Month: September 2017

Enlarge / SpaceX CEO Elon Musk speaks at the International Astronautical Congress on September 29, 2017 in Adelaide, Australia. (credit: Mark Brake/Getty Images)

Yes, Elon Musk still absolutely wants to go to Mars. But in a speech delivered Friday in Adelaide, Australia, the founder of SpaceX opened the door to sending humans to the Moon first. "It’s 2017, we should have a lunar base by now," he said, speaking just a couple of years shy of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landings. "What the hell is going on?"

This was just a single line in his talk, which was filled with exhilarating moments but also—critically—some welcome doses of reality. A year ago, when Musk unveiled his Mars rocket at the same annual meeting of the International Astronautical Congress, the presentation felt much more like science fiction than something that might become a reality. It lacked any real semblance of a plan to pay for the rocket.

A thoroughly sci-fi looking rendering of Moon Base Alpha. (credit: SpaceX)

This year, Musk's talk still sparkled with almost unimaginable technology. But it was leavened with enough tidbits of plausibility to think he just might maybe-sorta pull this off one day. After all, it was only nine years ago that the company made its first successful launch, a tiny Falcon 1 rocket that took flight after three consecutive failures. Now, SpaceX is proving out the technology that underlies reusable rockets, and it stands at the precipice of capturing at least a third of the global launch market.

Enlarge (credit: Autobahn)

An alarming number of Macs remain vulnerable to known exploits that completely undermine their security and are almost impossible to detect or fix even after receiving all security updates available from Apple, a comprehensive study released Friday has concluded.

The exposure results from known vulnerabilities that remain in the Extensible Firmware Interface, or EFI, which is the software located on a computer motherboard that runs first when a Mac is turned on. EFI identifies what hardware components are available, starts those components up, and hands them over to the operating system. Over the past few years, Apple has released updates that patch a host of critical EFI vulnerabilities exploited by attacks known as Thunderstrike and ThunderStrike 2, as well as a recently disclosed CIA attack tool known as Sonic Screwdriver.

An analysis by security firm Duo Security of more than 73,000 Macs shows that a surprising number remained vulnerable to such attacks even though they received OS updates that were supposed to patch the EFI firmware. On average, 4.2 percent of the Macs analyzed ran EFI versions that were different from what was prescribed by the hardware model and OS version. Forty-seven Mac models remained vulnerable to the original Thunderstrike, and 31 remained vulnerable to Thunderstrike 2. At least 16 models received no EFI updates at all. EFI updates for other models were inconsistently successful, with the 21.5-inch iMac released in late 2015 topping the list, with 43 percent of those sampled running the wrong version.

Enlarge (credit: US National Park Service)

The new trend in cancer research is to view a tumor’s malignancy not as solely determined by the tumor’s damaged genome. That view may be somewhat intuitive and has been dominant for decades, but there’s evidence that a cancer’s behavior is determined by the interplay between the tumor itself (the seed) and the environment in which it resides (the soil). Doctors have long observed that the “same” tumor acts differently in different people and in different organs within the same person; this new paradigm could begin to explain why.

A key part of that environment are its microorganisms. Recent results show that microbes associated with tumors can metabolize the chemotherapy meant to treat the cancer. And this week, we’re learning that microbes also influence the original seed-and-soil; the non-metaphorical one involving actual plants.

It’s not only a plant’s genetic makeup that dictates whether it will thrive in a given environment; that environment, and the way each plant interacts with it, is critical. This idea was reinforced through a study that used pinyon pines, combining controlled experiments in a greenhouse and garden with observational studies of trees in the wild, made over 20 years (the latter 10 of which included a drought). Results from the different venues corroborated each other.

Enlarge / A banana-man, or man-ana. (credit: Rasta Imposta)

A small company called Rasta Imposta has sued K-Mart after the retailer stopped carrying the company's banana costume for the 2017 Halloween season. K-Mart switched to another company's banana suit, and Rasta Imposta charges that the rival design infringes its copyright.

But Cornell legal scholar James Grimmelmann is skeptical. Copyright law grants narrower protections to the design of "useful articles" like clothing than it does to traditional creative works like books or movies. Grimmelmann tells Ars it's not clear if Rasta Imposta's fairly pedestrian banana suit design is creative enough to qualify for copyright protection.

Yet predicting how the case will come out is difficult thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling on the copyright status of cheerleading uniforms. In that case, which Grimmelmann describes as "a train wreck of a case," the high court ruled that the design of cheerleading uniforms was eligible for copyright protection. In the process, he says, the high court "blew away everything we thought we knew about how useful articles work."

Enlarge / This is not the way loot boxes work in Forza Motorsport 7. After Aurich's Photoshop job, however, we almost wish it was. (credit: Turn 10 / Aurich remix)

At this point, it would take something monumentally stupid to reverse the "loot box" trend in video games. The practice, which combines real money, virtual items, and random chance, has been found in various free-to-play games for years (and has been showing up more in fully priced retail games recently). The sales pitch, in short: by paying a little more real cash, a player will more quickly unlock a random item in the game (and see a flashy animation of a box opening—that part is apparently crucial).

This racket often skates by because game makers say that they're hiding "non-essential" and "cosmetic" items in these boxes. Game makers also point out that these "random item" boxes can almost always be earned simply by playing the game. Who's losing out?

The problem, as far as I'm concerned, is the poison these random-prize systems inject into their games' design. I've been biding my time, waiting for a loot box system so stupid and unnecessary that I can finally name and deconstruct the demonic practice in no uncertain terms. For that reason, I wholeheartedly thank Turn 10 and Microsoft Studios for the loot-box disaster that they've cooked into this week's release of Forza Motorsport 7.