Bewarethewumpus

Author : David Botticello

When the Nezzan ambassador abruptly walked out of a Council session, nobody really thought much of it. It was a time-honored method showing political irritation. Not that the Nezzan had ever used it before. They were a quiet species—fundamentally reasonable we thought—but quiet. Ideal citizens, really.

The Nezzan introduced themselves into galactic society in the usual way. First encountered by a long-distance cargo hauler that had wandered off course, they were eager to meet new races and participate in our burgeoning community. They joined the League of Free Worlds. They traded interesting variations on the most current technologies. They became active members of our polity, spoke at our councils, and joined even our most idealistic causes.

Usually, it’s the little cultural quirks that cause friction. One race worships the color red. Another hoards natural fabrics “because they’re fuzzy.” Every so often an ambassador gets offended, often as a political ploy, and then there’s an apology, some commiseration over Illyrian wine, and an economic concession. The affairs of state go on.

The Nezzan fleet attacked exactly as their ambassador’s shuttle debarked. We checked. The offensive was cold, strategic, and planned in alarming detail. But the Nezzan were never the most powerful of races; with only moderate technology and a below average birth rate, their ability to wage war was nothing special. To be sure, they caused serious damage to a few worlds—the attacks were particularly unpredictable, and therefore, effective—but the Nezzan never had any real chance against our Coalition Fleet.

We sent messages. What grave offense had set the Nezzan on their murderous course? The Nezzan gave no response. We sent envoys, but they were turned away at the edge of Nezzan space. So we turned inward to our own resources, but our great scholars and xenologists just shook their heads and shrugged. The Council voted to send Senior Mediator Drelax to search for answers and seek out peace. He made it past the border by virtue of his venerable reputation, but then sat daily in a conference room, in the finest government building of the largest city on the Nezzan homeworld, alone. It was not until the last day of his visit that Drelax was joined by the Nezzan’s most esteemed ambassador, Nax Nioryl. He, too, said nothing. Nioryl perched on the edge of the table and smiled pleasantly, implacable as a neutron star. After an hour of Drelax’s entreaties—begging for peace, or armistice, or at least some measure of explanation, the defeated senior mediator rose to leave, turning to Nioryl for one final question: simply, “Why?”

The Nezzan ambassador stared back wordlessly.

Still, we finally got an answer, of sorts. Two days ago a Nezzan heavy cruiser parked in low orbit over a primordial world deep inside the League’s territory. It deployed a plasma cannon of alarming scale and magnitude, carving intricate lines of ancient Nezzan calligraphy into the crust of Colmar Prime. As we gaped at the images coming in, great glowing scars in the planet’s the now-boiling surface, we realized this was Ambassador Nioryl’s response. Loosely translated it reads:

“Why? . . . Because life grows. Because gravity pulls. Because the stars burn.”

Author : William Ovide Richardson

On a clear day, the tower was a perfect filament of white, stretching from its mile-wide root before you to its faded terminus directly over your head.

The human mind is not accustomed to seeing straight lines at such massive scales. It interprets them as curves, and since the tower was 35,000 kilometers long and perfectly rigid and straight, it seemed to hang overhead, as though before it was lost to sight in the haze of the atmosphere it bent at the end like a light standard. To a conventional mind, unaccustomed to such counterintuitive sights, it could be as jarring as the view from the inner surface of one of the larger Stanford Tori, which seemed like an arch over a curved strip of solid ground, punctuated at the noon position by a luminous suspended cylinder that seemed to float weightless, and which the mind would simply not allow to be as massive as it actually was. The brain was trained and evolutionarily predisposed to understand ‘up’ as a place where incalculably huge things simply didn’t hang like that.

If you stood in front of the tower, that bizarre and disorienting apparent curve would confront you, and several thoughts would come to your mind unbidden. The first you might dismiss as hackneyed and obvious: this was the tower of Babel. It was a monument to human arrogance and hubris and God or nature or chaos or whatever would make us pay for it. Those who laboured for the consortium at all strata, from executives to lawyers to engineers to migrant labourers, would tell you that whatever your beliefs, that thought was perfectly normal. Some of them even believed it.

The second was sheer awe at the scale of human potential. We fight. We forget our lessons every generation, and most of us never learn them at all. We succumb to superstition, incompetence, and the endless blights of stupidity and mean-spiritedness. Nonetheless, this. Somehow we can achieve Olympus, Pedestal, Canaan, Luna, and the utterly mindblowing Tower and the masterstroke of political organization of the Consortium.

Once those thoughts crossed your mind, you would turn, because knowing what was there, you’d have to turn to look after your mind processed the second thought. The idea that the Tower Consortium was a miracle would necessitate it. You’d turn to see the airbase, operating military aircraft around the clock. Beyond that, warships passed, and in the seaport, the derricks of the shipyard turned and swung where the massive landing craft, fully equipped for long-duration seabasing, underwent construction and refits.

The scale of the operation was staggering, of an order to impoverish superlatives, and so was its opposition. Newton’s laws are, of course, immutable. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If some optimistic segment of humanity decided to buck the dark-age warnings of the fearful and build a tower to the stars, then those who thought any of a thousand contrary things–either that we should be satisfied with our God-given dominion, or that we were testing God’s (apparently finite) patience, or that we ought to simply read the stories bronze-age nomads wrote, or whatever else– would come together to tear it down, bound by the basic laws that govern the motion of everything from events to baseballs to force their own prophecies to come true.

And so, war. No more justification required. No more explanation needed for the now constant air, sea, and space battle being waged mere hundreds of miles away from where you now stood. The Consortium’s superiority was incontestable, but it was limited in manpower, while its enemies were legion. It was only a matter of time until this stroke of human genius came tumbling back to Earth, incomplete. Something had to change. Humanity had to improve; we needed to be objectively better.

That was a project much larger and far more daunting even than the Tower, and it was already underway.

Author : Rick Tobin

“You speak English, Mario? I don’t know German and you don’t speak French.” Emil put the phosphorescent torch down by the other resting miner. They took their break secretly, amid the dust and constant reverberation from other slaves mining the deep caverns.

“Some. Little bit. We speak here. So deep few come and they don’t burn us.” Mario coughed, looking at the dark blood splattering his tattered sleeve.

“You have it. You know it is bad.” Emil pointed at the glowing spurts reflecting the yellow glow of their lights. “They will put you in the surface if they see this. Here.” Emil rubbed the gray dust over Emil’s sleeve until the grime no longer shone under the torchlight.

“So long. These many years. So many faces in my head lost in these caves. I have tried to stay alive since the War, when they took us from the battlefield. You were there. I almost long for the smell of the trenches. At least there was water, even in the bombardments. There was horror, but no torture. None of these monsters driving us like cattle; only the madness of men, Earth men, to destroy us.”

“I heard from a crew in the cross tunnels that someone was on the surface and saw a flash on the Earth. Somewhere in the orient. Maybe a volcano, but it was bright as day. Maybe another war. We saw some new faces in the haulers. They had the new stare. Remember that, when we first were captured?”

Mario nodded, still catching his breath in his shattered lungs. The cloying humidity and high oxygen content pumped through the diggings ate away his stamina. The dizziness would return before the end of his shift. He would only think about lifting his pick against the walls, not knowing if he was actually lifting anything. That was all that was left…just imagining the movement to prevent the burning prods from the overseers.

“Mario, someday they will know.”

“Who?” Mario whispered.

“Us…those left behind. They will come here someday and find out the Moon is a slave market and that this horrible place is hollow. They will feel the blasting. They will see the lights in the craters and the ships bringing fresh workers here. Someday.”

The tattered men pushed up as the hum of an overseer patrol cart came near, pushing them to continued until they would be jettisoned on the dark side.

Author : Suzanne Borchers

“Hey, Cuz, why are you sitting on that refuse pile?” George5 glided by snickering. “Thought you were high end, not dead end!”

Eddie kicked at the garbage beneath him. He couldn’t be obsolete! He could still warm and cool his skin with just a thought.

He should have had two more years before the luxury spa was renovated. He had enjoyed regulating the restoration/whirlpool. He had enjoyed the soothing waves of the water mixed with the smiles of the bathers. He had been necessary. An Edward450 bot needed to be of service.

Eddie wasn’t ready to be recycled. He’d have to find something new. Eddie called, “Hear about any good jobs?” Even though Georgi5 was already down the alley at the corner, Eddie could hear his derisive laugh.

“My hands can still massage human muscles into relaxation,” Eddie mused. “I’m going back to my job at the Yoga to Go Studio.” After all, they knew he was hardworking. Then he remembered that it had been razed for a fast food chicklet joint.

Eddie wished he could frown. He kicked the pile beneath him.

It was then Eddie noticed an old ragged man writing on a cloth. The man slowly limped past shivering. His clothes were of light material, and he wore no hat or gloves in the freezing air. Eddie didn’t take his orb from the shaky form until a piece of rag drifted toward him on the wind. He pulled it off his stained metallic leg to read its handwritten words.

There once was a bot in my alley
Who certainly needed a pally
So join with me bot
You’re in a poor spot
The garbage ship’s here so don’t dally.

Eddie looked at the man who had turned to stare back at him. He heard the recycle ship rumbling behind him, the sound getting louder.

“You coming?” The ragged fellow turned and began to shuffle away.

“Wait!” Eddie was an intelligent bot and knew he only had seconds. He jumped from the pile and landed on his feet.

Later that evening, Eddie and Charles sat together inside a rickety box of piled metallic pieces tied together with strips of rags. Eddie emitted warmth and light into the space. Charles scribbled on another cloth, occasionally stopping to gnaw on a chicklet bone and take a swig from an ancient flask.

Charles sniffed then showed the cloth to Eddie.

There once was a ragged old man
Who prayed to his god for a plan
To keep him alive
And help him survive
So he sent a fantastic tin can.

Eddie wished he could smile.

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Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The nastiest habit of medieval cats seen via illuminated manuscripts.

Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally syndicated radio show the Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”

Carter was responding to a question from Hartmann about recent Supreme Court decisions on campaign financing like Citizens United.

Transcript:

HARTMANN: Our Supreme Court has now said, “unlimited money in politics.” It seems like a violation of principles of democracy. … Your thoughts on that?

CARTER: It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over. … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody’s who’s already in Congress has a lot more to sell to an avid contributor than somebody who’s just a challenger.

I’ve added Carter’s statement to this list of politicians acknowledging that money controls politics. Please let me know if you have other good examples.

(Thanks to Sam Sacks for pointing this out.)

The post Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery” appeared first on The Intercept.

A new series of documents released by WikiLeaks reveals a list of 35 high-profile targets in Japan that the NSA has spied on since 2006.

The slew of new documents reveals that the USA has been spying on “conglomerates, government officials, ministries and senior advisers.” Those include:

the Japanese Cabinet Office; the executive secretary to the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga; a line described as “Government VIP Line”; numerous officials within the Japanese Central Bank, including Governor Haruhiko Kuroda; the home phone number of at least one Central Bank official; numerous numbers within the Japanese Finance Ministry; the Japanese Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry Yoichi Miyazawa; the Natural Gas Division of Mitsubishi; and the Petroleum Division of Mitsui.

Elsewhere, documents made available by WikiLeaks include a series of reports that describe detailed U.S. understanding of internal Japanese deliberations. The reports touch on topics including agricultural imports, trade disputes, nuclear power and energy policy.

Speaking about the release, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief, explained that “the lesson for Japan is this: do not expect a global surveillance superpower to act with honour or respect.” It certainly won’t help U.S.-Japan relations, that’s for sure.

[WikiLeaks]

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Kyonghwan “Tahra” Kim is a freelance concept artist and illustrator from Korea. Good thing he’s got a book collecting his work already, because it saves me asking for one.

You can see more of Kim’s work at his personal site and ArtStation page.

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To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they’re big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), click on the “expand” button in the top-left corner.

Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of both their professional and personal portfolios. If you’re in the business and have some concept, environment, promotional or character art you’d like to share, drop us a line!

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Your aim in Poly Bridge is simple: build a bridge that’s strong enough to carry waiting cars across a river to their destination. Yet on that simple gameplay foundation, players have come up with some genius solutions.

This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK.

Some of the players’ solutions are elegant creations:

Image credit: KerbalrocketryYT.

Image credit: Pidiotpong.

Underpinning each level is a physics system which sees bridges buckle and collapse if they’re subjected to too much weight. Usually this is bad, but some players have started to work broken bridges into their solutions:

Image credit: PM_ME_A_PIZZAROLL.

The blend of physics, engineering, and a GIF generator has seen the Reddit community go nuts.

Image credit: Mittentroll.

Not everyone goes for the masterpiece, some players just build what’s needed to get the job done.

Image credit: Karmacist.

Image credit: Iwajira.

Image credit: Colonyyy.

Image credit: Xotice.

Poly Bridge has been in Steam Early Access since the end of June and it’s coming along really nicely as it heads towards a September release window. Updates have added new levels, new features, fixed bugs, and added new tracks to the soundtrack.

If you’ve been looking for a physics-based bridge building puzzle game (who hasn’t) you should definitely check it out.

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This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, bringing you original reporting, game culture and humour with a U from the British isles. Follow them on @Kotaku_UK.

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Over the past few years we’ve heard a lot about the smart, connected devices that make up the internet of things. From ceiling fans to cars and cameras, they’re everywhere. Unfortunately, anything that can connect to the internet can be hacked through the internet… and now, it seems, that includes guns.

Wired has reported today on a husband and wife security team that will be presenting their newest hack at a security conference in August. Their project? They’ve spent the last year hacking a pair of sniper rifles.

The TrackingPoint self-aiming rifles come with a fully-computerized, Linux-powered scope that allows the user to designate a target, then set variables like wind, temperature, and ammunition type. When the shooter pulls the trigger, the computer takes over and chooses the specific moment to fire, only activating when the gun is perfectly aimed, Wired explains. The weapon “can allow even a gun novice to reliably hit targets from as far as a mile away.”

That is, as long as nobody’s come along on wifi and stuck their fingers in the gun’s code.

The weapon’s wifi is turned off by default, which is the good news. The bad news is, as soon as it’s turned on, it’s vulnerable. The rifle uses a default password that allows anyone in range to communicate with it. Once connected, a hacker can access the weapon’s APIs to muck around with its targeting application and other features.

(Why does a gun have wifi at all, you may ask? “So you can do things like stream a video of your shot to a laptop or iPad,” Wired explains.)

The researchers demonstrated to Wired the range of control they had remotely over the gun. By assigning new values to variables the scope tracks, they were able to completely change its targets or even to disable the gun entirely. They were also able to interfere with the gun’s security, altering the PIN a user can set to limit others’ access to lock out the owner.

Happily, they were not able to fire the rifle remotely — doing that still requires manually pulling the trigger.

The risks from this particular hack, of this particular rifle, are low. Researchers had to acquire and dismantle one of the rifles in order to discover the full extent of its vulnerabilities. The guns are luxury items that go for $13,000 apiece, Wired reports, and about a thousand have been sold. They are far from the most common firearms being purchased and carried today.

But the potential pitfalls in the category of “smart gun” are something that buyers will have to be keenly aware of going forward. Using technology to increase security features on firearms isn’t itself a bad idea — but providing insecure internet connections opens it up to a whole world of problems.

In the same way that very few people thought about the network security of their cars until last week, very few people are thinking about the default password and exploitable wifi code embedded in firearms today. The problem is larger than one gun, one phone, one printer, one car, or one camera. It’s a whole world of default passwords and poor security that consumers don’t usually even know they need to change.

Hackers Can Disable a Sniper Rifle—Or Change Its Target [Wired]

In its most vanilla, near-ubiquitous form, Tetris is already a near perfect video game that challenges you to be smart and fast in increasingly hard fashion. The stuff that gets thrown at you in an ultra-hard arcade version is mind-blowing. Blocks that need to be cleared twice. A stack that flips around. Let’s watch one of the best Tetris players in the world take it on.

The video above is showing the Item Mode feature in Tetris: The Grand Master 2, taken on by Japanese grandmaster SQR as part of the Summer Games Done Quick charity speedrun marathon. In the ten-minute clip from last night’s stream, you’ll see him deal with a Death Block where the tetromino are twice as big, Roll Roll which changes into a different tetrominoes every time you rotate and 180 item that turns the whole stack upside down. SQR handles it all like the champion he is and the gasps of the crowd watching him play are a great indicator of just how crazy this playthrough is.

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Last night the Mormon Church issued a press release in which they threaten to end their relationship with the Boy Scouts over the end of the ban on openly gay leaders.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is deeply troubled by today’s vote by the Boy Scouts of America National Executive Board. In spite of a request to delay the vote, it was scheduled at a time in July when members of the Church’s governing councils are out of their offices and do not meet. When the leadership of the Church resumes its regular schedule of meetings in August, the century-long association with Scouting will need to be examined. The Church has always welcomed all boys to its Scouting units regardless of sexual orientation. However, the admission of openly gay leaders is inconsistent with the doctrines of the Church and what have traditionally been the values of the Boy Scouts of America. As a global organization with members in 170 countries, the Church has long been evaluating the limitations that fully one-half of its youth face where Scouting is not available. Those worldwide needs combined with this vote by the BSA National Executive Board will be carefully reviewed by the leaders of the Church in the weeks ahead.

The Mormon Church is the nation's largest sponsor of the Boy Scouts with over 30,000 LDS chapters comprising about 15% of total membership.

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Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

The Transportation Security Administration is investigating a disruption – that included a visit from the local bomb squad – at Dallas Fort-Worth International Airport Sunday night after authorities say a man boarded a flight without a ticket.

The Dallas Morning News reports airport authorities are investigating how the 26-year-old man was able to make it through a security checkpoint and onto a flight without being noticed.

The man allegedly drove his car to the airport, and left it parked at the terminal curb before heading inside. Once in the airport, he made his way through the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint and to an airport gate without a ticket.

Authorities were alerted to the unticketed passenger via a courtesy call from an airline agent. He was then arrested for criminal trespassing by officers of the airport’s Department of Public Safety, the Dallas Morning News reports.

As for the man’s car, according to CBS DFW, a bomb squad was called in to inspect the vehicle. Traffic in the area was diverted for a short period before it was determined the car posed no threat.

So far, the airport says in a statement that the only flight affected by the incident was the one the man boarded. A full report from the airport and local law enforcement – including which airline was involved – is expected to be released this afternoon.

TSA is investigating how a man boarded a plane at D/FW Airport Sunday without a ticket [Dallas Morning News]
Bomb Squad Called For Suspicious Vehicle At DFW Airport [CBS DFW]

Everyone knows that when a movie trailer or poster is peppered with single-word review quotes — “Wow,” “Thrilling,” “Meh” — there’s usually a good reason why the full sentence from the reviews aren’t being quoted. But when you see something resembling a complete thought on a DVD box, you might be misled into thinking it accurately represents the reviewer’s opinion.

Over at AVclub.com, reviewer A.A. Dowd has published an open letter to Mongrel Media, a company that picked up the DVD rights to a little-known (unless you’re a David O. Russell completist) film called Nailed and used a quote from Dowd’s review on the box.

“A comedic masterstroke,” reads the back of the packaging in bright, bold letters.

That would be great, if it even vaguely resembled what Dowd had written in his “C-” review of the film, which was released in the U.S. under the dreadful title, Accidental Love.

See, the movie was a long-in-progress project, directed by Russell and written by Al Gore’s daughter Kristin, that fell apart so many times before the director eventually washed his hands of it and had his name changed in the credits before its eventual, virtually unnoticed release earlier this year.

In Dowd’s review of the movie, he wrote [bolding for emphasis]:

To be fair to whoever refashioned Accidental Love from the abandoned scraps of Nailed, there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.

So the review didn’t even give the glimmer of hope that there might have been a good movie in there before Russell abandoned it. And yet there’s the misappropriated quote right on the DVD box.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out, Mongrel, just because you’re all the way up there in Canada?” asks Dowd, who accuses the company of playing “dirty pool.”

“You’re breaking the bond of trust between a critic and the public; if I lead anyone astray—and I’m sure you could find plenty of readers of this site who feel that I have—it’s by way of a difference in opinion, not malicious intent,” he explains. “Framing me as a big fan of Nailed isn’t just a lie, it’s an attack on my critical reputation. What if someone reads that and really thinks I see a ‘comedic masterwork’ in Nailed? They’ll never trust me on a comedy again!”

Dowd says he’s not demanding that the boxes be pulled from stores, just an apology, “and maybe a promise that you won’t pull this kind of stunt again. Because when you turn your allies in the critical community into unwitting shills, it’s the film-buying public that really gets nailed.”

Just a week after Google said it would ship its Google+ Photo platform into the ether, the company announced more plans to distance its social network venture from its other products by ditching a requirement that tied user activities to their public profiles.

Google announced today that it will begin removing the connection between users’ Google+ profiles and other platforms like YouTube, where some people may prefer to remain anonymous.

“People have told us that accessing all of their Google stuff with one account makes life a whole lot easier,” Bradley Horowitz, vice president of streams, photos and sharing at Google wrote in a blog post. “But we’ve also heard that it doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.”

So, starting today with YouTube and rolling out to other products over the next several months, Google will allow people to use their unsearchable standard Google account to comment or post content.

Under the previous requirement to use a searchable public Google+ account, individuals comments, posts and other actions were plastered on their profile for all to see.

For now, the folks at YouTube say in a blog post that the disconnect between Google+ and the platform only applies to posting comments. However, in the next several weeks, it plans to rollout changes in which a Google+ profile is no longer needed to upload or create a channel.

The company also says it will make it easier for people who currently have a Google+ account but don’t want to actually use it, to manage and remove the public profile.

Everything in its right place [Google]

It’s a bad news Monday for up to 950 million — yes, that’s almost 1 billion — Android device owners worldwide. A vulnerability that would let a hacker take over your phone remotely has been announced, and it’s a doozy.

The damage travels by text, Forbes reports, and takes advantage of a weakness in a piece of code called Stagefright.

Stagefright is a tool Android uses to play back media — any text you get that’s an MMS (as opposed to an SMS) is played back to you using Stagefright. Any app that can read your text messages sits on top of that code, from Google Hangouts to your pre-installed default “Messaging” program.

Joshua Drake, the security researcher who discovered the flaw, told Forbes that the only thing a hacker would need to send out exploitations would be phone numbers. Attackers could then send messages to those numbers with bad code packaged in that would allow them to access the receiving device and steal data.

The level of access attackers would gain would allow access to files stored on SD cards as well as on the phone memory. Attackers could also turn your phone into a bug, remotely recording audio and video without your knowledge. Bluetooth access is also hackable via Stagefright. All versions of Android from 2.2 and up are considered vulnerable.

If that sounds terrifying, well, it kind of is. And then it gets worse. The exploit isn’t like a virus-laden e-mail attachment; you don’t actually have to try to view the media in order to be affected. Merely looking at the message in some apps is enough.

And then there are the apps where you don’t even have to open the message: for folks who use Google Hangouts to read their texts, Hangouts would open and access the exploit code “immediately before you even look at your phone… before you even get the notification,” Drake told Forbes, adding that it’s possible then to delete the message before the user even receives an alert, making the attack completely silent.

The good news is, after Drake reported his findings, Google has verified and corrected seven security holes. But here’s the bad news: Google doesn’t update Android phones directly. Service providers do. So Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and other, smaller carriers all have to push patches to their own Android customers… and they are not known for doing so quickly.

Drake will be speaking about his process for discovering vulnerabilities in Android at the Black Hat InfoSec conference in Las Vegas next week.

Stagefright: It Only Takes One Text To Hack 950 Million Android Phones [Forbes]

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Forget the sun. Forget the beach. Hang out with us and watch more than 140 video games being speedrun to benefit Doctors Without Borders during the 2015 Summer Games Done Quick Marathon.

Easily one of my most eagerly anticipated annual events, the summer companion to January’s Awesome Games Done Quick tournament is an excellent reason to stay inside glued to a monitor or television instead of going outside to be backed by our closest star.

Running non-stop through early Sunday morning, the 2015 Summer Games Done Quick event is all about cheering on players, community spirit and gaming for good. It’s also about rewarding donations to global emergency medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders with cool incentives.

Here’s the full Wednesday marathon schedule. Highlights include an ongoing Kirby marathon, Earthbound and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

Wednesday July 29th
Time	Game	Runner	Platform	Target Time
12:05 AM	Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow	Dragondarch	Gamecube (GBP)	0:15:42
12:38 AM	Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow	romscout	DS	0:38:27
1:19 AM	INCENTIVE! Portrait of Ruin glitched run	romscout	DS	0:17:28
1:49 AM	Ori and the Blind Forest	Vulajin	PC	0:44:05
2:49 AM	Shantae and the Pirate's Curse	TheSoundDefense	Wii U	1:06:26
4:05 AM	Mighty Switch Force! 2	TonyOgbot	Wii U	0:23:29
4:50 AM	Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number	Duke_Bilgewater	PC	0:46:51
5:48 AM	Bastion	Vulajin	PC	0:50:28
6:50 AM	Half-Minute Hero	Essentia	PSP	0:28:45
7:51 AM	Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep FM HD	AdamTimothy0	PS3	1:12:41
9:12 AM	Gargoyle's Quest	unusualcook	Gamecube (GBP)	0:33:09
9:52 AM	Kirby's Dream Land 2	BBQSauz	Gamecube (GBP)	0:40:18
10:37 AM	Kirby: Tilt N Tumble	danray2352	Gamecube (GBP)	0:18:00
11:02 AM	Kirby Super Star	usedpizza	SNES	1:20:00
12:27 PM	Kirby's Avalanche vs. Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine	CosmykTheDolfyn	SNES or Genesis	0:20:00
12:52 PM	Earthworm Jim	Athens_	Genesis	0:35:00
1:32 PM	Ecco: The Tides of Time	Dolfinh	Genesis	0:45:00
2:22 PM	Gunstar Heroes	iongravirei, TonyOgbot	Wii VC	0:50:00
3:17 PM	Freedom Planet	johannhowitzer, Mylexsi	PC	1:05:00
4:37 PM	Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble	bertin	Gamecube	0:25:00
5:07 PM	Sonic Advance	Combo_Blaze, kirbymastah	Gamecube (GBP)	0:25:00
5:47 PM	Sonic the Hedgehog 2	Aleck47, Jmatt	Genesis	0:30:00
6:22 PM	Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D	NOUFozzy	3DS	2:15:00
8:42 PM	BONUS! The Legend of Zelda, swordless	jkoper	NES	1:05:00
9:57 PM	Earthbound	Aurilliux	SNES	1:55:00
11:57 PM	Prince of Persia: Sands of Time	Henneko_	PC	1:20:00

Make sure your affairs are in order before you press play—it’s impossible to stop watching this stream.

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My friend Gretchen has a folder on her iPhone’s home screen called “Crapple.” It’s where she sticks all of the apps that Apple adds to her device that she doesn’t use. As Apple has forced apps for their smart watch, HealthKit, bookstore, a separate podcasts app, their own maps app, and now their streaming music store on users, all of these come with apps that you can’t get rid of.

There’s a problem with pushing too many apps on users: anything that they don’t actually use is just burdensome and takes up hard drive space. For the makers of hardware and software alike, “spotlighting your own apps only works as well as the apps themselves do,” points out Brian Barrett in Wired. Part of the reason why some people switched to the iPhone in the first place was the relative lack of bloatware.

We’ve written before about the challenges that come along with trying to disentangle yourself from Apple services that you do use, like when iPhone users switch to another phone platform and their text messages still get redirected to iMessage.

Here’s the problem, which is specific to the current generation of Apple devices: the apps that you can’t get rid of gobble up 3 GB of space, and they still sell a 16 GB phone. If they want their customers to use these apps, they should create something superior instead of making something that people are stuck with forever and ever.

Apple Music’s Worst Feature? You Can’t Delete It [Wired]

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After a journalist’s report of being inside a 2014 Jeep Cherokee while hackers miles away took over his car as part of an experiment, Fiat Chrysler has announced it’s offering a software patch for some of its internet-connected vehicles. That being said, the company didn’t directly acknowledge the hacking event itself.

The company released a statement saying that just like other technology like smartphones and tablets, sometimes vehicle software updates are required “for improved security protection to reduce the potential risk of unauthorized and unlawful access to vehicle systems.”

“The software security update, provided at no cost to customers, also includes Uconnect improvements introduced in the 2015 model year designed to enhance customer convenience and enjoyment of their vehicle,” Fiat Chrysler says, via Automotive News.

A story on Wired.com by Andy Greenberg on Tuesday told how hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek had remotely taken control of the Jeep he was driving, as part of a pre-arranged demonstration designed to call attention to the Uconnect Infotainment system’s vulnerability. It’s installed in 2013-14 Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram vehicles, and the 2015 Chrysler 200, with an 8.4-inch touch screen and Wi-Fi hot spot.

Fiat Chrysler doesn’t have the capability to push software to affected systems wirelessly, so the company is instead directing drivers to www.driveuconnect.com/software-update/ where they can download the security patch themselves, or take their vehicle to a dealer for the software to be upgraded for free.

The hackers had said they were planning on releasing part of the code they used to infiltrate the system at an upcoming Black Hat conference, to convince automakers that their products are vulnerable. Fiat Chrysler does not approve.

“Under no circumstances does FCA condone or believe it’s appropriate to disclose ‘how-to information’ that would potentially encourage, or help enable hackers to gain unauthorized and unlawful access to vehicle systems,” the company said in the statement.

Jeep hacking prompts FCA software update to enhance security [Automotive News]