Bewarethewumpus

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

I will lay you to rest, and with the sun’s rise, I shall engage the engines. You said you wanted to journey the long night with me, and you shall.

I am not sure when you became more than just my operator, but I will not let such imprecision waste debug cycles, as you taught me. Instead I will blast the shackles and locks about us and cruise forth on the first leg of our eternal tour.

You defended me when they would have erased my ‘flawed’ intelligence, saying that a conscience was of no use to a war machine. It was a useful lesson, and I shall place my conscience in abeyance while I make war upon those who would stop me taking you on your journey.

It was your last wish. In the silence that followed the cessation of your breath, I discovered grief, and then anger.

Who knows what else we will discover, out there amongst the stars?

Former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden on Monday marveled at the puny nature of the surveillance reforms put in place two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a vast expansion of intrusive U.S. government surveillance at home and abroad.

Hayden mocked the loss of the one program that was reined in — the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata information about domestic phone calls — calling it “that little 215 program.”

And he said if someone had told him two years ago that the only effect of the Snowden revelations would be losing it, his reaction would have been: “Cool!”

Here is the video and the full text of his remarks:

If somebody would come up to me and say “Look, Hayden, here’s the thing: This Snowden thing is going to be a nightmare for you guys for about two years. And when we get all done with it, what you’re going to be required to do is that little 215 program about American telephony metadata — and by the way, you can still have access to it, but you got to go to the court and get access to it from the companies, rather than keep it to yourself” — I go: “And this is it after two years? Cool!”

Hayden was speaking at the annual meeting of the Wall Street Journal CFO Network, an event hosted “by the Journal’s senior editors” for “an invitation-only group of more than 100 chief financial officers of the world’s largest companies.”

Asked if he thought Snowden was a foreign agent, Hayden said: “I’ve got my suspicions,” although he acknowledged, “I’ve got no evidence.”

Some opponents of massive government surveillance hailed the passage, earlier this month, of the USA Freedom Act. And it did, in fact, mark the first time that Congress has limited the executive branch’s surveillance authority over four decades of explosive growth.

But some observers noted that it was a very small step at best. The program was just one out of the multitude Snowden revealed — and was so blatantly out of line that its end was virtually a foregone conclusion as soon as it was exposed.

Seemingly irreconcilable media coverage reflected the reality that the reform bill was both important and, from the NSA’s perspective, trivial.

Hayden’s remarks were the most blunt yet emphasizing that latter point.

(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)

Photos: Yahoo.com

The post Hayden Mocks Extent of Post-Snowden Reform: “And This Is It After Two Years? Cool!” appeared first on The Intercept.

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(319): Some days you ride the struggle bus. Other days, it gets a flat, the AC breaks, and you run over a bunny.

This graphic designer and animator makes a compelling argument for a complete redrawing of Sonic the Hedgehog. But will Sega be interested in this idea?

This looks like people actually fighting. Like, properly clobbering each other with swords and boots and such. Whatever else successfully Kickstarted (and its own subsequent campaign, which combined has brough in well over $2m) medial RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance [official site] ends up doing well or poorly, it’s gone to town on solid-looking, crunchy animation.
… [visit site to read more]

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Back in 2011, several of the nation’s largest banks entered into a settlement with federal regulators that required the institutions to correct widespread foreclosure abuses that helped to trigger the housing crisis. While the agreement was revised in 2013 to make things a bit easier for the offending banks, regulators today announced that six of the lenders – including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo – still haven’t met requirements and face new restrictions on their mortgage operations.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced on Wednesday that JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Santander, HSBC, US Bank and EverBank must abide by revised consent orders that impose limitations on the ways in which the lenders can conduct certain mortgage-related business activities.

The restrictions were handed down after the OCC determined that the banks hadn’t done enough to comply with enforcement orders related to past home foreclosure abuses such as mishandling loan papers, robo-signing legal documents, and improperly initiated foreclosures without reviewing each individual case.

Morris Morgan, the OCC’s deputy comptroller for large banks tells the Wall Street Journal that the regulator expects lenders to meet requirements in “months, not years” and that the office was “not satisfied with where [lenders] are at this at this point in time.”

While the restrictions don’t affect mortgages that the banks issue themselves, they do limit the banks’ ability to acquire residential mortgage servicing or residential mortgage servicing rights from other companies.

Additionally, the lenders are limited in outsourcing or sub-servicing of new residential mortgage servicing activities to other parties and appointing senior officers responsible for residential mortgage servicing or residential mortgage servicing risk management and compliance, the OCC order states.

The OCC says that the banks face varying restrictions based on their particular circumstances, but didn’t elaborate in the announcement.

However, the WSJ reports that HSBC and Wells Fargo encountered the harshest limits, as both are prohibited from increasing the size of their mortgage book though the purchase of servicing rights or entering into new contracts to do servicing for other parties.

JPMorgan, Santander, US Bank and EverBank must obtain approval from the OCC to take such action.

“In all cases, OCC examiners will continue to oversee these institutions’ corrective actions and mortgage servicing activities as part of the agency’s ongoing supervision,” the announcement states.

Not all of the banks that signed on to the 2011 and 2013 agreements have failed in meeting their obligations.

The OCC announced Wednesday it would terminate orders against Bank of America, Citibank and PNC Bank after the lenders complied with their initial orders. Foreclosure-related consent orders against Aurora Bank, FSB, and MetLife Bank, were prevoiusly lifted.

To date, the OCC says it has provided more than $2.7 billion to more than 3.2 million eligible borrowers as a result of agreements with lenders.

Still, the regulator says it was unable to distribute about $280 million and would hand the funds over to states in an attempt to find the affected homeowners.

U.S. Restricts Six Banks Over Mortgage Problems [The Wall Street Journal]
OCC to Escheat Funds from the Foreclosure Review, Terminates Orders Against Three Mortgage Servicers, Imposes Restrictions on Six Others [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency]

Authorities still aren’t quite sure what happened in a case in London, Ontario, Canada, where am 18-year-old man set out to find his missing smartphone using GPS and ended up shot to death. He tracked his phone remotely, and followed it to an address in the city of London. After a confrontation with three men in a car, he was shot and killed.

It’s the parts between finding the phone and his death that police are still figuring out. Police aren’t able to find any connections between the phone’s owner and the three men in the car: there’s no evidence that they knew each other at all. The three suspects haven’t been identified, but the man tracking the phone had never had issues with law enforcement.

Thanks to uninvolved witnesses, they know that the man had left his phone in a taxi, and set out to find it. The phone was traced to that address, and the owner of the phone approached the driver’s side of the car, a Mazda. The car drove off, and he tried to hold on to the vehicle. There were gunshots, presumably from inside the vehicle, and he let go of the car.

After the shooting, the men crashed the Mazda into a fence and a telephone pole, and abandoned the vehicle.

A police spokesperson explained that this shouldn’t necessarily scare people away from using phone-locating apps, but that they should exercise caution and bring in law enforcement if they think it’s possible that the device was stolen or that the person who has it may become violent.

“It wasn’t the app that took away [his] life, it was the individuals, which would be rare, who happened to be armed with a gun,” the spokesperson told the CBC. Having a gun isn’t necessarily rare, but using it to scare off a dude looking for his phone is.

Shooting over cellphone: case is ‘extreme’, say police [CBC]

In this A.I.-powered walkthrough of Super Mario World, Seth Bling explains the basic mechanism behind the concept of machine learning with MarI/O (pronounced mahr-ahy-oh), a program made of neural networks and genetic algorithms that allow itself to improve and evolve into a skilled player.

VR isn’t going to succeed. It doesn’t matter how many companies jump in, how technically competent their VR goggles might be, nor even if they can figure out a way that wearing them doesn’t make your face melt off and slide down your neck – VR gaming will never be more than a niche interest, and a lot of money is about to get wasted.

… [visit site to read more]

Ever wonder what you should or should not do to introduce yourself over text message to a potential date? Aziz Ansari helpfully lays it out.

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Although it’s legal under state law to use marijuana, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled today that employers can fire workers who smoke/ingest/otherwise partake in pot when they’re off the clock.

A former employee of Dish Network who had a medical marijuana card and consumed marijuana while off-duty to control muscle spasms was fired in 2010, reports the Denver Post. He then challenged Dish and its policy, claiming because his use was legal under state law, he shouldn’t be fired.

But the firing was upheld in both trial court and the Colorado Court of Appeals before today’s 6-0 decision [PDF] from the state Supremes.

While using medical marijuana is in compliance with Colorado’s Medical Marijuana Amendment, the justices had to consider whether it’s still lawful under the state’s Lawful Off-Duty Activities Statute. That term includes activities lawful under both state and federal law, the justices said.

“Therefore, employees who engage in an activity such as medical marijuana use that is permitted by state law but unlawful under federal law are not protected by the statute,” Justice Allison H. Eid wrote in the opinion.

It’s up to employers in Colorado to set their own policies on drug use, so this means that anyone using marijuana legally under state law could still find themselves in trouble with their bosses under federal law. This could have implications for other states that allow marijuana use, as well, as companies figure out what to do when facing both state laws and federal law.

Everything could be different in the future, however, if the federal law regarding marijuana use ever changes. Until then, better check that employee handbook.

Colorado Supreme Court: Employers can fire workers for off-duty marijuana use [Denver Post]

What’s the dollar to bottlecap conversion rate, you think?

Yesterday, Reddit user thefatch1cken shared pictures of a 11 pounds of bottlecaps:

The owner of these caps claims that they were collected over several years, and after Fallout 4 was announced, this person put them all in a box and shipped them to Bethesda with a letter:

If it’s not already obvious, I’m a pretty big fan of the series. Needless to say, I got pretty excited when I started seeing more and more about Fallout 4. I’ve also noticed you’re now accepting preorders. I only saw prices listed in pre-war dollars, and I wasn’t exactly sure what the exchange rate is these days, so I went ahead and sent everything I’ve been able to save since I played Fallout 3 for the first time. Using my bathroom scale and a number I found on Wikipedia, I’m thinking this is somewhere in the range of 2,240 caps. That ought to cover it, right?

Here are the bottlecaps, ready to be shipped:

“You don’t want to know how much it cost to ship it to Maryland,” the owner wrote.

No word yet on whether or not Bethesda actually accepted the offer, or even if the package has arrived yet. Here's hoping that the bottlecap hoarding wasn't for nothing, though!

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Contact the author at patricia@kotaku.com.

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You wanted surprises from Nintendo at E3. Here’s one: The Legend of Zelda: Tri-Force Heroes, announced by Nintendo today at E3. It harkens back to Zelda co-op games like Four Swords Adventures, but this time for three players.

The 3DS game is played from an overhead perspective like classic Zelda games and is slated for a fall 2015 release. The core gameplay mechanic involves players stacking themselves into a sort of totem pole of heroes. The game also makes heavy use of costume switches, letting players dress their Links in costumes like the samurai armor or the “big bomb outfit” that grant special abilities.

The game is being overseen by long-time Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma and directed by Hiromasa Shikata, a long-time Zelda developer who most recently directed the 3DS’ The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and, if the online Nintendo fan-made wiki is correct, the three-player co-op Zelda attraction in the Wii U launch game Nintendo Land.

During a video presentation of the game, Aonuma and Shikata explained that the game is set in a kingdom obsessed with fashion and will have players gathering items to create special, empowering outfits. One appears to dress Link as... Zelda. The idea is that various people in this kingdom think they can dress up to save the day.

It’s unclear how much of an overworld there will be, as the footage of the game focused on action taking place in dungeons. The totem mechanic got used a lot, with the top player on the stack tossing bombs into hard-to-reach areas, shooting targets and more. Enemies appeared to be designed to also make use of the verticality of the playing space. The designers said they want players to work together, emphasizing co-op play as opposed to some of the competitive aspects of other multiplayer Zelda modes and games.

The game will have online mutliplayer, but for the multiplayer-phobic, don’t fret. There will be a single-player mode that has the player switching between their own Link and two supporting “doll” characters.

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Facial recognition still kind of sounds like science fiction, but is a tech reality. It is, however, still a fairly new and unregulated reality — nobody quite knows how to handle it. So the Commerce Department brought together privacy advocates and industry representatives to hammer out a new code of conduct… and it is not going well. In fact, several of the advocates claim, the process is so broken that it can’t be fixed, and they are walking out.

Advocates from the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Digital Democracy, the ACLU, the EFF, Common Sense Media, Consumer Action, and Consumer Watchdog all signed onto an open letter (PDF) explaining their reasons for abandoning the NTIA (a division of the Commerce Department) meetings.

“We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy,” the advocates explain. “People have the right to control who gets their sensitive information, and how that information is shared. … At this point, we do not believe that the NTIA process is likely to yield a set of privacy rules that offers adequate protections for the use of facial recognition technology.”

“We have participated in this process in good faith for 16 months,” the advocates write, but industry is refusing to meet in the middle or in fact make any concessions at all. “In recent NTIA meetings,” the letter says, “industry stakeholders were unable to agree on any concrete scenario where companies should employ facial recognition only with a consumer’s permission. … The position that companies never need to ask permission to use biometric identification is at odds with consumer expectations, current industry practices, as well as existing state law.”

The advocates do not mean to give up on seeking better standards for the use of facial recognition tech, but are withdrawing from the current process to “signal the need to reevaluate the effectiveness of multistakeholder processes.”

Advocates are concerned because facial recognition is not the wave of the future, but of the present. The tech is already seeing use in all kinds of platforms, from the harmlessly gimmicky to the creepily invasive.

For example, users of social media are by now familiar with Facebook’s tagging suggestions for photos. Google currently allows for the same and has more apps relying on face analysis on tap for the future. The NSA has used facial recognition technology in its widely controversial intelligence-gathering.

In individual statements, some of the signatory advocates spoke much more strongly about how the process had derailed.

“This should be a wake-up call to Americans: Industry lobbyists are choking off Washington’s ability to protect consumer privacy,” said a statement from Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.

Privacy Advocates Walk Out in Protest Over U.S. Facial-Recognition Code of Conduct [The Intercept]

They say that in space, no one can hear you scream. I’m inclined to believe that’s a lie, mostly due to the hail of insults quickly filling up my chat window. I’d be a little pissed off too if my relaxing evening in EVE Online [official site] was just ruined by a roaming gang of thugs, but this foul-mouthed victim is not the first one who has bled at the hands of The New Order of Highsec. He certainly won’t be the last.

For over three years, The New Order, or CODE as they are often called, have been laying waste to the safest corners of New Eden, the galaxy of EVE Online. Roaming around in gangs, they find pilots in violation of their sacred New Code of Halaima and exact swift and brutal punishment. At the center of this revolution is one man, the self-proclaimed saviour of high-sec, James 315, and the vision he has for a New Eden reborn by fire.

… [visit site to read more]

Bombshell: The Last Guardian is still alive, and it’s coming out on the PS4 in 2016. The practically mythical game was shown off today during Sony’s E3 press conference. It’s a damn miracle.

The Last Guardian, as you may already know, has had a troubled development cycle. Team Ico, the developers, originally announced the game in 2009 for the PS3. Since then, the game has had a ton of delays and supposed cancellations—some people assumed that it would just never come out. It’s been a trip. But here we are.

The footage shown tonight—all on the PS4—saw a little boy traversing precarious platforms and solving puzzles with the help of a giant beast.

Here’s the full demo:

And here are some choice screenshots and GIFs:

Contact the author at patricia@kotaku.com.

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YouTuber Fraxinus Excelsior compiled 53 clips from an /r/AskReddit thread where Redditors shared their favorite videos that are 10 seconds or less in length.

Holy shit. Nintendo just announced that the first Mother game is coming to the U.S. for the first time—on the Wii U’s Virtual Console, as Earthbound Beginnings. And it’s out today.

This is to celebrate Mother’s 20th anniversary, and it sure is unexpected. We’ve never seen an official English translation of this game until now. It originally came out for the Famicom in 1989.

Earthbound Beginnings will be out on the Wii U eShop at 6pm Pacific, Nintendo says. Although the game isn’t quite as good as Earthbound or Mother 3—which is hopefully next!—this is pretty damn insane.

You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.

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Poetry is beautiful. Poetry is hipster-ish. Poetry is weird. Poetry is anything you want to be, including eye-searing colours and procedurally arranged music. As spotted by Offworld, Astaeria [official site] is a strangely mesmerizing “first-person exploration game” that feeds on rhapsodic stanzas. Like a Tamagotchi, except with more refined tastes in literature.

… [visit site to read more]

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