firehose

Fox has cast David Tennant to reprise his role in the US remake of Broadchurch. The Scottish star, most famous for his portrayal of the Doctor in Doctor Who, has signed up for the eight-episode series, which will debut next year on Fox. The original UK version of Broadchurch starred Tennant as Detective Inspector Alec Hardy, a tortured divorcé struggling with illness that investigates the death of a boy in a quiet seaside town. The show was extremely popular in the UK, and has been renewed for a second season. Although Tennant played the male lead in the UK series, it was his co-star Olivia Colman who gained the most plaudits. As Colman is a relatively unknown figure outside the US, however, Fox may opt to have an American actress fill her shoes for the remake.

Production of the new series is slated to begin in January, with the premiere episode set to be written by the UK show's creator and writer Chris Chibnall, who will also be executive producer of the entire season. It hasn't been decided if the show will be renamed for US audiences. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Chibnall says he's "fascinated to see this story in a different landscape," adding that "the DNA of the original is absolutely intact... it should still feel just as vibrant, interesting, strange, unique, and beautiful, but just in a different setting."

Smartphone speed tests are the latest home to a scandal over unscrupulous performance enhancers. According to AnandTech, Samsung, HTC, LG, and Asus have all altered some of their devices so that they will perform unusually well during popular benchmarks, which are often included alongside in-depth device reviews. Aside from Motorola and Apple, AnandTech writes that "literally every single [device manufacturer]" they work with has shipped or is currently shipping a phone that inflates its scores. Despite the broad statement, AnandTech only lists a few specific names, and it also appears to exclude Nexus and Windows Phone devices.

The performance gains were slight

The revelation shouldn't mean much to consumers: benchmarks are by-and-large an arbitrary measurement of raw performance, and not a measurement of how well a phone actually runs in day-to-day use. But they're nonetheless a tool that reviewers and some shoppers use when assessing a phone's capabilities, and it seems that these manufacturers may be hoping to give themselves an edge. That practice reportedly isn't present across the board, however. While on certain test, such as AnTuTu, AnandTech found that every company listed was inflating its scores, it found that on other tests, such as Geekbench 3, only a single device appeared to be inflating.

Phone manufacturers' methods of doing this appear to be fairly simple: the operating system detects when a specific benchmark is running, and then tells the device's processor to immediately begin performing at its top speed. Overall, AnandTech says that it doesn't even add up to much. It saw a 0 to 5 percent improvement on CPU speed, and for devices that also altered GPU speeds, no higher than a 10 percent improvement on those benchmarks. Benchmark manufacturers are reportedly now looking to outsmart devices — many by simply renaming their apps — but buyers will have to take their scores with an even larger helping of salt than usual until it's clear that these tests can't be bested.

One of Grand Theft Auto’s most iconic elements has always been its soundtrack.

Ribcage-rattling beats blaring from a dozen different radio stations and bawdy tongue-in-cheek commercials have become the staple soundtrack to players' adrenaline-laced adventures. For the streets and hills of Los Santos, Rockstar vowed not only to continue the tradition, but ramp up the volume.

If Grand Theft Auto 5 is a picture of Los Angeles' more underground and (sometimes) criminal culture, the game's soundtrack is a substance of sound that feeds that culture directly into your soul. A soundtrack can make or break a game, and many game composers and series have cult followings fervent for the music alone — just look at Final Fantasy or any other popular Japanese role-playing series, and the fans who still blare old Kirby and Castlevania tunes from their car speakers.

In Grand Theft Auto 5, a lot of the city's and the characters‘ heart is something that can't be conveyed in boisterous dialogue alone. Even the narrative is helped along by the game's culturally-driven music.

Five of the game's composers sat down during the New York Film Festival this week to discuss creating the sounds of Los Santos. The panel, moderated by Pitchfork Media founder Ryan Schreiber, featured Rockstar music supervisor Ivan Pavlovich; Woody Jackson, whose composition credits include films like Oceans 12 and 13 and a handful of Rockstar titles; founder of German electronic music group Tangerine Dream, Edgar Froese; hip hop producer Alan Daniel Maman, known as The Alchemist, who is currently working as rapper Eminem's official DJ; and Maman's partner in the power duo Gangrene, Michael Jackson, also known as Oh No.

For the first time in the Grand Theft Auto series, the score — which has always been an integral part of the experience, Schreiber noted — is fully interactive, changing with mood and tension as players move through Los Santos. This project was a mammoth undertaking, he said, and the final product is that extra "umph" that brings the world to life.

"You could argue that the soundtrack doesn't supplement the narrative, but is a part of it," Schreiber said.

Grand Theft Auto 5's final soundtrack includes 241 songs, much less than originally planned. Pavlovich said in terms of licensed music, the team initially shot for 900 tunes, trying to get the rights to as many as they could and then scaling back as they went along. The pick of the litter went into the game, spreading out across 17 radio stations.

As for radio station personalities, Pavlovich said that this time around the team knew what kind of stations they wanted and looked for personalities that matched. But sometimes, they had a personality that they just had to use, and so they built stations around the individual.

"Once we have a good understanding of where the station is going, generally the host will relate to the songs that are selected," Pavlovich explained. "So with Kenny Loggins... the direction of the station just started to take a turn. There became more of an easy rock, 1970s kind of feel, and Kenny became the natural person to host the station."

Loggins, a singer songwriter known for his affinity for soft rock, jumped at the chance to host a radio station within Rockstar's game. But he wasn't the only celebrity to join the Los Santos airwaves. Actress Pam Grier hosts Lowdown FM, the game's soul station packed with low rider classics, while renowned funk bassist Bootsy Collins takes charge of the 80s funk station, Space 103.2.

"Sometimes it's based on personalities of hosts, like with Bootsy, then the reggae station with Lee "Scratch" Perry — gotta love that, since it's a little hard to understand him anyway," Pavlovich said with a laugh. "So you know, each one is decided as the stations are coming together."

"All we want to do is create an authentic world and have that sound experience reflect the world we create.'

This was a different approach than the route Rockstar took with Grand Theft Auto 4, Pavlovich noted, where the music wasn't such a high focus. This isn't the first time we've been to Los Santos, but now we're being told a different story. This gave developers the opportunity to rebuild — with new places, people and of course, sounds.

"So much of [the soundtrack] has to do with the world that's created," he said. "Look at at how those stations play a role in the overall game. In this version of California, we wanted to have a lot of the stations to have that Cali feel — like the classic west coast hip hop station hosted by DJ Pooh. We'd never done a pop station [before in Grand Theft Auto,] but for us... The first time you get off an airplane in L.A. and you hear the radio and the pop just seeps out... We wanted that. It really connects you to the world.

"All we want to do is create an authentic world and have that sound experience reflect the world we create," he added.

Compiling mixes for a radio station is one thing. But composing original music for other segments of the game is quite another.

"In terms of score, the challenging thing is that, when you're creating a score for Grand Theft Auto ... Grand Theft Auto never had a score before," Pavlovich said. "We had to be careful to how we were approaching it. It was a little bit daunting.

"With a game as big as GTA 5, our approach was to be very subtle in the score," he added. "And as we filled out the game — the three characters and lots of different environments — we wanted to focus on what those environments were and how the score would interact with those environments and the characters. That was our process."

Pavlovich called GTA 5's soundtrack a "truly collaborative score." The team of five composers began writing for the game long before most of it was finished. They saw it running once in the beginning, Pavlovich said, and from there built their music. Most of the score was done by the time they were shown the almost-final product, but even after that the soundtrack continued to grow until finally Rockstar made the call to cap things off and prepare the game for shipping.

"With a game as big as GTA 5, our approach was to be very subtle in the score."

"What we'd do is we'd give them direction for certain missions, and a lot of times just told them to make some [unassigned] music as well," said Pavlovich. "They were sending us music and then we'd figure out what missions those pieces would fit into best. Then we'd go back and ask them to build the music out even more."

Pavlovich said the music was built on what he called a "stem-based" system; each piece had to have another component that would change to reflect what players were doing in the game, making the sound interactive. Once a piece of music was assigned to a mission, the composers had to break it down into different stems depending on what the turn of events might be. They wanted the music to relate directly to the mission, so each heist and confrontation was scored with the utmost care.

Interestingly, it wasn't just one composer working on one tune at a time. The music was sent around among them, and each would add their own elements and pieces to the song, "building out" other composer's elements and creating melting pots of beats and rhythm.

"The hope was, in the end when we would see all these missions, a certain continuity would be achieved," Pavlovich said. "By having them all collaborate throughout the game, there is that continuity."

Froese said he was familiar with the Grand Theft Auto series, but when he got the call about possibly scoring the game, he didn't bite right away.

"I get offers from game companies. I would refuse because the game seemed really stupid."

"I get offers from game companies," he said. "I would refuse because the game seemed really stupid."

Froese though Grand Theft Auto 5 was "another stupid game." But after flying out to see what Rockstar was putting together, he had nothing short of a 180-degree change of heart.

"They flew me in and to be honest, my first impression was, that game right there puts cinema to shame that we know it," he said.

"It's that innate effect of it being so big and it's always an adventure," he added. "And even if you play the game a hundred times, there's always new aspects, and in my opinion, that the future of cinematic graphic development."

Grand Theft Auto 5 is the first video game Froese has scored. Over eight months he composed 62 hours of audio for "the most massive world," as he put it, and assisted the other composers by layering his own elements on their own pieces.

"I just wanted to work on it."

For Jackson — who has also worked with Rockstar on Max Payne 3 and Red Dead Redemption — this is his first Grand Theft Auto score as well.

"I just wanted to work on it," he said. "I live my life with music and struggles and I'm not the perfect musician, but I love a challenge, and that's what it's like working at Rockstar. They let me do whatever I want — but it's also like a brick wall."

Jackson expressed trepidation when he initially learned that the composers would be building on each other's music. His biggest worry was how the group would create something fluid if there were so many cooks in the kitchen. His own first steps in creating the soundtrack focused around Trevor, the more unhinged member of GTA 5's trio.

"I decided his music was desert rock," Jackson said. "And when I first did it, I started to live these little fantasies. I formed a band and we called it Shark Week and we were a desert rock band, me and [the Mars Volta's] Deantoni Parks and Michael Shumen from Queens of the Stone Age... And [the music] was so good we had to make it not so good.

"First I thought, okay we'll just wing it and then I'm like wait, this is a job. So let me make sure I have a backup plan."

Jackson didn't hear a lot of his own pieces again until they had already been passed around. What Froese added to his music in particular moved Jackson emotionally.

"Edgar evolved the music, made it into a whole other thing," he said." It's this magic thing that doesn't really ever happen."

DJ Shadow — who is credited in the score but not the game itself — then took all the songs the group made and pieced them together. Jackson said once DJ Shadow had gotten his hands on them, it was like the pieces "exploded and then came back together."

"We all wrote these songs and then he sampled it and made it into these other crazy great things and it go twisted and convoluted into video game music that just suits the game," Jackson said. "The gameplay felt like a movie and it's never felt like that [for me], it's usually [for games] this heavy rock thing going on and you're shooting... But now, you'll go into a tunnel and the music changes, it puts up another level of entertainment."

The Alchemist said that when mixing tracks, he tried to "work around Los Santos" and make it really feel like that fictional L.A. Rockstar was striving for. While he and Oh No played things by ear with their first batch of music, as they began to receive pieces that had been built by Jackson and Froese,they decided the final overall sound of the score had to be "free and clear."

"They gave us a bunch of jams, almost 30 sessions worth," The Alchemist said. "They gave that to us and we went back and we treated those sessions the same way we treat a record. We were sampling, taking a piece form here, a piece from there. The first time [they all] heard it they were kind like, whoa, because we pitched stuff up, chopped it, tweaked it. Then we chose the tracks that worked and everyone came in and layered on that."

"It really is magic."

"It was almost like incest," he said, laughing, of the group's piling on each other's music.

"Edgar evolved funk into the hip hop then put his [style] over the top of it, and it was another magical moment," Jackson added. "It felt like, this music shouldn't really gel like that, but it did, and it just took it all to the highest level."

"This music is so laid back," he said; the music does sound almost effortless, whether you're listening to hip hop while blasting down a highway or waiting for something to queue up with the soft overtones of the loading screen music. But as the five men could attest, this was not the case, with the constant chopping, layering and mixing. "You almost think it's a mistake."

"My belief is, music is much more than what you listen to," Froese said. "It hits your consciousness... hits right into it, right at the moment before the visual image does. That is a magical moment. It really is magic."

By Adam Smith on October 3rd, 2013 at 4:00 pm.

There’s a trailer for The Mandate below and today’s challenge is for you to work out what genre the actual game will belong to when Perihelion Interactive release it. Don’t run off to Google to find the solution, just peel back the lids of your eyes and watch the video. You might want to unclog your ears as well so that the stirring, solemn music can distract you with images of the might of Imperial Russia. Tsars in space, that’s the theme, but how the devil does it play? Solve the mystery below.

It’s almost definitely a 4X strategy game, with rebellious outposts that have splintered into new factions and must now be tamed. Yes, that’s what it’ll be.

Except the mention of a single, small ship, designed to go where a fleet cannot, suggests that strategy will be thrown out of the window. Instead, The Mandate may well be a spaceship exploration/combat sort of a thing. It might even have boarding actions, judging by the short snippet of what looks like turn-based tactical combat.

Let’s read the press release and get to the heart of the matter:

The Mandate [is] a six player cooperative space RPG set in a world torn apart by 1500 years of war. From a newly formed development house featuring some of the creative minds from Funcom’s most popular MMO’s, and Ubisoft’ s original Assassins Creed, Perihelion Interactive collaborate to create a truly unique RPG experience with influences from some of the most tactically rich strategy and RPG titles of the past.

I certainly didn’t expect the ‘six player cooperative’ part. It all sounds a bit like Mass Effect built for somebody who likes roguelike and tactical elements rather than third-person combat.

Fight, quest, trade, scavenge, and upgrade your way to victory!

In a unique turn for the genre, relationships between captain, crew, and officers will directly affect battle situations, and with rogue-like elements, officers trained over time can be lost – literally vented out through the side of your ship – which will suffer irreparable radioactive and other atmospheric cosmetic and detrimental effects

When there is no possibility of people being “vented out” of a spaceship, I question why games are set on spaceships in the first place. This all sounds rather good, even if the trailer is a bit of a mess.

The pandas at the National Zoo are locked away, the Smithsonian museums are shut down, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial are barricaded. But luckily the most delightful—and certainly the weirdest—exhibition in Washington is still open for a few more days.

Ellen Harvey’s “The Alien’s Guide to the Ruins of Washington, D.C.,” on display at the private Corcoran Gallery of Art until Sunday, is an exhibition that takes place in the future, after extraterrestrials have discovered a wrecked and depopulated Earth. The exhibit is their well-meaning attempt to understand why the late earthlings erected so many white, pillared buildings, especially in Washington.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is the alien’s pamphlet about the various ruins they’ve discovered in the city: “The Circle/Triangle Pillar Thing” (the Jefferson Memorial), “The Really Complicated Pillar Thing” (the Capitol), etc., accompanied by very earnest, and exceedingly wrong, alien-museum-curator speculation about the likely purpose of the particular ruin. Imagine what ancient Athenians would make of 21^st-century academic articles about fifth-century Greek life, and you get some sense of what it's like to read the aliens’ guide. 

Harvey’s aliens also built themselves a souvenir stand, cheerily reminiscent of Washington’s own souvenir trucks, as well as their own pillar. And they have papered the walls of one gallery with 4,000 postcards of neoclassical buildings from around the world, sorted according to the aliens’ own peculiar classification scheme.

The exhibition never strays from its alien perspective and never winks. The result is strange and giddy-making. My children have never enjoyed a museum exhibition more, and I have never laughed harder at one. (In a canny bit of guerilla marketing that must have befuddled scores of tourists, the Corcoran over the summer placed the exhibition pamphlets among the glossy leaflets in Washington hotels—Spy Museum! Potomac River cruise! Brazilian steakhouse! Alien’s Guide to the Ruins of Washington, D.C.!)

Harvey, British-born and Brooklyn-based, says the exhibition sprang from a fascination with the omnipresence of classical and neoclassical architecture, styles that have meant all kinds of different things to all kinds of different people over 2,000 years. “It has been an architecture people have seen as representing democracy. It was also totalitarian. Stalin loved it. The Fascists loved it. It was connected to slavery. Plantations in the South—they look like mini Parthenons. In Britain, there was an imperial aspect to it. If neoclassical architecture was a virus, it would be the flu,” she says.

Harvey says she doesn’t know much about the aliens she invented, except that they’re very sweet: “All you can infer about the aliens is the guides they have written for themselves. Aliens are so often depicted as terrifying and evil. But what if they’re much nicer than us?”

Read more of Slate’s coverage of the government shutdown.

By Jeremy Laird on October 3rd, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

Could it be true? That here in my mortal hand I do hold a nugget of purest gaming? Not exactly. It’s the latest and tiniest NUC, Intel’s so-called ‘Next Unit of Computing’. It’s a full-function PC with Intel’s best graphics ever. And it’s claimed to sport pukka gaming chops. Meanwhile, Valve has been punting SteamOS, the whole Steam Box thang is still on – as far as I know – and Xi3′s Piston has been priced up at a preposterous $1,000. Chuck all that into the mix and you might wonder whether the NUC looks a lot like a entry-level Steam Box, on the hardware side at least. And if so, does the small-form-factor gaming thing add up?

I should say up front that I struggle to wrap my head around the Steam Box and SteamOS effort. For my money, Gabe Newell’s anti-Windows 8 rants don’t quite add up. And I’m not at all convinced about the viability of Linux as the basis of a platform to replace the traditional Wintel box as the gamer’s non-console weapon of choice.

Certainly, I don’t claim to be privy to all the politics involved. But I do know that Steam Box and SteamOS will do very well to leap hurdles like graphics driver quality and major game developers who may not necessarily want to help Valve become a dominant gaming OS provider.

Fancy a bit of NUCie?
Anyway, what about the NUC? As you can see from the picture, it’s absolutely puny. We’re talking 11cm square and 3.5cm deep. The model I’ve been playing with packs a dual-core Intel Core i5 mobile CPU, the same chip as found in the latest MacBook Air I do believe. Intel also threw in a 180GB SSD, a wireless adapter and 8GB of RAM, all of which you’ll have to pay extra for.

Oh, yeah, and the graphics. In this case, it’s Intel HD Graphics 5000. Not the fancy new Intel Iris Graphics. Except, in reality, it is. Intel’s branding is consistently awful these days, so it’s not a huge revelation to find the HD 5000 graphics core is indeed the latest variant with 40 execution units.

It’s exactly the same core as Iris, just a little lower clocked. And obviously it lacks the funky 128MB of EDRAM that comes with Iris Pro. Not that Iris Pro is terribly relevant to man nor beast. Intel has made it so expensive, you can have a much faster discrete GPU for similar money.

This is what 180GB of modern, ultra-fast storage looks like. Is it just me, or does my hand look weird? In fact, aren’t hands just weird? Anyway…

Whatever, what we’re really concerned with here is small-form-factor gaming. If you want the full skinny from me on the latest NUC, grab a copy of ye olde print rag PC Format next month. It’s all in there.

While I’m mad for big-iron gaming rigs, I also love the idea of a super-compact system that’s simple to spec and gets the job done when it comes to gaming. If it’s cheap enough, it’s the sort of thing I could put to all kinds of uses. Gaming on my projector. The basis for an occasional PC in the kitchen. You get the idea.

Stick on Steam
The point is that it needn’t be an absolute gaming beast. It just needs to be viable. So let’s chuck Steam on this thing and find out what she’ll do. There are plenty of benchmarks out there, so I’ll stick largely with the subjectives. What does it actually feel like?

First up, a spot of ye olde Counter-Strike: Source. Impressively, the NUC shakes that one off with ease, even at 2,560 by 1,440 on a 27-inch panel. I didn’t bother measuring the frame rates. I just played.

Granted, we’re not talking tournament-level frame rates. But the NUC is thoroughly playable and when playing it looks like this. The same goes for some classic gaming in the shape of closely-related Half-Life 2. In its way, HL2 still looks damned fine. Here’s a screen grab straight off the NUC.

NUC has no problem doing this at 2,560 by 1,440.

Of course, it’s not a massive surprise to find some legacy stuff playing pretty well. What about the latest clobber? We’ll go easy and arcadey at first with Grid 2. Knock it down to 1080p and medium settings and frame rates in the mid 20s are your reward and the IQ looks like this.

Could I enjoy Grid 2 on the NUC? To be honest, I struggle to really enjoy arcadey clobber like that courtesy of Titan and a 4K screen. But in terms of playability it’s marginal, though there’s scope for crushing the quality further and freeing a few more frames.

The last and easily most brutal test is Metro: Last Light. It’s a handy yardstick because it’s absolutely beautiful, it’s bang up to date and it absolutely monsters graphics subsystems. Critically, there’s also only so low you can go with the graphics settings. Even set to minimum, this is a good looking and very demanding game.

This is a bit of a chore at 1080p.

But it’s a bit too much for the NUC at 1080p. It feels very sluggish and that’s reflected in frame rates only just into double figures much of the time. It’s not literally unplayable. But it’s unpleasant and there’s no scope for unleashing a few more fps except reducing the resolution.

Depending on your choice of display, you could drop the pixel count to 1,280 by 720, of course. But I’d say that only makes sense with native 720p displays. Because the NUC’s – or rather the Intel HD Graphics’ – non-native interpolation is absolutely minging.

Where does all that leave us? I desperately want the NUC to be viable. It’s a very nice device and its graphical prowess is impressive when you think back to the days when Half-Life 2 was cutting edge. It just goes to show how far things have progressed that it’s now playable at beyond-HD resolutions on such a small box. It’s worth noting, too, that all the games I tried ran flawlessly and without a hitch.

And this is just a bit of a bore at any resolution or IQ setting.

But I also desperately want NUC to be a lot cheaper. For a fully functioning NUC like this one, you’re looking at roughly £500. Which is about £200 too much to be really attractive. That’s a pity, because the NUC is a genuinely desirable bit of kit.

It’s that painful Intel pricing again
The real problem in terms of pricing is Intel’s CPUs. They’ve drifted out of control thanks to lack of real competition from AMD to the extent that Intel now charges $340 alone for the CPU inside the NUC. That leaves zero scope for sensible NUC pricing.

In that context, I suppose the fact that the NUC and in turn Intel’s latest graphics falls tantalisingly short of true gaming viability is something of a mercy. It also tells us that affordable SFF gaming hasn’t arrived yet. In this spec, Intel’s 40-unit graphics is comparable to the fastest AMD integrated graphics in its APUs.

So the only faster integrated graphics are found in even more expensive and even more irrelevant Intel CPUs. And, anyway, I doubt the faster Iris cores are true gaming items, either.

So, we’re very, very close to a scenario where you can make an argument for something like the NUC as a general gaming box. Maybe just a single generation of CPUs and 12 months away. And it may well be Intel that pulls it off first. But we’re still not quite there.

Ross Ulbricht, the man accused of running the underground drug marketplace Silk Road, has been charged with drug trafficking and hiring a hitman to knock off one of his employees. Of course, the hitman was actually an undercover federal agent in Maryland, and no one was actually killed.

Silk Road had a handful of employees, according to court documents, and apparently one of them went astray. This employee, who is not named in the indictment, stole money from users and also managed to get picked up by the police. "I'd like him beat up, then forced to send the bitcoins he stole back," Ulbricht said, allegedly speaking over the internet as Silk Road's pseudonymous captain Dread Pirate Roberts. Later, he changed his mind: "Can you change the order to execute rather than torture?"

"Can you change the order to execute rather than torture?"

The payment was set at a $40,000 down payment, then $40,000 after proof that the murder had been carried out. The undercover agent sent staged photos of the employee being tortured to Dread Pirate Roberts, who expressed some discomfort but maintained that he believed he had done the right thing. The fact that the employee was in police custody suggests he was cooperating with federal agents.

The same undercover agent also sold a kilogram of cocaine through Silk Road with the help of Dread Pirate Roberts, for $27,000 worth of Bitcoin, the semi-anonymous virtual currency used for transactions on Silk Road.

Ulbricht has also been charged in New York with narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. Federal agents say he attempted to take out a second hit in Canada for $150,000, but agents could not find proof that it was carried out and he has not been charged.

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The governor of California has signed Senate Bill 255, which will make the posting of "revenge porn" a crime.

Revenge porn made headlines this year; the success of Hunter Moore's IsAnybodyUp spawned even more tasteless sites like IsAnybodyDown, founded by Craig Brittain. That site, which has been taken down, ran on an extortion-like business model. Nude pictures were posted with identifying information, without the consent of the subjects. The only way to get the photos down was to make a payment, which was apparently going to the owner of the site, Craig Brittain—although Brittain denied that to the end.

In California, anyone distributing nude photos online with an "intent to harass or annoy" can now face six months in jail as well as a $1,000 fine. The bill was signed yesterday and goes into effect immediately.