Friday, November 30, 2012

Seizure Warrant Issued For Warren Jeffs-FLDS Ranch

Polygamist Retreat

The main temple at the YFZ Ranch, home of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, sits in a rural area in Eldorado, Texas. (Tony Gutierrez / AP Photo)

The 91-page affidavit attached to the search and seizure warrant describes a multi-year history of alleged criminal activity facilitated on the 1,691-acre compound, alleging that leaders there used the property to engage in money laundering, harbor Jeffs while he was a fugitive, and practice sexual assault and bigamy. The seizure warrant was taped to the compound’s front gate Tuesday and released to the public Wednesday.

The filing, which initiates a civil forfeiture process against the property, marks “a great day,” said Sam Brower, a Utah-based private investigator and longtime researcher of the FLDS church. “This is not a religion,” he said. “It’s a criminal organization that rapes children.”

Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for the state attorney general, called the filing “simply the next step” in its prosecution of indicted FLDS members.

Prosecutors used DNA evidence last year to prove that Jeffs had fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl he had wed in a “celestial marriage.” Prosecutors also played for jurors what they described as a tape of Jeffs sexually assaulting a 12-year-old. Listed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for a time in 2006, Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison in August 2011.

Living behind bars has not done much to loosen the white-knuckle grip the 56-year-old self-proclaimed prophet holds on the men, women, and children who populated the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas, which was built on property purchased in 2003. The compound, the entrance to which is guarded by a formidable white metal gate, houses its own school, residential buildings, water and sewage treatment plants, clinics, and school, allowing the occupants to maintain a self-sufficient community.

A temple building and temple annex are the center of the community’s religious lifeâ€"though not one moment of life is left without religious significance for Jeffs’s followers. A recent investigation by ABC News found that Jeffs’s jail-cell directives included orders for followers to destroy their children’s toys. He has reportedly banned corn and dairy products from their diets while he eats prison food. Female members of the sect wear full-length pastel prairie dresses and keep their hair, which they never cut, in 19th-century styles.

Building a religious sect insulated from the rest of the world was always Jeffs’s goal, Brower said.

“Just recently, Warrenâ€"from prison, mind youâ€"sent out the edict that the people should be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.”

“We are establishing secret places where each person that goes there is placed under oath and covenant to keep it secret and sacred,” Jeffs said of the ranch in 2003 “Priesthood Records” obtained by officials and cited in the affidavit. Jeffs refers to the Eldorado ranch with the code word “R17” in the documents cited in the affidavit, referring to it in one instance as being in “a very isolated condition.”

Jeffs also has banned followers from accessing the Internet, reading newspapers, or watching the news, Brower said. Nevertheless, the community has carefully constructed mechanisms for spreading information among its members that likely kicked into gear when Texas declared its intention to seize the ranch.

“This system that they have sends out messages simultaneously to thousands of members on their phones. They’ll get a phone call and there will be a recorded message,” Brower said. “Just recently, Warrenâ€"from prison, mind youâ€"sent out the edict that the people should be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. He gave them instructions to put together backpacks, load them with provisions and all kinds of things, and that the end was coming soon.”

Such warnings are typical of Jeffs, Brower said. Yet whether to avoid the end of the world or for more mundane reasons, many of Jeffs’s followers may already have fled the area, people familiar with goings-on at the compound told The Daily Beast.

Carolyn Jessop, a former FLDS member and ex-wife of church leader Merrill Jessop, also said the YFZ compound has been emptying in recent months. The author of Escape, a memoir recounting her flight from the FLDS, Jessop describes herself as “a product of six generations of polygamy.” She fled the church and her powerful husband in 2003, taking her eight children with her.

“When they were buying property, things were getting really scary, so I got out a year before that,” Jessop said. Jeffs was talking to his followers about something he called the “center place.” “To me that meant compound,” Jessop said. “That scared me to death. I knew that getting off a compound would not be a possibility.”

The affidavit released on Wednesday alleges money-laundering practices that stretched over years and were used to finance the purchasing and maintenance of what became the YFZ ranch, some of them from around the time Jessop describes.

FLDS leaders bought the West Texas ranch “in a failed attempt to establish a remote outpost where they could insulate themselves from criminal prosecution for sexually assaulting children,” the Texas attorney general’s office said in a press release on Wednesday. The affidavit “details how the purchase of the ranch itself and the construction of a massive compound on ranch property were financed with the proceeds of illegal money laundering.”

Finances might have been the ranch’s undoing in more ways than one. “They’ve been doing a lot of building since the raid,” Jessop said of activity at the compound since 2008. “They went through a period where they were moving a lot of people around out there, and we had a lot of people disappear from the community, and we don’t know where they are.”

“The numbers probably quadrupled out there” a couple of years ago, Jessop said, before starting to drop again. “I heard they were pulling people off the ranch.”

Jessop said she thinks the building and maintenance expenses involved in keeping more people on the ranch was probably too heavy a burden. “I suspect that the reason they pulled people off the ranch was the financial part of it,” Jessop said. “They put a lot into building. I think they got top heavy and just could not afford it.”

“My understanding is the population has been declining there as of late, but it’s hard to say because during the original raid on the ranch in 2008 they were saying there were 150 to 200 people there,” Brower said. “The FLDS know how to make themselves scarce.”

It was not clear on Wednesday whether Texas officials would seize the property immediately or allow sect members to continue to live there. “I think the best course of action would be to take it now,” Brower said. “Once the FLDS knows that the government has control, my best guess is that they will just abandon it and leave. Warren Jeffs will probably give the order to abandon it and leave, and in the meantime they’re probably destroying all sorts of evidence and records.”

Whether seizure of the ranch will improve the lives of the women and children subject to Jeffs’ capricious prophesying is an open question. “My concern is the same as it’s always been: what is Texas doing to secure the well-being of the family?” Hays said. “I don’t understand how this is going to help the well-being of these women and children.”

Coached by Jeffs, FLDS members also may think they do not have much to fear from Texas officials, Jessop said. “As of right now, they haven’t shown any interest or concern in legal action with Texas,” she said. “Their whole thinking has been, ‘God is on our side.’ There’s a lot of magical thinking going on.”

The faithful could find refuge in similar, though smaller, FLDS locations in South Dakota and Colorado if the YFZ location is abandoned, Brower said. “I’m not naïve enough to think that the FLDS is going to say, ‘OK, we give up,’” Brower said. “Each time something like this happens, it takes a toll on them, and hopefully it will help to eradicate it somewhere down the line.”

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Won’t Someone Take iTunes Out Back And Shoot It?

iTunes 11 did not arrive on time. Apple originally promised to deliver the next version of its ubiquitous music-management program in October. Last month, though, the company announced that the release would slip to November, because the company needed “a little extra time to get it right.” This week the Wall Street Journal, citing “people who have seen it,” reported that the real cause was “engineering issues that required parts to be rebuilt.”

I suspect both those explanations are euphemisms for what’s really happening in Cupertino. I picture frazzled engineers growing increasingly alarmed as they discover that the iTunes codebase has been overrun by some kind of self-replicating virus that keeps adding random features and redesigns. The coders can’t figure out what’s going onâ€"why iTunes, alone among Apple products, keeps growing more ungainly. At the head of the team is a grizzled old engineer who’s been at Apple forever. He’s surly and crude, always making vulgar jokes about iPads. But the company can’t afford to get rid of himâ€"he’s the only one who understands how to operate the furnaces in the iTunes boiler room.

Then one morning the crew hears a strange clanging from iTunes’ starboard side. Scouts report that an ancient pistonâ€"something added for compatibility with the U2 iPod and then refashioned dozens of timesâ€"has been damaged while craftsmen removed the last remnants of a feature named Ping whose purpose has been lost to history. The old engineer dons his grease-covered overalls and heads down to check it out. Many anxious minutes pass. Then the crew is shaken by a huge blast. A minute later, they hear a lone, muffled wail. They send a medic, but it’s too late. The engineer has been battered by shrapnel from the iOS app management system, which is always on the fritz. His last words haunt the team forever: She can’t take much more of this. Too. Many. Features.

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Anyway, so iTunes 11 finally hit the Internet today. If you start downloading it immediately, you might be able to get it up and running by the time the ball drops over Times Square. People always wonder why this isâ€"why a simple music player weighs in at around 90 megabytes and requires many long minutes to install and “prepare” your library before it becomes functional. Don’t ask questionsâ€"this is just what you get with iTunes. Each new upgrade brings more suckage into your computer. It makes itself slower. It adds three or four more capabilities you’ll never need. It changes its screen layout in ways that are just subtle enough to make you throw your phone at the wall. And it adds more complexity to its ever-shifting syncing rules to ensure that the next time you connect your device, you’ll have to delete everything and resync. At this point, you shake your fists and curse this foul program to the heavens: iiiiiiiiiiiiiTuuuuuuuuuuunes!!!

Apple’s marketing material describes iTunes 11 as “Completely redesigned. For your viewing, listening, browsing, and shopping pleasure.” That sums up the software’s problem. Way back in 2001, Apple launched iTunes as a simple desktop music player for the Mac. It was a great one, too, because while it didn’t have all of the features that more-advanced software had, it was very simple to use. When iTunes was released for Windows, in 2003, it did seem like something truly novelâ€"a great-looking, easy-to-use program for PC users. It was, as Steve Jobs put it, "like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in Hell."

In the decade since, Apple has added arsenic to the water, drip by drip. What’s iTunes for now? As its unpithy tagline explains, it’s for everything. It’s for music and movies and TV shows and books and podcasts and university lectures and apps and, most of all, for shopping. There were legitimate reasons for Apple to have added all these features. As its devices morphed from music-playing iPods into do-everything gadgets like the iPhone and iPad, iTunes had to grow to accommodate their capabilities. Eventually iTunes became less a music player than a sync-masterâ€"the software you used to set up and manage your iGadgets. Indeed, up until just a couple years ago, the only way to get a new iPhone or iPad up and running was to plug it into iTunes first. Apple’s “post-PC” machines still needed a PC to workâ€"and, specifically, they needed a big, honking piece of bloated software.

The problem wasn’t that Apple added so much to iTunes. It was that it seems to have done so indiscriminately, without much thought to design or performance. The bigger iTunes got, the slower it felt, each new feature seeming to add a new weight atop its aging foundation. Now, every time I open iTunes, whether on a Mac or a Windows machine, I expect delay. The only other program I remember inducing such consistent panic was Microsoft’s Outlook 2003, which I was forced to use by office IT people before Gmail came along. In building the world’s most-downloaded Windows program, Apple has fallen victim to Microsoft-esque feature creep.

Is the new iTunes any better? Not markedly, to my eye. I’ve been using it for a few hours now. Naturally, the interface has been completely redesigned, though it’s too early for me to tell whether the new version is better or just different. Now, instead of a pane of options on the left side, you click between functions using buttons and menus on the top. Is this a genuine improvement, or just a face-lift masking the rot beneath? I suspect the latter: While some parts of iTunes move a little bit faster (the iOS app management screen, for example, used to be unusably slow; now it’s OK) most of it still feels lumbering.

What’s more, the new version doesn’t solve the key problems plaguing iTunes. First, it still does too many different thingsâ€"it’s a media player, a store, and a sync manager. Second, it remains a local file manager in a connected age. The new software does have deeper integration with Apple’s iCloud service, but at its core iTunes is meant to manage “your” music filesâ€"that is, stuff you’ve purchased or burnedâ€"on a single computer. That’s an outmoded model, one that’s being replaced by subscription systems like Spotify, which feature no distinction between stuff you own and stuff you don’t. Instead you have rights to play everything, all the time, whenever you want.

So even if the new iTunes is an improvement, it’s not a permanent solution. The only way for Apple to fix it would be to throw it out and start all over again. Perhapsâ€"as Macworld’s Jason Snell has suggestedâ€"iTunes should be split into multiple programs: One to play your media, one to sync your devices, and one to buy or subscribe to stuff from Apple. Or maybe it could be replaced altogether with a quicker, lightweight Web-based system. Whatever Apple does, it shouldn’t aim merely to fix iTunes but instead come up with a brand new system better suited to our age. iTunes 11 is enough. Please don’t let there be an iTunes 12.

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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Serious Google Security Glitch Gives Access To Previously Revoked Accounts

Earlier tonight, reports began rolling in of a serious breach in Google accounts security. Some sort  of glitch has granted access to Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and perhaps even more tools to users who previously had access, but then had that access revoked.

This means that ex-employees or contractors which formerly had access to a site’s records, reports and tools that could affect its place on the web have suddenly had their access restored. This is an enormously dangerous situation, obviously, as there is no guarantee that those people won’t do something malicious with that access.

You can see some evidence of the Webmaster Tools access on David Naylor’s blog here, where he demonstrates some of the things that could be done to his firm’s ex-clients. He has reported that he has access to Analytics too and that the issue has been going on for several hours at least. You can see the Reverifications triggering here:

 Serious Google security glitch restores Webmaster Tools, possibly Analytics access to revoked accounts

We spoke to Dennis Goedegebuure from TheNextCorner.net and former Director of SEO at eBay about the issue. He noted that he had been granted access to eBay’s Webmaster Tools, though he left the company 15 months ago.

He has not accessed the account at all, as that would be improper, but there is no way to know whether every one of the accounts that have been reinstated with this glitch will belong to conscientious users like Naylor and Goedegebuure.

Here’s a screenshot of Goedegebuure’s access to the eBay account:

Google webmaster access ebay 2 730x285 Serious Google security glitch restores Webmaster Tools, possibly Analytics access to revoked accounts

Currently, SEO blogs like State of Searchand SEO pros on Twitter are on fire with this issue. Many people are finding themselves suddenly in possession of access to accounts that they have no business being in charge of.

Screen Shot 2012 11 27 at 5.04.40 PM Serious Google security glitch restores Webmaster Tools, possibly Analytics access to revoked accounts

The things that could be accomplished with access to Webmaster Tools alone include some fairly scary stuff:

  • Change preferred domain, redirecting to another site (Imagine eBay suddenly being pointed to Amazon.com). As pointed out by Vanessa Fox in the comments below, this one wouldn’t be possible, but you could send it to one of your personal domains.
  • Drop pages from the index, removing the homepage URL.
  • Remove all sitemaps from the account.
  • Remove all users access from the webmaster.
  • Change parameter handling, and canonicalization.

There have also been reports that Google Talk contacts are reappearing as well. If you’re a site owner, you’re probably going to want to head into your WMT panel to delete those users. We have reached out to Google and they are looking into the issue.

Image Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images News

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Beyond The Iron Dome

An Iron Dome battery in Ashdod, Israel fires an interceptor at a rocket headed for Ashdod from Gaza, Nov. 17. Photo: Flickr/Israel Defense Forces

Israel just proved that its new Iron Dome system can repel Hamas’ short-range rockets and missiles. The bad news: Those weapons are nothing compared to the more advanced missiles that Hezbollah and Iran can throw at Israel, which would surely overwhelm Iron Dome. That’s why Israel, and America, are already looking into the missile defense systems that come after Iron Dome â€" including ones that rely on lasers.

The Israelis can justly say their system worked better than American and Israeli skeptics (and Hamas) anticipated. Five Iron Dome batteries destroyed some 421 Qassam rockets and Iranian-made Fajr-5 missiles launched from Gaza, for an interception rate of between 80 and 90 percent. (Hamas fired over 1,500 projectiles, but Iron Dome ignores those that don’t impact populated areas.) It kept Israeli casualties far below Palestinian ones and might have convinced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he didn’t need to re-invade Gaza. All this for a cost of under $30 million per interception.

All this has Israel pumping its fist. Uzi Rubin, a former Israeli missile defense official, boasted that Iron Dome outperformed the U.S.’ Patriot missile and showcased “Jewish genius with blue and white [i.e., Israeli] technology.” (Iron Dome was jointly developed with the U.S., but whatever.) And already Rafael, the company behind Iron Dome, is pledging to up its success rate to 95 percent in the next several months as it and the Israel Defense Forces sift through the launch data.

The thing is, Hamas is peanuts. Its Qassams and Fajr-5s are unguided systems, unsophisticated compared to the missile arsenals of Hezbollah and Iran, which include ballistic missiles. Even a souped-up Iron Dome would probably be overwhelmed by those. So as encouraged as Israel is by Iron Dome’s success, it’s already scaling upward, to more powerful interceptor-based missile defenses intended to blunt a layered assault from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran. Some, however, doubt that a bullet is the right instrument for stopping another bullet, and would prefer to use the laser weapons the U.S. is developing.

Just days after Wednesday’s ceasefire with Hamas, it prominently tested Iron Dome’s big brother, called David’s Sling (and sometimes “Magic Wand”). Whereas Iron Dome’s stated maximum range is 45 miles (and is probably shorter in reality), David’s Sling’s interceptors are designed to hit incoming missiles from up to 200 miles away. If it works as intended, David’s Sling should protect Israel against the longer-range missiles that Hezbollah possesses M600, Zelzal, other Fajr models; and perhaps even the Scud ballistic missiles Israel contends Hezbollah got from Iran or Syria.

David’s Sling and Iron Dome have another brother, the Arrow. The Arrow has been in development for years and was originally conceived of as a Scud-stopper. Like some American anti-ballistic missile systems, the Arrow family of defenses is designed to stop a ballistic missile upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere â€" principally, Iran’s Shehab-3. Over the summer, Israel upgraded the hardware, software, sensor array, interceptors and “Green Pine” radar on the Arrow-2; and an Arrow-3 is on the horizon that can reach twice its predecessor’s altitude. That’s likely intended to blunt the impact of Iran’s forthcoming the Iranian Sejjil-2 medium-range ballistic missile.

You can think of Iron Dome as the bantamweight, David’s Sling/Magic Wand as the middleweight and the Arrow as the heavyweight. And viewed together, you can see what Israel fears: a concerted barrage from Iran and its proxies that comprises everything from unguided Qassam rockets to Sejjil-3 ballistic missiles. That scenario brought U.S. Patriot missile batteries, Aegis ships and some 3,500 troops to Israel last month for the largest joint missile-defense exercises ever between the two allies, and you might hear more on the subject on Thursday, when outgoing Defense Minister Ehud Barak visits the Pentagon.

But some think hitting a bullet with another bullet is the wrong paradigm for missile defense. One Ha’aretz writer, Reuben Pedatzur, pines for Northrop Grumman’s Skyguard chemical laser, which would burn through projectiles after picking them up on radar. In the pre-Iron Dome days, residents of southern Israel once sued the Israeli government to bring Skyguard to their communities. And it’s worth noting that on Tuesday, rival Lockheed Martin claimed its own developmental laser system, the Area Defense Anti-Munitions, shot down four “small caliber” rockets from about a mile away in recent testing.

Except that laser-based missile defenses have been promised for decades and are never quite there yet. Rubin, the former Israeli missile defense official, blasted Skyguard in Ha’aretz on Tuesday as “simply unrealistic,” noting that the U.S. doesn’t even use it in Afghanistan, where its bases are frequently rocketed. And the U.S. Navy, which has sunk a lot of money into developing laser defenses for ships, still doesn’t consider its most mature solid-state lasers ready to burn through missiles this decade.

Still, David’s Sling and the upgraded Arrow have years to go before they’re ready, and their own trials by fire might not go as well as Iron Dome’s. Meanwhile, Hezbollah is pledging to launch “thousands of rockets” if Israel attacks, and the threat of a war with Iran hasn’t abated. If Hezbollah, or Iran, follow through on that threat, Iron Dome’s limits might become as visible as its successes just were.

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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

The World's Biggest Works Of Art

Perhaps you heard that Christo recently revived his plan to build the biggest artwork of all time? Before the passing of his partner in love and art Jeanne-Claude, the duo began to scheme about a work of massive magnitude. Constructed from 410,000 variously-hued oil barrels, the proposed beast would tower around 492 feet high and glow golden in the sunlight. And now, it might actually be happening in, where else, but Abu Dhabi. That will make all those orange-draped bridges, umbrella-dabbed fields, and purple-wrapped islands look pretty wimpy, won’t it? On that ambitious note, we’ve hauled in a few artworks known for their size. Not all of them are particularly aesthetically appealing, but damn, they’re big! But is bigger necessarily better? You decide. Spoiler: We’re a little biased.


Photo credit: Phaidon

Back to the GIANT ORANGE THING. Unlike Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s previous grand endeavors, this epic installation will be a permanent one. At this scale, does that make Mastaba a gigantic geometric sculpture or an architectural monument? Either way, the structure will be taller than St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or Great Pyramid at Giza, but…

…it won’t bigger than Mount Rushmore, America-a-a-a, fuck yeah! Featuring four, 60-foot faces of dead presidents, and taking up almost 1,300 acres, this very big sculpture monument attracts three million visitors a year.


Photo credit: Jim Denevan

Well, this is beautiful! San Francisco-based land artist Jim Denevan and his assistants created these icy loops and circular designs over frozen, snow-covered Lake Baikal in Siberia. It takes up nine square miles. The ephemeral work was “painted” with sweeping. Denevan also made other wintery land art with stomping, if that’s more your pace.


Photo credit: Banksy Forums

Unlike its fancy pants cousin “street art,” graffiti is motivated by the drive to put your name on things, legally or otherwise, as many things as possible, everywhere, all city, etc. That’s why SABER’s masterful piece in the bed of the Los Angeles River â€" often argued to be the world’s biggest â€" was such a big deal. And then it was buffed by the authorities. Boo.


Photo credit: Forbes

Speaking of putting your name on things, holy crap! Never mind then. Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan has hired laborers to dig deep canals forming ”the biggest graffiti tag the world has ever seen.” Behold his two-mile wide insignia! Behold HAMAD! Alright, show off. Where else but Abu Dhabi? Whoa. Déjà vu.


Photo credit: Terapixel

And this freshly launched monster right here is Daniel Richter’s first “Terapixel” photograph. It is made up of 36,000 extreme high resolution images combined using “multiviewpoint Gigapixel” technology. It’s a digital photograph with moveable, rotating parts and it’s a whopping 40 x 272,210px (W) × 92,970px (H). With visual capabilities that massive and opulent, you’d think they’d pick something more interesting to look at than a “locomotive.”

According to The Guinness Book of World Records, this is the world’s largest, longest “3D” street painting, created by 3D Joe & Max over 12,490 square feet of the Canary district in London. It’s utterly terrifying.

Tired of looking at things from above yet? Well, you can’t exactly prop this baby up. Or rather, this mama. Here’s the 2006 Guinness World Record holder for biggest painting done by a single artist, David Aberg’s 86,000-square-foot Mother Earth in the beautiful outdoors of Angelholm, Sweden. It’s also terrifying, but for different reasons. Yikes.


Photo credit: Crooked Brains

Alright, let’s get weirder. Here’s the Guinness World Record holder for “Largest TV sculpture,” spanning 33,744.85 square feet with 2,903 television sets, constructed by Lithuanian artist Gintaras Karosas in the Open Air Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania â€" which is apparently a forest. A magical forest of television sets!

And now, the toast of the town… Sorry, sorry. Here’s the world’s biggest portrait made out of toast by museum curator Laura Hadland. She created this portrait of her mother-in-law with 9,852 slices of toast. It’s 32’8″ x by 42’3″. That is a lot of toast. If you think that’s very silly indeed, we would like to remind you that Christo is building a gigantic, permanent trapezoidal pyramid in the desert from oil barrels and everyone seems to be very excited about it. The end.

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Facebook HQ Begging Employees To Test Android

“In the early days we gave employees iPhones primarily”, a Facebook spokesperson tells me. That decision and the rise of Android has left Facebook scrambling to get employees dogfooding its apps for Google’s OS. Now the company’s headquarters is plastered with these eye-popping posters asking Facebookers to “switch today”, and fix Android flaws with its secret bug reporting tool “Rage Shake”.

Facebook is making a shift. Not just to mobile, but to a balanced focus across mobile through an informal program to nudge employees to Android. It was first mentioned by Business Insider’s Owen Thomas in August and I’ve since investigated. The campaign casually known as “Droidfooding”, a portmanteau of Android and dogfooding â€" eating your own dogfood aka testing your own products.

I’ve attained some photos of the vaguely propagandistic posters found around Facebook’s Menlo Park campus. The most telling one is a graph of the International Data Corporation’s projection for shipments of Androids vs iPhones. It shows Google’s OS getting bundled with twice as many devices as Apple’s by 2016. If Facebook can’t even out the ratio of iOS to Android-toting employees soon, it could end up neglecting the vast majority of its smartphone app users.

The problem started because the first iPhone was just a heck of a lot better than initial Android handsets. Apple’s integrated OS and device plus early traction made it much more attractive to Facebook employees. Sure it cost more, but why not take the most advanced phone on the market if they weren’t footing the bill?

That caused a disconnect, though. Most people do have to think about the cost of their mobile handset. They might not be perfect or have micron-precision industrial design, but Androids get the job done. They surf the web, manage email, provide maps, and offer access to Facebook. If the social network wants to give Android users the best experience, it needs a fair portion of the company testing its Android apps and brainstorming what could be done next with the operating system’s flexibility.

That’s the goal of Droidfooding. While the default choice for what phone employees got used to be an iPhone, a Facebook spokesperson tells me that now “We don’t encorage one device over another. We let employees choose.” When I asked what the breakdown of iOS to Android users is in the company, Facebook’s spokesperson admitted “I don’t have a ratio but with the early focus on our iPhone app and the multi-year cycle of carrier contracts we do have more iPhones deployed.”

The campaign is starting to take hold, though. “We’ve created more awareness that Android devices are available” Facebook says. Now, “there’s plenty of people here carrying around both devices, and not just engineers and not just mobile people.” So while the posters ask employees to “switch”, it seems they’re pretty attached to their Apple products. At least there are more Androids in pockets at 1 Hacker Way.

Once they’re there, the company tries to make it as easy as possible to test the next generation of its Android apps. During my digging I found out Facebook forcibly updates employees to the most recent beta version of apps like Facebook For Android and Facebook Messenger. If they run across a problem in one of the Android (or iOS) apps, they can take advantage of a bug reporting feature Facebook builds into its internal betas.

It’s called “Rage Shake” and the name is spot-on. Employees just violently shake their phone and it automatically logs its current state and sends in details to Facebook’s mobile bug-squashers. The Google+ team apparently also has a “Rage Shake” feature and even gave access to it to end users, though it’s unclear which company had if first.

By avoiding a more complicated manual reporting process, Facebook maximizes the number of bugs it hears about from its 4,000 employee-testers. If Facebookers like the taste of Droidfood, they could make sure it’s not their actual users shaking their phones in fits of anger.

[Image Credit: TalkAndroid, Techno18]


February 1, 2004

NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

I Set the World Record on This Game (And It Only Cost Me $25)

I’m the top-ranked player globally in this pretty iPhone game, and it only cost me $25.

On Nov. 21, Electronic Arts subsidiary Chillingo published its 338th iPhone game, a racer with a minimalist visual style called Endless Road. It challenges you to outrun an earthquake that is causing the road behind you to collapse. The farther you drive, the higher your score.

Roughly 16,792 players have purchased Endless Road, according to its GameCenter leaderboards, and as of this writing I have scored higher than all of them. Am I some kind of Endless Road savant? No, I just paid twenty-five bucks.

Since Apple began to allow “in-app purchases” for free iOS software, many games using a free-to-play model allow players to spend unlimited amounts of money on virtual items. While some game developers say they’ll never embrace a “pay-to-win” scheme in which the biggest-spending players will always dominate their non-paying friends, some embrace it. Some players find themselves spending thousands of dollars on these games to stay on top. In Endless Road, it only took me $25 and a few hours to become the world’s greatest.

As players weave between cars and obstacles in Endless Road, sometimes they’ll come across short lines of coins. Given that most runs will take around five minutes, players often collect between 100 and 200 coins. Many of the game’s best upgrades, such as powerful new vehicles, cost tens of thousands of coins, so it would take a long, long time to unlock them through regular play.

The more efficient method of unlocking everything involves your bank account. For $8.99, you can purchase a package of 150,000 coins, enough to unlock everything.

Before I had ever spent a dime on Endless Road, I was already pretty good at it. I was ranked 117th out of around 10,000 players. After buying the 150,000-coin package and playing just one more game, my ranking immediately shot up to sixth. I doubled the distance that I could drive thanks in part to my purchase of a 50,000-coin monster truck that could bump into other cars on the road without slowing down much.

The other major factor in my success was consumables, items that could only be used once. This is the design that allows players to spend and spend without end. One of the items lets you skip the first 700 meters of each run. Another causes extra powerups to appear in the game. One even gives you a second life, allowing you to come back with no repercussions after a crash.

Robert Ashley must not be a big spender.

The best powerup, though, is the “Extra Nitro,” which costs 350 coins and can be used as many times as you like in a single race. It gives your car an insane speed boost that propels you through most any obstacle, even other cars. In a game that’s about going fast to survive, Extra Nitro is essentially an instant-win button. No mistake really matters when you can tap the nitro boost button and zip away from danger. I bought 25 of them before every race.

Endless Road seems to be suffering from problems with hackers. One of the game’s leaderboards tracks the number of coins that players have collected while driving. I’ve collected 27,878 coins, but Game Center shows that some players have over 1 billion of them, which implies that they’ve somehow hacked the game and taken as many coins as possible without paying. Every player besides myself in the top five of the Distance leaderboard seems to has way more coins than could have been collected through normal play.

I’m not proud of the fact that my name sits above every other player of Endless Road. Sure, I probably actually am better at the game than many of them, nor did I hack it. But that score is inflated because I spent money. My highest distance driven was over 23,000 meters, but if I didn’t use coins I’d rarely make it past the 6,000 meter mark.

The first game with a table of high scores was Space Invaders. Back then, it really meant something. It was a goal to shoot for â€" could you knock the top dog off the list and replace his initials with yours?

But the high-score table of Endless Road is utterly meaningless. Not a single person at the top achieved their position because of skill, and no amount of playing will let you beat them if you don’t pay up.

Endless Road is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the “freemium” or “pay-to-win” business model for games. Every bit of value it may have in its design is invalidated when any random journalist with 25 bucks in his pocket can pay to become “the best.”

I know that games like FarmVille 2 are designed to make lots of money instead of providing a cool gaming experience. I know that many of the top players of big games are just men with deep pockets, and I know that there are many cute iPhone games which are really just toyboxes designed to repeatedly take your money.

What I don’t know is if I’ll be able to ever take a game like this seriously ever again. Maybe by tomorrow, somebody will out-pay me and become the new world champion of Endless Road. I won’t be there to find out.

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An Escape From Sex Slavery

She remembers a home that looked fancy on the outside but ominous on the inside, a dark maze of bare chambers. She remembers the parade of men, one after the other, day by day, forcing her to have sex. She remembers contemplating death. She wasn’t yet 10 years old.

Sex Slave

A former sex slave finds solace at a center run by the Somaly Mam Foundation. (Jesse Pesta)

Her name is Sreypich Loch, and she was a slave in a Cambodian brothel. If she refused sex, she says, she would be beaten, shocked with an electric cord, denied food and water. “What else could I do?” she asks.

Loch, now around 20 years old, managed to escape that world and works today to rescue other girls. She helps grab them out of brothels, and she hosts a radio show in Phnom Penh, giving the girls a forum for their stories. It’s a groundbreaking effort for a young woman and former sex slave in this male-dominated society.

She hopes that by talking about her past, she will help people understand that slavery is alive and well. When people “hear the voice of the survivor,” she says on a recent visit to New York City, “we can help others.” She traveled to the U.S. with the group that helped save her, the Somaly Mam Foundation, named for another survivor of the sex trade in Cambodia.

Loch’s story may sound extreme, but it is not some isolated incident. An estimated 27 million people are victims of slavery around the world, according to the U.S. State Department. The buying and selling of humans is a multibillion-dollar global business, ensnaring vulnerable people who are often kidnapped or tricked into the trade.

Loch’s nightmare began when she was a child in Phnom Penh. Her stepfather raped her, she says, when she was just a girl; she thinks she was around 7 years old. He threatened to kill her if she told anyone. She would be raped again that year, by a stranger who snatched her from the street. He made the same threat, she says: tell anyone and die.

She stayed silent. “I was young. I was scared,” she says, speaking softly. “In Cambodia, many fathers rape their daughters; brothers rape their sisters.” Consistently ranked as one of the poorest and most corrupt nations in the world, Cambodia is still reeling from the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, which massacred as many as 2 million people in the 1970s. Intellectuals and city dwellers were targeted and tortured in an attempt to create a completely agrarian society. Families were ripped apart.

One day Loch worked up the nerve to tell her mother about the rapes. She’s not sure how much time had passed since the assaults, she says, as she was just a child and memories fade. But she has a vivid memory of her mother’s response. “She hit me,” Loch says. “She didn’t believe me. I think: she does not love me.”

Loch ran away from home, having lost faith in her family, she says. She remembers a heavy rainfall and the feeling of not knowing where to go. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I cried and cried,” she says. And then she was found by a gang of men. “Five men raped me on the street,” she says. “I wanted to die.”

That might have indeed been her fate if a woman hadn’t come along, offering to help. The woman took Loch to her homeâ€"or so Loch thought. The house turned out to be a brothel. She was locked in a basement room and forced to “sleep with many, many men every day,” she says. “I couldn’t see light, just dark.”

Her eyes fill with water at the thought of it. Then she pauses, closes her eyes for a moment, and continues. “If I said no, pimp hit me,” she says. “I tell pimp, please kill me.” Then she adds, “I am people. I am not an animal. How could they do me that way?”

Somaly Mam

Sreypich Loch (right) with her rescuer, Somaly Mam, on a visit to New York City. (Courtesy of the Somaly Mam Foundation)

Loch’s story mirrors that of many rescued Cambodian girls, who report being drugged, locked in coffins, whipped, even covered with biting insects in order to make them submit to sex. While their stories can be difficult to verify independently, the U.S. State Department confirms that the enslavement of girls in Cambodia is pervasive. “The sale of virgin girls continues to be a serious problem in Cambodia,” the State Department said in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report released this summer. “Cambodian men form the largest source of demand for child prostitution, though a significant number of men from the United States and Europe, as well as other Asian countries, travel to Cambodia to engage in child sex tourism.” Among local men, demand is often fueled by myths that sex with a virgin brings luck or good health.

Cambodia “does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking,” the State Department report says, but is making “significant efforts to do so.” Officials reportedly convicted 62 trafficking offenders this past year, an increase from 20 offenders the prior year.

Years had gone by, Loch says, when a client took her out of the brothel to his own home. There, she found an open window and fled, she says, hiding in the shadows until a policeman found her. “My body was bad, smelled not good,” she recalls. When she told her story, the police connected her with anti-trafficking officials. They in turn referred her to a center run by former sex slave Somaly Mam, according to a spokeswoman for Mam’s foundation, a grassroots group with shelters across Cambodia. No police action was taken against Loch’s captors, the spokeswoman says. Loch, for her part, remembers seeing all the girls at the shelter and thinking she had been sold to another brothel.

That was around four years ago, when Loch was in her midteens. At the center, she learned to sew and began attending school. In 2010 she joined an offshoot of Mam’s foundation called Voices for Change, a group of young slavery survivors who rescue girls from brothels. The activists gain access to the brothels by bringing supplies such as soap and condoms. Once inside they tell the sex workers that they can escape, with the help of the foundation and the police. The victims often need convincing. Many have been enslaved in the sex trade for so long, they don’t know how to function in the outside world; they wonder how they would support themselves. The activists tell them they can learn a trade, such as sewing or hairdressing, at the shelters.

The year Loch joined the group of young activists, she received an invitation to tell her story on a commercial radio station in Phnom Penh. The show sparked a storm of interest, with listeners calling in, reporting suspicious situations and asking about sentencing for pimps and traffickers. Loch saw an opportunity to help the public understand the shadowy world of slavery. This year she launched her own show, which she now hosts five days a week, interviewing former sex slaves as well as lawyers and legislators. She believes it’s the personal narratives of the girls that make people stop and listen.

Loch says she is “so happy” about her job. At the same time, she says it’s difficult to be reminded every day of her life in captivity. She is also haunted by the absence of her mother in her life; she has not seen her since she left home as a child.

She draws strength, she says, from her fellow survivors. The bond between these women is clear. On her trip to New York with two other young survivors, Sina Vann and Sopheap Thy, she holds their hands and hugs them frequently as they attend events and tour the city. In jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts, their dark hair pulled back into ponytails, the young women are quick to laugh at themselves and at one another. Vann jokes that Loch has great strength because “she eats a lot.” Loch makes fun of Thy for taking photos of flowers instead of Manhattan skyscrapers.

They look for restaurants that serve familiar dishesâ€"rice and fishâ€"and they marvel at the enormous platters of food that arrive. They look forward to going home and sharing their stories with the rest of the rescued girls. They call each other “sister.”

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Monday, November 26, 2012

Implant Lets The Blind Read Braille With Their Eyes

Blind people could soon be able to read street signs using an implant that translates the alphabet into Braille and beams an image of the Braille directly to visual neurons at the back of the eye.

The implant is a modified version of a class of devices called retinal prostheses, which are used to restore partial sight to people with retinitis pigmentosa. A degenerative eye disease that kills the photoreceptor cells in the retina, RP tends to affect people in early adulthood and can lead to blindness, but leaves intact the neurons that carry visual signals to the brain.

Prostheses such as the Argus II, manufactured by Second Sight in Sylmar, California, convert video from a camera mounted on a pair of glasses into electronic signals "displayed" on a 10-by-6 grid of electrodes implanted over a person's retina. This gives users a pixellated view of the world, allowing them to distinguish light and dark regions and even detect features such as doorways.

But deciphering letters and words with the prosthesis is slow because of its low resolution. To make this more practical, Thomas Lauritzen of Second Sight and colleagues have come up with a modified version of the Argus II that presents the user with Braille. Since Braille represents letters and numbers as dots in a 3-by-2 grid, it can be displayed using the electrode array of existing Argus implants.

The modified implant was tried out on a Braille-reading volunteer who already uses the Argus II. Tested on single letters and words of up to four letters, transmitted in Braille to the retinal implant, he correctly identified the letters 89 per cent of the time and words 60 to 80 per cent of the time. Longer words should actually be easier to read, Lauritzen predicts, because getting an individual letter wrong creates less confusion than when the word is short.

The user was able to read at a rate of at least one letter per second. By contrast, the pixellated letters of the conventional version of Argus can take wearers tens of seconds to decipher, so whole words can take minutes.

No Braille substitute

The modified system is not intended to replace standard Braille texts: a typical Braille user can read 800 letters per minute by touch. Where the system comes into its own is in situations when no Braille version of a text is available. It could be most useful for reading text in public places, for example, notices and street signs. There are approximately 65,000 people in the US and Europe with severe enough RP to benefit from the prosthesis, says Brian Mech, Second Sight's vice-president of business development.

Once the system has been properly tested, the team intends to provide the Braille functionality as a separate mode in the Argus II. In Braille mode, the device would bypass the video processing unit and instead use text-recognition software to identify signs and convert them on the fly into images of Braille. Although it wasn't used in the recent study, software exists that can find and read about 90 per cent of signs, Lauritzen says. "It's already good enough, and it will undoubtedly improve with time."

"Second Sight have done amazing work for years," says Patrick Degenaar at Newcastle University in the UK. But the test of any prosthesis is whether it restores abilities to the user. The problem with today's visual prostheses is their low resolution, he says.

Sound feedback?

Packing more electrodes into the same space is not currently possible because electrolytic effects make them degrade if they are too close together. "Over time the electrodes will fall apart," says Degenaar. Making the most of the low resolution and using the grid to display Braille is a good idea, he says, but other options should also be explored. If text-recognition software is already so good, then "why not use that to provide auditory feedback rather than Braille?", he asks.

"Anything that potentially leads to new ways to realise vision is very welcome," says Pete Osborne, chief Braille officer at the Royal National Institute of Blind People in London. Visual prosthetics in general are not trying to replicate sight, he says, and the challenge is to find the best alternative. Besides, Braille was developed as a means of reading by touch. "Will it translate to a visual medium? The proof will be in the pudding."

Journal reference: Frontiers in Neuroscience, DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00168

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Chris Brown Tells Female Comedy Writer That He Wants To Fart On Her

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Chris Brown Attacks Comedy Writer Jenny Jo...

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