Month: May 2018

REDMOND, Washington—The Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC), slated to launch "later this year," looks almost incomplete at first glance. The clean, confusing-looking slab, nearly the length and width of an Xbox One S, has no joysticks. The usual selection of Xbox inputs has been reduced down to a few menu buttons, a D-pad, and two black, hand-sized pads.

Don't let the pared-down design fool you. The XAC is one of the most unique and widely useful control tools Microsoft has ever designed, and it seems poised to change the way many players interact with the games they love.

Sam Machkovech

Lenovo IdeaPad 330

Intel's transition to building processors on a 10nm manufacturing process has been delayed repeatedly. Once upon a time the company said that it'd go into mass production at the end of 2015; with its most recent financial results the company pushed that back, again, to 2019. But the company has also said that, although the yields aren't good enough for large-scale production, it has been shipping 10nm processors, codename Cannon Lake, to an unspecified customer.

That customer is Lenovo: the IdeaPad 330 has been listed by Chinese retailers, and it includes a mysterious processor, the Core i3-8121U. The name tells us the market positioning—it's an i3, so it's low-end—the power envelope—the "U" at the end means that it's a 15W chip—and the branding—the number starts with an 8, so it's going to be another "8th generation" chip, just like the Kaby Lake-R, Kaby Lake-G, and Coffee Lake processors. This means that "8th generation" is a rather vague label that describes several different processor variants, built on several different manufacturing processes (two 14nm variants and now 10nm).

We didn't know much more about the chip until Intel published it on its Ark site. The Ark listing confirms that it is indeed a 15W Cannon Lake chip, built on a 10nm process. It has two cores, four threads, a base clock speed of 2.2GHz with turbo boost of 3.2GHz, and 4MB of level 3 cache.

Enlarge (credit: Elsamuko)

The past three days have highlighted the potential perils that can threaten people who rely on desktop computers to send encrypted messages. The events—which involve encrypted email and the desktop versions of the Signal and Telegram messaging programs—should in no way discourage people from using encryption. They do, however, provide important teaching moments about the often overlooked limitations of these apps. More about that in a moment. First, a review of the vulnerabilities.

Monday brought word of decade-old flaws that might reveal the contents of PGP- and S/MIME-encrypted emails. Some of the worst flaws resided in email clients such as Thunderbird and Apple Mail and offer a golden opportunity to attackers who have already intercepted previously sent messages. By embedding the intercepted ciphertext in invisible parts of a new message sent to a sender or receiver of the original email, attackers can force the client to leak the corresponding plaintext. Thunderbird and Mail have yet to be patched, although the Thunderbird flaw has been mitigated by a update published Wednesday in the Enigmail GPG plugin.

Also on Monday, a different team of researchers disclosed vulnerability in the desktop version of the Signal messenger. It allowed attackers to send messages containing malicious HTML and JavaScript that would be executed by the app. Signal developers published a security update on Friday, a few hours after the researchers privately notified them of the vulnerability. On Monday, Signal developers issued a new patch after discovering over the weekend that the first one didn’t fully fix the bug. (The incompleteness of the patch was independently and more or less simultaneously found by the researchers.)

At Ars Live #22, Neil Tsutsui tells Annalee Newitz about the secret lives of ants. Videography by Chris Schodt, produced by Justin Wolfson. (video link)

At Ars Technica Live this month, we had the pleasure of talking to ecologist Neil Tsutsui, who runs the Tsutsui Lab at UC Berkeley, where researchers study the behavior and communications strategies of ants. In a sense, Neil is trying to figure out how to talk to ants. Of course it's a lot more complicated than that.

Ants are blind, so they "see" the world by using their antennae to smell and taste everything around them. To communicate with each other, ants use dozens of chemicals naturally secreted by their bodies. Sometimes they lay trails of pheromones to guide each other to food, and sometimes they'll put one drop of a chemical on a leg and wave it in the air that it evaporates and spreads to other ants on the wind.