How one professor and his team ported Pong to a 29-story office building.

Cross this one off the old bucket list: I've now played the world's biggest game of Pong.

Andrew Cunningham

PHILADELPHIA, PA—Even if you don't normally play video games, it's a sure bet that you've heard of Atari's 1972 arcade hit Pong. You've probably even played it, either in one of its many ports or in one of those arcades that also sells beer. But you've probably never seen it quite like this.

A crowd of well over 100 gathered near the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Friday, despite rising winds and the looming threat of a thunderstorm. We were all there to play (and to watch) Pong, but not on an arcade cabinet—the version we'd be playing would be played out on the programmable LED lights lining the side of Philadelphia's Cira Centre, a 29-story office building across the Schuylkill River from the museum. The lights, normally used to display static images or simple looping patterns, had been transformed into a fully interactive game of Pong by Drexel computer science professor (and Co-Founder and Co-Director of Drexel's game design program) Frank Lee and his team in just a few short months. It's being billed by the event organizers as the "world's largest video game."

But the time spent developing the game was just a small part of Lee's journey, which spans five years and involves just as much lobbying as it did hacking. We talked to Lee and his team about what it takes to port a game to an office building, and then we traveled down to Philly to try the 437-foot-high game of Pong for ourselves.

Selling the game

Frank Lee, Drexel computer science professor and Co-Founder and Co-Director of Drexel's game design program, introduces his game on Friday night.

Andrew Cunningham

"I initially thought of the idea in 2008," Lee told Ars. "I was driving down at night, and saw the sparkling lights at the Cira Centre. The LED lights at the Cira Centre are built-in as part of the structure of the building. Every other night I would just pass by it, but this night I saw Tetris shapes forming in my mind's eye, falling down, and that began this long journey to try to make this game possible."

The first thing Lee needed to do was get buy-in from the Brandywine Realty Trust, the company that actually owns the Cira Centre. He had no contacts at the organization, but after much networking and many months of persistence finally managed to secure a meeting with a mid-level executive.

Enlarge / Gerard Sweeney, CEO and President of the company that owns the Cira Centre, was essential to getting the project off the ground.

Andrew Cunningham

"That was 2010, and I told him it was possible, and basically I was shot down," Lee said. "He said 'Pong is old, why would anyone care?'"

Lee tried to change their minds by pointing to the positive media attention garnered by the Google Doodle for May 21, 2010—a fully-playable version of Pac-Man created to celebrate the game's 30th anniversary. Lee was convinced that people would care specifically because the game was old, but Brandywine wasn't convinced.

"People care because it's Pong. Because Pong is a cultural milestone, and I mean that in that people who've never played Pong know Pong," Lee said. "Little kids know Pong. Grandmothers and grandfathers know Pong, and so on. It is part of our cultural fabric, because it was the first successful commercial video game that launched the multi-billion dollar industry that we have now."

"But I was shot down," Lee continued, "so I went back to square one and tried to talk to everyone that I [could] to essentially lobby to anyone who'd let me do this."

Lee's fortunes changed when he met with the organizers for Philly Tech Week, a week-long event organized by Technically Philly that's meant to showcase Philadelphia's technology scene. In 2012, the event had over 10,000 attendees across 88 events, and this year's event looks to be even larger.

"When I first told [the Philly Tech Week organizers] the idea they were all over it," said Lee, "and they were trying to reach out to everyone that they knew."

This intense lobbying effort finally put Lee in touch with Gerard Sweeney, the CEO of Brandywine Realty Trust. The results of this meeting were more positive than the last.

"We met for 30 minutes," Lee said. "We sort of had small talk about what I did for about 20 minutes, then he asked me about the project. I said 'I love your building, I think it's one of the most beautiful buildings in Philadelphia. Using your lights, I want to create a video game, Pong.' And he said 'wow, that sounds creative and great. Let's go for it!' And that was it. All that effort to talk to the people in the middle went nowhere, but once the top person says yes, everyone falls into place. That was the five-year lesson that I learned."

Making the game

Lee's team had to put together not just the code for Pong, but an API for the Cira Centre's lights.

Marc Barrowclift

This discussion and approval happened in late January of this year, giving Lee just a few short months to put together a team and actually program the game.

"They came right on board and helped me on their own time, because I had no budget," laughed Lee.

Lee has three others on his team, besides himself: Gaylord Holder, Senior System Administrator for Computer Science at Drexel; Dr. Santiago Ontanon, a Drexel computer science professor; and Marc Barrowclift, a sophomore in software engineering.

The Cira Centre's LED lights are on a private network, and each light has its own IP address. They're controlled by a system from Philips—in this way, they're not entirely unlike the Philips Hue lights we reviewed a few months ago. Each LED can be lit or unlit, and can turn a wide variety of colors. The team's first task was to figure out how to hack this system—to make something built to display static images into something interactive.

"If I could figure out what the commands, the packets, were that we being fed to the lights," said Lee, "then I could interactively turn them on and off, which is basically the basis for any game." Luckily for the team, the data being fed to the lights was unencrypted, and they were able to work through this problem relatively quickly.

Holder obtained from the Cira Centre an XML file that contained the IP addresses of all the lights, Barrowclift told Ars. He then created a script that would parse that file, and map out a virtual image of what the lights on the building were currently displaying—Barrowclift sent us a few images of the code alongside the virtual image (above) to demonstrate.

"And that's where I came in," he continued. "I took that structure [Holder] made and I picked a few from there, and I would control lights from that view that I would make from his application. That would allow [Ontanon] and anybody else that wanted to make games to essentially code games like they've always done, at least in concept."

The Philips lights' relative popularity helped the team out during this process. Barrowclift pointed us to a project called "kinet", maintained by GitHub user vishnubob, that saved them from having to start from scratch.

"Instead of having to go LED by LED and get the IP address… and figure out what was the exact command that will turn it on," Barrowclift explained. "This guy essentially did all that for us."

When Holder's code, Barrowclift's code, and the kinet project combined, the team had something that bypassed Philips' system for displaying static images in favor of something interactive that was relatively easy to code for. Essentially, they had written a gaming API for an office building. The next step was the game itself.

Playing the game

Eye of the tiger

The event itself was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sharp-eyed readers will recognize these steps from the Rocky training montage.

Andrew Cunningham

1. 

   Eye of the tiger

   The event itself was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sharp-eyed readers will recognize these steps from the Rocky training montage.

   Andrew Cunningham

2. 

   It's just an office building, right?

   The Philadelphia Cira Centre. None of its LED lights are currently turned on, but that would soon change.

   Andrew Cunningham

3. 

   Music, NES-style

   8static provided the evening's chiptunage.

   Andrew Cunningham

4. 

   Gamers young and old

   Attendees were largely young adults, but gamers from practically every generation were present.

   Andrew Cunningham

5. 

   New school, meet the old school

   An attendee dressed in full Master Chief regalia waits in line to play Asteroids.

   Andrew Cunningham

6. 

   I've got a golden ticket!

   The game could be seen by anyone in the city, but only those with tickets could actually play.

   Andrew Cunningham

7. 

   Hackin' it

   The game's controller is an off-the-rack X-Arcade joystick connected via USB to a MacBook Pro, which is connected to a 4G LTE hotspot.

   Andrew Cunningham

8. 

   I can see the Matrix

   A glimpse at the game's code.

   Marc Barrowclift

9. 

   Some lights go down, others come up.

   As the light faded, the Cira Centre's lights were changed to form the Atari logo.

   Andrew Cunningham

10. 

    "I swear, I didn't embezzle those credits."

    Master Chief briefly poses at the podium, giving us a glimpse of a world where fictional characters can run for public office.

    Andrew Cunningham

11. 

    Getting ready to start

    Christopher Wink, an organizer for Philly Tech Week. You can find out more about Philly Tech Week here.

    Andrew Cunningham

12. 

    Getting buy-in

    Gerard Sweeney, CEO and President of the Brandywine Realty Trust, gave Lee and his team the OK to use the Cira Centre.

    Andrew Cunningham

13. 

    Making a dream come true

    Frank Lee, Drexel computer science professor and Co-Founder and Co-Director of Drexel's game design program, introduces his game on Friday night.

    Andrew Cunningham

14. 

    Ready? Start!

    And we're off! The rules are simple: move your paddles up and down with the joysticks, and don't let that ball through.

    Andrew Cunningham

15. 

    Scoreboard

    The score, normally at the top of the screen in the arcade game, is shown between points in this version.

    Andrew Cunningham

16. 

    Precision is key

    The paddles gradually get shorter as the match progresses.

    Andrew Cunningham

17. 

    A winner is you!

    The first player to three points wins. The original point limit was five, but the threat of rain prompted some last-minute adjustments to let as many people play as possible.

    Andrew Cunningham

18. 

    Fun for all ages

    A young player enjoys a game created decades before he was born.

    Andrew Cunningham

19. 

    What's next for the team?

    Playable versions of Snake and Space Invaders already exist.

    Marc Barrowclift

I arrived at the Philadelphia Museum of Art about an hour before the event was scheduled to start on Friday. The event was definitely tailored to its audience—arcade cabinets for Space Invaders and Asteroids (as well as a multi-game cabinet with Dig Dug and a few other Namco titles) were up and running, and local chiptune band 8static was already warming up. Lee and his team were easy to find—they were all huddled around the game's controller, which I managed to get a good look at before the crowd obscured it.

All of the code for the game itself (as well as the associated code we mentioned) was stored on a MacBook Pro, which was hooked up to an off-the-shelf X-Arcade Dual Joystick via USB—this same control panel, which holds eight joysticks and two buttons for each, is commonly used in custom-built MAME arcade cabinets for those who don't want to build their own custom control panel. The laptop was connected to the Internet through an AT&T 4G hotspot and then connected through a VPN tunnel to the private network for the Cira Centre's lights.

The game in action. You can catch glimpses of lag here, but at this point in the evening the game was running mostly smoothly.

The presence of the small crowd caused some technical problems for the team's setup—while it had apparently worked fine during testing, the 4G hotspot's connection became overloaded. All of the code being transmitted from the computer to the building looks relatively light, but since all of it is on the computer it needs a stable, consistent connection to run smoothly, and the first game (between Lee and Gerard Sweeney, the realty company's CEO) was rendered unplayable about halfway through because of lag.

After a few minutes of "live hacking," as Lee's team referred to it, things smoothed out, and the game became more responsive as the evening went on. I was in the fourth group to play the game, and while there was a small bit of lag between my input and the movement of the lights, the embarrassing 3-0 shutout I suffered at the hands of my opponent was due entirely to my own lack of practice and not to technical issues.

What comes next?

The team has already coded games of Snake and Space Invaders.

Marc Barrowclift

If you're in the area and you missed the game (or if you didn't go because of the thunderstorm barreling down on the city—Friday's play session only lasted about half as long as originally planned), you'll have another chance to play it on Wednesday, April 24th.

Now that the hard work has been done, though, what's next? The team has already put together playable games of Snake and Space Invaders, for example, and Barrowclift is working to create a game of Tetris, the game Lee originally saw on the side of the Cira Centre in his mind's eye. But Lee doesn't want to stop at porting classic arcade games.

"What I like about this building and these lights is the fact that it is an ultra low-resolution display—20 by 23 pixels, that's nothing," Lee told Ars. "So it's heavily constrained, and I like constraints because constraints are the engine, the drivers for creativity. What I wanted to do in my proposal that I laid out was essentially to create Pong and other games that people would be familiar with, but have it as an annual event where for example kids from middle school and high school could submit new game ideas."

"Or, use the entire building, which could become interesting. We're only using one side of the building. What new games can you come up with?"

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham

Read More

And if that doesn't work, there's always having more sex than everyone else.

tonystl

Existential crisis? There's a drug for that. And it's available over the counter. I've taken acetaminophen for various forms of physical pain a number of times, but I had no idea that it also eased the pain of social rejection. But that's not the weird part—that's simply mentioned as an aside during the introduction of this paper. Apparently, acetaminophen also eases the pain inflicted by surrealist films. And it eases the fear of death.

As the title of the paper itself implies, there's a "common pain of surrealism and death," namely an existential threat to whatever meaning we've assigned to our lives. Challenge that threat, and people tend to get, well, a bit grumpy. In the experimental condition here, those who weren't given any drug were more likely to demand harsh punishment for rulebreakers after watching a surrealist film or writing an essay regarding their own death. A placebo did not ease the pain, but acetaminophen did, reducing the levels of punishment doled out down to that of the control group.

It's not how much I'm getting, it's how little you are. Lots of things contribute to people's sense of happiness, including some obvious ones like money and sex. But money doesn't only contribute directly to happiness; it also lets you feel better simply because you have more than your fellow citizen. Apparently, sex works the same way. People are happier if they're having more sex, but happier still if they think they're having more than their peers. Or, as the authors put it, happiness is "inversely correlated with the sexual frequency of others."

I'm so depressed, I can't even bother to fly. Being stuck in unpleasant or painful circumstances isn't any fun. But learning that you can't do anything about it is even worse. That's what we've concluded from studying a phenomenon called "learned helplessness" in animals like rats. When the animals can't escape a painful or stressful situation, they'll often just give up, which involves everything from sleep disorders to problems with the immune system. These symptoms make learned helplessness a model for studying depression in humans.

You might think that this complex suite of learning and behavior would require a fairly large and complex nervous system to support it. But you'd apparently be wrong, since scientists have now found that fruit flies also experience learned helplessness. Normally, when flies land on a hot surface, they move quickly to get away from it. A perverse group of researchers arranged it so the fly kept getting heated no matter what it did. So, just as with rats, the flies more or less gave up, and stopped trying to move much at all.

A left-hand turn powerful enough to make the Earth move. The National Science Foundation has funded the creation of the Earthscope Transportable Array, a collection of over 400 mobile seismometers that are gradually being moved across the country, sampling the Earth below them. And, at the same time, sampling the ocean. When ocean waves are energetic enough, they create "microseisms," small bits of seismic energy that can be detected well inland. Researchers have now found evidence that the westward shift of Hurricane Sandy—the one that sent it straight at New Jersey—made such a noticeable change in wave activity, that the Earthscope was able to detect it, even though most of its detectors were closer to the Mississippi than they were to the Hurricane.

Passing out may be in your genes, but what makes you pass out is in your environment. A common form of loss-of-consciousness called vasovagal syncope has a genetic root. Inherit just a single copy of the wrong region of the genome, and you're going to be prone to passing out (in technical terms, it's an autosomal dominant disorder). But that region was found in one large family of fainters, and the genetics of two other large families indicate that some other region must be responsible for their problems. Which suggests there may be multiple "fainting genes" scattered throughout the human genome. The authors suggest that as many as one in four people suffer from vasovagal syncope at some point in their lives, so the genetics may be rather complex.

Read More

Our Dr. Who contest isn't over yet: here's an interview with a creator of the Time Lord's world.

From left to right: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Christopher Eccleston, Matt Smith, David Tennant, Paul McGann, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, and Peter Davison

BBC

On Monday of this week, we introduced a sweepstakes package that Ars would be giving away to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the BBC series Dr. Who. To celebrate, we're giving away prizes to two lucky winners. This first prize is "The TARDIS prize package" which consists of three official books: a copy of A Plague of the Cybermen, by Justin Richards with a signed bookplate, a copy of The Dalek Generation by Nicholas Briggs, and·a copy of The Shroud of Sorrow by Tommy Donbavand. The second is the "The Time Lord package" which is a Blu-ray DVD Giftpack of Doctor Who, featuring Matt Smith (Seasons 5, 6, and 7).

Haven't entered yet? Don't worry. You have one day left: the contest ends on Sunday, April 21 at 9pm CT. Simply go to our sweepstakes post here and share your love for Doctor Who in the comments. You can tell us who your favorite Doctor is, what episodes make your best-of list, or how you got hooked on Doctor Who in the first place. Winners will be selected through a random drawing and contacted by e-mail. (Sadly, you must be at least 18 years old and a resident of the 50 United States and District of Columbia to participate this time around.)

If you've already entered, read on for an interview with author Justin Richards, who wrote one of the forthcoming books we're giving away, as well as a quick (and necessarily incomplete) refresher on the Doctors Who, with a poll at the bottom so you can tell us who you think is the best.

The man behind the curtain

The Dr. Who series has inspired feature films, spin-off plays, trinkets (see: editor Megan Geuss' "You will all be exterminated" novelty coffee mug), fan fiction, and perhaps most obviously, books. British sci-fi and fantasy author Justin Richards has written extensively for BBC books, and his most recent release, Plague of the Cybermen is just the latest chapter in the Dr. Who canon. Besides being a prolific author, Richards is also the creative consultant for BBC Books' range of Doctor Who fiction.

Ars asked Richards a few questions about the universe.

Ars: In celebration of the 50th anniversary, can you share with our readers a little-known fact about the books and novelizations that they may not know?

Richards:  For several years now Doctor Who has held the world record for the largest number of books centered round the same fictional character. The first Doctor Who-related publication was The Dalek Book; in June 1964—an "annual" with text stories, comic strips, features, and artwork. I don't know the initial print run, but a follow-up book, The Dalek World, published the following year had an initial print run of 300,000. The first Doctor Who novel was Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks which is a retelling of the first Dalek story, written by David Whitaker from Terry Nation's scripts. It's been reissued recently by BBC Books with the less cumbersome title Doctor Who and the Daleks. Unusually it's told in the first person by the character of companion Ian Chesterton.

Ars: How do you decide what characteristics each doctor retains and and what changes with each successive doctor?

Richards:  A lot of that is down to the actor, of course. For the books we very much have to reflect how the character is defined and played in the TV series. That can be quite tricky with a new Doctor as the timing of TV production compared with publication doesn't work in our favour! So when David Tennant took over and became the Tenth Doctor, the three authors working on the first set of books—including me—only got to see rough edits of his first episodes a couple of weeks before we had to send the books to print. You can only glean so much from the scripts, and so we needed to do some frantic rewriting and amending to get the character of the Doctor spot on for those books!

Enlarge / Nothing like a refreshing dose of hostility with your morning coffee.

Ars: Can you explain the ways in which the novelizations of Dr. Who interlock with the TV series in interesting ways?

Richards:  Basically, the TV series has a trump card—in any overlap, TV wins! So when we wanted to include Winston Churchill in a novel, the TV production people said, "Actually, please don't because he's the sort of historical character we might want to use in the future and we'd rather the books didn't get there first and set things up we might not [be able to] fit in." In fact it was a few years later—and a different production team—that eventually had Churchill appear. We didn't tell them he'd been in the books years ago already, albeit as a young man… But generally there isn't too much of a problem. We check out every outline before we start to make sure that we're not telling a similar story to something they're planning for TV so we can adapt before we get too far in. Obviously we reference the TV series and continuity where we can and where appropriate. We make sure the stories told in the novels fit very much into the overall continuity.

And it works the other way too sometimes. The Slitheen's rivals the Blathareen first appeared in the novel The Monsters Inside, as did the planet Justicia which Rose talks about having been to in one of the Ninth Doctor episodes… So we're all living in the same narrative universe.

Ars: Doctor Who has always taken tiny cues from what's going on in politics and science in the real world. How has it changed and do you see that as a good thing or as something that can't be helped when writing science fiction?

Richards:  I think it's both: it's a good thing because it reflects the world we live in and maybe makes people think about that critically. And because no writer—for the TV series or the novels—works in  a vacuum, it's inevitable. We're all influenced by what's going on around us, and it comes out—to a greater or lesser extent—in what we write. Has that changed? Only in so much as scheduling has changed. Way back, we used to have a Who novel written and edited maybe eight to ten months before publication, so topical subjects might have become stale news. Now, because we have to fit to TV schedules our own [schedules] are much more curtailed. So the three novels we have out this month (April) were still being worked on right through January!

Ars: Who's (pun intended) your favorite literary Doctor, and who's your favorite TV doctor? Why?

Richards: That's a such a tricky question—and one that everyone asks! But you're comparing like with like. [This question] isn't like 'Who's your favourite James Bond' where you can select from actors all playing basically the same role. The Doctor becomes a different character. Yes, his underlying morality and goals remain the same, but not the way he goes about things, or speaks, or behaves to other people… That said, my favourite Doctor from the classic series is the one I sort of grew up with—which is very often the case—and that's the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton. My favourite to write for? Again, they're so very different it's hard to say—each offers their own challenges and joys. I did very much like the Tenth Doctor—he works very well on the page as he talks so much, and dialogue is easier to reproduce than detailed mannerisms and physical traits. Easier for the writer to convey and for the reader to absorb. But there isn't a Doctor I don't enjoy writing for, there isn't a Doctor I don't love watching!

Read More

Secrets are no fun but sometimes they're necessary.

Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

abel is in the early stages of developing a closed-source financial app within a niche market. He is hiring his first employees, and he wants to take steps to ensure these new hires don't steal the code and run away. "I foresee disabling USB drives and DVD writers on my development machines," he writes. But will that be enough? Maybe a better question is: will that be too much?

See the original question here.

Trust goes a long way

ChrisF Answers (34 votes):

You need to trust your developers.

Virtually all professional developers won't steal your source. It's understood that if you work for somebody else, the employer own the code that you write. Devs might copy code for reference purposes, but it's highly unlikely they will offer it for sale to anyone else. Getting caught isn't worth the risk.

More so, distrust breeds distrust. Disabling USB ports and DVD writers will engender a feeling of distrust which will, paradoxically, make it more likely that the developers will copy the code.

By all means add a secrecy clause to your contract, but it's probably unnecessary to highlight it as the most important part of the contract.

Who would buy on the black market?

Bob Murphy Notes (17 votes):

Also, in the real world, third parties don't want stolen code. The risk is too great. Back when Informix and Oracle were duking it out for the enterprise relational database market in the mid-90s, one of Informix's developers quit to join Oracle (which was quite common), and took a hard drive full of Informix source with him (which wasn't). He told his new boss at Oracle, expecting a warm welcome, but instead he got a security team and an arrest. Then Oracle security called Informix security, and the hard drive went back to Informix without anyone from Oracle having looked at it.

Related: "How to prevent code from leaking outside work?"

Find a third-party solution

Cliff (2 votes):

As others have mentioned, this primarily seems to be a people concern.

However, there are a number of major security vendors who market software solutions to data leaks:

• http://www.symantec.com/data-leak-prevention
• http://www.mcafee.com/us/products/total-protection-for-data-loss-prevention.aspx
• http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/data-protection/index.html
• http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns895/index.html
• http://www.emc.com/security/rsa-data-loss-prevention.htm

I can't comment to their effectiveness or appropriateness as I have limited experience with these solutions, but just thought that it might be helpful to point this out. Feel free to edit this answer with additional software solutions to data leaks.

Your employees are your real resource

GrandmasterB Answers (34 votes):

If these programmers can write the software in the first place, then...

THEY DONT NEED TO STEAL IT.

They can simply rewrite it in a fraction of the time it took to originally develop it. Yes, it's true, developers arent complete idiots... once they figure out how to do something, they can often remember how they did it.

So, I guess you're just going to have to trust them, or else write the software yourself.

Find more answers or leave your own at the original post. See more Q&A like this at Programmers, a site for conceptual programming questions at Stack Exchange. And of course, feel free to login and ask your own.

Read More

Apps steal sensitive data, push SMS app that racks up charges to pricey service.

greyweed

Security researchers have unearthed a family of malware for Android-based smartphones that's been downloaded as many as 9 million times from Google Play, the official distribution platform hosted on Google servers.

BadNews, as the library of malicious code has been dubbed, was folded in to at least 32 applications offered by four different developer accounts, according to a blog post published Friday by Android app provider Lookout Mobile Security. Handsets that run the poisoned apps connect to a rogue server every four hours and report several pieces of sensitive information, including the device phone number and its unique serial number, known as an International Mobile Station Equipment Identity. The command and control servers, which were still operational as of Friday, also force some phones to display prompts to install AlphaSMS, a trojan that racks up charges by sending text messages to pricey services.

The people behind the campaign were able to sneak BadNews past Google defenses by adding the malware library to innocuous apps after they had already been submitted to Google Play. That gave the appearance of trustworthiness to measures such Bouncer, the cloud-based service that scours Play for abusive apps. It was only later that the apps were updated to carry out the attacks. Figures provided by Google Play showed the targeted apps had been downloaded from 2 million to 9 million times. It's unclear how many of the downloads involved apps after they had been updated to include BadNews.

"You can't even say Google was at fault in this because Google very clearly scrutinized all these apps when they want in," Marc Rogers, principal security researcher for Lookout, told Ars. "But these guys were cunning enough to sit there for a couple of months doing absolutely nothing and then they pushed out the malware."

Rogers said it's not clear exactly how BadNews got folded in to the apps, which contained a mix of games, dictionaries, wall papers, and other programs aimed at English- and Russian-speaking users. At least some of them were spawned by the people controlling the malware. Rogers held out the possibility that legitimate developers of other apps may have been duped into adding the malicious library to their code bases.

Malicious programs have been an unfortunate feature of Google Play since it debuted as the Android Market in 2008. Meanwhile there have been virtually no widespread reports of malicious titles infiltrating Apple's competing App Store. As was the case with BadNews, Google promptly removes malicious apps once employees become aware they're being hosted for download on the company's servers. Google representatives declined to say if they have any plans in place to stem the tide and also declined to comment on the record about the Lookout report.

As Rogers said, the persistent problem of malware available in Google Play isn't easy to solve, and the success of BadNews only raises the bar.

"This is a wakeup call for us in the industry to say: 'Bad guys are smart as well and they'll take a look at the security models we put in place and they'll find weaknesses in them,'" he said. "That's exactly what they've done here."

Read More

It's the most comprehensive map of US biodiversity ever made.

The United States Geological Society (USGS) has launched an online database and map that keeps track of more than 100 million different species and where they live within the United States,

Biodiversity Serving Our Nation, or BISON (a backronym if ever there was one), contains location-specific records of where living species are within the US. Its data comes from hundreds of different organisations and thousands of scientists, making it the most comprehensive map of American biodiversity ever made.

Anyone can search by scientific or common name of any living species (plant or animal), and can look to see what lives within any specific geographic area they want by drawing a perimeter—so, for example, searching to see exactly which forests in Virginia have been infected with a tree fungus.

All the results give a breakdown of the data (in map and list form), with information relating to where the data came from and how it was collected. BISON is hosted on servers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which are often used for large data processing like this. Not only are the locations of each species displayed, but up to 50 different environmental factors are also noted for each location to give a full ecological picture of everywhere within the US.

The idea is that it creates a unified source of information for everyone who needs to know the ecological status of a parcel of land. According to the USGS, that means "land managers, researchers, refuge managers, citizen scientists, agriculture professionals, fisheries managers, water resource managers, educators, and more." Altogether there are 110,233,486 individual species records on BISON's database.

It forms the American government's node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a worldwide effort to make biodiversity data as free and open as possible as a way of encouraging sustainable development.

The UK is a part of that network, too. Most of Western Europe and the Americas, and Australia and New Zealand, is involved, but African and Asian countries are sadly lacking in enthusiasm thus far.

This story originally appeared on Wired UK.

Read More

Week in Review now includes more of you.

AJC1

This week, instead of doing a strict list for our Week in Review, we've decided to highlight some of the reactions to the best and most important stories of the week. If this isn't for you, fear not! Since Ars' redesign last year, we've kept a "Top Stories" box on the front page (center column, scroll about halfway down), from which you can catch up on the most viewed stories of the week.

Spreadsheets ahoy

This week was full of awful stories in the news, but Ars is a tech publication, so we generally try to keep our coverage tech- and science-centric. Oddly enough, we had two, count 'em, two stories about Microsoft Excel hit the front page this week. The first was from Casey Johnston, who wrote "How an accountant created an entire RPG inside an Excel spreadsheet." The turn-based RPG is conducted entirely within an Excel file, and is called Arena.Xlsm. The accountant that created the game, Cary Walkin, did an AMA on reddit, describing the game and offering some snippets of code for the macros he uses so others can build on his idea.

By far the best comment on this story was from user sonolumi who spun us a high fantasy tale of bravery and daring:

Crawling around a Spreadsheet Dungeon to slay monsters? Sounds like my first job.

Stay a while and listen...

Twas an age ago when Graphical User Interfaces were but a pipe dream in the minds of ordinary MicroSerfs. The dungeon in question resided in the land of SuperCalc. It was a dull and sorrowful land rendered in monochromatic green phosphor.

Woe had befallen my Lord for he had to account for the addition of 3 new markets on the gargantuan monstrosity that was the Monthly Turnover report. Many a brave knight had attempted to tame the Beast, but it had been in vain. All challengers failed in their task, they had wildly hacked and slashed at it causing it grow bigger and more angry...."

We won't quote the whole thing and spoil the end. Click the link on the troubadour's alias to follow his journey to the end.

Our second story on Excel came from Peter Bright in "Microsoft Excel: The ruiner of global economies?" about an error introduced in a spreadsheet used to analyze data for a scholarly paper on economics. That paper was widely cited by politicians as a justification for introducing austerity measures, but once the error was fixed, the data suggested that the usefulness of austerity measures was not so clear-cut.

Of the story, commenter Shiimiish eloquently wrote:

"The spreadsheet error shown here is actually very easy to make in Excel... This particular error looks like that the average was made over the rows and then some lines have been inserted later on directly below the last row, in which case the formula will not auto-extend and the new numbers will be left out. This is something that happened to me before and something I do see in many spreadsheets I come across.

In any case my experience tells me that Excel is a single-user tool. As soon as a spreadsheet of a certain complexity shall be maintained by more than one person it will usually lead to disaster. As such, I usually will support a database solution whenever multiple user should work on a given data set."

While Peter was writing the story, he wrote in our editorial IRC channel "Aurich: how quickly could you do a picture of an Excel logo somehow destroying the world?" To which our intrepid creative director Aurich Lawson wrote "lol, I could probably handle that."

Lo and behold, not 30 minutes later, Ars Technica was the proud owner of this little beauty:

Enlarge / Figuratively speaking, of course.

Aurich Lawson

To which commenter nimro suggested: "The comments system needs a 'nice image, Aurich!' button next to the 'leave your comment' one." We've often felt that way, but Aurich claims that his ego isn't ready for that just yet. You'll just have to sing your praise by leaving a comment in the comment section, like our forefathers did in the days of Internet yore.

Odds and Ends

Beyond our dive into the fascinating underworld of Excel users, we also wrote about UDOO, a project that melds the characteristics of both the cheap Raspberry Pi computer board and the hobbyist Arduino boards together. Jon Brodkin wrote "Power of Arduino and Raspberry Pi combined in $99 Android/Linux PC" and elaborated beneath: "Arduino board uses quad-core ARM CPU for the power of '4 Raspberry Pis.'" To which ubercurmudgeon quipped "Surely three Raspberry Pis ought to be enough for anybody."

Superman turned 75 this week, and Kyle Orland penned an ode to the timeless hero. The headline, "Why Superman is still interesting on his 75th birthday," is more of a statement than a call for answers, but @mas1415 tweeted at us "cause he has hair." Perhaps a reference to Samson? Or a meditation on American culture and the norms of male beauty? We may never know.

Finally, Timothy B. Lee wrote a summary of the Obama Administration's take on the revised CISPA bill (which passed in the House of Representatives on Thursday): "Obama threatens CISPA veto, sponsor calls opponents basement-dwelling 14-year-olds." The sponsor, Rep Mike Rogers (R-MI), drew Twitter hecklers for implicating subterranean youth. @ALAPACKFANS wrote "@RepMikeRogers is a doodie-head, smelly sweatsock booger eater! (& my house has NO basement!) # NYAHNYAH" No basement, indeed.

Read More