Month: December 2017

When Hideo Kojima announced Death Stranding at E3 2016 as his first post-Konami project, the images of a naked Norman Reedus cradling a tiny baby left us with more questions than answers. A new trailer for the game at The Game Awards Thursday night showed us a lot more of the world Kojima is planning, but probably increased the number of questions we have about what's going on.

The extremely dark (in both tone and color palette) eight-minute trailer begins and ends with a bit of poetic cosmology: "Once there was an explosion, a bang that gave birth to time and space. Once there was an explosion, a bang that sent a planet spinning in that space. Once there was an explosion, a bang that gave rise to life as we know it... And then came the next explosion. An explosion that will be our last."

Frying computers like a CHAMP? (credit: Boeing)

On Monday, NBC Nightly News broadcast a report claiming that White House officials had discussed using an experimental weapon to disrupt or disable a North Korean missile launch. The weapon in question, the product of the US Air Force's Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), uses bursts of microwave energy to disable electronic devices such as computers, communications and air defense radar systems.

Officials from Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) suggested CHAMP could be fully weaponized in a matter of weeks. But almost as a footnote, the NBC report noted that the weapon would have to pass very close to an ICBM before launch to affect it—which, despite CHAMP's classification as a non-lethal weapon, might be considered an act of war.

The Air Force has conducted tests of CHAMP, a system designed to selectively beam high-energy microwaves to cause damage to electronic systems. AFRL, Raytheon, and Boeing's Phantom Works development team tested the CHAMP concept aboard a Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missile (CALCM) in 2012 at a Utah test range. In the 2012 test, pulses from the CHAMP cruise missile disabled computers and even the video cameras monitoring them as the missile flew over them.

Enlarge / You might need more of this stuff if you want to use Chrome's new Site Isolation mode. Well, not this stuff exactly; it's RAM from a very obsolete VAX computer. (credit: Kevin Stanchfield)

To further increase its enterprise appeal, Chrome 63—which hit the browser's stable release channel yesterday—includes a couple of new security enhancements aimed particularly at the corporate market.

The first of these is site isolation, an even stricter version of the multiple process model that Chrome has used since its introduction. Chrome uses multiple processes for several security and stability reasons. On the stability front, the model means that even if a single tab crashes, other tabs (and the browser itself) are unaffected. On the security front, the use of multiple processes makes it much harder for malicious code from one site to steal secrets (such as passwords typed into forms) of another.

Chrome's default model is, approximately, to use one process per tab. This more or less ensures that unrelated sites are kept in separate processes, but there are nuances to this set-up. Pages share a process if they are related through, for example, one opening another with JavaScript or iframes embedding (wherein one page is included as content within another page). Over the course of a single browsing session, one tab may be used to visit multiple different domains; they'll all potentially be opened within a single process. On top of this, if there are already too many Chrome processes running, Chrome will start opening new pages within existing processes, resulting in even unrelated pages sharing a process.