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Medical Marijuana Is Now Officially Kosher
TV: Great Job, Internet!: A 12-foot-high statue of Colin Firth as a wet Mr. Darcy is on display in London now
In 1995, Colin Firth became a British sex symbol just by getting wet in a TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice. Firth’s soaked strut has been an Internet meme ever since, spawning gifs, LOL-type images, and, now, a majestic 12-foot-high statue in London’s Serpentine Lake. The art—which depicts Firth as Darcy from the waist up and clad in only his sculpturally impressive thin, soaked, white button-down—was placed there to promote Drama, a new British TV network and will move from site to site before being more semi-permanently placed in a lake in Lyme Park, where the scene was first filmed. It will remain there until February, unless some lovestruck Firth fanatic ferries it away it in the middle of the night and makes it the centerpiece of her shrine. Not that anyone would do that, of course.
Read moreAmerica Is No Longer The Fattest Nation On Earth
firehose'The FAO last month reported Mexico has a 32.8 percent adult obesity rate — just above America's 31.8 percent — blaming increasingly industrialized agricultural production for a worldwide epidemic of both obesity and malnutrition. The Mexican rate may pale beside tiny, heavyweight countries like the Cook Islands, but it ranked Mexico the fattest, populous nation.
Avila and other experts criticize longstanding anti-poverty programs for putting cash into rural families' hands that too often is being spent on fried snacks and sodas rather than nutritious foods.'
Dragon Con Buys Out Ed Kramer
Twitter updates iOS, Mac, Android apps to finally sync direct messages
firehoseamazing innovation
Twitter has just updated its iOS app with a sorely-needed feature: direct message syncing. From now on, Twitter says that when you read a DM on one of its official clients (Tweetdeck, Twitter for Mac, Twitter for Android, or on the Twitter website), it will be marked as read across anywhere else you check. For anyone who uses DMs on a regular basis, this is a great addition — no longer will your account be plagued by the familiar "unread" dot whenever you check your messages on other devices. The update is available now in the iTunes app store.
- Source Twitter (iTunes App Store)
- Related Items update twitter sync syncing twitter for ios direct messages
Without the web, Syrian journalists turn to pirate radio
Images of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Photo credit: James Gordon (Flickr)
Lina Chawaf has spent the past two years watching her friends disappear in Syria. Some were killed, others imprisoned. Many, like Chawaf, were journalists.
"Real journalists can't work in Syria," Chawaf, 43, explained over coffee in Paris last week. She's been living here in exile for the last two months, after having fled her native Damascus more than a year ago. She spent 20 years working as a journalist in Syria, but left for Canada once President Bashar al-Assad began tightening control over the media following the outbreak of civil war in 2011.
"Now, if you say or write anything that the government doesn’t like, they will arrest you or kill you," she said. "I couldn't cooperate with that. Everyone has a conscience."
Can old media succeed where new media failed?
Assad's propaganda offensive has crippled Syria's media, dramatically skewing coverage of a conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people. Foreign news broadcasts are blocked in the country, and correspondents are regularly killed. Whereas news in other Arab Spring countries was disseminated through Twitter and social media, Syria’s internet infrastructure — like much of the country — is in tatters. Content is heavily filtered, and web access is sporadic or, at times, even nonexistent. .
Without a stable and secure internet, Chawaf and a group of other exiled journalists have begun turning to more traditional technologies. The technical challenges they face are formidable, and the risks could prove fatal, but Chawaf remains optimistic that the old can succeed where the new has failed.
"Syrian stories for Syrian people."
Late last month, she and a team of five Syrian journalists launched Radio Rozana — a station that aims to bring objective and independent reporting to Syrian listeners. The Arabic-language station gathers news from a network of undercover journalists on the ground in Syria, and broadcasts two hours of news, commentary, and interviews every day via satellite and on its website.
For now, the operation is fairly modest. Chawaf and her team broadcast from a small apartment in north Paris, and rely exclusively on funding from French government agencies, Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), and other European nonprofits. But Rozana is still in a fledgling phase, and Chawaf hopes to see an increase in listeners when the station launches on FM radio in the near future.
Lina Chawaf, co-founder and program editor at Radio Rozana
Whether Rozana can actually penetrate Assad's media fortress remains unclear. Chawaf, the station's program editor, acknowledges that the regime could use jammers to block Rozana’s FM signal, though she doesn't seem troubled by the prospect. ("We would just switch to a new frequency.") Rozana plans to install transmitters in other countries to beam FM waves into Syria from afar, but Chawaf declined to say which countries are involved or how many would be installed, citing security concerns.
Syrian law forbids radio stations from broadcasting political content, so if Rozana draws an audience, authorities would likely seek to jam its transmissions. Last year, the BBC accused Syria of jamming its satellite transmissions, in violation of international satellite regulations. That underscores a fundamental tension in Chawaf's plan: she wants to reach Syrians, but if Rozana causes a buzz, the risk of government intervention becomes greater.
So far, Rozana's website remains accessible from within Syria, though Chawaf says the site's primary goal is to help spread the word about the station itself. Only around 20 percent of Syrians have access to the web, and those that do typically have to deal with power outages, slow service, or blackouts. Chawaf hopes that offering Rozana on several platforms will increase its chances for success, noting that news and information could trickle down from those who are connected in the country.
"They’re putting their lives at risk."
Of more immediate concern is the safety of the station's correspondents. Rozana — which translates in Arabic as "the window that lets the light in" — gathers its news from a team of 30 citizen reporters in Syria. Chawaf and a team of RSF journalists trained them for six weeks in neighboring Turkey earlier this year, giving some of them pseudonyms to protect their anonymity.
"It’s easier for them to move around in liberated areas, so they can use their real names there, but in areas controlled by the regime, it’s more dangerous," Chawaf said. "They’re putting their lives at risk."
Chawaf declined to detail how she communicates with Rozana's correspondents, saying only that she relies on a variety of security systems to evade Syrian surveillance. She admits that it can be difficult to verify the objectivity of reports she receives — especially when they concern something as gruesome and personal as civil war.
"You have to separate feeling from truth."
"It's not easy to control emotion if you're seeing your own people getting killed," she says. "But as a journalist, you have to be neutral, which is how we trained them in Turkey. You have to separate feeling from truth."
In previous interviews, Chawaf has stressed that Rozana's coverage would not be influenced by its funders. The French government has been among the most outspoken supporters of the rebel groups looking to overthrow Assad, but Chawaf says her motives have nothing to do with politics or an "overseas agenda." Rozana, she says, only aims to bring "Syrian stories to Syrian people."
In Paris, Chawaf finds herself far removed from the atrocities that her correspondents witness every day, though launching Rozana has demanded personal sacrifices. Her husband and two teenage children remain in Canada, where the family moved after fleeing Damascus, and she’s not sure when she may see them again. Her radio station’s funds are finite, but there’s also no sign that the Syrian conflict will end anytime soon, and Chawaf seems determined to broadcast for as long as the war continues.
To Chawaf, Rozana is more than just a radio station
There's a subtle sense of resignation to Chawaf’s voice as she discusses her family — the hushed tones of a mother torn from her children. But there's a quiet determination there, too. Her tenor is soft yet deliberate when she talks about the friends she's lost, her deep, plaintive eyes silently speaking to the horrors they’ve seen.
It’s only when the conversation turns to Syria's media crackdown that her voice rises, eyes alight. It becomes clear in these moments that to Chawaf, Rozana is more than just a radio station — it's a duty she must carry out both as a journalist and a Syrian.
And although the station's future remains precarious, at least one thing is not: Chawaf won't set foot on native soil anytime soon.
"No way," she says with a soft laugh. "Maybe not for many years."
Osama Bin Laden Was Stopped For Speeding 8 Years Ago
Next-generation genome sequencing yields healthy test-tube baby, scientists announce
A technique that could render in-vitro fertilization (IVF) markedly more reliable, and maybe even less expensive, has for the first time been used to select an embryo that yielded the birth of a healthy baby boy.
Connor Levy was born in June to parents in Pennsylvania, who'd tried IVF on previous occasions without success, scientists announced on Monday. The situation of Levy's parents is hardly a unique one: only one-third of IVF procedures ever result in a baby, largely because of DNA abnormalities in the embryo that's selected. Scientists typically rely on a combination of visual inspection and blind luck to pick an embryo that'll be fertilized and then implanted, but a bevy of chromosomal abnormalities and genetic defects often thwart success. Existing tests that scan an embryo for some irregularities are slow and pricey: in the US, a single test runs around $3,000.
Specific genetic abnormalities or vulnerabilities to inherited illnesses
But the technique that led to Levy's birth, developed by a team out of the University of Oxford, might soon transform the uncertain nature of IVF for more people. By taking advantage of breakthroughs in sequencing technology, researchers are able use a single cell from each embryo to sequence around 2 percent of that embryo's DNA. Using that data, they can select a viable candidate for implantation. Right now, the technique is only used to spot chromosomal abnormalities, thought to be the primary cause of failed IVF. But as technology improves, researchers note, the method could also check embryos for specific genetic abnormalities or vulnerabilities to inherited illnesses.
Thus far, the Oxford team has used the method on two couples — in addition to Levy's parents, a woman in New York is expected to deliver her baby this summer. Next up? A larger-scale clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of the procedure on a group of prospective parents.
- Via AFP
- Source University of Oxford
- Image Credit Sabianmaggy (flickr)
- Related Items genome sequencing ivf genetics dna connor levy university of oxford
Prison visiting room photo backdrops
The image above left is a photo backdrop in the visiting room at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in New York. It's one of many unusual paintings found in prison visiting rooms around the United States. Their function is to make family photos more pleasant. Alyse Emdur photographed these scenes and compiled images sent by inmates into a book, titled Prison Landscapes. Above right, James Bowlin holds a fake trout bass at the US Penitentiary in Marion Illinois. BLDBLOG posted an interview with Emdur.
Fantastical scenes are actually much less common—from what I gather from my correspondence, realism is like gold in prison. That’s the form of artistic expression that’s most appreciated and most respected, so that’s often the goal for the backdrop painter."Captive America: An Interview with Alyse Emdur" (BLDBLOG)
Prison Landscapes (Amazon)
    
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Photo
firehosevia Vjuliao
eternal autoreshare
Solidarity Link! Order of the White Feather
firehosevia GN
Do not mistake my condemnation of Professor Elemental as some sort of career jealousy or random naming because I am a self-proclaimed feminazgul. He is extremely talented (and if you ask Olivia, she'd agree) and I have heartily enjoyed his music. I've had pancakes with him while he talked about his work with disabled children and watched his eyes sparkle while he talks about hip hop. I've no doubt he is capable of great good, but that doesn't cancel out his capacity for great evil, and what he did to O.M. Grey was unconscionable. To defend him is to look at O.M. Grey's pain and say, "nope, not important." By no means is he the only one.
Note that both people are incredibly different. With the one, it was simply people noticing him hooking up before what he did to Olivia (note the escalation of "celebrity hooks up with people, slowly becomes entitled"), while with the other, it was people noticing how incredibly explosive he could be but figured his friends would keep him in check, all the while alienating various people around him.
EDIT: For everyone's edification, a follow-up post has been written.
Western black rhino declared extinct - CNN.com
London (CNN) -- Africa's western black rhino is now officially extinct according the latest review of animals and plants by the world's largest conservation network.
The subspecies of the black rhino -- which is classified as "critically endangered" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species -- was last seen in western Africa in 2006.
Protecting E-Mail from Eavesdropping
firehose'The NSA has to process a ginormous amount of traffic. It's the "drinking from a fire hose" problem; they cannot afford to devote a lot of time to decrypting everything, because they simply don't have the computing resources.'
you're welcome, everybody
In the wake of the Snowden NSA documents, reporters have been asking me whether encryption can solve the problem. Leaving aside the fact that much of what the NSA is collecting can't be encrypted by the user -- telephone metadata, e-mail headers, phone calling records, e-mail you're reading from a phone or tablet or cloud provider, anything you post on Facebook -- it's hard to give good advice.
In theory, an e-mail program will protect you, but the reality is much more complicated.
- The program has to be vulnerability-free. If there is some back door in the program that bypasses, or weakens, the encryption, it's not secure. It's very difficult, almost impossible, to verify that a program is vulnerability-free.
- The user has to choose a secure password. Luckily, there's advice on how to do this.
- The password has to be managed securely. The user can't store it in a file somewhere. If he's worried about security for after the FBI has arrested him and searched his house, he shouldn't write it on a piece of paper, either.
- Actually, he should understand the threat model he's operating under. Is it the NSA trying to eavesdrop on everything, or an FBI investigation that specifically targets him -- or a targeted attack, like dropping a Trojan on his computer, that bypasses e-mail encryption entirely?
This is simply too much for the poor reporter, who wants an easy-to-transcribe answer.
We've known how to send cryptographically secure e-mail since the early 1990s. Twenty years later, we're still working on the security engineering of e-mail programs. And if the NSA is eavesdropping on encrypted e-mail, and if the FBI is decrypting messages from suspects' hard drives, they're both breaking the engineering, not the underlying cryptographic algorithms.
On the other hand, the two adversaries can be very different. The NSA has to process a ginormous amount of traffic. It's the "drinking from a fire hose" problem; they cannot afford to devote a lot of time to decrypting everything, because they simply don't have the computing resources. There's just too much data to collect. In these situations, even a modest level of encryption is enough -- until you are specifically targeted. This is why the NSA saves all encrypted data it encounters; it might want to devote cryptanalysis resources to it at some later time.
Giant Bomb's Ryan Davis passes away at 34
firehoseholy fucking shit!
"Many of you know that Ryan was recently married. In the face of this awfulness, many of us will at least always remember him as we last saw him: outrageously, uproariously happy, looking forward to his next adventure with the biggest grin his face could hold," Matthew Rorie wrote.
Davis founded Giant Bomb in 2008 with longtime compadre Jeff Gerstmann after they departed Gamespot. Our condolences go out to Davis' friends, family and colleagues at Giant Bomb.
Giant Bomb's Ryan Davis passes away at 34 originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 08 Jul 2013 13:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
DualShock 4 light bar can't be switched off, says Yoshida
firehose"Twitter users have expressed concern over the light's possible reflection on a TV in a dark environment."
"Twitter users"
The light bar on the PS4 was originally pitched as a way to communicate things like player health, back when the PS4 was first announced in February. More tangible ideas were conveyed at E3, however, in a demonstration for The Playroom, a series of tech demos included with every PS4 system. In The Playroom, players use the light bar on the DualShock 4 in conjunction with the PS4 Eye to play Air Hockey and interact with little robot men.
We've got some questions into Sony for more clarification on the light's effect on battery life and will update this post when we hear back.
DualShock 4 light bar can't be switched off, says Yoshida originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 08 Jul 2013 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The ‘X-Men’ Episode Guide 1×06: Cold Vengeance
firehosevia otters
ask about our mutant discount
The ‘X-Men’ Episode Guide 1×06: Cold Vengeance
Joss Whedon Loves Barbara Holm
firehosemeanwhile, in Portland
Yes, OUR Barbara Holm.
@barbara_holm killed it at Tonic tonight. And by it I mean me. She stabbed me. With funny. pic.twitter.com/NNUWMnfYmz
— Joss Whedon (@josswhedon) July 8, 2013
This is all the more delightful if you know that Barbara has a blog called "Letters to Buffy."
Also, yes, Joss Whedon appears to have been in Portland on Sunday night. "Eee" and all that.
Pugilista: Fitspo Memes - The Pugilista Edition
A couple of months ago, one of my friends found this little gem on a Facebook "Gym Motivation" page:
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| https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=360021220774966&set=a.107651092678648.14508.107648636012227&type=1&theater |
In the virtual Pinterest and Facebook world, countless women (and men, too) view pages, like the one above, that promote images of "health and fitness." And I put "health" in quotation marks, because a number of these memes promote disordered eating and thinking and are, in my opinion, the opposite of health.
Many of these memes rely on shaming to put forth their message. I will not directly post to any of these images, but here are a few of the quotes imposed upon pictures of very lean women:
"Tears will get your sympathy. Sweat will get you results."
"Success trains. Failure complains."
"This is what dedication looks like"
That final one is especially problematic to me. You can be dedicated without abs. You can be determined without a thigh-gap. And you can be worthwhile without large glutes.
I know a lot of people find "Strong is the New Skinny" motivating, but to me, it is just as degrading and shaming as any other beauty paradigm.
So what is my complaint? Several of my friends have said that they would be flattered to have their picture turned into a fitness meme. And I understand that desire. But it is this quote, this idea that my 'dreams' are somehow wrapped up in my abs or arms or thighs that truly bothers me. My 'dreams' are not to have nice abs and to conform to some other person's standards of beauty, but to finish my doctorate (done!), write my book, teach the sport that I love. I dream of being a good person, of motivating people through my actions, not my body.
If "Female Gym Motivation" wanted to just post my picture, preferably the original and not this odd, darkened version*, I would be okay with that. But adding this quote somehow made me feel like the interwebs was attempting to rewrite the totality of my existence. I have gone from a Professor and Coach, to a vapid and cliched trope. And maybe I am just a wee bit sensitive, but I already detest fitspo memes, and being made into one makes me feel, well, shamed.
*Notice how they used a strange effect on the meme to accentuate my muscles. It also gives me the look of having rolled around in the mud for several hours.
Mixionary: The Art of the Classic Cocktail
firehosevia KV
Though once considered more of a learned skill than an elevated art form, mixology has gone one to become a phenomenon. Whether you’re a purist and revere the classics or prefer the thrill of spirited invention, concocting cocktails is a marriage of science and innovation. Australian creative agency The Monkeys has taken that concept a step further with Mixionary, a series of color-blocked posters that celebrate the most beloved cocktails through deconstructed screen prints.
Created in collaboration with the beverage company Diageo, Mixionary sees classic cocktails like the Vodka Martini and Bloody Mary represented in color blocks that vary in size according to their volume within the drink. A Gin & Tonic becomes alternating blocks of cool grey and bright green while a Cosmopolitan juxtaposes the brightness of cranberry juice and a twist of lemon with the pale puce of Smirnoff vodka. From far away, each print resembles a stretched out homage to Josef Albers or a modern movie poster devoid of graphics and titles. It’s a genius idea that begs for further renditions. Check out more here.
Is the Hulk Catholic? Definitely, says the Vatican newspaper
firehose“Bruce Banner, the incredible green man, in fact married his beloved Betty Ross in a church and a Catholic priest presided at the ceremony,” he writes in the full-page article. “There are other indications dispersed among the hundreds of comic strips dedicated to him that are said to unequivocally reveal his faith.”
Batman, too, is Catholic, Vallini determines, offering as proof that Bruce Wayne’s mother was Catholic and noting a sequence depicting the character as a young boy is depicted saying his prayers by his bed. Again, though, Adherents.com brings the writer’s finding into question. The website arrives at the conclusion that the Dark Knight is a lapsed Catholic or a lapsed Episcopalian, stating, “there is some disagreement among fans as well as among writers about whether the character is a mostly lapsed Catholic or a mostly lapsed Episcopalian. There is universal agreement that the character is not an active churchgoer in any faith.”
But there’s at least thing on which L’Osservatore Romano and Adherents.com can agree: Superman is _definitely_ a Methodist.
Tezuka Osamu no Budda [videorecording] : akai sabaku yo! utsukushiku / seisaku "Tezuka Osamu no Budda" Seisaku Iinkai ; gensaku Tezuka Osamu ; kantoku Morishita Kōzō ; kyakuhon Yoshida Reiko.
firehosevia Overbey: "Looks like Harvard finally purchased the animated film of Tezuka Osamu’s Buddha."
Publisher: [Tōkyō] : Hanbai Tōei : Hatsubai Tōei Bideo, 2011.
Subjects: Foreign films Japan., Buddhists India Biography., Gautama Buddha Fiction., Animated films., Feature films., Fiction films., Film adaptations.
It's Time To Gentrify Android
firehosethis article is... weird
Chewbacca’s Voice Recreated Using an Electric Guitar
In this short video from 2008, Milwaukee-based Ryan “Bastian Stache” Albydamned and Sean “The Situation” Williamson recreate the voice of Chewbacca with an electric guitar.
video via Ryan Albydamned
via B3TA, The Awesomer
Aksys bringing curry-making RPG Holy Sorcery Story to North America this year
Publisher Akysus will localize Compile Heart's role-playing game Holy Sorcery Story (Sei Madou Monogatari) for release on PlayStation Vita in North America, the company announced at Anime Expo 2013 this weekend.
The dungeon crawler, from the developers of the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, is slated to launch later this year under the title Sorcery Saga: The Curse of the Great Curry God. Players will control protagonist Pupuru, a suspended student of the Magic Academy, on her travels through the world's various dungeons. Her journey is spurred by an old book of magical curry recipes, and she decides to gather the required ingredients to make curry good enough to save her local curry restaurant.
The game originally launched in Japan in March. Developer Compile Heart showed the title, along with Vita card battler Monster Monpiece, at Game Connection in San Francisco shortly before its Japanese launch.
Aksys Games specializes in localization Japanese video games for a western audience. Most recently the company has brought interactive visual novel Hakuoki: Memories of the Shinsengumi and Murasama: Rebirth.
Study Releases Predictably Depressing Findings on the State of Female Directors in British TV
firehose'the number of female directors for the BBC and ITV's flagship shows–Doctor Who and Poirot, respectively—totaling an impressive zero. I'm sorry, did I say impressive? I meant "incredibly frustrating," especially when you consider five years ago five percent of those shows' directors were repping it for the ladies.'
On social networking...
firehosesuddenly relevant
There's no sexism in gaming
firehosevia Russian Sledges
I am tired of all this "sexism in gaming" crap that has come up recently. Reasonable people know that fantasy has nothing to do with reality: believing otherwise infantilises us and treats us as if we cannot distinguish one from the other. People who are outraged about this latest ‘gaming drama’ need a severe reality check: those masculists simply seek out reasons to get upset all the time. The "disembodied bloody crotch in Speedos" outrage went too far, for a start.
A resin model of someone’s disembodied crotch isn’t hurting anyone. It’s simply something to put on one’s mantelpiece and enjoy. People sometimes ask me about mine when I am hosting dinner: and I say, ‘Oh yes, haha. I’m a gamer,’ and that’s the end of the conversation. One of my male friends left dinner early once because of it; his girlfriend apologised for him and said that he’d once been sexually assaulted and that he was just really sensitive about this sort of thing. We both shook our heads about it. “I’m so glad we have freedom of speech,” she said to me, ‘the Nazis wouldn’t have allowed this to be made. He’ll get over it - he’s just really emotional about that stuff."
The males who say they they are not represented by our videogame heroines are merely ignoring the fact that women have all the disposable income. Despite this, they whine and whine about how they would like to see Alex Vance actually do something in his scenes in the game, instead of fawn and flirt with our heroine Freewoman. Can’t they just enjoy the fantasy? It’s no reflection on real life: no women really shoot alien headcrabs in laboratory settings, and neither do males occupy secondary positions in most parts of our society and sit around to gratify our need to become pregnant. That would be absurd. Fantasy is not reality: we go to our games to get away from reality. Why don’t you just enjoy the fantasy? Games are a special medium, completely separate from our wider culture and any attempt to put them in context is just insulting.
Furthermore, reasonable people would see that asking to put male soldiers in the Call of Duty series is simply not do-able. Since the age of the Amazon, women have waged wars, because they have a higher pain threshold than males and have more stamina in every area of war. Who would take a male Battlefield seriously? Including men would simply cloud the matter; when crawling through tunnels, as is often necessary in war, our eyes would fall on the male backside - from then on women would be irreparably compromised.
I mean, who would take this guy seriously a soldier?
To anyone getting their boxers in a bunch over this, I say: buy the games with the male protagonists. There are at least four of them. They are attractive, virile boy characters with a lot going for them. Show us you mean business by buying those titles. Lawrence Croft is still an icon: that bulging crotch and tight ass, the washboard abs - what more could you want to identify with? He’s everything you aspire to. And those of you who complain we didn’t put any clothes on him - he became an icon because of that lack of clothes! And Lawrence Croft has trousers now, think about that. Women’s interest in a sexy, provocative young male is what gave Lawrence Croft his iconic status. Stop asking for special treatment by the games industry, we are making the best games in whatever way we see fit.
Anyway, you guys wouldn't even have videogames without women. Remember that. With Ada Lovelace at our head, we invented the technology that makes them possible. The majority of the games industry is populated by hardworking, talented women who have been producing the best interactive experiences for 20 years. Why shouldn’t we make videogames where we can look at sinewy, naked males who moan sexually when we toy with them? Why don’t you start your own games industry where you can make your male-led games about football and the colour blue? Perhaps then we will stop making jokes about how you can get back in the kitchen and take the bins out.
It's only men who can't get laid that complain about all this, let's face it. My boyfriend enjoys when I play games where the male character is sexy and capable. Do yourself a favour: stop being so uptight and humourless. Games are a special medium, don’t spoil them by trying to change the way they are made. Separate them from your masculist politics and sit back down on the couch. This ‘sexism’ in technology doesn’t exist.
Cara Ellison is a writer for Rock Paper Shotgun and other sites. She tweets: @carachan1
Perfect Forward Secrecy
firehosevia Overbey: "tl;dr DuckDuckGo is the only ethical and safe search engine."
If, like me, you’re unsettled by the recent government(s) snooping you are probably looking for ways to secure your on-line activities. One obvious way is to use SSL/TLS whenever possible. If you use Firefox or Chrome, HTTPS Everywhere can help.
Sadly, even if you believe in the security of SSL/TLS, there is, for most sites, a single point of failure. When the client and server negotiate to agree on an encryption key, the negotiation is encrypted by the site’s static key. That means that if the key is later broken or exposed and, like the NSA, you have saved HTTPS sessions, you can retroactively decrypt them all.
What’s needed is perfect forward secrecy (PFS). That means that if one session is decrypted, the others are still safe. For SSL/TLS, perfect forward secrecy requires you to change the key used to encrypt the session negotiation for each session. All of this is beautifully explained by Michael Horowitz over at Computer World. Because he goes into reasonable detail, the article is a bit long but well worth reading. I urge you to take the time to give it a look.
Netcraft also has an excellent article on PFS that covers much of the same material and gives more information on the support that various browsers provide for it. It explains why some browsers, such as Safari, which support PFS nevertheless fail to apply it for some sites. Definitely worth reading.
As users, of course, there is little we can do except encourage the sites we use to implement it. Currently Google and a few smaller sites do this but most do not. That’s probably because you get a performance hit when you implement perfect forward secrecy. One happy note for the paranoid among us is that DuckDuckGo is now using PFS with all the major browsers.
Those of us who are technologits are in a position to make things better. Whenever we can, we should push to use SSL/TLS with PFS on our Web sites. That may mean making a case to management or beefing up the server if needed. Not easy, of course, but well worth it if it helps secure the Web and keep the Nosy Parkers at bay.
Watch This 10-Year-Old Beat An International Master At Chess
firehosethis is hilarious