spriteleigh

Riccardo sez, "Snake is an end-to-end encrypted social network running in a browser (standard Web page or plugin) or as a mobile application. We already have a prototype but we are launching a crowdfunding campaign to make it real, and we need your help! Our aim is to make it easy for *everyone* to have one-to-one and many-to-many secure communications, using an interface similar to classic social networks such as Facebook."

This is not only an UI problem, but also more structural: we started from something similar to PGP but improved its scalability in group communication, usability and privacy. For instance, we worked on a way to authenticate public keys without requiring to meet the other end in person (through the Socialist Millionaires' Protocol, a method similar to the one OTR uses) and without disclosing relationships to the public, as happens with PGP's Web of Trust.

Moreover, our implementation of the storage server provides anonymity of data: this means that in case of seizure not only the contents of the messages is protected, but also the metadata and it's therefore impossible to understand who is the sender of a message or whether two users are friends or not.

We chose the state of the art cryptographic primitives in each area: for encryption we use AES in GCM mode, for digital signatures we use ECDSA over secp256r1 and for the key agreement we use FHMQV-C. If you want to know more, take a look at the "Features" page and at the FAQ.

Snake: the privacy-aware social network

The American Dialect Society's 2013 Words of the Year (PDF) (voted on earlier this week -- "because" won, because Internet) had some fascinating entries.

I liked "Most Productive" (such as "-(el)fie: (from selfie) type of self-portrait (drelfie ‘drunk selfie,’ twofie ‘selfie with two people’)" and "Most Euphemistic" (" least untruthful: involving the smallest necessary lie (used by intelligence director James Clapper)").

MOST EUPHEMISTIC
demised: laid off from employment (used by the bank HSBC)
least untruthful: involving the smallest necessary lie (used by intelligence director James Clapper)
slimdown: reinterpretation of “shutdown” used on Fox News site

“MOST PRODUCTIVE (new category)
-coin: (from bitcoin) type of cryptocurrency (peercoin, namecoin, dogecoin)
-(el)fie: (from selfie) type of self-portrait (drelfie ‘drunk selfie,’ twofie ‘selfie with two people’)
-shaming: (from slut-shaming) type of public humiliation (fat-shaming, pet-shaming)
-splaining: (from mansplaining) type of condescending explanation (whitesplaining, journosplaining)
-spo: (from thinspo) type of photo or video montage intended to inspire viewers to lose weight or stay fit (fitspo, sportspo)

American Dialect Society 2013 Words of the Year (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: IMG_0438, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from medilldc's photostream)

Anjin Anhut's concise explanation of why gender representation sucks in games and geeky movies (see this and especially this) sounds solid -- if depressingly entrenched -- to me. Anhut's thesis is that entrenched sexism created a situation in which marketing was tilted towards men, and then market research showed that men were the majority consumers of geek culture (surprise, surprise), which led to an even greater male bias in marketing, and more research showing that men were the major customers for games and geeky movies -- lather, rinse, repeat. It's a disheartening tale of how gender bias emerges naturally out of a series of "rational" commercial decisions that reinforce their own flawed logic at each turn.

The thing is, that sales data shows how women responded to geek related marketing, but not why. Excluding and exploiting women, so you can sell more stuff to men, while it might be financially sensible, is a social outrage. This systemic grand scale reinforcement of gender segregation and sexism would only be justifiable, if there would be something inherent to women, that makes them like geek media less than men do. …if there would be some truth to the sexist ideas, which are perpetuated here.

There never was a moment in the history of geek media, when geek media was advertised equally to men and women and there never was a moment in the history of geek media, when it was equally culturally acceptable to be interested in geek stuff for men and women.

Women never ever got as much marketing attention as men have and women always have been treated as an oddity in geek culture, with all the barriers that come with that. There never was a time, when toy cars and robots and construction toys have been made equally accessible to little boys and girls. The same goes for safe spaces and tech education.

Why Marketers Fear The Female Geek (Thanks, Alice!)

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A fairly recent subreddit, /r/gifsound, is dedicated to putting an appropriate soundtrack onto popular gifs. Here's a compilation of their best creations from the past year. The YouTube page has a list of the posts they are taken from. You can go back through each to find the original video or gif if you are that curious. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

Back in 2012, when Canada's Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized first. But only an insignificant fraction of the archives got scanned, and much of it was simply sent to landfill or burned.

Unsurprisingly, given the Canadian Conservatives' war on the environment, the worst-faring archives were those that related to climate research. The legendary environmental research resources of the St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick are gone. The Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John's, Newfoundland: gone. Both collections were world-class.

An irreplaceable, 50-volume collection of logs from HMS Challenger's 19th century expedition went to the landfill, taking with them the crucial observations of marine life, fish stocks and fisheries of the age. Update: a copy of these logs survives overseas.

The destruction of these publicly owned collections was undertaken in haste. No records were kept of what was thrown away, what was sold, and what was simply lost. Some of the books were burned.

Hutchings saw the library closures fitting a larger pattern of "fear and insecurity" within the Harper government, "about how to deal with science and knowledge."

That pattern includes the gutting of the Fisheries Act, the muzzling of scientists, the abandonment of climate change research and the dismantling of countless research programs, including the world famous Experimental Lakes Area. All these examples indicate that the Harper government strongly regards environmental science as a threat to unfettered resource exploitation.

"There is a group of people who don't know how to deal with science and evidence. They see it as a problem and the best way to deal with it is to cut it off at the knees and make it ineffective," explained Hutchings.

"The other worrying thing is that no one seems to care a great deal about it. There is minimal political cost for doing these things just as there is no political cost to making bad decisions about ocean management."

Many scientists, including Hutchings and world famous water ecologist David Schindler, compared the government's concerted attacks on environmental science to the rise of fascism and the total alignment of state and corporate interests in 1930s Europe.

"You look at the rise of certain political parties in the 1930s," noted Hutchings, "and have to ask how could that happen and how did they adopt such extreme ideologies so quickly, and how could that happen in a democracy today?"

What's Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada's Science Libraries? [Andrew Nikiforuk/The Tyee]

(Image: Book burning, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ender's photostream)

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Have you been losing sleep at night wondering where all those big name celebrities got their start? Are you going crazy trying to figure out the first televised appearance of Leonardo DiCaprio, Aaron Paul or Tina Fey?

Well, prepare to sleep easy my friend, because the crazed videophiles at Screen Junkies have put together one heck of a supercut that shows totally famous people before they were totally famous.

Before They Were Famous #2 is guaranteed to change your life, because you’ll get to see how uncool the rich and famous are before they become rich and famous...and cool. Everybody's got to start somewhere, why not start out selling some fried chicken or some Corn Pops?

Via Uproxx

Catriona tumbled these enraging statistics about gender and representation in games and films for 2013:

Women make up 45% of the gaming community and 4% of the protagonists of the 25 biggest games of the year.

"Yes, but that’s still a minority! If more women played video games, there would be more reason to have female protagonists!"

Men make up 35% of the cinema audience and 84% of the protagonists of the 25 biggest movies of the year.

I think the bottlenecks in film and game distribution are the only thing that makes this kind of economically insane under-representation possible. That is, you could, in theory, make a hatful of money by making media with better balance in representation -- except that the idiotic old boys calling the shots at the top of the media have sewn up all the ways that your customers would find out about and buy your product.

Those bottlenecks are being shattered by the Internet. Whatever failings the DRM-laden digital distribution channels have*, they hold the potential to redress this dismal situation.

* These failings aren't just theoretical. The WC3 is about to add DRM to the very infrastructure of the Internet because Netflix demands it -- requiring that every computer that complies with Web standards will also have to be capable of disobeying and keeping secrets from their owners.

(Image: More sausages on the grill, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 95268887@N00's photostream)

How many common idioms have the word "rock" in them? Redditor MariettaLittlelamb has (or actually had) a life-size cardboard cutout of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. She took a series of photographs that illustrate a long list of visual puns using the word "rock" -and there are a lot of them! I was particularly drawn to Rock Paper Scissors because all three elements work together so well.

Oh sure, you could think of more rock puns, but MariettaLittlelamb explained that the cutout is no more- he went to too many Christmas parties and never came home. He was definitely Party Rock. -via Uproxx  

Brandon Wiley -- a P2P developer I've known and respected for more than a decade -- writes, "The Operator news reader project was started in order to protect the most censored content on the Internet: news. Internet news has become a primary means of obtaining information in areas where broadcast media is censored. However, the increase prevalence of Internet filtering technology and its use for blocking access to news means that the people that are most dependent on Internet access for news are also the least likely to have it.

Operator News is an RSS news reader application which uses an adaptive cryptographic communication engine to circumvent Internet filtering which blocks access to news sources. Using covert communication channels, news content can be disguised as other sorts of traffic such as email, Skype, or chat. This is done automatically and requires no configuration from the user. The user simply sees their news appear in the application just as you'd expect.

The Operator project has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $35,000 for the programming, user interface design, translations, and documentation needed to provide critically important access to news to people around the world. Through crowdfunding, anyone that supports access to news will be able to support the development of this open source software and in return receive fun rewards such as the project soundtrack, t-shirts, and posters designed for the Kickstarter backers by artists that support Internet freedom.

Operator, a News Reader that Circumvents Internet Censorship (Thanks, Brandon!)

GOP power-brokers have raised a $50M war-chest to fight the nomination of "fools" to GOP seats in the upcoming mid-term elections. Effectively, the Republican big-business-friendly establishment has declared war on the Tea Party, in an effort to ensure donors that the slate will not be full of what Matt Taibbi calls "a bottomless pit of brainless Bachmanns and Cruzes and Santorums, all convinced our Harvard-educated president is a sleeper-cell Arab and that Satan is a literal being intent on conquering Nebraska with U.N. troops."

Taibbi is, as always, fucking incandescent on the subject. He points out the delicious irony of svengalis like Karl Rove and Dick Armey -- who put GW Bush in the White House by gleefully pandering to the ignorant and prejudiced with "faith-based initiatives" to bring in "the nuts" (as Rove calls evangelicals when he thinks he's in private) and Swift-Boating -- now having to keep those people from derailing the party and scaring off all the millionaires and billionaires.

If they're going to keep on donating to the GOP, they need to be assured that the party's elected reps understand that gay marriage and no-abortion-for-rape-victims are just distracting side-shows to win votes, and should be set aside once in office to pursue the serious business of looting the nation and spying on everyone to prevent any kind of popular uprising.

For Rove, if that required handing out chestnuts like the "Faith-based thing" to the "nuts," or indulging John Ashcroft’s pathological fear of marble tits, so be it – the important thing was that in the end, Cheney’s energy buddies got their Clear Skies Act, the biotech donors got their Prescription Drug Benefit Act, the consumer credit vampires got their Bankruptcy Bill, and so on.

With Armey and the Tea Party, the "movement" was about always about rallying ordinary struggling Americans behind an idealized anti-tax/deregulatory agenda that, in an amazing coincidence, also favored the super-wealthy industrialists who happened to be backing groups like FreedomWorks.

The problem with blowing off the whole governing thing in favor of a decade-plus of cynical pandering and generally treating presidential politics like a fraternity pranking competition is that it eventually comes back to bite you.

If you spend years letting your voters think Saddam Hussein was an agent of al-Qaeda, that passing a national health care program will result in the formation of Stalinist "death panels," or that Barack Obama is secretly a foreigner, you’re going to end up with some loopy candidates prone to saying crazy things that will turn off voting majorities, which in turn will make it hard to the deliver policy objectives you actually care about for your big-money donors.

The Republican establishment is only just figuring this out. Hence this new $50 million initiative, which according to the WSJ will involve the Chamber working with party leaders in“an aggressive effort to groom and support more centrist Republican candidates.”

On Christmas, Republicans Quietly Declare War on Themselves [Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone]

(Image: Karl Rove Republican Thief, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 102627552@N04's photostream)

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A year and a half ago, we brought you a great video from Jurgen Otto of the peacock spider and his strange mating dance. Now Dario Trovato·has taken that footage to the next level by giving those peacock spider disco fever! Watch them boogie down the "YMCA" by the Village People. But that wasn't enough. He also saw the flamingo flamenco and gave it an upgrade as well.

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They look quite attractive dancing to Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel." -thanks, Kim Kinslow!

(via Bruce Sterling)

Apropos of this.

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Martin Scorsese is the undisputed master of the gangster flick, responsible for such greats as Casino, Goodfellas and The Departed just to name a few, but his career seems to have brought him full circle with his latest release The Wolf of Wall Street. To illustrate his return to his good old days of student filmmaking we present It’s Not Just You, Murray!, a film he made as a student attending NYU.

The story bears certain similarities to The Wolf of Wall Street- the main character breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience about how he made all of his money, and the two characters seem to be a similar breed of smarmy narcissist. Enjoy this slice of New York cinema history!

Via Geek Tyrant

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There’s no better way to ring in the new year than sitting around nursing a hangover and watching a bunch of amazing videos online, unless you’re planning to party through New Year’s Day! io9 has put together a rather amazing list of the Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Short Films from 2013 and they are so much fun to watch it makes you wonder what sort of visual goodies await us in 2014.

From face melting Liquid Television inspired shorts like PostHuman by Cole Drumb to kinder, gentler shorts about robots like Dr. Easy by Shynola, there’s something on the list for every kind of viewer, and you won’t have to scour the interwebs to find them all because they've taken care of the gathering for you! (Some films may be NSFW due to language and/or violence)

Those life events inform my experiences and opinion. And, they inform my perspective on 2013 Tomb Raider. And, with respect, if you only have people voting on game of the year from a very singular opinion — generally white, straight and male — it’s missing so much information that it loses its validity. This doesn’t mean guys can’t have awareness of issues affecting women. And it doesn’t mean women have a singular, monolithic opinion on games or even sexism. Even among my female friends, we have vastly differing opinions about 2013 Tomb Raider. Some of us love Bioshock Infinite; some of us hate it. But more viewpoints need to be represented in discussing games. We need more female games journalists who have a more central part of the dialog.

2013 seems to have been a good year for games, but a bad one for gamers: a blur of angry adolescent guys reminding women just who is the boss in game culture. Wu recounts a number of the year's worst examples, and they're surprisingly grotesque.

That said, a bravo must go out to one of the more prominent contributors to the bullying tenor of game culture, Mike Krahulik, who today recognized his problem and promised to deal with it.

But publishers have a responsibility, too. Websites that let people comment on game reviews are a big part of the problem: much of this year's nastiness was facilitated by websites which chose to publish relentless, sexist attacks on their own authors.

Jennifer Jenkins from the Duke Center for the Public Domain writes, "What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2014? Under the law that existed until 1978 -- Works from 1957. The books 'On The Road,' 'Atlas Shrugged,' and 'The Cat in the Hat,' the films 'The Bridge on the River Kwai,' '12 Angry Men,' and 'Funny Face,' the musical 'West Side Story' and the songs 'All Shook Up' and 'Great Balls of Fire,' and more -- What is entering the public domain this January 1? Not a single published work."

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years – an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1957 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2014, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” (Mouse over any of the links below to see gorgeous cover art from 1957.) Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2053.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in Canada and the EU are different – thousands of works are entering their public domains on January 1.

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014? (Thanks, Jennifer!)

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The one thing that always seems to make a movie trailer look even better is when it gets the sweded treatment, and 2013 was a very good year for both blockbuster films and sweded versions of movie trailers. From Iron Man 3 to Thor 2 to The Hunger Games Catching Fire, and every other over-the-top action title in between, here’s a recap of the year’s best sweded movie trailers brought to you by the good folks at Geeks Of Doom.

Watching these sweded trailers is like taking a bite of cheese you’ve been holding on to since last year- at first the whole thing seems a bit off, but as you surrender to the cheesy flavor you’re transported to a magical land where up is down, bad is good and people acting out scenes from movies while wearing homemade costumes are actually funny!

Mike Krahulik, aka “Gabe” of Penny Arcade, has posted a new year’s resolution on the site, talking of some of the things he’s learned about himself in the last year amid various controversies he’s been instrumental in creating, and what he sees as the things he needs to start doing to become a better person. Or as he puts it, “I know I don’t want to be this angry kid anymore. I take medicine to control my anxiety and depression but there is no pill I can take to stop being a jerk.”

I can’t and won’t defend Mike for the stuff he’s talking about in the resolution piece, because he was spot-on: He has been a bully, and whatever the underlying reasons for those bullying actions, at the end of the day the actions speak for themselves. Mike is a grown-up and needs to account for the things he does and if possible make amends to the people he’s harmed. Without follow-up action, none of the apologies and resolutions will mean much of anything. I think the folks who Mike has bullied have reason to be skeptical — and should be skeptical — of him. He’s got a lot to make up for.

I’m not a disinterested observer of either Mike or Penny Arcade. Both Whatever and Penny Arcade started around the same time. I was one of Penny Arcade’s early advertisers in 1999, advertising a self-published book called Agent to the Stars. Later, when the book was professionally published by Subterranean Press, we got Mike to do the artwork for the cover. I wrote the introduction to their book The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade. I’m a long-time and enthusiastic fan of Child’s Play, the charity they use to send games and toys to children in hospitals and shelters. PAX, their gaming convention, has been a launching pad or significant boost for the current careers of several of my friends, including Wil Wheaton, Paul & Storm and Jonathan Coulton. I like both Mike and Jerry and consider them friends; we’ve been mutual supporters of each other’s work through the years.

None of the above excuses Mike’s actions (or the actions of the rest of the Penny Arcade crew, for that matter, when they step into it as well). Nor does the good that Mike and PA do via Child’s Play and their other initiatives mitigate harm done elsewhere — when you’re an adult, you probably can hold in your mind the idea that a person can simultaneously can do good things and hurtful things, be praised for one and fairly taken to task for the other. People are complicated and occasionally broken. We all know, and most of us either like or love, people like that (hell, we often are people like that). It’s painful to see people you think of as friends and as part of your cohort, do things you know hurt others. You recognize both things can come out of the same people.

I’ve talked about apologies here on Whatever, and I’ve noted that in my opinion that while you apologize to someone, the apology is for you — you do it because your sense of morality, your sense of who you are as a person (or at least who you should be), demands you offer it. You recognize that the apology might not be accepted, and that merely offering the apology doesn’t excuse you from the hard work of both making amends for past action and improving your behavior and actions in the future. I’d like to think that what Mike has written here is him working on a similar level: Making an accounting of, and acknowledging the consequences of, his actions, but also recognizing that the reason to try to change is not because it’s demanded by others (or at least not only), but because he doesn’t want to be that person any more. He wants to be someone better.

And, well. We’ll see how that goes. I’d like to see Mike get right with himself; I’d like to see him work to earn belief from those he’s hurt that he’s trying to get away from who he’s been before. They don’t owe it to him and some people will never believe him, which is their right. But Mike shouldn’t be doing it to be forgiven, anyway. He should be doing it because it’s correct thing for him to do, no matter how anyone else responds to it.

I won’t wish Mike good luck with his resolution. What he wants to do isn’t about luck. I will wish him good work, because it will be a lot of work, and it will be hard. I hope he gets to where he wants to be, for himself and for the people he cares about, and who care about him. I’d like to believe he will.

It's Public Domain day again -- the day when music, books and movies enter the public domain in countries where copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 50 years (hint: not the USA).

But as John Mark Ockerbloom points out, the list of life+50 countries keeps getting shorter, as more and more countries are arm-twisted into extending their copyright terms by the US Trade Representative. And increasingly, countries are passing regressive copyright laws that take works out of the public domain and put them back into copyright -- an insane policy that ends up criminalizing new art that incorporates the old, and that provides no new incentive to create (give Elvis or the Beatles 50 more years of copyright if you like, they're still not going to record any more music).

It's not all bad news: between the Hathi Trust lawsuit (which held it legal to scan old, in-copyright books under some circumstances) and the growth of Creative Commons licenses.

There's urgent work to be done. We need to fight copyright term extension, to expand fair use and fair dealing, increase access to orphan works, and discredit and destroy the new practice of making global copyright law through secretive treaty negotiations like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the Open Knowledge Foundation are all working to bring copyright into line with the modern world, and to stop its from being used for censorship and surveillance.

The next major plateau for international copyright terms, life+100 years, is now in sight.  The leaked TPP draft from August also includes a proposal from Mexico to add yet another 30 years onto copyright terms, to life+100 years, which that country adopted not many years ago.  It doesn’t have much chance of passage in the TPP negotiations, where to my knowledge only Mexico has favored the measure.   But it makes “life+70″ seem reasonable in comparison, and sets a precedent for future, smaller-scale trade deals that could eventually establish longer terms.  It’s worth remembering, for instance, that Europe’s “life+70″ terms started out in only a couple of countries, spread to the rest of Europe in European Union trade deals, and then to the US and much of the rest of the world.  Likewise, Mexico’s “life+100″ proposal might be more influential in smaller-scale Latin American trade deals, and once established there, spread to the US and other countries.  With 5 years to go before US copyrights are scheduled to expire again in significant numbers, there’s time for copyright maximalists to get momentum going for more international “harmonization”.

What’s in the public domain now isn’t guaranteed to stay there.  That’s been the case for a while in Europe, where the public domain is only now getting back to where it was 20 years ago.  (The European Union’s 1990s extension directive rolled back the public domain in many European countries, so in places like the United Kingdom, where the new terms went into effect in 1996, the public domain is only now getting to where it was in 1994.)  But now in the US as well, where “what enters the public domain stays in the public domain” has been a long-standing custom, the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can in fact remove works from the public domain in certain circumstances.   The circumstances at issue in the case they ruled on?  An international trade agreement– which as we’ve seen above is now the prevailing way of getting copyrights extended in the first place.   Even an agreement that just establishes life+70 years as a universal requirement, but doesn’t include the usual grandfathered exception for older works, could put the public domain status of works going back as far the 1870s into question, as we’ve seen with HathiTrust international copyright determinations.

Public Domain Day 2014: The fight for the public domain is on now (Thanks, John Mark!)

Antoin sez, "Digital Rights Ireland has done great work challenging mass surveillance laws before the European Court of Justice. But it could now be shut down by the music industry if it can't pay legal bills arising from Internet blocking litigation."

In February we took another important court case. We applied to be an ‘amicus curiae‘ in a case brought by record companies demanding internet blocking in Ireland. This would have given us the right to speak in court – to explain why blocking is futile and how overblocking affects other websites and harms internet users. Otherwise the Irish courts can order blocking based only on the say so of the music industry – without anyone to challenge their case.

The judge gave a detailed decision. However, the upshot was that we did not succeed in our application. What’s more, costs were awarded against us. This meant that we had to pay the bills of the other parties to the case. The ISPs did not pursue costs against us, but the music industry did – demanding that we pay them €26,658.15 for what was, in effect, a single day in court. We challenged that bill and it was reduced to €13,700 – but we had to pay further costs of €1,900 to do so.

You might think that litigation in Ireland is outrageously expensive. You might think that this favours industry over the rights of the individual and cripples civil society. We wouldn’t quibble. Be that as it may, we now need to raise money to cover these costs.

The alternative is that the music industry could shut us down.

Digital Rights Ireland: We need your help to keep working for European digital rights in 2014

(Image: HTML Protest, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from gfhdickinson's photostream)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kurt Opsahl -- a brillliant digital civil liberties attorney who has been suing the US government and the NSA over spying since 2006 -- took to the stage at the 30th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this week to explain in clear and simple language the history of NSA spying. Kurt lays out the tortured legal history of American bulk surveillance, showing how an interlocking set of laws, policies, lies and half-truths have been used to paper over an obviously, grossly unconstitutional program of spying without court oversight or particular suspicion.

If you're mystified by the legal shenanigans that led up to the Snowden and Manning leaks, this is where you should start. And even if you've been following the story closely, Opsahl gives badly needed coherence to the disjointed legal struggle, connecting the dots and revealing the whole picture.

30c3: Through a PRISM, Darkly - Everything we know about NSA spying

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Despite the fact that you never hear of two things going together "like cats and bananas," there are quite a few YouTube videos that involve both. Some cats are terrified of bananas, other are disgusted. Shorty and Kodi like to play with them, and a very few cats even like to eat them. Enjoy a compilation of the best cat and banana videos. -via Tastefully Offensive