Month: October 2018

(credit: Wikipedia)

Tiny Chinese spy chips were embedded onto Super Micro motherboards that were then sold to companies in the US, including Amazon and Apple, reports Bloomberg. The report has attracted strenuous denials from Amazon, Apple, and Super Micro.

Bloomberg claims that the chips were initially and independently discovered by Apple and Amazon in 2015 and that the companies reported their findings to the FBI, prompting an investigation that remains ongoing. The report alleges that the tiny chips, disguised to look like other components or even sandwiched into the fiberglass of the motherboards themselves, were connected to the management processor, giving them far-reaching access to both networking and system memory. The report says that the chips would connect to certain remote systems to receive instructions and could then do things like modify the running operating system to remove password validation, thereby opening a machine up to remote attackers.

The boards were all designed by California-based Super Micro and built in Taiwan and China. The report alleges that operatives masquerading as Super Micro employees or government representatives approached people working at four particular factories to request design changes to the motherboards to include the extra chips. Bloomberg further reports that the attack was made by a unit of the People's Liberation Army, the Chinese military.

Enlarge / Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope. (credit: United Artists)

Below you’ll find the third installment of this week’s After On podcast interview, in which UC-Irvine quantitative psychologist Don Hoffman presents his wildly counterintuitive theory on the nature of reality. Check out parts one and two if you missed them. Otherwise, press play on the embedded player or pull up the transcript, both of which are below.

We kick off today's segment by talking about what’s widely referred to as “the hard problem of consciousness” (what is it, and how does it arise from inert matter?). Don takes a highly contrarian approach to the subject. “We'll try to solve the mind/body problem the other direction,” he says. “Instead of starting with a physical world that's not conscious and trying to figure out how we can boot up consciousness from unconscious ingredients, maybe we can start with a mathematical theory of consciousness and then show how we could boot up space-time and physical objects [from that].”

Next, we discuss the eerie results of several-hundred brain-splitting surgeries, which were performed a few decades back. These severed the connection that ties the left side of the brain to the right. This wasn’t barbaric One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stuff but a genuinely effective therapy for people who were crippled by certain seizure syndromes. Powerful evidence eventually emerged that two independent—and at times conflicting—conscious entities resulted from these surgeries. Don knows quite a bit about all this because he knew the surgeon who performed a high percentage of the operations.

Enlarge / What'd you find there, Ikaros? (credit: Ubisoft)

At this point, Assassin’s Creed is more of a gaming institution than a simple series. With almost two dozen titles in just over a decade (plus movies, novels, and more), the franchise has developed its own arcs and stories that go well past the events portrayed in its code.

While the series struggled under a deeply accelerated release schedule some years back, Ubisoft’s tentpole franchise is on a more solid pacing again. That means a return to what Assassin’s Creed does best: expounding on and remixing prominent game design ideas and serving them up an aesthetic and conceptual cocktail. Odyssey, much like last year’s Origins, takes ideas from its best contemporaries and reassembles them into a new whole.

Choose your choice

The Assassin’s Creed games are principally founded on the notion that recorded history has just enough gaps to fit in the existence of an unknown, international cabal of elite assassins. Different segments of the series have offered up addendums to the basic conceit, starting with an open world and a flexible parkour system. The Assassin’s Creed franchise has evolved to become a standard-bearer for entire trends in gaming, such as, but certainly not limited to the so-called “Ubisoft towers.”

Enlarge / Vladimir Putin visits the Coastal Cluster Olympic Village ahead of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics on February 5, 2014. (credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

The US government announced on Thursday that it has indicted seven Russian intelligence officials for hacking targets in the United States.

Ordinarily, intelligence agencies focus on issues related to national security. But a federal indictment announced on Thursday charges that Russian spies waged a long-running campaign to undermine investigations into doping activities by Russian athletes during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Key Russian attacks were carried out in 2016, days after the World Anti-Doping Agency released an initial report on Russian doping activities. Russian agents targeted anti-doping organizations to gather information to undermine the investigation and embarrass non-Russian athletes.

Sascha Segan

Android smartwatches may be about as dead of a form factor as Android tablets, but that isn't stopping OEMs from continuing to pump out these little packages of wrist-mounted sadness. The latest is LG's "hybrid" smartwatch, the Watch W7, which one-ups the usual Wear OS hardware package by slapping physical, analog watch hands on top of the display.

The watch hands look great in LG's press renders, which only ever show the watch face, but if you try to use any of the "smart" capabilities of your smartwatch, you'll quickly realize how bad of an idea this is. The physical watch hands constantly obscure the display, making it difficult to see the text and buttons on your smartwatch. To make matters worse, the watch hands need to connect to the requisite gearing in the body of the watch, so there's also a sizable hole in the center of your tiny 1.2-inch display. To make matters even more worse, the layout has the display, then the watch hands, then the glass cover, so there's a large air gap between the display and the display cover. As we learned in early smartphone designs, not bonding the display to the cover negatively affects display brightness and contrast.

Enlarge / Some of the features of Titan's atmosphere, like its polar vortex, can be seen with visible light. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

Weather prediction is a tricky business. And it's even more difficult when you only have a single deceased orbiter to get your data from. This week, via a ouija board, the Cassini probe tells us of dust storms on Titan.

Cassini had a couple of imaging spectrometers on board. These created pictures of Titan, with each pixel in the image telling us something about the materials in the atmosphere and on the ground within the region covered by the pixel. In 2009 and 2010, during the equinox, Cassini observed a sudden and short-lived brightening on Titan.

The brightening was not visible to the naked eye. Instead, it was mostly visible in the infrared (a wavelength longer than we can see). What could have caused it?

Enlarge / Map of shaking intensity around the epicenter of the September 8, 2017 magnitude 8.2 earthquake. (credit: USGS)

September 2017 saw a pair of weird earthquakes in Mexico. A magnitude 8.2 on September 8 just offshore the state of Chiapas was followed by a magnitude 7.1 on September 19—this time much closer to Mexico City, causing considerable destruction there. While the two earthquakes were not connected, they were the same type of earthquake, which is unusual in the region.

Mexico’s western coast is a tectonic plate boundary, where the Pacific plate collides with and dives beneath the continent. That means that earthquakes along that boundary are typically the result of compressive force that squeezes rock to slide up the plane of the fault. Both September earthquakes were the result of stretching, however, which is almost as much of a head-scratcher as finding that part of your car’s engine was pulled apart during a head-on crash.

The explanation here is that as the oceanic plate disappears beneath the continent, it sinks downward into the mantle. First of all, the bending of the plate downward causes stretching, just as the skin over your elbow has to stretch. Second, the sinking plate pulls downward as it “hangs” from the part of the plate that is still up at the surface—another stretching force. Occasional earthquakes within this bending, sinking plate can reflect that stretching.