firehose

It's hard to have sympathy for Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, the infamous internet provocateur known for his copious drug use and racial epithets who once bragged to the The New York Times, "I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money." But a team of digital rights lawyers looking to appeal his conviction under the same controversial law used to prosecute Aaron Swartz make the case that, if uncorrected, what's happening to weev will have a devastating impact on the rights of every internet user — troll and non-troll alike.

"It is irrelevant that AT&T subjectively wished that outsiders would not stumble across the data."

The team, which is being led pro-bono by The Volokh Conspiracy's Orin Kerr with support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, filed a brief yesterday to appeal the case. Auernheimer was sentenced in March to 41 months in prison and a $73,000 fine on multiple "hacking" charges for revealing an AT&T security hole which publicly displayed the email addresses of over 100,000 iPad 3G customers on the company's website. Auernheimer and partner Daniel Spitler had discovered that private user information could be viewed by simply incrementing the number at the end of a public URL, and wrote a script to automatically scrape the public data from AT&T's site, which they then shared — without publishing it and after warning AT&T — with a journalist at Gawker.

Of particular concern: how can those actions can possibly constitute "unauthorized" or "exceeding" access to a computer, which do not have clear definitions under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? The team arguing Auernheimer's appeal makes the case that just because the access was "undesirable" and damaging to AT&T's reputation does not make it "unauthorized," since the material in question was available by simply typing in a URL. "It is irrelevant that AT&T subjectively wished that outsiders would not stumble across the data or that Auernheimer hyperbolically characterized the access as a 'theft,'" the brief argues. "The company configured its servers to make the information available to everyone and thereby authorized the general public to view the information."

"The fundamental question in this case is whether it is a crime to visit a public website."

The root of the issue is the vague language of the statute, which has allowed Terms of Service agreements to fill in the blanks with their own definitions of "unauthorized" or "exceeding access." The consequence, digital rights groups say, is that vast amounts of innocuous internet activity can be easily made into felony offenses, like using a fake name on a social network, if the site's administrators simply assert they didn't give a user explicit permission. "The fundamental question in this case is whether it is a crime to visit a public website," the brief states. It cites a court case, United States v. Gines-Peres, which ruled that a company that “places information on the information superhighway clearly subjects said information to being accessed by every conceivable interested party,” unless “protective measures or devices that would have controlled access” are put in place.

But the court in the weev case didn't seem to make that distinction. Instead, the prosecution focused largely on weev's personality, citing unsavory and agressive public statements made on Reddit prior to the trial rather than examining the technical aspects of whether or not he had actually broken the law. Members of Congress are currently pushing new legislation designed to narrow the CFAA's scope so that future prosecutions only target malicious intruders, not authorized users a company might find undesirable.

Apple and Time Warner Cable have nearly finalized a deal that will allow TWC subscribers to stream cable programming with Apple TV. Bloomberg is today reporting the scoop, claiming that an announcement confirming the monumental agreement will be made within "a few months." Responding to the rumor, a Time Warner Cable spokes person didn't do much to quell speculation, telling Bloomberg only "We don’t have an agreement with them at this time."

If true, the move would represent Apple's first time offering live TV on its set-top box. The company has recently been expanding content available on Apple TV, most recently (and finally) bringing HBO Go to customers — a streaming app that has long been available on competing living room devices. Apple has largely stuck to video-on-demand content with Apple TV, limiting live coverage to its own special events.

For Time Warner Cable, the territory is more familiar. The provider already allows third-party hardware to act as an extra cable box — so long as they're being used inside of a subscriber's home. Pursing deals with cable operators (and embracing the TV Everywhere model) rather than signing individual TV networks and content producers could allow Apple to overcome the difficulties it's reportedly faced securing programming, both for Apple TV and a long-rumored Apple-branded television.

By Nathan Grayson on July 2nd, 2013 at 6:00 pm.

Klei has put marks on ninjas and avoided starvation (for now), and it’s all been pretty great. But now that all of that’s out in the open, what’s next? How do you follow gloriously precise stealth and maddeningly demented survival? Why, with turn-based tactical espionage, of course. Otherwise, there just wouldn’t be enough adjectives. I sat down with Klei co-founder Jamie Cheng for a brief chat about Icognita, which he’s billing as a more information-centric cousin to modern XCOM. Somewhat fittingly (though also frustratingly), he kept many details hidden away beneath his figurative trench coat, but we were able to discuss the broader strokes: espionage, the game’s upcoming paid alpha (ala Don’t Starve), procedural generation, and PC as the primary platform. Give the chat a quick read after the break.

RPS: So then, what’s Incognita all about? 

Cheng: Well, what I’ve been asking everyone is, based on your first impression [of an image that basically looks like the one up top], what kind of game do you think this is?

RPS: Based on the perspective, it looks tactical. There’s also a big grid, so I’m guessing turn-based tactical, ala XCOM. And the name Incognita makes it sound espionage-y, so is it centered around that sort of thing? 

Cheng: You are… frickin’ spot on. That’s exactly what it is: turn-based tactical espionage.

The game is already playable. We’re gonna do the same thing we did for Don’t Starve. People are gonna be able to play it early while it’s still in development [and offer feedback]. Don’t Starve was this weird experiment that blew up to be just amazing. We wanted to build a community. I knew that. And I wanted to work with them and talk with them all the time. Don’t Starve ended up a way better game because of the community.

So same thing. Incognita is again an evolving game. I think that a game like Mark of the Ninja would’ve been much harder to have the community involved. If players just had to replay the same level or something, I think that’d get pretty boring. And of course there’s the story, which would’ve gotten spoiled. So it’s a big difference.

But I think Incognita will work out much better.

RPS: So is Incognita a more emergent sort of game? Because games like XCOM aren’t quite as open and random as, say, Don’t Starve, but they’re close. Are you focusing on that element? 

Cheng: We’re using procedural generation again. It’s gonna be pretty raucous. It’s almost like we’re taking all the learnings from Don’t Starve and Mark of the Ninja, and making something new with it.

RPS: How exactly does espionage work in a turn-based setting? How is it different from simply positioning your forces and eliminating enemies, ala XCOM or Fire Emblem or others along those lines? 

Cheng: Well, we’re still keeping a lot under wraps right now, but I can say a little. Here’s the idea: if you play the new XCOM – which is a fucking amazing game – it’s 90 percent positioning. Ten percent information gathering and 90 percent positioning. It’s kind of like, “I sort of wonder where the enemy is, but if I position myself well, march forward, and re-position myself well, then I’ll mostly be fine.”

The idea behind Incognita is, we want information to be power. We want information to be a very key part of your experience.

RPS: Do you control multiple operatives in the field? Just one? 

Cheng: I can’t say a lot more right now. Just give us a bit more time.

RPS: Hm, OK then. What’s the dev team structure like? Is it a mix of Mark and Don’t Starve folks?

Cheng: They are a lot of the Mark of the Ninja group, so it’s actually been in development for quite some time now. It was parallel with [Don't Starve].

RPS: When will the open alpha launch? Sounds like it’ll be pretty soon.

Cheng: We’re thinking it’s gonna be late in the summer. But it’s really when we feel like it’s ready, at least for feedback. As opposed to, “This game’s just broken, man”. We’re gonna make sure it’s pretty polished.

RPS: You showed me a picture on iPad, but is PC the main platform? 

Cheng: PC is the primary platform, yeah. It’s just easier to carry around an iPad. It’s definitely a PC game. I don’t know if we’re gonna support it right off the bat, but we’re gonna do Mac, and we hope to support Linux.

RPS: Thank you for your time.

Though the HTC One S is still a young phone at just over a year old, its update cycle has come to an end. HTC tells us that the One S will no longer be receiving updates, keeping it on Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean at the latest. The device's 1.5GHz processor and 1GB of RAM should have made it powerful enough to handle any Android updates coming down the pipeline right now, but the lack of continued support from an Android manufacturer remains — unfortunately — unsurprising.

That brevity of support underscores what continues to be one of the bigger issues for Android devices. Even the iPhone 4, which is now over three years old, is still supported by Apple and will be updated to iOS 7 when it's released this fall. That level of support has so far been impossible to come by on Android devices, shy of Google's official Nexus line. In the past, HTC itself has done better when it comes to continuing support — even on the One S, HTC managed to bring Android 4.1 Jelly Bean over within just a few months of the operating system's release.

HTC tells us that One S users should "feel confident" with the device as it is. Its full statement is below.

"We can confirm that the HTC One S will not receive further Android OS updates and will remain on the current version of Android and HTC Sense. We realize this news will be met with disappointment by some, but our customers should feel confident that we have designed the HTC One S to be optimized with our amazing camera and audio experiences."

These lovely women were from the era when bikes became affordable to more cyclists.