Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The FBI remotely accessed and disinfected US-located devices running a powerful new strain of Russian state botnet malware, federal authorities said Wednesday. Those authorities added that the Kremlin was using the malware to wage stealthy hacks of its adversaries.

The infected devices were primarily made up of firewall appliances from WatchGuard and, to a lesser extent, network devices from Asus. Both manufacturers recently issued advisories providing recommendations for hardening or disinfecting devices infected by the botnet, known as Cyclops Blink. It is the latest botnet malware from Russia’s Sandworm, which is among the world’s most elite and destructive state-sponsored hacking outfits.

Regaining control

Cyclops Blink came to light in February in an advisory jointly issued by the UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). WatchGuard said at the time that the malware had infected about 1 percent of network devices it made.

Enlarge / Quantum Go Fish is just one of the many math-y games in Ben Orlin's latest book, Math Games with Bad Drawings. (credit: Ben Orlin)

Adapted from Math Games with Bad Drawings (2022) by Ben Orlin. You can read our latest interview with Orlin here.

Of the thousand games I encountered in researching my book Math Games with Bad Drawings, only one of them truly frightened me. It's a finger game. But trust me: It is the most cognitively taxing finger game that the human race has yet devised—a cross between a logic puzzle, an improv comedy session, and a collective hallucination, played with the strangest deck of cards you've ever seen (or not seen). Keep your aspirin at the ready.

How to play

What do you need? Anywhere from three to eight players. Each begins the game by holding up four fingers. These are the "cards" in the deck.

Enlarge / Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is at heart a game of fractal structure, per math teacher Ben Orlin, author of Math Games with Bad Drawings. Players must balance two levels, an element that requires them to "Think globally, act locally." (credit: Ben Orlin)

In 1974, a geneticist named Marsha Jean Falco devised an ingenious research tool to help determine whether epilepsy in dogs was an inherited trait. She drew a series of symbols on index cards, where each card represented a dog and each symbol represented a DNA sequence, to create her own coding system. But as she shuffled and reshuffled the index cards over time, she began seeing the deck in terms of pure abstract patterns and combinations.

Eventually her personal coding system became the game of Set—just one of the many math-y games included in math teacher and bestselling author Ben Orlin's new book, Math Games with Bad Drawings. (You can read an excerpt and try your hand at a game of Quantum Go Fish here.)

Orlin's first book, Math with Bad Drawings, after his blog of the same name, was published in 2018. It included such highlights as placing a discussion of the correlation coefficient and "Anscombe's Quartet" into the world of Harry Potter and arguing that building the Death Star in the shape of a sphere may not have been the Galatic Empire's wisest move. We declared it "a great, entertaining read for neophytes and math fans alike, because Orlin excels at finding novel ways to connect the math to real-world problems—or in the case of the Death Star, to problems in fictional worlds."

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It's time for another Dealmaster! Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a number of lower-than-usual prices on various Apple devices. The 40 mm Apple Watch SE, for instance, is available for $229 at Amazon and Walmart as of this writing. That's the best price we've seen since Black Friday and only $10 more than the all-time lowest price we've tracked. It's the same situation with the bigger 44 mm model, which is available for $259. The higher-end Apple Watch Series 7, meanwhile, is down to its lowest price to date: the 41 mm model is currently on sale for $329, while the 45 mm model is down to $359.

To be clear, we've seen multiple discounts for both of these watches in recent months, and the two have generally retailed for less than Apple's MSRPs at Amazon, Walmart, and a few other online stores since they launched. It's almost inevitable that Apple will refresh one or both devices by the end of the year, too. But if you own an iPhone and want a wearable to pair with it right now, the Series 7 is still the top pick in our guide to the best smartwatches, and the SE remains a great alternative for those on a tighter budget. As we've noted before, both devices deliver a strong build quality, robust software, and good-enough activity tracking for most. Between the two, the Series 7 has a bigger display that stays active when you put your wrist down, faster charging speeds, and more advanced health-tracking tools like ECG functionality and blood-oxygen monitoring. If you can overlook those features—the lack of an always-on display likely being the most notable—the SE can do most of the same things, albeit slightly slower, for a much lower price. Either way, note that not all colorways for each watch are on sale between the two retailers.

Besides the Apple Watch, we also have a few iPad discounts. The 256GB Space Gray model of the entry-level, 10.2-inch iPad is down to a new low of $429, while versions of the latest 10.9-inch iPad Air and 8.3-inch iPad Mini with the same storage capacity are available for lows of $679 and $600, respectively. These devices aren't especially cheap, but we've reviewed all three positively. In short, the base iPad is likely the best value for most, as it still offers an altogether competent way into iPadOS for the lowest price possible. The recently released iPad Air is a fairly noticeable step up in terms of performance, however, and its design is far more modern, with a bigger and brighter display, a USB-C port, wider accessory support, and better cameras. The iPad Mini, meanwhile, is built like a shrunken-down iPad Air, though its processor is a bit slower. If you prefer a smaller design, though, it's the only iPad that fits the bill. Both the 10.2-inch iPad and iPad Mini launched in September 2021, while the iPad Air arrived last month.

Enlarge / This is your brain on NFTs. We have a lot of questions. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Ubisoft's first experiment with non-fungible tokens (called "Quartz Digits) in Ghost Recon Breakpoint is already winding down just four months after it started. The short saga serves as a prime example of the problems that can arise when a company just throws "the blockchain" into their project plans without really thinking about why they're doing so.

Ubisoft announced on Twitter on Tuesday that the company has released "our final piece of content" for Ghost Recon Breakpoint after rolling out 11 updates since the game's 2019 launch. While Ubisoft says it will "continue to maintain our servers" for Breakpoint and 2017's Ghost Recon Wildlands for the time being, Breakpoint's relatively limited player base means that online multiplayer support probably won't last that much longer. (Ubisoft will shut down the gameplay servers for battle royale shooter Hyper Scape later this month).

On the Ubisoft Quartz website, the company confirmed that "the last Digit for Ghost Recon Breakpoint was released on 3/17/2022."

Enlarge / Forthcoming "Edit Tweet" option as seen in a post by Twitter's communications team. (credit: Twitter)

Twitter is adding an edit button, the company said yesterday. The "Edit Tweet" option will become available "in the coming months" to users of the paid Twitter Blue subscription, with a potential rollout to other users later on.

The announcement came shortly after Elon Musk joined the Twitter board of directors and polled users about whether they want an edit button. But Twitter said the edit button has been in the works for months.

"Now that everyone is asking... yes, we've been working on an edit feature since last year!" Twitter's communications team wrote in a tweet. "No, we didn't get the idea from a poll . We're kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn't, and what's possible." Twitter Blue currently has an "Undo Tweet" option that delays sending tweets for up to 60 seconds, but the planned edit button would be the first feature to let users change a tweet after it has been posted. Twitter Blue costs $2.99 a month in the US.