Month: April 2022

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Like many people in Shanghai, Joyce has spent weeks shut at home since the latest COVID-19 lockdown was imposed on March 28. The software industry executive, who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid attention from the authorities, says she has suffered from food shortages, and the compound where she lives has resorted to “group buying,” where different individuals are responsible for sourcing as much of a certain product as possible for the community.

“A lot of people are struggling with being confined at home, because they have literally no income,” she says. Group purchases “are three to four or five times more expensive than the normal days, and Shanghai is not cheap.”

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It’s the weekend, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a handful of deals on Google Nest devices. Both the popular Nest Learning Thermostat and the more wallet-friendly Nest Thermostat are on sale, for instance, with the former down to $199 and the latter available for $100 at various retailers. While neither deal brings the absolute lowest price we’ve tracked, both are a good ways below their typical street prices online and well under Google’s MSRPs of $250 and $130, respectively.

In any event, both devices remain commendable options for those looking to adopt a smart thermostat, either to cut down on energy usage or take greater control over their home’s heating and cooling. The higher-end Nest still looks sharp, installs relatively easily, and works with a variety of smart home devices and platforms. It can still “learn” your usual heating and cooling preferences, then automatically schedule its future adjustments accordingly, (mostly) staying out of your way over the course of a day. The more affordable Nest Thermostat lacks that auto-scheduling feature (though you can still enter a schedule manually), has a cheaper plastic frame, and doesn’t support Google’s remote temperature-balancing sensors, but still looks nice and has an otherwise similar feature set—including tools like HVAC monitoring and voice commands via Alexa or the Google Assistant—for less money.

If you have no need for a new thermostat, though, other Google devices like the Nest Audio home speaker and Fitbit’s Luxe activity tracker are also on sale. Beyond that, our roundup includes good deals on Nintendo eShop gift cards, a spacious 1TB SanDisk microSD card for your Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, a number of Roomba robot vacuums, iPads, AirPods, and much more. You can find our full curated roundup below.

Enlarge / VPNfilter had a total of nine modular tools discovered thus far by researchers, potentially turning thousands of routers into a versatile attack platform.

Previously unknown “zero-day” software vulnerabilities are mysterious and intriguing as a concept. But they’re even more noteworthy when hackers are spotted actively exploiting the novel software flaws in the wild before anyone else knows about them. As researchers have expanded their focus to detect and study more of this exploitation, they’re seeing it more often. Two reports this week from the threat intelligence firm Mandiant and Google’s bug hunting team, Project Zero, aim to give insight into the question of exactly how much zero-day exploitation has grown in recent years.

Mandiant and Project Zero each have a different scope for the types of zero-days they track. Project Zero, for example, doesn’t currently focus on analyzing flaws in Internet-of-things devices that are exploited in the wild. As a result, the absolute numbers in the two reports aren’t directly comparable, but both teams tracked a record high number of exploited zero-days in 2021. Mandiant tracked 80 last year compared to 30 in 2020, and Project Zero tracked 58 in 2021 compared to 25 the year before. The key question for both teams, though, is how to contextualize their findings, given that no one can see the full scale of this clandestine activity.

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Six years ago, Rwanda had a blood delivery problem. More than 12 million people live in the small East African country, and like those in other nations, sometimes they get into car accidents. New mothers hemorrhage. Anemic children need urgent transfusions. You can’t predict these emergencies. They just happen. And when they do, the red stuff stored in Place A has to find its way to a patient in Place B—fast.

That’s not a huge problem if you live in a city. In the United States and the United Kingdom, 80 percent of the population clusters around urban hubs with high-traffic hospitals and blood banks. In African nations like Libya, Djibouti, and Gabon, about 80 to 90 percent of the populations live in cities, too. But in Rwanda, that number flips: 83 percent of Rwandans live in rural areas. So, traditionally, when remote hospitals needed blood, it came by road.

That’s not ideal. The country is mountainous. Roads can be hot, long, and bumpy. If kept cool, donated blood can be stored for just a month or so, but some components that hospitals isolate for transfusions—like platelets—will spoil in days. A turbulent drive is not a perfect match for such finicky cargo.

Enlarge / By moving simple shapes from one grid to the next, Tandis players can apply mathematical functions to their shapes and enjoy immediate shape-shifting results—all used to solve the game’s tricky, unique puzzles. (credit: Mahdi Bahrami)

The puzzle-gaming genre of “making shapes out of formulas” is currently ruled by a single designer. Five years after his last sensational stab at the genre, Iranian-born game-maker Mahdi Bahrami has returned with an even more impressive—and, at times, hair-pullingly difficult—puzzling masterpiece.

Tandis, a new Windows/Mac/Linux game out this week on both Steam and as a direct, DRM-free purchase for $15 (temporarily on sale for $13.49), is arguably the coolest execution of high-level math I’ve ever seen in a video game. Even better, its challenge is disguised in the form of a tinker-toy. Hand this to any young, budding mathematician, and watch them get hooked on what’s ultimately a brilliant edutainment gem in disguise.

Axes and allies

The beauty of Tandis comes from how it turns the formulaic manipulation of X, Y, and Z axes into a gaming mechanic. Typical education about mathematical formulas revolves around plotting solution results on a 2D grid to see what shapes they generate. That’s fine enough—though doing this requires the mathematical grokking of a formula itself. But what if you could do this kind of thing much faster, and in 3D, by dragging shapes onto an easily understood series of grids, then watching them transform into fantastic new shapes in response?