Month: August 2019

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  Who could this woman be? We're not telling.

Four years ago, Sam Barlow surprised the game industry by reviving the moribund and seemingly outdated genre of full-motion-video games. Barlow's Her Story was a well-made, gripping, and ambiguous tale of murder and mania, told exclusively via conversational video snippets that players could search through via deduced transcript keywords.

But Her Story was tight and focused to the point of practical claustrophobia; every scene involved one actress whose character was interrogated in a single, mostly empty room over the course of a few in-game days. Barlow's latest FMV effort, Telling Lies, expands the same basic concept to great effect, packing many more characters, environments, and lengthy plotlines across roughly six hours of raw video and months of in-game time. The result is a slow-burning and deeply intimate character study with a plot that would feel cliché if not for its incredible presentation.

Random walk

Like Her Story, the player interacts with Telling Lies by searching through a video database and watching the clips. This time, though, that database is sourced from an intelligence agency, apparently stolen by your "viewer" character Snowden-style before her access could be completely cut off. Right away, it's apparent your goal is to search through the data before spreading it to the wider world. "When you use the uploader it will erase the hard-drive, so please do that before they take you into custody," read a note that accompanies the USB drive containing the database. "(Which they will—you know this, right?)"

Enlarge / Things got weird during a sponsored talk at this year's Black Hat USA conference. Now it's spawning a lawsuit. (credit: Getty Images)

One of the strangest moments at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas this month has now become the subject of a federal lawsuit against the conference.

In a filing to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (PDF), attorneys for the "emerging digital cryptography" firm Crown Sterling alleged that Black Hat USA had breached "its sponsorship agreement with Crown Sterling and the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing arising therefrom." Crown Sterling goes on to accuse the conference organizers of "other wrongful conduct" connected to events surrounding the presentation of a paper by Crown Sterling CEO and founder Robert E. Grant. In addition to legally targeting the conference, Crown Sterling has also filed suit against 10 "Doe" defendants, who it claims orchestrated a disruption of the company's sponsored talk at Black Hat.

Grant's presentation, entitled "Discovery of Quasi-Prime Numbers: What Does this Mean for Encryption," was based on a paper called "Accurate and Infinite Prime Prediction from a Novel Quasi-PrimeAnalytical Methodology." That work was published in March of 2019 through Cornell University's arXiv.org by Grant's co-author Talal Ghannam—a physicist who has self-published a book called The Mystery of Numbers: Revealed through their Digital Root as well as a comic book called The Chronicles of Maroof the Knight: The Byzantine. The paper, a slim five pages, focuses on the use of digital root analysis (a type of calculation that has been used in occult numerology) to rapidly identify prime numbers and a sort of multiplication table for factoring primes.

Enlarge / Fire damage on the roof of a Walmart store in Indio, California. (credit: Walmart)

Walmart and Tesla are actively negotiating to resolve the lawsuit Walmart filed against Tesla earlier this week over defective solar panels, the two companies said in a joint statement sent out on Thursday evening.

"Walmart and Tesla look forward to addressing all issues and re-energizing Tesla solar installations at Walmart stores, once all parties are certain that all concerns have been addressed," the statement said. The companies say they're both committed to a "sustainable energy future" as well as safety and efficiency.

Spokespeople for Tesla and Walmart declined to provide any further details about the state of the negotiations, but it's not hard to guess what happened. The optics of Walmart suing Tesla over multiple fires on its store roofs were not good for Tesla. Tesla wants the public—and potential customers—to know that it's now working to address Walmart's concerns.

Enlarge / The Big Red Ball is pictured in Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Oct. 2, 2017. There is no word on whether or not the Big Red Ball contains an unknown glowing green substance which fell to earth, presumably from outer space. (Though it probably does not. Probably.) (credit: Jeff Miller / UW-Madison)

The solar wind is made mostly of pure awesome. It is an always-changing, poorly predictable flow of charged particles from the Sun: a giant exhalation right into our faces. It's responsible for the auroras, which it produces in partnership with the Earth's magnetic fields. The solar wind has also given rise to possibly the coolest job description on Earth: space meteorologist.

But data on the solar wind is not so easy to come by. Yes, we can always observe the charged particles that hit our world's magnetic field, but for a more global view, we need to use satellite data—and satellites don’t come cheap. It would be nice if we could recreate the solar wind in the laboratory. And that is exactly what a group of physicists have done, using a machine called the "Big Red Ball."

A closer look at the solar wind

You'd think we understand the solar wind pretty well given that its existence was predicted before it was observed. But it's a complex system, and predicting its existence has not made it any easier to predict its behavior. Why is it so complicated?