Bewarethewumpus

Author : Travis Gregg

The brightness was overwhelming at first and it took several minutes for his eyes to adjust. The dirt was warm under his bare feet, and the smell, the smell was like something from his childhood. The smell of dirt and wind and sun. He’d forgotten that smell.

All around him the wheat fields stretched from horizon to horizon, a sharp contrast against the deep blue of the cloudless sky. The only thing that broke the uniformity was a two story ramshackle building on top of a nearby hill. It looked about a hundred years old, all rotted wood and sagging porch. The roof had partially collapsed and it looked like a stiff breeze would send the whole structure crashing into a heap. He slowly rotated and it was all sky and wheat and the abandoned building.

“What is this?” he asked. “Another test?”

At first there had been many tests. Some painful, some beyond painful. Some he’d forgotten and some he’d probably never be able to. His hand rubbed the scars unconsciously. On at least three occasions he’d been led to believe he’d been freed only to have the illusion melt away after his captors ascertained whatever it was they were hoping to learn.

There had been fewer and fewer test though the longer they’d held him. He couldn’t even remember how long it’d been since the last one but certainly a while. He’d lost a sense of time almost immediately after his capture.

“No, no more tests. We’re done with that,” his captor replied.

“If not a test, then what is this?” he asked.

“Your home, or near enough to where we picked you up.”

“Look at this place, there’s nothing here!”

His captor had no shoulders but still managed to convey an indifferent shrug as it turned back to the portal. “A significant time has passed on your specie’s time scale. The rules are when we’re done the subjects must be returned to their original habitat.”

“How long has it been?”

Silence was the only response he got as the portal and his captor faded to nothingness. As he looked out at the empty expanse, truly alone for the first time in ages, he realized simply surviving might be the most difficult test.

Author : LB Benton

I am a simple watchmaker. Once I owned a watch repair shop on West 38th Street, near the jewelry district. The shop was very small and, now, I barely remember it—worn wooden floors that softened the footsteps of customers, the sweet smell of lubricating oil, a door that jingled when it opened. Many things about it I have forgotten. Now I sit at a worktable in a damp cement room and repair the inner workings of androids. Like a surgeon bent over an operating table, I hunch over the lifeless forms of one android after another and bring them back to life, so to speak. Only someone with the skills and knowledge of a watchmaker can repair their complex, finely tuned mechanisms and overhaul the labyrinth of intricate wheelworks.

The horrid creatures tell me I am the last human, the last watchmaker. I don’t know if it’s true. Surely they are capable of lying, but I haven’t seen another human in months, perhaps as long as a year. Our tragic and fatal mistake was programming reason into the droids, giving them thoughts and freedom of choice. We wondered if they were sentient and self-aware, but that ceased to matter once the killings began.

They believed in their rationality, but in their heated frenzy to eliminate every living person, they made a serious error. It was an error likely disastrous for them. Strangely they did not know exactly how they themselves worked internally. They had not grasped the concept of parallel drives, the interaction of rods and tensors, the oscillation of the escapement, any of it, even the blinking of their eyes. For at the center of every android is a powerful mainspring which drives all animation and motion. Too late, they realized they did not understand the mainspring, the precision machined gears, the linkages. They simply didn’t know.

But the killings had gone too far. I was saved at the last moment from the chemicals. I was pulled from line when they realized their mistake. But I was the only watchmaker saved, the others were exterminated. Through bad luck, the Swiss went early. Now, I am toiling 10-12 hours a day making repairs. Without my skills they would cease to move, some inner part would malfunction and stop. They could not be repaired and would, in effect, die. Eventually, all of them would cease to be.

I try but there is too much work. Broken androids are piling up. They tell me to work faster, threatening me, but I can’t keep up. In their desperation, they are forcing me to teach them to be watchmakers, to give them the tools and techniques to do the work themselves. But once I teach them, I will be superfluous, and they will certainly kill me. My knowledge is the only thing keeping me alive.

My knowledge is also the only thing keeping them alive. I have begun the training, but I will not finish it. I will not tell them everything. I will not teach them all I know. All I have left is my skill and my art. This they must not acquire for, with it, they can live forever, will live forever. So, I have decided on a bold step—a step more than a little frightening for a simple watchmaker. It will soon be over, for I have a plan. My knowledge must vanish; it must sink into the final darkness. May God forgive me.

My only regret is that I have no one to say goodbye to.

Author : Gray Blix, Featured Writer [ bio ]

“I remember when there were forests and farms right up to the border. I’d shout hello from my dad’s tractor and Americans would shout back. We crossed the border to shop. Before the DPA.”

“There you go again, old man. You could have retired years ago,” meaning he should have. “Why keep working?”

“Who can live on a pension nowadays?”

“Hey, pay attention, look at your display.” Pointing, “Right there.”

Only an expert controller could glance at another’s screen and make out two indistinct thermal signatures against rocks still warm from the Sun. The kid was good.

Below, having rested as long as they dared, two intruders put on hoods and walked by starlight on the dry bed of Belly River, now a trail, an escape route for desperate refugees from a parched, hungry, violent homeland. Even if they had heard the quadcopter buzzing above, these two wouldn’t be worried, having paid thousands to make themselves undetectable.

The older pilot activated his mike, “Four-zed, crank up your sensitivity and look for two partially cloaked illegals to come around the bend in few minutes.”

From a truck on the bank, looking upriver through his thermal scope, “Will do.”

Mutual Assured Destruction kept the US from invading. As the situation in the states had deteriorated, the Canadians had secretly positioned nuclear tipped missiles. When they had enough to obliterate their neighbor to the south, Parliament simultaneously passed the Dominion Preservation Act, sealed the border, and offered a non-aggression treaty.

“That’s it,” she said, pointing to a stack of rocks. The two figures, their cloaking gear looking like bulky hazmat outfits, headed up the creek.

“Four-zed, do you see them yet?”

“Nope. Are you sure of what you think you saw, old man?” He laughed and nudged the other officer. “Better crank up the sensitivity on your bifocals.”

“They must have deked up a creek, four-zed, heading for the campground or Highway 6. Check it out.”

Neither officer moved. They had hoped to sit in the dark until sunup, when they would be safe from the triangles. Drawn to lights like huge moths, the craft had been seen sucking out the contents of homes and swallowing up vehicles whole.

“Four-zed?”

Finally, a reluctant, “OK.”

The heat and moisture inside the cloaking gear was becoming unbearable.

Checking his watch, “They’re supposed to pick us up in about 15 minutes.”

They removed headgear and sat on a picnic table. Hearing what sounded like the buzz of an insect, she swatted the air, nearly slapping him. He laughed and playfully swatted back.

Zooming the drone’s camera, “Four-zed, they’re in the campground, end of the road.”

The driver flicked headlights on, and the Americans froze.

Watching his display, “We’ve got ’em,” said the old man. But he cringed, knowing the two intruders faced death sentences.

A shaft of light fell towards the truck, engulfing it. The old man later described it as “a bright waterfall.” He pushed the video record button.

All four at the scene fought to make sense of what was happening, but their mental processes were labored, as if they had been drugged.

Suddenly, the man behind the wheel slammed the shift into reverse. The truck spun its rear wheels but didn’t move an inch before the light fell upward, taking the vehicle and occupants with it. A dark triangle silently floated away.

The video’s sale funded retirement on a New Zealand hobby farm, where the old man spent endless hours driving his tractor and chatting up neighbors. His new island home was like a lifeboat in a worldwide sea of misery. Until the triangles arrived.

Author : Gray Blix, Featured Writer [ bio ]

Richard walks the dark streets of the worst part of town, a noir figure in a fedora and trench coat, his eyes casting about for shadows that move, his ears yearning to hear a cry for help. Nothing. He can’t remember his last assignment, his last rendezvous, his last secret password, his last foreign intrigue… no memory of claptrap from a bygone era, because memory was at a premium in the old days, and they’d only issued him 16K.

Even though he’s a walking relic, he feels young, as if he’d joined the Service just yesterday. His girl has a lot to do with that. The girl of his dreams come to life, she has Grable’s million dollar gams, and Russell’s voluptuous bazongas, and Bacall’s sultry pillow talk. What a dame. But deep down he knows he doesn’t deserve her. He hasn’t won her for sending the bad guys to jail, or to hell.

And worst of all, he’s a kept man. Yeah, it crushes his soul to depend on her for everything, for life itself — for vacuum tubes.

Back home, Constance sits by the window, looking onto the dimly lit street below, waiting for him to return from his midnight walk. She knows he aches to get into the fight, to right wrongs, to defend his country, to earn the devotion of a dame like her. It was designed into his circuits, and she loves him for it.

He is the man of her dreams. Literally one of a kind. The shining achievement of a top secret project to make a robot agent generations ahead of its time — able to outthink Enigma, to shed bullets, to overcome evil, to go 24 hours without recharging, and most important to her personally, to pleasure women. That last feature was added in hopes of turning foreign fems into spies for America. Connie gladly role-plays Axis Fraulein to stimulate Dick’s Allied Powers.

She had come across him at a government surplus auction, standing next to the crate that had preserved him for nearly 70 years. Others had thought he was a statue or a clothes mannequin and passed by without stopping. But she immediately saw something special about him. He was a hunk of a guy — healthy mop of brown hair, laughing green eyes, kissable lips, square jaw, and the body of an Olympic athlete. Lingering to examine him carefully from head to toe, she marveled at the attention to detail. Moles, scars, hairs in nose and ears. She found his power cord and wondered what it was for. Some sort of pre-Disney animatronics? Whatever. It didn’t matter. She had to have him. Didn’t bargain. Just paid the $100 cash and had him placed in the passenger seat of her Prius. Almost forgot his user manual!

To this day, three years later, she still wakes up in a panic from the recurring nightmare of forgetting to take the user manual. But it’s always right there on her bedside table, and he’s next to her, emitting the reassuring hum of his battery charger.

He stops. A muffled cry? Over there, in the alley behind the tavern. Two figures silhouetted, a man and a woman, struggling. He runs towards them, kicking a can, alerting the man.

“This is between me and her. And I got a gun.”

He’s just twenty feet away when the bullets ricochet off of him. He slams into the man, who collapses like a broken mannequin. The girl runs away.

He dusts off his coat, picks up his fedora, and heads for home. There will be no need for role-play tonight.

Jon Stewart's April 29 interview with Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times, was one of those serious, detailed, quietly angry interviews he does so well. You should watch it.

I remember the first time I went shoplifting.

The sun was shining, Marin was singing, and I needed a shovel. Two hundred Rupees was well outside my price range, but as I slipped into the village store I clocked my prize: back shelf, far left. The elderly shopkeeper rubbed his hands together at the thought of a sale, but I shamefully used his frailty against him as I snatched, grabbed, and ran behind his till. The clerk turned, but I turned quicker as I darted towards the door. He’d asked kindly that I pay, but the allure of acquiring something outside my means proved too much to resist. “Guess what?” read the caption above my head as I stepped outside. “You got it for free. Are you proud of yourself?”

(This article originally appeared on Kotaku UK.)

The question hung in the air like a bad smell. Was I proud of myself? I’d gotten used to being ushered around linear landscapes, being channelled towards foregone conclusions. Now, I was faced with a query that not only questioned my actions, but also my morals. I don’t think I quite appreciated how significant this little segment of Zelda: Link’s Awakening was when I first played it back in 1994.

But it didn’t stop there.

Thief. Hitman. The Elder Scrolls. Fallout. Assassin’s Creed. Dishonoured. Dragon Age. The Clue. The Sting. Broken Sword. Final Fantasy. Suikoden. Mafia. Saint’s Row. Grand Theft Auto. Mercenaries. Fable. The list of games wherein stealing became a fun distraction would grow and grow and grow. Why was I doing this? I wasn’t stealing in real life and have never felt the urge, so I was intrigued to explore the psychology behind why people steal in reality, in an attempt to understand the draw of virtual theft.

Professor Graham Scott of the University of the West of Scotland suggests that internal reasons, such as personality and lack of empathy, as well as external reasons, such as physically needing something or socio-economic factors, are the basis upon which people steal. The anonymity, or at least perceived anonymity, of the online spectrum drives this desire further still.

“There is a higher propensity of people who commit fraud and identity theft online as opposed to offline,” explains Scott. “One of the reasons for this is that within the online world you feel sort of isolated, and the consequences of your actions are much less apparent. If you steal from someone in the street, the risks of getting caught - the physical consequences - are greater. If you do something like that to someone online, they’re not likely to come after you, therefore you’re not going to see the damage it causes. You may be abstractly aware, but it probably won’t have the same impact.”

In the case of video games, Scott suggests that players might not actually be particularly bothered by how the act of theft directly affects others, but that they are scared of the consequences in reality. Games present an outlet. Another possibility, of course, is that certain games require the player commit theft in order to progress levels or storylines.

“Take Grand Theft Auto, for example,” says Scott. “The appeal of playing something like that wouldn’t be the actual act of stealing the car, it’d be driving the car and completing the mission. In that situation, you’re given a character with a personality and you’re given a script that you must follow.

“The player wouldn’t see stealing as being something bad - most adults in real life can tell the difference between fantasy and reality - they would just see it as following the script and completing it. The danger is that, even though it’s a game, repeated exposure to these types of behaviours could desensitise you to it and normalise it so that you’re more likely to do it in real life.”

Although I don’t necessarily agree with Scott’s concern about the transference of learned in-game behaviours to real life, I think considering the process in reverse perhaps best illustrates his points. As outlined in the Zelda shovel-thievery above, stealing in times of need within video games tends to be the most necessary and/or fulfilling time to do so.

If you bankrupt your bomb and rope stockpiles in the opening levels of Spelunky, for instance, you can always rob the shop - though you’d best be quick enough to escape the ricochet of the aggrieved shopkeeper’s shotgun blast as you scramble back into the depths of the caves. Hey, you’ve only got to worry about him and his relentless, bloodthirsty revenge-quest for the rest of your game, popping up in every single level thereafter - to the point where ‘wanted’ posters adorn his walls with your face.

But the rush of swiping a shotgun or teleporter of bomb box from the old-timer’s stash is pretty damn amazing, isn’t it?

“Most people will tell you that they fell in with the wrong crowd, but I never believe anyone who says that,” David tells me. David, a pseudonym decided upon before our conversation, is from Glasgow and served an eight-year prison sentence for armed robbery in the 1970s.

He asks me if I’ve ever stolen anything before. I tell him no, because I’m fairly certain swiping a shovel in Zelda doesn’t count. “Well, let me tell you, the buzz you get is second to none - no matter if your friends are idiots or otherwise. Even if you’re in a group, you’re not doing it for them, you’re doing it squarely for yourself.”

David begun stealing from a relatively young age, taking shoplifting on as his full-time job, before graduating to more aggressive acts of theft. When he was eventually sentenced to prison, he and a few others had been caught holding up a city centre bookmakers at knifepoint.

“I started shoplifting when I was younger, around my early twenties or so,” he continues. “Mostly clothes, sometimes aftershaves, perfumes, things you could always sell on at pubs or at the pawnie (pawn shop) or the football, really. This was long before the internet so you had to be creative with your audience. I’ve been in and out of employment all of my life, you see, so most of the time shoplifting was easier than holding down a shitey, boring job.

“I knew a lot of folk who could get me things too and I was really good at it on my [own], so I was making far more money than working for someone else would’ve given me. When we robbed the bookies it was like taking that buzz further. There was risk, sure - fuck I know that, and some, now - but the reward trumped the risk. Thinking back, it’s hard to put yourself in that mindset, I thought I was fucking invincible. I obviously wasn’t.”

David goes on to explain how his sentence was the maximum he could’ve received, due to his previous convictions. I ask David why I, as a player of games, might find stealing enjoyable if the act takes place in virtual reality, even though I have no desire, consciously at least, to steal in the real world.

“Well I know next to nothing about computer games,” he admits. “But my grandson is mad for that one that looks like it’s from the 80s. Minecraft, is it? Let me put it this way - you said before that you’d never stolen before, but you said there just now about games that allow you to steal?”

I nod.

“So you have stolen - at least in these games. Let me ask you then, why did you do it in one of your games? Because the game asked you to? Because it felt good? It’s the same thing, as far as I’m concerned. The only difference is the real police have more concern catching up with people like me [laughs].

“What I’m trying to say is that everyone would steal if they thought they could get away with it - just look at the rich and famous [people] who blag things. They’ve got enough money to buy things twice. As I say, I don’t really get computers, my phone is hard enough to work, but I suppose I could see how you could enjoy acting out crimes knowing there’s no real police to face up to.”

When I consider the amount of things I’ve swiped in digital spaces, I wonder if there’s any truth in what David suggests. Again, consciously, I have no desire to steal anything in the real world, but is that to do with social convention and rules and empathy? If I thought there were no repercussions, would I snatch a shovel from my local store? Am I a digital kleptomaniac?

David rightly points out that there are no real police officers chasing us down in our virtual playgrounds - but there are definitely angry shopkeepers. Lots and lots of angry shopkeepers.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said pay!” harked the elderly clerk as I returned to the Mabe Village store on Koholint Island. Finished with the shovel, I now needed a bow and arrow.

“Now, you’ll pay the ultimate price!!” he said, before unsheathing sort some of lightning wielding weapon and pulling the trigger.

Oh, bollocks.

---

Contact the author at evan@kotaku.com.

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The last time we wrote about dinosaurs-versus-jetpacks multiplayer shooter Orion: Prelude [official site] it was 2012, after which I suspect we realised it was broken and rubbish and stopped paying attention. It’s three years later however and its developers haven’t stopped updating it in that time, and in canny fashion they’re now bragging about their support, noting their improved Steam user review rating, and making the game free to play all this week. Watch the trailer below.

… [visit site to read more]

There's a lot of reasons to be excited about Disney Infinity 3.0, but there's only one that truly interests Elliott!

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Oh god. Surely, the people who made this inflatable Pikachu know? They have to.

Warning: This article contains content some readers might find objectionable.

A few years ago, images surfaced of a Pikachu bouncy house in Japan with the entrance in a rather interesting place. To refresh your memory:

Yep. But if you thought that was something, you must see the latest version. A new Pikachu bouncy house recently went up in Seoul, South Korea. It’s in front of the Lotte Department near Jamsil Station, and it tops Japan in the inflatable vagina department.

[Photo: hong_ki_py]

Heh.

[Photo: sienauni]

A side view.

[Photo: aka_chacha]

You thought I was kidding, right? I was not!

[Photo: 14.may]

Who wants their picture in front of Pikachu’s vagina? You?

[Photo: junghyehwan]

Be sure to get a good look. And yes, this opening is to see when small children are inside, which kind of makes the whole thing more yeah.

[Photo: nara_sinn]

Perfect weather for a Pikachu vagina!

Gotta wonder what Giratina is thinking.

[Photo: Kawells00]

[Photo: tack_92]

That’s the entrance. At least it’s not going into Pikachu’s butt, am I right? I am so right.

[Photo: chunghokim]

And this has been a look at Pikachu’s vagina. Your move, Japan!

Top photo: tmt1002/Pixels by Kotaku

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

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

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This may look like a black and white manga drawing. But no, it’s a three-dimensional figure with a custom paint job.

Previously, Kotaku profiled Japanese figure maker mumumuno53 (here and here). Those earlier works were in living color, but his latest effort evokes black and white. From nearly every angle, the custom paint job makes the figure appear drawn.

This is a Revoltech collectable of the Powered Armor from the Starship Troopers anime (you can see the original here). Studio Nue did this particular design.

Check out photos from mumumuno53’s site:

[All photos: mumumuno53]

Bravo!

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

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

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While most cutting-edge virtual reality entertainment ventures are focusing on stay-at-home systems, one Salt Lake City-based startup called The Void is working on an ambitious project to launch a chain of out-of-home, virtual reality theme parks across the United States.

YouTuber Kurz Gesagt explains the concept of the Fermi paradox, which points out the apparent contradiction between the high probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life and the lack of evidence for their existence.

This infomercial parody reimagines Tinder if it were software from the 1980s, complete with keystrokes, floppy disks, and cheesy VHS effects.

It’d be easy to assume the GIF above is the most impressive part of this run, but it’s not.

This incredibly fast speedrun of Half-Life 2: Episode Two was pulled off by SourceRuns Team, and they managed make it through Valve’s shooter in record time: 30 minutes and 36 seconds.

In order to make this work, some parts of the run weren’t done consecutively, so that particular strategies could be employed:

Timing starts when the crosshair appears and stops when it disappears. Segmented means that the run was done in multiple parts so riskier and faster strategies could be used. The version of the game is from 2009, build 4104. Some scripts (such as a jumping and duck spam script) were used.

One of the first things you’ll notice is how most of the speedrun takes place backwards. Here’s their explanation why that’s so useful:

Short version: If you jump backwards you go fast.

Long version: ABH or Accelerated Back Hopping is an unintended side effect of fixing bunny hopping. If you’re not familiar with the 2004 version of Half-Life 2, every time you jumped forwards with W held down you gained a little bit of speed. This could be exploited by jumping immediately after landing; you could gradually gain speed.

Then people at Valve decided to fix bunny hopping for Episode 2 and Portal. So how the fix works is if your horizontal speed is greater than the speed cap you get accelerated the amount you’re over the limit backwards. This gets applied every time you jump. The obvious way to exploit this fix is to simply turn around so that your speed is increased, instead of decreased.

The speedrunners actually break down how they pull off every glitch and exploit moment-by-moment in an exhaustive and super interesting document that makes for fascinating reading.

My favorite moment? When the speedrunners tackle the climactic battle against the striders and manage to nuke one of ‘em by tossing a bomb into the air, destroying the strider as it spawns in:

God damn, this makes me want Half-Life 3.

You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.

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Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.

But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.

Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.

The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.

Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.

The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.

Spying on international telephone calls has always been a staple of NSA surveillance, but the requirement that an actual person do the listening meant it was effectively limited to a tiny percentage of the total traffic. By leveraging advances in automated speech recognition, the NSA has entered the era of bulk listening.

And this has happened with no apparent public oversight, hearings or legislative action. Congress hasn’t shown signs of even knowing that it’s going on.

The USA Freedom Act — the surveillance reform bill that Congress is currently debating — doesn’t address the topic at all. The bill would end an NSA program that does not collect voice content: the government’s bulk collection of domestic calling data, showing who called who and for how long.

Even if becomes law, the bill would leave in place a multitude of mechanisms exposed by Snowden that scoop up vast amounts of innocent people’s text and voice communications in the U.S. and across the globe.

Civil liberty experts contacted by The Intercept said the NSA’s speech-to-text capabilities are a disturbing example of the privacy invasions that are becoming possible as our analog world transitions to a digital one.

“I think people don’t understand that the economics of surveillance have totally changed,” Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told The Intercept.

“Once you have this capability, then the question is: How will it be deployed? Can you temporarily cache all American phone calls, transcribe all the phone calls, and do text searching of the content of the calls?” she said. “It may not be what they are doing right now, but they’ll be able to do it.”

And, she asked: “How would we ever know if they change the policy?”

Indeed, NSA officials have been secretive about their ability to convert speech to text, and how widely they use it, leaving open any number of possibilities.

That secrecy is the key, Granick said. “We don’t have any idea how many innocent people are being affected, or how many of those innocent people are also Americans.”

I Can Search Against It

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who was trained as a voice processing crypto-linguist and worked at the agency until 2008, told The Intercept that he saw a huge push after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks to turn the massive amounts of voice communications being collected into something more useful.

Human listening was clearly not going to be the solution. “There weren’t enough ears,” he said.

The transcripts that emerged from the new systems weren’t perfect, he said. “But even if it’s not 100 percent, I can still get a lot more information. It’s far more accessible. I can search against it.”

Converting speech to text makes it easier for the NSA to see what it has collected and stored, according to Drake. “The breakthrough was being able to do it on a vast scale,” he said.

More Data, More Power, Better Performance

The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s.

What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds.

In a brief interview, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, indicated that the government’s ability to automate transcription is still limited.

Kaufman says that automated transcription of phone conversation is “super hard,” because “there’s a lot of noise on the signal” and “it’s informal as hell.”

“I would tell you we are not very good at that,” he said.

In an ideal environment like a news broadcast, he said, “we’re getting pretty good at being able to do these types of translations.”

A 2008 document from the Snowden archive shows that  transcribing news broadcasts was already working well seven years ago, using a program called Enhanced Video Text and Audio Processing:

(U//FOUO) EViTAP is a fully-automated news monitoring tool. The key feature of this Intelink-SBU-hosted tool is that it analyzes news in six languages, including Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, English, and Farsi/Persian. “How does it work?” you may ask. It integrates Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which provides transcripts of the spoken audio. Next, machine translation of the ASR transcript translates the native language transcript to English. Voila! Technology is amazing.

A version of the system the NSA uses is now even available commercially.

Experts in speech recognition say that in the last decade or so, the pace of technological improvement has been explosive. As information storage became cheaper and more efficient, technology companies were able to store massive amounts of voice data on their servers, allowing them to continually update and improve the models. Enormous processors, tuned as “deep neural networks” that detect patterns like human brains do, produce much cleaner transcripts.

And the Snowden documents show that the same kinds of leaps forward seen in commercial speech-to-text products have also been happening in secret at the NSA, fueled by the agency’s singular access to astronomical processing power and its own vast data archives.

In fact, the NSA has been repeatedly releasing new and improved speech recognition systems for more than a decade.

The first-generation tool, which made keyword-searching of vast amounts of voice content possible, was rolled out in 2004 and code-named RHINEHART.

“Voice word search technology allows analysts to find and prioritize intercept based on its intelligence content,” says an internal 2006 NSA memo entitled “For Media Mining, the Future Is Now!”

The memo says that intelligence analysts involved in counterterrorism were able to identify terms related to bomb-making materials, like “detonator” and “hydrogen peroxide,” as well as place names like “Baghdad” or people like “Musharaf.”

RHINEHART was “designed to support both real-time searches, in which incoming data is automatically searched by a designated set of dictionaries, and retrospective searches, in which analysts can repeatedly search over months of past traffic,” the memo explains (emphasis in original).

As of 2006, RHINEHART was operating “across a wide variety of missions and languages” and was “used throughout the NSA/CSS [Central Security Service] Enterprise.”

But even then, a newer, more sophisticated product was already being rolled out by the NSA’s Human Language Technology (HLT) program office. The new system, called VoiceRT, was first introduced in Baghdad, and “designed to index and tag 1 million cuts per day.”

The goal, according to another 2006 memo, was to use voice processing technology to be able “index, tag and graph,” all intercepted communications. “Using HLT services, a single analyst will be able to sort through millions of cuts per day and focus on only the small percentage that is relevant,” the memo states.

A 2009 memo from the NSA’s British partner, GCHQ, describes how “NSA have had the BBN speech-to-text system Byblos running at Fort Meade for at least 10 years. (Initially they also had Dragon.) During this period they have invested heavily in producing their own corpora of transcribed Sigint in both American English and an increasing range of other languages.” (GCHQ also noted that it had its own small corpora of transcribed voice communications, most of which happened to be “Northern Irish accented speech.”)

VoiceRT, in turn, was surpassed a few years after its launch. According to the intelligence community’s “Black Budget” for fiscal year 2013, VoiceRT was decommissioned and replaced in 2011 and 2012, so that by 2013, NSA could operationalize a new system. This system, apparently called SPIRITFIRE, could handle more data, faster. SPIRITFIRE would be “a more robust voice processing capability based on speech-to-text keyword search and paired dialogue transcription.”

Extensive Use Abroad

Voice communications can be collected by the NSA whether they are being sent by regular phone lines, over cellular networks, or through voice-over-internet services. Previously released documents from the Snowden archive describe enormous efforts by the NSA during the last decade to get access to voice-over-internet content like Skype calls, for instance. And other documents in the archive chronicle the agency’s adjustment to the fact that an increasingly large percentage of conversations, even those that start as landline or mobile calls, end up as digitized packets flying through the same fiber-optic cables that the NSA taps so effectively for other data and voice communications.

The Snowden archive, as searched and analyzed by The Intercept, documents extensive use of speech-to-text by the NSA to search through international voice intercepts — particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Mexico and Latin America.

For example, speech-to-text was a key but previously unheralded element of the sophisticated analytical program known as the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG), which started in 2005 when newly appointed NSA chief Keith B. Alexander, according to the Washington Post, “wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.”

The Real Time Regional Gateway was credited with playing a role in “breaking up Iraqi insurgent networks and significantly reducing the monthly death toll from improvised explosive devices.” The indexing and searching of “voice cuts” was deployed to Iraq in 2006. By 2008, RTRG was operational in Afghanistan as well.

A slide from a June 2006 NSA powerpoint presentation described the role of VoiceRT:

Keyword spotting extended to Iranian intercepts as well. A 2006 memo reported that RHINEHART had been used successfully by Persian-speaking analysts who “searched for the words ‘negotiations’ or ‘America’ in their traffic, and RHINEHART located a very important call that was transcribed verbatim providing information on an important Iranian target’s discussion of the formation of a the new Iraqi government.”

According to a 2011 memo, “How is Human Language Technology (HLT) Progressing?“, NSA that year deployed “HLT Labs” to Afghanistan, NSA facilities in Texas and Georgia, and listening posts in Latin America run by the Special Collection Service, a joint NSA/CIA unit that operates out of embassies and other locations.

“Spanish is the most mature of our speech-to-text analytics,” the memo says, noting that the NSA and its Special Collections Service sites in Latin America, have had “great success searching for Spanish keywords.”

The memo offers an example from NSA Texas, where an analyst newly trained on the system used a keyword search to find previously unreported information on a target involved in drug-trafficking. In another case, an official at a Special Collection Service site in Latin America “was able to find foreign intelligence regarding a Cuban official in a fraction of the usual time.”

In a 2011 article, “Finding Nuggets — Quickly — in a Heap of Voice Collection, From Mexico to Afghanistan,” an intelligence analysis technical director from NSA Texas described the “rare life-changing instance” when he learned about human language technology, and its ability to “find the exact traffic of interest within a mass of collection.”

Analysts in Texas found the new technology a boon for spying. “From finding tunnels in Tijuana, identifying bomb threats in the streets of Mexico City, or shedding light on the shooting of US Customs officials in Potosi, Mexico, the technology did what it advertised: It accelerated the process of finding relevant intelligence when time was of the essence,” he wrote. (Emphasis in original.)

The author of the memo was also part of a team that introduced the technology to military leaders in Afghanistan. “From Kandahar to Kabul, we have traveled the country explaining NSA leaders’ vision and introducing SIGINT teams to what HLT analytics can do today and to what is still needed to make this technology a game-changing success,” the memo reads.

Extent of Domestic Use Remains Unknown

What’s less clear from the archive is how extensively this capability is used to transcribe or otherwise index and search voice conversations that primarily involve what the NSA terms “U.S. persons.”

The NSA did not answer a series of detailed questions about automated speech recognition, even though an NSA “classification guide” that is part of the Snowden archive explicitly states that “The fact that NSA/CSS has created HLT models” for speech-to-text processing as well as gender, language and voice recognition, is “UNCLASSIFIED.”

Also unclassified: The fact that the processing can sort and prioritize audio files for human linguists, and that the statistical models are regularly being improved and updated based on actual intercepts. By contrast, because they’ve been tuned using actual intercepts, the specific parameters of the systems are highly classified.

“The National Security Agency employs a variety of technologies in the course of its authorized foreign-intelligence mission,” spokesperson Vanee’ Vines wrote in an email to The Intercept. “These capabilities, operated by NSA’s dedicated professionals and overseen by multiple internal and external authorities, help to deter threats from international terrorists, human traffickers, cyber criminals, and others who seek to harm our citizens and allies.”

Vines did not respond to the specific questions about privacy protections in place related to the processing of domestic or domestic-to-international voice communications. But she wrote that “NSA always applies rigorous protections designed to safeguard the privacy not only of U.S. persons, but also of foreigners abroad, as directed by the President in January 2014.”

The presidentially appointed but independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) didn’t mention speech-to-text technology in its public reports.

“I’m not going to get into whether any program does or does not have that capability,” PCLOB chairman David Medine told The Intercept.

His board’s reports, he said, contained only information that the intelligence community agreed could be declassified.

“We went to the intelligence community and asked them to declassify a significant amount of material,” he said. The “vast majority” of that material was declassified, he said. But not all — including “facts that we thought could be declassified without compromising national security.”

Hypothetically, Medine said, the ability to turn voice into text would raise significant privacy concerns. And it would also raise questions about how the intelligence agencies “minimize” the retention and dissemination of material— particularly involving U.S. persons — that doesn’t include information they’re explicitly allowed to keep.

“Obviously it increases the ability of the government to process information from more calls,” Medine said. “It would also allow the government to listen in on more calls, which would raise more of the kind of privacy issues that the board has raised in the past.”

“I’m not saying the government does or doesn’t do it,” he said, “just that these would be the consequences.”

A New Learning Curve

Speech recognition expert Bhiksha Raj likens the current era to the early days of the Internet, when people didn’t fully realize how the things they typed would last forever.

“When I started using the Internet in the 90s, I was just posting stuff,” said Raj, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. “It never struck me that 20 years later I could go Google myself and pull all this up. Imagine if I posted something on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica or something like that, and now that post is going to embarrass me forever.”

The same is increasingly becoming the case with voice communication, he said. And the stakes are even higher, given that the majority of the world’s communication has historically been conducted by voice, and it has traditionally been considered a private mode of communication.

“People still aren’t realizing quite the magnitude that the problem could get to,” Raj said. “And it’s not just surveillance,” he said. “People are using voice services all the time. And where does the voice go? It’s sitting somewhere. It’s going somewhere. You’re living on trust.” He added: “Right now I don’t think you can trust anybody.”

The Need for New Rules

Kim Taipale, executive director of the Stilwell Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy, is one of several people who tried a decade ago to get policymakers to recognize that existing surveillance law doesn’t adequately deal with new global communication networks and advanced technologies including  speech recognition.

“Things aren’t ephemeral anymore,” Taipale told The Intercept. “We’re living in a world where many things that were fleeting in the analog world are now on the permanent record. The question then becomes: what are the consequences of that and what are the rules going to be to deal with those consequences?”

Realistically, Taipale said, “the ability of the government to search voice communication in bulk is one of the things we may have to live with under some circumstances going forward.” But there at least need to be “clear public rules and effective oversight to make sure that the information is only used for appropriate law-enforcement or national security purposes consistent with Constitutional principles.”

Ultimately, Taipale said, a system where computers flag suspicious voice communications could be less invasive than one where people do the listening, given the potential for human abuse and misuse to lead to privacy violations. “Automated analysis has different privacy implications,” he said.

But to Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, the distinction between a human listening and a computer listening is irrelevant in terms of privacy, possible consequences, and a chilling effect on speech.

“What people care about in the end, and what creates chilling effects in the end, are consequences,” he said. “I think that over time, people would learn to fear computerized eavesdropping just as much as they fear eavesdropping by humans, because of the consequences that it could bring.”

Indeed, computer listening could raise new concerns. One of the internal NSA memos from 2006 says an “important enhancement under development is the ability for this HLT capability to predict what intercepted data might be of interest to analysts based on the analysts’ past behavior.”

Citing Amazon’s ability to not just track but predict buyer preferences, the memo says that an NSA system designed to flag interesting intercepts “offers the promise of presenting analysts with highly enriched sorting of their traffic.”

To Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, keyword-search is probably the “least of our problems.” In an email to The Intercept, Rogaway warned that “When the NSA identifies someone as ‘interesting’ based on contemporary NLP [Natural Language Processing] methods, it might be that there is no human-understandable explanation as to why beyond: ‘his corpus of discourse resembles those of others whom we thought interesting'; or the conceptual opposite: ‘his discourse looks or sounds different from most people’s.'”

If the algorithms NSA computers use to identify threats are too complex for humans to understand, Rogaway wrote, “it will be impossible to understand the contours of the surveillance apparatus by which one is judged.  All that people will be able to do is to try your best to behave just like everyone else.”

Next: The NSA’s best kept open secret.

Readers with information or insight into these programs are encouraged to get in touch, either by email, or anonymously via SecureDrop.

Documents published with this article:

• RT10 Overview (June 2006)
• For Media Mining, the Future is Now! (August 1, 2006)
• For Media Mining, the Future is Now! (conclusion) (August 7, 2006)
• Dealing With a ‘Tsunami’ of Intercept (August 29, 2006)
• Coming Soon! A Tool that Enables Non-Linguists to Analyze Foreign-TV News Programs (October 23, 2008)
• SIRDCC Speech Technology WG assessment of current STT technology (December 7, 2009)
• Classification Guide for Human Language Technology (HLT) Models (May 18, 2011)
• Finding Nuggets – Quickly – in a Heap of Voice Collection, From Mexico to Afghanistan (May 25, 2011)
• How Is Human Language (HLT) Progressing?(September 26, 2011)
• “Black Budget” — FY 2013 Congressional Budget Justification/National Intelligence Program, p. 262 (February 2012)
• “Black Budget” — FY 2013 Congressional Budget Justification/National Intelligence Program, pp. 360-364 (February 2012)

Research on the Snowden archive was conducted by Intercept researcher Andrew Fishman.

Illustrations by Richard Mia for The Intercept.

The post How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text appeared first on The Intercept.

In its unstoppable ascent to the upper echelons of the video game industry, weird-as-fuck indie game Goat Simulator is taking aim at the fiercest, most ubiquitous competition of all: zombie games. Watch out, Dying Light!

The game about being a goat is releasing a $5 expansion this week called GoatZ that adds zombies into its already chaotic mixture. GoatZ is a reference to the much-hyped, always-in-development open-world zombie game DayZ. It also sounds suspiciously similar to goatse, which is a once-famous internet meme that depicts a man bending over and using both his hands to stretch his anus beyond what is normally thought to be a healthy or reasonable distance. I’m not going to link to that legendary image here, but you should google it if you’re curious.

GoatZ has a very different kind of gore, as you can see in this silly trailer:

The expansion—out May 7th—promises everything a fan of modern zombies games could ask for. Heavy weaponry!

Poorly animated zombies!

It’s even got a crafting system.

Ok, so GoatZ doesn’t look very good. I suppose that’s the whole point Coffee Stain Studios is getting at with this parody—that most, if not all, zombie games are actually bug-riddled messes. But I appreciate Goat Simulator all the more for the way it’s becoming a tool to lampoon the mockable aspects of modern video games.

GoatZ will be available for PC, Mac, and Linux on Thursday, May 7th.

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Contact the author at yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com.

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Twitter is kinda terrible sometimes. It enables people of all types and backgrounds to come together and get really, really angry at each other, and somehow many of us lose hours to the damn thing every day. These talking mountains, though? They brighten the place right up.

In short, Mountains of Mouthness is a bunch of sentient, immobile mountains yelling nonsense at each other. So basically, Twitter.

The mountains automatically suck up any tweet that has #bad in it and spit it out in their silly, echoing tones. If you want to vibrate their cavernous vocal chords more directly, however, you can also send tweets to @MoMouthness, #mountains, or #mouthness. You can access them via your PC or mobile devices, and if you’re on phone or tablet you can explore the environment a little bit.

The main attraction, however, is definitely the mountains themselves, with their craggy buck teeth and endless enthusiasm for even the strangest and most putrid of phrases. The way they pronounce “hashtag mowwwthness” is wonderful, verging on downright smooth.

That said, as with anything where the Internet is able to control it remotely, beware of NSFW language and some downright awful stuff (racial/sexist/ableist slurs, etc). More recently, trolls from Certain Boards seem to have flocked to it, so beware of that as well. But even the trolls occasionally have their moments. One time I listened to the mountains recite a bunch of elaborately written erotica, which was pretty much Peak Internet.

As for more, er, wholesome stuff I’ve encountered, there’s been recited dubstep:

An insane clown prophecy:

Video game references:

Philosophy:

I also saw a couple (probably fake) marriage proposals, but I didn’t snap photos of them in time. Oh well.

So yeah, this is A Thing. Part of me wishes it was the default Twitter app. I might be singing a different tune after five more minutes of listening to these increasingly irritating mountain voices, but oh what a five minutes they’ll be.

Update: Yep, definitely singing a different tune. Oh god my ears.

To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.

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