Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Bandai Namco creative director Hirofumi Motoyama shows off his Hololens at the 2018 Game Developers Conference. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

SAN FRANCISCO—"It surprised us how Pac-Man on Hololens created interaction between people who are complete strangers!"

Bandai Namco creative director Hirofumi Motoyama declared this while standing next to a photo of arguably the world's largest Microsofot Hololens game experience to date. In it, two players sporting Microsoft's "mixed reality" headgear are seen high-fiving—which is both a fun photo moment and a bit of a cheat.

Pac In Town, which premiered in January exclusively at one of Namco's Japanese theme parks, actually requires players to high-five each other in order to beat its challenges. But as Motoyama's presentation at the Game Developers Conference made clear, that action is but one way that Bandai Namco answered an important question: how do you make a full-room, multiplayer Hololens game that doesn't suck?

Enlarge (credit: Saleem Rashid)

For years, executives at France-based Ledger have boasted their specialized hardware for storing cryptocurrencies is so securely designed that resellers or others in the supply chain can't tamper with the devices without it being painfully obvious to end users. The reason: "cryptographic attestation" that uses unforgeable digital signatures to ensure that only authorized code runs on the hardware wallet.

"There is absolutely no way that an attacker could replace the firmware and make it pass attestation without knowing the Ledger private key," officials said in 2015. Earlier this year, Ledger's CTO said attestation was so foolproof that it was safe to buy his company's devices on eBay.

On Tuesday, a 15-year-old from the UK proved these claims wrong. In a post published to his personal blog, Saleem Rashid demonstrated proof-of-concept code that had allowed him to backdoor the Ledger Nano S, a $100 hardware wallet that company marketers have said has sold by the millions. The stealth backdoor Rashid developed is a minuscule 300-bytes long and causes the device to generate pre-determined wallet addresses and recovery passwords known to the attacker. The attacker could then enter those passwords into a new Ledger hardware wallet to recover the private keys the old backdoored device stores for those addresses.

Ars talks with Hod Lipson about "sailing west" into the uncharted waters of robotics. Click for transcript. (video link)

Research has traditionally been broken down along simple lines. There's basic, fundamental research into how the world works, and there's applied research that attempts to take these insights and make something useful out of them. The two have very different end goals and require very different approaches to the research process.

But there's a large gray area in between, where the approach is more applied but the end goal may be little more than "make something cool": things like tiny flying robots or 3D computer displays that rely on beads levitated by lasers. How do researchers find direction for these open-ended engineering challenges?