firehose

Three riders of one of Uber's black cabs were taken for what one described as a "high speed chase across state lines," in Washington DC, with a local taxi official in tow. Yesterday, New Yorker Ryan Simonetti and two of his colleagues hopped into an Uber vehicle for a ride, which quickly escalated into a chase between the driver and a DC taxi inspector, reports The Washington Post. The taxi official was talking to the driver before Simonetti and company got into the vehicle. Just after they got in, the driver took off — going so far as to run a red light to shake the tail, who reportedly had police lights on at the time.

Police radios were offline

The chase, which Simonetti said lasted eight to 10 minutes, eventually resulted in the driver letting the passengers out, but that was only after being blocked by the taxi inspector, and with Simonetti threatening the driver by telling the man he'd "knock the side of your head in." The driver relented by pulling over, but then took off again, going the wrong way up an exit ramp in reverse to make his escape.

Police might have gotten involved, though the ordeal just happened to occur during a nearly half-hour disruption of the city's emergency communications system that was caused by a power outage. The incident resulted in the unnamed Uber driver being removed from service, The Post reports. Uber has refused to give officials the name given its privacy policy

The New York district judge presiding over the criminal case against Ross Ulbricht, the alleged creator of underground online drug market Silk Road, has decreed that cryptocurrency Bitcoin is functionally the same thing as real money. Ulbricht had argued that he could not be charged for money laundering for his alleged part in creating Silk Road, as Bitcoin was not a real currency, but Judge Katherine Forrest rejected his defense. "The money laundering statute is broad enough to encompass use of Bitcoins in financial transactions," Forrest wrote in a ruling released on Wednesday. "Any other reading would-in light of Bitcoin's sole raison d'être be nonsensical."

Bitcoin clearly acted as money on Silk Road

Ulbricht's argument against the money laundering charge centered on statements from the IRS and US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network in which the bodies said Bitcoin did not qualify as "funds" or a "monetary instrument." The IRS defines the cryptocurrency as "property," but Forrest said the governmental bodies had no position to define money laundering laws. "Sellers using Silk Road are not alleged to have given their narcotics and malicious software away for free — they are alleged to have sold them," Forrest writes, with Bitcoin clearly acting as money in the transactions.

In addition to money laundering, Ulbricht is also accused of a range of criminal charges including narcotics trafficking conspiracy, hacking conspiracy, and  for setting up and running Silk Road. Ulbricht, who was also accused of hiring assassins to kill six people, had argued that he had done no wrong in providing a platform that was later swamped with nefarious sellers of illegal items, but Judge Forrest rejected that argument too.

Silk Road was "a drug dealer's dream house"

"Silk Road was specifically and intentionally designed for the purpose of facilitating unlawful transactions," she said, noting the difference between the dark web marketplace and other sites that sometimes unknowingly host illegal content. Forrest also quashed Ulbricht's defense that he should be seen more like a landlord for a "crack house" in which drug deals take place than a kingpin, saying that his taking of a share of the site's profits gave him a more active role. "Ulbricht's alleged conduct is more akin to a builder who designs a house complete with secret entrances and exits and specially designed traps to stash drugs and money," she said, describing Silk Road as "a drug dealer's 'dream house.'"

Forrest's decisions will make life difficult for those such as Ulbricht and Bitcoin Foundation founder Charlie Shrem, who are currently trying to fight Bitcoin money laundering charges, but they'll also have important consequences for the cryptocurrency's legal standing. While Bitcoin might not be real money just yet, in the eyes of the law, it's close enough to get you arrested.

New York Comic Con has only been around since 2006, but each year it gets exponentially bigger. Last year’s convention saw 133,000 fans in attendance, as well as 2,500 press members and 9,200 trade professionals. This year, 3-day passes sold out only an hour after they were made available on the ReedPOP site. And if the numbers are any indication, a lot of those passes were probably bought by women.

Using some sales kits from ReedPOP (the 2013 figures can be found here), comic book journalist (and former TMS Weekend Editor) Janelle Asselin crunched some numbers on her Tumblr page and got this:

The first trailer for Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods And Kings plays out like a live-action version of The Prince Of Egypt. Both that ’90s animated film and Scott’s upcoming epic tell the tale of Moses by focusing on his relationship to his brother, Ramses, Pharaoh of Egypt. But while the animated version embraced a variety of skin tones, Scott’s film looks a bit more monochromatic. Despite the Egyptian setting, white actors Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton star as Moses and Ramses, respectively. Rounding out the cast are other notable white people Aaron Paul, John Turturro, and Sigourney Weaver. Ben Kingsley seems to be the only actor of color in a predominate role (although everyone is sporting a whole lot of black eyeliner for “authenticity”).

Exodus: Gods And Kings retells the biblical story of Moses with a few more action scenes than were written in the Book of ...

Multiple choke points.

Howie Muzika

Satellite TV and Internet provider Dish has asked the Federal Communications Commission to block Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC), and it's not a fan of the AT&T/DirecTV merger either.

"The pending Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger presents serious competitive concerns for the broadband and video marketplaces and therefore should be denied. There do not appear to be any conditions that would remedy the harms that would result from the merger," Dish Deputy General Counsel Jeffrey Blum wrote in a filing with the FCC today.

Dish didn't ask the FCC to block AT&T's proposed purchase of satellite provider DirecTV, but the company said it "presents competitive concerns... Among other things, AT&T and DIRECTV will also be able to combine their market power to leverage programming content, to the potential detriment of consumers." AT&T hasn't responded to a request for comment, but it argued previously that it needs to buy DirecTV because its own TV service is unsuccessful, and it claims consumers will benefit from expanded broadband deployments.

Check out all his majesty.

homestarrunner.com

If you were on the Internet a decade or so ago, the odds are good that you saw at least one Homestar Runner cartoon. In the Internet's awkward adolescence, somewhere between poorly designed GeoCities sites and the user-generated boom that YouTube ushered in, we entertained ourselves by watching a two-bit wrestle man write e-mails on an old computer with his boxing gloves on. It was hilarious, trust us.

The site's oddball cartoons were updated regularly through most of the 2000s, tapering off toward the end of the decade before stopping completely in 2010 or so. Matt and Mike Chapman, the brothers responsible for the cartoon, dropped a surprise update on the Internet on April 1 this year, and the response was apparently so good that they're going to try to make more episodes.

"The April Fools thing was definitely like a 'we've got the time, we're gonna do it, we'll see if anybody gives a crap anymore,' and if they do the goal will be to start making more stuff, hopefully on a more frequent basis," said Matt Chapman on The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show podcast earlier this week. Chapman stopped short of making concrete promises, but he said people can expect to see new cartoons later in the year.

Body swapping is a dream of both science fiction and present-day virtual reality. What would it be like to spend a day as a model, or a rock star, or a child? Designer Yifei Chai wants his Pretender Project to answer that very question. But in the process, he's learning how hard it can be to condense a collective cultural dream into a real project.

Visit the Royal College of Art to see Chai's project, and you might be asked to don a pair of Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles and stand in front of a Kinect. Suddenly, you'll be seeing out of someone else's eyes — the eyes of your "avatar," probably Chai. Put your hand up, and an electric current will lift his too. Bend your elbow, and his will follow, clumsily. It's not just imitation. It's a reflex, like a dead frog's legs twitching when you shock it. "The tingling as my arms are moved and twisted into positions out of my control is more powerful than I imagined," is how New Scientist's Sandrine Ceurstemont describes it. "It is quite unsettling."

"I was interested in what would happen if you put a living person in another living person."

The Pretender Project started as a way to build on Chai's interest in, among other things, witchcraft. Fascinated by the idea of transferring your mind into another body, he soon turned his attention to the Proteus Effect: the phenomenon of changing real behavior to match a virtual avatar. "I was really interested in what would happen if you put a living person in another living person," he says. To do so, he hacked together a set of three common technologies. One person, who he calls the "experiencer" or the "controller," wears an immersive virtual reality headset like the Rift. Their motion is tracked by the Kinect and translated into a 40- to 80-volt shock, which targets specific muscles in the avatar — it's essentially, says Chai, the same process would-be strongmen use to tone their body without working out. The overall effect is a very rough sketch of something from Neuromancer, or a lo-fi James Cameron movie.

In theory, the avatar could be directed to do anything. A project video shows them clubbing, eating breakfast, riding a bike, and escaping a gunfight. But the real system can only control your arms, and it does so with high lag and low accuracy. Chai says a shock can give you a wide range of motion, but it can't target small muscle groups. His current-generation Kinect, he admits, is "very, very poor" at skeleton tracking. If you cross your arms, it could well lose track of where they are. A higher-definition Oculus Rift and next-gen Kinect for Windows are both in the cards, but there are basic, fundamental problems preventing people from living in another body. The only way to get truly fine muscle control "would be for the pinpointers to be directly implanted under the skin," says Chai. Legs, which bear the load of the body, would be difficult to shock into motion at all. And touch feedback isn't even part of the equation.

The real system controls your arms with relatively low accuracy

Chai originally planned the project simply as a way to explore a concept. It built on The Machine to be Another, which allows two people to swap perspectives and move in tandem, experiencing the sensation of being in a different body. "A lot of the inspiration for the project came from them, but at the same time, I pushed it to a new level," he says. While the motion in The Machine to be Another was choreographed by a human, the Pretender Project's is automatic. Both have been described as a way to build empathy by putting a wearer almost literally in someone else's shoes. Leaving aside the idea of glamorous virtual vacations, there's the opportunity to simply see how the world looks from the perspective of a different body, as long as that body is all right with being temporarily turned into a puppet.

Things have gone further than Chai expected. "To be honest, I hadn't expected this project to get so much attention," he says. He's interested in continuing it, but among other things, he has little training in coding. "I would need a team of people with more expertise than mine to push this forward. But I'm definitely willing to see what I can get out of this." Compared to other parts of the academic world, Chai's work is low-tech. At the University of Washington, you can actually control someone's body with your mind. Despite this, it's captured our attention because it feels like fiction. No matter how well it works — and, by all accounts, there are some very hard limits in play — it's a testament to how even the technology we associate with toys and spurious infomercials can do something that seems to belong in the world of mad science. After all, science fiction isn't just about predicting the future. It's about pointing out that the present is already deeply weird.

How do you create a viral tweet? If you're Google, the answer is easy: see what everyone in the world is interested in by tracking their search results, then write something about whatever's popular. During the Germany–Brazil World Cup game yesterday, Google let NPR into its newsroom to see how it chooses which trends it should share with the world. NPR's most interesting finding was that Google chooses to avoid negativity — avoiding, say, bringing up Brazil's staggering loss, despite a wide interest in it.

"We're also quite keen not to rub salt into the wounds," Google producer Sam Clohesy tells NPR, "and a negative story about Brazil won't necessarily get a lot of traction in social."

Instead, Google chose to share this through Twitter and other social channels after the game:

Google has been sharing tidbits like this throughout the World Cup. It is effectively advertisement, but it's hard not to be intrigued by Google's insights into the world's interests. While NPR was at Google, it got to learn some of the other trends that didn't make the cut: at first, searches for the lyrics to a chant became popular in Brazil; later, the word "shame" started climbing in the charts. As for Germany? Its citizens had a pretty obvious question: "What's the highest score in a World Cup victory ever?"

Facebook has tried to apologize for rebalancing around 700,000 users' news feeds as part of a social experiment in 2012. But not only is one lawmaker still angry, he's hoping Facebook will have to answer to the FTC. Today, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) sent an open letter to the FTC commissioners, requesting that they "fully explore the potential ramifications" of Facebook's experiment.

The Facebook study, which was published with the help of Cornell University researchers in the journal PNAS, was meant to study the phenomenon of "social contagion," or the spread of emotions between people. Over the course of a week, 689,000 users saw a slightly different version of their normal feeds, with either some positive or some negative stories (determined by a language analysis tool) removed. The resulting analysis found that these users correspondingly posted — again, very slightly — either more positive or more negative updates during the period. But while academic research that involves human subjects has to be approved by a university ethics board, Facebook had no such restrictions. As a result, it was unclear whether the experiment met accepted ethical standards, especially because the rigorous informed consent process was replaced by a line in a much longer list of terms and conditions. In addition, the clause that specifically allowed Facebook to use information for research and testing had been added after the study.

"The very fact that important questions remain unanswered highlights the lack of transparency."

Facebook and others have defended the study, saying that it was reviewed internally and used minimal changes to find real results. Co-author Adam Kramer noted that his study addressed common questions about Facebook and other social networks, including whether seeing someone else's happy posts made users depressed about their own lives (a theory that he says was contradicted by the results.) Cornell University said in a statement that it had passed on reviewing the study's ethical implications, since Facebook had been wholly responsible for collecting the data. And since Facebook commonly tries out new features on small groups of users, it's likely that many people have seen larger changes to their feeds over the course of standard testing.

In his letter, Warner wondered whether Facebook had really adequately informed users, and whether it assessed the potential risks and benefits of the study before going ahead with it. Though he acknowledged that the results way have been barely noticeable for individual users, he expressed concern that the effects could grow if the practice became common — the paper itself argued that a large sample size could turn modest results into real phenomena. "The very fact that important questions remain unanswered highlights the lack of transparency around these business practices," he wrote. "While Facebook may not have been legally required to conduct an independent ethical review of this behavioral research, the experiment invites questions about whether procedures should be in place to govern this type of research."

Warner doesn't necessarily believe that the FTC should regulate the issue, but he's asked the agency to assess whether it has a role in increasing transparency and accountability in big data research, as well as whether it can help nudge companies towards creating their own best practices and internal regulations. He also wants an answer on whether simply observing data should be treated differently to actively manipulating it, as Facebook did. While Facebook has access to an especially deep well of user information, Warner wants the FTC's answers to apply across the industry. "Big data has the potential to help power economic activity and growth while serving consumers in meaningful ways," he says. "Companies like Facebook may have to perform research on a broad scale in order to improve their products. However, because of the constantly evolving nature of social media, big data, and the internet, many of these issues currently fall into unchartered territory."

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