Brexit Is Making VR More Expensive in the UK

Thanks to Brexit, Vive virtual reality just got more expensive in the United Kingdom. Already, one of the biggest obstacles for the VR adoption is the price, so this certainly doesn't help.

The previously £689 ($911) HTC Vive, the VR headset using Valve's technology, comes with a visor, dual hand controls, and two sensors that track the user's movement. The price is high, as compared with the £500 ($660) Oculus Rift and £300 ($400) PlayStation VR, and some question whether or not it's worth it. With the new Brexit-heavy price tag, that question mark becomes even more pronounced.

In a July 29 message to its UK customers, the HTC said:

"HTC continuously monitors and adjusts pricing to ensure we are providing our customers with the best value possible. Due to recent currency valuation changes and the current value of the GBP [Great Britain Pound] we are adjusting the price of the HTC Vive in the UK to £759 + P&P [postage and packaging]. The adjustment will come into effect on Monday 1st August."

In American dollars, the new price is equivalent to about a grand.

Over July, as the value of the pound dropped to its lowest level against the US dollar in three decades, many companies raised their prices to maintain their British margins. For example, Dell also raised the price of its PCs, and OnePlus raised the price of the OnePlus 3, the company's latest phone.

Because Brexit has reduced the UK's growth prospects, the value of the pound has fallen. A strong economy with a strong currency hinges on the country's growth prospects, and whether investors are investing there, the Telegraph reports. With lower growth comes lower interest rates, and a rate cut for markets, bringing about domestic inflation, while businesses have to pay more for imports from foreign markets.

This is not good news, especially for VR. This year, VR headsets became more available, but only the most enthusiastic early adopters have been buying them so far. For starters, VR requires a high-end PC, which itself costs at least another $500. There's also not much content for VR, so the payoff for the hefty price isn't exactly there yet.

There's hope for VR, but its market in the UK may take a solid hit until the pound recovers.

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Brexit Is Making VR More Expensive in the UK

Preserving the Ancient Art of Getting Pwned

Image: danooct1.

Getting infected with a computer virus used to be so much more fun. Take the Caterpillar virus, for example, which back in 1991 quietly infected .COM and .EXE files on MS-DOS. After lying in wait for two months, a line of ASCII characters in the shape of a caterpillar would begin to crawl across the screen, kind of like the game Snake, eating white characters as it goes and pooping them out in yellow.

That’s so much more entertaining than finding a mysterious charge on your credit card, only to realize that you were one of millions of people who were victim to a massive security breach at Target, or one of the many other sites that are hacked on a regular basis.

That’s what getting pwned usually feels like these days, but thanks to Daniel White, a YouTuber who goes by the name danooct1, we can see Caterpillar in action, as well as other viruses from back in the day when getting pwned came with a little bit of flair.

“I started recording videos because I wanted to see some of the stuff I read about for myself rather than just imagining it in my head,” White told me over chat. “So I used an old computer I had lying around. Shortly after that I figured maybe I'd put some videos of it on YouTube, just for myself really. I didn't expect anyone else to find it interesting.”

White’s fascination with old malware started with an internet worm called Sasser, which he was infected with in 2004. Sasser would spread itself across networks by launching an FTP server on infected computers and immediately scanning for other vulnerable targets. Once infected, Sasser would use up all system resources, forcing the user to restart the computer, which didn’t help much since Sasser would relaunch.

To demonstrate how Sasser jumped from machine to machine without any human interaction, White set up a network of five Windows XP and Windows 2000 machines with hardware from the time the virus first appeared.

It’s an elaborate setup, but one that White is used to putting together after years of uploading similar videos to his channel.

“There's a lot of preparation that goes into it,” he said. “One video in particular, for a virus called CIH, requires a pentium MMX processor. The virus exploits a bug in the architecture to gain write access to the BIOS and overwrite it, causing the computer to fail to boot until the BIOS chip is reflashed. So I sacrificed an old computer for that video which was really neat.”

In addition to running old hardware and hunting down old malware—White’s main source is the Ukrainian site VX Heaven—capturing these videos also involves a certain amount of risk. It’s a very low risk, White admits, since it’s unlikely any of these ancient viruses will be able to make the leap to a modern computer, but he isn’t taking any chances—he has off-site backups for everything.

Either way, it’s a lot of effort for a YouTube channel with a growing but still modest following of 124,000 subscribers.

“I think it's something not a lot of people really give much thought to,” he said. “Computer viruses are this sort of threat that always lingers around but isn't quite tangible. Most people experience malware at some point or another but it's usually nothing more than your antivirus picking something up and telling you about it.”

Older viruses had a personal touch, White said, because they were made by enthusiasts, many of them teenagers, who were learning how to program. They were more interested in finding interesting ways to infect files, hide infections, and taunt their rivals in the community (or even antivirus industry professionals), then they were in making money. It was just a hobby.

“Authors like Spanska wrote a few viruses where he talked about viruses being art and that coding them can be fun, and often had non-damaging payloads with a really neat graphical component,” White said.

That visual component inspired what is my favorite part of White’s channel: viewer-made viruses. Since he started the channel in 2008, White has received 200 viruses his viewers have made and asked him show off in a video. These, much like Spanska’s work, aren’t so much concerned with spreading and damaging users, but in creating the trippiest visuals possible.

The best example of this is from White’s most recent user-made virus video, a creation called MEMZ, which led us to discover his channel earlier this month.

The Trojan—a type of malware which infects a computer by masquerading as a non-malicious program—begins by informing the user that their computer “has been fucked by the MEMZ Trojan” and that any attempt to kill the Trojan will cause their “system to be destroyed instantly.”

It then opens web pages for Club Penguin and Google searches "how to buy weed," but things get weird when the screen starts inverting its colors to a soundtrack composed of Windows XP error pings. At this point the Trojan begins taking dozens of screenshots to create a tunneling effect, which prompts White to attempt to restart his computer. As promised by the Trojan’s original note, the computer was totaled and now is good for nothing besides running an animation of the Nyan cat.

Since they’re coming from his viewers, viruses like MEMZ focus on the least malicious part of malware. Like the scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s they try to emulate, they’re more focused on creative, artistic aspects of getting pwned, and that’s exactly what White hopes to inspire.

“I figure whether I condone it or not, people are still going to be writing things to send to me to make them into videos, so I might as well try it out to give back to the people who have followed the channel so loyally,” White said. “And maybe if they have this creative outlet then they won't be swayed by the dark side…”

The Hacks We Can’t See is Motherboard’s theme week dedicated to the future of security and the hacks no one’s talking about. Follow along here.

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Preserving the Ancient Art of Getting Pwned

What’s the Future of Chinese Hacking?

Adam Segal, the Ira A Lipman Chair for Emerging Technologies and National Security and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age,

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After years of public reporting on the theft of intellectual property, business strategies, and trade secrets, last month the cybersecurity firm FireEye issued a report headlining a steep decline in Chinese cyber espionage against organizations in the US and 25 other countries.

The number of network compromises by 72 suspected China-based groups dropped from 60 in February 2013 to less than 10 by May 2016. While FireEye did not rule out the possibility that improvements in tradecraft were leading to less detection (FBI Director James Comey once compared Chinese hackers to drunk burglars who kick in the door and knock over a vase on their way out with the TV), US Assistant Attorney General John Carlin confirmed the company’s findings that attacks were less voluminous but more focused and calculated.

A combination of the threat of US sanctions, a diplomatic accord signed by President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping, and internal reforms of the People’s Liberation Army may have temporarily produced a dramatic decline in cyber espionage, but is it time to shut down the firewall, send the threat intelligence analysts home, and declare victory? Very unlikely.

China hacks because it wants to move its economy from labor intensive manufacturing to high technology innovation.

For Beijing, cyberspace is essential to economic growth, sustaining and strengthening the Chinese Communist Party, and maintaining domestic stability and national security. As a result, China hacks because it wants to move its economy from labor intensive manufacturing to high technology innovation; defeat foreign ideologies and weaken opponents of the regime; and counter the technological advantages of the US military in the Pacific.

These fundamental motivations direct state-backed hackers to a set of high value targets. Because Chinese leaders do not want to be dependent on foreign technology suppliers, and are impatient with the results produced so far by massive investments in education and scientific research, Chinese hackers steal intellectual property from high technology companies as well as business secrets from the pharmaceutical, financial, energy, legal, and other sectors. “The situation that our country is under others' control in core technologies of key fields has not changed fundamentally, and the country's S&T foundation remains weak," President Xi Jinping told a gathering of the nation’s top scientists in May 2016. The companies breached are global, with victims identified in Germany, Australia, Japan, India, and the United Kingdom.

Worried about the spread of ideologies that threaten regime legitimacy, and the ability of domestic opponents to organize and foment dissent, Beijing supports cyber attacks on Tibetan and Uighur activists, NGOS and think tanks, and the diplomatic, military, and political agencies of all the major powers. When the New York Times and Bloomberg published stories about the massive wealth amassed by the families of China’s top leaders, they, along with other media outlets, were hacked.

Chinese hackers also conduct intelligence and counterintelligence operations. The theft of 22 million records from servers of the Office of Personnel Management included information perfect for blackmail, and might also allow Chinese counterintelligence agencies to identify spies working undercover at US embassies around the world.

Chinese defense planners are preparing the PLA to fight "informationized local wars": short, technologically-intense regional wars. The potential enemy in these future wars is usually referred to as a “technologically advanced” adversary but is clearly a stand-in for the United States and its allies. As a result, these planners want to both understand and disrupt US weapons platforms. Two PLA groups, Units 61938 and 61486, have reportedly stolen information from over two dozen Defense Department weapons programs, including the Patriot missile system, the US Navy’s new littoral combat ship, and the F-35 and F-22 stealth fighter jets.

Cyberspace remains central to all of Beijing’s predominant economic and political interests, and cyber attacks are, and will continue to be, a potent tool.

If a conflict breaks out over Taiwan or the South China Sea, the PLA will want to disrupt communication, transportation, intelligence, and reconnaissance systems, so hackers have mapped these networks. In addition, Chinese leaders want to signal to US policymakers that the conflict may not stay regional, and so PLA operators have penetrated into banking, energy, and other critical infrastructure networks, and may have intentionally left evidence of the intrusions as a reminder that the US homeland is not immune to attack.

Given Beijing’s long-term strategic concerns about technological innovation, domestic stability, and national security, Chinese hackers may change tactics and organization, but they will remain focused on a similar set of targets.The creation of the Strategic Support Forces, a move intended to centralize space, cyber and information warfare troops, will result in greater coordination among the many different hacking groups and better tradecraft overall.

Continued tension over China’s sovereignty claims in the South China Sea mean that the networks of the US military and its regional allies will remain prime targets. As the economy moves up the value chain, and as Chinese technology companies like Xiaomi, Huawei, and AliBaba compete in global markets, cyber economic espionage will be narrower and more tailored to specific technologies. The attacks on domestic opponents and outside ideological threats are will become more sophisticated and increase in pace as the Chinese Communist Party appears increasingly worried about domestic stability, regime legitimacy, and the spread of information within China.

Chinese leaders will also be watching closely how the Obama administration responds to the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Like Moscow, Beijing also believes that it is in an ideological contest with the West and it has tried to shape the information space, though in a more limited way, for example by trolling Tibetan independence activists on Twitter and using distributed denial of service attacks to knock GitHub offline for hosting anti-censorship technology.

However, the complex interdependence of the Chinese and US economies and a greater slate of shared interests in global affairs make a hack as brazen as an effort to influence the US election highly improbable. Still, cyberspace remains central to all of Beijing’s predominant economic and political interests, and cyber attacks are, and will continue to be, a potent tool.

The Hacks We Can’t See is Motherboard’s theme week dedicated to the future of security and the hacks no one’s talking about. Follow along here.

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What’s the Future of Chinese Hacking?

Mathematicians Still Years from Verifying Nightmare 500-Page Proof

In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki published four papers on his own website with little fanfare. Together, they totalled more than 500 pages—a hyperdense labyrinth of symbols invoking a brutal new mathematical framework known as inter-universal Teichmüller Theory. Via said framework, Mochizuki claimed to have solved the abc conjecture—a simple-seeming statement about prime numbers that has nonetheless eluded mathematicians since first being proposed in 1985. The catch? No other mathematician could understand the thing.

Mochizuki had unleashed an impenetrable mathematical hellscape. Understanding it is not simply a matter of being a really great number theorist, one has to become an expert in an entirely new mathematical field as defined in Mochizuki's papers. The only preparation for verifying the new proof is to understand inter-universal Teichmüller Theory, which no one really does. Thus, a paradox is raised: verifying the proof means fully committing to it for years even though it might be wrong.

In a verification progress report published in December of 2014, Mochizuki bemoaned: “With the exception of the handful of researchers already involved in the verification activities concerning IUTeich (inter-universal Teichmüller Theory) discussed in the present report, every researcher in arithmetic geometry throughout the world is a complete novice with respect to the mathematics surrounding IUTeich, and hence, in particular, is simply not qualified to issue a definitive (i.e., mathematically meaningful) judgment concerning the validity of IUTeich on the basis of a ‘deep understanding’ arising from his/her previous research achievements.”

Mathematicians have nonetheless taken up the challenge. At a workshop last week at the University of Kyoto, the normally reclusive Mochizuki presented his work in-person to a gathering of believers, several of whom noted significant progress in untangling the proof. UC San Diego number theorist Kiran Kedlaya at least sees a light at the end of the tunnel, however distant. He told Nature News that we can expect a verification no less than three years from now, but that mathematicians have begun to uncover a general strategy unlying Mochizuki's proof and have isolated passages that seem particularly key.

Moreover, there are now 10 mathematicians committed to the cause, up from three at the time of a workshop last December at Oxford.

Skepticism remains, however. “The constructions are generally clear, and many of the arguments could be followed to some extent, but the overarching strategy remains totally elusive for me,” Yale mathematician Vesselin Dimitrov told Nature. “Add to this the heavy, unprecedentedly indigestible notation: these papers are unlike anything that has ever appeared in the mathematical literature.”

Proving the abc conjecture may prove to be worth the effort. A paper by Dimitrov earlier this year showed how a reduction of Mochizuki's proof, if it is eventually verified, should offer solutions to a large number of other mathematical problems, including a new proof of Fermat's last theorem.

As for what the abc conjecture actually is, here's what I wrote in 2015:

Take three (whole) numbers—a, b, and c—of the form a + b = c. These three numbers are what’s known as coprime. This just means that they don’t share any divisors (except for 1, but every number is divisible by 1). If one of the numbers is divisible by, say, 13, none of the others are divisible by 13. It’s an interesting relationship, like three people with no shared ancestors all the way back to the very first human/number (which is 1).

What we need to prove is that for some other, fourth number d, there will be a finite (countable) number of abc triplet sets (as, bs, and cs fitting the above equation) such that c is greater than d raised to some positive power that is not 1 (a “perfect power”). Finally, this extra number d isn’t just anything; it must be the product of the prime factors of a, b, and c. That’s it. Somehow, these three numbers that aren’t linked by common factors (coprime) are, after all, linked by their factors. It’s weird.

You could even say that the conjecture is kind of elegant: three seemingly perfect mathematical strangers are related in the end. A simple statement, but with a proof that turns out to be anything but.

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Mathematicians Still Years from Verifying Nightmare 500-Page Proof

Bulldogs Are Genetic Monstrosities, DNA Study Finds

When it comes to dogs, few sights are sadder than a tired bulldog, gasping for precious oxygen. You’ve probably seen one—its watery eyes drooping under folds of skin, while stubby little legs buckle under the weight of its body.

Bulldogs are abominations of nature, and it’s definitely our fault.

A new study shows just how deeply we've warped this canine’s genetic makeup. Purebred English bulldogs will never be healthy, thanks to generations of calculated inbreeding in pursuit of “ideal” characteristics. The paper’s findings, which were published today in Canine Genetics and Epidemiology, mark the first time the breed’s diversity has ever been investigated on a DNA level, rather than by pedigree.

“Just as it took decades, and maybe centuries, to breed the bulldog to its present form, it may take a very long time to reverse what has been done. English bulldogs have lost so much genetic diversity, and the bad traits have become so universal to the breed, that either such positive traits no longer exist, or that they exist in a very small proportion,” lead author Niels Pedersen, a professor at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine’s Center for Companion Animal Health, told me.

A bulldog who looks mad about being so inbred. Image: Flickr/Paul Hudson

A team of veterinary researchers analyzed the DNA of 102 registered, or “show quality,” English bulldogs, both from the US and other countries. After their genes were sequenced, they were compared to those of puppy mill dogs, based on the notion that commercial bulldog breeders were responsible for propagating health issues common to the breed.

Among both groups, it was clear that large portions of the English bulldog’s genome have affected by centuries of selective breeding. Researchers identified a significant loss of genetic diversity in the region responsible for normal immune responses. And in regard to problematic traits like skin wrinkling and hip dysplasia, the lack of diversity left in bulldog DNA leaves little hope for “weeding out” issues from within the existing gene pool.

Additionally, the study revealed that breathing problems associated with brachycephaly—the flat, wide skull emblematic of most bulldogs—are a product of complex changes to the dog’s head structure, and can’t be fixed simply by “lengthening” the face.

A 2015 survey conducted by The Kennel Club discovered inbreeding among pedigree bulldogs skyrocketed during the 1980s and 1990s. This genetic bottleneck, or loss of diversity, is thought to have occurred when several popular sire dogs were repeatedly used to build up the population.

In a separate study, published in the Public Library of Science Genetics, Swedish researchers also found genes that predispose bulldogs to a certain type of brain cancer called canine glioma, which is cancer of the brain’s glial cells. According to their results, the repeated selection of brachycephalic breed traits (basically, a smooshed face with an underbite), which appear in the same region of the genome linked to glioma, could be to blame for its diffusion.

English bulldogs originated somewhere in the British Isles, and were used for the now-outlawed sport of bull baiting. Technically “working” dogs, the breed soon outgrew its usefulness as humans selected for debilitating traits, such as stockiness, wide jaws, and massive heads. Today, more than 80 percent of bulldog litters are delivered by Caesarean section.

Most English bulldog owners can expect their animals to die of cancer or cardiac arrest, if not old age. A small cohort of breeders is attempting to resurrect the original bulldog, which they call the “Olde English Bulldogge,” though researchers warn that rapidly introducing new diversity into the gene pool could be harmful.

“I think that the attempt to create a dog with many of the desired attributes and physical features of the bulldog, but free of the serious health problems, is laudable. They obviously saw the writing on the wall many years ago, and had the foresight to break away from the established English bulldog breed and make the necessary changes,” Pedersen added.

When I asked Pedersen whether a hybrid would be a good compromise for people who want bulldogs, but not the health issues, his reply was hopeful.

“If the cross was to a non-brachycephalic, non-chondrodystrophic dog with a normal tail and unwrinkled skin, I would definitely say that the cross would be healthier than its bulldog parent.”

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Bulldogs Are Genetic Monstrosities, DNA Study Finds

Become the Best Hacker 1980 Has to Offer in ‘Quadrilateral Cowboy’

I’m pushing a vault out of a window. Due to my line of work, cyber-espionage and sabotage, I’d assume the vault’s full of valuable documents. The moment I touch the vault I trigger a turret, meaning I have about ten seconds before it make some melty Swiss cheese out of me. This is exactly what happened during the previous simulation, where I also had to hop across rooftops and use a termite-looking “Weevil” drone to jack into the door controls. I did that laying on my stomach between the floor and the ceiling, placing my computer console and a CCTV (to see through the Weevil’s eyes) among the ventilation pipes. All to get into this room and get torn up by bullets. I’ve failed but I will try again, to do better, and after I succeed I will try again, to do it better, because in Quadrilateral Cowboy you don’t just have to be a good hacker: you have to be the best hacker.

Created by Brendon Chung, Quadrilateral Cowboy takes place in his surreal, recurring fictional city of Nuevos Aires, scattered with the debris of odd books and ramen packages and where everyone has a flat face on a square body, like papercraft South Park characters. But unlike Chung’s previous games like Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy isn’t an experimental narrative game but one more rooted in the more familiar grit of conspiracy, quick wit, and competitiveness.

It's set in alternative 1980 where buildings vine their way into the sky and flying motorcycles exist, but technology is otherwise stuck in the bog of cassette tapes and manual input. You're part of a trio of women, freelance hackers who work in the cover of night. Every gig requires surgical planning and craftiness, using coding to hack the planet and ensure you don’t get caught or killed. Most of the game is set within simulations of your heists, where you time yourself to get in and out, leaving less than footprints and taking nothing but corporate secrets.

Framing the game around training scenarios means you're not only trying to set records against other players, but so is your character. It’s Chung’s least plot-centric game yet, but even the time trials are part of the story.

Being the best hacker in 1980, of course, means using a lot of cool tech. You’ll have the Weevil drone, a remote controlled turret of your own, a launchpad, but your most essential gadget is a central computer terminal that controls all your own tools as well as hack the doors and security hurdles around you. A popular security service ensures that most of these obstacles cannot be hacked for more than three seconds at a time. Hacking these things is more than just button pushes on your end.

Your clicking computer rig needs you to be specific. If you open a door or turn off a laser you have to type in how long. If you want your Weevil to turn or move forward, you need to type in how far or to what degree. If you want your turret to shoot, you have to boot up the program and type “fire.” From the outside this might sound like secretary work, but in practice it actually feels like programming.

If you want to merely get by you can go step by step, but players who want to demolish every leaderscore will need to come up with entire command chains, sequences created by separating each function with a semicolon. This means that, on certain levels, you can begin by typing in a single elaborate code command on your computer terminal and then sprint through the entire stage without stopping.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is about being extremely efficient with outdated machines. If video games are about power fantasies, this one is for players who want to fiddle around with manual objects in a virtual space, flip switches, loosen screws, control ye olde drones with every clunky command, and type on old, loud keyboards. If you ever wanted to be a hacker—not a real one, but the cool idea of being hacker you got from a cheesy movie—it's bliss.

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Become the Best Hacker 1980 Has to Offer in ‘Quadrilateral Cowboy’

This Guy is the Lance Armstrong of Pigeon Racing

The world of British pigeon racing is aflutter today over the scandalous revelation that Eamon Kelly, a preeminent fancier and reigning champion, cheated in the Tarbes National. Did he dope his avian athletes? Or kneecap another competitor using a very tiny baton?

No, folks. Kelly, aka “Feather Daddy,” pulled off an even more elaborate hoax to win the 580-mile-race’s bounty: a pretty £11,500 ($15,220 US). In an act that can only be compared to the antics of Tour de France swindler, Lance Armstrong, the seasoned pigeon racer microchipped a bird and calculated its record-setting time without ever setting it free from his Oxfordshire apartment.

According to The Guardian, race officials were initially suspicious when one of the 14 birds that Kelly registered in the marathon clocked in at faster-than-average speeds. The journey was supposed to take the bird from Oxfordshire to the south of France, however, the pigeon that actually made the trek to Tarbes wasn’t the one that was microchipped. When referees realized that Kelly’s winged winner, who averaged speeds of 40 miles per hour, was leagues away from other birds flying at similar speeds, they knew they had a cheater on their hands.

“I, Eamon Kelly, sincerely apologise to all my friends and fanciers over my stupid actions relating to the recent Tarbes race.”

“I was tempted and fell,” Kelly told The Sun in a statement. “A decision I will regret for the rest of my life. A sport that I love so much, that has given me untold pleasure and above all friendship I have thrown all away.”

Pigeon racing isn’t a stranger to the the dirty underbelly of international sport. In 2013, European fans of the sport were aghast when six Belgian birds tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. Elsewhere, in 2014, someone set a Newcastle aviary on fire, killing 400 champion birds.

In fancier forums, complaints from flyers underscore the seedy tactics used by cheaters. “Over the years, I have encountered many great flyers who I considered a true champion, but right now, in our club, we have a ‘gentleman’ [who] goes way beyond winning out of turn… I believe that he is somehow manipulating the electronic timer,” said a user named “derf.”

But Kelly seemed above all of this. He was described by peers as a “true worker,” and was even a race controller for the National Flying Club. Like so many other esteemed sportsmen, Kelly’s passion for pigeon racing dates back to his childhood, when he was taken under the wing of renowned fancier Frank Lloyd.

I can’t help but wonder if, perhaps, Kelly is the victim here. In an effort to make sense of my feelings, I Googled “why do athletes cheat,” and found a helpful article from CNN that said many scammers do so because of national, financial, and individual pressures. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization offered another explanation, saying money and fame can often push players into risky behavior.

Maybe Kelly just spent so much time at the top, he couldn’t fathom the eventual journey back down. We might never know why he chose the low road that day, but if he’s anything like his protégés, he’ll be flying high in the sky in no time.

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This Guy is the Lance Armstrong of Pigeon Racing