Month: November 2018

Enlarge / A view of the new floating solar farm being grid connected on Godley Reservoir in Hyde, on February 10, 2016 in Manchester, England. (credit: Ashley Cooper / Barcroft Media / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

A total of 1.1 gigawatts (GW) of solar have been installed around the world as of September, according to a new report by the World Bank (PDF). That's similar to the amount of traditional solar panel capacity that had been installed around the world in the year 2000, the report says. The World Bank expects that, like traditional solar 18 years ago, we're likely to see an explosion of floating solar over the next two decades.

That's because floating solar is not simply "solar panels on water." Solar panels prevent algae growth in dammed areas, and they inhibit evaporation from occurring in hotter climates. (According to Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, major lakes in the southwestern US like Lake Mead and Lake Powell can lose more than 800,000 acre-feet of water to evaporation per year, and the adorably-described "floatovoltaics" could prevent up to 90 percent of that evaporation.") Additionally, floating solar avoids taking up space on land that is priced at a premium. In Northern California, for example, a floating solar installation was added to a nearby reservoir because the land around it was better used for growing grapes.

Another benefit of floating solar is that ground doesn't have to be leveled before the plant is installed. Usually, fixed-tilt panels are attached to a floating platform that's moored to the bottom of the reservoir. Most systems send electricity through floating inverters, although in some smaller installations the inverters are situated on land.

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

This past weekend, tens of thousands of tabletop gaming fanatics made a pilgrimage to the German city of Essen for the annual Internationale Spieltage fair—better known to board gaming fans simply as Spiel (or Essen). It’s the most important event in the board gaming calendar, where major publishers unveil their new releases, indie designers clamor to draw attention to their passion projects, and players scramble to try the hottest new games before they hit store shelves.

It’s a heaving, sprawling, noisy celebration of analogue gaming, and with thousands of new products on show, it’s impossible to do more than scratch the surface of what’s on offer. Once you set foot in the cavernous Messe Essen venue, you quickly realize that no matter how meticulously you’ve planned your visit, it all counts for nothing; it’s all about spotting empty spaces at demo tables and leaping at them before anyone else.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Over the past 11 months, the processors running our computers, and in some cases phones, have succumbed to a host of attacks. Bearing names such as Meltdown and Spectre, BranchScope, TLBleed, and Foreshadow, the exploits threaten to siphon some of our most sensitive secrets—say passwords or cryptographic keys—out of the silicon microarchitecture in ways that can’t be detected or stopped by traditional security defenses. On Friday, researchers disclosed yet another leak that has already been shown to exist on a wide range of Intel chips and may also affect other makers, too.

PortSmash, as the new attack is being called, exploits a largely overlooked side-channel in Intel’s hyperthreading technology. A proprietary implementation of simultaneous multithreading, hyperthreading reduces the amount of time needed to carry out parallel computing tasks, in which large numbers of calculations or executions are carried out simultaneously. The performance boost is the result of two logical processor cores sharing the hardware of a single physical processor. The added logical cores make it easier to divide large tasks into smaller ones that can be completed more quickly.

Port contention as a side channel

In a paper scheduled for release soon, researchers document how they were able to exploit the newly discovered leak to recover an elliptic curve private key from a server running an OpenSSL-powered TLS server. The attack, which was carried out on servers running Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake chips and Ubuntu, worked by sending one logical core a steady stream of instructions and carefully measuring the time it took for them to get executed.

Enlarge / Detective Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali) investigates a missing persons case while haunted by his past. (credit: YouTube/HBO)

We'd almost forgotten about HBO's uneven crime anthology series True Detective. It had a fantastic first season, only to hemorrhage viewers with the abysmally dreary, disappointing second season. But now the series is coming back for season 3, and if the new trailer is any indication, it's a welcome return to form.

The brainchild of former lit professor and novelist Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective has always fostered a very literary, philosophical tone, and, shall we say, unhurried pacing. When it works, it's brilliant. Season 1 was set in the Louisiana Bayou, as Detective Rustin "Rust" Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and his partner Detective Martin "Marty" Hart (Woody Harrelson) tracked down a twisted serial killer with a fondness for leaving weird twig sculptures in the woods.

The spooky setting and strong chemistry between the lead actors pretty much ensured its success with viewers and critics alike. It was well-plotted to reel the viewer in, and the dialogue between McConaughey and Harrelson yielded some much-needed comic relief. (Only McConaughey could pull off those long, drawling abstract ruminations without everyone wanting to strangle him, his partner included.)