Bad news first, folks. LastPass, our favorite password manager (and yours ) has been hacked. It’s time to change your master password. The good news is, the passwords you have saved for other sites should be safe.
Rumors of a collection of Rare games have been bubbling for weeks. Today, the developer officially announced the project at Microsoft's E3 2015 press event. The Rare Replay collection will cost $30 and include 30 games — that's much of the developer's catalog, dating back to R.C. Pro-Am and Battletoads. Comparatively more recent games, like Perfect Dark and Blast Corps, will also be included. We've also seen Viva Piñata,
Some big names appear absent, presumably due to licensing issues. Goldeneye won't be in the collection. Neither will the Donkey Kong Country series, which is owned by Nintendo.
The cavernous interior of the MZK building (Site 112A at Baikonur Cosmodrome). Abandoned for some years, it contains the second Buran orbiter and a static test model.
9 more images in gallery
Thanks to reddit, we discovered this amazing photo essay by Ralph Mirebs from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan. A lot of Mirebs' photography has been documenting the industrial decline that followed the disintegration of the USSR at the end of the Cold War, and this most recent post starkly illustrates this via the fate of the Soviet shuttle program, Buran. We've included some of our favorites in the gallery above, but be sure to check Mirebs' post for the whole set.
Buran (Blizzard) was a reaction to NASA's Space Shuttle and closely resembled the American reusable orbiter, but without the latter's main engines (Buran was powered into orbit by the Energia heavy lift rocket). It only made a single (unmanned) space flight, in November 1988. Orbiter (OK)-1K1 Buran made two orbits before returning to earth (unlike the Space Shuttle, Buran was capable of autonomous flight from the outset). A lack of funds saw the program suspended shortly after its return to earth, and Boris Yeltsin cancelled it in 1993. It got worse from there; in 2002 an earthquake caused the roof of the MIK building in which OK-1K1 was being stored collapsed, destroying the orbiter and killing eight people.
Following that tragedy, the second orbiter, OK-1K2 (Ptichka, or Little Bird) was moved to the slightly smaller (but still huge) facility we see here. This building, known as MZK (Russian for Assembly and Fueling Complex, we think), was specially designed to contain the massive shockwave that would follow a catastrophic explosion during fueling (to prevent damage to other parts of the Baikonur complex. While that may seem like overkill, a failed launch of the USSR's N1 heavy lifter in 1969 was equivalent to almost 7kT, about half that of the Hiroshima bomb.
It's a serious problem all of us have experienced but few of us ever discuss: poop splash.
This video, by Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day, explores the science behind the unfortunate phenomenon that occurs when the poop you drop into the toilet causes water to splash back up and hit you in the butt.
It turns out that the splash is what physicists call a "Worthington jet": a vertical stream of water that shoots upward if an object drops into a pool of water with enough force.
The jet forms because the object opens up a cavity of air in the water as it plunges downward. Water quickly squeezes in to fill the pocket of air, coming from all sides and colliding, forcing it to shoot upward.
Using a high-speed camera and poop-shaped pieces of clay, Sandlin determines that smaller air cavities mean shorter jets of water. He also figures out a neat trick to make sure the jet formed by your poop doesn't shoot up high enough to hit you.
The key is laying a piece of toilet paper over the surface of the water. It'll slow down the falling poop and cause it to pierce the water's surface at more of an angle — and in doing so, eliminate the problem of poop splash forever.
Alex Falcone, who writes film criticism for Portland, Oregon's Willamette Week, had a problem. Universal wasn't screening Jurassic World in time for him to meet his review deadline. But the movie is unquestionably the biggest release of the week, so Falcone needed to write something about it.
Enter Una, a 10-year-old acquaintance of Falcone's. Una likes movies, dinosaurs, and scary things. That made her the ideal person to discuss Jurassic World. So Falcone interviewed her, under the absolutely perfect headline "Clever Girl."
What's most important here, however, is that Una has the best advice ever for dealing with scary movies. If you're easily terrified, Una has got you covered:
Alex: Yuck. Una, it seems like you’re kind of into scary things. So when you watch scary movies, how do you deal with it?
Una: My friends always watch movies before me, so they tell me the scary parts and then I watch those scary parts on YouTube 10 million times to prepare myself.
Alex: That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.
Una: It works pretty well. In Lord of the Rings there’s this scary part where this gross orc jumps out of the mud, and it’s like, "whaaa," so I watched that like 10 million times until I got used to it.
Alex: That would give me nightmares!
Una: I didn’t get nightmares from that. But when I was 6, I probably shouldn’t have been watching a Scooby Doo movie, but I did, and I had a nightmare about a mutated wrestler chasing me and my dad.
Alex: If you had to rank them, which of those three things is the scariest?
Una: Um, I would say mutated wrestler, then orc, then dinosaur.
Solid advice, Una. (For the record, we believe an orc to be scarier than a mutated wrestler.)
More and more film critics who work in print mediaare coming up with creative ways to deal with the very situation Falcone found himself in, as studios increasingly wait to screen their movies until the absolute last minute. Sometimes this means the movie is bad; sometimes it just means the director is working on it nonstop.
But so long as it results in fun stories like this one, who cares? Falcone can share his Jurassic World thoughts later; Una's scary movie advice is eternal.
If you ever looked through the Games folder on an early to mid-'90s Windows PC—pre-Internet you had to seek out distraction—there's a decent chance you’d have stumbled on Chip's Challenge. The surprisingly deep tile-based puzzle game was part of the fourth Microsoft Entertainment Pack and later its "Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack." Thus, it came pre-installed on millions of off-the-shelf systems made by OEMs, and the game was purchased by millions more early Windows gamers.
Late last month, that cult hit finally saw the release of a proper sequel, Chip’s Challenge 2, which hit Steam over 25 years after the first game’s release. But this isn’t the usual story of a developer revamping a long-neglected classic gaming property using today’s game design lessons. In fact, Chip’s Challenge 2 has actually been complete for over 15 years; a lost classic trapped in limbo thanks to a prolonged publishing battle involving the decline of Atari, a devoted modding community, and a religious software house.
The best piece I’ve read arguing for the other side of the “Google violates your privacy” debate is this piece from Dustin Curtis, written back in October:
Apple is going to realize very soon that it has made a grave
mistake by positioning itself as a bastion of privacy against
Google, the evil invader of everyone’s secrets. The truth is that
collecting information about people allows you to make
significantly better products, and the more information you
collect, the better products you can build. Apple can barely sync
iMessage across devices because it uses an encryption system that
prevents it from being able to read the actual messages. Google
knows where I am right now, where I need to be for my meeting in
an hour, what the traffic is like, and whether I usually take
public transportation, a taxi, or drive myself. Using that
information, it can tell me exactly when to leave. This isn’t
science fiction; it’s actually happening. And Apple’s hardline
stance on privacy is going to leave it in Google’s dust.
There’s much I disagree with in Curtis’s piece, but it’s well-worth reading. I think he’s wrong, and that his fundamental mistake is conflating the collection of information in order to provide useful context-aware services with the collection of information in order to sell targeted advertising. But maybe he’s right. His is certainly the best articulation of the pro-Google perspective that I’ve seen.
A powerful storm rumbled by Simla, Colorado, last week, and at the scene was professional storm-chasing photographer Kelly DeLay, who captured this “shot of a lifetime” showing a massive supercell storm cloud extending twin tornados to the ground below.
It’s a “shot of a lifetime for me,” writes DeLay. “I have been trying to get a shot like this for 6 years.”
Here’s a crop of the photograph showing the two tornados in more detail:
“When I chase storms, I like to stay back for the most part so I can see structure,” says DeLay. “I am interested in the whole picture not just if it produces a tornado.”
The storm reportedly produced as many as four tornados when it passed through the area on June 4.
Apple's getting more aggressive than ever before in trying to move Android users over to iOS. The company has previously offered a step-by-step tutorial to ease the transition for people coming from Samsung, HTC, and other Android phones. Now it's building an actual app to help transfer essentials like contacts, messages, calendars, mail accounts, and media from an Android device to any iPhone or iPad running iOS 9 — and it does so wirelessly.
The new software, which wasn't detailed during today's keynote, is plainly called "Move to iOS." Aside from moving over all the critical stuff, it also aims to help rebuild your app library once you've made the leap to Apple's platform. For free apps, it'll look at whatever's on your Android phone...
Well how 'bout that. Let's see how well it competes against Spotify, et al.
It's being shown off exclusively on iPhones at Apple's WWDC 2015, but the new Apple Music service will be spreading out beyond the Apple realm, including a release on Android later this year. The new subscription service — costing $9.99 per month — will first be available on the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and PC starting June 30th, and will make its way to the Apple TV and Android phones this fall.
Other than Beats Music, an Android app that Apple acquired with the company bearing that name, there are no Apple apps on the Android platform. But the determination to make Apple Music the universal destination where fans go to listen to and connect with their favorite artists has led to a change of strategy. Apple now makes Android...
New submitter nerdpocalypse writes: In a larger battle than even Godzilla v. Mothra, Google v. Oracle threatens not only Japan but the entire nerd world. What is at stake is how a language can be [copyrighted]. This affects not just programming languages, APIs, and everything that runs ... well ... everything, but also the copyright status of new languages such as Klingon and Dothraki.
This may look like an ordinary photo of an orchestra, but there’s something special about this shot: it’s a clone photo in which every one of the 100 musicians in the frame is the same person.
The image was created by Alexander Light, a violinist for the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra who’s also a passionate photographer.
After hearing of the idea, the orchestra wanted to make a giant print of Light’s photo, so Light created the shot as a giant panoramic image measuring 200 megapixels. Roughly 400 individual photos were stitched to create the final photo.
Light tells us he first photographed the empty music hall, and then shot photos of orchestra percussionist Heming Valebjørg sitting in each chair with each instrument. The shoot took 5 hours to complete.
The photographer then spent 7 months editing the image in his free time. Here are some crops that offer a closer look of the clones:
P.S. Here’s a different video of this same idea. In this second case, a guy actually played each of the instruments and did a one man performance of a piece he wrote. Impressive.
Last year, the Army announced that it had chosen a new camouflage uniform, finally selecting the replacement for its pixelated camouflage outfits, known as the Universal Camouflage Pattern. The reason was straight-forward: those outfits didn't work. And now the replacement uniforms — really, a version of older uniforms — are coming.
The UCP story is a strange, complicated, unfortunate one. In 2004, the Army adopted the new patterns in the hopes of improving invisibility, but that didn't happen — in fact, the pattern may have made troops more visible. So in 2010, the Army launched a competition to find the next generation of camouflage, but as Gizmodo reported last year, the competition never led to a winner. Instead, the Army chose a...
The only thing harder than foreign policy is Middle East policy, and the only thing harder than Middle East policy is Iraq policy. I don't think an American politician exists today who manages to sound politically appealing as well analytically trenchant on Iraq, because doing either of those things, much less both, is just very hard.
Still, even by that low standard the latest quote from Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio on Iraq is not particularly graceful. Here, as flagged by Business Insider's Hunter Walker, is Rubio's quote from his Thursday appearance on the Fox News panel show Outnumbered:
RUBIO: I think we have a responsibility to support democracy. And if a nation expresses a desire to become a democratic nation, particularly one that we invaded, I do believe that we have a responsibility to help them move in that direction. But the most immediate responsibility we have is to help them build a functional government that can actually meet the needs of the people in the short- and long-term, and that ultimately from that you would hope that would spring democracy.
FOX NEWS HOST: That sounds like nation-building.
RUBIO: Well, it's not nation-building. We are assisting them in building their nation. We have a vested interest in doing that. The alternative to doing that is the chaos we have now. Because in fact what happened in Iraq under this administration is they rallied around [former Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki, a Shia leader who used his power to go after Sunnis, and that created the environment that was conducive for ISIS to come back in and create all these problems.
Rubio's seemingly contradictory statement stems from two issues: a political problem and a policy problem.
The political problem is that Rubio has an obvious political interest in hammering President Obama's handling of ISIS (which is deeply unpopular), but at the same time he has to avoid offering any alternative ISIS policies that would be similarly unpopular. "Let's do less about ISIS" is unlikely to be an appealing policy option among voters, particularly Republican voters. At the same time, "let's re-invade Iraq and put down a bunch of ground troops, even if the Iraqi government doesn't ask us to" is probably not going to win a lot of voters, either. "Nation-building" reminds people of George W. Bush's 2003 Iraq invasion and Obama's Afghanistan surge, so Rubio has to be against nation-building, but he also has to be for doing something more.
That gets to Rubio's policy problem. He has positioned himself as the super-hawk neoconservative true believer of the Republican field, and thus the likely beneficiary of GOP donor Sheldon Adelson's largesse, which requires endorsing the neoconservative position. And the neoconservative position on Iraq, and indeed on the Middle East, is to instill (or install) democracy through massive nation-building enterprises. So Rubio has to be simultaneously for nation-building in Iraq and against it. And that is in fact exactly what he has done here.
Is there a rhetorical needle to be threaded here, of the United States helping Iraq build up its capacity for democracy, without the US doing that nation-building itself? Not in the Iraq of 2015, unfortunately, there is not. The state is so fundamentally broken, not just in terms of security but in terms of its basic political identity, that this is not a problem that could possibly be solved by the US providing some more weapons or funding. (At a recent off-the-record Middle East policy event of bipartisan think tankers and current and former government officials, the only thing everyone agreed on with regards to Iraq was that the nation as we once knew it fundamentally no longer exists.)
That's why you don't hear Rubio saying, "Here's what I mean by helping Iraq to nation-build without doing it ourselves," because such a policy can not exist in today's reality, and everybody knows it. So you get oddball comments like this.
It reminds of the 2012 presidential debate, when Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates hammered President Obama on Afghanistan, but then described an Afghanistan policy that was basically identical to Obama's. They made a lot of vague and contradictory statements like this one. Obama didn't sound much better, offering hollow promises of "handing over" Afghanistan to the Afghans that everyone knew were doomed. But they had to say something.
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has announced plans for native support for SSH in Windows. "A popular request the PowerShell team has received is to use Secure Shell protocol and Shell session (aka SSH) to interoperate between Windows and Linux – both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa, Windows connecting to and managing Linux via SSH. Thus, the combination of PowerShell and SSH will deliver a robust and secure solution to automate and to remotely manage Linux and Windows systems." Based on the work from this new direction, they also plan to contribute back to the OpenSSH project as well.
A Florida high school teacher was suspended without pay for five days Tuesday for deploying a signal jammer in his science class to block students from using their mobile phones.
Superintendent Kurt Browning said in a Pasco County School Board reprimand letter (PDF) to instructor Dean Liptak that he exercised "poor judgement" and "posed a serious risk to critical safety communications as well as the possibility of preventing others from making 9-1-1 calls."
Liptak was accused of jamming mobile devices from his Fivay High School classroom between March 31 and April 2. Verizon discovered the blockage on the cell tower located on campus.
Today Microsoft formally announced the release date for Windows 10, the latest version of their Windows operating system. Up until this point, all Microsoft had said was that they were aiming for a summer release. Today's post on the official Windows blog states the release date for Windows 10 has now been set for July 29, less than two months from now.
According to the blog post, Microsoft will be simultaniously launching Windows 10 around the globe to some 1.5 billion Windows users that currently reside in over 190 different countries, making it the widest Windows has ever been released at once. Windows 10 is Microsoft's chance to win back users who didn't embrace the changes made in Windows 8, and they have a lot riding on its success. Offering it as a free upgrade to existing Windows users will certainly help in gaining adoption.
Even with the free nature of the upgrade, the promise of a July release date for such a monumental update is quite a bold move on Microsoft's part. The less than optimal state of the current Windows 10 testing builds means that Microsoft has a great deal of work ahead of them as they squash bugs and improve the stability of Windows 10 in the two months between now and release. As a user who is keen on upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10, I really hope they succeed.
Finally, Microsoft has revealed a few more details about how Windows 10 distribution will work. Starting today, users can "reserve" Windows 10 on Windows 7/8.1 machines. Reserving Windows will in turn flag a machine for pre-loading, with Microsoft distributing most of Windows 10 ahead of time as to get it in to customers' hands more quickly to better balance the expected load on their server backend. According to Microsoft's FAQ, reserving/pre-loading Windows 10 only downloads it, and users will still manually confirm the installation, or for that matter users can cancel the reservation entirely. Pre-loading has not started yet, and while Microsoft doesn't say when it will start, I expect it won't be until very near July 29th.
Windows 10 Upgrade Paths
Win10
Win7
Win8.1
Windows 10 Home
Windows 7 Starter
Windows 8.1 (Core)
Windows 7 Home Basic
Windows 8.1 (Country-Specific)
Windows 7 Home Premium
Windows 8.1 w/Bing
Windows 10 Pro
Windows 7 Professional
Windows 8.1 Pro
Windows 7 Ultimate
Windows 8.1 Pro for Students
Windows 10 Mobile
N/A
Windows Phone 8.1
Along with detailing the reservation process, Microsoft has also confirmed the upgrade paths for various versions of Windows. As expected, all Pro/Ultimate versions of Windows 7 and 8.1 will get upgraded to Windows 10 Pro, while all other versions of desktop/tablet Windows will get upgraded to Windows 10 Home. And of course, Windows Phone 8.1 devices will upgrade to Windows 10 Mobile.
Here’s a funny little 30-second blooper reel drone shot by aerial photographer Daniel Peckham. While capturing some beautiful footage of the sun over the Pacific Ocean, Peckham’s “epic” shot came to a surprising and abrupt end.
“The sunset was glorious, the flying was buttery smooth (probably my best aerial capture yet)… and then this happened,” he says.
Peckham was flying his DJI Phantom 3 around Arch Rock near Little Corona Beach in Newport Beach, California, when he accidentally flew the drone right into the tree hanging off a 30-foot cliff.
The moment the shot went all wrong.
Luckily for Peckham, he was able to locate the drone using the DJI Pilot app, climb up the tree, and recover the quadcopter.
“This drone crash was entirely my fault — the Phantom 3 performed flawlessly,” he writes. “There was no damage to the drone despite my fail.”
A new wave of truly gigantic telescopes is under construction, and will give astronomers the ability to learn more about our universe than ever before.
These telescopes will have primary mirrors 24 to 39 meters wide — more than twice as large as the biggest current telescope, in the Canary Islands, which is about 10 meters wide.
What's more, the James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2018, will be nearly three times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope. Though it's smaller than ground-based telescopes, the James Webb won't have to deal with interference from Earth's atmosphere, allowing it to see distant objects with much greater clarity.
What scientists will do with these giant telescopes
The Thirty Meter Telescope, to be built in Hawaii. (Thirty Meter Telescope Corporation)
There's a reason scientists want to build such giant telescopes, both in space and on land. The bigger the mirror, the more light a telescope can collect. And the more light collected, the better astronomers can see faint objects — whether planets orbiting faraway stars or distant galaxies being born billions of years ago.
When it comes to the search for extraterrestrial life on exoplanets, these telescopes will be especially crucial. We've been able to use the Kepler Space Telescope to spot nearly 1,000 exoplanets, but we need more powerful telescopes to see them in more detail, so we can analyze their atmospheres.
"Earth-like planets are smaller and have relatively thin atmospheres — so we need to take in a lot of light to analyze them and search for potential signatures of life," says Lisa Kaltenegger, director of Cornell's Carl Sagan Institute, which aims to look for life on other planets. The James Webb and the Earth-based telescopes will both be put to use for this purpose.
These powerful telescopes will also let astronomers look back in time. Because light takes billions of years to travel from the far reaches of the visible universe to us, when we look out at galaxies there, we're literally seeing them as they were billions of years ago.
These new telescopes will be able to better resolve objects that are extremely distant — more than 13 billion light years away. The universe is believed to be 13.8 billion years old, which means these telescopes will allow astronomers to look all the way back to just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
During this period, which astronomers call the "dark ages," all matter was essentially just a soup of charged hydrogen atoms and free electrons, which scattered light and blocked it from traveling through space. Soon afterward, this matter started clumping together, allowing light to radiate for the first time through space. Looking back at this era could help us better understand the exotic processes that allowed all this to occur — and the universe as we know it to form.
Here's an empirical truth: everybody loves The Rock. If you're not a fan of wrestling, there's the Fast and Furious movies. If you hate cars; there's San Andreas. If you hate disaster movies, there's his upcoming HBO series Ballers. And if you hate yourself, there's even The Scorpion King. The point is that Dwayne Johnson has managed to turn himself into a likable, nice-guy leading man that can deliver on the action front while also transitioning credibly into comedy without skipping a beat. Which is why I'm very excited about him potentially starring in a remake of John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China.
What lightsaber color would you choose? This chart shows all of the known colors in the Star Wars universe,along with what we know about the characters who typically use them.
Every lightsaber color in the Star Wars universe. (Anand Katakam/Vox)
In the Star Wars universe, lightsaber colors are determined by the force of the Jedi using a lightsaber. More specifically, as noted on the official Star Wars site, lightsabers come fromKyber crystals, typically found in the frozen caves in the world of Ilum, which acquire color once attuned to a specific Jedi. (There are exceptions, however: At some points, lightsaber crystals were replaced by Kunda stones. More significantly, Sith usually use red-hued synthetic crystals.)
There are some caveats: Many of these colors come from different aspects of the Star Wars expanded universe — movies, books, television shows, comics, and video games — and there may well be inconsistencies between the large number of writers in these various genres. Some accounts of how lightsabers came about may not allow for unusual colors that pop up elsewhere.
Likewise, some of these categorizations may be controversial. Many sources call Tera Sinube's saber white, not silver, though we've charted it as silver above. And the interpretation of the darksaber listed above is, unfortunately, subjective — because it's extremely rare, we don't know how consistently it would fit certain character types (it's also shaped more like a metal sword than a lightsaber).
Other quirks abound, as well — Samuel L. Jackson's character, Mace Windu, probably got a purple lightsaber because Jackson asked for it, not because of some complicated mythology in the universe. And Luke Skywalker's lightsaber was originally blue, and was only changed to green during post-production to make it more visible.
So with all those caveats, are lightsaber colors meaningful at all? It's tough to say, especially since the expanded universe is no longer canonical, according to Star Wars corporate parent Disney. However, the first few colors are definitely symbolic guides to the characters who carry each lightsaber, and as future lightsaber colors are considered, it's likely that previous color choices will be taken into consideration.
All that is a long way of saying, yes, you can gloat that you understand lightsaber colors and your friends don't. Now choose the one that suits you, and may the force ... well, you know the rest.
An enormous and fascinating series of charts reveal exactly which Game of Throneschapters inspired every single episode of the TV show.
The plotlines are much more complicated than you can imagine. The matter of connecting the show's stories with the books they are based on becomes increasingly muddled the deeper you dive into them. The show often condenses original plotlines, switches characters between stories, and just generally moves a ton of things around.
Enter Joel Geddert of the site Joeltronics's tool who want to reread the chapters the TV scenes are based upon. For instance, here is the relatively straightforward first season:
Joel Geddert
The filled-in squares indicate direct adaptation, while the dots indicate indirect adaptation.
Things quickly get more complicated, as you can see in the series' third book outline,. The book provided material for three whole seasons of the show, with some straggler plotlines even showing up in season five:
Joel Geddert
Here's how book three was adapted for the screen.
And occasionally, something that book fans might have given up on ever seeing adapted shows up several seasons later. Remember when, around season five's midpoint, Littlefinger told Sansa the story of Rhaegar Targaryen, and her aunt Lyanna? That was actually a story from the first book, transplanted forward in time. It was new to show fans, but gratifying to book fans, who had possibly abandoned hope on ever hearing it. (And, indeed, it's important to one major fan theory.)
Joel Geddert
Notice that little dot all the way down in season five? That's this story.
Geddert's charts are lots of fun, so go and poke around at them. The versions on his website are interactive, and you can switch how things are displayed and focus in on certain connections between book and screen.
I enjoyed this piece by Charlie Warzel on Google’s I/O keynote, but disagree with it. The headline, I thought, nailed it:
Google’s Quest For Complete Control Of Your Digital Life
The sub-head, not so much:
Today’s keynote suggests Google is poised to surpass Apple when it
comes to mobile design.
For example, it’s pretty hard to see Google as “surpassing Apple when it comes to mobile design” when this is the current Android UI for copy/paste (“A powerful yet completely hidden feature is easy to use once you find it”), and this oddly familiar UI is what’s coming in Android M.
I think what Google’s I/O keynote was about is a post-mobile world. It’s about ubiquitous computing that is contextually-aware and identity-aware — about Google knowing who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing at all times. From your doorknob to your desktop. That’s not Google surpassing Apple at “mobile design”. That’s Google beating Apple to a world where anything and everything is a networked computing device.
But, I’m unconvinced their demos were all that impressive. The demo that most impressed Warzel was of a “Now on Tap” music player. Now on Tap is a new opt-in feature where Android apps can allow Google to know exactly what the current app on your Android device is displaying or playing. In the demo, while playing a Skrillex song, Google director of product management Aparna Chennapragada asked the device, “What’s his real name?” And a moment later, the answer came: “Sonny John Moore”. Now on Tap is what allowed Google to know the context for “him”.
It was a cool demo. But as soon as I saw it, I took my iPhone, held down the home button, and asked Siri, “What’s Skrillex’s real name?” And a moment later came the answer: “Sonny John Moore”. Allowing Google to index everything the apps you use show or play for you seems like a stiff privacy price to pay for the ability to use “him” in that query, especially when, in my opinion, “What is Skrillex’s real name?” is the natural way most people would pose the question.
Now on Tap has much more potential than this, of course. But, still. To me, this week’s I/O keynote made me more convinced than ever that Google is turning into the Microsoft of old: a company whose ambitions are boundless, who wants its fingers in every single pie, and who wants to do it all on its own. A company whose coolest stuff is always in the form of demos coming in the future, not products that are actually shipping now.
Washington is turning into the bad apple state, as growers are dumping "millions of pounds" of the state's official fruit in open fields, where the fruit is left to rot.
Local NBC affiliate station King 5 took video of what experts call the biggest apple dump in the state's history. Video shows a dump truck creating long rows of fresh apples on grassy hills. Locals told King 5 the trucks come multiple times a day:
The apples slowly turn entire fields red, attracting too many flies to count:
The dumping of the state's official fruit is a reminder of the complex tendencies of free markets. There are various factors encouraging growers to discard produce otherwise meant for human consumption, including a surplus of apples and ongoing labor disputes in Western cities, including those at the ports of Tacoma and Seattle.
It's shocking to see the loss of healthy, inexpensive produce happening at a scale that would turn green fields red. The USDA says more than 47 million Americans had trouble accessing food in 2012. Even in a country where food deserts still limit access to fresh produce, these growers have the opposite problem — no logistical infrastructure to get their crops into the hands of consumers.
SourceForge, the code repository site owned by Slashdot Media, has apparently seized control of the account hosting GIMP for Windows on the service, according to e-mails and discussions amongst members of the GIMP community—locking out GIMP's lead Windows developer. And now anyone downloading the Windows version of the open source image editing tool from SourceForge gets the software wrapped in an installer replete with advertisements.
Update: In a blog post issued shortly after this story posted, an unidentified member of SourceForge's community team wrote that, in fact, "this project was actually abandoned over 18 months ago, and SourceForge has stepped-in to keep this project current." That runs counter to claims by members of the GIMP development community.
The GIMP project is not officially distributed through SourceForge—approved releases are only posted on the GIMP project's own Web page. But Jernej Simončič, the developer who has been responsible for building Windows versions of GIMP for some time, has maintained an account on SourceForge to act as a distribution mirror. That is, he had until today, when he discovered he was locked out of the Gimp-Win account, and the project's ownership "byline" had been changed to "sf-editor1"—a SourceForge staff account. Additionally, the site now provided Gimp in an executable installer that has in-installer advertising enabled. Ars tested the downloader and found that it offered during the installation to bundle Norton anti-virus and myPCBackup.com remote backup services with GIMP—before downloading the installer authored by Simončič (his name still appears on the installer's splash screen).
Mad Max: Fury Road, the sandy, bloody, barbecued action flick, has become the (surprising?) feminist movie of this young summer. While its thrilling action scenes have garnered the highest of praise, it's the film's powerful central figure, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), and its message of gender equality that has made the film a fixture in pop culture conversations. And in another pocket of our dark universe, it's angered the minority of humans that identify themselves as Men's Rights Activists.
Enter the Feminist Mad Max Tumblr. It hits a sweet spot between humor and a somber, subtle message of feminism. It's built like the Ryan Gosling "Hey girl" meme of yesteryear — stills of the movie with sentences imposed onto them — but has its own twist by wrapping itself around the plot of Mad Max.
For example, the Tumblr tackles the idea of how we treat victims of sexual assault:
And why a guy like Max, who isn't exactly someone you'd envision taking home to meet the family, is still sort of a dreamboat because he recognizes his own shortcomings:
It's a perfect chaser for fans of the movie, and for fans who wish to see some future films take a page out of Fury Road's book. For more memes, head on over to Feminist Mad Max.
Could an IBM mainframe from the 1960s mine Bitcoin? The idea seemed crazy, so I decided to find out. I implemented the Bitcoin hash algorithm in assembly code for the IBM 1401 and tested it on a working vintage mainframe. It turns out that this computer could mine, but so slowly it would take more than the lifetime of the universe to successfully mine a block. While modern hardware can compute billions of hashes per second, the 1401 takes 80 seconds to compute a single hash. This illustrates the improvement of computer performance in the past decades, most famously described by Moore's Law.
The photo below shows the card deck I used, along with the output of my SHA-256 hash program as printed by the line printer. (The card on the front of the deck is just for decoration; it was a huge pain to punch.) Note that the second line of output ends with a bunch of zeros; this indicates a successful hash.
How Bitcoin mining works
Bitcoin, a digital currency that can be transmitted across the Internet, has attracted a lot of attention. If you're not familiar with how it works, the Bitcoin system can be thought of as a ledger that keeps track of who owns which bitcoins, and it allows these to be transferred from one person to another. The interesting thing about Bitcoin is there's no central machine or authority keeping track of things. Instead, the records are spread across thousands of machines on the Internet.
Nearly every state lets prisons and jails charge inmates for their own incarceration — room, board, clothing, and doctor's visits — in a phenomenon called "pay-to-stay."
We don't know exactly how many prisons and jails take advantage of "pay to stay." The latest survey, done in 2005, found that 90 percent of jails surveyed charged inmates fees of one kind of another. In an era of tight budgets, the practice is probably even more widespread today.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a criminal justice reform think tank, put together an analysis of what pay-to-stay laws are on the books in every state. If you're interested in what your state's laws are, you can check out this nifty interactive map on its website. But spoiler alert: your state almost certainly has pay-to-stay.
Pay-to-stay piles on a second punishment to the sentence that's been handed down by a judge. That creates lasting, detrimental effects on inmates and their families — and society as a whole. It doubles the strain on inmates' families: in addition to losing a household income, they have to pay to support their incarcerated family member. And it makes it even harder for inmates to get back on their own two feet financially after they're released from prison.
It's estimated that about 10 million Americans owe about $50 billion in debt because of fees and fines they've gotten through the criminal justice system — and because of pay-to-stay, some of that debt comes from prisoners having to pay for their own incarceration.
Almost every state practices pay-to-stay
Forty-three states allow inmates to get charged for "room and board" — the cost of their own imprisonment. Thirty-five states charge inmates for at least some medical expenses. Taken together, at least 49 states have a law on the books that authorizes at least one of the two. (Hawaii, as well as DC, doesn't have statutes that explicitly address pay-to-stay.)
In many of the statutes the Brennan Center analyzed, states only charge room and board to inmates who are on work release or have a prison job, on the logic that they're the only ones making money while in prison. (It seems possible that some inmates might be dissuaded from taking prison jobs if they know some of their wages are going to be garnished.) Others take the money out of inmates' commissary accounts — which are usually filled by family members on the outside — or bank accounts.
That's particularly worrisome when inmates are being charged for their own medical care — especially when, as many states do, prisoners get charged a fee for every doctor's visit they request. Most states set that fee pretty low, around $5, but Texas charges a $100 annual fee for any inmate who asks to see a doctor.
As the Brennan Center points out, some inmates are afraid to ask to see a doctor if they know their families will get hit with a fee for it — which increases the risk that an inmate won't get treated for a contagious disease that will spread throughout the facility.
Three states allow at least some inmates to get charged for clothing. Missouri allows clothing fees for prison and jail inmates; Louisiana allows it for jail inmates; and Nevada allows inmates on work release to get charged for the clothing they need for their jobs.
In Michigan, an inmate is charged $12 when he enters jail. But if he hasn't paid the fee by the time he's released — for example, if he can't afford it — he owes the state $100.
Pay-to-stay doesn't even save states much money
Many states make fees dependent on inmates' ability to pay. But some states are willing to put people (or their families) in debt for the cost of their own incarceration. In at least eight states, ex-prisoners are liable to pay back any debt they owe even after they're released from prison — and many jurisdictions hire collections agencies to get that money back. And in at least two states — Florida and Wisconsin — the law says that after an ex-prisoner dies, his or her estate can be on the hook for any unpaid debt.
All of this would at least be explicable if the fees that got charged were actually recouped. But they're not. Even when a collections agency gets called in, governments often don't see much of the money they're owed. At least one county (in Minnesota) had to overhaul its pay-to-stay program because it wasn't making as much as it cost to run.
The premise of pay-to-stay is that it's more important for governments to save money than for inmates to be as financially stable as possible when they leave prison. That's a risky tradeoff to begin with, since financial instability could make it harder for people to stay out of prison for good. So if pay-to-stay isn't even saving states money, what's the reason to keep these laws on the books?
![[10 years later] Man, why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook control over our nuclear weapons?](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/planning.png "[10 years later] Man, why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook control over our nuclear weapons?")
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