firehose

Screenwriter and cultural commentator Kevin Smith has declared his support for content creators on YouTube, who are currently facing a barrage of copyright notices that threaten their livelihood.

Speaking on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight in Canada, the writer of Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma said that creators ought to be allowed to use game assets to make new content. In the past week, YouTube has issued thousands of copyright notices to video makers, often generated by music companies seeking to secure advertising revenues from the shows' popularity.

Some games companies are also seeking revenues from video shows, sometimes known as Let's Plays, while others are keen for the shows to continue.

"On YouTube they are starting to cull all these video game clips," he said. "YouTube are starting to pull back on the freedom of expression that people have been enjoying. Now video game companies are jumping into the fray on behalf of the kids [content creators] saying, let them run these clips. Let them have fun. These kids are not hurting anyone."

You can follow Polygon's coverage of the YouTube Let's Play crackdown on our Story Stream.

Two researchers at York University have worked out a way to communicate between two points using vodka evaporated into the air. They used their system to message the lyrics of “O Canada” between two points, leading them to conclude that in times of need, when there is no cellular reception, it would be possible to text-message using this system.

The authors of the paper, published Thursday, used specific concentration levels of the vodka to represent bits 1 and 0. They wafted the “message” across 12 feet in the lab to the receiving unit, which read out the message as it detected the concentration of vodka in the air rising or falling over time.

The process sounds slow and short-range, but the researchers suggest that it could work for closed environments that don’t have the benefit of a cellular or Wi-Fi signal. They cite the example of the clogged London sewer system as one where robots could have been deployed below ground and have relayed their findings via the molecular communication system.

Days after Sprint was revealed to be considering a purchase of T-Mobile US, satellite provider Dish Network is reportedly thinking about making a bid of its own.

A potential Sprint/T-Mobile merger would leave the US with just three major cellular carriers and would be heavily scrutinized by the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. A Dish purchase of T-Mobile would maintain the status quo of four major nationwide carriers and would perhaps be more palatable to antitrust authorities.

Dish's potential bid was reported by Reuters last night, citing "people close to the matter."

The effort to turn CyanogenMod into the next big mobile operating system just got a big new vote of confidence. The company announced today that it has raised an additional $23 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz, to add staff and improve its distribution around the world. The series B round, which comes on top of $7 million that the company closed in April, shows that investors are betting the world is clamoring for a different take on Android. “Mobile has really just begun,” says Kirt McMaster, Cyanogen’s CEO. “Apple, Google, and Samsung have not won. Although it seems like they’ve won, it’s still early days.”

There’s some data to back up the big talk: CyanogenMod now has 11 million active users, up from 8 million in September, and that counts only those who have elected to share data with the company. The true number of CyanogenMod users is already in the tens of millions, says Andreessen partner Peter Levine — and that’s despite some significant distribution challenges. One guide for installing CyanogenMod on your Android smartphone lists 23 steps; the company released a one-click installer this fall, but was forced to remove the companion app from the Google Play store after Google said it violated the store’s terms of service. Licensing issues also mean that a freshly installed Cyanogen ROM doesn’t come with Google apps or the Play Store — users typically have to search online forums for links to those apps and install them via PC. These are all significant hurdles to mainstream adoption.

Cyanogen now has 11 million monthly active users

So where’s all the growth coming from? Initially, Cyanogen’s custom ROM found favor with hobbyists in the United States and abroad who preferred it to the often bloated versions of Android promulgated by carriers. The ROM strips Android down to a near-stock version while customizing it with a new camera app, secure messaging, and access to thousands of themes. It has also proven a godsend to owners of older devices that are abandoned by their carriers.

But Cyanogen has also found favor with Chinese smartphone manufacturers. Xiaomi’s MiUI operating system is based on Cyanogen, for example, and Oppo’s N1 is shipping with CyanogenMod preinstalled. Emerging markets have begun to embrace it as well, particularly in India, where merchants are flashing used smartphones with the latest version of Cyanogen and reselling the devices. And it has begun to announce its first device partnerships, where Cyanogen is preinstalled on the phone.

The task now is to make Cyanogen more appealing to the mainstream. “We have to figure out a way to cross the chasm and get into the mass market,” McMaster says. “For that to happen, we have to do some things that are different.” Late next year, Cyanogen plans to unveil a new consumer brand. Among other things, it will be easier to say than “cyanogen.” The company is also working on what McMaster calls “signature experiences” — features no other operating system can offer. (The company won’t say what it’s working on, but the offerings will include “some things that scream out, like, ‘Fuck yeah,’ that’s really awesome,’” McMaster says.)

An installer that personalizes your phone

And while some see the Cyanogen installer as a hurdle to adoption, McMaster sees it as a potential benefit. The installer can evolve into software that personalizes your phone the moment it updates your firmware, so that when it restarts your device will be populated with custom wallpaper and apps you are likely to enjoy. But McMaster is likely understating the challenge: replacing a phone’s firmware can be difficult and risky. The reason Google wanted the Cyanogen installer app out of the Play Store is that installing it can void the warranty of many smartphones — something most mainstream users would rather not risk.

Now McMaster will begin rapidly expanding his team of 20, which is split between Seattle and Palo Alto. He plans to hire between 40 and 50 people over the next nine months — “enough to start doing some real damage,” he says." He says he is also confident that the one-click installer will return to the Google Play store; he has been in contact with Google to begin discussions.

And if investors are worried about the company’s relationships with Google, they’re not showing it: previous Cyanogen investors including Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures also invested in this round, as did Chinese tech giant Tencent. In a blog post accompanying the announcement, Levine likens Cyanogen to Linux Red Hat or Windows — operating systems that thrived by being independent of hardware. “Software is eating the world, Android is eating mobile, and we think Cyanogen only just finished their appetizer and is moving onto the entree,” he says. But Red Hat may be a telling example — consumers’ appetite for it never matched its makers’ ambitions, and it ultimately pivoted into an enterprise offering. If Cyanogen doesn’t become easier to use, that entrée may prove to be out of reach.

This unassuming black cylinder can cost you a pretty penny. Nearly a million pretty pennies, in fact.

Apple

Apple's new Mac Pro has gone live on Apple's online store, and the first orders will begin to arrive on December 30—just barely sliding, Indiana Jones-style, under the door of the company's self-imposed December deadline. We knew the starting prices for the two base Mac Pro configurations, but we weren't sure how much the various CPU, GPU, and other component upgrades would run. Now we know.

Unlike most of the other Macs, your upgrade options for the "low-end" $2,999 Mac Pro aren't artificially limited to encourage upgrades to the higher-end $3,999 model (for example, you can't upgrade the CPU in the $1,299 or $1,799 iMac base models—those upgrades are only available to the $1,499 and $1,999 SKUs). So, starting from $2,999, how much does each individual component upgrade cost? Let's break it down.

CPU

• 3.7GHz (3.9GHz Turbo Boost) Quad-core Xeon E5-1620 v2 (base)
• 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo Boost) six-core Xeon E5-1650 v2 (add $500)
• 3.0GHz (3.9GHz Turbo Boost) eight-core Xeon E5-1680 v2 (add $2,000)
• 2.7GHz (3.5GHz Turbo Boost) 12-core Xeon E5-2697 v2 (add $3,500)

GPU

• Two AMD FirePro D300 GPUs, 2GB of GDDR5 each (base)
• Two AMD FirePro D500 GPUs, 3GB of GDDR5 each (add $400)
• Two AMD FirePro D700 GPUs, 6GB of GDDR5 each (add $1,000)

RAM

• 12GB of 1866MHz ECC DDR3 (base)
• 16GB of same (add $100)
• 32GB (add $500)
• 64GB (add $1,300)

SSD

• 256GB PCIe SSD (base)
• 512GB PCIe SSD (add $300)
• 1TB PCIe SSD (add $800)

The upgrades add up to a whopping $9,599 if you max out each one, though Apple Education and Apple Business customers will be able to get it for less than this—the Apple Education pricing for the same machine is a mere $8,739. This is the pricing for the tower only, and you can spend quite a bit more on peripherals if you have a mind to. Adding an AppleCare three-year warranty to the machine (recommended if you're going to drop multiple thousands of dollars on a workstation) costs another $249. You might also consider a keyboard ($49 wired, $69 wireless), a mouse ($49 wired, $69 for either a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad), and a display or three while you're at it ($999 for an Apple Thunderbolt display, $3,595 for that Sharp 4K display we noticed last week). External Thunderbolt 2 storage is another pricey add-on if you need it—Apple will sell you Promise Pegasus2 storage arrays starting at $1,499 for 8TB.

The two jailed members of Pussy Riot are due to be released from prison. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina will be freed as part of an amnesty bill that will also see 25,000 Russian prisoners let go in anticipation of the 2014 Sochi Olympics. There’s no timeline yet for the duo’s release, but a lawyer for the two women says she expects it to be a swift release. Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were both given two-year sentences for staging a musical protest at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior and, in recent months, had become a cause célèbre for everyone from Madonna to Paul McCartney.

In a press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he’s not sorry that the members of Pussy Riot ended up behind bars, saying that he was “sorry that they were engaged in such disgraceful behavior,” which he maintains “was degrading to the dignity of women.” 

After all the virtual public flogging National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has received, in the past week a few voices have suggested cutting him some slack.

At a Tuesday closed-door meeting with tech leaders, one unnamed participant suggested to Obama that Snowden be pardoned; Obama said he couldn't do that. During a 60 Minutes report on the leaks that aired Sunday, though, even an NSA official suggested it might be worth discussing amnesty—if and only if he returns the leaked documents securely, almost surely an impossibility at this point. (CBS news has been busy defending itself against accusations that Sunday's show was a "puff piece.")

Even that tiny, tentative olive branch seems to have crossed a line for security hawks. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander dismissed the idea, comparing Snowden to "a hostage taker taking 50 people hostage, shooting 10, and then say[ing], 'You give me full amnesty and I'll let the other 40 go.'"

BitTorrent, Inc.

BitTorrent, Inc. is developing a serverless instant messaging system that relies on public key encryption to protect the privacy of communications, identifying users not with traditional usernames but with cryptographic key pairs.

The company, which develops the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol as well as the BitTorrent and μTorrent file sharing software, announced the forthcoming chat software in September and revealed some details on how it will work in a blog post today. It reads:

With BitTorrent Chat, there aren’t any “usernames” per se. You don’t login in the classic sense. Instead, your identity is a cryptographic key pair. To everyone on the BitTorrent Chat network at large, you ARE your public key. This means that, if you want, you can use Chat without telling anyone who you are. Two users only need to exchange each other’s public keys to be able to chat.

Using public key encryption provides us with a number of benefits. The most obvious is the ability to encrypt messages to your sender using your private key and their public key. But in public key encryption, if someone gains access to your private key, all of your past (and future) messages could be decrypted and read. In Chat, we are implementing forward secrecy. Every time you begin a conversation with one of your contacts, a temporary encryption key will be generated. Using each of your keypairs, this key will be generated for this one conversation and that conversation only, and then deleted forever.

Underlying this system is a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) which finds IP addresses, removing the need for a central server to route messages, the company explained.

Metahaven is a graphic design collective based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Since its launch in 2007, the team — led by Daniel Van der Velden and Vinca Kruk — has pursued collaborations with organizations that traditionally don't seek out graphic design as a platform or medium. Examples include the whistleblower platform WikiLeaks, the Icelandic Modern Media Institute (IMMI), and the diplomatic advisory group Independent Diplomat.

An interdisciplinary group of writers, editors, critics, and curators, the collective has been able to expand upon the foundation of designer as form-maker and break free from the traditional confines of the studio. Its avant-garde aesthetics and intellectual approaches have lead to exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Metahaven has also written extensively about the internet as a political and creative space — anyone interested is encouraged to check out the book Uncorporate Identity.

Metahaven's latest work, Black Transparency, is a short film that incorporates graphic design to make a statement about "collectivity and togetherness" in a police state, according to the group. "Many people are starting to understand that the structures which claim to serve them have turned against them."

Verge Exclusive: Metahaven, Black Transparency (videogram), 2013. Video. Co-produced with Bureau Europa.

Can you explain the work you created for WikiLeaks? How did that work differ from traditional brand-identity work?

Our initial work for WikiLeaks aimed at an overhaul of their visual presence as a matter of graphic design. We were interested in WikiLeaks as a somewhat anonymous, opaque organization publishing leaked documents — and causing great upheaval because powerful others, governments and corporations, didn’t want those documents out in the world. At the time, Julian Assange didn’t have a lot of celebrity status. He did make public appearances though, and these were mired in mystery and controversy, even as fashion statements. He addressed a freedom-of-speech working group of the European Union wearing an Icelandic sweater.

To us, all this seemed to be about reinventing what an organization is. We reasoned that obliviousness to celebrity, while doing such important work, contained a great possibility for graphic design. The WikiLeaks logo, of which we discovered the original designer, could be expanded into an ecosystem which would reflect the site’s multijurisdictional hosting model. That is a complex way of saying that WikiLeaks was hosted in many countries to make it uncensorable, and the identity should reflect that.

Metahaven, WikiLeaks Identity (unrealized proposal), 2010.

In the end, we never made a complete rebranding of WikiLeaks. When meeting with them we found out we couldn't do anything with their identity. They wanted to shape their graphic relationship to the world through products; the non-designed nature of the WikiLeaks web site is an example of their minimized reliance on external parties.

Metahaven, WikiLeaks scarves, 2011. Photo by Meinke Klein.

What sort of products did you design for WikiLeaks?

We primarily made scarves and T-shirts. Scarves came up as a way to make something about WikiLeaks without even touching their “identity.” Scarves are in some sense wearable flags; they can be used to conceal as well as reveal the body and the face.

What are your thoughts on the activities of WikiLeaks? Has their work affected how we view and understand information?

In a post-Snowden era, it's important to remember that although Collateral Murder is now three years behind us, WikiLeaks is where our new model for involuntary transparency began. That is, transparency that stems from leaks and not from government or corporate "transparency programs." It is impossible to even imagine our contemporary understanding of such transparency without WikiLeaks. It has sparked a movement. It can't be undone.

How have the actions of Edward Snowden changed the story of WikiLeaks in your mind?

Edward Snowden's actions are a continuation of the WikiLeaks story. The slightly problematic part of this story is the role of Russia. None of the EU countries and not even Iceland or Norway were prepared to do anything at all for Snowden, so he ended up in the only jurisdiction within reach that wanted him. On Snowden's part, staying in Russia is in his direct self-interest. It is very hard to believe that any genuine ethical concern has motivated the asylum offer. For Russia it is a means, not an end; it shows the country's cunning ability to sail the geopolitical trade winds "just because it can." Other examples are Putin's New York Times letter to President Obama, the state-owned English-language channel RT which hosted Assange's show; and more. Yet this is also the country that ruthlessly persecutes its own whistleblowers, incarcerates Pussy Riot in a prison in Siberia, and sides with Syria's Assad government. An even more stunning contradiction however is that the same Assad has an Instagram account — as Independent Diplomat's Carne Ross alerted us.

Metahaven in collaboration with IMMI: Data / Saga, 2013.

How has surveillance and transparency affected the design process both for yourselves and in general?

Design is basically high-res censorship.

Please explain.

This is a bit of a provocation, obviously.

Design is coming from the decision to publish something, wherever that may be. Every decision to publish is also a decision to frame a message. And design is, however minimalist or baroque it is, often a decision not to do something, to leave something else out. What else is that than high-resolution censorship?

Artwork above: Metahaven, Sheikh Al-Skype, 2013. Nomadic Data Center. Co-produced with Bureau Europa. (e-flux journal)