Month: December 2019

Some games entice you into playing them with loud marketing campaigns, sexualized cover art, or the promise of ludicrous over-the-top violence. But then there are games like Lorne Lanning's Oddworld series—games that don't lead with muscle- or bikini-clad heroes and defy easy categorization. Games like Oddworld tempt you into playing by promising a different kind of experience. There are guns and violence, sure, but the setting is strange, the plot is filled with gray, and the hero—well, Abe isn't exactly sexy, or really even, you know, human.

But players who gave the original Oddworld a chance back in 1997 found themselves stumbling through a unique and fascinating world that was equal parts surprising and subversive, and the series has gone on to acquire legitimate cult-success status. With the approaching release of Oddworld: Soulstorm in 2020, we thought it was a good time to pay a visit to Lorne Lanning and his team at Oddworld Inhabitants, and talk about our favorite meat processing factory worker and his long journey from design notebook to screen.

“Write what you know,” they say...

We interviewed Lanning at the Emeryville, CA headquarters of Oddworld Inhabitants, the studio he co-founded with Sherry McKenna in 1994. For Oddworld fans, the office was a magical place, stuffed with the kind of memorabilia that amasses over more than two decades of game design. Lanning walked us through his journey to become a game creator, starting from his poor beginnings in what sounds like an unstable family. He got into video games because his father had a job at Coleco, and Lanning thought gaming would be a good way to meet girls.

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  In a recent video, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny tackled corruption at Vostochny Spacport. [credit: YouTube screenshot ]

Russia has a storied and capable space program. And following the space shuttle's retirement in 2011, for nearly a decade, the country has safely and reliably provided a ride for US astronauts to get into space. But that does not mean the country’s space corporation, Roscosmos, is not riven by corruption.

A leading critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Alexei Navalny, recently turned his attention toward the country's space program. In an entertaining 13-minute video not unlike those produced by "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" on HBO, Navalny tackles corruption surrounding the construction of the Vostochny Spaceport in far eastern Russia, as well as the apparently lavish lifestyle of Roscosmos leader Dmitry Rogozin. (The video is in Russian, it was translated for Ars by Robinson Mitchell. The English-language captions are mostly accurate).

Vostochny troubles

At the outset of the video, Navalny notes that Putin has called for "transparency" surrounding the Vostochny project, which is mired in corruption and has led to a dozen criminal cases. The cost of the project has doubled from 150 billion rubles ($2.3 billion) to 300 billion rubles ($4.7 billion). Then Navalny zeroes in on the primary cause for these problems.

Enlarge (credit: Mike Myers)

Researchers have reached a new milestone in the annals of cryptography with the factoring of the largest RSA key size ever computed and a matching computation of the largest-ever integer discrete logarithm. New records of this type occur regularly as the performance of computer hardware increases over time. The records announced on Monday evening are more significant because they were achieved considerably faster than hardware improvements alone would predict, thanks to enhancements in software used and the algorithms it implemented.

Many public-key encryption algorithms rely on extremely large numbers that are the product of two prime numbers. Other encryption algorithms base their security on the difficulty of solving certain discrete logarithm problems. With sufficiently big enough key sizes, there is no known way to crack the encryption they provide. The factoring of the large numbers and the computing of a discrete logarithm defeat the cryptographic assurances for a given key size and force users to ratchet up the number of bits of entropy it uses.

The new records include the factoring of RSA-240, an RSA key that has 240 decimal digits and a size of 795 bits. The same team of researchers also computed a discrete logarithm of the same size. The previous records were the factoring in 2010 of an RSA-768 (which, despite its digit is a smaller RSA key than the RSA-240, with 232 decimal digits and 768 bits) and the computation of a 768-bit prime discrete logarithm in 2016.