Bewarethewumpus

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two, one… “Fire one!”

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

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

“Fire two!”

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

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

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

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

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

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

“There’s a lot to be said for old technology. Mainly: ‘ooh looky, spares’. Me and the old bus are both getting long in the tooth. But as she’s got six hundred years and I’m only approaching fifty, we’ll not embarrass the lady with ageist stuff.

She’s still got her original heraldry: a grey shield, with sable bar low and silver cross sinister. She’s called the ‘Last Lancer’ and damn me if she ain’t. The only surviving Rockwell B1, packing four Tetragrammaton XIV near-space drives, a twenty-hour rating for free space thanks to the Lenkormian Permaseal some foresighted owner had put on five centuries ago, and a suite of no-see-me and I-see-you that has yet to let her down.

This month we’re gracing the jungle planet of Durkedhil, where the locals are fighting a vicious civil war, supplied by some offworld profiteers. If it wasn’t for the imported arms, they would be throwing spears and cussin’ each other out, like they did before man and company came along with their ‘Uplift the Primitives’ spiel.
The Durkedhil have assault rifles, mustard gas and napalm to go with their loincloths and proto-heraldry. You would not believe just how happy a tribesman whose entire existence is surrounded by, and dependent on, trees can be to burn them down if he thinks that will stop his brother-in-law from getting them.
They have about a year before they doom themselves. The GalPol cannot touch the weapons merchants, because the population of the planet is willingly engaged in active trade. No matter that it’s a dying market in dying.

This is where people like me come in. We’re ex-GalPol, ex-military, or both. We share a belief that places are better without big guns. We like old technology – I admit mine is older than most – and we hate weapons peddlers. One of us will get the call. One of the others will get the payment. Then pretty soon, United Antiques will stage another display in the name of peace. Antiques aren’t weapons of war by intergalactic statute. They’re curiosities that people can view at travelling shows – or watch hurtling through their skies.

Free space is a dangerous place, but messing around in atmosphere carries different penalties and most shuttle pilots are nth-generation space monkeys. To use an old phrase we like: ‘They can’t fly for shit’.

Interdicting a planet is almost impossible. Stopping the deliveries in atmosphere is easy. The Last Lancer and I are the most recent piece of the puzzle, because the weapons companies have started to put hard bases down to host protection for their deliveries. They call them ‘caravanserai’ but in reality, they are nothing but heavily-fortified warehouses. A Rockwell B1 can carry enough destruction for twenty of ‘em. So while the lads and lassies are mopping the skies, I clean up the ground.

We should be done here in a month or two. On average it takes two months of no profits and big repair bills to get a planet declared ‘commercially non-viable’. Then they’ll be off supplying the next armaggedon down the way, and we’ll be waiting for another call from like-minded people who care about people rather than profits.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Last Lancer and I have warmongers to flatten.”

While FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler works to make Verizon’s skewed vision of net neutrality real, Senator Al Franken of Minnesota has made an impassioned plea to the American people to stand up against the notion that deep-pocketed companies should have better and faster access to Internet users than everyone else.

For those coming to this story late, earlier this year a federal appeals court sided with Verizon and gutted the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality rules — which had prohibited Internet Service Providers from blocking, slowing, or prioritizing the data they carry. In the wake of that decision, Wheeler promised to restore neutrality, but the draft proposal he recently circulated to his colleagues at the commission includes a so-called “fast lane” exception, which would allow Verizon and other ISPs to charge a premium for a faster connection to their end users.

In the above video released by Franken and a group called Progressive Change that is behind the site NoSlowLane.com, the Senator takes issue with the idea of fast lanes, especially as they go against the basic foundation of the Internet.

“It was American taxpayers for paid for the development of the Internet by DARPA, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency,” explains Franken. “Since then, the Internet has changed everything about the way we communicate with each other. And the astounding innovation that accompanied and accelerated this revolution was possible only because of the basic architecture of the Internet — net neutrality.”

Franken believes that Wheeler’s fast lane proposal means is the biggest threat to date to the idea of neutrality.

“This means that big corporations will be able to get their content delivered faster,” he explains. “Mom and pop stores would lose even more ground to corporate giants; big media companies will be able to get their version of the news to consumers faster. We’d end up paying for it with higher rates for Internet service, and new obstacles to accessing the content that we want.”

The Senator call neutrality, “the free speech issue of our time. We cannot allow the FCC to implement a pay-to-play system that silences our voices and amplifies that of big corporate interests.”

“We have come to a crossroads,” he concludes. “Now is the time to rise up and make our voices heard to preserve net neutrality. We paid for a free and open Internet; we can’t let it be taken away. We have to win this and we have to win this now.”

The FCC has taken the very rare step of starting an e-mail address — openinternet@fcc.gov — to accept comments on the neutrality proposal before it’s even been seen by the public. Those comments are on the record and the commission says they will be taken into account as the proposal moves forward.

The commission is set to vote as a whole on the draft on May 15, after which the full text will be made public and available for further comment.

The government is giving you a chance to be heard, so you might as well take the opportunity while you can. Even if the FCC doesn’t listen, at least neutrality supporters will be able to point to the FCC’s failing when the next former telecom executive is eventually appointed to replace Wheeler.

Author : Bob Newbell

“And let all men and women present be witnesses,” the Legate was saying, “that what we now do we do without hatred and with a heavy heart. We act in the name of retribution, not revenge. We act in the name of justice…”

The Legate’s voice droned on. It was the same boilerplate men had been telling themselves for centuries right before they killed a man. They don’t say it to make killing easier. Killing is easy. That’s the trouble. They say it to convince themselves that it’s not. They’re pretending that when they blow me out of this airlock in a minute they’ll be heartbroken that they’ve put a murderer to death. They won’t be. But they have to try to prove to themselves that they’re civilized.

“Does the prisoner have anything to say before the sentence is imposed?”

What is there to say? I’m guilty. I said so at the court-martial. One of the fastest courts-martial on record. Commander Richman had made it his personal mission to make my life a living hell from the moment I set foot on this ship. He’d go out of his way to publicly humiliate me. If some other crewman screwed up, he’d blame me for some reason. Even the other officers noticed it. One day Richman decided to chew me out while I was working on the auxiliary fusion reactor’s control rod assembly. I apparently snapped. I abruptly noticed he’d stopped talking. I also noticed he had a hafnium diboride control rod embedded in his skull. My hand was clenched around the other end of the rod. I recall two other crewman who had also been working on the reactor looking at me, both of them frozen with shock. I remember dropping the rod and saying, “You guys wanna call security? Or should I?” I wasn’t sorry for what I did. I’m still not sorry. I shake my head at the Legate.

The inner airlock door slides closed. I hear the bolts lock into position. I can see through the window in the inner airlock door that the Legate is still talking. I can’t hear a word he’s saying. Through the window in the outer airlock door I see a field of stars. It’s amazing how appealing it looks. It’s as if you could just open the door and float out there unprotected and bask in the glory of the cosmos. In nearly 400 years of space travel, more than one person has died trying to do just that.

The lights in the airlock go out. The stars seem even more appealing. But it’s an illusion. A siren’s song for the 24th century. Red lights come on and the airlock’s decompression alarm starts squealing. I’ll remain conscious for about five or ten seconds. They say don’t try to hold your breath. It’ll just rupture your lungs. Your blood won’t boil and you don’t quickly freeze solid, though. It takes a good minute, minute and a half to die from space exposure. Maybe the explosive decompression will hurl me forward before the door completely opens and the impact will kill me or knock me out.

Spacing isn’t a pleasant way to die. But there are worse ways to check out. This beats eventually lying in a nursing home bed decrepit and demented for a decade. A moment before I hear the outer airlock bolts shoot back, I turn around, flip the Legate and the other observers a bird with each hand, and smile. The airlock door snaps open. The ship seems to bound away from me. I have no regrets.

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Read last week's Part the First here.

AND: Quickly join the INNER HIVE to get direct, early access to Tom the Dancing Bug comics before @RubenBolling is thrown off the Internet for writing about Net Neutrality and other subversive, Socialist, Collectivist notions.

Peter Gibson is my new hero, not because he's questioning the existence of non-celiac gluten intolerance. But because he was so willing to repeat, and challenge, his own research.

From graphic design genius Sean Tejaratchi. (See also, 20 Best TED Talks)

A twenty-seven year old Japanese man was arrested on suspicion of printing and possessing guns. This is the first instance of such an arrest being made in Japan.

According to ANN News, Yoshitomo Imura allegedly downloaded gun blueprints from a foreign site and then printed the resin guns with his 3D printer.

Imura had apparently uploaded videos to YouTube in which he fired off what looks to be a 3D printed pistol. Last month, police seized five 3D printed guns from Imura's Kawasaki City home.

According to authorities, it was possible with two of the guns to pierce over ten pieces of plywood by firing rounds, and thus, the police deemed it was possible to use the guns to kill.

"I made them myself," Imura is quoted as saying, "but, I didn't know they were illegal."

It is possible to own guns in Japan, but the country has incredibly strict firearms regulations. It's not clear whether others will be also arrested for printing guns, but we're pretty sure this wry Twitter user will evade the law with his printed "gun."

Yes, the kanji character "jyuu" (銃) means "gun."

3Dプリンターで製造した殺傷能力ある銃を所持で逮捕 [ANN News]

3Dプリンター悪用　樹脂製"殺傷可能"拳銃を製造 [ANN News]

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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It’s now been over a month since the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to force the Obama administration to declassify parts of the Committee’s landmark report on CIA torture, and the public still has not seen a word of the 6,000 page investigation.

Read the rest

Fast-talking mathematician Vi Hart weighed in on the Net Neutrality debate with a great video explaining the telcoms' extortion plan with an excellent metaphor about postal delivery. (Thanks, Alan!)

Lawrence Lessig has announced the next step in his campaign against corruption in American politics with the launch of MAYDAY, a Superpac intended to raise enough money through small donations (and, eventually, major ones) to elect a large enough roster of congressmen and senators that they can pass meaningful campaign finance reform, making Superpacs and other perversions of democracy a bad memory.

MAYDAY is trying to raise $1M in the next 30 days, and to build this sum into a "moneybomb" that can be dropped onto the 2016 elections. They're doing it through a Kickstarter-like mechanism, so your pledge only comes out of your bank account if the full amount is raised. They're calling it a moonshot. It's audacious, improbable, and desperately needed. I only wish that I could donate (I'm a foreigner). Tell you what, if you throw in an extra buck for me, I'll add an extra hundred pounds to the UK equivalent when and if it launches.

In 2014, we want to make fundamental reform the issue in 5 congressional races.

From that, we'll have a better sense of what victory in 2016 will take. And we'll put Congress on notice that in 2016, we'll be back.

So for 2014, we have two fundraising targets:

The first is $1 million by the end of May. If we meet that goal, that $1 million will be matched, and we'll move to the second target.

That second target is $5 million by the end of June. If we meet that goal, that $5 million will also be matched, and our fundraising for 2014 will end.

We will then have the funds we need to hire the best campaign shops we can to use 100% of these kickstarted funds to win in these 5 districts.

Mayone.US

The Launch of the MAYDAY Citizens’ SuperPAC

Geek nuptials can be wonderful when they're done right. And what better way to celebrate a marriage than with a mariachi band playing Zelda music?

Watch as a new wife surprises her Zelda fan of a husband with a big band version of the Gerudo Valley theme from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It's a thing of beauty, I tell ya. Here's the original, for reference:

Christian Martinez via Geekologie

To contact the author of this post, write to chrisperson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @papapishu.

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This teenager has no patience for “fake ass people.”

Now that marijuana is legal in Colorado for recreational use, that doesn’t mean necessarily that everyone is sitting around toking on pipes and joints, despite what your imagination has led you to believe. And because a whole lot of people, including pot tourists, like to eat their reefer, state officials are taking on the task of regulating those edible offerings.

As funny as it might be to imagine someone giggling over a batch of brownies, consumers ingesting too much marijuana is a serious problem for health officials and regulators. And of course, those who could come to harm by doing so.

To tackle the issue of how to curb such a problem, a task force is meeting today to start refining Colorado’s rules on edibles, meaning, edible marijuana products, reports the Associated Press.

“Basically, we are trying to figure out how to come up with a reasonable THC concentration or amount in edibles in proportion to product safety size,” said one pediatrician who has treated kids who have eaten marijuana and gotten sick.

Eating too much pot can have serious consequences, and not just in children — one Denver man reportedly jumped to his death from a hotel balcony after eating six times the recommended dosage of a marijuana-infused cookie.

It’s especially important because many people eschew smoking marijuana for the edible forms, including tourists to the state who can’t smoke in public or at a hotel. And because it’s a new industry, many consumers just don’t know how much to eat.

The state already limits how much THC can be in edibles to 10mg per serving, with a max of 10 servings in a package. But it’s hard to nail down that potency because of the wide varieties of marijuana available.

State lawmakers are also working on legislation that would require edibles themselves to be marked as containing pot, and not just the containers and wrappers they come in. Another bill would reduce limits on how much concentrated marijuana you can have, like the oils used to make cakes and cookies.

“All of us want to make sure people are safe,” said Meg Collins, executive director of the Denver-based Cannabis Business Alliance and a member of the task force. “The industry is stepping up and is looking at the best ways to educate and communicate to its customers safe ways to recreate with marijuana.”

Colorado works on new rules for edible marijuana [Associated Press]

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

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

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

(Thanks, Alan!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a waste.

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

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

Okay! Back on the horse.

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

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

(Image: theapexfan)

(via Neatorama)

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Larry Hryb (@majornelson) April 26, 2014

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

— Larry Hryb (@majornelson) April 26, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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