Bewarethewumpus

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

“Yngtranzian Harvester incoming! Genghis Class – it’s huge!” Janice sounds terrified, but she’s new. She’ll get over it.

Many pre-spacers compared the depths of space to the seas of Earth. Truly prophetic words. A wise man once said: “The ocean is the only café where the food fights back.” Fortunately, in an environment renowned for big-eats-little dynamics, humans were a decent size. Unfortunately, in space we’re only just medium sized and nothing out here thinks we’re cute and worth protecting.

The ‘blip’ on the screen is about the size of the Isle of Wight. It’s filled with six-metre tall tripeds with wide mouths full of sharp teeth. They have a cookery book dedicated to making a whole range of delicious meals, for any time of day or night, out of human. Including several recipes where we go into the hot and/or sharp part of the process conscious. Apparently you can judge the succulence of human flesh by certain tones in the screams emitted by the owner.

“Alright, it’s big, but it’s not bigger than a Dobberil Grinder. Set up a pair of point-three light triple-stage boosters; add countermeasures packages Alpha Cream Nine and Pete Echo Four. Slap a teraton warhead on the second one. Fire control to me.”

The Dobberil are like whales in size, and that they like their food small. Minced, to be precise. They drive whole herds of people out of cover into open ground using sonics, then a Grinder class vessel swoops in, mulches them up – along with a decimetre of whatever they were cowering on – and serves the whole mess fresh with a splash of peroxide.

The Harvester comes straight in, ignoring the defensive batteries on the Moon and on Moon Two, the defence station that orbits opposite the Moon. But we’re on patrol today, back at last from persuading the Slavyesh that humans are not for drinking. We had to knock the society back to their stone age to do it, but they will think twice before squeezing one of our colonies for their morning juice again.

The fire control comes online and I wait. Yngtranzians are fussy. They’ll want to line up before entering atmosphere, and that’s when I can clip them.

Two, one… “Fire one!”

The missile leaves me, accelerates like nothing on Earth, leaves a rainbow contrail in high atmosphere and slams into the Harvester at a several hundred Mach. The Harvester pitches and yaws out of orbit, station-keeping drives and stabiliser fields spitting. By my head, trajectory calculations are coming in faster than they are correcting their yawing vessel.

Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock. They have passed the orbit of both Moons. Time.

“Fire two!”

The night goes bright just as the concussion of launch fades. The first missile was slowed by atmosphere, its control systems keeping it from going to relativistic speeds. The second had no such limitations. No-one on this ship saw it go and nothing on the Yngtranzian saw it coming. For a few seconds, we have a third, supernally bright moon. I’m glad sound doesn’t travel in space. That would have been loud.

“Northern Hemi Control, this is Orca One. Please alert Russia for debriteors and add an Yngtranzian Genghis to our kill tally.”

“We hear that, Orca One. Orca Two has risen from Mars Base and will relieve you in twenty-seven hours.”

That’s the good news. A kill means we get a couple of days shore leave.

Slowly but surely, the predators of this ocean called space are learning that the tiddlers from Sol Three are vicious and have really big teeth.

Author : Andrew Hawnt

Frozen in time behind the door to Vault Six is an explosion, and it talks to me.

How can an explosion talk to me? I don’t really know, but then again I’m just a guard. I sit next to the door to Vault Six and I read, or I clean the corridor, or I check and recheck the systems which keep the explosion imprisoned in a time bubble.

My name’s John Drake, but the explosion calls me Johnny Boy, or occasionally Drakey when it wants to wake me up. The explosion (or Bang, as I call it when we’re alone) even saved my skin last Friday when it woke me up just before Colonel Trent turned up unannounced.

Me and Bang are friends, even though it’s stuck in a cell and I’m guarding the door. We have an understanding. I don’t tell people it can talk to me, and Bang tells me stories to pass the time.

I thought I was going mad when Bang started talking to me, but hey, I have a mad job. This building is full of impossible things and a fair few staff have lost it over the years, but I can deal with Bang. It explains the monsters in other cells. The ghosts and the aliens and the sentient computer viruses and everything else.

But today, Bang told me a secret I didn’t want to hear. Where it came from. Where it began. I didn’t believe it at first, but then I remembered there’s a guy with horns claiming to be the devil in the next cell, so I figure there’s not all that much which is still impossible.

Bang is the end of this facility. This whole complex. Exploding. Bang told me the explosion was so powerful that it ruptured time and space and seeped through into the present. The department were able to imprison it using an experimental technique which bends time on itself into a loop, sealing whatever is inside it completely.

But the thing is, the thing that’s been making my head hurt all shift long, is that Bang says the explosion began when Bang gets released accidentally. But that means that Bang is both the cause and the result of the incident. An explosion from the future which detonates in the present, creating a paradox which can never end.

The thing that really freaked me out though was that Bang claimed to be me, John Drake, caught in the future explosion which created it and broke time. Bang’s voice in my head is me, my consciousness having become a part of the living explosion when the facility was, or will be, wiped out.

So that means I die here, I guess. Bang says that might not be the case. That I might get out. That it gets my voice because of all the time we spent talking in the past, or the present. That’s when my head hurts, thinking about that.

Get out, Bang tells me now. Get out quickly. It’s started.

Alarms start to chime, then the strip lights along the corridor go red and I hear commotion on the floor above and the floor below. An overlooked weakness in safety protocols. The corridor doors lock themselves. I could scream for help, but it wouldn’t do any good. Bang tells me it’s okay. Bang says it will look after me. Bang tells me in my own voice that this was always meant to be.

The protective bubble around Bang ruptures, and the building is consumed in blinding fire. I am taken away by the bubble’s broken science and the force of Bang’s unleashed energies swallows me whole. I am gone, but I am still here.

As quickly as it begins, it ends.

The bubble reverts to its previous state. Time realigns. I am Bang, and outside Vault Six there sits John Drake. He is a friend. Within the bubble which holds my fire imprisoned, I feel a sense of completion.

“Hello Drakey,” I say out loud, and the guard wakes up, staring at the door to Vault Six with eyes which are so very familiar.

Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, had heard many people apologize for commercial online surveillance by saying that people who didn't want to give their data away should just not give their data away -- they should opt out. So when she got pregnant, she and her husband decided to keep the fact secret from marketing companies (but not their friends and family). She quickly discovered that this was nearly impossible, even while she used Tor, ad blockers, and cash-purchased Amazon cards that paid for baby-stuff shipped to anonymous PO boxes.

We ordered everything baby-related on Tor. I’ve used a lot of browser plugins and software on my career. A lot of people just asked if I downloaded an ad blocker. But I wasn’t worried about the ads; I was worried about the data collection that fuels the advertising. If I had an ad blocker, I wouldn’t be able to see what the internet knew about me. So we used a traceless browser for baby things. Everything else, I did on my normal browser. We got everything in cash that we could. We’d do research online, using Tor, and then go out and buy things in cash in person. For some purchases online, we made through Amazon, and we set up an Amazon account from a private email account and had it deliver to a local locker in Manhattan, so it wasn’t associated with our address. We stocked it with Amazon gift cards that we bought with cash. So we did those kinds of things to draw a distinction between our online lives and our offline lives.

Meet The Woman Who Did Everything In Her Power To Hide Her Pregnancy From Big Data [Jessica Goldstein/Think Progress]

(Thanks, Alan!)

(Image: pregnant woman, Teza Harinaivo Ramiandrisoa, CC-BY-SA)

I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a year, and I might as well get it out there now that I’ve just read that Google is backing away from Google+.

It’s not surprising that Google is getting away from Google+.  It was actually a really good product, but the thing has had zero traction with real people.

But, I have to be honest, the way Google has handled Google+ has totally pissed me off.  No, I’m not among the legions who have been unhappy about Google integrating Google+ into all of their other products.

I’m pissed because Google blew an amazing opportunity.  Google possessed a totally simple and easy way to make Google+ practical and relevant, but somehow, I don’t know how, they f***ed it up.

What am I talking about?  Let’s rewind to March 13, 2013:

We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go.

Naturally, there was a lot of reaction and angry Reader users.

But, Google could have avoided angry Reader users and given Google+ a massive boost by simply integrating Reader into Google+.

Yes, just that simple…make it so that you could follow an RSS feed as though it were another user in G+.  Make it so that you could put RSS feeds into circles, and share them, just like you do with other G+ users.

If Google would have done that G+ would have taken off like wildfire and nobody would have ever looked back.  I have no idea why they didn’t, but for some reason the lost potential has irritated me for a year.  And, here we are now, with the whole effort going down the tubes.

What a waste.

Brazil's buying $4.5B worth of fighter jets. And rather than buy them from American military-industrial complex go-to Boeing, they're buying them from Sweden's Saab. Why? A contract with Boeing is synonymous with NSA surveillance. Multiply this by every country in the world and you start to get a sense of the cost of letting the NSA run around without any adult supervision. (via Techdirt)

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

Okay! Back on the horse.

A cosplayer at C2E2 stops and poses in her elegant, gender-swapped Boba Fett getup. She's the kind of bounty hunter our galaxy needs!

The Great Pit of Carkoon has been good to you, Ms. Fett. #StarWars #C2E2

(Image: theapexfan)

(via Neatorama)

This video might leave you with an irresistible urge to dig out your old supersoaker and favorite Pokemon shirt and start a water war in the office. You’ve been warned.

Sonic the Hedgehog finds himself in a video game level filled with awful fan-created original characters made in his likeness.

According to urban legend, a massive stockpile of Atari gear — including truckloads of the notoriously awful game E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial — has laid buried in a New Mexico landfill for over thirty years. Today, that story is no longer a myth. Construction crews have uncovered copies of the Atari 2600 game at a landfill deep in the New Mexico desert, near the city of Alamogordo.

Back during the so-called video game crash of 1983, a struggling Atari was stuck with truckloads of the game and other unsold hardware. With little recourse and a crashing interest in video games in North America, the company decided to dump its excess merchandise into a landfill, according to reports at the time. The story was never confirmed, however, and it's carried on as a legendary tale from a time when video games were near worthless. It reportedly cost Atari millions to get the rights to produce a video game tie-in to the incredibly successful Steven Spielberg film, but the resulting E.T. game was a massive flop and it's considered one of the worst titles of all time.

Today's dig became a reality thanks to an upcoming documentary, produced by Microsoft's Xbox Entertainment Studios. The documentary, which will focus on the changing landscape of the video game industry, is expected to come out next year, and it is part of a broader push by Microsoft to produce original video content for Xbox 360 and Xbox One owners. Its biggest project is a live-action Halo TV series connected to Steven Spielberg.

Looks like ET had some company here in New Mexico. Still in shrink wrap! pic.twitter.com/BNjKyVVcrN

— Larry Hryb (@majornelson) April 26, 2014

Here it is up close - the very first ET cartridge exhumed after 30 years pic.twitter.com/nb8tv33w8F

— Larry Hryb (@majornelson) April 26, 2014

Stay up tonight online to watch an awesome lunar eclipse with our astronomer pals at NASA:

Spring is here and ready to capture the world's attention with a total lunar eclipse. The eclipse will begin early on the morning of April 15 at approximately 2 a.m. EDT. If you have questions about the eclipse, this will be your chance! NASA astronomer Mitzi Adams and astrophysicist Alphonse Sterling will also answer questions in a live web chat, beginning on April 15 at 1 a.m. EDT and continuing through the end of the eclipse (approximately 5 a.m. EDT). The chat module will go live on this page at approximately 12:45 a.m. EDT. Convert to your local time here. A live Ustream view of the lunar eclipse will be streamed on this page on the night of the event, courtesy of Marshall Space Flight Center. The feed will feature a variety of lunar eclipse views from telescopes around the United States.

It just doesn't end. Bloomberg is reporting that, according to “two people familiar with the matter,” the NSA has known about the Heartbleed vulnerability for at least two years—and was using it to collect information about people instead of, you know, telling someone about it and getting it fixed.

With millions of websites compromised, people all over the world changing their passwords for protection, the Canadian government suspending electronic tax filing, and people speculating about whether Heartbleed is the “worst vulnerability ever,” this could end up looking pretty bad for the agency. Good thing it already has a sparkly-clean public image, or it might be in trouble.

According to Bloomberg, it doesn’t seem that the NSA created Heartbleed—it just  found the bug and used it. An NSA spokesperson declined to comment about the agency's knowledge or use of Heartbleed. But Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative and a former Air Force cyber officer, told Bloomberg, “It flies in the face of the agency’s comments that defense comes first. They are going to be completely shredded by the computer security community for this.”

In early 2012 Heartbleed was mistakenly introduced into the code for OpenSSL, an open-source software component for certain popular types of encryption. It would make sense if the NSA found it soon after, because—in addition to using its influence to weaken new or existing encryption—the agency also spends millions of dollars looking for software vulnerabilities that already exist around the Web, especially in open-source code that is more likely to have inconsistent oversight, and therefore bigger errors.

The big question is: Who else knew about it? If the NSA found it, other international intelligence agencies or criminals could also have been dipping in to the flow of usernames, passwords, and other personal details. But as Bloomberg points out, it took two years for anyone reviewing OpenSSL code to spot it, and there is no evidence so far that hackers found the flaw. The full extent of the damage remains to be seen, though.

The incident raises questions about the NSA, of course, but also about the trust people place in software developers to produce secure code. These questions have lingered in the cybersecurity and cryptography communities for years, but are only now coming to the fore consumers are becoming increasingly aware that their personal privacy is on the line. Settle in, because this won't be the last news story about the NSA exploiting a vulnerability instead of reporting it.

---

From the Morning Sentinel, a story about a gentleman in Norridgewick, Maine, who has the silhouette of a gun tattooed to give the impression that he has one tucked into his belt.

David Leaming

Michael Smith went outside shirtless after being awakened Tuesday morning, yelling at a tree removal company to get off his property. The workers thought they saw a gun in his waistband and called police. Smith, who’d gone back to bed, was awakened again minutes later — this time by Maine State Police at his front door, backed up by a group of troopers with assault rifles in his driveway. They were asking him via a megaphone to come out of his house

New Comic: Titania

The NSA has a research facility in Bluffdale, Utah. It's loaded with "metadata-gathering computers that currently require 1.7 million gallons of water a day" to keep them cool. Utah representative Marc Roberts (R) has introduced HB161, which would shut off their water supply. If the bill passes, how will the federal government respond?

With more than 4,300 players, the Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix event in Richmond, Virginia, was one of the largest face-to-face gaming events to ever take place. Many players in attendance were participating in their first-ever Magic tournament, and they experienced the courteous and respectful environment full of camaraderie and excitement that the Magic community is known for.

Conor Friedersforf counts the ways, but it comes down to saying "we've failed, sure, but we might succeed if only you gave us more money."

Someone had to do it, so YouTuber NeckerBrick did: U.S. Senate’s Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign ad gets paired up with Guile’s Theme from Hyper Street Fighter II!

Here's a great history of English mispronunciations that became the received pronunciations. The piece makes the important point that English has no canon, no unequivocal right way or wrong way of speaking -- a point that is often lost in Internet linguistic pedantry and literacy privilege.

I'm as guilty as anyone of thinking that my English is the best English, but the next time I wince at "nukular," I'll remind myself that "bird" started out as "brid" and "wasp" started out as "waps," but were mispronounced into common usage.

Adder, apron and umpire all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word. Linguists call this kind of thing reanalysis or rebracketing.

Wasp used to be waps; bird used to be brid and horse used to be hros. Remember this when the next time you hear someone complaining about aks for ask or nucular for nuclear, or even perscription. It's called metathesis, and it's a very common, perfectly natural process.

8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today [David Shariatmadari/Guardian]

(via Hacker News)

(Image: Double bitted felling axe, Wikimedia Commons/Luigizanasi CC-BY-SA)

Just like Colorado doesn’t want drunk drivers swerving all over its roads and endangering people, the state doesn’t want anyone getting stoned and trying to operate a car, now that marijuana is legal in the state. Because if what we’ve learned from the movies about reefer is true, there are plenty of distractions when you’re stoned — food (Funyuns specifically), the way Willie Nelson’s braids sway just so and oh what’s that thing I must stare at over there?

While you probably have that one friend who insists, “No, it’s fine — I’m way more focused on the road when I’m stoned!”, Colorado disagrees: The state is spending $1 million on TV ads for the Colorado Department of Transportation’s new “Drive High, Get a DUI” campaign that make fun of pot users who already space out under normal circumstances.

The point there being that driving a potentially deadly hunk of metal around other people could be a really bad time to space out. For example — one ad shoes a guy (with huuuuge hair, because obviously the more cartoonish of a character, the better comedic value!) trying to operate a grill while high and not realizing what the problem is, because he’s stoned. The idea being, you wouldn’t want him driving a car if he can’t turn a grill on.

It’s the first time since marijuana was legalized in 2012 that Colorado has pushed such a campaign to remind drivers to treat marijuana like alcohol, reports the Associated Press. The state has also recently started tallying impaired driving violations due to marijuana, while in previous years those just fell under the same category as drunk drivers.

And also? The ads are actually pretty funny:

You can follow MBQ on Twitter if you can find her oh wait, here: @marybethquirk

Colorado launches campaign to stop stoned driving [Associated Press]

Nat writes, "A Dunedin, NZ, man lost a bet five years ago and changed his name by deed poll to the longest name he could make (99 characters, 1 shy of the Dept of Internal Affairs limit). I want to know what they were drinking because the name is fantastic. "The 22-year-old man from Normanby is now legally known as 'Full Metal Havok More Sexy N Intelligent Than Spock And All The Superheroes Combined With Frostnova'." (Thanks, Nat!)

S

First came the Ouya Android microconsole. Then came Mad Catz's M.O.J.O. Android microconsole. Today Mad Catz announces the M.O.J.O. microconsole will be playing host to Ouya content. I am so confused.

This is all due to Ouya's recent decision to allow the Ouya experience to be embedded in other Android devices. They call it Ouya Anywhere. It basically takes the software that runs the Ouya — the storefront and such — and turns it into an app for other devices.

So the M.O.J.O., a more powerful Android microconsole (it runs on Tegra 4 to the Ouya's Tegra 3 chip), now gives Android gamers access to all of the exclusive content the Ouya folks worked so hard to acquire. Plus all the existing Android games the Ouya couldn't play.

The M.O.J.O. console does cost twice as much as Ouya's physical presence, reduced today to $199, but it's far more powerful and comes with a much better controller.

Who needs an Ouya now? Nobody, really. This Ouya Anywhere initiative effectively kills any reason to buy the physical product.

But that's okay. Ouya CEO and founder Julie Uhrman, via official press release, is just pleased to take the box out of the console experience.

"Up until now, the game console experience has been locked inside a box," said Julie Uhrman, CEO and founder of OUYA. "Together with the hardware veterans at Mad Catz, we end that. Today's announcement signifies the inception of a truly open platform where independent developers can bring their creations to the platforms where gamers actually play: everywhere."

All of the enthusiasm that made the Ouya such a ridiculous success on Kickstarter has come to this. They made a console, and then ditched it to become a platform. Is this making sense to anyone else?

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