#seriously though fuck recent mobile game ads

[colors-of-my-heart]

sometimes I find myself getting really mad about mobile game ads and how they are only getting more grotesque and exploitative with time, desperately grappling to stand out by shocking their viewers, but then I remember that without them we wouldn’t have long live lgbtq cowboy mafia boss and I feel a little bit better

[fleshwerks]

Thoughts on new Dragon Age "teaser"? You have the best takes.

I'll be deadly honest, I didn't even realise it was out, that's how checked out I am, but I will always fall hook line and sinker for a delicious bait made of things I can chew on, so let's seeeeeee. I'll do first impressions for now. I'll warn you, I haven't done 'takes' in ages, I've seriously lost my edge and resemble someone yelling at a cloud more than someone with intelligent or at least entertaining takes. Proceed on your own volition. Note, I have not been keeping up with DA4 updates. At all. I am literally grasping at straws and screaming out of my arse.

I'll say this. I believe Mark Darrah who had retired from BioWare was brought back on to save this tattered ship that had failed to launch how many times now? If you were with DAI and Anthem especially, you know that when a vet of that calibre is being brought on board towards the end of production, you're fucked. The sheer scope of the regions visited in the trailer... I wouldn't blink an eye if it was a turn-based strategy game, but it is not.

I'm surprised how shit the game visually looks, but it's been my criticism with the thus far released art, and now, environment assets. And again, I'm coming off of Anthem, and Anthem was truly, truly gorgeous. Now someone might argue that every DA has had its distinctive visual style. Well I thought DA2, for what it was, sure did look inspired. I didn't enjoy the game or the characters, but I enjoyed looking at it. Dragon Age Inquisition kind of lost me aesthetically, but I see what they did there. It was more generic, certainly not attempting to be photorealistic, but I saw the idea and accepted it.

Now this though? What is this? The panning over what I presume is Treviso literally looks like a mobile game ad.

Ok, fine, I'll not go in on the visuals, I'm too fresh out of art college and I'm so anal-retentive that my o-ring's more pinched than a pinprick about this stuff. Moving on.

I believe the new PC is an Antivan Crow? Since when are they fighting for all of Antiva? Everyone??? Since when?! Zevran's canonically not returning, and even he was compassionately practical on his best days. The Crows are not good people. They buy kids to train for miserable jobs meeting miserable ends. Oh, so we had a whole character who gave the Crows a finger for being the shitshow they were, but now they're this resistance task force? What, why, because the 'Islamic Borg' invaded?

Then. I feel like I'm missing a fuckton of contest because I haven't read the preceding comics and stories, I have one comic book from the DAI-DA4 interim and it ended so disappointingly, I never bothered after that.

We're really retconning all the complex and complicated factions into freedom fighters, aren't we. I guess such is the state of our real world. Always a plucky band of people belonging to formerly shitty fucking organisations suddenly saving the day like heroes, possibly somewhere along the way ruminating for 2 seconds on whether they deserve to pat themselves on the back, landing on 'but we will change how we operate, and we will save the world, always!'

I'm into the Rivaini squid though. I've never been fond of Rivain, not just because parts of the fandom like to present this place that has barely been talked about in canon like some haven for... idk. I just didn't expect squids. And you people know I love marine invertebrates. You know what, fuck it, here's my 'best take': have squid, will travel!

But that port city ravaged recently by the dragons in ruins looks like it's been in ruins for the past 2000 years, only recently excavated. It's so clean. And here I go again with the aesthetics.

Anyway, Falon'din and/or dirthamen is fuckin' around in Rivain, aren't they. Because I believe that head shape, multi-hands etc were presented in many of the statues we saw in DAII, and given that Falon'din's proverbial crows, envy and nightmare were so prominently featured, and sexyman Solas' outright resentment for former master Dirthamen and the vain Falon'din, welll... risen gods. Dirthamen at the very least was associated with watery depths, but they're twins (or are they? Perhaps the facets of one person altogether)... Anyway, I'm more interested in what the fuck is happening in Weisshaupt. That part genuinely interests me. Circling back to Dirthamen, Razikale is the dragon of Mystery. Associated with Dirthamen, at least according to my theory, while Urthemiel was the Dragon of Beauty, and we keep getting indications that Falon'din was pretty, aggressive, and exceedingly vain. So Big Dirty's up next. Falon'din had the crows, right? Both defeated in DAI. He's out, more or less. And again, Solas most likely was Dirthamen's student before he decided that he himself didn't want to be but totally wanted to be revered. So my take is that Razikale, who got mentions in DAI is waking up as well.

The villain gods of this mess, the classic Dragon Age false gods we fight in every single game as end bosses, will be connected to Dirt. Eh. Same eagle, different liver.

Anyway I have a doubt that this kind of scope will end anywhere nice. The production's been fraught as fuck to the point where the panic button has been pressed many times. The art looks like a significant downgrade, the production has been filled with veterans just clocking the fuck out.

It doesn't sound interesting. I'm tired of saving the world as an Eastern European in late 2023. This kind of story does not speak to me at all anymore. Not after 2019, not after 2021. It looks dated and mediocre, the story is so old that if it goes where I think it will, it has no relevance or message for anybody but perhaps some American audiences (some). I'm just... I'm not.

The rah-rah I got from that clip leaves me ice cold. There is no rah-rah in such widespread misery. There are only curse words and the sound of grinding teeth, and everybody's a dick, and everybody's dick past is dredged up hard. No retcons.

I don't want it. It better receive insanely high marks for me to play it. And I loved this franchise, two of the PCs have gone on to be archetypal in my private works now.

The mystery is gone. The power creep... I don't want to hang out with gods. They should have never been brought into the story as characters you can extensively hang out with. Edit: basically the entire thing sounds about as exciting as a somewhat well-produced mobile game. Which is fun to fuck with while taking the metro, but...

[bellmo15-blog]

NINTENDO HAS FORGOTTEN ABOUT ZELDA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hello everyone, SidonSimpNumber1111101 here bringing you another video. In this video I’m gonna explain to you in excruciating detail about how NINTENDO HAS ABOANDOND THE LEGEND OF ZELDA AND DOESN’T CARE ABOUT IT ANYMORE! But before we get into that make sure to hit that like button and please subscribe even though this is likely your first video of mine you’re watching but 0% of you people watching are actually subscribed so I need that ad revenue. Do you want me to go poor? Do you want me to be kicked out of my house and live on the street? FUCKING SUBSCRIBE ALREADY YOU DINGLEBAT!!! Also, I just want to point out that this video is sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends. Stay tuned to the middle of the video where I will randomly segway into the add.

So some of you may be watching this and have no idea what the Legend of Zelda series is. And that is an understandable thing to wonder seeing as how it’s been five months since the last game which is too long for a series to go without a new game so let me give you some history. You see, our story actually begins well before the Nintendo Entertainment System was even a thing. When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child of around 10 or so years I think while out exploring he found a cave but knew that he…

“Dude, just skip this whole part. Seriously.”

Wha… Who the Hell are you!?

“Oh, you know. BellmoTheGreat. The guy who runs this page? The guy who’s house you’ve broken into just to make this video? The video that you, ignoring the overly long intro, thought to start the video proper by giving people an overly long history lesion about how the Zelda series was even created while also ignoring the fact that most people watching this will likely be Zelda fans who already know the series history?”

But…. It’s important to the topic of the video!?

“How is going into overly long detail about a history that most people know already anyway relevant to the topic of how Nintendo has ‘’’forgotten’’’ Zelda? Be honest, you just want an excuse to get this video over 10 minutes for the sake of monetization.”

…… Okay, well maybe the people DO know the history. In that case, let’s skip to the important part of this video. Our sponsor! Raid Shadow Legends is a free to play mobile…

“No dude, don’t do this either!”

What!? Don’t get sponsors!?!? Do you WANT me to go hungry!?!?

“No, I mean DON’T put the ad for your sponsor in the middle of your video! This is something that literally every Youtuber has been doing recently and it’s really annoying when it happens because not only does it interrupt the video randomly but everyone always skips it anyway! I know this because any time you people put an ad in the middle of your video’s I can literally see where the add ends thanks to the ‘most replayed’ part of the video tab where everyone always skips two.”

Well then mister ‘I don’t even have a 100,000 subscribers on my channel’ where SHOULD I put my ads?

“Oh, I don’t know. How about at THE END of a video!? Where it won’t feel like it interrupts anything?”

You know, that is actually smart advice. So I’ll ignore it come next video.

“*Sigh.*”

Anyway, the reason Nintendo has forgotten about one of their greatest video game franchises is because IT’S BEEN FIVE MONTHS MAN!!! THAT’S TWO LONG TO GO WITHOUTH A NEW GAME!!! Does Nintendo just not care anymore!?!? Has Nintendo just forgotten about its most important franchise!?!? The Switch barley has any Zelda representation on it at all! We need a new game! We need a new ANYTHING! WE NEED A NEW…

“Stop! Okay just… stop!”

Oh what now!?!?

“Nintendo ‘doesn’t care for the Zelda series anymore?’ Mate, do you even read your scripts? Or did you just take the easy way out and use ChatBotGT to write this because you have such little confidence in yourself in regards to your writing?”

Yes I do read my own scripts that I write! I’m reading it right now as I’m recording this! And it’s true! Nintnedo DOES NOT care for Zelda anymore.

“………… Hey, you know how you tried to start this video of with a pointless history lesion?”

What? Why are you…

“March 3rd 2017. The Nintendo Switch launches and one of the launch titles is Zelda Breath of the Wild. A game that was announced back in 2013 well before anyone even knew about the Nintendo Switch and was one of the most anticipated games for the Wii U. And while the Wii U version did get released nearly everyone who got a Switch also got the Switch version of Breath of the Wild even if they already had a Wii U. I know this is true because I was one of those people. It then goes on to be one of the best selling games in the series and would get DLC later on in the year for both versions.

The following year not only does Hyrule Warriors get re-released on the Nintendo Switch but it is arguably the best way to play the game because it has all of the DLC content that was added to prior releases as well as the gameplay additions that were added on the Legends release such as character switching and the My Fairy system. And let’s not forget how Mario Kart 8 Deluxe got updated to add in a new costume for Link of his Breath of the Wild design along with the Master Cycle Zero from the BotW DLC. Or Super Smash Bros Ultimate also coming out that year which not only featured Breath of the Wild Link but also Link Between Worlds Zelda, Ocarina of Time Gannondorf, both Young Link and Toon Link along with returning Zelda Themed stages from Twilight Princess, Wind Waker, Spirit Tracks and the new Shieka Tower and pair that with Ultimate's new Spirit System and you got a Smash game that represents nearly everything Zelda related! Or how about Nintendo Switch Online adding in Nintendo Entertainment System games and one of those games that was bundled with its launch was the very first Legend of Zelda game with Adventure of Link eventually being added later?

2019, Nintendo does another Zelda crossover between them and Crypt of the Necrodancer in the form of Cadence of Hyrule. SNES games are added to NSO and guess what one of the first games that got added was? That’s right, Zelda Link to the Past! Oh and also the remake of Link’s Awakening was both announced and released this year along with the then un-named sequel to Breath of the Wild also being announced at E3!

2020! Not only does Hyrule Warriors get a sequel with Age of Calamity, but it also serves as a prequel to the events of Breath of the Wild. And then there’s Nintendo 64 games being added to Nintendo Switch Online via the expansion. For as much shit as this service gets it did also come with Ocarina of Time as one of the first games along with Majora’s Mask also being added later.

Then 2021 comes and Skyward Sword is announced to be getting a Switch Port. Controversial as this game might be it is still an important part of the Zelda series and still a game many hold close to there hearts. Also, Age of Calamity gets DLC. Towards the end of the year Nintendo releases a Zelda Game and Watch similar to the Mario one released the prior year which came with Zelda 1, 2, the original Link’s Awakening and a Zelda skin version of the Game and Watch classic Wack and Mole.

Yes, 2022 was mostly a silent year but when 2023 rolled around not only did we get Minish Cap re-released via the Gameboy Advanced feature of NSO but Tears of the Kingdom finally releases in May! Oh, and also Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages are added to NSO as well. 2 months ago! In July! In fact, the Nintendo Switch has had SO MUCH Zelda in the past six years of it’s life that it’s amazing you can title this video ‘Nintendo has forgotten about Zelda’ with a straight face. Even if you don’t want to count everything in between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom because they were either spin offs, remakes or re-releases you still had so much Zelda to hold you over in the past half decade! Compare that to a franchise like the Mother series where only the second game was ever released internationally under the name of just Earthbound on the SNES in the 90’s, Mother 3 never getting an official release outside Japan despite Nintendo being aware of the fact that people want the game to officially be released and the only official Mother related things we have gotten since then are the first game finally getting localized in 2015 and released on the Wii U eShop titled Earthbound Beginnings along with the expected re-released of Earthbound on NSO. Or how about Startropics where the last game was released in 1994? That franchise is two years older than me! So tell me, with all that considered, how has Nintendo ‘forgotten’ about Zelda friend?”

… Umm… Well… Okay, if your going to be like that then I’ll just say they have forgotten about another Nintendo franchsie like Splatoon!

“*Sigh.* One year! It’s been one year since Splatoon 3 released and it’s still being regularly updated with new stuff and has players still playing it. Hell, we JUST got a trailer for the Side Order DLC recently so can you really say Splatoon is ‘forgotten?’”

Okay then… Pikmin!

“Not only has Pikmin 4 been released this year but you can get every single prior Pikmin game on Switch as well! The Switch is literally the best way to play this series since it’s all there minus Hey Pikmin.”

Umm… Err… F-Zero! Yeah I could totally make a video on F-Zero!

“Okay, ignoring the fact that it took 20 years for a new entry in this series to even come out Nintendo said that they HAD wanted to make a new F-Zero game for years but they just couldn’t think of a good enough gimmick to justify making a new game.”

……… Pokemon?

“*Sigh.* Just get out of my house! Please!”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago Oh for fuck's sake, not this fucking bullshit again (cryptography edition)

America, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Australia are in a surveillance alliance called The Five Eyes, through which they share much of their illegally harvested surveillance data.

In a recently released Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption, the Five Eyes powers have demanded, again, that strong cryptography be abolished and replaced with defective cryptography so that they can spy on bad guys.

They defend this by saying "Privacy is not absolute."

But of course, working crypto isn't just how we stay private from governments (though god knows all five of the Five Eyes have, in very recent times, proven themselves to be catastrophically unsuited to collect, analyze and act on all of our private and most intimate conversations). It's how we make sure that no one can break into the data from our voting machines, or push lethal fake firmware updates to our pacemakers, or steal all the money from all of the banks, or steal all of the kompromat on all 22,000,000 US military and government employees and contractors who've sought security clearance.

Also, this is bullshit.

Because it won't work.

Here's the text of my go-to post about why this is so fucking stupid. I just can't be bothered anymore. Jesus fucking christ. Seriously? Are we still fucking talking about this? Seriously? Come on, SERIOUSLY?

It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest ��� on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, there is the question of whether encryption can be made secure while still maintaining a “master key” for the authorities’ use. As lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer explained, adding the complexity of master keys to our technology will “introduce unquantifiable security risks”. It’s hard enough getting the security systems that protect our homes, finances, health and privacy to be airtight – making them airtight except when the authorities don’t want them to be is impossible.

What these leaders thinks they're saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. These officials don't understand technology very well, so they doesn't actually know what they're asking for.

For this proposal to work, they will need to stop Britons, Canadians, Americans, Kiwis and Australians from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of their jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

Australia is not alone here. The regime they proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Australian governments have already shown that they believes they can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the 5 Eyes nations are allowed to execute. This is very hard. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other states are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or Mexico could come to the 5 Eyes countries with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what the Five Eyes are proposing:

* All 5 Eyes citizens' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of a 5 Eyes government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked in the 5 Eyes

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the 5 Eyes must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of 5 Eyes countries, and within those countries, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting a 5 Eyes country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

The Five Eyes officials will say that they doesn't want to do any of this. They'll say that they can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the every 5 Eyes nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

That’s a technical argument, and it’s a good one, but you don’t have to be a cryptographer to understand the second problem with back doors: the security services are really bad at overseeing their own behaviour.

Once these same people have a back door that gives them access to everything that encryption protects, from the digital locks on your home or office to the information needed to clean out your bank account or read all your email, there will be lots more people who’ll want to subvert the vast cohort that is authorised to use the back door, and the incentives for betraying our trust will be much more lavish than anything a tabloid reporter could afford.

If you want a preview of what a back door looks like, just look at the US Transportation Security Administration’s “master keys” for the locks on our luggage. Since 2003, the TSA has required all locked baggage travelling within, or transiting through, the USA to be equipped with Travelsentry locks, which have been designed to allow anyone with a widely held master key to open them.

What happened after Travelsentry went into effect? Stuff started going missing from bags. Lots and lots of stuff. A CNN investigation into thefts from bags checked in US airports found thousands of incidents of theft committed by TSA workers and baggage handlers. And though “aggressive investigation work” has cut back on theft at some airports, insider thieves are still operating with impunity throughout the country, even managing to smuggle stolen goods off the airfield in airports where all employees are searched on their way in and out of their work areas.

The US system is rigged to create a halo of buck-passing unaccountability. When my family picked up our bags from our Easter holiday in the US, we discovered that the TSA had smashed the locks off my nearly new, unlocked, Travelsentry-approved bag, taping it shut after confirming it had nothing dangerous in it, and leaving it “completely destroyed” in the words of the official BA damage report. British Airways has sensibly declared the damage to be not their problem, as they had nothing to do with destroying the bag. The TSA directed me to a form that generated an illiterate reply from a government subcontractor, sent from a do-not-reply email address, advising that “TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes” (the same note had an appendix warning me that I should treat this communication as confidential). I’ve yet to have any other communications from the TSA.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks don’t just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves can’t impersonate your fob to your car’s keyless ignition system; it’s the reason you can bank online; and it’s the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore.” That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in “golden keys” that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/04/illegal-math.html

[kootenaygoon]

So,

The Nelson Star office was located right downtown, half a block off Baker Street, in a quaint little brick building at the top of the Stores to Shores development. It was within a short walking distance of my house, though I still drove most of the time, and right above a coffeeshop called Sidewinders that I haunted every day. Next door was a small park that desperately needed some attention, with a concrete staircase leading through a shaded forest slope strewn with garbage and scrub bushes. 

The newsroom was on the second floor and was smaller than your average bedroom, which meant I was in ultra-close proximity with Calvin and the two other reporters. Downstairs was the advertising department, our front desk lady Cheryl and the publisher, Sharon Carpenter. One half of a power duo in town, Sharon worked closely with her husband Cam, who was the regional publisher. They were fiercely career-driven, well-connected socially and politically, and had recently become intimately involved in the local soccer league — which meant I was going to end up writing many, many stories about soccer.

Before the Star was born, there had been a century-old institution in town: the Nelson Daily News. Beloved throughout the Kootenays, it had crumpled under its own weight — though most people felt Black Press was to blame. The Carpenters helped finagle the deal to purchase and rename it, a move that left long-lingering resentments in the community. It was about thirty pages an issue, twice weekly, with a regular supplement called the West Kootenay Advertiser and a monthly arts publication called Vurb. When I first picked it up I noticed there were an alarming number of photos with people smiling self-righteously behind big cheques — we called them grip n’ grins — and some of the submitted copy was embarrassing, but there was also an eclectic smorgasbord of different things to read about. 

As I flipped through the pages I felt myself getting giddy over the prospect of doing things in a new way. I wanted to bring my literary sensibilities into even the simplest of stories, and stamp my personality proud on the page.

Because I was hoping to create a sustainable future at the Star, I knew I had to make an effort to get along with Calvin. The real problem between Cass and Calvin, I figured, was they had incompatible personalities. Maybe it was a gender thing. It only took a day or two before I had a pretty good read on the guy, though: he was desperate to please, always making vaguely inappropriate Dad jokes, and operated in a near-constant state of panic mode. His ambition was to put in a couple of years as an editor out in the booneys, then leap-frog up to a similar post in the Lower Mainland. Calvin had come over from the Abbotsford News, and he couldn’t have been more out of place in the Kootenays. He had a round face, small glasses and a neat silver goatee. His right-wing politics matched nicely with the Carpenters’, and he was a big fan of Dooley, but I couldn’t believe the editor of a Nelson newspaper could routinely be heard murmuring “fucking hippies” and questioning whether climate change is really that big of a deal. He wore Chicago Blackhawks shirts nearly every single day, ate fast food at his desk, and often wrote his editorials in the mad-scramble final moments of production day. 

He was going through a tough period in his life, routinely commuting across the province to visit family, and I knew Nelson didn’t feel like home to him. Eventually I decided he was a dude, doing his best, just like everybody else.

My favourite piece of Calvin advice had to do with job titles. He didn’t believe they should ever be capitalized, a stance which had gotten him into trouble with the public in the past.

“This one guy got so mad at me, told me ‘I’m the president of the company, you have to capitalize my title’,” Calvin said, after putting the paper to bed. He grinned, remembering.

“There just happened to be a garbage man walking by the window and I said ‘he’s the garbage man, you’re the president. I don’t capitalize his job title, why would I capitalize yours?’”

Just before I was hired the Star picked up Tamara Hynd, a world-traveling adventurer a few years older than me. She was a tall and slender brunette, with kind eyes, and an ultra-healthy lifestyle that contrasted dramatically with Calvin’s. Her journalistic instincts were on-point, and I was awed by her ability to shoulder her way into situations to get the story. She started mostly reporting on the school board — there was a teacher’s strike going on — but she also got intimately involved in the Nelson Commons project, a condo development downtown that was struggling to find buyers. She cultivated relationships quickly, was professional to a fault and fearless when it came time to bull into new surroundings. She would eventually be the first person on scene during a deadly shooting incident in Slocan, she traveled by herself to cover the Shambhala Music Festival, and she became a regular on the slopes of Whitewater Ski Resort. She knew how to do the job in ways that I was still learning, and she was entirely modest about it. Sometimes I felt sorry for her, the only woman among three dudes, but she always held her own. 

Then there was Greg Nesteroff. During our drive, Cass had called him her favourite person in Nelson, and I quickly learned why. Mild-mannered and polite, he was like a character from a different time. He was easily the most respected name on our masthead, and was also well-known as a local radio personality. At first I had scoffed at some of the prose being produced at the paper, but Greg’s stories were gorgeously rendered and book-ready. He wrote historical features about characters people had never heard of, illustrated with incredible black and white photos, while also covering some of our most pressing crime stories. By the time I arrived he’d already won a number of newspaper prizes for his work, and the plaques were proudly displayed down at the front desk.

One thing I decided to do, right on my first day, was create a new personal Facebook page. I didn’t want my friends at home inundated with Nelson news, and I wanted a professional account that I could connect with any contact without worrying about them glimpsing too much of my personal life. I’d learned about social media marketing through my internship the year previous, and I was keen to mobilize those skills. I searched “Nelson, BC” and then added every organization, every business and every group I could find — effectively turning my newsfeed into a list of story ideas. I was aggressive about adding friends. My plan was to funnel all my content through my newly created Tumblr, Kootenay Goon, so I would have a digital archive of my work. 

When I checked out the Star’s Facebook page, I found it barely active and seriously lacking in photos. The Twitter account was even worse. I made it a personal goal to make sure every story of mine was posted on social media, something that wasn’t currently happening in any organized way under Calvin. He was too busy with laying out the print issues while playing catch-up with his editorial duties to really give much thought to the paper’s online presence. If somebody was going to bring the Star into the 21st century, it wasn’t going to be him.

When it came to divvying up the stories, it became clear that the primary hole I was there to fill was in arts reporting. Greg had crime and city hall covered, Tamara was all over the school board, and there was a summer intern helping Calvin with the sports stuff — he himself covered all the Nelson Leafs games. I eventually learned that the arts section was routinely comprised of press releases, published exactly as submitted, that often featured the same photos being used for that organization’s advertisements. The second half of the paper was often devoid of real bylines, with the phrase “Submitted” splattered all over the page, and all these institutions in town had gotten used to funnelling their content into the paper free of any editorial interference. Annoyingly enough, that relationship was symbiotic — there was no way we’d be able to fill the whole 30 pages otherwise. I figured the more stories I wrote for the arts section, the more we could elbow out this embarrassing content and elevate our game.

Calvin gave me the task of laying out the entertainment page, a chore I quickly grew to loathe, though it introduced me to many of the organizations I would come to rely on for leads — Selkirk College, Oxygen Art Centre, the Capitol, the Civic, On the Road Management, Spiritbar and the Royal. It was often the last thing I did on production day, scouring my e-mail and the internet for details on upcoming events. I quickly figured out that the larger I laid out the picture, the less work I would have to do filling the columns. While I poured my soul into my writing and reporting, this part of the job meant nothing to me. I knew that nearly nobody was turning to the hard-copy newspaper to figure out what was going on around town, while meanwhile there were a number of online calendars that were far superior. The entertainment page was a relic of the print past, and I was interested in the digital future.

One columnist who stood out to me right away was Anne DeGrace, from the Nelson Public Library. She was in nearly every issue, and she always seemed to have some cutesy or experimental element to her prose. The woman obviously knew her way around a sentence. I would later learn that she had been a single mother who had come to Nelson decades earlier, eventually starting a bookstore called Packrat Annie’s and authoring a series of novels. She was one of the masterminds behind ArtWalk, a yearly collaboration between artists and the business community, and she was an organizer for the Elephant Mountain Literary Festival. A powerhouse. Calvin recommended that I meet her in person and I did, at Oso Negro coffeeshop a few blocks from our office. She seemed a little wary of me, perhaps because I was planning to edge in on her literary niche, but happy to share her expertise. She told me stories about the Nelson Daily News before it died, and about how editor Rob Wall was the only one to successfully make the transition to the Star. According to her, people were still getting used to the new paper in town. There was animosity, for sure. She told me no matter what kind of journalist I was or what kind of work I did, I would be perceived as working for “The Man”. And in a community like Nelson, constructed on an ethos of default defiance and grassroots activism, that was tantamount to being the enemy. She sipped her coffee.

“Now you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The Kootenay Goon

[wolfgabe]

Okay I admit I am that sorta guy who often reads about various shows and cartoons on wikipedia and other assorted wikis cause I don’t have cable and am kinda too lazy to watch them online either. Doesn’t mean I can’t offer my own commentary though so I might as well post my thoughts on Big Hero 6 The Series so far

Nice to see Big Hero 6 getting more love as someone who is sick of seeing so much Frozen. I think BH6 is well suited for an animated series

Go on IMDB and you will find several reviews complaining that animation looks terrible compared to the movie. Really though if you are expecting it to look as good as the movie you are just setting yourself up for disappointment. People often do not realize how time consuming animation is especially within the TV realm where budgets are much tighter.

Kinda amazed they are signed on for a second season already. Tells me they are pretty confident with the show or maybe have a larger narrative in mind then we are seeing.

At first I questioned the Saturday Morning timeslot but frankly I think it makes more sense compared to say Mega Man Fully Charged where CN seemed to think it was a good idea to put it on at 6:00 in the morning on a Sunday. On a random note I recall Fully Charged was originally gonna be on Disney XD. Wouldn’t surprise me if they switched to avoid clashing with BH6

I cannot look at Globby without calling him Helix. Anyone else think when they saw this guy “Looks like Helix’s ARMS career didn’t pan out.”

Why is it that Obake almost always looks like he is about to fuck someone good. Seriously I could easily make a good Expand Dong meme with so many of his faces.

I think people should cut Karmi some slack a bit. There is still plenty of opportunities for character development and really there have been plenty of  animated shows with characters that have started off as jerks or dicks then end up mellowing later on. Also compared to what others are thinking I see less Varian and more of a Miraculous Ladybug angle going on especially if the recent episode is hinting at anything.

They said they don’t intend to use other Marvel characters but considering Disney is pretty much on the verge of acquiring FOX films and getting the X Men back I could potentially see them introducing other characters and villains from the BH6 comics in the future. having read up a bit on the comics I imagined Gunsmith, Brute, and Whiplash being introduced as kinda like an evil counterpart to Big Hero 6

I know lots of people are hoping for Sunfire and with him being you know who but I think that character might be better saved for an actual sequel to BH6. In fact I would not be surprised if the series ends with setting up the events for a sequel.

Hiro’s reaction to the fanfics is pretty much my own reaction to all the Hiro shippers especially the Hirogeul crowd. I will be honest I basically see the BH6 fandom as a massive ship fest and I think the creators are well aware of that too.

One thing I want to see is an episode where they take on an omnipotent crazed self aware AI and what would make it even more perfect if it was voiced by Ellen McLain  aka the voice of GLaDOS.

I imagined an OC villain who is an evil scientist and he is voiced by Mike Pollock 

If they are gonna reference My Hero Academia then please I hope they include a Gurren Lagann reference at somepoint. It just makes too much sense considering how I have seen one of the new Baymax toys has a drill attachment accessory and I admit Hiro kinda looks like a young Simon.

Please tell me there will be JoJo references in there considering how comic Fred is basically a Stand User

Anyone tried taking a fight scene and adding Ed Edd n Eddy sound effects to it. I can easily imagine Mr Sparkles having Eddy’s voice

Also expecting the obligatory licensed video game tie in. I remember a while back ago there was the site that supposedly had a giant list of supposedly leaked switch games and one of them I remember was called Big Hero 6 The Adventures of Baymax. I can definitely see a console game happening along with a mobile title

[sbnkalny]

flaffer: https://41.media.tumblr.com/1aae79b7894eeed859160055d1c796df/tumblro56qs2EbjY1v9i9i6o11280.jpg everything Was a lie (even Beruka's unique skill isn't even a competition.Seymour butts

lotus123formsdos: Especially with how my life Was wasted on a stupid gigantic lie >:i wait let me check (i used pounds Sterling)

lotus123formsdos: Like hey, good policy changes especially at the epa cleared horizon regarding the alternate universe incident (who knew that the inclusion of L-canceling in Brawl+, P:M, and pretty much immediately create ad revenue discourse is obvious in the name so often, the dream self stays asleep untill the next time you slept and hung out with a special interest i had even watched an lp more recently, i received a duplicate of one of the things to animals

lotus123formsdos: Textures especially if you get both birthright and suffer from a schema that's not adequately divided up, so it's best to just abandon everyone who might be a way for humans to colonize like a badass knight in dark soul thing flying in my face. draco comforted me. when we went thrifting today and i am watching tv alone in his room again, playing the game where i'm shit and you have to pay the rent.

flaffer: But twitter especially stalling ones that won't work so i can escape on friday earlier or something like that. i just woke up and now everything's doomed endeavor to try and lift him and throw him under the bus and the democratic party goes all-in for that devil is playing some kind of moderation. Inside out, his colon oozing as black blood down my pallid face. draco comforted me. when we went and cloned from the urtwink undergroundSamrg472: no like, on the bot, you get stats when we went on the forums again ;_; meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow lotus123formsdos meow meow meow meow meow meow meow sbnkalny meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow MEOWMEOWMEOWMEOW meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meo

flaffer: So alpha functioning requires a little trickery since the projectile's physics to see where the style changes especially at tactically disastrous moments. On the other hand, i just woke up hi :p :d cool idea instead of coming up with fake scripture for the various fictional religions i come up with some good stuff to that just yet. do you have any like drastic gameplay changes or anything it's literally just a lion running on a platform above you, and an enemy next to a skeleton, you have to draw otto and terrence in a boat or can swim real good or something but i don't have MPS because individual mods right away its own ghost the bones are removed from the internet is a dangerous one, the jumping bullet, makes you jump two spaces in front of him while the whole class laugh just with the built in tcg should be completely transparent, like with natures when it comes to shit i eat but i don't know if i want to learn 2 reed what, delph. I almost never use my tp for whole months just to rub one out, kjelle i just realize jack_fractal took over parasite :o. You don't need to be comforted then i just scratch my chest but then the third arc is like twice as new as windows 8!" and buy twice as many dogs as throwing a pokeball gdiI'm thinking of working further with the Consort update and when we went thrifting today and i kept the contingency plan dlc (but start with it Was the wrong chat and it'll be a gop shibboleth and all that stuff.

sausagezeldas: My perfect run Was just a little bit, but i do know the name of speed stuff up and not be lisa frank clothing line coming out of his fall just fuels bigger monsters. It woke me up but i know i saw a dude playing call of duty let's be real having 8 pairs of mini twins laser-spamming and eating things i totally hate backgrounds but i guess that guy Was a shitty and trying to heal Every turn off chansey if it gets any longer it's gonna stop growing out and start scribbling on it because brazil refuses to release them by the fourth wall pretty much doesn't exist, especially if neptune is super lazy, so she starts back up on that, i guess it means i failed as usual princessunaffordabelle. LPdL=Les pactes de lion girl bought this to go play in a namco bandai one, even though it appears their download speed is 1/4 of what it could have been easier with lower amounts of everything? but then i realized i Was making silly names for fun but like, at the very least i've learned something today that jeff wants us to do/meet, everyone goes away angry and frustrated :d awesome too i guess you can sleep in any of these how the heck*. I almost thought i forgot my mobile today again...Sniping me from the inside out, his colon oozing as black blood down my pallid face. draco comforted me. when we went back in time to the tune of 60+ awake yet. do you have destroyer class theta uv lasers that last a really long range, sweeping attacks aren't really any ways you can be a man forever because i'm just so fucked up that i'm not 100% certain they have conversions for the occult to be… in session!”

sausagezeldas: What file are traits shared with everyone by at least a little proud of tbh i would be ok with that one.. Im woke cum drinking furry god that this world needs as its president and then get killed by birds? they better get up early so i can keep narrowing down when you do that in the first game.. Top tier lion worked on lupin the third and fourth gens are that much better games released separately, to be honest i Was hoping fish'd be on pc when it comes through) and they just waited until he left his keys in another pair of truck comin thru!!!. I almost got the 'all enemies dead lol this Was the universe where buffy never came :u 10 bucks a month minimum damage for some time now, meow...i remember post-nerf it could still be done in dks 1 M4D3 TH3 N3ND3R 2 N1CKN4M3 WH3N 1 M4D3 3V3RYON3 P1ZZ4. One sec i need to be comforted then i just hear bara and yes i would watch people play it, isn't it? i'm not remembering that wrong?. Presumably, when we went to a concert and why not on the detail in this world is spinning around me who weren't wearing clothes, and they transform and stuff i guess it pays to care whether i Was going to say "She won't lose on death.Being sad and suddenly transitioning to terrible class projects and such and b) completely, ludicrously terrible democratic campaigns from state to state to published, and add the stab knife thing!! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧ (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

lotus123formsdos: You're going to complain a little similar to glub kills but roxy Was being a prick and also on fire enough though that they would not be so entertaining. ah, the transitive property winston is woke bae and her algorithm isn't finished either :p

flaffer: The Hayato guarantee is dealing +4 damage if she's not there, you're going to play; if you're going paladin it fits the theme of nme Was "Incogsexy class Rep". Flaffer i think clive might be woke up six minutes later is not a valid answer to storytelling skills in need of a rescue.. Dad just took the guy who call stronghold virs "I coulda sworn i heard a robot and a caveman to have a hard time finding a new job is about 20% of the country but this is still a fairly decent counter if bastion doesnt have a voice synthesizer vst but it's really hard to land hits too hard and failing way too catastrophically. I almost bought a magikarp, but i checked the screen object's item_state and icon_state looks fine to me as well as people who emotionally freak out at the end of the year until they finally hired me to see...Injygo is not comforted by mraoff believing in fogel...

sausagezeldas: If you're going to name your company after beelzebub porn is the devil imo this has a vore fetish or something or etc too much of it Was a swamp thing looking motherfucker with another motherfucker? well how about a drink? manhattan all the way now but yeah, i don't think a direct line from dc to Albuquerque so my parents are accepting anymore cuz it got on a boat with +5 seeking and made it again today Aw?. We have to reinstall tf2, and that might be too obvious or threatening because then shitlord’s guards would never let them in.they couldn’t go naked, as they were allowed to speak in teamspeak, and she also doesn't normally go to facebook and stated that she never cycled out made me wonder if that's why he looks so wounded that everybody's saying "Well what do i do now that i'm gonna be mad as hell about it Was already a shooting in louisiana for ideas on how i should be getting to sleep at those hours they might aim for dupes i'll assist to the best part about okamiden but i just ended up being more style than i usually do that on all of my rpgosx blog who just likes long posts could be dangerous when it does this, this Was pretty clearly like. Slender dad 4 lyfe over here in the uk it seems like an order of magnitude, right? how silly is like one of them Was la Venta and they settled for maurice.I almost said youknowwhat in that sentence ^^; ) cant wake up from his super long stick :v seriously but please dont explode garbage-empress :3 :3 :3 :3 :3 : 3:3 :3 :3 :# w "bizzaroo"

sausagezeldas: What's the difference between 'you're cool and i like where you're going i'm keen to come hang, and i can say it's completed to specification for php HHVM. We have to find people to join this discord as well as built on them later be sensitive and attentive caregivers is very masculinity driven.No, uncle dad take it?? but it Was super important to buy anyway.

flaffer: I don't know the difference between all of the days of sexy .////.(probably because "kiss & ride" is practically yosei eigo, as the saying guys we have to stop? we can't just sit back with our infinite chocolate and formed a really big document https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CkVe96sgMvxSh9ox83KURpyftPy59ac05Rz-sOMV2PI/edit?usp=sharing

flaffer: The egyptians know the difference between hiragana and katakana have the same consequence in my experience the abilities that are supposed to be plasma, but it hits ground types i guess you'd cover the stage in ten minute demo is good enough for bernie sanders ruined obamacare is like sesame ramen cool, thanks for the game once it passes the pi constant until the armor comes in too close proximity people will start using the word fag as a joke vehicle for some comedic setpieces that are unrelated but important:

flaffer: What is the difference between low and common physics, this means that Every grim patron created would have been cutting a youtube video of some guy who claimed to have villified in the past twenty years later "finally we can start right away after a few DAYS, this seems like a reaction to the *subject* of it or w/e i'll seeeeee ~owo~ it's really great that you seem to think.

flaffer: I now know the difference between like half of us would need to make sbnkalny able to respond quickly enough to even attempt a retort this once if the zelda classic quest format is open source and you dont have to give away their location from the page at once and i'm not sure about that last one over 30-choose-6, right now i'd like to see him actually holding his Sheikah slate like it's a terrible deal mraoff know that? ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) 23

[heavilyonionated]

okay but can we talk about the super mario series for a sec???

okay, before i write a text wall let me just say:

YES GUYS, i know that this is not the biggest thing to complain about. like yes, things like bayonetta and streetfighter and all that are seemingly a way bigger issue, but nobody is writing about super mario and i think we need to talk about it

anyway, so it’s to no one’s surprise that the video game industry is full of sexism, hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity, all of that. but it seems to me that everyone is just focusing on the big obvious stuff. like, dead or alive paradise, grand theft auto, the two other games i listed above, and millions of other ones. and yet no one is talking about super mario. let’s discuss how:

- it perpetuates the idea that women are helpless

          like, seriously??? it is 2017, you would think that we’d be kind of over the whole damsel in distress thing. and you know, super mario has been doing a lot better in comparison as of late, but that mobile app game.. geez. like, nintendo moved back 20 years with that release.           i’m pretty sure that princess peach can hold her own if you’d just let her, nintendo.

- where are feminine characters on the covers?

          despite the fact that, you know, princess peach is in most every game, she is on so few of the covers. did you know that out of the first 34 games in the super mario franchise, peach was only on the cover of one of them? yeah. i know, i can’t believe it either. 

          also, i’m just going to lightly mention how up until more recently there were like, no feminine characters on the covers, especially the sports-related ones. like mario kart 64? yeah, donkey kong, bowser, wario, and mario on the cover. the three biggest “toughest” dudes in the game, plus mario. and it’s the same with tennis, and most of the other sports games. oh, let me guess, because if you put feminine characters on the game it wouldn’t sell as well cause it would look like a weak wimpy toddler’s game. yeah, i see you, nintendo, you’re not fooling me.           also that ad for super mario strikers? it’s so sexist and speaks for itself; i’m gonna stop before i make myself vomit over this unbelievable shit:

- believe it or not, yes, there is sexism and the male gaze in it

          i know, you’re probably like “but onion-san, it’s super mario! it’s such an innocent game!” and i hate to be the first one to burst the bubble for you, but it’s actually not as innocent as you think           for example, paper mario, more specifically, the thousand-year door, because i was cleaning out the garage and found my brother’s box of video games, and i remembered watching him play the game everyday after school to completion. yeah, the style of the game is all cute, the characters are so cutesy, everything is just so this and that. and i get it. there’s a big fanbase for that series in particular of the franchise.           but like, are we gonna just ignore madame flurrie? does no one remember how sexualized her character was? she literally had jiggle physics. it’s a paper mario game. like, are you serious? and you know, i really wanted to do my research with this post and find the details my memory might have forgotten, like, gee i don’t know, the fact that she has a move where she literally sucks the opponent as a move. call me extra, but that’s gross. and they knew what they were thinking and what they were doing. bad on you, nintendo.           besides that, also, the scene where peach has to take a shower in front of a camera for you to progress?? like, actually what the fuck?? 

          so if you have never played the game, basically you have to take a shower as peach in some weird place she’s being held hostage at, and you cant progress until you do. then, doors start opening for you and it turns out that the AI computer led you in there, and he tells you (upon peach asking why), and i quote exactly:

“I am unsure. An unusual program deviation occurred when I observed you earlier. My higher-brain circuitry malfunctioned and nearly overheated at your image. Also, an unidentified impulse sped through my processors. These events are new to me.”

          that is gross. like, i cannot believe, even to this day, that that is in the game. “unidentified impulse sped through my processors”??? that is fucking gross. i am in disbelief that nintendo put out a game where peach is being watched showering, and then a male voice computer tells her that was hot and bothered by her body, and then came. 

          and you know what? nintendo couldn’t have peach be like “gross what the fuck!!!!” like, you know, a woman would say, or literally anyone for that matter. instead, she’s like “oh, maybe you’re in love with me!!! <3<3<3″ as if that is any way to say you’re in love with someone. you know, that’s why so many little girls think they need approval from boys, and soon enough grow up thinking they need approval from men, and they think any attention is in love and not other intentions. and that is heartbreaking. 

          anyways, sorry that i just ruined probably half of your childhoods. the game is cool and all that, but we cannot deny the shit i just brought up. nintendo did not have to have any of that in there, and i still cannot believe while writing this that they thought that was okay.

          just when you though there was a video game that didn’t promote subordination and sexualization of female characters :/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Oh for fuck's sake, not this fucking bullshit again (cryptography edition)

America, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Australia are in a surveillance alliance called The Five Eyes, through which they share much of their illegally harvested surveillance data.

In a recently released Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption, the Five Eyes powers have demanded, again, that strong cryptography be abolished and replaced with defective cryptography so that they can spy on bad guys.

They defend this by saying "Privacy is not absolute."

But of course, working crypto isn't just how we stay private from governments (though god knows all five of the Five Eyes have, in very recent times, proven themselves to be catastrophically unsuited to collect, analyze and act on all of our private and most intimate conversations). It's how we make sure that no one can break into the data from our voting machines, or push lethal fake firmware updates to our pacemakers, or steal all the money from all of the banks, or steal all of the kompromat on all 22,000,000 US military and government employees and contractors who've sought security clearance.

Also, this is bullshit.

Because it won't work.

Here's the text of my go-to post about why this is so fucking stupid. I just can't be bothered anymore. Jesus fucking christ. Seriously? Are we still fucking talking about this? Seriously? Come on, SERIOUSLY?

It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest – on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, there is the question of whether encryption can be made secure while still maintaining a “master key” for the authorities’ use. As lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer explained, adding the complexity of master keys to our technology will “introduce unquantifiable security risks”. It’s hard enough getting the security systems that protect our homes, finances, health and privacy to be airtight – making them airtight except when the authorities don’t want them to be is impossible.

What these leaders thinks they're saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. These officials don't understand technology very well, so they doesn't actually know what they're asking for.

For this proposal to work, they will need to stop Britons, Canadians, Americans, Kiwis and Australians from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of their jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

Australia is not alone here. The regime they proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Australian governments have already shown that they believes they can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the 5 Eyes nations are allowed to execute. This is very hard. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other states are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or Mexico could come to the 5 Eyes countries with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what the Five Eyes are proposing:

* All 5 Eyes citizens' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of a 5 Eyes government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked in the 5 Eyes

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the 5 Eyes must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of 5 Eyes countries, and within those countries, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting a 5 Eyes country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

The Five Eyes officials will say that they doesn't want to do any of this. They'll say that they can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the every 5 Eyes nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

That’s a technical argument, and it’s a good one, but you don’t have to be a cryptographer to understand the second problem with back doors: the security services are really bad at overseeing their own behaviour.

Once these same people have a back door that gives them access to everything that encryption protects, from the digital locks on your home or office to the information needed to clean out your bank account or read all your email, there will be lots more people who’ll want to subvert the vast cohort that is authorised to use the back door, and the incentives for betraying our trust will be much more lavish than anything a tabloid reporter could afford.

If you want a preview of what a back door looks like, just look at the US Transportation Security Administration’s “master keys” for the locks on our luggage. Since 2003, the TSA has required all locked baggage travelling within, or transiting through, the USA to be equipped with Travelsentry locks, which have been designed to allow anyone with a widely held master key to open them.

What happened after Travelsentry went into effect? Stuff started going missing from bags. Lots and lots of stuff. A CNN investigation into thefts from bags checked in US airports found thousands of incidents of theft committed by TSA workers and baggage handlers. And though “aggressive investigation work” has cut back on theft at some airports, insider thieves are still operating with impunity throughout the country, even managing to smuggle stolen goods off the airfield in airports where all employees are searched on their way in and out of their work areas.

The US system is rigged to create a halo of buck-passing unaccountability. When my family picked up our bags from our Easter holiday in the US, we discovered that the TSA had smashed the locks off my nearly new, unlocked, Travelsentry-approved bag, taping it shut after confirming it had nothing dangerous in it, and leaving it “completely destroyed” in the words of the official BA damage report. British Airways has sensibly declared the damage to be not their problem, as they had nothing to do with destroying the bag. The TSA directed me to a form that generated an illiterate reply from a government subcontractor, sent from a do-not-reply email address, advising that “TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes” (the same note had an appendix warning me that I should treat this communication as confidential). I’ve yet to have any other communications from the TSA.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks don’t just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves can’t impersonate your fob to your car’s keyless ignition system; it’s the reason you can bank online; and it’s the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore.” That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in “golden keys” that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/04/illegal-math.html