VICE AU - MOTHERBOARDRSS feed for https://www.vice.com/en/topic/motherboardhttps://www.vice.com/en%2Ftopic%2Fmotherboard%3Flocale%3Den_auenTue, 02 Jun 2020 02:40:36 GMT<![CDATA[How to Protest Without Sacrificing Your Digital Privacy]]>https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/gv59jb/guide-protect-digital-privacy-during-protestTue, 02 Jun 2020 02:40:36 GMTThis article originally appeared on VICE US.

Thousands of protesters are filling the streets of American cities to protest the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, and police brutality writ large. Police officers have shown they’re more than willing to escalate violence with pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, vehicles, and other dangerous crowd suppression measures. In addition, law enforcement are likely heavily surveilling protests with all sorts of tech and spying gear. Already, we've seen a Customs and Border patrol drone flying over Minneapolis protests.

It's not just the cops that protesters need to worry about: when much of a protest is broadcast via tweets, viral video clips, and livestreams, those watching may also want to digitally target protesters, perhaps by identifying them publicly.

So, if you're a peaceful protester, but you don't necessarily want your participation in a demonstration to follow you around or lead to harassment online, what sort of steps can you take around your digital security?

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Image: Neil Cooler/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

Bring a clean phone…

"They'll be, obviously, cell-site simulators," Matthew Mitchell, a founder of Crypto Harlem told Motherboard in a Signal call. These devices, otherwise known as IMSI-catchers, Stingrays, or more recently Crossbows, can record phones' geolocation, their phone number, and sometimes the content of texts and phone calls.

"If everyone is texting a couple of organizers, or calling a bunch of friends, that one friend that connected to all people could be identified," Mitchell said.

"What it'll say is this person was definitely at this place, at this time, and maybe you don't want that. Maybe you want to be able to show your support, show your political view, and having the ramifications for that, the cost of your free speech, to be low," he added.

SMS text messages are the easiest for police to intercept, and during a protest you should not assume that these will be private; if possible you should use an encrypted alternative (more info below).

READ MORE: What to Bring to a Peaceful Protest

If you'd rather make it harder for any data that is swept up by these devices to be linked to you personally, you might consider buying a new, dedicated device for the protest. Maybe a $100 Android phone, Mitchell suggested.

"Your privacy is worth more than that," Mitchell said. You could buy this with cash or a gift card too so it's not linked to your credit card records. Don't turn it on when at home with your normal phone, and switch it off when you leave the protest.

You may also want to quickly setup a new Gmail account, on public wifi, and then use that to download encrypted communication apps.

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Image: Steve Barker/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

...Or bring no phone at all

Of course, those are several hoops to jump through, it's easy to screw it up somehow, and you might not have $100 to spend on a temporary protest phone. So the simpler, and probably more effective approach for protecting privacy, is to not bring a cell phone at all and rely on more traditional methods of activist coordination.

Agree to meet friends at a certain place, at a certain time. Maybe decide on multiple locations in case the protest is broken up or cordoned off by law enforcement.

Ultimately, there is a trade-off to be had between convenience and privacy while at a protest, and how much you're willing to sway on either side of that is up to you. That also depends on what particular information you want to protect and from whom; something that can be summed up as your own 'threat model' (for more on this, take a look at Motherboard's Guide to Not Getting Hacked).

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Image: Paul Stein/Flickr/CC-by-SA 2.0

If you do bring your personal phone, encrypt it

In the end, you may want to just use your own device when going out and protesting. Just keep in mind that it will be relatively easy for law enforcement to identify you and your movements if they do want to access your phone records in some form.

If you're worried about cops, or anyone else, physically seizing and examining your phone, you should encrypt it if you haven't already, and in general keep the device as free of unnecessary information as possible. If you have a passcode on your iPhone, the device is encrypted. Many Androids are also encrypted by default, but you can double check by going to the Settings app, and then tapping on Security, there should be an option for encryption in the menu.

Disable Biometrics

If you use your fingerprint or your face (for example with the iPhone’s FaceID) to unlock your phone, disable them before going to the protest. In case of detention or arrest, the cops can theoretically force you to unlock your phone if it’s protected by biometrics.

This does not mean, however, that you should disable your passcode—it's critical to leave that enabled. Cops cannot legally force you to give up your passcode. On that note, remember to use a strong PIN or passcode, made of at least 9 to 12 digits, ideally combining numbers and letters. If your phone is ultimately seized and a warrant is needed to unlock it, having a longer, stronger passcode or passphrase will make it more difficult to unlock. At least one forensic company also offers law enforcement a tool that will install a piece of software onto a phone so that once the device is handed back to its owner, the software will secretly record their password. The police then seize the device and can unlock it.

Use these messaging apps

Encrypted messaging app Signal has Disappearing Messages, which deletes messages in a conversation after they've been seen. If you don't want someone being able to rummage through your old chats if they do happen to get access to them, you could turn this feature on.

And although it's relatively unlikely an adversary is going to attempt to read your Signal or WhatsApp messages while in transit, it's probably worth verifying each of your protest contacts' cryptographic fingerprints: in Signal these are known as Safety Numbers and in WhatsApp, they are known as Security Codes. While WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, it's worth keeping in mind that Facebook does own the app, so take that into account when selecting a messaging app to use. iMessage is also encrypted, but if you have iCloud backups on, those are not encrypted. Wire is another good, end-to-end-encrypted app that also offers disappearing messages.

Scrub faces from your pictures

If you take pictures or videos of the protests, and want to post them publicly on social media, make sure there’s no faces in them that can help identify protesters. A new tool called “Image Scrubber” makes that process extremely easy. With it, it takes just a few seconds to anonymize a picture, potentially saving your fellow protesters from getting in trouble with the cops.

Create new social media accounts

"Media will be covering you, but you'll also be on livestreams and Twitter," Mitchell continued. Keep that in mind if you would rather your employer not know you're attending a protest for whatever reason, but also remember that plenty of other people will be monitoring social media looking for protesters to digitally harass.

If you did bring that phone and you're going to be sharing posts or photos yourself, you could make a new social media account for this purpose too. That way, those trying to dox protesters may have a harder time digging up your real identity.

"Understand that people who repost, retweet that the most—the timeline of where the original hashtag was created—all of that's of interest," Mitchell said.

If you do upload images and videos to social media, it's worth considering that street signs, the names of businesses, and other details in photos and video can easily give away your location; think about whether or not that is information you want to be public, and be especially careful if you are protesting very close to your home.

Consider turning off location services on your phone

If you want to share photos or updates on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, without people knowing your exact whereabouts, you should turn off Location Services for those apps (you can do that on Android and iPhone).

Or, you could check you're not inadvertently sharing constant updates on your location via Twitter's metadata if you don't want to.

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

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gv59jbJoseph CoxLorenzo Franceschi-BicchieraiJason Koeblerguideprivacysecurityprotestfreedom of expressiondigital privacyfirst amendmentdemonstrationsmotherboard showTechMotherboard
<![CDATA['Battlefield V' Players Are Using Shitty Graphics for a Competitive Edge]]>https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/43zdnb/battlefield-v-players-are-using-shitty-graphics-for-a-competitive-edgeSun, 17 May 2020 01:16:32 GMTThis article originally appeared on VICE US in June 2019

From poker, to chess, to Counter-Strike, there have always been unscrupulous players looking to cheat in games. The only thing that’s changed is the method.

Now, cheaters in online shooters such as Rainbow Six: Siege and Battlefield V are tweaking their graphics settings to gain an unfair advantage over other players. It’s called level of detail (LOD) bias tweaking, and it involves adjusting the graphics settings at the hardware level so that games looks shitty, but advantageous.

When a beautiful game like Battlefield V suddenly looks like Minecraft, the visual field becomes less cluttered. When there’s no grass or shadows in Battlefield V, it’s much easier to see and kill opponents across the map. A player may think they’re hiding in a patch of long grass, but to the the player on the other end who tweaked the game to show less details, they’re lying out in the open.

This is different than simply playing a game on low graphics settings, which some competitive players do. There are a few advantages to this—the less graphically intense a game is, the better it will run, improving reaction time. Reducing the level of detail also removes some visual clutter, which could make it easier to spot the enemy. Tweaking a game’s settings below what the software allows is another matter entirely.

As explained in a recent video by YouTuber jackfrags, cheaters are using simple text editors and, for players using NVIDIA graphics cards, programs like NVIDIA Inspector to tweak graphics beyond what the game would normally allow.

NVIDIA Inspector allows in-depth tweaks to the settings of specific programs that are running on a graphics card. There’s plenty of legitimate reasons to use NVIDIA Inspector—a gamer may want to adjust power consumption and fan speed for individual games, for example. But cheaters can also use the program to tank their LOD settings.

Some players are reportedly receiving bans for exploiting LOD bias in Battlefield V.

Redditor Gudboiharvester streamed themselves playing Battlefield V on Twitch with an LOD bias and claims to have received a permanent ban from the game. “What. Did I get banned for cheating finally?” they said when the game logged them out, according to a video that Gudboiharvester allegedly deleted from their Twitch page, but not before a Redditor uploaded it to Streamable.

When Gudboiharvester took to the Battlefield V subreddit to complain about the ban, a verified producer (meaning a DICE employee) going by Merson316 called them out on their behaviour.

“So I'm not allowed to publicly state why you were banned,” Merson316 said. “What I will say though, I think you know why you were banned. So much so you deleted the Twitch VOD showing it happening live on your stream. Afterall, I was watching it at the time.”

When another Redditor asked if messing around with NVIDIA Inspector was a bannable offense, Merson316 replied, “Using it to abuse LOD bias can land you in trouble,” adding, “We're investigating potential fixes.”

The visual elements of Battlefield V are a huge part of the game. There’s places to hide in the shadows on the expansive maps, the terrain provides cover, and camouflage can help players blend into their surroundings. LOD bias tweaking circumvents all that and turns the game into a cel-shaded shooting gallery. Where’s the fun in that?

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43zdnbMatthew GaultEmanuel MaibergGamingcheatingDiceEABattlefield VTechMotherboard
<![CDATA[An Adult Model Explains How to Take the Best Nude Selfies]]>https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/qv74k5/an-adult-model-explains-how-to-take-the-best-nude-selfiesTue, 21 Apr 2020 22:30:47 GMT Welcome to BUYABLES, a new series that will show you how to upgrade your life and the things you need to buy along the way. VICE Media makes a small commission on products linked in this article.

Taking a good naked photo is harder than it looks, even if professionals (Instagram influencers, sex workers, and Reddit models) make it look easy. Any casual selfie-taker—that means me, and probably you—can stand in front of a mirror and snap a passable thirst trap, but whether it’s good or should be instantly deleted depends on your experience and your equipment. Grabbing your smartphone and pointing it at yourself isn't going to give you good results—you're going to need to buy some better stuff.

First of all, you’re nude: Anything you do naked, if you’re not used to hanging out with your glorious, naked self on display, instantly becomes more awkward and clumsy than you’d hope. Second, you’re probably using a busted phone and the fluorescent, half-burnt light fixtures that came with your apartment.

I asked nude selfie experts for advice on how to strike the perfect naked pic, and their suggestions apply to anyone with a body and a desire to get flirty with their camera phone.

Your camera and how you hold it

Most smartphones made in the last five years or so will take perfectly fine photos—there’s probably no need to get a dedicated DSLR or mirrorless camera. Omfgmeow, an award-winning clipmaker on adult video hosting and streaming platform ManyVids and self-described professional nude selfie taker, told me she doesn’t upgrade her phone every year “cuz that is just wild,” but said she does update it every two years or so for the camera updates alone.

A lot of the art of taking nudes is about the angles and experimenting with which angles are most flattering for your body. What that means to you is entirely your call—and I’ll get to that in a moment—but first, you’ll need to decide whether you can grip your phone well enough to twist and turn it without dropping it. And if you do drop it, you'll want a screen protector.

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A PopSocket. Image: PopSocket

“If this is nearly impossible because you have a giant smartphone, you're clumsy or have small hands—whatever the case, you need a PopSocket,” omfgmeow said. These little suction-cup shaped pieces of plastic stick to the back of your phone and help you keep a grip for taking photos.

“A PopSocket allows you to get the craziest angles while maintaining stability and that sexy booty pose,” she said. “While some people get help and have a friend as cameraman, most don't. These PopSockets will save your phone’s life and they are like, four dollars.”

If you don’t love the look or feel of a PopSocket, spending another $10 or so on a selfie stick could help get all the goods in the frame. Don’t forget to angle it so that you’re keeping the stick and stick-holding arm out of the shot. It’s so unsettling when people don’t do this.

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A remote bluetooth shutter. Image: Amazon

Sex and culture writer Sofia Barrett-Ibarria told me that a tripod can also help: “Any device that can hold your phone in place is also great for getting an upward angle, which is bad for selfies but great for butt pics,” she said. “Any ass can look amazing as long as the camera is positioned lower than the butt pointed slightly up.”

Some selfie sticks double as camera phone stands, which can be helpful for another of omfgmeow’s recommendations: A Bluetooth remote shutter button. While they’re a step up in technicality from the PopSocket plastic and a literal stick, they’re still relatively inexpensive, and allow you to go more-or-less hands free. They’re also great for taking pictures that don’t require a mirror or an assistant. Some remote Bluetooth shutters cost around $15-20 and have a connectivity range of up to 30 feet.

Get lit with ring LEDs and window coverings

Even your most basic selfie-taking stage, you’ll want to be mindful of lighting—but you don’t necessarily have to buy any extra equipment if you’re strapped for cash.

“I would say natural lighting is absolutely essential and the most flattering,” Barrett-Ibarria said. “It also gives off a carefree daytime sex vibe.”

But even with the dreamiest natural light streaming through your bedroom window, the sun’s rays might be too intense, crossing from glowy to glaring. Omfgmeow suggest getting semi-sheer curtains that filter the light. This is especially helpful when you need to draw them in order to reduce glare in mirrors and on your phone.

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Image: Amazon

If you’ve watched any amount of YouTube makeup tutorials, you’ve likely seen the results of a ring light, those round LED lights that leave a little ring of catchlights—the little specks of light reflected in the subject’s pupils.

"Since it's a ring of light, you have this beautiful neutral zone in the middle and a ring of light around the face, so it gives a soft glow along the edges," Stephanie Musick, an educator at the DVE Store, told Racked in 2016. "It's not a single source hitting your face, so it really helps wash out any blemishes. You don't need to worry about light placement. You just put it right in front of you and it illuminates you appropriately.”

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Image: Amazon

Omfgmeow told me that she replaced all the all the lights in her house with LED ones, so that every room is photo-ready. But the casual selfie-taker doesn’t have to go that far. One ring light in your favorite nude room will do.

“These lights are great they will showcase your makeup, and even out your skin tone everywhere and bring some light to your naughty parts so there is less shadowing,” she said.

If you want to take lighting a step further, box lights and umbrella lights are the next step up from LED rings, but are probably only needed if you want to make a living as a photographer or model.

Use a mirror

Short of contorting yourself into impossible shapes, the classic mirror selfie is your best bet for getting your entire, glorious visage into the frame. Position a good-quality full-length mirror near your bed or in a spot that’s generally free of clutter, and snap away.

The “hoe mirror,” as omfgmeow calls her own floor-length mirror, is an absolute essential. “I cannot stress how much it’s necessary if you are trying to get the best selfies,” she said. “These mirrors are great for front pics, for booty pics, and for kneeling on the floor pics.”

How much you spend on that mirror could push you into the luxury-zone—some floor-to-ceiling mirrors cost upwards of $200. They’re beautiful, but not essential; any mirror that makes your whole body visible and can hang on the back of a door or prop against a wall will work, as long as you like the frame style and size.

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Image: Amazon

Now that you’ve got that big glorious mirror, you’ll likely notice a lot more of your own clutter reflected back at you. Get that shit cleaned up, kick it under the bed, scoot it out of the frame, and generally move it out of your shot so the focus is on you. “No one wants to see a bag of Cheetos in the background,” omfgmeow said.

You don’t really need more than a simple setting—a mirror, a tidy room and some flattering lighting—to achieve the perfect nude. But if you do end up with stray junk behind your otherwise ideal pose, you’ll want to edit that out.

Omfgmeow uses Photoshop very sparingly, but suggests using other, simpler apps like Filmora to touch up lighting or crop as needed.

Angles, breathing, and sending nudes safely

You can have all of the above—LED lights all over your house, the latest phone camera, spotless mirrors and strategically-positioned tripods—but if you’re not skilled in striking a pose, your nudes will fall flat.

Here are a few tips for finding your good side:

  • How you pose depends on what you’re highlighting, of course, so be mindful of where your focus lies. For a hint of sideboob: Lie on your bed nude, lift one arm, arch your back, and get your whole body in the mirror. For a sexy belfie: Lie on your stomach and shoot over your shoulder. Find the poses that work for you and repeat them until you feel comfortable.
  • Professional photographers borrow a technique from marksmanship experts to get a clear shot, that works just as well for selfies: Set up your shot, exhale half a breath, pause, and press the shutter button. It’ll keep your hands from shaking and steady your focus.
  • You don’t have to send your nudes to anyone or post them online to enjoy them. Taking nudes can make you feel sexy, if you’re into it and having fun, and that’s the real goal here. That said, if you do decide to share them with someone, brush up on Motherboard’s guide to secure sexting, before you hit send.

The Buyables:

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

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qv74k5Samantha ColeJason KoeblerDIYDIY NudesnudesBuyablesGUIDEShow toHow to take nudessecurityTechMotherboard
<![CDATA[How to Download Thousands of Free Books From Public Domain]]>https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/qvq99b/how-to-download-thousands-of-free-books-from-public-domainMon, 09 Mar 2020 05:27:09 GMTStarting at midnight on January 1, tens of thousands of books (as well as movies, songs, and cartoons) enter the public domain, meaning that people can download, share, or repurpose these works for free and without retribution under copyright law.

Per the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, “corporate” creations (like Mickey Mouse) can be restricted under copyright law for 120 years. But per an amendment to the act, works published between 1923 and 1977 can enter the public domain 95 years after their creation. This means that this is the first year since 1998 that a large number of works have entered the public domain.

Basically, 2019 marked the first time a huge quantity of books published in 1923—including works by Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Robert Frost—became legally downloadable since digital books became a thing. It’s a big deal—the Internet Archive had a party in San Francisco to celebrate. Next year, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, and so-on.

So, how do you actually download these books?

It largely depends on what site you go to, and if you can’t find a book on one site, you can probably find it on another. For instance, ReadPrint.com, as well as The Literature Network (mostly major authors), and Librivox (audio books), Authorama (all in the public domain), and over a dozen other sites all have vast selections of free ebooks.

There’s also a handful of archiving projects that are doing extensive work to digitize books, journals, music, and other forms of media. A blog post from Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain listed some of the most recognizable works published in 1923, as well as links to download these books on digital archiving projects Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and the Gutenberg Project. The books include:

In total HathiTrust, a massive digital archiving project, has also uploaded more than 53,000 works published in 1923 that just entered the public domain. Over 17,650 of them are books written in English. Similarly, Internet Archive has already uploaded over 15,000 works written in English that year.

Project Gutenberg, which has over 58,000 free downloadable books, has digitized five works that entered the public domain in the new year: The Meredith Mystery by Natalie Sumner Lincoln, The Golden Boys Rescued by Radio L. P. Wyman, White Lightning Edwin by Herbert Lewis, The Garden of God by H. De Vere Stacpoole, and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I’m going to be perfectly honest: I recognize exactly zero of those books. But like most if not all digital archives, Project Gutenberg had some books from 1923 available for download before January 1, 2019 (like Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf.)

If you’re interested in academic papers, Reddit user nemobis also uploaded over 1.5 million PDF files of works published in academic journals before 1923. Your best bet for actually finding something you want to read in there is to know which academic paper you’re looking for beforehand and check the paper’s DOI number. Then, search for the DOI in one of nemobis’s lists of works—one list includes works published until 1909, the other includes works published until 1923.

It’s worth noting that projects like Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg rely on volunteer efforts, so there’s going to be disparities in the number of books available for download depending on where you go. But over the next several days and weeks, it’s safe to expect many more books will become available legally and for free across the web.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

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qvq99bCaroline HaskinsJason KoeblercopyrightBooksHathiTrustInternet Archivegutenberg projectMotherboardTech
<![CDATA[Do We All See the Man Holding an iPhone in This 1937 Painting?]]>https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/a3db9b/iphone-man-1937-paintingTue, 28 Jan 2020 03:53:45 GMTThis article originally appeared on VICE US

This story is part of DOUBLE TAKES, a Motherboard meditation on the tech-time continuum that reinterprets old art through the lens of modern digital anxieties.


Lower right quadrant. Seated. Holding a small, black, rectangular object at about eye level.

See him?

It's not clear exactly who this man is, but he might as well be popping off a selfie or thumbing through his news feed. He seems to gaze into the handheld device in such a way that renders all-too-familiar today, as if he's just read a bad tweet or recoiling from a Trump-related push notification from the Times. He would almost look unremarkable, if only he and the world around him existed at any point in the past decade.

But the multi-part, New Deal-era mural the man occupies, titled "Mr. Pynchon and the Settling of Springfield," pre-dates the iPhone by seven decades. Completed in 1937 by the late Italian semi-abstract painter Umberto Romano, "Settling" is loosely based on actual events that occurred around a pre-Revolutionary War encounter between members of two prominent New England tribes, the Pocumtuc and Nipmuc, and English settlers at the village of Agawam in present-day Massachusetts in the 1630s, some 200 years before the advent of electricity.

Flash forward, and we can pin the entrance of the portable cellular telephone into the historical record to a precise date—April 3, 1973—nearly four decades before Steve Jobs, in 2007, revealed the so-called "one device," now arguably the best-selling product in history.

In other words, what the man in the painting holds simply cannot be an iPhone.

So, what is it?

It's a question that keeps me coming back to Romano's "Settling." The man is found in the first of four mural panels that comprise the artist's retelling of New England history, which falls under the care of the United States Postal Museum and currently hangs in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts State Office Building (formerly the Central Post Office) in Springfield.

Adding a layer of intrigue to it all is the fact that Romano's mural is focused on one William Pynchon—that's him at center, wearing pink—who wrote The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, the first book ever to be banned (and subsequently burned) on American soil, and who just happens to be the earliest colonial ancestor of elusive living novelist Thomas Pynchon.

Maybe I've read too much of the latter Pynchon, who was born in—wait for it—1937, the same year Romano finished "Settling," and whose paranoid fictions, a noted Pynchon scholar told me in 2012, don't "necessarily present technology as a good thing."

Maybe I too often joke (casually, among friends) about intergalactic time travelers.

Maybe, despite working for a tech publication, it's because I am too regularly overwhelmed by even basic consumer technologies, including (especially) my iPhone, a composite of dredged-up Earth and backbreaking labor.

Or, maybe it has to do with confronting a tendency to project present-day anxieties onto the past through the miasma of a historically white-washed genocide narrative.

Whatever it is, I just can't stop looking at him. The longer I look, the closer his profile appears cut along what is perhaps the defining gesture of the digital age, a pose made all the more curious considering the obvious: that both the painting and what's painted came many generations before the digital age. It's uncanny.

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The one device—or another.

My introduction to the man came recently by way of New York City-based writer and historian Daniel Crown, who published an illuminating essay on William Pynchon in The Public Domain Review in 2015. Crown's piece makes one passing mention (in an image caption written by a PDR editor) to the object the man holds, noting how it bears a striking likeness to a smartphone. Romano, who died in 1982 at the age of 77, appears to have made no remarks specifically about the man; whatever clarity the artist could've offered he likely took with him to the grave. Crown's nod to the sitting man, near as I can tell, is the first and only such reference to date. I figured I'd start by reaching out to him.

"To put it in the kindliest possible terms, Romano's so-called 'abstract' aesthetic was willfully ambiguous," Crown told me over email. But it could very well be, he added, that the man quite literally sees himself in the handheld object, looking back at him.

"When Romano painted the mural, Americans were obsessed with the 'noble savage' trope," Crown told me. "Given the scene's focus on the founding of Springfield, Romano, in reductive fashion, was probably trying to capture the introduction of modernity into a curious but technologically stunted community, which was instantly bewitched by Pynchon's treasure trove of shiny objects."

The shiny object in question? He thinks it's a mirror.

This hunch tracks with the location of the man's figure inside a crate full of what look like ceramic jugs, amid a scene full of trade goods. There's reason to believe, then, that what the man is examining is not an Indigenous object, but rather of European origin, like mirrors, which were presented often in such exchanges. The way the man holds it up, if indeed he's looking at his own face reflecting back at him, would certainly make sense.

When Europeans introduced such reflective devices to Indigenous peoples in the 1600s, "many Native nations incorporated [mirrors] into tribal aesthetic and cultural contexts," as Indigenous art, fashion, and design expert Dr. Jessica R. Metcalfe wrote in a 2011 blog post about mirrors in Indigenous culture. In that post, Metcalfe, herself of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa of North Dakota, pulls from The Arts of the Native American, a 1986 book by Native art specialist Edwin L. Wade, who reflected on the differences in mirror usage among Indians and European settlers around this time:

For Native Americans, mirrors were symbols of wealth and prestige. They were commonly mounted in dance batons or other objects of ceremonial regalia, since it was their light-reflective property, not their ability to reflect images, that was considered important.

In this view, it could be said Indigenous peoples, who likely used the image-reflective properties of pools of water as needed before Europeans showed up, turned the colonialist notion of mirrors inside out.

But even then, we could still be looking at a rendering of the very moment that foreign technology first bewitched one individual.

"There are so many things wrong with this image that it's hard to know where to begin."

Another possible theory extends the idea of an outside, potentially corrupting influence. If not a mirror, what the man holds might be a pocket-sized edition of a religious text, Crown said. "One of the gospels or maybe Psalms," he added. "These did exist at the time and were roughly the same rectangular shape."

Dr. Margaret Bruchac, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of the Native American & Indigenous Studies Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, offered yet another theory. According to her, it's likely the object is in fact an iron blade, with the sharp edge rested against the man's palm.

Then again, Bruchac highlighted the painting's accuracy, or lack thereof. "There are so many things wrong with this image that it's hard to know where to begin," she told me. "This artist obviously had never seen many of the objects he depicts."

While knives and iron blades were popular trade items during the 1600s, Bruchac explained how an accurate depiction of a blade should have a hole, meant for fastening it to a handle for an axe or tomahawk. The box the man is sitting in, which she suspects is meant to evoke a dugout canoe or shipping crate, "bears no resemblance to any historical wooden container or boat from any nation." Similarly, the woman with the cradleboard (lower left quadrant) should be clothed, the English garb is wrong ("what's with the pink suit?"), and there is a witch riding a broom in the far background.

"Suffice to say that this image is a record of a romanticized artistic genre that says much about modern American fantasies and fictions of colonial White dominance vis-à-vis Indians," Bruchac said, "while conveying virtually no useful information about Native American peoples themselves."

And yet, when it comes to whatever it is the man in question holds, Bruchac can't help but see the similarity either. "It does bear a rather uncanny resemblance, both in the way it's being held and the way it focuses his attention, to a smartphone," she said.

It's a blade. A prayer book. A mirror. An iPhone in the hands of a time traveler.

It is whatever we want it to be. But also whatever we think it should be.

Even if it is an Android.

See something strange in an image that predates the internet, digital age, or dawn of electricity? Contact this writer at brian.anderson@vice.com.

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a3db9bBrian AndersonMotherboard StaffTIME TRAVELgadgetsiPhonenative americanspaintingArtindigenous peoplesthomas pynchonnew englandmirrorsBladesToolseuropeanscolonizationcolonialistsTRIBESFeaturesDouble TakesTechMotherboard
<![CDATA[This YouTube Channel Streams AI-Generated Death Metal 24/7]]>https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/xwnzm7/this-youtube-channel-streams-ai-generated-black-metal-247Tue, 22 Oct 2019 03:46:08 GMTThis article originally appeared on VICE US

For nearly a month, Dadabots has been streaming death metal nonstop on its YouTube channel. While that may sound like a huge undertaking for a typical four-piece metal band, Dadabots is actually an AI generating its own approximations of what death metal sounds like.

Dadabots—a fake band powered by deep learning software—was developed by CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, two musicians and technologists who met while they were going to Berklee College of Music in Boston they told The Outline. It’s based on a recurrent neural network—computing architecture that “learns” patterns in a large amount of input data (in this case, death metal) in order to predict what musical elements and sequences are most common and recreates them.

They broke down their process in a 2017 paper posted to the arXiv preprint server. They start by feeding the AI model short segments of music, a few seconds at a time. As this training goes on, the AI learns the identifying features and starts to produce more and more detailed samples, including riffs and sectional transitions.

In the paper, Carr and Zukowski wrote that initially, they were surprised by the result.

“While we set out to achieve a realistic recreation of the original data, we were delighted by the aesthetic merit of its imperfections,” they wrote. “Solo vocalists become a lush choir of ghostly voices, rock bands become crunchy cubist-jazz, and cross-breeds of multiple recordings become a surrealist chimera of sound.”

While it doesn’t sound totally human—because the vocals in each track are distorted gibberish, notes are held without room for breaths, and some of the guitar riffs are at speeds most people couldn’t achieve—the general feel and instrumentals are convincing, especially to the untrained ear.

With Dadabots, besides the YouTube stream, they have released 10 different albums based on the music of metal and experimental groups like Aepoch, Battles and Meshuggah. They then curate the best-sounding tracks into an album. They characterize their work with Dadabots as working towards “eliminating humans from black metal.”

For each project, they have Dadabots analyze "subsets of a single artist’s discography,” and work off of it to create its own work. The music that the livestream is based on is a Vancouver-based technical death metal band called Archspire. And it produced another pleasant surprise.

“Most nets we trained made shitty music. Music soup. The songs would destabilize and fall apart. This one was special though,” CJ Carr told Motherboard. The Archspire Dadabots created much more consistent, stable music. Carr’s guess is that because Archspire’s music is played at such a high tempo, it stabilizes what the bot puts out. “It's autonomous, running on a linux server somewhere in South Carolina,” he said. “You're hearing everything it makes.”

In the future Carr and Zukowski hope to include some kind of audience interaction with Dadabots.

If you need a nice jolt, the livestream keeps going 24/7.

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xwnzm7Rob DozierEmanuel MaibergMusicAIdeath metalTechMotherboard
<![CDATA[Researchers Made a Self Lubricating Condom That Can Withstand '1,000 Thrusts']]>https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/bj4kja/researchers-made-a-self-lubricating-condom-that-can-withstand-1000-thrustsTue, 08 Oct 2019 03:46:17 GMTThis article originally appeared on VICE US

Over the centuries, a lot of brain power has gone into making condoms more enjoyable. Condoms have come a long way since Renaissance-era men wrapping their dicks with livestock intestines, but even with ribs for her pleasure, rubbers that glow in the dark, and self-warming varieties, only about one third of men in the US use them.

As part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s competition to design a better condom, a research team created a rubber that gets slippery when wet. A specially-designed layer of hydrophilic polymers coats the condom’s surface, which activates and becomes slick when it comes into contact with moisture. Some condoms you can currently buy at the store have a thin layer of lubricant already applied, but it wears off during sex. The researchers were awarded a $100,000 grant for their research.

The researchers say their new condom is good for “1,000 thrusts.” Assuming a rate of one thrust per second, that’s more than 16 straight minutes of jackhammering before the artificial lube wears off. Sounds like a lot but okay. (The study says typical intercourse lasts for between 100 and 500 thrusts.)

The study, published in the Royal Society Open journal, outlines in the driest terms how they’ve created this self-lubing condom. The researchers assessed “frictional performance” across a variety of lubricated and non-lubed latex condoms using a machine and performed touch-tests with human participants to determine how they perceived slipperiness and what they preferred, hypothetically, during sex.

After touching non-lubed, lubricated, and the newly-designed condoms, 73 percent of the study’s 33 participants (13 male and 20 female-identifying) said they preferred the new condom design, and would be more likely to use a condom if it was inherently slippery. Even some of the people who said they never used condoms told the researchers they’d consider starting, if this condom existed.

A few notes about this super condom: Just because it stays slick for 1,000 thrusts does not mean that obliviously pounding your partner’s brains out constitutes good, fun sex (unless they ask for that in which case, godspeed). If you really need to know when you’re setting a personal record, there’s a pedometer cockring for that.

And for the love of God, do not reuse this condom. Or any condom, for that matter.

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bj4kjaSamantha ColeEmanuel MaibergcondomScienceBill GatesSexMotherboardTech
<![CDATA[Please Do Not Pet the Radioactive Puppies of Chernobyl]]>https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/9k3kqz/please-do-not-pet-the-radioactive-puppies-of-chernobylThu, 19 Sep 2019 03:26:09 GMT

In the wake of the catastrophic Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown in 1986, people rushed to evacuate, and many were forced to abandon their pet dogs. Now, like some kind of atomic-age fairy tale, the feral descendents of those deserted animals roam the ghost towns within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), a patch of land 1,000 square miles around the destroyed plant where contamination is most severe.

These radioactive puppies have proliferated in the wilds of nuclear fallout, and are profiled in the above documentary "Puppies of Chernobyl" by filmmaker Drew Scanlon, who happens to also be the guy in the Blinking White Guy meme. In addition to gifting the world one of the most beloved reaction gifs of all time, Scanlon is producing a travel series called Cloth Map, which led him to meet some of Chernobyl's estimated 900 stray dogs.

Read More: Humans Are More Toxic to Wildlife than Chernobyl

They are part of a resurgence of animal populations at the site, which is almost entirely devoid of people, and the accordant ecological damage that normally comes with human inhabitants. Wolves made a major comeback in the CEZ over the past three decades, and boars, deer, and elk have thrived in the absence of settlements. It may be as long as 20,000 years before the area is safe for human habitation again, so this turf will remain largely undisturbed for the foreseeable future.

Because the fallout puppies could carry dangerous radioactive particles in their fur, visitors are warned not to touch them. This leads to some excruciating shots in the documentary, starring puppies who seem to really crave a friendly head-pat or belly-rub from the tourists.

If your heart strings are pulled, check out some of the fundraising efforts to provide medical care, humane population management, and comfort to Chernobyl's vibrant canine community.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

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9k3kqzBecky FerreiraKate LunauRadioactive Dogsnuclear falloutmeltdowndisasterdogsANIMALSwatchRadioactivenuclearReadPUPPIESsadCutechernobylTechMotherboard
<![CDATA[Here's How Much Pornhub Knows About You]]>https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/kzmmpa/pornhub-xhamster-data-about-youThu, 05 Sep 2019 15:49:45 GMTThis article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

People love porn. Websites like Pornhub and xHamster consistently feature among the most visited sites in the world, and in some countries get more daily hits than news sites, Twitter or Netflix.

During a time in which we're constantly investigating companies like Google and Facebook on what they're doing with our data, should we not give porn sites and the companies that own them the same level of scrutiny? Because behind every porn site is a giant tech firm to whom millions of users give away intimate insights into their most personal fantasies.

I looked at Pornhub and xHamster to better understand what these websites know about us – and, importantly, what they are actively doing with that information.

To do that, I signed up as clients of their advertising platforms and tested how far you could go in customising ads based on how much personal information I could collect from their users. What I discovered is that porn sites are selling the makeup of our sexual desires and automatically collecting data that could potentially be used to track individual users over time.

"We respect your privacy," Pornhub says in its data protection statement – but that doesn't quite seem to align with what the company is pitching to clients.

Screenshot von MindGeek.com
The MindGeek website | Screenshot via www.mindgeek.com

Though there are an infinite number of websites online that will show you a video of two people fucking, only a handful of tech companies control the most popular ones. MindGeek is arguably the largest of them all, with a network that owns, among other sites, Pornhub, YouPorn, RedTube and MyDirtyHobby. Meanwhile, xHamster is run by Hammy Media.

Hammy Media doesn't have its own website. Even though MindGeek does, you'd struggle at first glance to realise the company has any relationship whatsoever with pornography. It actually seems like they're trying very hard to avoid using the word "porn" at all. Instead, MindGeek just reels off a bunch of numbers: 115 million hits, 15 terabytes of content per day, more than 1,000 employees across six locations from Luxembourg to Montréal.

Still, we can ascertain what porn sites collect about us based on the ads that they sell.

Screenshot von TrafficJunky
When you define your target group more specifically, TrafficJunky gives you suggestions: why would you just pick the "MILF" category when you could also choose "My friends hot mum"? Screenshot from traffickjunky.com

TrafficJunky is MindGeek's advertising platform. On its page, it's more explicit about its links with Pornhub and other adult sites, as is the language it uses to attract potential clients. "Tailor each ad buy and select the specific placements that will put the right ad in front of the right customer for your product."

Reading this, it seems hard to believe that Pornhub can both respect your privacy and offer advertising tailored to individual specifications.

To dig into this, I signed up as a TrafficJunky client, logged into the online shop where you can purchase the type of ad you want to place and picked out the banner that would appear across the top of the screen. From there, I customised the ad according to different target groups.

For example, you can narrow it down to audiences who browse content related to specific categories like "Milf", "BDSM" or "anal". I could also choose whether the target group was gay, straight, trans or "female-friendly", and pick a place of residence: country, region and city.

Do you want the ad to be visible only at night? No problem, simply enter a time limit. You also have the option to select some more specific technical criteria, like targeting a specific operating system or people browsing in a particular language. What this all means is that you could create a hyper-specific ad that is only seen by people watching gay porn in Bristol who are browsing in Spanish between 6 and 7AM, looking for content with the keywords "threesome" and "outdoor".

xHamster works in a similar way, but they use TrafficStars instead of TrafficJunky. Here, too, you can customise ads based on a person's individual specs and sexual preferences. Differing from Facebook and other services, however, ads placed by TrafficStars are only based on the data collected during a single page view; previous online behaviour is not taken into consideration.

PornHub Insights Deutschland
Pornhub data from 2016 which shows which regions in Germany spend the most time on the site per session. People in Berlin spend the most time on the site, while those in Thuringia spend the least | Screenshot via PornHub Insights

It is, however, possible to track the online habits of visitors over the course of a longer period of time, even when they delete their cookies and browse in incognito mode. Whenever a user views a page, a bunch of data is automatically transferred from the browser to the website, such as your IP address, how full your battery is, which browser version you are using, your time zone, system fonts, screen resolution, which plugins you have installed and much more.

If enough data points are gathered, a website can create a digital fingerprint of sorts that can more comprehensively distinguish one visitor from another, based on their very unique set of characteristics, as you're likely to be the only person using a specific browser on GMT, with exactly your set of plugins, screen resolution, language settings and graphics card. This fingerprint can then be used to track users over time and across websites, and even to create a personalised advertising profile just for you.

A 2010 study by the the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an NGO focused on civil liberties and privacy online, found that 83.6 percent of the browsers in the study had an instantaneously unique fingerprint. In an en email exchange with VICE, both Pornhub and xHamster denied tracking individual users using digital fingerprinting methods. A spokesperson for MindGeek wrote: "We don't analyse the viewing habits of individual users." The spokesperson for xHamster also replied that: "While we look at broader patterns, we avoid connecting data to individual users."

In addition, Pornhub assures users in its privacy statement that the website anonymises the IP addresses of its users. As explained above, however, not knowing a user's IP address is not necessary to track them: other elements can make up that unique digital identity as well. Still, singling out users based on their habits is only possible if the information gathered is comprehensive or is combined with other datasets.

So what is actually collected by Pornhub and xHamster when you visit their pages? I used the browser extension "Don't Fingerprint Me" to check which tracking methods are applied by the websites, and found that both gather data that could be compiled into a digital fingerprint, but nothing more than usual. Most websites collect the same, if not more, information.

According to Dominik Hermann, professor for Privacy and Security in Information Systems at University of Bamberg in south-central Germany, the data might be enough to create a digital fingerprint, but that can only be determined on an individual case. What we do know is that there is a gap between fingerprinting someone's behaviour and associating it with an actual name. But people can accidentally reveal their names through common surfing habits, such as providing credit card information to a site or an email with your name in it. From a technical perspective, it is possible to associate the two when different datasets are merged, but we have no evidence to prove that this is already happening.

How your information is being used also depends on where you're accessing the sites. Much of Europe is currently protected under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which determines how the personal data of EU citizens is processed, used, stored and exchanged. Personal data refers to all information that can be linked to an identifiable subject, so includes things like your name, address and income, but also health information, political opinion, race and sexual orientation.

According to these regulations, EU citizens are entitled to the right to know how, where and for what purpose their personal data is being processed, as well as the "right to be forgotten" – having all your data deleted. The point of digital fingerprinting is to track single users across the internet and match them with personalised ads, so the practice must comply with GDPR rules.

The GDPR requires all companies that process personal data of EU citizens to prove that they have a legitimate reason to do so. Because consent is supposed to be informed and be given freely, companies should, in theory, disclose their fingerprinting methods, wait for users to consent and then apply them. However, companies can also claim that collecting such data falls within their "legitimate interests".

Unfortunately for our collective love of porn, "legitimate interests" is a legal concept that remains extremely vague.

This article originally appeared on VICE DE.

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kzmmpaSebastian MeineckLisa McMinnMotherboardSexinvestigationpornpornhubTechnologyVICE InternationalVICE Germany
<![CDATA[Watch This Slug Risk His Life to Smoke a Spliff]]>https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/4x5k7m/watch-this-slug-risk-his-life-to-smoke-a-spliffFri, 19 Jul 2019 05:41:01 GMTThis article originally appeared on VICE US

The World Wide Web is massive. Not every video can go viral, even if it really deserves it.

That would explain why at the time of writing a mere 552 people have gotten a good look at this work of contemporary art, which was uploaded in 2013:

The scene opens on a slug, in cover of darkness, enjoying a spliff as upbeat stock music plays.

Four years later, we have relatively little context in which to place this short film, but let's try to dissect what's going on here.

According to two invertebrate experts I talked to, this slug is from the Arionidae family. From there, we can narrow it down to Arion vulgaris by its brownish color and bright orange foot sole.

As the videographer skillfully maneuvers his iPhone 5S or whatever people were using for cameras in 2013, we get a better look at what this beautiful slime boy is up to. It definitely appears to be gnawing the paper. Slugs like paper.

Offering weed to slugs and snails is a meme that never quite grew legs. Making a snail smoke weed, as Reddit would like everyone to know, is not an invention. These guys, for example, put a lighter way too close to a snail while trying to get it to smoke a joint. Another snail just said no.

Slugs also like to ruin marijuana crops, happily chewing through the leaves and stems and laying eggs all up in your bud. They're such a recurring annoyance for growers that slugs have earned a spot in the venerable Cannabis Encyclopedia, a cultivation and consumption guide.

But for as much as there is to unpack in this video, there are as many questions unanswered: Do slugs get the munchies from marijuana plants because they're capable of feeling the effects of THC, or do they just indiscriminately eat green leafy plants? Would dried, rolled weed have the same allure as a chlorophyll-laden living leaf? Does ingesting marijuana harm slugs?

Smoke isn't rolling out of its respiratory opening, so we can at least say it's not inhaling.

The invertebrate experts who were kind enough to entertain my questions were also largely stumped.

"Slugs are pretty general herbivores, and will eat most any plant material they can find, I guess including joints...?" Morgan Jackson, an entomology graduate student at University of Guelph in Ontario, told me in an email. "No clue what the effects would be, or even how you'd tell given their naturally stoned behaviour." Fair point.

Dr. Menno Schilthuizen, a snail and slug researcher at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, also posits that it's the paper our hero is after. "Many slugs are rather generalistic detritus feeders," he told me. "They would definitely eat the outside of the 'spliff,' as snails and slugs have a predilection for paper, but I'm not too sure about the content."

Here is where our tale takes a bleak turn. Tobacco powder, or "snuff," Schilthuizen notes, is used as a way to control slugs and snails as pests. Studies show that tobacco is an effective slug-killer, and tobacco extract mixed with ethyl alcohol actually lures them in to die. So if the slug did get through the rolling paper, and if the uploader called it a spliff because it's a weed mixed in with tobacco (that's what the term usually means), the slug was likely harmed or killed.

"Whether they are affected by the cannabidiol in the marijuana, and, if so, in what way, I don't know," Schilthuizen said. There seems to be a gaping scientific hole in research around marijuana's effects on invertebrates.

We can only hope that this slug reached a bit of green before he chomped down on any tobacco. Either way, considering the average lifespan of a slug is 12 months, its work is recognized here posthumously. Rest in peace, little slimer.

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4x5k7mSamantha ColeWeedPOT420earthwatchslugReadTechMotherboard