firehose

Bloomberg reporters have been keeping tabs on Wall Street using their company's financial terminals, the New York Post reports. Bloomberg terminals, which cost $20,000 a year or more to lease, are a fixture in the banking world. But according to the Post, Goldman Sachs executives recently discovered that reporters could track when investors were logging into the terminals, as well as what they were doing — from looking at a wire story to using the messaging tool. In one case, a reporter apparently asked a Goldman Sachs executive whether a partner had left the bank, mentioning that he hadn't been logging into his terminal.

In a statement to the Post, Bloomberg spokesman Ty Trippet said that reporter access had been cut off, supposedly within 24 hours of Goldman Sachs asking Bloomberg about it. "Limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists, and has never included clients' security-level data, position data, trading data or messages," Trippet said. "In light of [Goldman's] concern as well as a general heightened sensitivity to data access, we decided to disable journalist access to this customer relationship information for all clients."

So why were journalists able to get access to terminal information in the first place? Apparently, it's left over from a 1990s system in which reporters would work with sales teams, something that gave them access to customer relationship management tools. We've reached out to Bloomberg for confirmation, but for now, it's the latest incident to test the line between journalistic investigation and inappropriate surveillance.

One World Trade Center hit a milestone today as construction crews set the 408-foot spire on top of the building. Newspapers are calling it a historic moment for the project, bringing the structure's height to a symbolic 1,776 feet. That would make it the tallest building in the western hemisphere and the third tallest building in the world — if it holds up.

But making that official is a good deal more complicated. It won't happen for months, and when the final figure comes in, it could fall as far as to 16th in the global rankings, below both the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower and the Trump International Hotel in Chicago.

It could fall as far as 16th in global rankings

It's up to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the recognized authority on building heights, which will issue an official ruling later this year. The biggest issue is the massive spire, which doubles as a radio antenna. Unfortunately for the Port Authority, antennas are considered non-essential telecom equipment and don't factor into the "architectural top" of the building. If the council decides One WTC's peak is more antenna than spire, it could go on the books as reaching only 1,368 feet. The Willis Tower, in contrast, is 1,450 feet to its rooftop, with an antenna reaching up to 1,730 feet.

It's a point that's drawn controversy throughout the process. The plan was originally for a 400-foot antenna encased in an ornamental white shell, which would have been easier to acknowledge as a permanent architectural element of the building. Last May, the planned casing was dropped after the Port Authority decided it would be too expensive to construct and maintain, a move the building's lead designer described as "unfortunate." The inner antenna remained, but One WTC officials took care to refer to it as a spire in subsequent descriptions. Whether the Council will agree has been the subject of much debate.

Even if the spire is recognized, other factors could rob the building of its symbolic 1,776-foot designation. The Council measures the bottom of the building from the "lowest significant open-air pedestrian entrance," which could be interpreted a number of ways for One WTC. The building has entrances on four sides — from the pedetrian plaza and three adjacent streets — and the Vesey Street entrances is several feet lower than the other three. A few feet won't make much difference in the global rankings, but it illustrates the difficulty of nailing down an exact height before the final drawings are in.

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat is expected to address the issue after its awards symposium on November 7th.

The nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation is raising money to pay for a court stenographer to transcribe the events of Bradley Manning’s court martial. Over the next three to four months, the group hopes to raise the $40 - $50,000 it needs in order to pay someone to transcribe each day’s proceedings. In a press release, the organization decried the military court’s overbearing secrecy including its refusal to release an official transcript or copies of written rulings in one of the most widely-reported cases in history. As a result, journalists have had to rely on first-hand accounts from independent reporters like Alexa O'Brien and Kevin Gosztola.

While the current situation journalists face in trying to cover the trial is "Kafkaesque," in the words of documentary filmmaker Lauren Poitras, Judge Lind cracked down further last month, banning cell phones from the court’s media center. The move was made following the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s decision to publish leaked audio of Manning reading a prepared statement at the trial in March.

Celebrated Chinese film director Yimou Zhang (pictured right) could face fines totalling 160 million yuan ($26 million) following reports he broke family planning laws in China by fathering more than one child. According to the WSJ, Zhang — who directed Hero, The House of Flying Daggers, and designed the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics — is under investigation in the city of Wuxi, located in China’s Jiangsu province, for reportedly fathering as many as seven children.

China's one-child policy restricts urban couples to one child (exempting rural families if their second child is a girl) to limit its expanding population and help bring it out of poverty. Zhang is suspected of having more than one child with his two wives and two other women, and the situation has questions over China's treatment of wealthy citizens that break its family planning laws. While some are charged double their annual income, many escape fines altogether. Jiangsu's provincial family planning commission confirmed to the WSJ that Zhang is under investigation, stating that it didn't "know yet how [it] will deal with it, if it turns out to be true."

By Nathan Grayson on May 10th, 2013 at 11:00 am.

In a post-re-Rise-of-the-Triad world, any franchise reboot is possible. Case in point: Shadow Warrior. The original was a ninja-themed first-person shooter sliced and diced from Duke Nukem 3D‘s cloth – Build engine, unrepentantly offensive humor, and all – but it didn’t exactly have legions of lovers banging down doors for its long-overdue return. At least, not that I’m aware of. Maybe I should’ve looked in more shadows. Regardless, it’s coming back, and Hard Reset developer Flying Wild Hog’s hefting the weighty, blood-rusted katana of responsibility.

The company whose name makes it impossible for me to not think about Cards Against Humanity announced the rather surprising project via Facebook:

“Our next project is finally revealed, we’re working on a total reimagining of Shadow Warrior with Devolver Digital.”

So then, it probably won’t be the same game you knew back in the day, except with handsomer decapitations. I’m not saying there won’t be plenty of gruffly attractive, well-dressed cranial severings, but Flying Wild Hog’s fingerpints will probably be quite apparent. Will Shadow Warrior still be abjectly racist in its “humorous” sensibilities? I suppose time will tell.

Really, the same goes for pretty much everything at the moment. Details are basically non-existent, but we’ll be finding out more very soon. But hey, if nothing else, we know for certain that Flying Wild Hog has a fairly magnificent in-house engine and decent-ish old-school shooter chops. Hard Reset’s level design might have been as drearily dreadful as its setting, but bosses were big and guns went kaboomzang real good. Appearances, then, at least seem to suggest this’ll be a pretty natural fit. For now, though, it’s impossible to say anything for sure.

Hurrah! Get excited! Or don’t! It really doesn’t matter at this point. How about the original Shadow Warrior, though? Did you play it? Did you enjoy it? Have you been silently suffering ever since its credits rolled, praying that it’d eventually return to softly cradle your still-beating heart one last time?