Month: April 2018

Enlarge (credit: Stonemaier Games)

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

In 2011, game designer Rob Daviau released Risk Legacy, a campaign-driven reimagining of the classic strategy game Risk. In the process, he created an entirely new way of thinking about board games.

Previous releases had largely been immutable, with players resetting games to their starting states every time they were played, like the orderly arrangement of pieces on a chess board. Daviau’s approach threw this assumption out the window. His take on Risk saw players permanently alter the game as they played—writing on the board, destroying cards, and revealing new components hidden in sealed compartments.

Enlarge / Brains are gross. (credit: Adeel Anwar / Flickr)

The premiere of the second season of Westworld is a perfect time to ponder what makes us human. This is not new territory; such questions have long been dealt with in works of fiction, and they have appeared in science in the form of studies of creatures that have human-like characteristics—like consciousness—yet are not Homo sapiens.

These studies raise ethical questions whether the subject is an animal or an AI. Last May, a consortium of bioethicists, lawyers, neuroscientists, geneticists, philosophers, and psychiatrists convened at Duke to discuss how this question may apply to relatively new entities: brain “organoids” grown in a lab. These organoids can be either chimaera of human or animal cells or slices of human brain tissue. Will these lab-grown constructs achieve any sort of consciousness deserving of protection?

Why organoids?

If we ever want to understand, let alone cure, the very complex brain disorders that plague people—like schizophrenia, ASD, and depression—we need research models. And in order to be informative, these models must be accurate representations of the human brain. Yet as our models become more and more like the real thing (and for now, they are still quite a long way off), the problems with using them become so pronounced as to negate their utility—like Borges’ map.

Enlarge (credit: Bosch)

Is there still a future for the diesel engine? According to Bosch, the answer is yes—this week the German company announced it had made a breakthrough by combining a number of existing technologies, which means that modern turbodiesel engines can still make good power and deliver excellent fuel efficiencies. At the same time, Bosch says this combo will emit very low levels of dangerous nitrogen oxides (NOx)—in fact, the company says it can beat future European emissions regulations by 90 percent.

Diesel is a dirty word

For a while, it looked like the turbodiesel engine was an easy way to boost fuel efficiency and cut carbon emissions without sacrificing power or torque. But its dirty secret was that the modern turbodiesels that gained so much marketshare in Europe and were starting to gain popularity here in the US came with some serious baggage. Although they appeared to satisfy EPA and European emissions regulations, it turned out that in many cases that was only because of chicanery. So-called "defeat devices" could tell when a car was being tested, switching engine mapping to beat the test. Out on the open road, a different engine management map would be in charge, resulting in high levels of nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollutants coming out in the exhaust.

Volkswagen Group was the highest-profile offender, and Bosch itself had to cough up $328 million for its part in the scandal. But Fiat Chrysler has been in trouble with US regulators, and, in Europe, Renault, PSA Peugeot-Citroen, Daimler, and BMW have all received unscheduled visits from law enforcement over dodgy engines. The fallout has been far-reaching. In the US, diesel has once again fallen from grace. Volkswagen's reputation suffered a beating, and the company was ordered to pay massive fines and spend even more money building a network of electric car charging stations. The EU even revised its emissions test procedures in an attempt to prevent them from being gamed. And some automakers have even decided to end development of diesel engines.

Enlarge / North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un (L) and South Korean President Moon Jae-in (R) shake hands over the military demarcation line upon meeting for the Inter-Korean Summit on April 27, 2018 in Panmunjom, South Korea. (credit: Korea Summit Press Pool/Getty Images)

As Kim Jong Un became the first North Korean leader to step into South Korea, his generals continue to oversee teams of increasingly advanced hackers who are actively targeting the financial, health, and entertainment industries in the US and more than a dozen other countries. The so-called GhostSecret data reconnaissance campaign, exposed Tuesday by security firm McAfee, remains ongoing. It is deploying a series of previously unidentified tools designed to stealthily infect targets and gather data or possibly repeat the same type of highly destructive attacks visited upon Sony Pictures in 2014.

Last month, McAfee reported finding Bankshot, a remote-access trojan attributed to Hidden Cobra—a so-called advanced persistent threat group tied to North Korea—infecting Turkish banks. In this week's report, the security firm said the same malware was infecting organizations all over the world. McAfee researchers also found never-before-seen malware that was infecting the same organizations. One tool included many of the capabilities of Bankshot, including its ability to compromise computers that connect to the SWIFT banking network and permanently wipe data from infected computers. The tool also had digital fingerprints found in Destover, the name given to malware that was used in the Sony Pictures intrusion.

Server seizure, listening malware

Coinciding with the McAfee discovery, according to a ThaiCERT advisory published Wednesday, Thailand officials seized a server inside the Thammasat University in Bangkok that was being used to communicate with computers infected in the GhostSecret campaign. The server used the same IP address range that was used in the Sony Pictures hack. Thai officials are in the process of analyzing the server now.