BuzzFeed FWD

BlackBerry, as BlackBerry users know it, is finished. The company that was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of always-on mobile culture but stopped short of winning the smartphone race is facing some grim options. The company, now, is a shadow of its former self; soon, it will be lucky if it’s still recognizable as a company at all.

This is a situation in which hindsight is perfectly unobscured: BlackBerry made an enormous bet against the style of product that ended up replacing it as most Americans’ first smartphone. It’s easy to see what happened. But it’s less clear what happens next. What does collapse mean for a company so large and culturally significant? Floyd Norris of the Timesexplains it in terms of much older computer manufacturer NEC, whose narrative of market failure traces a trajectory similar to BlackBerry’s.

But BlackBerry isn’t quite NEC, nor is it Gateway or Palm. It’s a company that even today has millions of active a loyal users, who don’t just purchase BlackBerry products but use them every hour of every day — who live in them, and will soon have to live in something else. BlackBerry is less like a company than a country. A failed state: BlackBerria.

BlackBerria exhibits all the classic signs of a collapsing country. Today, it’s the kind of place that might compel the State Department to issue a travel advisory. For one, it’s officially up for sale, and will be sold from a position of weakness — its suitors will look more like the World Bank than casual bond buyers. Meanwhile, its crisis-time leader, whose public misjudgments are excruciatingly well documented but who is flattered by his monstrous predecessors, stands to become fabulously rich as the result of his country’s full failure. (BlackBerria’s deposed former leaders, for all their failures, are among the richest men in the region.)

When William Hsu first moved to San Francisco to work in startups, he got a one-bedroom apartment. “I thought that was the adult thing to do, the thing I was supposed to do,” Hsu says. “But it kind of sucked actually to go home and no one was there. It was kind of depressing.” He missed college. Like many other young techies, his career development was outpacing his social development.

Instead of just getting roommates, he applied to live with 15 other guys at a San Francisco “startup mansion,” which he later went on to run. As more and more young techies like Hsu move into the notoriously expensive city, these “hacker houses” are becoming a rising trend. Varying in size from about 5 to 20 people, they are sort of commune-meets-incubator-meets-dorm. Each has its own vibe, reflecting the different sub-scenes of the of the tech world from visionaries to brogrammers, grad students to hackers, as well as people working at big companies. Some houses are more established and formal; others, chiefly casual.

I first heard about Hsu’s house when I saw the Craigslist ad for the “Live/Work Startup Mansion with sweeping views of San Francisco!” looking to add “cool new people.”

“Come check it out, seriously,” the ad said.

Is it possible to make secure private phone calls? Can you sign up for a cell phone without signing away your rights?

Straight up, the answer is no.

In fact, using a phone is the absolute worst way to communicate if you want privacy. The government can listen into your phone calls and track who you are calling and when. Phone companies, including AT&T and Verizon, are handing over information on millions of Americans on an ongoing basis. We know this thanks to Edward Snowden and others who have leaked classified information. And the phone companies haven’t denied any of the revelations.

But it is possible to make it harder for the government to access your private phone calls.

“You can make it difficult enough that the only way the government can get your information is when they really care about you, versus now when they can get everyone’s calls and records at a drop of a hat,” says technology expert Christopher Soghoian of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The government should have to work to spy on you. You can make it harder for government. Not impossible, but harder.”

Your best bet is to use an encrypted voice app, either on your computer or cell phone. Basic SSL encryption won’t cut it, since most companies keep an unencrypted version of your data. ZRTP encryption, which encrypts data end to end, means that the service provider can’t even access it.

One of the best encryption apps, according to Soghoian, is Red Phone, currently available on Android. The iOs version comes out next month.

“We’ve never received any government requests, probably because it would not be possible for us to include a back door,” says a representative from WhisperSystems, which runs Red Phone. “The communication is encrypted end to end and the software is open source, so any back door would be publicly visible.”

For added protection, you can use a new disposable phone paid for in cash and go to a location far from home or work that has Wi-Fi.

New information about the NSA’s spy program will continue to be released. Based on what we know so far, here are your options, listed from most to least effective.

* This shows 2,537 million words across 4.3 million articles (for August 2013), implying an average of 590 words per article.

* Same source shows 19.83 GB (=20,498,960 B) across 2,537 million words, implying 8.08B/word. ASCII uses 1B/character which in turn implies 8.36 characters/word. However, this includes wikimarkup, and 5 char/word plus one for space is standard, so 6 characters/word will be assumed.

* There are currently 4,309,877 articles, which means 2,542,827,430 words, which means 15,256,964,580 characters.

* One volume: 25cm high, 5cm thick. 500 leaves, 2 pagefaces per leaf, two columns per pageface, 80 rows/column, 50 characters per row. So one volume = 8,000,000 characters, or 1,333,337 words, or 2,259.9 articles.

* Thus, the text of the English Wikipedia is currently equivalent to 1,907.1 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

* Sanity check: Encyclopædia Britannica has 44 million words across 32 volumes, or 1,375,000 words per volume. This would imply 1,849 volumes for WP.

In 1995, an American college student named Kaitlin Greenbriar returns late one night from a trip to Europe to her family’s new home, only to find that her mother, father, and younger sister have all left. She spends the next few hours exploring every last gable of the unfamiliar mansion, learning through tossed-away notes and thrown-open drawers about the personal struggles of her father (a frustrated writer), her mother (a frustrated wife), and sister (a frustrated teenager). There are no great surprises here, just the pointillist depiction of a strained—that is to say, normal—suburban family at the turn of the century.

No, this is not a description of some Carver-and-Updike besotted MFA thesis, but the premise of Gone Home, the new indie game from the four-person Portland studio The Fullbright Company. In the context of games, which don’t really do small-scale realism, a story about upper-middle-class white people coming to terms with things (other than their impending death by zombie mouth or alien claw) feels legitimately fresh. And it has certainly struck a chord: Chris Suellentrop, writing in the New York Times, called Gone Home “the greatest game love story every told” and “the closest thing to literary realism I’ve encountered in a video game”.

Gone Home is a first person exploration game in which all the action consists of reading old notes, listening to old music, noticing small details, and solving little puzzles. It’s a clever thing, to turn the little mysteries of a family in 1995 into something like the classic 1993 first-person adventure game Myst, not least because you can almost imagine the game’s Greenbrier clan taking turns at the family Pentium to play, well, Myst. That is, if they had a computer. The storytelling technique that Myst helped pioneer, the evocation of an abandoned place through the written and recorded testimonials of the people who lived there, has become common to the point of cliche in games today. But this structure makes intuitive sense in a year when people still sent letters and the bellestristic impulses of a sensitive teenager got spent in the pages of a diary and not in the input prompts of a Tumblr.

Today’s cyber attack from the Syrian Electronic Army is just the latest in a rash of high-profile attempts by the organization to gain control of and disrupt major media outlets.

Unlike past efforts, today’s hack could have lasting, damaging effects.

According to Daniel Cohen, head of Online Threats Managed Services at RSA, a computer and network security company, the attack could have infected thousands — possibly millions — of users with potentially harmful malware. The hack, which infiltrated Outbrain, a third-party recommendation platform, gave SEA access to partner sites like The Washington Post, Time, and CNN and rerouted them to a SEA homepage. Any users redirected to the SEA homepage could have been potential targets.

“The scale of this attack — the possibilities here — I don’t even want to think about them because they’re so scary,” Cohen says. “They could’ve infected millions of users on these high-trafficked sites like CNN. Some of the visitors were being redirected to the SEA site, and any number of things could have happened. They could’ve been infected with malware; possibly other media outlets and businesses could’ve been infected.”

While Cohen took pains to note that it’s still quite early into the investigation of the hack, he notes that it’s entirely possible even government networks could’ve been compromised. “The next notch up here is the government offices. Employees checking news on CNN getting infected with malware makes it possible they could steal information and data or documents if they knew how. Even with the simplest malware today you can run the camera on a laptop and take pictures without the user knowing. This kind of attack is really an eye-opener,” he says.

Yesterday, I started preparing for my inevitable death. I’m not writing a will, setting up life insurance, or planning my funeral. I signed up with LivesOn, the service that will tweet for me once I’m gone. Or as they put it, “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.” Pretty catchy for something so grim.

You may have heard about LivesOn when the service first announced it would be rolling out. The media was all over the idea.

LivesOn selected me as one of its guinea pigs for its alpha-stage product, which would analyze the language and topics of my past tweets and write new ones on my behalf.

First I had to nominate an executor of my LivesOn “will.” It would be up to that person to decide whether to keep my account live. Tweets would appear with @_LivesOn in them so my followers understand what they are. For now, I could preview them and decide whether to publish them or not.

No one in my immediate family tweets. My close friends are stuck on Facebook and Instagram. But still, my mom won out as my executor. She’s my mom. I called her to explain. She went online to accept the role and emailed, “Done. Kind of creepy.”

For at least two decades, the average gamer has labored under the yoke of an oppressively highfalutin artistic culture. As is the case with any powerful avant-garde regime, the haughty intellects—I call them the gamerati—who perpetuate this culture tend towards elitism, creating purposefully difficult and unfun art that is hostile to a public unfamiliar with its obscure standards, honed over years at the most exclusive universities. Indeed, the history of video games, from its beginning in the laboratories of MIT through its maturation from such already highbrow platform games as Boogerman and Conker’s Bad Fur Day into such remote exercises in auteurism as Wargasm, Killzone, and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, can be read as one extended act of artistic snobbery.

I say: Enough. I say: It is high time someone wrested game design from these obscurantists and made, for a change, some good, dumb, fun!

Praise be to the gods of good, dumb, fun, then, that the Illinois game studio Volition has heard the cries of a game proletariat tragically underserved with easy pleasures. Their new game, Saints Row 4 is, according to reviews, finally a videogame that puts fun above all else!