Possibly the most loved and used fighting knife in the world, the Fairbain-Sykes Fighting Knife is a stilletto daggar designed and produced during WWII for commando troops and still used to this day. The knife was designed for a precise grip and a long thin blade that could go through a Soviet Army greatcoat to the ribs and slice, rather than tear, for faster death.

The knife's history is
worth a small book alone, but the two men who invented it also helped invent modern police fighting and close combat, and probably inspired Q from James Bond.

W.E. Fairbairn served in the British army and then in 1907 joined the Shanghai Municipal Police. Shanghai was then considered one of the most violent cities in the world with a tiny and overwhelmed police force. Fairbairn's response was to invent new tactics, equipment and training for the world's first anti-riot police unit and in his words: "Get tough, get down in the gutter, win at all costs... I teach what is called 'Gutter Fighting.' There's no fair play, no rules except one: kill or be killed"

He invented a riot baton, bulletproof vest, a training room staged like an opium den, and other innovations like marking bullets at the base to track them later. That introduced him to E.A. Sykes, then the representative for Remington in Shangi, who quickly joined the Shanghai Municipal Police as a reserve officer.

Fairbairn invented his own martial arts, Defendu, a mix of judo, jiu jitso and chinese boxing that he had learned in Shanghai, as a way for police to restrain and defend themselves, distinct from the close quarter combat style he and Sykes later trained soldiers in. They also co-wrote one of the first and still relevant books on shooting for police, Shooting to Live (PDF). Fairbairn retired from the SMP in 1940 with over 600 non-training fights he survived and scars covering his entire body. According to his daughter Dorothea, he also bred goldfish and taught her bonsai, and never swore or drank.

During WWII, together with his friend Sykes, he developed the training for the Special Operations Executive and the newly formed commandos teams. Dubbed "Dangerous Dan" (no relation to Beano) and basically trained people how to kill other people with your little finger at Churchill's secret school, Beaulieu.

Both were very well-liked trainers. One trainee remembers Sykes as having "the manner and appearance of an elderly, amiable clergyman, combined with the speed and ferocity of a footpad; lulled by his soft tones and charmed by his benevolent smile, we would be startled to hear him conclude some demonstration with a snarled "Then you bring up your right knee into his testicles".

Fairbairn also wrote two widely distributed comic booklets on hand to hand fighting: Get Tough! training comic by Fairbairn (1942) and Hands Off! Fairbairn's comic book guide to self defence for women (Bonus: short feminist history review of the comic).

Sykes and Fairbairn fell out at the end of the war, although neither ever disclosed why. Sykes' much-loved wife died young of cancer, and he never remarried. He had to retire early in 1945 due to ill-health and died soon after. Post-war, Fairbairn went briefly by Cyprus and Singapore where he set up their riot police units, before dying at home in 1960 (probably too polite to kick Death to well, death).

Carrying on their training was Colonel Rex Applegate. Born and bred in Oregon to a family heritage of shooting, Applegate joined the military police where he was recruited to the OSS, forerunner to the CIA, and eventually met and became fast friends with the two men. Ironically, Applegate never went into combat because of a lung ailment. Instead, he poured his considerable energies into training other people on how to kill effectively and efficiently. Applegate's book Kill or Be Killed (scanned marked-up book PDF or hardcover) is a classic for combining military and police tactics.

Post-war, Applegate was a special advisor in Mexico, establishing their riot police and taught John Wayne how to shoot, still lecturing and teaching up to his death in 1998.

Applegate with Fairbairn's approval, also created a version of the knife, with a handle that could be differently weighted to change the balance point and a partially serrated blade, but it wasm't as popular as the original, except for the folding version. Or you could carry a Fairbairn's other knife, the Smatchet with your spork.

Finish off with some official training films from DoD have Applegate's classic training films on shooting and why war is not sport, or just check out an entire channel of Fairbairn beating people up.

(Gutterfighting previously on metafilter mentions Fairbairn)

Manfeels Park

Manfeels Park is an exercise in flogging a pun for all it's worth.

The male dialogue in this webcomic is all taken word for word or adapted only slightly from web commentary by hurt and confused men with Very Important Things To Explain, usually to women. Artistic license is exercised in editing commentary for brevity, spelling and grammar, but the spirit of the original comment is always faithfully observed. Witty rejoinders are also 'found dialogue' where possible.

With art "hand-traced on photoshop from regency period drama screencaps, just like the Old Masters used to do it."

Scroll down to the comments for a preview of next week on Manfeels Park… or read it on their Tumblr for additional snarky hashtag commentary.

Maybe you haven't heard of lewd visual novel Sakura Spirit, which is currently available on Steam. That's OK, because Sakura Spirit's Steam reviews are here to help.

Even if you have no interest in playing it, it's hard not to be struck by the reviews of Sakura Spirit—most are silly. And given that the game is, as one reviewer calls it, the "closest thing to hentai in steam," a lot of the reviews reference sex. Fair warning!

First, so you get a sense of what the game looks like, here's a trailer:

Granted, once in-game, the stuff you see might be a little less, err, wholesome. Still, the game looks like standard fare as far as visual novels of this type go, right? It's not that the game is of particular note, or that the game is good/worth playing, but rather that it was recently released on Steam—so there are a bunch of fresh Steam reviews for it. Most are reviews are rather silly. Some are kind of uncomfortable.

Let's take a look at what people are saying about the game, shall we?

I think my favorite part is the constant allegation that the game is short, and yet there are a number of people with a ridiculous number of hours in the game. Obviously its easy to just leave the game running, but still—kind of funny.

You can read more Steam reviews of Sakura Spirit here.

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A follower on Twitter showed me this really-long MOTHER 3 Medley on YouTube very recently, check it out!

Man, it’s over 50 minutes? That must’ve taken a long time to put together! It’s nice and easy to listen to, though, so thanks to Mr. Orchestra for making it!

If you’d like to get an MP3 version, you can download it from here!

You know what makes everything better? Adding Levi from Attack on Titan to everything. Yes. Everything.

Below, you can see what Levi Ackerman looks like in the Attack on Titan anime. If you are unfamiliar with Levi, this wikia can hopefully bring you up to speed.

In the past few years, Attack on Titan has become incredibly popular in Japan and abroad. Last year, Japanese Twitter users began, in earnest, to add Levi's face to other anime and different images. The results, which were often rounded up on Naver, were quite amusing.

The king (or queen!) of the Levi face-swaps was Twitter user Kagayake_rivai, whose work spread outside of Japan to China and the West. Let's have a look back at some of the standouts.

[Photo: Kagayake_rivai]

[Photo: ATURN_sendai]

[Photo: sznmix]

[Photo: hey_cho_cleanUp]

[Photo: xma73sanx]

[Photo: Kagayake_rivai via 3captains1piece]

[Photo: momo_no]

[Photo: Kagayake_rivai via 3captains1piece]

[Photo: trk_1200]

[Photo: Kagayake_rivai via 3captains1piece]

[Photo: hey_cho_cleanUp]

[Photo: Kagayake_rivai via Weibo]

[Via Naver]

To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond.

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YouTuber Karma Town provides this very realistic MLG montage-style PSA demonstrating the dangers of smoking marijuana.

via http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lf6iemPHes1qzls9yo1_500.jpg

After racial slurs in NSA materials leaked, White House asks security agencies to clean up

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[awesomeparker]

Christopher Wilson is a 22-year-old computer science student with Asperger's syndrome. He's also facing six months in prison for refusing to hand over the encryption keys to police during the course of an investigation. Wilson first found himself on...

Nearly four years after the last great war between 4chan and Tumblr, the two heavyweights of the memesphere are once again butting heads over their opposing political stances.

This week I have a somewhat topical essay over at Medium.com. Warning: political.

Zack Danger Brown of Columbus, Ohio wanted $10 to make some potato salad, so he went to Kickstarter. Now he has more than $2,000 to make potato salad, proving a long-standing theory here at Snacktaku — potato salad is pretty great.

Read more...

The review was undertaken by Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani for the Washington Post, working from a cache of previously undisclosed primary surveillance data that Edward Snowden took with him when he left the NSA.

In many cases, it's clear that the NSA has good reason to be concerned about its surveillance targets, but it's also clear that the collateral targets -- who far outnumber the first group -- have intimate, totally irrelevant information about their lives collected and retained by the spies, where it is routinely accessed by spies, analysts, and private-sector contractors.

Almost everything in the NSA cache is haystack, in other words, with just a few needles. And the hay is deliberately collected and retained, even though it consists of things like love notes, baby pictures, medical records, and other intimate data belonging to people who are under no suspicion at all.

And while foreigners -- myself included -- are justifiably anxious about the possibility that the NSA faces no legal hurdles to collection of our data, it's significant that the NSA deliberately targets Americans in the USA and abroad. That's because the NSA is legally enjoined from spying on Americans, and the proof that the agency is flouting this prohibition is evidence of illegal activity and strengthens the case for more oversight, reform and intervention from the US Congress.

The NSA uses laughably sloppy tools for deciding whether a target is a "US person" (a person in the USA, or an American citizen abroad). For example, people whose address books contain foreign persons are presumed by some analysts to be foreign. Likewise, people who post in "foreign" languages (the US has no official state language) are presumed by some analysts to be non-US persons.

When the NSA does determine that it is intercepting US persons' communications, it is required to take "minimization" steps on any data it retains. However, many of these minimization steps are likewise laughably inadequate -- for example, in early 2009, the files refer to "minimized U.S. president-elect," rather than Barack Obama, but you hardly need be a surveillance mastermind to make sense of this.

The documents reveal how the controversial "section 702" of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has become the go-to basis for surveillance, 702 further lowers the bar for conducting surveillance from the already generous height at which it had been previously set. In the cache, the Post reporters see evidence that analysts whose judicial surveillance authorization warrants have expired then switch to 702 as their basis for continuing spying, rather than demonstrating to a judge that their cause is good.

Snowden says he released this cache to the Washington Post to better inform the debate about 702. The NSA's allies in Congress talk about 702 as something used in special cases and with due care. But it's clear from these documents that 702 is a legal back-door that lets spies avoid the very generous and casual oversight of the FISA court, a veritable rubberstamp factory that grants virtually every NSA request.

Last week's revelations about the NSA's "targeted" surveillance program showed us that NSA wordsmithing has distorted the word "targeted" beyond all recognition, but that was about a largely automated system that spied on people based on stupid, automated rules (albeit rules that a human being had created and put in place).

In this story, we see that even when a trained NSA analyst is making individual, case-by-case decisions about which people to target, s/he can be expected to get it wrong nine times out of ten.

Nice shooting, Tex.

-Cory Doctorow

In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are [Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani/Washington Post]

(Image: Archery, Vassilis, CC-BY-SA)

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Check out these clips from the Vinesauce live stream of gameplay footage featuring a corrupted Mario Kart DS game.

View

In a shocking story on the German site Tagesschau (Google translate), Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz report on the rules used by the NSA to decide who is a "target" for surveillance.

Since the start of the Snowden story in 2013, the NSA has stressed that while it may intercept nearly every Internet user's communications, it only "targets" a small fraction of those, whose traffic patterns reveal some basis for suspicion. Targets of NSA surveillance don't have their data flushed from the NSA's databases on a rolling 48-hour or 30-day basis, but are instead retained indefinitely.

The authors of the Tagesschau story have seen the "deep packet inspection" rules used to determine who is considered to be a legitimate target for deep surveillance, and the results are bizarre.

According to the story, the NSA targets anyone who searches for online articles about Tails -- like this one that we published in April, or this article for teens that I wrote in May -- or Tor (The Onion Router, which we've been posted about since 2004). Anyone who is determined to be using Tor is also targeted for long-term surveillance and retention.

Tor and Tails have been part of the mainstream discussion of online security, surveillance and privacy for years. It's nothing short of bizarre to place people under suspicion for searching for these terms.

More importantly, this shows that the NSA uses "targeted surveillance" in a way that beggars common sense. It's a dead certainty that people who heard the NSA's reassurances about "targeting" its surveillance on people who were doing something suspicious didn't understand that the NSA meant people who'd looked up technical details about systems that are routinely discussed on the front page of every newspaper in the world.

But it's not the first time the NSA has deployed specialized, highly counterintuitive wordsmithing to play games with the public, the law and its oversight. From James Clapper's insistence that he didn't lie to Congress about spying on Americans because he was only intercepting all their data, but not looking at it all; to the internal wordgames on evidence in the original Prism leak in which the NSA claimed to have "direct access" to servers from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, etc, even though this "direct access" was a process by which the FBI would use secret warrants to request information from Internet giants without revealing that the data was destined for the NSA.

I have known that this story was coming for some time now, having learned about its broad contours under embargo from a trusted source. Since then, I've discussed it in confidence with some of the technical experts who have worked on the full set of Snowden docs, and they were as shocked as I was.

One expert suggested that the NSA's intention here was to separate the sheep from the goats -- to split the entire population of the Internet into "people who have the technical know-how to be private" and "people who don't" and then capture all the communications from the first group.

Another expert said that s/he believed that this leak may come from a second source, not Edward Snowden, as s/he had not seen this in the original Snowden docs; and had seen other revelations that also appeared independent of the Snowden materials. If that's true, it's big news, as Snowden was the first person to ever leak docs from the NSA. The existence of a potential second source means that Snowden may have inspired some of his former colleagues to take a long, hard look at the agency's cavalier attitude to the law and decency.

-Cory Doctorow

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If at first you don’t succeed, try again with a more drastic measure. Just two weeks after a bill to allow private student loan borrowers to refinance at lower interest rates failed to gain traction in the Senate, a new bill expected to be introduced this week takes things a step farther.

The bill, from Iowa senator Tom Harkin, would create an option in which private student loans could be discharged through bankruptcy proceedings, according to the Wall Street Journal.

While that might seem like a dramatic measure, the impact would be rather small when looking at total student loan debt in the United States. Private lenders only hold about 10% to 15% of all student loan debt; the rest is held by the U.S. Education Department.

Under current federal law, neither federal nor private student loans can be discharged in bankruptcy. Other debts such as money owed on mortgages, credit cares and auto loans can be discharged in bankruptcy.

Consumer advocates have long said the prohibition of discharging student debt in the case of bankruptcy is keeping borrowers buried under high debt burdens that they have little chance of digging themselves out of.

On the other hand, those who support the status quo have argued it reduces the risk that borrowers will walk away from debts and in turn keeps interest rates in check.

Harkin’s bill also reportedly contains measures that would ease student costs, hold schools with high default rates accountable and mandate that colleges reveal data on the outcomes of their students.

With one-in-three students loans considered delinquent and often affecting a student’s ability to make purchases in the future, the bill could offer much-needed reprieve for college students left with mountains of both federal and private student loans. However, the likelihood of the bill moving forward this session is slim, the WSJ reports.

The debt burden created by student loans seems to be at the forefront of legislators’ minds this year with a number of bills being introduced. However, little has actually been accomplished on the front.

Just two weeks ago a bill that would have allowed consumers refinance their student loans to the rate currently being issued on new federal and private student loans died in the Senate. The Bank On Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act, introduced in May by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, fell short of the 60 votes needed to end debate and move on to a final vote.

The Act would have allowed federal and private student loan borrowers to refinance to rates set for first-time borrowers – approximately 3.86%.

In early June, student borrowers received a bit of good news as President Obama signed an executive order that expanded a federal loan forgiveness plan to 5 million additional consumers who borrowed before October 2007 or those who have not borrowed since October 2011. The Pay As You Earn program allows students who borrowed federal direct loans to cap their loan payments at 10% of their monthly incomes.

While the order could be considered a big win for consumers, as Consumerist reported in April the debt forgiven by government programs has added up more quickly than anticipated. At its current rate the Pay As You Earn plan is expected to reach $14 billion next year, exceeding government expectations by 90%.

Legislators have also looked into attacking student loan debt concerns before they become an issue for borrowers. Back in April, Sen. Sherrod Brown from Ohio gave new life to the 2013 Know Before You Owe Act, a bill that would require much fuller disclosures for private student loan terms and options.

Harkin Opens Door To Bankruptcy Option for Student Loans [The Wall Street Journal]

General Motors’ internal investigation claims that no top executives at the car company were aware of the defective ignition switch that has resulted in at least 13 deaths (and likely many more) and the recall of nearly millions of vehicles. But newly released documents from the Congressional investigation into the debacle indicate that one current GM Vice-President was made aware of the problem as early as 2005.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, which recently grilled GM CEO Mary Barra, has released around 80 new documents unearthed during its investigation, much of it correspondence between various GM engineers and folks at Delphi, the manufacturer who supplied the defective switch.

But one internal GM e-mail [PDF] from June 2005 details potential fixes to the problem and includes news stories from the NY Times and others about reports of Chevy Cobalts mysteriously turning off because drivers bumped the ignition switches with their keys.

Among the intended recipients of that e-mail was Doug Parks, who used to be chief engineer on the Cobalt and the Saturn Ion, another recalled vehicle. Parks was not a VP at the time, but has been the company’s VP Global Product Programs since 2012, as is indicated in these org charts provided to investigators. He’s also been described as a close associate of Barra, herself a longtime veteran at GM before rising to the CEO position at the beginning of 2014.

Another e-mail from 2005 shows that Park was indeed aware of the issue, as he asks, “can we come up with a ‘plug’ to go into the key that centers the ring through the middle of the key and not the edge/slot? This appears to be the only real, quick solution.”

The reason that it’s important for General Motors to claim that no top execs at the company knew of the ignition problem before 2009 involves a tricky condition of the company’s bankruptcy restructuring. As part of that deal, the post-bankruptcy “New GM” can not be held liable for non-accident claims related to defective vehicles produced by pre-bankruptcy “Old GM.”

However, lawyers representing plaintiffs in class-action suits against the car maker say that the fact that the ignition problem went without a recall for more than a decade is a sign that the New GM conspired to cover up the defect for several years.

The fact that a chief engineer learned of this problem at the Old GM and kept it with him (or disregarded it; which may be worse) through his rise to a high-profile vice-presidency at the company would seem to give the plaintiffs’ lawyers much-needed ammunition.

While not from a VP or other top exec, an internal 2009 e-mail about the Cobalt ignition problem gives an indication as to how the problem had become a part of GM lore by this point.

“Gentleman! This issue has been around since man first lumbered out of sea and stood on two feet,” writes one employee about the issue of changing the key hole on Cobalts to lessen the chances of the ignition being turned off. “In fact, I think Darwin wrote the first [Problem Resolution Tracking System] on this and included as an attachment as part of his ‘Theory of Evolution.’”

In what may be additional evidence of either a cover-up or pure ineptitude, an e-mail from the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation to GM from July 2013 says that the general perception of GM’s response to questions about the Cobalt investigation is that the car maker is “slow to communicate” and “slow to act.”

“The documents that we have received to date paint a disturbing and devastating picture, a beyond-worst-case systemic breakdown that led to lives needlessly lost,” said Congressmen Tim Murphy and Fred Upton in a statement to Detroit News. “But as the recalls mount, important questions remain and our investigation continues into both GM and NHTSA.”

The newly released papers also reveal that there is indeed a federal grand jury looking into the ignition delay, as some of the documents from Delphi include stamps indicating that they were submitted to the Justice Department under a grand jury subpoena.

A rep for the company confirms with Detroit News that “Delphi has been cooperating with all government agencies to provide any requested information.”

The documents also help to clarify the process through which the GM engineer responsible for the switch made under-the-radar changes that resulted in a safer ignition but failed to change the product number, meaning that defective and non-defective switches were commingled in GM inventory for years after the fix was made.

Bloomberg reports that the engineer — one of the 15 people who have been fired in the wake of the recall — authorized the switch improvements after an internal panel said no to the proposal for a new ignition switch that wouldn’t turn off with a slight tug or a bump of the knee.

E-mail correspondence from 2002 between this engineer and Delphi shows the discussion of how the existing switch could be strengthened. Delphi said that making it more difficult for the switch to be turned off could have the unintended effect of making it harder to turn the start the car with a key. This could lead to switches breaking or wearing out too quickly. “[D]o nothing,” replied the GM engineer, “maintain present course.”

Meanwhile, GM announced today that it will finally reveal details of its plan to compensate victims of crashes in cars related to the ignition defect. As Barra told lawmakers last week, accepting compensation from the GM fund would be in lieu of a victim or a victim’s family seeking legal action against the company.

This, folks, is the very essence of "get wrecked."

Watch as Daisy is completely unable to catch a break in this video by HowBoutGaming:

I think my favorite part is at the end, when she clearly just stops trying to move forward. I don't blame you, Daisy.

Confession: I have an absolutely irrational and intense hatred for Daisy, so this video makes me feel happy despite claims that Daisy deserves better. Still, we've all been there, right? The title of this video says it all. This is Mario Kart, this is the Mario Kart experience. It's bullshit. And that's why we love it.

(Via Reddit)

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