Making it work

Tails works by booting your computer off of an external disk — usually a USB drive, an SD card or a CD — but getting Tails onto a the right storage drive is harder than it sounds. Ideally, you’d keep it on a CD: once it’s burned into the plastic, the code can't be changed, making it completely immune to malware. But with new versions being released every few months (and plenty of laptops going without CD drives), a USB stick can be more convenient. We used Rufus to make a bootable version on a USB drive and SD card, but even then, certain flash drives simply won’t work with Tails. There are ways to add encrypted storage or persistent programs too, but each extra feature is also a new chance for security problems.

there are lots of ways to accidentally break your own security

Getting Tails onto a computer isn’t straightforward either. There’s a long list of computers that can’t run the OS, and it includes most of the computers made by Apple. We spent the better part of a day trying to launch it on a Toshiba Kirabook, only to have Windows 8 punch through every time. It ends up working best on machines that are Linux-friendly, without anything like a high-powered video card to trip things up. There are a few different stable setups, but lots of ways to accidentally break your own security.

In exchange for all the troubleshooting, you get an unusual kind of anonymity. Keeping the operating system on a disk means you’re operating independent of the computer, picking nothing up and leaving nothing behind. It also makes your setup portable. You can launch Tails from an internet cafe and know that none of the programs on the public computer will get in the way of what you’re doing. The new versions of Tails will even hide you within a local network, randomizing the computer’s MAC address to make you even harder to track. None of the methods are completely impenetrable, but together they add up to a major headache for anyone trying to follow you across the web.

Getting there has been a five-year process, with developers working in their spare time on a miniscule budget — less than $60,000 a year in donations, before the recent grant. The code has been open for review at every stage, and after each release, auditors have found holes in Tails' security, creative ways an attacker might circumvent the program. The holes are patched a few months later, then new holes are discovered, then those holes are patched a few months after that. By now, this process has repeated more than 30 times. It's the nature of open-source development, a messy, public process that produces secure software through a slow grind of bug hunts. That parade of public security failings is meant to make users feel safe. If there's a problem in security at any level, you'll know about it, and the team will be under pressure to fix it as soon as possible. It's the same open workflow that built Tor and PGP, and stumbled more recently with the Heartbleed bug. But it means that even if the developers wanted to put in a backdoor, they couldn't.

Even more remarkable, no one knows who's behind it all. The development team works under pseudonyms and their legal names have never been publicly revealed. "Some of us want to remain anonymous," the Tails developers told me from a group email account. "Some of us simply believe that our work, what we do, and how we do it, should be enough."

Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer at DogeCon SF

When dogecoin arrived on the cryptocurrency scene in late 2013, it was little more than a Twitter joke come to life — a play on bitcoin and the doge meme, two of the most successful internet trends of the year. However, just under five months after dogecoin officially launched, its creator Jackson Palmer and hundreds of members of the dogecoin scene gathered in San Francisco last Friday for the first-ever DogeCon: a way to celebrate the achievements of an unlikely community that’s sprung up around an online currency whose logo is a bewildered dog on the front of a coin.

Speaking to a packed room filled with several hundred dogecoin enthusiasts, Palmer took the stage to kick things off and look back at a "crazy" 138 days in a quick 15-minute keynote that touched the things that make dogecoin so unique in the cryptocurrency sphere: a community that doesn’t take things too seriously, a strong sense of charity, and a low value that makes it easy to spread hundreds or even thousands of dogecoin to strangers wanting to see what the currency is all about.

There’s no doubt that dogecoin has real value — its market cap has reached as high as $100 million. While its value has dropped since hitting that high, its current value of $37 million still marks it as the fifth-largest cryptocurrency in use. However, one dogecoin is still only worth $.000494 as of this writing, far behind the value of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, litecoin, and peercoin. At this point, dogecoin is essentially like real-world Reddit karma — internet points that are nearly valueless in a vacuum but people still want to collect.

"We need to never lose sight of the fact that this is a dog on a coin."

That’s not something that appears to concern Palmer or the dogecoin enthusiasts attending the conference. When talking about where he sees dogecoin going in the future, Palmer stressed that it’s not about making people rich — at least not in dollars. "One doge[coin] really means one doge. The viability of a digital currency shouldn’t be pegged to what you can cash out." Dogecoin is looking to attract those who want to truly create an internet-native currency and have fun doing it rather than cash in on a fad. "You shouldn’t wake up every day and wonder what bitcoin or dogecoin is worth in USD," Palmer said.

"You shouldn’t wake up every day and wonder what bitcoin or dogecoin is worth in USD."

That low value plus Reddit- and Twitter-based "tipbots" (tools that let you send and receive dogecoin with a simple tweet or Reddit post) mean it is incredibly easy for dogecoin users to spread their currency around — Palmer announced that over $150,000 had been tipped via Reddit’s doge tipbot. Compared to bitcoin, it’s incredibly easy to start sending and receiving dogecoin (though cashing it out and converting it to USD is a more complicated process). That ease of use means that users are "strongly incentivized to keep it in the system and pass it along," says Jon Leland, a Kickstarter employee and dogecoin enthusiast who previously built a startup that lets you pay in dogecoin.

While one single dogecoin may not be worth much, the dogecoin community has proved to be surprisingly adept at rallying around causes and raising significant money. At the top of Palmer’s presentation, he recounted the notable charity donations that have taken place in the last few months thanks to dogecoin: the Dogecoin Foundation raised $30,000 for the Doge4Kids program, which aimed to send service dogs to families and kids in need, and another $30,000 worth of dogecoin was donated to help the Jamaican bobsled team reach the winter Olympics. Eric Nakagawa (co-founder of I Can Has Cheeseburger) started his own charity Doge4Water, which raised 40 million dogecoin that’ll be used to build clean water projects in Kenya, and the community even decided to sponsor a NASCAR driver to get him to Talladega next week.

"The projects I’ve done with dogecoin have been some of the most fun and interesting i’ve done in my life," said Ben Doernberg, a board member for the Dogecoin Foundation, the official charity arm of the currency. In May, Doernberg and Nakagawa will be releasing more details around future charity initiatives and how the community can take part in shaping where their dogecoin goes. "We’re working on making things as transparent as possible and we’re working on creating a more structured way for people to give us feedback," Doernberg said.

The generous community spirit is something that Palmer considers a key to the currency’s success. "I think one of the things that really stands out about dogecoin to pretty much everyone that I talk to is that ‘you’re the guys sponsoring all those cool charities,’" Palmer said. "Let’s keep doing it." That spirit of giving — whether it’s small tips, big charity donations, or simply helpful advice on the highly active dogecoin Reddit page — is a big part of the community’s desire to keep things fun. "We need to keep up the fun community spirit that we have," he said during his keynote. "We need to never lose sight of the fact that this is a dog on a coin."

Aurich Lawson

Update: A few hours after this article went live, Google engineer Adam Langley published a blog post taking issue with the GRC characterization that Chrome's CRLSet is "completely broken." In the post, Langley said he has always been clear that the measure isn't perfect, but in any event, it's more effective than the revocation checks on by default in other browsers. "And yet, GRC managed to write pages (including cartoons!) exposing the fact that it doesn't cover many revocations and attacking Chrome for it." In fairness to Google a test performed after this article was published showed Chrome blacklisted the TLS certificate Ars revoked three weeks ago. The text of the article as it originally ran follows:

The ability of Google Chrome to block secure website connections compromised by the Heartbleed bug is "completely broken" because the browser by default detects less than three percent of the underlying digital certificates that have been revoked, according to a detailed analysis recently posted online.

The charge was leveled against CRLSet, a regularly updated list in Chrome that catalogs website encryption certificates that have been revoked recently. Last week, noted cryptography engineer and Google employee Adam Langley promoted CRLSet as an improvement over the online certificate status protocol turned on by default in most other browsers. Langley blasted OCSP as "useless" because he said it was trivial to bypass and threatened to harm the performance and stability of the overall Internet.

There’s been a lot of talk over the past couple of years about the death of 35mm film, but there’s one area that often gets overlooked. What happens to the movies that aren’t welcome in the archives at UCLA or the Museum of Modern Art? What about the drive-in flicks and kung fu double features that never made it to DVD, let alone digital files? Aren’t they worth saving? 

The American Genre Film Archive thinks so. The Austin-based archive was founded in 2009 with a mission of preserving “horror, sleaze, action, and independent regional filmmaking, as well as international genre cinema with an emphasis on films from Hong Kong.” Board members include directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Nicholas Winding Refn (who is a collector of rare 35mm prints himself), as well as Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League. Many of the more than 3,000 prints housed ...

The escalating feud between Jay Z and Drake has claimed its first collateral damage, as Jay Z shot back on Drake’s suggestion that he eats fondue and caught the sport of lacrosse in the crossfire. There were no survivors.

More specifically, there were survivors, and they wear colorful polo shirts and enjoy the sport of lacrosse—so much that they have already made their displeasure known with Jay Z’s apparent disregard for it. The insult in question came in DJ Khaled’s track “They Don’t Love You No More,” where Jay Z contributed a verse saying, “Haters wanna ball, let me tighten up my drawstring / Wrong sport boy, you know you soft as a lacrosse team.” 

All told, it was tantamount to insinuating that Drake wouldn’t know capelin caviar from beluga. Or that his last performance of dressage was not with a warmblood, but rather some ...

In the overwhelmingly male comic book industry, it has been a challenge for some editors and readers to see the ever growing number of talented women currently trying to make a name for themselves. With that in mind, ComicsAlliance offers Hire This Woman, a recurring feature designed for comics readers as well as editors and other professionals, where we shine the spotlight on a female comics pro on the ascendance. Some of these women will be at the very beginning of their careers, while others will be more experienced but not yet “household names.”

Cartoonist Kasey Williams has been writing and drawing her own mini comics and anthologies for years while working on her first graphic novel. In the mean time she’s also the artist on the webcomic Galacticat, which is also available in two print volumes.

ComicsAlliance: What is your preferred form of creative output?

Kasey Williams: The general art side, definitely. I have a ton of respect for writers, but I don’t think I could just write.

CA: Do you work on paper or digitally?  Why?

KW: I normally sketch on paper, but have recently moved more into doing most other things digitally. It’s hard to go back to traditional when you’ve gotten accustomed to digital! I’ve been spoiled by CtRL+Z.

CA: What’s your background/training? 

KW: I didn’t go to art school or anything- I’m mostly self-taught, with a couple basic art classes here and there. Most of my training came from drawing a lot, observing a lot, and having talented friends who tell me what not to do.

CA: How would you describe your creative style?

KW: I’d probably describe it as subtle. Nothing I do is very action-packed, nor is it dynamic- most of the shots I draw are eye-level, with simple composition. My page layouts are basic, modified grids. I think that simplicity in storytelling is very underrated.

CA: What projects have you worked on in the past? What are you currently working on?

KW: I’m currently actively working on my first big project, a web/print comic called Galacticat. It’s a collaborative effort between my and my dude Gene Goldstein– he writes it and I draw it. We just released the second volume, and there’s one more to go! Before that, I participated in a few anthologies, but I mostly just made self-printed minicomics. I’ve been working on developing one of those mini comics, Before I Sleep, into a big fat graphic novel for the past few years. Once Galacticat is over, I’m going to bust my ass and get to work on that.

CA: Approximately how long does it take you to create a 20-page issue?

KW: About a month, but it totally depends. If I’m not writing it, it could take less time. If I’m busy with my day job, more time.

CA: What is your dream project? 

KW: I’d love to work on a multi-volume graphic novel series, completely written and drawn by myself.

CA: Who are some comic creators that inspire you?

KW: Charles Burns, Matt Furie, Johnny Ryan, Anatola Howard, Jamie Hewlett, Guillaume Singelin, Ben Constantine, Michael DeForge, Kaneoya Sachiko… I have a really long, bloated list. Anybody with a very standout art style is inspirational to me. I love something that looks different and interesting.

CA: What are some comics that have inspired you either growing up or as an adult?

KW: I started drawing comics as a kid because of Dav Pilkey. I loved Captain Underpants and I drew notebooks full of obvious knockoffs of his work. I also grew up with anime and manga, which, in general, was a huge influence on my art. Although it’s not technically a comic, I caught the anime FLCL on TV as a kid and it blew my MIND. Since I’m still young and my art hasn’t really settled into a comfortable place yet, I gobble up anything remotely interesting to me, and it’s all super inspirational. I was finally able to get a hold of the first volume of Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit, and it’s drawing me to the idea of making something super pulpy and relatively simple. Inio Asano’s Goodnight Punpun is a relatively recent discovery that’s really really resonated with me. It focuses on complex characters, very detailed art and atmosphere — the whole thing is completely different than any comic I’d ever been exposed to before. Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button reaffirmed my belief in subtlety in comics.

CA: What’s your ideal professional environment?  

KW: A personal studio with big windows, a tablet that always works, the fastest Wi-Fi and unlimited snacks.

CA: What do you most want our readers and industry professionals to know about your work?

KW: There’s a lot more to come! I’m always drawing, and always thinking of more ideas.

CA: How can editors and readers keep up with your work and find your contact information?

KW: My webcomic is up at http://galacticat.net/ and my art blog is http://whoiskasey.tumblr.com/. Or you can email me at kasey.brianne-at-gmail-dotcom!

If there is a woman you’d like to recommend or if you’d like to be included in a future installment of this feature, drop us a line at comicsalliance-at-gmail-dot-com with “Hire This Woman” in the subject line.

If you were wondering whether the existence of a Jem movie and an impeding Gallery Edition hardcover of Batman: Year One were in fact evidence that I had gained mysterious, reality-warping powers that allow me to control the world as we know it, yes. Yes I have. I am master of reality now. I mean, how else can you explain the fact that last night, Magneto showed up to challenge Wolverine to a battle on WWE’s Monday Night Raw?

Okay, admittedly: It was actually professional wrestler (and Intellectual Savior of the Masses) Damien Sandow, in cosplay, confronting X-Men: Days of Future Past movie star Hugh Jackman, who responded by busting out a pretty sweet wrestling move. Still, that’s close enough, and by “close enough,” I mean it was the greatest thing I have ever seen.

On the off chance that you need some background, this actually Jackman’s second appearance on Raw. A few years ago, he was “hosting” the show, which was a vague, nebulous position that allowed for pop culture celebrities to swing by and promote their movie while scuffling with professional grapplers. In Jackman’s case, his antagonist du jour was Dolph Ziggler, the gentleman in the pink shirt who’s also in the ring referring to his hair color as “super rad.” Back then, Ziggler was more of a villain than he is today, and ended up getting punched out by Jackman after repeatedly referring to him as “Batman.” It was pretty delightful.

For some reason, Jackman did not appear on Raw to promote Les Miserables.

The video above likely speaks for itself, but it’s worth noting that there are so, so many amazing things going on, including Sandow suddenly (and inexplicably) believing himself to actually be Magneto and possess powers of Magnetism, the existence of MAGNET SOUNDS, and, perhaps the greatest moment in the history of the King of Sports, Hollywood actor Hugh Jackman claiming that he has “fought the real Magneto.”

Truly, this is the best of all possible worlds.

‘Scooby-Doo: WrestleMania Mystery’ Is The Greatest Film Of Our Generation

While rival services like Google Hangouts have long offered free group video calling, Microsoft is catching up to the competition and finally making Skype group video calling free. Skype users have been requesting free group video calling for years, and starting today Windows, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS users will all be able to use the feature at no extra cost.

Microsoft previously offered the feature as part of its Skype Premium service, a $8.99 monthly subscription that includes some free calls as part of a larger package. An individual day pass to access Skype Premium and group video calling cost $4.99 alone. Skype group video calling allows users to participate in video chats with up to 10 people using PCs or Macs. Microsoft’s change of policy is part of a broader push by the company to position Skype more competitively against rivals and fix some issues with its cross-platform clients.