Month: June 2016

Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, has approved a series of new online surveillance measures as part of a wide-ranging anti-terrorism law. In a tweet, Edward Snowden, currently living in Russia, wrote: "Russia's new Big Brother law is an unworkable, unjustifiable violation of rights that should never be signed."

As well as being able to demand access to encrypted services, the authorities will require Russia's telecom companies to store not just metadata, but the actual content of messages too, for a period of six months. Metadata alone must then be held for a total of three years, according to a summary of the new law on the Meduza site. Authorities will be able to access the stored content and metadata information on demand.

Snowden pointed out the difficulties of implementing the new law: "'Store 6 months of content' is not just dangerous, it's impractical. What is that, ~100PB of storage for even a tiny 50Gbps ISP?" He added: "This bill will take money and liberty from every Russian without improving safety."

They call it "mechanical doping," but the name simply doesn't do it justice. Cycling is not a sport celebrated for honesty amongst even its top riders, but following several very high-profile doping cases in recent years, it seems as though the cheats have been trying a different route: hiding motors in their seat posts that help push them to superhuman feats of endurance.

The technique has been known since at least 2010; commercial versions of the motors can put out 200 steady watts of power, nearly doubling a typical pro-cyclist's output. An onboard motor can help riders go faster, and can keep their pedalling cadence—the number of revolutions through the crank per minute—up while energy dips in endurance stages.

With the biggest cycling event in the world, the Tour de France, set to begin on July 2, mechanical doping is a serious concern—one that has moved France's sports minister Thierry Braillard to tell the French press: "This problem is worse than doping; this is the future of cycling that's at stake."

Until recently it was fairly easy to dismiss China’s space program. Yes, China is one of just three nations to launch humans into space, but its technology has always seemed highly derivative of Russian spaceflight architecture. And when a recent article raised the question of whether China might develop reusable rocket technology, one Ars reader offered an amusing yet perhaps not entirely untruthful response: “That depends on how good SpaceX's IT security is.”

After Saturday’s launch of the Long March 7 rocket from the new Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, however, such skepticism appears to be increasingly unwarranted. Although largely ignored by the Western world, the Chinese launch marks something of a defining moment for the giant of Asia, a moment when China firmly staked its position as one of the world’s great space-faring nations. More than that, it took a step toward equaling, or perhaps even surpassing, NASA one day.

The Long March 7 rocket does not immediately threaten NASA or the US launch industry, of course. With the capability to heft 13.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, it is roughly on par with the Falcon 9 and the Atlas V launch vehicles. And the Tiangong-2 space laboratory China intends to launch later this year is but a shadow of the International Space Station.

Since it popped up online last week, the trailer for HBO's new science fiction series Westworld has been viewed almost 2.5 million times. That's because it offers a raw, original vision of what a robot uprising might really be like in the twenty-first century. Of course, it starts with gaming.

Westworld has an interesting history. Written for the screen by Michael Crichton in 1973, the original movie was about a western theme park populated by robots who glitch out and go rogue. The robots are programmed to get shot in gunfights and to rent themselves out for sex in the downtown whorehouse, but suddenly they start killing their human customers. There are a few hints that the robots might be achieving a kind of sentience, but mostly we're meant to think that they've simply malfunctioned in a dangerous way. The original Westworld is ultimately about how amusement parks are disasters waiting to happen, a concern that showed up again in Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park (which became the basis for the eponymous blockbuster movie franchise). Crichton was preoccupied throughout his life with system failures, whether in science, business, or entertainment, and he viewed the park in Westworld as a flawed system because it had no safety measures.

The new Westworld series is helmed by Lisa Joy (a producer on the cracklingly fun Burn Notice) and Jonathan Nolan, who recently wrapped up his creator/producer duties on the final season of AI thriller Person of Interest. Both Joy and Nolan have experience with breakneck pacing and techno-thrillers, and their vision in Westworld takes the Crichton story to a very different place. As you can see in this trailer, they've preserved the basic premise, which is that people will pay to interact with robots in theme parks. Westworld is very much an adult theme park, with sex and violence serving as the primary lures for people bored with their high-tech lives. It's basically a game world writ large, with perfectly realistic robots called "hosts" replacing consoles and VR rigs. What's new in this version of the story is that it's very clear that the robots are developing human-equivalent consciousness. This isn't just a glitch in the machine; it's a robot uprising that happens to take place in a theme park.

In the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk, residents enjoyed many benefits of modern life. The city, located in modern-day Iraq, was home to massive ziggurats that would rival any of today's modern skyscrapers for sheer monumentality. People in Uruk exchanged goods for money, played board games, and sent each other letters on clay tablets using a writing system called cuneiform. They were also paid for their labor in beer. We know this because pay stubs were incredibly common documents at the time, and one such pay stub (pictured above) is now in the possession of the British Museum.

Writing in New Scientist, Alison George explains what's written on the 5,000-year-old tablet: "We can see a human head eating from a bowl, meaning “ration,” and a conical vessel, meaning “beer.” Scattered around are scratches recording the amount of beer for a particular worker." Beer wages were by no means limited to Mesopotamia. In ancient Egypt, there are records of people receiving beer for their work—roughly 4 to 5 liters per day for people building the pyramids. And in the Middle Ages, we have several records of the great fourteenth century poet Geoffrey Chaucer being paid in wine. Richard II generously gave Chaucer an annual salary that included a "tonel" of wine per year, which was roughly 252 gallons.

These salaries weren't just about keeping workers drunk so they would be more compliant. In the ancient world, beer was a hearty, starchy brew that could double as a meal. And during Chaucer's time, people believed that wine brought good health—which may not have been strictly accurate but was certainly a lure at a time when the Black Death was decimating the populations of Europe.

The era of the "puzzle-platformer" video game—in which players run through a 2D world with a weird gimmick or two to spice up the old Mario formula—has long passed. The late-'00s saw games like the time-bending Braid and the high-speed, tough-as-nails Super Meat Boy offer a breath of fresh, side-scrolling air, but those inventive gems were followed by a mess of games with much less heart.

One of the last greats in that era was Limbo, one of the best indies of 2010. That haunting, wordless game smeared its black-and-white world with a smoky blur and a preoccupation with death, and the results were visually and emotional staggering—but they had less impact in terms of gameplay. Its side-scrolling puzzles were occasionally clever, but they were there not so much to bend the player's mind as to spread out the pacing of the game's somber tale of a brother and a sister.

The Danish team at Playdead took its time crafting a follow-up game, and they could have spent those six years inventing a more innovative gameplay hook. But that's clearly not where their hearts are. Instead, these Danes have returned with Inside, a side-scrolling journey that once again doubles down on atmosphere over puzzles—and is all the better for it.

Another company is getting into the hybrid space. Chinese manufacturer Huawei, known primarily for its smartphones, released the MateBook for people who want tablet features in a device that can also stand in for your regular laptop. There's a bunch of competition in this space: Microsoft has its Surface line of two-in-ones and the Surface Book; Lenovo has its new ThinkPad X1 hybrid along with its Yoga series; HP and Dell each have their own entrants; and you can even lump Apple into this category with its iPad Pro devices, too.

With its first two-in-one, Huawei tried to make the MateBook stand out. The 12-inch tablet is powered by Core M processors, has a side fingerprint sensor, and has keyboard, pen, and docking accessories to suit every type of user. But really, what it comes down to is the twofold experience of using a hybrid: How well does it work as a tablet, and how well does it work as a laptop? If any hybrid is lacking in either respect, it'll be hard to make a case for spending hundreds of dollars on it. Thanks to steep competition, Huawei's $699 MateBook has an uphill battle to set itself apart from the competition.

Look and feel

Huawei's MateBook takes notes from the playbooks of Microsoft's Surface line and Samsung's TabPro S. The tablet itself is a 12-inch rectangle with a 2160 x 1440, IPS touchscreen display surrounded by a 10mm bezel. It has a metal unibody design so there's no hardware interrupting the satin-finished back of the device (there isn't even a rear camera, which is important to note if you have a habit of taking photos with your tablet). The tablet alone weighs just 1.5 pounds (or about 690 grams) and measures 6.9mm thick, so it is heavier than the iPad Air 2 (.95 pounds) and just a hair thicker than that device as well (6.6mm).