Month: October 2016

REDMOND, Washington—Card economies are pretty much everywhere in video games right now, and Microsoft is leading that charge. The company's first major card stab was last year's Halo 5, whose "Warzone" mode revolves entirely around cards that can be purchased using in-game currency or real cash (and, in my opinion, the game suffers for it).

Clearly, the data shows that people are using, loving, and possibly even paying for cards, because Microsoft is now following up with two major card-economy games: this month's Gears of War 4, and next year's Halo Wars 2. We're concerned with Halo Wars 2 right now because Microsoft invited Ars to its Redmond Halo studio, 343 Industries, to see a reveal of the upcoming RTS's new "Blitz" mode.

Cards against humanity—if you play as the Banished, at least

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For most of humanity's existence, communication has been incredibly slow. For millennia the only way of transmitting information between two humans was via speech or crude drawings. About 5,000 years ago written language and papyrus increased the transmission distance and bandwidth of human-human communication, but the latency, delivered by hand, was still pretty bad.

Somewhere around 300BC, though—at least according to recorded history—things started to get interesting. Ancient Greece, as described by the historian Polybius, used a technology called hydraulic telegraph to communicate between Sicily and Carthage—a distance of about 300 miles—in the First Punic War.

The system was essentially a slightly higher bandwidth signal fire, with a long unbroken line of humans standing on hilltops with identical telegraph machines. There was still a fair bit of latency, of course, as the humans tweaked the hydraulic levels, but near-speed-of-light electromagnetic radiation was quite a bit faster than papyrus-by-horseback (like the classic example of "driving across the country with a van full of tapes," though, the bandwidth was probably lower).

Enlarge (credit: Martin Godwin/Getty Images)

Most commuters keep their eyes down in the morning while traipsing through the gleaming corridors of London’s Euston Underground station. Their attention is focused on the feet, the coffee or, beyond that, the rigours of the day into which they hurtle. If any did manage to bravely look up, however, they’d catch a glimpse of a new addition to this, Britain’s sixth busiest railway station: a phalanx of tiny white boxes stuck fast to the ceiling, one every ten or so paces. These are Bluetooth beacons, transmitters able to provide a GPS lock-on to a phone or tablet even here, deep in London’s soil. Each one is able to produce a tiny miracle: the ability for a blind or partially sighted person to navigate the station’s warren of corridors with precision, without help, using nothing but a mobile phone.

It works eerily well. On a sweltering September afternoon, I’m told to put on a pair of glasses. They look like something designed by Jackson Pollock: chicly black-framed, lenses splattered with thousands of tiny droplets of paint swarmed around the centre. It’s possible to see through them, particularly at the periphery, but only in sketchy patches. This is what, I’m told, it is like to be visually impaired.

I’m handed a white cane and a pair of headphones. Through these, a calming voice asks for a destination station and, once selected, begins to issue brisk commands. “Turn right and walk forward”, she says. “Turn left and take the escalator.” The technology—designed by Wayfindr, a non-profit organisation seeking to create a standards for digital wayfinding and UsTwo, the Shoreditch-based game and app developer—tracks my location as I travel through the station via the ceiling-mounted beacons (whose batteries last for a year apiece).

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Researchers have devised a technique that bypasses a key security protection built into just about every operating system. If left unfixed, this could make malware attacks much more potent.

ASLR, short for "address space layout randomization," is a defense against a class of widely used attacks that surreptitiously install malware by exploiting vulnerabilities in an operating system or application. By randomizing the locations in computer memory where software loads specific chunks of code, ASLR often limits the damage of such exploits to a simple computer crash, rather than a catastrophic system compromise. Now, academic researchers have identified a flaw in Intel chips that allows them to effectively bypass this protection. The result are exploits that are much more effective than they would otherwise be.

Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, a computer scientist at the University of California and one the researchers who developed the bypass, told Ars: