Introducing Hate, the Map

Holy shit, Americans are assholes (via Floating Sheep)

In a lot of ways, the Geography of Hate affirms what we already know: Americans are fucking racist. Homophobic and ableist, too.
But while that may not come as any great surprise, the map reveals a startling bigotry coursing beneath our preconceived notions of just where in the US hate is harbored most. Americans, it turns out, fall racist and homophobic and ableist, and are apparently vocal enough about it to spout off bigotry on social media, in no real discernible pattern, though it's often where we least expect bigotry that we find it rearing its ugly head.
The visualization comes way of Humboldt State University's Dr. Monica Stephens and the Floating Sheep--the same group that made a map of post-election Twitter hate speech. It comprises 150,000 geo-coded hate tweets flagged between June 2012 and April 2013 for including the word "chink," "gook," "nigger," "wetback," "spick," "cripple," "dyke," "fag," "homo," or "queer". At first blush it's awfully depressing, a real day ruiner, or worse. Click around and most slurs--not all, but most--see the intercontinental US pocked by deep reds, the research team's translation for "most hate." Jesus Christ. Is it 2013? It can't be 2013.
But, really? That can't be right, can it. Surely something's off. How can we be sure "positive" uses of an otherwise hateful slur (e.g., “dykes on bikes #SFPride”) weren't inadvertently swept up in the Geography of Hate? Contextualiztion is crucial--is everything, really. Did Stephens' team allow for it?
They did. In fact, this is why they used humans (read: Humboldt State students), not machines, to analyze the entirety of the 150,000 offending tweets, all drawn from the University of Kentucky's DOLLY project. (It was also very much the reason the project got underway in the first place, as the Floating Sheep got a fair deal of flak over whether their post-election map contextualized hate rigourously enough.) It was a matter of avoiding "any algorithmic sentiment analysis of natural language processing," the researchers write, "as many algorithms would have simply classified a tweet as ‘negative’ when the word was used in a neutral or positive way. The students were able to discern which were negative, neutral, or positive."
As such, the map only includes those tweets used in explicitly negative context. Like so much of modern life, it's an uncomfortable truth perhaps best summed up by the late George Carlin.

This Is Life in a 400 PPM World

Okay, so it won't be that bad. Yet. Image: Flickr

It already ranks as one of the grimmest measurements ever taken. Climate scientists found that for the first time in approximately three million years, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 400 parts per million. The reason that figure was splashed across the front page of the New York Times—and why top White House advisors find it "truly frightening"—should be well understood by now. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, and the more that accumulates in the atmosphere, the more sunlight it traps—and the more the globe warms.
We've now added enough CO2 to the atmosphere to change the lives of every human on the planet. This isn't an exaggeration. An increasingly large portion of the CO2 clogging our atmosphere comes from human activity—from our coal-fired power plants, our petroleum burning cars, our factories. Before we had any of those, carbon dioxide accounted for just 280 ppm. That means we've already turned up the dial on the planet's central heating by some 42 percent.
As with most heating units, it will take a little time for the temperatures to catch up with the new setting. But many of those changes are already under way. Life in a world where carbon accounts for 400 ppm is going to be quite different from the old 280 ppm world. The climate is now fundamentally different than it was 40, 30, even 20 years ago.
When I was born, in the mid-1980s, the amount of CO2 that had accumulated in the atmosphere was just enough to account for 350 ppm—the amount climatologists like NASA's Dr. James Hansen have identified as the threshold between a stable climate and an unpredictable, potentially volatile one. Between the 1800s and then, humans—mostly the United States and Europe—had built enough carbon-belching power plants and factories to add 70 ppm to the atmosphere.
Yet in my short life alone, human activity has pumped enough carbon pollution into our skies to raise the bar a full 50 ppm more. That's a huge change—out of the 120 ppm humans have added in total, nearly half of it has occurred in just under 30 years. That's the rest of the world following suit, building fossil fueled power plants and industrializing; the same way the U.S. did.
And that's enough carbon to transform our climate to the point that it better resembles another geologic era entirely: The Pliocene. That era, which took place from 5.8 to 2.6 million years ago, was the last time there was so much CO2 was blanketing the planet. According to the geological record, the CO2 levels of 360-400 ppm that marked the Pliocene made the world a drastically different place than the one that you and I grew up in.
Here are some characteristics of the 400 ppm world then—and those that are likely to be reprised in coming years:
-Sea levels were, on average, between 50 and 82 feet higher.
-Temperatures were 2-3˚C higher, or about 4-6 ˚F, than they are today.
-Arctic temperatures were between 10-20 ˚C hotter.
-Many species of both plants and animals existed several hundred kilometers north of where their nearest relatives exist today.
-Vast swaths of land turned into swamps.

Image: Liverpool University

This is our 400 ppm world. Hotter, nastier, even less predictable than the one you got comfortable with. This is the world that your kids are going to be growing up in. And some of the irrevocable damage has already been done.
"We've taken one of the largest physical features on earth--the Arctic--and we've broken it; new data shows 80 percent of the ice that was there 40 years ago is gone. So now we'll find out what disappears between here and 450," Bill McKibben, the environmentalist and author of Eaarth: Life on a Strange New Planet, told me in an email.
What seems like pessimism is actually gloomy pragmatism. McKibben knows that if we keep our factories humming, our cars guzzling, and coal plants firing, we'll hit 450 ppm in less time than we hit 400.
"Sadly, we're shooting right past 400 ppm and likely to commit to at least 450 ppm within a matter of years if we don't begin ramping down our greenhouse gas emissions," the preeminent climatologist Michael E. Mann told me.
And if there's one thing that's worse than a 400 ppm world, it's a 450 ppm world.

"If we cross 450 ppm we likely commit to just under 4˚ F warming of the globe relative to preindustrial," Mann continued. "That's a world where the most extreme summers we've ever seen, like last summer, with its record heat and drought, decimated crops, unprecedented wildfires, and devastating Superstorm Sandy, will be the typical summer. And the extreme summers? There is no analog in our past for what that would look like."
That world is just decades, even years away. I won't recite a full list of dangers a world like this holds—the one that includes displaced climate refugees, tensions over diminishing resources, increased reach of tropical diseases, battered coastal populations—but suffice to say that the 400 ppm world and its successors can be ugly places.
The Arctic is already melted. Sea levels are rapidly rising. We've seen a full 1˚ F of temperature rise since mid-century. Scientists are predicting that climate change is indeed going to devastate plant and animal habitats worldwide, much as it did in the Pliocene. This is the 400 ppm world, and it's upon us. The only question now is if we're going to keep cranking the central heat—are we going to turn this sauna into an inferno? We'd have to embrace a whiplash transition away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy—otherwise we can say hello to planet hotbox.
"Fortunately, there is still time to avoid that future," Mann says. "But not a whole lot of time. Breaching the sobering milestone of 400 ppm simply puts an exclamation mark on that."

The Feds Are Making It Hurt in Every Way Possible For Weev, But for What?

Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, who is currently serving jail time for exposing an AT&T security hole, got an in-person visit from his lawyer Tor Ekeland on Sunday. The four-hour-plus drive out to the Pennsylvanian penitentiary from his Brooklyn offices was mandatory for Ekeland, as the prison has denied him access to his client since he was placed in solitary confinement for unconfirmed reasons weeks ago. 
Ekeland, accompanied by two of weev’s female friends who tweeted the experience under #weevroadtrip, learned he was sharing a 10x10 cell in solitary with a cellmate, and is let out three times a week for a 15-minute shower. And that’s it. Ekeland called this treatment “odd for someone convicted of a non-violent computer crime” in a recent phone interview, and “a bit draconian” as it appears “[weev] is being punished for his speech.”
Reasons for the “administrative detention”—what the prison is calling solitary confinement—are still unclear. Normally, inmates are put into housing like weev’s if they have started a fight in the prison. But weev did no such thing. Ekeland spoke to his client in a visitation booth separated by glass, with communication only audible through telephone, “like in the movies.”
The penitentiary also threatened to relocate weev regularly, in order to disrupt communications with friends, as well as rooming him with gang members and terrorists if he tries to communicate with the outside world via Internet again. weev tweeting and posting messages to SoundCloud is not illegal, but disrupts the federal government’s goal of weev quietly carrying out his prison sentence and thus fading from public memory.
Even more troubling than the “administrative detention,” threats, and limited access to letter-writing materials and stamps: the prison is not serving weev gluten-free meals. weev has special dietary needs as he has Celiac’s disease, an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine that causes him to have an adverse reaction to gluten. Ekeland learned his client has gone to see the prison doctor, but his diet has not changed. The food his friends brought weev was not allowed, nor was weev able to keep any of the notes his friends brought him.

Let VICE School You on the Web This Internet Week

You think you know everything about the internet because you managed to bookmark a few free porn sites and up-voted some Grumpy Cat meme's on Reddit? Well, there's a lot more to the web than carnal perversions and dwarf felines: it's a tool that connects millions of disparate people and ideas together, impacting everything from the food we eat to the way we date. To help you get a grip on all of this high-tech shit and the ways it enhances our lives, David-Michel Davies and Neil Vogel of the Webby Awards, and Katherine Oliver of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment came together in 2008 to form Internet Week—a celebration of all things digital and the luminaries behind all those ones and zeros.

VICE will be joining in the geek fun at Internet Week for the third year in a row, by hosting a series of panels ranging from the importance of social media in the conflict in Syria to the effects of internet piracy. VICE's sister technology site, Motherboard, will also be hosting a week of panels around the future of drugs, drones, and code. And VICE's founder Shane Smith, accompanied by legendary media mogul Tom Freston, will top the week off with a keynote address on Thursday evening.

The nerdy hoopla is happening right now at Manhattan's Metropolitan Pavilion. But if you can't make it in person because you've dived so deep into the nether realms of internet smut and cat memes that you can't even bear the thought of leaving your computer, you're in luck—you can stream all the stuff going down at Internet Week over the internet! 

Jodorowski's Dune Would Have Been More Insane Than You Can Even Imagine

Image: Giger's rendering of House Harkonnen from Jodorowsky's Dune

In 1974, the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky set about turning the classic sci-fi novel Dune into a major motion picture. He recruited Orson Welles, Pink Floyd, H. R. Giger, David Carradine, Salvador Dali, and Mick Jagger to the project, completed 3,000 pieces of story art, and spent millions of dollars preparing for production. Investors balked when he asked for more—and when they realized the script would account for a meandering 14-hour film—and it was ultimately shelved.
David Lynch would famously take up the mantle and go on to turn Dune into an epic flop. So today, Jodorowsky's effort remains one of the most famous movies never made. A documentary about the lost film debuted at Cannes, and it's getting rave reviews—it's essentially a prolonged bull session with Jodorowsky about the aborted project. 

Juggalos Are OK, Cupid

Screenshot via OkCupid Juggalos
Something like 70 percent of the internet is people going, “Hey did you see this cute/funny/sad/tragic/OMG/WTF/fail thing?” and passing around the meme du jour—a wacky crime story from Florida, an amazing photo of natural phenomenon that just has to be seen to be believed, a fake video of an eagle snatching a kid in a park, a cat that looks like something other than a cat. Yesterday, the hot, clickable content being viewed, blogged, reblogged, shared, and no doubt monetized was a Tumblr called OkCupid Juggalos.
Juggalos, of course, are diehard fans of the crypto-Christian rap duo Insane Clown Posse, and OkCupid is a really popular free online dating site. Combine the two things, and you get awkward, posturing selfies of men and women with painted faces and poorly done tattoos, coupled with their ungrammatical statements about being “chill,” loving Faygo, and being “crazy.” Hilarious.
The site is part of a subgenre of Tumblrs devoted to pointing out people, usually men, who have bizarre OkCupid profiles that sometimes make them sound like psychopaths or rapists. (It’s such a popular trope that OkCupid Juggalos isn’t even the only Tumblr devoted to Juggalos on OkCupid.)  OkCupid Goldmine documents a grab bag of creeps and weirdos; Okc_ebooks gets gullible users to respond to messages that are actually gibberish tweets from bot/poet @Horse_ebooks; the creator of OkCupid Enemies sought out people who weren’t good matches for him or her to find freakish profiles (that one’s apparently now defunct); Fedoras of OKC targets the usually nerdy, Reddit-using, neck-bearded gamer types who think they look good in fedoras; and Nice Guys of OkCupid (also defunct) went after dudes who claimed to be “nice guys” but were clearly entitled, misogynistic dicks who had some fucked-up thoughts about women.

Australian Scientists Think "Salamander-Like" Human Limb Regeneration Is Possible

An axolotl salamander's limb in the process of regeneration. Image: Nature

I am a human, so if my limbs fall off, they stay off. This is unfortunate. It's also why Australian scientists are working to enable "salamander-like" limb repair in people. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers new insights into how salamanders self-repair, and holds clues as to how humans might learn from their example.
Salamanders, you see, are one of the few vertebrates with full-fledged regenerative capabilities: they can repair their hearts, brains, and spines, and they regrow entire limbs. What makes all that regeneration possible are cells called macrophages. These cells not only kill off invasive bacteria and fungi, study author Dr. James Godwin, of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, tells ABC Australia, they "actively determine repair."

Image: Georgia Tech University

Humans have macrophages, too, but no limb repair. So Godwin and his team of researchers set out to study what makes the salamander's restorative cells different. They extracted the macrophages from an axolotl, an aquatic species of salamander, and discovered that without macrophages, limb regeneration shut down entirely—the salamanders became like us, with lost limbs turning into stumps. But the scientists found that "Full limb regenerative capacity of failed stumps was restored by reamputation once endogenous macrophage populations had been replenished."
The discovery led Godwin to believe that a chemical release accompanying the deployment of macrophages is essential to limb regeneration—and that it's entirely possible that by emulating that chemical release, we may be able to spur human limb regeneration. As he writes in the study's abstract: "Promotion of a regeneration-permissive environment by identification of macrophage-derived therapeutic molecules may ... aid in the regeneration of damaged body parts in adult mammals."
In other words, if he can identify which chemicals are driving that limb repair, he may be able to concoct a medicinal treatment that could actually help humans regrow limbs right in the emergency room.
"The long-term plan," he said, "is that we'll know exactly what cocktail to add to a wound site to allow salamander-like regeneration under hospital conditions."

Not Everyone Can Copy Technology

Bangladesh, along with Haiti, Rwanda, and many other countries, relies on its TRIPS exemption for cheaper medicine and access to the innovation economy (via Orangeadnan/Flickr)

Americans and much of the rest of the developed world seem to take their technological invention and innovation for granted. By contrast, technologically under-developed countries, known as “least developed countries” (LDCs), are trying to play catch-up and build their technologies and economies from the ground up.

That is why the the World Trade Organization's TRIPS waiver, which allows LDCs to exempt themselves from enforcing intellectual property restrictions, is so vital to these countries. Initially it was designed to last from 1995 to 2005, and was subsequently extended to July 1, 2013, as LDCs continued to play economic catch up. They argue that being forced to comply with IP laws, which are often frivolous, stifles innovation in small, cash-poor markets. Because of that, the WTO's recent informal negotiations on the waiver threaten to derail technological and economic progress in LDCs if another extension isn't reached.

Why is this of any concern to Americans? Well, for the same reason that companies like Google oppose legislation like SOPA and PIPA: the intellectual property regulations can be innovation killers. And not just for developing countries, but for everyone.

For the unfamiliar, TRIPS stands for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, and is part of the WTO. The TRIPS council is currently chaired by Alfredo Suescum of Panama, and the parties involved in deciding the waiver's fate involve the United States (naturally), European Union, Japan, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and Switzerland.

Let's say a tech start-up in a poor country decides to launch their own version of YouTube or DailyMotion, but it's way better. Right now, they can do just that without having to worry about lawsuits over intellectual property. But come July, if the waiver expires, they may end up open to legal actions, which would mean either licensing IP or developing workarounds.

We Don't Need Someone: A Chat With Mount Kimbie

Mount Kimbie (via their Twitter)

British production duo Mount Kimbie are releasing their sophomore LP, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, this Tuesday on Warp. Mount Kimbie's last release, 2010's critical darling Crooks And Lovers, eventually boxed the group into the forefront of the blogger-created pseudo-genre 'post-dubstep.' This style connoted lush-production, R&B and ambient influences combined with UK garage and 2-step. With Cold Spring, though, Mount Kimbie cannot easily be labeled by PR gurus looking to coin a music meme.
The duo retreated to its studio in South Bermondsey to create possibly the best come-down album this side of Burial. Favoring cathedral pedals and guitars over found samples, this new release is an obvious shift from previous records. Tracks like "Made To Stray" and "So Many Times, So Many Ways" even veer into electronic jams that undoubtedly could implode any of the big, sweaty outdoor festivals. Mount Kimbie sounds like a band now, even if it is still a Boiler Room favorite.
I spoke to Dominic Maker and Kai Campos (the brains behind the synths) about goofing off with members of Stereolab instead of working, their desire to cover Juicy J, and Roald Dahl as an influence on this album. Don't expect the duo to remix others soon, but they joked about releasing a cathedral pedal covers EP of Cold Spring Fault Less Youth. We can only hope. 

My Name Is Tom and I’m a Video Game Addict

Image by Courtney Nicholas
“I am a video game nerd and I love it.” That’s what Tom Bissell admits in his excellent confession and analysis of his descent (ascent?) into video game addiction, Extra Lives: Video Games Matter. He seems like me (I say that humbly), in that he once had a love of literature and spent much of his intellectual and professional life engaged with literature: reading literature, writing about literature, and teaching literature. But at some point in his late 20s, video games took over.
Tom seems to have mixed feelings about his video game addiction. His book makes excellent arguments about video games being the newest popular art form that can do a variety of things that other art forms can’t. They can engage the audience as players and thus as creators of the narrative. They also allow players to create their own avatars to navigate imaginary worlds. And they can make narrative engagement active and open-ended because each player can experience his or her own unique version of the journey. This last point is even more evident in free-roaming games such as Grand Theft Auto IV, where one can just wander.
But Tom also seems to be confessing or defending (to himself?) his tight tether to video games. He plays morning, noon, and night. He ends his book (spoiler alert!) with a moving comparison of his addiction to Grand Theft Auto IV with his concomitant addiction to cocaine. He travels the world on various assignments or grants, fully intending to rid himself of both addictions—I think these trips are called “geographics” in addiction parlance—but he always gets sucked back in. Ultimately it sounds as if his cocaine addiction has been kicked, but the existence of this book shows that video games are still a huge part of his life. They are his life.
Over the years I have dipped into various video games. I was a Nintendo Legend of Zelda fanatic. The later incarnations of Zelda—I think one was called Ocarina of Time—helped me through difficult times in high school, while also making me feel like a loser because I was spending hours playing a children's game when I could have been out socializing with the cool kids. Much later, I played Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and its sequel Grand Theft Auto IV, and then the same company’s Red Dead Redemption and LA Noir. I wanted to get in on the zeitgeist, and these games engaged so many subjects that I loved, but normally found in books and film. San Andreas embraced the 80s and 90s Los Angeles hip-hop culture that I discovered during high school, when I immersed myself in Dr. Dre and Death Row records and LAbrynth, the stunning book about the Tupac and Biggie murders. GTA IV captured the immigrant underworlds of New York City that seemed like something out of The Wire or a film by Scorsese or Tarantino. Red Dead Redemption seemed to reference Cormac McCarthy’s opus Blood Meridian, which is about the dark side of Manifest Destiny and the embrace of the western antihero, a perfect influence for a video game in which incessant killing is built into its form. And LA Noir was the activation of my love for James Elroy’s sordid take on the LA crime world of the midcentury.
But what has kept me from plunging headlong into video games is that they take so much damn time. It’s the same with television. How can I watch all the great shows and still live a life and pursue goals in the real world? If I indulge myself too much in the world of video games, I'll feel as I did in high school—a sad boy who was running from the scary social world, comforting himself by inhabiting the controlled otherworld of Link, a little elf who shoots arrows and fights dragons. But Tom Bissell, while aware of the detriment video game absorption has had on his real life, claims that his experiences within games have the same value as real experiences. I suppose if you take game play as seriously as he does, the moral questions some games pose, the emotional engagement fostered for some of the characters could create deeper responses than just the excitement of problem solving.
Maybe it’s obvious, but what is so impressive about video games today is the world building. In fact, that’s where most of the design time and energy is spent, rather than on the writing. Just as porn can get away with bad acting as long as the sex is good, video games can get away with bad writing and bad characterizations as long as the game play is exciting and engaging.
Extra Lives is a search for what is so attractive about video games, but it is also a kind of modernist investigation into the essence of the medium and what video games can do better than other mediums. If we tried to translate the agency given to the player in video games to other mediums, you’d get something like elaborate coloring books or extensive choose your own adventure books. But to the n^th degree, because videogames are now able to contain random interactions, unplanned occurrences between the player avatar and the unscripted independently programmed characters and elements of the game world. This means that the video games are approaching the open-ended dynamic of life. 

This Is Probably Going to Be the First Woolly Mammoth That Gets Cloned

Images: Semyon Grigoriev, Institute of Applied Ecology, Yakutsk

Who wants to see a 10,000 year-old Woolly Mammoth stomping around the modern world? Everyone, right? A team of Russian paleontologists and a controversial South Korean biologist are assuming as much, since they've been working to do exactly that for the past year. And now, the Russian scientists have discovered, for the first time, a mammoth carcass with perfectly preserved blood in a chunk of ice on a Siberian island in the Novosibirsk archipelago.
The paleontologists, who hail from the Institute of Applied Ecology at Yakutsk, suspect the mammoth fell into a swamp and was trapped. There, it was attacked by scavengers, and was half-eaten—they found the trunk separated from the carcass. The blood that flowed out from its wounds froze in the water and was preserved for thousands of years there, until the scientists chiseled it out earlier this month.
The head of the Institute, Semyon Grigoriev, told the Siberian Times that they have discovered "the best preserved mammoth in the history of paleontology."
All of this is good news for those hoping to see a cloned mammoth stalk the earth. That's because the Institute of Applied Ecology is the same team that partnered with Hwang Woo-Suk, the disgraced leader of Korea's controversial Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. The group was the center of a major controversy when, after it successfully cloned a dog, it was revealed to have fabricated results that purportedly proved it cloned embryonic stem cells, too.

Last March, the Russian academics nonetheless inked a deal that granted Hwang exclusive rights to cloning any woolly mammoth specimens the team uncovered. At the time, the Russian news outlet Ria Novosti spoke with the Institute about its plans for reviving the mammoth.
"We intend to carry out somatic cloning by implanting the genetic material of a mammoth that lived several thousand years ago into the egg of a modern female elephant," a spokesman told Ria Novosti. "The egg will then be placed into the womb of the elephant, who will bear the foetus for 22 months before hopefully giving birth to a live baby mammoth."

The addition of finely preserved blood now offers a wealth of additional genetic materials. Many onlookers now assume that the final roadblock to cloning a mammoth has now been overcome—the Siberian Times says "there now seems little doubt that this WILL happen." And Russian newspapers don't use all-caps lightly.
Hwang Woo-Suk has already successfully cloned a dog. Since his disgrace, he's claimed to have cloned coyotes. There's a significant amount of evidence that he succeeded. Next up, it looks like he'll seek to complete his redemption by birthing the first baby woolly mammoth the world's seen in thousands of years. And if he's going to do it, he's going to do it with the best preserved mammoth blood in history. 

Track the CIA's Secret Rendition Flights With a New Interactive Map

A soldier stands guard inside Camp 5 at Guantanamo (via Defense Department)

The CIA's extraordinary rendition program, which consisted of flying terrorist detainees across borders, often for aggressive, extra-legal interrogation, is one of the lasting legacies of the post-9/11 world that Bush and Cheney built.
Over the years, the rendition program has encountered stiff resistance, though never enough to stop it. The Rendition Project, based in the UK, hopes to change that. Or, at the very least, keep it in the public eye.
A collaborative effort between Kent and Kingston university academics and the non-governmental organization Reprieve, The Rendition Project is sure to piss of a few people in the US and beyond.
“The Rendition Project has begun an ambitious initiative to 'map' the global rendition system, providing a detailed analysis of its component parts and a clearer understanding of how they fit together,” reads a release on The Rendition Project's homepage. “The focus has been on tracking the movement of CIA flights around the world, and individual detainees as they have been transferred between secret prisons for continued detention and torture."
It wasn't as if the United States didn't dabble—nay, excel—in shady covert missions and programs before 9/11. But rendition was and is different because snatching up suspected terrorists for interrogation in foreign countries is so flagrantly, unapologetically imperialistic—although it did succeed because it had the support of a surprising number of nations.

Is Ecstasy the Key to Alleviating Autism Anxiety?

Autism resists both definitions and treatment within the medical community. But the strange historical interpretation of autistic behavior and symptoms has led to novel experimental treatments for the disorder. Sometimes a disease that doesn’t fit neatly into the medical paradigm must go outside that paradigm in search of nontraditional treatment options.
Because autism presents itself in such a variety of ways—from individuals who are completely nonverbal to those with more aggressive, disorganized behaviors—it resists a definitive treatment protocol. In fact, there are no pharmacological interventions that “treat” autism.
Instead, psychiatrists are focused on treating co-morbid conditions, often things like depression, anxiety, and social isolation. So, today, someone on the autism spectrum might take an antidepressant or an atypical antipsychotic medication to improve their experience in the world, but these medications aren’t correcting any neurological changes associated with autism itself. Now, there's building interest in testing the clinical use of psychedelics. Last week, the FDA approved a research study protocol in which adults diagnosed with both autism and social anxiety will be given the psychedelic drug MDMA in hopes that they’ll experience a long-term reduction in anxiety.
Alicia Danforth, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology who focuses on psychedelic research, recently completed a research study on adults with autism who have self-administered ecstasy. Because of how difficult it has traditionally been to get research studies through the FDA approval process, many studies investigating the effects of psychedelic compounds are in fact non-controlled, survey studies on individuals who have illegally and independently used psychedelic drugs. The purpose of this self-administration ranged from those who were using it purely recreationally, to individuals curious about the potential therapeutic effects of MDMA trying, at least partially, to "self-medicate."
The results of her survey study were positive and promising, though of course far more rigorous studies are necessary to strengthen the connection between MDMA use and improvement in social anxiety in the autistic. Danforth said that over half of the people she interviewed spontaneously made reports in improvement in social anxiety.

Danforth states that over half of the people she interviewed spontaneously made reports in improvement in social anxiety.

When asked if structured research studies with autistic people and MDMA will be similar in format to the PTSD trials already underway, Danforth said that there’s a “general consensus in the field that conventional psychotherapies don’t work particularly well with autistic individuals. There are some barriers to developing that trust and therapeutic rapport, so we’re really reconsidering what MDMA-assisted therapy will look like.” So perhaps it’s the actual experience of trust enabled by the drug, rather than any specific talk therapy that takes place while under the influence, that is ultimately beneficial.
It’s important to note that those on the autism spectrum do not necessarily want to be “cured” of their autism, to become neurotypical. Many of the manifestations (or symptoms) of autism can be seen as beneficial—for example, increased ability to focus on details and highly specialized interests. However, the difficulty in relating to others can take a psychological toll. New research into psychedelics and autism treatment is focused on this aspect of the disorder: they want to ease co-existing anxiety, not “fix” neurological differences.
Psychedelics operate in a way that is fundamentally different from the most common pharmacological treatments for mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. These drugs—things like SSRIs and atypical antipsychotics—are maintenance therapies, taken over years or decades to suppress symptoms. Psychedelic drugs operate on the principle that a person can alter their perception of the world in a more permanent way via transient, controlled psychedelic experiences. So while a person who undergoes MDMA-assisted therapy might continue to take some supportive therapy (like an antidepressant) after the experience, the hope is that they would have a sustained improvement in their social anxiety as a result of the therapy.

Is a 'Starbucks of Pot' What Corporate Cannabis Really Needs?

Sticky icky, coming to a corner store near you? (via)

Jamen Shively is high on cannabis legalization.
For someone who only lit up for the first time ever last year, Shively, a former Microsoft manager, sure has mastered all the heady pro-pot talking points. He likens the growth of green legalization, recently spurred by Washington State and Colorado voting to legalize small amounts of cannabis for recreational use, to the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. When the Seattle Times asked him if he's at all worried about the Feds shuttering his plans to open up a national chain of pot shops, he waxed Jedi: "Darth," Shively began, cribbing Obi-Wan Kenobi, "if you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."
You might be cringing. But there's no way around it: When you're a business person looking to capture a massive slice of a potentially massive pie, you have to talk the talk, winking and nodding as if you've been there all along. You have to sidle up, in this case, to a crowd that is maybe quite wary of some of the ripples starting to emanate from proverbial Big Pot. Medical pot users and stoners alike just loOooOve Star Wars, or something. Right? So does Jamen. He is one of you! And together--you, the affluent Baby Boomer user to whom Shively's proposed chain would expressly target and cater--you'll forever change the arc of history, bong in hand.
This is the reality of the "get rich or high trying" phenomenon. But here's the thing. Not only have OG NorCal growers and strain connoisseurs long foretold (however sketchily) the coming age of a Starbucks of Pot, wherein deep-pocketed suits and squares swoop in, wiping out a rich history of mom 'n pop bud shops in the name of shilling mediocre product masked as the Real Deal. (Think Marlboro Greens.) Shively's plan, if he can pull it off (see: unlikely), stands to do far more harm than good to America's No. 1 cash crop. 

Dude Sweat Makes Other Dudes Nicer, Bro

Image: The Gender Society/Creative Commons

That headline is the essence of the findings of a new study in the journal PLOS ONE. To be more specific, a suspected male pheromone called androstadienone (a component  of male sweat which can be bought in concentrated form for use by pick-up creeps) incites other males to be more cooperative and generous. Which is maybe great news for anyone wanting to take advantage of anyone else.
The study: evolutionary biologist Markus Rantala of the University of Turku in Finland took 40 males in their 20s and had them play a particular video game where two players try to figure out how to split €10. One player decides on a split and offers it to the other, who then decides whether or not to accept it. That seems to be about it, and, no, research video games are never terribly exciting.
So, you can probably see where the experiment is going. Players either got a huff of yeast (the control) or androstadienon, and were then observed playing the game. You already know the results. Interestingly, the players who had the highest testosterone levels seemed to respond strongest to the pheromone. So, sweaty males and people with high levels of testosterone (male or female, presumably) are more likely to get along.
The paper suggests that "apparently such behaviour is considered attractive by the opposite sex, and such acts may produce delayed benefits via direct reciprocation or reputation increase." These are really the usual presumed benefits of cooperation in general, or at least socialized behavior in general, but now we have a chemical to tie that to.
This also reinforces that pheromones—chemicals also capable of directing worker bees, making ants fight, precipitating all kinds of sex stuff, and more—are some of the weirdest things that nature has going. Also, again, imagine the capabilities for evil here: a chemical that makes people generous. Rantala tells Science mag, "They could spray a pheromone in a car, for example. People will feel happier in the car and will probably buy more readily." In which case, maybe the buyer could blast some back at the dealer, who suddenly becomes more interested in hooking up a good deal. The chemical mind-control race begins. 

How Many Trees Does It Take to Fill a Mexican Art Space With Printed Websites?

Everyone’s always saying, “follow your dreams,” even though lots of people dream of terrible things. In a way, then, it’s encouraging to see people come out to plead with Kenneth Goldsmith not to follow his latest dream. Citing the environmental impact of such an endeavor, there’s a petition going around titled, politely enough, “Please don’t print the internet.” 
See, if you haven’t already heard, Goldsmith, the Museum of Modern Art’s first poet laureate, wants to print out the entire internet and put it on display in a warehouse/gallery space in Mexico City, as a piece in homage to Aaron Swartz.
Rather than printing it all on his own, Goldsmith wants everyone to print some internet—news articles, personal blogs, emails, whatever—and mail it down to Mexico City’s LABOR space, where it will be on display from July 26 until the end of August.
If your first thought was, “That sounds like a huge waste of paper and ink; there’s no way this is a good idea,” you’re not alone. Even fellow avant-garde poets and artists are saying this is a bad idea on Twitter, so you can imagine what they’re saying over at the Huffington Post.

Silicon Valley's Next Disruption: Floating, Autonomous City-States

A render of a future Blueseed ship, via Blueseed

It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Palo Alto, and seasteading entrepreneur Max Marty is trying to persuade me that putting 1,500 immigrant entrepreneurs together on a floating startup city in international waters 12 miles off the coast of San Francisco is a good idea.
“The exchange of ideas and collaboration is really, really helpful in the creation of new technologies and innovations,” Marty tells me. “It’s really a win-win-win for everybody—obviously it’s a win for the entrepreneurs, but also for the local governments, for the economy, for the environment.”
“It’s an ideological bent of ours,” Marty adds. “We like win-win situations.”
For anyone who has ever met a “seasteader,” this enthusiasm is unsurprising, if not entirely comprehensible. The founder and CEO of Blueseed, Marty is at the forefront of a small but zealous cadre of Silicon Valley libertarians who view the ocean as a new frontier where people can live and work without the burden of national boundaries and government regulations. His unusual startup is the latest—and most promising—attempt at achieving this techno-libertarian dream.

Blueseed CEO Max Marty, courtesy Marty

Part-tech incubator and part-college dorm room, Blueseed is billed as the “Googleplex of the Sea,” promising a “perpetual hackathon atmosphere.” The company plans to lease a decommissioned 1,500-passenger cruise ship, and outfit it with coworking spaces, high-speed wifi, 24-hour concierge services, and a gym, with a tentative launch date of spring 2014.
As bizarre as it may sound, the idea has gotten a surprising amount of interest from entrepreneurs and partners, if not from investors. According to Marty, about 800 startups have already applied to join Blueseed, about 400 of which are being considered to join the ship. Interestingly, about 20 percent of the applicants are from the US, indicating that Blueseed’s appeal goes beyond immigrant entrepreneurs.

The breakdown of Blueseed’s applicants by country. Via Blueseed

For now, however, Blueseed is still conceptual. After receiving an initial $350,000 seed round last year, the startup has been looking for funding sources to provide the $27 million needed to actually launch the ship. (Naturally, the company accepts bitcoin.)
If Blueseed gets the funding, it’s not clear how the US government would react to a ship full of foreign nationals floating off the coast of San Francisco with the explicit goal of circumventing US immigration law. Technically, the ship will be out of the jurisdiction of US law and customs enforcement, in international waters governed by UNCLOS, a loosely followed maritime treaty. (The US is not actually a signatory, but has typically deferred to the treaty’s rules.)
Marty is confident that the US won’t want to “establish precedent” by taking action against a cruise ship in international waters. But he concedes that there are a number of other ways the US government could make life difficult for Blueseed and its passengers, including holding up its wireless Internet permits and making it difficult for passengers to travel to and from shore on business and travel visas. So far, though, there has been no public opposition to the project from any government agencies or politicians.
But the project is also a logistical nightmare. Arrangements have to be made for supplies, ferry transportation, legal support, wireless Internet, medical care and insurance, and a million other contingencies that could come into play when 1,500 people live together on a boat for 6-12 months.
But regardless of whether Blueseed ever gets in the water, the project could represent the next evolution of the techno-libertarian ocean pioneering popularized by Silicon Valley’s Seasteading Institute.

The plan for Blueseed's first ship is to moor it just across the international water line. Map via Blueseed

Founded in 2008 by Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and grandson of free-market champion Milton Friedman, and aided by a $1.25 million donation from Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel, the Seasteading Institute envisions a maritime utopia where floating city-states act as incubators for new forms of government and “compete” for citizens.
On paper, the Seasteading Institute is the ultimate confluence of the most ostentatious elements of Silicon Valley libertarianism, combining Randian worship, technological determinism, and billionaire youth into a Libertarian 2.0 Waterworld.
In person, however, it’s hard not to be endeared to the hippie capitalists who run the think tank. The Seasteading Institute’s offices are in the Oakland Embarcadero, in a building called The Leviathan, which is actually designed to look like a sea monster eating a barge. On a sunny Wednesday afternoon last week, the dog to human ratio in the office was about 1:1, and staff members were happy to brief me on maritime laws and various emerging “aquapreneur” markets.
Seasteading Institute Senior Director Randy Hencken is trying to dispel the idea that seasteading is strictly the purview of super-rich libertarian tech gurus.
“Everyone always writes that we are building libertarian utopias for Peter Theil,” Hencken said. "As an Institute, we are politically agnostic. We see seasteading as a technology rather than a political ideology."

The Seasteading Institute Team, from left to right, Randolph Hencken, Charlie Deist, George Petrie. Via Seasteading Institute

Theoretically, at least, the seasteads would work like a marketplace of governance. Each seastead would be an autonomous city-state that could decide its own system of governance and rule of law. Citizens who wished to move to a seastead would then be able to choose the governance system that suits them, and leave if they were not satisfied.
The idea, Hencken said, is not to have no laws, but to develop better laws.
Ideally, there would be multiple seasteads trying out different types of governance, he explained. Those could include libertarian seasteads, but also dictatorships, participatory democracy, and even new forms of governance like a cryptographic legal code. Christians could live on a Christian seastead governed by Biblical laws, atheists could bar religion on their seastead, and so forth.
“People are looking for known rules in government,” Hencken explained. "The problem that we have now is the rules are always changing."
But while Hencken insists that seasteads are not meant to be “utopias,” his vision of the movement’s potential is grandiose bordering on delusional.  
"It's not only about government—it's about making the planet better. We are creating more wealth, making the planet cleaner and healthier, curing diseases that we couldn't cure on land,” he said. Other benefits of seasteading include "reducing global warming," "feeding the hungry,” “and creating new fuel and fuel sources.”
"It's about ensuring humanity has a future."

"The Swimming City" by András Gyõrfi, winner of the Seasteading Institute’s 3D Design Contest.

But without an overarching system governing seasteads, each community would be free to make its choices, like what kind of businesses to allow, how to dispose of waste, and how to police its citizens. So if one seastead started polluting the ocean, for example, the other seasteads would have no recourse to stop it, besides cutting off economic relations.
It’s easy to imagine seasteads as floating dystopias, and even some of the potential seastead industries suggested by the Institute (e.g. medical tourism, unregulated drug trials) sound terrifying.
I asked Hencken about some of the more sinister possibilities. What if lax laws turned a seastead into a haven for child pornographers, or if white supremacists decided to start their own seastead?
Hencken largely dismissed these hypotheticals. In the first case, he argued that the threat of citizens leaving the community would likely force the seastead to change its laws. In the second scenario, other seasteads would likely end relations, leaving a lonely floating island of white supremacists. (Hencken drew the line at my idea of a Most Dangerous Game Seastead though, calling it “far-fetched.”)
This ideological zeal has lead some Bay Area libertarians to dismiss seasteaders as the Billy Carters of the movement.
“Sure, it’s an interesting idea, but it’s such a waste of money,” said one Facebook engineer I met at an event hosted by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) last week. “These guys are pouring millions into these experiments instead of putting it towards something useful, when they could actually get something done.”

“I hope that Blueseed is the start of a new string of movements that use technology to address what have normally been thought of as political problems." — Max Marty, Blueseed CEO

With Blueseed, Marty, the former director of business strategy for the Seasteading Institute, has aimed to address these criticisms.
“Often what happens, especially to people who have these kinds of big ideas, is that they don't ground those ideas in practical realities, which are necessary to make them work,” Marty said. “There are certainly people who have had utopian visions, but the definition of a utopia is a place that doesn't exist. A lot of times grandiose ideas go well beyond the scope of what is actually possible.”
“I hope that Blueseed is the start of a new string of movements that use technology to address what have normally been thought of as political problems,” he added. “Instead of complaining or trying to leave the situation, using the market, technology to create some sort of venture that addresses what the problem is.”
While Blueseed may be a step forward in ocean colonization, the Seastead Institute is still holding out hope that someone will establish a permanent residential settlement on the high seas.
“"They definitely fit with the idea of of seasteading in that they are looking for an opportunity that doesn't exist on land, but I don’t think that Blueseed will ever be a permanent settlement,” Hencken said. He predicts that the world will see the first seastead city “within the decade.”
"At first it is going to be small,” he adds. “Just like the Pilgrims coming to America."

The Confusing Science of Stoned Driving

Let's start with a simple, unassailable premise:
Operating a 3,000-plus pound motor vehicle on public roads while dangerously impaired on any psychoactive substance—from opium to OxyContin—is not only illegal, it's immoral.
The trick, when it comes to marijuana and driving, involves determining what exactly “dangerously impaired” means. Ask a few average all-American, pot-smoking teenagers, and they'll likely say there's no such thing. A recent survey conducted by insurance giant Liberty Mutual, for example, found that among teens who admitted to driving after consuming cannabis, more than 70 percent self-reported no negative effects whatsoever on their competence behind the wheel, including 34 percent who believed, however dubiously, that getting blazed was actually performance enhancing.
Meanwhile, at least ten states mandate severe penalties for any trace of THC in a roadside drug test, even inactive metabolites that remain detectable up to a month after use. In February, the Arizona State Court of Appeals went so far as to reinstate the conviction (overturned by a lower court) of a man charged with a marijuana DUI despite a blood test that proved he wasn't under the influence. An Orwellian decision that confirmed Arizona's zero-tolerance “legislative ban extends to all substances, whether capable of causing impairment or not."
The Michigan Supreme Court, on the other hand, just last week ruled that registered pot patients do enjoy a limited exemption from zero-tolerance prosecutions. Although driving while impaired remains illegal in all circumstances, the court decided that the mere presence of THC in a patient's blood or urine should be viewed as a legal form of “internal possession.” Since state law allows patients to carry up to 2.5 ounces of cannabis, and currently offers no clear guidelines to determine impairment, the justices urged lawmakers to move quickly toward creating a universal standard similar to the one used for alcohol.
Which sounds imminently reasonable, until you start to look at the science of stoned driving, including a significant number of peer-reviewed studies with results that range from confusing to contradictory. For example, according to a widely reported meta-analysis published in the British Medical Journal, marijuana use within one hour of driving doubles the risk of a serious automobile accident. But a later review in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention claimed those findings were overblown, likening increased risk to the use of antihistamines or penicillin. While a 2009 report from the US National Library of Medicine concluded that though “cognitive studies suggest that cannabis use may lead to unsafe driving, experimental studies have suggested that it can have the opposite effect.”
And if all that isn't confounding enough, wrap your mind around one last study that shows widespread use of medical marijuana actually produces a major improvement in public safety. Mostly because legal access to cannabis leads a significant number of drivers to smoke buds instead of drink Bud, a relatively safer choice that ends up saving a lot of lives.

The Video Game Helmet That Can Hack Your Brain

Reshil-Marie Torrevillas, a research assistant in Nicole Prause's lab, wears an Emotiv.

For brain scientists Greg Siegle and Nicole Prause, understanding the brain is really tricky, and it's especially tricky when your subjects are in the middle of sexual intercourse.
You can't, for instance, ask them to do their thing inside an fMRI machine, or with a wig of cables attached to their head. “All these brain-measuring systems have significant limitations," says Siegle, a neuroscientist who has spent more than a decade poking at the brain using all sorts of sophisticated psychophysiology and neuroimaging tools. With these, he says, “you can’t move your head very much, it costs a heck of a lot to buy, they take a long time to set up, and I could never really bring them out of the lab."
Siegle isn't ashamed to say that his answer to this particular problem is a faddish-looking toy originally geared toward video gamers. The Emotiv, which is made by an Australian company and comes in $299 and $750 flavors, looks like a cyberpunk skull cap, with 14 electrode arms that branch out from the back of your head to surround your skull. The device is a cheaper, wireless, and more user-friendly version of a standard EEG machine, the kind that scientists use to non-invasively detect the faint electrical signals in your brain, the brainwaves that fluctuate as you think and feel.
When it was released in 2009, the Emotiv promised to turn gamers’ brains into joysticks, and make the act of casting a spell, for instance, a matter of simply thinking of one. A parade of affordable brain-computer interfaces (BCI) made by companies like NeuroSky and NeuroVigil have shipped in the Emotiv's wake; a giant market, however, has not. When they're working properly (they can be imprecise and sometimes annoyingly non-responsive), they do something that can border on magic; years after the technology hit the market, tech blogs still ooh and ahh over them. But the idea of mind-controlling your video game has mostly remained in the realm of sci-fi gimmick.
But the nerdy-looking toy's cult following has loftier goals. Engineers, hackers, scientists and artists have been mining the Emotiv's brain data, parsing waves and bringing them places far outside the walls of a video game. "The data’s very clean," is Siegle's sober assessment of his toy headband. "We've been very impressed with it and we’ve incorporated it into some of our major research protocols."

The Motherboard Guide to Avoiding the NSA

Image via Flickr

If you've been reading the headlines about the NSA mining intelligence data from the world's largest data mongers, and haven't already burnt down your house with everything you own in it and set sail for a libertarian expat community in Chile, then there are some less dramatic suggestions in store for you. Evading the NSA's comprehensive surveillance system is no simple task, especially as we only know snippets of the agency's capabilities. But we're going to try our best.
First, it's time to take an inventory of anything you own or are borrowing that can be traced. Phones, credit cards, cars, e-mail addresses, bank accounts, social media profiles, wi-fi coffee machines, residences, P.O. boxes, and so on—any piece of property where there is more than a handwritten cash receipt proving more than purchase price should either be ditched or reengineered to steer clear of the NSA's radars.

Unicode Is the New Internet Gold Mine

Pim Roes with his cat.
There’s a saying among expats in Hanoi: “Vietnam is the best party in the world, so long as you don’t question the party.” The threat of the hardline communist government raining down upon you with its iron fists is enough to ensure that most just keep their heads down and continue with their office jobs, sex tourism, animal abuse, or whatever it is that they're there to do.
So when the country's leading lights made an ambitious and arguably misguided $100 million bid to oust Google as the country's primary search engine with a new company called "Cốc Cốc," expats might have felt it wise to stay out of the way. When Dutch expat Pim Roes heard about the plans, however, he didn't stand aside for these captains of Vietnamese industry. Instead, he put himself right in their way, registering the domain name www.cốccốc.com, which, unlike the official www.coccoc.com website, contains the company name with its full Vietnamese characters.
That might not mean too much quite yet, but Pim has been quick to recognize the potential for grabbing websites and domain names using Unicode (those country-specific accents and characters, to you and me). So that when Unicodes inevitably take off (as Pim is adamant they will) and these companies want to register their domains with the characters they actually use in their names, they'll have to go through Pim first.
I caught up with him to find out a little more about his domain-grabbing and how he plans to proceed with his squatting of the multi-million dollar juggernaut aiming to boot Google out of Southeast Asia.

The homepage of Cốc Cốc, the site whose domain Pim has squatted. 
VICE: Hi, Pim. So how did this all come about?
Pim Roes: Normally, if I read anything in the news about Google launching a new service or a new movie coming out, the first thing I’ll check is if the domain name is still available. I've done it before, too. When I heard that the new James Cameron film is going to be called The Informationist, I quickly snapped up www.the-informationist.com.
Why?
Sometimes I do it for money, but it’s certain that if I don’t do it someone else will, and it’s likely to be lucrative. Sometimes they’ll threaten to sue you and then you have to decide if you want to ask for money or hand it over for free and avoid any legal trouble, so there isn’t much to lose. With Cốc Cốc, I heard about the company, checked if the domain name was available and then registered it for $8. In this case I didn’t really do it for money, I just saw that it was there and realized this would be potentially valuable—not necessarily in financial terms—so I took it.
That sounds either very clever or very stupid. Rebels haven’t done too well in Vietnam in the past…
I didn’t intend to hijack their brand name, I just recognized the significance of this particular address. I’m not really afraid of lawyers as I can always just give it back for free—I’ve had threats in the past, but I’ve always cooperated. In terms of the countries involved, I have to be careful what I say as I’m very much aware this is being recorded. With this, I’m not really standing in their way too much as most users will still go to coccoc.com, without the Unicode. But if they want to become as big as Google then they need to consider elements like this.
So were they careless to push ahead with this huge project without safeguarding the domain name?
I wouldn’t necessarily say they were careless, as Unicodes as domain names are still a relatively new concept and only came into use in 2010. You wouldn’t expect your typical developer to know too much about them, but with the level of staff Cốc Cốc has, you’d hope the people in charge of choosing the domain name would have knowledge on the subject. It’s my prediction that in ten years' time Unicodes are going to be the innovation people will be kicking themselves for not getting involved with in the early stages, in much the same way that people regret not registering domains like pizza.com and insurance.com in the days before the internet boom. All money made from the internet comes from discovering the small improvements and ideas that people are not yet doing, so small insights can become very lucrative.

Insurance.com, AKA the only insurance domain that doesn't need opera singers or meerkats to remain popular.
Have you had any contact from Cốc Cốc so far?
I met one guy who works for them at a house party and he was pretty cool, but other than that, nothing. It’s strange, because with so many people working for them in Hanoi, I’d expect to have encountered a few more. I actually emailed them to say I was surprised to find that cốccốc.com hadn’t been registered and asked whether they’d heard of Unicodes. I told them I paid $8 for the domain name, but they could have it back for free once the transfer lock of 60 days had passed, so we’ll have to see what they say.
Right... If you don’t want money, then why did you do it?
I just did it as a small thing for a laugh, really. I shared it with my friends on Facebook to show them what I’d done and see their response. Hopefully Cốc Cốc might like me for it and thank me for the tip. I once hacked the website of a major political party and then emailed to let them know of the weak point in their site. They were really grateful and sent me a T-shirt with that country’s prime minister on it. With Cốc Cốc, I partly did it because I’d like to meet their developers and share ideas. I used to work as a developer in Dublin and there were loads of like-minded people to talk to, but there don’t seem to be many of those in Hanoi, so it would just be nice to start a dialogue.
What’s the moral position in developer circles on using other sites’ intended traffic to make money?
Lots of traffic comes through search engines rather than direct visits, so most of the sites I make focus on ensuring high rankings in search engines. People are unbelievably reliant on search engines; for a long time, the top search term on Google was actually "Google," as well as being the top term on Bing. People are so drilled in getting to search engines that they don’t actually realize they’re already on one. By that same token, it means hijacking domain names (registering sites with accents or familiar typing mistakes, "like facebookk.com," for example) isn’t too damaging to big sites, as the bulk of their visits come from search engines.
Can you make a lot of money out of it?
Yeah, if you have enough domain names in the right places, you can make a killing. I know one guy who made it his business—he bought thousands of domain names similar to popular sites and became rich very quickly just through Adsense and affiliate marketing. I think it’s a legitimate way to make money, just as long as you don’t misuse that site by tricking the user into thinking they’re actually on Facebook and stealing their data.
What kind of sites have you created in the past?
All sorts. I’ve currently got around 50 sites, which in total attract 2.5 million visitors per month. Some of my celebrity sites listing stars’ heights or showing pictures of them without make-up are pretty popular. And then I’ve got others, such as websites listing popular baby names, which is a great one for running in multiple languages as it’s of universal interest and unlikely to attract anything controversial that might piss off advertisers. There are also the funny ones, like kick-a-ginger-day.com, which started as a joke on South Park and then gained media attention, so I bought the domain name and knocked up a website. I’ve actually sold quite a bit of merchandise on there as well.
So what advice can you give me for making internet millions?
The thing with the internet is that if you get the right domain name, you can make easy money for doing nothing. But you generally need to have years of experience in programming, as well as studying user behavior, advertising, and marketing. The people I know who are good at making money online were interested in the industry from a very young age, whereas those who study it may learn techniques but won’t necessarily have the great ideas. Money-making ideas are usually very simple, but you have to be the first person to have ever come up with them. Being first and having no competition is the best situation, then when more players come into the market you have to be the best. Be first, then be best.

Meet the Man Behind the Push to Ban Killer Robots

Image via Wikipedia

Depending on who you ask, armed robots that can discern by themselves when and how to stage attacks, without guidance from humans, present either an unprecedented danger to humanity or its greatest mechanism of defense. But both sides agree that such "lethal autonomous robots," as they're known, are on their way whether we're ready for them or not.
The prospect of free-thinking war machines waging the ultimate battle against the human race has been bouncing around most of our minds since Arnold promised us that he'd be back in the 1980s. That was back when the idea of a walking, talking robot soldier was, like Schwarzenegger himself, more caricature than distressing.
Less then three decades and more than a few drone strikes later, a new UN report is calling for "national moratoria" on developing killer robots in every country on the globe. It's a good first step, considering no one really knows what an accurate portrait of drone development looks like around the world. We think that between 60 and 70 countries use surveillance drones. The US is the largest drone manufacturer. China plans to start selling them on the global market. We're hoping for the best, but we're not planning for the worst.
To bring clearer into focus the backdrop of killer robots and the threat they pose, I talked to Peter Asaro, co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. The author of the UN report, Christof Heyns, drew heavily on Asaro's research and his organization's agenda in crafting his conclusions. In creating machines that are better than humans, Asaro says, we're enabling a new kind of danger that we aren't prepared to handle.
MOTHERBOARD: Why is it important that we acknowledge this report, and these issues, right now?
Asaro: I think we face these issues immediately today. It's the best time for regulation. The sooner we talk about it, the better. Once these systems become developed and nations become dependent on them it will be very hard to move backward.
There are a number of systems outlined in the human rights watch report—they call them "precursor systems"—which are autonomous systems that are in use already. The Samsung Techwin system that patrols the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea has fully autonomous capability that is switched off. But of course you could switch it on. The technology is there at that level. The developments we see with X-47B or Taranis, which are combat drones capable of autonomous flight and weapons. The question is, who is controlling the weapons? Those technologies are in testing and development. We're really only a few years away from a prototype and large-scale development.
Given the picture you just painted, what perspective would you like world leaders to acknowledge as the world comes to terms with autonomous killer robots?
We think the national moratoria are good steps toward an international ban. We want a worldwide ban so that there will always be a human meaningfully supervising targeting and kill decisions. What we really want is a discussion about regulation. Ultimately, we need a treaty that establishes a norm that it is unacceptable to delegate the authority to kill to a machine.
What aspect of autonomous weapons is going to present the greatest challenge, regulation-wise?
Primarily, we're concerned with deployment. But research and development are much more difficult to regulate and ban, especially in terms of dual-use technologies. For example, the X-47B performs autonomous launch and landing on aircraft carriers. That could be a stepping stone to an autonomous fighter, but it could also be used to launch actual human pilots. It's hard to say that automated take-off and landing, themselves, are bad or should be prohibited because the technology can be used in different ways.

We want a worldwide ban so that there will always be a human meaningfully supervising targeting and kill decisions.

You think about navigation or being able to identify humans in the crowd—how will those be applied? We want to ban the couplings of those within a weapons system, the act of connecting them and authorizing a system to use lethal force without further human supervision. Of course, there is a challenge in how we define "meaningful human supervision" such that it can be implemented in a treaty, but this is precisely why expert discussions and international negotiations are needed.
Where exactly do you draw the line between what is and is not acceptable within a system that will continue to be outfitted with autonomous features?
There's a very clear line to be drawn when it comes to using lethal force. It's fine to automate transportation, surveillance and other military tasks. But when you talk about using or releasing a weapon, you really want a human who has situational awareness and who is aware of context and who is able to discern that the target is valid before the weapon is used. Otherwise you're giving free reign for automation to decide for itself what is a target.
The problem is not just whether it is precise or accurate. Maybe the technology can progress in terms of its accuracy and precision, but the deeper question is, can it assess the value of a target? Is it really a threat? Is the use of lethal force really necessary? How has its military value changed in light of the unfolding battle? Is the value of that military target high enough that we're willing to risk civilian lives? How many? It requires a sophisticated strategic understanding of what's going on—risk assessments and other judgments that computers aren't equipped to make right now. It's not easy to write an algorithm to do that, and it may be impossible.
Also, there's a lack of accountability and responsibility for whoever told the robot to go do something. The reality is that if the robot does something really bad, in criminal court you can't hold it accountable. In reality, you lose the deterrent effect and any identifiable accountability and you have killing going on that's unaccountable. That's a huge problem.
What implications does this have for conventional notions of human accountability? What sort of moral and philosophical quandaries do killer robots present?
There's a question of whether they can even conform to laws. And for us, is having no accountability in and of itself acceptable? That's a moral question—whether it's permissible at all to delegate the authority to a machine to kill a human being.
Generally, humans killing humans is acceptable when it's self-defense. But in that case it's a human estimation, and it's always a judgment call.
It's difficult when even uniformed armed combatants engaged in warfare are not always legitimate enemy targets. There's a moral quality: If it's not necessary to kill your enemy in a given situation then it's morally wrong, even if it's legal. Is it ever legitimate for a machine to decide who lives and dies? I think the answer is no, no matter how legitimate a computer is.
Are there any individuals or interests who are pushing back against your proposed regulations?
There's a reaction that they might be some AI system down the line that actually make targeting and kill decisions better than humans. And if there were, then those systems might cause fewer civilian casualties in war, and if so then we might be morally obligated to use them. They argue that if we ban development going forward that would effectively prevent these potentially better machines from ever existing.
But similar arguments were made for chemical and biological weapons, that these could be more human than bullets and bombs. After getting a few glimpses of chemical warfare, the world community agrees that it is repugnant, and believe that those weapons are wrong in and of themselves.

How to Build a Secret Facebook

The NSA's Utah data center near Bluffdale, Utah. Via Google Street View

Since retiring from a three-decade career at the NSA in 2001, a mathematician named William Binney has been telling anyone who will listen about a vast data-gathering operation being conducted by his former employers. "Here’s the grand design," he told filmmaker Laura Poitras last year. "You build social networks for everybody. That then turns into the graph, and then you index all that data to that graph, which means you can pull out a community. That gives you an outline of everybody in that community. And if you carry that out from 2001 up, you have 10 years of their life that you can then lay out in a timeline that involves anybody in the country. Even Senators and Representatives—all of them."
The invasive spying program Binney described—one that could build a "social graph" of nearly any user of the American Internet, like some massive, secret Facebook—was in the works, he says, when he left the agency. The details of this program, known as "Stellar Wind," have never been made explicitly public. Lawsuits and complaints about this and other programs (for instance, by lawyers for Guantanamo Bay prisoners, who suspect their phone calls were intercepted) have been dismissed by the government because potential evidence—like the court that administers these programs—is itself secret.
But now we know more about one aspect of the US's surveillance arsenal. A tool called PRISM, the top secret project described last week in the Guardian and The Washington Post, is sucking in data directly from the big Internet companies to do much the same thing that Binney warned about when he described "Stellar Wind." Rather than going to Internet companies piecemeal with search warrants and requests, a system like this provides "lock boxes" for data co-located at companies' servers, allowing government analysts a far more easier way to access entire troves of a person's data, and to do with it what they will. Obama and others have insisted that even if Americans' data is swept up, searches through this data are focused on foreign nationals, and are "very narrowly circumscribed." But when Senators asked for details last year about how many Americans have been swept up in the NSA's dragnet, the agency replied that revealing that number would "itself itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons."
Agencies like the FBI, which itself has been quietly pushing for a "back door" system like this, call it crucial for national security. The leaker of the document, government contractor Edward Snowden, who has sought asylum in Hong Kong, calls it a recipe for "turnkey tyranny." With a single PowerPoint, we've been teleported from shadowy hacker spy movies and giant Internet conspiracy theories (it's the CIA who actually invented Facebook, right?) into a reality that is simultaneously gut-wrenchingly alarming, and—unless you've been hibernating for the past dozen years—not terribly surprising.
This was not the kind of reality that Binney, like Snowden and other recent espionage whistleblowers, signed up to build. For decades, he and his colleagues were tasked with crafting systems for scanning the communications of foreigners, not Americans. A program that Binney and others championed, ThinThread, was designed to encrypt Americans' communications, but was dropped by the NSA in favor of a more expansive project (though reportedly not before it was tested on New Zealanders.) (Binney's story is told in Poitras' short film, "The Program," released last year by The New York Times, which you can watch it below; Poitras is also one of the journalists whom Snowden first contacted, and she filmed his interview with Glenn Greenwald for the Guardian.) 

Unicode Is the New Internet Gold Mine

Pim Roes with his cat.
There’s a saying among expats in Hanoi: “Vietnam is the best party in the world, so long as you don’t question the party.” The threat of the hardline communist government raining down upon you with its iron fists is enough to ensure that most just keep their heads down and continue with their office jobs, sex tourism, animal abuse, or whatever it is that they're there to do.
So when the country's leading lights made an ambitious and arguably misguided $100 million bid to oust Google as the country's primary search engine with a new company called "Cốc Cốc," expats might have felt it wise to stay out of the way. When Dutch expat Pim Roes heard about the plans, however, he didn't stand aside for these captains of Vietnamese industry. Instead, he put himself right in their way, registering the domain name www.cốccốc.com, which, unlike the official www.coccoc.com website, contains the company name with its full Vietnamese characters.
That might not mean too much quite yet, but Pim has been quick to recognize the potential for grabbing websites and domain names using Unicode (those country-specific accents and characters, to you and me). So that when Unicodes inevitably take off (as Pim is adamant they will) and these companies want to register their domains with the characters they actually use in their names, they'll have to go through Pim first.
I caught up with him to find out a little more about his domain-grabbing and how he plans to proceed with his squatting of the multi-million dollar juggernaut aiming to boot Google out of Southeast Asia.

The homepage of Cốc Cốc, the site whose domain Pim has squatted. 
VICE: Hi, Pim. So how did this all come about?
Pim Roes: Normally, if I read anything in the news about Google launching a new service or a new movie coming out, the first thing I’ll check is if the domain name is still available. I've done it before, too. When I heard that the new James Cameron film is going to be called The Informationist, I quickly snapped up www.the-informationist.com.
Why?
Sometimes I do it for money, but it’s certain that if I don’t do it someone else will, and it’s likely to be lucrative. Sometimes they’ll threaten to sue you and then you have to decide if you want to ask for money or hand it over for free and avoid any legal trouble, so there isn’t much to lose. With Cốc Cốc, I heard about the company, checked if the domain name was available and then registered it for $8. In this case I didn’t really do it for money, I just saw that it was there and realized this would be potentially valuable—not necessarily in financial terms—so I took it.
That sounds either very clever or very stupid. Rebels haven’t done too well in Vietnam in the past…
I didn’t intend to hijack their brand name, I just recognized the significance of this particular address. I’m not really afraid of lawyers as I can always just give it back for free—I’ve had threats in the past, but I’ve always cooperated. In terms of the countries involved, I have to be careful what I say as I’m very much aware this is being recorded. With this, I’m not really standing in their way too much as most users will still go to coccoc.com, without the Unicode. But if they want to become as big as Google then they need to consider elements like this.
So were they careless to push ahead with this huge project without safeguarding the domain name?
I wouldn’t necessarily say they were careless, as Unicodes as domain names are still a relatively new concept and only came into use in 2010. You wouldn’t expect your typical developer to know too much about them, but with the level of staff Cốc Cốc has, you’d hope the people in charge of choosing the domain name would have knowledge on the subject. It’s my prediction that in ten years' time Unicodes are going to be the innovation people will be kicking themselves for not getting involved with in the early stages, in much the same way that people regret not registering domains like pizza.com and insurance.com in the days before the internet boom. All money made from the internet comes from discovering the small improvements and ideas that people are not yet doing, so small insights can become very lucrative.

Insurance.com, AKA the only insurance domain that doesn't need opera singers or meerkats to remain popular.
Have you had any contact from Cốc Cốc so far?
I met one guy who works for them at a house party and he was pretty cool, but other than that, nothing. It’s strange, because with so many people working for them in Hanoi, I’d expect to have encountered a few more. I actually emailed them to say I was surprised to find that cốccốc.com hadn’t been registered and asked whether they’d heard of Unicodes. I told them I paid $8 for the domain name, but they could have it back for free once the transfer lock of 60 days had passed, so we’ll have to see what they say.
Right... If you don’t want money, then why did you do it?
I just did it as a small thing for a laugh, really. I shared it with my friends on Facebook to show them what I’d done and see their response. Hopefully Cốc Cốc might like me for it and thank me for the tip. I once hacked the website of a major political party and then emailed to let them know of the weak point in their site. They were really grateful and sent me a T-shirt with that country’s prime minister on it. With Cốc Cốc, I partly did it because I’d like to meet their developers and share ideas. I used to work as a developer in Dublin and there were loads of like-minded people to talk to, but there don’t seem to be many of those in Hanoi, so it would just be nice to start a dialogue.
What’s the moral position in developer circles on using other sites’ intended traffic to make money?
Lots of traffic comes through search engines rather than direct visits, so most of the sites I make focus on ensuring high rankings in search engines. People are unbelievably reliant on search engines; for a long time, the top search term on Google was actually "Google," as well as being the top term on Bing. People are so drilled in getting to search engines that they don’t actually realize they’re already on one. By that same token, it means hijacking domain names (registering sites with accents or familiar typing mistakes, "like facebookk.com," for example) isn’t too damaging to big sites, as the bulk of their visits come from search engines.
Can you make a lot of money out of it?
Yeah, if you have enough domain names in the right places, you can make a killing. I know one guy who made it his business—he bought thousands of domain names similar to popular sites and became rich very quickly just through Adsense and affiliate marketing. I think it’s a legitimate way to make money, just as long as you don’t misuse that site by tricking the user into thinking they’re actually on Facebook and stealing their data.
What kind of sites have you created in the past?
All sorts. I’ve currently got around 50 sites, which in total attract 2.5 million visitors per month. Some of my celebrity sites listing stars’ heights or showing pictures of them without make-up are pretty popular. And then I’ve got others, such as websites listing popular baby names, which is a great one for running in multiple languages as it’s of universal interest and unlikely to attract anything controversial that might piss off advertisers. There are also the funny ones, like kick-a-ginger-day.com, which started as a joke on South Park and then gained media attention, so I bought the domain name and knocked up a website. I’ve actually sold quite a bit of merchandise on there as well.
So what advice can you give me for making internet millions?
The thing with the internet is that if you get the right domain name, you can make easy money for doing nothing. But you generally need to have years of experience in programming, as well as studying user behavior, advertising, and marketing. The people I know who are good at making money online were interested in the industry from a very young age, whereas those who study it may learn techniques but won’t necessarily have the great ideas. Money-making ideas are usually very simple, but you have to be the first person to have ever come up with them. Being first and having no competition is the best situation, then when more players come into the market you have to be the best. Be first, then be best.