Hi I'm Jessie, chosen ghost talker of the internet elite. Rusty and Bijan aren't dead, they're just sleeping.
I'm excited to lead off tabs with some very important writering news: Jonathan Franzen is blessing us all with a new novel! He has left the world of superior beings (birds) and worked feverishly for two years to create a tale of a lesser being, a woman, who—naturally—is incomplete until she finds her father. He is also—we are so lucky, fellow humans—getting biographied, and we are being promised that it will intimately reveal his metamorphosis as a writer and as a person who has achieved his final, true form of a bird. The bird people are coming, Tabs readers, and they have chosen Franzen to carry their message.
This isn't my first rodeo. it's my two hundred and sixth. fuckin love rodeos. season tickets, baby
In other writering news, famous mean garbage company Vice has launched a science fiction vertical, Terraform and honestly it is great so far and I am excited about it, even if I think Vice is stealing ideas from my brain. Like a science fiction story, get it? Hmm? Yes, good, good jokes, moving on.
Jay is actually Hae in disguise: We've already peeled the first three layers of Takes off of Serial, because the internet is an efficient takes-based machine. Julia Carrie Wong contributed Serial's use of the model minority trope to the ongoing discussion/backlash re: the podcast's race issues, and then Jaime Green dropped a meta-take dissecting the use of citation in these arguments. That's right, my little spider-egg-carriers, we are already on Take Level Meta and the podcast's season hasn't even finished. Life is truly a miracle.
When your friend is drunk and getting a little riled up you can now say, "Whoa, settle down, Cake Boss" and roll your eyes.
Vows:Solange Knowles got married in a caped jumpsuit, like a superhero whose bridal party is also her amazing color-coordinated superhero brigade. Knowles and her new husband left the ceremony on bicycles painted completely white, like those ghost bikes people paint and leave by the road to memorialize bicyclists killed by cars. Is Solange a ghost superhero? Maybe. Is her power making the girl internet completely freak out on Sunday night? Yes.
I struggled a little to find an intern that would bring Bijan's philosophical musings and thoughtful curation to the intern section today. Fortunately, I know a beautiful cat. Duck, what's hot on the 'net?
jessie asked me to write the intern tab today and i'm pretty nervous!!! ok here goes.
if you want to know how much your cat poops and how much it weighs you could scoop the litter box daily and get a scale, or you could purchase Tailio. i hope it sends a push alert every time i use the litter box: "duck just pooped". according to the daily mail, tailio may be able to answer the age-old question 'can cats predict earthquakes?' i'll save you the time and money: we can, but we don't care.
new york is getting a cat cafe next month, congratulations humans. when will someone make a cat cafe for cats? i know the intern tab is usually more philosophical so: what is the meaning of life? who are we? what is a cat? what is a human? where does she take the cat?
i ate some food, drank some water, and gazed out the window. life is beautiful.
thank you for reading love duck
im the intern
Great job, Duck, and thank you, Becca Laurie, for having the foresight to teach your cat to type.
Time (TIME? I don't care) has issued an apology for attempting to have a nuanced, thoughtful discussion on the internet by asking for a straight up-and-down vote on banning the word 'feminist' or some other word used primarily by women, teens, and/or POC. I am giving odds on whether they still announce "feminist" as the winner on Wednesday, or if they pick the runner-up, thereby stoking the rage of the baby men on message boards who took up this very serious and real opportunity to ban the word "feminist." Please contact me for betting information; the prize is I remove the part of your brain that is aware of Time. Related: here are some tips to prevent/deal with being doxxed.
The granddaddy of tech giants is launching a new platform today called IBM Verse. Billed as an enterprise collaboration suite, Verse has a heavy focus on re-imagining email with a simplified design and some under-the-hood smarts that IBM hopes will set it apart from the approximately six gazillion companies already competing in the space.
"This is mail that understands you," says Jeff Schick, IBM's head of social enterprise solutions. "It leverages analytics to understand your characteristics and behaviors and that which is most important to you."
In a nutshell, IBM Verse does a few things: It attempts to simplify the email user interface by de-cluttering it and offering more direct pathways to the people and tasks that seem most important to you. It also integrates a calendar and other collaboration tools in ways that try to be less intrusive and more contextually useful.
Beyond the visual rethinking of email, Verse has a lot going on under the hood. IBM is using its own analytics platform to craft what it hopes will prove to be a much smarter inbox. Instead of just a list of unread messages, you'll see a row of avatars—these are your colleagues and recent business contacts. They are ranked by how much you communicate with them, for example, or show who you may be awaiting a response from.
Meanwhile, IBM Verse will mine the contents of messages to try and understand their importance. This is a little like Google's Priority Inbox, but with a more enterprise-focused logic behind it. In particular, IBM Verse is big on actions and figuring out which emails have some expected action tied to them. It also promises some advanced classification and filtering options that could make it easier to sift through the mountain of mail.
For Verse to gain traction, IBM is going to need all the unique selling points it can trot out. Not only is email and communication a long-established, crowded space, but recent "focused email" efforts like Google's Inbox and Microsoft's Clutter appear to take aim at the same desire for a more sane digital work environment that IBM is aiming for. Meanwhile, real-time collaboration tools such as Yammer and Slack are gaining steam as replacements for what used to happen via inter-office email.
IBM is banking on the use of data smarts to set itself apart. When IBM Verse launches early next year, it will not only use IBM's analytics-powered filtering and message prioritization, but it will offer a hint at its own future: Watson integration. Initially, IBM Verse have an optional Watson add-on that will serve as a sort of AI-powered tech support for the product itself. Natural language questions about Verse's functionality and how to troubleshoot issues will yield relevant answers. It's a minor, if still somewhat neat feature, but it's hard to imagine that's where IBM's AI-powered collaboration ambitions end.
If you've ever had to merge two Excel spreadsheets then you know how challenging it can be to work with data from multiple sources. At LinkedIn, where tables with hundreds of millions of records are far from unheard of, simply merging those giant datasets for routine queries began to take up massive amounts of time and resources.
"It slowed down the queries and even made them infeasible to execute in our Hadoop environment," says LinkedIn engineer Srinivas Vemuri, who worked on the number-crunching pipeline for XLNT, LinkedIn's A/B testing platform. "The size of the intermediate output of the join was explosive."
That led engineers working on XLNT to carefully craft a suite of Java code that pulls necessary data in from across the company, according to a blog post by engineers Vemuri and fellow engineer Maneesh Varshney.
"Written completely in Java and built using several novel primitives, the new system proved effective in handling joins and aggregations on hefty datasets which allowed us to successfully launch [the framework called] XLNT," the engineers wrote earlier this month.
The code divides data into manageably sized blocks of rows from the different tables, where rows from different tables referring to the same user are guaranteed to be found in corresponding blocks. That let a lot of interesting statistics, like tallies and averages, be computed block-by-block, without ever having to store the whole merged dataset in memory and made it possible to generate A/B test results in a reasonable amount of time.
"However, we soon became victims of our own success," wrote the engineers. "We were faced with extended requirements as well as new use cases from other domains of data analytics. Adding to the challenge was maintaining the Java code and in some cases, rewriting large portions to accommodate various applications."
The company decided to build a general-purpose tool built on that block-by-block principle, creating an open-source framework they called Cubert. Varshney, Vemuri, and some of their colleagues described the principles in detail in a conference paper published in September by Varshney, Vemuri, and other LinkedIn staff.
"We started off with the A/B testing analytics problem, and we went ambitious and decided to generalize these primitives," says Vemuri. "We were very surprised by the diverse nature of the use cases."
With the data broken into the right blocks, Cubert—which takes its name partially as a tribute to the classic block-sliding Rubik's Cube puzzle—makes it efficient to compute statistics broken down by a variety of variables, such as tracking user clicks by factors like day of week, time of day, or demographic factors, the engineers say.
Those kinds of statistical breakdowns are traditionally represented by an OLAP cube—a multidimensional plot where each dimension represents one of the factors in the breakdown. Different points within the cube correspond to the different possible sets of values those variables could take on.
Cubert's programmable through a custom scripting language not too dissimilar from SQL, so analytics experts don't have to write their own custom Java code to take advantage of its speed. A "blockgen" statement, for instance, breaks data down into blocks based on specified factors; a "cube" statement constructs an OLAP cube along specified dimensions.
"It should have the flexibility and the control to go and describe exactly how my algorithm should be run, and it should be simple enough as a scripting language to be written quickly and easy to discuss with somebody," says Varshney.
They also discovered the framework is surprisingly well suited to many network graph problems common at LinkedIn, like finding possible connections between friends of friends.
"Graph processing is technically a very interesting subject area for us," says Vemuri. "What we found is these same sort of primitives, with some twists and some extensions, can perform graph processing very efficiently."
The engineers say they hope making Cubert open source will enable engineers from different companies to work together on solving the kinds of problems it's suited to, rather than continuing to develop their own one-off solutions.
Ben Smith went to a dinner party: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. And as he hobnobbed with the nobs at Graydon Carter's Waverly Inn, pressing the flesh under a snowstorm of Names (Arianna, Ed Norton, Michael Wolff, Chris Hughes, you know darling, Our Kind) he heard something very strange! Or not strange, so much as exactly the sort of thing you would expect to hear from Uber, whose mission statement is "To Redefine Corporate Evil For the New Millennium!" Uber exec Emil Michael suggested that the company should hire a team of researchers to ruin the life of Pando Daily founder and Lyft Senior VP of Shadow PRSarah Lacy, as though being a close confidante of Paul Carr weren't already ruination enough for ten lives. Granted, the idea of an Uber Dirty Tricks squad is horrific, even if Michael were thinking of Lacy more as a spokesperson for his competition than a journalist per se. And further granted that Lacy has been completely right about Uber's creepy totalitarianism and rampant misogyny. So does it matter that Lacy and Pando have a close relationship with Lyft investors and a clear bias in favor of Lyft and against Uber, if Lacy's critiques are true? These are questions best left for another time, because this story is about Ben Smith and a dinner party. Ben Smith signed it: and Ben Smith's name is good upon 'Change, for anything he chooses to put his hand to. Emil Michael is as dead as a door-nail.
The Jaden and Willow SmithT Magazine interview is nothing short of a revelation. These kids are avatars of a new kind of human, you mark my words. If you're not convinced, Cooper Fleishmanrendered it in blank verse for Daily Dot.
Today in Art:Super Flemish: Superheroes in the style of the Flemish Masters.
Today in #longreads: I needed three full days off from Tabs to read the whole thing, but Jacqui Shine's history of the Style section in the Awl really is worth your time.
Today's Song: Senri Kawaguchi, "Jinshin no Ran Demo" is a teenage girl rocking the hell out on the drums, do not miss.
Some of us just can't watch a "normal" music video anymore, passively absorbing flat images in a rectangle video square. With electronic acts so frequently collaborating with digital artists, it seems only natural that ambient outfit Teengirl Fantasy (Logan Takahashi and Nick Weiss) have released their new EP Thermal as an "interactive online experience."
Each of the four singles on the album are paired with four in-browser, embeddable virtual worlds utilizing WebGL and Web Audio, allowing the viewer to manipulate the video and audio with mouse and keyboard controls. Launched today, Thermal Online Experience was created by the digital agency 4REAL.
Moving the mouse inside "Cavescape" changes the camera angle, swooping around a gyrating black blob, floating and morphing surrounded by Dan Flavin-style neon beams, before being sucked into a flashing, prismatic chasm which inexplicably spits forth flowers and desktop computers. You can try it out right here.
"U Touch Me" is a video game-like experience influenced by David Lynch's Lost Highway. As you pilot a shiny, speeding sports car through the desert night using your keyboard, you do actually lose the highway, along with the glowing billboards featuring bits of pink-hued video. It's not exactly overwhelming with action, but fitting to the hypnotic, synthy loops and electric crinkles of the track.
"7:30 AM" is chilly and beautiful but its navigation is a bit confusing. Meanwhile, "Lung" (embedded below) is a playful, faux-augmented reality simulation, showcasing the sunny live action of the original official video featuring Lafawndah, on a rendered device inside the virtual space.
According to 4REAL's press release, the agency would like to foster "a more immersive and poetic internet." Not without its quirks, their latest project is a timely and enjoyable interface, particularly for those partial to the aesthetics of the immaculate digital tableaux by artist Takeshi Murata for Oneohtrix Point Never's "Problem Areas" and the software-centric 3-D worlds of Holly Herndon's "Chorus" created by artist Akihiko Taniguchi. It's only subtly interactive however, and there have been more complex online music projects recently, like Tanline's Photoshop-like "Not the Same" from OKFocus. Perhaps, the sweet spot of multi-format online entertainment today is striking a balance between involved and just distracting enough.
Getting information from one location to another still isn't painless, but it's gotten a lot easier thanks to cloud-based systems like Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. Now BitTorrent has entered the fray with an alternative, a peer-to-peer sharing system that skirts the cloud entirely called BitTorrent Sync.
But on Monday at a hacking conference in Paris, a session devoted to testing the security of Sync found the system lacking. The organizers of the session, who admit that it was not a professional assessment but a "community effort," discovered multiple security flaws that could allow anyone to access to supposedly encrypted files via Sync. The security analysis details both server side and client side risks that were discovered. However, most were not confirmed, only mentioned and given a risk rating.
BitTorrent Sync general manager Konstantin Lissounov has tried to dispel the security concerns in a post titled "Bittorrent Sync: Security Is Our Highest Priority." He says that Sync was built to be completely secure and has gone through various third-party audits (which he linked).
Lissounov also adds some specific explanation for a few of the issues raised, including one from Hackito labeled "[HIGH?] Tracker server gets hashes of new folder?" To which it turns out, the hashes aren't the folder key.
"They are used to discover other peers with the same folder," Lissounov writes. "The hashes cannot be used to obtain access to the folder; it is just a way to discover the IP addresses of devices with the same folder. Hashes also cannot be guessed; it is a 160-bit number, which means that it is cryptographically impossible to guess the hash of a specific folder."
The other major issue raised was the use of BitTorrent infrastructure which could allow data to be intercepted. The response and overarching theme, however, was that Sync isn't beholden to their servers.
"The public infrastructure is there to enable better connectivity and a more user-friendly folder-sharing experience," Lissounov explains. "Compromising the public infrastructure cannot impact the security of Sync."
The clear explanations and response given on behalf of the company should comfort those questioning how important security is to the product. Even claims unsubstantiated, merely thought to be a problem, were addressed quickly.
Is BitTorrent Sync safe enough for your sensitive data? If your answer is no, then for now you probably should rethink using Dropbox, Drive, or Box as well.
O'Reilly Media just published its 2014 Data Science Salary survey, which also identifies the favorite tools of data professionals. The 816 respondents from 53 countries performed a variety of job functions within the data world, the most popular being data analyst (including some coding), statistician, and software developer.
The median salary in the U.S. including non-salary compensation was $144,000. Major industries with the highest median salaries included entertainment ($135,000) banking/finance ($117,000), and software ($116,000).
This being a data science survey the authors created a regression model in order to determine how much different factors affected salary. Regression models can be used to predict the value of one variable based on the values of others, e.g., predict salary based on demographic data or tool usage.
According to O Reilly's model, when all other factors are held constant, working in Europe or Asia seriously depresses earning power, by $24,000 and $3,000 respectively. Those toiling in the education sector took a hit of $30,036 for their trouble. Being female (only 15% of respondents were women) means you earn $17,294 less than your colleagues, an amount consistent with the gender gap as a whole and similar to the $17,318 toll that working at an early stage startup takes from a data professional's paycheck.
To earn more, the model suggested moving to California (+$25,785), earning a doctorate (+$11,130), and learning how to use more data tools. Each new tool contributed up to $1,900 to salary. That adds up, as many respondents used up to 20 different tools.
Not all tools resulted in a similar salary boost, however. O'Reilly ran a clustering algorithm on the tools respondents reported that they used, and looked at the median salaries of those tool users. The median salary of Hadoop users, for example, was $118,000 versus $88,000 for those who don't know Hadoop. Hadoop belonged to O' Reilly's Cluster 2 of tools related to the Hadoop ecosystem, including Elastic MapReduce, Cassandra, Spark, and MapR. Storm and Spark users earn the highest median salaries in the entire sample.
However, the most popular tools—used by 50% of data professionals—are the rather less glamorous workhorses of SQL, R, Python, and Excel. One entirely new tool cluster, Cluster 4, centered around Mac OS X, JavaScript, MySQL, and D3, also appeared for the first time in this year's survey.
Is Racket Teen real? People keep asking me this, and I have no idea. But I gave them Tabs to do today, so real or not here it is:
While the MSM (mom-stream media) only ever tells you about the Bad Teens, we at Racket Teen want to use this opportunity to tell you adults other side of the story.
Today in Hero Teens:
Abby Snodgrass, 17, saved a baby at a Wal*Mart, "using life-saving techniques she had learned recently in health class Hillsboro High School."
Jack Shafer got laid-off again, which for certain teens is maybe a sign that we should consider an entirely different career path, because, come on. But he is pretty chill about it because he is the sort of libertarian who is honest enough to not be upset when he is axed for not creating enough value for a firm. Obviously Shafer's next position will be Racket Teen Ombudsman and procurer-of-beer because he just turned 21 and he has a car.
As teens we only watch Twitch streams of fellow teens playing violent video games, but we heard from our stepdad (he's pretty cool we guess) that Mike Nichols, who died yesterday, was one of the smartest filmmakers in American cinema history, a master of comedy and drama alike, who nearly always got the best out of both his screenplays and his actors. His "Angels in America," probably his last great work, is almost as perfect a film adaptation of a theatrical work as his "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" was four decades earlier, and it features Al Pacino's best "shouty era" performance. RIP to a truly impressive teen.
A team of computational neuroscientists and psychologists at the University of Washington have managed to create telepathy in their lab, enabling one test subject to use his thoughts to control another test subject's body as he played a video game a mile away. The game was created by a team led by Rajesh P.N. Rao.
The test subjects wore sensor- and magnet-filled hats that vaguely resembled Cerebro in the X-Men comics and movies. The programming and the brain-computer interface used in the study involved players in different buildings playing a simple Missile Commander-like game in which they attempted to protect a city from alien invasion. When players in one building, who were hooked up to a electroencephalography machine, thought about pressing a button on their joystick, that thought was turned into computer-readable data and transmitted to a player in another building, who then involuntarily mashed a button on their joystick, defeating those pesky aliens. Thoughts were transmitted using a popular brain-computer interface toolkit called BCI2000. A custom-made serial cable connected the second player's computer to a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) machine, which induced physical motions in their hands. Researchers in both rooms were in contact with each other via Skype during the tests.
In the lab, the second player had their finger successfully controlled by first player between 25% and 83% of the time. Although those percentages are obviously not perfect, they occurred often enough to let researchers know telepathy can be successfully induced via brain-computer interfaces.
According to the study, the complete process of a thought from player one turning into an action by player two took approximately 650 milliseconds. Transmission of the thought across the Internet took approximately 10 milliseconds, and the bulk of the remaining time was taken up by the second player's involuntary muscle movement.
As the researchers put it, "Our results provide evidence for a rudimentary form of direct information transmission from one human brain to another using non-invasive means."
Rao and research partner Andrea Stocco hope to eventually create far more complex telepathy tools—tools which could potentially impact a number of fields, including neuroscience, education, and health care:
Most current methods for communicating are still limited by the words and symbols available to the sender and understood by the receiver. Even when they include non-verbal content (as in the case of visual and auditory information), communication constraints can be severe. A great deal of the information that is available to our brain is not introspectively available to our consciousness, and thus cannot be voluntarily put in linguistic form. For instance, knowledge about one's own fine motor control is completely opaque to the subject, and thus cannot be verbalized.
As a consequence, a trained surgeon or a skilled violinist cannot simply "tell" a novice how to exactly position and move the fingers during the execution of critical hand movements. But even knowledge that is introspectively available can be difficult to verbalize. Brilliant teachers may struggle to express abstract scientific concepts in language, and everyone is familiar with the difficulty of putting one's own feelings into words. Even when knowledge can be expressed in words, one might face the hurdle of translating between the many existing spoken human languages. Can information that is available in the brain be transferred directly in the form of the neural code, bypassing language altogether?
In the mid-'90s, when video game production was saturated with simple shoot-em-up games for boys and vapid dress-em-up games for girls, artist Theresa Duncan was making strange interactive digital artworks that were pioneering the young field of indie games on a now-defunct format known as CD-ROM. Since her tragic death in 2007, these works have largely fallen into obscurity, victims to software upgrades and trapped in time.
Now, thanks to the Internet-based art nonprofit Rhizome and their unique restoration software, Duncan's CD-ROMs Chop Suey (1995, co-created with Monica Gesue), Smarty (1996), and Zero Zero (1998) will be restored, archived, and made playable online for free in April 2015. Rhizome has launched their first ever Kickstarter campaign to support the effort and is working with the New Museum on an online exhibition that will show Duncan's work in the context of feminist gaming history. To present the dreamlike, trippy, expressive search and discover video games for girls aged 7 to 12, Rhizome is developing the "Emulation as Service" system with the University of Freiburg in Germany.
"This approach involves the use of server-side software that duplicates the functions of outdated operating systems, giving users the experience of running, say, Windows98 in their normal web browser, with no additional software or plugins required on their end," the organization explains in an announcement. The system has already actualized artist Cory Arcangel's Bomb Iraq, reproducing it in its "full mid-90s Macintosh TV environment."
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"These works have to be presented in that way because you don't want to read about software, you want to use it and experience it," says Rhizome's digital conservator, Dragan Espenschied, in the Kickstarter video. "This emulation will make it possible to play these games in their natural environment."
"A key factor for a responsive emulation experience on the web is that the CPU that runs the emulator be as physically near as possible to its users, with the least possible number of network hops in between," Rhizome explains, concerned that as an Internet-based resource, its users are all over the world. "Optimizing the emulation experience means establishing our own on-demand emulation infrastructure using cloud computing providers offering international locations."
Simulation: Rhizome
Through its technical challenges, the effort is quite experimental, but also valiant, and so is the cause to place these fringe works into the contest of institutionally recognized contemporary art.
"The Theresa Duncan CD-ROMs are aesthetically sophisticated, lyrical, richly detailed, and very human," editor and curator of Rhizome, Michael Connor, tells Fast Company. "Even though they're designed for children, they're still an excellent rebuttal to Roger Ebert's famous provocation that 'video games can never be art'." (A provocation that he did, in time, partially retract.)
Though Chop Suey got some shine when Entertainment Weekly named it "1995 CD-ROM of the Year," its presence highlighted a lack of projects of its kind at the time.
Capture: Chop Suey, Rhizome
"There wasn't anything that had the sort of strong story or character development or the kind of luminous, beautiful art you find in truly good children's books," Duncan and Chop Suey co-creator Monica Gesue had said. "And most of the interactivity is very predictable. And we wanted to do something that would encourage girls to look at software. Most of the CD-ROM market has been boy-oriented—all that blow-'em-up, blood-and-guts, linear stuff. But hey, men make all the software."
Today, when brands like GoldieBlox are marketing subversion of gender "norms" in children's products, it's exciting to look back at truly inspired art works and their creators and collaborators like the artist and Duncan's late partner, Jeremy Blake. (Duncan and Blake both committed suicide a week apart in 2007.)
According to the Entertainment Software Association, as quoted recently by the New York Times Magazine, nearly half of all gamers are female, though the majority of employed developers are male. With more experimental, powerful, and intimate game projects like Porpentine's , and open-source game-creating platforms like Twine becoming more known, it's a good time to be reminded of Duncan's pioneering work from a decade ago is as relevant as ever.
Every so often, machines hit a new milestone in their quest to think more like us. Some of them—from the first automated chess player in 1914 and MIT's 1964 precursor to modern chatbots to Watson's infamous Jeopardy win just a few years ago—are obvious. Others are bit more subtle: like when computers invent magic tricks for the first time.
Yup, that just happened.
Artificial intelligence researchers at Queen Mary University of London recently trained computers to devise their own math-based magic tricks. The illusions—which take the form of a jigsaw puzzle and a "mind reading" card trick—were generated by AI systems that were fed information about known magic tricks.
Just as Watson can take mounds of food recipes and learn how to make delicious new ones, these magic trick variations are made possible by the AI system's unique ability to crunch large data sets and sort through a vast array of possible outcomes more quickly than our measly flesh-based brains can.
The magic jigsaw involves assembling a jigsaw to show a series shapes, then taking it apart and reassembling it so that certain shapes have disappeared using a clever geometric principle. Creation of tricks of this kind involve several simultaneous factors such as the size of the puzzle, the number of pieces involved, the number of shapes that appear and disappear and the ways that the puzzle can be arranged. Something this complex is ideal for an algorithm to process, and make decisions about which flexible factors are most important.
And the card trick:
The mind reading card trick involves arranging a deck of playing cards in a specific way then, based on a few seemingly innocuous pieces of information from the audience, identifying a card that has been seen selected from the deck and using an Android app to reveal the card on a mobile phone screen. The computer was used to arrange the decks in such a way that a specific card could be identified with the least amount of information possible. The program identified arrangements for the deck that on average required one fewer question to be asked before the card was found than with the traditional method.
This approach simply relieves the human of the need to remember the order of the cards, allowing a computer to pick up the mental slack instead. It's not as entertaining as watching Ricky Jay and his 52 assistants, but novelty has always been an important element in the illusionist's bag of tricks.
What's the practical application of all this computer magic? It's as futuristic as you can imagine, and in fact there's plenty of AI that is already doing much more groundbreaking work than this. Still, these AI tricks make for some fun mobile apps.
Phoney is an Android app that uses the very same technology developed at Queen Mary for this research. Other apps like Crystal Ball and Subliminal Card employ artificial intelligence as well.
Surely this is only the beginning of machines outsmarting us. Today, it's card tricks. Tomorrow? Probably the full-fledged subjugation of the human race by soulless robot overlords. Pretty neat, though!
How would you use light if it was paper-thin and could be applied to any surface anywhere? When Rohinni CMO Nick Smoot asked me that question, I was pretty stumped at first.
But he's already figuring it out. That's because Rohinni has developed a form of what it calls Lightpaper. It's a way to print lighting and apply it to nearly any surface, in any shape, and for any situation. It's a kind of stunning proposition that reminds me of the first time I heard about 3-D printing.
"With Lightpaper it's more of a platform of light that we don't even know how it's going to be used," explains Smoot. "All we know is that we're trying to unlock the ability to create light."
In its current state, Lightpaper is manufactured by mixing ink and tiny LEDs together and printing them out on a conductive layer. That object is then sandwiched between two other layers and sealed. The tiny diodes are about the size of a red blood cell, and randomly dispersed on the material. When current runs through the diodes, they light up.
The promise of thin lighting has been simmering for a while, thanks largely to breakthroughs in OLED technology. But nothing viable has come to market, and Lightpaper is much thinner than OLED—which has been able to get TVs down to a fraction of an inch thick—and is lower cost and has a life-span of around 20 years, like LEDs.
Rohinni isn't interested in the entrenched TV market. The company would rather put the technology to use where it can make a big difference soon; everything from illuminating a logo on a mobile phone to providing headlights for a car. A few companies are already working on Lightpaper implementations, but Smoot wouldn't name any.
"The design process is something that can be done almost in an afternoon," Smoot says. "We've had people engage with us before, and before the day is out, we have designs that can go to market, which is a pretty weird thought."
Consumers should start to see Lightpaper in the wild around the middle of 2015. But Rohinni won't be aiming at the home hobbyist market until after it takes hold in the commercial and industrial space.
The big problem with the product's current, version one, is how it places the LEDs when printed. Right now, they aren't distributed evenly on the printed surface. This can cause a shimmering, or starry night effect. Smoot explained that for a lot of applications, this won't matter, but the challenge being worked on currently is to get specific placement of the diodes—to produce completely even light. Not an insurmountable task, a second version of Lightpaper is likely a few months out.
"The magical thing about this solution is it's brighter, it's thinner, it's flexible, it's addressable, and programmable. You can address the sections of the diodes, which is a whole other space when you start thinking about solutions of light that you can address sections of."
Uber Stank: Everyone's pet journalist and "fracas"-user Michael Wolffwrote up his take on the infamous Uber dinner: "It was a long table, probably 40 feet or more, and Smith was seated at the far end with Emil Michael…" It was like a dinner party on Hoth! Smith and Michael were well beyond the first marker, no one's tauntaun could even make it out there. Oddly though, Nicole Campbell was apparently "one seat over from Emil Michael" during the conversation. She was probably not even visible to Wolff, as far away as he was. But Campbell too is "upset that Ben sensationalized what happened at that dinner" with her dear friend Emil. What's a little tracking journalists with God Mode between all of us good friends? Uber, after all, would never hire oppo researchers and heck, folks who make mistakes can learn from them—myself included.
Let's Free-Associate! ⏎
Adult Swim's new parody infomercial is for Smart Pipe, a quantified-self startup and registered sex offender. ⏎
And what goes down your Smart Pipe is, of course, the irl version of the poop emoji. ⏎
The Observer's Rusty Foster correspondent Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke caught up with Racket Teen for a Q&A after their Tabs debut yesterday. She made sure to ask the important questions, like "What was it like to be Rusty Foster for a day?"
Paul Ford on HTML5 is wonderfully-written and informative but also an exceedingly rare New Yorker Dot Com production disaster.
argh
We're pretty much back to normal, and that means intern Bijan is back too! I know at least two of you missed him, assuming those were not just Bijan's sock puppet accounts pretending to ask where he was.
Science is great because it tells stories. A lot of the time those stories get lost in the noise—dry math, passive-voice sentence constructions, unfamiliar terminology—and we need people to translate them for us, to make them real. These people/saints are science reporters; through their work, they help us make sense of our place in the world. One of my favorites, Liz Lopatto, recently wrote a critically slept-on piece about a mysterious disease affecting starfish.
Again, once the mudstone is exposed, we set down the tape measures and start hunting for starfish. Five are sick. One is contorted like an arthritic hand, the ends of its arms pulled in tight toward its body like a fist. George removes it from the crevice to look it over. There's something viscerally repellent about its body, like I'm watching it writhe in slow-motion. It looks wrong.
Of course, the rest of the story goes into detail about what we know, and, more importantly, what we don't. Read it, be chilled.
Arguably science is great for other reasons in addition to its story-telling prowess? But ok! Thanks Bij. Hope you survive ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴜʀɢᴇ.
~"In fact, I don't think anyone's ever tried to hump me." —Larry King~
Today in Tabs had quite a strange week. Thanks so much to guest-tabbers Jessie Guy-Ryan and Racket Teen, and guest intern Duck the cat for covering for me while I was traveling. Thanks to FastCoLabs for putting Tabs on the WWW and for buying me lunch ("mid-century modern!"). And thanks to you, for subscribing and making me feel like all of this has a purpose. You can always hit reply to reach me, or find me on Twitter.
I was lost in the Bronx. It was my first week as a Significance Labs Fellow, where my job was to create a tech product for some of the American households who earn less than $25,000 a year. In 2013, 45.3 million Americans lived at or below the poverty line, which for a family of four is $23,834.
Another fellow and I spent an hour on the subway from Brooklyn to do a user interview. This area of the Bronx has no cafes or shops, only the odd cluster of fast food joints around a subway station. Yellow cabs don't drive here. We couldn't find the address. Google Maps kept moving the location further away. Coming from the technology world, we were confounded when that technology failed us. Eventually, a car service dispatcher told us that the address didn't exist.
To some extent technology has failed low-income Americans too. Developers don't build apps for them. Growth hackers ignore them. At Significance Labs, I learned a lot about how low-income Americans live and use technology but also about its limitations, and my own.
Our first week was spent in some of NYC's poorest neighborhoods interviewing all kinds of people. We talked to a devoted teenage dad in Washington Heights, a school aide in Brownsville, and an undocumented Mexican immigrant who had built a good life for her family on 25 years of babysitting and cleaning jobs. When I asked what her ideal job would be she said "computer programmer."
Every person we met had an intensely individual story, but common themes emerged. Like most New Yorkers, our interviewees were busy. Many juggled multiple jobs, and sometimes school, with family responsibilities. Like other Americans, they often traded off time and convenience against cost.
It also became clear that inequality isn't purely about income. It's about information and status and opportunity. If you look at the dollar amount, my own income as a freelance writer probably wasn't much higher than some of my interviewees, but I still had resources like educational credentials and social capital which many of them lacked. One of the reasons that graduation rates among low-income first generation college students hover at around 10% is that they don't have the "college knowledge" taken for granted by their peers.
Living on a low income translates into other forms of scarcity: of power, information, respect, opportunity, time, health, security, and even of sleep. Our job was to build a piece of technology which could increase our users' stock of at least one of those resources.
A few years ago I interviewed a Mexican impact investor named Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui. He explained that impact investors need to be very clear about their motives. "Do you want to do good, or do you want to feel good?" he said. "It's much easier to feel good by giving away meals to starving kids in Sudan, but you are not going to solve any systemic problem in the world by doing that. This is business, and business is messy and you have to make hard decisions."
I often didn't feel good. Sometimes that was because I had to make hard decisions, sometimes because people didn't understand why we were building mobile tech for domestic workers. All the teams at Significance Labs worked for significantly below market rates. They left jobs, or in my case, even countries. That makes it all the more unsettling when your potential users misunderstand or mistrust you. They have good reasons.
When doing nonprofit or volunteer work it's all too easy to congratulate yourself for taking on the work at all.
My team worked closely with housecleaners to build Neatstreak. We assembled a panel of "superusers" who tested multiple versions and suggested features we implemented. Cleaners were often delighted just to have someone ask them about their work. People rarely do.
Nevertheless we often had trouble persuading housecleaners and other domestic workers to come to interviews, even though we paid $25 per hour, which was higher than their regular hourly rate. They didn't know us and it looked too good to be true. Low-income Americans are often the targets of scams which advertise fake education credentials or applications for government benefits.
In the last week of the program one of Neatstreak's superusers mailed me to say that he felt slighted. "I'm starting to feel like when corporate America uses the little guy for ideas and then forgets about them," he said. "I was excited and ready to be hands on but instead feel used for my ideas." During a user testing session with a group of Spanish-speaking cleaners, one of the testers gave a speech to the others about how we were a company (Significance Labs is a nonprofit) trying to take advantage of them. When building for low-income users you have to work harder to win their trust and to demonstrate your product's value.
Technologists are problem solvers. It's tempting to either jump in too quickly with a technical solution to an intractable systemic or human problem or to be discouraged by its difficulty. One of my first interviews was with a 21-year-old father of two, Angel. Angel was in foster care before he turned 1 and had been in trouble with the law as a teenager. What he really needed was a steady job which would provide him with an income for his family. No mobile app I could build in three months was going to deliver that.
Another issue was impact versus scale. Should we try to solve a smaller problem for a large number of people or have a bigger impact on a smaller group? Angel had attended Green City Force (GCF), an impressive program in Brooklyn where low-income young people do six months of national service related to the environment and are prepared for sustainable careers. GCF had a huge impact on the graduates we met but this kind of "high-touch" program is not where technology excels. Our best bet might be to create a little more breathing space for a large number of people.
My colleague Jimmy Chen, for example, built a mobile app called EasyFoodStamps to do the first stage of the application for food stamps, saving people hours of standing in queues at the food stamp office. When you lose a day's work or have to get a babysitter to watch your kids in order to apply, that really makes a difference.
Furnishing a naive technical fix is the software equivalent of building a well in a developing country which the locals have neither the motivation nor the skill to maintain. You have to understand the whole context. For example, housecleaners prefer to be paid in cash (so mobile payments were out), mainly use text messaging, and sometimes don't want to reveal professional information online, especially if they were undocumented.
The U.S. has a serious inequality problem. The top 0.1% of Americans own more than the bottom 90%. Technology in many cases has made that inequality worse by eliminating jobs or replacing them with more insecure ones. Disruption is all very well when you are one of the beneficiaries. The tech business has a moral obligation to see what it can do to help.
But I am also convinced that there are sustainable, if not wildly profitable, businesses to be built on providing valuable services to low-income Americans. At Significance labs, essentially we made bottom-of-the-pyramid products for the developed world. Nearly one in four New Yorkers reply on food stamps and 40,000 more apply every week. Multiple companies chase their dollars outside the food stamp office. We estimated that housecleaners work in 20 million homes in the U.S. These are big numbers.
One of impact investor Rodríguez Arregui's investments in Mexico is Finestrella, a successful startup which developed a set of algorithms to assess the creditworthiness of people who don't have an official employment history, bank account, or credit rating, in order to offer them a mobile phone plan which costs much less than pre-paid. Two Silicon Valley VC funds with no impact investing mandate, Storm Ventures and Bay Partners, have also invested in Finestrella.
Maybe the best long-term solution is to train a new generation of developers and designers from a low-income background to build their own solutions, but that's easier said than done. People on low incomes already lead a precarious life juggling multiple, low-paying, no-benefits jobs or government support. The last thing they want is more risk of the kind that is involved in launching a startup.
On the other hand, it's striking that all six Significance Labs Fellows are zero or first-generation immigrants. Jimmy was born in China. Margo grew up in Ghana. They went on to Ivy league schools and jobs in companies like Facebook and LinkedIn but their families know what it was like to live a very different life.
Many of the housecleaners I met were already entrepreneurs. Our office cleaner at Significance Labs, Jason, employed five or six people in his cleaning business while also holding down another full-time job. The best thing about my time at Significance Labs was meeting incredible people like Jason and Angel. The most fun I had last summer was sitting in a room chatting to housecleaners.
"Why do we hate Uber?" asks Matter's Bobbie Johnson, before providing a long list of reasons to hate Uber, in case you needed any more. And Paul Ford looks into our horrible convenient future for Vice's new sci-fi vertical.
Deb Chachraon what "Maker culture" gets wrong is terrific. Making things is great but so is critiquing and examining and teaching and caregiving.
Cannot stop thinking about a cool-ass bird singing a song called "Beak On Fleek." Anyway, what happens in your head when it's quiet?
There's a special kind of narcissism that goes along with youth. The young—and I include myself here—usually lack a working knowledge of (and therefore a working fear of) failure. They are blissfully unselfconscious, mostly unaware. There occasionally come inklings, though, of the future, of things more terrible and powerful. It's a wonder that any of you Olds made it through, isn't it?
The first six months were heaven. I loved sex. I loved Jägermeister. I gained 10 to 15 pounds on birth control and processed cheese slices; I had never been happier. […] How it all got so bad is a blur. I blocked the door. I blacked out the basement windows. I remember myself curled in feral positions, sounds on repeat getting louder, climbing up and out of the window to piss in the grass. When I had an exam, I studied for sixteen hours, then didn't go. I called home and my parents said they would rather I didn't talk to my siblings.
Things got worse. Things got better. "It is because I couldn't afford not to work—because necessity is destiny, in the end—that I was alright," Prickett writes. "Eventually I got into a life with almost no habits and no flat horizons so that I would stay awake longer, and even now, I could only finish this essay because—clearly—I had no idea how it might end."
A "special kind of narcissism," huh? You're just doing my job for me here, dude.
Jokes by Kids: Q: What do you call a fish with no legs? A: A fsh.
Today's Song: Presidents of the USA, "Peaches" (If I have to spend the next week with it stuck in my head, so do you.)
~It's a dangerous business, Frodo, opening a tab… there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.~
Today in Tabs will be back tomorrow, but then off for Thanksgiving till next week. We're on the web at FastCoLabs and in your email thanks to TinyLetter. If you have ever thought "hey how can I get my #brand in front of 7500 or so really cool people?" (that's you guys!) then email me about sponsorship opportunities. If you have ever thought "hey is for horses lol," then follow me on Twitter because we should probably be friends.
But while these low-income individuals are classified as "Americans," many of them are not actually American citizens. A high proportion of people living in the United States whose household earns less than $25,000 a year are undocumented immigrants. Ironically, some of these low-income undocumented immigrants are benefitting from some relatively trivial "technological innovations" aimed at the more affluent class.
That's because, as Nextgov reports, undocumented immigrants have been using social media check-ins in apps like Facebook, Foursquare, and Yelp to prove they've resided in the country for a specific period of time—so they can meet continuous residence requirements under immigration policies such as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). And with President Obama's recent executive action on immigration allowing undocumented immigrants to be shielded under deportation, the practice of social media check-ins as proof of residency is expected to continue.
On November 20th, President Obama signed an executive action that is expected to enable five million undocumented immigrants to legally remain in the U.S.—provided they meet a number of requirements. They must lack a criminal record, have children who are U.S. citizens, and also meet a continuous residence requirement of at least five years. That last requirement can be particularly difficult to prove.
After all, if you're an undocumented immigrant, you usually don't have pay slips for work you've done, nor are you likely to possess a driver's license, utility bills, or insurance documents in your own name. So how do people who were so afraid of being found out that they went out of their way to leave behind evidence of their existence now prove they've been in the U.S. for five years?
It's hard to believe that something as silly as checking into a McDonald's via Facebook's app could solidify your future in the U.S., but that's exactly what's happening. Lacking any traditional paper evidential proof, undocumented immigrants are now finding success by submitting printed copies of past check-ins at bars, restaurants, and movie theaters to prove they've been in the country since a specified date.
Those online check-ins are being accepted as valid proof by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services—but no new U.S. immigration policy guidelines specifically list social media check-ins as a valid form of continuous residency evidence. Neither was allowing Foursquare check-ins as proof of residency in any way mentioned by President Obama in his latest executive action.
Social media check-ins as evidential proof slowly became more common last year—a year after the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals came into effect. The DACA is an immigration policy allowing illegal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before they turned 16 to stay in the country provided they can prove when they entered the country. Since these foreign teenagers were like teenagers all over the world—they grew up with social media and online check-ins—many started submitting online check-ins as evidence of their time in the country. One undocumented immigrant even used Xbox Live account records to prove he'd been in the country for a specific period of time.
As David Leopold, an immigration lawyer and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told ABC News at the time, "the [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have been] viewing evidence very liberally, not restrictively, and they've been very helpful about accepting alternative forms of evidence that show evidence that they were present around June 15" (when DACA went into effect).
But if the last four days is any indication, it's not just young, undocumented immigrants applying under DACA who will use social media check-ins to prove continuous residence. An immigration attorney from New York confirmed to me today that in the short time since President Obama's executive order, three undocumented immigrants who contacted him—one in his 50s—asked if their online check-ins can prove residency.
"In most cases, I suspect the answer is a 'yes'," he says. "It seems laughable, but Facebook can give them their future here. It's very fortunate."
Following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, there have been increased calls for on-duty police officers to wear body-mounted cameras. Over 145,000 people have signed a whitehouse.gov petition in support of a proposed "Mike Brown Law," requiring all police officers to wear a camera.
But little has been written about the actual technology of how these cameras work and the broader implications of deploying them en masse. Police departments around the country may range in size from a few dozen to over 1,000 officers. With cameras generating upwards of a gigabyte of video recordings per officer per day, the data storage issue can quickly get out of hand. On top of that, civil liberties organizations have raised concerns about the lack of clear policy for how they should be deployed. Not to mention the potential privacy issues for people recorded during encounters with the cops.
Here are some things that will surprise you about the debate.
Ever since the beating of Rodney King was caught on tape in 1991, police have been aware that their actions may be recorded and used against them. The advent of ubiquitous smartphones has only put a finer point on it. With everyone essentially carrying a video camera in their pocket, police either accepted that they may always be recorded or actively tried to stop bystanders from recording them.
"Because of video recordings a lot of Americans who have had largely positive interactions with the police are having their eyes opened about the kind of stuff that does unfortunately take place," says ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley.
"Having officers' lies and misbehavior revealed through the world is often not through police body cameras but through bystander cameras. As a result, there's been a trend of police officers demanding that bystanders stop photographing or recording and sometimes harassing or arresting people exercising their constitutional right to photograph government officials acting in public."
In such an environment, it makes sense that police would want to have video backing up their own version of events (assuming they're not outright lying).
Rick Smith, the founder and CEO of Taser International, which makes the AXON line of body-mounted police cameras, says their surveys reveal upwards of 80% of officers wanted their own cameras. "In a lot of cases bystanders are only going to turn in the part of the footage that makes the officer look unreasonable, not the build-up that may be justification for why the officer took a certain action," he says.
One major issue is whether (and when) a cop can turn his camera system on and off. In one incident just this month, a New Orleans police officer turned her camera off just before shooting a man who had to be hospitalized.
Smith recounts another incident in which an officer's camera turned off immediately prior to a female suspect having, he says, "her teeth knocked out." Taser was called in to investigate if there was a failure in the camera. Because of logs on the devices, Taser was able to determine that the camera was intentionally shut off. The officer was subsequently removed from the force. In other words, the cameras worked—even when they were turned off, but not in the ideal way.
Taser believes the solution here is automation.
"We're building a whole bunch of remote triggering capabilities," says Smith. "For example when you turn a taser on, it would turn our AXON cameras on. The same could be done with other events, like turning on the lights and sirens of a police vehicle."
Stanley believes that this approach is cause for optimism, but also cautions that technology alone cannot solve every potential pitfall.
"I'm glad that Taser is working on this kind of thing and thinking along these lines," says Stanley. "I'm not sure that the technology will be here for a while to make automatic triggers sufficient. There will inevitably be times when an officer should be recording an interaction but those triggers may not be present. But this kind of feature could help increase public confidence."
"We at the ACLU have always frowned upon pervasive video surveillance of our public spaces. And this has the potential to be yet another vector of government video surveillance," says Stanley.
Although the call for deploying cameras has come from civil liberties groups working to ensure police accountability, those same groups are also concerned with what could happen with all these recordings. After all, people often aren't at their best when they're interacting with the police.
"The use of these cameras has the potential to lead to real invasions of privacy," says Stanley. "For example, a significant proportion of police calls are for domestic violence. Police often walk into people's homes and catch them at some of the worst moments of their lives. We don't want to see video of bad moments of people's lives being circulated or going up on the Internet in situations where it has no public importance."
Some of the policies Stanley and the ACLU are urging be adopted include: granting people who have been recorded access to that footage for as long as the government has it, not recording in homes without the permission of a resident, and requiring officers to notify individuals when they are recording.
"It's vital that departments don't just throw these cameras at officers and let them do with them as they will," says Stanley.
We hear a lot how wearables are the future of tech. But it's not often that we see a wearable device that actually has a clear demand for it. (Yes, I'm looking at you, smart watches.)
Surprisingly enough, Taser sees itself primarily as a software company. Whereas other police body camera companies are just that—camera companies—Taser's emphasis is on building an integrated ecosystem.
Smith estimates that Taser has spent somewhere in the ballpark of $70 or 80 million developing the AXON line and Evidence.com, its complimentary remote storage system. More than three out of every four dollars spent has gone into software and communications technology as opposed to the cameras themselves.
"What we're doing is applying some pretty well-known technologies—wearable, video, cloud syncing—but we're doing it in a unique space," Smith says. "We're looking at how we can use the idea of this more connected world to attack violence as a social problem. When violence happens we want to have tools to make it less dangerous and we want to create more transparency with state actors."
"This is important work and it's not a place most tech companies have traditionally focused," he adds. "Six years ago we were a weapon company. Today we are an integrated hardware-software company."
There isn't much to "Highway At Night"—a road, cars, flashing police sirens, a starry sky, glowing skyscrapers, a "dragon's eye view of a flight to 3D city." That is until you realize it's a manually coded JavaScript animation, just 1k in size.
"Highway At Night" is a runner-up in the "JS1k, a JavaScript code golfing competition," an annual online event where devs show off their coding prowess. There are many rules, from the purely technical—demos cannot exceed 1024 bytes and should be fit in a single script tag—to the more aesthetic and experiential—"do not submit HTML soup."
"My initial idea was to do a very realistic looking demo of a car driving along a highway on a dark night," Ylikangas writes. "I watched some dashcam videos on YouTube and realized that what we see in real life is very limited - it's mainly just lights and silhouettes. I made notes on what I saw and how I could try and implement it. But first I needed a good yet small engine for road construction and rendering. I wanted the demo to have true perspective [sic] 3D drawing combined with cheap tricks. I found out that I only needed to do the center line with real polygons… the initial idea of photorealistic graphics was dropped in favor of vintage video game looks. Another thing that helps to fool the eye is high speed. This allowed the graphics to be very simple and raw."
I spent last night at a bar, very drunk, trying to figure out what I'd say. I'd spent the day trying to accept what I already knew—that there'd be no indictment, that justice didn't and never has lived here. I don't know that she ever will. I'd blind her if I could.
After work, a friend and I split a bottle of wine at some place downtown. We sat outside, in the unseasonable warmth, and I thought about the heat in Ferguson on that Saturday in August, five days after my birthday; that heat from the summer that hasn't died down. I didn't tell my friend what I was thinking, but on the way there I told her how my body felt. My mouth is dry, I said, and there's a lump in my throat. There is a tight low ache in my stomach. "Those are classic symptoms of anxiety," she replied. The wine didn't help.
A few summers ago, while I was back at home in Tyler, Texas, after my first year in college—I was 18 then, Michael Brown's last age—a few friends and I decided to go to the lake. The heat was seasonable then, hot and wet. We jumped in my friend Jamie's car—he was always the driver—and raced 10 over the speed limit because we were young and invincible and full of life, piss and vinegar. There were a few country families who probably lived near the lake, white and southern, enjoying the water and their watery beers that come in shiny blue cans.
Of course something had to change. I think it started in the air. But suddenly there was yelling and then there was a gun in someone's hand and I was flying and I couldn't feel anything but alive, my body on autopilot, thousands of years in the past, still stuck on the savannah plain. There were shots. I was crouched behind Jamie's car.
I called my then-girlfriend when I got home—full of piss and vinegar, still youthful, still alive, high on adrenaline—and told her what happened. There's no record of the conversation, but I remember her being appalled. Sometimes I think I've dreamed the whole thing, that it couldn't be real. How could things change so quickly? How could there have been a gun? I remember thinking I could have died and getting high on the thought. I was lucky in my first real encounter with a white man's rage. I was on the periphery. I was not a target. Michael was.
At the bar last night, after drinks with my friend, I started refreshing my Twitter feed. I was with Sanna and Bella, two Swedish friends of mine, to whom I couldn't quite explain how I felt later, after the non-indictment. I drank two more glasses of wine. Then there was the prosecutor's rambling. I switched to whiskey. I flew.
I don't know why I never told my parents about that day at the lake. I didn't want to worry them, I guess, or maybe it was that I didn't want them to know that I now knew they were right. That I finally saw the value of my life as others saw it: a cheap thing, so easily discarded between muzzle flash and hot asphalt.
I am a writer. I believe words have power. Or, maybe it's this: That I must believe words have power because this is the only thing I can do, this is the only thing I have, and I need it to be enough.
Let me tell you another story. It was Nabeem's birthday and we were headed to a club to dance and sweat with each other. I was standing beside Calah when she reached the front of the line; the bouncer looked at her ID—she's black like me—deemed it fake, and, for some reason, rendered it unusable. He broke it in half. We called the manager and I was angry, trying and failing to explain to him why this was not okay. He told me I was too drunk—I wasn't—and told me to take a walk to cool off. I walked to a bodega and walked back. He wouldn't let me in. I wasn't a writer then, or I didn't see myself as one, though I was writing for places that people might have heard of. I finally threatened him with words. I told him I'd write about him, and that was when he became as angry as me. He finally saw me. That night we slept at Calah's place—home, safe, black peas in a pod. I don't need to tell you that Michael Brown is neither home nor safe.
Here's another story. I am the only black person on the editorial floor at my place of employment. The other ones who look like me work as cleaners or in the mailroom. When we lock eyes I nod, and it is both the easiest and hardest thing in the world. I know nothing of their lives, and yet here we are the same. Today I will do this. We will share a look that encompasses last night's indignities and acknowledges tomorrow's. We will keep our heads down and our hearts guarded, and I will only bleed here, in words, on this page. Last night I showed Sanna and Bella that picture of Michael from his high school graduation. I looked into his eyes and I felt the heat of summer again on my skin.
Tabs:
"Mike Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in broad daylight on a hot Saturday afternoon in Ferguson, Missouri. Consequently, eyewitnesses were standing at virtually every angle to observe exactly what happened that day. Seven have come forward publicly. Many gave interviews in the immediate aftermath of the shooting on Canfield Drive. Below is an annotated list of every public interview and video given by each eyewitness."
"It would have been powerful to see charges filed against Darren Wilson. At the same time, actual justice for Michael Brown—a world in which young men like Michael Brown can't be gunned down without consequences—won't come from the criminal justice system. Our courts and juries aren't impartial arbiters—they exist inside society, not outside of it—and they can only provide as much justice as society is willing to give."
"Perhaps it only seems contradictory that the deaths of Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, John Ford and Michael Brown—all unarmed black men shot by men who faced no official sanction for their actions—came during the first black Presidency. Or perhaps the message here is that American democracy has reached the limits of its elasticity—that the symbolic empowerment of individuals, while the great many remain citizen-outsiders, is the best that we can hope for."
"How do we talk about race? How do we see one another as human, as having lives that matter, as people deserving of inalienable rights? These conversations are always so tense, so painful. People are defensive. We want to believe we are good. To face the racisms and prejudices we carry forces us to recognize the ways in which we are imperfect. We have to be willing to accept our imperfections and we have to be willing to accept the imperfections of others. Is that possible on the scale required for change?"
"I know that one day I will tell my child, if I am blessed enough to have one, that the world is afraid of them, and that the police are not to be trusted. I know that one day, that child will tell her own child the same thing. And yet, I know that I still have enough hope to want to bring children into this world, broken as it is. That is something."
"Yet I, along with every other black person in America, live with fear every day. We are human — why does that never come to light until we're forced to show our animal pain grieving another dead child? I'm tired; I am so, so unendurably tired."
"I shouldn't have to train my boy to live his life to deflect the danger of other people's warped perceptions of him. I shouldn't have to teach him police avoidance techniques and ask him not to act out as we did as teenagers and to willingly swallow other people's disrespect – all to keep him breathing in a world that feels so sickeningly unfair.
I will, as my black parents did before me, take on this task of training my son to both survive and thrive.
But who will take on the responsibility for training the police?"
"Being a black parent, especially of a black boy, comes with the added onus of having to protect your child from a country that is out to get him—a country that kills someone that looks like him every 28 hours, a country that will likely imprison him by his mid-thirties if he doesn't get his high school diploma, a country that is more than twice as likely to suspend him from school than a white classmate."
"But when the hands are up and the cop still shoots, reform is merely a Band-aid on a malignancy. When there is still no recognition of black humanity – when law enforcement is still so constantly projecting white fears of black criminality – then the answer is not just a happy political narratives. Because Darren Wilson still would have fired 12 times if Mike Brown had been wearing a tie on Canfield Drive."
For those that don't know, Cicada 3301 is a mysterious Internet puzzle that appears online every January. It consists of a highly complex series of riddles and enigmas that stretch from the digital world out into the real world. To solve these riddles you need to have expert skills in a varying range of disciplines including steganography, cryptography, and ancient Mayan numerology, as well as detailed understandings of 18th century European literature and even cyberpunk speculative fiction. And that was just for last year's puzzle.
Thousands of cyberslueths try to solve Cicada each January (there have been three annual puzzles since 2012) but none are known to have solved it completely. And in this case, it's not the journey that matters. The makers of Cicada promise "enlightenment" to those who can make it to the end. But what's more baffling than each riddle or what "enlightenment" awaits those who solve them all are the people behind Cicada.
No one knows if Cicada is a single person or a group of individuals, though evidence from the puzzle points to Cicada being more than one brilliant individual. The sheer scale of the riddles transcends cyberspace and requires participants to call dummy phone numbers set up in the real world and travel to up to 14 different countries to find QR codes that have been physically taped to telephone poles. This suggests Cicada is indeed a global network of individuals—a cabal no one knows anything about.
And it's this "unknown cabal" hypothesis that gets peoples minds racing as much as the Cicada 3301 puzzle itself. If Cicada is a group, how many members there are? Where they are based? What are their ultimate motives?
Which brings me back to my inbox...
Since writing my original story about Joel Eriksson, a cryptosecurity researcher from Sweden who was, until now, the only known person to make it further than any other in solving the Cicada 3301 puzzle, I get a few emails each week from people alleging they have information on who Cicada are.
Some emails are obviously fake. They're from fantasists that want to pretend they hold the hidden knowledge everyone desires. Some emails are downright strange, like the email I received a few weeks ago from a person who said he worked "for a component of the Intelligence Community of a 5-eyes country" and that this intelligence agency had reason to believe Cicada "may be the same group that was behind the 2007 cyberattacks in the Baltics." Then there are the emails that say Cicada are aliens, terrorists, Barack Obama.
But every once in a while I'll get an email that has the air of believability about it. These emails give me enough of a kick to look into not only the claims they make, but to investigate the person who's made them.
I received just such an email last week from a person alleging they made it past the point Joel Eriksson did and were actually invited into Cicada's online layer on the dark net. I began exchanging emails with this person who was more than willing to give me his personal details provided I don't reveal his true name or contact information. After several follow-up emails and then speaking to him on Skype to get his story, I was able to verify credible details about his life: who he was, where he went to school, that he had the skills needed to solve Cicada 3301.
It is for this reason that I bring you his story now with the caveat that while I believe he is who he says he is and I believe he certainly has the skills to solve Cicada, I have no way of verifying if what he says about Cicada's inner sanctum is true, though I will say his story is certainly plausible.
Before exploring the story this person told me it's important to take a moment to highlight that Cicada says they are looking for talented individuals who have the skills required to join them. The key word there is "individuals." Individuality and individual skill seem to be a highly desired quality for Cicada—and it's the reason, through no fault of his own, that Joel Eriksson was shut out from entering Cicada's inner sanctum.
While Eriksson apparently solved all of Cicada's riddles, the accomplishment was bittersweet. Eriksson only found out about the puzzle's existence three weeks after other participants had already started their journeys and by the time he solved it, arriving at the ultimate destination—an anonymous website on the TOR network—Cicada had put up a notice announcing that they weren't permitting people in anymore because they were disappointed that participants had been sharing the solutions to the riddles online. Ironically, Cicada was shutting out the very person they sought: someone who could solve the puzzle on his own, as Eriksson did.
A list of GPS coordinates posted on a screenshot taking the game to a whole new level: the real world.
And with that it seemed like what lay beyond the curtains of that anonymous TOR site would forever remain a mystery. That is, if it wasn't for a 16-year-old student who, with the help of his friends, made it past before Cicada shut its doors. This student, now 18, would email me two years later telling me he wanted to talk about what it's like to hang out in Cicada 3301's inner sanctum and just what the group's ultimate goals are.
"When I'm competitive, I'm very competitive and this really was interesting," says Tekknolagi when I call him up over Skype and ask what motivated him to try to solve the Cicada 3301 puzzle. In the background I hear him clacking away at his keyboard. "It's a race against the clock and other people to solve puzzles that involve cryptography and whatnot and that was just really interesting for me, and then also the fact that it was distraction from school work which is kind of nice."
Tekknolagi, of course, is not his real name but a handle he goes by and one that he asked me to call him for this article in order to protect his privacy. At 18 he's just begun his freshman year as a Computer Science major at a major research university in the Northeast. The university records office confirmed his enrollment to me. His course of study is probably of little surprise to anyone who knows him because he's been coding since he was 9. But it was at 16 that he first heard of Cicada.
Just one of 14 Cicada-marked QR codes spread across the globe. This one was found in Warsaw, Poland.Photo: via Wikipedia
"I was just in a robotics class in my high school and a buddy of mine came up and said, 'Hey there's this weird thing on 4chan'," Tekknolagi says. "I said, 'Why are you doing on 4chan at school? It's ridiculous.' He said, 'I don't know, but check it out.' So I took a look and we both just sat down and messed with it for a couple of hours and eventually found some people and that group of people transformed over time into the group that I finished with."
It's the formation of the IRC group that Tekknolagi joined to solve the puzzle that is probably the reason that he managed to succeed where Joel Eriksson was stopped. Where Eriksson was working alone, Tekknolagi's group consisted of about 12 people, most of them Internet strangers, working together to solve parts of the puzzle and share their findings. Ironically, of course, this success was in direct opposition to the directive from Cicada organizers that they are looking for talented individuals who can solve the puzzle. It's also the reason Cicada gave for shutting out people like Eriksson who arrived at the site on their own after teams working together had already found it.
But it is this teamwork that enabled the 16-year-old Tekknolagi past the point where Eriksson was shut out. What Tekknolagi found on that site, instead of a message telling him to go away, was a congratulatory letter for getting that far. It also asked him to set up a new email address from a public, free email service and enter it in a field below. The note on the site said Tekknolagi would receive instructions in a few days with how to progress further into the TOR site.
A painting containing a riddle to be solved.
The next day the message was removed from the TOR site, but then discovered in the source code of the former website was binary code which referenced file names of previous clues in the puzzle. It was evident that the test was not over. From the file names of previous clues a new TOR network URL was found that led to a site with another image. The image, a painting, referenced the 1793 book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake. Tekknolagi wrote custom code to decipher another hidden TOR URL from the text. From there more puzzles followed, including the ultimate one, which was a MIDI file that needed to be decoded. Doing so resulted in an ASCII armored message which members of Tekknolagi's group were instructed to send to a Gmail address. A few days later Tekknolagi received an email saying there would be no more puzzles. The email contained a final TOR URL and a username and password for him to log in with.
"There were a bunch of people on it. Some were from my group, some were existing members or part of some … I don't know how they described it, but it felt like the board of this weird organization," says Tekknolagi when I ask him what Cicada's home on the dark web is like.
Tekknolagi says the site consisted of part message board, part chat room, with a private messaging feature as well. On the message board part of the site were a list of different topics including a welcome section as well as sections listing the goals and current projects of Cicada. In the chat room section of the site Tekknolagi saw about 20 members, some from his team, but others who he did not know.
"They wanted to further the use of cryptography in the world so people could have privacy and anonymity and stuff like that," says Tekknolagi when I ask what the "current projects" message board contained. "Those were some big ended goals, very broad obviously. There was some end-to-end encryption thing that I was interested in working on."
Tekknolagi's reports match an email that has since been leaked that is alleged to be from members of Cicada. In the email the organization states:
You have all wondered who we are and so we shall now tell you we are an international group we have no name we have no symbol we have no membership rosters we do not have a public website and we do not advertise ourselves we are a group of individuals who have proven ourselves much like you have by completing this recruitment contest and we are drawn together by common beliefs a careful reading of the texts used in the contest would have revealed some of these beliefs that tyranny and oppression of any kind must end that censorship is wrong and that privacy is an inalienable right...
You are undoubtedly wondering what it is that we do we are much like a *think tank* in that our primary focus is on researching and developing techniques to aid the ideas we advocate liberty privacy security you have undoubtedly heard of a few of our past projects and if you choose to accept membership we are happy to have you on-board to help with future projects.
But Tekknolagi found that the benign nature of their message did not mesh with some of the things Cicada's leaders revealed in online chats.
Tekknolagi's claims of Cicada's goal being to create altruistic open source software for the benefit of mankind may disappoint—or be unbelievable to—people who think Cicada is a front for a terrorist or anarchist organization or a recruitment tool for the NSA, GCHQ, or another Five Eyes member. But just because their stated aims were benevolent, Tekknolagi says, doesn't mean he didn't find the Cicada organizers on the other end of the chat room unnerving.
The boot sequence of a decoded Cicada ISO lead to a series of prime numbers listed sequentially, pausing on "1033" and then stopping completely on "3301".
"They wanted to make it seem like they were this network of people that had 'infiltrated,' if that's the right word, various private and public organizations," Tekknolagi says, going on to liken Cicada to the Freemasons and revealing that a Cicada member in the chat room stated that Cicada members had infiltrated major magazine publisher Conde Nast.
Tekknolagi says that during an online chat with one of Cicada's leaders he told him that he wanted to write a blog post about his experience in solving the puzzle. The leader was open to Tekknolagi's idea as long as he agreed to leave some pertinent details out, and in return he made him a better offer.
"I expressed interest in publishing a story, which I did publish, of how the whole challenge went down. One of the leaders, I guess you could call it, he said, 'Hey wait a bit. We have people at Wired. We can get that published for you.' But I didn't really want to wait and I also didn't really want to publish it in Wired so I just went ahead and published it. They weren't happy but once I removed some other details they were fine."
I press Tekknolagi on just how far the Cicada leader says their involvement with Wired goes.
"I don't think generally people at Wired are involved but [Cicada] made it seem like they had someone or multiple people inside Wired."
A page of runes from Carl Jung's book Liber Primus was found to have hidden clues.
As for other organizations Cicada say they've infiltrated?
"I think they wanted to have the feel that they had these 'in' positions in some government whatever," says Tekknolagi, "but I don't recall a specific instance of hearing that like I did for Wired."
Infiltrating organizations, of course, are the stuff of spy movies and conspiracy theories. I ask Tekknolagi if he believes what the Cicada leader said or if it's possible the people who organize Cicada are nothing more than a group of random hackers sitting in their basements who want people to believe they are more omnipresent than they actually are.
"I don't know who would have the time to set up," Tekknolagi says. "The thing about this puzzle is that each step leads to something else and it's the kind of thing that because it's time stamped can't be changed after the fact. The signature wouldn't work out, so every step had to be planned out beforehand and worked out perfectly. Otherwise, the whole thing would just fall apart. That's a lot of hours all at once for a puzzle to work out nearly perfectly. My inclination is to think that it's not just random people."
When I run through some theories of who Cicada might be (aliens, NSA, terrorists) Tekknolagi says "I have no idea" but says one of the most popular theories—that Cicada is a front for a government security agency recruiting people—is unlikely ("I feel like the NSA has better ways of recruiting.") Tekknolagi says Cicada could consist of some security researchers at major companies or universities, but then there were things he saw on their TOR site which also suggests to him that's unlikely as well.
"It was too informal," he says. "There were some spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes. Too many of those I think to be, like GHCQ, or something like that."
And as for the theory—as some of the emails I get—that suggest Cicada is a cyberterrorist organization?
"There was really nothing ever said to the tune of disruption or virus creation or whatever," he says. "All of it was like, 'Oh yeah; we're going to release some public open source software.'"
In the end, Tekknolagi still doesn't know who is behind Cicada or what kind of enlightenment—as its creators promise—there is to be had. And though Tekknolagi says he has no reason to believe Cicada is any type of "evil" organization, he says his experience on the inside "was just weird and creepy."
"Creepy because, we [still] have no idea who they are [and] it was just so well thought out. It was weird. Across the globe, fourteen different QR codes were placed just on lamp posts and mailboxes and whatever and I have no idea how long it took them to place those there but they obviously got there somehow," he says, citing just one example of the way the puzzle breaks from the digital to the real world. "Someone had to do it so they have some kinds of resources at their disposal."
But while many who obsess over the mystery that is Cicada might have stuck around to find out more, Tekknolagi only logged into the anonymous site for a few weeks before leaving.
"I just got bored," he says. "I had a job. I was working at a startup and of course that requires focus. Also the puzzle solving was over and I was what? 16? Short attention span. It's just the puzzle solving is over so I said, 'Screw this, I'm out.'"
As for the others in his IRC group, Tekknolagi says none of them who he is still in contact with say they stayed for much longer and after a while the Cicada site on the TOR network became hidden again.
Over Skype I still hear Tekknolagi tapping away at his keyboard, working on some project he's been working on the whole time while we've been speaking, only taking breaks to reply to me or to the instant messages this 18-year-old college freshman gets every few minutes. He tells me he has a headache and a lot of work left to do for the night. But before I let him go, I ask him one more thing: "After your experience of getting farther than anyone else has known to have gotten with Cicada, who would you say Cicada are and, regardless of what they claim, what do you believe their ultimate goal is?"
"I don't know and I don't know," Tekknolagi says. "That's the truth. I think that's the only thing that I can truthfully say."
