Month: April 2022

Enlarge / Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s “Smart Voting” app. (credit: Natalia Kolesnikova/Getty Images)

Apple has restored an app sponsored by Alexei Navalny, a prominent leader of Russia’s political opposition, to the company’s Russian app store. Apple took down the app last September, days before Russia’s legislative elections, under pressure from the Russian government.

Russian voters went to the polls last September to elect representatives to five-year terms in the Duma, Russia’s legislature. Russia does not have free and fair elections, so no one expected Putin’s party, United Russia, to lose its majority. But opposition figures like Navalny still saw the election as an important opportunity to register public disapproval of Putin’s regime. To help Russia’s fractious opposition parties coordinate, Navalny created an app that listed endorsements for hundreds of candidates.

The Washington Post reported that days before the election, the Russian government sent agents to the homes of top Apple and Google executives in Russia, demanding that Navalny’s app be removed from the companies’ app stores. Russian authorities claimed that Navalny’s group was an “extremist” organization. If Apple and Google failed to comply within 24 hours, the government said, their Russian executives would go to prison.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

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

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 Cyclops Blink, the latest botnet malware from Russia’s Sandworm, 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.”