Month: September 2019

Enlarge / Sven Olaf Kamphuis's Facebook profile picture, taken in front of the original CyberBunker facility. Its German successor was seized by police on September 26. (credit: Sven Olaf Kamphuis)

On September 26, a data center in a former NATO military bunker in the town of Traben-Trarbach, Germany was raided by police, according to a report by the Associated Press. Set up by a man who authorities describe as a 59-year-old Dutchman, the "CyberBunker" offered "bulletproof" hosting services—promising to keep hosted sites secure from law enforcement actions and operational regardless of legal demands.

According to authorities, the bunker housed the servers for a multitude of "dark web" sites selling drugs, hosting child pornography, and conducting other illegal activities. Among the sites hosted was "Wall Street Market," which authorities claim was one of the world's largest criminal marketplaces—selling drugs, stolen financial data, and hacking tools—until it was taken down earlier this year. The Traben-Trabach data center was also involved in a 2016 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Deutsche Telekom.

Seven people were arrested, and six other suspects, including two Dutch nationals, are still being sought by police. The raid was part of a coordinated law enforcement action at five locations by authorities in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Luxembourg.

A few weeks ago, we asked folks at both the main and fashion-specific Rainbow Six subreddits to share pictures of their Rainbow Six: Siege operators and loadouts. We took some of those submissions and shared them with Ubisoft Presentation Art Director Alex Karpazis to get his expert take on the style and the strategy behind these character choices.

Karpazis has plenty to say about the purely superficial bits of Rainbow Six style, calling out some rocking "Twitch Prime purple hair" in particular. But he also gets into how that style can affect gameplay, as with different gun sights that "obscure different parts of the screen" when trying to make your shot. There's also some general strategy advice mixed in, especially for people who accidentally kill their hostages with Fuze's grenade-spreading gadget.

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  A peek behind the scenes during the shoot.

We also convinced Karpazis to show off his own in-game loadouts and stats, a process he preceded by saying "Nobody is good at Rainbow, including me... Please be gentle, I get it."

A depiction of the complex topology of the connections among qubits in D-Wave's next-generation hardware. (credit: D-Wave)

On Tuesday, D-Wave announced the details of its next-generation computation hardware, which it's calling "Advantage," and released a set of white papers that describe some of the machine's performance characteristics. While some of the details of the upcoming system have been revealed earlier, Ars had the chance to sit in on a D-Wave users' group meeting, which included talks by company VP of Product dDsign, Mark Johnson and Senior Scientist Cathy McGeoch. We also sat down to discuss the hardware with Alan Baratz, D-Wave's chief product officer. They gave us a sense of what to expect when the machine comes online next year.

Part of the landscape

D-Wave's hardware performs a form of computation that's distinct from the one being pursued by companies like Google, Intel, and IBM. Those companies are attempting to build a gate-based quantum computer that's able to perform general computation, but they've run into known issues with scaling up the number of qubits and limiting the appearance of noise in their computations. D-Wave's quantum annealer is more limited in the types of problems it can solve, but its design allows the number of qubits to scale up more easily and limits the impact of noise.

It's easiest to think of a D-Wave as exploring an energy landscape filled with hills and valleys. It specializes in finding the lowest valley in one of these landscapes and avoids getting stuck in a local valley by using quantum effects to "tunnel" through intervening hillsides. That can be used to perform calculations, but only if the calculation can be structured so that it looks like an energy minimization problem.

Enlarge / People exploring the Maze at Glendurgan Garden, Cornwall, England, UK. (Photo by: Geography Photos/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) (credit: Geography Photos | Getty Images)

We don’t know how older people navigate around their environments, only that they don’t do it as well as they once did. It has been posited that they favor egocentric strategies, focusing on the relationship between themselves and the objects around them. That could reduce their perspective on the environment compared to allocentric strategies, which focus on the relationships among the objects, regardless of viewpoint.

Either way, they need to use the objects around them as visual cues. A new study suggests that their declining navigation skills aren't the result of a change in strategy but that they occur even before they get to that, in how they process visual cues.

People generally harness two types of visual cues for navigation. Geometric cues include things like the brick walls of a building or a hedge border; landmarks like that really gnarled dead tree trunk or that broken street lamp. Children like geometric cues, and young adults favor landmarks.

Enlarge / A health worker puts on protective gear as he prepares to screen travelers at the Mpondwe Health Screening Facility in the Ugandan border town of Mpondwe as they cross over from the Democratic Republic of Congo. (credit: Getty | Isaac Kasamani)

US and UK government officials are warning travelers of the possibility of a concealed Ebola outbreak in Tanzania after the World Health Organization reported that the government there is withholding information about possible cases of the deadly virus.

On September 21, the WHO released an unusual statement outlining a series of unofficial reports from the country. The first was that a doctor who had recently traveled to Uganda had returned to Tanzania with a “suspected” case of Ebola. Testing performed by the Tanzanian National Health Laboratory reportedly indicated that the doctor was positive for the virus. She died on September 8 in Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania, after traveling extensively throughout the country. Subsequent unofficial reports to the WHO indicated that there were several other suspected cases as well as contacts in quarantine in various sites in Tanzania.

The Tanzanian government has said that there have been no cases of Ebola and that no suspected cases are “admitted anywhere” in the country. But officials there have been remarkably slow to respond to the WHO’s requests for information, have failed to provide critical details about the cases, have not offered alternative explanations for the illnesses and death, and have refused to perform confirmatory tests to ensure that the disease is not spreading, according to the WHO.