firehose

On Tuesday, 13 men were charged in a case involving Bluetooth-enabled data skimmers planted on gas station pumps. The hackers allegedly made more than $2 million by downloading ATM information from the gas pumps, and then using that data to withdraw cash from ATMs in Manhattan.

According to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, the suspects used credit card skimming devices that were Bluetooth-enabled and internally installed on pumps at Raceway and Racetrac gas stations throughout Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina. Because of this configuration, the skimmers were invisible to people who paid at the pumps, and later, the suspects were able to download the skimmed data without physically removing the devices.

Between March 2012 and March 2013, the suspects used forged credit cards to withdraw money at ATMs around Manhattan and deposited the cash in New York bank accounts, feds say. Then, other members of the group withdrew the money from those bank accounts in California or Nevada.

The shuttle buses that transport workers for huge tech firms like Google, Facebook, and Apple between San Francisco and Silicon Valley every day have come under increasing fire lately, but today a vote was passed unanimously on a pilot program that the city hopes will help ease those tensions. In front of a meeting room packed full with journalists and citizens, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) just approved a proposal that will see commuter shuttle buses pay to share approximately 200 spots with city buses.

Companies that operate the buses will soon have to pay $1 for every stop they make every day to the SFMTA — amounting to about $1.5 million over the 18-month pilot (set to start in July 2014). The agency won't earn any profit from the money it collects, though; instead, it'll use the fees to cover the new permit program, enforcement, and further evaluation of the pilot. Prior to today, Silicon Valley shuttles typically would use SFMTA bus stops throughout the city without express permission, leading to potential traffic snarls — as well as a sentiment that these companies were taking advantage of the city without giving anything back.

Whether that'll be enough to quell the sometimes-violent protests against tech shuttles remains to be seen — just hours before today's vote, protesters in San Francisco again blocked two buses from Apple and Google.Things didn't get violent this time, but it seems likely that tensions between the bus-users and other San Francisco citizens could remain high. While the Silicon Valley companies will now be giving back to the city more than they have in the past, a formalized shuttle system won't answer the concerns that the tech industry is causing class warfare in San Francisco. Housing prices in the city are skyrocketing out of the reach of ordinary citizens, and many are blaming the high-income individuals employed by companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google.

Despite these concerns, there were no protesters lined up outside San Francisco City Hall before today's vote — but there were plenty of objections to the plan voiced prior to the vote. "We're very concerned that the tech industry is privatizing public transit," said Jane Martin. "We think the tech industry can do more." A common refrain from objectors was that the buses should pay far more than a dollar per stop to make the income collected more equal to what those paying for public transportation have to pay.

An animated citizen Steve Zeltzer said that "this is a class warfare" and questioned why these commuter shuttles were allowed to park in bus spots for years without the city doing anything about it. Indeed, a number of citizens commented on the fact that if they parked in a bus spot, they'd get smacked with a ticket for hundreds of dollars — but the commuter buses parked there without incident for years.

As for data in favor of the vote, the SFMTA's research showed that nearly half of all regional shuttle riders and 27 percent of all intra-city shuttle riders they surveyed said they would drive alone if not for the shuttles; 59 percent of regional riders said they either sold their car or put off buying one because of the shuttles. Without shuttles, the companies argue, there'd be more cars on the road and more congestion in San Francisco itself.

San Francisco supervisor Scott Wiener also came out to support the measure, and also attempted to keep the issue focused specifically on transportation rather than sprawling out to encompass housing. "Blaming employee shuttles, blaming tech workers is not a solution to our housing problems," he said.

While the naysayers seemed to outnumber the supporters, there were a number of Google employees (as well as other citizens who don't use the shuttles) who showed up in favor of the pilot program — not to mention an employee of one of the shuttle bus programs, who noted that his San Francisco-based company employees plenty of working-class citizens. "I just wanted to say that not everyone at Google is a billionaire," said Crystla Scholts, a project manager at Google who rides the shuttle. "Like many people 10 years after the fact, I'm still paying off my student loans."

Hitachi drives crush competing models from Seagate and Western Digital when it comes to reliability, according to data from cloud backup provider Backblaze. Their collection of more than 27,000 consumer-grade drives indicated that the Hitachi drives have a sub-two percent annualized failure rate, compared to three to four percent for Western Digital models, and as high as 25 percent for some Seagate units.

Hard drive manufacturers like to claim that their disks are extremely reliable. The main reliability measure used of hard disks is the mean time between failures (MTBF), and typically this is quoted as being somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million hours, or between 11 and 110 years.

These failures are generally assumed to follow a so-called bathtub curve, with relatively high failure rates when the drive is new—"infant mortality," caused by manufacturing defects—and similarly when the drive nears the end of its useful life, but low failure rates in between.

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is attempting to lay the groundwork for a for-pay live Web TV service. The service would offer channels like those currently provided through cable and satellite TV.

The WSJ previously reported that Amazon was developing a set-top box for content delivery that would be similar to Roku or Apple TV. Ostensibly it would work with Amazon’s own Prime Instant Video, but a connected set-top box would also have the potential to deliver streaming live TV.

Sources speaking to the WSJ said that Amazon has “approached at least three big media conglomerates seeking rights to distribute their channels online.” The company’s efforts mirror some of those of Intel’s media platform, which sold to Verizon today. Intel tried for two years to get content distributors on board with the "search and discover" features that would have been its signature, but ultimately it failed to lure distributors away from cable companies.

Back in 2012, Namco launched ShiftyLook with an eye on turning older video game franchises like Bravoman and Rolling Thunder into webcomics, and they’ve done a good job of it, too. Galaga, in which Ryan North, Christopher Hastings and Anthony Clark reimagined space combat as the story of two teenage girls building spaceships out of giant pixels and blasting off to defend Earth alongside a two-fisted President, was one of ComicsAlliance’s best comics of 2013, and now, they’re giving the team a second chance at capturing that magic.

Today, North, Clark and Hastings launched DigDug, a short story based on the classic 1982 arcade game. I spoke to the three creators to find out more about how they adapt an 8-bit game into a character-based story, where they find time to take on an additional project and whether they’ve officially named their team.

ComicsAlliance: I am almost completely unfamiliar with DigDug.

Christopher Hastings: That’s fair. Arcades don’t exist anymore.

CA: I was never much of an arcade gamer to begin with, so I really missed out on it. Is all there is to it digging?

CH: The basic gist of the game is that DigDug is a fellow who has a drill and a harpoon-like balloon pump. It’s completely 2D, you dig down or sideways. There are monsters down there, and you pump them up with air to explode them, and then by exploding them you get points. Then, once they’re all dead, you move on to the next stage and do it again and again and again.

Ryan North: If my recollection of the DigDug Wikipedia page is correct, the genesis of the game was the idea of doing Pac-Man, but you make your own maze. So by digging through the ground, you make a path for these creatures to follow you.

CH: Yeah, except that they can turn into ghosts and follow you anyway.

RN: Yeah, well. It had some wrinkles.

CA: I would say that’s kind of a thin premise to base a comic on, if you guys hadn’t done Galaga, which is an equally thin premise.

CH: I’d say thinner.

RN: Yeah, Galaga is super thin. There wasn’t even a name for… anything, except that the game is called Galaga.

CH: Things happen in sequels, I think. They might start naming enemies or whatever, but yeah. That just meant that you could make up whatever you wanted! “Write a story about a spaceship that is piloted to shoot bugs in space.” They’re not even attacking Earth in the game! We made that up!

RN: They’re just there and we’re shooting them, because what else are you going to do in space?

CA: Is that liberating, to do an adaptation that only has three things you need to make sure are in there?

CH: I think it’s super fun. A lot of the fun that we’ve had with Galaga and with DigDug is taking these game mechanics and justifying it into a story.

RN: For sure. I think I mentioned this when we talked about Galaga, but I go back to the example of the Battleship movie, where they don’t have the phrase “You sunk my Battleship!” in the movie.

CH: So dumb.

RN: It’s so dumb! If you’re going to be adapting something across media, you should at least have the moves that people want you to hit, and that you want to hit. Having spaceships and teaming up with a duplicate of yourself, that’s stuff that we did with Galaga because it’s in the game and we wanted to include those parts. With DigDug, there are elements in the game that we don’t want to ignore, because that’s where the fun is. Otherwise you’re just doing something that’s… not… good. I’m a professional writer, by the way.

Anthony Clark: “Not good.”

CA: So you’ve got an underground maze, blowing up enemies like balloons. Once you hit those, where do you go after that? I guess that’s the same question of what do you do with Galaga once the enemies move down.

CH: Well, honestly, this is a much shorter comic than Galaga.

CA: So there’s a defined length?

CH: Yeah. Galaga‘s a hundred pages.

RN: Around there. Four seasons of about 25 pages each.

CH: DigDug‘s going to be eighteen, I think.

CA: So it’s basically a DigDug one-shot.

RN: Yeah, which is fun, because we did a DigDug strip in 2012 for DigDug‘s 30th Anniversary. A bunch of creators did comics, and this same creative team did one for DigDug about the kill screen, where he goes and hangs out with Pac-Man for a bit. I got special dispensation to use Pac-Man, it was pretty cool.

CA: Ryan, you mentioned you’re a professional writer. You’ve won “prizes.”

RN: Yes, I’ve won prizes for putting words on a computer.

CA: When you’re working on Galaga, you’ve got Hastings, who’s a cartoonist who’s done Dr. McNinja and written at Marvel, Anthony’s a cartoonist with the very popular Nedroid. So how much collaboration comes in with the writing? As a guy who’s used to writing Dinosaur Comics by yourself for so long, do you just knock out a script and send it to these guys or is there some back-and-forth involved?

RN: With Galaga, Chris and I had a couple of phone conversations where we sort of figured out what the book was going to look like and how we could draw it. I think it was Chris’s idea to have the cubes be a major factor in how Galaga played out, which was great, because it says “written by Ryan North,” not “written by Chris Hastings and Ryan North.” I get the credit for that, but it was his idea.

CH: It was.

RN: But with DigDug, I didn’t really have any ideas. I was completely tapped. They said “Do you want DigDug,” and I said “Yes, but I don’t know what to do.” So I emailed Chris and said “do you have any ideas?” and he came back with this premise that was really cool. So for DigDug, we split the writing. Should I say which parts we wrote?

CH: No, I think it’s fun to see which parts people think we each wrote.

RN: We divvied up the writing. It’ll be a surprise who wrote what, but the good parts are probably… all good parts.

CA: Anthony, do you ever get in on that?

AC: No, I was not involved in the writing. I’m mostly in this interview just to make sure nobody’s talking bad about me.

CH: Anthony works with me on character design stuff. We worked together to make the Galaga bugs, and I forgot we had to design monsters for DigDug until it was time to draw the comic. That one was a little less back-and-forth.

CA: That makes sense, though, because there’s a lot of color to them. They really pop on those pages.

RN: Yeah, the colors are awesome in Galaga and DigDug, and I think it makes the comic… look… better than it is? Which sounds bad, because it makes it sound like the comic looks bad, but it looks amazing.

AC: What you’re trying to say is that it’s the most important part, right?

CH: You do handle the lasers.

RN: Yeah, and the lasers are the best part of the comic by far.

CH: I think Anthony actually does a little more work than most colorists do in a typical coloring process. Usually, a penciller and an inker team draw everything, but when I work with Anthony, I’ll just say “Anthony, can you put a moon in? And maybe make a laser happen here?” There’s stuff that it doesn’t make sense for me to draw in black and white that’ll look better if Anthony does it.

CA: Along those lines, Dr. McNinja is going three days a week, Galaga is once a week, Dinosaur Comics every day, Nedroid updates frequently, Adventure Time and Midas Flesh are monthly, Chris just came off of Longshot for Marvel, which I assume was done a while back –

CH: Actually, I had to do a lot of little things on it right up until a couple weeks before the last one got printed, just because of dialogue matching up with the art, and bits where I realized nobody actually explained what they were doing. It said so in the panel descriptions, but not in the dialogue, so there were a lot of little fixes to do.

CA: Do you end up having to do that a lot in your own work? There’s an alt text gag early on in Doc about writing an outline and leaving it up to your future self.

CH: Oh yeah. Yup. I don’t really have to rewrite my own stuff, because as I’m drawing it, I can see instantly if something’s working or not, whereas if I’m writing something for someone else, it can be a while, a month or more, before writing it out on paper and seeing what it actually looks like.

CA: All that stuff is really time-consuming. I’ve done interviews with Ryan before about his process and the time it takes to write Dinosaur Comics and Adventure Time, but when they come to you and they want you to do something else on top of all that, at what point does it seem like it’s too much? Is there always room to take on a new project, especially when it’s short like this?

RN: For me, since I’m just doing writing, which I think objectively is the easiest job in comics, it’s not a huge time sink. It takes time to write, but I’m pretty much done, and Chris and Anthony do all this hard work to make the comic good! There’s always a finite amount of hours in the day, but especially when you’re doing a one-season strip…

CH: Yeah, we wrote the whole script over the course of last weekend. That wasn’t bad.

CA: So it doesn’t tax your schedule at all?

RN: I had some plans to play some more Super Mario 3D Land that day, but I just shifted that to today.

CA: [Laughs] I like how easy you make it sound. “I was going to play some video games but instead I won these Eisners.”

RN: It worked out well! Man, those Eisners come up a lot. We should mention it.

CA: It’s good for the résumé. Put it on your business cards.

RN: I guess I’ll just have to move “New York Times Bestseller” out of the way.

CH/RN: OHHHHHHHH!

RN: This is why it’s hard to talk about winning awards. You can’t do it without sounding like a tool.

CA: Leave it to me, then.

RN: Be sure to mention that I’m two meters tall.

CH: Tall people have a better chance of dying younger.

RN: Is that true?!

CH: Uh oh! Ryan, you should look into that.

RN: Is it legitimately true?

CH: Yes!

RN: I made it to 33 and no one told me…

CA: I can’t believe how super vicious this got, and also that you actually just gave Ryan surprising information about his possible death.

RN: We’re talking about maybe 1% or 2%, right? It’s not 90% or anything?

CH: Oh, I never had to worry about it. I’m only 5’10″, so I haven’t really researched it.

RN: Oh… well, when we’re done with this, I’ll do some research.

CH: Hey, best of luck to you, buddy.

CA: Do you think there’s a chance that you’ll die before the completion of DigDug?

RN: Well, it’s written already, so I could die tomorrow and Chris and Anthony could handle whatever’s left.

CH: Absolutely. Oh, I’d be sad. I’d definitely be sad.

RN: I’d be a little sad too, but if I die from being a little too tall, my legacy is secure in DigDug.

CA: Assuming that you survive, which I hope you do, all three of you, are there plans to work together again after Galaga and DigDug?

RN: Well there aren’t plans not to, right?

CH: Yeah, no plans not to. DigDug is going to be running until March, so that’s the rest of our winter scheduled out. That’s enough planning in advance for me.

RN: If I could give a little “real talk” for a bit, I truly like working with these two guys, and I’d love to do it again. I feel like they’re both really talented, great writers and artists of our generation, and I say that with all sincerity.

CH: Thank you, Ryan. I feel the same way towards the two of you.

CA: Anthony, anything to say?

CH: Have we lost Anthony?

AC: No, I’m here.

CH: Sweet jokes, Anthony. Sweet jokes.

AC: No, I like our team. It’s a good team. I think we need a team name.

CH: Like a studio, right?

RN: Like “Chucklehugs Studio?”

AC: This was actually something that Chris said years and years ago in an interview that always stuck with me as just a nice phrase, if we could be “Team Nice Wizard.”

CH: I forgot about that! Yeah. There you go, done. Team Nice Wizard. I’ll register that domain.

CA: I know you guys all know each other through doing webcomics and being part of Topatoco, and obviously Chris and Anthony have been working together for almost five years on Dr. McNinja. Was that a natural extension of your friendship, working on a big thing together?

CH: The first thing we did together was that first DigDug comic. I was staying over at Ryan’s house for TCAF, and I think you just showed me the script for some reason? And I was just like “Can I draw this? I like it!”

RN: We need a better origin story that has more drama, because that’s exactly it.

CH: I had to find Jim Zubkavich to ask him for permission, too, so that happened. He said yeah, it wasn’t an issue. And I really like working with Anthony all the time, so I asked him to do it. What happened with Galaga after that?

RN: I think they said “do you want to do a Galaga comic?” and I said “Yeah, if I can do it with Chris and Anthony” and that was it.

CH: Oh. Great.

CA: I’m glad Team Nice Wizard has such a pleasant and efficient origin.

CH: I’m worried that when this is typed out, you’re not going to be able to hear the joy that’s in our voices. It’s just going to lie flat on the page and we’re going to look like jerks.

RN: Luckily, sentences such as these will alert the attentive reader to our true intentions.

CH: Ryan, that was exactly my idea.

RN: Chris, will it be a problem for you if I start saying things like “Anthony: I love Ryan!”

CA: So Galaga is getting pretty close to an ending, and with DigDug only being 18 pages, are there plans to collect them in print?

RN: I can mysteriously say that things are in the works.

CA: With DigDug, You start off with a guy falling down a hole, which is always a good way to start a story. In the way that you took Galaga and made it the story of two best friends and the President fighting an alien invasion, what do you add to DigDug?

CH: I think we decided to approach it like a survival horror. The protagonist, Doug, is sort of like a goofy space miner, and then he’s put in this horrific situation that he can’t escape, and it begins to wear on his sanity and he has to kill these really terrible alien monsters. He can’t figure out how to get out of the mines.

CA: [Laughs] So does it get very graphic with the blowing up like balloons and exploding? Is there body horror involved?

CH: Yes. I remember we had a chat with editorial over alien blood, because we wanted to have bloody, gutty exploding monsters, and they said “oh, just make sure that it’s a different color than red, so that it doesn’t appear to be too horrifically violent.”

CA: I was kind of kidding, but now I’m getting excited about that.

CH: Cool. No, it’s a big part of it. They’re not just empty inside.

RN: I think the horror aspect was the brilliant part of the idea. Suddenly you get to see a story told through that lens, and it makes the idea of DigDug really interesting. There’s meat on those bones. If I’d had that idea, I wouldn’t have needed Chris, but I didn’t.

CH: That’s true. It was my idea. But also, one thing that was really cool about it was that I don’t think I’ve ever co-written anything before. Teaming up with Ryan, he solved problems that I knew were there and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do about them. He just put in cool stuff that I would’ve never thought of. The character Mary, for example, was completely missing from my draft until she popped up in Ryan’s draft.

CA: Anthony, what was the final decision on subterranean creature blood?

AC: I think we just replaced it with Nickelodeon Gak™. We didn’t get the license, so we can’t officially call it that, but it’s Nickelodeon Gak™.

RN: That’s the Pantone color name, I’m pretty sure.

CH: And that’s 100% Anthony. That’s how we’ve always done it with Dr. McNinja, anytime there’s blood, I just say “Anthony, please put blood here. Lots of blood.”

RN: Do you get back pages with blood where there was not supposed to be blood?

CH: No, never. Anytime it shows up, it’s appropriate.

CA: So, survival horror DigDug, twice a week on ShiftyLook.

CH: Tuesdays and Saturdays.

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.”

This week we’re talking to comics and animation writer Mairghread Scott, who is best known for her work on the Transformerss property both at Hasbro and at IDW Publishing, where she became the first woman to write an official Transformers comic.

ComicsAlliance: Tell us about your process.

Mairghread Scott:  I always break out my outlines on paper before I type the actual script in my computer, then I go back to paper, breaking the script back into an outline during my revision process to see if/where I may have strayed from the original plan. Digital writing is wonderfully easy to edit, but the physical act of writing with a pen gives me the time I need when I’m thinking through a story as a whole. Of course, I can also use only one of three pens to write with or nothing works, but that’s another story.

CA: What’s your background/training?

MS: I have a BFA (or a BA if my mother asks) in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and got my start in LA working various production jobs in animation. Once I started writing in animation and my career began to take off, I was able to make the leap to writing comics as well.

CA: How would you describe your creative style?

MS: I tend to write very intense, motive-driven stories. I don’t like to say “character-driven” because I think fast-paced action is crucial in comics, but for me the real meat of any comic is in why the hero and the villain make the choices they do. Being either comes at tremendous personal cost, and exploring both the loss and gain from that choice is at the heart of what I write.

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

MS: In television I’ve written for Transformers Prime, Rescue Bots, Kaijudo and several other shows that haven’t aired yet because animation takes so long. In comics I’ve co-written Rage of the Dinobots and Transformers Prime Beast Hunters. I am currently writing Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs for Lion Forge (yes, it is about an intergalactic law enforcement officer on a robotic horse), and the Transformers Windblade miniseries for IDW with the fantastic Sarah Stone. I’m also pitching my first original graphic novel with Sarah and… between you, me and the Internet… it’s awesome!

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

MS: My preferred time frame is 10 business days for a first draft, five for rewrites on a 20-24 page comic. My “under the gun” timeline is half that.

CA: What is your dream project?

MS: I love filling in the gaps and smoothing out the bumps in a character’s continuity. My dream project would be fleshing out and re-grounding some of those wonderful side characters that get killed/canceled/retconned a lot, but are still around. Clearly they resonate with the readers; they just need someone to hit the right note.

Or Wonder Woman. My other ideal project is anything Wonder Woman.

CA: Who are some comic creators that inspire you?

MS: Greg Rucka, Neil Gaiman, Emma Rios, and Kate Beaton. All people who pushed the boundaries of what comics are “supposed” to be while keeping the human element at the forefront of their work.

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

MS: I started reading comics in high school. The ones that have meant the most to me are: Lore, One Soul, I Kill Giants, Batman: The Black Mirror, Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia, Pang: The Wandering Shaolin Monk and Egg Story. I know it seems a little out of step with the others, but it is fantastic.

CA: What’s your ideal professional environment?

MS: A deadline and a decent chair. Seriously, I know it sounds silly, but I hate working on a nebulous deadline. If you want it in a week, if you want it in 24 hours, I don’t mind either way, just give me the date and consider it done.

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

MS: That more than anything, I strive to make you feel something in my work, and not just for the title character. I want the world, the plot, and the people to seem real and for each character to be a distinct individual in their actions, reactions and tone. The world is a vast and varied place. Comics should be, too.

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

MS: I can be reached on Twitter at @MairghreadScott or Tumblr at MScottWrites and look forward to any and all questions.

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.

I think we can all agree that you can improve virtually anything by adding Batman to it, right? It’s just one of those unavoidable truths of the world, proven over and over again by how great things get on those rare occasions when the World’s Greatest Detective shows up. I mean, look, I like Alice In Wonderland just fine, but when you swap out Alice for Batman and it becomes the story of a haberdashery-themed supervillain with cybernetic mind control hats. That’s way better.

I’m getting a little off-track here, but what I’m trying to get at is that there’s some magic to be found in adding Batman to everyday situations, which is exactly what french artist Rémi Noël has done with a series of photographs. The compelling series of photos find Batman everywhere from a laundromat to a can of beans, and they’re pretty fantastic. Check a few of ‘em out below!

I don’t think we’ll ever see anything in the world quite as sad as a costumed orphan who watched his parents get murdered in front of him reading a book about microwave cooking. For more of Tiny Batman and his adventures around the Southwestern United States, check out Nöel’s website!

Batman 1966 Is Finally Coming To Home Video