Month: April 2022

Enlarge / The raw power of a new Mortal Kombat cabinet was hard to contain…

David L. Craddock’s Long Live Mortal Kombat goes behind the scenes to reveal untold stories from the making of the first four Mortal Kombat games and explores how the franchise impacted popular culture. In this excerpt from the book, two of MK‘s arcade legends meet for the first time and learn a new technique that propels them to the top of the food chain in their local arcades.

Nitin Bhutani was bored. It was the fall of 1992, and he was hanging out with friends between classes where he attended college in Long Island, New York. The group had two hours to kill. Bhutani proposed they go to the student rec center and play some of the pinball and arcade games there. Brown-skinned with dark, slicked-back hair, he looked for any excuse to get away from classrooms and play games. Truth be told, though, he was lukewarm toward his own suggestion. He and his boys had played the rec center’s handful of coin-operated amusements to death. But it was either hit buttons or hit the books, so they moseyed over to the rec center.

To Bhutani’s surprise, a new cabinet stood among the ranks of games he had conquered. He watched the attract mode. When the game’s title flashed across the screen, something about it—the intentional misspelling, the golden lettering set against a red backdrop—caught his eye. A few other guys stepped up to play. One of them finished the match by firing a bolt of lightning at the other character that blasted his head apart in a spray of blood. Holy shit, he thought. “It just showed up one day. I see this game where people are chopping heads off and am like, ‘Oh my god. I gotta play this,'” he recalls.

Enlarge / Anachronistic baroque painting of the pivotal Battle of Actium by Laureys a Castro, 1672. (credit: Public domain)

Historians widely consider the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE to be the decisive event that led to Octavian defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The couple committed suicide—Antony by stabbing himself in the stomach, and Cleopatra by the bite of an asp (or, alternatively, by some other poison). Octavian subsequently became the Roman Emperor Augustus, thereby ushering in the Pax Romana, a 200-year period of peace and prosperity that lasted until 180 CE.

Barry Strauss, a historian at Cornell University, argues that the true pivotal moment in the conflict occurred some six months before as part of a strategic campaign to cut off the supply lines for Antony and Cleopatra’s forces. Strauss makes his case in his new book, The War that Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium, re-creating the battle in detail, as well as what he maintains was the turning point of the war six months before.

This is a particularly dramatic historical period that inspired two separate historical plays by William Shakespeare. Roman general and statesman Julius Caesar was famously stabbed to death at the Curia of Pompey on the ides of March in 44 BCE. The senators who killed him thought assassination was the only way to preserve the republic, but the murder ultimately led to the republic’s collapse. The following year, Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, formed the Second Triumvirate with Mark Antony and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Hype and hyperbole were on full display this week as the security world reacted to reports of yet another Log4Shell. The vulnerability came to light in December and is arguably one of the gravest Internet threats in years. Christened Spring4Shell—the new code-execution bug in the widely used Spring Java framework—quickly set the security world on fire as researchers scrambled to assess its severity.

One of the first posts to report on the flaw was tech news site Cyber Kendra, which warned of severe damage the flaw might cause to “tonnes of applications” and “can ruin the Internet.” Almost immediately, security companies, many of them pushing snake oil, were falling all over themselves to warn of the imminent danger we would all face. And all of that before a vulnerability tracking designation or advisory from Spring maintainers was even available.

All aboard

The hype train started on Wednesday after a researcher published a proof-of-concept exploit that could remotely install a web-based remote control backdoor known as a web shell on a vulnerable system. People were understandably concerned because the vulnerability was so easy to exploit and was in a framework that powers a massive number of websites and apps.

Enlarge / A vial of the current Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Ivan Romano)

Mild or not, more SARS-CoV-2 variants are inevitable. To avoid any blips in our pandemic endgame, researchers at the National Institutes of Health on Thursday announced the start of a complex Phase II clinical trial to find the best COVID-19 booster regimen to protect against variants that emerge in the wake of omicron.

“We are looking beyond the omicron variant to determine the best strategy to protect against future variants,” Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a statement. “This trial will help us understand if we can use prototype and variant vaccines alone or together to shift immune responses to cover existing and emerging COVID-19 variants.”

Evidence so far suggests that the current vaccines—which are based on an early version of SARS-CoV-2 isolated in Wuhan, China—can muster protection against most of the variants that have swept across the globe so far. However, current vaccines have struggled against omicron, an ultratransmissible variant that is the most divergent variant yet. As such, researchers are wary that an omicron-specific vaccine alone will not generate broad protection against any future variant that may be more closely related to past variants—such as beta, a variant first detected in South Africa in 2020 suspected of being more severe than past variants, and delta, a highly transmissible variant that swept through the US before the emergence of omicron.

Enlarge / A Lightning port on a Samsung Android phone… if you’re into that. (credit: Exploring the Simulation (Kenny Pi) on YouTube)

We’re not sure why you’d want such a thing, but someone has modified an Android phone to use Apple’s Lightning port instead of the industry-standard USB-C connection.

The modification was undertaken by Ken Pillonel, who previously made waves across the Internet for a much more sensible project: bringing USB-C to an iPhone.

Pillonel’s video announcing the Lightning Android phone was published on April 1, but while that tongue-in-cheek date was a conscious choice, the modification is real. Pillonel said he wanted to “balance the chaos” stirred by his unveiling of a USB-C iPhone.