A new Oxford University study has published empirical evidence showing that government mass surveillance programs like those exposed by Edward Snowden make us significantly less likely to read about surveillance and other national security-related topics online.
The study looks at Wikipedia traffic before and after Snowden's surveillance revelations to offer some new insight into the phenomenon of “chilling effects,” which privacy advocates frequently cite as a damaging consequence of unchecked government surveillance. What it found is that traffic on “privacy-sensitive” articles dropped significantly following what author Jon Penney describes as an “exogenous shock” caused by revelations of the NSA's mass surveillance programs and the resulting media coverage.
The articles were chosen based on keywords from a list of terms flagged by the Department of Homeland Security, used for monitoring social media for terrorism and “suspicious” activity. For example, Wikipedia articles containing the 48 terrorism-related terms the DHS identified—including “al-Qaeda,” “carbomb” and “Taliban”—saw their traffic drop by 20 percent.
The results also mirror a similar MIT study from last year which found that users were less likely to run Google searches containing privacy and national security-related terms that might make them suspicious in the eyes of the government.
Perhaps even more alarmingly, the study seems to show a long-term drop in article views on these topics that lasts well past the initial shock of Snowden's revelations, suggesting that people's' calculations about what to read on Wikipedia may have been permanently affected.
“It means that the NSA/PRISM surveillance revelations, covered by media in June 2013, are associated in the findings not only with a sudden chilling effect but also a longer term, possibly even permanent, decrease in web traffic to the Wikipedia pages studied. This indicates a possible chill,” writes Penney.
While the study makes a convincing argument, identifying chilling effects empirically has always been tricky. There are plenty of other factors that can influence behavior online that may not necessarily have to do with being afraid of the government, for example. But given the specific timeframe and the huge amount of other evidence showing that surveillance tends makes citizens more prone to self-censorship and conformity, Penney's study seems to at least be an anchor point for future arguments that these programs have caused harm.
Hello Motherboard readers, it’s me again, Motherboard’s weekend editor Emanuel Maiberg. Thank you for joining us on what is so far not a horrible weekend.
I was worried that you stopped writing to us at first, but it turns out a bunch of your letters were simply pulled into the black hole that is our spam folder.
Luckily, Motherboard’s editorial staff was brave enough to go in there and wade through emails from Chinese vendors trying to sell us vertical oil tanks and totally legit offers to get rich quickly by disclosing our banking information. We emerged on the other side, covered in sewage, like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, with your precious correspondence in hand.
Coincidentally, we got a few emails about sewage and poop and the differences between them, so let’s get right into it.
I read the article on cheating in Rainbow Six Siege by Leif Johnson.
The first thing that usually comes to mind is a cheater app running on the host machine, which in today's tech age is not the only, nor most effective, way to cheat. All I would need is a second host hooked up to display off screen and stream the Twitch feeds onto that from my teammates/competitors. Most people have multiple email and user accounts on various services and this would be very easy to setup. If there is a way for a spectator to watch live, what is stopping the players? If people are really dedicated and want to mask their IP they can use services like TOR, or use the neighbor's WiFi on the second device, possible shooting them a few bucks. Who can say, without a doubt, that his neighbor is not actually watching if he claims he is? The only way around it, that I can see, would be to put a delay on the streams of players so it would appear live to all but the actual players themselves.
The article itself is well written and very objective with the evidence, which is refreshing in today's pandering and force-fed biases in most media outlets. This was one article that has restored some faith that journalism (real journalism) is not a dead art. So if you see this Mr. Johnson, or Mr. Editor, Thank you.
Cheers,
Jeremy Grier
Dear Mr. Grier,
Thank you so much for the kind note and the information. Cheating in video games is something thatI’m personally very interested inand hope to cover more of Motherboard in the future.
It’s always been a weird scene and it will keep getting weirder now that there’s more money on the line in the form or professional, organized competition.
Frankly I was surprised by your choice to publish this article. It reads like typical mainstream media journalism—very much on the surface and pro-establishment. VICE being the supporters of medicine outside of the establishment (cannabis) I am not sure how this article, which lacked any sort of quality research component snuck through the hands of your normally critical way of interpreting society's issues. I would hazard a guess the author's only research was recycling the ideas of other articles.
FACT: Doctor prescribed medicine is a lead cause of death around the world, and so using this opportunity to get down on Naturopathy instead of looking at the other major issues implicit in this trial:
The ambulance driven by the Alberta Health Services was not equipped with critical emergency equipment even though it should have been. The dispatcher sent an ambulance from a jurisdiction further away. Other key evidence was obscured. Also meningitis is a condition that eludes the diagnosis of many doctors and medical tests. The list goes on. But somehow the take-home is about how Naturopathy is not legitimate. This type of journalism only sets back society's evolution and recycles the old adages of a system that actually cannot be fully trusted to take of the people but still pretends that it can and punishes and threaten people who want to evolve this dialogue.
Thank you.
Kat McKernan
Dear Ms. McKernan,
Thanks for the note. As the author of the piece, I wanted to respond directly.
Naturopaths can certainly benefit some people, especially through the lifestyle advice they give their patients on diet and exercise, which I mention in my piece. But my goal here was to highlight that many of the services they advertise are still not backed by scientific studies. You mention cannabis in your email. Whatever your views on medical marijuana, there is an active field of research into whether it can help some patients. In contrast, many of the services offered by naturopaths, such as “detoxing,” have no science behind them, and have been debunked many times.
The case in Alberta was sad for everyone. But it seems important now that doctors, government, and naturopaths themselves consider why some patients would seek out alternative therapies for a sick child.
Thanks for taking the time to write.
Kate Lunau, Editor of Motherboard Canada
To Whom It May Concern,
After reading this article, I was thoroughly disappointed by the author's point of view about Naturopaths. I am currently in Naturopathic Medical school in Portland OR after which I will be able to prescribe drugs just like MDs, at least in Oregon.
But that's not the point. The fact is, this author's opinion, which unfortunately is the same as many out there who misunderstand the profession, is about what one Naturopath, whom I know nothing about, made a bad decision regarding treating this child. The first principle of Naturopathic Medicine is First, Do No Harm.
Saying that naturopathy is pseudo-science is the over-generalization of the decade, and the author needs to get her facts straight.
At accredited colleges of Naturopathic Medicine that LICENSE Naturopathic Doctors (there are 6 of them between US and Canada), students are learning the same basic sciences and pharmacology as MD students. The difference is that there are so many more hours spent working on alternative therapies so that we don't prescribe pharmaceuticals in every situation and create unnecessary side effects. That said, there are emergency situations where conventional medicine should absolutely be used, such as in the case with meningitis. Unfortunately this was overlooked in this case.
Obviously this naturopath didn't do a proper job diagnosing this serious life-threatening condition, but this is no way should be a reflection on all licensed naturopathic doctors who are saving people's lives and helping them recover from acute and chronic illnesses everyday (many of which were caused by pharmaceutical side effects).
Tell your author to get her shit straight. Saying that all naturopaths practice pseudoscience is like saying that all founders of sandwich conglomerates are pedophiles just because Jared from Subway was molesting children.
Not to mention she should read about all the studies that claim that at least 40 percent of all medical practices are deemed unnecessary if not unsafe. It takes 15-20 years for new research to take effect where the rubber meets the road in the clinic. There are countless diseases and deaths caused by doctors (many of them MDs). But of course you wouldn't mention that.
I don't really care if you publish this letter or not, but at least let the author read it.
Maybe she's compassionate enough to realize that there are a lot of doctors (MDs and NDs alike) busting their asses to help sick people, and everyone makes mistakes.
Sincerely,
Angela Hardin, Future Antivax Hack Witch Doctor
Dear Angela,
Thanks for your note. I do recognize that most doctors, nurses, and naturopaths are working hard for their patients, and want nothing more than to make sure they get healthy and stay that way. In the case of this Alberta toddler, there are questions about how the naturopath handled it, and they’ve been raised in court (see more infohere). As you say in your letter, there are times when conventional, science-based medicine must be used. But there’s no denying we’re seeing a mistrust of it, and a creep towards pseudoscience, which can have serious consequences for the most vulnerable patients, including kids.
It’s something that doctors, naturopaths, and anyone who treats patients should be concerned about.
It is statements like the title that confuses the public and farmers. I will attach a couple of reports for your review.
The correct description of what you are calling “Human Poop” is Industrial, Hospital/Medical, Storm and Household waste.
When you state “Human Poop” you are part of the sewage deception or con that the sewage industry and EPA are a masters at.
Just for grin read any two of the attached and keep this little known regulation 40 CFR 261.30(d) and 261.33 (4), every US industry connected to a sewer can discharge any amount of hazardous and acute hazardous waste into sewage treatment plants. In fact they are required to. Now those darn sludge heads will state that there is no need to worry, pretreatment of that hazardous waste is strictly enforced. Now read the EPA’s Office of Inspector General’s Report No. 14-P-0363 / 09/2014 and see what bald face liars they are.
The proponents you speak of are making money on sewage. Naturally they would be for it. Now, go ask your neighbor if they know what bio solids or sewage sludge is or what it contains.
Sincerely,
Craig Monk.
Dear Craig,
Thanks for getting in touch about our piece on biosolids! As editor on that one, I wanted to write you back.
I see what you're saying: the use of "Human Poop" in the title could be confusing, although it was meant here as a catchall phrase for sewage, which includes waste water and excrement. As you say in your letter, there is some controversy about the use of biosolids on farmers' fields, and their levels of contamination.
We at Motherboard do not wish to be part of a sewage deception.
Sincerely,
Kate
That’s it for this week. If you want to share your thoughts with us, we’d love to read them. You can contact us here.
Climate change denial is still a huge problem among elected representatives, to say nothing of the general populace, and even when our elected leaders do try to act to combat climate change, their efforts often leave much to be desired. While it’s easy to blame the problem on scientific illiteracy, a lot of research has shown that even when individuals are educated about climate change and its effects, this knowledge does little to change their concern about the problem—they are still more likely to stick to political narratives than scientific ones.
However, a new study coming out of the University of Michigan suggests that what people know about climate change can make a difference. Namely, people who understand that climate change is largely caused by human activity are more likely to be concerned about climate change and its effects.
According to the researchers, the problem with previous studies that didn’t find links between greater knowledge about climate change and increased concern about it had more to do with the metrics previous researchers were using to measure "knowledge." Most previous research measured knowledge about climate change using a single, self-assessed scale, whereas the University of Michigan survey contained questions about climate change divided into three general categories of knowledge: physical, causes, and consequences.
"Physical knowledge" included things like knowing that burning oil produces CO2 or that CO2 is damaging to plants. "Causes knowledge" addressed human contributions to climate change, and questions about the predicted outcomes of climate change fell under "consequences knowledge." Finally, the survey asked participants to self-evaluate personal traits like how concerned they were about climate change, how much they cared about looking after themselves and others, and how much they cared about environmental stewardship.
The team found that all 2,500 participants in each of the six countries (US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and China) seemed to be “reasonably well informed about climate change,” particularly when it came to the knowledge of its consequences (the weakest area was "physical knowledge"). Moreover, the team found that knowledge of the causes of climate change was correlated with higher levels of concern about climate change across all countries, something it chalked up to a feeling of responsibility given that climate change is largely driven by human activity.
"What we found was that culture [political narratives, historical relationships to nature, etc.] plays a relatively small role, and that knowledge about climate plays a larger one [in making people concerned about climate change]," said Joseph Arvai, a University of Michigan professor of sustainable enterprise and the lead author of the study. “Our research clearly shows that education and decision support aimed at the public and policy makers is not a lost cause."
DeepMind, the Google-owned A.I. famous for turning your photos into LSD-addled Lovecraftian nightmares, is being given real-time access to the medical information of more 1.6 million people in the UK, under a data sharing pilot program between Google and the UK's National Health Service (NHS) that was hinted at earlier this year.
The program, called Patient Rescue, provides the company with a stream of sensitive records from all patients of three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust, according to a copy of the information sharing agreement obtained by New Scientist. That includes historical patient records from the past five years, as well as real-time data on hospital visits, test results, diagnoses, addictions, and more.
The scale of the sharing program was apparently misrepresented to the public, originally announced as an app to help hospitals monitor patients with kidney disease with real-time alerts and analytics. But since those patients don't have their own separate dataset, Google has argued it needs access to all patient data from the participating hospitals. The main idea is that by comparing patient data with millions of other cases, DeepMind could aid diagnostic decisions and predict diseases in their early stages.
Naturally, this doesn't sit well with anyone who is understandably leery of Google and the monopoly-like power they wield over the world's information. Aral Balkan, a software designer and privacy advocate called it “fucked up beyond belief” that the NHS would agree to “giving a corporation that farms people access to personal health records.” It's currently unclear whether there is any way for patients of Royal Free hospitals to opt-out of the real-time data sharing.
The agreement says the data can only be retained until the project's end date in late September 2017. But it notably doesn't prevent Google from doing all kinds of analytics on that data in the meantime—which is probably why the company has so charitably provided its services to the NHS for free.
It's the first time Google has gained direct access to medical information under such a program, and speaks to the data behemoth's desire to establish a foothold in the health industry the same way it intends to do for transportation, city infrastructure, and pretty much everything else.
People have really been missing classic World of Warcraft lately. The bulk of the news centers on the forced closure of Nostalrius Begins, a private server that simulated the experience of playing during the MMORPG's earliest years, and now YouTuber "Daniel L" is turning heads by reimagining the game's original zones using the Unreal 4 engine. Tree by tree, stone by stone, Daniel is recreating it all, and his work is often a wonder to behold.
His latest project is easily his finest, although he's careful to point out that it's still an early build. It's Duskwood, a spooky zone familiar to most Alliance players; a place where werewolves skulk around marble crypts and ghouls frolic beneath the canopy of eldritch oaks. With Daniel's reimagining, the darkness is both alluring and suffocating, and the torches lining Duskwood's paths give off a realistic light that reminds me of nights on camping trips when I've imagining sinister origins for the sounds I hear beyond the reach of the campfire's flames.
This darkness works in Daniel's favor. It's mainly a work of mood, which he uses to good effect with the music from Blizzard's own version. His earlier creations, though, have focused on sunnier climes like neighboring Elwynn Forest and Westfall, where the difference of his vision and that of Blizzard is most readily apparent.
That's not always a good thing. While undeniably beautiful and skillful, his reimaginings in these places have the curious effect of highlighting the strengths of Blizzard's cartoonish aesthetic and why it's worked so well for 11 years compared to a more realistic approach. The lighting effects in particular are often magical, but on the whole the work bears the stamp of games that too readily show their age in a few years' time. It lacks something of the real game's color and liveliness.
"And now you have another generic looking MMO," said YouTuber Vitobet1500 in a comment on one of Daniel L's older videos. "The thing about WoW is that you know it's WoW by the look of it. It has a personality. Just look at Tera, it looks like a generic game. But when you see a WoW screenshot you instantly know that it's WoW."
World of Warcraft itself has visually evolved itself over the years, of course, chiefly through texture updates that would have left my PC crying for mercy in 2004. Most of this work, though, is in the end-game expansion zones that brand-new players don't immediately see. Sometimes that work is astounding. Even after seeing the dungeons of a yet newer expansion, I'm still not entirely over my awe of the temples in WoW's 2012 Mists of Pandaria expansion, which invite many minutes of admiration for their detail while still seeming very much a part of that world that so wow'd us a decade ago.
As for Daniel L.'s vision? Considered in the context of the heritage of Warcraft, it's a little too unreal.
The Silicon-valley mantra of "innovation at all costs" can have its perks, but it often means abandoning things which were already great—like Windows 95. Indeed, it might be the fact that this monument to perfection was so wantonly cast aside by its creators in favor of a newer, not-quite-as-good version of the same thing that explains the trend in retrofitting today’s latest technology to run this particular '90s-era operating system.
As Lee details in a blog post, the Apple Watch has a lot of computing power crammed into a small amount of space: a 520 MHz processor and 512 MB of memory. It’s processor alone is 25-times faster than the popular 386 processor that was probably powering your PC two decades ago, and 512 MB was the size of many computers’ hard drives when Windows 95 was released—their memory capacities were even smaller.
Given the far superior computing power of his wristwatch, Lee wrote that he “was confident” that it was capable of running Windows 95. I won’t get too into the weeds about just how he did it, but essentially Lee used Apple’s WatchKit (an app developing tool) to patch a different app that allowed him to emulate Windows 95 on the watch. If you want all the details to try it for yourself, Lee gives step-by-step instructions here and has posted the code to GitHub.
A California start-up named Advanced Rail Energy Storage (ARES) has a clever idea for storing electrical power at the most extreme scales, e.g. those of the power grid itself. It's a battery of sorts, but a battery that doesn't resemble anything we'd normally associate with the term. Rather than chemicals, ARES stores power as gravity.
The key components of ARES storage scheme include a really big hill and a few railroad cars. Energy to be stored in the system is first used to pull the rail cars via electric locomotives to the top of the hill, where it persists as potential energy. So long as the cars are at the top of the hill, the initial energy expended to get them up there remains trapped within the system. To recover that energy, the cars are simply lowered down the hill, turning built-in motor-generators in the process. This power is collected and then returned to the grid.
So, energy goes in and then it comes back out. Up and down. Earlier this month, ARES won approval from the Bureau of Land Management for a lease in southern Nevada featuring some train tracks on a hill and connectivity to the local power provider, which in turn will provide ARES with a means to connect to the greater western US power grid.
A fair question to ask is what's the point? We're not actually generating any power here and are most likely losing it, at least to some extent. But generation isn't the goal. What ARES is after is grid stabilization at very large scales (up to 50 megawatts with the Nevada project)—as the grid becomes more diversified, smoothing its peaks and valleys becomes a more and more vital task. Sometimes it's cloudy, and sometimes the wind doesn't blow.
So, if on some day the wind was really blowing and wind farms were really kicking the power out, ARES locomotives would automatically kick in, pulling several rail cars to the top of the hill. Should the grid dip, the cars would then be lowered back down the hill, returning about as much power to the grid as they removed.
The 50 megawatts of the Nevada facility is not huge—enough to power 15,000 or so homes for an hour—but ARES imagines large regional facilities capable of storing 2 to 3 gigawatts. The scalability of a such a system seems intuitive enough: more tracks, more cars, more grid.
Of course, one might wonder what advantage there is to doing this with train cars vs. literally any other thing that can be raised or powered, such as water (as in pumped-storage hydropower). ARES answer is efficiency: the system is able to recover 80 percent of the power that it takes in. That might not seem too impressive, but it's better than most car batteries, at least. And then part of the answer is the aforementioned scalability. This is a limiting factor in water-based storage schemes in that it's challenging to find workable sites and water supplies.
Once ARES' final environmental compliance reports are in, construction of the Nevada facility should take about eight months.
It's a funny time for software testing. As more and more software is replaced by web applications—the cloud, that is—software bugs have more and more come to mean security holes. That is, interacting with software now so often means exposing data, which means trusting the builders of said software to entirely new degrees. And, as builders, we really need to not fuck that up.
Software testing—or debugging—is intense, tedious, and imperfect. Hence, software is full of bugs. Hence, software producers offer sometimes very large cash bounties to people that can find those bugs. A funny time.
Computer scientists from MIT have developed a new automated tool that can quickly comb through many thousands of lines of code written using the popular web framework Ruby on Rails looking for security vulnerabilities. In testing 50 popular RoR web applications, the tool, which will be presented at the International Conference on Software Engineering in May and is known simply as Space, was able to come up with 23 previously undiagnosed vulnerabilities. The longest it took to debug any program was 64 seconds.
And, as someone that does software testing on a semi-regular basis, I can say that 64 seconds essentially translates to 0 seconds. Performing a static analysis of code—where it's analyzed and inspected without actually running the program—at any kind of scale is a complicated, time-consuming ordeal.
Things get even more difficult when we start talking about contemporary web applications because so much of the code behind them is pulled in from external libraries and frameworks. This was the problem faced by the MIT group: Even very simple functionality in Ruby on Rails applications, like assigning values to variables, tends to be defined in often-vast external libraries. When all of these external resources are drawn in, the resulting pile of code gets to be very large.
“The program under analysis is just huge,” explains MIT computer science and engineering professor Daniel Jackson in a statement. “Even if you wrote a small program, it sits atop a vast edifice of libraries and plug-ins and frameworks. So when you look at something like a Web application written in language like Ruby on Rails, if you try to do a conventional static analysis, you typically find yourself mired in this huge bog. And this makes it really infeasible in practice.”
To solve the problem, the researchers attacked the RoR libraries themselves. The various operations defined within them were rewritten such that instead of doing actual computational operations, they returned symbolic expressions explaining what exactly those operations do.
"So we didn't revise the old code," Joe Near, now a postdoc researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and the lead researcher behind the tool, told me. "For a subset of the APIs, we threw it out and replaced it. The new versions don't let you actually run the web application; they only let you analyze it."
The effect is that as code is fed into the Ruby on Rails interpreter, that interpreter offers the helpful line-by-line description of the program's functionality in very clear, precise terms. With this in hand, static analysis becomes a much more reasonable task.
To make this reasonable task into an automated task, Near looked at the general nature of web applications and the various ways in which they allow users to have access to their data. He came up with seven different methods, and, for each, came up with a model describing what operations a user can perform on data. Using the rewritten libraries, he was able to develop a means of testing to see whether or not a given web app adheres to those models. When an app breaks the rules, there is likely to be a resulting security flaw.
Even without complete access to their underlying code, Near was able to analyze 50 web apps using Space. For a programmer familiar with their own code (and with complete access to it, obviously), the tool should be no sweat.
On the internet, just like nobody knows you are a dog, nobody knows you’re not really a famous hacker—and famous hackers can make a lot of money.
Those two ingredients, mixed with the fact that the public has become painfully aware of the damaging consequences of stuff like ransomware and, to a lesser degree, denial of service (DDoS) attacks that take down apps or websites and cost several hundred dollars in maintenance costs, have created a new kind of online threat: the fake hacker.
Earlier this week, the security firm CloudFlare outed a group of hackers, or an individual, who was pretending to be the infamous hacking gang Armada Collective. This imposter was apparently making money off of empty threats of crippling DDoS attacks.
“While the actual members of the original Armada Collective appear locked up in a European jail, with little more than some bitcoin addresses and an email account some enterprising individuals are drafting off the group's original name, sowing fear, and collecting hundreds of thousands of extorted dollars,” CloudFlare’s founder Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post.
With his blog post, Prince hoped that companies and individuals who received the hackers’ threats would know better and simply not pay. If his blog post got enough attention, Prince hoped, it would sink old posts about the feared, and real, Armada Collective.
[tweet text=""The Armada Collective" tells shakedown targets to Google them.@CloudFlare just sunk them. https://t.co/oaqXXAdnx6http://pic.twitter.com/HwXtQuQgXw" byline="SecuriTay" user_id="SwiftOnSecurity" tweet_id="724728050517037056" tweet_visual_time="April 25, 2016"]
That strategy seems to have worked, but now, whoever was behind the new fake Armada Collective has just started pretending to be another infamous hacking group, the Lizard Squad.
In the last few days, hundreds of organizations have received email threats from someone calling themselves Lizard Squad and demanding a ransom in order to avoid a crippling DDoS attack, according to both Prince and another DDoS mitigation firm Radware.
“We are the Lizard Squad and we have chosen your website/network as target for our next DDoS attack. Please perform a google search for ‘Lizard Squad DDoS’ to have a look at some of our previous ‘work,’” reads the email, shared with Motherboard by Radware’s Daniel Smith. “We are willing to refrain from attacking your servers for a small fee. The current fee is 5 Bitcoins.”
There you go. Somebody burns your fake identity? Just make a new one. The good news is that it took just a couple of days for CloudFlare and Radware to figure this out, thanks to the fake hackers reusing the same language in the email and some of the same email addresses. And so far, none of the targets appear to have paid, Prince told me.
The problem with these kind of attacks is that they’re ridiculously easy. All one needs is an email address and a bitcoin address, and, as Prince explained, neither of those leave very a significant trail that could lead to an arrest. In other words, this is almost a perfect crime.
The bad news for the imposters is that there aren’t really that many infamous DDoS hacking groups, so at some point they’ll run out of names. But it’s kind of amazing that in this day and age, you can make money just by pretending to be a hacker. That’s how popular hackers and ransoms have become.
“Attackers now know that the general population is uneducated and fears both [DDoS for Ransom and Ransomware],” Smith told me.
The best counter to this trend, for Prince, is simply better education.
“We just have to get information out there when attackers are real attackers versus when they’re just blowing hot air,” he said.
Hopefully that’s enough to tell the real hackers from the fake ones. The dogs, on the other hand...
When publishers allow modders to tinker with their games through Steam’s Workshop, a community hub for mods and goofs, they're taking a bit of a risk. In the cases of Half-Life 2, Fallout and Cities: Skylines, it breathes new life into the games, enthusiasm kept going by players tweaking the worlds to suit their often chaotically entertaining vision. But opening up your doors doesn’t guarantee that everyone will take their shoes off. Sega will quickly discover that the practice can be a real conundrum. Its Genesis & Mega Drive Collection, a platform for classics like Golden Axe, Gunstar Heroes and Shinobi, enabled mods on Steam this week.
It appears Sega didn’t provide any of its own specific tools through Workshop, meaning that modders can go wild with the ROMs (Read-only memory), the game software stored on the original game cartridges. ROM hacks, a proud tradition of modding old games, have existed for decades, and many users seem to be uploading pre-existing ones from the basins of the web. An even bigger legal headache on top of the pirated variations of Sega Genesis games, modders have also uploaded other commercial Genesis games that aren’t available on the platform. The internet caught wind of one user adding Contra: Hard Corps, a game which belongs to Konami. It has since been taken down.
Video game ROMs, hacks, and pirated software is nothing new online. Whatever files Steam and Sega strike down from Workshop is likely available elsewhere. What makes this situation surreal is that, before being reported, modders can upload all sorts of grey zone copyright material within Sega’s own platform, something akin to walking into a McDonald’s and finding someone giving away Burger King chicken fries at one of the tables. At the time of writing there are versions of Donkey Kong Country,Wolfenstein and Angry Birds (none of which have anything to do with Sega) available on the Genesis & Mega Drive Collection. They will likely be removed, and something will likely be added in their place.
Games Workshop, the company that makes the fantasy tabletop game Warhammer and its futuristic counterpart Warhammer 40,000(as in the year 40,000), has been on a bit of a licensing tear for the last couple of years. What was once a closely guarded intellectual property, translated into great video games like Dawn of War and not so great games like Fire Warrior, is now licensed with abandon.
There are Warhammer 40,000 endless runners, battle chess, and lane strategy games, none of which do justice to one of the most influential franchises in gaming, or capture its essence: a future where there is only war, spread across an entire universe.
That’s why I’m cautiously optimistic about Space Hulk: Deathwing, a new first-person shooter from Streum On Studio. It’s based on the Space Hulk boardgame (which is spun off the traditional Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game) and slated for release later this year.
I was skeptical when it was first announced three years ago because it was yet another Warhammer 40,000 game, and increasingly so as we’ve seen so little of it since. However, publisher Focus Home Interactive finally dropped a trailer showing some Space Hulk: Deathwing gameplay this week, and it’s encouraging.
Some observations:
Space Hulk: Deathwing is being made with Unreal Engine 4, and it obviously looks very beautiful. Unreal engine really good at rendering dark, spacey, bloody environments and big guns, which is a perfect match for Warhammer 40,000 visual palette.
Space Hulk: Deathwing seems to have the style and structure of Left 4 Dead, meaning a player and three friends go from level to level, taking on huge numbers of enemies. It’s about managing crowds and surviving, only here the crowds are aliens (“Genestealers“) instead of zombies.
Space Hulk: Deathwing is all about shooting and killing, and it doesn’t look like it sucks!
And that’s really what’s exciting about it. As a tabletop game Warhammer 40,000 lends itself to the strategy genre, but rarely does it capitalize on the potential and thrill of putting players in the boots of a space marine. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine came pretty damn close, but even that was in 2011.
If Space Hulk: Deathwing is anything like this trailer, it could finally be the shooter Warhammer 40,000 deserves.
Retweeting is a basic protocol of social media. It’s a low-commitment way to disseminate information that you yourself have not distilled, but at a most rudimentary level, tells your followers, “Hey, look at this shit I like.”
But just because you share other people’s well-written articles or insightful opinions, it doesn’t mean you’re smart. And according to a new study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, retweeting might actually be making you stupid.
An international team of human development researchers at Cornell University and Beijing University set out to investigate the cognitive effects of sharing information on social platforms. What they found was retweeting, or “re-blogging,” directly interfered with people’s learning capabilities and retention rates.
The authors asked a group of Chinese college students to scroll through a series of messages on Weibo—which is China’s version of Twitter—and share the posts they found most interesting and engaging. Compared to the control group, which was not given the option to share any of the messages they saw, the students who re-blogged information performed worse on comprehension tests on the material they’d just read.
“Most people don’t post original ideas anymore. You just share what you read with your friends,” Qi Wang, professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University, said in a statement. “But they don’t realize that sharing has a downside. It may interfere with other things we do.”
According to the study’s finding, the participants who were allowed to retweet their favorite messages submitted twice as many incorrect answers on the comprehension test than their peers in the control group. And the material they did remember indicated a poor understanding of the subject matter. "For things that they reposted, they remembered especially worse," Wang added.
What the researchers suspect is the decision to share or not to share actually consumes a person’s cognitive resources, which they referred to as “cognitive overload.” Have you ever spent more time crafting a tweet about a story you just read than reading the story itself? Chances are you’d fail a quiz on what that article was actually about.
In a second experiment, the authors gave both test groups a science article to read after spending time re-blogging, or not, on Weibo. They discovered the students who re-blogged again performed worse on a comprehension test about the article. The action of sharing information, it seems, also negatively affects people’s cognitive abilities in other non-social media related tasks.
“In real life when students are surfing online and exchanging information and right after that they go to take a test, they may perform worse,” Wang suggested.
Similar studies have observed whether social networking impacts analytical reasoning and retention. And just as the Chinese researchers found, certain actions online caused test subjects to exhibit poor cognitive functioning.
I don’t think people should stop sharing things on social media. Afterall, without the RT, we’d never know that Donald Trump is dim enough to accidentally retweet “white genocide,” or that militant atheist and insufferable pedant Richard Dawkins really is that bad.
But instead of spending so much time obsessing over the right way to retweet, maybe we should focus on understanding the stuff we claim to read, and take satisfaction in knowing that most everyone else is faking it.
Online services that let parents secretly track their kids’ smartphone usage—location, texts, Snapchats, and more—would be concerning enough, even if they weren’t also used by abusive men to monitor their partners.
Now, a company called TeenSafe is opening a whole new can of worms by adding the option to track Tinder usage, Mashable reports. Without even downloading an app on the target’s phone (all you need is an email and Apple ID password), TeenSafe allows the user to log on to its web service and see who the target swiped right on, who they ignored, and even read their messages on the hook-up app.
TeenSafe—which reportedly has more than one million users—uses data from phone backups done through the cloud, so targets can still be monitored as long as they don’t change their password. “Seeing as the service only requires an Apple ID to work, devices that were recently cleaned can still work with TeenSafe without interruption,” one review for the service states.
Image: Mashable via TeenSafe
This is incredibly dangerous. Even if the app is meant to track teens, abusers use the same kinds of apps to track their partners and exes. TeenSafe makes you check a little box that affirms your promise to only use the service legally, under penalty of account suspension and deletion, but it may still be misused.
“All these systems that can be misused or abused by a parent to spy on a child—that’s what they’re doing—you can spy on anyone with it,” said Jennifer Perry, CEO of UK anti-abuse group Digital-Trust. “These services are only legal when marketed as being for children, so that’s the way they get away with marketing it as legal software.”
“There’s no way to verify it,” she added.
Neither TeenSafe nor Tinder responded to Motherboard’s request for comment within our publishing timeframe.
Digital surveillance is a well-established aspect of domestic abuse. Women’s shelters make sure to screen incoming women’s phones for tracking apps, NPR reported in 2014. Also in 2014, UK group Women’s Aid ran a survey that revealed 41 percent of domestic abuse victims reported being electronically surveilled, with email and Facebook being the most common venues.
“There is no doubt that it is a criminal offense to intercept people’s communications in any way"
TeenSafe can’t be detected by merely looking for an app on the target phone, since it uses a web app and an Apple ID, which only requires an email and a password. Passwords are what controlling abusers may ask for from their partners, Perry said, often under the auspices of merely looking out for their partner’s safety.
And, yes, monitoring someone over the age of 18 without their consent is totally fucking illegal. TeenSafe gets around this by claiming that its stealthy deployment is only for use by legal guardians to check up on their kids.
“There is no doubt that it is a criminal offense to intercept people’s communications in any way,” said Canadian privacy lawyer David Fraser. “It’s really as simple as that.”
Our entire lives are on our phones, and tools like TeenSafe make it incredibly easy to access all of that information. Now that it’s possible to monitor Tinder with this software, the game has gotten just that more treacherous.
Be safe out there. Go with your gut, and be careful with who you trust to hold onto your passwords.
In the Pacific Ocean, just east of the US Mariana Islands, is the deepest part of the world’s seas: the Mariana Trench.
Plunging over a mile deeper than the 29,029 feet high peak of Mount Everest, the trench is home to some of the weirdest creatures we’ve ever seen. Right nearby, on a ridge called the Enigma Seamount, is where researchers found this beautiful, spider-like jellyfish 2.3 miles below the surface.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer caught the little guy swimming deep down below in this new video.
Marine biologists have identified it as belonging to the genus Crossota, but they don’t yet know the exact species. The little guy was only several millimeters long, and likely only lived for a few days, the typical lifespan of these type of jellyfish.
In the video, you can watch the small friend idly float along in its far away underwater world. While it might look relaxed, it’s likely on the prowl, hoping something will meander into its tentacles and get stung.
This isn’t the first alien-like species NOAA has found in the area. They’ve also discovered this bizarre, never-before-seen sponge, and an octopus that looks like it has elephant ears, among other finds. You can watch a livestream of the expeditions here, and some of the best highlights here.
For most of this week, a “meteorite strike” that caused a brushfire in my hometown was the only thing my high school friends and family were talking about on Facebook and Twitter—it even made international news.
After putting out the fire, the Bowie, Maryland Volunteer Fire Department tweeted a photo of a massive crater in the woods and called it a “possible meteorite strike.” The news picked it up, it went viral on Facebook and Twitter. Soon enough, NASA was involved. The agency quickly said quite definitively that meteorites do not cause fires because they cool after entering our atmosphere.
After a public apology from the fire department, the whole discussion went away as quickly as it had spread through social media.
I’m not ready to let this one go, though. I have just one question: What the hell happened here?
As you’ll see in this photo, there is a positively massive crater in the middle of the woods, and officials are operating on the principle that it was “dug by hand.” This crater is, according to the fire department, “12-15 feet wide by 5-6 feet deep.” The cause of the fire is “undetermined,” but the local CBS affiliate is saying that the meteorite theory is a “hoax” and that “arson is suspected.”
After conferring with NASA and the American Meteor Society, both of which responded politely but kind of exasperatedly to my questions, I am willing to accept that there was no meteor strike. However, I am not willing or able to live in a world where newscasters can casually suggest that a human or group of humans dug a “bizarre crater” in the middle of the woods and lit the damn forest on fire without asking any additional questions.
Here are some facts:
- The two-acre fire started at 6PM on Sunday behind an entirely boring and normal suburban street located across from a mostly dying strip mall with an Outback Steakhouse and a sweet comic book store.
- The crater is just a few hundred feet into the woods, not far from a pretty well-trafficked area of said boring suburban street, where people digging holes in the woods would probably be spotted (everything fun in Bowie is spotted). It’s also near a popular trail.
- The Bowie Volunteer Fire Department showed up and 15 firefighters spent four hours putting out the fire. Local media reported that “the fire was started by a group of kids and when it got out of control they made up a story about the meteorite.” The Bowie Volunteer Fire Department ran with the story.
- No arrests have been reported, the Prince George’s County Fire Department (which has taken over the case) have not released a cause for the fire, did not return my phone calls, and these teens have not been heard from at all. WHERE ARE THE TEENS?
- I and everyone I know spent the majority of my childhood Not Going Into The Woods, because these suburban woods are boring with practically no cool animals in them SAVE FOR a mythological beast called Goatman, a half-goat, half-man experiment gone wrong from the nearby USDA.
- Mere days after the fire, a Baltimore NBC affiliate ran this story from nearby Laurel.
A theory: There were no teens. Teens don’t go in those particular woods because they’re not even good for doing teen things. Said teens would have been spotted, or interviewed, or arrested. There are better places for teens to smoke and give handjobs to each other in Bowie, such as the delightful Regal Cinema or the practically abandoned Marketplace mall down the street.
Alternate theory: The Goatman—who knows nothing about astrophysics but who is good at remaining undetected—ate these teens and their bones, burned whatever was left of their clothes, then left a bunch of meteorite-looking rocks in his giant crater trap.
Look, I’m not saying the Goatman definitely caused this fire but I think we’d be remiss to not at least consider the possibility. If you know anything more about the fire please email me ASAP and call my parents if you believe they’re in any sort of danger.
It’s not every day Motherboard interviews a rock star, but it’s also not every day a rock star releases a 700-page opus about aliens, UFOs, and a deep government conspiracy going back to the 1940s.
The first installment, a novel called Chasing Shadows co-written with author A.J. Hartley, came out on April 5. It’s a rollicking page-turner about a skeptical journalist who runs a UFO debunking website, a Holocaust survivor, an heiress whose father mysteriously dies, and a Marine pilot who gets recruited into a secret government technology project at Area 51. Somehow, their stories all intersect.
The rockstar has a circle of 10 advisors helping him on this stuff, he says, and one of them is a high-level member of the Pentagon
But the book isn’t pure fiction, DeLonge says. It’s based on real events, and sourced from DeLonge’s own research. “For as long as I can remember, I have sought answers,” he wrote in the foreword.
The rockstar has a circle of 10 advisors helping him on this stuff, he says, and one of them is a high-level member of the Pentagon.
This Department of Defense advisor gave DeLonge the go-ahead to take the story—the real story—to the masses, on the condition that he introduce it bit-by-bit, through fiction and nonfiction.
DeLonge has long been dipping in and out of the UFO conspiracy theory community. In 2011 he launched a website called Strange Times, which fizzled, and has appeared multiple times on the cult hit paranormal talk show Coast to Coast.
We talked to DeLonge about his beliefs, his project, and how Chasing Shadows came into existence. We also dive into the weird and wonderful world of conspiracy theorists in the longest Radio Motherboard episode to date.
Featuring Tom DeLonge, Motherboard Editor in Chief Derek Mead, Senior Supervising Producer Chris O’Coin, managing editor Adrianne Jeffries, reporter Jason Koebler, and paranormal investigator Dark Journalist.
Show notes:
:40 Is DeLonge Jason’s celebrity lookalike?
Jason Koebler or Tom DeLonge?
1:15 The first email from Tom’s people. Subject: “The Punk Rocker and the Department of Defense.”
1:45 Screencaps from the video:
4:05 That’s George Knapp from Coast to Coast.
4:40 Introducing Daniel Lizst, also known as Dark Journalist. His YouTube documentary on the framing of Lee Harvey Oswald is here and his channel is here.
11:42 Hello Tom DeLonge!
22:04 The first three to six months of DeLonge’s relationship with his cowriter A.J. Hartley, who is a Shakespeare professor, consisted of DeLonge educating his new friend about the UFO phenomenon.
28:27 Wernher von Braun is one of DeLonge’s favorite historical examples. He invented the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany and went on to work for the US government.
37:03 The moment when this became the most important thing in DeLonge’s life was after a conversation with one of his sources “that is of the highest level and rank in a very specific division of the Department of Defense” in the back of a restaurant or bar. “The very first thing he does is look me in the eyes and say, ‘It was the Cold War, and every single day, we thought nuclear war could happen… but somewhere in that timeframce’ and then he looked away and he looked me back in the eye, and he goes, ‘We found a life form.’”
45:50 Why is DeLonge so interested in Area 51? Don’t we know what’s happening there now?
50:50 Adrianne asks about a certain scene in the book that implies the use of anal probes.
56:30 Jason wants to know how much of the picture, like what percentage, DeLonge thinks he knows at this point. “It used to be a joke between me and my friends. I’d call them up and say holy shit! I now know 95 percent of the truth! And then I’d call them two days later and go dude, it’s down to 85.”
"And then he looked away and he looked me back in the eye, and he goes, 'We found a life form.'"
59:00 Adrianne asks DeLonge the hardball question. He refers to a news piece that will be coming out soon where a journalist actually met his advisor. He also mentions this Rolling Stone piece.
1:04:30 Adrianne and Jason debrief.
1:20:35 We grab Editor in Chief Derek Mead and Supervising Senior Producer Chris O’Coin, who know a lot about UFO history.
1:25:30 The book Chris is talking about is Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Baseby Annie Jacobssn. The essential argument about the Roswell crash was that the US and Russia were developing saucer technology to scare each other, and that the Roswell crash was a craft sent by the Russians that had a child on it that they had done surgery to in order to make it look like an alien. And, allegedly, the US did the same thing to Russia.
1:31:45 We all agree the messaging of mixing truth and fiction is confusing for DeLonge's project.
1:39:40 Chris predicts DeLonge's project is not pointed or direct enough to succeed as a UFO book. His pro-government bent is also a turnoff for most UFO believers.
1:48:53 Everyone agrees we want Sekret Machines T-shirts, and that if Tom DeLonge one day goes missing, Radio Motherboard will dedicate itself to investigating his disappearance. The podcast devolves very quickly into an argument over the new Star Wars, somehow.
1:50:30 That’s our show! Thanks for listening. Email letters@motherboard.tv and tell us what you think of the UFO question.
I need to start this with an admission of guilt: More than a year ago, I convinced Diarrhea Planet—whose six members and roughly six hundred stage guitars shred so hard they produce the musical equivalent of the woodchipper scene from Fargo except instead of a witness being killed in cold blood, they murder bummers—to take a detour from one of the busiest tour schedules in music to stop by the VICE offices on a Sunday to talk to me (who'd gotten a little too loose at their show the night before) about whatever it was that trickled out of my ravaged brain. And they were incredibly kind about it.
Then I accidentally smashed my phone, and lost the interview, then found it again and thought I'd finally make time to transcribe an hour conversation between seven people, and then lost the phone AND the audio files, and basically spent a year feeling like a hopeless dirtbag for not running this delightful conversation right as Diarrhea Planet has gotten more and more of the critical acclaim they deserve.
A few weeks ago, by pure chance I ran into DP drummer Ian Bush in the backyard of a Nashville cafe at 3 in the morning, and at that moment, staring at his handsome face as he looked at me like I'm an idiot, I felt the tides turn. The universal forces or overseers who govern luck on Earth had decided to tumble the dice in a more fruitful direction, and this interview would come to life. Now here we are!
Here, I spoke to the band about aliens and crystals and sweat that literally melts guitars, which means I personally think this interview rules but also means you might not want to take my word for it and check them out for yourself. Diarrhea Planet are currently on tour—they're pretty much always on tour—and are set to release a new album, Turn to Gold, June 10. Early tracks released from Turn to Gold sound like everything that makes DP so great: It's music that makes you want to drive a flaming Camaro into the ocean to impress that special someone while Puff Daddy, wearing a tuxedo, rides by on a Jet-Ski and gives you a thumbs up.
MOTHERBOARD: I think we can just start at the biggest question: Do you think that the future, individually or collectively as DP—whoa, I've never interviewed six people at once so this is a new experience for me—but do you think the future is going to be good or bad?
Evan Bird, guitar: Bad.
Bad?
Evan: Yeah.
Why?
Evan: Well we have to self-destruct at some point.
It's like the stars are gonna explode or something?
Evan: Like, humanity will implode. Something will happen.
Is this how everyone thinks? The future's bad?
Evan: I can't speak for them.
Jordan Smith, singer-guitar: Oh, you mean the future of the Earth? Or the future of the band?
Oh no, the Earth.
Evan: Future of the band is a total—I don't wanna touch that. But yeah. Humanity collapsing, yeah. OK, I'm all yours.
Jordan: It's feel like super hard to say because there's very obviously a lot of bad things going on. California is running out of water, and how they're saying there's all that weird stuff this last week with the Large Hadron Collider. They had the, uh, rainbow gravity or whatever.
Emmett Miller, guitarist-singer: Bad news Jordan. That was an elaborate April Fool's.
Jordan: Oh, DANG IT. That made me so excited.
Emmett: Ian and I stayed with my buddy Phil and all those guys are turbo nerds and very into it. People of science.
Jordan: Aw, I got so excited. Dude, this year April Fool's just went over my head because I didn't even realize it was April 1st, I just didn't even care.
Emmett: It was a very elaborate prank.
Jordan: But that was PBS?!
Emmett: Yeah.
Jordan: Dang!
Emmett: Yeah like if you scroll down and get to the end of the article it has a—
What the fuck, PBS is blowing it man.
[multiple people talking at once about dolphins and rainbow universes]
"Life Pass" is the first single from Diarrhea Planet's upcoming album Turn to Gold.
Emmett: Yeah the rainbow universe they created had a dolphin in it.
Ian Bush, drums: Yeah if you look at it now, this is obviously a prank, but it was pretty funny.
Mike Boyle, bass: It was something about the way, uh, Jupiter was aligning with something so that gravity was going to be 20 percent less powerful—so you could jump and you'd be airborne for like a second and a half.
Brent Toler, guitar: I can dunk today!
Evan: You can dunk every day, man. Don't give me that.
Ian: I think the future's gonna be a lot like the movie Her.
You fall in love with a computer?
Ian: Yeah, that really freaks me out.
Evan: That movie hit a little close to home for me.
Emmett: I think the future's gonna be good, you know? Humans are either gonna live or they're gonna die. It's win/win either way.
I mean... What if we don't die though? Like you could computerize your brain?
Ian: Immortality will probably be achievable. [I'd say] in 50 years. No joke.
50 years?
Emmett: Not life extension first? Just pure immortality?
Ian: I think someone's gonna figure out how to be immortal.
Emmett: Someone's gonna build a computer we're part of right now.
Evan: Kurzweil's getting close, man.
Ian: Like a biological computer.
Evan: We're getting closer and closer.
I don't think I could live forever, I don't know. I'd get really bored, right?
Jordan: Yeah I don't know if I'd want to.
Ian: Make it count for like 80-something years?
Evan: 30-something years?
Emmett: Isaac Asimov's, what was it—"The [Last] Question"—that was like a...what was it, the inverse of "The Last Answer," that said the universe is the product of an eternal being trying to create simulations of ways of killing itself because it's immortal, or something like that?
Holy shit. That's gnarly.
Emmett: The penultimate question: "Hey can I ask you a question?" [laughs] That was dumb, sorry.
Evan: I liked it.
Diarrhea Planet at Treefort 2016. Left to right: Mike, Emmett, Evan, Jordan, and Brent, with Ian on drums. Image: Patrick Sweeney/Treefort Music Fest
That was pretty good. I dunno, what about robots? Would you have a robot play with you?
Jordan: I think that would be hilarious. You could just dress it up how you want.
Emmett: Save us a lot of money.
Jordan: Trackbot.
Mike: We wouldn't have to pay em, so.
Ian: 'Cept when he wants to get paid they can just kill you with a flick of a switch. Just like a robot.
Evan: Laser eyes.
Emmett: What was the name of the robot in Interstellar?
Evan: Uhhh. Michael Fassbender.
Emmett: That my favorite part of the whole thing. Laughed way too hard at that.
Brent: Yeah, that robot was cool.
Evan: Yeah I can't remember. Archie? Archie Hicox? Dagwood?
"Yeah, all this guitar stuff, man. When's it gonna stop?"
Did you see that robot band? It's called Compressorhead or some shit? It's all robots and they all play, umm—
Jordan: The Blues?
[laughter]
Jordan: Mississippi Delta Blues?
No they play like, Motörhead [series of people saying "yeah"] and it's so tight, but it's also really noisy because they're all robots. So it's just just like…
[Someone makes really loud and realistic pneumatic robot jackhammering noises]
Ian: They just run around on the stage with a can of oil? WD-40?
Evan: What do they look like?
They look like fucking Terminator robots. Terrifying.
Ian: They look like battlebots.
Jordan: That's awesome.
And there's this guy that has like a hundred fingers to play the guitar.
Jordan: It's like playing a real, like a normal guitar.
Emmett: That's cool. That's fucked up.
Jordan: I'd love to see that.
Emmett: It's an abomination. A slight against God.
Jordan: Just if you could measure everything perfectly.
Emmett: Androids and aliens?
Evan: I'll watch any band so long as it's an affront to God.
Jordan: I feel like that it would just be so interesting to watch, to hear like a perfected version of something without any human emotion in it. Think that'd be cool.
Would it be perfect though?
Jordan: Well. No. It wouldn't be perfect in that I feel like the emotional depth and everything wouldn't be there, but performance-wise, maybe in terms of technical skill and technique, you could perfect that element of it.
But I think it would be interesting to hear how something would sound played to a T as perfectly as possible without any emotion behind it, to see the actual stark contrast between that and how a human being would play that song, y'know?
Ian: Like the Max Rebo Band in ROTJ… that alien band in Return of the Jedi? The Cantina?
[Someone does a mouth-kazoo of the cantina song]
Emmett: Yeah that's the future of music.
Jordan: Yeah right there.
Evan: It's the one with those pianos…
Ian: Yeah, Max Rebo. The giant blue one. It's this alien band.
Evan: ...the pillow guy, playing the oboe thing?
Ian: Yeah. And Sy Snootles singing the whole time.
Emmett: We gotta go on a sand barge tour.
Evan: Yeah. Salacious B Crumb and the Bounty Hunters, feat. Diarrhea Planet.
Emmett: I don't want any slaves onboard though, can't get down with that though.
Evan: Yeah, I don't want any slaves.
Emmett: Slave-free, slave-free sand barge.
Evan: I do want a robot bartender though.
Emmett: Yeah, robot exploitation is fine.
Evan: Robot slaves, yeah, do whatever you want. But.
Emmett: God gave us dominion over the robots. Says so right in the Bible.
Evan: Says so in every Kurzweil keyboard owner's manual. Fine print at the bottom.
Is that how we're gonna die though?
Evan: Keyboards?
No, not keyboards. Well, keyboards are gonna kill us.
Evan: Keyboard uprising, ha. No, the Fermi's Paradox thing, where it's like "where is everybody?" Have we not seen anybody because we haven't found them yet or because they're not there anymore? And the most common—well, it's painting it with a broad stroke, but one of the most common consensuses is that there's some cataclysmic event that happens in every major civilization or planet or something.
And maybe it's like the dinosaurs and we overcame it, or maybe it's just that it hasn't happened yet. And I'm willing to bet that that hasn't happened yet. I don't think I'll live to see it.
In my opinion that seems the most likely. I'm not hoping that happens, obviously, but if I had to guess that's probably what I'd say. But... I don't... I don't read too good. I can only count to six—I don't read too good, so…
So the one thing I did actually want to ask you aside from aliens—I wanna ask you about that—and ghosts—we can get to that in a second—but I was curious for you guys: How do you guys deal with having so many fucking guitars on stage? You have like 40 guitar players or something? You know how many it is? But is that difficult to set up and get everything working at once?
Emmett: My favorite is when the sound engineer rolls up with an iPad like, "So how many guitars you guys have? Oh..." There you go. Every time it's an iPad, I go, "Oh, this is gonna hurt."
Evan: This is really gonna hurt. Occasionally someone will ask "What's your input list for the guitars blah blah blah", and [after they say they have four guitars and a bass], it's like "Yeah, OK, cool." Then the second they think we can't see them, they just sigh, start rummaging for mics, and look like they're about to have an anxiety attack. In their defense, we don't have our own front of house or anything, so every night we just roll the dice and it's a lot to mix.
Jordan: The most frustrating thing is when we show up at a really, really tiny stage. You know, some places we'll just show up and it's really tiny. We've kinda figured out how to stack our amps. Me and Brett will stack on top and then Emmett and Evan will kind of stagger, Evan will put a road case behind Emmett's amp, and then put his amp up so it's above Emmett's to get the speakers up there.
I think the hardest stage we've ever played on was at the Parish Underground at SXSW like two years ago...
Emmett: That was brutal.
Jordan: It was so tight that we all had to stand sideways the entire show. We couldn't turn this way, so we all had to play the show like this [makes gesture of lining up front to back] with the mic here…
Emmett: It was like a barbershop quartet.
Jordan: ...it was so weird. But it's a huge pain in the ass sometimes and one of the things we were just talking about last night was when we get back from this tour, getting everyone on the wireless game. It's consistently a problem with just cables all over the stage. Just getting on your nerves like stepping on them, or when you go to take a knee and play a solo and getting it on your kneecap, then your knee hurts really bad the next day.
Jordan narrowly avoiding a cord in 2014. Image: Taylor Hill/Getty
Then you can just crowd surf all the time.
Jordan: Yeah! Then we can do whatever we want. Then we can climb anything, We can jump off anything.
Emmett: Just get a raft, get all four guitar players out on there.
Evan: Zach was talking about doing that. I got an inflatable raft and a captain's hat trying to crowd surf for the first time you guys play.
Jordan: Get a blow-up kiddie pool and all us jump in there while we're playing, with little sailor hats on.
I 100 percent support that. So I get the feeling that you guys are pretty nerdy for gear, is that true?
Jordan: Oh yeah. To the point where it's kinda like, it's probably super annoying.
Mike: Yeah, all this guitar stuff, man. When's it gonna stop?
Jordan: We went to the Guitar Center, right, before we came?
Ian: [Mimicking DP's army of guitar players] We need this transparent distortion, you know we gotta hit up this pedal company. Like, alright.
Emmett: My favorite is Ian, where you know the buzzwords for pedals and stuff. We're dragging him into it even though he's the drummer. Now we can really talk the talk.
Ian: What kind of diodes are you guys using?
Emmett: We're playing soft diode content.
Jordan: Do you got these NOS Germanium transistors, I found this stash of them.
"You need a lot of crystals, yeah."
What about those crystals though?
Evan: You need a lot of crystals, yeah.
Ian: Working on Star Wars pedals right now. Got the AT-AT fuzz, got the land cruiser delay.
Jordan: The Wookiee-based octave…
What's your Holy Grail? What's the search?
Jordan: You know, I've changed so much but I would really freak out the most if I got to get an original Mosrite Mark II, like the same guitar that Johnny Ramone has. There's only around 150 originals in existence.
That's probably not cheap then.
Jordan: No. Mosrites in general, they're four to five grand usually, umm, but that's probably for me. But it wouldn't even be because it's an amazing guitar or anything; he's my favorite guitar player and I've always loved Mosrites and Mosrite-styled ones. I'm on my second Univox Hi-Flier right now. I like all my other guitars, but those guitars, they weigh nothing and they're so much fun to play. Those guitars are way more fun to play than any other guitars.
That's chill.
Jordan: My Hi-Flier's taking a beating this tour, I've got so many dings from this tour on it already. Wonder how long that guy's gonna last.
I get the feeling you guys are not very easy on your gear.
Jordan: We all clean our gear relatively frequently, but for me, even if I'm not hitting my guitar on stuff, the amount that I sweat just destroys—I mean it ruins my bridges, it ruins the screws, it ruins the electronics, it ruins the jacks. I just sweat 'em out and they corrode.
Right now my Fender, which has been my guitar for a long time, I gotta get some stuff fixed on it because my sweat just like caused all the screws to rust. And the pickguard, it's like I can't get 'em out anymore. They just corroded over.
Do you think it's something wrong with your sweat? Do you have poisoned sweat?
Jordan: It's just enough. Maybe there's just a high acidic content or something, you have a diet that makes it a little more corrosive.
I would have never thought about that.
Jordan: Yeah, you know like the movie Aliens? Where like, "dude I'm pretty like have this special thing..." Greg Ginn in Black Flag, he had to take his guitar and basically had to solder everything together and put duct tape over the entire guitar because his sweat just kept destroying his electronics. That's the only other guitar player I've heard of that has this sweat problem that I do.
Our tech who does all of our work, Dave Johnson from Scale Model in Nashville, he's always laughed because he'll put in a Switchcraft jack, which is the ultimate, best jack you could put in your guitar. He's like, "Dude, you'll never sweat through this." And one tour I came back to him and said, "Dude," hand him my guitar, and he says "I've never seen someone destroy a Switchcraft jack before." I sweat, like I can wring my clothes out, my pants, my shirt...
Gnarly.
Evan: Life finds a way. We gotta get that waterproof spray that you can put on like clothes and electronics whatever...
Jordan: Scotchgard.
Evan: Yeah. Just take the necks off and spray the bodies down...
Jordan: I wanna see if I can get anyone to make pants out of bamboo but make them look like jeans, y'know, like a lightweight absorbent material that wicks the stuff away. But make pants out of something like that that look like jeans so it just gets all the moisture off me. So when I crowd surf, I just soak the crowd. They're rubbing it on all their clothes, getting all the moisture off me.
Jordan soaking the crowd. Full disclosure: I tried to dive over him.
You might as well stuff your pants full of newspaper. Like "you got some weird, puffy legs. What's going on?"
Jordan: What's with this guy's like, guy's looking like he's wearing a giant diaper. He's so wrinkly. Basically like fish and chips in a pair of jeans.
Do you guys think aliens would like Diarrhea Planet? I'm just going off the rails now, so...
[laughter]
Evan: I don't know man.
Mike: I'd say chances are pretty slim.
Evan: If they got ticket money [laughter] they got some merch money...
Ian: Yeah, they'll love our merch, they won't like the band.
[Unclear who's speaking]: Do you guys think aliens have very sensitive ears? [General agreement from the room]
Emmett: Yo, if you guys find an alien civilization that had music and language, would you rather be able to speak their language, or play their most popular instrument as a virtuoso?
This is a great question.
Ian: Instrument. Well I feel they would, if you were the BEST at their instrument, they would figure out a way to communicate with you and then you'd just be the king.
Evan: Yeah if you could move them to uh, alien tears, by a concert, surely they'd do what they could to reach out to you.
Emmett: Yeah I kinda like the idea of someone being presented with this opportunity and all of human civilization being like, "you gotta pick the language so you can learn!!!" and the dude's like...
[Everyone in room]: "Nahhhh" "Nahhhhhh"
[laughter]
[Someone makes vocal approximation of alien instrument solo]
[More laughter]
"Yeah, aliens have very sensitive ears."
Yeah. I would definitely go that route.
Evan: What do you think?
About aliens?
Evan: Yeah.
Would they like your band?
Evan: Yeah.
Uhh, yeah.
Evan: Not to put you on the spot, but you can be honest.
No no I mean I personally feel like aliens probably—you said they had sensitive ears, I think the ears would are probably tuned...
[laughter]
I think they're probably tuned...
Evan [to others in the room]: Don't listen to him.
...more kinda like a 311 kinda vibe. But yeah. I think you guys could pull it off.
Brent: 311?
Yeah, I'm pretty convinced aliens are big fans of 311. But that's not related.
Emmett: 311 was an inside job.
Ian: Yeah, aliens have very sensitive ears.
Evan: Duh!
Yeah I think it could work. I feel like any alien civilization that we manage to hang out with, they would already know what they're into it because they'd be coming to visit us. And if they were gonna come and visit us and didn't kill us all then they'd probably be relatively chill. But that might just be me hoping.
Ian: Depends on the race, too.
Evan: [Extremely nerd voice] Well if it was the Tyranids, uh—with their superior firepower we'd surely be destroyed.
[Discussion about the extreme Star Wars fans that a few members of the band stayed with the night before]
Jordan: Why did we all start talking about Star Wars today? Because we were talking about Star Wars on the way here.
Emmett: It's just crystals or something.
Ian: Just the vibes.
Evan: It's the future, man. The singularity.
Motherboard's Brian Merchant wades into the world of DP.
Emmett: [The Star Wars fans] got to talking about the scene in which Han Solo puts Luke inside the tauntaun. There was like a huge Reddit thread about this recently like whether or not that would kill him—once you got it open, if that would actually behoove you to be inside the beast. Because they got to talking about like, it might start getting rigor mortis, you might get trapped inside...
Ian: Yeah, but you're in a wet environment in a cold environment, and you'd get hypothermia much quicker and the rigor mortis, you would be trapped inside the ribcage... I was like "no one disagreed!"
Emmett: [Quoting their host] "Think about perspiration on the skin, we have all that wind, it's just gonna get so cold. It's like you're not taking account of the surface area nor the residual heat of the beast after it's died, it's gonna stay warm for a little bit. It's gotta count for something." He just went on and on, like, yeah, you forget about rigor mortis, he's got a goddamn light saber he can cut it open again.
Seems like an obvious solution.
Emmett: I wish these guys were here cuz they can just riff on this stuff forever.
Evan: We gotta get them to start a band and we'll give them your info.
That sounds great, I'd love to listen to hours of two people debating tauntauns. So you guys are reading that on Reddit too? Do you guys use Reddit? Are you guys Redditors?
Emmett: I wouldn't call myself a Redditor but I spend a lot of time—
Evan: Dude, you are totally—you are addicted to Reddit.
Emmett: I don't post. I don't ever post on Reddit.
Evan: I mean, I'm addicted to the internet, but maybe not Reddit specifically. But then again that's coming from me so it's like…
Ian: I don't think I've ever been off the front page, I don't know how to work it.
Jordan: I like to read their Reddit Music stuff, it's great because I feel it's one of the last places on the internet that you can go to that's not constant trolling. In a lot of the comment threads on it, there's actually a lot of really intelligent discussion and it's a lot more positive. It's not just arguing and public shaming and all this crap like that. It's actual people talking, and you can learn a lot from other people on Reddit. I like it.
Yeah? That's awesome. What's your, uh, what's your social media strategy?
Evan: Shock and awe, shock and awe man.
Do all of you guys have the keys to your accounts?
Evan: We do but it's mostly, uh, mostly Emmett. We occasionally do some guest posts but Emmett...
Ian: Yeah Mike had a guest post when we were in Toronto on Instagram.
How does it feel, does it feel powerful?
Mike: Well [Emmett] posted it for me: "Hey, Mike here!"
Emmett: That was good.
Evan: Hey it's me, Mike!
"Juggarnaut" is what got me hooked on DP in the first place.
That's awesome. I think that's what Larry King does to tweet, he calls someone and then records it into their voicemail, and then they read it and type it into his Twitter account.
Emmett: So it really is him, kinda. It's not just someone…
Ian: He can't use Twitter like a normal person. He's got very sensitive ears.
Emmett: He's an alien.
Ian: He probably is an alien, he's been alive long enough. He's probably achieved immortality.
Do you guys have any serious Twitter fans, like people DMing you all the time?
Emmett: We have a follower that that we picked up this past tour who is consistently on the likes podium across Twitter and Instagram. Like top three, every single time. And I don't know if she gets notifications whenever we post something, or if she's constantly refreshing.
Jordan: It's crazy, like she's on point.
Emmett: I think she's one of those 19-year-old blog girls, but it's never on your stuff, it's always photos of the people.
Evan: It's like small town in Florida, these guys are the closest to whoever but the Jonas Brothers. It's harmless. It's weird, but it's harmless.
Have you ever met her?
Evan: Yeah. We met her and her mom at a show, yup.
It's tough to meet someone on the internet and be like "oh you're that internet person."
Ian: Well that was pre-race-to-the-likes finish line.
So you converted a very strong fan, basically. That's a good personal approach.
Evan: Gotta keep excited for the fans, man.
How was that last night? I saw that a lot of people were like on stage.
Jordan: Yeah, last night was awesome. I mean, there's the one dude who totally destroyed my mic stand when he was singing. Yeah, I got dumped on hard by that guy. But it was funny, there was a point where I was just like "Well, y'know it's my personal mic so if he destroys it the venue won't be mad," I was like whatever. It's insured, whatever. I stepped away and I was like, "I'll just sanitize it later."
And then I just watched the dude dismantle the mic stand and unplug the mic screaming in it, and just throw the mic on the ground really hard. I thought, "Well, it's gonna take me like five minutes to set this thing up before the next song," but fortunately the Bowery staff, they were killer. And the dude ran out. I did not expect that, like I was like "dude...thank you."
I saw that dude sprint out of the side and I was like "holy shit."
Jordan: Yeah, I think the hardest thing is, I keep getting stuck with mic stands where the boom gets out too far and a lot of people like to come up, and they like to like crowd surf, and I have this automatic response now of kicking my monitors back into place because people like to crowd surf up off that. But the main thing is, people will crowd surf and jump off directly in front of my mic with the boom way up so they're always jamming the mic into my teeth. So I'm waiting for the show where I'll break my front teeth out.
I've chipped out my teeth and spit out pieces of teeth, like I've seen pieces of my teeth come out of my mouth onto the ground. My lower teeth are looking like the graveyard, but I'm waiting for the show where there's a crowd surfer who does me in and knocks one of my teeth out. Then I'm gonna say "Okay, I think it's time for me to get a cool gold tooth."
Evan: Time to get a headset and a headset mic, man.
Jordan: I really want, yeah, get a headset mic, do Ted Nugent style, "Awwwwwriiiight!"
Ian: Dude we have to play Stranglehold.
Jordan: Oh dude def—Stranglehold will definitely happen anyways at some point because that song kicks ass.
