On r/askreddit you will be instabanned for bringing up that a poster is a pedophile or racist based on their post history (as that’s harassment), but it’s fair game to out women for posting nudes on r/gonewild.
What great community standards.
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24 Feb 01:09
PSA: Askreddit is now a safe space for pedophiles (Mod Approved) : ShitRedditSays
PSA: Askreddit is now a safe space for pedophiles (Mod Approved) : ShitRedditSays:
23 Feb 21:55
[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].
An extraordinary exhibition closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, featuring mechanical furniture designed by the father and son team of Abraham and David Roentgen: elaborate 18th-century technical devices disguised as desks and tables.
First, a quick bit of historical framing, courtesy of the Museum itself: "The meteoric rise of the workshop of Abraham Roentgen (1711–1793) and his son David (1743–1807) blazed across eighteenth-century continental Europe. From about 1742 to its closing in the early 1800s, the Roentgens' innovative designs were combined with intriguing mechanical devices to revolutionize traditional French and English furniture types."
Each piece, the Museum adds, was as much "an ingenious technical invention" as it was "a magnificent work of art," an "elaborate mechanism" or series of "complicated mechanical devices" that sat waiting inside palaces and parlors for someone to come along and activate them.
If you can get past the visual styling of the furniture—after all, the dainty little details and inlays perhaps might not appeal to many BLDGBLOG readers—and concentrate instead only on the mechanical aspect of these designs, then there is something really incredible to be seen here.
[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].
Hidden amidst drawers and sliding panels are keyholes, the proper turning of which results in other unseen drawers and deeper cabinets popping open, swinging out to reveal previously undetectable interiors.
But it doesn't stop there. Further surfaces split in half to reveal yet more trays, files, and shelves that unlatch, swivel, and slide aside to expose entire other cantilevered parts of the furniture, materializing as if from nowhere on little rails and hinges.
Whole cubic feet of interior space are revealed in a flash of clacking wood flung forth on tracks and pulleys.
As the Museum phrases it, Abraham Roentgen's "mechanical ingenuity" was "exemplified by the workings of the lower section" of one of the desks on display in the show: "when the key of the lower drawer is turned to the right, the side drawers spring open; if a button is pressed on the underside of these drawers, each swings aside to reveal three other drawers."
And thus the sequence continues in bursts of self-expansion more reminiscent of a garden than a work of carpentry, a room full of wooden roses blooming in slow motion.
[Images: Photos courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].
The furniture is a process—an event—a seemingly endless sequence of new spatial conditions and states expanding outward into the room around it.
Each piece is a controlled explosion of carpentry with no real purpose other than to test the limits of volumetric self-demonstration, offering little in the way of useful storage space and simply showing off, performing, a spatial Olympics of shelves within shelves and spaces hiding spaces.
Sufficiently voluminous furniture becomes indistinguishable from a dream.
[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].
What was so fascinating about the exhibition—and this can be seen, for example, in some of the short accompanying videos (a few of which are archived on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website)—is that you always seemed to have reached the final state, the fullest possible unfolding of the furniture, only for some other little keyhole to appear or some latch to be depressed in just the right way, and the thing just keeps on going, promising infinite possible expansions, as if a single piece of furniture could pop open into endless sub-spaces that are eventually larger than the room it is stored within.
The idea of furniture larger than the space that houses it is an extraordinary topological paradox, a spatial limit-case like black holes or event horizons, a state to which all furniture makers could—and should—aspire, devising a Roentgen object of infinite volumetric density.
A single desk that, when unfolded, is larger than the building around it, hiding its own internal rooms and corridors.
Suggesting that they, too, were thrilled by the other-worldly possibilities of their furniture, the Roentgens—and I love this so much!—also decorated their pieces with perspectival illusions.
[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].
The top of a table might include, for example, the accurately rendered, gridded space of a drawing room, as if you were peering, almost cinematically, into a building located elsewhere; meanwhile, pop-up panels might include a checkerboard reference to other possible spaces that thus seemed to exist somewhere within or behind the furniture, lending each piece the feel of a portal or visual gateway into vast and multidimensional mansions tucked away inside.
The giddiness of it all—at least for me—was the implication that you could decorate a house with pieces of furniture; however, when unfolded to their maximum possible extent, these same objects might volumetrically increase the internal surface area of that house several times over, doubling, tripling, quadrupling its available volume. But it's not magic or the supernatural—it's not quadraturin—it's just advanced carpentry, using millimeter-precise joinery and a constellation of unseen hinges.
[Images: Photos courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].
You could imagine, for example, a new type of house; it's got a central service core lined with small elevators. Wooden boxes, perhaps four feet cubed, pass up and down inside the walls of the house, riding this network of dumbwaiters from floor to floor, where they occasionally stop, when a resident demands it. That resident then pops open the elevator door and begins to unfold the box inside, unlatching and expanding it outward into the room, this Roentgen object full of doors, drawers, and shelves, cantilevered panels, tabletops, and dividers.
And thus the elevators grow, simultaneously inside and outside, a liminal cabinetry both tumescent and architectural that fills up the space with spaces of its own, fractal super-furniture stretching through more than one room at a time and containing its own further rooms deep within it.
But then you reverse the process and go back through it all the other direction, painstakingly shutting panels, locking drawers, pushing small boxes inside of larger boxes, and tucking it all up again, compressing it like a JPG back into the original, ultra-dense cube it all came from. You're like some homebound god of superstrings tying up and hiding part of the universe so that others might someday rediscover it.
To have been around to drink coffee with the Roentgens and to discuss the delirious outer limits of furniture design would have been like talking to a family of cosmologists, diving deep into the quantum joinery of spatially impossible objects, something so far outside of mere cabinetry and woodwork that it almost forms a new class of industrial design. Alas, their workshop closed, their surviving objects today are limited in number, and the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now closed.
Roentgen Objects, or: Devices Larger than the Rooms that Contain Them
by Geoff Manaugh
firehosevia Grussian N. Sledges
[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].An extraordinary exhibition closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, featuring mechanical furniture designed by the father and son team of Abraham and David Roentgen: elaborate 18th-century technical devices disguised as desks and tables.
First, a quick bit of historical framing, courtesy of the Museum itself: "The meteoric rise of the workshop of Abraham Roentgen (1711–1793) and his son David (1743–1807) blazed across eighteenth-century continental Europe. From about 1742 to its closing in the early 1800s, the Roentgens' innovative designs were combined with intriguing mechanical devices to revolutionize traditional French and English furniture types."
Each piece, the Museum adds, was as much "an ingenious technical invention" as it was "a magnificent work of art," an "elaborate mechanism" or series of "complicated mechanical devices" that sat waiting inside palaces and parlors for someone to come along and activate them.
If you can get past the visual styling of the furniture—after all, the dainty little details and inlays perhaps might not appeal to many BLDGBLOG readers—and concentrate instead only on the mechanical aspect of these designs, then there is something really incredible to be seen here.
[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].Hidden amidst drawers and sliding panels are keyholes, the proper turning of which results in other unseen drawers and deeper cabinets popping open, swinging out to reveal previously undetectable interiors.
But it doesn't stop there. Further surfaces split in half to reveal yet more trays, files, and shelves that unlatch, swivel, and slide aside to expose entire other cantilevered parts of the furniture, materializing as if from nowhere on little rails and hinges.
Whole cubic feet of interior space are revealed in a flash of clacking wood flung forth on tracks and pulleys.
As the Museum phrases it, Abraham Roentgen's "mechanical ingenuity" was "exemplified by the workings of the lower section" of one of the desks on display in the show: "when the key of the lower drawer is turned to the right, the side drawers spring open; if a button is pressed on the underside of these drawers, each swings aside to reveal three other drawers."
And thus the sequence continues in bursts of self-expansion more reminiscent of a garden than a work of carpentry, a room full of wooden roses blooming in slow motion.
[Images: Photos courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].The furniture is a process—an event—a seemingly endless sequence of new spatial conditions and states expanding outward into the room around it.
Each piece is a controlled explosion of carpentry with no real purpose other than to test the limits of volumetric self-demonstration, offering little in the way of useful storage space and simply showing off, performing, a spatial Olympics of shelves within shelves and spaces hiding spaces.
Sufficiently voluminous furniture becomes indistinguishable from a dream.
[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].What was so fascinating about the exhibition—and this can be seen, for example, in some of the short accompanying videos (a few of which are archived on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website)—is that you always seemed to have reached the final state, the fullest possible unfolding of the furniture, only for some other little keyhole to appear or some latch to be depressed in just the right way, and the thing just keeps on going, promising infinite possible expansions, as if a single piece of furniture could pop open into endless sub-spaces that are eventually larger than the room it is stored within.
The idea of furniture larger than the space that houses it is an extraordinary topological paradox, a spatial limit-case like black holes or event horizons, a state to which all furniture makers could—and should—aspire, devising a Roentgen object of infinite volumetric density.
A single desk that, when unfolded, is larger than the building around it, hiding its own internal rooms and corridors.
Suggesting that they, too, were thrilled by the other-worldly possibilities of their furniture, the Roentgens—and I love this so much!—also decorated their pieces with perspectival illusions.
[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].The top of a table might include, for example, the accurately rendered, gridded space of a drawing room, as if you were peering, almost cinematically, into a building located elsewhere; meanwhile, pop-up panels might include a checkerboard reference to other possible spaces that thus seemed to exist somewhere within or behind the furniture, lending each piece the feel of a portal or visual gateway into vast and multidimensional mansions tucked away inside.
The giddiness of it all—at least for me—was the implication that you could decorate a house with pieces of furniture; however, when unfolded to their maximum possible extent, these same objects might volumetrically increase the internal surface area of that house several times over, doubling, tripling, quadrupling its available volume. But it's not magic or the supernatural—it's not quadraturin—it's just advanced carpentry, using millimeter-precise joinery and a constellation of unseen hinges.
[Images: Photos courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].You could imagine, for example, a new type of house; it's got a central service core lined with small elevators. Wooden boxes, perhaps four feet cubed, pass up and down inside the walls of the house, riding this network of dumbwaiters from floor to floor, where they occasionally stop, when a resident demands it. That resident then pops open the elevator door and begins to unfold the box inside, unlatching and expanding it outward into the room, this Roentgen object full of doors, drawers, and shelves, cantilevered panels, tabletops, and dividers.
And thus the elevators grow, simultaneously inside and outside, a liminal cabinetry both tumescent and architectural that fills up the space with spaces of its own, fractal super-furniture stretching through more than one room at a time and containing its own further rooms deep within it.
But then you reverse the process and go back through it all the other direction, painstakingly shutting panels, locking drawers, pushing small boxes inside of larger boxes, and tucking it all up again, compressing it like a JPG back into the original, ultra-dense cube it all came from. You're like some homebound god of superstrings tying up and hiding part of the universe so that others might someday rediscover it.
To have been around to drink coffee with the Roentgens and to discuss the delirious outer limits of furniture design would have been like talking to a family of cosmologists, diving deep into the quantum joinery of spatially impossible objects, something so far outside of mere cabinetry and woodwork that it almost forms a new class of industrial design. Alas, their workshop closed, their surviving objects today are limited in number, and the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now closed.
Nylonthread, firehose and one other like this
23 Feb 17:19
by Rob Heinsoo By now, everyone who has been part of the 13 True Ways support network (Escalation Edition, Kickstarter, Bestiary pre-orders) has gotten notice of the availability of the new druid and the updated commander and monk. As you’ll see, the druid class is a beast. The challenge of embracing elements of traditional druidic roles (wild healer, animal shifter, elemental magician, summoner, warrior of the wild) became huge fun as I took new approaches (talents defining spell lists and abilities, carefully calibrated summoning mechanics, spell lists tied to specific terrain). It’s definitely the biggest of all the class design jobs. I hope it turns out to be as much fun to play as it was to design. Other 13 True Ways progress includes the fully edited and illustrated write-up of Horizon from Jonathan and Lee, and full illustrations and text for Drakkenhall from a combination of Jonathan, Robin D. Laws, and Lee Moyer. The great bear druid piece above is newly competed as well, a sketch from Aaron finished by Lee. This week Jonathan is working on miscellaneous monsters, including azers, pixies, and cloud giants. I’m working on multiclassing after cooling down from the druid work by finishing a […]
(Original RSS Post)
Pelgrane Press 13 True Ways Update: Claw Claw Call Lightning
by RPGnet News
firehoseBears Will Tear Us Apart Again: The Roleplaying Game
by Rob Heinsoo By now, everyone who has been part of the 13 True Ways support network (Escalation Edition, Kickstarter, Bestiary pre-orders) has gotten notice of the availability of the new druid and the updated commander and monk. As you’ll see, the druid class is a beast. The challenge of embracing elements of traditional druidic roles (wild healer, animal shifter, elemental magician, summoner, warrior of the wild) became huge fun as I took new approaches (talents defining spell lists and abilities, carefully calibrated summoning mechanics, spell lists tied to specific terrain). It’s definitely the biggest of all the class design jobs. I hope it turns out to be as much fun to play as it was to design. Other 13 True Ways progress includes the fully edited and illustrated write-up of Horizon from Jonathan and Lee, and full illustrations and text for Drakkenhall from a combination of Jonathan, Robin D. Laws, and Lee Moyer. The great bear druid piece above is newly competed as well, a sketch from Aaron finished by Lee. This week Jonathan is working on miscellaneous monsters, including azers, pixies, and cloud giants. I’m working on multiclassing after cooling down from the druid work by finishing a […](Original RSS Post)
23 Feb 15:52
The Red Plebeian - The entrance of the “Euromaidan” occupied City...
firehoseI have no idea what's going on
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from  The Red Plebeian.
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The entrance of the “Euromaidan” occupied City Hall in Kiev now sports a giant banner-icon of the WW2 Nazi collaborator Stephen Bandera, who orchestrated the genocide of Jews and Poles in the Nazi occupied Ukraine, flanked on either side by the blue and yellow three finger salute flags of the literal Neo Nazi, Svoboda party.
Say you will about the political confusion of Occupy Wall Street, at least they never dropped banners with pictures of Nathan Bedford Forrest on them
23 Feb 15:42
▶ Thomas the Tank: The Best Hip Hop Instrumental Ever
firehose14 songs on the Thomas track
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Published on May 19, 2012
Demonstrating just how good this theme tune is, using 14 different songs.
Some ideas have been taken from other youtube users, but I am not trying to pass these off as my own.
Follow on Twitter @DTKIAwesome
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23 Feb 10:26
Part time entry level transit analyst
firehose'Our firm is growing in Portland and we'll soon be adding another entry level person with good geographic and spatial analysis skills, and strong GIS experience.
This job starts as a subcontractor as we find out if we're a good fit for each other, but then could quickly turn into employment. For that reason, it's probably for someone who's already in Portland, though I certainly won't tell you not to move here.'
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submitted by wet-blanket [link] [2 comments] |
23 Feb 10:24
diane, this is a fine cup of kofi annan
diane, this is a fine cup of kofi annan
firehose likes this
23 Feb 10:23
jacobaaronschroeder: UntitledAcrylic and sprinkles on canvas14”...
firehose#teamcake
firehose and -1 others like this
23 Feb 10:23
rhamphotheca: Atopodentatus Will Blow Your Mind by Brian...
Atopodentatus Will Blow Your Mind
by Brian Switek
The fossil record is replete with wonders. Humungous fungus, dazzling dinosaurs, intricate ammonites, and perplexing protomammals just scratch the surface of such a wide array of fantastic organisms that sometimes it’s easy to become acclimated to the enigmatic and weird. Yet, even then, there are fossils so strange that they make me jolt upright in my seat and think “Wait, what the hell is that?” The latest prehistoric creature to leave me gobsmacked is Atopodentatus unicus.
The roughly 245 million year old marine reptile is beautifully preserved. Uncovered in southwest China and described by Wuhan Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources paleontologist Long Chen and colleagues, the reptile’s nearly complete, nine-foot-long skeleton is laid out as charcoal-colored bones against gray rock. And while not as wholly adapted to an aquatic lifestyle like the eel-like ichthyosaurs found in the same deposits, the stout limbs, hips, and geological context of Atopodentatus hint that this reptile divided its time between land and sea. Then there’s the skull.
Preserved in profile, the cranium of Atopodentatus looks like a bony version of a Scotch tape dispenser. In front of a rounded orbit, the creature’s snout is a downturned hook that creates an arc of tiny, needle-like teeth that are fused to the sides of the jaw rather than sitting in sockets. Stranger still, most of the teeth in the upper jaw faced each other in a split running between the two halves of the upper jaw. Head-on, Atopodentatus had a zipper smile of little teeth…
(read more: Laelaps blog - National Geo)
illustration by Julius Csotonyi.; photo: Cheng et al.
23 Feb 10:22
Can't wait to see you play Nebula in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Did they make you shave your flowing red tresses for the part or did you wear a bald cap? Also How do you find the time to fit both acting and comic book writing into your schedule? Loving your run on Iron Man btw.
There’s been a resurgence of the jokes recently. I’ve been sparing the punishment.
But I can only take so much.
Here it is.
firehose likes this
23 Feb 06:58
Poll: How should Apple refer to OS X 10.10? | The Unofficial Apple Weblog
by gguillotte
OS X Rin Ten Ten63 (5.6%)
OS X Ten Ten218 (19.3%)
OS Tenpocalypse38 (3.4%)
OS Ten Point Ten201 (17.8%)
OS X David Tennant111 (9.8%)
OS X Malibu Barbie149 (13.2%)
OS X Other Unspecified California Location348 (30.9%)
23 Feb 06:52
Gearbox Software filed a lawsuit against 3D Realms (3DR) and Interceptor Entertainment, accusing the studios of unauthorized use of the Duke Nukem property and alleging violation of trademarks held by Gearbox. The lawsuit points to 3D Realms' recent...
Gearbox suing 3D Realms, Interceptor for 'unauthorized' Duke Nukem use
by Mike Suszek
firehosewhat
Gearbox Software filed a lawsuit against 3D Realms (3DR) and Interceptor Entertainment, accusing the studios of unauthorized use of the Duke Nukem property and alleging violation of trademarks held by Gearbox. The lawsuit points to 3D Realms' recent...
23 Feb 05:10
NBC resurrecting 'Heroes' for miniseries in 2015
by Kwame Opam
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from  The Verge - All Posts:
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Heroes is coming back to TV. Four years after being unceremoniously cancelled, NBC revealed during its Olympic coverage that the series will return for a 13-episode miniseries run in 2015. Creator Tim Kring is already onboard, but plot details are currently slim.
Even though Heroes flamed out in the seasons before its cancellation, it's impact can't be denied. NBC expressed excitement about bringing the property back, even teasing appearances from the original cast. "Shows with that kind of resonance don’t come around often," said NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke in a statement, "and we thought it was time for another installment. "Until we get closer to air in 2015, the show will be appropriately shrouded in secrecy, but we won’t rule out the possibility of some of the show’s original cast members popping back in." By the look of it, the series is following a similar formula as Fox's 24, which is due out this May.
23 Feb 05:10
Samsung replaces Galaxy Gear with a pair of Tizen-powered smartwatches
by Andrew Cunningham
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from  Ars Technica:
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| tee hee |
The Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo.
Samsung
If it wasn't clear to first-generation Galaxy Gear owners that they were beta testing a new product category for Samsung, it should be obvious now: the company has just announced not one but two follow-ups to its original smartwatch, the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo. Both watches drop the Galaxy branding and follow the original Gear by a bare five months.
Neither watch's key specs differ all that much from the first Gear. Both of them have 1.63-inch 320×320 AMOLED displays, 4GB of internal storage, 512MB of RAM, Bluetooth 4.0, and an IR blaster, all identical to the first-generation watch. The biggest internal difference is probably a 1.0GHz dual-core SoC of unspecified make (one of Samsung's own Exynos chips seems like a good bet), an upgrade from the 800MHz single-core chip from the first Gear. The extra performance should help to smooth out some of the performance jitters we noticed in the first Gear. Despite the extra CPU core and a somewhat smaller 300mAh battery, Samsung claims that both Gear 2 watches will last two or three days between charges, roughly doubling the runtime of the original Gear.
Samsung has made even larger changes to the software, jettisoning the original Gear's customized Android 4.2.2 in favor of its own home-grown Tizen operating system. Tizen is a Linux-based mobile OS that rose from the ashes of the MeeGo project back in 2011, and counts Samsung and Intel among its major backers. Engadget notes that the Gear watches are two of the very first commercial products to run Tizen, after Samsung's NX300M camera.
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23 Feb 04:39
"Jump for the Meat!!" - Bishi Bashi Special (Konami - PSX -...
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from  obscure video games.
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"Jump for the Meat!!" - Bishi Bashi Special (Konami - PSX - 2000)
23 Feb 04:39
Little Girls Are Better At Designing Superheroes Than You is a...
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from  little girls R better at designing heroes than you.
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Little Girls Are Better At Designing Superheroes Than You is a project where pictures are drawn based on girls’ superhero costumes.
Unfortunately, the evil Dr. Chlorine doesn’t give you a lollipop after giving you a shot.
23 Feb 04:02
Microsoft Lync Server Gathers Employee Data Just Like NSA
by timothy
coondoggie writes "Microsoft's Lync communications platform gathers enough readily analyzable data to let corporations spy on their employees like the NSA can on U.S. citizens, and it's based on the same type of information — call details. At Microsoft's Lync 2014 conference, software developer Event Zero detailed just how easy it would be, for instance, to figure out who is dating whom within the company and pinpoint people looking for another job." 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ken.elwell, Aibanhamano and 2 others like this
23 Feb 04:01
Hillary Clinton will speak in Portland April 8, launching first all-women World Affairs Council of Oregon speakers series
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from  Portland, Oregon - The Subreddit.
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submitted by CosmicGame [link] [comment] |
23 Feb 03:55
1949 Customer using a coin-operated Book-O-Mat, which has 50...
firehosevia Russian Sledges
cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q946sfGLxm4
1949 Customer using a coin-operated Book-O-Mat, which has 50 different selections with titles visible for browsing - Via
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23 Feb 03:54
→ Why Indie Developers Go Insane
firehosevia Albener Pessoa
Jeff Vogel on what it’s like to put yourself out there, and what happened to Flappy Bird:
Dong Nguyen quit. A fortune coming through the door, and he walked away. …
Think about this. I mean you, personally. Think about what it would take to make you run from a gold mine like this. Really. Think about why someone would do this.
This is not about money.
Bingo.
Flappy Bird’s success was hilarious, but it also appears to be completely earned. I’ve read the posts suggesting he cheated at the ranks or reviews, but I haven’t seen any that supported those claims enough. Some guy in Vietnam made a primitive, crude, completely unoriginal game with cute, equally unoriginal artwork that was charming in its shittiness, frustratingly difficult, and inexplicably addictive.
A charming, comically shitty, addictive, accessible yet difficult, very casual, very quick to play, completely free game with no manipulative in-app purchases? Of course it succeeded in the App Store, fair and square.
Then so many people brutally harassed and abused the developer that he couldn’t take it anymore and deleted the number one app in the App Store in an attempt to do anything to make the abuse stop.
Flappy Bird was a cultural tragedy, and the tragedy has nothing to do with the game.
23 Feb 03:53
★ On the Timing of iOS’s SSL Vulnerability and Apple’s ‘Addition’ to the NSA’s PRISM Program
by John Gruber
firehosevia Overbey
you know shit is getting bad when Gruber starts looking for the tinfoil
I have confirmed that the SSL vulnerability was introduced in iOS 6.0. It is not present in 5.1.1 and is in 6.0.
iOS 6.0 shipped on 24 September 2012.
According to slide 6 in the leaked PowerPoint deck on NSA’s PRISM program, Apple was “added” in October 2012.
These three facts prove nothing; it’s purely circumstantial. But the shoe fits.
Sure would be interesting to know who added that spurious line of code to the file. Conspiratorially, one could suppose the NSA planted the bug, through an employee mole, perhaps. Innocuously, the Occam’s Razor explanation would be that this was an inadvertent error on the part of an Apple engineer. It looks like the sort of bug that could result from a merge gone bad, duplicating the goto fail; line.
Once the bug was in place, the NSA wouldn’t even have needed to find it by manually reading the source code. All they would need are automated tests using spoofed certificates that they run against each new release of every OS. Apple releases iOS, the NSA’s automated spoofed certificate testing finds the vulnerability, and boom, Apple gets “added” to PRISM. (Wasn’t even necessarily a fast turnaround — the NSA could have discovered the vulnerability over the summer, while iOS 6 was in developer program beta testing.)
Or, maybe nothing, and this is all a coincidence.
I see five levels of paranoia:
- Nothing. The NSA was not aware of this vulnerability.
- The NSA knew about it, but never exploited it.
- The NSA knew about it, and exploited it.
- NSA itself planted it surreptitiously.
- Apple, complicit with the NSA, added it.
Me, I’ll go as far as #3.1 In fact, I think that’s actually the optimistic scenario — because we know from the PRISM slides that the NSA claims some ability to do what this vulnerability would allow. So if this bug, now closed,2 is not what the NSA was exploiting, it means there might exist some other vulnerability that remains open.
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“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” —Hanlon’s Razor ↩
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Closed on iOS, that is. As of this writing, it remains open on Mac OS X 10.9.1. I expect it to be closed there soon, though. ↩