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by Hammer of Los » Fri Nov 29, 2013 8:54 am
by Hammer of Los » Fri Nov 29, 2013 9:25 am
What the f**k is wrong with this world were living in?!?!?!?
by MacCruiskeen » Fri Nov 29, 2013 3:11 pm
Hammer of Los » Fri Nov 29, 2013 8:25 am wrote:
From the comments;What the f**k is wrong with this world were living in?!?!?!?
by norton ash » Fri Nov 29, 2013 3:19 pm
by justdrew » Sat Nov 30, 2013 5:24 pm
by elfismiles » Sun Jan 05, 2014 6:46 pm
December 31, 2013, 3:26 pm 30 Comments
Apple Says It Is ‘Unaware’ of N.S.A. iPhone Hack Program
By NICOLE PERLROTH
Apple said Tuesday that it was unaware of the National Security Agency’s efforts to hack into the iPhone and has never facilitated agency efforts to install backdoors into its products.
The Cupertino, Calif., company released a strongly worded statement in response to a recent article in the German magazine Der Spiegel, which reported that N.S.A. analysts refer internally to iPhone users as “zombies” who “pay for their own surveillance.”
“Apple has never worked with the N.S.A. to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone,” an Apple spokeswoman said in an email.
Der Spiegel released a number of slides detailing the agency’s hacking division — known internally as the Tailored Access Operations, or T.A.O. division. One slide, describing an N.S.A. software implant called DROPOUTJEEP, stood out.
The agency described DROPOUTJEEP as a “software implant for Apple iPhone” that has all kinds of handy spy capabilities. DROPOUTJEEP can pull or push information onto the iPhone, snag SMS text messages, contact lists, voicemail and a person’s geolocation, both from the phone itself and from cell towers in close proximity.
It can also turn the iPhone into a “hot mic” using the phone’s own microphone as a recording device and capture images via the iPhone’s camera. (Reminder to readers: Masking tape is not a bad idea).
But the Der Spiegel report is based on information that is over five years old. The slide, dated January 2007 and last updated October 2008, claims that the agency requires close physical proximity to the iPhone to install DROPOUTJEEP.
“The initial release of DROPOUTJEEP will focus on installing the implant via close access methods,” the N.S.A. slide says. Then, “A remote installation capability will be pursued for a future release.”
Based on the timing of the report, the agency would have been targeting Apple’s iOS5 operating system. Apple released its latest iOS7 operating system last September.
Nevertheless, privacy activists point out that the agency’s capabilities have expanded, if anything, over the last five years. “Imagine what they have now,” Christopher Soghoian, a technology adviser at the American Civil Liberties Union, posted on Twitter.
Apple denied any involvement.
“We have been unaware of this alleged N.S.A. program targeting our products,” Apple said in a statement. ”Our team is continuously working to make our products even more secure, and we make it easy for customers to keep their software up to date with the latest advancements.”
The company added, “Whenever we hear about attempts to undermine Apple’s industry-leading security, we thoroughly investigate and take appropriate steps to protect our customers. We will continue to use our resources to stay ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks, regardless of who’s behind them.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/3 ... k-program/
by coffin_dodger » Sun Jan 05, 2014 8:00 pm
by elfismiles » Thu Jan 23, 2014 10:27 am
Most Creative People
"DayZ" Makes You Feel Every Murder You Commit. Can You Handle This?
Dean Hall developed the zombie-packed, psychologically trying PC game to re-create tension faced by soldiers. The emotional responses it triggers have helped the game sell more than a million downloads in its first month.
By Evie Nagy
In early January, a Reddit user posted an emotional story about waking up on a beach and befriending a fellow lost soldier. But the soldier's health began to deteriorate. And the author was eventually forced to kill his friend with the other man's own gun to end his suffering. "His voice gone, I sat there staring at my monitor and began to cry," the Redditor wrote. "I'll never see that friend again and I miss him very much."
"God damn," wrote a commenter. "Alright I'm getting this game."
The game play leads to a degree of psychological tension and emotional response that players report never before experiencing in a computer game.
The writer was playing DayZ, a zombie apocalypse multiplayer PC game that sold its 1-millionth download last week, less than a month after its Dec. 16 release. That release is only the game's early-access alpha version, which developer Dean Hall will be enhancing and improving for most of the next year before launching it in beta. But even at this stage, the reason for DayZ's enormous success is becoming clear--the game play leads to a degree of psychological tension and emotional response that players report never before experiencing in a computer game.
This comes largely from DayZ's use of permadeath--meaning that players have only one life in the game and lose everything if they are killed--as well as a scarcity of survival resources, and a kill-or-be-killed relationship with other players, who often need your supplies to stay alive themselves. There are also zombies.
Dean Hall Hall created DayZ based on his experience in the New Zealand army, which sent him on a survival exercise in Brunei that nearly killed him in 2010. "[The exercise] was really tough, and I kind of wondered, why is it that as a soldier you have to go through and do all of this training?" says Hall. "Was there maybe a way to do some of this in a computer game?" Hall developed a mod (the term for a modification of an existing game) of military simulation game Arma 2, in which a soldier's character, health, and equipment persisted from mission to mission, rather than starting over each time. He then had fellow soldiers play the simulation as training.
"I noticed how different they were behaving when their characters saved to a database, and they knew that the character was going to be back there every day," says Hall. "They were suddenly arguing with each other. They were really tense. When someone got shot they were really concerned; they would try to help them. Normally in the simulation training we do, someone would die and they’d carry on with the mission. Well, if that happens in real life that’s not what happens, you know?"
The discovery led Hall to further explore the potential for adding psychological elements to the game, including the zombie threat and having a player's character spawn (i.e., initially appear in the game world) at any random location with almost no supplies. This resulted in the first DayZ mod of Arma 2, released in 2012. Hall had already been hired as a junior developer at Bohemia Interactive, the company that makes Arma 2, based on the strength of other mods he'd built for the game--but surpassing all the others, the DayZ mod reached 1 million players in its first four months, and early last year Bohemia announced plans for the standalone version of the game.
"His son is like, 'Just kill me. Just kill me.' Because his legs were hurt and they didn’t have any morphine and stuff."--DayZ creator Dean Hall
The fact that DayZ sold a million copies (at around $30 a pop) in four weeks came as a surprise to Hall, who originally felt that 250,000 in a year would be a success--the DayZ mod had been a free download if you already owned Arma 2, so he wasn't counting on the same numbers for the standalone. But just as surprising have been the stories coming from players.
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"One of the things that really hit me was a story posted to my Facebook page from this father," says Hall. "He was playing with his son and they were getting ready to go into a barn and they were a little worried there was another player in there because they had seen players in the area. They only had one compass between them, so he said, 'You approach from the west.' And then they headed in towards it, and he saw this person coming in from the other side, so he shot them, and wounded them. Then he walked over and realized it was his son. His son is like, 'Just kill me. Just kill me.' Because his legs were hurt and they didn’t have any morphine and stuff. I felt really bad about it, but the father said it was awesome … they had this amazing experience together. And he wasn’t normally into computer games."
One particularly striking post calls the game 'a murder simulator like no other,' describing the player's stages of emotions after making his first kill.
The DayZ section of Reddit is an endless rabbit hole of emotional accounts of playing the game. One player describes his overwhelming sense of justice after having killed and pillaged another character who shouted a racial epithet; another writes about being "emotionally scarred" after the "whirlwind of chaos, sorrow, and show of true love" that he experienced when he was mortally wounded and a friend exacted instant, furious revenge on the attacker. And about the more mundane ways the game invades the psyche, another player writes, "I spent hours [in the game] looking for a canteen or a water bottle and never found one. Today, when I went to work, someone had left an empty water bottle on the desk. It was like finding $20 on the ground. Split second of pure joy."
One particularly striking post calls the game "a murder simulator like no other," describing the player's stages of emotions after making his first kill. He starts off feeling a wave of guilt and grief for the stranger sitting across the Internet, who in that moment lost everything he had accomplished in the game. "Then the worst thing happened," writes the player. "I started to rationalize my kill. 'Well he probably would've tried to kill me.' 'Well it's only fair, I've been killed 10 times by players like him.' 'It's only a game.' Anything I could think of to make myself feel better. This is what makes DayZ so great. To think that this 'game' gave me the opportunity to struggle with morality in a way that other forms of entertainment never have. It also shows you how people can do horrible thing to others as long as everyone is doing it (think Nazi Germany). How every time you kill someone that feeling of remorse and grief is a little less painful until one day you feel nothing at all."
While Hall prefers the term "story generator" to "murder simulator," he considers the player's story proof that he's doing what he set out to.
"There are a lot of films I’ve watched that really moved me, like The Road, the film adaptation [of Cormac McCarthy's novel]," says Hall. "Some of these films can be really powerful, and sometimes make you angry. Whereas I feel like videogames, a lot of the time have been always about being fun. A lot of people didn’t take them that seriously from other media because it’s all just fun--click the little thing, jump around and do this. Whereas I wanted to see a videogame explore areas like loss and fear and anger."
As for whether the success of DayZ will inspire other developers to create similar games, Hall believes it's possible, but it's not as straightforward as saying "emotion sells copies."
"If you really want to pull permadeath off, you really have to go all the way," says Hall. "I think that can be a lot to swallow, and it can be quite a risky proposition because people aren't used to upsetting their customers. Which we do. I mean, the amount of times people have said to me, 'I got so angry with the game I uninstalled it and I said to myself, I’m never playing this again.' And then they say that an hour later they are re-downloading it because they really wanted to play."
[Images courtesy Dean Hall]
http://www.fastcompany.com/3025201/most ... s-your-emo
by justdrew » Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:10 pm
Noam Chomsky: Zombies are the new Indians and slaves in white America’s collective nightmare
By Scott Kaufman | Friday, February 14, 2014 9:04 EST
During a question-and-answer session with students on February 7, 2014, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky was asked why there’s a cultural preoccupation with “the zombie apocalypse” in United States.
“My guess is,” Chomsky said, “that it’s a reflection of fear and desperation. The United States is an unusually frightened country, and in such circumstances, people concoct, maybe for escape or relief, [narratives] in which terrible things happen.”
“Fear in the United States is actually a pretty interesting phenomenon,” Chomsky continued. “It actually goes back to the colonies — there’s a very interesting book by a literary critic, Bruce Franklin, called War Stars. It’s a study of popular literature…from the earliest days to the present, and there are a couple of themes that run through it that are pretty striking.”
“For one thing,” Chomsky said, “one major theme in popular literature is that we’re about to face destruction from some terrible, awesome enemy, and at the last moment we’re saved by a superhero, or a super-weapon — or, in recent years, high school kids going to the hills to chase away the Russians.”
According to Chomsky, “there’s a sub-theme: it turns out this enemy, this horrible enemy that’s going to destroy us, is someone we’re oppressing. So you go back to the early years, the terrible enemy was the Indians.”
“The colonists, of course, were the invaders…whatever you think about the Indians, they were defending their own territory.” After a brief discussion of the Declaration of Independence, Chomsky notes that one of the complaints listed in it is that King George “unleashed against [the colonists] the merciless Indian savages, whose known way of warfare is torture and destruction and so on.”
“Well, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that…knew quite well that it was the merciless English savages whose known way of warfare was destruction and torture and terror, and taking over the country and driving out and exterminating the natives. But it’s switched in the Declaration of Independence,” Chomsky said, indicating that this is yet another example of Franklin’s thesis that oppressed people become, in the popular imagination of the oppressors, the “terrible, awesome enemy” bent on the destruction of America.
“After that,” Chomsky continued, “it became the slaves. There was going to be a slave revolt…and the slave population was going to rise up and kill all the men, rape all the women, and destroy the country.”
“And it goes into modern times, with Hispanic narco-traffickers who are going to come in and destroy this society…and these are real fears, that’s a lot of what lies behind the extremely unusual gun culture in the United States,” Chomsky said. “We just have to have guns to protect ourselves from the United Nations, the federal government, aliens, and zombies, I suppose.”
“I think when you break it down,” Chomsky concluded, “much of it is just a recognition — at some level of the psyche — that if you’ve got your boot on somebody’s neck, there’s something wrong, and that they people you’re oppressing may rise up and defend themselves.”
by elfismiles » Fri May 16, 2014 4:01 pm
by justdrew » Fri May 16, 2014 9:14 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Sat May 17, 2014 4:17 pm
by elfismiles » Sat May 17, 2014 6:21 pm
Iamwhomiam » 17 May 2014 20:17 wrote:I dunno, elfi. I sure appreciate you sharing with us stuff of interest you find there, but me, nah, I'm not goin there.
If I remember right, that's the library with books that read you.
by elfismiles » Sat May 17, 2014 6:23 pm
Pentagon document lays out battle plan against zombies
By Jamie Crawford, CNN National Security Producer
updated 2:07 PM EDT, Fri May 16, 2014
Zombies stumble across the East Plaza of the U.S. Capitol to promote 'The Warehouse: Project 4.1' urban haunted house in Rockville, Maryland, on Wednesday, October 3, 2012.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Pentagon planners draw up disaster plans to deal with different contingencies
Planners created an attack by the walking dead to plan for large-scale operations
Tactics include "concentration of all firepower to the head, specifically the brain"
Washington (CNN) -- Never fear the night of the living dead -- the Pentagon has got you covered.
From responses to natural disasters to a catastrophic attack on the homeland, the U.S. military has a plan of action ready to go if either incident occurs.
It has also devised an elaborate plan should a zombie apocalypse befall the country, according to a Defense Department document obtained by CNN.
In an unclassified document titled "CONOP 8888," officials from U.S. Strategic Command used the specter of a planet-wide attack by the walking dead as a training template for how to plan for real-life, large-scale operations, emergencies and catastrophes.
And the Pentagon says there's a reasonable explanation.
"The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development through a fictional training scenario," Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze, a spokeswoman for U.S. Strategic Command, told CNN. "This document is not a U.S. Strategic Command plan."
Nevertheless, the preparation and thoroughness exhibited by the Pentagon for how to prepare for a scenario in which Americans are about to be overrun by flesh-eating invaders is quite impressive.
Read the Pentagon's Zombie apocalypse plan
A wide variety of different zombies, each brandishing their own lethal threats, are possible to confront and should be planned for, according to the document.
Walker Stalker Con Walker Stalker Con
Anderson Cooper: Stop scaring New York!
'Walking Dead' zombies prank NYC
Zombies take to the streets for a cause
Zombies on the run!
Zombie life forms "created via some form of occult experimentation in what might otherwise be referred to as 'evil magic,' to vegetarian zombies that pose no threat to humans due to their exclusive consumption of vegetation, to zombie life forms created after an organism is infected with a high dose of radiation are among the invaders the document outlines."
Every phase of the operation from conducting general zombie awareness training, and recalling all military personnel to their duty stations, to deploying reconnaissance teams to ascertain the general safety of the environment to restoring civil authority after the zombie threat has been neutralized are discussed.
And the rules of engagement with the zombies are clearly spelled out within the document.
"The only assumed way to effectively cause causalities to the zombie ranks by tactical force is the concentration of all firepower to the head, specifically the brain," the plan reads. "The only way to ensure a zombie is 'dead' is to burn the zombie corpse."
There are even contingency plans for how to deal with hospitals and other medical facilities infiltrated by zombies, and the possible deployment of remote controlled robots to man critical infrastructure points such as power stations if the zombie threat becomes too much.
A chain of command from the President on down along with the roles to be played by the State Department and the intelligence community for dealing with the zombie apocalypse are clearly spelled out in the document.
'Walking Dead' finale: The biggest reveals
The training document was first reported by Foreign Policy magazine.
This is also not the first time zombies have been used as the antagonist in U.S. government training operations. Both the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Homeland Security have used the creatures as a vehicle for training their personnel in the past.
Defense officials stress the report in no way signals an invasion of zombies is on the horizon. The only real purpose of the document was to practice how to execute a plan for handling something as large and serious a situation like flesh-eating beings trying to overrun the United States.
And why zombies?
Officials familiar with the planning of it say zombies were chosen precisely because of the outlandish nature of the attack premise.
"Training examples for plans must accommodate the political fallout that occurs if the general public mistakenly believes that a fictional training scenario is actually a real plan," the document says. "Rather than risk such an outcome by teaching our augmentees using the fictional 'Tunisia' or 'Nigeria' scenarios used at (Joint Combined Warfighting School), we elected to use a completely impossible scenario that could never be mistaken as a real plan."
So, practice for the when, where and how to plan for a more likely disaster scenario? Yes. But zombies of all stripes would be well advised to take note of this directive to Strategic Command personnel buried within the document.
"Maintain emergency plans to employ nuclear weapons within (the continental United States) to eradicate zombie hordes."
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/16/politics/ ... index.html
by JackRiddler » Sat May 17, 2014 11:45 pm
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