Steemit Is Like Reddit, But Where Upvotes Equal a Cryptocurrency Payout

A homeless man can afford to buy an RV thanks to a popular blog post. A woman earns a year’s salary from a YouTube makeup tutorial. An African writer starts with three hours of electricity per day and ends with over $40,000 dollars.

These are some of the striking and somewhat implausible-sounding stories to have emerged during the first fully operational month of Steemit, a forum-style platform that rewards community content and curation with cryptocurrency payouts, and where—for the moment at least—users who hit the goldmine of a viral post can see up to five-figure payouts. (Here I should include a journalistic disclosure: a post on the site in which I appealed for sources for this story earned a total value of over $800, of which I have currently withdrawn $100.)

But as with any new cryptocurrency, there are key questions over stability, sustainability, and underlying motivation. As it stands, the bulk of the site is made up of quickly-written, poorly-researched content, some of which is remunerated into the thousands of dollars. At the same time, critics have raised concerns over both the distribution of the currency and the business model of the platform, questioning the huge sums accrued by early adopters and in some cases alleging a scam dependent on new investment to remain afloat.

The principle of the Steemit platform and its three value tokens—Steem, Steem Power, and Steem Dollars—is outlined in the Steem Whitepaper, written by the founders and lead developers, which describes it as “the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward an unbounded number of individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.” In the simplest explanation, every year, approximately 10 percent of the total value of the currency is allocated to content finders and creators by votes cast by the community; it’s essentially something like Reddit meets Bitcoin.

Screenshot of the Steemit site showing trending articles earlier this month

When users want to cash out, they can trade Steem or Steem Dollars for Bitcoin on a cryptocurrency exchange, then convert Bitcoin to fiat currency through the service of their choice; but half of the payout received for any post on the platform is assigned through another token called Steem Power, which the Steemit website is programmed to only release back to users gradually in a series of 104 weekly increments spanning two years, in order to promote long-term investment in the project.

At present, Steem has enjoyed an explosive growth in value in only a few months of operation, but with payouts for contributors coming from the creation of new currency, there have been accusations within the cryptocurrency community of the project being a pyramid scheme, with continued new investors required to keep the system afloat. Among other things, the nature of the three-token system has been criticised for creating an artificially high valuation of the currency: Almost all of the tokens in the system are locked up as Steem Power, but figures for the overall value are calculated by taking the market value of Steem—which has much more liquidity, but only represents 4 percent of the total supply—and applying it to all of the vested funds. In turn, the high value could then encourage people to buy into the currency as a whole at a price dictated by the subset; it’s difficult to know how the system of payouts would fair in the face of a slowdown in this new trade.

Over phone and email, CEO and co-founder Ned Scott, a former financial analyst, talked about his vision for the platform, and the criticisms that have been levelled at it.

“It’s a new and groundbreaking way of rewarding people for sharing information with other people,” Scott said. “And over time we start to see this as a more stable way for journalists to participate in the content economy. I can also see new types of content being incentivised: Wikileaks for example, or investigative journalists ... But there’s other economic layers to add in, like the idea of a peer-to-peer marketplace like Craigslist or eBay; with those layers it becomes less like a social network, and more like a social economy.”

At the time of writing, Steemit had a market capitalisation of $167 million according to Coinmarketcap.com, ranking it the fifth largest cryptocurrency

Scott and his team believe that their model of directly paying users for content could one day displace social media giants like Twitter and Facebook, but not everyone is convinced. One outspoken critic of Steem, cryptocurrency analyst Tone Vays, vowed to tweet out an exposé of each page of the whitepaper. So far he’s made it up to page 18 of 44.

“Here is the problem: The whole system depends on newcomers buying Steem Power and buying Steem Dollars,” he said in a call. “As long as there are people willing to buy into the system they can keep this jig going, but I don’t think people are going to keep buying into this system for long … it’s big news now, but once the hype dies down, it will be over.”

(In a follow-up email, Scott said that, “This is a decentralized ecosystem based on token seignorage with set and specific rules ... Claims that [payout] money is coming from new investment in Steemit are categorically false.”)

As Vays frames it, the problem is that early adopters of the platform are already being largely overcompensated. With most cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, new tokens must be mined by solving computationally expensive hashing problems, a concept known as proof of work. While Steem uses proof of work mining, it also includes a proof of stake system whereby for every one new unit of Steem created, nine units are divided proportionally among all holders of Steem Power—which is to say that anyone with a large stake in the network is rewarded just for owning that stake.

At the time of writing, Steemit had a market capitalisation of $167 million according to Coinmarketcap.com, ranking it the fifth largest cryptocurrency, but also drastically down from a high of over $400 million in mid July. Stats provided by http://ift.tt/2aqYd03, a third party site that pulls data from the Steem API, show that the top 219 accounts collectively hold 87.8 percent of all Steem, mostly because they were involved in the initial mining process; comparatively, the lowest 50,000 accounts hold 0.5 percent between them. At present value, Scott’s personal account is worth approximately $7 million, with co-founder Dan Larimer’s at $5.5 million.

Image: http://ift.tt/2b6zNLE

Perceived fairness or unfairness in the way that coins are allocated and stored can be the downfall of a new cryptocurrency, warned Garrick Hileman, economic historian at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and founder of economic news site MacroDigest.

"We can note that how the creators intend to profit from the invention of a new currency has a bearing on its ultimate success,” he said. “Certain currencies have been heavily criticised by people in the crypto world because of the retention of coins ... We've seen situations where a new coin was introduced, people bought into it, then the originators would sell up to in the face of this new demand and crash the price. Given the history of this kind of thing in the crypto space, transparency about ownership stake and how it was allocated is an important thing to disclose.”

But for some content creators on the platform, sharing their work through Steemit has proved to be a goldmine.

“I found Steemit in early June, and I just never left the rabbit hole,” said Leah Stephens, aka user @stellabelle, in a Skype call. “My writing for other companies gave me no copyright and I was a very poorly paid writer, I was making about $16 per article. But since July I’ve been exclusively living on Steem Dollars! I don’t have any other source of income coming in, and I’m going to be able to pay off my debt with it too.”

Having spent years writing a high volumes of content for small science and tech sites or ghostwriting blogs for business leaders, Stephens is now one of the most successful authors on Steemit, with hundreds of posts to her name and an account valued at $250,000.

But though she is prolific and clearly dedicated to the community, she’s also an anomaly: Even if Steem’s value persists, it’s unlikely that many authors will reach her level of success due to the spread and weighting by which payouts are allocated by the reward distribution algorithm.

The Steemit reward system currently has something of a casino feel to it

As the whitepaper explains, a system in which rewards are allocated according to community votes is susceptible to a Sybil attack, the term for a single user creating a large number of accounts to subvert a peer-to-peer system, in this case by casting numerous votes for themselves. Steemit counters these attacks by weighting votes in proportion to the amount of Steem currency held by the user, meaning that a large network of zero-value accounts wields very little influence—which does mitigate the problem, but conversely means that a single account with large value can wield as much influence as hundreds or perhaps thousands of others. This creates the phenomenon of what, in Steemit parlance, are called “whales,” high value accounts with the voting power to assign sizeable rewards, whose support can make or break an aspiring writer on the site.

The overall effect is that the Steemit reward system currently has something of a casino feel to it, as the promise of big payouts and a general air of unpredictability spurs the creation of a huge range of content, and makes some users overnight successes almost at random.

On the one hand, the platform has a solid community of developers and it’s not hard to find insightful posts on mathematics, cryptography, and other esoteric topics, with a range of community-built web applications that plug into Steem being deployed at a rapid pace.

But on the other, a glance at the homepage shows that a lot of popular content tends towards the amateurish and introspective: posts written about Steemit do disproportionately well, leading to an endlessly introspective cycle of content discussing the platform itself; another breakout topic is “introduce yourself,” where high scoring posts tend overwhelmingly to be written by either physically attractive women or professionally successful men.

A lot of this could be down to the newness of the site, with norms still being established, according to CEO Ned Scott.

"The platform is very young in terms of how long it's been doing these payouts,” he said. “Now we see people attracted to content that tells them more about the community and the underlying technologies, but I think over time we'll see people steer away from that."

For now, the winner-takes-all nature of the reward system is likely to deter most serious writers from participating, although Scott concedes that the algorithm could still be tweaked in future. The more serious questions to answer are over the long-term sustainability of Steemit’s wealth creation model, and how all of the money tied up in two-year bonds will fare over the inevitable price fluctuations (as a comparison, the price of a single Bitcoin went from $1 to over $1,000 from 2011-2013, but then lost 80 percent of its value in the two years to 2015; over the same period, many other altcoins have collapsed entirely).

The promise of easy money is sure to attract a crowd of hopefuls, but Steem may yet prove to be a bait-and-hook masquerading as a free lunch.

Steemit Is Like Reddit, But Where Upvotes Equal a Cryptocurrency Payout

Your Feed is All You: The Nuanced Art of Personalization at Facebook

Perhaps more than any other organization, Facebook faces the challenge of personalization of digital information at a grand scale (recent numbers for monthly users in July 2016 topped out at about 1.71 billion, almost a quarter of the world’s total population). Over the past few years, Facebook users have likely experienced both more ad content as well as “relevant” stories that relate to past searches, clicks, and other measurements of customer interaction (more on how this works a little later).

Hussein Mehanna is the director of engineering for the Core Machine Learning group at Facebook, which is part of the Applied Machine Learning organization that steers the development of algorithms for Facebook’s artificial intelligence. Mehanna has led a team that he says is making a conscious effort to reduce the “creep” factor as they continue to improve their more personalized user interface, which users know as the News Feed.

“Facebook today in terms of personalization leverages a lot of social signals… the challenge is doing this at scale, doing this for 1 billion users for (on average) 1,500 stories per user every day,” says Mehanna. As a consequence of massive amounts of incoming data, the task of creating algorithms to better measure a consumer’s behavior and interests (two years ago the algorithm was said to measure over 100,000 factors) is becoming increasingly complex.

***

After getting some controversial attention over its old algorithm EdgeRank, Facebook introduced its newest algorithm Facebook FYI and continually updates its newsroom blog with updates to how the algorithm is determining what shows up in your News Feed. While social signals (such as who you interact with, whether you hide certain posts, etc.) are important, Mehanna states future efforts at personalization will need to involve algorithms that can look “beyond” the obvious. This will be necessary in order to develop a much sharper understanding of exactly what you like about a particular product, service, story, etc. and when you like it, as people’s interests are not always static and often change over time.

Understanding the true sense of "engagement" with content will be critical, and this is where Mehenna says deep learning may have it’s real advantage. He gives an example from his own Facebook News Feed.

“I have stumbled across a video for Messi,” he says, “which is this very famous player. It was a video about clips of him playing soccer and doing some amazing tackles when he was a kid all the way until he became a professional player. It was about 15 minutes long or more and I watched all of that—the video itself is interesting... So that is a kind of content I would like to see, but I don't want the system to confuse that with me liking soccer, so what is it in the video that the user likes—that is a very hard problem and we need to solve that.”

There are plenty of questions that might be relevant when trying to form an initial understanding of why Mehanna watched the video. Did he watch a 15 minute soccer video in his Facebook feed because he loves soccer, or is he just a fan of the player being highlighted? Maybe he just loves elite sports performance in general? Or, was he simply interested in the cinematography and unique camera angles? When it comes to understanding motivations, applications of deep learning are still “coarse” when it comes to applications in personalization, especially in rich media like video. Understanding video (especially in real time) is something that Twitter, Clarifai, and other AI companies are taking seriously, but it’s a tough nut to crack.

Being able to personalize a user’s feed with exactly the right kind of content at the right time is no small task, and Facebook has made efforts to make sense of “influencers” that shape your News Feed, including your network connections and activity (for example, factors such as people with whom you interact frequently and the stories in which they’re interested can help shape the content that you see). A lot of today’s deep learning technology needs significant amounts of data to make any real sense of a user’s interests; at present, it’s prohibitive to teach these “personalization” systems how to comprehend the complexities and subtleties of human motivations or capture refined interests. Furthermore, many users get easily bored, which is why it’s important to better understand how human interests change over time, even in the short-term. “I get extremely exhausted after reading something political or unpleasant news, it becomes sort of draining. Now, it’s still important, I still want to read it, but I don’t want my News Feed to be jammed with content like that,” explains Mehanna.

I don't want the system to confuse that with me liking soccer, so what is it in the video that the user likes—that is a very hard problem and we need to solve that.

Another veil that has yet to be lifted is reading into the habit of the quick scroll. People tend to interact passively with digital content, scrolling through their News Feed quickly or staying for just a few seconds. How do you know if a person even liked the story or the ad in these cases? “This is not necessarily a machine learning problem, but it’s a problem that affects our ability in understanding a user's reaction toward the content,” says Mehanna. While these engagement issues are ones that Facebook is looking to conquer, Mehanna has a couple of important ideas on developing technologies that can help avoid the pitfalls of “too-personalized” content, starting with a new genre of burgeoning technology: chatbots.

***

Chatbots, or what Mehanna refers to as a “personalized butler” (perhaps a subtle reference to Mark Zuckerberg’s annual goal-oriented efforts), will become an extended layer of preference, functionality, and personalization in the Facebook experience. Mehanna describes a chatbot that is far different from the automated voices that we blankly chat back and forth with when calling into a customer hotline. “Imagine yourself calling a call center…... where the agent doesn't really understand you… versus a butler who really knows you well. I think personalization has the ability of changing these two-way interactions between human beings and automated agents to become extremely personalized,” Mehanna explains.

This is a whole new area of tech exploration and one in which bridging the gap between the reaction of the system “knows too much” to a system that more closely resembles a knowledgeable personal assistant will likely help to remove the discomfort factor. Advances in natural language and socially-calibrated algorithms will allow for a more natural way to interact with these entities. These systems will also be able to explain why they brought up a particular subject or suggested a specific action, like buying flowers for your significant other.

Active users of Facebook and other companies using some sort of recommender system (Amazon is an obvious example) will often tell you that the current level of personalization makes them feel uncomfortable precisely because they don’t understand how the system makes recommendations. Even if it’s an object of interest, the feeling of being "watched," of a system being able to make too-specific a suggestion, is a tad too creepy for some people. “The moment you feel that a personalized system is uncomfortable or creepy, then that’s not a personalized system,” says Mehanna. People want to know how and why a system is making a recommendation, and Mehanna believes there’s no reason that there shouldn’t be this kind of transparency.

During our interview, I brought up The Wall Street Journal’s now-famous “Red Feed Blue Feed” coverage, which highlights the extreme differences of news coverage between Facebook users who “like” conservative Facebook fan pages or liberal fan pages, respectively. Mehanna claims that people are responsible for their feeds, and that Facebook's interference (“veering conservatives to be more liberal, or liberals to be more republican, or people who like soccer to like more volleyball”) in a person's own crafted experience would not be right. He emphasizes the value of the users knowing that they, not Facebook, control the experience.

When you like or unlike a page, take an interactive quiz, or click on an ad, the system responds. Mehanna believes you need the ability to tell a system to forget about some particular search or posting or click, to have the volition to say “do not suggest this or that anymore”. While undoing clicks or direct demands aren’t yet possible, you can clear your Facebook search history (similar to Google), a fact that I would surmise most people don’t know. To do so, you click on the main page drop-down arrow, select "more" under activity log, then select the search option, which will you show an entire history by date and allow you to erase individual searches or the entire archive. Not only do you need to know where to look, but this must be done manually on an ongoing basis in order to keep up a clean slate.

Regardless of the current roadblocks, Mehanna emphasizes the need to build user control into user interface systems like Facebook from the very beginning and believes it’s an essential part of a personalized system that adapts to your biases and not the person who wrote the system. “Many algorithms today are not being built this way," says Mehanna. “All of the machine learning gurus that I talk don’t really value transparency, but this is important for the user’s sake.” While it’s unclear whether Facebook is developing algorithms that have such built-in control options, it’s a claim worth keeping in mind as user interfaces and other technologies like chatbots are developed at a more rapid rate.

***

While more information on controls is being made public to users, it might be argued that Facebook could do a better job of publicizing these updates. In other words, if you don’t avidly check the Facebook newsroom, you’re missing out on updates being made to its News Feed algorithms and are using Facebook “in the dark”, without knowledge as to how the interface works. Much of Facebook’s algorithms remain in a black box, but users have been given more tools over the past couple of years to help control what they see on Facebook, which aligns with Mehanna’s stated emphasis on transparency. That being said, it seems to be in Facebook’s best interest (both for making revenue and avoiding scaring away users) to keep it in its newsroom blog where concerned users can go for updates, while the gross majority of users interact with the interface in a more automated fashion.

The Facebook News Feed team recently shed light on how its latest algorithm, Facebook FYI, ranks and displays “personally informative stories,” changes that took into account feedback from their Feed Quality Program (which apparently includes tens of thousands of crowdsourced surveys from around the world asking people what they like to see in their News Feeds). Not into an ad? One of Facebook’s most recent updates is updating its ad preference controls, allowing users to opt out of seeing ads from specific businesses or organizations (they also include an explanation as to why the inclusion of ads is necessary in the first place, acknowledging that ad revenue helps support their organization - if you didn’t already know that collecting and selling personal information is how their business model is run). Other settings allow users to alter who can view their posts, who can tag them in images, among other “control” options.

The control factor is really a universal concept across technologies, believes Mehanna. Similar to content that seems to read your mind in your newsfeed or chatbots that you can’t get to stop suggesting make-up gifts for a soon-to-be ex-spouse, many of the problems arise when people don’t know what a machine will do next. Take for instance the time that Mehanna test drove his friend’s self-driving Tesla. “It’s very smart, you’re not quite sure why it’s making the decisions that it is, and you don’t quite trust it,” he says.

Mehanna notes that there are a lot of opportunities to test out experiences in which smart technologies, including chatbots, vocally (or otherwise) suggest a next action or explain a current course of action, anchoring again in his emphasis on transparency and control. “There’s a lot of opportunities, chatbots are a growing genre of technologies, and this is an area where human beings can interact with them in a multi-modality form,” says Mehanna. On the flipside, there’s also the reality that consumers are not often “conveniently” informed of all the privacy and personalization options available to them, a good reminder that well-informed consumers do their homework and find out just how much control they can leverage.

Taking the bird’s eye view, it’s clear Facebook’s principle of “transparency” only goes so far. Though Facebook does disclose what they must in order to maintain trust with users, they certainly have experiments and systems that users are simply not privy to—and never will be. On the one hand you can’t blame Facebook for maintaining the competitive advantage it has earned, and the billions in pays out in company-wide salaries. On the other hand, a skeptic might see the value of transparency to be a feint of just enough transparency to keep people quiet.

The same might be said of “control.” While Facebook should be sensitive to the users’ concerns about how they are being used paired with advertising and content, it can’t give away its control to users entirely. No one can remove all of their advertisements from their Facebook experience, as this option might just put Facebook out of business.

Your Feed is All You: The Nuanced Art of Personalization at Facebook

How Olympic Timekeepers Judge False Starts and Photo Finishes

Bahamas' Shaunae Miller falls over the finish line to win gold ahead of United States' Allyson Felix, right, in the 2016 women's 400-meter final. Image: Matt Slocum/AP

Time is truly of the essence for Olympic athletes, as evidenced by some extremely close finishes at the Summer Games in Rio. For competitors at this elite level, a split-second can mean the difference between snagging Olympic gold and returning home without a medal.

Needless to say, every photo finish must be captured with as much precision as possible in order to clearly determine the winning lineup. For almost a century, that responsibility has fallen to Swiss watchmaking brand OMEGA, which has held the title of official Olympic timekeeper since the 1932 Summer Games were hosted in Los Angeles.

OMEGA was chosen for the role due the accuracy of its chronographs. This reputation eventually led the company to other historic opportunities, like hooking Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin up with the first watches worn on the Moon.

“1932 was, in actual fact, the first time that a single company had been given the role of timing every single event at the Olympic Games,” Alain Zobrist, CEO of OMEGA Timing, told me.

Back in those days, OMEGA used one timekeeper and a few dozen stopwatches—accurate to one fifth of a second—to chronicle the events. But just as athletes have become faster, stronger, and bolder since 1932, so too has OMEGA upped its timekeeping game with each successive Olympic experience.

Today, nearly 500 timekeepers monitor results at the Games. On top of that, the company has unveiled several new technologies specifically for Rio. Among them is a finish line camera called the Scan’O’Vision MYRIA, which takes an impressive 10,000 images per second, leaving little to the imagination in terms of podium placement.

The Scan’O’Vision MYRIA. Image: OMEGA

“[W]ith 10,000 digital images taken per second, judges can pinpoint the exact positioning of each racer as they cross the line,” Zobrist said. “It’s so advanced that results are indisputable. From a practical point of view, the camera is much more compact now, making it easier to assemble.”

In addition to sharper cameras, OMEGA debuted a new scanning system in Rio for archery, which can calculate an arrow’s distance from the bullseye to within 0.2 millimeters—a level of precision imperceptible to the naked eye. The company also introduced starting blocks that measure athletes’ weights 4,000 times per second, in order to better detect false starts.

New OMEGA archery technology at Rio 2016. Image: OMEGA

All of these myriad innovations share the common goal of hyper-accurate and indisputably fair rankings for the world’s most exceptional athletes. After all, nail-bitingly close finishes are a time-honored tradition at the Olympics, and OMEGA’s team has had to adjudicate results that would have been impossible to judge without sophisticated camera and timekeeping technology.

“There have been many unforgettable timekeeping moments over the last 84 years,” Zobrist told me. “One that often gets talked about is Michael Phelps’s gold medal in the 100 meter butterfly final in 2008. He won that race by a hundredth of a second, the closest possible result in swimming. That was a moment where OMEGA’s presence and expertise was invaluable.”

You may be thinking that a hundredth of a second doesn’t sound that precise for a company capable of snapping thousands of shots in the blink of an eye. But as Deadspin’s Timothy Burke points out, swim events can only be measured down to this level due to limitations in pool measurements, rather than timekeeping constraints.

Olympic pool lengths have a margin of error of three centimeters and a single pool’s dimensions can subtly fluctuate depending on factors like ambient temperature and occupancy, which obfuscates timekeeping beyond one hundredth of a second. This is a topical point, given that it is the reason why Phelps just tied with two other swimmers for the Olympic silver in the 100 meter butterfly at the Rio games.

Dimensional uncertainties aside, the OMEGA timekeeping team intends to continue honoring its role as the official Olympic timekeeping by keeping pace with the achievements of athletes in future games.

“We are still in the development of our next technologies, but it’s fair to say that Tokyo will be one of the most innovative Olympic Games in timekeeping that we’ve ever had,” Zobrist said. “We want to enhance the Olympic Games for athletes, spectators, and judges, and there are many areas and sports in which we can still do that. We learn something new every year and the arrival of new software and digital abilities is going to push us even further.”

How Olympic Timekeepers Judge False Starts and Photo Finishes

Someone Rickrolled the Bitcoin Auction for NSA Exploits

Image: Chinnian/Flickr

All this week, the security community has been abuzz with the public dump of NSA-linked exploits. The hacker or hackers who released them, The Shadow Brokers, have indicated they will give more material to the winner of an ongoing bitcoin auction, and at least a few people are trying to get their hands on the promised goods.

You might that think that the sale of NSA-linked exploits would be very serious business. But that hasn't stopped someone from bombarding the relevant bitcoin address with a series of payments spelling out the lyrics to Rick Astley's infamous song, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

On Wednesday, the following addresses sent tiny payments of bitcoin to The Shadow Brokers:

1never9kNNkr27UseZSHnaEHg1z8v3Mbb

1gonnaV3MFNjymS4RGvUbHACstiS8aSYz

1giveGEk184Gwep2KT4UBPTcE9oqWzCVR

1youKBMLEohsexdZtkvnTzHnc4iU7Ffty

1upAbpBEWQ467QNT7i4vBMVPzSfQ3sqoQ

1never9kNNkr27UseZSHnaEHg1z8v3Mbb

1gonnaV3MFNjymS4RGvUbHACstiS8aSYz

11etAyypstpXLQpTgoYmYzT8M2foBSBe1

1youKBMLEohsexdZtkvnTzHnc4iU7Ffty

1downAsBbRQcBfUj8rgQomqhRsNFf1jMo

To top it all off, the 10 transactions were all for 0.001337 bitcoin. Very leet.

Although some of the exploits included in the dump have been confirmed as legitimate, the auction itself may be a farse: The Shadow Brokers are asking for the audacious sum of 1 million bitcoins, or around $500 million, and have not detailed what exactly it is they apparently have for sale.

On Wednesday, the current highest bidder told Motherboard they “have a feeling nothing will come out of it, but worth a shot.”

Even before this latest Rickroll, the auction was always a bit of a joke.

Someone Rickrolled the Bitcoin Auction for NSA Exploits

Former NSA Staffers: Rogue Insider Could Be Behind NSA Data Dump

There are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding the shocking dump of a slew of hacking tools used by an NSA-linked group earlier this week. But perhaps the biggest one is: who’s behind the leak? Who is behind the mysterious moniker “The Shadow Brokers”?

So far, there’s no clear evidence pointing in any direction, but given the timing of the leak, and the simple fact that very few would have the capabilities and the motives to hack and shame the NSA publicly, some posited The Shadow Brokers could be Russian.

But there’s another possibility. An insider could have stolen them directly from the NSA, in a similar fashion to how former NSA contractor Edward Snowden stole an untold number of the spy agency’s top secret documents. And this theory is being pushed by someone who claims to be, himself, a former NSA insider.

“My colleagues and I are fairly certain that this was no hack, or group for that matter,” the former NSA employee told Motherboard. “This ‘Shadow Brokers’ character is one guy, an insider employee.”

“This ‘Shadow Brokers’ character is one guy, an insider employee.”

The source, who asked to remain anonymous, said that it’d be much easier for an insider to obtain the data that The Shadow Brokers put online rather than someone else, even Russia, remotely stealing it. He argued that “naming convention of the file directories, as well as some of the scripts in the dump are only accessible internally,” and that “there is no reason” for those files to be on a server someone could hack. He claimed that these sorts of files are on a physically separated network that doesn’t touch the internet; an air-gap. (Motherboard was not able to independently verify this claim, and it’s worth bearing in mind that an air-gap is not an insurmountable obstacle in the world of hacking).

Of course, as Matt Suiche, the CEO of Dubai-based cybersecurity company Comae, noted in a post analyzing the insider theory, a leading theory is that a member of NSA’s elite hacking team, Tailored Access Operation, or TAO, made a “mistake” and left the hacking tools exposed on a server.

“We are 99.9 percent sure that Russia has nothing to do with this and even though all this speculation is more sensational in the media, the insider theory should not be dismissed,” the source added. “We think it is the most plausible.”

The source said that while he was “a little nervous about this whole thing,” he was coming forward precisely to warn people against accusing Russia.

“Now seeing what's being paraded in the media like the wildly speculative attribution to Russia, I feel a personal responsibility to propose the more plausible theory on behalf of me and the rest of the guys like me,” he said. “I think it's dangerous to point fingers when they shouldn't be. That could have real implications that affect real people.”

The source provided a military award as proof of his past employment, and multiple former intelligence sources who reviewed the award for Motherboard said it looks legitimate. That award describes the source’s role as a “Cyber Intrusion Analyst,” and although he was not a member of TAO himself, he said he was able to work with TAO operators and access and analyze the data retrieved.

A redacted copy of a military award received by the source, shared with Matt Suiche and Motherboard.

Another former NSA source, who was contacted independently and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that “it’s plausible” that the leakers are actually a disgruntled insider, claiming that it’s easier to walk out of the NSA with a USB drive or a CD than hack its servers.

Michael Adams, an information security expert who served more than two decades in the US Special Operations Command, agreed that it’s a viable theory.

”I feel a personal responsibility to propose the more plausible theory on behalf of me and the rest of the guys like me.”

“It’s Snowden junior,” Adams told Motherboard. “Except he doesn’t want to end up in virtual prison in Russia. He’s smart enough to rip off shit, but also smart enough to be unidentifiable.”

It’s important to note that there’s no evidence pointing the finger at an insider, just like there’s no evidence pointing toward Russia. It’s all speculation, but these two theories, at this point, seem the most plausible.

Former NSA Staffers: Rogue Insider Could Be Behind NSA Data Dump

Oracle Says Google Didn’t Play Fair, Wants Third Trial (Oh God)

Oracle is definitely not mad about losing in Oracle v. Google (again). The multibillion dollar corporation is definitely not beet red and nude right now, and actually, it finds all of this funny.

The company asked for (and lost out on) a $9 billion judgment against Google for allegedly infringing on Java Standard Edition when it created Android. This was the second trial in a six-year-long case that has already gone up to a court of appeals and back down again. Oracle is expected to appeal again.

Meanwhile, Oracle showed up in court on Wednesday to ask for a new trial. It's easy to say that it’s just out of bitterness, but truthfully, Google did something really bizarre during the trial and now it’s coming back to bite the company.

While highly-paid attorneys in a courthouse in San Francisco were busy waving their arms and pointing at illustrative file cabinets, their client was over in Mountain View hosting Google I/O, a giant trade conference for developers. Even as a massive copyright trial over Android (every version up to Marshmallow) loomed over the industry, Google went ahead and announced the next version of Android—Android Nougat.

Oracle isn’t mad about Android Nougat, or at least, today wasn’t the day to get mad about it in a court of law. It’s mad because Google announced that Google Play was coming to Chrome OS. In other words: Android apps could now run on Chromebooks.

Seriously, Google announced a brand spanking new maybe-infringement at I/O while it was still unsure over whether the last one was going to cost them $9 billion.

Why does this matter? At the same time Google announced that Android was coming to laptops, Google lawyers at the Oracle trial were off arguing that Android never harmed the market for Java Standard Edition because Android is for smartphones and tablets, and not desktops and laptops. LOL.

Here’s the thing: Oracle’s argument hinges on Google’s supposed failure to produce documents relating to the Google Play on Chrome OS announcement. Oracle says that Google was working on this project for “months” in “secret,” and that the company hid this from discovery.

Google’s lawyers claim that they did indeed produce those documents: they told Oracle all about a project known as “ARC”—App Runtime for Chrome. And actually, one of Oracle’s expert witnesses devoted seventeen paragraphs to ARC in his report. Oracle knew all about these developments, and just decided not to bring it up at trial.

ARC does basically what it says it does: it lets you run Android apps on Chrome OS. But it wasn’t very good, and at I/O, they announced… something new? Here’s what Ars Technica had to say about it back in May:

The real shocker here is that this release of Google Play on Chrome OS is not based on ARC. Zelidrag Hornung, the engineering director of Chrome & Android, filled us in on the details: "We have redone this completely differently. There are no connecting points between the two projects (ARC and today's announcement) from an implementation perspective." ARC wasn't good enough, so Google started over from scratch.

“This was a shock to the industry and to us,” said Oracle attorney Annette Hurst to Judge William Alsup. “Ars Technica, the premiere publication in this industry, called it a shocker. A shocker.”

“For the record @Oracle, I called Android on Chrome OS ‘a shocker’ because the underpinnings weren't what I expected,” Ron Amadeo, the author of that article, tweeted today.

Hurst argued that when Google’s expert witnesses said that Android was for phones and tablets, rather than desktop (like Java Standard Edition), they lied. “They were perpetrating a fraud on the jury!” she said in court.

Is ARC all that different from Google Play on Chrome OS? Maybe?

Is ARC so different that Oracle is entitled to a new trial? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The really weird thing that’s going on here is that in the four years since the first trial in 2012 (which resulted in a hung jury with respect to the fair use issue—hence the second trial), Google has been up to all kind of stuff. There’s Android TV. There’s Android Wear. There’s Android Auto.

Perhaps because he was faced with the very grim prospect of explaining Java and application programming interfaces to a jury of laypeople, the judge excluded all of these later devices, and told the parties to limit themselves to phones and tablets from 2012. But the trial was about versions of Android all the way to Marshmallow, which was released in September 2015. The whole thing is very awkward!

It’s so awkward that when Judge Alsup asked Google attorney Christa Anderson if Oracle was entitled to sue over Android TV, Android Wear, Android Auto, Google Play on Chrome OS and so forth, she readily said that yes, they were. Unless something changed on appeal, of course.

Oracle wouldn’t just be able to sue over these inventions, it could also sue over Android Nougat. This newest version supports Java 8—and in making that support possible, Google probably reimplemented a bunch of the very same API packages that they were being sued over. Seriously, the company announced a brand spanking new maybe-infringement at I/O while it was still unsure over whether the last one was going to cost them $9 billion.

All of this might seem like a huge headache, but it gets even more ridiculous. Oracle isn’t the only one dragging its feet post-trial. Google has filed for a finding of civil contempt and sanctions against Oracle, and is also asking for $3.9 million in costs. Oracle only wants to give its opponent about $975,334.32. This is all trial-related costs for things like photocopies and court-appointed experts. We can only speculate as to how much the lawyers and their own actual expert witnesses cost both sides.

From a filing made by Google.

Oracle and Google might be really mad, but the maddest one of them all is Judge Alsup, who is clearly sick of everyone and would very much for this case to leave his courtroom forever. “Do you know how many Social Security claimants I can't rule on right now because you're arguing over a costs bill?” he snapped at Google’s attorneys. But it’s not over yet: they’re all back in court on September 22nd, for the hearing on contempt and sanctions.

Oracle Says Google Didn’t Play Fair, Wants Third Trial (Oh God)

​Sgt. Augmento

"Augmented" is worming its way into a status as the preeminent buzz adjective du jour. Between augmented reality and human augmentation—from Pokemon Go to smart drugs to biohacking—we're priming our appetites for new experiential frontiers. We're already beginning to collide with what the transhumanists call 'H+'—the idea that an 'enhanced', or at least modified, humanity is within our grasp. So, for the next three weeks, Terraform is going to explore the concept of augmentation with three stories that each explore the ramifications such fundamental experience-hacking may yield. First up, a feast for the eyes from one of the masters of the space: Bruce Sterling. Enjoy. -the editor

---

The robots took all the jobs. I was never gonna have one.

Personally, I was okay about my idleness. Happily doing nothing-much, that had always been my top life-skill. Still, I didn't like being stuck inside Mom and Dad's trailer.

So, I left Tennessee and I joined the US Army. The Army sent me on their free world-tour of the 'Stans. My deployment life, not so different. My duties had me watching targeting screens from inside trailers and bunkers. We jarheads were assigned to our jars, while those smart air drones, land drones, and sea drones, they just kept watching and learning.

I took up sniper training, because the Army recruitment algorithms had seen that I excelled at sitting quiet. I saw field action, I fired shots in battle. I got pretty decent at kinetically repressing hostiles, because I was fit, I knew my duty and the terrorists had it coming. But my robot sniper rifle learned to do that work better and faster than me.

The terror war never ended, but I mustered out. The Army kept promoting me, and I didn’t like giving orders. Back home, us American vets had our guaranteed annual income to live on. Not real generous, but better than some other people. We had our balky GI psychiatric health-care. We had pretty much nothing at all to do.

I knew this Special Forces op who had volunteered for "milspec augmentation." The Army medics had amped him up with the fast combat reflexes, the big Olympic-doper muscles, like that. Out on patrol, my augmented pal was as shaky as a Mexican space shuttle, but back in civilian life, he was a cool macho beef-cake guy and the chicks really dug him. I was rent-sharing his apartment when he wiped out on his Harley. He had never trusted the driving skills of robot cars, that poor dumb guy.

Super-heroes never make wills, so nobody ever showed up to obtain his media center, his leather couch, his bachelor-pad waterbed, or that other cool stuff I was "sharing." His landlord was a real-estate robot. So if I kept the cash flow going for the rent and utilities, the algorithms probably wouldn't evict me. Plus, the barbecue's pretty damn good in Durham, North Carolina.

So, I snagged the needed rent money by part-timing on security cams. I would watch the screens like a trained US Army security guard, and the robot would watch my eyeballs moving. Pretty soon, the AI would deep-learn to watch like me, only better. Robots never get bored, robots never sleep, they need no wages or health care -- I'm sure you're heard that deep-learning, neural net, robotics pitch. Because it's all true, you know.

My little part-timer watchman job was about making sure that all the full-time security guys would lose their jobs forever. That was how it was working out everywhere.

The algorithms seemed to like my positive attitude, so I got a better offer. It came from "Ogmentoeil," a local medical-tech company in the North Carolina Research Triangle. These geeks were hiring medical volunteers for tests of their augmentation projects.

They offered me good money, though my job wasn’t really "work." The medical-volunteer life is mostly about cheerfully doing nothing for as long as they need you to. Ogmentoeil Inc hired patients who were really patient. Healthy, baseline-humans who were cool about drinking distilled water, eating medically-defined diets, doing moderate calisthenics and totally avoiding vodka, marijuana, fast motorcycles and promiscuous diseases.

Basically, us in-house patients sat around the clinic and watched a lot of packaged entertainment.

My corporate employers at Ogmentoeil had a solid business model. They took proven milspec augment technology, combined that with their own biotech start-up weirdness, ran that mush through us volunteers, refined those treatments with algorithms, and then sold their patented augmentation products to super-rich guys who wanted to swagger around and act superhuman.

I got fed a stack of ethical briefings about my medical situation, but I just signed-off the checkboxes, because the basic deal was so obvious. Ogmentoeil needed the eyeballs, and I was paid to be the schmoe who would risk going blind. Most likely I wouldn't go blind, because their tech had worked great in dogs and guinea pigs.

Besides, the treatment was just painless eye-drops. I was a terror-war veteran, I'd seen people blown to pieces. I just couldn't get real fretful about the supposed risk of eye-drops.

So, I shared-out my shareable apartment to some other sharers, and I moved full-time into an ex-factory concrete fort near Durham. This Ogmentoeil compound was surrounded with videocams, networked visual robots making sure that no moving objects disturbed the biotechnical activities. Just like my Army bases out in the 'Stans, only entrepreneurial.

I got the eyedrops, both eyes, since I couldn't risk just one because that's not how stem cells work. "Tetrochromatic" means "four colors." Us human beings have only three color receptors, but sharp-eyed eagles and falcons and such, they've got four, plus, they're better-evolved. So my gummy eyedrops were built to ooze into the backs of my eyeballs, where they would tack some of those fancy four-color receptors into my standard three-color eyeball nerves.

The big-drama moment of my augmentation takes us like thirty seconds. Completely painless, no big deal. Then we await results. Every day I get the optometry tests. The shiny lights, the flashing speckles, all of that.

My augment is one of those alpha-rollout come-and-go things. My color perception improves some, the tests say, like thirty-seven percent better, they claim. But I'm the guy who's actually using the improved eyeballs. I'm not all that impressed by my high-tech experience.

It's like you get a new prescription for glasses. Maybe you say "Wow, everything looks so clear now!" But two days later, you can't notice it. People just get used to whatever they see. That's how people are in real life.

My eyeballs could see some new wavelengths. So for me, the rainbow looked a little broader, it was "Sort of Red, Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Indigo, Violet, Even More Purpley." But nobody goes around gazing at rainbows all the time, except maybe gay guys.

Of course the robots were closely studying my eyeballs during all this. They wanted to deep-learn and simulate human eyeballs, so that Ogmentoeil could get rid of human volunteers. They didn't want to pay so much.

And I got it about that idea, because -- cheap robot labor does have its benefits. That's why we've all got those guaranteed annual incomes. Basically, the robots generate the wealth, and the investors bribe us with some of it, so we won't go set fire to ourselves and blow everyone up, like they all do out in the 'Stans. And man, that is a pretty good arrangement, because the 'Stans are goddamn terrible.

I've got a heart. I've been around some. I wouldn't risk my own eyeballs just as a mercenary, for no better reason than that. If Ogmentoeil can run really lean and cheap, then the market price of an eyeball augment ought to crash some day. Then the benefits of corporate eyeball science can be spread over anybody who's got eyeballs. Free eyeballs, all around. Like that.

So, for six weeks, my color perception gets better, better, better, then the effect levels off. Slowly, the eyedrops start wearing away. Of course it's not a permanent upgrade for me, it's all been set up as an experiment. So the bioactive components will dwindle off, and my eyesight will return to my schmoe status quo, so they claim.

I muster out, I go home to my shared apartment. I kick out my three sub-sharing girls who are splitting the rent on my place. They've totally messed up my apartment, of course. I have to completely re-format my media center, new providers, cable, wireless, new passwords, tiered services, all that. Fixing my home display screens is a total nightmare, it’s way more painful than anything that happened to my eyeballs.

I drop by the fort twice a week for further optometry tests. I eat only pre-packaged Ogmentoeil TV dinners and they pay me intern wages while I'm tapering off. Mostly I watch TV at home, and since I got some loose money, I splurge on the top-tier package.

Then I quickly see that my new media set-up is, like, TV Utopia. I always kind of liked old TV shows, especially the old serials, the ones where the plot never much changes, so you can binge-watch for years. But, since I got the augmentation, now I'm starting to notice weird little stuff.

Like: I can see that "retina screens" are made out of teensy colored dots. The accurate colors don't really mesh all that well with the sloppy analog color formats of twentieth-century television.

But mostly, I start noticing how much human work they were doing for those old TV shows. Like: incredible, classy, artistic human labor. I can't help but see how the camera is moving around. I suddenly realize that all their cameras are huge, heavy boxes. The old cameras are completely dumb, no built-in smarts at all. Human beings, "camera-men" I guess, are physically pushing the cameras around. They even focus those cameras by using their own human hands.

And the lighting is also hard human work. They're huge electric lights, and some TV guy is physically working them. He's getting paid to make all kinds of arty fuss about the contrast of the light and shadows.

Then I realize that even the actresses get it about those big cameras and those bright lights. The TV machines are so huge and awkward, the actresses can literally see their working parts. These girls are some hard-working artistes. They're not just making cute girl-expressions while they recite their dialogue lines. They're placing their faces into the light with the camera so that their make-up will look better. I can't help but notice all that, and it's fascinating.

After a while my eyeball augment was fading, so my screen didn't look quite as vivid. No problem, I just turned up the brightness slider. The thing was, maybe my fancy eyes had "seen" it first, but my brain had understood the art.

I understood TV now. I just did. Nobody needs great eyes to watch TV. Old people have terrible eyes, and they love TV.

And the amazing thing about the old, human TV was… there was just this incredible plenitude of artistry. This amazing human generosity. All that labor, just stored up and recorded. Now it was being given away, for free. Mostly by and for the robots, I guess.

The old software computers, they always loved text, but modern AI computers, man, they sure do love TV. These deep-learning neural nets were just superb at analyzing video. And since they weren't human at all, the robots were completely cool with Hindi television, Brazilian, Mexican, French, German, Turkish television back when there was a Turkey…

The robots made automatic translations, they just dubbed everything on the fly. Esperanto straight to Eskimo, no problem for robots; just the right emotional intonations, too… since they'd watched billions and billions of hours of actors talking, their translated performances were better-acted than the originals.

The robots were better than me at watching TV. But that was okay. That was how it was. I would never work for a television show, because the whole technical structure of that art-form was gone forever. TV just didn’t exist, like dinosaurs didn't.

TV was a precious thing stored deep in the dark that popped out in the light when you pumped it. TV was like fossil fuel, and I had lucked out, and struck oil. And the world was full of it.

I was so rich.

​Sgt. Augmento

How to Send a Secret Message With Techno at a Rave

Balearic techno, a style of dance music born on the tropical shores of Ibiza, is optimized for going out of your mind on the dance floor, oblivious to everything but the rhythm.

That could be why Polish cybersecurity researcher Krzysztof Szczypiorski saw club music as the perfect genre to serve as a vehicle for Morse code-like messages, hidden in nearly imperceptible changes in tempo. Basically, he turned tunes that were designed to put people in a druggy trance into a method of sending secret messages across an entire open-air beach rave, without most people noticing what they’re really listening to.

The basic system is this: just like Morse code, letters are ascribed a dot-and-line series, but the “dot” is a slight increase in tempo, and the “line” is a slight decrease. By modulating the tempo ever so slightly, an entire sentence can be communicated over time. To decode the messages, you could use an algorithm that analyzes the beats per minute or simply listen very closely, if your ear is finely tuned enough.

"For the live mixing it is just usage of tempo slide on the DJ controller—limited only by manual skills of a DJ"

“It is very easy—it is just tuning the tempo which is visible as a curve in [Digital Audio Workstations like Logic],” Szczypiorski wrote me in an email. “The shape of this curve could be changed by a mouse and follow adopted Morse mode or any coding scheme. For the live mixing it is just usage of tempo slide on the DJ controller—limited only by manual skills of a DJ.”

In a paper published on the arXiv preprint server, which hasn’t been peer reviewed, Szczypiorski describes two experiments with the system, which he called StegIbiza, after the technical term for hiding messages in other media, steganography. In the first experiment, twenty people—half of which had musical backgrounds—listened to dance music that Szczypiorski had manipulated to contain messages. When the tempo was changed by less than one percent, “none of them could identify a difference in the audio,” he wrote.

The second experiment is sure to be a bit more familiar to people who actually enjoy Balearic dance music: Szczypiorski DJ’d an open-air summer party with about 70 people in attendance. He reported similar results to the more controlled first experiment, but wrote that after he manipulated the tempo too much, the experiment had to stop “because the rest of the party did not care about the music.”

For all of his expertise, it looks like Szczypiorski didn’t know that there’s nothing worse than a DJ who just won’t stop screwing with the tempo.

It’s worth noting that music steganography is a very old practice, and Szczypiorski points out in his paper that hiding messages in musical compositions and scores goes back at least 500 years—but not with club music, which is way more fun than whatever the kids were bumping when people were still drilling into skulls to cure bad humors.

Next time you’re at a rave, keep a keen ear out. The DJ might just be trying to send you a hidden message.

How to Send a Secret Message With Techno at a Rave

Peeing in the Pool Isn’t Just Gross, It’s Unhealthy

Bad things can happen when you pee in the pool. The pool could turn green, for instance, which is what happened at the Olympics this week. (Just kidding—the green Olympic pool was actually caused by excess hydrogen peroxide.) But like hydrogen peroxide, urine also interacts with chlorine and, while the pool won't turn green, the results are still pretty nasty.

This video by Reactions, a series from the American Chemical Society, explains how organic matter from our bodies such as dirt, sweat, lotion, and urine affect the pool chemicals meant to keep it clean and free of dangerous microorganisms.

Chlorine, sodium hypochlorite, and calcium hypochlorite—the chemicals added to public pools for sanitation—react with water to create a disinfectant called hypochlorous acid. Pools are also kept clean with ultraviolet light, ozone, and bromine, which tackle chemicals that are immune to chlorine.

The problem with these disinfectants is that when they come into contact with organic materials, especially urine, they create unhealthy byproducts called disinfection byproducts, or "DBPs".

Public pools contain a whopping 30 to 80 milliliters of urine per person (gross!), and that urine contains a chemical called urea which reacts with chlorine to create trichloramine. Trichloramine causes the classic pool smell, as well as a burning sensation in the eyes and in some cases asthma—a serious problem, especially for professional athletes who spend much of their time in public pools.

Urine also contains chemicals from new and existing drugs on the market, and scientists don't yet know how these chemicals will interact with those already in the pool.

If this story hasn't completely turned you off from swimming in public pools, remember next time to shower off before and after you dive in. And for everyone's sake, pee in the toilet. Nobody swims in there.

Peeing in the Pool Isn’t Just Gross, It’s Unhealthy

Every Month This Year Has Been the Hottest in Recorded History

Despite the cruise ship that’s now plowing through a melting Arctic, or the wildfires that have consumed parts of North America, and devastating drought that's stricken in East Africa, it can still be easy to ignore sometimes that our climate is rapidly changing. But 2016 has been a remarkable year for record-breaking temperatures, and even in the midst of it, July stands out as the hottest month of all.

On Wednesday, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet, since modern record-keeping began in 1880.

JUST IN: #July was hottest month on record for globe - @NOAANCEIclimate #StateOfClimatehttps://t.co/yfJUYpFugi http://pic.twitter.com/wCU2odlLZ2
— NOAA (@NOAA) August 17, 2016

NASA has reached the same conclusion. July smashed all previous records.

July 2016 was absolutely the hottest month since the instrumental records began. http://pic.twitter.com/GQNsvARPDH
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016

Keep in mind that July almost always stands out as the warmest month in a given year, across the planet. “July is, climatologically speaking, the world’s warmest month of the year,” NOAA climatologist Ahira Sanchez-Lugo told me in an interview. That’s because the Northern hemisphere “has more landmass, and less ocean” than the South, she continued, and the land heats up more quickly.

But this July was the hottest month recorded on Earth, ever—beating the previous record, which was actually just set the July before.

Image: Ebony-Renee Baker

Temperature records are falling like dominoes, month after month, year after year. Although July stands out, each consecutive month in 2016 has broken its own previous record (May was the hottest May, April the hottest April, etc.) Consider this:

June 2016 was the hottest on record.

So was May.

April smashed previous temperature records.

March did by a long shot.

February and January were the hottest ever.

Image: NOAA

“The streak of consecutive records started in May 2015,” Sanchez-Lugo told me. We’ve now lapped ourselves, and are starting to break records set within this same streak, last year.

According to the NOAA, July was the fifteenth month in a row where the global land and ocean temperature was the highest recorded since 1880. “This marks the longest such streak in NOAA’s 137 years of record keeping,” its report says. (NASA’s analysis varies, but only slightly: It calls July the tenth record-breaking month in a row.)

It seems pretty certain that 2016 will go down in history as the hottest recorded year on Earth, although we’ll have to wait for the data to confirm that. If and when that happens, this will be the third record-breaking year in a row, which would be a new record in itself: Let’s not forget that 2015 set its own annual temperature record, breaking the one set in 2014.

“We should be absolutely concerned,” Sanchez-Lugo said. “We need to look at ways to adapt and mitigate. If we don’t, temperatures will continue to increase.”

Next year is expected to be slightly less intense, with the fierce El Niño we’ve been experiencing now abating. But the truth is that record-breaking temperatures, month after month, year after year, are starting to look less like an exception, more like the norm.

Photo above: Ethiopia has been facing extreme drought related to severe El Niño weather conditions. The European Commission announced humanitarian funding in response.

Every Month This Year Has Been the Hottest in Recorded History

China's Sex Workers Are Ditching Their Pimps for iPhones

When high schooler Kate* was hard up for money, she took a seemingly easy job as a hostess at a nightclub in Mong Kok, Hong Kong’s grittier, neon-soaked red light district. But each night, she walked away with peanuts. So when she met a gangster who said he’d pimp her and make her thousands more—to go on easy dates, and just give the experience of a girlfriend—Kate fell in love with the idea.

He took her to a room and made her do shi gong, a Chinese term for trying out the girl before you sell her. Then, he left Kate in the lurch.

This isn’t the plot of a 70s triad film—it’s just one of many typical examples of why young sex workers in the city are using technology to work for themselves. Soon after Kate ran into trouble at the nightclub—like many other fresh-faced high school girls in Hong Kong today—she discovered online forums to run her own business as a sex worker. On HK Big Man and HK Mensa, where ads are proliferating everyday, so-called “compensated daters” offer their services without the help of a middleman.

Bowie Lam Po-yee, who runs an organization called Teen’s Key that provides outreach for these girls, says that it’s common for one girl to find an ad she likes, and then copy it—with just minor adjustments. Then, girls leave their contact information and negotiate where they’ll meet and how much they’ll charge. It’s easier to evade the cops that way: they’re less likely to be caught for solicitation if they’ve checked a client out to see if he’s legitimate. Police can be obvious as to their identity when it comes to brokering a deal over a chat app.

“With these online forums, it’s a bit unique in Hong Kong because these are only young girls,” Lam says. “They don’t actually recognize themselves as sex workers—they think at first it’s a one-time or two-time thing, and that it’s convenient.”

Mong Kok, Hong Kong. Photo: Paul Wong/Shutterstock

Lam estimates that there are some 2,500 compensated daters in the city, drawing on the organization’s records during outreach work. The police have been slow to catch on to these girls now that they’ve taken refuge online—from July 2015 until July this year, the force has only seen 12 cases of compensated dating. So long as they’re not soliciting clients in public spaces, they’re not breaking the law in Hong Kong.

For Kate, internet forums jumpstarted her career as a compensated dater after her frightening stint at the nightclub. She copied an ad from a forum that she thought fit her—she only changed her name, age, body measurements, and contact information. The next step is contacting the compensated dater from her post on the forum: girls mostly use WhatsApp and a Chinese chat app called WeChat to negotiate with their clients over the phone, specifying services, price, and location.

With this continued boom in Hong Kong’s digital age, compensated daters are enjoying certain benefits of being their own bosses—namely, they’re no longer subjected to the sexual and physical abuse from gangster agents. Also, they don’t have to give away money for an agent fee, which means they’re making more. Forums and chat apps, for the most part, are putting the power back in the hands of the sex workers.

“Now, compensated daters are freelance and it’s rare these days to have a triad agent,” says Patrick Wong Chun-chin, a former senior superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force. “It’s no longer like in the past, having men escort women; it’s not that common anymore for men to control women as prostitutes in Hong Kong.”

Wong, also the co-founder of a private security company called Centinel, says that iPhones are killing Hong Kong’s once ubiquitous, rowdy karaoke brothels. “Fifteen years ago, these were the places that attracted gangsters and triads—but with the change in today’s communication model, this type of thing is diminishing.”

He says that compensated daters are clever when it comes to the language they use on their posts to a forum—girls will engage clients by writing that they’re “available to make friends,” and they don’t introduce sexual services until the private conversation through a chat app.

“Compensated daters are freelance and it’s rare these days to have a triad agent”

Laura*, who still works as a compensated dater, is a perfect example of this newfound power. The Macau native ditched her agent quickly after realizing that she could negotiate on her own through a forum and WhatsApp. She’s since developed what she calls a “menu” for clients, which, for example, says she’ll have sex twice in one hour for an extra $130 tacked on—and she doesn’t have to give any of that money away.

Laura also says that the internet gives her a trump card that other sex workers don’t have in Hong Kong—the right to reject clients. Because she can be choosy when talking to guys over chat apps, she has certain rules she sticks by: check for a nice and calm demeanor, always make sure he wants to use a condom, and usually go for a guy over 30. For the women in Hong Kong’s one-room brothels though—mostly prostitutes who emigrate from the Chinese mainland—where a client just shows up, she says the sex workers don’t have the luxury of choice. “Those girls have to do everything,” Laura says.

Independence doesn’t always mean safety, though: While Laura has evaded any brushes with violence, Kate’s been raped by a client. As for the legality of the online forums, Lam says the police have closed them before—only to see a new one open just weeks later.

Meanwhile, agents haven’t yet completely disappeared from the scene in Hong Kong—mostly, because some girls, especially the studious ones, have difficulty balancing their time. For compensated daters who want to stay in high school and find themselves swamped with their studies—typically a high load in Hong Kong and China—they’ll find an agent to help arrange their appointments with clients, Lam says. A small few will also still hire an agent out of fear that their clients might turn out to be dangerous; they can call their agent for protection.

And interestingly enough, some girls just end up pimping each other. “They don’t actually realize it’s actually illegal to set up their friends with clients and take a finder’s fee,” says Lam.

*Not their real names.

China's Sex Workers Are Ditching Their Pimps for iPhones

McDonald's Offers Activity-Tracking Wearables with Their 500 Calorie Happy Meals

McDonald's is now asking kids to work off the iconic Happy Meals they serve.

In an effort to stay competitive with other fast food chains, and publicly establish a commitment to healthy consumers, American and Canadian McDonald's outlets are giving away activity trackers with Happy Meals, and marketing them in light of the Olympics.

"Keep up with your friends and your favorite athletes," McDonald's urges kids.

Like a Fitbit for kids, the McDonald's activity tracking wearables come in all different color wristbands and measure either speed or steps taken."Physical activity is important to everyone of all ages. We very much support children's wellbeing," Michelle McIlmoyle, McDonald's Canada senior marketing manager, said. "Whether it's our sponsorship of the minor hockey program...in local markets or within our Happy Meals, our objective is always to provide a balance."

Sure, with a 539-calorie Happy Meal for a 60-pound kid, they'll need that balance between intake and calories burn. For an 8-year-old to burn the number of calories in a Happy Meal, they would need to walk for about 300 minutes.

But are the McDonald's wearables, or any activity tracking device for that matter, accurate enough to even help with that kind of calculation? It's likely that these devices—now a $1.5 billion industry—are less precise than we'd hope. Different activity trackers result in different step counts at the end of the day, according to Scientific American, so they’re not always reliable.

One study found that fitness trackers mounted onto shoes measured movement more efficiently than those at hip level. It's also dubious as to how accurately the devices measure calories burned. Another study found that activity trackers were often erroneous in this category. Researchers at Iowa State University tested eight different models, finding that error ratings ranged from 9 to 23.5 percent.

While activity trackers are less than accurate, the act of monitoring activity could be enough to inspire people to embrace and maintain healthier habits.

"Research has shown that if you want to stick to a new habit, monitoring is one of the best ways to make a change," Joshua Klapow, Ph.D., clinical psychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told Shape Magazine. One study presented at the American College of Sports Medicine, for instance, showed that people who wore pedometers were more active and lost more weight overall than those who didn't.

So with child obesity more than having doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years, wearing a cheap and potentially inaccurate McDonald's wearable just may do the trick for future adults everywhere. Or it could just a healthy dose of PR for the flailing brand.

McDonald's Offers Activity-Tracking Wearables with Their 500 Calorie Happy Meals

New Morphine Alternative Kills Pain Without the OD Risk

Researchers based at Stanford University have developed a morphine alternative that offers comparable painkilling but largely without the overdose risk. Moreover, early experiments targeting mice indicate that the compound, which is described Wednesday in Nature, may prove to be less addictive than opiate painkillers.

For the most part, opioids all kill via one mechanism: respiratory suppression. The neurons of the brain's respiratory control center happen to be laden with opioid receptors, and when these receptors are occupied by actual opioids, the effect is that the channels used by the cells for signalling start blinking off. The result is reduced neuronal excitability, and, with it, respiratory suppression.

So, the brain's breathing "pacemaker" slows, and, if it slows enough, the body will find itself starved of oxygen. This may lead to death. In the case of morphine, it leads to some 30,000 deaths annually. This side effect places a fundamental limit on how much morphine can be safely administered to a patient, which then becomes a limit on how much pain can even be suppressed using the drug.

The new compound doesn't have this respiratory effect, though it targets the same neural receptor that opioid compounds do. Recent research has demonstrated that the signalling cascades resulting in painkilling on one hand and respiratory suppression on the other are in fact distinct, despite originating with the same receptor (the mu receptor). With this in mind, the task of the Stanford group was to find new compounds capable of targeting this one receptor in such a way as to trigger the beneficial signalling cascade without triggering the other.

Computational methods now allow for the testing of vast numbers of simulated compounds against simulated neurons. In the initial screening round, the researchers vetted 3 million commercially available or easily synthesized compounds, resulting in a pool of 2,500 compounds that might possibly have the desired properties. The next round of vetting trimmed the field to a few dozen compounds. Then, from this group, the Stanford team looked for the compounds most unlike known opioids, resulting in a new list of 23 candidates. One more cull left only seven possibilities, which were then sent off to a pharmacology lab at the University of North Carolina for further analysis.

The UNC lab found just a single compound that seemed to have the desired quality of not triggering respiratory suppression while still having painkilling (analgesic) properties. The effect, however, wasn't large enough to be therapeutic.

So, the researchers tried tweaking the compound, which is known as PZM21. Eventually, they came up with a version much better at binding the mu receptor. The result was about a thousand times more effective than the originally vetted compound. Finally, it was time to try PZM21 out on mice, where the compound behaved as hoped. Not only did it have about the same analgesic efficacy as morphine while being relatively benign in terms of respiration, the mice showed little interest in the compound from a dependency perspective.

"Strikingly, mice did not show a preference for the testing chamber in which they received PZM21 over the one in which they received saline, and the compound did not induce hyperactivity—signs of addiction-like behaviour in mice," notes McGill University researcher Brigitte Kieffer in a separate Nature commentary.

PZM21 sounds like a pretty amazing solution, but there's still a whole lot of ambiguity. The compound may have further in vivo activities so far unobserved, for one. Two, it's metabolic stability is still somewhat unknown, and it's also unknown how and if animals may acquire a tolerance to the drug.

"Are we getting closer to the ideal pain-reliever?," writes Kieffer. "PZM21 is a leading member of a nascent club of pain-effective [mu receptor] agonists that seem to have reduced risk for abuse. These are not exactly opioids, and structure-based discovery approaches should increase their number and enhance the chances of a successful drug reaching the market at last."

New Morphine Alternative Kills Pain Without the OD Risk

​From Now On You'll Be Able to Access NASA Research for Free

Fancy some super nerdy bedtime reading? NASA has announced that it will now provide public access to all journal articles on research funded by the agency.

Any scientists publishing NASA-funded work will be required to upload their papers to a free, online database called PubSpace within a year of publication.

PubSpace is managed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) PubMed Central, which archives biomedical research. You can see NASA-funded studies here, with recent examples including a paper on cardiovascular disease in Apollo astronauts and one on Martian tsunamis caused by meteor impacts.

NASA explains that the new web portal is a response to a 2013 government request for federally-funded research to be more accessible. There are a few obvious exceptions to what’s included, such as and material that’s related to national security or affected by export controls.

NASA’s openness follows a trend to make science results more accessible outside of published, often paywalled journals.

Researchers across disciplines are also increasingly uploading results to preprint servers, so others can see their work before it goes through the review and publication process. Earlier this month, the American Chemical Society announced it wanted to make something like the popular physics-focused arXiv site so chemists could get in on the online data sharing trend.

While it’s cool that anyone will be able to check out what the space agency’s been up to, what’s probably more important is that other researchers will have easier access to build upon NASA-funded work, with one discovery hopefully inspiring others. “Making our research data easier to access will greatly magnify the impact of our research,” NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan said in a statement. “As scientists and engineers, we work by building upon a foundation laid by others.”

​From Now On You'll Be Able to Access NASA Research for Free

The Current Highest Bid for Alleged NSA Data is 999,998.371 Bitcoin Short

When a mysterious group called The Shadow Brokers dumped a bunch of hacking tools and exploits allegedly belonging to an NSA-linked group, it also said they had more, juicier stuff. But to see it, the group warned, someone has to win a strange auction for one million bitcoin, or around $500 million.

That’s a lot of bitcoin, which immediately raised a lot of eyebrows. The auction, many argued, was simply a ruse, or a scam. Either way, it’s not going great.

As of Wednesday morning, the auction is 999,998.371 bitcoin short. The bitcoin wallet set up by The Shadow Brokers has only received 15 offers for a total of around $930, and the highest bidder—by far—is from someone who paid 1.5 bitcoin, or around $850.

“Have a feeling nothing will come out of it, but worth a shot,” said the bidder, who declined to be identified but told Motherboard that they are interested in using the hacking tools and unknown, or “zero-day,” exploits that The Shadow Brokers might have in their possession.

“Have a feeling nothing will come out of it, but worth a shot.”

“The code is outdated, and there are no guarantees I (or anyone) will get anything from this,” the bidder said in an online chat. “I do however think that is the most anyone will bid. So, if I get a few 0days, even if old, for $850—that would still be nice.”

The bidder declined to elaborate on what they intend to use the exploits for. They said that they’re not interested in reselling them, but using them for their criminal activity, such as hacking routers to intercept people’s data—logins, for example.

Matt Suiche, the CEO of UAE-based cybersecurity company Comae, who’s been following the leak since the beginning, is skeptical.

“The auction is a PR stunt,” Suiche told me. “Initially I was thinking of bidding too but when I realized they mentioned they wanted $500M USD, it made me doubt about how serious they were on the auction.”

For Suiche, it’s more likely the auction was just a way to get attention. But if The Shadow Brokers don’t get enough bids, and the auction “is still shitty like now,” he argued, they might release what they have anyway eventually to prove they have more, and increase their chances of making a profit.

In any case, the highest bidder isn’t holding their breath, but is hopeful.

“If you ask me - in a month it will all be forgotten,” the bidder said. “People have short memory, this team will either disappear with the little amount of [bitcoin] and give me nothing, or release another teaser just to try to get more [bitcoin] (which won’t work)...my bet in [bitcoin] is on the part where they live up to their word :)”

The Current Highest Bid for Alleged NSA Data is 999,998.371 Bitcoin Short

How Companies Will Use VR and Read Your Brainwaves to Sell You More Stuff

I’m passing through the front foyer of a major Chinese bank. I careen through well-lit hallways and teller booths, before sliding by some signage written in Cantonese. It’s as if I’m there, minus the tellers, customers, and sounds of a bustling financial institution.

But the thing is, I’m not actually in China, or in a bank, although it almost feels as though I am. I’m using the Microsoft HoloLens to see a visual representation of this branch’s layout, as designed by Toronto branding and design agency Shikatani Lacroix. Augmented reality gives me a bird’s eye view of the scene. I then put on a Samsung Gear headset, and take a VR tour of the same space.

What I’m experiencing is part of the design firm’s offering to its clients: An application that creates realistic retail environments using 3D technology, visualized through augmented reality and virtual reality. Experts say they can then analyze a consumer’s brainwaves to judge how they’re responding to the virtual environment, via electroencephalogram, or EEG. The EEG capability comes from a new partnership with True Impact, a neuromarketing research firm.

VR bank kiosks. Image: Shikatani Lacroix

This marriage of technologies is still in its newlywed phase, and it’s difficult to assess its value this early. But it’s easy to understand the appeal. Instead of a design firm building dollhouse prototypes to show focus groups, it can tour consumers through the environment in AR or VR, and report back to a client on what excited or bored them, using intimate details to make the case: These consumers will be outfitted with sensors across their bodies, including EEG.

“What we found with VR is that people aren’t always honest about how they feel about what they’re seeing,” said Daniel Terenzio, head of immersive solutions at Shikatani Lacroix. “But we eliminate that with neuroscience.”

The Chinese bank is this technology’s first client (Terenzio declined to name the bank). Their tests found that in areas with lots of information and detail, for example where large signs were displayed, “cognitive responses go up,” noted Terenzio in our interview, “but in areas with larger more empty spaces that cognitive effort level goes down and it’s more soothing and restful.”

A test subject is fitted with an EEG and Microsoft HoloLens headgear to view the AR retail environment. Image: Mark Willard

Shikatani Lacroix is not the first to harness neuroscience to give brands detailed data on what their consumers supposedly want. More companies are embracing it.

Earlier this year, Carl Marci, chief neuroscientist and executive vice president of Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience, spoke at the Digiday Retail Summit about how tools such as eye tracking, EEG and biometrics can help brands identify visual hot spots (areas in a store or on a product that attract the most attention) and blind spots and determine levels of emotional impact. For instance, wearing an eye-tracking glasses unit and EEG sensors, you can walk through a fake store and a firm can determine which area of the shelf your eyes turned to most and what made your heart rate fluctuate during your shopping trip.

AR and VR are also finding a home in retail. In 2013, IKEA introduced an app to let customers “place” a product in their home by placing the outline of that table, for example, in a living room space.

The web interface. Image: Shikatani Lacroix

And earlier this year, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba allowed shoppers to check out their goods on a VR headset to view at clothing and other fashion items in 360 degrees. This move comes several months after Alibaba opened a VR research lab to develop VR and AR technologies to help sellers on Alibaba platforms build their own 3D product inventories.

Terenzio demonstrated to me how they use a tablet outfitted with AR technology to display a digital label on a bottle of Pepsi (one of their clients), wrapping around the product fully. As I turned the bottle around, on the tablet I saw the new label, a moving image as opposed to a static one.

“This is a much better way to show clients how a label will look on their product, rather than just showing them flat pictures,” said Terenzio.

When I first heard about what Shikatani Lacroix was unveiling, I had that initial creepy feeling of “Oh great, another company hoping to read our brains to sell us more stuff.” It made me think of something out of a Cronenberg movie. But from their clients’ perspective, it could save a lot of money. Who wouldn’t want a virtual tour of a new shopping mall you’re about to build, say, instead of seeing its miniature model that you literally can’t walk through?

Reading our minds to build better stores and products will be the future or retail, for better or worse. Responsible companies have to ensure consumers give consent to have their bodies scanned to optimize shopping. It would be a dark day if this neuromarketing spun out of control: if we walked into a bank and didn’t know our heart rates were being monitored.

How Companies Will Use VR and Read Your Brainwaves to Sell You More Stuff