Over the past two decades, Ricardo Dominguez has been utilizing electronics and the internet to piss off just about every high-level administrative authority in the US. In the late 90s, his performance-art-cum-activist organization the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) set up a participatory website-jamming network called the FloodNet system, which allowed anyone with an internet connection to gum up the official sites of the US Border Patrol, White House, G8, Mexican embassy, and others, rendering them inaccessible. The Department of Justice retaliated with an electronic attack on the EDT that aimed to destabilize the group and interrupt their online meddling. As any conspiracy wonk can tell you, it’s illegal for the government to use military force against civilians without declaring martial law; that’s the job of cops and FBI agents.

Dominguez, a Zapatista sympathizer and close friend of Subcomandante Marcos, claims the various forms of online mischief conducted by the EDT were experiments in electronic civil disobedience rather than true acts of sabotage. Their work led to massive virtual and physical sit-ins protesting the Mexican government between ’98 and ’99, attracting more than 100,000 participants. But his current project–the Transborder Immigrant Tool–is poised to enrage a much broader spectrum of the North American populace. By augmenting a low-cost Motorola phone with GPS and a battery of applications, Dominguez’s goal is to help illegal immigrants complete safe border crossings without being sent back by the Border Patrol or getting shot in the face by American “patriots.”

You know what? If you're smart enough to get that phone in Juarez or wherever, haul your ass across a border using our own satellite network to get you here, I want you making my Wendy's Applewood Smoked Bacon Deluxes. Because you're not a completely fucking idiot, and when I say "no pickles" I won't get pickles and pickle relish.

And if you haven't had Wendy's Applewood Smoked Bacon Deluxe, you really should consider it. Even Bacon Today was quite taken by it.

At a fast food establishment, I have never met its equal. The truth is that rapid, high-volume production and bacon are not a match made in heaven. Fast food bacon is usually limp and soggy as a result. In order for bacon to be truly delicious it must be given some time, love and attention in the kitchen.

A biologist walks into a sushi bar and orders some tuna. What does he get? Escolar, a nasty fish with buttery flesh that can cause bizarre episodes of diarrhea, accompanied by a waxy intestinal discharge.

It’s not a joke. It happened five times to the same scientists during a brief research project. The results of that study were published Wednesday in PLOS One.

“A piece of tuna sushi has the potential to be an endangered species, a fraud or a health hazard,” wrote the authors. “All three of these cases were uncovered in this study.”

The team of researchers from Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History ordered tuna from 31 sushi restaurants and then used genetic tests to determine the species of fishes in those dishes. More than half of those eateries misrepresented, or couldn’t clarify the type of fish they were mongering. Several were selling endangered southern bluefin tuna.

Yeah, I can see the proposal now. "Uh, I like, want to test the voracity of sushi. Preferably in Japan. For science. It will fit into my three-part thesis, following this vaca--research, I'll need to run some DNA tests on some ceviche. In Buenos Aires.

"Part three isn't finalized, depending on the results of the first two 'surf' studies, but I think you'll find the name quite clever."

Seriously, how awesome have the past few hours been? Engadget turns the design stakes up to 11, Google finally dishes the dirt on Chrome OS, and now you can even download the forthcoming software to have a fiddle with yourself. It's completely free, though you'll need VMWare running atop a Windows, Linux or OS X installation to make the magic happen. Naturally, we've been considerate enough to provide download links for everything you'll require at the source below, so get those fingers clicking.

...We've had a chance to have a quick and dirty snoop around Chrome OS and our early conclusions are rather predictable. This really is a browser with an OS attached rather than vice versa. You get your tab-based navigation up top, and the focus is of course on the internet, with minimal option buttons on the far right and app launchers at the top left. Unfortunately, in order to access the more interesting apps, one requires a Google.com login which we do not have, so we were stuck gazing at only the Gmail and Calendar applications. They act and function much like their online counterparts, but for the significant lag and choppiness that may be attributed to the still very early stage of development or the fact it's running on a virtual machine.

My question is: will it play full-screen flash video? I know it's old hat, but seriously, that's the yardstick. It doesn't matter if it has the coolest, bestest note-taking application that reads your mind and arranges your ideas for you (and shares them with Google, natch) if YouTube chops, then it's fail.

Still, time to get the ol' laptop dual-bootin'. Provided it's not based on kernel 2.6.27 or later, 'cause that shit don't support my chipset. You know what does? Windows 7.

In a report on the incident the officer, Dustin Bradshaw, said the mother gave him permission to use the Taser.

When he arrived, the girl was curled up on the floor, screaming, and resisting as her mother tried to get her in the shower before bed.

"Her mother told me to take her if I needed to," the officer wrote.

The child was "violently kicking and verbally combative" when he tried to take her into custody and she kicked him in the groin.

He then delivered "a very brief drive stun to her back," the report said.

OK, he didn't tase her, he used a stun gun on her. A ten-year-old child. A police officer tased a crying, ten-year-old child. While her mother watched. Approvingly.

Really? I read that sentence, like, five times. It's spelled right, but it isn't.

Hey look, related article: "Policeman who used Taser gun on girl, 10, suspended"

The funny thing is, if I sent this in an email to my friends, I bet Google would try to sell us stun guns.

and i'm sorry about the title, but what else are you going to do?

The e-mail system of one of the world's leading climate research units has been breached by hackers.

E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday.

A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission.

An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.

But it gets funnier:

I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.

You know how every so often it turns out a hardware company's bribed some press firm to tweak their benchmarking results to skew it in favor of their product? This is like that, only they're skewing data to exacerbate global warming statistics.

That's it, we need to nutrocute Al Gore, and get the facts.

wait, we don't do that anymore? oh, it's wrong again

Yup. You read that right. Modern Warfare 2 PC now has dedicated servers.

Wait, PC gamers! Before you send Bobby Kotick a thank you letter, know that it wasn't they who did it, but rather the gamers who took Infinity Ward and Activition's attempts to lock down the game as a challenge. And bring it those gamers did, managing to hack in the developer console and enable the ability to set up dedicated servers. Keep in mind, the game hasn't even been out a week.

Perhaps some of the boycotters caught playing the game were not being hypocrites, but rather hard at work turning the highest-profile shafting of PC gamers right around, as the video below might demonstrate.

Alright, in the wake of Chipmaker Showdown being canceled, I'm once again certain I haven't been teleported to some parallel dimension.

Because, honestly, how long should it take for hackers to put the love back into Modern Warfare? I mean, that's like expecting to safely use wireless Internet at Defcon; it's just not going to be that way forever.

I'd try it myself, but you see, I bought it on steam. Hurry up and make it official, damnit.

Careful what you say – that iPhone over there could be a live microphone.

Which is to say there’s a new, free iPhone app called Soundbiter designed to monitor the world’s audio and upload it to Twitter and Facebook with the push of a button.

When running, the Soundbiter app is constantly recording, keeping an audio buffer of a minute or so. Then when you hear a good joke, a fine guitar riff or a politician’s slip-of-the-tongue, you hit the apps’s only button, which saves the last 60 seconds of sound. From there, it’s a cinch to edit, upload, title and publish the sonic snippet to Twitter or Facebook.

No no, it's true, you should always record everything you say when you're high. You are actually smarter when you're high, and all your friends will be embiggened by your... *shudder* "sonic snippets".

Look, I'm not even going to get into the privacy/ security ramifications of such an app. I'm just going to say this: congratulations, you just made the Internet dumber. No no, for decades we didn't think it was possible, but. There you have it.

Not even Google Wave will be able to save it.

@ RockPaperShotgun

Just as a FYI. (Click for the full thing)

@ Kotaku

According to "internal Activision estimates", Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 didn't just have a good launch, it had "the biggest launch in history across all forms of entertainment".

This claim is based on sell-through sales, with Activision bean-counters reporting the game managed to pull in $310 million in its first 24 hours on sale. And that's not a worldwide number, that's just in North America and the UK. $310 million. In a single day. In three countries.

Sure, games cost more than a movie ticket, but $310 million in 24 hours is still a mighty impressive number, regardless of the admission price.

So wait, like, does this mean you can't hack it? All these people are playing it because the ingenious multiplayer system turns out to be badass, right?

It totally does!

But you know what the most important part of this is? That the consumer, I, you, we... we spoke with our hearts, not our wallets. Because denying the economy even one sixty dollar game is unamerican and factually terrorism.

there are 27 countries in north america, you wankers

Think you can type? Now's your chance to jump in the ring – err, take a seat at your keyboard – and go head-to-head with the fastest typists around. Put your fierce typing skills to the test for a chance to win $2,000 and be crowned the first-ever Ultimate Typing Champion.

The current dude is leading at 171 WPM, which, actually probably beats her. But she can still blitz the rest of you. I mean, c'mon, she was a legal secretary, she doesn't break keyboards so much as punch them through desks.

Still, 171...

HAX

@ Ars Technica

Intel and AMD are fierce competitors in the world of chipmaking, but in recent years they've taken the fight to the courtroom. AMD has sued Intel for antitrust violations (allegations that have been picked up by a number of governments), while Intel fired back by claiming that AMD had violated a licensing agreement for x86 technology. This morning, however, the two companies made a surprise announcement: they've reached an agreement that settles all legal issues between them.

@ AnandTech

Out of this settlement come four major things for AMD:

1. $1.25 billion in cold, hard cash.
2. Intel will stop doing things that they and AMD agree they shouldn’t be doing.
3. The right to not have to produce x86 CPUs in-house. AMD can go fabless.
4. The right to have their x86 processors fabricated anywhere of AMD’s choosing.

What the hell, I get the flu and the whole world changes! You can't end the legal throw-down, that upsets the balance of God damn everything. Next thing you know, NVIDIA and AMD will freely allow cross-licensing for multi-GPU configs, the Crunchpad and the Open Pandora will hit mass market, and Kyle Bennett will go vegan and quit drinking.

This just doesn't sit well with me at all.

Alright. You put a lot of miles on a mouse. Over time, they get quirks, and those are actually just little stress fractures and other flaws that you beat into them, and I don't just mean the body of the mouse. The feet are ablative and wear away, the plastic used to make the buttons go click gets rickety, and the wheel gets greasy and inaccurate.

The way cheap mice get around this is by using bulkier, thicker plastic and wheel-tracking optics that scan larger, lower-resolution areas. All that makes 'em last longer, but it makes it harder to click and scroll, and fucks with the relationship between your brain saying click and the computer hearing click. It adds inconsistency.

Using cheap input devices is like using bulk Bic ballpoints. Your lettering slides around and the amount of force required to overcome the ink's tackiness is also the amount of force it takes to throw the ball across the whole word.

And that's just the buttons. A cheap mouse sticks its cheap circuitry anywhere it fits in the body, where a good mouse levels the weight of the internals across the axises you use to move it around. That means that cheap mice pull and push in directions that even if you subconsciously correct for, track the cursor in directions your brain is opposed to.

The most noticeable change when using a good mouse is the tangible effects of the USB cable. The cheap mouse cable is designed to withstand, to resist change, and they do it by using thick plastic shielding. Good, thin shielding is expensive. But there's more to it than just inflexibility; a cheap mouse cable pushes constantly towards the front of the device. But a floppy cable will get tangled underneath, so the cable has to be rigid enough to supports its own mass but not impede or deflect the mouse's movement. And that means sticking knit sleeves between the insulator and the wiring, but without adding weight.

There's all this before you even begin dealing with latency and accuracy, and they're all real costs that make these devices more expensive. Macros? On-the-fly reprogramming? More than three chunky, finger-bashed buttons? These are all good things.

But the real test for using a good mouse is to then switch to a bad mouse. Like, you're helping a friend delete all the pornspam off his machine, and you do that swirly thing you do to calibrate your brain to someone else's sensitivity and acceleration, and then it hits you: this mouse is a piece of shit. I thought I knew you, man. I thought you were cool.

So what is it? Are you a good Mont Blanc owner, caretaker, secret lover? Do you only use Mont Blanc ink because you know to use otherwise violates not just the warranty, but the honor of your implement?

Or does it not matter. A pen's a pen, a mouse is a mouse, and they both smell like spit after a week, anyway...

i have a fever and love my mouse

In fact, many of you have commented that you have cancelled your preorders in response to the design decisions made by Infinity Ward. But Activision, publisher of what will be one of the largest titles of the year, doesn't seem all that worried about the backlash from PC gamers.

"We're, of course, watching this very carefully and paying attention to it," Activision president Mike Griffith said in response to a financial analyst, as noted by Kotaku. "But we're not overly concerned about it."

"One of the problems with our PC SKUs in the past is that it has not been as friendly a consumer experience in terms of matchmaking and online play as the consoles have allowed it to be," he added. "Our solution here improves that consumer experience overall by a significant margin. And so we think that the benefits we will see are going to far outweigh any negatives that seem to be surfacing."

"Any negatives" in this case means "profits lost over money gained by using a crippled peer-to-peer multiplayer system."

Originally, I thought that this magical never-before-tried could have been something new and different. As it turns out, it's just a bullshit cost-cutting measure, which shouldn't surprise me or anyone, for that matter.

I still stand by my support of the single-player game, that is, I'm going to wait and see, but if it's only just as good as Modern Warfare, there's no reason not to buy this game, unless you're a baby-killing, terrorism-pot-smoking liberal anti-Modern Warfare fakeriot.

real americans pledge their faith to god and country through video game violence

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

...among others.

I just... I don't get this. Didn't the US Congress just bolster the FCC's authority over the Internet? Isn't proactive another word for invasion? Jesus, how is any of this feasible, let alone legal?

"Give me six..." shit, I just used that quote. Just go read Schneier. Man, if this gets codified, up will be down, black will be white, and our turkeys will be photoshopped.

No but yeah, this is bad.

As a fan of the ridiculous acrobatics in the games, one of the aspects I was specifically watching for in the trailer was the stuntwork. As expected, the action is heavy on the CG, but as a result the free running in the trailer is as unbelievable as in the games, if not more so. Some specific moves shown off in the trailer will be familiar to fans of the games, while others are so fantastic that a game would be hard pressed to replicate them outside of a cut-scene or quick time event. Suffice it to say that I was pleased with the quality and density of acrobatic stunts in the trailer, and I hope that the movie maintains both.

As far as combat, there is not much to say. Much like combat took a backseat in The Sands of Time videogame, it wasn't featured particularly prominently in the movie trailer. I can say that bows and arrows are confirmed, as is at least one swordfight. At least!

What dominated the trailer, however, was the newly scripted story, which borrows elements from The Sands of Time trilogy (most obviously, the Dagger of Time), but otherwise introduces a new prince, a new female lead, and an original plot. The trailer naturally spoils very little of the film, but it showed enough to be clear that it won't simply be a silver screen retelling of the videogames.

While I'm kinda-sorta excited to see how this all works out, I can't help but think, aren't there movies to be made that don't just re-purpose existing media? I know it's not really possible to make something truly original, but everyone agrees, if ticket sales are down, the industry only has itself to blame.

There are so many breathtaking, edge-sitting tales out there that are just begging to be shot, and I'm not even talking about an action-packed cop movie about a rogue
parahawking detective, which would without a doubt be, well, original, I mean something as knuckle-whitening as the history of the solid-state disk.

i'd watch that over and over

The first step to solving this problem of limited inventory space is to use your characters as mules. In my game, every single character has a secondary weapon equipped. Every amulet and belt slot is used. Both ring slots are filled. Not necessarily because the character is going to use those items, but because it frees up slots in my backpack.

The second step is to shell out for the backpack expansions. These are an ingame money sink. They partly encourage you to visit various merchants to see if they sell one of the precious backpack expansions. But they mostly force hard decisions about how to spend your money.

But then there's the third step. It's called Warden's Keep and it'll cost you seven dollars to download. It adds a new party camp that includes storage so you can free up backpack slots when you're adventuring. Bioware claims this was created after early reviews complained about the lack of inventory space. But rather than fixing the game by giving everyone a storage locker, they opted to use the problem as a way to make more money.

Oh, everyone look shocked and then start an online petition. There has to be a way to show your outrage with you non-wallet. Because, you know, it's busy enjoying Dragon Age.

Not that I've played it; I'm skeptical about Bioware's ability to make a great game after they blew their wad on Jade Empire. Blah blah blah Mass Effect. I played Moon Patrol already, thanks. On a black-and-white television, even.

I'm guessing that the astounding praise is like when they give someone an Oscar for a shit movie, but five years ago, the guy did an awesome job but got passed over, and in this case, everyone's all nostalgic about Baldur's Gate because we all bought 4th Edition and didn't bother with it, and now it's just another box on the shelf.

Minsc wasn't funny then, and he isn't funny now, and space lesbians don't make games good.

In terms of data on current human scales, a yottabyte is nearly infinite (though I'm sure the NSA will manage to fill the thing in like 2 weeks, and iPods will come with yottabytes in just a few months).

To be fair, the yottabyte figure is just one estimate generated by a Pentagon think tank. The facility could hold a mere hundreds of petabytes. But either way, the prospect is as unsustainable as it is frightening. This one facility will burn through as much electricity as the entirety of Salt Lake City.

All of this data comes from the book The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid. And while the paranoid among you may read it, I, MARK WILSON, HAVE NO REASON TO FEAR THE NSA'S INVOLVEMENT IN MY LIFE OR INFORMATION AT ALL. [NYBooks via CrunchGear]

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
--Richelieu, Cardinal de

But yeah, weren't the wiretaps supposed to stop? Oh, wait, we still have that homeland to secure. If we let the NSA record all our calls, can we at least bring pocketknives on planes?

Unfinished Windows 7 Feature Turns Laptops Into Wi-Fi Hotspots

A Philadelphia developer has rooted out an unfinished feature of Windows 7 that turns any laptop into a wireless access point, allowing other Wi-Fi-enabled devices to share the connection without special software. Nomadio, which specializes in military network consulting and development, used the new "Virtual Wi-Fi" feature in Windows 7 to create Connectify, a free application that it released as a beta last Friday.

Windows 7 Turn Laptops into Wi-Fi Hotspots

PC Advisor reports that Philadelphia developer Nomadio has discovered an unfinished Windows 7 feature (Virtual Wi-Fi) that can turn a laptop into a Wi-Fi hotspot. That means other devices in the near vicinity can access the Internet without the need for special tunneling software. The company has now exploited the uncovered treasure and created a free application called Connectify, released just last week.

See, the enterprising high school geek will, in his head, use this as a lure to acquire the attentions of hot, Internet-needy ladies.

But that T shirt'll put an end to things, don't worry.

@ Wired

The good news is that this feature-rich handset, running version 2.0 of Google’s Android OS, compares very favorably to the Goliath of the smartphone world as a utility mobile-computing device – and, oh yeah, a phone. The bad news is that there may be too many good things going on to make using this device the quick, intuitive, out-of-the-box experience it should be. That’s a problem, given that the iPhone has set the usability bar so high.

@ PC World

Especially snappy is the Droid's Web browser, which loads images quickly thanks to the powerful 550MHz processor and speedy hardware-accelerated graphics. Though you are at the mercy of your 3G high-speed data network coverage, once you're in it, Web surfing is breezy and smooth. Video from sites such as YouTube looks equally impressive; the playback of a high-definition YouTube cartoon ("Sita Sings the Blues") was excellent, with no stalling or audio dropouts. Audio also sounded great piped through a pair of high-quality headphones. The straightforward music player supports playlist building, album art, and shuffle and loop playback modes. You can purchase DRM-free music at the Amazon MP3 store via the preloaded app on the device.

OK, this needs to be said: no matter what your feelings about Motorola, Google, Android, Verizon, smartphones in general--that is a stunning photo. Maybe a little too narrow DOF, but that backdrop makes up for it. What is it, a driveway? And you know that the vignetting's fake, but damn, is it used right.

Also, Kurtis, get me one of these phones; I'm on Verizon. I promise to keep it charged! I promise!

Well, triple resurrections, if you also include the upcoming sequel/relaunch. For the purposes of this post though, it’s vintage Mechwarring. Not been able to try this myself yet — mainly due to the torturously slow proprietary bitorrent client necessary to download the thing — but there’s a whole lot afoot in Mechwarrior land. First, a major new version of a free remake of Mechwarrior 2 made in Blitzbasic. It’s called Assault Tech 1: Battletech. Tech tech? Tech. Tech! Apparently, it now looks better than the original, thanks to a revamped DirectX7 engine. Oh, mighty seven. Decide for yourself in the videos below. As an additional ray of robotic rapture, the MW fan/mod site behind AT1:BT, MekTek.net, are also gearing up to re-release the rather splendid Mechwarrior 4, in its DRM-free, modern-Windowsed entirety.

Man, Mechwarrior 2, that brings back all kinds of memories, namely, peer-to-peer modem games. And kicking the shit out of Angelo until he discovered the nuke. And then not finishing my project, begging my dad to tell the school I was sick, and then ditching class to go to the library to finish my homework.

I ditched a lot of class to get classwork done. In hindsight, I sometimes wonder what part, if any, of my post-sixth-grade education was derived from school. No, really, I got out of the shower this morning and started to wonder; if I just didn't even bother with school would I have been dumber or just missed out on a lot of awkward fumbling (also at the library).

My first job was at a library, I was six. I tracked down law books for students and was paid in vending machine snacks. I also dug up microfiche and floppies for sodas, and made copies marked up a nickel each. 'Course, now we have the Google, nobody knows what microfiche is, and kids these days don't get taught how to use card catalogs.

See: Google. This is tech-related.

Speaking at BAFTA’s Annual Video Games Lecture last night, Lionhead boss Peter Molyneux revealed what he believes to be the 5 most revolutionary games from the past 20 years.

In a typically passionate and engaging presentation, Molyneux spoke of the need for designers to defy perceived wisdom and custom, saying, “The best innovations come from challenging the foundation stones of conventional wisdom.” The 5 games selected by Molyneux were specifically chosen for their success in doing just that.

The first title Molyneux highlighted for discussion was Dune 2, an early RTS. Molyneux said Dune 2 took gaming away from twitch-based reactions and instead encouraged a slower, more cerebral approach. Furthermore, alongside its innovative multiplayer, Dune 2 could be played in a variety of ways. Terms to describe these differing play styles, such as ‘turtle’ (where the player is overwhelmingly defensive), are still used in gaming to this day. According to the man himself, Molyneux is a turtle.

No. Fact. System Shock 2 is not on this list. Fact. He doesn't have the world's best video game/ movie tie-in, which itself is a tie: Goldeneye and Blade Runner. Fact: I think Dark Reign 2 was a huge let-down. Fact: OK, Dune 2 was pretty cool even if it ripped off a lot from Command & Conquer.

Fact: his games aren't on the list. Even the guy who made Fable can't really claim Fable goes in the top five.

And Black & White just got annoying. I don't want my peons to tell me when I got email. I want them to get their own damn jobs and stop bugging me every time the sky light up with fire. That shit happens all the time, be happy you don't live in Mordor, whiners.