WikiLeaks, in Data Terms
This is an interesting post from the always interesting ReadWriteWeb on the WikiLeaks thing…
The US government has called on the organization Wikileaks to “return” all the classified documents it received and has begun to publish and “destroy” all the documents in its databases. For at least the fraction of the documents that have been released to the public, it’s far too late for that.
How far and wide have the Wikileaks Cablegate documents spread around the web – and how fast have they been travelling? After reading Danny Sulivan’s post Why Wikileaks Will Never Be Closed or Blocked today, I visited the torrent search engine The Pirate Bay, pulled down some numbers and did some math. Here’s what I found.
- There are 113 different torrents with the words Wikileaks Cablegate in the title listed on the Pirate Bay right now.
- At the moment I write this, there are 109 people leeching a Wikileaks Cablegate file from those torrents and 5801 total seeds for those files living on computers all around the world. For context, that’s roughly the same number of seeds you’ll find for the latest Katy Perry album.
- The most popularly seeded file is 10 Mebibytes (Megabytes) in size; it’s the seed for the first day’s released cables and was released that evening.
- That first full archive file was seeded two and a half hours after @wikileaks first Tweeted about the documents’ availability.
- The first upload, a mirror of the Cablegate site, was seeded as a torrent 20 minutes after its availability was published about on Twitter.
Cthulhu Thursday: The Masks of Nyarlathotep
My first encounter with the Cthulhu Mythos was via the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu – still a favourite of mine. Of the many adventures that you can get for the game (and there are lots) one of the stand out ones is the amazing Masks of Nyarlathotep.
Nyarlathotep is a scary and cool creation. He is a god that walks the earth and has a thousand forms – or masks. In the adventure the players are drawn into a global conspiracy run by a cult of Nyarlathotep. As the adventure unfolds, from London to Egypt to Australia – each episode gets darker and darker (though for my money the bit in Egypt is the best bit). A classic!
Masks of Nyarlathotep is a Lovecraftian exercise in horror and mystery. This Call of Cthulhu roleplaying classic is a series of linked adventures forming one long and unforgettable campaign. Horrifying deeds and dangerous sorcery dog those who dare attempt to unravel the fate of the Carlyle Expedition.
Set in 1925, adventures begin in New York, then move overseas to England, Egypt, Kenya Colony, Shanghai, and western Australia. Such extended globetrotting requires wit and planning by the players. Their investigators must have steady finances, good language skills, and a willingness to persevere despite governmental interference and cultist harassment. Meanwhile the keeper must bring to life different exotic locales, recreate the sensibilities of other cultures, and balance non-player-character foes and friends to allow each investigator to earn his or her own destiny—ultimate triumph, perhaps, or perhaps madness and agonizing death.
Masks of Nyarlathotep
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)
WikiLeaks and Network Politics
I feel we’re in the midst of one of those pivotal moments in history where from here onwards, nothing is the same again. Not that now is dramatically different from before – there have been incremental slow and steady changes moving from day to day to get us here. But now is the time when the changes that have been building are undeniably real. Post-WikiLeaks, it’s not going to be the same.
This is about the politics of technology and connectivity. In the WikiLeaks saga we have a non-state actor taking on a number of powerful states (the US being foremost) and using its understanding of the network combined with a shared network – the Internet – as it’s platform;
Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.
But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won’t work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.
In many ways, WikiLeaks’ understanding of the network means that, for this battle at least, they have already won the war. Months ago WikiLeaks distributed a file called ‘insurance.aes256’ on p2p networks, available for anyone to download. It’s an encrypted file that needs a password. But the p2p distribution means that, before they started releasing files, they had in effect pre-released whatever they wanted and there is nothing that can now be done to stop that. All they have to do is put out the password;
For several months now Wikileaks has hosted a file called insurance.aes256, which, as the name implies, is encrypted with a 256-bit AES key. That’s about as uncrackable as you can get in 2010, meaning the file is all but useless without its encryption key. … In fact, the Defense Department has been unable to crack the file since it was first made available in July… More important than whether or not Assange releases the encryption key, or even what’s in the insurance file itself, is the idea behind Wikileaks. It speaks to the inherent openness of the Internet that so many mirrors have popped up in the last few days following the site’s repeated difficulties in staying online. The sheer notion that you can put Wikileaks back in its little bottle is hilariously naive.
Not only that, but as the main site for WikiLeaks went down, so mirrors appeared, meaning that the more the attacks on WikiLeaks intensified, the more it was mirrored. It’s the dynamics of p2p written on a strategy stage.
Microbot – Battle in the Body
EA has an interesting looking title coming out, Microbot. Now I’m a huge fan of Fantastic Voyage and Innerspace, so this game looks right up my street…
MicroHexon Research thought they had revolutionized medical technology when they invented the MicroBot, a microscopic robot specifically designed to assist the immune system in fighting a variety of health ailments.
Unfortunately, due to a disastrous malfunction, their technology is now working in tandem with the viruses and bacteria and attempting to take over the host body. Now it is up to you to stop the biotechnical infestation before it’s too late.
Pilot a prototype cutting-edge MicroBot that can be customized and upgraded mid-mission in order to cure the infected host. Improve your weaponry, movement, defensive options and special attacks using data fragments harvested from eradicated enemies.
Travel through blood, bone, breath and brain as you track down and eliminate the cause of the infection. But are you the ultimate cure…or the next disease?
Microbot Screenshot
Paying for Multiplayer
A financial analyst is saying that games companies need to ‘monitise’ the multiplayer aspect of the games:
Publishers must start charging for multiplayer if they want to reinvigorate sales numbers, Pachter suggests. “We firmly believe that until the publishers address monetization of multiplayer, game sales will continue to be challenged by the publishers’ altruistic decision to provide significantly more entertainment value per hour than ever in history,” he says.
“In our view, monetization of multiplayer is one of the greatest opportunities for the publishers, and we think that it would be a serious strategic error to pass on this opportunity,” he adds.
I think is argument is a little one-dimensional. Games like Modern Warfare 2 are not huge single player experiences (it does not take long to complete) and so to charge full price for a short experience then charge again for multiplayer seems a bit unfair to me. I have no problem in charging for ‘value added’ services or making the single player version of the game not able to access multiplayer, but cheaper to buy. But currently I think most gamers feel the cost of the game includes the standard multiplayer service.
Which is why I noticed with interest that GamesTM was also thinking along the same lines. This is from their review of Black Ops, issue 101:
“But you’ll also know that Call of Duty, over the last three installments, has become a game divided. While the single player continues to suffer under the law of diminishing returns, that multiplayer has sneakily become the main part of the package.”
Monday Morning Gamification, Gaming Public Transport
It’s gamification time again. Now, I’m a big user of public transport. I don’t have a car so almost all the times I travel, it’s on public transport. I’ve been doing it for so long I’d like to think that I’m pretty good at it. So now there is the chance to turn this most common of skills into points – and what do points make? Prizes! This from the most recent issue of Wired (Dec 10th 2010):
If you’re Jason Bourne, public transport is a thrill; for the rest of us, it’s a drag. Unless you’re playing Chromaroma. “We wanted to make something that added magic to someone’s life, every day,” says the games 37-year old creator Toby Barnes, of Brimingham-based developer Mudlark…. Working as a team or individually you get bonuses for hitting special “collections” of stations or completing missions such as the diamond runner” between Bond Street and Chancery Lane (imitating the couriers who ferry gems between jewellers and safe houses).
The game (as you might have guessed) is set in London currently, but it’s a great idea and I hope to see it spread! (As I’m in London more now for our work with the Wellcome Trust, I should look to have a go!)
Promoting PSN – on PC!
This is an interesting idea – doing a Playstation Network (PSN) title but putting the demo out on PC so a wider audience can sample it’s delights. I’ll be interested to see how this experiment plays out…
Just announced today, I Must Run! the new minis title from Gamelion will be getting a demo. While it won’t be on the PlayStation Network, anyone that has a PC will be able to try the game out. We also have a new tidbit about the game, it is a “skill-based action game”. That still doesn’t bring me any closer to understanding what it is all about. Hopefully we will have some screens to show you in the near future.
I Must Run! will be out December 14th in the US for $3.99 and the following day in the EU for €2.99.
(Thanks to PSNStores for the link.)
Making the Digital, Scarce…
If there is one thing about digital media we are all having to come to terms with, it’s abundance. Scarcity is no longer the issue:
If the shift from previous media technologies and distribution platforms to software has challenged our most basic concepts and theories of “media,” the new challenge in my view is even more serious. Let’s say I am interested in thinking about cinematic strategies in user-generated videos on YouTube. There is no way I can manually look through all the billions of videos there. Of course, if I watch some of them, I am likely to notice some patterns emerging.. but how do I know which patterns exist in all the YouTube videos I never watched?” (Manovich 2008:195)
Never mind analysing it all, I can’t even watch all the video uploaded. Not only that but it’s connectivity is ubiquitous and pervasive. It’s finds you:
As Pew has pointed out, young people especially (and people of all ages) act as conduits as much as consumers. And they expect to watch video themselves. This is also a clear example of how the peer replaces the editor. My favorite line:
Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”
So it is always great to find an example of people doing it differently, going against the grain. In this instance, in making the pervasive and ubiquitous, less so. But not for reasons for aping the physicality of analogue media, but to capture its sense of presence.
Witch-house bands go even further: they put their music up for free on places like SoundCloud, but remove the files after a certain number of listens or downloads, creating scheduling and scarcity in a system that’s otherwise about abundance and time-shifting. Aside from the fact that some of these bands are really good, witch house is interesting to follow because it’s a sort of ad hoc Darknet — the places where you can hear this music move around. One week, it’s a private group on Last.fm. The next week, it’s a public message board. The week after, they’re all living on a blog entry’s comment thread. To keep finding this stuff, you’ve really got to want it. Modern networking tools are mobilised in pursuit of an atemporal way of gathering a fan base.
Cthulhu Thursday: The Art of John Coulthart
I came across John Coulthart’s artwork in a collection of contemporary Mythos fiction (including a story by Alan Moore called The Starry Wisdom. This was a great (but adult!) collection of work and I really enjoyed it, but what stood out was a comic inside, The Call of Cthulhu – which had horrific images that re-captured the original horror I felt when I encountered Lovecraft’s work as a child-ling. Here’s an example of his art:
Approaching R'lyeh
Great stuff! Here’s lots more…
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)
Blast from my Gaming Past: Cloud Master
This was a classic game for me on the Sega Master System. It was a shoot ’em up with cool power-ups. I think I love it so much partly because the cool Monkey-like styling but also because power-ups came via a shop system, which was fairly new to me back then.
That and the first time I played it, I completed the first level and first boss. Oh yeah.
A Great Becoming... 