firehose

Five days worth of Soylent. God help me.

Lee Hutchinson

An unassuming USPS box arrived in my mailbox this afternoon, but the label had a word in it that I'd been hoping to see: "SOYLENT." Unpacking, I laid the contents on the counter in front of me. These were five shiny, bulky pouches. They crinkled dully when I touched them, sounding and feeling like the heavy-duty plastic used to wrap military MRE rations.

Arrayed on the counter in front of me was what the technology press has been calling both the future of food and a harbinger of the downfall of modern society: Soylent.

Soylent is a nutritionally complete meal replacement that is being created by Rob Rhinehart, a young engineer and entrepreneur. The story of the product's development has been chronicled by Vice, Forbes, and tons of other huge tech outlets, so re-spinning the tale in detail here would be duplicating the efforts of far better journalists than I. Rhinehart's intent is for Soylent to be a cheap, universally available meal replacement that can reduce a meal to a quick checkbox that you can tick then move on with your day. Soylent isn't necessarily supposed to be the kind of thing you live on forever—though Rhinehart says he has been subsisting on Soylent for months with no apparent ill effects. Rather, this is something that you can consume when stopping to prepare food is inconvenient. Soylent, explains Rhinehart in the product's crowdfunding campaign page, is intended to almost be like the food equivalent of water—"cheap, healthy, convenient, and ubiquitous."

National Panthems

Straight Leg

Bonobos 100% Cotton American Flag Print Straight Leg Washed Chinos

$98.00

A court successfully stopped Google from admitting that it had received secret requests for user data, but some sloppy redacting accidentally gave the company what it was asking for. Earlier today, The Wall Street Journal posted a legal request from an unknown company, asking for permission to let it identify itself as the recipient of a national security letter or NSL — an FBI request for information that also forbids the recipient from talking about it. The court had ordered Google to keep quiet about the letter, and it released a heavily redacted version of the request, with all identifying information stripped.

Well, almost all identifying information. On one page of the ten-page document, the court lets the identity of the company slip. "On June 6, 2013, the public's already healthy interest in Google's receipt of, and response to, national security legal process skyrocketed," reads the document. Google argued that since it was already allowed to list general numbers of NSLs, concealing the fact that it received them was pointless, and that doing so undermined the public's trust in both Google and the government. It also appears to reference a June 18th request to reveal how many requests it gets under FISA surveillance law, using the same justification.

It's already well-known that Google has fought to have some national security letters modified or thrown out, though those attempts generally haven't been successful. In this case, it appears to still be respecting the gag order, refusing to confirm it was involved in the case to the Journal. "We fight for our users and have petitioned the U.S. government for more openness about their requests for user information, so we find the government's position in this case disappointing," it said instead. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge, nor did the attorney named on the request.

Dan Goodin

For the first time, the freely available password cracker ocl-Hashcat-plus is able to tackle passcodes with as many as 55 characters. It's an improvement that comes as more and more people are relying on long passcodes and phrases to protect their website accounts and other online assets.

Until now, ocl-Hashcat-plus, the Hashcat version that can use dozens of graphics cards to simultaneously crack huge numbers of cryptographic hashes, has limited guesses to 15 or fewer characters. (oclHashcat-lite and Hashcat have supported longer passwords, but these programs frequently take much longer to work.) Released over the weekend, ocl-Hashcat-plus version 0.15 can generally accommodate passwords with lengths of 55 characters. Depending on the hash that's being targeted and the types of cracking techniques being used, the maximum can grow as high as 64 characters or as low as 24. The long sought-after improvement targets one of the last remaining defenses people employ to make their passwords resistant to cracking.

"This was by far one of the most requested features," Jens Steube, the lead Hashcat developer who also goes by the handle Atom, wrote in the release notes for the new version. "We resisted adding this 'feature' as it would force us to remove several optimizations, resulting in a decrease in performance for most algorithms. The actual performance loss depends on several factors (GPU, attack mode, etc.), but typically averages around 15 percent."

Verizon Wireless just rolled out some of the most appealing data packages we've ever seen from the carrier. There's one big problem, though. These "Max" tiers — which offer 6GB of wireless data for $30 and 8GB for $50 — are only available if you're financing a device through the just-launched Edge upgrade service. As we've examined at length, these "affordable" plans that let customers upgrade their device more often are a terrible deal for most.

But Verizon is no doubt hoping the savings here will be enough to lure customers away from grandfathered unlimited contracts. At $50, the 8GB tier is particularly attractive since it includes tethering. Regular, non-Edge subscribers pay more to receive smaller chunks of data. But when you factor in the monthly charge that will be lumped onto your bill with Edge upgrades, Verizon's new tiers suddenly lose their luster. If you're dead set on monthly installments on that new Moto X or HTC One, however, it's an option. An option that reportedly will only be available for a limited time.