Month: December 2016

(credit: Ashley Madison)

On December 14, 2016, the Federal Trade Commission settled a complaint with the company running the adult finder site Ashley Madison over the 2015 data breach that exposed the personal data of more than 36 million users and highlighted the site’s unfair and deceptive practices.

This complaint and settlement is important, but not for the obvious reasons. Yes, the breach had an outsized reach, much like the Target and Home Depot breaches preceding it. Yes, the breach involved poor security practices and deceptive promises about the site’s privacy protections. The Ashley Madison complaint follows a long line of actions brought by the FTC to combat unfair and deceptive data protection practices. The site’s exploitation of users’ desperation, vulnerability, and desire for secrecy is exactly the sort of abuse of power the Federal Trade Commission was created to mitigate.

But there are five key lessons that should not be missed in discussions about the agency’s settlement of the case. This complaint and settlement are more than just business as usual—they reflect a modern and sustainable way to think about and enforce our privacy in the coming years.

Enlarge / Awesome Minecraft architecture by Arsian qchronod.

Two chemists, a materials scientist and a game developer (all professors), have created a Minecraft expansion designed to sneakily teach chemistry and engineering concepts. They used the mod as part of a college course and found preliminary results that suggest it works reasonably well.

The goal, the group writes in Nature Chemistry, was to create an educational game that didn’t feel like work, but rather would “excite [students] so much that they would consume it without needing to be assigned it.” The Polycraft World expansion had two central guiding principles: “the science we add must be accurate, and it must add something fun to the game.”

Much like vanilla Minecraft, Polycraft World requires players to combine materials to generate items, but it adds in accurate chemical processes to get there. “If you combine the right reactants (in a chemically balanced way) you will get a new material such as Kevlar,” the researchers explain. They wanted to create a strong natural incentive to learn the practical concepts by allowing players to generate items like jetpacks and flamethrowers. Polycraft World uses an online wiki to teach users how to play, as in vanilla Minecraft.

Andrew Cunningham loves Dragon Quest Builders possibly more than he loves his own life. (credit: Square Enix)

Our recent list of the top 20 games of 2016 is a good round-up of the editors' collective opinions on the best made and most compelling interactive entertainment of the year. But, much like every year, there were quite a few other games that stood out to individual editors, even if they didn't merit full discussion in the Game of the Year piece for one reason or another.

To give some of those personal gaming passions their due, we present this list of the "Best of the Rest" games of 2016, as picked by some of our editors. They might not be perfect, but these games all struck a chord with someone on our staff, and they may just strike a chord with you as well.

Dragon Quest Builders

As a lifelong Dragon Quest fanatic and lapsed Minecraft obsessive, I thought it was awful nice for Square Enix to release Dragon Quest Builders in North America exclusively for me. Dragon Quest games, with their intentionally quaint menus and dated mechanics, tend to appeal most to people who already like Dragon Quest games (see: Dragon Quest VII). But much to my surprise, I found in Dragon Quest Builders a really fun title that improves on the exploration and creativity of Minecraft by setting up concrete objectives and boundaries.

Artis's rendition of a cloud of trapped antihydrogen atoms. After wandering its trap, an antihydrogen atom is released to annihilate on the trap wall, creating signals that can be tracked by a nearby detector. (credit: Image courtesy of CERN/ALPHA)

One of the persistent mysteries about our universe is the extreme imbalance between matter and antimatter. Antimatter and matter were both generated during the Big Bang, but the Universe is now dominated by ordinary matter, and we don't know why that should be the case. To solve that mystery, an obvious place to look for clues would be in antimatter itself. If researchers could find something different about antimatter’s behavior, it might hint at an explanation for the extreme disparity.

To that end, a team of researchers decided to test whether hydrogen and antihydrogen have the same spectrum—do they absorb and emit light at the same wavelengths. They generated the first ever laser-spectroscopic measurement of an antimatter atom, but the results look an awful lot like that of a regular hydrogen atom.

Trapping antimatter

Antimatter is the same as matter but has the opposite electrical charge. So, while an ordinary hydrogen atom is made of a proton (positive charge) and a much smaller electron (negative charge), an anti-hydrogen atom is composed of an anti-proton (negative) and an anti-electron, or “positron” (positive).

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Hawk)

Anyone who has ever watched an American crime movie or television show can practically recite the Miranda warning by heart, even if they don’t know its official name.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything that you say or do can be used against you. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be provided to you. Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?

The basic idea behind the Miranda warning is to provide someone being arrested with information about their constitutional rights against compelled self-incrimination (Fifth Amendment) during a custodial situation and to reassure them of their right to an attorney (Sixth Amendment).

This warning stems from a 1966 Supreme Court case, Miranda v. Arizona, where a kidnapping and rape suspect, Ernesto Miranda, confessed to the crime without the benefit of a lawyer and without being fully informed of his rights to not self-incriminate. Today, all American police officers must recite some version of the Miranda warning while taking someone into custody due to the Supreme Court’s landmark 5-4 decision.