firehose

Aurich Lawson / HBO

The National Security Agency’s spying tactics are being intensely scrutinized following the recent leaks of secret documents. However, the NSA isn't the only US government agency using controversial surveillance methods.

Monitoring citizens' cell phones without their knowledge is a booming business. From Arizona to California, Florida to Texas, state and federal authorities have been quietly investing millions of dollars acquiring clandestine mobile phone surveillance equipment in the past decade.

Earlier this year, a covert tool called the “Stingray” that can gather data from hundreds of phones over targeted areas attracted international attention. Rights groups alleged that its use could be unlawful. But the same company that exclusively manufacturers the Stingray—Florida-based Harris Corporation—has for years been selling government agencies an entire range of secretive mobile phone surveillance technologies from a catalogue that it conceals from the public on national security grounds.

Lucasfilm knows a thing or two about making movies, and executives at the company are convinced that video game engines will play a huge role in film production within the next decade. Chief technology strategy officer Kim Libreri laid out the company's vision at BAFTA in London this week. Libreri says that computer graphics will eventually evolve to a point that allows video game assets to be inserted in scenes in realtime — drastically lessening the burden of post-production for filmmakers. "Everyone has seen what we can do in movies, and I think most people will agree the video game industry is catching up quite quickly, especially in the next generation of console title," Libreri said.

"You'll leave a movie set and the shot is pretty much complete."

"I'm pretty sure within the next decade, we're going to see a convergence in terms of traditional visual effects capabilities." He mentioned "realistic fire, creatures, and environments" as some of the video game graphics that could make their way into film production, all working "completely interactively" according to Libreri. "We think that computer graphics are going to be so realistic in real time computer graphics that, over the next decade, we'll start to be able to take the post out of post-production; where you'll leave a movie set and the shot is pretty much complete," Libreri said.

Lucasfilm and its effects company Industrial Light & Magic have already put the theory to practice; they developed a prototype film built with a gaming engine as a "vision statement" ILM's future pursuits. They've also used 1313, a Star Wars video game abandoned after Disney's takeover of Lucasfilm, as a proof of concept for realtime motion capture. (We visited the same stage where this demo was captured last year.) "If you combine video games with film-making techniques, you can start to have these real deep, multi-user experiences," Libreri said. "Being able to animate, edit and compose live is going to change the way we work and it's really going to bring back the creative experience in digital effects." You'll see some of Lucasfilm's magic in the video from The Inquirer below.

Squee! Spotter: nutz4cubbies

YouTube’s comments section, that notorious bastion of hostility toward women, people of color, rational thought, empathy, and the English language, is finally getting a makeover. In a series of sweeping changes that begin rolling out today, the space below YouTube videos will transform to what Google is calling "conversations that matter to you." But they will also be tied to the commenter’s Google+ account — a step that could alienate users even as it promises to supply the social network with timely new content.

Beginning this week, the new design will start appearing on the discussions tab for existing channels. The goal for comments, say YouTube's product designers: relevance, not recency. Before now, comments appeared on YouTube in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posts appearing at the top of the feed. The result is a largely undifferentiated stack of comments that often displays the internet hive mind at its worst. On popular videos, comment threads stretch into the thousands, and getting through all of them is practically impossible. "We’ve always been excited about the opportunity that comments give us," says Nundu Janakiram, a YouTube product manager, in an interview with The Verge. "We also know we have a lot of room for improvement."

Where good discussions are buried under bad ones

Janakiram insists YouTube hosts plenty of great discussions — it’s just that they often get buried under the bad ones. The new design works to surface smarter and more interesting discussions, bringing to the top any posts from the video’s creator, people in your Google+ circles, and what the site calls "popular personalities." YouTube will also highlight more active conversations inside the comments and thread them for easier reading, as in Gmail. And if you’re a glutton for punishment, the firehose is still available — just click "all comments" on a drop-down menu where the discussion begins.

A difficult problem

So why did it take YouTube so long to try fixing comments? Janakiram says it took time to develop discussions that are truly personalized. "This is a very complex problem," he says. "Trying to surface meaningful conversations is something that takes work." It also took lots of testing as the company worked to understand which posts users found meaningful. They used both existing signals, like upvotes and downvotes, and new ones, like the level of engagement in threaded conversations.

It’s also the case that Google couldn’t attempt to personalize the comment feed until it knew who was commenting — and that wasn’t really possible until Google+, which brought a unified identity to all of Google. Before the social network launched in June 2011, users had different logins for different Google services. You’d have one identity on YouTube, another on Gmail, and another on Blogger. The company could have enabled logins through another social network, like Facebook or Twitter, but that would hand some of Google’s most valuable data to its rivals. Google+ was conceived as a layer of social interaction that spans the company’s entire range of products, for better and for worse. The new design for YouTube comments shows that mission in action.

Surfacing meaningful conversations

If the new design works as planned, YouTube comments will lead to better discussions that are personalized to individual users, the company says. "At a high level, what we’re trying to do is to surface meaningful conversations for a particular viewer," Janakiram says. That means that if you’re logged into YouTube, the comments you see may be very different than the comments another person sees. If your friends are discussing a particular video, the comment feed could feel compelling in a way it hasn’t before.

Clamoring for change

Video creators have lobbied YouTube to fix its comments for years. Benny and Rafi Fine, whose popular "Kids React" and "Teens React" videos have helped them accumulate more than 500 million views, started asking YouTube for help almost three years ago. They found that their videos, which often involve minors expressing strong opinions, generated torrents of hatred in the comments. "It has forced a huge part of our company to be dedicated to curbing hate-filled, bullying comments for far too long," the brothers wrote in an email to The Verge. They say they are cautiously optimistic that the changes will improve discussions.

But YouTube risks alienating some users by requiring them to use their Google+ identity to comment on the site. The move has been more than a year in the making; in June 2012, Google began asking YouTube users to switch their usernames to their Google+ handles, part of a relentless push to herd users onto the social network. With the change, users can now choose to post their YouTube comments to Google+. It’s a creative way of supplying Google+ with fresh content — YouTube draws comments by the millions. Still, it may upset people who preferred to comment anonymously. (Google says you can still comment on YouTube using a pseudonym, if you use one when you create a Google+ account.)

Jordan Maron, who makes gaming videos under the name Captain Sparklez and has attracted more than 1 billion views, says he expects a backlash to the news that commenting will require a Google+ account. But he says he welcomes the move in the hopes that it will cut down on the number of spammers who use the comments section of his videos to advertise their videos and products. "The only people who will be truly upset at the new system into the distant future will be the people who were abusing the current one," he says.

It may upset people who preferred to comment anonymously

The redesign won’t come to all videos until later this year. For now, you will start seeing them in the discussion tab of video creators who have linked their accounts to Google+ and enabled discussions on their channel page. (You can see the discussion tab for Machinima, a popular YouTube channel focused on gaming, here.) Meanwhile, Google will be tweaking the new ranking algorithm that decides which comments appear in your feed.

It’s a radical change for one of the most visited sites on the internet, and it might well reduce the number of comments on YouTube. But it might also make the comments YouTube does receive better — and for anyone who has spent any time reading them, that’s welcome news.

Weird Twitter is still reeling from the revelation earlier today that the beloved @Horse_ebooks account was not algorithmic, but the project of 29-year-old performance artist Jacob Bakkila. Speaking to The Verge from the Fitzroy Gallery on New York's Lower East Side, where his project Bear Sterns Bravo is showing, Bakkila said the project went deeper than many observers realized.

"The point was never to automate it."

For starters, Bakkila says he never scheduled a tweet. That meant late nights and fitful posting hours, but for Bakkila, the hardship was part of the art. He modeled the project off of the performance art pieces of Marina Abramovic and Tehching Hsieh, in which the artist's endurance becomes a central focus of the art. "The point was to never automate it," Bakkila says. "Part of the installation was performing with no breaks for two years. You begin to see things differently."

"I expected it would be polarizing."

Bakkila confirmed earlier reports that he acquired the Horse account from Russian spammer Alexei Kouznetsov, but said no money changed hands, and Kouznetsov was puzzled why anyone would want an otherwise useless spam account. After that, his goal was to make followers think nothing had changed. "I impersonated the algorithm as best I could." Bakkila also addressed recent speculation that he might be responsible for the popular @Dril account, saying "I'm not Dril, but I'm friends with Dril, and Dril contributed to Bear Sterns Bravo. I don't think he would want me to say any more."

Bakkila has been performing the successor piece, Horse_ebooks 2, all day at the Fitzroy Gallery — so he's missed some of the backlash as devout followers were disappointed to discover a person behind the account. When we told him how the news had been received, he said he'd heard mostly positive things, but wasn't surprised there were haters. "I expected it would be polarizing," Bakkila told us. "Considering people believed it to be human before I took over, it's not exactly a new criticism."

In a move certainly not timed to undermine the attention focused tonight’s debut of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, news has broke that Warner Bros. Television and Fox are moving forward with a new television series based on DC Comics’ Batman characters. Titled Gotham, the police drama will focus on James Gordon long before he became the city’s police commissioner and Dark Knight confidant; when he was just a detective investigating what Deadline reports will be some of Gotham’s most famous criminals.

A police procedural set in Gotham City is an approach familiar to longtime Batman fans. Bill Finger and Bob Kane’s legendary gotham cop was the star of Chuck Dixon and Jim Aparo’s underrated 1996 miniseries Batman: GCPD, but it was the cult favorite Gotham Central by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka and MIchael Lark that made plain, in those creators’ words, how well a Homicide: Life on the Street approach could work in Batman’s world. The book featured a vast cast of characters including Gordon and Detectives Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya, numerous subplots and extremely few appearances by the Dark Knight himself.

The influence of Brubaker and Rucka’s Batman comic books have been seen on screen in the very recent past, in the Dark Knight Trilogy created by Christopher Nolan. Asked about the possibility of a Gotham Central TV series just the other day by USA Today, Brubaker had this to say:

The book is actually more popular now than when we were doing it. There’s been talk of Gotham Central on TV since when we were doing the comic even (in the mid-2000s). Everyone at Warner Bros. really loved it. Chris Nolan, after they did Birds of Prey, had asked them to just please not do any Batman-related stuff until he was done with his trilogy — looking at Birds of Prey, you can see why. It was not the world’s greatest pilot.

Every season, I wait to see if they’re going to announce something like that, and just a couple of months ago there was some article in the Hollywood Reporter about them supposedly developing it. I haven’t heard any confirmation on it or anything. You can easily see it.

Gotham is being developed by Mentalist creator Bruno Heller.