Category: Technica Aquarius

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.”

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It’s time for another Dealmaster! Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a number of lower-than-usual prices on various Apple devices. The 40 mm Apple Watch SE, for instance, is available for $229 at Amazon and Walmart as of this writing. That’s the best price we’ve seen since Black Friday and only $10 more than the all-time lowest price we’ve tracked. It’s the same situation with the bigger 44 mm model, which is available for $259. The higher-end Apple Watch Series 7, meanwhile, is down to its lowest price to date: the 41 mm model is currently on sale for $329, while the 45 mm model is down to $359.

To be clear, we’ve seen multiple discounts for both of these watches in recent months, and the two have generally retailed for less than Apple’s MSRPs at Amazon, Walmart, and a few other online stores since they launched. It’s almost inevitable that Apple will refresh one or both devices by the end of the year, too. But if you own an iPhone and want a wearable to pair with it right now, the Series 7 is still the top pick in our guide to the best smartwatches, and the SE remains a great alternative for those on a tighter budget. As we’ve noted before, both devices deliver a strong build quality, robust software, and good-enough activity tracking for most. Between the two, the Series 7 has a bigger display that stays active when you put your wrist down, faster charging speeds, and more advanced health-tracking tools like ECG functionality and blood-oxygen monitoring. If you can overlook those features—the lack of an always-on display likely being the most notable—the SE can do most of the same things, albeit slightly slower, for a much lower price. Either way, note that not all colorways for each watch are on sale between the two retailers.

Besides the Apple Watch, we also have a few iPad discounts. The 256GB Space Gray model of the entry-level, 10.2-inch iPad is down to a new low of $429, while versions of the latest 10.9-inch iPad Air and 8.3-inch iPad Mini with the same storage capacity are available for lows of $679 and $600, respectively. These devices aren’t especially cheap, but we’ve reviewed all three positively. In short, the base iPad is likely the best value for most, as it still offers an altogether competent way into iPadOS for the lowest price possible. The recently released iPad Air is a fairly noticeable step up in terms of performance, however, and its design is far more modern, with a bigger and brighter display, a USB-C port, wider accessory support, and better cameras. The iPad Mini, meanwhile, is built like a shrunken-down iPad Air, though its processor is a bit slower. If you prefer a smaller design, though, it’s the only iPad that fits the bill. Both the 10.2-inch iPad and iPad Mini launched in September 2021, while the iPad Air arrived last month.