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The Supreme Court is considering whether to adopt a broad reading of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that critics say could criminalize some types of independent security research and create legal uncertainty for many security researchers. Voatz, an online voting vendor whose software was used by West Virginia for overseas military voters in the 2018 election, argues that this wouldn't be a problem.

"Necessary research and testing can be performed by authorized parties," Voatz writes in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court. "Voatz’s own security experience provides a helpful illustration of the benefits of authorized security research, and also shows how unauthorized research and public dissemination of unvalidated or theoretical security vulnerabilities can actually cause harmful effects."

As it happens, we covered a recent conflict between Voatz and an independent security researcher in last Thursday's deep dive on online voting. And others involved in that altercation did not see it the way Voatz did.

Enlarge / A Long March 4B carrier rocket lifts off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Taiyuan in north China's Shanxi Province in April, 2019. (credit: Xinhua/Liu Qiaoming via Getty Images)

On Monday, a Long March 4B rocket launched from China's Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center carrying a remote-sensing satellite. This 50-year-old spaceport is located in north-central China, about 500km to the southwest of Beijing.

As often happens with the first stages of Chinese rockets launching from the inland Taiyuan facility, the spent Long March 4B booster fell downstream of the spaceport. In this case, it landed near a school, creating a predictably large cloud of toxic gas.

Unlike most of the world's spaceports, several of China's launch sites are located at inland locations rather than near water to avoid such hazards. For security purposes, China built three of its major launch centers away from water during the Cold War, amid tensions with both America and the Soviet Union.

Enlarge / Artist's impression of 5G. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

In our last 5G explainer, we talked about the potential impact of the 5G cellular protocol—and the various bands over which it operates—on gaming. Today, we're going to explore what the improved throughput and latency associated with 5G networks might mean for work rather than play.

For the most part, the improvements are iterative, not revolutionary—and they're the same ones we talked about in the gaming piece. Upgraded equipment in towers means lower network latency, and mmWave connections to outside devices mean less contention for sub-6GHz devices inside buildings.

This person is adding additional Gs to a transmission tower. (credit: morfous / Getty)

Where mmWave connections to devices are possible—which for the most part, will mean "outdoors, in high population areas"—users can expect extremely high throughput and low latency. But mmWave has far lower range and penetration than the sub-6GHz connections we're familiar with, and we don't expect indoor users to be able to get a connection. You don't necessarily need a clean line of sight to a tower—the massive MIMO antenna arrays mmWave deployments use are highly directional and can make good use of RF reflections to get around obstacles—but punching through an exterior wall to an indoor space is almost certainly too much to expect.

Enlarge / Be still our hearts with this 8-bit cover art.

Today, legendary game developer Sid Meier's first memoir arrives at bookstores and digital platforms, complete with the appropriately goofy name, Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games. It's everything you might expect from the brain responsible for PC gaming series like Civilization, Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and Alpha Centauri: comprehensive, thoughtful, detailed, and with just enough humor and heart to pace out the dry, technical bits.

In good news, instead of us telling you what we think of the book (TL;DR: thumbs-up), we thought we'd let Meier himself regale you with an exclusive Ars Technica reprint of a chapter. Most of the book's chapters combine Meier's personal stories with a focus on a specific game, and this one, about 2008's Civilization Revolution, is as much an explanation of its PC-to-console transition as it is a lesson on game-industry history and on game design.

My own first exposure to video games was, like most people my age, the venerable black-and-white tennis match known as Pong. There was a small restaurant down the street from General Instrument where some of us would hang out and have dinner after work, and at some point they installed this weird little table in the lounge with a television screen facing upward underneath the plexiglass surface. The idea was you could set your drinks and bar snacks on it while you played, but it seemed irreverent to eat on the surface of a TV, so most evenings we would just wander over to play a few rounds before returning to our normal, wooden tables. The most memorable thing about it was that one side of the cabinet had somehow ended up wired backwards, sending the little white line to the left side of the screen when the player turned the knob to the right. So we had always agreed that whoever was more skilled had to sit on the broken side to compensate—perhaps my earliest experience in balancing gameplay.

Rotating dial controls were sometimes called “spinners” in arcade hardware terminology, and truly inveterate nerds recognized them as either potentiometers or rheostats, depending on their function. But to the general public, they were incongruously known as “paddles,” due to their original table tennis associations. A year after Pong’s release, the first four-way gaming joystick—a word which, oddly enough, had its roots in early airplane controls—made its debut in the arcade game Astro Race. It caught on quickly, and by 1977, the Atari 2600 home console offered a standardized plug that could support a potentially limitless number of third-party controllers, in addition to the five different styles produced by Atari themselves.