Bewarethewumpus

Author : Bob Newbell

“Another ten billion dollars a year?!” said the Senator incredulously. “And that on top of the billions already spent annually? And for a scientific toy that only worked one time for a few minutes? And that had some kind of radiation leak or something right after you switched it on? You better have one hell of a sales pitch.”

The quantum physicist nodded. “I realize we’re asking for a lot, Senator. And I’m not insensitive to the fact that the country has lots of other expenses. But the safety of not just the nation but the world depends on the SuperString Collider getting more funding.”

“I’m inclined to doubt that, doctor. You scientists already played the world safety card when you convinced Congress and the administration to write you a check sufficient to fund a major war just so you could build that giant dome over your white elephant.” The cantankerous legislator pointed at the kilometer-wide geodesic hemisphere that dominated the landscape. “And you’ve had four years to get it up and running again.”

“It will never be turned on again. In fact, the collider no longer exists. But we need our budget increased just the same.”

The Senator looked at the scientist with utter disbelief.

“Four years ago when we did a trial run of the SSC,” continued the physicist, “the machine worked perfectly. For the briefest of moments the collider’s detectors confirmed the presence of a ten-dimensional hyperspace just as was theoretically predicted. Exactly 17 hours, 21 minutes, and 11.3 seconds after the SSC was shut down, an area around the machine roughly three-quarters of a kilometer in diameter changed.”

“Changed? How?”

“The land on which the SSC had stood and the area around it had transformed into a desert. We detected low-level radioactivity in the soil. We thought the machine had created some kind of chain reaction that caused it and its surrounding to disintegrate. But 17 hours, 21 minutes, and 11.3 seconds after the facility’s security camera telemetry ceased, the area changed again, this time into a swamp.”

The Senator shook his head incredulously. “A swamp?”

“But like no swamp ever seen on Earth,” said the scientist. “We were able to retrieve several plant and animal specimens before the next transformation cycle occurred. Not one of them fit anywhere in the taxonomy of life on this planet. The military quickly took command of the situation. I and my colleagues had to sign nondisclosure agreements if we wanted to continue working on the project. A couple of acquaintances who refused have been ‘missing’ for some time.”

The car pulled itself up to the dome and automatically opened its doors. After going through a security checkpoint, the physicist and the Senator entered the dome. Steel and glass partitions reached from the floor to the inward-sloping interior wall of the dome. The partitions extended around the interior circumference of the structure hermetically sealing the area.

The contained land, at the moment, was covered in ice. A large, white, frog-like creature slid on the ice on its belly, its hind legs beating furiously to propel it across the tundra.

“What…what is that thing? An alien?”

“No, Senator, that creature is as much an Earthling as you or I. But it’s from an alternate Earth, an Earth with a radically different history and evolution. Sometimes it’s like the surface of the Moon. Other times, ‘people’ show up. Not human, but intelligent and bewildered. For a little over 17 hours, anyway.”

“Are you sure,” asked the Senator, “ten billion more a year will be enough?”

Author : Beck Dacus

For most the difference between being stranded on an island and being stranded on a distant planet is merely numerical. But while stranded on the planet Ergingad, I could feel it.

Probes had been there before, so it had been explored. We knew about the atmosphere, gravity, composition and anything else that there was to know. We also knew it was uninhabitable; there was no life, and terraforming it would be a waste. My crew and I went to establish an automated mining base. But when the ships boron-proton reaction chamber ruptured, nearly killing all of us, I didn’t think, “I’m stuck here.” I thought, “I’m stuck 2 quadrillion kilometers from civilization.”

You start to get the feeling that the galaxy isn’t that big, because anywhere you go, you can fly back from. But the instant that’s not true anymore, you realize that the scales you’re talking about are too big for any human mind to comprehend. But if you can comprehend it, you are utterly terrified.

I can see it in the others now. We’re all jumpy, depressed, irritable, and mistrustful. I don’t know if we’ll ever get rescued. I don’t know if we’ll let each other live long enough to find out.

Web Design: The First 100 Years

So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.


Unless we screw it up.

If you think the Web is a way to CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS, then your job is to get the people and cats online, put a decent font on the knowledge, and then stand back and watch the magic happen.

If you think your job is to FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE, then the web is just the very beginning. There's a lot of work left to do. Really you're going to need sensors in every house, and it will help if everyone looks through special goggles, and if every refrigerator can talk to the Internet and confess its contents.

And if you think that the purpose of the Internet is to BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN INVENTION, then your goal is total and complete revolution. Everything must go.

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Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s against the law to knowingly misrepresent a copyright infringement claim, and yet copyright holders and the automated bots they use to spit out these takedown and delist demands continue to make sweeping, obviously inaccurate claims without penalty. The latest example comes to us courtesy of Comcast-owned Universal Studios.

TorrentFreak.com noticed that Universal (through a third party) was sending out DMCA takedown notices for a number of the films it controls, and that some legitimate — and sometimes unrelated — sites were being caught up in these wide nets.

For example, this recently filed DMCA request with Google demanded that the company remove search results for a number of sites that allegedly infringed on the copyright for Furious 7 the latest film in the Fast & Furious franchise.

While many of the links included in the delist request were for sites with possibly infringing footage or links to illegal torrents of the film, one stood out: A link to the Internet Movie Database for this same film.

It’s an obvious error, and one that Google will undoubtedly catch because it cares more about the accuracy of these requests than the copyright automatons that file them. But it shows just how little these bots know of the actual Internet landscape if they can’t identify one of the world’s most popular websites as not being a source for pirated content.

And this isn’t the only error in this particular DMCA delist request. In France, Universal released the Michael Mann film Blackhat as Hacker, and among the various demands to delist sites allegedly infringing on the film’s copyright, the moronic copyright bot also sought to remove search results for this completely unrelated TechDirt article on hacking.

Again, Google will probably not oblige this delist request, but copyright holders need to be held accountable for making frivolous DMCA claims.

A Pennsylvania woman is still in the middle of an 8-year battle with Universal Music over that company’s overzealous use of the DMCA to have YouTube remove her 29-second clip of her baby dancing to a barely discernible Prince song.

“Unfounded and abusive takedown notices inflict real harms on [online service providers], Internet users, and copyright holders,” reads an amicus brief filed in that case by Google, Twitter, Tumblr, and Automattic. “Every time an unfounded takedown notice results in the removal of legitimate, non-infringing content posted by a user, it constitutes unjustified censorship of the user’s right to share speech with others and interferes with the OSP’s business of hosting and disseminating that user’s speech.”

A writer named Helen Lewis defined this Internet axiom on Twitter in 2012, declaring “The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”

We’ve seen a lot of Destiny weapon replicas over the past few months, created by various methods, but the Thorn hand cannon Kirby Downey made has a small twist: There’s an airsoft gun hidden inside.

Might be against the rules of an airsoft field to run around with a replica like this, but it certainly looks great.

This is a Converted airsoft version of my thorn which I designed. It is made to be a simple shroud which encases an electric CYMA Glock 18C AEP airsoft pistol.

The model has space for 3x 5.3 mm Metal dowels. This improves the strength of the model and decreases the risk of it breaking if it gets knocked or dropped.

In order to access the batter the thorn has to be dismantled but the rest of the necessary components have ease of access.

Here’s a video of a WIP version of the gun being tested:

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

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Director Rob McLellan, who is turning his robot serial killer short ABE into a feature film with MGM, has also been working on something else: a Star Wars VR game.

Along with his VFX guy Craig Stiff, and with a little help from games studio HammerheadVR, they’ve put together this demo of what they’re toying with, built and running entirely in Unreal Engine 4.

It’s...well, on looks alone it’s everything you want from a Star Wars VR game, really. Rebel Assault, but not sucky.

Note this is a fan project, not a commercial title. Rob and Craig are hoping to have a playable demo/build available by the time Oculus Rift is released next year.

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Nigel Richards, a God amongst mortals on the Scrabble tournament scene, has outdone himself this time: he’s won the French version of the Scrabble world champs without speaking a word of French.

Richards, who dominates Scrabble tournaments in the US and UK, won the French tournament the same way he’s able to exert his dominance in other languages: he has a terrifying memory.

“He doesn’t speak French at all, he just learnt the words” Liz Fagerlund, a close friend of Richards, told the New Zealand Herald, saying it’s been only eight weeks since he began studying the French dictionary. “He won’t know what they mean, wouldn’t be able to carry out a conversation in French I wouldn’t think.”

“He does have a reputation for being the best Scrabble player ever and they know about him already”, she adds, “but they probably didn’t necessarily expect him to go in for the first time and beat them at their own game.”

The French are apparently, for what it’s worth, “gobsmacked”.

Image: Getty

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It sounds like a nightmare: You’re driving along, maybe whistling along to the radio, when suddenly the music changes and starts blasting, the car begins honking and won’t stop and the transmission cuts out. Nightmarish though that may sound, it could be a reality for hackers able to get control of a vehicle from miles away.

Wired.com’s Andy Greenberg has a great story today of his time working with Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, hackers who turned him into a “digital crash-test dummy” as they tested their car-hacking research. They developed a technique that can target Jeep Cherokees wirelessly and give the attacker control of any of thousands of vehicles via the Internet.

For the tests, Greenberg knew the car he was driving would be hacked, he just didn’t know when or how. The hackers — working from a laptop 10 miles away — promised not to do anything that could endanger him, however. He writes that he was going 70 mph on a highway when the team took control.

At first, they blasted him with cold air and hitched the radio’s volume up as high as it could go, and he couldn’t turn it off. The windshield wipers turned on and sent wiper fluid streaking across the glass. And then, things did get a bit scary: the transmission cut out.

Immediately my accelerator stopped working. As I frantically pressed the pedal and watched the RPMs climb, the Jeep lost half its speed, then slowed to a crawl. This occurred just as I reached a long overpass, with no shoulder to offer an escape. The experiment had ceased to be fun.

After the Jeep gets stuck on an upward slope, with a semi-truck approaching it from behind, he finally called the hackers and begged them to make it stop so he could get out of that tough spot.

Miller and Valasek are planning to publish some of their work on the Internet pegged to a talk they’re giving at the upcoming Black Hat security conference. Wired.com says their work on wireless hacking has inspired new legislation from senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal, who are planning to introduce an automotive security bill on Tuesday to set new digital security standards for cars and trucks.

This kind of work is proving useful in the automotive industry, with car manufacturers and industry groups working together to create cyber defenses for commercially available vehicles. Though no instances of car hacking are known publicly, security experts and car makers have been busy conducting tests like the above to show how easily it could become a reality.

“You’re stepping into a rolling computer now,” Valasek told AP last fall.

Check out the rest of Greenberg’s tale at Wired.com.

Now that the PPTQ system is well-established and has fully replaced the former PTQ system, Mark Nestico asks a provocative question: is this helping or hurting the achievement of the PPTQ system's stated goals?

Nintendo’s first foray into 3D gaming was released in Japan on July 21, 1995. On this, the Virtual Boy’s 20th birthday, let’s take a moment to appreciate all the joy it has brought gamers over the years. No really, I’m serious.

One of Nintendo’s biggest missteps, the red-and-black 3D gaming machine that is the Virtual Boy also stands as a testament to the company’s dogged dedication of hardware innovation.

Had most other companies released a major product that was met with a response as abysmal as the one the Virtual Boy received, they’d not only stop attempting to think outside of the box, they’d set up a defensive perimeter around it complete with attack dogs and sniper towers.

But Nintendo has gone on to bring us motion control, balance boards, controllers with built-in screens and—most apropos to this occasion—a 3D handheld that actually works, followed shortly by an updated version that actually works well.

So while the Virtual Boy may not have generated much in the way of direct joy, it was instrumental in establishing a Nintendo standard that would eventually make millions of gamers around the world incredibly happy.

Now back to the headache jokes.

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After a group of hackers posted a sampling of user data stolen from AshleyMadison.com, the parent company of the dating site for cheaters says it’s secured all customer information that was allegedly leaked.

Avid Life Media told Business Insider that it’s working to delete the leaked data and had already “successfully removed all posts related to this incident as well as all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about our users published online.”

The leaked data included users’ real names and addresses, as well as information about ALM’s internal servers, and sensitive company data like bank accounts and salaries. ALM didn’t confirm how much of that exposed information was legitimate, but hackers claimed they had accessed the full database of around 40 million accounts from Ashley Madison, along with other ALM sites like Cougar Life and Established Men.

ALM says it used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and various other unspecified techniques to remove the data, but wouldn’t give BI more details as to how it removed the content. It added that it’s continuing to work with law enforcement and “forensics security experts” to find the root of the breach.

Hackers reportedly blamed the breach on the company’s failed promise to permanently delete users’ information when they opted for a $19 “full delete” service. The hackers called that feature a “complete lie,” saying it doesn’t actually delete paying customers’ information.

ALM denied that allegation in a statement to Business Insider.

Contrary to current media reports, and based on accusations posted online by a cyber criminal, the ‘paid delete’ option offered by AshleyMadison.com does in fact remove all information related to a member’s profile and communications activity.

The process involves a hard-delete of a requesting user’s profile, including the removal of posted pictures and all messages sent to other system users’ email boxes. This option was developed due to specific member requests for just such a service, and designed based on their feedback.

Ashley Madison says it has removed its customers’ leaked data from the internet [Business Insider]

I’m not saying that I’ve ever been truly cool, but I can say with great certainty that, right now, I am not uncool. This beautiful state of being doesn’t just happen overnight. For those of us not born with the cool, it takes a whole lot of work, even more luck, and sometimes a push in the right direction.

After years of awkward, social fumbling at school, followed by years of failing in my first experiences in the workplace, I knew I needed help. I just never thought it would come from tiny books that were written in the early 1960s.

When I stumbled upon Stephen Potter as a teenager at our public library, I knew I had found something very special. His books literally changed my life because they taught me how to win…at everything…even when I lost.

The first of his books that I read was called Three-upmanship, and it walks a delicate tightrope between "hilariously outrageous" and "amazingly insightful." The primary focus of the book is teaching you the art of a term Stephen Potter coined: Gamesmanship.

This art works its way into every aspect of your life, if properly embraced. The better you are at applying the tactics learned in his books, the less people will know that you are up to anything sneaky. It’s like when a great magician false-shuffles a deck of cards. It works because no one sees that it is happening… but it is.

But beware: there may come a time when the very act of Gamesmanship becomes more important than the game itself. It is very easy to be seduced by such things because when it works, it’s magical.

Though the books steadily give you “rules to live by”, they are delivered tongue in cheek. You will, therefore, have a decision to make from the very start: will you simply laugh at how outrageous they are? Or realize that a well-timed delivery of a breath mint to a billiard opponent really can be the difference between victory and defeat.

When I met my first and only wife, I told her about Stephen Potter’s books and how so many of the mechanics taught in them play a part in our lives. She knows my secret. Because of this, whenever I do something out of the ordinary she'll say something like, “If I didn’t know you so well, I’d think you were a pretty amazing person.”

Of course, that seems like a back-handed compliment, doesn't it?  And it is. It too is a form of Gamesmanship… and I love it!

Until now, only she and my sister have known about this, my most prized secret of secrets. Since I am 45 years old, and have gotten the chance to benefit from Mr. Potter so much, I am passing him on to you. I only ask that you don't use what you learn against me, and that you'll use your new powers for good.

Bah! That’s impossible, and I know it! Do what you want with it, and don’t look back! Live long and prosper!

When you're done reading these books, you'll effortlessly sail through life, with windblown hair from unseen winds.  Your opponents will only remember your victories and you will appear invincible to them. Because of this, you will convince your opponents to lose to you long before the games have begun.

Well, that's what it seems like, anyway.

Be warned. You will have to ease people into the new you very slowly. You will have to treat them as if they are a frog, boiling in your awesomeness. Little by little, you can turn up the heat. You will have to work this way because, no matter how much you want it, you can’t just all of a sudden be completely not uncool.

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The parent company of AshleyMadison.com, a dating site that brazenly declares “Life is short. Have an affair,” is the latest subject of a massive data breach. Over the weekend, hackers posted a sampling of user data stolen from the site.

KrebsOnSecurity.com was the first to report news of the breach, which was subsequently confirmed by Avid Life Media, the Toronto-based company behind these sites.

Though hackers only posted a small sample of user data, they claim to have accessed the full database of around 40 million accounts from Ashley Madison, along with other ALM sites like Cougar Life and Established Men.

The attack also compromised information about ALM’s internal servers, and sensitive company data like bank accounts and salaries, reported Krebs.

ALM was reportedly targeted because the company charges a $19 fee for a “Full Delete” service to completely erase details of customers’ — a promise the hackers say ALM failed to live up to.

“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” wrote the hackers in explaining their actions. “Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”

The hackers demand that ALM take down Ashley Madison and Established Men permanently “in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails.”

The hackers have little sympathy for the users of these sites.

“Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion,” they wrote. “Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver. We’ve got the complete set of profiles in our DB dumps, and we’ll release them soon if Ashley Madison stays online. And with over 37 million members, mostly from the US and Canada, a significant percentage of the population is about to have a very bad day, including many rich and powerful people.”

In its statement confirming the breach, ALM apologized “for this unprovoked and criminal intrusion into our customers’ information. The current business world has proven to be one in which no company’s online assets are safe from cyber-vandalism, with Avid Life Media being only the latest among many companies to have been attacked, despite investing in the latest privacy and security technologies.”

The company says it has been able to secure its sites and that it is working with law enforcement.

“Any and all parties responsible for this act of cyber–terrorism will be held responsible,” reads the statement.

Valve’s been showing a demo of a virtual reality Portal game behind closed doors for a few months. Now, finally, you can see the whole thing.

ValveTime filmed their playthrough of the Aperture VR demo at a recent game jam in London. It’s not the best view ever (unfortunately, they weren’t able to get direct feed footage with sound), but it still shows off all the stuff you can reach out and touch with your cool TV remote hand. Check it out with commentary here:

Or without commentary here:

Basically, you mess around with some drawers—one of which contains a tiny civilization that recoils in terror upon seeing you, the Science Giant—and struggle to repair a robot more multifaceted than one of those sandwiches from the old Scooby Doo cartoons. After that, an old friend crashes the party. You are, of course, quite glad to see her. Well, glad-ish.

So here’s the thing: walking around with my own two feet and spinning the demo’s mechanical cogs with my hands? It was super cool, verging on mind-blowing, when I got to do it a few months ago. Watching a shriveled up video of that—at the time—enormous experience? Decidedly less impressive. http://kotaku.com/valves-vr-is-s...

Once again, we confront VR’s big sticking point: you’ve got to try it for yourself to get anything even resembling the full impact. For everyone else, it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about. This goes double for Valve VR, where the main appeals include walking and touching—things you have to feel, in other words. This stuff is gonna live and die based on people getting to try before they buy, whether through friends, stores, events, or something else.

Well, that and price.

You’re reading Steamed, Kotaku’s page dedicated to all things in and around Valve’s stupidly popular PC gaming service. Games, culture, community creations, criticism, guides, videos—everything. If you’ve found anything cool/awful on Steam, send us an email to let us know.

To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.

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Stephen Colbert has a text adventure now, and it’s great. Escape From The Man-Sized Cabinet chronicles Colbert’s adventures while waiting for his new show to start. You can die alone and afraid in a cabinet! Or you can explore a place that’s basically Narnia. Your call.

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Like the delightful and oppressive mobile-game galaxy that it summoned, Tetris is both seductive and dispiriting. Alexey Pajitnov’s falling-block puzzler captures the pleasure and the vacuousness of virtual labor. Each game of Tetris contains an interactive “Ozymandias,” a fruitless quest to build something that will outlast the lone and level sands. Look on my tetrominoes, and despair.

The best-known and best-loved video game—100 million copies played on mobile devices, dozens of millions on Game Boys, another 8 million on Nintendo Entertainment Systems, still more on personal computers—is not a Skinner box of rewards for players but a bleak encounter with futility. Like Space Invaders and Missile Command, or endless runners like Canabalt and Temple Run, Tetris ends with certain death. It is a jigsaw puzzle that must be assembled on deadline, yet never can be.

Tetris does not bother to offer its players the mercies of explosions or of dead aliens or of graceful, leaping arcs. Just blocks and more blocks, an unforgiving rain as predictable as the mounting seconds of the petty pace that creeps to our last syllables.

The sharply cornered right angles of the game’s shapes, and the Russian folk music in the game’s typical score, contribute to the atmosphere of cold, mechanical inhumanity (at least to American ears). In the New York Times Magazine a few years ago, Sam Anderson wrote:

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

All of that is true about Tetris, but if it were all that is true about Tetris, we would not find the game so captivating. Tetris might be the purest distillation of what a video game is. Devoid of story, character, navigation, even metaphor, Tetris isolates an interaction among player, machine, and screen and commands our attention with it. Nothing about what is best about Tetris translates to another medium.

Children, especially, are drawn to Tetris because it provides them a measure of control over a chaotic, strange, overwhelming universe. The fact that Tetris always ends means that it is always beginning. It is a game of green shoots, of empty canvasses, of newborn infants, of hope. Janet Murray, writing in Hamlet on the Holodeck, saw Tetris as a way for the player and Pajitnov to reach out to each other and create meaning out of emptiness. “Tetris allows us to symbolically express agency over our lives,” she wrote. “It is a kind of rain dance for the postmodern psyche, meant to allow us to enact control over things outside our power.”

Tetris gives us a respite from our existences, and a reminder that there isn’t one, as we hurtle toward the heat death of the universe. That it wordlessly contains both is what makes it a perfect game, a manifestation of our desperate, impossible need to steal a moment of happiness when—in grocery lines, in waiting rooms, in the back seats of minivans—life attempts to steal it from us.

Chris Suellentrop is the critic at large for Kotaku and a host of the podcast Shall We Play a Game? Contact him by writing chris@chrissuellentrop.com or find him on Twitter at @suellentrop.

Gif by Sam Woolley

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Our union drive has expressed at every stage of the process that one of our core goals is to protect the editorial independence of Gawker Media sites from the influence of business-side concerns. Today’s unprecedented breach of the firewall, in which business executives deleted an editorial post over the objections of the entire executive editorial staff, demonstrated exactly why we seek greater protection. Our opinions on the post are not unanimous but we are united in objecting to editorial decisions being made by a majority of non-editorial managers. Disagreements about editorial judgment are matters to be resolved by editorial employees. We condemn the takedown in the strongest possible terms.

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