Game Dev Tycoon teaches a lesson about pirating games

By Joe Jasko| May 1, 2013 |

Game Dev Tycoon is a fun new simulation game about managing your very own video game development company, and the first release by a studio called Greenheart Games. But like any game on the market these days, the $8 title was at risk of internet piracy the moment it was released. So in order to combat the expected piracy head on, the developers intentionally created a cracked version of the real game, and uploaded it to torrent sites themselves the same day of Game Dev Tycoon’s release. What better way to combat piracy than by giving an interactive lesson on how stealing games can harm a developer?

But the creative minds at Greenheart Games had a more ingenious way of punishing the pirates instead of just telling them that their copy of the game was illegal. Patrick Klug of Greenheart Games outlined the devious plan and the community’s response on the developer’s blog, amidst a heartfelt plea to buy the games that you enjoy and to support independent developers.

For the first few hours of gameplay, the cracked version of Game Dev Tycoon plays just like the genuine game does. But then here’s where things get interesting: once players have gotten their development company off the ground, the game will gradually send Sales Report notifications to inform you that consumers have begun to illegally download your products. It warns the gamer that, “If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.”

Following these messages, the player’s funds are slowly dwindled away until they are forced to close their company doors: a very real possibility for game developers today who can’t afford to stay afloat from lack of genuine purchases. Within one minute after posting the fake version of Game Dev Tycoon to a popular torrent site, Klug already found people downloading the game on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms. To put this into a broader perspective, after the first day of the game’s release, only 214 users had legally purchased the genuine version, while a whopping 3,104 users had downloaded the cracked one.

Gamers quickly flocked to the Greenheart Games forums in exasperation, after realizing they could no longer progress in the game because so many people had pirated their titles and drained away their funds. One unidentified user who had illegally pirated Game Dev Tycoon commented: “Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me!” The delicious irony was not lost on Klug and his cohorts at Greenheart Games.

Klug says the Game Dev Tycoon stunt was a unique opportunity given the subject matter of the game, but still dances around the subject of whether he will ever do something like this again. He did, however, end his post with one discomforting thought as to why so many users might be tempted to pirate games and other illegal software in the first place: “Customers get the trouble with always-on requirements and intrusive DRM, while pirates can just download and enjoy. A twisted world.”

So what do you make of Greenheart Games’ ironic message to internet pirates? If these illegal downloaders are more inconvenienced in games than paying customers are, could piracy show any signs of slowing down soon?

How to become internet famous for $68. By Kevin Ashton

Santiago Swallow may be one of the most famous people no one has heard of.

His eyes fume from his Twitter profile: he is Hollywood-handsome with high cheekbones and dirty blond, collar-length hair. Next to his name is one of social media’s most prized possessions, Twitter’s blue “verified account” checkmark. Beneath it are numbers to make many in the online world jealous: Santiago Swallow has tens of thousands of followers. The tweets Swallow sends them are cryptic nuggets of wisdom that unroll like scrolls from digital fortune cookies: “Before you lose weight, find hope,” says one. Another: “To write is to live endlessly.”

Swallow is a pure product of the Internet: a “speaker and thinker,” who specializes in “re-imagining self in the online age,” an apparent star of the prestigious TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference, and a hit at Austin’s annual art, technology and music event, South By South West (SXSW). His Wikipedia biography explains why: Swallow is “a Mexican-born, American motivational speaker, consultant, educator, and author, whose speeches and publications focus on understanding modern culture in the age of social networking, globally interconnected media, user generated content and the Internet,” who has “dedicated himself to helping others know more about how media and personality can be manipulated in the 21st Century.” Famous for its “neutral point of view,” Wikipedia also reports that Swallow’s opinions are controversial in some quarters, especially his prediction that “the disassociation of self would lead to a revision of the standard definition of Multiple Personality Disorder to include selves that only manifest in the online world.” He can be expected to take up this argument in his book, Self: Imaginary Identities in the Age of The Internet, due out later this year, something that his Wikipedia biography, his official web site (santiagoswallow.com) and his Twitter feed all confirm.

There’s just one thing about Santiago Swallow that you won’t easily find online: I made him up. Everything above is true. He really does have a Twitter feed with tens of thousands of followers, he really does have a Wikipedia biography, and he really does have an official web site. But he has never been to TED or South By South West and is not writing a book. I—or rather he—flat out lied about that. (Editor’s note: Santiago Swallow’s Twitter account was suspended after the publication of this piece. After about 30 hours the account was reinstated. In the meantime, a fake Santiago Swallow Twitter account named @SwallowSantiago appeared.)

Creating Santiago and the online proof of his existence took two hours on the afternoon of April 14 and cost $68. He was conjured out of keystrokes in a matter of minutes. I generated his name on “Scrivener,” a word processor for writers and authors. I turned the “obscurity level” of its name generator up to high, checked the box for “attempt alliteration,” and asked for 500 male names. My choices included Alonzo Arbuckle, Leon Ling, Phil Portlock and Judson Jackman, but “Santiago Swallow” just leapt out as perfect. I gave Santiago a Gmail account, which was enough to get him a Twitter account.

Then I went to the web site fiverr.com, the online equivalent of a dollar store, and searched for people selling Twitter followers. I bought Santiago 90,000 followers for $50, all of whom would, he was assured, appear on his Twitter profile within 48 hours. Next I gave him a face by mashing up three portraits from Google images using a free trial copy of Adobe’s “Lightroom” image manipulation software. I gave Santiago his “Twitter verified account” check box by putting it onto his cover image right where his name would appear. It will not fool many people, but might give him a little extra credibility with some. By the time I uploaded these images to Twitter, Santiago had developed a large “following,” even though he did not have a profile and had never tweeted anything.

To get him tweeting, I used a trial copy of TweetAdder, which automatically tweets, follows and retweets on Santiago’s behalf. His breezy platitudes come from half a dozen “mad-lib”-like phrases of the “if this, then that” variety, coupled with a list of nouns from the new age TED/SXSW hipster vocabulary: dolphins, phablets, Steve Jobs, mobile, Tom’s shoes, stevia and so on. To get his Tweet count up as fast as possible, I set TweetAdder to spit out these jewels every minute or two and hooked him up to retweet select other Twitter users, mainly from the “religion and faith” category—plus, of course, Quartz.

Last, I wrote Santiago’s Wikipedia biography—trying for something that would not attract the immediate attention of Wikipedians on the lookout for scams and self-promotion. I borrowed the biography of management thinker Peter Drucker, deleted most of it and rewrote the rest, making Santiago an expert in the fake TED-ish field of “the imagined self.” His web site cost $18 from WordPress.

Making up—or at least “enhancing”—an identity like this is something real people do to increase their reputation, look popular, and sell themselves. There are equally real people who profit from this by selling fake followers created by software at the push of a button. Twitter is awash with fakers with fake friends, many with self-created Wikipedia biographies and most of whom position themselves as “professional speakers,” “experts,” or something similar. The people in the middle—the rest of us—get duped into thinking someone is more popular than they are.

On social media, it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility, and that is exactly what the fakers are hoping for. To most people, a Twitter account with tens of thousands of followers is an easy-to-read indication of personal success and good reputation, a little like hundreds of good reviews on Yelp or a long line outside a restaurant. Looking online to learn more about somebody has become a reflex—blind daters do it, potential employers do it, potential customers do it.

Specialist social media analytics companies do it too. These businesses claim they can analyze somebody’s social media behavior and accurately evaluate their level of influence. One of the best known is “Kred,” a service provided by San Francisco company PeopleBrowsr. PeopleBrowsr says its customers include consumer goods giants Procter & Gamble and Budweiser and major advertising agencies Ogilvy & Mather and Wieden + Kennedy. Less than a day after he was invented, Santiago Swallow had a Kred influence score of 754 out of 1000. According to a free white paper Kred sent him, Santiago is living in a “new era of consumer influence: when nobodies become somebodies.”

If companies like PeopleBrowsr are so easily fooled, it is easy to see how other people might be taken in too. How can thousands of Twitter followers be wrong?

Consider Sandra Navidi. According to Wikipedia, Navidi is a “frequent media contributor,” who has “a global network with access to key decision-makers,” “frequently appears as a keynote speaker and panelist all over the world,” and “provides financial markets analysis that has resonated in the financial community.” On Twitter, Navidi has an impressive 5,000 or so followers. Which key decision-makers in the financial community follow Sandra Navidi’s resonant analysis? Mitch Tan, a “girl with simple dreams,” who only ever retweets and from three accounts; Kathleen Culver, who has 13 tweets to her name; and Vanessa from “Midwest, USA” who has tweeted 17 times, but only says things like “2eme jour sur twiiter =D.” According to Status People, a web site that analyzes Twitter users, 96% of Ms. Navidi’s followers are fake, and another 3% are inactive. Only 1%, or 50, of her followers are really following her.

Scott Steinberg, rather like Santiago Swallow, is a “keynote speaker and bestselling futurist,” and also a “business management, technology and digital lifestyle expert.” He has more than 27,000 Twitter followers, including “Buy TW Followers,” “the world’s No. 1 Twitter followers seller,” and Meg McEachin, a young woman with two followers and no tweets whatsoever. As a digital expert, Steinberg may be surprised to learn that, according to Status People, 75% of his followers are fake and another 4% are inactive. Or maybe not: we can assume he knows his “bestselling” books, are not actually bestsellers — his “Modern Parent’s Guide To Kids And Video Games” ranks two millionth on Amazon’s sales list and his “Business Expert’s Guidebook” is three millionth. They are both published by “Tech Savvy Global”—whose CEO is Scott Steinberg.

Twitter faking is not only for would-be experts and speakers. Last year, the technology blog Kernel caught a CEO named Azeem Azhar purchasing 20,000 fake followers for his Twitter account. This was potentially awkward for Azhar, as his company, Peer Index, is —like his competitor Kred—in the business of measuring online influence and reputation. (Azhar told Kernel he did it to show how easily it could be done, and that such tactics didn’t affect Peer Index rankings.) A few months later, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney received national attention for gaining 117,000 new Twitter followers in a single day. More recently, Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez, who Foreign Policy dubs one the “10 Most Influential Latin American Intellectuals” and Time says is “One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World,” has also fallen under fake follower suspicion. Sanchez’s Twitter account has 475,000 followers, but according to Status People, 19% are fake and 41% are inactive. Although this still leaves her with 230,000 real followers, it also makes her vulnerable to doubters: in February, Mexican independent newspaper La Jornada used a detailed analysis of Sanchez’s Twitter account to raise the question “¿Quién está detrás de Yoani Sánchez?”—Who is behind Yoani Sanchez?

This is another way Twitter fakers do real harm. Just because you have fake Twitter followers, it does not mean you paid for them. Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Barack Obama have all made headlines for having fake Twitter followers—many millions of them. On average, only 28% of people following the 20 most popular Twitter accounts are real. The remaining users are either fake or dormant. According to Status People’s estimates, Justin Bieber has 15 million true followers, not the 38 million his Twitter profile shows, and Rihanna, not Lady Gaga, has the second highest number of users at 9.6 million, followed by Instagram—No. 12 in the official Twitter statistics—with 9.5 million.

People with large real Twitter followings, from celebrities to activists like Yoani Sanchez, are made to look guilty when they are in fact innocent. Fake followers created for sale to impostors like Santiago Swallow follow real users in an attempt to outwit Twitter’s generally very effective spam management systems. The more followers you have, the more likely it is that a fake follower will follow you. By trying to inflate themselves with the electronic equivalent of silicon implants, fakers make the system noisy for everyone.

But it seems to work: a few hours after Santiago was invented, Scott Steinberg proudly tweeted that he was “Thrilled to be giving keynote speech at Arizona Board of Nursing’s 2014 CNA Educators Retreat.” I know because Santiago Swallow retweeted it.

Kevin Ashton helped conceive of the “Internet of Things” as an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 14 years ago. In 2010, he sold his energy tech company to consumer electronics firm Belkin, where he is now a general manager.

Egyptian Columnist: Jewish Internet Moguls Benefit Humanity And Muslims More Than Muslim Scholars And Al-Qaeda »

In an article published in the independent Egyptian daily Al-Watan on March 8, 2013, columnist Khalid Muntasir praised the Jews’ achievements in science and technology and their contribution to humanity, including to Muslims. He wrote that Jewish hi-tech magnates, especially the founders of Google and Facebook, have done much more to improve the life of humanity than the leaders of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, or Muslim scholars, who, he claims, deal with obsolete matters and trivialities.

The following are excerpts from the article:[1]

Khalid Muntasir[2]

“Long Live The Descendants Of Apes And Pigs”; Terrorists – To Hell

“When the Jewish internet and social network magnates get together, put aside their competition and unite to declare a $33-million grant for medical research on incurable diseases that prolongs human life[3] – I cannot help but cry out ‘long live the descendants of apes and pigs,’ as they were described by [Egyptian President] Dr. [Muhammad] Mursi and his [Muslim Brotherhood] movement.[4] On the other hand, those who detonate bombs in the midst of the innocent, murder tourists and eviscerate them, assassinate politicians, thinkers and intellectuals, and accuse others of being infidels can go to hell, where they can continue indulging their sick taste for violence and blood.

“The founders of Facebook and Google and the Russian billionaire [Yuri Milner] are the ones who truly love life, change it for the better, and have passion for freedom and creativity. They respect [true] scholars, as opposed to those whom we call scholars merely because they memorized 100 old books and can recite them without interpreting or even understanding them – scholars that could be replaced by a single DVD containing these books, which can be read at the stroke of a key on a keyboard costing less than $1. These emperors of the internet founded an organization that awards the world’s biggest prize without any preconditions of age, faith or gender, and with no limit on the number of times you can win. Any scientist who achieves a major breakthrough in medicine and treatment by means of genetic engineering and brain cells will receive $3 million. This prize will surely influence the advancement of medical research, accelerate change, and push universities and labs to ramp up their efforts to discover new treatments for diseases that still cause death and confound doctors.

“As I read the article on this organization, I also happened to watch a video sent to me by one of my friends, in which an important [Muslim] speaker lectured on the benefits of having a beard in treating impotence, and [explained] how the beard gives the man virility and strength. I closed the article, shut off the computer, sighed and said: It’s no use. Free us [of your discussions] on whether it is permissible to eat the flesh of demons, whether a woman can disrobe in front of a male dog, and on treatments using camel urine, fennel flower, bee stings, etc. The voice of the sheikh in the neighboring mosque rose and echoed as he cursed the Jews, the descendants of apes and pigs, [wishing] that they would scatter in every direction and that their wives become widows and their children orphans, while the worshipers rejoiced in the mighty victory…”

Who Does More Good To Humanity, Those Who Fly The Flag Of Science, Or Extremist Sheikhs?

“[As I said,] the podium at the award [ceremony] happened to feature three Jews. The first was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who predicted that in three years, Facebook would be the most populous ‘state’ in the world, overtaking China and India. Zuckerberg is one of the richest and most influential men in the world – a genius who shocked the world at 20 years old with this amazing invention called Facebook. The second was Google cofounder of Sergey Brin, of Russian origin, who owns the internet’s largest and most famous search engine, which has not been surpassed thus far. The third was Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who abandoned his PhD in physics to become an internet tycoon, but never forgot his love of physics despite his estimated fortune of over $1 billion – so much so that he gave prominent physicist Stephen Hawking a $3 million prize late last year [2012].

“By God! Who is more conscionable, moral, and loves life and his fellow man – is it these three Jews who contribute to science, health, happiness and the improvement of life, or [Al-Qaeda leaders] bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and Al-Zarqawi, [Taliban leader] Mullah ‘Omar, and those who display their pictures, kiss them, memorize their ideas and adopt them? Who does more good to humanity and the world, and even to Muslims –those who fly the flag of science, or [extremist Egyptian Sheikh] Abu Islam[5] and [the religious television show]Hatoli Ragel,[6] who hold up shoes [in a gesture of contempt for their enemies]?”

Endnotes:

[1] Al-Watan (Egypt), March 8, 2013.

[2] Image source: elwatannews.com.

[3] Referring to the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, founded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

[4] See MEMRI TV Clip No. 3702 , Morsi in 2010: No to Negotiations with the Blood-Sucking Warmongering “Descendants of Apes and Pigs”; Calls to Boycott U.S. Products, March 20 and September 23, 2010.

[5] Abu Islam is Egyptian Salafi preacher Sheikh Ahmad Mahmoud ‘Abdallah, owner of Al-Ummah TV, who is known for his extremist fatwas. For example, addressing the phenomenon of sexual attacks on women protesting in Al-Tahrir Square, he blamed the attacks on the women themselves, calling them “demons” and “devils” and claiming that 90% of them are “crusaders” while the rest are widows who have lost their femininity. See MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 942, Sexual Harassment On The Rise In Egypt, February 28, 2013.

[6] The show will air on the religious Al-Hafez TV channel and will be hosted by Salafi sheikh Mahmoud Sha’ban, who issued a fatwa sanctioning the killing of Egyptian oppositionists. See MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis Series No. 929, Fatwas Sanction Killing Of Egyptian Oppositionists, February 12, 2013.

Google Reader’s demise is awful for Iranians, who use it to avoid censorship. By Zachary M. Seward

Google’s announcement that it’s killing off Google Reader, the company’s beloved, if not wildly popular, tool for consuming RSS feeds, was met with outrage from journalists and other, largely American nerds who rely on it to efficiently churn through blogs and other websites. But the real tragedy is likely to be felt in countries like Iran, where Google Reader is used to evade government censorship.

RSS readers take raw feeds of data—headline, text, timestamp, etc.—and display that information in a stripped-down interface along with many other feeds, which is what makes them so efficient. (Here is the RSS feed for Quartz.) Less obvious is how many RSS readers, including Google’s, serve as anti-censorship tools for people living under oppressive regimes. That’s because it’s actually Google’s servers, located in the US or another country with uncensored internet, that accesses each feed. So a web user in Iran just needs access to google.com/reader in order to read websites that would otherwise be blocked.

And, indeed, Google Reader has long been accessible in Iran, where it is the most popular RSS reader. Iran would probably have to block all of Google and its many popular services in order to keep its citizens from using Reader. YouTube, by contrast, is easier to censor, though it is also owned by Google, because the video site is located on its own domain, youtube.com. Reader is also harder, though not impossible, to block because it uses more secure technology known as HTTPS.

This is Reeder, an application for consuming RSS feeds, which currently uses Google Reader to fetch new data. It has vowed to figure out an alternative method.

There are many alternatives to Google Reader, but switching is a more complicated prospect for Iranians. Many RSS readers do work like Google’s—with the service’s own servers, rather than the user’s, fetching new data from across the web—but those would be much easier to block, if they gained any traction, without the protection afforded by the popularity of Google’s other services.

The Iranian government has occasionally blocked all of Google, most recently in September 2012, but always for a limited time. It’s not clear if Iran’s move toward a domestic version of the internet will affect access to google.com. Google also hasn’t said what it might do with the Google Feed API, which is a service for programmers to access RSS feeds, usually for display on other websites. If it sticks around, the Google Feed API would potentially allow someone to build a service that replicates some of Google Reader’s core features and still rely on Google’s domain to do it.

Iranian bloggers were vocal opponents of the changes Google made to Reader in 2011, when the ability to share individual stories with other users was removed. The shared items of certain heavily followed Iranians served as de facto newspapers free from the government’s censorship regime, gaining popularity after the 2009 elections led to uprisings in Iran. The next presidential election is this June.

“Such bad luck!” wrote Vahid HT, an Iranian, on Google+ today. “What does the internet without Google Reader look like?…What harm will come to the online world?” Another person wrote in response, “Really what Google is thinking is that all revolutionary ideas do not fit with their absurd ideas.”

TALKS

Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles”

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

Pioneering online organizer Eli Pariser is the author of “The Filter Bubble,” about how personalized search might be narrowing our worldview. Full bio »

Interview: A Capitalist in North Korea (Yes, They Do Exist...) By Justin Rohrlich »

While the world was quasi-agog last week over images of Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) chairman Eric Schmidt watching students at Kim Jong Il University utilizing his company’s search engine, it’s a safe bet they won’t be networking with potential employers after graduation.

A small slice of North Korean society may be permitted to access the Internet in limited ways (according to analysts, only a thousand or so of North Korea’s 25 million people can get online; the best most can do is view the country’s walled — and heavily restricted — intranet, where state-sponsored news is available). Expats living in-country (a small number of diplomats, NGO workers, and a tiny sprinkling of brave businesspeople; a 2005 census reported 124 foreign nationals residing in Pyongyang, a city of 2.1 million) are, however, able to get online via satellite — though even they face restrictions.

“LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) blocked me when I listed my North Korean address — and I was not the only one,” Felix Abt, a Swiss entrepreneur who spent seven years living and doing business in North Korea, tells me.

Abt, co-founder of the Pyongyang Business School, former managing director of the Pyongsu Joint Venture Company, North Korea’s first-ever foreign-invested pharmaceutical enterprise, and author of the new book, A Capitalist in North Korea (Amazon Publishing Services, 2012), was unceremoniously booted from the site in 2009.

“Maybe LinkedIn’s legal department thought it was too risky or something,” Abt, now living — and working — in Nha Trang, Vietnam, says. “I don’t know.”

In fact, “as a matter of corporate policy,” LinkedIn does not allow “member accounts or access to our site from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria” under the conditions of international sanctions imposed by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. (LinkedIn is not alone; other major tech names such as Google, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) among others, also restrict access to their products from sanctioned countries, though one wonders if Eric Schmidt notified Google’s legal department that its products are being utilized at Kim Il Sung University.)

Abt’s book offers an extraordinary first-hand account of life in a place where it is almost impossible for outsiders to know what is actually happening on the ground. He could travel without being accompanied by official government minders, and (obviously) had daily contact with his North Korean staff at PyongSu — who impressed Abt as budding capitalists in a rigidly communist system.

“At the beginning, we had philosophical differences about how a business should be run,” Abt tells me. “The North Koreans were used to the socialist way of running a business. I was raised in a market economy.”

Abt’s first obstacle? Marketing.

“I explained that without it, we could never sell what we produce,” Abt tells me. “They would say, ‘No, no, in our country, nobody does that.’ Finally, I said, ‘Okay, let’s start manufacturing and see what happens.’ And nothing happened.”

With a warehouse full of product and no customers, Abt says his employees “started realizing, ‘Maybe he’s right.’”

“When it turned out that I knew what I was talking about, they started agreeing with me,” Abt continues. “Eventually, my staff started suggesting doing ‘Another advertising campaign, and another advertising campaign,’ and that was pretty amazing in itself.”

A Hermetically-Sealed Country? Not Quite.

A popular Western trope is that North Koreans are a robotic, brainwashed populace with little to no understanding of the outside world. Abt says this not true.

“I regularly took my staff to China for business, so they saw what was going on,” he explains. “I brought them to supermarkets, to restaurants; some went to the dentist or the doctor and saw how well-equipped, how well-organized, how competitive they had become — but also how expensive they were.”

Abt educated his employees on the finer points of consumerism before landing in China, describing them as “perhaps a little vulnerable.”

“The shop assistants can be very competitive and aggressive and the North Koreans are not used to this,” Abt says. “So I taught them, ‘Okay, they will set the price very high for you at the beginning, offer them half. When they say ‘no,’ walk away, they’ll call you back and go down a bit, and so forth.’ I must say, these guys learn fast.”

According to Abt, details of these experiences were quickly shared with other North Koreans via Pyongyang’s “bush telephone.”

“Of course they had to make reports to the authorities and security officials when they got home,” Abt tells me, “but they also showed their photos with friends and family. People communicate a lot; you read all these horrible stories and think the people are all afraid to talk to each other because somebody’s always watching, but I did not have this impression, really. Of course they are cautious, but not overly so.”

For this reason, Abt takes exception to reports claiming that the North Korean regime will collapse once information begins “trickling in.”

“If that were true, the system should have collapsed a long time ago,” Abt says. “People know quite well what is going on. From the South Korean soap operas they watch at home to foreign books they read at the university, there is always some information. It’s not a hermetically-sealed country, and it never has been.”

To be sure, North Korea’s reputation as one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships is well-deserved. The country reportedly detains between 150,000-200,000 political prisoners in a vast network of labor camps, though Abt avoids the topic in his book.

“There are surely gulags that may be horrible, but I didn’t come across them so I cannot write about anything I have not seen myself,” he explains.

A Middle Class Emerges

Though far from becoming a global beacon of freedom anytime soon, Abt says that, “by North Korean standards, there has been quite a practical change in society and the economy.”

“Most North Koreans today are involved in some kind of business, so they seem to have an income that allows them to buy their daily necessities in the markets,” Abt tells me. “The most important thing is that a middle class has emerged in the cities; in the countryside, there is more private farming going on — throughout North Korea, you can see plenty of farming going on on the slopes; the flatland is still reserved for the state-run farms.”

Today, the regime is slowly introducing a capitalist component to the agriculture sector.

“Workers on the state farms were promised last year that they will be allowed to sell up to 30% of their harvest to free markets at a premium,” Abt says. “Should that be realized, it’s the beginning of quite a big change, like early reforms in China and Vietnam.”

Is North Korea Now Open for Business?

Not quite. But Abt tells me he believes opening up to commerce has “become a more important priority” for the North Korean government over the past ten years.

“I’m getting a lot of proactive proposals from the North Koreans, which we haven’t experienced in the past, so there is quite a big change on that front,” Abt says. “My business partners in Pyongyang can use [file-sharing service] Dropbox, they can travel more often now, and more North Korean companies have been allowed, particularly in 2012, to interact with foreign ones.”

Still, obstacles exist for anyone seeking to do business in this most frontier of frontier markets.

Power cuts are frequent, infrastructure is crumbling, and sanctions remain strict. On the other hand, Abt says the hardships he encountered cemented deep personal bonds between him and his colleagues.

“We had to solve practical problems every day; it was a daily struggle that brought us close,” Abt recalls. “We worked hard together, but we also partied together, went to karaoke, had good dinners, went on excursions, and had fun together. I never had the feeling that I was an alien in their eyes or a potential enemy or a spy — the relationship was quite relaxed and friendly, driven by our joint goals.”

Abt and staff members celebrate International Women’s Day in Pyongyang (Photo: Felix Abt)

So, would he do it again?

“I like to go back from time to time to eat some good food and have a merry evening, but otherwise, of course, I am happy where I am now,” Abt says.

Pyongyang

Nha Trang

“Seven years is a long time.”

Photo: Aaron Swartz speaking at a rally against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in January 2012. Daniel Sieradski, via Wikimedia Commons

Why Aaron Swartz is becoming a martyr, and why you should care. By Gideon Lichfield

Martyrs tend to be made quickly, before the dust has settled on their lives, or their deaths. Such is the case with Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old digital activist who apparently hanged himself at his home in New York City on Jan. 11. His family and friends say Swartz, who was prone to depression, felt hounded by prosecutors who were threatening him with up to 35 years in jail for computer hacking. Though Swartz was little known outside the circles of the geek world—and was hardly a celebrity even in internet terms, with a modest 7,000-odd followers on Twitter at the time of his death—there has been an outpouring of online tributes and media articles about him.

His rapid elevation to tragic folk hero is easy to understand when you look at his life. To those who knew him, Swartz was a kind of Arthur Rimbaud for the internet age: an impassioned, difficult, capricious, endearing, depressive boy genius who was doing foundational work by his mid-teens, and brought it to an end (albeit, in Rimbaud’s case, not by suicide) when barely an adult.

The long list of projects that made up his brief but astonishingly productive career (covered in detail elsewhere) were united by a fierce commitment to making knowledge as widely available as possible. His early work included helping develop the Creative Commons license, a form of copyright that lets authors make their work shareable and even modifiable while still keeping rights to it; later he launched a free online repository of books and campaigned against legislation that would have greatly empowered copyright holders at the expense of internet startups. The charges he faced for his latest escapade were 13 felony counts for the theft of online documents—not, as you might surmise, diplomatic cables or nuclear-weapon designs, but academic journal articles from an online archive, JSTOR, which he downloaded with the presumed goal of making them available for free, as he had previously done with a massive stash of US court records. The prosecution continued even though JSTOR withdrew its complaint and has since made itself largely free to the public anyway.

The troubled young prodigy with the free-thinking ideals, the heartless bureaucrats exercising absurd governmental overreach—all the elements of a good myth, and in particular a good American myth, are here. And not just because of the tragic arc of his own life. Swartz fills a particular slot in modern American left-wing iconography, one that was waiting for an occupant. His acts of radical document liberation echo those of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, and Bradley Manning, the American soldier believed to have sent Assange a trove of leaked US diplomatic cables (and whose trial begins in March.) But with Assange discredited and Manning’s motives unclear—and he did, after all, leak government secrets, not harmless academic papers or public records—Swartz represents a less tarnished ideal. As an icon for the information-freedom movement he perhaps serves the purpose that Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers (but is still very much alive), did for the press freedom and anti-war movement in the 1970s.

Not that Swartz’s friends and colleagues all agreed with some of his methods. They certainly did not agree with his killing himself, their sadness mixed with anger at him for throwing away his life and his potential. Nor are they all overjoyed at his sudden beatification. Swartz’s friend danah boyd, a researcher into internet culture and a digital activist herself, wrote:

I… fear the likelihood that Aaron will be turned into a martyr, an abstraction of a geek activist destroyed by the State. Because he was a lot more than that–lovable and flawed, passionate and strong-willed, brilliant and infuriatingly stupid. It’ll be easy for folks to rally cry for revenge in his name. But not much is gained from reifying the us vs. them game that got us here… I think we need to look for an approach to change-making that doesn’t result in brilliant people being held up as examples so that they can be tormented by power.

All movements that agitate for change make progress thanks to a mixture of radicals and moderates in their ranks. Swartz will be a martyr to some, and will inspire some young activists to commit extremist or foolhardy acts. It’s probably too late to stop that happening. But for the broader public, his death puts a human face to fundamental debates otherwise expressed largely in legalese and acronyms—SOPA, PIPA, PACER—about what sort of information society should be able to access without restriction. If his death helps makes those complex issues more widely understood, it will not have been entirely in vain—though if only he had stayed alive, he would undoubtedly have achieved far more.

Guns, unlike almost every other technology, are unique in that the more they improve, the less safe they become…The AR-15 shows how guns have become gadgets, thanks to technological change and an army of fanboys connected over the Internet. It’s a military weapon in the hands of civilians, so exquisitely designed that it might as well have been invented in Cupertino by Apple. It’s the iPhone 5 of guns, only instead of an app ecosystem, it has an ecosystem of parts and ammunition designed to make it as effective as possible.

“

—	Christopher Mims on how guns became gadgets

Why HP, Dell and IBM Are on the Wrong Side of Internet History. By Jason Hoffman

Photo: Peter McCollough / Wired

In 1956, the first modern container ship traveled from Newark to Houston. It seems like such a simple idea now: a boat carrying not random little crates, but massive containers that could easily be moved onto trains and trucks and straight into factories. The arrangement took years to construct, perfect and implement. But once it was put into use, the global shipping industry would never be the same.

Containers revolutionized the shipping industry because they made it easier to transport massive quantities of inexpensive goods from port to port. Suddenly, small crates – and the shipmen who earned a living loading them on and off boats – became irrelevant. Goods could stay in their containers for the duration of their journey from one factory to another, saving significant time, money and effort.

Today, an analogous transformation is taking place: This time, we’re transporting digital, not physical goods. Rather than physical factories, we’re seeing the rise of digital ones.

The heavy hitters in tech – think Facebook, Google and Amazon – can’t survive on small-scale servers.

Or, as they’re more commonly known: data centers.

In this analogy, those small crates and hardworking shipmen are the former powerhouse data-center server makers Dell, HP and IBM. Whereas businesses once purchased servers from these big three to store and transport their digital goods, they’re now choosing to make their own servers and data centers.

Why? Because there’s greater potential for efficiency. The rise of the digital “data factory” will be similar to the rise of the physical factory in how it affects different businesses. Namely, big businesses will build their own. And those little “crates”? They’ll become a thing of the past.

We’re already seeing this revolution in motion. The heavy hitters in tech – think Facebook, Google and Amazon – can’t survive on small-scale servers. So they’ve gone on to build out their own “data factories” that are faster, more scalable and more flexible. These self-made data centers can process a lot more data than the standard packaged ones with which server vendors have long dominated the market.

Further evidence of this can be seen from some interesting data Intel CIO Diane Bryant shared with Wired just a few months ago. She said that in 2008, 75 percent of Intel server chip revenue came from three server makers: IBM, Dell and HP. In 2012, it’s eight companies, not three, which account for 75 percent of revenue.

Four years ago, most companies were buying servers from the big three – but the new statistics from Bryant indicate there’s now been a shift in the market. HP denied the validity of these numbers, stating that HP, Dell and IBM combined still held 73.9 percent of market share. But if you look at the how the data center has actually evolved, Bryant’s data confirms the server industry is being disrupted.

And three key trends have evolved as a result of this disruption:

Individual companies have grown as big as the big server vendors. Today, there’s so much data in existence that a single company can command a server volume close to the size of a single vendor’s entire business. If Dell has a volume of 2 million servers and your company requires 1 million, you suddenly comprise half the total volume of one vendor’s business – and that’s when it stops making sense to do business with the middleman. Just ask Google, which sits pretty at number five on Intel’s list of top eight server makers. The search giant doesn’t even sell servers; it simply needs so many of them to run its business that it makes more sense to build the servers and data centers themselves.

Companies making parts are consolidating and standardizing. Another trend we’ve seen is fewer companies in the business of making server components. We’re left with just three major fabricators in Intel, Samsung and TSMC; and just two major companies that make hard drives (Seagate and Western Digital). This unprecedented consolidation makes it significantly easier for companies that want to build their own data centers, because it means more standardization of parts. Companies can pick and choose the parts they want to use from all three fabricators.

Components are becoming commoditized. Once, the servers themselves were the commodity. But now, we’re seeing the commoditization of server parts. The purchase of these server components – boards, network interface controllers and chips – signifies a shift in the market. It indicates that companies are making their own servers and data centers, rather than buying hardware from someone else and renting space in someone else’s computing facility. And perhaps more significantly, Intel has taken note of this trend and has started offering warranties on individual parts.

What we’re seeing here in the world of servers and data centers is exactly what we saw when factories and containers revolutionized the shipping industry over 50 years ago.

Shipping containers changed the way we store and transport physical goods. Modern data centers change the way we store and transport digital goods. Computers and servers were the focus of our industry before the data center, just as small crates were the focus of the shipping industry before the container. But now data centers are being built and customized … just like the containers and factories before them.

What does all this mean? It means big businesses will build and manage their own data centers. Small businesses will want to rent space in the bigger data centers.

It’s a new sort of “cloud computing”; a holistic concept that will maximize efficiency and take our economy to the next level. But the bottom line is that this business will no longer be about who’s building the box.

Jason Hoffman is the CTO of Joyent. An expert on scalable systems, Hoffman earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Pathology at The Burnham Institute and UCSD School of Medicine, and MS and BS in Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA.

Why the world is arguing over who runs the internet. By Wendy M. Grossman

The ethos of freedom from control that underpins the web is facing its first serious test, says Wendy M. Grossman

WHO runs the internet? For the past 30 years, pretty much no one. Some governments might call this a bug, but to the engineers who designed the protocols, standards, naming and numbering systems of the internet, it’s a feature.

The goal was to build a network that could withstand damage and would enable the sharing of information. In that, they clearly succeeded - hence the oft-repeated line from John Gilmore, founder of digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” These pioneers also created a robust platform on which a guy in a dorm room could build a business that serves a billion people.

But perhaps not for much longer. This week, 2000 people have gathered for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to discuss, in part, whether they should be in charge.

The stated goal of the Dubai meeting is to update the obscure International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), last revised in 1988. These relate to the way international telecom providers operate. In charge of this process is the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency set up in 1865 with the advent of the telegraph. Its $200 million annual budget is mainly funded by membership fees from 193 countries and about 700 companies. Civil society groups are only represented if their governments choose to include them in their delegations. Some do, some don’t. This is part of the controversy: the WCIT is effectively a closed shop.

Vinton Cerf, Google’s chief internet evangelist and co-inventor of the TCP/IP internet protocols, wrote in May that decisions in Dubai “have the potential to put government handcuffs on the net”.

The need to update the ITRs isn’t surprising. Consider what has happened since 1988: the internet, Wi-Fi, broadband, successive generations of mobile telephony, international data centres, cloud computing. In 1988, there were a handful of telephone companies - now there are thousands of relevant providers.

Controversy surrounding the WCIT gathering has been building for months. In May, 30 digital and human rights organisations from all over the world wrote to the ITU with three demands: first, that it publicly release all preparatory documents and proposals; second, that it open the process to civil society; and third that it ask member states to solicit input from all interested groups at national level. In June, two academics at George Mason University in Virginia - Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado - set up the WCITLeaks site, soliciting copies of the WCIT documents and posting those they received. There were still gaps in late November when .nxt, a consultancy firm and ITU member, broke ranks and posted the lot on its own site.

The issue entered the mainstream when Greenpeace and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) launched the Stop the Net Grab campaign, demanding that the WCIT be opened up to outsiders. At the launch of the campaign on 12 November, Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the ITUC, pledged to fight for as long it took to ensure an open debate on whether regulation was necessary. “We will stay the distance,” she said.

This marks the first time that such large, experienced, international campaigners, whose primary work has nothing to do with the internet, have sought to protect its freedoms. This shows how fundamental a technology the internet has become.

A week later, the European parliament passed a resolution stating that the ITU was “not the appropriate body to assert regulatory authority over either internet governance or internet traffic flows”, opposing any efforts to extend the ITU’s scope and insisting that its human rights principles took precedence. The US has always argued against regulation.

Efforts by ITU secretary general Hamadoun Touré to spread calm have largely failed. In October, he argued that extending the internet to the two-thirds of the world currently without access required the UN’s leadership. Elsewhere, he has repeatedly claimed that the more radical proposals on the table in Dubai would not be passed because they would require consensus.

These proposals raise two key fears for digital rights campaigners. The first concerns censorship and surveillance: some nations, such as Russia, favour regulation as a way to control or monitor content transiting their networks.

The second is financial. Traditional international calls attract settlement fees, which are paid by the operator in the originating country to the operator in the terminating country for completing the call. On the internet, everyone simply pays for their part of the network, and ISPs do not charge to carry each other’s traffic. These arrangements underpin network neutrality, the principle that all packets are delivered equally on a “best efforts” basis. Regulation to bring in settlement costs would end today’s free-for-all, in which anyone may set up a site without permission. Small wonder that Google is one of the most vocal anti-WCIT campaigners.

How worried should we be? Well, the ITU cannot enforce its decisions, but, as was pointed out at the Stop the Net Grab launch, the system is so thoroughly interconnected that there is plenty of scope for damage if a few countries decide to adopt any new regulatory measures.

This is why so many people want to be represented in a dull, lengthy process run by an organisation that may be outdated to revise regulations that can be safely ignored. If you’re not in the room you can’t stop the bad stuff.

Wendy M. Grossman is a science writer and the author of net.wars (NYU Press)

From issue 2894 of New Scientist magazine, page 28-29.

Tense talks around national regulation of the internet. At the International Telecommunications Union talks in Dubai, a surprise proposal has emerged backed by Arab states, Russia, and China to require governments to regulate Internet companies. Enshrining this in an international treaty could add legitimacy to online restrictions and censorship by repressive regimes. The discussions are supposed to lead to a final treaty by Friday.

What If NASA Could Figure Out the Math of a Workable Warp Drive? By Rebecca J. Rosen

american-samoa:

A new line of research hopes to drastically reduce the amount of energy required for warping space-time, and get us to Alpha Centauri in just two weeks time.

Alpha, Beta, and Proxima Centauri (Wikimedia Commons)

When, a few weeks ago, astronomers announced that an Earth-sized planet had been detected orbiting a Alpha Centauri B, a star in the closest system of stars to our own, and that this planet might, just might, mean that there is another planet, maybe another Earth-sized one, maybe, just maybe, in that magical distance from a sun that could give rise to life, and that all this was taking place right there in our galactic backyard, the next thought was inevitable: What if there is life there?

What if we, the people of the early 21st century, could be among the generation — the first and only of all the generations ever — that would be first to know that we were not alone?

But then there is the inevitable letdown: Even if we did find a planet in one of those nearby stars’ habitable zone and even, even, if we could detect an atmosphere that could harbor life, then what? Alpha Centauri may be the closest star system to Earth, but it’s still four light years away. Voyager 1, our farthest-traveled probe is moving at *38,000 miles per hour*, and after 35 years, it’s still in our solar system (barely). Moving at Voyager’s speed, it would take 700 *centuries* for a mission to reach Alpha Centauri. With speeds like that, we stand to become the first generation to know life is out there, and to not be able to know much more than that. The prospect is maddening.

Of course, our only hope would be to travel at much, much greater speeds. As MIT astronomer Sara Seager explained here at The Atlantic to Ross Andersen:

There are a lot of people who think we have the capabilities to get to a tenth of the speed of light. People are using that number as a benchmark of what they think is attainable, whether it’s with a solar sail or nuclear pulse propulsion. If we could achieve that speed, then we could get to Alpha Centauri in just over 40 years.

Whenever I give a talk to a public audience I explain the hazards of living on a spacecraft for 40 years, the fact that life could be extremely tedious, and could possibly even include some kind of induced hibernation. But then I always ask if anyone in the audience would volunteer for a 40+ year journey, and every single time I get a show of hands. And then I say “oh I forgot to mention, it’s a one way trip,” and even then I get the same show of hands. This tells me that our drive to explore is so great that if and when engineers succeed at traveling at least 10 percent of the speed of light, there will be people willing to make the journey. It’s just a matter of time.

So, one-tenth the speed of light and we could be there in 40 years. That’s not half bad. As Seager notes, many people would be willing to give up Earth and make that assuredly miserable journey for the privilege of being the first humans to explore another solar system. But still: 40 years, it’s no cakewalk.

That’s why a new number, care of NASA physicist Harold White, is so stunning: Two weeks. Two weeks to Alpha Centauri, he told io9, if only we can travel by warping space-time.

Of course, of course, easier said than done, but White thinks it’s possible, and he and a team at NASA are at the very early stages of making it so. io9’s George Dvorsky explains:

The idea came to White while he was considering a rather remarkable equation formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper titled, “The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity,” Alcubierre suggested a mechanism by which space-time could be “warped” both in front of and behind a spacecraft.

Michio Kaku dubbed Alcubierre’s notion a “passport to the universe.” It takes advantage of a quirk in the cosmological code that allows for the expansion and contraction of space-time, and could allow for hyper-fast travel between interstellar destinations. Essentially, the empty space behind a starship would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction — passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration. …

In terms of the engine’s mechanics, a spheroid object would be placed between two regions of space-time (one expanding and one contracting). A “warp bubble” would then be generated that moves space-time around the object, effectively repositioning it — the end result being faster-than-light travel without the spheroid (or spacecraft) having to move with respect to its local frame of reference.

And that’s not even the hard part: Ever since this idea was floated, the catch has been the absolutely enormous amount of energy such an event would require. As White explains, “Space-time is really stiff, so to create the expansion and contraction effect in a useful manner in order for us to reach interstellar destinations in reasonable time periods would require a lot of energy.” When he says a lot, he doesn’t mean a couple of nuclear-power plants’ worth; he means energy equal to the mass-energy of Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system. So that’s not going to work.

But, as Dvorsky explains, White has recently come up with a new design for a warp drive, one that, theoretically, would require way, way less energy. “I suddenly realized,” he told Dvorsky, “that if you made the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring larger — like shifting from a belt shape to a donut shape — and oscillate the warp bubble, you can greatly reduce the energy required — perhaps making the idea plausible.” White believes that with his new design, warp drive could be achieved with the power of a mass that is even smaller than Voyager 1’s. I’m not going to pretend that I have the faintest clue how this would work or how NASA would conceivably build such a thing, but the idea that physicists at NASA are even toying with it gives me hope that interstellar travel could one day be possible, even if this isn’t how it is ultimately accomplished.

White emphasizes that all of this is *extremely* preliminary, just theoretical math and some very small-scale lab experiments. Additionally, other scientists have raised concerns that warp drive could be potentially very dangerous, potentially destroying the destination in its path. But, still, it’s an exciting reminder that the parameters we accept today may some day melt away.

REBECCA J. ROSEN - Rebecca J. Rosen is an associate editor at The Atlantic. She was previously an associate editor at The Wilson Quarterly, where she spearheaded the magazine’s In Essence section.

Talks continue on control of the internet.

american-samoa:

A UN agency, the International Telecommunications Union, has been meeting in Dubai to discuss proposals for regulating the internet. Some American commentators say this sort of talk is terrible, as it may lead to repressive regimes being able to suppress comment about them made in freer societies. The New York Times’s Eric Pfanner argues that the panic is overblown. Talks began yesterday and continue today.

Pledge your support for the free and open Internet:

“A free and open world depends on a free and open Internet. Governments alone, working behind closed doors, should not direct its future. The billions of people around the globe who use the Internet should have a voice.”

Make your voice heard.

They sure seem to have their priorities right

Damascus Demonstration: To Hell with Freedom, We Want an Islamic Caliphate and Weapons