Month: January 2018

Review: Fallout: The Board Game

Charge up the Pip-Boy.

Enlarge / Two letters short of being truly S.P.E.C.I.A.L.! Also, note the V.A.T.S. dice. (credit: Charles Theel)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Would you be surprised if I told you that the new Fallout board game from Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) was something special? You really shouldn't be, since FFG has a fantastic track record of nailing intellectual properties like Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, and Doom. Fallout is the latest success here, a tabletop design that feels like a passionate love letter to its source material, even as it stumbles in some areas.

This cardboard version of the digital classic is best described as a narrative adventure game for up to four players. Participants compete for thumbs (the energetic expression for victory points) by engaging in branching story paths, acquiring gear, and throwing their weight behind one of the factions vying for power.

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The detailed toys and rare collectibles that keep watch over our home offices

Including what one admittedly single Ars editor dubs his “forever alone” shelf.

Thanks to Ars Technica's unique staff-from-all-over arrangement, we don't often see how our coworkers organize their home offices. There's also the matter of us being a bunch of overgrown children who keep, and proudly display, all kinds of toys, action figures, dolls, and other nerdy decorations in our home offices.

Thus, this latest edition of our ongoing "how Ars works" series focuses specifically on the toys and characters that keep watch over our desks, chairs, coffee mugs, and other home-office accoutrements.

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The Usenet Deep Space 9 recapper that helped inspire modern TV criticism

If you watched DS9 and lived on the Internet in the ‘90s, you likely read Tim Lynch.

In 1993, TV—and TV writing—were much different entities than what we know today. (credit: Tony Young)

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, Exhibit 5,768: the current golden age of TV has clearly inspired a golden age of TV writing. And if you follow today’s TV criticism at all, chances are a handful of names immediately come to mind (people like Emily Nussbaum at The New Yorker or James Poniewozik at The New York Times, for instance). But time and time again, stories on the rise of this format in recent years end up pointing to one writer—Uproxx’s Alan Sepinwall—as the dean of modern TV criticism.

While landmark TV writing sites like TV Without Pity (1998) wouldn’t come along until the Internet matured, Sepinwall was on the Web back when “Lynx and Mosaic were the only two browsers and you had to drive uphill through the snow both ways to get to the Yahoo! homepage,” as he once put it. Back in 1993, long before he started his own blog or went on to contribute to the Star Ledger and Hitfix, Sepinwall was just a college sophomore posting about NYPD Blue to Usenet.

<em>DS9</em> recapper / physics teacher, Tim Lynch.

DS9 recapper / physics teacher, Tim Lynch. (credit: MKA.org)

Ask Sepinwall about the origins of modern TV writing, however, and he has something different in mind: Usenet’s rec.arts.startrek.current and a certain Deep Space Nine recapper extraordinaire named Tim Lynch.

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Geldautomaten: Mehr Datenklau und trotzdem weniger Schaden durch Skimming

Datendiebe haben an Geldautomaten in Deutschland 2017 wieder deutlich häufiger zugeschlagen als vor Jahresfrist. Die Kriminellen nutzten letzte Sicherheitslücken, um aus Kundendaten Profit zu schlagen. Die Branche sieht jedoch keinen Grund zur Sorge. (…

Datendiebe haben an Geldautomaten in Deutschland 2017 wieder deutlich häufiger zugeschlagen als vor Jahresfrist. Die Kriminellen nutzten letzte Sicherheitslücken, um aus Kundendaten Profit zu schlagen. Die Branche sieht jedoch keinen Grund zur Sorge. (Geldautomat, Internet)

Did Twitter engineers just admit to shadow-banning conservatives? Nope

A engineer’s plan to “ban a way of talking” didn’t refer to conservatives.

Enlarge / James O'Keefe. (credit: Gage Skidmore)

James O'Keefe is a conservative activist who has made a name for himself with hidden camera investigations of supposedly liberal organizations. This week, he turned his attention to Twitter, publishing a series of secretly recorded videos of Twitter employees (and former employees) discussing Twitter's content moderation policies and political culture.

O'Keefe claims to have uncovered smoking-gun evidence of a far-reaching conspiracy to suppress conservative speech on the Twitter platform. Conservative media outlets have taken that frame and run with it.

But there's a lot less to the two videos Project Veritas released this week than meets the eye. For example, O'Keefe has repeatedly highlighted Twitter engineer Steven Pierre's comment that Twitter was working on software to "ban a way of talking." The strong implication is that the "way of talking" Pierre wants to ban is conservative political speech. But if you actually watch the full video, that's clearly not what Pierre meant.

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Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: Entwickler setzen auf Ping-Regionen statt auf China-Sperre

Teile der Community von Pubg wollen chinesische Spieler aus ihrer Region aussperren – wegen Cheating. Das Entwicklerstudio ist dagegen und verweist auf das geplante System zum Matchmaking. (Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, Microsoft)

Teile der Community von Pubg wollen chinesische Spieler aus ihrer Region aussperren - wegen Cheating. Das Entwicklerstudio ist dagegen und verweist auf das geplante System zum Matchmaking. (Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, Microsoft)

Gartner: Markt für PCs zeigt 2017 leichte Trendwende

Auch 2017 war kein wirklich gutes Jahr für die Hersteller von Computern. Der weltweite Absatz ist weiter gesunken. Es gibt aber erste Anzeichen für eine Besserung – auch, weil sich die Rolle der Computer bei den Verbrauchern ändert, so das Marktforschu…

Auch 2017 war kein wirklich gutes Jahr für die Hersteller von Computern. Der weltweite Absatz ist weiter gesunken. Es gibt aber erste Anzeichen für eine Besserung - auch, weil sich die Rolle der Computer bei den Verbrauchern ändert, so das Marktforschungsunternehmen Gartner. (Gartner, Notebook)

Sgnl im Hands On: Sieht blöd aus, funktioniert aber

Wer zu faul ist, sein Smartphone zum Telefonieren aus der Tasche zu ziehen, kann sich dank des Armbands Sgnl einfach seinen Finger ins Ohr stecken. Wir haben das Knochenschall-Armband ausprobiert und waren erstaunt, wie gut es funktioniert. Ein Hands …

Wer zu faul ist, sein Smartphone zum Telefonieren aus der Tasche zu ziehen, kann sich dank des Armbands Sgnl einfach seinen Finger ins Ohr stecken. Wir haben das Knochenschall-Armband ausprobiert und waren erstaunt, wie gut es funktioniert. Ein Hands on von Tobias Költzsch (CES 2018, Samsung)

Court Expands Dutch Pirate Bay Blockade to More ISPs, For Now

A Dutch court has ordered more local ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. The order will be valid until the Supreme Court hands down its final decision. That will be the climax of a long legal battle that started at the turn of the last decade.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN discounts, offers and coupons

The Pirate Bay is arguably the most widely blocked website on the Internet.

ISPs from all over the world have been ordered by courts to prevent users from accessing the torrent site, and this week the list has grown a bit longer.

A Dutch court has ruled that local Internet providers KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile, Zeelandnet and CAIW must block the site within ten days. The verdict follows a similar decision from September last year, where Ziggo and XS4All were ordered to do the same.

The blockade applies to several IP addresses and more than 150 domain names that are used by the notorious torrent site. Several of the ISPs had warned the court about the dangers of overblocking, but these concerns were rejected.

While most Dutch customers will be unable to access The Pirate Bay directly, the decision is not final yet. Not until the Supreme Court issues its pending decision. That will be the climax of a legal battle that started eight years ago.

A Dutch court first issued an order to block The Pirate Bay in 2012, but this decision was overturned two years later. Anti-piracy group BREIN then took the matter to the Supreme Court, which subsequently referred the case to the EU Court of Justice, seeking further clarification.

After a careful review of the case, the EU Court of Justice decided last year that The Pirate Bay can indeed be blocked.

The top EU court ruled that although The Pirate Bay’s operators don’t share anything themselves, they knowingly provide users with a platform to share copyright-infringing links. This can be seen as “an act of communication” under the EU Copyright Directive.

This put the case back to the Dutch Supreme court, which has yet to decide on the matter.

BREIN, however, wanted a blocking decision more quickly and requested preliminary injunctions, like the one issued this week. These injunctions will only be valid until the final verdict is handed down.

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A copy of the most recent court order is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN discounts, offers and coupons

Digitale Assistenten: Hey, Google und Alexa, mischt euch nicht überall ein!

Digitale Assistenten waren eines der beherrschenden Themen auf der diesjährigen CES. Amazon und Google dringen immer stärker in Bereiche vor, die für Sprachsteuerung eher ungeeignet sind. Wer will schon unbedingt mit der Klospülung sprechen? Eine Anal…

Digitale Assistenten waren eines der beherrschenden Themen auf der diesjährigen CES. Amazon und Google dringen immer stärker in Bereiche vor, die für Sprachsteuerung eher ungeeignet sind. Wer will schon unbedingt mit der Klospülung sprechen? Eine Analyse von Ingo Pakalski (CES 2018, Google)