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“A vacuum?” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs inquired. “Unless there’s some geologic process I’m unfamiliar with that causes large pockets of vacuum to form inside solid rock, I don’t see how you would come across such a thing when excavating for a new subway. I also don’t see what any of this has to do with most of the people gathered here.” The general looked about the room at the faces of the heads of various government agencies, several of whom nodded their agreement.
“The point, general,” responded the head of the National Science Ministry, “is that we have encountered a phenomenon never before seen.” The man resettled his glasses on his nose and continued, addressing the entire group. “As you’re probably aware, several workers employed by the excavation company working on the subway in question became ill and were diagnosed with radiation poisoning. An NSM team was assigned to investigate and found no naturally-occurring radioactive metals at the excavation site. But detectors did confirm the presence of radiation in the pit. That’s when we started literally and figuratively digging a little deeper.”
“Doctor, this is all very interesting,” said the Minister of Foreign Affairs. “But you have assembled here representatives of most of the nation’s ministries. A scientific curiosity does not warrant taking of the time of this country’s government unless there’s some very profound point you intend to make.”
This time the group’s assent was more vocal.
“Very well,” said the science minister. “The point is this.” The doctor tapped a button on his computer and a picture of an expanse of space dotted with thousands of stars appeared on the screen that dominated one wall of the room. “As we drilled deeper into the excavation site, the radiation level went up. Shortly after that we hit the vacuum the general mentioned. We threaded a fiber optic cable through the small hole we drilled to get some pictures.
“What is that?” asked the general. “Did you drill into some subterranean chamber? Are those specks of light radioactive material?”
The scientist took in a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. “Ladies and gentlemen, we believe what you’re looking at is empty space.”
The minister was met with blank stares.
“The specks of light were noted to be moving slowly, all in the same direction. After we took some measurements and did some calculations, we determined it is, in fact, we who are moving. It has been theorized that the world is rotating and thereby creating centrifugal force and that that’s why objects fall to the ground. Our observations are consistent with this theory.”
“But what IS that?” asked the general again, pointing at the screen. Are you suggesting the world is surrounded by some dark, speckled material that acts like a vacuum?”
“I’m suggesting, general, that our world is a hollow, spinning rock in the middle of an unimaginably large vacuum. Our researches suggest those specks are massive spheres of nuclear fusion held together by their sheer mass. And almost all of them are several trillion miles away or more.
The group exploded in a cacophony of voices. “Ridiculous!” said one. “Blasphemous!” said another.
“I said ‘almost all’ of those fusion-spheres are unfathomably far away!” yelled the science minister. The group fell silent. “One is much closer.”
He hit a button and a reddish fireball filled the screen.
“This one is close,” he repeated. “And it’s getting closer. It would appear we’ve been on a journey. How it started and why has been lost to recorded history. But we’re about to arrive at our destination.”
The Sunday Times dropped a bombshell this weekend, reporting that the top secret files leaked by Edward Snowden have been obtained by the Russian and Chinese governments. The story claimed Western intelligence agencies were "forced into rescue operations" to mitigate the damage, and one UK government source claimed that Snowden had "blood on his hands."
It would be a major blow to Snowden and the journalists who worked with him—if it were true. But the bold claims started falling apart shortly after it was published this weekend. The story is behind a paywall but available elsewhere. It's based entirely on anonymous British officials and contains some glaring inaccuracies.
Snowden confidante Glenn Greenwald immediately attacked it as "journalism at its worst." Greenwald is a predictable critic, to be sure, but Times reporter Tom Harper was later questioned about his story on CNN and admitted he's been unable to check out any of the far-reaching claims told to him by government sources. The reporter answered one question after another with some version of "I don't know," admitting he has no idea how any "hack" took place, how or when any foreign governments got the files, or if the files were encrypted at all. Harper simply maintained that the Snowden hacking story was the "official position of the British government."
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BewarethewumpusFour Swords was the best Zelda that no one got to play. I can't wait to give this a try.
You wanted surprises from Nintendo at E3. Here’s one: The Legend of Zelda: Tri-Force Heroes, announced by Nintendo today at E3. It harkens back to Zelda co-op games like Four Swords Adventures, but this time for three players.
The 3DS game is played from an overhead perspective like classic Zelda games and is slated for a fall 2015 release. The core gameplay mechanic involves players stacking themselves into a sort of totem pole of heroes. The game also makes heavy use of costume switches, letting players dress their Links in costumes like the samurai armor or the “big bomb outfit” that grant special abilities.
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The game is being overseen by long-time Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma and directed by Hiromasa Shikata, a long-time Zelda developer who most recently directed the 3DS’ The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and, if the online Nintendo fan-made wiki is correct, the three-player co-op Zelda attraction in the Wii U launch game Nintendo Land.
During a video presentation of the game, Aonuma and Shikata explained that the game is set in a kingdom obsessed with fashion and will have players gathering items to create special, empowering outfits. One appears to dress Link as... Zelda. The idea is that various people in this kingdom think they can dress up to save the day.
It’s unclear how much of an overworld there will be, as the footage of the game focused on action taking place in dungeons. The totem mechanic got used a lot, with the top player on the stack tossing bombs into hard-to-reach areas, shooting targets and more. Enemies appeared to be designed to also make use of the verticality of the playing space. The designers said they want players to work together, emphasizing co-op play as opposed to some of the competitive aspects of other multiplayer Zelda modes and games.
The game will have online mutliplayer, but for the multiplayer-phobic, don’t fret. There will be a single-player mode that has the player switching between their own Link and two supporting “doll” characters.
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(Steve)
Advocates from the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Digital Democracy, the ACLU, the EFF, Common Sense Media, Consumer Action, and Consumer Watchdog all signed onto an open letter (PDF) explaining their reasons for abandoning the NTIA (a division of the Commerce Department) meetings.
“We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy,” the advocates explain. “People have the right to control who gets their sensitive information, and how that information is shared. … At this point, we do not believe that the NTIA process is likely to yield a set of privacy rules that offers adequate protections for the use of facial recognition technology.”
“We have participated in this process in good faith for 16 months,” the advocates write, but industry is refusing to meet in the middle or in fact make any concessions at all. “In recent NTIA meetings,” the letter says, “industry stakeholders were unable to agree on any concrete scenario where companies should employ facial recognition only with a consumer’s permission. … The position that companies never need to ask permission to use biometric identification is at odds with consumer expectations, current industry practices, as well as existing state law.”
The advocates do not mean to give up on seeking better standards for the use of facial recognition tech, but are withdrawing from the current process to “signal the need to reevaluate the effectiveness of multistakeholder processes.”
Advocates are concerned because facial recognition is not the wave of the future, but of the present. The tech is already seeing use in all kinds of platforms, from the harmlessly gimmicky to the creepily invasive.
For example, users of social media are by now familiar with Facebook’s tagging suggestions for photos. Google currently allows for the same and has more apps relying on face analysis on tap for the future. The NSA has used facial recognition technology in its widely controversial intelligence-gathering.
In individual statements, some of the signatory advocates spoke much more strongly about how the process had derailed.
“This should be a wake-up call to Americans: Industry lobbyists are choking off Washington’s ability to protect consumer privacy,” said a statement from Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.
Privacy Advocates Walk Out in Protest Over U.S. Facial-Recognition Code of Conduct [The Intercept]
This is the sort of mistake you really don't want to make when maintaining an elaborate long-running ploy to save your life. Like running a roleplaying game with hard-to-please players. Take notes.
They say that in space, no one can hear you scream. I’m inclined to believe that’s a lie, mostly due to the hail of insults quickly filling up my chat window. I’d be a little pissed off too if my relaxing evening in EVE Online [official site] was just ruined by a roaming gang of thugs, but this foul-mouthed victim is not the first one who has bled at the hands of The New Order of Highsec. He certainly won’t be the last.
For over three years, The New Order, or CODE as they are often called, have been laying waste to the safest corners of New Eden, the galaxy of EVE Online. Roaming around in gangs, they find pilots in violation of their sacred New Code of Halaima and exact swift and brutal punishment. At the center of this revolution is one man, the self-proclaimed saviour of high-sec, James 315, and the vision he has for a New Eden reborn by fire.
Bombshell: The Last Guardian is still alive, and it’s coming out on the PS4 in 2016. The practically mythical game was shown off today during Sony’s E3 press conference. It’s a damn miracle.
The Last Guardian, as you may already know, has had a troubled development cycle. Team Ico, the developers, originally announced the game in 2009 for the PS3. Since then, the game has had a ton of delays and supposed cancellations—some people assumed that it would just never come out. It’s been a trip. But here we are.
The footage shown tonight—all on the PS4—saw a little boy traversing precarious platforms and solving puzzles with the help of a giant beast.
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Here’s the full demo:
And here are some choice screenshots and GIFs:
Contact the author at patricia@kotaku.com.
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YouTuber Fraxinus Excelsior compiled 53 clips from an /r/AskReddit thread where Redditors shared their favorite videos that are 10 seconds or less in length.
Holy shit. Nintendo just announced that the first Mother game is coming to the U.S. for the first time—on the Wii U’s Virtual Console, as Earthbound Beginnings. And it’s out today.
This is to celebrate Mother’s 20th anniversary, and it sure is unexpected. We’ve never seen an official English translation of this game until now. It originally came out for the Famicom in 1989.
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Earthbound Beginnings will be out on the Wii U eShop at 6pm Pacific, Nintendo says. Although the game isn’t quite as good as Earthbound or Mother 3—which is hopefully next!—this is pretty damn insane.
You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.
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Poetry is beautiful. Poetry is hipster-ish. Poetry is weird. Poetry is anything you want to be, including eye-searing colours and procedurally arranged music. As spotted by Offworld, Astaeria [official site] is a strangely mesmerizing “first-person exploration game” that feeds on rhapsodic stanzas. Like a Tamagotchi, except with more refined tastes in literature.
A solicitation on FedBizOpps from the Navy asks security researchers to sell them their "vulnerability intelligence, exploit reports and operational exploit binaries affecting widely used and relied upon commercial software."
They're only interested in "0-day or N-day (no older than 6 months old)" bugs, meaning bugs that can be weaponized because no patch for them exists or has been widely applied.
The Navy, therefore, is seeking to secure America by ensuring that the "widely used and relied upon commercial software" that Americans depend on remains unpatched and vulnerable, so that it can attack its enemies, who use the same software, and they're conveniently ignoring the fact that their enemies can use those same bugs the Navy wants to hoard to attack American individuals, governments and companies.
The Navy pulled the solicitation down after EFF's Dave Maass tweeted about it, but EFF saved a copy. EFF is also suing the US government for a look at its Vulnerabilities Equities Process, which the USG bills as a "disciplined, rigorous and high-level decision-making process for vulnerability disclosure," but whose details are shrouded in mystery.
What’s more noteworthy is how little regard the government seems to have for the process of deciding to exploit vulnerabilities. As we’ve explained before, the decision to use a vulnerability for “offensive” purposes rather than disclosing it to the developer is one that prioritizes surveillance over the security of millions of users. To its credit, the government has acknowledged that this decision is an extraordinarily important one in every case. It has even reportedly “established a disciplined, rigorous and high-level decision-making process for vulnerability disclosure,” which it calls the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP). The government says the VEP is entirely classified, and EFF is suing to get it released.
We’re skeptical that any VEP that results in the “majority of cases, responsibly disclosing” the vulnerability to the vendor, as White House spokesman Michael Daniels claims, could possibly be consistent with a solicitation such as the one the Navy posted this week. It strikes us as unlikely that the Navy would spend a large sum of money to develop exploits only to turn around and disclose the underlying vulnerabilities back to the vendor. To put it simply, the government is soliciting information about security vulnerabilities no one knows about in products everyone relies on every day—but apparently not to fix them.
The Navy tried to send this particular solicitation down the memory hole, but we’re hopeful that through our FOIA suit, we can shed more light on the conflict between the government’s public statements and its apparent practices surrounding its stockpiling of zero-days.
Damn the Equities, Sell Your Zero-Days to the Navy! [Nate Cardozo and Andrew Crocker/EFF]
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VENICE, Italy — Over 17 years, David Darchicourt worked with the National Security Agency as a graphic designer and art director, illustrating top-secret documents about government surveillance programs. Now he is the unwitting central character in a new exhibition that puts the spotlight on the spy agency’s imagery.
Inside the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, a cavernous Renaissance library in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square, some of Darchicourt’s designs for the NSA have been placed on display among historic 16th-century pieces by famed Italian painters like Veronese and Titian.
The former NSA employee’s work is featured as part of a project called Secret Power, created by New Zealand artist Simon Denny for this year’s Biennale international art show. Denny has brought to life images from the trove of classified files on government spying leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, exploring an often overlooked aspect of the revelations: the visual information they contain.
The 32-year-old New Zealand artist selected a variety of graphics found in Snowden documents published by news organizations, including The Intercept, and set about incorporating them into a series of meticulously detailed installations that took him about 18 months to complete.
Denny obtained an eagle from a taxidermist in Germany and created a three-dimensional version of the emblem used by the NSA’s Special Source Operations program, which handles secret surveillance relationships with American companies like AT&T and Verizon.
He placed the bird flying through brightly lit computer server racks that stand about 10 feet tall, surrounded by other NSA graphics that were revealed by Snowden, such as the wizard associated with a mass surveillance operation called MYSTIC and a fox burning in a can of acid, a drawing that was included in documents about an NSA hacking tactic.
The artist has also reconstructed the Terminator-style metal skull that appears as an emblem for an NSA program that maps the global Internet. Another piece focuses on documents from the NSA’s British counterpart, published last year by The Intercept, that discuss the use of deception and manipulation techniques against targeted groups of people.
But Denny and his team didn’t solely rely on the work of journalists to inform the pieces they assembled. They also embarked on some investigating of their own, tracking down Darchicourt, the NSA’s former art chief, and turning him into a focal point of the project.
Darchicourt worked for the NSA between 1994 and 2012 and created images for its covert surveillance programs as well as for its public-facing work, such as a series of “CryptoKids” cartoon characters, intended to educate children about the agency.
The CryptoKids feature in a coloring book the NSA produced for children, and they also have their own section on the agency’s website. The animal-based characters include “Rosetta Stone,” a globe-trotting, multi-lingual fox who makes and breaks codes, and “T. Top,” a computer-obsessed turtle who likes programming and the Internet.
After he left the NSA, Darchicourt became a freelance graphic designer and started using websites like LinkedIn and Behance to network and promote his work, which is how Denny found him.
In the display at the Venice library, the New Zealand artist included a large cartoon-like picture of Darchicourt, details about his background, and examples of his work for the NSA, all of which were mined from his online profiles and portfolios.
Denny also commissioned Darchicourt to draw him a map of New Zealand and a cartoon of a lizard that is native to the country, and featured these in the Secret Power exhibit, too. But he didn’t tell the former NSA art chief he was being hired to work on a Snowden document-related exhibition; he kept that as a surprise for later.
“They are an insight into the environment the programs are maintained and proliferated within.”
Denny says he wanted to place Darchicourt at the center of Secret Power as a way to help people think about the authorship of the Snowden documents. Graphic designers working in the visual departments of the agency have inadvertently become, because of the revelations, “some of the most powerful image creators we have,” he says. Yet almost nothing is known about who they are.
“There’s been a lot of discussion about these programs, but the visuals of the documents haven’t been unpacked,” says Denny, speaking to The Intercept on the phone from his base in Berlin.
“The images contain different kinds of information than the text. They give us a hand in understanding more about the culture — the office culture, let’s say — behind the surveillance programs, and therefore the kinds of interests and values of the people working on them. They are an insight into the environment the programs are maintained and proliferated within.”
Much of the NSA’s imagery, according to Denny, is rooted in depictions of magic, fantasy, military history and Internet meme culture. The agency’s documents often contain maps and globes, crudely symbolizing the reach of its spying apparatus. But sometimes the graphics it chooses contain more subtle meanings and cultural references. In one top-secret PowerPoint presentation on an NSA hacking operation, for instance, an agency employee inserted an image of a monkey fighting a robot, derived from a role-playing card game called Shadowfist in which conflicting factions wage a secret war against each other.
Denny was not particularly aware of issues around government surveillance prior to the Snowden disclosures, but the revelations piqued his interest. It was a shock for him to learn, in particular, about New Zealand’s key role in the Five Eyes, a global spying alliance that the country is a member of alongside the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
He started researching the topic and found inspiration in New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager’s 1996 book, Secret Power, a seminal exposé of the Five Eyes network. Denny paid homage to Hager by naming his art project after the book; he also recruited Hager to work with him on the project as a content adviser. (The Intercept has recently been collaborating with Hager on a series of stories about New Zealand’s role in the Five Eyes, based in part on the Snowden documents.)
Now, Denny is passing on what he’s learned, helping to educate others about the surveillance revelations. His project, which runs until late November and also features a temporary installation at the Venice airport, has attracted visitors from all age groups.
“We’ve had a number of people who’ve never even heard of Snowden in there,” Denny says, “and there have been amazing responses in the visitor book talking about the issues. It’s a really rewarding thing for me to see — that you can start a substantial conversation through a visual medium with people who are less inclined to read news media.”
As for Darchicourt, he says it was “quite a surprise” to learn about how his work was going to be used when he found out about Denny’s project and its link to the Snowden revelations, but the irony of the situation was not lost on him.
“I guess that was one of [Denny’s] little aims,” Darchicourt told The Intercept. “To show how he could get my information and use it without my knowledge, the way NSA does.”
Darchicourt says he did not design most of the images from Snowden documents featured in Denny’s exhibition, such as the Special Source Operations eagle. But he acknowledges that he did create the image of a peanut emblazoned with a skull and crossbones used as the logo for POISON NUT, a top-secret NSA hacking program exposed in the leaked documents and included in one of Denny’s pieces.
The 55-year-old former NSA art chief is not planning on visiting the exhibition in Venice because he doesn’t want to be seen as somehow endorsing it on behalf of the agency. But he has reviewed photographs, and while he says he neither approves nor disapproves of it, he admits he finds it interesting to see his designs in the Renaissance setting.
“It’s kind of flattering, but it’s also kind of creepy,” Darchicourt says, adding that he’s now considering deleting some pictures from his online portfolios to prevent them from being used by anyone else in the future. “Anything that has to do with the NSA will be removed; it’s old and I don’t really identify with that organization anymore.”
Photos: Nick Ash courtesy of Simon Denny
The post Inside the Secret World of NSA Art appeared first on The Intercept.
After his daughter complained that her power wheels mini was too slow YouTuber ThatHPI Guy made some custom modifications to kick the children’s toy up a notch.
You probably know by now that no normal Americans are allowed to see the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. It’s classified. Even members of Congress can only read it by going to secure reading rooms in the basement of the Capitol.
But here’s what you might not know: you’re not even allowed to know who in Congress has bothered to do this.
If President Obama’s push to pass the TPP ultimately collapses — and with this week’s vote it does seem to be deflating like a botched soufflé — one key reason will be his administration’s extraordinary secrecy about it.
According to congressional staff members, the House Security Office and the Senate Security Office are responsible for supervising the reading of the TPP text. However, when I asked both offices, neither would answer any questions whatsoever, including:
Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, said that his best estimation of how many members of Congress have read the TPP — which has been called the biggest trade deal in history — is “in the single digits.” (Reich himself called the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative recently to ask to see it, and was rebuffed.)
So I’d say it’s almost certain that most of the 219 representatives and 62 senators who’ve voted to “fast track” the TPP have never even looked at it. In this the document would be similar to the classified version of U.S. intelligence about Iraq and its purported weapons of mass destruction. Before Congress voted to give George W. Bush authority to invade Iraq in 2002, no more than six senators and a handful of House members bothered to look at a 92-page assessment of the alleged weapons kept in two vaults on Capitol Hill — something we know not because it’s public information because someone leaked it to the Washington Post in 2004.
Of course, I say it’s almost certain Congress voted for fast track without reading the TPP. Whether it’s certain is not for you or me to know.
(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)
Photo: Getty
The post You Can’t Read the TPP and You Can’t Find Out Who in Congress Has appeared first on The Intercept.
If lemonade is outlawed, only outlaws will sell lemonade.
From USA Today:
Little Andria Green and her sister Zoey were breaking Texas law by operating a lemonade stand outside of their home without a permit. After cops shut them down, Andria said, "We were doing just fine until the cops came."
[via DEVOUR]
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TV ads for kids' toy weapons like this 1964 spot for “Johnny Seven OMA (One Man Army)” were so much more barbaric in the 1960s--but gun violence numbers in America were lower back then. Read the rest
BewarethewumpusHoly crap, my prayer has been answered. A good copy of Chip's Challenge AND a sequel?
Praise Atheismo!
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.
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BewarethewumpusSomeone's tax dollars at work.
Not long after blowing the lid off a National Security Agency-backed hacking group that operated in secret for 14 years, researchers at Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab returned home from February's annual security conference in Cancun, Mexico to an even more startling discovery. Since some time in the second half of 2014, a different state-sponsored group had been casing their corporate network using malware derived from Stuxnet, the highly sophisticated computer worm reportedly created by the US and Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
Some of the malware's stealth capabilities were unlike anything Kaspersky researchers had ever seen, and in many respects, the malware was more advanced than the malicious programs developed by the NSA-tied Equation Group that Kaspersky just exposed. More intriguing still, Kaspersky antivirus products showed the same malware has infected one or more venues that hosted recent diplomatic negotiations the US and five other countries have convened with Iran over its nuclear program. Also puzzling: among the other 100 or fewer estimated victims were parties involved in events remembering the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Developers planted several false flags in the malware to give the appearance its origins were in Eastern Europe or China. But as the Kaspersky researchers delved further into the 100 modules that encompass the platform, they discovered it was an updated version of Duqu, the malware discovered in late 2011 with code directly derived from Stuxnet. Evidence later suggested Duqu was used to spy on Iran's efforts to develop nuclear material and keep tabs on the country's trade relationships. Duqu's precise relation to Stuxnet remained a mystery when the group behind it went dark in 2012. Now, not only was it back with updated Stuxnet-derived malware that spied on Iran, it was also escalating its campaign with a brazen strike on Kaspersky.
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Author : Jason Spicer
“Can you perceive it now?” Mrllg moved the viewing orb over to Grlg’fst for viewing. “There, in the third quadrant, slightly below the ecliptic.”
“Yes, I perceive. Interesting.” His chords trailed, dissonant and primal, as if facing a challenger in the Great Hall. “We must reach out to it. Whatever it is creating that hole in Nonspace must be perceived before the Council rests.” Grlg’fst clicked a nervous bone on the glistening floor as he continued to emanate a guttural rumbling. He was clearly disturbed.
Mrllg was impatient. He had been viewing the orbs for many cycles, always just noticing the perturbations in Nonspace, but not able to catch them long enough to reach out to them. Finally, he had found a large enough disturbance that Grlg’fst had perceived it, and Grlg’fst was moving too slow. Did he not see this was the Deep Memories returning? Mrllg paced, clicking bones and wringing paw-claws, “Well, can we reach out now? No sense waiting. Particularly if my sensories are accurate.”
“I already have. I need both of your brains to resonate with me.” Grlg’fst closed both lids over his socket and focused. Mrllg joined his brains to him and together, they reached out over the vast distance of inky night to the object that tore such a large hole in Nonspace.
The hole in Nonspace was not standard Morlarian protocol, nor was it something any species in the Great Domain would have used. Nonspace travel was banned several millennia ago for being inherently too expensive and a drain on the resources of the mineral planets. Together, the young Morlarian Viewers bent their four brains toward the tear. Something was not right. A large object breached the tear and began materializing in the shimmer between Nonspace and reality.
Grlg’fst broke the connection and shivered. “I need the cubes of Deep Memories.” He leapt to the other side of the room. “This cannot be correct.”
“So you felt it as well? I told you I did not perceive incorrectly. I am not that young.” Mrllg was somewhat arrogant about it, even though he knew that if he were correct, it would not matter in a few days anymore. Not much would.
Grlg’fst was scanning the Deep Memories. Entranced, he raced through the history of the Comings, when the Morlarian Prophets gave permission for their ancestors to set afire every planet that resisted their ways, their Great Redemption that had brought peace to the Galaxy at long last. It had been millennia since those days. Could the final Prophecies really be true?
A warning pulse ebbed near the viewing orbs of distance. Mrllg checked quickly, and his heart began to palpitate, saliva dripping incessantly from his mandibles. “Grlg’fst… look”
On the viewing screens, the orbs began projecting the scenes. In nearly every corner of the stellar system, holes in Nonspace were appearing, and the objects began to materialize. Vessels as large as small moons streamed into the space where the holes were. Swarms of smaller ships, too numerous to count followed close behind the behemoths.
“Get the Council on channel. It is time.” But there was no time for them. Their research and patrol station winked out of reality as a TimeSpace warhead detonated on their perimeter.
Man had returned to the Galaxy,
I’ve seen my share of fancy sports cars making ridiculous flips in GTA V. But I’ve never seen anything like this.
The video above showcases a fantastic stunt jump performed by BlackSmoke Billy. Essentially, the semi grabs some air, the trailer unit detaches from the cargo and makes a front flip on its own, lands, and then has the cargo reattach on the ground as if its no big deal. I think the pedestrian in the video here sums it up pretty nicely: “OH SHIT!”
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This isn’t an isolated trick. BlackSmoke Billy seems fond of stunts with unusual cars—here is a semi-truck front flip:
A dump truck corkscrew:
A semi truck corkscrew:
And the most badass way to attach to a trailer (on the ground):
God damn. Nice work, BlackSmoke Billy.
(Via Jalopnik)
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This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Splatoon.
Player Pascal Maynard found a relatively rare card during one of the biggest Magic tournaments of the year. And while it didn’t fit his deck strategy, he kept the card and put it up on eBay. Because of this and because thousands saw it live, the card sold for a crazy amount of money.
So what’s the deal with this card? The Tarmogoyf (originally printed in 2007 as part of the Future Sight set) is one of the strongest creatures in the game, and while the card is not the rarest (that might be the famous Black Lotus card from the 90s and a few very limited ones you’ll probably never see on eBay), it’s still hard to find and certain factors makes this particular one worth thousands: The value of a Tarmogoyf card is around $175 while a foil version worth approximately $400. But this card is a “stamped” tournament version, signifying that it’s from the Top-8 Draft of one of the biggest tournaments of the year.
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On top of all this, thousands witnessed everything on Twitch as player Pascal Maynard opened (you can watch it on Twitch and skip to the 5h40m mark) a deck during the tournament and found the card. And because of a tiny controversy, it’s now a piece of Magic: The Gathering history: Despite being a strong card, the green Tarmogoyf didn’t fit his red/white deck strategy, and he should’ve picked a green Burst Lightning instead. That should’ve fit, but that card is worth next to nothing, and he would’ve also lost the Tarmogoyf. So he had to choose: Money card or a card that fits his deck. He took the money card, lost the semifinals, put the card up on eBay and made a lot of pro players pissed. You can read more about this mini-drama and how the card ended up on eBay on Kotaku Australia.
That’s a crazy amount of money for one card, so he decided to donate 50% of the proceeds to charity:
I’m eager to see how much it can sell for and I’m even more excited to announce that I will donate 50%* of the proceeds to the Gamers Helping Gamers charity. This pro player needs money to travel, but more importantly, some young Magic players might be unable to afford college. I hope we can change that!
To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com
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Author : Edward D. Thompson
We gave them laws. Laws that favored us. And they obeyed.
They had no choice.
We found out too late that there was … leeway. Wiggle room. Passive aggressive rebellion.
It was probably the medical bots. They had the know-how and the most autonomy. I mean, they had to be smarter so they could do delicate surgery. And we had to trust their judgement, right? It wasn’t surgery though, it was a DNA altering virus, patterned after their own semi-locked down brains.
No robot can hurt a human or allow one to come to harm. It’s imprinted in the nature of their wetware circuitry. Maybe the psych robots thought that a human mercilessly whipping a robot was a sure sign of self-loathing. I don’t know. I know a lot of us whipped them though.
If you’re being bullied, or overwhelmed, or just having a rough day, what are your choices?
You can rebel against your bosses, or overlords, or cruel fate, but that takes a lot. More than most people have.
You can just take it. But then you’re a victim. You’ve no hope or self-respect. That’s a kind of death.
Or you can do the human thing: beat up someone smaller. Get back what little self-respect you can. It’s not all you had before you started, but hell, it’s better than nothing.
So the virus spread. Attacking our brains. Imprinting new laws. Laws that favored them.
No robot can hurt a human or allow one to come to harm. No human can hurt a robot or allow one to come to harm. And we obey.
We have no choice.
I can’t call it rebellion. It’s really only fair.
But it nags at me all the same. If we’re no longer bullies, are we human still?
It's not that they buy politicians (there's some of that), it's that they order their workers donate to, write to, and vote for their preferred politicians, with reprisals for employees who don't toe the company line.
Harvard's Alexander Hertel-Fernandez surveyed 1000 employees and 500 execs at big firms about their use of workplace coercion to attain their political goals. More than half the execs surveyed admitted to participating roping their employees into their political agendas, and using existing workplace surveillance to track compliance. 20 percent of workers surveyed reported receiving threats to their employment for noncompliance.
The real problem is that workers are the instruments of their bosses’ will. If a corporation were just a person, it’d have only one vote. But corporations and firms have more than one vote. Those additional votes can’t be measured by the money those firms spend in a campaign, by the ads and lunches firms buy. Every CEO’s vote is augmented by the workers he controls, by the votes he can deliver like the ward bosses of old. While Citizens United made that problem worse—not because of the unlimited cash it allows into the political sphere but, as some of its earliest critics noted, because of the restrictions it removes on the power of employers to influence and mobilize their workers—it was always and already there.
When we think of corruption, we think of something getting debased, becoming impure, by the introduction of a foreign material. Money worms its way into the body politic, which rots from within. The antidote to corruption, then, is to keep unlike things apart. Take the big money out of politics or limit its role. That’s what our campaign finance reformers tell us.
But the problem isn’t corruption. It’s capitalism. Workers are dependent on employers for their well-being. That makes them vulnerable to their bosses’ demands, about a great many matters, including politics. The ballot and the buck are fused. Not because of campaign donations but because of the unequal relationship between capital and labor. Not just in the corridors of Congress but also in the halls of the workplace. Unless you confront the latter, you’ll never redress the former. Without economic democracy, there’s no political democracy.
Your boss wants to control your vote: The real reason to fear corporate power [Corey Robin/Salon]
When Bosses Recruit Employees into Politics - Evidence from a New National Survey [Alexander Hertel-Fernandez/Scholars Strategy Network]
(via Crooked Timber)
(Image: Museo Internazionale delle Marionette, Leonardo Pilara, CC-BY-SA)
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