The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
The National Security Agency is building a “spy center” in Utah with the purpose of gaining intelligence by breaking codes. But the center will also collect massive amounts of private domestic data, including phone calls, emails and Google searches:
“The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks ‘basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.’ Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. ‘A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,’ she says, ‘incredibly intimate, personal conversations.’ Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. ‘It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,’ she says.”
Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software
Inside the making of the social network for programmers—which now has 1.3 million users and more than 2 million source code repositories:
“At first, GitHub was a side project. Wanstrath and Preston-Werner would meet on Saturdays to brainstorm, while coding during their free time and working their day jobs. ‘GitHub wasn’t supposed to be a startup or a company. GitHub was just a tool that we needed,’ Wanstrath says. But — inspired by Gmail — they made the project a private beta and opened it up to others. Soon it caught on with the outside world.
“By January of 2008, Hyett was on board. And three months after that night in the sports bar, Wanstrath got a message from Geoffrey Grosenbach, the founder of PeepCode, a online learning site that had started using GitHub. ‘I’m hosting my company’s code here,’ Grosenbach said. ‘I don’t feel comfortable not-paying you guys. Can I just send a check?'”
The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever
Scientists are discovering how chemicals can affect the way memories are formed, paving the way for a future where it could be possible to forget anything we wanted by taking a single pill:
“This isn’t Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style mindwiping. In some ways it’s potentially even more effective and more precise. Because of the compartmentalization of memory in the brain—the storage of different aspects of a memory in different areas—the careful application of PKMzeta synthesis inhibitors and other chemicals that interfere with reconsolidation should allow scientists to selectively delete aspects of a memory. Right now, researchers have to inject their obliviating potions directly into the rodent brain. Future treatments, however, will involve targeted inhibitors, like an advanced version of ZIP, that become active only in particular parts of the cortex and only at the precise time a memory is being recalled. The end result will be a menu of pills capable of erasing different kinds of memories—the scent of a former lover or the awful heartbreak of a failed relationship. These thoughts and feelings can be made to vanish, even as the rest of the memory remains perfectly intact. ‘Reconsolidation research has shown that we can get very specific about which associations we go after,’ LeDoux says. ‘And that’s a very good thing. Nobody actually wants a totally spotless mind.'”
Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust
A look at which alternative energy initiatives succeeded, which ones failed, and whether there’s hope for a rebound:
“In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, it had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks, it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the sector between late 2009 and late 2011. Avarice, altruism, and policy had aligned to fuel a spectacular boom.
“Anyone who has heard the name Solyndra knows how this all panned out. Due to a confluence of factors—including fluctuating silicon prices, newly cheap natural gas, the 2008 financial crisis, China’s ascendant solar industry, and certain technological realities—the clean-tech bubble has burst, leaving us with a traditional energy infrastructure still overwhelmingly reliant on fossil fuels.”
Let the Robot Drive
Self-driving car technology is advancing rapidly. But how comfortable can we get with the idea?
“Beyond bureaucracy, there are deeper legal questions. Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, which is studying the legal framework for quasi-autonomous vehicles, notes how active the liability landscape already is when it comes to cars’ safety features. ‘People sue over all kinds of stuff. People sue because some feature that was supposed to protect them didn’t. People sue because their car didn’t have a blind-spot warning when other cars at the same price point did.’ Imagine the complexity we’ll have when cars drive themselves. Who will be responsible for their operation—the car companies or the drivers? What happens, for example, when a highway patrol officer pulls over a self-driving car? Who gets the ticket?”
The Curse of ‘Cow Clicker’: How a Cheeky Satire Became a Videogame Hit
It’s a Facebook game called Cow Clicker, and it’s unlike anything Bogost ever made before, a borderline-evil piece of work that was intended to embody the worst aspects of the modern gaming industry. He meant Cow Clicker to be a satire with a short shelf life. Instead, it enslaved him and many of its players for much of the past 18 months. Even Bogost can’t decide whether it represents his greatest success—or his most colossal failure.
Weight Watchers Revamps Its Magic Formula
The transformation required a radical, stealth operation. The company’s more than 12,000 leaders, the emcees who guide the local meetings, were put on PointsPlus so they’d have it mastered before the switch. This meant they were practicing one program while preaching another. Meanwhile, marketing and brochures needed to be updated, new smartphone apps, calculators, and cookbooks had to be developed, and the website needed to be overhauled. Miller-Kovach’s team compiled a new database of some 47,000 foods. All while, even in the executive ranks, people were questioning such a wholesale change. “Do I think at least 90 percent of the people who worked for Weight Watchers regretted Dave asking me that question? Yes,” says Miller-Kovach, referring to the initial meeting with Kirchhoff. “The business had at least quadrupled since the introduction of Points, and very few people in areas of responsibility had been through a program transition. When reality hit, it was big.”
Just after Thanksgiving 2010, Weight Watchers flipped the switch. Says Kirchhoff: “It was as though we went from dollars to euros overnight.”
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin
Bitcoin was drawing the kind of attention normally reserved for overhyped Silicon Valley IPOs and Apple product launches. On his Internet talk show, journo-entrepreneur Jason Calacanis called it “a fundamental shift” and “one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in 20 years in the technology business.” Prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson heralded “societal upheaval” as the Next Big Thing on the Internet, and the four examples he gave were Wikileaks, PlayStation hacking, the Arab Spring, and bitcoin. Andresen, the coder, accepted an invitation from the CIA to come to Langley, Virginia, to speak about the currency. Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party (whose central policy plank includes the abolition of the patent system), announced that he was putting his life savings into bitcoins. The future of bitcoin seemed to shimmer with possibility.
Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think
Bezos: If you go back to 1999, it’s hard to remember how effervescent the bubble was. People who really didn’t have any passion for technology or the Internet were giving up their careers as doctors and mining Internet gold. And when the bubble popped, a meaningful fraction of our people left. They realized they didn’t really want to be doing this. Some of them got laid off, some of them left of their own accord. Those were not happy days. This super-valuable person you really liked leaves. So your skin gets thicker. Not just me, but all of the executives who stayed.
6 Guys in a Capsule: 520 Days on a Simulated Mars Mission
In a secluded area on the ground floor, six brave young men (three Russians, an Italian, a Frenchman, and a Chinese national) are simulating a mission to Mars. For 520 straight days—that’s more than 17 months—the volunteers will be sequestered in a tubular steel stand-in for a spacecraft whose 775-square-foot living area is so cramped and spare it might have been designed by Dostoyevsky himself. Mars500, as their mission is called, is jointly sponsored by the Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency. It seeks to answer a question that looms as the EU, the US, Russia, and India all look to put a man on Mars by the 2030s: Can the human animal endure the long isolation and boredom implicit in traveling to a planet that is, at its closest, 35 million miles—and roughly six months of rocket travel—away? Will one of the volunteers crack before the faux mission’s scheduled conclusion on November 5, 2011?