How Elon Musk and DOGE did it (and are still doing it)

The past three weeks in American life have been extraordinary, to put it mildly.  There hasn't been this much history made in my lifetime since the collapse of communism.  In some ways there are parallels between the two.  The Soviet Union fell because of Gorbachev's reforms in the face of that country's unsustainable bureaucracy.  And what some are calling American Revolution 2.0 is now transpiring as a consequence of even worse bureaucracy in the United States at last being made accountable to its people.

What President Donald Trump and his administration, and especially Elon Musk and his crack team of boffins at DOGE, are accomplishing just might be the second most dramatic "kicking over the tables at the temple" ever recorded.  There will be volumes written in years and decades to come about the winter of 2025 and the shaking up of the American government that has transpired in less than a month.  It's been a beautiful thing to behold... and I am of the mind that it's going to get even better.

A writer calling himself Eko over on Substack has published an intense account of what transpired in the wee hours of the Trump years just less than 21 days ago.  "Override" reads like a William Gibson cyberpunk novel as envisioned by Ron Paul.  Eko's write-up begins thusly:

The clock struck 2 AM on Jan 21, 2025.  

In Treasury's basement, fluorescent lights hummed above four young coders. Their screens cast blue light across government-issue desks, illuminating energy drink cans and agency badges. As their algorithms crawled through decades of payment data, one number kept growing: $17 billion in redundant programs. And counting.

"We're in," Akash Bobba messaged the team. "All of it."

Edward Coristine's code had already mapped three subsystems. Luke Farritor's algorithms were tracing payment flows across agencies. Ethan Shaotran's analysis revealed patterns that career officials didn't even know existed. By dawn, they would understand more about Treasury's operations than people who had worked there for decades. 

 

This wasn't a hack. This wasn't a breach. This was authorized disruption.

It's a helluva read, well worth recommending to anyone with even a passing interest in information technology or constitutional government. 

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About the Murthy vs Missouri decision...

Regarding Murthy v. Missouri: the Supreme Court decision yesterday about government coercing social media companies to censor users' activity based on political content.  SCOTUS decided that the plaintiffs had no standing and dismissed the lawsuit.

This seems like a colossal victory for the government and social media companies.  HOWEVER...

The case was *not* dismissed.  Today's ruling dealt with the temporary injunction in the case, not the case itself.  The case was REMANDED, back down the legal chain.  It could still come before the high court where the plaintiffs can better frame their arguments with solid evidence of coercion and censorship.

I believe that such a thing is not only possible, it is almost guaranteed to happen.

Twitter, or X as it's called now, is going to be VERY interesting to watch as it pertains to the case.  When Murthy v. Missouri was first filed it was confronting a seemingly unassailable block of social media companies, especially Twitter.

But Twitter/X is no longer part of that.  It's in the hands of Elon Musk now.  Who may prove to be quite enamored with the idea of opening up Twitter's old files and shed some sunlight on how his company under previous management censored content because the government told it to.

That may be a more substantive body of evidence than a few emails were as was the crux of the plaintiff's arguments.  If not in support of the Murthy plaintiffs then almost certainly worth a case all its own.

So to those who have been frustrated by today's ruling: be of good cheer.  This sort of thing has happened before, and it will again.  Personally I believe that Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas were correct in their dissent.  But I'm not ready to throw out the bathwater with the baby quite yet.  This was a ruling on the injunction, not necessarily the case itself.  The case was sent back to the lower courts.  And might still come before the Supremes again.

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My first foray into using an AI chatbot

No, I am still not going to "write" a blog post using artificial intelligence.  I'm sitting in front of a keyboard composing these words.  If you ever do see a product of AI being displayed, it's going to state as much.  Which is what I'm doing now.  What you are about to read is definitely the product of artificial intelligence.  It also represents the first time that I've used a "chatbot" to generate text.  Up until now I've avoided such things.  But as I'm currently involved in a project necessitating some familiarity with AI, there was little choice but to see what it is that I'm getting into.

A friend encouraged me to try ChatGPT.  I've been playing around with it since last night, firing hard at its walls.  And I have to say, I am intrigued.  One of the things I asked it to do was to describe the impact that the television series The Dukes of Hazzard had on high school football.  ChatGPT returned a thorough response in less than seven seconds.

This morning I tried something else: making the AI be "creative".  And now is where things start getting spooky.  The idea of a poem about the Orks from Warhammer 40,000 came to mind.  So I asked ChatGPT to compose some poetry featuring those wacky greenskins.

Here's what it came up with in the space of less than five seconds...

(I know I said previously that I wouldn't "copy and paste" an AI generated product, that I would only post screenshots.  I tried to make a screenshot with this but it was too big to fit onto one screen.  Sincerest apologies for that.)

------------------------------------------

 

"An Ode To WAAAGH!" 

by ChatGPT
05/19/2024 10:15 am EST

In the grim dark of the far future’s expanse,

Where hope is a shadow and death is a dance,

There roams a green tide with a hunger for war,

The Orks of the cosmos, in battles they soar.

 

With tusks sharp as daggers and muscles like steel,

They bellow and brawl with a fiery zeal.

Their laughter is thunder, their fury a storm,

In chaos and mayhem, their spirits transform.

 

Through rusted machines that clatter and grind,

They fashion their weapons, a savage design.

With choppa and slugga, they charge into fight,

Under skies burning red with the blood of the night.

 

WAAAGH! is their battle cry, echoing wide,

A call to destruction, no foe left to hide.

They’re born from the spores of a war-torn land,

To crush and to conquer with a brutish hand.

 

Gork and Mork, their gods of might,

Guide them through darkness, through endless night.

One brutal, one cunning, both deities grand,

In their name, the Orks spread terror unplanned.

 

Yet, in their chaos, there’s a unity fierce,

A bond of the battle, a truth they pierce.

For in every clash, in every raid,

An Ork’s heart is joyous, in war it’s laid.

 

So, heed the green tide, the Orks in their thrall,

For when they come knocking, it’s the end of it all.

In the far future’s expanse, where the strong will prevail,

The Orks march to WAAAGH!, their endless tale.

 

 ------------------------------------------

 

I have to admit, I am deeply impressed.  It's going to be very difficult to detect the use of AI already.  How convincing will it be even just a year from now?  What is going to happen to things like not only writing term papers and college theses, but also things like legal and business documents?  Would a minister delivering a sermon be found out if he had "cheated" with an AI chatbot?

AI can be a tool like anything else.  It can also be a crutch keeping us from discovering our fullest potential.  And in nefarious hands it can - and will - become a weapon.

As Yoda put it, "a dark place" this is taking us to.

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DOOM is thirty years old today!

Doom, arguably the most installed piece of software in the history of anything, today celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of its release.

It was at 12:01 AM on the morning of December 10th, 1993 that the team at id Software uploaded the first one-third of the game - the shareware version - to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  Within minutes wanna-be players crashed the school's system as everyone and their brother (and a few sisters) tried to get Doom.  Hours later and campuses around the world were banning the game's network play capability, it was such a resource hog.

By the end of that first day it was very obviously clear: the world was Doomed.  It wasn't long afterward that the id Software staff started getting sales of the full game to the tune of a hundred THOUSAND dollars a day.

And it wasn't just the high school and college crowd that was playing Doom: it was people from all walks of life.  Young and old.  Students and professionals.  Especially when it came to the game's revolutionary multiplayer component.  Doom was the great leveler after death itself.  In a perfect world there would be no wars: only games of Doom to prove one's skill.

My first exposure to Doom came a few months later, when a friend brought over a box containing the shareware version that he had found at K-Mart for like a dollar.  This was still a time when most homes in America didn't have Internet and consequently no FTP access, so id also distributed the shareware edition in boxes for the cost of packaging.  Johnny's own computer was having problems running it, but maybe mine would.  We were sharing rides to the community college for a history class on Tuesday nights.  After I returned home that evening I installed Doom on the 486-SX system that I had gotten for Christmas.

Doom was a little overwhelming at first.  Also plenty violent.  I didn't honestly know what to make of it when I initially cranked it up, and there was school work and my job at the nearby seafood restaurant for most of the weekend.  But on Sunday afternoon I gave Doom another shot.  It sucked me in hard and refused to let go.  I was firing at anything and everything that moved.  By the time I found the chainsaw I was grinning like a maniac.  Dad walked past my door and looked in to see what I was doing.  He saw me blasting those Imps away with the shotgun and just sort-of shook his head in disbelief.  Later on he watched me sawing into the demons and I like to think he found it pretty amusing.  Just as I was finding that killing off hordes of the undead was a GREAT stress reliever after all.

It wasn't long after that when I sent a check off to Texas.  A week or so later the full version of Doom - containing version 1.666 - arrived at my door.  By that time I had conquered "Knee Deep In The Dead" many times on the various difficulties.  Now it was time at last to wade upon "The Shores Of Hell" on my way to "Inferno".

And then came the discovery that id Software had made the game almost completely customizable!  People had figured out how to create their own levels, edit and add-in new graphics, change up the sounds and music... pretty much anything pertaining to the game's environment.  That first night I tried an add-on, when I UNZIP-ped a WAD (acronym for "Where's All the Data?") file and changed the Baron of Hell into Barney the Dinosaur... that just lit a fire under me to find and collect EVERY add-on file that I could locate.  I think my favorite custom level was "Deimos Subway": a very well-designed board imitating a train station along with a catchy tune for background music.  There was the WAD that added sounds from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  And there is also no forgetting the various WADs that added classical MIDI music to the game.  All very clever (and often very funny) stuff.  Although I kind of harbor doubts that many people these days would be comfortable with loading the COSBY.WAD before starting the game...

Wow.  Thirty years.  So much has happened both in personal time and across the realm of video/computer gaming.  But even today, that first one-third of Doom is with us as much as ever.  Ports of the game have been made for everything from calculators to refrigerator doors to home pregnancy tests to John Deere tractors.  It's become an unofficial mantra of the coding sector: "It's not a computer if it doesn't run Doom."

And I would be remiss if I did not admit that every so often I find myself playing original Doom again.  There's just something about this game that charms the player and leaves an indelible mark on one's cerebral pleasure center.  I've played a lot of so-called "Doom-clones", but it's the original game which the game-oriented part of my personal entertainment proclivity owes its allegiance to.

Time has proven that it is true: "Doom will never die.  Only its players will."

So Happy Thirtieth Birthday to Doom!  May we be playing it for another thirty!

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HEIC? What the heck is THAAAAAT???

Had to take some photos with my iPhone and send them to my personal e-mail account.  But when I was about to use them I was hit with a shock: the pics were in something called HEIC format.

I had no idea whatsoever what that meant.  Only that it wasn't readable by my usual image software, much less usable for most critical purposes.

So I did some quick research and found that HEIC, or HEIF, stands for High Efficiency Image Container.  It was adopted over ten years ago by Apple for use primarily in their mobile devices.  But for some reason I'm only now hearing about it.

Basically it makes the same photos that you usually work with as JPEGs and ummm... makes them smaller in file size.  Sort of like how we used to compress files with PKZIP back in the day.

If you're reading this, you're probably wondering how to turn HEIC/HEIF off so that you can have your full resolution JPEGs.  That's what I'm going to tell you to do.

It's really simple.  Go into your iOS devices Settings, and find Camera.

Look for the Formats setting.

Change that from High Efficiency to Most Compatible.

And that's it!  Hope this quick tip will help you if you're also confronted with the HEIC hobgoblin :-)

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Artificial intelligence has original singers performing "Weird Al" Yankovic's parodies... and it's pretty horrifying

This is already the scariest thing I've seen all month... and it's only October 2nd.  A terrible, terrible line has been crossed.  Advanced technology really is taking us to places that, not to put too fine a point on it, are unnatural to the extreme.

Andy Baio at Waxy.org has applied artificial intelligence to a lot of songs - which are mostly parodies of other artists - by "Weird Al" Yankovic.  Baio's intent with this dubious exercise is to see what would happen if the original artists performed Al's parodies themselves.

In other words, Baio has Michael Jackson's voice singing Yankovic's "Eat It".  Among others.

Let Mr. Baio indict himse... I mean, explain himself:

In the parallel universe of last year’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Dr. Demento encourages a young Al Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) to move away from song parodies and start writing original songs of his own. During an LSD trip, Al writes “Eat It,” a 100% original song that’s definitely not based on any other song, which quickly becomes “the biggest hit by anybody, ever.”

Later, Weird Al’s enraged to learn from his manager that former Jackson 5 frontman Michael Jackson turned the tables on him, changing the words of “Eat It” to make his own parody, “Beat It.”

This got me thinking: what if every Weird Al song was the original, and every other artist was covering his songs instead? With recent advances in A.I. voice cloning, I realized that I could bring this monstrous alternate reality to life.

This was a terrible idea and I regret everything.

This is a horrific milestone in digital manipulation.  There is no going back now.  Like the Joker said in The Dark Knight "You've changed things, forever."

Mash down here to read more about this experiment in abominable intelligence.  God have mercy on us all.

 

EDIT 10/08/2023 2:44 AM: Feel led to say something here.  All of this "the horror! the horror!" was done purely tongue in cheek.  I actually think is pretty cool.  Excellent work Mr. Baio :-)

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Safehouse: Back a friend's invention on Kickstarter

Hey gang, got something really special for you.  How often is it that you have the chance to get in on the ground floor of a new piece of technology?  Okay, maybe because of the Internet that chance happens on a routine basis now.  But even so, here's a utility that so far as I know is pretty unique.

I've known Matt LaCoe for quite awhile now.  He and I worked together at an on-campus computer store when we were students at Elon.  I saw his technical prowess then and he's only gotten better.  And now he's presenting us with a new mobile app: Safehouse.

It would be better if Matt explained it to y'all:

Have you ever found yourself lost, tired, unsure of where you are, where to go or what to do? Have you ever felt fear that you might be harmed by persons who have taken an great interest in you for one reason or another? Do you remember how these feeling felt? Do you recall the desire to feel safe in those moments?

What if you had a mobile application that would just that for you? What if you could simply hit a button and be guided to a place that would be a "Safehouse" for you? Would you use it?

As as disabled combat veteran I decided that I would try to change this. The objective is to create an application that will allow users who are both travelling and those who can offer a safe place when needed. Whether it be to avoid a bad situation or simply find a safe spot to park your car for the night and having someone near willing to look for your safety. I can easily highlight different use cases for this application but, it the ones I can't imagine that might make this app the difference in someone's life. Whether you are an adventurous person seeing the world or simply a college student trying to make their way home to visit family for the holidays wouldn't it be nice to have an application on your phone designed to look out for your safety?

Safehouse addresses that need, for a wide spectrum of people in our communities.  If you're requiring the assistance of others, help is available with a finger stroke on the phone screen.  It's a really neat concept and I can't think of anyone better to bring this to market than Matt.

And now the project is on Kickstarter, where interested people can back it.  Matt has a lot more information about Safespace on its page there, including  information regarding the protocols in place to ensure that the app is not used by people of malicious intent.

So I ask you to visit Matt's page, and consider backing it.  I've all the confidence in the world that Matt is going to launch something very wonderful with this.

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My solemn word that anything you see posted here is genuine

You might have noticed a slight addition to this blog.  It's on the header, toward the right of the screen.  There now appears the following label:

 

 

I have heard all kinds of insane stories about people using ChatGPT and other "artificial intelligences" as something more than a curiosity.  Students have begun having AI write papers for classes.  Some ministers have admitted that they have used ChatGPT to compose sermons for Sunday morning.  In at least one situation a lawyer had AI create his legal paperwork for a court case: the judge was not impressed.

To be truthful, I'm not impressed by any so-called "artificial intelligence" thus far.  Their enthusiasts are claiming that AI is now able to pass the Turing Test (in which a living person can or cannot differentiate verbal responses from a human being or a computer).  It's not something I'm particularly jazzed about, not yet anyway.

But the horse is out of the barn.  And AI is going to start being used for a lot of things from here on out: some with benefit in mind, some not.

I just felt led to let the readers of this blog know, that I am absolutely committed to producing content that comes from my own mind, or from the rare occasion when The Knight Shift has welcomed a guest writer.  It is my vow to you, that there will be no posts or articles that you see here which will have been generated by a machine.  From the very start I've wanted this blog to be my own little online presence.  It's been that for nearly twenty years now.  I won't "take the easy way" and farm out the writing to a computer, no matter how stylish it is at the moment.

That doesn't mean that I may not experiment with AI some and report about what transpires.  Several weeks ago a good friend caused ChatGPT to lock up and get stuck after he convinced the AI that he too was an artificial intelligence.  It was like something you'd see on any number of episodes of the classic Star Trek.  My friend proved how ill-prepared AI currently is to handle complex concepts. I've an idea for my own experiment that I may carry out soon.  If so, I'll be posting screenshots of the AI's responses, rather than copy and paste it into the article.

Okay, well, there you go.  The Knight Shift will completely be a product of my own mind and heart and soul.  I promise.

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Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun: Carnage-filled fun for gamers of a certain age (and other people too!)

This coming December will mark thirty years since the original computer game Doom was released by id Software.  Gadzooks!!  Where did all that time go to?!?  Well, Doom sucked me in hard and refused to release its grip.  There had been a few first-person shooters before, notably id's own Wolfenstein 3-D.  But it was Doom that showed off the REAL potential of the genre.  And it broke the ground for other high-drama atmospheric entries in the category, like Star Wars: Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3-D, and Quake.  Those in turn showed the way for more advanced games in the forthcoming generations, such as Halo and Call of Duty.

But no matter how advanced home computers and gaming consoles have become, my heart belongs to 1993's Doom and its contemporaries.  Especially for how editable it was, and it seemed like everyone and their brother was creating WAD files containing new graphics (my favorite is still the one that turned the Baron of Hell into Barney the Dinosaur), or sounds and music, right on up to new maps to play in.  Yes, the music was MIDI and the graphics were REALLY pixelated when you got up close to an element like scenery or an attacking monster... but that was just part of the charm.  Part of why I and many others came to love those games.

Well, a few weeks ago I heard about Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, from Auroch Digital.  And what grabbed my attention was that it was created in the very same style of the Nineties-era first person shooters like Doom.  The game came out a few days ago and lo and behold a friend gifted it to me on Steam (where it's currently priced around twenty bucks).  So I installed Boltgun and played around with it.

Friends, that evening I felt what it was like to have played Doom for the very first time all those decades ago.  Auroch took the Warhammer 40,000 franchise and gave it a game it didn't know it needed.  If you're a "gamer of a certain age" who was among the first to play classic shooters, you will LOVE Boltgun.

The game has you playing a member of the Ultramarines chapter of the Adeptus Astartes (faux Imperial lingua franca for Space Marines).  If you ever played the Space Marine third-person game, you'll be especially delighted to learn that Boltgun takes place following that tale (and before the upcoming Space Marine II).  Your well-enhanced warrior, Malum Caedo, finds himself on the forge world of Graia.  Just like those Union Aerospace scientists did in Doom, it seems that the local techpriests got to messin' around with stuff they shouldn't have and opened a portal to Hel... I mean, the Warp.  Demons and mutant heretics and traitor marines have come through and are threatening the planet and all around it.  So as Caedo, you set out to make things right... by shootin', explodin', and chainsawin' every thing that's in your way.

Boltgun is an intense game, and the blocky pixelated blood and gore that splatters across your screen is all the more like enjoying a classic again.  Befitting a Warhammer 40,000 product, it is unfettered chaos and wreckage that will have you attacking anything and everything that moves.  I've gotten pretty good at taking aim with the selected firearm (mostly the boltgun) at relatively far targets, then rushing in to chainsword the baddie and any surrounding renegades.  It was like when I was playing Doom for the first time and came upon the chainsaw: Dad was walking past my room and had to see what I was giggling about.  I got the sense that he thought it was pretty gruesome (but also kind of funny).  Lord only knows what he would think of modern gaming.

I'm only three levels into the game, but felt it was already worth recommending to all two of this blog's readers.  I've been pretty well entertained by Boltgun so far.  What I would VERY much like to see however is for Auroch (provided that Games Workshop approves the concept) to open the game up for editing, just like we could do with many of the more popular first-person shooters of that epoch.  At the very least the studio could produce some add-on campaigns.  I would DEFINITELY pay to have Boltgun pitting the player against the Orks, or Tyranids (which reminds me of that legendary megaWAD that transformed Doom into the movie Aliens).

If you have fond memories of the gaming of thirty-some years ago, I think you'll like Boltgun.  It may also entice younger gamers to look around at the titles we had back then and give them a try also.

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun can be found for purchase on Steam, again for about twenty bucks.  Not a bad deal if you're looking for something to vent a little angst and tension without having to shoot at the wall like Sherlock did.

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Will a forty-year old Atari 2600 work on a modern HDTV?

The notion has been bugging me for a few years now: could my old Atari 2600 - technology that's fully four decades old - be made to work on a high-def television set?  Seemingly no easy task, what with the analog connector and antenna switch box and those screws on the back of the televisions of yesteryear (that had the antenna feed either with those C-shaped ends or just bare wire).  And yet, we are talking about the grand-daddy of all home video game systems.  The forerunner of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the PlayStation, the Xbox.  Marcus Fenix may hold his own against Locusts but he never had to face down the unstoppable Evil Otto, did he?

The Atari 2600 Video Computer System was there first.  And it deserves some respect and honor.  And I decided it was time to hook it up to my high-def television, for hopefully still more years of fun and frolic.  So tonight I went to experimenting...

It turned out that it was much easier to pull off than one might expect.  In the end it was only one small part (an RF TV coaxial F plug female adapter, found in various online outlets for three to five bucks) that was needed to modify the end of the Atari's cable so that it could be run into the HDTV's coax jack.  Then it was turning on the Atari absent any cartridges, having the TV re-scan for channels so that it only detected the one for the Atari, and then turning off the console and inserting a cartridge.  Total time: about 7 minutes.

The results?  Here's a video I made of the entire procedure, including that magnificent moment when the E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial game came onscreen!  Which might be the best-ever use of the E.T. game.

Game play itself was a bit wonky.  Pitfall Harry ran straight into the scorpions and my poor little ship kept getting smashed into cosmic dust by the asteroids.  And not every game cartridge worked at all.  I'm going to assume that the cartridges; internal board and the console's slot have accumulated some dust.  Blowing or vacuuming it out should fix that problem.  And the Atari joysticks weren't as responsive as I remembered.  Or maybe I'm the one not as responsive (hey, be kind! :-)  Still, it's a nice accomplishment and I'm rather happy to have pulled it off.

Maybe next time I'll figure out how to hook up a Nintendo Entertainment System.  And play Super Mario Bros. 3 in all its original glory.

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Retro-Internet on an iPad Pro

For whatever reason, over the weekend I found myself musing on how far the Intertubes have come from the crazy days of dial-up PPP and ICQ and RealPlayer (you kids with YouTube have NO idea how well off you are). And just for fun I wondered how much of the "classic" Internet from its earliest years could be replicated on my iPad Pro...

Turns out: quite a bit!

Here's what I came up with after reaching back into the inner fog of time immemorial, or at least those strange days of college. Trying to find analogies on the App Store of everything that most of us had as Internet utilities on our PCs or, if you were fairly wealthy, laptops. Don't even think that we had smartphones in those days. "Internet" and "phone" usually meant waiting until your roomie was finished talking to his girlfriend before you could fire up the 14.4 baud modem (sorry about that guys).

The resulting group of apps, which with usual creative flair I dubbed "Old School Internet":

 

I still hate that %#$@ Gopher icon, looking at me, grinning, mocking...

That's pretty much what most people had on their Windows and Mac machines, absent having an account on a UNIX server (which students at most colleges and universities were given access to so even if you didn't have your own PC then, you still had quite a bit of Internet power to do uhhh... "work" with).

Aesthetically the most glaring omission from this group is Apple's Quicktime Player, which was the precursor of the H.264 video standard now so ubiquitous on most devices. Quicktime became the most commonly used - and most trusted in terms of security - video format on the 'net in a fairly short amount of time, supplanting RealMedia and some other competitors. But since the descendants of Quicktime are built into every browser (and Apple-built product) nowadays anyway, a dedicated Quicktime app would be worse than redundant.

For the web brower app, instead of using Safari as comes with the iPad Pro, I opted to include Firefox. Why? Because Firefox is the successor of Netscape Navigator, which was derived directly from Mosaic: the first "killer app" in Internet history. Mosaic was the first browser to incorporate the ability of using graphics and also gave greater control over fonts and text sizes. So let's pretend that this is Netscape Navigator, or even Mosaic:

 

The last website that Kip Chalmers ever saw...

That's the "official" website of Wyatt Oil. If you get the reference without Google-ing it, go buy yourself a candy bar and pretend you bought it from me. I'm not going to give you the candy bar because if you know the reference you already realize that giving it would be a violation of moral code.

If we seriously wanted antiquated Internet by any means, we would have to get e-mail through a UNIX system and using the Pine program. We used Pine with our accounts on the server at Elon (my own account name was was knigr5c0) but I don't have a UNIX server handy at the moment. So instead let's find an app that approximates the kind of program most of us used with commercial Internet providers. For a long time I used Eudora, made by Qualcomm. But there is no Eudora on the App Store and I didn't want to use the E-Mail app that comes with iOS devices, so I used the Google Mail app instead:

Just imagine it without the Nigerian scammers...

And now we're getting into the good stuff! I'd venture to say that the vast majority of Internet users have either never heard of Usenet or it's a vague notion playing on the edge of memory. But once upon a time Usenet was how a LOT of productivity - more or less - happened on the Internet. I know of at least two major websites, still going strong today, that spawned from their founders being active on newsgroups.

Okay so what's a "newsgroup"? Basically a big trove of publicly posted e-mails on just about every subject imaginable and some that Hunter S. Thompson wouldn't hallucinate matter how much acid he'd drop. I'm still trying to figure out what alt.muppets.bork.bork.bork was supposed to be about. Anyway, if you were a Star Wars geek, rec.arts.starwars was the big central place to pow-wow at. There was a hierarchy (more or less) and to be an "official" newsgroup it had to be voted on by Usenet, errr... users. Otherwise they were an "alt"-something. And of course this being the Internet even then one had to take anything you'd find on Usenet with a massive cow lick of salt.

I sincerely thought that Usenet wouldn't be around anymore, and I can't even remember the last time I went to a newsgroup. But there are a few Usenet servers still around. Most of them are with ISPs and are included with monthly subscription, but some out there are free... IF you can connect to them. No luck on that. Still, having a Usenet reader on my iPad is pretty neat:

 

Before Facebook and the Russian hackers THIS is how we got our fake news...

Telnet is a utility that is still often used in academia and other purposes. Not so much today by most private users but once upon a time this was one of the best arrows in your quiver. Telnet is remotely logging in to another computer, and usually a very BIG computer, and using it on your own desktop. It's how most of us checked the e-mail on our student accounts when we lived off campus. It's also how you could play MUDs (Multi-Level Dungeons) and join in the community on ISCA BBS. Operated by Iowa Student Computing Alumni, ISCA BBS was the "hang out place" for all the cool kids... even if we only had plain ASCII text on a screen.

So I found a Telnet client on the App Store and out of pure muscle memory typed the address, expecting it to not be there at all...

... but it WAS!

"I'm BAAAA-AAAACK!!"

Holy crap!! ISCA is still running!! Wish I could remember the name of the account I last used on there. My first screenname was "The Man Eating Cow" and over the next couple of years I was "Jedi Master Yoda" and "Let My People Go" and a few others (why so many names? There was a girl at Elon who was stalking me. Long story...). I joined this time as "TheKnightShift" and was welcomed by pretty much the same screens that came up every time I ever logged in before.

And then there were MUDs.  Something I never got into but they were popular enough that you knew what they were.  The MUDs were essentially an MMO like World of Warcraft, except all-text.  If you ever heard of a waaaaay old game called Zork well, a MUD was pretty much Zork with a few hundred people running around inside of it.  And some of them are still online!  If you want to telnet into one of the more famous ones from the ancient times and give it a try here's the official website for ShadowMUD.

FTP means "File Transfer Protocol" and is one of those things that is now running under the hood even if you don't know (or care) that it's there.  Still, it gets a fair bit of usage, particularly when bulk uploading or downloading material.  Here is one FTP utility I found in the App Store:

 

Meh...

I could never make sense out Gopher.  It was a search engine thingy that let you look for material on Gopher servers, usually at universities and major libraries.  If it was out in "Gopherspace" you could easily find it.  IF it was in Gopherspace that is.  But it must still be used and appreciated because there is at least one Gopher client for iOS devices and I'm assuming for Android also:

 

"Gophers, ya great git! Not golfers! The little brown furry rodents!"

I figured that a text-based browser like Lynx wouldn't be on the App Store.  If it is, it's so obscure that it didn't show up in a search.  And some might wonder about the point if a web browser that shows only text.  But there is quite a good rationale for it.  Lynx and other text-only browsers can tie in to software that converts the words into audible speech.  Hence, even thoughs with little or no eyesight at all can "surf the web".  Pretty neat aye?  There are some textual web browsers for the iPad Pro and other mobile devices. However none of them make it plain "Amish-style text".  All they do is strip out the graphics and other bells and whistles and generate text with the formatting, fonts etc. intact:

 

The Knight Shift: Apocalypse Mode
Because the wasteland cares not for your bandwidth...

And that's pretty much how it was two decades or so ago.  We were the pioneers.  The ones who had to dial in through a landline and hope that there weren't so many connections that we couldn't log in.  Who could only share photos with other users (like that girl who sounded so cute) by giving them our snail-mail address and wait a week for a Kodak print to arrive.  Who had to trust that the character waving at us inside a MUD really did have a sword equipped before we stormed the castle.  Who had to uudecode that file from a newsgroup, having good faith that it really was a pic of a computer-animated dewback from A New Hope: Special Edition and not something obscene.

That's how we had our Internet.  And we LIKED it!

"Now get off my lawn!"

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Die in this game and you can never EVER play it again

Thank the Lord this isn't a Super Mario Brothers game.  Or a Fallout title.

So here's the conceit: if you die in Upsilon Circuit, you get perma-permadeath.  As in: you'll never play the game again.  Not because you won't want to play but because you literally can't play.  Ever again.  You get one life, one chance to make it through.  And that's it.  One shot at making it through to final screen.

And it won't be easy.

From the article at Kotaku:

The fantasy RPG plops specially selected players onto a single server and divides them into two teams of four. This means only eight players will ever be playing Upsilon Circuit at any given moment, and their adventures will likely come to swift, brutal ends. Sounds terrifying, right? Every move you make can literally be your last.

On top of that, the game will have a participatory audience watching live, something nearly as cool as the "one death ever" conceit. Here's how it works:

"Each Contestant explores the overworld and generated dungeons in search of the Dream Tech Crystals. They fight monsters, avoid traps, and compete with the opposing team."

"When the Contestant fights monsters or gets treasure, the EXP and other rewards go to the Audience. EXP is used collectively by the Audience to level up the Contestant's Skill Tree. Simply put, the Audience is part dungeon master, part strategist, and part judge & jury."

Sorta makes you wish Gary Gygax was still alive and making easy stuff like "Tomb of Horrors", aye?

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Catherine Rose: Mother, genius, communications pioneer

Catherine Rose and her daughter Alexis

It is an honor and a privilege to be able to say that I have been able to count Catherine Rose among the friendships that I have made through this journey in life.  She and I were in high school together and shared many conversations back and forth from our swim meets.  Catherine is, literally, one of the most powerhouse intellects on the face of the Earth.  I thought that then about her and the past decade has only served to reinforce that estimation.

Catherine and her husband are blessed to be the parents of two beautiful daughters.  One of them, Alexis, was born with severe disabilities that prevent her from learning and communicating as other children her age.  It was something that led Catherine to take a position at Philips and their healthcare division.  In her time at Philips, Catherine has led the development of a system which could be used by Alexis and countless others to express thoughts and ideas that would otherwise be extremely difficult.  Catherine's technology, called LightAide, is now being employed throughout the world by people from all walks of life.  For her efforts, she and her team have been lauded with many awards from the healthcare and engineering communities.

I know of no other way to put it than this: Catherine Rose is the precisely right person to accomplish this magnificent task.  I can not possibly think of anyone else so gifted and given such an opportunity to share that gift with so many.

And now Catherine has been named among The Mighty!  That website has just posted an in-depth conversation with Catherine in regard to her family, LightAide, and how technology is providing a bridge across which we all may span together...

Rose noticed her daughter's attraction to lights and convinced her employer to build a teaching tool to help children with visual impairments learn. LightAide is now being used around the world by people of all ages, and, just as important, by their teachers and caregivers, who are beginning to realize their charges might have better cognitive abilities than previously thought.

"There's a whole lot of people who have vision, but they have low vision," Rose said. "They can't see as well in the light that we normally give them. But if we give them more light, then they may be able to use more vision."

Mash here for more of The Mighty's interview with Catherine.

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Goodbye NAND flash? Startup's new storage holds insanely high promise

Imagine a few years from now having a smartphone or an iPad equipped with extremely nonvolatile memory, retaining information for decades, is ultra-fast, can be made cheap with already-existing manufacturing technology, and holding a terabyte of data.

Your reaction is probably gonna be the same as mine: "Shut up and take my money!!"

A Crossbar RRAM chip sitting atop a CMOS

A little company called Crossbar came out roaring yesterday with its announcement about developing what it's calling resistive RAM (RRAM).  And as The Register is reporting, this could be the "flash killer" that makes NAND memory - which is fast approaching the upper limit for feasibility - obsolete.

From the article:

"With our working Crossbar array, we have achieved all the major technical milestones that prove our RRAM technology is easy to manufacture and ready for commercialization," said Crossbar CEO George Minassian when announcing his company's new NAND flash competitor. "It's a watershed moment for the non-volatile memory industry."

Whether Minassian's exuberance is justified remains to be seen, but Crossbar RRAM tech certainly looks good on paper. The company claims that due to the tech's "simple" three-layer structure, it can be stacked in multiple layers resulting in multiple terabytes of storage space in a single chip "the size of a postage stamp."

Performance claims are also worth a gander. Compared with top-notch NAND flash memory, Crossbar claims that its tech will provide 20x faster writes at 20x lower power and with "10x the endurance," all in a die size that's half that of comparable NAND.

Lots of technical specs at the link above, comparing Crossbar's RRAM with standard NAND.  I haven't read the whitepaper about it yet but if somewhere in there it indicates that RRAM also has NAND's problem with cell degradation licked, this is looking to be the hot next big thing in computer technology.

That, and it would be nice to carry an entire Blu-ray collection around on my iPad :-)

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Hackers use wi-fi laptop to control EVERYTHING on a modern car

Remember that stunt Jeff Gordon pulled on an unsuspecting car salesman a few months ago?  The one where Gordon was disguised as any off-the-street Joe Shmoe and took a car for a test drive and terrified the crap out of that poor guy?

This is scarier...


Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek - two top-rate hackers out of Indiana -went into the guts of a Toyota Prius, jimmied-around with thirty-something on-board computer units and were able to take charge of dang nearly every function of the car.  Using a wireless laptop they can steer, put on the brakes, honk the horn, fake the speedometer reading, switch on the headlights and even tighten and loosen the seatbelts.

My dad has long proclaimed that "Cars only need gas, air and electricity to work: they don't need a computer!"  After watching this video, it's hard to argue with that.

Crash here to read more about this amazing hack, which was funded by the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (the kind folks who brought us the Internet).

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Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, has passed away

Unless you're reading this on a mobile device (and even that owes a lot to him) you're enjoying this blog and practically everything else on the Internet because of this man: Douglas Engelbart.

While working at SRI in the 1960s, Engelbart was struck with the idea of humans interacting with computers by manipulating on the screen with an intuitive interface.  He called his invention the "x-y position indicator".  The first model was carved from a block of wood with wheels, a push-button and a connecting cord.

Douglas Engelbart had created the mouse.  And he didn't stop there.  By the time he left SRI in 1977, he had helped develop such now-common technologies as "display editing, online processing, linking and in-file object addressing, use of multiple windows, hypermedia, and context-sensitive help".

The sad word is coming out of Atherton, California tonight that Douglas Engelbart - pioneering engineer and visionary whose invention let the rest of us discover the power of computers - has passed away at the age of 88.

In his memory, here is the now-legendary "Mother of All Demos", which Engelbart presented on December 9th, 1968.  So much of what we use today, which Engelbart was showing us almost five full decades ago...

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The latest from the wonderful world of 3D printing

This is easily the technology that I'm keenly following more than any other right now.  And for plenty of good reasons...

3D printing is now capable of producing replacement bones using living cells.

Desktop-produced firearms continues to be developed and refined, beyond the control of any government.

Laser-guided 3D printing can now produce metal objects with high precision.  You will soon be taking your car into a garage and have a new custom part created in-house.

High-capacity lithium-ion batteries smaller than the size of a grain of sand have been created in the laboratory and it's thought that they could eventually be used to power ridiculously tiny gadgets, including next-generation medical devices like pacemakers.

And then there's this: 4D printing!  Objects which are manufactured in 3D "folded-up", then are allowed to self-assemble themselves.  One possible use mentioned is being able to buy furniture packed-flat from a store, bring it home and then take it out of the box and watch it put itself together.  More serious applications could be for building construction in hazardous situations.

No doubt parents across the country will be happy to know about 4D printing.  It will potentially bring an end to those most dreaded of words found on just about every toy or game box: "some assembly required"!

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Department of Defense has 3D printed gun yanked... but I got it anyway (and so can you!)

The Liberator: Coming soon to
a desktop near you!

Defense Distributed has made a lot of headlines lately about the Liberator: a firearm which is completely fabricated by "3D printing", apart from the firing pin.  I think the success of this gun already is that it's got politicians like Charles Schumer and Steve Israel all steamed-up about it.  Schumer wants 3D printed guns to be outlawed completely.

The thing is, politicos like Schumer can't figure out how to pull that off.  3D printing will soon be a household implement and if it can be drawn up on a computer, anyone will be able to produce a fully-functioning model right on their desktop.  The computer doesn't care if it's a replacement part for a kitchen appliance or an action figure or a real working handgun.  The barn door has been thrown wide open and there's no getting that horse back inside.

Never let something like common sense stop the government from trying.  Earlier today the Department of Defense requested that Defense Distributed remove all its 3D weapons-related files from its website.   Defense Distributed's founder Cody Wilson is laying the blame on the doorstep of Secretary of State John Kerry.

As of this writing, Defense Distributed's site has "gone dark".

But less than five minutes after reading about the government having the Liberator pulled from the web, I had downloaded the gun.  And not once, but twice.

Here's how I did it, and how anybody else can as well:

Download µTorrent if you don't have it already (it's a free download) and run the install.  Any other torrent client should work too.  I found the Liberator files on The Pirate Bay.  There are two torrents for it so far: here's #1 and here's #2.  If either of those can't be found just do a search for "liberator" and "gun": I got those two results at once.  The file size is 2.02 megabytes (such a tiny thing for something so much fuss about).

And then... just download your Liberator files!  If you possess a 3D printer you can start making your Liberator pistol immediately.

I downloaded the file from each of those two torrents.  It is on my hard drive.  It is also on at least two USB drives that I've copied it too.  I can e-mail the file to anyone, anywhere in the world.  I could even set up a torrent on my own and allow people to download it from me directly.

In fact, it is happening right now.  Not by me, but by other people.  Lots and lots of other people.

Shutting down the Defense Distributed website was just about the worst thing that the United States federal government could have done, if it didn't want the Liberator to get into the wild.  By trying to outlaw it, the feds have made it so that practically everyone can want it.  Defense Distributed could not have asked for better publicity for and dissemination of its product!

Anyhoo... "Annie get your gun!" :-)

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Scientists create "injected breathing": breakthrough could save lives of millions

"Liquid breathing" from The Abyss.
Do not try this at home.

Remember in James Cameron's movie The Abyss, where Ed Harris' character was put into that funky diving suit which got filled with "breathing fluid" and he had to respirate through the liquid in order to survive a deep, deep dive?

(Incidentally, that was in 1989 and at the time it wasn't far from reality.  The mouse from the earlier scene that the fluid is demonstrated on?  That was not a special effect folks!  The mouse was actually breathing with that stuff!)

How about one better than that?  Say... put a needle in your arm and shoot yourself up with breathable oxygen?

Research scientist at Boston Children's Hospital have come up with a neat trick and it could revolutionize much of modern medicine: a nanoparticle which can be injected into a person and provide enough oxygen to maintain short-term "breathing".

From the article at TechWench.com...

This finding has the potential to save millions of lives every year. The microparticles can keep an object alive for up to 30 min after respiratory failure. This is accomplished through an injection into the patients’ veins. Once injected, the microparticles can oxygenate the blood to near normal levels. This has countless potential uses as it allows life to continue when oxygen is needed but unavailable. For medical personnel, this is just enough time to avoid risking a heart attack or permanent brain injury when oxygen is restricted or cut off to patients.

(snip)

The microparticles used are composed of oxygen gas pocketed in a layer of lipids. A Lipid is a natural molecule that can store energy and act as a part of a cell membrane, they can be made of many things such as wax, vitamins, phospholipids, and in this case fat is the lipid that stores the oxygen.

These microparticles are around two to four micrometers in length and carry about three to four times the oxygen content of our own red blood cells. In the past, researchers had a difficult time succeeding as prior tests caused gas embolism. This meant that the gas molecules would become stuck trying to squeeze through the capillaries. They corrected this issue by packaging them into small deformable particles rather ones where the structure was rigid.

Okay, I don't see how this could maintained for very long, before the carbon dioxide has to be expelled out of a person's system and that's one of the bigger functions of the lungs.  In fact, the 30 minutes limit cited in the article is very hard to believe, truth be known.  Even a few minutes without CO2 being exhaled would be fatal.  There would definitely be significant and possibly permanent damage.

But for things like localized injuries, this certainly could be extremely useful.  I'm also wondering how it could be used in therapies to fight oxygen-unfriendly situations like infection and most kinds of cancer.

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Don't want to marry your sister? There's an app for that!

Incest is a terrible thing.  But when you're one person among a population of 300 thousand, your odds of contributing to genetic bottleneck go substantially up.  That's the problem in Iceland, where just about everyone is related to everyone else and some downright... creepy... marital relations have inadvertently come about.

(I'm assuming those were inadvertent anyway...)

Enter App of Icelanders, a new app for Android-based devices.  Utilizing a database called Book of Icelanders that has data on 95% of the country's native population going back 300 years, smartphone users can find information about their family with the touch of a finger.  But the real gimmick is what the developers have named the "Incest Prevention Alarm": by merely touching your Android smartphone with another also loaded with App of Icelanders, the software automatically determines if you and the other person are cousins.  Or brothers.  Or sisters.  Or parent and child...

(Hey, it happened to Oedipus didn't it?!)

The developers have come up with a catchy ad slogan for their product: "Bump in the app before you bump in the bed".  If you have an Android phone and you're Icelandic, you can find it here.

Bump here for more about this app, which is no doubt being coded-up even as we speak for segments of the population in certain quarters of Appalachia...

Apple should jump on this for iOS gadgets.  It could be called iNcest!

(I'll just leave by the back door...)

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