Month: November 2016

Enlarge / System76's Oryx Pro: Not small, quite powerful. (credit: Scott Gilbertson)

Laptops preloaded with Linux aren't as rare as they used to be. In fact, big name hardware companies like Dell have whole lines of laptops that ship with Ubuntu installed, and if you want to stretch things a bit you could argue that a Chromebook is a kind of Linux machine (though it takes a bit of tinkering to get actual Linux installed). Still, there's no question the Linux user of today has a wealth of options compared with the dark ages of just a few years ago when "I use Linux" was code for "I spend all my time looking for hardware drivers."

Today, what remains unusual even in the midst of this growing interest in PCs shipping with Linux is a company that sells nothing else. There are a handful of organization that do just this, however, and they have done so for some time. These entities range from longtime Linux supporters like System76 to newer efforts from the likes of Purism, which began life with an impressive crowdfunding campaign that raised more than a $1 million to create a line of sleek, Apple-inspired but completely free-software laptops.

If Purism is any indicator, the Linux-based hardware businesses might have an actual future in a world increasingly dissatisfied with the proprietary OSes being offered. After all, if you're a developer looking to get a laptop with more than 16GB of RAM, Apple's no longer an option. That company recently updated its Macbook Pro line but still caps RAM at 16GB. So, you can either get a PC and live with Windows 10 or you can try installing Linux and hope it works.

Megan Geuss

DURHAM, NC—On a crisp morning in October, Audi hosted a coterie of journalists at an unassuming brick building near Durham’s downtown. The building was a “culinary incubator”—essentially a temporary restaurant space for concept dining startups and events. Speaking over coffee and various breakfast foods, Audi executives tried to tie the building’s startup ethos into an overview of Audi’s own strategy for the coming year. Part of that strategy involves the new Audi S3, a premium sedan in the A3 family that we journalists were about to drive for the first time.

Make new customers, but keep the old

The 2017 S3 is little changed from its earlier version, but it’s still an important car for Audi. Audi is VW Group’s most profitable brand, and it’s a critical part of the German automaker’s strategy to keep VW owners who are ready to “graduate” to a luxury brand. And, after a bruising year of dealing with the legal fallout from VW Group’s “dieselgate” scandal, Audi is no doubt hoping to capture even more of those former VW owners. Audi hopes this despite its involvement in the scandal, on the assumption that the Audi brand is not associated with the scandal as strongly (although Audi allegedly played a key part in VW’s diesel scandal and the brand may be facing its own legal issues with recent revelations of falsified CO₂ numbers).

Enlarge / Margaret H. Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama on Tuesday, November 22. (credit: White House)

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to several luminaries in the arts, sports, and sciences.

Of those, the class of 2016 included two women who played crucial roles in American computer science in the 20th century: Margaret H. Hamilton and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who was given the award posthumously.

Here’s how the White House described the pair:

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

For the past several years, a few corners of the Internet have sporadically lit up with excitement about a new propulsion system, which I'll call the WTF-thruster. The zombie incarnation of the EM-drive has all the best features of a new technology: it generally violates well-established physical principles, there is a badly outlined suggestion for how it might work, and the data that ostensibly demonstrates that it does work is both sparse and inadequately explained.

The buzz returned this week, as the group behind the EM-drive has published a paper describing tests of its operation.

Before getting into the paper, let me step back a bit to set the scene. I am not automatically rejecting the authors' results. I am not even rejecting the possibility that this study may hint at a new physics. I am saying that before I will take that possibility seriously, I have to be convinced that the data cannot be explained by the current laws of physics. And currently, I am not convinced. In fact I am very frustrated by the lack of detail.

Enlarge / A screenshot showing an exploit that takes full control of a fully updated version of Fedora. (credit: Chris Evans)

Recently released exploit code makes people running fully patched versions of Fedora and other Linux distributions vulnerable to drive-by attacks that can install keyloggers, backdoors, and other types of malware, a security researcher says.

One of the exploits—which targets a memory corruption vulnerability in the GStreamer framework that by default ships with many mainstream Linux distributions—is also noteworthy for its elegance. To wit: it uses a rarely seen approach to defeat address space layout randomization and data execution prevention, which are two of the security protections built in to Linux to make software exploits harder to carry out. ASLR randomizes the locations in computer memory where software loads specific chunks of code. As a result, code that exploits existing flaws often results in a simple computer crash rather than a catastrophic system compromise. Meanwhile, DEP, which is often referred to as NX or No-Execute, blocks the execution of code that such exploits load into memory.

Unlike most ASLR and DEP bypasses, the one folded into the GStreamer exploit doesn't rely on code to manipulate the memory layout or other environmental variables. Instead, it painstakingly arranges the bytes of code in a way that completely disables the protections. And by eliminating the need for JavaScript or other memory-massaging code to execute on a targeted computer, it's possible to carry out attacks that otherwise wouldn't be possible. Chris Evans, the security researcher who developed the exploit, describes the challenge as "a real beast."

Enlarge / How does it feel to have written the programs that cause you to experience emotional pain? Not that great, actually. (credit: HBO)

This week's Westworld, "Trace Decay," finally made me a believer in all the fan theories. (Spoilers ahead.)

Yes, there are multiple timelines. Yes, at this point, anyone could be a robot. The only thing left to do is play this show like a game and test every theory until it's proven wrong. My guest this week, game developer Jane McGonigal, agrees. McGonigal is the author of two books, Reality Is Broken and SuperBetter, which are about how gaming can improve our real lives. And she has a lot of thoughts about the gameworld of Westworld, plus a theory you've probably never heard before.

Topics discussed: why the MIB is really looking for the maze (he wants a game with consequences), what makes the gameplay in Westworld so unsatisfying (there's no Minecraft element to it), Jane's so-crazy-it-just-might-work theory about who the MIB really is (and what the maze really is, too!), how many timelines are floating around inside Dolores' head (yes, we are finally coming around to the multiple timeline idea), whether it's cheating on your partner if you have sex with a robot (it's more complicated than you might think), how many people are actually robots (it could be everybody), Maeve's incredible new story-changing abilities (she's the ultimate gamer now), the tragedy of loops (and the horror of memory), how Westworld invites viewers to interact with the series like it's a game (and stay up late reading theories on Reddit), and whether there's something inherently limiting about the Western story (maybe we're about to see Futureworld soon?).