Month: February 2019

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Researchers from Google investigating the scope and impact of the Spectre attack have published a paper asserting that Spectre-like vulnerabilities are likely to be a continued feature of processors and, further, that software-based techniques for protecting against them will both impose a high performance cost. In any case, the researchers continue, the software will be inadequate—some Spectre flaws don't appear to have any effective software-based defense. As such, Spectre is going to be a continued feature of the computing landscape, with no straightforward resolution.

The discovery and development of the Meltdown and Spectre attacks was undoubtedly the big security story of 2018. First revealed last January, new variants and related discoveries were made throughout the rest of the year. Both attacks rely on discrepancies between the theoretical architectural behavior of a processor—the documented behavior that programmers depend on and write their programs against—and the real behavior of implementations.

Specifically, modern processors all perform speculative execution; they make assumptions about, for example, a value being read from memory or whether an if condition is true or false, and they allow their execution to run ahead based on these assumptions. If the assumptions are correct, the speculated results are kept; if it isn't, the speculated results are discarded and the processor redoes the calculation. Speculative execution is not an architectural feature of the processor; it's a feature of implementations, and so it's supposed to be entirely invisible to running programs. When the processor discards the bad speculation, it should be as if the speculation never even happened.

Enlarge / Apple's new store will be at the Galleria Dallas. In addition to being a beautiful mall, it's also outside the reach of the notoriously patent-friendly Eastern District of Texas. (credit: jinjian liang / Flickr)

Apple is closing two Apple stores in the northern suburbs of Dallas in an apparent bid to ward off litigation from patent trolls. The stores are in the Eastern District of Texas, a federal court jurisdiction notorious for its friendliness to patent holders. As Joe Rossignol at MacRumors points out, closing the two stores will make it easier for Apple to resist being dragged into Eastern District courtrooms in patent cases.

Apple confirmed the closings in a statement to TechCrunch, though the company didn't say whether the move was patent-related.

The Eastern District wraps around to the North of Dallas, covering Dallas suburbs like Plano and Frisco. Apple currently operates two stores north of Dallas that fall into the Eastern District: Apple Willow Bend and Apple Stonebriar.

Enlarge / Dale Kronkright (left), head of conservation at the Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, uses a handy new imaging tool to study "acne" on Georgia O'Keefe's "Ritz Tower." Northwestern University's Oliver Cossairt (right) developed the tool. (credit: YouTube/Northwestern University)

The Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, houses some 140 oil paintings by the iconic American artist, along with thousands of additional works from O'Keefe's prolific career. But the oil paintings have been developing tiny pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Conservationists and scholars initially assumed they were grains of sand trapped in the paint. But then the protrusions grew, spread, and started flaking off, leading to mounting concern.

Now an interdisciplinary team of scientists from Northwestern University is studying this mysterious "paint disease," using a low-cost, portable tool that allows the user to image the surface of the paintings quickly and easily with a smartphone or a tablet. They demonstrated the new technique last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Washington, DC.

This "paint disease" isn't limited to O'Keefe's oeuvre. Conservators have found similar deterioration in oil-based masterpieces across all time periods, including works by Rembrandt. Chemists concluded that the blisters are actually metal carboxylate soaps, the result of a chemical reaction between metal ions in the lead and zinc pigments, and fatty acids in the binding medium used in the paint. The soaps start to clump together to form the blisters and migrate through the paint film. "They can form exudates on the surface, which obscure the painting itself, creating an insoluble film, or an effect of transparency, so you can look through those layers, which was not the intention of the artist," said Marc Walton of Northwestern University, who co-led the study.

Enlarge / Mutants defending their camp.

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

After going decades without a proper Fallout tabletop title, we’ve now been graced with two quality releases in the span of a little more than a year. While Fantasy Flight’s offering is a narrative adventure game about roaming the wasteland, Modiphius’ new Wasteland Warfare is a miniatures skirmish design that features grizzled war bands clashing in harrowing environments. (Think Warhammer, but we swap Space Marines for the Brotherhood of Steel and Orks for Super Mutants.) At the risk of making you cringe, I’ll say it: the game is pretty rad.

Because this is a true miniatures game, it requires some work. The two-player starter set comes with pre-assembled plastic miniatures, but expansion figures are multi-part and will require assembly. You will fight with 6-12 of these figures over the stretch of an hour or two, and you will need to supply your own terrain for the brutes to battle over. It’s a commitment, as these games tend to be, but one that promises a deep and immersive experience in return.

Enlarge / Ba-ding! (credit: Aurich)

Last week, a copy of the first printing of Super Mario Bros. in pristine condition sold for just over $100,000. This week, the collector who sold that gem told Ars that he's been preparing for this moment for years.

The seller—who asked to remain anonymous to protect his privacy but goes by the handle Bronty online—told Ars he didn't even have an NES growing up. He just played games like Super Mario Bros. at a friend's house. But around 2002, at age 27, Bronty was gripped by a desire to once again play the NES games he hadn't thought about for well over a decade.

A quick trip to eBay got him his nostalgic gaming fix and sparked an interest in a new hobby that fewer people were paying attention to at the time. "Having already been a comic collector for many years, I had an interest in collecting in general," Bronty told Ars. "I started thinking, 'Would this be an interesting thing to collect?'"

Enlarge / Wallace's Giant Bee next to a honeybee for scale. (credit: Clay Bolt)

For security reasons, I can’t tell you exactly where Clay Bolt rediscovered Wallace’s giant bee. But I can tell you this. With a wingspan of two and a half inches, the Goliath is four times bigger than a European honeybee. Very much unlike its honey-manufacturing cousin, it’s got enormous jaws, more like those of the famous stag beetle. And it lives not in nests with thousands of family members but largely alone in burrows in termite mounds, a tubular home it coats with waterproof resin.

Last month, Bolt and his colleagues were on a miserable slog through the rain on an Indonesian Island That Shall Not Be Named, searching for termite mounds in trees, the last place a scientist spotted the superlative species of bee nearly 40 years ago. Sometimes they’d sit under a tree with a pair of binoculars for 20 minutes, watching for the distinctive movements that would reveal a bee in a mound way up high. For mounds closer to the ground, they’d scramble up for a closer look.