Denizens of the World Wide Web take note: Internet week is upon us. For five splendid days, we can avert our strained and bleary eyes from our laptops and venture out into the meatspace to fraternize with the internet's finest minds. These, after all, are the people who make it possible for all of us to only have to do this once a year. 

And Motherboard is going to be there. We're going to be talking about the most important stuff on the internet—sex, drugs, drones, and code. Our Future Sex columnist Kelly Bourdet and contributor Arikia Millikan will talk about the future of intimate times, editors Brian Anderson and Alex Pasternack will talk drones, and oh so much more. A full schedule of our panels is below:

For those of you so addicted to the internet that you'd rather not leave your house for any reason, a live feed is available for your viewing pleasure here. 

Our friends at VICE are hosting a bunch of panels, too—get the details for those here. 

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The Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, is up for a vote in the European Parliament this Wednesday, May 22. TAFTA is a free trade area proposal between the European Union and the United States. It aims to open up trade between the US's NAFTA bloc and the EU bloc (EFTA), boosting overall trade by up to 50 percent.

US and EU leaders claim that the trade agreement is vital to lift their respective economic zones out of recession. However, like ACTA, SOPA and PIPA before it, the negotiations, which were held in secret, resulted in more copyright and patent trade regulation—without public stakeholder input. In other words, US and EU citizens can neither see the text of nor vote on TAFTA. Many of the trade agreement's provisions apparently derive from ACTA, Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which was voted down last year in the EUP.

The operating principle of international copyright law might as well be this: never put all of your eggs in one basket. Dispersion is the key—multiple fronts of attack, one after another. Activists and critics will see the maneuvers; but, as with any war of attrition, the opposition's momentum dissipates. And the majority of the world's population are fully ignorant of international affairs, dazzled as they are by technological titillation, reality TV, political theater, etc.

In that ignorance lies the ability to pass trade agreements like TAFTA.

Indeed, there doesn't seem to be the oppositional inertia coming out of activist corners against TAFTA as there was with ACTA. Precious little online chatter is playing out on the subject, except on Twitter, where there is a vocal effort to raise awareness about the trade agreement's side effects.

Meanwhile, Le Quadrature du Net rallied 47 signatories for its Civil Society Declaration, “to exclude from the upcoming Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement any provisions related to patents, copyright, trademarks, data protection, geographical indications, or other forms of so-called 'intellectual property.'”

The Civil Society Declaration's signatories include European and international organizations such as EFF, Public Knowledge, Big Brother Watch, PLUS Coalition, Bits of Freedom, European Digital Rights, and others.

La Quadrature du Net's spokesperson, Jérémie Zimmermann, had this to say of TAFTA:

“The European Parliament is not ready to draw lessons from the massive citizen mobilization against ACTA last year. It has decided to stick to 'business as usual' by calling once again for a 'strong protection' of copyright and patent, whereas the US and the EU already suffer from the most maximalist regimes in this field. After the ACTA fight, the negotiators of this new trade agreement –and in particular EU Trade commissioner Karel de Gucht – may once again attempt to use undemocratic negotiations to impose online repression in the name of copyright enforcement. Citizens must remain vigilant to influence the negotiations at the national level, and be watchful of EU institutions so as to avoid the worst.”

The opposition, however, extends beyond civil liberties and internet freedom groups.

Here in the US, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has been a vocal critic of the current round of secret TAFTA talks. Grayson sees in TAFTA an effort to deregulate the food industry, enriching corporations and putting people's health and safety at risk.

“The TTIP features 'investor-state' dispute resolution, which invites huge corporations to file lawsuits to prevent government actions that they just don't like, such as health and safety regulations,” wrote Rep. Grayson in a recent Huffington Post article. “Similar trade agreements have allowed the World Trade Organization to strike down country-of-origin meat labels , dolphin-safe tuna labels and limits on candy-flavored cigarettes marketed to kids.”

Another concern is that TAFTA will, instead of fostering free trade, create barriers of entry with its copyright and patent provisions. That is, the trade agreement would favor powerful corporations, reducing competition and stifling innovation in the process.

As noted in the Civil Society Declaration, “Past trade agreements negotiated by the US and EU have significantly increased the privileges of multinational corporations at the expense of society in general.” The declaration also warns that TAFTA's provisions have the potential to, “among many other concerns, limit free speech, constrain access to educational materials such as textbooks and academic journals, and, in the case of medicines, raise healthcare costs and contribute to preventable suffering and death.”

Peter Sunde , a candidate for a seat in European Parliament and co-founder of The Pirate Bay, is worried about what TAFTA would and could do, but isn't so sure TAFTA will pass.

“I am not sure that the EUP will be stupid enough to pass this,” Sunde told Motherboard. “However, there's been too little noise about TAFTA, mainly because people in general think that telling the politicians what they think should be enough (as with ACTA, SOPA, PIPA) to not simply re-name the legislation and try to pass it again. But it might be exactly what's going on.”

Sunde wagers that there is a 50/50 chance that TAFTA will pass, but noted that this doesn't mean it will become law in EU. It would, in his words, likely get tied up in “huge bureaucracy” before implementation.

“First, there is a vote for ratification by the commission; which, with a recommendation, goes over it, and then there can be hearings and so on,” said Sunde. “Next, every country needs to ratify it with the EU as well. At this stage, citizens can try to stop it before it gets ratified. Every step towards its total passage is bad, though, and it should be stopped.”

Parts of TAFTA's language made it out onto the internet in the form of leaks, but civil society still hasn't seen the full text of TAFTA. And this is a huge problem with with trade agreements like TAFTA and TPP—vested corporate interests working in concert with diplomats to regulate trade, and doing it all in secrecy.

“It's an ongoing issue that we don't have full transparency with these agreements,” said Sunde. “If the agreements can't see the light of day before they're voted on, they should not be allowed to vote on at all.”

Photo from a protest in Kunming, May 16, 2013, via Weibo

It should now come as no surprise that people in China, like people pretty much anywhere, get mad as hell about industrial pollution in their backyards, seeping into their water, obscuring their skies. What's different this time around is that increasingly they are not going to take it anymore. 

The numbers from a survey released earlier this month by the Public Opinion Research Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University bear this out. According to the study, up to 80% of citizens believe that environmental protection should be a higher priority than economic development. And 78% of those surveyed (3,400 people from 34 cities) said that they will participate in protests if pollution facilities are built near their homes—even though public protest is generally outlawed by the authorities.

(As of publication, a May 9 article about this study on the website of state-run English-language China Daily loads only intermittently; a cached version is here.)

Over the past decade, pollution has become a flashpoint for popular protest in China, in part because ecology is seen as an apolitical issue, which makes it more tolerable to government censors, and in part because citizens have become better informed about the risks to their health, their farms, and their newly-rented or purchased homes. (Land seizures by government officials have also stirred up public rancor, but not like the environment has.)

New digital tools, and SMS and Weibo in particular, have been instrumental in organizing opposition to large industrial projects. At a meeting last year of the standing committee of the National People's Congress, Yang Chaofei, vice chairman of the Chinese Society of Environmental Sciences, told officials that between 1996 and 2011, the number of environmental 'mass incidents' grew an average of 29% every year. And between 2010 and 2011, the number of environmental protests rose by 120%.

Top: a protester being carried away by plainclothes policemen; a demonstrator's sign. Via Weibo and South China Morning Post

While these findings are being borne out in real time, everyday, in small gatherings across the country, few recent incidents have garnered as much attention as the recent protests in the city of Kunming, the famously laid-back capital of Yunnan province. An initial protest on May 4th, the anniversary of the 1989 student movement, brought residents onto the streets of the sun-kissed southwestern city to fight plans for two nearby petrochemical factories: a controversial petroleum refinery and a related chemical plant producing paraxylene, or PX—a chemical used for making fabrics and plastic bottles, and a suspected carcinogen. 

What makes the Yunnan protest so noteworthy is its scale and its timing, just as the realization is dawning on officials and citizens alike that public protest can be effective. Since 2007, all previous protests against PX plants— in the cities of Xiamen, Dalian and Ningbo— ended with local governments agreeing to either cancel or relocate the projects. 

Oftentimes, these relocations focus on the poorer, interior parts of China, where citizens are thought to be less likely to revolt. An abundance of cheaper labor and lower political consciousness helps explain why large manufacturers like Foxconn are also rapidly expanding in China's western provinces. 

Map by the New York Times, 2012

"[Officials and factory owners] make the false assumption that people living in or close to the poverty line will accept almost any kind of work, put up with the worst kind of environmental and health conditions," Ralph Litzinger, an anthropologist based at Duke University, told Dissent recently. "I think this is a highly suspect assumption. I suspect more and more industrial-related environmental protests will occur in the coming years in the western provinces of China, as the industrial manufacturing and chemical processing base is moved to the interior of the country."

In July, high school students in Shifang, in the western province of Sichuan, researched the possible deadly effects of a proposed molybdenum copper plant, then used social media like Weibo and WeChat to spread what they'd learned. Protests ensued, Photoshopped memes about aggressive police officers spread like wildfire across Weibo, and, after violent encounters between demonstrators and police, the project was reportedly cancelled.

The protests in Shifang, July 2012. Photo via Weibo

Though they are rarely used, legal remedies offer citizens another option for stopping polluters. Last year in Yunnan, the NGO Friends of Nature brought a lawsuit against a local chemical company for discharging 200,000 tons of waste into the Pearl River. While the case hasn't gone to trial yet, it has already set a precedent as the first time a grassroots group has succeeded in bringing a case against a polluter in China.

But court action or public consultation is still rare. Despite a 2012 law requiring public impact assessments for industrial projects, most of the time, local officials address environmental crises as they arise, rather than implement better methods for civic decision-making before new industrial projects begin, an approach that Elizabeth Economy points out "may contribute to far greater political challenges for the ruling government."

The recent torrent of civic excitement around the environment (or what some dismiss as mere NIMBYism) helps explain why when residents of Kunming planned a second protest last week, local officials were waiting to preempt them. Beforehand the city's mayor Li Wenrong had offered to hold town hall meetings in July, when feasibility studies for the plants are scheduled to be completed. He also called a press conference on May 10 and held two discussion sessions with small groups of residents, citing the plant's "strategic importance" for the region's economic development. The plants lie at the end of a massive natural gas pipeline, set to start operating this month, that links a port in Myanmar's Rakhine State with the Yunnan capital. 

Video by Al Jazeera

But by the time the second protest arrived on May 16th, a number of activists had already been invited to "drink tea" with police, sent threatening text messages, or been instructed to attend "study sessions" about the plant. The same day, the national government released a handy advisory to the editors of the country's news websites:

State Internet Information Office: All websites are asked to remove text, images, and video related to the protest of over 1,000 people in Kunming city center against the Anning PX construction plan. Interactive platforms must strictly monitor activity. 

That didn't disuade the protesters, hundreds of whom had gathered in the morning to march toward the city center. Despite thousands of police, the crowd would not be stopped. In one of the city's busiest intersections, with thousands of police present, mayor Li emerged for an unusual, impromptu face-to-face dialogue with citizens; for fifteen minutes he sought to quell their concerns and insisted they leave their contact information so that a public meeting could be organized. He promised to set up his own Weibo account so that he could take public critciisms, and he denied that any protesters had been detained.

"I don't think the police dare to detain people, and I expect the refinery to be eventually called off, because maintaining social stability is the government's priority now," one protester told the South China Morning Post. As some demonstrators were hauled away by uniformed and plainclothes police, some shouted, "Police officers are Kunming residents too! Police officers drink Kunming water too!"

"The people of Kunming are waking up now," one man told the Post, when asked why he had never protested in public before. That consciousness is hard to dismiss in far-away Beijing, where top officials have worried about aloud about public unrest—the seeds of tumult throughout Chinese history—and insisted on more stringent control of corrupt local politicians and on a more ecological approach to development, at least on paper. "We should adopt effective measures to prevent and control pollution," former premier Wen Jiabao said recently, "and change the way we work and live."

At around 3pm local time on Thursday, as protests in Kunming reached their fever pitch, "Kunming" was the third most discussed topic on Weibo. By evening, after the police had dispersed demonstrators, posts mentioning the protest had vanished. 

More on China's civil society and environment

All Eyes Are on WeChat, Including the Chinese Government's

China's Famous Fearless Bloggers: Steve Maing Explores the Netizen 'High Tech Low Life'

China Took the Clean Energy Lead in 2012, and Will Likely Stay There

Will Extreme Air Pollution Slow the Chinese Economy?

A casual survey reveals that approximately half of the interent is populated with porn, and another quarter with trolls. The rest is mostly Huffington Post reblogs. But here's the thing about those trolls back there—they skewed my casual survey, just by being louder and more obnoxious than everybody else. 

There are obviously all sorts of trolls, but as a reporter who's covered global warming for five years now, I can tell you that there are none more unpleasant than climate deniers. They are religious in their dedication to proving that global warming is a hoax concocted by Al Gore and the UN to initiate a New World Order wherein flourescent lightbulbs are foisted on an unwitting population. 

They leave long, venomous rebuttals on blog posts, they harass you on Twitter, they take to the YouTube comment section with the zeal of Kansan pro-lifers. There's no global warming, there's global cooling. There's warming, but it's sunspots. Carbon dioxide is good for plants. Al Gore has a big expensive house and he eats steak and jets around the world and will get rich off global warming. Also, Al Gore.

But the strangest thing about these people is that they are actually human people, almost always men, who choose to spend their time in this fashion. 

Hoyt Connell is one such man. After the good folks at the Climate Desk had endured years of his social media-fied derision, they decided that, instead of ignoring him or harassing him back, they'd interview him. So they did. And what followed is interesting on multiple levels—it sheds a little light on why people troll, as well as why people choose to deny science. 

Tim Schafer has lived many lives in the game industry.

He's the man behind your favorite old school LucasArts adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango. In 2003, Tim founded Double Fine Productions, a game studio in San Francisco that's spearheaded major shifts in the game industry. Last year, Double Fine launched a Kickstarter project that opened the floodgates to game crowdfunding, which could prove to be a pivotal shift in how we make games.

In other words, Schafer is a living legend. I recently had the chance to sit down with him before he jetted off to keynote the Nordic Game 2013 Conference in Sweden.

MOTHERBOARD: You’ve been in town for the TwoFiveSix Conference, which is the 256^th games conference this year, right?

Yes, that’s [Kill Screen’s] Jamin Warren’s very first one, so hopefully it’ll turn into a big thing and he’ll ask me to return for the next one.

He did a great job, didn’t he?

I thought it was really neat how he paired up people and chose people I wouldn’t normally see. I wouldn’t walk across GDC [Game Developers Conference] for a talk on sports statistics, but you had a guy doing sports stats paired up with the Major League Gaming e-sports guy and it was fascinating. I thought it was really neat. And then him moderating it–-way more energy than a regular talk, where you’d tune out and fall asleep. But being interviewed--and Jamin doing a little improv--made the day go by quick.

I remember you said something about Jamin being the Ira Glass of videogames.

In his voice a little bit, and also his interview style when Ira does an interview on stage. Jamin was pretty similar. I’m glad we have him.

If Jamin is Ira Glass, who’s going to be our Ed Sullivan? With Jimmy Fallon taking over "The Tonight Show," that might have an impact on bringing new games to the mass audiences?

Isn’t Jimmy Fallon the Jimmy Fallon of games?

Fair point. But as far as really bringing about a videogame Beatlemania; realigning videogames to the center of popular culture–like we’re a part of it, but off to the side. The kid’s table.

It’s such a strange place! Anytime you meet someone who doesn’t play videogames they always say, “Oh yeah, you know, I used to love that… what’s it called? Pac-man!” It’s strange to think of how much cultural penetration there was when Pong and Pac-man came about and then, all of the sudden, everyone all at once didn’t care anymore, until the young Nintendo kids grew up. Now, it seems like it is everywhere, and everyone is playing, but maybe that’s because I just always deal with people who are in the industry and all my friends are in the industry. And of course, all of them are playing games and making games.

We always talk about how to “broaden the market” and it’s hard to imagine how all these people would be thinking, “Oh, I can’t wait to get home and play my game” and everyone thinks that’s going to happen, but people are reading books or watching shows that appeal to them. Maybe if they were going to play a game that was like the books they were reading, they would go home and play something.

So maybe Nicholas Sparks should make games?

Who’s Nicholas Sparks?

The Notebook.

[laughs] Well, maybe! That’s the thing--a lot of the genres people in games would make fun of are big in movies or novels. But even things as basic as comedy; it’s so huge in film but nowhere in games. There’s definitely more places to go.

I just played Guacamelee.

Haven’t played it yet! But I heard it has a lot of calaveras stuff in it.

Yeah, but it’s also rife with self-referential material--meme jokes and videogame culture references. And that seems to be where humor lies in videogames right now, with the exception of you, who's actually funny, in my opinion. But there’s this weird cannibalistic nostalgia loop going on and I think it’s a barrier for people outside of “gamer” culture to enjoy the work.

I think there’s just so many people who still really enjoy pressing that little gland in their brain that makes us feel like we’re twelve years old. Hearing chip-tunes music might give you that sensation of being a kid and playing Atari on a Saturday morning in the same way that I love watching Close Encounters or E.T. You get this comforting, “Oh my God, I’m eating cereal in my parents basement and I feel really cozy,” at least for those of us that had childhoods like that. Probably some people just don’t want to remember their childhood at all, so they play Call of Duty.

So that’s part of it. It’s those memories of nostalgia, and... I don’t know. I guess that’s why people harken back to things they love, things that are mostly not done anymore. But also there’s a lot of things I’m nostalgic for that aren’t being done still. Like stylized 3D character platformers, stuff like Super Mario 64--brightly colored, cheerful, stylized platformers.

When they made Jak and Daxter, I remember there was a feeling like Jak and Daxter was successful, but they wanted it to be more successful. And the frustration was that the kids they were aiming for still wanted to play Grand Theft Auto III with their older brother, even though they were like, 8, and you knew deep down they’d totally enjoy playing a cheerful platformer, but then they wanted to drive cars and shoot guns.

Nothing against killing guys, but it feels like there’s more than you could do.

Hence Jak II and III with assault rifles on the box cover. Oh, and then shadow selves were big for a while.

Shadow selves, that was awesome. Anyway, with all the big AAA games coming out this year, I’m super excited about Grand Theft Auto V. I just love playing all of those. I’d love to make a GTA game that was about something else than those things games usually are--just experiencing a city in a different way, in the same way that New York City is fun for me to come visit. It’s actually enhanced by Grand Theft Auto. Like, anytime I see a hot dog vendor with the umbrellas, I want to drive through it. Being in a location you’ve only seen in the game, and then being there in real life, there’s this weird “Oh, I think I know what’s around the corner, Oh, yep” feeling.

That’s how I felt when I moved here, which was surreal because I was working at Rockstar Games at the time. It was weird not having any bearings on where I was, but since I had played GTA IV I felt like I had already been there.

Right! That’s the fun part for me. But I’m not exactly sure how I would do that, and I’m not putting them down, but I feel like all I’m doing is following an arrow on the ground to a group of guys, shoot them, then follow another arrow to the next group of guys I’ve got to kill. Nothing against killing guys, but it feels like there’s more than you could do.

It feels like there’s this momentum to build things bigger. More elaborate action set pieces for just that: killing guys. What could be a different approach to a game like GTA?

It could be easy to just add a new set of things you need to achieve, another set of verbs than just guns and cars. I mean, keep the cars. 

I’m going to think of something really stupid and that’s gonna be the headline of the article isn’t it? “Tim Schafer Insists Grand Theft Auto Needs More Bunny Rabbits.”

At least when Kotaku reblogs the article.

[laughs] Then again, how would you make that game? How would you get the millions of dollars you need to make a GTA game without shooting or any of the things that have worked in the past, when you take out the thing that makes its core? I think you’d have to make a smaller one and do it on Kickstarter. Like I said, Kickstarter is always my answer.

But with all the engines out there now, ready to go engines like adventure game engines, maybe there will be an open-world city engine? “InstaCity” tools where you can make your own world to play in. Can you run around like GTA in the new SimCity?

I don’t think so.

Why hasn’t anyone done that? I guess making all of that procedural will make it hard to get the same fidelity of a GTA game. Then again, everything I thought was impossible is totally being done in the next five years I look forward to playing the InstaCity.

Thanks for the idea.

You’ll be rich! At least until you publish this article and someone else steals it.

Speaking of Kickstarter, how’s all the success being taken by the Double Fine crew? There’s a documentary, there’s the media attention, and then there’s the game in the works. Are you excited to get it out the door? Will you guys do another Kickstarter?

Yes and yes.  Everyone’s excited; the game looks great, it’s coming together great. I got so excited when all the money came in, I started designing a regular game. When it started with the limited budget, we were only planning on doing a simple project, like a flash game.

But then when we got the larger budget, like $4 million, so now we have to hone it down to get it done on the budget. The difference this time is that since the Kickstarter backers are watching us build the game, they keep getting upset when we cut stuff out of the game. “Don’t cut it! I paid for that!” But it’s such a normal process for making a game.

It’s not even bad; editing is good. But that’s just a painful part of the process. I write free-verse and then I try to make it semi-decent and cut out the bad stuff- you look smarter by editing. If you write twenty jokes and you pick the best three, it just seems like you're a genius. “Every joke he makes is great!” but really you just cut seventeen jokes. Did I get the math right? Luckily I don’t make a living from math.

So the editing process is normal, but having people observe the process–who will see stuff we took out of the game–might miss a certain room in the game. It’ll be interesting to see how people take it. That’s what we wanted to make the documentary for; to show people everything.  The painful meetings where someone wants to cut something and someone else doesn’t, and people get mad. That happens when you make a game.

Well you said you have a no jerks policy at Double Fine.

Well, mostly.

[laughter] So how heated and painful are those meetings?

Well the way it works is, you can have some heated arguments when you have so many creative, opinionated, passionate people. But what I’ve noticed over the years is they resolve well because, deep down, everybody just wants the game to be really great. So as long as that’s the goal, then we usually can resolve it.

But sometimes, you’ll be in a situation where that’s not the goal: where someone wants a promotion, or they want to get their name out there so it’s a fight to do things their way, or they just don’t like someone so they shoot down every idea they have. Those never get resolved, and usually someone gets fired or quits. Those are more political fights that I was talking about, that we try to weed out in the hiring proces–like if someone’s gripey about their past employers or little signs like that, or blaming other people for their troubles. Keeping people like that out keeps Double Fine focused on making the game great.

You’ve had some great collaborators over the years, Scott Campbell and Ron Gilbert for example. How did you form these relationships and who do you look for when you’re looking for someone to collaborate with?

Well a lot of us have worked together for twenty years–like Peter Chan, and Ron obviously was one of the first people I met in the industry, like in ’89. And Scott I met when he was at LucasArts making an educational Star Wars game with baby Star Wars characters. But I went to one of his gallery shows and his fine art was just amazing and I thought, “that’s something that would be good in games.” Same with Nathan Stapley; in that case, I was looking for outsiders whose art doesn’t look like it belongs in games. That was really easy, because games tend to look the same a lot.

Orange and blue light.

You forgot shiny! Indie games are branching out aesthetically, but there’s even things that indie games are gravitating toward–8-bit retro stuff for example–even while some of them are very experimental.

So anyway I’m just looking for experimental artists and pairing them with hardcore production people who can get things done. We’re really small and we don’t have a lot of turn over. Like right now, we’re not hiring anyone so I guess we’ll have to kill someone before another person comes on. But most of the time, it’s kind of what you’d expect. Looking at amazing portfolios, or if it’s an engineer we put them on the phone with the team and ask them all the tough engineering questions.  Then we bring them in to see if they’re tolerable to go to lunch with. [laughter]

We really value humility. People who brag a lot or who take credit for other people’s work aren’t good, but people who are really humble and positive and smart–and if they’re curious about how things work–that’s a good sign.

You’re probably the closest thing we have to a gaming “celebrity,” there are a lot of people who either can’t handle it or aren’t funny. How come you’re the only one?

Well it’s been really slow; it’s not like it was overnight. I’ve been around since ’89. It’s kind of like the story of the boiling frog; it’s not killing me; it’s pleasant. I really like it, every interaction I have as a result of being in the game industry is a positive one. People come up to me at conferences, and they’re always just the most happy, “I love your games, and I want to work on games!” It’s always just a love fest. Maybe it would be different if I made a game like Call of Duty, where you’d have fans that don’t love your stuff but play it anyway, or they like your game but they don’t love your game. Or they just don’t feel anything. All of our fans feel a personal connection to the games and the people who made it.

Plus I was really lucky to be around when there was no internet, so I could make all my mistakes offline. If I was 22, and Twitter was around, I would probably be flaming my fans or making mistakes and speaking up and saying obnoxious things I’d have to retract later, but I got all of that stuff out of my system at Lucasarts. I made tons of mistakes in my twenties and did stupid stuff, now all the stupid stuff you do is on Twitter.

The Blow/Fish effect.

[laughter] Wait, the blowfish?

John and Phil.

Oh! I wonder about that because I’ll read Phil’s tweets and say, “oh my God I can’t believe he said that” but I don’t think it’s cause he’s young and stupid. In a way I think it’s the public persona he’s choosing to adopt. I think he has some self-awareness about that, cause he gets a lot of attention for it–and look, we’re talking about him right now. So maybe it’s just totally working!

It’s such an interesting development in videogames, because public personas play a big part in popular culture and videogames haven’t really debuted to the mass media yet. It seems like the indies always get written as pretentious or bombastic, but then there’s a lot of silent developers as well. Is there a happy medium? How should developers be presenting themselves as videogame personalities?

I think you can get down the rabbit hole of like shadow boxing. Like on Twitter, you’re shouting into a canyon full of thousands of people, and you think they’re all thinking one thing because of one tweet, and so you need a response to that. But really no one is talking to you, and no one is really saying this to you, you’re almost just arguing with your own inner demons. Like when someone calls you a loser, it’s like it activates some thing in your head that tells you “you’re a loser” like you’re fighting with that thing, and you should really stop fighting in front of everybody, cause it’s embarrassing. Just get that under control.

It’s hard when you’re exposed to the public in a raw, internet way. If a news article comes out about your game, and there’s a bunch of positive stuff about it, but then there’s that one super testy, negative comment, and you’ll be tempted to respond to that.  “Hey, you didn’t think about this,” when really that’s like half of a percent of the people who responded, and it’s probably just someone trolling you anyway. Instead you should always spend your mental energy on the positive comments, who really like what you’re doing.

Also, remember you’re never really famous. Like, walk down the street, 'who’s the most famous person in games?' It’s gotta be like Will Wright or Miyamoto. People that everyone in the games industry would know. Anyway walk down the street and ask someone who their favorite game developer is. They wouldn’t even be able to pick one. They might know who Will is, if you went down and asked ten people in a row. But if you ask them about Brad Pitt or Angelina, people will know what you’re talking about. There’s a huge difference between actually being famous and being game-famous.

Gamous?

Gamous. And that’s an important thing to stay humble about; the most famous person in games is not famous at all.

Well hopefully someday, right? Don’t we want games in the spotlight?

Yeah, but probably not. The thing I think about is like, even among the most famous film directors, there’s only like a handful of recognizable names there too.  Scorcese or Spielberg, but that’s probably the maximum game developers could get. People that are really famous are glamorous or beautiful. But Spielberg is famous for what he is doing,

That’s a great analog to what’s going on. Didn’t Jamin and Robin Hunicke just talk about comparing videogames and designers to American New Wave cinema? Those film directors are still household names. Could that be good for games being recognized by the larger culture?

Yeah, except for the people doing level design or all of the hard stuff. Like the game designers and the people actually coming up with ideas and doing work.

But the best movies, most people don’t know a single screenwriter. That’s kind of the best we can hope for, is the level of those film directors. It’s funny, you read in science fiction about the future, there’s always some rockstar game developer, you know what I mean? Cause in the future there going to be like rockstars. They’re not. At the best they’ll be like those movie directors. Which is fine, that’d be great.

Well it keeps a good level of being relevant to the culture at large and not being obsessive or having videogame developers on TMZ. That’s such a weird thing anyway.

Well, maybe just the beautiful ones, like me.

Another example is people are always asking “how can we make our awards more like the Oscars” and I’m like, “until Brad Pitt is working in games, no one is going to watch our award shows on TV” The most we could hope to accomplish with our shows is the Director’s Guild Awards. Forget movies.

Check in later to hear about new consoles, new business models, AAA vs. indies, good guys, bad guys, damsels, daughters, and just plan old videogames.

Plus Tim and Colin will make Vine videos.

You can follow Tim on Twitter @TimOfLegend.

You can follow Colin on Twitter @scallopdelion.

Image: Flickr, CC

In its feeding frenzy of tech startups, Yahoo! just moved on from the appetizer menu to the main course. And it ordered the lobster.

CEO Marissa Mayer officially announced today that Yahoo! is acquiring Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash—roughly a third of what the once-great web company has in its wallet.

The "why" is pretty simple: Yahoo! is rebranding as a technology company, upping its social media game, and trying to woo the younger generation by "looking cool again." (From the CFO’s own lips.) 

How to pull it off without ruining everything will be another story—and one that Tumblr loyalists are watching intently, terrified Yahoo! will suck the cool out of their beloved haven of random, irreverent and awesome internet stuff. (The fear is warranted; Yahoo! has a history of bombing its startup acquisitions, a la Flickr and del.icio.us.) 

But Yahoo! has promised not to screw this up. Mayer posted this GIF on Tumblr to announce the deal:

First it will have to learn from its mistakes. When Yahoo! bought Flickr in 2005, the photo site was a rising star. Merging with Yahoo! was a hot mess for years. “They were forced to integrate instead of innovate,” Gizmodo writes in its great, in-depth look at the Flickr fail. I noticed the same thing firsthand when Aol bought HuffPost two years back. 

Which is probably why Mayer said, "Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr.” That’s nice, but doesn’t change the fact that Yahoo! will have to find a way to monetize the 6-year-old microblogging site, which prior to this deal was generating little revenue ($13 million a year, according to most analysts). So what’s the other part of the strategy? 

There are parallels to draw between this deal and the Facebook-Instagram acquisition last April. In return for its $1 billion, Facebook got Instagram’s six employees, 50 million users, zero revenue, and wild popularity. 

Tumblr, by comparison, has 108 million blogs (via Quancat), 184 million unique visitors a month (via comScore) and like Instagram, an active, loyal and devout user base.

In both cases, the communities freaked out when they heard they were being bought out by the man. Angry users threatened to leave Instagram in droves. They didn’t; the photo app has almost twice as many users now, and four times the staff. Which means Facebook’s plan is falling right into place. Facebook’s M.O. is to grow a solid user base before sneaking eerily targeted ads into its platform.  Instagram is still ad-free, and as of this month Facebook said it has no official plan to change that. But it will. The social network has added features and updates—location data, hashtags and a new web feed—all partially designed to make room for an eventual infusion of advertising. 

Google took a similarly patient route in monetizing YouTube, after buying it for $1.65 billion in in 2006. Three years after the sale, YouTube still hadn’t made a dime, but was growing like gangbusters. In the last couple years, as surely you've noticed, Google started slapping ads on popular videos. Last year YouTube brought in over 3 billion in gross revenue. Gangnam Style alone earned $8 million from ad dollars. 

So will Yahoo!, too, take it slow? The company already has plans to boost revenue, possibly by putting more ads on Tumblr’s dashboard, the Wall Street Journal reports. But it will be especially tricky to sell ads on Tumblr, which is ripe with not-so-advertising-friendly content like, you know, pornography. And stuff like this.

Yahoo! will also have to risk not pissing off Tumblr’s users (any more than it already has), who are used to David Karp’s minimalist and independent way of doing things. 

That's the troubling Catch-22 here—for both companies. To make any money off Tumblr's cool factor, Yahoo! will have to make Tumblr decidedly less cool. 

Image: Deviant Art, CC

Yahoo!, the company that created the website your grandparents may still have as their home page because they haven't figured out how to change it, just ponied up $1.1 billion for the "micro-blogging" service Tumblr. That's a lot of money to spend on anything, especially a social media site that is basically Blogspot with a sexy design. 

Yes, $1.1 billion dollars. We hear about an awful lot of things that cost about that much, but I posit that we rarely take a minute to sit back and absorb just how much fucking money that is. So I'm going to try to put into perspective how much a popular micro-blogging platform is worth in 2013: 

There are about 25 sovereign nations whose gross domestic product is equal to Tumblr. Economically speaking, Tumblr is apparently worth more than a year's worth of work of every single person in Somalia, whose GDP is 1.06 billion (same goes for Grenada or Samoa or Zanzibar). 

With one Tumblr, you could purchase sixty-eight million seven hundred fifty thousand Brooklyn Nets-themed plastic cups from Tumbler.com.

Tumblr is worth 275 Super Bowl commercials, which were priced at about $4,000,000 per 30-second ad this year.

With one Tumblr, you could buy 251,716,247 Big Macs. Or pay Oprah's salary for 3-4 years. 

Tumblr is worth 6% of NASA's annual operating budget. $1.1 billion dollars is almost enough to buy you the Burj Khalifa. It would get you 73% of the world's tallest building to be exact. But Tumblr's worth enough to buy you almost all of 432 Park, the new ultraluxury tower by Raphael Vinoly that's rising on Park Avenue.

Or, instead of Tumblr, Yahoo! could buy 135,200,000,000 bitcoin. 

If any Burning Man is counting, the micro-blogging service is worth roughly as much as 16,369 lbs of MDMA, or 9 military grade combat drones from General Atomics. 

Finally, Tumblr = 733,333.333 pairs of Google Glasses. Which makes at least one deal where I'd rather have Tumblr. 

But let's get even realer for a second. Let's talk cash money. This packet of $100 bills you are looking at is about a half inch thick—and it's worth $10,000 in all:

Here, then, is what one billion U.S. dollars looks like:

Pull up another crate, and you've got enough cash to buy a micro-blogging site. 

With additional research from Erik Franco.

By now you are likely aware that carbon dioxide levels have reached 400 parts per million in Earth's atmosphere. It's been three million years since that last happened, but there were no humans around then to endure the epic sea level rise, crazy droughts, hotter temps, and the mass swampification of once-arable land. 

Scientists are just as certain as ever that this is the case—a recent study revealed that 97% of scientific papers that tackle climate change confirm it's caused by human activity—but many people remain unconvinced. Maybe that's because words are often boring, and a lot of them are written on the internet, where it is especially easy not to believe things.

Good thing then that we also have charts, visualizations, maps and graphs. Yes, charts are also posted on the internet. They are, however, arguably easier to not be distracted from. So, in the name of good data ecology, here is the story of our 400 ppm world told with fewer words, and more lines and numbers. Starting with the most important number of all:

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as measured by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, has climbed from under 320 to 400 ppm in just fifty years. That means CO2, a powerful greenhouse gas, is warming the globe a hell of a lot more than it was half a decade ago. Before we had factories and power plants—say, a century ago—the number was 280 ppm. The world has rapidly warmed since then, as NASA shows us in this animated map of temperatures over the last 130 years:

As average global air temperatures have risen, so too have those of the oceans. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that the heat content of the world's oceans has skyrocketed alongside the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere—our oceans are warmer and warming still. They are also acidifying. Meanwhile, the Arctic is melting. Fast.

Source: National Snow & Ice Data Center

That orange line denotes the average Arctic ice extent in 1979. The white mass is where it was measured last year—the lowest extent on record; it is quite clearly melting away. 

Source: EPA

As was noted on the Arctic Sea Ice blog, this trend is nearly a perfect inversion of the previous two charts. Which makes sense—carbon spikes, the heat's cranked up, oceans warm, and the Arctic melts. 

All of this because humans have relied upon carbon-rich fossil fuels to power their lives and societies: decades of burning coal and oil have hot-boxed the planet. Those charts, graphs, and maps above tell a pretty straighforward story of what happened next—and what's going to keep happening if we don't keep the rest of that coal and oil in the ground. 

Photo via Flickr / CC

With Yahoo's acquisiton of Tumblr for $1.1 billion, we thought we'd dig up this interview with David Karp, the site's founder, from November 2009. - The eds.

David Karp is 23 and the founder and creator of Tumblr, and probably everyone but my editor (even though Vice has one and Motherboard too) knows what that is. He is also a millionaire. Which is hilarious, because when I was 23 I was running around with a rolled-up $20 bill up my nose, stealing day-old bagels from dumpsters, memorizing Nation of Ulysses lyrics, drinking midrange gin, and trying to sleep with art school girls. I was most certainly not flying around the world with my hot girlfriend being a genius. I called David up for an interview the other day to see just exactly how someone got the whole "being young and fucking smart" thing totally right.

VICE: So, first things first. It looks like you're giving the "early Prince album cover" look in almost every single picture taken of you. Why is this?

David Karp: I have like two different faces for photographs. I practice them. I've never heard the Prince thing before.

In all stories about you people like to mention how you dropped out of high school and moved to Japan at, what, 18? That's insane.

Yeah, I actually dropped out at 15 to work on my own business making websites for people. I grew up in New York, and you're very much spoiled living here, so I tried to think what other city was going to be totally different yet offer similar attributes. I picked Tokyo.

So not for the usual "I'm really into Anime" sort of thing?

I was actually still working tech and just had a Vonage account that they'd call me on. They thought I was in New York for the first eight months or so before I finally let it slip I was half way across the fucking world.

There's a certain stigma when someone names you Boy Wonder Of The Internet or what have you. A lot of the time it's some phony bullshit. How do you feel about the stigmas being attached to yourself and Tumblr so early on?

Hmm... I don't think I've actually accomplished all that much. More than anything I'm glad to have, by total dumb luck, been able to work with all these people [at Tumblr]. When I sit down with a blank sheet of paper I'm excited to figure out the problems. I mean, I get a kick out of it--the "Boy Wonder" stuff. Obviously.

Define "entrepreneur." Is it more along the lines of the 1985 Val Kilmer movie Real Genius or more like Warren Buffet in a suit and tie?

It's... someone who has a vision for something and a want to create. People creating.

Would you actually consider yourself an entrepreneur? Why do you think you've succeeded and other people who might have similar goals haven't succeeded?

I think I'm doing OK. It's a lot to do with the people around me. The idea behind it all is to keep it simple, and I think we've always looked for a place to express ourself as simply and honestly and expressly... like, being dragged over to our grandma's house to look at a family photo book... now there's a medium to see that or do that as it's being done and not be bombarded with seven photobooks every time you stop by. You can view it at your own pace, and they too, at their own pace. It's a new mechanism for people to express themselves.

So, social media and social networking are blurring the lines between public interaction and "internet" interaction. We are using them for the same reasons, almost.

Remember how much of an issue privacy online was, like, five years ago? And now it's totally gone. People our age aren't hung up on photos of themselves that people can Google and find, it's kind of a given now. It's become so socially accepted so quickly. Your online persona is now an extension of your actual persona--you can go to someone's blog and have an extension of them up there that's much more personable and customizable to fit YOU than, say, a Facebook or Myspace page. I think it's more cool that the photos online aren't just some crappy Facebook photos that someone tagged me in after a long night at a party... [on Tumblr] they're things that I've found, or taken right away to share. It's really me.

What about oversharing? Is this the Age Of Oversharing?

I hesitate to use the word overshare, because... well... it's more that our personalities are now able to reach out a lot further than they would ten years ago. Ten years ago there simply wasn't an option to find like-minded individuals so easily, but now if someone somehow get to your blog they can decide that you're like-minded and might want to get a drink with you next time they're in New York. Or get married. Or whatever.

So people from the site are meeting up and having babies. Do you own the rights to these babies? Are you going to make people call the babies "Reblog"?

Fuck! We should really change the Terms Of Service so that can happen. I thought it'd would be cool to be invited to a Tumblr wedding; never really thought about the baby aspect of it. Hmm. That's a good idea.

Where do you see the lines of public and internet interactions going in five years?

Everything should be more accessible. And the community and social stuff. I don't think the paradigm will jump that much, I think it'll focus more on the idea of identity, which is what we've been very careful about. Even Third World countries have high speed cell phone networks now.

While the site is designed to be incredibly user friendly, there's no denying that just under the surface there's a vast amount porn. How do you feel about that?

It's only about four percent.

Really?

We actually track it now. One of the first guy's original jobs was to troll Tumblr for porn. That was pretty much his job for a while.

That sounds AWESOME.

Yeah. Now it's the editorial staff's job to flag it.

Any favorite Tumblr porn blogs?

Me and my girlfriend have really gotten really into Dirtyrottenwhore, and ThingsThatExciteMe is really good. What about you?

Hmm, Syntheticpubes and Bedazzledblue aren't bad. I gotta keep it classy for when I do my work at the coffee shops.

Ah.

I hear that you think that robots are better than humans and that you want to have robot children.

I'm going to have one human baby and one robot baby.

So you do think robots are superior to humans?

I've always more than anything wanted to work with robots, and thought that working in media and information would be a good place to start. For example, I've always wanted to evolve Tumblr into this sort of giant AI that's built on top of all this information it gathers in real time, and then turn that into this giant army of machines that knows what everyone in the world is thinking. And the robots would be able to protect us from "bad." I trust the robots.

Why do you trust the robots?

I think we'd be stupid not to trust the machines.

OK, last question. I'm gonna ask a hard-hitting one. Tumblr. Why no "e"?

We checked the domain name for 'Tumbler.com' and it was this mom and pop store for tumbler glasses. We thought it'd be pretty fun one day, when we got enough money, to acquire their whole business. No joke! Actually, that's a joke.

This interview was published on November 23, 2009.

One of Samsung's recent arguments against the iPhone is that the iPhone is the phone of old people. But let's not assume that just because old people like a particular gadget, it must be bad. In any case, the only old person I associate with the iPhone is Lou Reed, who designed an elderly-friendly app called “Lou Zoom” that made text bigger—addressing a stereotypical complaint by the elderly—but he’s still Lou Motherfucking Reed and therefore cooler than some young dads trading videos by bumping Galaxys.

As America simultaneously ages and becomes more smartphone saturated, app developers are proving savvier than their advertising counterparts, with some positive, if unseemly results. For example, this app that helps you prepare for a colonoscopy, with tips and pictures.

Without going too deep into it, a colonoscopy is a routine procedure recommended for people over 50, to screen their bowels for signs of colorectal cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the US. 

Screen grab from the app in question.

(Lunch Spoilers Ahead, FYI)

The app, which is available for iPhone and Android, allows patients to select their procedure and get timed alerts on their phone as the big day approaches. It was developed and tested by doctors at Arizona Digestive Health, a physician group focused on gastroenterology. 

The procedure seems bad enough on its own—with a camera going up the anus to give the doctor a thorough gander of the colon—and on top of that, it involves an unpleasant-sounding preparation process, that climaxes with taking a bunch of laxatives and drinking 73 ounces of colon cleansing liquid. The PDF I looked at promises, “You will have diarrhea, which can be quite sudden. This is normal.” Getting old does sound like a drag sometimes.

Anyway, the preparation starts days before potentially sudden diarrhea sets in, and involves dietary restrictions and taking medication. The more thoroughly a patient prepares, the more effective the procedure is. And patients who used a smartphone app came in prepared at rates demonstrably higher than those who didn’t use them.

The results were made public at Digestive Disease Week, which exists. Apparently people who used the app scored “good” on the Boston Bowel Preparation Scale, which is something else that exists, about 84 percent of the time, versus only 56 percent for people who didn’t.

“We know that better prep means a better colonoscopy," said Nilay Kavathia, MD, a gastroenterology fellow at Phoenix VA, and one of the application's developers. "And now we know that this app improves prep. This finding has huge implications for treatment, patient satisfaction and further research in how the use of technology can impact healthy outcomes."

It might not look great in commercials, but it’s one of better uses for the smart phone we've found yet. Normally I think of my phone as just sort of a distracting pest, so it makes sense that if you need to be pestered to do something good for your health—ie, something that could kill you dead—it's the perfect tool.

Life isn't all homemade sex videos, selfies and graduations. There's going to be more apps like this as the smartphone integrates itself into our lives further and further (just imagine what disgusting things Google Glass will do). Let's just be honest, and admit that so far the best thing about the smartphone is how easy it makes it to use the internet and the toliet at the same time. The colonoscopy app seems as inevitable as getting older.

(via) 

It's not the first time a small-fry drone has spun up over the site of the doomed cruise liner. But it's certainly the most visually stunning.  

Which is something the makers of this video grapple with. Team Blacksheep, the drone collective behind stunts that  have buzzed the Statue of Liberty and harassed French cops, know this sort of this steers dangerously close to disaster porn. It explains their disclaimer: "This video is supposed to be a showcase for possible UAV applications." Presumably this means the potential for small, remotely-piloted aircraft to take search and rescue to new heights.   

Still: Too soon? 

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson // @VICEdrone

Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, who is currently serving jail time for exposing an AT&T security hole, got an in-person visit from his lawyer Tor Ekeland on Sunday. The four-hour-plus drive out to the Pennsylvanian penitentiary from his Brooklyn offices was mandatory for Ekeland, as the prison has denied him access to his client since he was placed in solitary confinement for unconfirmed reasons weeks ago.  

Ekeland, accompanied by two of weev’s female friends who tweeted the experience under #weevroadtrip, learned he was sharing a 10x10 cell in solitary with a cellmate, and is let out three times a week for a 15-minute shower. And that’s it. Ekeland called this treatment “odd for someone convicted of a non-violent computer crime” in a phone interview today, and “a bit draconian” as it appears “[weev] is being punished for his speech.”

Reasons for the “administrative detention”—what the prison is calling solitary confinement—are still unclear. Normally, inmates are put into housing like weev’s if they have started a fight in the prison, but weev did no such thing. Ekeland spoke to his client in a visitation booth separated by glass, with communication only audible through telephone, “like in the movies.”

The penitentiary also threatened to relocate weev regularly, in order to disrupt communications with friends, as well as rooming him with gang members and terrorists if he tries to communicate with the outside world via Internet again. weev tweeting and posting messages to SoundCloud is not illegal, but disrupts the federal government’s goal of weev quietly carrying out his prison sentence and thus fading from public memory.

Even more troubling than the “administrative detention,” threats, and limited access to letter-writing materials and stamps: the prison is not serving weev gluten-free meals. weev has special dietary needs as he has Celiac’s disease, an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine that causes him to have an adverse reaction to gluten. Ekeland learned his client has gone to see the prison doctor, but his diet has not changed. The food his friends brought weev was not allowed, nor was weev able to keep any of the notes his friends brought him.

Some highlights from  #weevroadtrip:

Nicole Powers, who was originally denied access to weev because she was not wearing a bra, eventually made one with the help of a stranger in the parking lot. The whole thing adds additional absurdity to an already absurd case. Ekeland called the prison’s actions“fanning the flames,” but internet folk would call it “feeding the trolls.”  

More on weev

Weev Has Been Placed in Solitary Confinement, Possibly for Tweeting

Lulz Seemed Terribly Fragile Next to Leg Irons: In the Courtroom with Weev

Swartz, Keys, Weev: Doing Hard Time for Hacking Doesn't Actually Require Any Hacking

Hose shot by Guian Bolisay

In 2010, heat killed approximately 55,000 people in Russia, dwarfing the total death toll of every American hurricane combined.  Daytime temperatures hit a cruising altitude of around 104°F and barely cooled at night; over 1 million hectares of land were swept by wildfires. The crop failure rate touched 25 percent, and total damages by the time the brutality let up came to $15 billion. In terms of spatial extent and deviation from normal, every temperature record for the region was shattered, beating even the 2003 European heat-wave, which claimed 70,000 lives. Both are extremes, but extremes that will become more likely as climate change makes its wrath felt.

Don’t ever doubt the power of a single-digit temperature variation. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods get most of the natural disaster credit, but heat will fuck you up, and, what’s more, it will do it slowly. So, keep this in mind when I say that a new study out from researchers at Columbia University's Earth Institute and published in today’s Nature Climate Change suggests that Manhattan is about to go into the oven for the indefinite future. By the next decade, heat deaths could rise by nearly a quarter on the island, while, by the 2080s, deaths could almost double. What’s more, most of the increase won’t come during the usual mid-summer months, but during May and September. In other words, say farewell to pleasant or at least tolerable shoulder seasons.

Percentage change (average over 16 models) in monthly
temperature-related deaths in the 2080s versus the 1980s
for one scenario

First, the bare numbers. Between 1901 and 2001, the average monthly temperature rose in Central Park by 3.5°F, leaping ahead of preindustrial local and global trends. 2012 was the island’s warmest year on record, while each of the past three years has seen temps hitting 100°F. Future projections show an increase of between 3.3 and 4.2°F by the 2050s and 4.3 and 7.1°F by the 2080s. Just imagine Times Square after two weeks of 115°F weather, when the buildings and sidewalks have soaked up some much heat that even the deepest subway tunnel radiates it like a sauna filled with trash and dead rats.

Which brings us to the death part. The researchers, led by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Tiantian Li, who did his postdoc work at Columbia, took projections from 16 different global climate models and rescaled them down to Manhattan. They used two different backdrops, one in which population growth slows and efforts are made to curb greenhouse gases, and a worst-case in which population rises at current rates and little effort is made to quell GHGs. Compared to now, more people die in either situation, but, in the worst-case scenario, the estimated yearly death toll tops 1,000 people. This is extrapolating from 1980s death rates in the 300s.

Senior author Patrick Kinney notes that there is some hope for the island that’s not reflected in the study. Mainly, Manhattan is a global leader in mitigation strategies, like planting trees, using reflective surfaces on buildings, and the opening of public air-conditioning centers. In fact, while the area has gotten warmer over the past century, overall heat-related deaths have gone down, thanks to the development of individual air conditioning. "I think this points to the need for cities to look for ways to make themselves and their people more resilient to heat," Kinney says. Trees aren’t exactly going to bring the same 30 degree drop as your wall unit, but at a municipal scale, it doesn’t take all that much to make a big, life-saving impact.   

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

People that hate math bum me out. There are a lot of them, particularly in the subset of people I often interact with (20 to 40-year-olds that do art or music things). From a certain perspective, math is the perfect storm of pointless, norm-y, and, crucially, very hard. The whys of modern math hatred are actually pretty interesting (from algorithm phobias to many, many terrible math teachers), but the difficulty of math is pretty straight-forward. Math is highly convoluted, effort-intensive puzzlework involving strange symbols and high degrees of abstraction, where the only “good enough” is being 100 percent correct. This is different than most anything in our day to day lives.

Courtesy Thomas Weickert, Neuroscience Research Australia 

The last couple of sentences above could actually double for an explanation of why math is actually awesome, but hard is hard, for any brain. What if there was a way, an easy physical way, of making math less difficult? Like a pill or, say, zaps to the skull? The latter is a real possibility, uncovered through some recent research at the University of Oxford. The equipment for at least one of the techniques is cheaper than your average math textbook, and could begin testing in classrooms very soon.

The DC Stimulator Plus, one commercially available
TDCS device

Of course, we’re probably still a lot farther away from electric zaps not conjuring One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest associations of forced brutality, but a post at Nature assures the methods are painless. The first, announced to some fanfare in 2010, is called transcranial direct-current stimulation (TDCS). This method, reported to feel like a “baby tugging gently on your hair,” helped study volunteers “learn and remember a number system made up of unfamiliar symbols.” What’s more, the effect was still seen in subjects re-evaluated six months later.

The more recent technique, called transcranial random-noise stimulation (TRNS), is kind of just what it sounds: electrical pulses sent randomly into different parts of the brain, thus exciting them and leaving the subjects with better abilities for memorizing mathematical facts and for performing complex calculations. In the study, 13 volunteers got random zaps to the prefrontal cortices of their brains, the portions associated with higher cognitive abilities, and, indeed, they performed better on mathematical tasks than a control group. Brain imaging using near-infrared spectroscopy supports the general idea, finding that blood flow to the related portions of the brain peaked earlier in subjects that had received the treatment.

While the study appears in last week’s issue of Current Biology, it’s worth noting that 13 is an extremely small number of participants to be drawing huge conclusions from. Daniel Ansari, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario, also expressed to Nature some skepticism of the work: “The training used here is highly contrived and does not resemble the way in which math skills are typically acquired.”

One of dozens of do-it-yourself-TCDS videos on YouTube.

It’s true: people become “good” at math through intensive practice and repetition rather than just looking at a thing and suddently getting it a la Good Will Hunting. In that, math is a lot like most anything else worth doing: one becomes good at it. But, the catch is that different people start from different places: not every prefrontal cortex is created equal, nor is every math teacher. The idea of being able to level the playing field is intriguing, particularly in the cases of students with special difficulty in learning math. So, the idea is less math steroid than math prosthesis. That said, if I could have zapped my brains every morning before differential equations class, I’d be a piece of toast by now, but probably a bit better at inverse Laplace transformations.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

This nearly half-century-old commercial went viral (or at least Buzzfeed viral) a few years back, but it's got me thinking lately about how assimilated synthesizers eventually became. Even pop-country circa 2013 is rife with electronic tones, however brutally plain. Remember, in 1969, when this commercial aired, the technology was still brand new and faddish; Moog synths had been circulating in pop culture for only about two years and had yet to be even seen in live performance, though they were pushing themselves into studios with names like the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.

You could consider the above commercial a snapshot of disruptive technology in action: a new thing, suddenly popular, but still uncertain enough to produce ... this.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

Image via Wikimedia

You likely already know how overcrowded and abusive the US prison system is, and you probably are also aware that the US has more people in prison than even China or Russia. In this age of privatization, of course, it’s also not surprising that many of the detention centers are not actually operated by the government, but by for-profit companies. So clearly, some people are making lots and lots of money off the booming business of keeping human beings in cages.   

But who are these people?

Using NASDAQ data, I looked through the long list of investors in Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, the two biggest corporations that operate detention centers in the US, to find out who was cashing in the most on prisons. When we say “prison-industrial complex,” this is who we’re talking about.

Henri Wedell
The individual who’s invested the most in private prisons is Henri Wedell, who started serving on CCA’s board of directors in 2000, when the company was struggling with scandals related to prisoner abuse and mismanagement. He now owns more than 650,000 shares in the company, which is far more successful these days. Those shares are worth more than $25 million.

I called Wedell to ask him what it was like to make a fortune from the incarceration of others, and whether it bothered him to profit off a system that puts more people in prison than any other country in the world.

“America is the freest country in the world,” he told me. “America allows more freedom than any other country in the world, much more than Russia and a whole lot more than Scandinavia, where they really aren’t free. So offering all this freedom to society, there’ll be a certain number of people, more in this country than elsewhere, who take advantage of that freedom, abuse it, and end up in prison. That happens because we are so free in this country.”

Presumably, when he’s referring to all the freedom Americans have, he’s not including the 80,000 inmates in 60 prisons operated by CCA.

George Zoley
Another prison profiteer who presumably has no moral qualms about the business is George Zoley, the CEO of GEO Group and the second-biggest investor in the incarceration industry. In fact, he’s so proud of his business, which has committed a laundry list of human rights abuses, he tried to get a college football stadium named after it.

Zoley made nearly $6 million last year through salary and bonuses alone, but the real money is in stocks—he owns more than 500,000 shares in GEO, and he has made $23 million in stock trades during one 18-month period. But you can’t accuse him of not earning his pay, exactly. GEO saw a 56 percent spike in profits in the first quarter of 2013, and the company’s executives reassured investors that the incarceration rate wouldn’t be dropping any time soon when announcing its earnings. Zoley will be mega rich for years to come.

Jeremy Mindich and Matt Sirovich
Both Wedell and Zoley are big donors to the Republican party, but that doesn’t mean those from the left side of the aisle can’t play their game. Matt Sirovich and Jeremy Mindich both donate to Democratic politicians and are involved with progressive-leaning organizations like Root Capital, a nonprofit lending company that offers loans to farmers in developing countries to alleviate poverty.

Their day job, however, is running Scopia Capital, a hedge fund that is the one of the largest shareholders of GEO Group. The fund owns about $300 million in shares in that company, which represents 12 percent of its entire portfolio. Like Zoley, they are good at what they do—their fund outperformed the market by 20 percentage points, and the State of New Jersey hired Scopia to manage $150 million worth of pensions.

I called them up to ask their thoughts about being politically liberal but heavily invested in private prisons, but Mindich refused to answer any questions and Sirovich was unavailable.

It should be pointed out that while being far to the left politically might seem incompatible with investing in prisons (or managing a hedge fund in the first place), the Democratic party is totally fine with the incarceration rate. Although Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are largely responsible for the drug-war policies that caused the prison population to skyrocket, Bill Clinton was a “tough on crime” president who continued their ideas. And Vice President Joe Biden was a principal player in the Clinton era’s crime policies—he wrote the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which, among other things, called for $9.7 billion in increased funding for prisons and stiffer penalties for drug offenders.

Though the US prison population is shrinking slightly, the number of inmates in federal lockup is increasing, and while Obama keeps saying he’s ending the war on drugs, he’s also proposed budgets that call for increasing the amount of money spent on the Bureau of Prisons. So it’s not such a stretch that a Democratic donor would also be in the men-in-cages industry.

Retired People and Probably You
The Vanguard Group and Fidelity Investments are America’s top two 401(k) providers. They are also two of the private prison industry’s biggest investors.

Together, they own about 20 percent of both CCA and GEO. That means if you have a 401(k) plan, there’s a good chance you benefit financially from private prisons. And even if you don’t, there are many more mutual funds, brokerage firms, and banks that invest in private prisons—it being a growth industry and all—so if you have money somewhere other than your wallet or your mattress, it’s a good bet you’re involved in some way with companies that are locking up and probably abusing inmates.

This is especially true for government employees like public school teachers because their retirement funds are some of the biggest investors in private prisons. According to NASDAQ data, the retirement funds for public employees and teachers in New York and California together have about $60 million ($30 million each) invested in CCA and GEO. Teacher retirement funds in Texas and Kentucky have $8.3 million and $4 million invested in prisons respectively, and public employees in Florida ($10.3 million), Ohio ($8.6 million), Texas ($5.6 million), Arizona ($5.3 million), and Colorado ($2.25 million) are also connected to the industry. Except for New York, which has only one privately run detention facility, each of these states has several prisons run by CCA and GEO Group facilities. And it’s not just Americans who have ties to prisons. Foreign investors have money in them as well, including the pension fund for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which recently sold off its $5.1 million worth of GEO Group stock.

Most of these employees are probably unaware that their pensions are tied to prisons—and it’s hard to say that these are “bad” investments from a purely capitalistic perspective, since these prisons are making money hand over fist. The private prison industry is entrenched in our society. And the only way to make sure that we’re not individually and collectively profiting off of it is to close these things.  

Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayDowns

This post originally appeared at VICE.

Image: Hisakazu Watanabe/Flickr

Thought your sexting habit could remain a secret? Unfortunately, a YouTube user named Nick Keck uploaded a video yesterday that proves Snapchat, the popular self-destructing video and photo messenger, doesn't really delete those nudes you sent a hook-up buddy, suggesting that anything sent among smartphones can't truly be ephemeral. 

The Daily Beast previously reported that a digital forensics company called Decipher was charging users $300-$500 to extract the Snapchat messages you thought were extinct by manipulating the file extention ".NOMEDIA" that had previously kept the images from being viewed. Thanks to Keck's video, though, you can save your money and still find your potentially-incriminating media. 

Without using data-mining or file extracting software, Keck was able to find his sent and received Snapchats without even using a computer. In the video, he uses an iPad and iPhone to send a video to himself (using two separate Snapchat accounts under his name). He then went into his iFile app to find the root of this data.

Keck clicks on "var" then "mobile" then "applications" and a series of folders appear, each with long, arbitrary titles. He opened each one until discovering the the storage facility of 'deleted' Snapchats. His was titled under "20D..." and then there was a folder called "tmp" that contained all his traded videos. Although he didn't have time to look for it, he said another folder must exist in "applications" that contains the Snapchat photos, too. 

Snapchat may be the most fun way to flirt, but don't think your information is private. It turns out the only way to truly show your penis without the risk of it later appearing on the internet is to flaunt your junk in real life, far away from iPhone cameras. 

Have you ever seen a quasi-stellar radio source (aka a quasar)? Of course not. You probably have never even heard the term before, which is affectionately used to describe mysterious hotbeds of electromagnetic energy that form around black holes out in space. But never fear--Jean-Michel Crettaz and Mark David Hosale, the two creators behind slap!HQ, are offering you the chance to observe a synthetic reproduction of one.

Scientists are still piecing together the little information we have about these naturally occurring phenomena, but what we do know is this: quasars are a compact region surrounding a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Though they are extremely bright and powerful, much more so than the sun, they remain difficult to detect. Weird, huh?

Quasar 2.0: Star Incubator. Jean Michel Crettaz and Mark-David Hosale with Duly Lee, Micaela Neus, F. Myles Sciotto, Marco Verde.

Jean-Michel Crettaz, an engineer and architect based in Los Angeles, and Mark David Hosale, a composer and media artist currently based in Toronto, are amongst those cosmos enthusiasts who enjoy decoding and contemplating outer space. Motivated by their interest in the quasar phenomenon, the two artists created an interactive light and sound installation, titled Quasar, which reproduces its astronomical properties on a smaller scale.

“The name Quasar is derived from more or less mysterious astronomical events understood as extremely ancient and highly luminous events that occur in the furthest known reaches in our known Universe," explain Crettaz and Hosale. "The significance of quasars to the work is that they represent the edge of what can be seen and known, they are a demarcation of our epistemological horizon.”

Quasar 2.0: Star Incubator. Jean Michel Crettaz and Mark-David Hosale with Duly Lee, Micaela Neus, F. Myles Sciotto, Marco Verde.

Slap!HQ will present the 4^th version of Quasar this September at the Land|Slide exhibition in Markham, Ontario. 

This post originally appeared at the Creator's Project.

Image: Flickr

Peter Sunde, one of the co-founders of the BitTorrent clearinghouse the Pirate Bay, is no stranger to the law. In 2009, after he was sentenced to nearly a year in prison and fined almost a million dollars in Sweden, he held a press conference. "Even if I had any money," he said, "I would rather burn everything I own and not even give them the ashes." Money, he believes, should flow not to corporations but to the people who are producing culture, which is why he founded Flattr, an app that allows users to send money directly to artists, activists, and designers. And as with information and money, he believes that citizens should be able to better influence the laws that govern the politics of technology and the technology of politics—which is why he's decided to seek a seat in the European Union Parliament.

A Swede with Finnish roots, Sunde will run as an MEP candidate for Finland's growing Pirate Party in the 2014 election. His aim is not one of simply advocating online piracy, though, which is probably how governments and corporate interests will spin his candidacy. Sunde has bigger aspirations: If it were up to him, there would be a total overhaul in how the international community handles intellectual property and copyright law. He also hopes to instigate a much larger revolution in how we view democracy and other systems. 

I spoke with Sunde by email about running for the European Union Parliament, the Pirate Party, his hatred of “faceless corporate lobbyists,” and why he wished Barack Obama would have lost the 2012 election. 

Motherboard: You're running for a seat because you want to create an alternative perspective in the European Union Parliament (EUP). Can you describe your platform for those unfamiliar with the Pirate Party?

Peter Sunde: Well, even though I'm a candidate for the Pirate Party, I'm not actually a member. The PP platform is based on transferring those liberties we have in the analog world into the future, which is much more dependent upon the digital. The party and I are very in sync here, but I also have other strong beliefs that are not part of the Pirate Party political platform. 

I am a lefty by European standards, in that I believe people should (through a government) own infrastructure jointly. I have strong opinions on how we treat animals, and I might be in favor of putting a higher tax on meat (or lowering the ones on veggies). I also believe we need to look at how we create power in the future, and lots of other things. I've been a member of the Swedish Green Party at the same time as the Swedish Socialist Party. Both are very progressive parties, though they're not always in sync with their other European counterparts.

If elected, what would be the first thing you'd do as an MEP?

I need to answer with something flamboyant or funny here, right? Honestly, I think it would be to send t-shirts to the Hollywood representatives with text like, "I bribed people all over the world to get my way in life, but all I got was this lousy t-shirt” or something like that. [Laughs]

If elected, how do you think a meeting with a corporate lobbyist might play out? These are the people who have led the charge against The Pirate Bay. Wouldn't it be a bit strange suddenly sitting across from them, trying to come to an agreement on patent and copyright laws?

I've met these people numerous times, but they're all faceless people you can't remember. They are lawyers and lobbyists that don't really care about the issue. They're only paid to do their work, and at 5 o'clock they go home and shop for a new car and some porn with their filthy paycheck. I would do as I've always done and tell them to go screw themselves. I think it might bite me in the ass to maintain my normal persona (not wearing a suit might be an issue in the EUP), but I won't change for anyone.

How are things going with Flattr?

Good! New features are popping up and we're seeing growth that we didn't expect. I'm happy about it, but always want more users to join. 

Are people using Flattr as a means of donating to your EU Parliament campaign?

I haven't asked for any contributions, and I try to do things without using money—it feels more real and honest. And since I'm running for a democratic seat, I'd prefer getting it without the money pushing me to a winning position. 

Via The Share Conference

You and many others feel that patent law, intellectual property and copyright laws need to be reformed, both internationally and on various domestic fronts. Do you feel that there are people in the EU Parliament with whom you could work? 

What I see is more of an age and cultural difference when it comes to these matters, rather than political background. Younger people (under 40ish) are usually quite understanding when it comes to these issues. The Green group and, to some extent, the Socialist group in the EU parliament are quite open to these ideas. The Swedish Pirate Party already have two elected politicians in the EU parliament. They joined the Green group and have been influencing them quite a lot. They've really done a great job, but more work needs to be done. 

I think that with some education, and a bit of focus on these issues media-wise (as we had with ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, and so on), we could influence the majority and make them understand that we can't just listen to monied interests in discussions about our future foundations.

You told TorrentFreak that you also tried to recruit Kim Dotcom to run for for an EUP seat in Finland. I assume he's just too busy with Mega now, but did you get the sense that he might run in the future?

We've talked a bit about things, in general. I think he's in a bubble of fighting, and I know what that means—you can't really do anything besides be angry. To focus on things that are more than a few months in the future might be really hard or even unthinkable. Like others, my feelings about Kim are mixed, so I'm not sure how well he'd do for any political party. He's got a great sense for PR, but he's also quite hated (especially in Germany), which might be a problem for him.

Most people think that people hate me, but I haven't really met a lot of people that dislike me at all. Maybe 10 people during the past 10 years. But, people assign a value to what I represent rather than to who I am. I'm not sure that's the case with Kim. And he has a family that he needs to focus on. Being away on the other side of the world for five years might not be the best solution for his family.

I haven't asked for any contributions, and I try to do things without using money—it feels more real and honest.

The Pirate Party is quite clearly interested in growing in Europe. Given that US politicians, lobbyists and corporate interests really drive the international debate on copyright, patents, and piracy, does the Pirate Party have plans to recruit candidates in the US?

The Pirate Party is (from what I hear) growing in the US as well, but you have much bigger issues than just copyright over there. From an outside perspective, we Europeans can't really understand how you can call it a democracy with only two parties that are so close to each other on the issues. Yes, the problem for us outside the US is, of course, that you have so much influence over us. But, I don't think it's going to last, and I don't think it will be Europe that takes over after that. So, for me, it's more important to start influencing the Asians on how to deal with these issues.

I hope that's not too arrogant from me :) I know that some US people might have issues with us snotty Europeans having views on your country for instance.

I think a lot of Americans might agree with you—even if, on occasion, our system allows for progress (gay marriage, for instance). But the way things are, politicians still respond quickest when money is at stake. Do you see democracy as the least worst government?

Yes. But by allowing people to believe that democracy solves all problems, we're not looking for anything better than that system. When Obama got elected (and then re-elected), I was almost hoping he'd lose. For the simple reason that the crash would come sooner, and things would have to improve. People would have to do something if Sarah Palin started running your country. It would finally be a revolution. 

I'm still waiting for the revolution against globalization in the rest of the world. The corruption that's eating away our systems; the false belief that democracy exists; and this idea of democracy actually being 'the solution' at all.

Photo via

E-waste remains a heaping problem. Just last week the New York Times reported, "Americans replace their cellphones every 22 months, junking some 150 million old phones in 2010 alone."

And if everyone I know has at least one superfluous cell phone in a drawer or closet, picture the stashes big companies with IT departments and IT budgets have lying around. All that so-called e-waste—batteries, laptops, monitors, whatever—all full of mercury and lead, and unlikely to disposed of responsibly.

This is especially true of New York City, which boasts the lowest electronics-recycling rate in its state, in spite of its reputation as a bastion of liberal treehuggers who can’t decide how much soda to drink on their own. While the city government is moving to make it easier for residents to recycle their electronics, John Kirsch remains skeptical that having collection bins in apartments is a viable proposition. Well, actually, what he said was, “Good luck with that.”

But Kirsch isn’t just another skeptical New Yorker; he’s partner and co-founder of the e-waste recycling company, 4th Bin. “We’ve picked up 2 million pounds and I’ve done over 2,000 pick-ups myself, both residential and business, there’s the argument that it’s just better not to do [have bins]. It’ll be very very difficult.”

With Intel, 4th Bin is collecting old laptops in exchange for a hundred bucks off a new Ultrabook, hoping to raise their profile and keep electronic detritus out of garbage dumps.

This IT guy-turned-electro-undertaker offered his perspective from the e-waste problem’s front lines, the Wild West world of so-called electronics recyclers, 4th Bin’s collaboration with Intel and how IT departments are producing waste just to prove their own worth.

MOTHERBOARD: Hi, John. What was the impetus behind 4th Bin? 

John Kirsch: Basically [4th Bin] was started by a bunch of IT professionals--myself included, and Michael Deutsch. We wanted to create a system of legitimate recycling especially for small to medium-sized businesses. We came from the industry so we knew there was a lack of recycling options that were really legitimate—meaning that if you’re a company and you have stuff and you really want to do the right thing, you don’t know who is collecting it and where the stuff goes. People will come and pick up your electronics, but where it ultimately ended up no one knows. Those types of questions weren’t getting answered.

So we wanted to do that—we wanted to find a way where we’ll come pick it up and it gets recycled and there’s no bullshit going on. We’re not shipping stuff to China, we’re not taking the metal and chucking the rest—which is really par for the course. That’s what’s happens.

[Ewaste recycling] really hasn’t been systematized at all. I know a lot of the bigger companies have vendors that are legitimate, but they’re for massive companies. They’ll come out and take away a thousand computers, but there wasn’t someone willing to come take away ten.

When did 4th Bin start in earnest?

In 2009, on September 11. The way we started was, we launched a design competition, giving out money to designers around the world to build a bin and a logo. The bins were supposed to be actual collection points and the logo would mean that anything put in a bin with this logo would be recycled to a standard above and beyond what we had then.

We did the competition not knowing that we’d actually start a company out of it, but then all these people contacted us and were like “We wish we had this.” And we were like, “Well... maybe this will work.”

So we had to figure out the logistics part, because I was an IT director and my partner was an IT director, we didn’t know about logistics or waste management. So we did a pilot of it, driving around and getting eWaste and figured out that it works better to not have an actual bin, but instead to have what we call a virtual bin. So they call us up and we price it and come. And it’s very very simple process. We get a lot of inquiries still that are like “can we get a bin?” and I’m like “we don’t have any!”

Bin is right in the name.

Well, it’s a concept. In New York City you already have the three bins and we’re the fourth. But there’s a lot of reasons that it didn’t work. I won’t bore you with the legal reasons—stuff breaking in the bin or leaking or people throwing non-electronics in the bin. And the bin that won the competition—by a firm called Springtime, from Amsterdam—to build that bin would cost beyond what’s feasible, from a cost and logistical perspective. Not to mention the threat of people stealing from it, or stuff breaking and leaking. There were enough arguments for the virtual bin then. Just tell us what you have. We’re happy to come out and pick it up and recycle it.

Well where does it go?

We have a process where people find us through our advertising, then we give them a quote for picking the stuff up. If we pick it up, we take it to a facility in Harlem. Some of the stuff is reused—the rates are around four to five percent and the rest is separated and taken to Long Island where a company called Ecotech then processes the stuff.

Everyone’s been fully audited, and we’re the only eSteward-certified company in New York City. The way I tell people about eStewards is that it’s like organic for the food industry. EStewards is very strict on stuff: who handles it, where it goes, with the goal of being all this stuff collected getting recycled. And we handle everything locally, which makes us different. When the equipment gets to Harlem we aren’t shipping it off to China or anywhere, and everyone, again has been fully audited. They’ve had to prove themselves and we’ve had to prove ourselves.

(via)

You mentioned your certification online.

I always tell people that we’re the only eSteward in New York City, the biggest tech market.

A lot of what happens is that no one knows where the stuff goes. By law, companies have to recycle, but they don’t, ultimately, know where it goes. I joke—and it’s not really a joke—but you and I could put up a website and then start collecting stuff tomorrow. There’s not enough knowledge in general from an educational perspective. Businesses know that they’ve got to recycle this stuff; they can’t just throw this stuff away. But they don’t know the definition of a recycler.

I think a lot of them work on price alone. So they’ll ask for a price and then be like, “We were a super green company until you gave us an estimate for recycling” and you discover how green they really are. I expected that to some degree as I got into this business. I wasn’t into waste management; I was a tech guy. We try to keep the costs low. The reaction from companies, a world I came from, kind of disappoints you sometimes. It was a shock. A lot of companies surprised me in good and bad ways.

But there are companies who I wouldn’t think would be into ethical recycling say, “That’s fine. We trust you with our data and our physical equipment.” And then other companies will give you every sustainability report they’ve ever had and you’ll chat with them and they’ll say they’ve cut their power consumption by X amount, and then when they get the bill—even if it isn’t a big bill—they don’t wanna hear it. “Either do it for free, or we’ll give it to the scrap guys down the block. They’re recyclers.” But not really.

Something on your website that caught my eye was “Data destruction.” I think some people who want to recycle their electronics only think about that negatively.

Data destruction is a big selling point. Sometimes you have to convince companies, “Whether its your phone or copy machine or computer or laptop, when it leaves your office, who are you really trusting to do this? Would you rather have a group of professionals collect them, or would you rather have a company who just hires day laborers to pick this stuff up? What insurance do you have that that stuff ever gets anywhere?”

It’s funny. A lot of people were like, “We used this company and they gave us this certificate of erasure” but it looks a little pathetic. It’s like, “anyone can open a Word document and make a certificate.” And I’ve seen some of these things, and some are really pretty pathetic. Some look more legitimate, but again, they may or may not be doing it. But the fact that someone is taking a thousand computers and erasing their hard drives to a high standard, they’re probably only clearing them. To erase a hard drive is actually pretty intensive.

So you know I think that the real thing is that it’s still new and it’s like the wild west. There’s not a lot of clear options for consumers. The best you can do is clarify what’s downstream for a vendor, but most people aren’t going to provide that. They’re not willing to put it out there where the stuff really goes. But I would want to know where it goes, who touched my computer and has my stuff. It’s really easy to fake it now, being a “recycler.”

Even without recycling.

There’s an incentive to the wrong thing, that’s the problem. No one is busting anyone for not recycling, and there’s a demand in China and other countries to get this stuff. They want the rare earth materials.

There’s just no control if you send stuff to China or Africa. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that it isn’t being recycled. You can look up the processing facilities in those countries and they basically take what they need and dump the rest of it. They’re not under any kind of environmental standard and they have to keep their costs down. In China they don’t have the regulations that exist in the West, and they need the stuff. They need the rare earth so they don’t need to mine it.

So how is business doing?

Yeah, I think a lot of that is increased awareness of e-waste. I’ve been in IT for fifteen years and e-waste was not part of anyone’s vocabulary even a few years ago. I think consumers are following this now. People kind of already knew that it was bad and that’s why they’d hoard stuff. Electronics are something that the average people has and knows that it’s bad to throw out but they don’t know what to do with that.

Unless it’s a TV. People just chuck those out.

The problem now is that a lot of the newer electronics just break. We get a lot of flat screen TVs. It’s amazing how many we get; it’s such a waste. Some people are upgrading their flat screens. I’ll give them credit, they’re willing to pay the premium cost to have us come get it out of the apartment and take it and disassemble it. But a lot of them are just broken. These are flat screens that are just junk. I won’t name any manufacturers, but you know about planned obsolescence. I don’t know if its pressure from the shareholders or what, but you just can’t have a TV for 25-30 years anymore like when we were kids.

I mean, I look at new TVs then mine from two years ago and it looks like its from the ‘80s. The picture is so much better and smart TVs are coming out. I’ve tended to sour on technology a little bit doing this business. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it but...

Running this business rather than doing IT, your take on the technology has changed?

Well I appreciate it, but I think a lot of companies and their technology is not needed. Okay, you’re pumping up your processing speed. There are watershed events that do happen—Windows 7, I consider a watershed event because it moved from 32 to 64 bit, yeah. Apple’s OS X and then adopting the Intel. Those are big changes. I hate to say the word, but game changers. Businesses and people adopted the technology really quickly.

But putting aside the gadgets and stuff, I mean how much do you really need them? I mean, I use my iPad for watching movies on Netflix, I don’t do any work on my iPad. But I think that they’re marketed better now and people feel the need to have them. Does a business need to swap out a thousand computers that are already on a 64 bit? I don’t know. I could make the argument, nah just wait. You can run the computer into the ground. The technology is that much better. Sure the Pentium, the new chips, are great, but I think IT drives it. The IT departments need to justify themselves. Your in-house IT guys have to show value and part of that is using the latest and greatest stuff. With the goal almost being themselves not going into obsolescence. I joke about it, because I was IT, but you’re not making money in the profit centers for the company. If you’re running the show you want to constantly be moving equipment in and out.

I think the trend for the last decade has been to run a more outsourced model of a separate company coming in to run IT, so the company can become leaner and leaner and they’re cutting in-house IT.

I think if you can introduce new stuff on the software side. The whole cloud trend has facilitated a move to less. We’re seeing more and more servers come out. We took 800 servers out a few weeks ago. The company was saying we’re consolidating, taking it down, and cutting out these servers. There’s more ewaste now, but with the goal of less. There’s more and more stuff and less hard drive space. I mean you still need the screen and computing power. I appreciate the smaller stuff, but people call the tablet the endgame, and I disagree.

@a_ben_richmond

Aleksandra Sima is part of a team of researchers in Norway using sophisticated octocopters to search for petroleum (via)

We've seen drones used to safely navigate oil thanks through thick ice flows, so it's not all too surprising to hear that small, relatively affordable unmanned systems are now being used to sniff out oil deposits. This sort of thing was bound to happen sooner rather than later. 

A team of researchers with Norway's Centre for Integrated Petroleum Research, a collaboration between the University of Bergen and Uni Research, is on it: 

But really, what is it with Nordic drones?

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson // @VICEdrone

iRobot, the company behind the adorable Roomba vacuum cleaner and some less-adorable military security bots, has developed a semi-autonomous hand that can do almost everything your hand can do, just better. Using a Kinect sensor, it can manipulate a key to open a locked door. It can grab all kinds of stuff. Its fingers can lift 50 lbs weights. 

Next, it's going to punch its semi-autonomous three-fingered fist right through the future. 

That's because the robot hand, which is being developed for DARPA with assistance from researchers at Yale and Harvard, will eventually be entirely autonomous. It's part of the Autonomous Robotic Manipulation project, which DARPA describes thusly: 

"Current robotic manipulation systems save lives and reduce casualties, but are limited when adapting to multiple mission environments and need burdensome human interaction and lengthy time durations for completing tasks."

Alas, that "burdensome human interaction" that's always getting in the way of more perfect robot performance may not be a burden for long.

"ARM seeks to enable autonomous manipulation systems to surpass the performance level of remote manipulation systems that are controlled directly by a human operator," DARPA explains. 

Right now, the machine's current setup "incorporates some autonomous capability," but "the hand still requires an operator for manipulation of objects in its fingers," according to the Singularity Hub.

The allure of a powerful, dextrous, and autonomous robot hand to police squads, the military, and security forces makes sense—if robots can open the locked doors perps and/or combatants are hiding behind, so much the better for the side that wants to get that door open. It also means that we're ceding one more inch of control over to a powerful, dextrous machine. 

But such is the future! Come hither, robot hand; I'd like to shake thee. 

via Flickr / Creative Commons

Just before he died, Aaron Swartz built a technology that let citizens securely and anonymously send tips and documents to journalists, without having to worry about leaving their digital fingerprints all over the web.  

The resulting program, called Strongbox, just launched on the New Yorker. Think of it as a hyper-secure inbox. It protects whistleblowers from being tracked, and also journalists from being pressured by the government to reveal sources—since they themselves have no earthly idea.

The technology powering Strongbox is called DeadDrop—a free, open-source web application built by Swartz. It launched one month before he died.

The app's readme on github describes how it works:

In operation, every source is given a unique "codename." The codename lets the source establish a relationship with the news organization without revealing her real identity or resorting to e-mail. She can enter the code name on a future visit to read any messages sent back from the journalist -- "Thanks for the Roswell photos! Got any more?? -- or submit additional documents or messages under the same persistent, but anonymous, identifier.

Innovations to track and locate people online have progressed much faster than innovations to protect privacy and anonymity. (You don't have to stretch your imagination too far to think why.) A brilliant civic hacker, Swartz of course understood this. His interest in free information, privacy and anonymity led him to rely on Tor, highly-encrypted software originally sponsored by the Navy for hosting and viewing websites totally anonymously. Sometimes we call the area it opens up the Darknet. 

Strongbox makes access to this area of the web easier than before. To submit documents to Strongbox, users first download and install software for Tor, then go to Strongbox at http://tnysbtbxsf356hiy.onion for further intructions. (To access Strongbox on mobile, you'll have to use the Guardian's Darknet browser Android app, Orweb. Happily, they've provided an interactive tutorial.)

In a 2008 blog post about a Tor hack, the Swartz shared his thoughts on the role of anonymous publishing in a free society:

In 1787, when America’s framers wanted to argue for its Constitution, they published their arguments (the Federalist Papers) anonymously. Whistleblowers have released everything from the Pentagon Papers to the Downing Street Memos. Anonymous speech is a First Amendment right.

And yet, on the supposedly Wild West frontier of the Internet, publishing anonymously is not so easy. Hosting providers require a name and credit card, which they have to hand over to the FBi at the drop of a National Security Letter. Free hosting sites zealously obey takedown requests and require publishers to reveal their identity if they want their stuff put back up (a tactic Scientologists have used). Luckily there are now services like Wikileaks, but they only publish a very narrow range of content.

But, talking with Virgil Griffith and others, I hit upon a new way of allowing for anonymous publishing. The amazing Tor project lets you use the Internet anonymously, by disguising your traffic thru a long series of relays. Less well-known is that it also allows for anonymous publishing, by running the system in reverse. Unfortunately, you need the Tor software to visit anonymously-published sites, but we realized there’s no reason this need be so.

So I dusted off some work I’d begun years and years ago and build a tor2web proxy. Now anyone with a web browser can visit an anonymous Tor URL like http://sexy36iscapohm7b.onion/ from any Web browser, without any special software, just by going to:

http://sexy36iscapohm7b.tor.theinfo.org/

Which means that publishing an anonymous website is now also fairly easy. 

So it stands to reason that fellow hacktivist-turned-journalist Kevin Poulsen, the news editor at WIRED who oversaw that website's Wikileaks coverage, approached Swartz two years ago (at that point he was already a rising star on the web) with his secure submission project. Poulsen recalls in his New Yorker article that Swartz learned he was being indicted on federal charges while they were working on DeadDrop. “By December, 2012, Aaron’s code was stable, and a squishy launch date had been set,” he writes. “Then, on January 11th, he killed himself. In the immediate aftermath, it was hard to think of anything but the loss and pain of his death. A launch, like so many things, was secondary." 

Strongbox is the first use of the DeadDrop technology. (The magazine was chosen for the debut because of its history of investigative reporting.) Since WikiLeaks shut down in 2010 a few other publications have tried to build similar secure submission programs but were plagued by security and legal problems.

Seeing as the Justice Department just spied on the Associated Press and seized two months’ worth of phone records, it seems it’s high time one of them works. Let’s hope Strongbox does. As Swartz wrote, "Here's to anonymity—and more tools protecting it."

See also

The FBI Is Coming for Your Gchats

The Motherboard Guide to Spy Kits

'Going Dark': What's So Wrong with the Government's Plan to Tap Our Internet

Assume Your Computer is Owned at All Times: A Chat with Cryptocat's Nadim Kobeissi

Image: White House

Considering that every new image of Obama doing anything remotely unusual is typically transformed into a tumblr-traversing meme, isn't it a little strange that the objectively wonderful photo featured above isn't all over the internet?

I mean, the thing barely spread beyond the audience at the White House correspondent's dinner. The image was a prop in a joke about how everyone thought that PR photo of Obama shooting skeet had to be Photoshopped—this was the real one, get it? (Okay, it's actually a pretty good joke). But the internet somehow missed it altogether.

It may simply be that members of the media (who don't get invited) loathe that smarmy self-congratulating tribute to the super-powerful so much that anything produced therein is ignored on principle. But seriously—there wasn't a single Buzzfeed blogger in the crowd?

Of all the presidential images that journey across our Facebook walls, racking up thousands of likes and shares, this is the one that gets a pass? The one with cats and laser beams and rainbows? The one that's full-on Seapunk? This thing is tailor-made for the internet. How is it not still on the top of Reddit? 

I mean, I'd rather look at this than some photo of Obama fist-bumping the janitor any day. In fact, maybe I'll print this thing out. Maybe I'll crumple the edges and burn them, like we did in second grade to make printer paper look old, and then maybe I'll frame it. Who knows, maybe in this majestic era of artistic remixing and reproduction, that counts as actual art. I am an artist. And I shall call my first work The Presidential Meme That Never Was. 

Image via

Okay, prepare yourself for some pretty dense internet jargon, all in the name of safety. Originally used as a form of online protest, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks – basically where you bombard a website with traffic until it has a meltdown – are becoming increasingly malicious as people realize they can use them to fuck with large companies who have websites, a.k.a. every large company in the world. In 2012, DDoS attacks increased by a pretty ridiculous 200 percent, and 35 percent of businesses experienced some kind of disruptive DDoS attack.

For a powerful DDoS attack, hackers use botnets, which is essentially turning computers into an automated army that amplifies the traffic you're hurling at websites and works like this. If enough computers are used in an attack, you can end up doing some serious financial damage, like the time Anonymous left Paypal dealing with a hefty $5.3 million loss in a DDoS attack that paralyzed the company's computer systems.

I was maybe a little over-worried about the future of internet terrorism, so I caught up with Dragon and PhäntömZ – two very experienced programmers who run a stresser/booter company called Agony – to find out a little more. In case you didn't know (which is incredibly likely), a "stresser/booter" is normally a software or service that allows the user to flood the network of their target. As in, the kind of thing you'd use to help you carry out a DDoS attack.

Photo via

VICE: Hey guys. Talk to me about botnets.
PhäntömZ: We stay away from botnets at all costs. The same goes for shells and black hat hackers.

What's a black hat hacker?
Black hat hacking is an internet term for someone violating computer or internet security maliciously or for illegal personal gain, as opposed to "white hat", which is ethical hacking.

How can you hack ethically?
Oh, it's where a computer security expert who specializes in penetration testing and will try to hack an organization's information in order to ensure that it's safe.

Ah, OK. What do you think about people who DDoS maliciously for a personal or political agenda?
Dragon: I personally think that they're internet terrorists. The point of the internet was originally freedom of information, and most of the time that's not what people are using DDoS attacks for. Many of the attacks nowadays come from political parties or people trying to take out businesses.

What's your opinion on CISPA?
CISPA is just the government trying to spy on everyone, in my honest opinion. CISPA would waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cyber security.

Would CISPA affect you?
Yes, CISPA would affect both of us. In fact, it would affect everyone. The issue is, when I want to do something anonymous online, I can't anymore – well, not without a ton of work. After CISPA, if a state agency like the police says, "We want records on this person," everyone has to release them.

Could CISPA shut down your business?
If it grows into a more controlling bill, then it could have the potential to. I doubt it will, though.

Photo via

What do you think of Anonymous?
They’re just a bunch of kids – 99 percent of them are under 20.
PhäntömZ: They’re online terrorist groups. I've had a few of them try to recruit me, but I keep turning them away. The way those groups run is just helping the government have more reasons to put cyber laws into play.

How does a DDoS attack work, exactly?
You either type a command into a server and it executes a program that attacks the target, or you use a GUI – otherwise known as a booter. [See these visualizations too - Ed.]

Are DDoS attacks becoming a threat?
Dragon: DDoS attacks are becoming a real threat to some online businesses and individuals. Say you’re on a fun game online. A kid who doesn’t like you sees that you're having fun. With access to a booter, they can knock your entire house offline with the click of a button.

Have you been the victims of DDoS attacks?
We were hit by an attack for an entire week. I diagnosed it and managed to divert it and notified everyone I could to help get it discovered and healed.

What do you think of TOR and the Deepweb?
It's 99 percent bad; there's no purpose for it. It's expanded into a huge amount of illegal content that's mostly very disgusting and has no real purpose.

Don't you think it helps with internet privacy to some extent?
Privacy over the internet is overrated. Most of the time, if someone wants to find you or knows who you are, they can find out what you're doing. It’s like my friend used to say – "A lock is to keep honest people honest."

What do you know about the Reddit attack?
Reddit isn't that large of a website, so many different booter services could have been capable of an attack like that. Even our service, if tuned the correct way, could be capable of it.

Illustration of a DDoS via

Do Stressing/DDoS companies work as a business?
They do, but they don't make much unless they have a large clientele, like us, or do illegal things. There are many services on hacking forums that offer to do that kind of thing for you, but most people would rather be able to do it themselves using a program or a website that sells subscriptions.

How would they go about doing that?
The only way someone would be able to make it themselves is if they had the appropriate programming knowledge and the server resources to create enough packets to stress whatever they were trying to stress.

Follow Will on Twitter: @Hypothesising

This post first appeared appeared at VICE UK

Read more about DDoS attacks and internet warfare:

Is DDoS the New "Sit In"?

The Shady Geeks Hiding in Bunkers Trying to Nuke the Internet

The Syrian Electronic Army are at Cyber War with Anonymous

Anonymous Calls Bullshit on the Future of Cyber Warfare

Image via Wikipedia Commons

Chris Gill, Motherboard's shooter-at-large, as seen from a tactical surveillance drone at roughly 300 feet (via)

Later today, a congressional hearing will convene on domestic drone use--the second such hearing in three months. The hearing will continue teasing out the privacy implications of aerial surveillance systems, a sign that an increasing number of US citizens and policy makers alike are losing sleep over the thought potentially thousands of small-fry drones soon taking to American airspace. 

To see you, overly-paranoid human, through today's hearing, we've gone ahead and collected a few choice tracks about the perils of being watched--or stalking, depending on where you fall. Look out. 

BLACK SABBATH, "PARANOID"

TONER LOW, "DEVILBOTS DESIGNED TO ASSIMILATE"

JUDAS PRIEST, "ELECTRIC EYE"

MASSIVE ATTACK, "SPYING GLASS"

HALL AND OATS, "PRIVATE EYES"

SERGE GAINSBOURG, "LAISSEZ MOI TRANQUILLE"

THE CURE, "PICTURES OF YOU"

CAN, "OUTSIDE MY DOOR"

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson // @VICEdrone

Images: BSC

Building tall things is among our human-est proclivities. The divine collapse of Babel didn't stop us, so taller and taller we go, often for little other reason than we can. Governments, corporations, and architects have long built record-breaking skyscrapers simply to bask in the glory of the feat itself (and the attendant press frenzy, of course). Hell, the world's tallest building at the moment is the Burj Khalifa, and that thing isn't even hooked up to a proper sewage system.

But there's something particularly remarkable about the next World's Tallest Building—it will be erected in just over half a year, and, if it pans out, it's going to be replicable and mass producable. Before long, in fact, there may be dozens of the next world's tallest building.

The Broad Sustainable Construction company has announced that it plans to break ground on Sky City, a 220-story, 2,750-foot skyscraper in a remote field in Changsha, China in June this year—and aims to finish erecting the final story by December.

That may sound insane—and it kind of is. But BSC's building, Sky City, isn't like other skyscrapers. It's a prefab building—soon to be the world's biggest—which means all of its parts are manufactured to spec and pre-packaged for (relatively) easy assembly. The component parts are mass produced in modular factories, so yeah—BSC is hoping that this Sky City will merely be the first of many. 

So, should we cheer or jeer the prospect of mass-produced biggest-ever skyscrapers? And also: why mass-produce ginormous skyscrapers in the first place?

Well, if the specs BSC provides are to be believed, mass-manufacturing prefab skyscrapers is much more efficient than our more traditional towers. It's five times more energy efficient, can be built at half the cost, and packs a lot more people into a smaller space. BSC is going to stuff 30,000 people into these self-contained skyscraper communities—a resident of Sky City will use up 1/100th of the land used by a typical Chinese citizen. 

And it really is a city in and of itself—4,450 apartments, nearly 100,000 square feet of indoor vertical farms, 250 hotel rooms, 92 elevators, 30 foot courtyards for athletics, and a six mile ramp that can be used to walk or run around the entire city. 

Once again, BSC intends to build this thing in seven months. How will that work? Treehugger's Lloyd Alter explains: "16,000 part-time and 3,000 full-time workers will prefabricate the building for four months and assemble on site in three months." (For a closer look at all of the design specs, see Alter's in-depth piece on the project.)

That's right. The parts will be built in a factory, and then this thing will fly up in just three months. Three months. Remember how long it took to build the Freedom Tower? Like ten years. BSC thinks it can build the tallest building in the world in a single season.

If it succeeds, it will be a loaded feat indeed: Made-to-order skyscrapers bigger than any the world's ever seen–that's resource- and energy-efficient to boot–may well become a hot commodity in our quickly urbanizing world—remember, by 2030, the UN expects 5 billion people to live in cities. And once they're there, we're going to need space to live. Cheap, massive skyscrapers may be a viable option. 

Obviously, there are concerns aplenty, and not just with the structural soundness; the reliablity of a 2,500 foot city manufactured in 3 months. There's a more distant concern that this may not be the most pleasant way to live; stacked atop one another, separated from open air and nature. Plus, that cookie cutter aesthetic could eventually sap the architectural diversity of the cities of the future, and turn our most notable population hubs into towering Levittowns. 

Or maybe it's exactly what we need, with resource consumption and energy use spiraling out of control. Maybe our best hope is to churn out a host of massive, identical, self-contained Sky Cities to house the booming population—maybe this is the future of how we'll live on a teeming planet. 

A wood engraving of this evil instrument from La Nature, 1883.

If you're like me, you're a slightly overweight, devastatingly charming Jew who’s been diagnosed with ADHD before entering kindergarten. To cope with your “behavioral problems” and “short attention span,” you’ve run the pharmaceutical gamut from Ritalin and Wellbutrin to Adderall and Vyvanse.

If only 19^th century German psychiatrist Johann Christian Reil was still around to treat today's hyperactive youth. In an 1803 manual on the treatment of mental disorders, Dr. Reil prescribed that the “oft-distracted” be forced to watch a concert preformed on the Katzenclavier (translation: “cat piano”) as therapy. Here’s Reil’s description of the machine:

"An octave's worth of cats arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard fitted out with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument--when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expression on their faces and the play of these animals--must bring Lot's wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness..."

This "sadist's synth" was invented by the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher some three hundred years before Kraftwerk. Kircher believed the harmony of music reflected the divine proportions of the universe. He had a bunch of other crazy and sometimes brilliant ideas about music - he invented the Aeolian Harp, which is sort of a complicated wind chime, and worked on early theories about transmitting music to remote places. So in a way, he sort of invented satellite radio too.

As far as anyone knows, nobody's ever constructed a true Cat Piano, but British sound sculptor Henry Dagg put together a humane version using squeaky toys. At a 2010 garden party, his performance of  “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” made Prince Charles chuckle like a fat-cat nobleman, check out this video:

This story originally appeared at our sister site, Noisey.

(via)

When it comes to celebrating the history of computers, it’s important to mark all binary anniversaries. In this spirit, we celebrate the 111th anniversary of the discovery of the oldest known computer.

While some people call the Atanasoff-Berry computer the first, and some people point back further to Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, those who know give the crown to the Antikythera Mechanism, which scholars now think was built around 87 B.C.E.

The Antikythera Mechanism was taken out of a sunken ship discovered in 1900 just off the tiny island of Antikythera, just north of Crete in the Mediterranean. After sitting in storage at Greece’s National Museum among other unidentified lumps of bronze, the archeologist Valerios Stais discovered it was, in fact, a mechanical object, on May 17, 1902.

Granted, when most people say “computer” they don’t mean things like the slide rule or the abacus, but that’s what the term meant before—and concurrently—computers were electrified and digitalized. Technically the Antikythera Mechanism is analog, which makes the whole binary date thing seem a little dubious, but whatevs.

Consisting of a box with dials on the outside and a very complex assembly of gear wheels mounted within, the Antikythera Mechanism must have looked like an old clock when Stais first deduced he was looking at something mechanical. What makes it all the more surprising is that it employs technology that would go unused in Europe until the 14th Century.

A modern attempt to reconstruct the Antikythera Mechanism, which is like someone trying to rebuild an iPhone in the year 4026 (via)

The Antikythera Mechanism is thought to be an astronomical mechanism, capable of predicting both solar eclipses and the Olympiad, which makes it sort of like NBC, but with solar eclipses and no Bob Costas. One dial indicates the Sun against the Zodiac, and some of the missing pieces might also indicate the position of the planets.

Contemporary scientists used tomography to find the months etched onto the back. The month names surprisingly were “of Corinthian origins.” This is especially confusing, given that the ship it was found in was Roman.

Classical literature mentions things like the Antikythera Mechanism, leading some to link it to Archimedes, but scientists just don’t know. It’s both an incredible find and an intriguing mystery, but people are pretty sure it is also the oldest known computer. On this day, 111 years ago, an archeologist in Athens discovered the Antikythera Mechanism and also that the Greeks knew even more than we gave them credit for. 

Photo via

One of the world's oldest and biggest species of flowering plants bloomed in Ohio yesterday: the extremely rare Titan Arum. The plant, which was grown by the Biological Sciences Greenhouse at Ohio State University, is endemic only to rainforests in Sumatra, where it was first discovered in 1878. Today, it's colloquially known as the "corpse flower" because of its pungent stench—it smells like decomposing flesh.

Wednesday's feat was part of an ongoing effort to save the rare species, led in part by Ohio State molecular geneticist Joan Leonard, who planted the seed for this now-49-pound Titan Arum back in 2001. Worldwide, the species has bloomed fewer than 150 times since it was discovered over a hundred years ago, according to Sandi Rutkowski, communications director at OSU's College of Arts and Sciences.

Because of booming population growth, the corpse flower's only natural habitat is rapidly diminishing. About 70 percent of its endemic habit in Sumatran rainforests have already been destroyed, said Leonard, coordinator of the campus's Biological Sciences Greenhouse.

On Wednesday, Ohio State's greenhouse again became one of the few who've gotten a successful bloom out of the unwonted, diffident flower. In order to save the species, conservationists must get the plant's putrid flower to bloom, as that's the only way botanists can obtain and share pollen and seed to propagate the species, Rutkowski said.

"Sumatran islands have an exploding population, so in order to feed their people they're clearing out Titan Arum's habitat. Pretty soon its natural habitat is going to be gone, and it only grows in one place in the world. The only way to save it is for plant scientists and conservatories to preserve it. That's why conservation botanists and conservatories around the world have been trying to grow them," she said.

Although yesterday's bloom has closed, more flowers should bloom soon, according to Leonard. 

"The bloom that just finished; we collected pollen off of it yesterday and we will use that pollen to pollinate the next bloom. Today we pulled in the second bud that's coming up, and it's going to bloom in about 10 days."

The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies the disappearing rainforest species as "vulnerable," which is one step away from being classified as endangered.

You can watch a live stream of the plant's unsavory redolence (and subsequent blooms) here.

All images credited to Wim L. Noorduin, Harvard University.

If you’re stuck inside on the Internet on a beautiful spring day, like us, please accept our condolences and this gallery of pictures of crystals induced to grow into beautiful, microscopic flowers. By manipulating the conditions where the crystals were forming, researchers were able to get the crystals to self-assemble as stems, leaves and buds, all on the tinest of scales.

Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and his colleagues dissolved barium chloride  (a salt) and sodium silicate (also known as waterglass) into a beaker of water. Carbon dioxide from the air dissolved naturally into the water, fomenting a reaction to form barium carbonate crystals. In response to the crystals the pH of the solution surrounding them lowers, triggering a reaction with the dissolved waterglass, and adding a layer of silica to the growing structure. This reaction uses up acid from the solution and allows the barium carbonate crystals to continue to form.

As this process takes place, the shape the crystals take can be manipulated through changes to the solution–increases in carbon dioxide levels in the water creates “broad-leafed” structures. Reversing the pH gradient at the right moment can create curved, ruffled structures. "You can really collaborate with the self-assembly process," said Noorduin.

Noorduin and his team grew fields of the floral-looking crystals on glass slides, razor blades and even a penny they submerged in the solution. Then Noorduin took pictures of the crystals using an electron microscope to produce these false color images of the “flowers” after they assemble molecule by molecule. The black and white images aren’t quite as charming.

"When you look through the electron microscope, it really feels a bit like you’re diving in the ocean, seeing huge fields of coral and sponges," Noorduin said. "Sometimes I forget to take images because it's so nice to explore."’

Noorduin’s paper on the crystal manipulation is the May 17 issue of Science’s cover story.

Happy spring, anyway.

Hours after a highly-anticipated album gets leaked online, what can possibly be said about it? 

Not long after the stream for Daft Punk's Random Access Memories went live on Monday (following a leak on BitTorrent), a DJ tweeted his review, a widely-retweeted sentiment that would be echoed in some form or another, in quips across the web.

This wasn’t going to sit well with Daft Punk’s fans. But even indifferent listeners had reason for skepticism. At Pigeons and Planes, someone wrote an article called, “Why It's Too Early to Judge Daft Punk's New Album”:

The new Daft Punk album is here. It has arrived. Sit with it for a minute. Let it sink in. Play it at your next party. Let it spin at 3 a.m. when you’re high/drunk/sober/happy/ alone/with friends/depressed/whatever. Give it a little time. Let this album live. Music isn’t a science—it breathes and moves, it adjusts to its surroundings. We know that everyone wants to figure this out as quickly as possible, but that’s not the way to take in music, and an album release like this one just shows more clearly than ever how unhealthy the state of music really is. We are literally trying to review albums—no, album leaks—within 24 hours. When it’s something with as much history, anticipation, and relevance as the new Daft Punk project, is that really how we want to handle it?

What I know after listening to the new record for a couple of days: critics—and especially critics on social media, offering their first quick impressions—really don't know what the hell they're talking about when they talk about Random Access Memories.

This time, however, it's not because Daft Punk supposedly failed to live up to Homework and Discovery (depending on one's preference between the two). Instead, I'm going to blame the internet. It's turned into a disintegrating force in music. Piracy really isn't at fault; jackasses with opinions and platforms and itchy Twitter fingers are. And when would-be critics race to opine about a new song, video or album, whether it's through established music outlets, blogs, Facebook, or YouTube, they do a disservice to the audience. 

Everything is about velocity. The internet has virtually zero patience for thoughtful, reasoned critique. It can't wait. Much of this, obviously, has to do with the money imperative behind site traffic. The hits are the commodity that pays for the entire operation. Except in rare circumstances, the later one publishes a review of any given album, the less chance there is of social interaction. In other words, your shit won't sell if the post doesn't go live that day, and more usually, that hour. The new operating principle is this: to sell its shit, the Internet pumps out shit. So it goes.

There is, as one friend noted, very little interest in letting Random Access Memories live as a record and as an experience, whatever that may be. But any serious music fan knows that, like a good wine, like good fine art, like an idea, music needs to breathe. It has to have an atmosphere in which it can fully bloom, be tasted, and be discussed. For all the good technology has brought to the music listener, it has an unparalleled capability of burying good music (or hyping bad music) in a micro-second. It only takes one critic's impression to trigger a meme, a hive opinion, and so unmake the critical experience of a record for thousands of people. Think of it like the spread of a rumor, an information virus, the sort that can destabilize markets in seconds with false data, except with brains and musical taste. Disposable media begets disposable content. 

Granted, this phenomenon isn't new. It's a problem with criticism in general in an era of countless distractions. Hysteria or hyperbole is an excellent way to attract attention. But online, that kind of criticism gets taken to the nth degree.

Consider My Bloody Valentine's latest album, m b v. No one could possibly have spent the time required to pick up on every nuance, every shade and morsel of white noise and beautiful dissonance. And, yet, YouTube and Google searches were quickly polluted with reactionary opinions. The commenters may have been trolls; but they were also critics, turned by their sheer reach into arbiters of mass taste.

I almost fell victim to this hyper-criticism myself with m b v. After the sublime notes of “You Found Now” faded, my excitement dissipated with each successive track. Even so, I fell asleep with headphones on listening to the album. Days later, after I'd digested the album at full volume on my living room speakers, I sat down to write my review of m b v.

The Quietus, which typically balances solid criticism with more sensationalist or provocative editorials, took a slightly different tack. On May 1, writer Paul Smith reviewed Random Access Memories track-by-track. But he didn't jump to conclusions: “Random Access Memories is a gut-busting 75 minutes long. While too ambitious to evaluate after one listen, it’s a record that constantly surprises.”

Lauren Martin of FACT was much more succinct with the tweet: “Maybe lots of people are hating on RAM right now because it’s not very good … It’s not great or even god awful. Just, pish.” Again, this is a mere day after the stream was launched. Martin's opinion may ultimately represent a general consensus that RAM is middling, but it is still a rush to judgment. Something is very amiss in the world when Daft Punk is relegated to "pish," while unabashed praise is heaped on the overhyped Charlie XCX, who is, according to Martin, a “young pop star to be reckoned with." The hype is something to be reckoned with, but Charlie XCX's music could never be mistaken for earth-shattering.

Diplo's Twitter review isn’t even worth quoting. But one should read his tweets if only to understand that even famed producers can and do talk out of their asses, especially on Twitter.

Insta-critics, hyper-critics, or whatever they should be called, might write off any positive criticism of Random Access Memories as a byproduct of too much investment in Daft Punk. That may be fair, but passing a hastily definitive judgment two or three days after Daft Punk made the stream available is not. The dominance of this insta-criticism raises a serious question: is Daft Punk's album stream to blame here (to say nothing of its marketing strategy)? Or is that the internet is just not the right medium for serious, thoughtful music reviews, or criticism in general, for that matter?

The internet is how most of us experience music these days. But with the good, comes the bad. We can tour an entire genre in the space of an hour. But our demand for new music from the bands we love can turn an album leak viral in minutes. Post-leak, Daft Punk tried to soak up listeners with their own full album stream; but their giant squid-like promotion machine also set them up for fast, reactionary criticism.

Given its wildly successful viral marketing campaign, it's fair to say that even grandmothers and rubes have probably seen traces of the hype surrounding Daft Punk's new album Random Access Memories. It's understandable. Daft Punk have, over the years (and despite claims that the masks focused attention on the music) carefully and masterfully crafted a unique cult of personality for more than just the club kids. Kraftwerk is an obvious parallel, but perhaps Daft Punk borrowed more heavily from Space, a French electronic group whose members dressed in astronaut suits way back in the late '70s. Kiss is another analogue, albeit a creatively groan-worthy one.

The disguises, in fact, were an interesting postmodern touch, a meta-commentary on the alienation of digital music. When they managed to penetrate the mainstream in the early '90s, DJs and electronic music producers were largely faceless. The robot helmets, preceded by more primitive attempts (face paint, for instance, or paper masks), looked like an attempt to take the faceless, robotic DJ to its absurd conclusion. Around the same time, Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Orbital, Underworld, and several other acts were putting a "face" on electronic music. Daft Punk's move was an odd one by comparison, but it certainly worked as a marketing tactic.

Daft Punk, circa 1996

With Random Access Memories, the mask motif and the whole Daft Punk brand reaches its absolute apex. Where else do Bangalter and Homem-Christo go from here? If the Alive tour was the height of Daft Punk in live format, Electroma their cinematic opus, and TRON: Legacy the duo's debut as film composers; then the whole Random Access Memories experience feels like the synthesis of the total Daft Punk mythos, an album three years in the making, with an impressive list of collaborators, a limited use of electronics, and a sound caught between visions of the future and nostalgia for the disco.

For years they've celebrated their robot alter egos and electronic music production, even though the music has always had a distinctive human element. They didn't just offer circuitry, but a complete nervous system—a full range of emotional response. Discovery was incredibly organic, while Human After All morphed into something less mechanistic and more elastic on the Alive tour. It was sublime vindication— especially for those who initially dug Human After All—when Daft Punk silenced the critics from atop their laser-lined psychedelic pyramid.

Now, seven years later, the insta-criticism seems unavoidable. One way or another RAM was going to make its way onto the internet, and be experienced in a less-than-ideal way. Perhaps they could have anticipated this, and preempted it. Given all of Daft Punk's talk about analog recording, vintage synthesizers, and going back to the past to find the future, did they think that perhaps the proper listening experience, like their apparently meticulous recording process, was best enjoyed slowly and in high-fidelity, in a way that mp3 files on computer speakers simply don’t allow? Did they ever consider releasing only an actual, touch-able record?

Daft Punk is, if anything, not daft. Surely they must have considered that their retro approach on Random Access Memories would meet head-on the kaleidoscopic ADHD, Tumblred version of the internet in which we all, for better or for worse, now live. If Daft Punk really wanted to be bold, they should have made Random Access Memories a vinyl-only release. It would have forced a degree of patience on both their fans and all curious individuals that we don't see much anymore.

And what is more, it might have helped to silence and save us all from all that traffic-baiting criticism. Including, even, my particular bit of it.

Read more DJ and Daft Punk

Did Boards of Canada Create the Weirdest Musical Rabbit Hole Ever? 

How Science Fiction Has Kept Daft Punk in Our Ears

Daft Punk Is the Apple of Dance Music

GIF courtesy Pitchfork

Caleb "Kai" Lawrence McGillvary with Jimmy Kimmel (via Facebook)

Remember Kai? The hatchet-wielding hobo of SMASHH!! SMAAASSHHH!! SAAAMAASHHH!! fame? The guy who made headlines after stopping some psycho who claimed he was Jesus Christ and ran over a bystander before attacking a group of women? Well, now Kai's wanted for murder.

ABC Local is reporting that an arrest warrant is out for Lawrence in connection to the murder of one Joseph Galry, who was found dead in his home on May 13. Reports are spotty, but authorities are considering Lawrence, last seen on Tuesday, to be armed and dangerous. He was last seen at a rail yard near Haddonfield, New Jersey. No matter the outcome, it's a truly bizarre and tragic twist to the "homefree" tale of everyone's favorite hatchet-wielding hobo, who it's been said harbors a bit of a violent streak. As he told told VICE last month, recalling stopping another dude after the Jesus incident: 

He was on a trip of dominance and control. I think he had a poisoned psyche. I've heard some of the research that people have been doing about his life and apparently he was a high school basketball coach for girls. That is fucked up. That truly sickens me. When I hear stuff about him getting jumped by six guys in a Fresno County jail and getting his jaw broken, I'm not going to lie to you, I celebrate that. People like that need to be fucking stopped.

For now, all we have are these words, which Lawrence put on Facebook two days ago:

what would you do if you woke up with a groggy head, metallic taste in your mouth, in a strangers house... walked to the mirror and seen come dripping from the side of your face from your mouth, and started wretching, realizing that someone had drugged, raped, and blown their fuckin load in you? what would you do?

We'll continue to follow this one. But what the fuck?

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

From Vice UK

Deep within a mountain somewhere in west Texas, The Long Now Foundation are hard at work building a 500-foot clock that's been designed to run for 10,000 years. I know that sounds a bit like the folly of a Lone Star oil billionaire, but apparently this massive clock is going to adjust the manner in which we understand time itself, so I suppose that counts as having a purpose.

The team behind the construction—boasting names like Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and, somewhat bizarrely, Brian Eno—want the clock to help destroy the short-term thinking they believe is plaguing society. Their aim is to engage the population so we all properly consider the ways we should be preparing for the future.

The giant clock might seem a slightly excessive way to do that, but when you've got Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos investing $42 million in your project, you don't really need to worry about excess.

Executive director Alexander Rose talked me through the concept.

VICE: Hey. So what's up with this gigantic clock?
Alexander Rose: The clock is an iconic project to inspire other people to get the conversation going about long-term thinking. I was once giving a tour to some IBM engineers and one gentleman said, "You know, this is never going to work. In 3,000 years, they're going to be sacrificing virgins on this thing and all the blood is going to drip into it and it's not going to work." And I said, "That may be, but before you walked in the door here, you weren't thinking 3,000 years in advance, so it's already working."

Sneaky.
Well, what we hope to do is make something so mythic and crazy that people want to tell stories about it and it becomes a meme that can be called upon. When people tell you that you can't do long term things, there will always be the 10,000 year clock.

I guess so—at least until the 10,001th year. What inspired the clock, Alexander?
"The Millennium Clock," a clock that ticked once a year, bonged once a century, and the cuckoo would come out once a millennium. If you make it "forever" or of an astronomic time scale of millions and billions of years it dwarfs the human experience and it doesn't feel like there's anything you can do that's important in that time scale. So we thought, What is the human civilizational moment? If you look back to the last ice age, when agriculture started, that's when large parts of the planet started having what we now call civilization. So that was chosen. If we can look back 10,000 years, then we can look forward 10,000 years.

I kind of see what you mean. Why Texas?
The current location was one that came as part of the funding from Jeff Bezos. When Jeff offered the property in west Texas, it was all private and allowed us to get going much faster. It had the attributes of being high in the desert, which is a great preservation environment away from cities—good for something lasting, away from the churn of cities and wars. We also wanted that distance so that people would have to travel to it, and while traveling they would have some conversations about it. Then, on their way back, they'll hopefully have changed a little bit.

You’re building a giant alarm clock, aren’t you? The future is going to be so pissed.
There are elements of the clock that we're leaving undone for future generations and anniversary events. The idea is that there will be a cool mechanical thing that happens on a year, a decade, a century, a millennium, and then a tenth millennium. We'll only build the year and decade ones, then the others would be left for other people to build in the future.

How are they going to know how to program it? Is there a manual?
Over 10,000 years, the platform dependence goes all the way back to the fundamentals of language, so we started looking at ways of making a modern Rosetta Stone by micro-etching silicone and then casting that into long lasting metal, like nickel. We've created a Rosetta disk, which has thousands of languages with parallel information on them so that anyone who found the disk could hopefully understand as many of the languages on the disk as possible. The later steps may be including some of the documentation alongside the clock and other projects that have several major world languages as part of that.

That’s cool.
With the Rosetta Project, we created the broadest language database and archive in the world. We literally had to collect stuff out of shoeboxes in Papua New Guinea, and we now have documentation of over 2,500 to 3,000 languages. We etched that into silicone using a gallium ion beam and casted that onto nickel so that it could last for a very long time.

That’s pretty amazing. So how long do you think it will be until the giant clock is finished?
I'm not sure.

Do you have an estimate?
Nope.

Really?
No.

Do you know how much it will cost overall?
No.

Well, this interview seems to have drawn to a natural close. Thanks Alexander.

All images by Rolfe Horn.

Follow Camille on Twitter: @camstanden

Image: Google

If the sprawling opening day at Google's I/O 2013 conference made one thing clear, it’s that Google knows everything about everything.

To stay competitive in today’s tech market, Google is brandishing its biggest weapon: Data. Massive amounts of data. The company knows so much about us it can serve as a cross between a personal assistant and a brain extension. The major product announcements from the opening day of Google’s annual developer conference reflect that, all trending toward the founders’ dream of artificial intelligence. Basically, Google is reading our data so that it will be able to read our minds.

All this personalized information has the potential to be transformative—so long as you’re not concerned with things like privacy or corporate world domination. It all depends on how much creepy we’re willing to put up with in exchange for usefulness.

In that spirit, here's a look at some of the magical and unnerving features announced at I/O:

“SEARCH AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER”

The world’s leading search engine admitted that search is totally antiquated. Google is inching closer towards the dream of the semantic web. It has updated the Knowledge Graph, which launched a year ago today, and is a mechanism to add contextual meaning to information in order to understand the intent behind a query and provide a better answer.

"Finding things is tricky, and so you really want intelligence,” Brin and Page said in their 2008 TED Talk. “And in fact, the ultimate search engine would be smart. It would be artificial intelligence.”

Now you can literally have a conversation with your computer. Google’s voice search/Siri counterpart called “hot wording” is available now on desktop. Say “OK Google,” and ask a question, request a reminder, pull up dinner reservations, and so on, and the computer will respond.

GOOGLE+ WILL SUCK A LITTLE LESS

Google is still pushing its social network, laboriously trying and failing to take on Facebook. Its big advantage? Again, intelligence. When you upload photos to Google+, it automatically highlights the photos it “thinks” are the best, based on whether or not people are smiling, if there are major landmarks in the shot and other data. “Your darkroom is now a data center,” the slogan goes.

Google will also smooth out wrinkles, perfect skin blemishes and automatically enhance the photos. (That is, unless you feel weird about this and turn it off.) For a little pizazz, a new feature called “Auto Awesome” takes a string of shots snapped in a sequence and automatically creates a short video with them—Google’s version of the GIF.

Also, Google+ got a redesign, so it’s prettier. Thank god.

REVAMPED MAPS

Google Maps for desktop got a total overhaul. The new user interface brings the full Google brain to the map experience; the goal is creating a personalized map for every user. Again the company is playing with anticipation and discovery here. When you search for places, it also makes recommendations based on Zagat reviews, what your Google+ contacts like, other places you’ve been. The map’s behavior morphs as you use it, remembering what you like, where you live and work, where you recently went. Creeped out yet?

It integrates info about flights, public transit, live incident reports, re-routes for traffic, and offers 360-degree tours inside local businesses. Google Earth and Street View are built in (no plug in or download needed) so you can transition to the third dimension instantly while you navigate. Google Earth zooms all the way out to space, where you can see Earth with real-time clouds. Real-time clouds, people!

Sign up to try it out here.

MUSIC

I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed by Google’s unfortunately named subscription music service--Google Play Music All Access--especially since I’m not the target audience, which is clearly Android users; the product was introduced by Chris Yerga, Android's engineering director. But now I must admit I found myself up until 2 a.m. playing around with it.

Google Play does what Spotify, Rdio and Pandora do, but nothing new—except, once again, it embraces Google’s ability to read your mind. You pull in your music library—automatically from your Google Play music locker, for anyone that actually has one—and it mixes with Google’s library of “millions” of songs. (They didn’t specify; Spotify has some 20 million.) Then based on what you own, have played recently, thumbed up and thumbed down, it will—yet again—make recommendations. And here’s a funny thing: There are curated playlists from Google's "music experts,” like introductions to emo (I know) or top tracks in down-tempo electro-pop.

I’m guessing that, for people not already living within the Google ecosystem, it’ll be a hard sell to steal users away from Spotify or Rdio, particularly since there’s no “freemium” option ($9.99/month or $7.99 for early adopters), though the 30-day free trial will help. Time will tell.

My best wager? If there's a second thing Day 1 of I/O made clear it's that the ecosystem Google is building is going get harder to resist.

Image via Youtube.

If you’re a horrible hell-demon who is summoned when someone reads an ancient parchment aloud, it must be devastating to see your grimoire become old, fragile and illegible. That’s the end of your haunting career, isn’t it? Maybe not anymore!

Developers at Cardiff University and Queen Mary, University of London, have developed a technique they call “microtomography,” that can read the text of rolled scrolls or folded documents without the potential for distress that opening them allows.

“The conservation community is rightly very protective of old documents and isn’t prepared to risk damaging them by opening them,” Tim Wess, professor at Cardiff University said. “Our breakthrough means they won’t have to. Across the world, literally thousands of previously unusable documents up to around a thousand years old could now become available for historical research. It really will be possible to read the unreadable.”

Parchment scrolls are especially susceptible to drying, cracking when they’re unrolled, as they’re literally made of skin. Being able to read a document without having to flatten it out opens documents to research that was heretofore impossible.

Microtomography works by taking an X-Ray of the document. The standard ink on medieval parchments was iron gall ink, made from tannins and iron, and it shows up on well in the series of “X-ray slices” taken by a tomography scanner that the researchers used at the Institute of Dentistry at Queen Mary, University of London, presumably because it was in England and therefore always available.  

And while tomography isn’t exactly new—CT and CAT scans operate via this principle—its combination with the software produces extremely legible and detailed page, which excites the developers. “What makes the technique stand out from other methods is the unprecedented high-contrast resolution it provides to clearly distinguish between text and parchment, meaning the text is much clearer and much more readable,” the audio slideshow voice over explains.

As a test case, the developers successfully scanned a medieval legal scroll provided by the Norfolk Record Office, but they also claim the technique has potential outside of discovering long lost, 12th century lamb recipes  and the like. “High-contrast microtomography has the potential to help opthamologists investigate problems relating to glaucoma,” the video says.



The developers next goal is making it faster and maybe even portable. My only request is that they read what they find silently to themselves at least once before saying it aloud and ruining a perfectly nice weekend in the woods.

 
 

via Flickr

By now you've maybe heard about one Ryan Fogle, an American detained recently by the Russian Federal Security Service. The FSB claims Fogle is a spy. The giveaway? All the goofball shit Fogle had on his person. To wit: two fluffy, Austin Powers-y wigs (blonde and black), sunglasses, piles of cash, a map of Moscow, compass, flashlight, an old cellphone, SIM cards, pocket knife, pepper gas canister, keyholder, alkaline batteries, a notebook, RFID shield, and a lighter. 

The things Ryan Fogle carried

And that's all well and good. Often it's archaic gadgets--not today's shiny new gadgets--that are best suited for cruising below the radar, or evade the gaze of CCTV cameras. But it would've been way fucking cooler, if entirely impractical, if Fogle toted around the following items, crowdsourced by Motherboard contributors 568, 771, and 420. 

1. Black turtleneck sweater

via

2. Fake mustache / facial hair

via

3. Eye patch (bonus points for fake 'stache)

via

4. Small-fry drone with mounted imager

via

5. Chutes and Ladders (diversion is crucial)

via

6. 3D-printed gum (in case of panic attack)

via

7. Google glasses

via

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

NASA went out of its way to make sure Wednesday's status update on Kepler, the agency's planet-finding space telescope, wasn't seen as a funeral. But if I'm ever in the hospital and people start talking about me like this, kill me.

If Kepler's not dead, it's certainly a vegetable.

Scientists controlling the spacecraft went to check on it Tuesday and found that one of its four reaction wheels, which let the telescope point at things it wants to see, wasn't responding. NASA went through the same thing last year, and hasn't been able to get that reactor wheel working. It needs at least three to function, and John Grunsfeld, who runs NASA's science mission directorate, said the telescope "is not in a place where I or any other astronaut can go up and rescue it."

The other Kepler scientists aren't ready to take it off life support yet, but it seems like they're ready for the inevitable. In what seemed like a series of eulogies given by people whose careers are in danger of getting sequestered away (NASA is on the verge of canceling its Kepler Science Conference in November), Paul Hertz, astrophysics director at NASA HQ and Bill Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator, reminisced on the good times.

"I'm delighted that the mission gave us four years of excellent data," Borucki said. "On the other hand, I would have been even happier if it had continued for another four years. That would have been the frosting on the cake, but we do have an excellent cake."

He's got a point there: Kepler never gave us the ridiculously gorgeous images we get from Hubble, but it gave us the best evidence--at least if you use your imagination--that we're probably not alone in this big thing we call the universe. 

Artist rendering of Kepler-47, the first solar system discovered with multiple planets orbiting a pair of stars. Photo via.

Kepler's mission in life was to stare out into the night sky, monitoring approximately 150,000 star sequences constantly and looking for faint flickers. Those flickers, astronomers suggested, could be caused by planets passing in front of their stars during orbit. Take a look at the size and spot of the shadow the planets cast, and you've got a reasonable estimate of a planet's size and distance from its star. Find one that's in the "habitable zone"--far enough away so that you wouldn't be melted to death if you're a humanoid alien, but close enough to still have liquid water--then send our greetings to its (maybe) inhabitants when we develop a warp drive.

Kepler scientists were hoping to find a couple "Earth-like" planets--instead, they've found 132 confirmed planets, another 2,740 planet "candidates," and they still have at least two years worth of data to comb through. Scientists have also found "binary systems," a new, pretty common class of solar system with planets that orbit two stars.

Just last month, a Notre Dame astronomer found two planets in a five-planet solar system that are "the closest thing ever found to Earth." They are just 1.41 and 1.61 times the size of Earth, and are roughly as far away from their star as we are.

"Before we flew Kepler, we didn't know that Earth-sized planets in habitable zones were common throughout our galaxy," Hertz said. "We didn't know that virtually every star has planets."

If Kepler goes out like this, and it sounds like it probably will, it didn't have the best of timing. 

Just last week, the House Subcommittee on Space held a hearing called "Exoplanet Discoveries: Have We Found Other Earths?" in which Republicans Lamar Smith and Steven Palazzo heaped praised on Kepler and its discoveries. 

Palazzo said the discovery of planets in the habitable zone "has broad implications not only for the scientific community, but for all mankind." Smith said the "discovery of life outside our solar system would alter our priorities for space exploration and how we view our place in the universe."

Kind of a bummer, then, that Kepler is being put into a fuel-saving "Point Rest State," where it won't be able to do much besides sit there and hope someone can rescue it. The team is still exploring whether Kepler can be used to do some other sort of astronomy, but without being able to point it at a specific spot, that seems unlikely. 

There's still the off chance that NASA gets Kepler's wheel started again. But the wheels are known to have a limited lifetime, and Kepler's mission was only supposed to be three and a half years. When scientists saw the quality of information they were getting back, the mission was extended until at least 2016. Recent indications suggested that the wheel would be breaking soon, and it seems like NASA was trying to squeeze every last bit of data out of it.

"We do not know how much longer it will be able to maintain the very precise pointing required for its exoplanet mission, but we do know that Kepler's legacy is secure," Grunsfeld testified at the Congressional hearing last week. Consider these staggering numbers:

Thanks to the Kepler mission, we now know that when you go outside and look up at the night sky, virtually every star you see has at least one planet around it. Based on the latest Kepler results, scientists estimate that at least 17 percent of all the stars out there have rocky planets orbiting them. Of even greater interest, the results suggest that 15 percent of M stars–the smallest, coolest class of stars, but also by far the most common type of star in the galaxy–have rocky planets in the habitable zone. This number tells us that the nearest potentially habitable planet could be only 15 light-years away.Moreover, if that trend holds for other classes of stars, it would mean that there are approximately 50 billion potentially habitable rocky planets spread throughout our own galaxy.

NASA has the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite launching in 2017 and the James Webb Space Telescope launching in 2018--both missions will attempt to find planets located closer to Earth. Until then, scientists will parse through two more years worth of data, looking for a planet that looks like ours.

"People are saddened; it's definitely not good news for a mission that's been performing so well," Hertz said. "But after we've answered the questions [a mission] was built to answer, as Kepler has done, we move on to additional questions."

If old crippled Kepler's ready to kick the bucket, it's had a hell of a life.

Okay, so it won't be that bad. Yet. Image: Flickr

It already ranks as one of the grimmest measurements ever taken. Climate scientists found that for the first time in approximately three million years, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 400 parts per million. The reason that figure was splashed across the front page of the New York Times—and why top White House advisors find it "truly frightening"—should be well understood by now. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, and the more that accumulates in the atmosphere, the more sunlight it traps—and the more the globe warms. 

We've now added enough CO2 to the atmosphere to change the lives of every human on the planet. This isn't an exaggeration. An increasingly large portion of the CO2 clogging our atmosphere comes from human activity—from our coal-fired power plants, our petroleum burning cars, our factories. Before we had any of those, carbon dioxide accounted for just 280 ppm. That means we've already turned up the dial on the planet's central heating by some 42 percent.

As with most heating units, it will take a little time for the temperatures to catch up with the new setting. But many of those changes are already under way. Life in a world where carbon accounts for 400 ppm is going to be quite different from the old 280 ppm world. The climate is now fundamentally different than it was 40, 30, even 20 years ago. 

When I was born, in the mid-1980s, the amount of CO2 that had accumulated in the atmosphere was just enough to account for 350 ppm—the amount climatologists like NASA's Dr. James Hansen have identified as the threshold between a stable climate and an unpredictable, potentially volatile one. Between the 1800s and then, humans—mostly the United States and Europe—had built enough carbon-belching power plants and factories to add 70 ppm to the atmosphere.

Yet in my short life alone, human activity has pumped enough carbon pollution into our skies to raise the bar a full 50 ppm more. That's a huge change—out of the 120 ppm humans have added in total, nearly half of it has occurred in just under 30 years. That's the rest of the world following suit, building fossil fueled power plants and industrializing; the same way the U.S. did.

And that's enough carbon to transform our climate to the point that it better resembles another geologic era entirely: The Pliocene. That era, which took place from 5.8 to 2.6 million years ago, was the last time there was so much CO2 was blanketing the planet. According to the geological record, the CO2 levels of 360-400 ppm that marked the Pliocene made the world a drastically different place than the one that you and I grew up in.

Here are some characteristics of the 400 ppm world then—and those that are likely to be reprised in coming years:

-Sea levels were, on average, between 50 and 82 feet higher. 

-Temperatures were 2-3˚C higher, or about 4-6 ˚F, than they are today.

-Arctic temperatures were between 10-20 ˚C hotter. 

-Many species of both plants and animals existed several hundred kilometers north of where their nearest relatives exist today.

-Vast swaths of land turned into swamps. 

Image: Liverpool University

This is our 400 ppm world. Hotter, nastier, even less predictable than the one you got comfortable with. This is the world that your kids are going to be growing up in. And some of the irrevocable damage has already been done.

"We've taken one of the largest physical features on earth--the Arctic--and we've broken it; new data shows 80 percent of the ice that was there 40 years ago is gone. So now we'll find out what disappears between here and 450," Bill McKibben, the environmentalist and author of Eaarth: Life on a Strange New Planet, told me in an email.

What seems like pessimism is actually gloomy pragmatism. McKibben knows that if we keep our factories humming, our cars guzzling, and coal plants firing, we'll hit 450 ppm in less time than we hit 400.

"Sadly, we're shooting right past 400 ppm and likely to commit to at least 450 ppm within a matter of years if we don't begin ramping down our greenhouse gas emissions," the preeminent climatologist Michael E. Mann told me.

And if there's one thing that's worse than a 400 ppm world, it's a 450 ppm world.

"If we cross 450 ppm we likely commit to just under 4˚ F warming of the globe relative to preindustrial," Mann continued. "That's a world where the most extreme summers we've ever seen, like last summer, with its record heat and drought, decimated crops, unprecedented wildfires, and devastating Superstorm Sandy, will be the typical summer. And the extreme summers? There is no analog in our past for what that would look like."

That world is just decades, even years away. I won't recite a full list of dangers a world like this holds—the one that includes displaced climate refugees, tensions over diminishing resources, increased reach of tropical diseases, battered coastal populations—but suffice to say that the 400 ppm world and its successors can be ugly places. 

The Arctic is already melted. Sea levels are rapidly rising. We've seen a full 1˚ F of temperature rise since mid-century. Scientists are predicting that climate change is indeed going to devastate plant and animal habitats worldwide, much as it did in the Pliocene. This is the 400 ppm world, and it's upon us. The only question now is if we're going to keep cranking the central heat—are we going to turn this sauna into an inferno? We'd have to embrace a whiplash transition away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy—otherwise we can say hello to planet hotbox.

"Fortunately, there is still time to avoid that future," Mann says. "But not a whole lot of time. Breaching the sobering milestone of 400 ppm simply puts an exclamation mark on that."

Online piracy is so widespread that it's taken for granted as much as it's fought and denounced. A windfall for consumers and a major thorn in the side of the entertainment industry, illegal downloading has become a nice ripe hot-button issue used by politicians to ingratiate themselves with Hollywood. But just how major of a thorn is it really?

Digital piracy is deeply pervasive. It disrupts multibillion-dollar industries, and it's virtually un-studied--a trifecta that affords people on all sides of the debate the luxury of vaguery. You can say piracy costs the entertainment sector billions in lost revenue each month and no one would be in a position to argue.

In fact, a few industry associations have already offered estimates of downloading rates and revenue losses. For example, the Entertainment Software Association claims there were 9.8 million illegal downloads of 200 games in December 2009. But why would anyone trust those figures? Such groups aren't transparent about their methodologies and have every incentive to overestimate the rates and the costs.

This absence of credible data is a prop wielded by both sides of the debate over the causes and effects of digital piracy. A new study out this month is a good first whack aimed to chip away at that absence and give the digital piracy landscape some shape.

A team of researchers at universities in Denmark and Canada conducted what they call the first "large-scale" analysis of video game downloads executed via BitTorrent. During three months from late 2010 to early 2011, the team tracked 173 games of all kinds--racing games, first-person shooters, RPGs and others--across 14 popular platforms, including Xbox 360, Play Station 3, PC, iOS/Mac, Wii, Nintendo DS and PSP.

To gather the data, the researchers built a web crawler that queried BitTorrent for metadata containing server uniform resource identifiers. The data provided IP addresses of the people involved.

In observing the dissemination within the decentralized file-sharing network, researchers found that BitTorrent's downloader "swarm" for those 173 games tallied 12.7 million unique users from 250 countries. As it turns out, there are a ton of download-happy gamers in Eastern Europe--Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, Poland, Serbia and Armenia. There are a bunch more in Greece, Italy, Israel, Portugal and Qatar.

This is definitely not a case of developing countries vs. industrial countries but much more diverse," coauthor Anders Drachen told Wired. In a press release he said that "the numbers in our investigation suggest that previously reported magnitudes in game piracy are too high. It also appears that some common myths are wrong, e.g. that it is only shooters that get pirated, as we see a lot of activity for children's and family games on BitTorrent for the period we investigated."

Not surprisingly, the 10 most popular games were highly ranked on game review websites and accounted for more than 40 percent of the downloading. Each one garnered shares from more than 536,000 unique peers. They were: 

1. Fallout: New Vegas
2. Darksiders
3. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
4. NBA 2k11
5. TRON Evolution
6. Call of Duty: Black Ops
7. Starcraft 2
8. Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2
9. Two Worlds II
10. The Sims: Late Night

But the question of what these numbers mean to the industry is still up in the air. "How the number of unique peers translates into lost sales is a contested issue," the authors say, "and one that future research will investigate."

via NASA

News on the exoplanet front has been pretty excellent as of late. NASA's Kepler space telescope has found 132 confirmed exoplanets and a further 2,740 candidates. But the winning streak was broken over the weekend when Kepler suffered a critical hardware malfunction. The failure is certainly putting a damper on the mission, but it doesn’t mean the mission is over--or that we won’t find more exoplanets from Kepler. It just means the mission might be about to change. 

Kepler doesn’t find exoplanets directly. It doesn’t look at a star, see the telltale dip in light, and declare “planet, ho!” Rather, Kepler looks at starlight, focussing on one specific star to gather data about the light coming from that star. The information is then sent down to Earth where astronomers “read” it, looking specifically for dips in the star’s brightness, a telltale sign that a planet is crossing between the star and Kepler. The regularity of these dips tell astronomers about the planet’s orbit, and the change of light with every dip gives information on its size and possible type. 

Artwork of the Kepler spacecaft showing it's field of view (via)

The hard part for Kepler is staying still enough to capture subtle changes in a star’s light across incredibly large distances--we’re talking lightyears here. If the telescope moves at all, a subtle dip will be lost. To stay steady, Kepler relies on four reaction wheels driven by electric motors powered by the spacecraft’s own power supply.  The wheels spin, imparting a physical change on the spacecraft’s orientation (what's know as "attitude") based on the principle of angular momentum transfer and Newton’s Third Law, which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The computer knows just where to point Kepler and the wheels spin to get it in the right orientation. And it needs three of these reaction wheels for a pinpoint orientation. Just like pilots use three axes to orient themselves in flight--pitch (nose up and down), yaw (turning left and right), and roll (tilting wings) axes--so does Kepler. 

Reaction wheels are common. Mars orbiters use them. The Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting the Saturnian system uses them. And NASA knows they fail. That’s why Kepler launched with four. If one failed, there was a backup. And one did fail. Last July, wheel No. 2 went offline. But the spare was brought online and Kepler's stargazing business proceeded as usual.

What Kepler data--exoplanet Kepler 5-b, specifically--looks like (via)

And here’s where the problem is. Now wheel No. 4 is stuck leaving Kepler with only two axis for orientation. That's not enough to lock on to a target. 

The trouble started on Sunday. Kepler’s computer brain noticed it was drifting from its programmed position and immediately went into safe mode. When the Kepler team did their regularly scheduled check-in with the telescope on Tuesday they noticed the problem immediately. They soon realized one of the remaining wheels was stuck. At the moment, the team suspects the culprit is "a structural failure of the wheel bearing."

But the mission isn’t over. Aside from the stuck wheel, the spacecraft is stable and healthy, which means engineers can keep it in safe mode while they work the problem and figure out what the hell to do next. They need to run a series of tests to find out what’s good on the spacecraft and what else, if anything, might be malfunctioning as a result of the stuck wheel. They’re planning to try and unstick the wheel by running it backwards and then back and forth, like a car rocking out of a snowbank. They might try bringing wheel No. 2 back online; it’s a long shot but there’s a chance, somehow, that when they turn it back on after eight months' rest it will spring back to life. 

The team needs to see exactly what they’re working with before writing off the mission entirely. Once’s they’ve taken stock of the situation, they’ll start considering their options. If it looks like the wheel is damaged beyond repair and Kepler indeed won’t be able to lock on to one point in the sky for detailed images ever again, they might find a secondary use for the telescope. If everything else is working, it would be in NASA’s best interest to use all the systems they can while they can. But the team can’t even speculate on what those other applications might be before running the necessary tests. 

An artist's concept of potential habitable exoplanets as of July 2012 (via)

And unfortunately sending a crew to replace the wheel isn’t an option. Even if we still had the space shuttles up and running, Kepler orbits about 40 million miles away from the Earth; the International Space Station, the shuttle’s main target in its life, is only 200 miles away.  

In the meantime, while engineers figure out how to move forward with Kepler, the hunt for exoplanets is still on. There’s a backlog of data downloaded from Kepler, terabytes of data, that the team is confident will keep them and interested citizen scientists busy for at least a decade. 

As we wait for news on Kepler fate, it’s worth remembering that Kepler’s been working on borrowed time since its three-and-a-half year mission ended in November. And the mission will never be for naught. Not only has the telescope changed the way we look at the Universe--before it launched on March 7, 2009, we didn’t know there were planets around other stars in the sky. The lessons we've learned from mission will help scientists design better missions in the future. TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope, and future exoplanet hunters will be better designed to hone in on the right kind of exoplanets. 

And the team remains not only optimistic but thrilled at the mission as it’s happened so far. Kepler was born decades ago as an idea few thought would work and now it’s a worldwide favorite. No matter what happens now, Kepler will always be a success.   

To put it in pirate terms, prosecutors want the Swedish court of appeals to give a black spot to the domain registrar for aiding the scallywags of Pirate Bay. But ye olde registrar, .SE, feels like it only be granting passage to the Pirate Bay, and took to the Internet to say, “Avast! Don’t make us dance the hempen jig for that!”

Just as The Pirate Bay feared a month ago, when the site unsuccessfully tried emigrate from its native Swedish domain name (.se) to one in Greenland (.gl), the prosecutors are trying to cut off the file-sharing torrent site at its domain name.

To cut off those using The Pirate Bay for free music and movies, the prosecutors went to the District Court and the domain registrar to forfeit control of the domain names “piratebay.se” and “thepiratebay.se.” The domain registrar calls itself the Internet Infrastructure Foundation, but it goes by .SE for short, and it is Sweden’s largest. Danny Aerts, .SE’s CEO, explained that .SE doesn’t really see what it has to do with this.

“So, what have we done?” Aerts wrote. “[W]e administer nearly 1.3 million .se domain names. We provide a search and cataloging function, and assist in the translation from domain names to the actual address on the Internet – the IP address.”

The prosecution has decided to implicate .SE for doing exactly that. “They have been used as a means to commit crime," prosecutor Fredrik Inglad said, according to Reuters. "There is a significant criminal copyright infringement which causes a great deal of damage to many."

Through a somewhat idiosyncratically translated post on .SE’s own website, Aerts said that .SE “would naturally respond to the prosecutor’s perspective.” However, .SE’s position is that by going after The Pirate Bay’s domain name—and by extension .SE—no resolution will be reached. The Pirate Bay will live on, if not at piratebay.se, then somewhere else.

If history is any indication, he’s definitely right. Pirate Bay already transitioned from a “.org” domain in February 2012, to distance itself further from grasping American laws, and just got an Icelandic domain (.is). In fact, the prosecutors are already one step behind, because at this point the .se domain only redirects you to Pirate Bay’s newest home, piratebay.sx, registered appropriately enough, in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten.

“Removing domain names from the address sphere is like removing the sign for a store in the city,” said Aert. “It will be harder for customers to locate the store, but the store nevertheless remains in place and customers who manage to get there can still shop there.”

Taking down the .se sites at this point only be a gesture, and it would be the mildest inconvenience, which is a price habitual torrent downloaders have proven they’re willing to pay.

In .SE’s own estimation, they’re not any more culpable for piracy at the Bay than Google is for helping you find the domain, and no one’s going after Google. “This is also my point,” said Aert, “where should the line be drawn for legal processes and matters of liability?”

The prosecution, chasing a website that claims it isn’t responsible for what peers share with other peers, actually probably wants an answer to that same question. Setting aside questions about what the act says about how the Internet will be legislated, clamping down on domain names is just treating a symptom and delaying a conversation that is probably overdue. 

Yup. That's the frothy shit that rose to the top. Image via

You know that awful moment you need to use a bathroom at a city park? You walk into that shady anti-oasis, turn its Fisher-Price-style-lock and try to avoid a few things: a) Breathing through your nose b) touching anything, or c) peering through that ring into the "bucket" of magenta soup and other people's darkest moments shit. Of course, it's not going to kill you, but it seems like it might.

According to a presentation by agricultural researchers at the University of Minnesota, there's quicker, tangible ways for shit to kill us. Layers of noxious foam–up to four feet thick–collect atop vats of manure at hog farms. Working as an airseal, the foam can capture large amounts of flammable methane beneath its bubbly surface. A stray spark from a welder, a mechanical heat element, or a worker's cigarette can create flash-fires and incredible blasts, capable of mass destruction.

While reports in the past have labeled farm explosions as "mysterious," awaiting evidence to link them to the shit bubbles, U of M's research offers some best practices for dealing with the fast-growing foam. Ventilation is key, and agitation of the stew is helpful. There is also talk of using monesin, an antibiotic generally given to cattle to help them grow faster, to treat the pits of dispair. Twenty-five pounds of monesin is effective in preventing half million-gallon tanks from foaming.

As research from schools in the Midwest continue to explore other treatment and management procedures, a worry lingers, like stink above a hog farm in July: That the explosive manure foam could become just another widely-acknowledged-yet-dismissed hazard of negligence and cost cutting, hissing in the background of the American food industry. But perhaps mass-scale loss of the Other White Meat will have farms and regulating agencies adopting a way to cut the shit, and remove these sudden-death suds.

@DanStuckey

ABC's Austin newsroom, via Trey Ratcliff/Flickr

In an attempt to cater to the changing habits of TV viewers, ABC will now live stream its programming on mobile devices. The Watch ABC app is now available in New York and Philadelphia, with expansions planned for coming months, and offers national, local and some on-demand channels, The New York Times reported yesterday.

In reality, ABC’s move is less about adapting to the future of television than it is about trying to prevent it, by stopping viewers from cord cutting—severing ties with oppressive and expensive cable packages (which of course include the broadcast networks)—which is becoming more popular in a world with Netflix, Hulu, and premium YouTube. After a free trial period through June, the live stream will only be available to dish or cable subscribers. 

But let me back up. The idea that traditional, linear TV is dead and dying comes as no great shock. We expect—we demand—to watch shows anytime, anywhere, and on any device. And free, or at least really cheap. Streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon dangled this possibility in front of us, and now hope to lure people away from the cable bundle. And they’re doing a pretty good job; House of Cards helped Netflix soar to 30 million subscribers this year.

The cable companies fired back by giving viewers a little more of what we want with the “TV everywhere” approach—think HBO Go, or the ability to watch network shows online after they've aired. (To its credit, ABC was ahead of the other networks on this front, too.)

But when it comes down to the numbers, viewers are pretty damn hooked on old-school, live television, watching nearly 35 hours of TV a week, according to Nielsen. This is why Aereo is so interesting as a cable alternative. It still offers live programming from some 30 broadcast channels, via the internet and on mobile, at just $8-12 per month. That's quite a drop from, say, Time Warner Cable’s soul-crushing $60 per month package.

Personally, I couldn't be less excited about live streaming ABC shows. The shows are already available to watch on Hulu or ABC.com, and they aren’t even any good. Not being a huge sports fan, little is lost if I watch a program an hour or even a week after it first aired at my convenience.

If you ask me, the company that will conquer the future of the industry and collect its multi-billion-dollar prize will be the one that finally cracks a la carte. The biggest problem with TV today isn’t that we want to watch it on our smartphone, it’s that we’re force-fed cable packages with hundreds of channels we don’t want to watch at all.

This would totally disrupt the powerful cable model, which is largely why it hasn't gained momentum yet despite obvious consumer demand. (Remember the Take My Money, HBO campaign?) But the media giants are inching closer. Apple TV and Google’s YouTube are slowly making their way toward the a la carte model.

The trick could be simple consolidation. If you cobble together all the streaming options available now—a few key YouTube channels, Aereo for network TV, ABC’s live app, a Netflix account—you can probably get almost all the TV you want for still way less money than a cable package. But who has the time? (Has anyone tried?) Someone needs to step in and make it convenient, user-friendly and slick.

In the meantime, ABC's decision to live stream its programs on mobile won’t revolutionize the TV industry, but it is likely it’ll keep the 70-year-old television network in the game a bit longer.

Photo via

With deference to Paul Simon, these are the days of lasers in the jungles, lasers in the jungle, somewhere. Using absurdly futuristic-sounding laser technology, researchers have discovered what looks to be an ancient lost city in the Honduran jungle, possibly untouched by humans for thousands of years.

Flying high above the malaria, coral snakes and dense vegetation, which prohibit venturing into the jungles of the La Mosquitia region of Eastern Honduras on foot, American researchers created three-dimensional maps of the forest floor using “light detection and imaging," a type of optical radar called LiDAR.

LiDAR works by shooting 125,000 laser pulses per second at the ground and measuring the speed at which they bounce back. The technology is so sensitive that it can pick up changes in height smaller than four inches. And while outfitting an airplane with LiDAR can cost $1.5 million, it holds the potential to replace costly, blind and groping expeditions into the jungle.

That’s what Steve Elkins, an independent filmmaker and amateur archeologist, had planned on doing in Honduras before his expedition was washed out by Hurricane Mitch. Elkins had dreamed of searching for the legendary, lost Ciudad Blanca, the White City, for 20 years.

People have searched for the Ciudad Blanca and its legendary gold, dating back to Hernán Cortés. One form of the legend—and there are legendary lost cities spanning mythologies of Mesoamerica—says the indiginous Pech people of Honduras lived in the Ciudad Blanca until they mistreated a Tawaka Indian man, who cursed the place while leaving. The curse led to disease and catastrophes and the Pechs had to clear out, reliquishing the city to the forest and legend.

A scientist at NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory pointed out unusual features of this valley in La Mosquitia that might be hiding a city about 15 years ago. The valley was too remote for anyone to follow up on this lead until Elkins convinced the new National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping to give it a LiDAR scan.

Researchers from the NCALM flew Cessna airplanes outfitted with LiDAR above a 60 square mile area of jungle over several days in 2012. “99 percent of what's reflected comes off leaves,” Douglas Preston, who covered the expedition for The New Yorker, told NPR. “But here and there, there are tiny gaps in the canopy where a laser beam can reach the ground, bounce off and go back up to the plane. And then with massive software processing, they're able to remove all the reflections from leaves, leaving only the ground.”

The data was collected and sent to the University of Houston engineer Bill Carter, in West Virginia, to be analyzed. Within five minutes of looking at the data, Carter saw right angles and straight lines, telltale signs of human habitation. “He was thunderstruck,” Preston said. Carter “saw in this valley pyramids, structures, buildings, plazas, terracing, roads. He saw this incredible amount of archaeological features that he recognized immediately even though he's not an archaeologist.”

Photo via the University of Houston

The network of plazas and pyramids spans three sites, the largest of which, T3, is a massive five square kilometers. The lead archeologists on the project, Christopher Fisher and Stephen Leisz of Colorado State University, told The Independent that the hidden city “was probably home to a sophisticated Mesoamerican society, with paved streets, parks, pyramids and an advanced irrigation system.”

To discourage looting or to keep ahead of would-be Indiana Joneses, researchers remain tight-lipped about where the site is exactly. After being untouched for a dozen centuries or so, scientists are eager to get to the sites before the loggers and looters do. Preston’s New Yorker piece notes that scientist might not reach the sites before the people who are illegally logging massive mahogany trees in La Mosquitia do. So they are planning to helicopter into the site in early 2014, although Elkins mentioned returning in the fall.

While Peru has transformed re-discovered lost cities (found cities?) into tourist attractions, the inhospitable La Mosquitia jungle surrounding the sites makes casts doubt on future vacations to the White City—if that’s even what this is.

Image: EFF, CC

Remember SOPA? Remember how when we the people finally defeated SOPA everyone got so stoked that confetti poured out of their eyeballs and its opponents downloaded films and albums and pirated video games in celebration? Well, shortly after SOPA there was CISPA—the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act—a bill that is both scarier than Zombies and much less well known than SOPA .

On April 18, three days after the Boston Marathon bombing, CISPA passed in the House of Representatives. Obama’s White House has expressed “fundamental concerns” about CISPA. They are justifiably a bit turned off by how CISPA doesn’t specify precisely how it intends to spy on the internet—and when it is ok to spy on internet users—and that is a terrifying prospect.

As a Canadian, these American “fuck up the internet” bills have always been disconcerting. While Canadian sovereignty would ideally save anyone who lives in this country and errs on the wrong side of a SOPA or a CISPA—with so much internet traffic filtering through American-owned web servers—it is not out of the question that American jurisdiction could be called against an international cyber-offender. The state of Virginia, for example, claimed jurisdiction against the Hong Kong-owned Megaupload who was hosting their website in that state.

But now it appears that it’s going to be even easier for international copyright offenders to be tried in court by the interests–and lobbying power–of Hollywood. Starting today, 11 countries—Canada, America, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, Brunei, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand—are having a secret (no members of the public and no press) meeting in Lima, Peru to figure out what can be done about copyright offenders who transmit Hollywood’s precious content over the interweb’s tubes without paying for it.

The meeting is held under the banner of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement. They’re looking to sign an international treaty that will create world government-esque laws to handle anyone who downloads an early leak of Iron Man 3 illegally.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling this the “biggest global threat to the internet since ACTA.” If you remember, ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an international, internet-policing treaty that was shut down by the European Parliament with a 92 percent nay vote. Luckily for Europeans, no EU country is anywhere near the TPP negotiations in Peru right now—and European politicians are now quick to distance themselves from the policies that ACTA is trying to ram down the world's throat.

But in North America, the ACTA movement is still very much alive. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government passed a bill in March that makes Canada more ACTA-friendly by allowing customs officers to destroy counterfeit goods and ratcheting up the criminal penalties against copyright offenders. And the United States has seized hip-hop blog domains without warning or trial, because they were alleged to host pirated material.

A leaked chapter outlining some preliminary discussion to re-examine intellectual property has revealed that TPP wants to add further checks and balances to restrict fair use. Those behind TPP want to make sure that if a teacher is trying to show some copyrighted material in their class for the purpose of education, or if a humorist using copyrighted material in an article for the purpose of satire, they’re doing so under what TPP calls a “good faith activity.”

The language in this leaked TPP chapter is incredibly dense and dates back to February 2011—so not only is it a confusing bit of writing, but it will also likely be revised over and over during this meeting in Peru. As it stands, the EFF is worried that “the United States is trying to export the worst parts of its intellectual property law without bringing any of the [fair use] protections.” And just like SOPA or CISPA, many people are concerned that the broad language in new legal terms like “good faith activity” will potentially lead to unjust prosecutions.

It may take a while before the results of this TPP meeting in Peru filter out to the press, but it’s crystal clear that even though SOPA died, the Hollywood lobby is more than willing to generate new legislation and international partnerships to protect its interests. SOPA, for a combination of reasons, incited the ire of the public. We saw SOPA blackouts where websites like Reddit and Wikipedia went offline for a day, celebrities spoke out against it on Twitter; there was a bona fide cultural movement.

But now, the language behind international efforts like ACTA or TPP is getting more and more obscure, the reporting on such efforts less and less frequent, and the meetings being held to define these treaties are being held behind closed doors. The wheels of government are moving quickly to restrict international copyright online as much as possible—with the lobby of Hollywood thrusting it forward—in order to preserve the profits of content gatekeepers like the RIAA and MPAA.

Everyone, including you and me, is using Facebook and Twitter more and more at work. In many cases, we expect that we should be able to. But we often forget that, in doing so, we're opening up our social media to the prying eyes of our employers.

Chances are one of the first things you do upon arrival at the office is check up on at least one of your social media platforms. It’s probably not in your job description, but it’s part of your morning ritual and it's a way to stay plugged in to (ir)relevant news.

But for many, using social media is not just a routine. People increasingly feel entitled to be able to stay connected. It's not a bad thing; social media has become so important to our lives that a lot people consider Instagram a workplace right. If your boss all the sudden announced a new policy banning personal email or social media at work, you might feel a little oppressed, and you’re not alone.

The reality is that employees spend a lot of time on social media sites during work hours. A recent study shows that a third of employees spend an hour or more a day at work on social media sites. A full quarter of the study’s subjects, which included 1,000 employees in the United States and Canada, indicated that they would not work for a company that did not allow them to use social media at work.

The results of the study performed by Intelligent Office seem to suggest that employees are beginning to see social media use as a right, rather than a luxury or business tool. But think about this: whenever your eyes are locked onto your Facebook account at work, your boss’s may be too.

Every email you send at work (including private ones) that goes through the company’s server is accessible to your employer.

We often forget that when we are at work the door is open for our employers to scrutinize our activity. Your employer can (and probably is) monitoring your work computer. In the office, unlike at home, you should have a devastatingly low expectation of privacy, and you can be certain that you have essentially no privacy rights to social media communications from work computers.

In this new study, just one third of employees admitted to using social networks for an hour or more per day, but in actuality, just about everyone in an office is probably checking some personal network or email at some point. Even way back in 2009 studies showed that 77 percent of Facebook users used the site at work. And “one hour a day” is likely a veiled way of saying “almost my entire work day,” because I know plenty of friends who are wasting spending two or more hours a day just on Gchat.

With everyone going hog-wild with social media on the clock, they fail to remember that if you do it from your work computer, you are waiving certain privacy rights with respect to that online activity. Your boss has access to every click. They can use keystroke trackers and your monitor your internet history. They can look at downloads, stored files, and internet messaging and chats. And while the specific laws will vary state to state, it should be apparent that you should have no expectation of privacy on your work computer. It goes all the way to the top: an employer isn’t barred by the 4th Amendment, which only stops the government from unlawful searches. (Occasionally.)

Every email you send at work (including private ones) that goes through the company’s server is accessible to your employer. The same principle applies to messages within social media platforms. Even under federal law, an employer can listen to your phone calls until they figure out that it is personal in nature. Likewise, all your text messages from your work phone are just as searchable, because as the Supreme Court held in Ontario v. Quon, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy on your work phone.

Depending how you use it, social media is either a valuable business tool or a steamy dump of mindless blather. In either case, we feel entitled to be able to login and post while at work; for many of us, it’s the only way we can make it through an eight hour day. Whether we use it to be productive, or out of boredom, laziness, or pure insubordination, we have forgotten that working hours aren’t personal or private. Every time you log in at work, it’s like letting your boss log in as well.

In the end, you’ll have to choose which right is more important: privacy or social media. Since employers want to limit their liabilities (e.g. harassment suits, disclosure of trade secrets, theft of company time), it has historically been rare to find an employer who actively allows employees to use social networks on their own computers.

But with companies seeking new ways to remain relevant and productive, they may ask employees to pursue leads and sales through social media platforms. Just remember that logging in at work, even at the boss’s behest, may waive your right to privacy.

Top image via pursuethepassion/Flickr

via Flickr

The world's oldest water has the properties necessary to support life, a development that scientists think bodes well for the possibility of life on Mars and in other extreme environments.

Found seeping out of a borehole from an Ontario mine about a mile and a half below ground, the water is believed to have been isolated for at least 1.5 billion years, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature. 

Researchers found "abundant chemicals known to support life," such as hydrogen, methane, and isotopes of helium, neon, and argon in the water. The water is still being studied by researchers at Toronto University to see if there is any evidence of life or remnants of life.

The study is the latest to look for life in the unlikeliest of places--and more often than not, microbes seem to find a way to get their, umm, living on. 

Last year, an American team found all sorts of bacteria in Antarctica's Lake Vida, which is covered in more than 30 feet of ice, reaches temperatures of just 8.6 degrees Fahrenheit and is six times saltier than sea water. Life has also been found in deep sea hydrothermal vents, in storm clouds and in the Trinidad and Tobago's hydrocarbon Pitch Lake (which mimics conditions seen on Saturn's moon Titan). Meanwhile, Russian scientists studying samples from Antarctica's Lake Vostok--which remained untouched for 15 million years beneath 2.5 miles of ice--are still trying to get their shit together as they decide whether their samples are contaminated or not.   

The water discovered by researchers working on this latest study is believed to be the oldest isolated water ever discovered on Earth. Previously, super-old water incapable of supporting life had been discovered in bubbles formed in rock samples. 

"We've found an interconnected fluid system in the deep Canadian crystalline basement that is billions of years old, and capable of supporting life," Chris Ballentine, a professor at the University of Manchester and a coauthor of the study, said. He added that the finding is "central to the whole question of the origin of life, the sustainability of life, and life in extreme environments and on other planets."

The Canadian water is believed to have originated from the Precambrian Period, which dates from the birth of the world until the first complex organisms started developing about 541 million years ago. At the time, the only life Earth supported is believed to be microbial, so if the water supports any life, it'll almost definitely be bacterial. They'd also probably have noticed anything visible to the naked eye by now. 

Ballentine says that the water's makeup is similar to water found in a similar system in South Africa that supports life. Of course, the finding has researchers excited for what might one day be found on Mars and on other planets, if we ever decide to you know, actually go there. 

"What we can be sure of is that we have identified a way in which planets can create and preserve an environment friendly to microbial life for billions of years," Greg Holland, lead author of the study, said. "This is regardless of how inhospitable the surface might be, opening up the possibility of similar environments in the subsurface of Mars."

Start drilling, Curiosity Rover.

Photo: Blind Nomad/Flickr

Hunger is a well-known side effect smoking marijuana, and all those burritos, ice cream, and Bagel Bites have to take a toll on your waistline, right? Well, according to new research published in the The American Journal of Medicine, cannabis enthusiasts may very well be overweight, but weed isn't to blame.

Researchers found that people who regularly smoke marijuana actually have lower levels of fasting insulin and are less likely to be insulin resistant. What's more, the study found that current marijuana smokers are likely to have smaller waist circumferences than non-smokers. All of these are factors in diabetes risk, with pot smoking lowering that risk. 

Looking at data from over 4,600 patients—roughly 45 percent of which had never smoked or ingested pot, 43 percent had smoked pot in the past but didn't currently, and 12 percent were regular smokers—the study found that those people who had smoked in the past month had 16 percent lower fasting insulin levels than people who had never smoked pot. They also had lower levels of HOMA-IR (insulin resistance), along with higher levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol ("good" cholesterol). 

As for the part about smaller waists, this research found similar results to previous research that has found that even though regular marijuana users have, on average, higher levels of caloric intake—yes, if you didn't already know, the stereotype is backed up with research—there is an association with smoking pot and lower body mass index. 

The researchers note that all the data on frequency of marijuana use is self-reported, which may mean that people underestimate their use of pot or deny using it at all, but underestimation would tend to skew the results toward a lower association between more pot use and lower fasting insulin levels. 

Study co-author Elizabeth Penner comments,

It is possible that the inverse association in fasting insulin levels and insulin resistance seen among current marijuana users could be in part due to changes in usage patterns among those with a diagnosis of diabetes. However, after we excluded those subjects with a diagnosis of diabetes, the associations between marijuana use and insulin levels, HOMA-IR, waist circumference, and HDL-C were similar and remained statistically significant.

In other recent pot-isn't-nearly-as-bad-for-you-as-you-were-told news, The Oncology Report writes that a new survey of pot smokers in the US, Canada, UK, and New Zealand shows that regular marijuana smokers "are no more likely to develop lung cancer than are more likely to develop lung cancer than are people who indulge occasionally." 

Furthermore, 

In an analysis of marijuana smokers that excluded tobacco smokers, there were no significant differences in any of the comparisons, including habitual versus non-habitual use; number of joints smoked per day; duration of up to 20 years or a duration of more than 20 years.

That said, one of the report's authors, Dr Michael Alberts, reminds us that smoking anything isn't particularly good for the respiratory system. And before you start to argue that smoking weed is a viable diet plan, be forewarned that a combination of a good diet and regular exercise is probably a better idea.