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Artist's rendition of the horde of DDoS requests coming at your router.

Rainbow Six: Siege players are complaining that the game continues to make their global IP address available to other players, putting those players at risk for DDoS attacks from bitter opponents.

The problem seems to stem from the way the game implements voice chat between players. Back in September, Ubisoft confirmed that while the game uses dedicated servers to host matches, it still uses direct, peer-to-peer connections "strictly to support voice and chat comms for a team." Beta players began noticing almost immediately that this infrastructure decision presents a pretty big security hole when playing with strangers on the Internet. This netcode analysis from January shows how a simple packet sniffer like NetLimiter could easily reveal the IP addresses of all other players in the match, even though voice chat is only available between teammates during a match.

Armed with these IP addresses, unscrupulous players could easily use any number of services to initiate a DDoS attack to remove opposing players from the game. There's a decent amount of evidence that many players were doing just that to gain a leg up in ranked matches, with some managing to climb the in-game ranking ladder despite awful play statistics.

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Elizabeth Parrish (credit: YouTube)

Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of the biotech company BioViva, claims that her body's cells are 20 years younger after testing her company’s age-reversing gene therapy on herself.

The 45-year old Seattle-area woman, who has no scientific or medical training, underwent the experimental treatment last September in an undisclosed clinic in Colombia. The unorthodox, overseas trial, which was designed to skirt US federal regulations, prompted the resignation of one of the company’s scientific advisors. George Martin of the University of Washington quit after telling MIT Technology Review, "This is a big problem. I am very upset by what is happening. I would urge lots of preclinical studies.”

Though details of the fast-tracked trial are unpublished, Parrish says it involved intravenous infusions of an engineered virus. That infectious germ carried the genetic blueprints for an enzyme called telomerase, which is found in humans. When spread to the body’s cells, the enzyme generally extends the length of DNA caps on the ends of chromosomes, which naturally wear down with cellular aging. In a 2012 mouse study, Spanish researchers found that similar treatment could extend the lifespan of the rodents by as much as 20 percent.

Landing a vehicle as large as a Dragon spacecraft on Mars would be unprecedented. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX announced an audacious plan on Wednesday to land an approximately 6,000kg spacecraft on the surface of Mars. This simple declaration from the uber-popular rocket company drew a ton of questions from all quarters, and Ars spoke to a range of people across the space industry to get some answers. How big a milestone would this be? Can SpaceX do it? Is the plan realistic? And why does Rice play Texas, anyway? (OK, we didn't actually try to figure out that last one.)

Is this really a big deal?

Oh, heavens, yes. No private company has ever launched a significant, independently financed expedition into deep space, let alone all the way to Mars. In fact, only two world powers have ever softly landed spacecraft on Mars. The United States has done so half a dozen times, and the Soviet Union did it once with Mars 3 in 1971—although the vehicle failed after sending back just 15 seconds of data. And all previous soft landings have been relatively small and light; SpaceX is talking about landing a Dragon weighing about 6,000kg on the surface of Mars. The previous landing heavyweight was Curiosity, at 900kg. Soft-landing a 6,000kg object on Mars would be a stunning achievement for NASA or any government-backed space agency. For a private company, it's unheard of.

Can they do it?

Why not? In just the last six months, SpaceX has successfully launched and then recovered the first stages of multiple Falcon 9 rockets, first landing them on the ground and then later landing on an autonomous drone ship. SpaceX is known for making bold promises, and—eventually—delivering on them. However, the company has missed deadlines before, and making the 2018 launch window to Mars will be a real challenge.