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You might think connecting your car to your phone is the dumbest thing ever, but neither the tech nor auto industries are giving up on it any time soon. (credit: Getty Images | Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg)

As you might imagine, we at Ars get bombarded with PR pitches about connected cars. Devices that plug into your car's OBDII port. Smartwatch integration with new models direct from the factory. Cars that alert you if you've left your keys behind. These are just the tip of the iceberg, and more ideas like them are coming from both the tech and auto industries. LTE modems are becoming widespread in new models and not just in luxury cars—try buying a Chevrolet without embedded 4G.

There's just one problem: most Ars readers, in my experience, think connecting a car to the internet is the dumbest thing you can do on four wheels. Who can blame them? Last year saw a litany of car hacks that affected aftermarket devices but also security flaws direct from the factory—1.4 million Fiat Chrysler vehicles had to be recalled as a result.

The problem is with the digital nervous system of our cars. Back when automotive network standards were being created, the idea that cars would use the Internet to interface with the outside world was ludicrous. And so, there's little—or none—of the sort of network security in place that you'd take for given if designing things from a clean sheet. As long as you have access to the Connected Area Network (or CAN), your electronic hooks are into the engine, the brakes, and even the steering.

Telsa Model Ss in the company's European production center in Tilburg, Netherlands. (credit: Getty Images | Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg)

Wake turbulence can ruin your day. Large aircraft deposit a strong ground-bound vortex that can cause huge altitude losses for other aircraft following them.

In the jet wash of a gob-smacking 325,000 pre-orders—at $1,000 each—for the upcoming Model 3 in just one week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had bad news for his investors on Thursday. He told them the July 1, 2017 start date for production "is not a date that will actually be met." While this would be the fourth production delay for the Model 3 since the concept was first floated several years ago, the news doesn't stop there. New, more aggressive production goals have been set, even though Tesla is losing primary executive staff responsible for achieving them. The financial performance of the company has also worsened.

Tesla is already struggling to meet production deadlines for its current Model S and Model X units.
Quality glitches with the Model X's "falcon wings" and seat latches have led not just to production delays, but apprehension about the X's positive initial reception. Tesla is actually suing its supplier for the doors.

Detail from the cover of Central Station, by Lavie Tidhar. (credit: Sarah Anne Langton)

The scope of Lavie Tidhar's new novel Central Station may be galactic, but each of its many, many co-existing layers of reality are connected by one locale: the ever-present space port of Central Station, an unimaginably massive building that joins the human past on Earth to its rapidly evolving future. Trying to summarize Central Station is like trying to summarize an entire season of a soap opera, except there are no heroes or villains, and, you know, the plot's mysterious baby scandal is about who engineered him in the vat and to what purpose. Adding to the drama is the Conversation: an inescapable, interconnected network that touches (almost) all people throughout the space-time continuum.

Central Station grew out of 13 linked short stories, some previously published and some new, which is what grants World Fantasy Award-winning author Tidhar such a broad canvas. His interwoven mix of human and non-human lives is full of characters crashing into the world and sending out ripples like stones thrown into a pond.

Is the main thrust that prodigal son Boris Aharon Chong has returned to Central Station, with an alien parasite in tow, to face the family, woman, and otherworldly child he abandoned in different ways? (In the cast list at the back of the book, Boris Chong is described as having “issues”—an understatement.) Is the central plot the forbidden battlefield romance between Isobel Chow and a robotnik named Motl, a being that stopped being human as we understand it long ago? Is the story the machination of the Oracle, Ruth Cohen, and the rag-and-bone man Ibrahim, who are all joined with non-human, digital, sentient life forms called Others? What of techno-vampire Carmel and her romance with the least technologically capable human in the story, the node-less and thus data-less Achimwene Haile Selassie Jones? And what's up with the manufactured boys Kranki and Ismail anyway?

Board gaming is in the midst of a creative “golden age.” But while games thrive on innovation, a paradoxically conservative streak runs through the hobby when it comes to the most fundamental technological shift of the 21st century: the rise of the smartphone.

While publishers have pushed out digital adaptations of hit games like Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride, this is generally a one-way movement; few digital apps and tools are used in physical board games. But there are exceptions.

One of the first high-profile attempts at an analog-digital hybrid was XCOM: The Board Game. Released in 2015, the game offers a cooperative, multiplayer reimagining of the revered video game series that tasks players with repelling an alien invasion of the Earth. Created by Canadian designer Eric Lang, it uses a smartphone app to coordinate the aliens’ sinister plans to enslave the planet.