Month: September 2019

Enlarge / An Amazon Echo device. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon has announced that it will hold an event on September 25 to announce new hardware products. The company's invitations indicate that it will discuss "new things from the Amazon Devices and Services team" at the event.

Amazon held a similar event around the same time last year, when it announced a plethora of new devices, including a new Echo Dot, Sub, Show, and more—the majority of the Echo line was refreshed. That seems like a more likely focus for this year's event than the Fire TV, as Amazon announced new Fire TVs and a new Fire TV Cube at IFA just recently. However, Fire TV tablets are a possibility.

We're not sure whether it will be quite the gauntlet that last year's event was—Amazon announced more than a dozen products then. And there isn't a strong case to be made that the company's lineup is as in need of refreshes as it was then. But if you've bought into the Amazon ecosystem and Alexa, this is the event you'll want to keep an eye on to learn what new gear you can add to your setup.

Enlarge / Settle in, grab some popcorn, and enjoy the game. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Last week, the team behind Death Stranding discussed the game's "Very Easy Mode" publicly for the first time. The mode, according to Director Hideo Kojima's assistant Ayako Terashima, is designed for "[people] who usually don’t play game[s], movie fans or RPG fans. Normal or Hard Mode is for action game fans." Kojima later added that the new mode was designed for "movie fans since we have real actors [starring]. Even [writer Kenji Yano], who never completed the 1st stage of Pac-Man, was able to complete the game on Very Easy Mode."

The news was treated with its fair share of derision in certain corners. Some poked fun at Kojima's not-so-hidden desire to be a movie director (as usual, the Onion did it first). Others said such a mode was below their dignity and only appropriate for babies (or for those lousy game journalists, of course).

But Death Stranding's Super Easy mode is part of a trend toward extreme difficulty tuning that's slowly seeping into the industry at large. And, frankly, it's a trend we hope picks up more steam going forward.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

There are some people who would never buy a ThinkPad, and there are others who flock to Lenovo's flagship business family every time the company makes an update. The latest release will be no exception, even if the updates it brings are relatively small. The seventh-generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon will look familiar to ThinkPad fans, and in this case, familiarity is a good thing.

Most of the improvements and updates come in optional add-ons or internal changes that make the laptop even better than it was before. We spent about a week using it to get a feel for the updates and see which (if any) are worth spending at least $1,400 to get this upgrade.

What’s new

Lenovo has typically gone against the grain with the design of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. The X1 Carbon doesn't look like any other premium Windows notebook, much less any of the flagship laptops that are vying for your attention and dollars with fancy, ultra-slim profiles. The fundamentals of the X1 haven't changed, but Lenovo did make it nearly one millimeter thinner, which is a feat considering the previous model was already a svelte 15.95mm. It's also still a MIL-SPEC tested machine, so it will take up less space in your bag, but it won't crack or bend easily if that bag has an accident.

Enlarge / The Dallas County, Iowa courthouse, the sight of a penetration test gone spectacularly wrong. (credit: By Iowahwyman - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Two security contractors were arrested in Adel, Iowa on September 11 as they attempted to gain access to the Dallas County Courthouse. The two are employees of Coalfire—a "cybersecurity advisor" firm based in Westminster, Colorado that frequently does security assessments for federal agencies, state and local governments, and corporate clients. They claimed to be conducting a penetration test to determine how vulnerable county court records were and to measure law enforcement's response to a break-in.

Unfortunately, the Iowa state court officials who ordered the test never told county officials about it—and no one evidently anticipated that a physical break-in would be part of the test. For now, the penetration testers remain in jail. In a statement issued yesterday, state officials apologized to Dallas County, citing confusion over just what Coalfire was going to test:

State court administration (SCA) is aware of the arrests made at the Dallas County Courthouse early in the morning on September 11, 2019. The two men arrested work for a company hired by SCA to test the security of the court’s electronic records. The company was asked to attempt unauthorized access to court records through various means to learn of any potential vulnerabilities. SCA did not intend, or anticipate, those efforts to include the forced entry into a building. SCA apologizes to the Dallas County Board of Supervisors and law enforcement and will fully cooperate with the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office and Dallas County Attorney as they pursue this investigation. Protecting the personal information contained in court documents is of paramount importance to SCA and the penetration test is one of many measures used to ensure electronic court documents are secure.

The case is an example of the legal risks faced by security testing firms, particularly when the scope of such tests is vague. Even the most basic electronic security tests, when done outside of the bounds of a contractual agreement, could land the testers in trouble, as Ars reported when Gizmodo reporters attempted to phish Trump administration and campaign figures in 2017.

Enlarge / Comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov). Note the fuzzy appearance and faint tail. (credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope)

Due to complicated gravitational interactions from planets and other bodies, it's expected that our Solar System has ejected various small bodies like comets and asteroids. Since exosolar systems are likely to do the same, it's thought that the vast distances of interstellar space are sparsely populated by these small bodies. As such, we should expect one of these objects to wander through our Solar System, an expectation that was confirmed in 2017 with the arrival of 'Oumuamua, an odd, cigar-shaped object that shot through the Solar System at an extreme angle.

Now, just two years later, we seem to have our second. Officially termed C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), the comet is approaching the inner Solar System at an angle that almost certainly indicates it didn't originate here.

Hyperbolic orbits

Right now, there's not much public information about C/2019 Q4 (Borisov). A press release from the Jet Propulsion Lab provides some basic details. Discovered on August 30, it takes its name from Gennady Borisov, who spotted it from an observatory in the Crimea. Since then, observations have firmed up its orbit, indicating that it will make its closest approach to the Sun in December, passing no closer than Mars' orbit.