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What you can learn from the million-dollar tuna

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:34:24 +0000

On Saturday, a bluefin tuna was sold at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market tuna auction for $1.76 million. Which is a little crazy. (Also crazy, the size of the fish in question.) But the amount paid for this specimen of a chronically overfished species doesn't really represent simple supply and demand, explains marine biologist Andrew David Thaler. It shouldn't be read as a measurement of tuna scarcity, he says, but rather as an artifact of culture (and marketing).

Boing Boing Charitable Giving Guide, 2012 edition

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 21:00:11 +0000

Here's a guide to the charities the Boingers support in our own annual giving. As always, please add the causes and charities you give to in the comments below!

Electronic Frontier Foundation
There's never been a time when EFF's mission was more important: everything we do today involves the Internet; everything we do tomorrow will require it. No one stretches a dollar further and gets more done than EFF. They've been at it since 1990, and have been at the forefront of practically every significant online rights battle through the whole era of the Internet's rise to prominence. The world I want my kid to grow up in needs EFF in it. —CD

Creative Commons
CC celebrated its tenth birthday (!) this year, a remarkable milestone from a remarkable organization. More than anyone else, CC has reframed the way we talk about creativity and copyright in the Internet era, providing practical, easy-to-use tools to make it possible for creators and audiences to work together in a shared mission of creating and enjoying culture.—CD

Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)
Imagine a world without Wikipedia! Is there any other organization that does more to preserve the original, amazing spirit of the Internet, the sense that we're all on a shared mission to make the whole world a better place through communication and freedom?—CD

Freedom of the Press Foundation
Launched in December 2012, with a board that includes Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, and actor-activist John Cusack, Freedom of the Press Foundation provides you with an easy way to donate to journalism organizations dedicated to transparency and accountability. (I'm on the board, too.) — XJ

The Humane Society
The nation's largest and most effective animal protection organization advocates for animals through public policy, corporate reforms, and major campaigns to confront national and global cruelties -- and saves lives though rescue efforts, disaster response and veterinary support. — RB

The ALS Association
My father died in 1980 from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. A number of my family members have also died from it; we have a very rare familial strain. While there have been many scientific advances surrounding ALS in the decades since my dad died, little is known about how and why this disease manifests (particularly in familial strains), and what approaches may offer hope for a cure. The ALSA was founded in 1985, and leads the way in global research, "providing assistance for people with ALS through a nationwide network of chapters, coordinating multidisciplinary care through certified clinical care centers, and fostering government partnerships." The Association helps people with ALS maximize quality of life while enabling research for new treatments and, one day we hope, a cure. —XJ

The Participatory Culture Foundation
PCF keeps on growing and making me proud to serve on its board. In addition to Miro, its brilliant Internet video client, they've just shipped their ambitious Universal Subtitles project, which aims at nothing less than to render every video on the Web universal, multilingual, and accessible. —CD

METAvivor
Funding vital metastatic breast cancer research, METAvivor's programs sustain the power of hope for people with advanced disease. The non-profit "rallies public attention to the needs of the metastatic breast cancer community, help patients find strength through support and purpose, and make every dollar count as we work with researchers to regain longevity with quality of life."—XJ

World Vision:
An oldie, but goodie. Highly rated by Charity Navigator, World Vision is the classic way to donate in someone's name as a gift. Children, families, and communities all over the world benefit. Your friends and loved ones get to see, in a tangible way, how they've helped to improve lives. Buy 5 ducks and 2 chickens for a family or a cow for a small village. In the US, you can provide school supplies, winter necessities, and food to children and families. I once bought half a cow in the name of my grandparents. As farmers, they liked knowing that they were helping other farmers. What a great way to make connections! —MKB

Marine Mammal Center
Compassionately healing seals from diseases they did not want to contract the Marine Mammal Center then releases them into their native habitat -- if you are a marine dwelling mammal in trouble, and they can find you -- its proof positive the MMC will do their all to ensure your return to health. This tireless and heroic group of full-time staff and army of well trained volunteers need our help to continue helping beautiful creatures who can not help themselves. —JW

Doctors Without Borders:
In global disaster zones, few groups make as much impact as quickly as do Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders. The international medical humanitarian organization was created by doctors and journalists in France in 1971. Today, MSF provides aid in nearly 60 countries to people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe, primarily due to armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, exclusion from health care, or natural disasters. We've published items about their work in Congo, Haiti, and I've met with MSF staff in Guatemala, where they have a project dedicated to violence against women and girls. The do good work. They get things done in places where it is dangerous and difficult to get things done. —XJ

Nurse-Family Partnership:
Provides in-home nurse visits for low-income, first-time expectant mothers and their babies. This program is evidence-based and studies have shown that it has an impact on both public health, and reducing child abuse and neglect. In 2010, it was highly rated by GiveWell.org. It's also one of Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy's "Social Programs That Work". —MKB

Breast Cancer Action
Breast Cancer Action "carries the voices of people affected by breast cancer to inspire and compel the changes necessary to end the breast cancer epidemic," and operates as a national, feminist grassroots education and advocacy organization. The group was founded in 1990 by women who realized the power of community, and the need for a grassroots organization with a unique understanding of the political, economic, and social context of breast cancer. BCAction’s members are women with breast cancer and their supporters — ordinary people who, by educating themselves on the facts and the issues related to breast cancer, have empowered themselves and others to create needed change to end the epidemic.—XJ

Friends of Gettysburg:
From Gen. Buford's heroic first day defense to Pickett's disastrous charge -- no three days more define the struggle we now call the American Civil War. Viewed as the turning point of the war and the high-water mark of the confederacy, walking the roads, fields and hills of Gettysburg truly allows you to feel a deep connection with men and women who struggled here. Sadly, developers and other creeps continually try to modify, encroach upon and invade this monument; luckily we have an organization that still fights to preserve and continually improve access and education in and around the park - the Friends of the National Parks at Gettysburg. They tirelessly work to preserve my favorite National Park, which is saying a lot as I live inside another. —JW

Youth Radio:
Youth Radio is an afterschool program that teaches journalism, media, and audio production skills to underserved young people, mostly high school age You can hear their stories on National Public Radio, local airwaves, and of course online. A lot of the graduates stick around for a while as paid writers, producers, engineers, and teachers. —DP

Child's Play
Since 2003, this game industry charity has worked to improve the lives of children in hospitals with toys and games in a network of over 70 hospitals worldwide. Child’s Play works in two ways: with the help of hospital staff, they set up gift wish lists full of video games, toys, books, and other fun stuff for kids. By clicking on a hospital location on a map, you can view that hospital’s wish list and send a gift. Child’s Play also uses your cash donations to purchase new consoles, peripherals, games, and more for hospitals and therapy facilities. This allows children to enjoy age-appropriate entertainment, interact with their peers, friends, and family, and have vital distraction from the experience of being a child in a hospital setting with a serious illness.—XJ

Mario Marathon
A Mario Brothers gaming marathon that raises cash for Child’s Play Charity (see above). What's not to love? Here's how it works. —XJ

The Sierra Club:
The US's oldest and biggest grassroots environmental organization. Whether it's protecting endangered species, opposing dams, or helping you learn how to green your home, the Sierra Club has spent more than a century trying to keep the wonder of the natural world wonderful. —DP

Big Brothers Big Sisters:
As a former Big, this was one of the most rewarding programs I've had the pleasure of being a part of. It also works. The Big Brothers Big Sisters approach has shown success in randomized controlled trials and it's one of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy's "Social Programs That Work". —MKB

Facing History and Ourselves
Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational group that helps young people study issues around racism, antisemitism, and prejudice in history, from the Holocaust to today's immigrant experiences to the killing fields of Cambodia. Their aim is to teach young people "to think critically, to empathize, to recognize moral choices, to make their voices heard, we put in their hands the possibility--and the responsibility--to do the serious work demanded of us all as citizens." —DP

Fundacion Sobrevivientes:
Contact asobrevivientes@yahoo.es. Telephone (502) 2245-3000

Fundacion Sobrevivientes (In English, "Survivors Foundation") works to end violence against women in Guatemala, where there is an extraordinarily high rate of sexual assault and gender-based violence, and where rapists and murderers operate with impunity. They provide legal aid, mental health care, and security for rape victims, including children. They assist women whose children have been stolen from them to be sold illegally into adoption. They provide support for families of the "dissapeared." Founder Norma Cruz was featured in the documentary Killer's Paradise. Her work links the murders of thousands of Guatemalan women to the country's 36-year civil war. She, her colleagues, and family are frequently targeted by those who seek to prevent the center's work. How to donate: here. —XJ

Innovations for Poverty Action: Highly rated by GiveWell.org, IPA does the studies that find out what kind of poverty interventions actually work and where those interventions work. IPA is led by scientists and uses randomized controlled trials to help make sure that charities are reaching their stated goals and doing what they're supposed to be doing. When they find programs that work, they also assist in scaling those programs up from trials to full-scale interventions. —MKB

Free Software Foundation/Defective By Design:
The Free Software Foundation's principled litigation, license creation and campaigning is fierce, uncompromising and has changed the world. You interact with code that they made possible a million times a day, and they never stop working to make sure that the code stays free. —CD

The Internet Archive: A free repository for all of human knowledge, a bottomless source of bandwidth and storage, the Internet's collective memory, the reinvention of the library right before our eyes. I don't know what I'd do without it. —CD

National Academy Foundation:
The NAF supports Career Academies in low-income public high schools, programs that are proven to make a difference in kids' lives. Studies have shown that graduates of Career Academies see an average 11% increase in annual earnings, an effect that stays strong over the long term. Basically, they start out making more money and keep making more money. —MKB

Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation:
My aunt Heather died of breast cancer when she was only 41. My whole family is now involved with the society. I don't live in Toronto and can't join the annual run for the cure there, but at least I can donate to the cause. —CD

Open Rights Group:
This was the year that the UK government broke its promise to reduce surveillance, and announced, instead, that it wanted to have warrantless, ongoing access to the nation's entire Internet traffic for police and government. It was the year that the courts began to aggressively issue censorship orders against ISPs. We live in an era where people who say dumb things on Twitter and Facebook face jail time. The UK Open Rights Group is the leading national voice on fighting the country's slide into digital insanity, a country where all rights are suspended whenever a computer is involved. —CD

Kiva:
Since 2005, Kiva has been a pioneer in providing micro-financing to the "working poor", offering users the ability to choose their cause of choice. Micro-financing has shown itself to be a boon to the developing world, and especially in creating newly-empowered women entrepreneurs. Kiva has focused on this goal, and makes a difference in the regions they support.—Ken Snider

(I like Kiva, too. It's a fun family activity to look at the proposals and decide where to make investments. Also, Kiva Cards are a cool gift to introduce your friends to the fun world of microinvesting! —Mark Frauenfelder)

The Gutenberg Project: The world's leading access-to-public-domain project. They have truly created a library from nothing, and oh, what a library. Last year marked the sad, premature death of its visionary founder, Michael Hart, and supporting his life's work is a fitting tribute to one of the Internet's true pioneers —CD

Mission statement: "Founded in 1991, the Institute for Justice is what a civil liberties law firm should be. As our nation's only libertarian public interest law firm, we engage in cutting-edge litigation and advocacy both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion on behalf of individuals whose most basic rights are denied by the government--like the right to earn an honest living, private property rights, and the right to free speech, especially in the areas of commercial and Internet speech. As Wired magazine said, the Institute for Justice 'helps individuals subject to wacky government regulations.'" —MF

I've been a member of the American Civil Liberties Union for many years. They need all the support they can get to keep Americans safe and free from a government that answers only to their corporate string-pullers. —MF

The MetaBrainz Foundation:
I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the MusicBrainz project. MusicBrainz is a free and open alternative to the evil (dis)Gracenote, which took all the metadata about CDs that you and I keyed in and locked it away behind a wall of patents and onerous licensing deals. The org that controls the metadata controls the world -- this needs to be in the public's hands. —CD

Any homelessness charity that uses Critical Time Intervention strategies: Homelessness charities are inherently local things. Find one near you, then find out whether it uses CTI, a method of reaching people during crisis situations so that they never become homeless to begin with. CTI has been found to reduce the likelihood of homelessness by 60%, 18 months after people were randomly assigned to CTI-based programs. —MKB

The Clarion Foundation:
I'm also a volunteer on Clarion's board, helping to oversee the world-famous Clarion Writers' Workshop, a bootcamp for sf writers that has produced some of the finest talents in our field, including Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and Lucius Shepard. I'm a graduate myself, and an instructor (I taught in 2005 and 2007 and will teach again this coming summer) -- I received a substantial scholarship to the workshop in 1992 and it changed my life. I will pay that debt forward every year. —CD

Amnesty International:
Justly famed for their principled, effective campaigning for justice and fair treatment under the law, Amnesty has its finger in every pie -- freeing Gitmo detainees, defending jailed journalists, fighting torture and human trafficking, and standing up to bullies wherever they find them. They deserve every cent we can give them. —CD

Hospice Net:
I make a donation to this charity every year in memory of my dear friend, former Boing Boing guestblogger Pat York. Pat was killed in a car accident, and her family nominated this charity for memorial gifts. —CD

Two great jobs charities: Year Up is a national program that trains highly motivated, low-income young adults for well-paying careers. Candidates spend six months going through intensive training and six months on an internship. Most end up with jobs that pay upwards of $40,000 to $60,000 a year. At the other end of the jobs spectrum is The Hope Program, which focuses on getting extremely disadvantaged New Yorkers a job. The Hope Program is working with people who would otherwise have trouble finding any kind of employment at all, folks with histories of substance abuse, homelessness, and prison records. Helping people overcome those barriers and find employment can be a key to making sure they don't end up back in a bad situation. —MKB

ACLU:
For the liberties the EFF doesn't cover, here in sticky meatspace, we have the ACLU. Fearless upholders of the Constitution -- an org that knows that you have to stand up for the rights of people you disagree with, or you aren't in a free society. Unwinding the violence done to fundamental freedoms over the past decade (and the new assaults, from drones to wiretapping) will take time and money. The number of bad laws and regulations to overturn is staggering. —CD

Liberty:
Britain's answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. Every single time I read or hear a news-story about incursions on human rights in the UK, there's an articulate, knowledgeable Liberty commentator countering government's flimsy arguments and campaigning for our freedom. In an era where politicians spy on us seemingly through naked instinct, like ants building hills, it's groups like Liberty that present our best bulwark against tyranny. —CD

Child Rights and You:
I travelled to Mumbai in 2009 for research and was overwhelmed by the terrible, ubiquitous child poverty -- thousands and thousands of children, barefoot, disfigured, begging. I asked my Indian friends about it and was told that it was endemic to Mumbai and India in general, and that many children are exploited by desperate parents or criminal "pimps" who muscle them out of the majority of their earnings. As a new parent, I couldn't help but wonder again and again how I would feel if it were my child living in those circumstances. I'm no stranger to poverty -- I helped build schools with Nicaraguan refugees in Central America, worked to set up an NGO in sub-Saharan Africa -- but I'd never seen anything to rival this. On advice from my Indian friends, I investigated and made a donation to CRY. CRY works to remedy the root causes of child poverty in India, in cities and the countryside, with a special emphasis on protecting girls from exploitation. The problem is deep and huge, but the solution has to begin somewhere. CRY also maintains a UK site for British donors. —CD

Software Freedom Law Center:
As the leading legal clinic defending the interests of free software authors, SFLC is a nexus for the defeat of stupid software patents, work on free software stacks for use in defeating network censorship and shutdowns in repressive regimes, and fighting obscure but vital fights like the battle over UEFI, which threatens to make it both legally and technically challenging to install GNU/Linux on your own computer.

Neighborworks America: This national charity has done a couple of things I really, really like. First, it's a leader in providing counseling to families at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure. At a time when there are lots of scams ready to prey on the weak, Neighborworks protects and helps people keep their homes. Second, they're working for sustainable, affordable housing, making sure that all people can afford homes that are energy efficient and environmentally safe. —MKB

MySociety:
Software in the public interest -- it's a damned good idea. MySociety produces software like Pledgebank ("I will risk arrest by refusing to register for a UK ID card if 100,000 other Britons will also do it") and TheyWorkForYou (every word and deed by every Member of Parliament). It's plumbing for activists and community organizers. —CD

Project Noise

Project Noise creates videos and media campaigns at no or low cost to organizations working to better the world. - MF

The Foundation Beyond Belief:
This is a great one for anybody who wants to donate to one place, but have their money reach multiple causes. It's also a good charity for people who want to donate to charity as an expression of humanist values, rather than religious ones. It works like this: You donate to the Foundation Beyond Belief. Every quarter, the Foundation picks ten charities, one in each of nine categories—health, poverty, environment, education, human rights, peace, animal protection, child welfare, other worldviews—plus the Foundation itself. You can tell them how you'd like your gift divvied up among the categories. At the end of the quarter, 100% of the donations go to the chosen charities and the cycle starts over again. —MKB

ZaReason: a computer company with freedom built in

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 12:14:42 +0000

For the past couple of months, I've been playing with a laptop from ZaReason, a small, GNU/Linux-based system builder founded in Oakland, CA (though it has expanded to New Zealand). ZaReason's deal is that they build computers themselves, using components that are guaranteed to have free and open drivers, and pre-install your favorite free/open operating system at the factory. They offer full support for the hardware and the software, and promise that they'll never say, "Sorry, that component just doesn't work right under Linux." So unlike buying a ThinkPad or other commercial laptop and installing a free operating system on it (which can be a bit of a gamble, and will shortly become more of one, see below), ZaReason's machines arrive ready to run. And unlike buying a commercial laptop from a freedom-friendly vendor like Emperor Linux (who'll sometimes warn you that certain features of your hardware aren't supported), ZaReason can promise you that every single capability of every single component in your system will just work.

ZaReason sent me their Alto 3880, "Long battery life, HD graphics, light and lean = everything a laptop should be." I found it to be a very snappy, responsive machine that, as promised, "just worked" out of the box. The machine's styling is pretty generic -- it looks like your basic, silvery OEM laptop, albeit one where they've opted for the top-spec option for the pointing surface, keyboard, etc. It's rather heavier than the machine I carry for daily use, a Lenovo ThinkPad X220, which shaves its ounces by omitting the optical drive and shrinking the screen to 12" (the Alto has a 14" screen). My machine came loaded with Mint, a Linux flavor forked off of Ubuntu, the OS I use on my ThinkPad. Mint seems to me to be what you'd get if you kept on developing the venerable (and somewhat fuggly) Gnome desktop, which looks a lot like various flavors of Windows. Ubuntu, meanwhile, is driving full-on for a more "modern" (and more constrained) desktop environment called Unity, which I've come to tolerate and even like with the latest release, which came out in April. I found the Mint/Alto combination slightly more stable than the ThinkPad/Ubuntu combo, though both of them are easily as stable as any commercial OS I've ever used, and rarely, if ever, crash or require a reboot. If you prefer Ubuntu to Mint, ZaReason will happily install it at the factory -- other choices include Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or whatever you specify (I assume there are some limits to this).

The ZaReason laptop prices compare well to other PC vendors' machines, within a few points up or down when compared with a comparably equipped Dell. They work well. But working well is easy -- when it comes to my computers, the question I always ask is "How well does it fail?" I live and die by my laptop and even a day's downtime is unacceptable.

My experience -- both personal and as a former CIO -- with the major vendors, from Dell to Apple, is that none of them are terrific when it comes to hardware support. There's a lot of queuing up, a lot of being deprived of your machine for unpredictable periods, and a lot of arguing about whether the warranty covers whatever has gone wrong. On the plus side, Dell has an enormous, bottomless well of replacement parts, and a titanic staff of service techs. Apple, of course, has its ubiquitous stores, where you can drop off machines for service.

ZaReason can't compete head-on with this. Instead, the company offers a highly personalized tech support service from named technicians who treat you like a person, not a trouble-ticket. And the company is willing to go the extra mile for service when it can -- they told me about a South African customer whose machine had some bad RAM; rather than have the machine shipped back to them for service, they diagnosed the problem remotely, found a local South African PC store that had the required part, and had it couriered directly to the customer.

I have been a very, very happy ThinkPad user for some years now. They generally support Linux very well (though there were some bobbles when I moved from 32 bit machines to 64 bit machines), and the company has a whole product line devoted to serious travellers -- machines that cut their weight by leaving out the CD/DVD drive, and come with a variety of batteries, in varying degrees of heaviness/long life, meaning you can go featherweight for short trips, or add an extra 500g with a snap-on, two-day Slice battery that covers the whole underside of the machine, depending on your needs.

More importantly, ThinkPad has an extended on-site hardware replacement warranty that is fulfilled by IBM Global Services, the gold standard in worldwide tech support. For about the same price as AppleCare, Lenovo will give you a warranty whereby any faulty hardware parts are overnighted to you, anywhere in the world, and a few hours later, a technician will show up at your door and fix your computer right there, on your own desk. IBM Global Services are genuinely global, and I've had service in several countries.

ZaReason doesn't really do a laptop for road warriors (yet) -- their offerings fall into the "good-spec/low-price" bucket, or the "massive, blazing gamer/graphics pro laptop," both of which are important categories, but they're not my category. I'm a guy who's on the road about a third of the time, and whose chronic back pain means that every gram of extra weight is a big deal.

But I'm awfully glad that ZaReason exists. As a company, I get the impression that they are as motivated by the cause of freedom as they are by profit. This is especially important today, as a new PC "security" feature called UEFI is making it increasingly hard to install non-commercial OSes on your own computers: free OSes like Fedora and Ubuntu are having to pay blood money to Microsoft so that their users can install and boot their OSes without having to lift the lid off their machines and change the inner workings. This is a trend that I see getting (much) worse before it gets better -- although the right to freely choose and modify your kernel is highly esoteric and technical, it is the wellspring from which all other technological freedoms arise. ZaReason's mission isn't just to make free/open hardware: it's to ensure that there is always a free-as-in-free-speech option for your computing needs. This is a vital role, and they deserve kudos for stepping up to it.

ZaReason's machines work -- and fail -- as well or better as comparably priced systems from much bigger vendors. They promise to support both hardware and software and will never punt support calls on the grounds that "the hardware isn't performing as it's supposed to, we do the software" or "that's a software problem, we only supply the software." They offer limited support for peripherals (external drives, scanners, printers, etc), though in truth, I find that these devices work better in Linux-land than they do for Macs and Windows machines.

Though I thoroughly support ZaReason's mission, I regret to say that I'm not their target market. The Alto they sent me to try was as nice a machine as any other in its weight/price class, but it's not the kind of machine I need. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with, when and if they decide to try it. And in the meantime, they have my endorsement and gratitude for keeping freedom alive, and putting ethics ahead of profit.

ZaReason

Lockdown: free/open OS maker pays Microsoft ransom for the right to boot on users' computers

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 31 May 2012 20:51:38 +0000

A quiet announcement from the Fedora Linux community signals a titanic shift in the way that the computer market will work from now on, and a major threat to free/open operating systems. Microsoft and several PC vendors have teamed up to ensure that only operating systems bearing Microsoft's cryptographic signature will be able to boot on their hardware, meaning that unless Microsoft has blessed your favorite flavor of GNU/Linux or BSD, you won't be able to just install it on your machine, or boot to it from a USB stick or CD to try it out. There is a work-around for some systems involving a finicky and highly technical override process, but all that means is that installing proprietary software is easy and installing free/open software is hard.

This is a major reversal. For many years now, free/open OSes have been by far the easiest to install on most hardware. For example, I have installed Ubuntu on a variety of machines by just sticking in a USB stick and turning them on. Because the OS and its apps are free, and because there are no finicky vendor relationships to manage, it Just Works. On some of those machines, installing a Windows OS fresh from a shrinkwrapped box was literally impossible -- you had to order a special manufacturer's version with all the right drivers to handle external CD drives or docking stations or what-have-you. And the free/open drivers also handled things like 3G USB adapters better than the official drivers (not least because they didn't insist on drawing a huge "WELCOME TO $SOME_STUPID_PHONE_COMPANY" box on the screen every time you connected to the Internet.)

At issue is a new facility called UEFI, which allows a computer's bootloader to distinguish between different operating systems by examining their cryptographic signatures. In theory, this can be used to alert you if malicious software has modified your OS, putting you at risk of having your passwords harvested, your video and sound secretly captured, and your files plundered. But rather than simply alerting users to unsigned ("I have found an unknown operating system and I can't tell if it has dangerous software in it, continue? [Y/N]") or changed OSes ("Your computer has been modified since the last time it was turned on, and now has a version of Windows that can't be verified") Microsoft and its partners have elected to require a very complex and intimidating process that -- by design or accident -- is certain to scare off most unsophisticated users.

Fedora has opted to solve this problem by paying to receive Microsoft's blessing, so that UEFI-locked computers will boot Fedora without requiring any special steps. The payment is comparatively small ($99). When you multiply $99 by all the different versions and flavors of free/open operating systems, it adds up to a substantial ~~revenue stream for Microsoft~~ cost to, and drag upon the free/open software world.

What's more, free/open OSes that don't pay the $99 Microsoft tax will not boot at all on Microsoft-certified ARM-based computers, because Microsoft has forbidden it partners from booting an OS that hasn't been signed by Microsoft, even if the user takes some affirmative step to install a competing system.

This is a tremor before an earthquake: the hardware vendors and the flagging proprietary software vendors of yesteryear are teaming up to limit competition from robust, elegant and free alternatives.

Here's Fedora's Matthew Garrett explaining their decision:

We've been working on this for months. This isn't an attractive solution, but it is a workable one. We came to the conclusion that every other approach was unworkable. The cause of free software isn't furthered by making it difficult or impossible for unskilled users to run Linux, and while this approach does have its downsides it does also avoid us ending up where we were in the 90s. Users will retain the freedom to run modified software and we wouldn't have accepted any solution that made that impossible.
But is this a compromise? Of course. There's already inequalities between Fedora and users - trademarks prevent the distribution of the Fedora artwork with modified distributions, and much of the Fedora infrastructure is licensed such that some people have more power than others. This adds to that inequality. It's not the ideal outcome for anyone, and I'm genuinely sorry that we weren't able to come up with a solution that was better. This isn't as bad as I feared it would be, but nor is it as good as I hoped it would be.
What about ARM
Microsoft's certification requirements for ARM machines forbid vendors from offering the ability to disable secure boot or enrol user keys. While we could support secure boot in the same way as we plan to on x86, it would prevent users from running modified software unless they paid money for a signing key. We don't find that acceptable and so have no plans to support it.
Thankfully this shouldn't be anywhere near as much of a problem as it would be in the x86 world. Microsoft have far less influence over the ARM market, and the only machines affected by this will be the ones explicitly designed to support Windows. If you want to run Linux on ARM then there'll be no shortage of hardware available to you.

Implementing UEFI Secure Boot in Fedora (Thanks, Deborah!)

How food spherification works

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 02:03:25 +0000

On IO9, Esther Inglis-Arkell does a great job of describing the molecular gastronomy practice of "spherification," whereby food is liquefied and then coaxed into forming gelatinous spheres. It has its origin in a 1950s drug-delivery project from Unilever, but was revived by chef Ferran Adrià around 2003.

What spherification does is put back in what the manufacturers of sodium alginate take out. First, the food, whatever it is, is pureed until it's liquid. Then the calcium content of the food is determined. If the calcium content is high, adding sodium alginate will solidify the whole thing immediately. To high-calcium foods extra calcium chloride is added. To all other foods, sodium alginate is added. Then, as with all delectable meals, it's off to the centrifuge. The mixture gets centrifuged to remove any bubbles or impurities there might be in it. Once that's done, drops of the stuff are tossed into a bowl of liquid. If the food contains calcium chloride, the liquid will contain sodium alginate. If the food contains alginate, it will be tossed into liquid containing calcium.
Immediately, the process begins. The outer edge of the spherical drops is the front line. When the sodium alginates hit calcium ions, the ions bind the long strings together, until they form a kind of haphazard net of polymers. The outer layer of the gel solidifies before any of the inner liquid can leak out. Depending on the concentration of both chemicals, and the time spent in the 'bath,' the gel will either be a tiny skin, or an extremely firm layer. Even if the mix of chemicals is weak, the reaction will keep moving inwards, so the balls have to be whisked carefully out of the bath, put on a plate, and rushed out to be set in front of the strained smiles of dinner guests. Then there's just enough time to say, "Oh. You served me vegetable soup in cold, quivering ball form. How original," and it's down the reluctant hatch.
Better living through chemistry.

The Horrific Practice of "Food Spherification"

(Image: Huevas de Té Verde, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jlastras's photostream)

Boing Boing Charitable Giving Guide, 2011 edition

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:40:59 +0000

It's time again for Boing Boing's guide the charities we support in our annual giving. As always, please add the causes and charities you give to in the comments below!

Electronic Frontier Foundation
The EFF's mission has never been more important: as laws like SOPA are rammed through Congress, as bloggers around the world are arrested and tortured with the collusion of American network-surveillance companies, and as the FBI's unconstitutional, warrantless use of surveillance technology like GPS bugs comes to light, EFF is poised to be center-stage in the fight for a free and open world with a free and open Internet. —CD

Creative Commons
Creative Commons has permeated my life in a thousand ways -- on Boing
Boing and in my writing, Creative Commons is responsible for how I get
the job done and how I get paid for it. CC's advocacy of a nuanced,
intelligent position on creativity and sharing changes the lives of
creators, educators, scientists, scholars, and kids, all over the world. —CD

The Participatory Culture Foundation
PCF keeps on growing and making me proud to serve on its board. In
addition to Miro, its brilliant Internet video client, they've just
shipped their ambitious Universal Subtitles project, which aims at
nothing less than to render every video on the Web universal,
multilingual, and accessible. —CD

National Lawyer's Guild: An American institution, these justice-loving lawyers have been a fixture at Occupy actions across the nation. When you see protesters with lawyers' numbers written in marker on their arms, chances are that's the local NLG chapter. —CD

Fundacion Sobrevivientes:
Contact asobrevivientes@yahoo.es or info@sobrevivientes.org. Telephone (502) 2285-0100 or (502) 2285-0139

Fundacion Sobrevivientes (In English, "Survivors Foundation") works to end "femicide" in Guatemala. They provide legal aid, psychological care, and protection for rape victims -- including children. They assist women whose children have been snatched from them to be sold illegally into adoption. They provide support for families of female assassination victims. Founder Norma Cruz was featured in the documentary Killer's Paradise. Her work links the murders of thousands of Guatemalan women to the country's 36-year civil war. She, her colleagues, and family are frequently targeted by those who seek to prevent the center's work. —XJ

Wounded Warrior Project:
Via Susannah Breslin, whose "War Project" interviews I've blogged here on Boing Boing, a recommendation to consider the nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project. The group works to raise awareness and enlist the public's aid for the needs of injured service members; helps injured service members aid and assist each other, and provides unique, direct programs and services to meet the needs of injured service members. Many veteran's charities exist, few get as much good work done for actual vets as this one.—XJ

Open Rights Group:
As Britain's slide into the surveillance society continues, as unelected officials present insane proposals to dismantle privacy and due process to catch pirates, ORG just gets more and more relevant. Membership is up 25% since the Digital Economy Bill was introduced and it continues to grow. Your £5/month pays to keep the lights on for a group of activists working to keep DRM off the BBC, working to ensure that you won't lose your Internet connection because someone in your house was accused of infringement. —CD

The Gutenberg Project: The world's leading access-to-public-domain project. They have truly created a library from nothing, and oh, what a library. This year marked the sad, premature death of its visionary founder, Michael Hart, and supporting his life's work is a fitting tribute to one of the Internet's true pioneers —CD

The Clarion Foundation:
I'm also a volunteer on Clarion's board, helping to oversee the world-famous Clarion Writers' Workshop, a bootcamp for sf writers that has produced some of the finest talents in our field, including Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and Lucius Shepard. I'm a graduate myself, and an instructor (I taught in 2005 and 2007) -- I received a substantial scholarship to the workshop in 1992 and it changed my life. I will pay that debt forward every year. —CD

ACLU:
For the liberties the EFF doesn't cover, here in sticky meatspace, we have the ACLU. Fearless upholders of the Constitution -- an org that knows that you have to stand up for the rights of people you disagree with, or you aren't in a free society. Unwinding the violence done to fundamental freedoms over the past eight years will take time and money. The number of bad laws and regulations to overturn is staggering. —CD

The Friends of the Merril Collection:
Every library's "friends" organization deserves your support, but the Merril is special -- it's the largest
public science fiction reference collection in the world, and performs a
real service for the global community of sf writers and readers. As of
this year, Americans can also get a tax-receipt for their donations to
the Merril. —CD

Linux Foundation memo: how to make a computer that doesn't lock out GNU/Linux

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:35:21 +0000

UEFI is a new hardware standard nominally aimed at stopping malicious software, but it could also make it illegal to replace Windows or MacOS with GNU/Linux on your computer. The Linux Foundation has written a technical memo for hardware vendors explaining how they can ship PCs that still protect users from malware, without putting them in legal jeopardy for running free operating systems:

The recommendations can be summarized as follows:
All platforms that enable UEFI secure boot should ship in setup mode where the owner has control over which platform key (PK) is installed. It should also be possible for the owner to return a system to setup mode in the future if needed.
• The initial bootstrap of an operating system should detect a platform in the setup mode, install its own key-exchange key (KEK), and install a platform key to enable secure boot.
• A firmware-based mechanism should be established to allow a platform owner to add new key-exchange keys to a system running in secure mode so that dual-boot systems can be set up.
• A firmware-based mechanism for easy booting of removable media.
• At some future time, an operating-system- and vendor-neutral certificate authority should be established to issue KEKs for third-party hardware and software vendors.

Making UEFI Secure Boot Work With Open Platforms (via /.)

Anti-malware hardware has the potential to make it illegal and impossible to choose to run Linux

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:52:20 +0000

It's been years since the idea of "trusted computing" was first mooted -- a hardware layer for PCs that can verify that your OS matches the version the vendor created. At the time, TC advocates proposed that this would be most useful for thwarting malicious software, like rootkits, that compromise user privacy and security.

But from the start, civil liberties people have worried that there was a danger that TC could be used to lock hardware to specific vendors' operating systems, and prevent you from, for example, tossing out Windows and installing GNU/Linux on your PC.

The latest iteration of Trusted Computing is called "UEFI," and boards are starting to ship with UEFI hardware that can prevent the machine from loading altered operating systems. This would be a great boon to users -- if the PC vendors supplied the keys necessary to unlock the UEFI module and load your own OS. That way, UEFI could verify the integrity of any OS you chose to run.

But PC vendors -- either out of laziness or some more sinister motive -- may choose not to release those keys, and as a result, PC hardware could enter the market that is technically capable of running GNU/Linux, but which will not allow you to run any OS other than Windows.

What's more, UEFI may fall into the category of "effective access control for a copyrighted work," which means that breaking it would be illegal under the DMCA -- in other words, it could be illegal to choose to run any OS other than the one that the hardware vendor supplied.

Secure boot is optional, but there is likely to be a fair amount of pressure applied by proprietary OS makers to enable it. One could imagine that those vendors might also provide a way to turn off secure boot (from a BIOS-like menu for example), but that is something that might be exploited by rootkits and other malware, so there may well be resistance to allowing that kind of option. Protecting users from rootkits and the like is certainly useful, but there is a competitive advantage as well. Hardware vendors can ensure that only the code they approve can run on the hardware, and proprietary OS vendors will be largely unaffected because their keys will be in the signature database. One would hope that the protection against malware is the primary motivation, but the ability to lock out free OSes is likely seen as a plus.
It is Linux and other free systems that could suffer most from secure boot implementations. While it would be possible for various distributions to get their keys added, that wouldn't help anyone who wanted to run a tweaked version of the "approved" bootloader or kernel. Distributors would not be able to release their private keys to allow folks to sign their own binaries either. Each key is just as valid as any other, so malware authors would just pick up those keys to sign their wares. Exposed keys would also find their way onto the forbidden list rather quickly one suspects.

UEFI and "secure boot" (via /.)

MIT Researcher records 90,000 hours of home video, analyzes the hell out of it

Mark Frauenfelder — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 04:20:08 +0000

[Video Link]MIT researcher Deb Roy's presentation was probably my favorite at TED2011. The highlight of his presentation was when he played an audio file of his son learning how to say "water" over the course of the research project.

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn. Deb Roy studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways. On sabbatical from MIT Media Lab, he's working with the AI company Bluefin Labs.

Deb Roy: The birth of a word

JC Hutchins's sf novel 7TH SON serial, Part 8

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:13:24 +0000

Twenty-five

Imagine two eighteen-wheelers parked side by side. Now, imbued with the power of a giant, press them toward each other, into each other. Moosh the mess downward a bit, flatten out the trailers so they're the same height as the cabs. Lay a massive cylinder atop the monstrosity--a construction-site sewer pipe, maybe--where the two trucks meet. Spray-paint the thing camo green.

That would be a layman's view of the MAZ transport-erector-launchers currently stationed at the Tatishchevo Mobile Nuclear Missile Garrison.

Like most Russian vehicles, the MAZ was an exercise in angles. The only streamlined thing on it was the missile launch canister resting atop the truck's spine. The drivers' cockpits were actually separated by the girth of the tube: a trapezoidal compartment resided on either side of the canister (whose nose hung in front of the MAZ by about six feet), each of which allowed a single man to squeeze inside and drive the behemoth. The two large windshields cursed the MAZ with the appearance of a mechanical insect.

Doug Devlin admired the vehicle here, under the sputtering lamps of the garrison's garage. He strode past one of the front tires, gave the five-footer a kick with his boot, then climbed up the metal ladder built into the side of the MAZ. Devlin opened the eight-inch-thick door and slid into the left-side cockpit. He tossed his Primas and Zippo onto the dash and kicked on the heater. He eyed the chunky high-frequency radio built into the dash, the linchpin in what would unfold hours from now.

The MAZ driver in the other cockpit had once been named Boronov. Now, like the rest of the Saratov garrison, he was a Devlin, too. Thanks to countless drills during the past two weeks, Devlin knew what his copilot was doing: Boronov-Devlin was flipping switches, tapping gauges, and twisting dials necessary for start-up. For his part, Devlin jonesed for a smoke and made sure the Kalashnikovs he'd brought aboard were loaded with full magazines. They didn't expect trouble during their first (last) mission . . . but it didn't hurt to be prepared.

Behind both of the drivers' cabins--inside the sealed targeting/launch compartment--two other Devlins sat at the ready, undoubtedly fighting the pangs of claustrophobia, staring into flickering monitors and prepping their payload through a series of keyboard taps.

Again, Doug Devlin thanked himself for learning Cyrillic. It had been more than handy during this mission. From learning the computer targeting software to decrypting the Permissive Action Links--specialized computer chips built into the missiles that prevented an unauthorized launch--to laughing at Russian TV commercials, those lessons had been damned useful.

The MAZ started up just fine, belching its dark diesel fumes into the mammoth garage. In eight other garages, eight other MAZes like this one were filled with Devlins and roaring to life. An orchestra of bodies conducted by one mind.

Devlin felt Boronov-Devlin depress the clutch, shift into gear, and gently press the gas. From somewhere behind him, the eight-hundred-horsepower engine snarled like a tyrannosaur. The 120-ton truck rumbled out of the garage and into the November air. Inside the launch canister slept its payload: one RT-2PM2 Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile. Seventy-five feet long, six feet in diameter. Weight: fifty-three tons. Range: six thousand five hundred miles. In flagrant violation of the U.S./Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (a clandestine order by the Russian president last year), each missile carried three nuclear warheads, not one. Total yield: two thousand seven hundred kilotons.

The sun was just beginning to rise in Saratov; the fog was burning away in the morning light. The MAZ rumbled through the mist along with its brethren, all piloted by Doug Devlins. All hungry to make the biggest kill in history.

Three groups of MAZes were to drive sixty miles in three separate directions (north, east, and south) and, upon arriving at the predetermined coordinates, set up each MAZ for deploying its missiles. When it was time, they'd launch the nukes right into the history books. It would take them less than two minutes to do so.

Nine missiles. Twenty-seven warheads. Two targets.

Doug Devlin slipped on his helmet and activated its comm unit; this would enable him to speak to the NEPTH-charged men in the targeting compartment. "How are we doing back there?"

"Superb" came the reply. Devlin nodded. He couldn't see his two comrades; they were separated by two feet of wires, insulation, and steel. The voice crackled in his ear again. "During the big show, there are two seats back here with your names on 'em."

Boronov-Devlin's voice snickered into his comm line. "Don't you mean your names on them?"

All four of them chuckled at that. The MAZ rolled past the garrison's electric fence, past the minefields on either side of the road, out into the frosted countryside beyond. Eight other MAZes followed it. Combined, the missiles would launch 24.3 megatons of destruction--a blast hundreds of times more powerful than the weapon that had annihilated Hiroshima.

"What a lovely day for World War Three," Devlin said.

His comrades laughed and agreed.

That was the great thing about this gig. Everyone had such a wonderful sense of humor.

Twenty-six

Level Fourteen. Stalemate.

Father Thomas sighed and slid his back down the wall until his butt touched the floor. He crossed his legs. It felt good to sit like this. Not in an office chair or on a circular couch in front of a mountain of computer screens. Just here, on a concrete floor, with his back against a wall. It felt . . . appropriate.

"Mind if I just sit here for a while?"

Stone's eyes narrowed into slits. "I'm not going anywhere."

They sat and stood in silence for the next minute.

"You know, you remind me of a man I once knew," Thomas said finally. "Met him just before seminary, back in what I call my crotch-rocket days. Motorcycle, see. Fast one. Japanese."

Stone grunted. "Folks call 'em rice rockets where I'm from."

"That's kinda racist."

"Racist as hell."

Father Thomas smiled, then continued, "So, yes. This guy. He was a bouncer at this bar I used to hang out in, back in St. Louis. I'm human; this was my last hurrah before a life of the cloth. This guy? Nice guy. Big as a bear, but cool around his buddies and the regulars. But you didn't want to tick him off, you know? It's like there was an animal under his skin. A lion. He always seemed ready when a scrap went down."

Thomas exhaled. Stone looked down at him, imperious.

"Does that make sense?" Thomas asked. "When people came into the pub, this fellow knew which customers were the merry drunks and which ones were sad drunks and which ones were going be the mean drunks. He just knew. Like he could smell it. When you walked through that door, he knew if you were right or if you were wrong. Read people like a book, Knuckles could. I think he would have made a helluva priest, actually."

Stone harrumphed. "Knuckles."

Thomas looked up from the floor and laughed. "Ridiculous, right? But that's what everyone called him. 'Don't fuckles with Knuckles,' this one old lush used to say. Absolutely inappropriate, but that's what he said. And you'd think Knuckles wouldn't tolerate that . . . I mean, the one person you don't want to mess with is the bouncer, right? But it was okay for the geezer to rib him like that. Why? Because Knuckles knew the old lush was right. Not right as in 'correct,' but right as in the opposite of wrong. Cool, harmless. On the white side. Understand?"

Stone nodded slightly.

"That's who you remind me of, Stone. Knuckles. The man with a lion inside. The man who makes you on sight. The man who knows the difference between who's right and who's wrong."

The soldier crossed his arms. "I know what you're trying to do. Don't even think about it."

Thomas waved it away. "I'm not." He shrugged. "I am. A little. Okay, a lot. I have an agenda." He sighed. "Do you know what I am?"

"Yeah. A soulless freak."

Thomas flinched. Yes. An untethered monstrosity, the dark voice within him said. A parentless, godless thing . . . no right to exis--

Stop it. Stop listening.

"Ah . . . I think our panel of judges might accept that answer," Thomas said, recovering. "But I'm also something else, Stone. I'm just like you. I have a life and a job and bills and flaws and problems. I have baggage from my childhood--even if it wasn't mine, I remember it as such. The most brilliant things I've ever said I've never said, because the real zingers come hours after the cocktail party, yes? I've been a jerk. I've been a jewel. Most times I'm somewhere in between, though I do my very best to stay on the path and lead by example.

"I'm you, Stone. Just a man. Just another guy making his way in this wondrous and confusing world, dreaming secret dreams and praying they'll come true. And I've been dreaming about my dead father for fourteen years. I've been haunted, been lied to. What I thought was right wasn't. It was wrong. I'm going to learn to live with it. But all the questions I now have--the questions about this place and what it's really all about--they can be answered by only one person. He's six feet away from me, Stone. Just beyond that door you're guarding. Six feet, fourteen years, seven sons. Please. Don't be the man who denies me the right to ask those questions."

With a beeping sound and a gentle whoosh, the doors slid open. Thomas looked up, past Stone, into the open doorway of the living quarters.

Into the eyes of his father.

"Let him in," Hugh Sheridan said, and disappeared back into the dimness. Stone nodded.

Thomas stood up, dumbfounded. Stone hadn't opened the door. Thomas looked at the soldier, amazed. "I thought Kleinman and Hill . . ."

"Nope," Stone said. "The request came from Sheridan."

Thomas stood for a moment, his mouth open in surprise--then he threw his head back and laughed. Of course Sheridan had wanted to keep them away. You're not my son, he had said. You just think you are. It's what you remember. . . . It's too soon. Too soon.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Thomas asked.

Stone smirked. "You didn't ask."

Thomas looked into the soldier's green eyes. "You were never going to move. No matter what I said, you were never going to let me in."

"No. And you were never going to move, either."

"No."

Stone smiled. It looked out of place, there on his face.

"So we have two things in common," Stone said. "We're both black belts, and truly stubborn bastards."

Thomas laughed again.

"That thing in Oklahoma," Stone said. "It was business, you know. Nothing personal."

The priest nodded, his smile fading. "I'm beginning to understand that more and more." He stepped into his dead father's home.

The doors whooshed shut behind him.

Twenty-seven

In Los Angeles, Durbin was screaming. Screaming through what was left of his mouth.

Dr. Mike didn't know when it had happened, but the horror show unfolding before him didn't lie. Durbin had been shot in the face. A bullet--just one? surely more than that, surely more--had blasted off the man's lower jaw. Dr. Mike had seen it happen. One second, Durbin was screaming at Dr. Mike and John to run like hell for the glass-encased VIP lounge; there was cover there, tables and couches, and hurry the fuck up . . . and an eyeblink later, Durbin's entire chin had exploded in a mist of bone and blood.

It had taken another second for Durbin to realize something was wrong. That moment played out in hyper-slow-motion for Dr. Mike. Durbin's head rocked from the impact. His eyebrows rose, as if he were asking himself a question. The man had then looked into Dr. Mike's eyes . . . and the pain had taken hold.

Durbin screamed, was screaming now. Screaming without lips, without a tongue. It was a hollow, rattling noise; a monstrous, unfocused gurgle-roar.

Dr. Mike shrieked as another bullet blew out Durbin's left eye. And then Durbin the asshole, Durbin the fuckwit, Durbin the Ben Affleck look-alike who deserved much more than this, fell to the catwalk floor and lay still.

A bullet droned past Dr. Mike's head and exploded into the wall behind him. The world quickly resumed in real time. He leaped to the floor, next to Durbin's body. It was sensory overload: the strobe light and thunderclap of automatic gunfire, the wood and steel fixtures here in Folie á Deux exploding from bullet impacts. He spotted John's face in the darkness. He was to Dr. Mike's left, also lying low, taking cover, way out of his element, trembling like a leaf in a hurricane. Dr. Mike heard the screams of other men, from below--from the ground floor. And from the commlink in his right ear, his marine clone shouting orders to the men.

"Above! Above!" Michael was screaming. "Two on the second level! Two more at the skylight!"

Dr. Mike tilted his head up toward the skylight in the center of the nightclub's ceiling. What in the fuck is he talking about? he thought frantically. I don't see anyone up--

Guttural spurts of machine-gun fire suddenly flickered through what was left of the skylight windows. Someone screamed below.

"Fuck!" a cry came from the commlink. "He got me! Can't see--"

Another explosion of gunfire sputtered from the skylight. The voice on the commlink fell silent. But Dr. Mike still couldn't see the person up there firing the guns.

I should at least be able to spot something up there, he thought frantically. At least the blast from the gunfire should give me some kind of glimpse. But . . .

He glanced down at the PDA strapped to his wrist. The thermal imager on his helmet was still set to night vision. He could see the ceiling and the skylight in perfect detail, painted in liquid-crystal shades of green. The screen erupted into a flash of bright green as another volley of bullets was fired from the skylight. A dark gray shape--barely visible, blending into the night sky--loomed over the window. Dr. Mike reached to the imager on his helmet and clicked the rubber button several times. The imager finally switched to body-heat mode. The shape was still dark gray.

The fuck? How can--

"They're shades," a voice whispered. Dr. Mike looked to his left. It was John. The man's eyes were wide, manic.

"Do you see them?" Dr. Mike asked. "On your screen?"

"They're shades," John hissed. "Devils. Ghosts. We're being hunted by ghosts."

Dr. Mike shook his head. Goddamn civvy's lost it. The wall behind them exploded in puffs of plaster and wood. Splinters fell around their faces. We can't see them, but they can see us, he thought. Whoever they are.

One of the 7th Son soldiers on the ground level fired up at the skylight. What few panes of glass that were unbroken exploded as the bullets zipped through them . . . then the entire frame of the skylight suddenly sank inward and plummeted forty feet down, smashing spectacularly into the center of the dance floor.

"Jesus!" Dr. Mike cried.

He stared at the wreckage in the dim light from the full moon above. Parts of the metal frame flickered. Shimmered. He glanced down at the screen on his wrist. Hues of orange and yellow were popping in and out of the screen, like fireworks. Suddenly the screen revealed the glowing thermalized shape of a man. Mike looked from the LCD to the floor. A man, dressed in a skintight black suit, lay dead in the center of the crumpled skylight frame. His face was covered in a spandexlike ski mask and goggles. A box-shaped backpack smoked behind his shoulders.

"Shit, that's what I thought," said a voice over the commlink. It was the marine, Michael. "They're wearing light- and heat-protective camouflage. Vaporwear."

"How do you know?" said another voice. Maybe Lockwood's.

"Because I was one of the soldiers who test--"

But Dr. Mike didn't hear the rest of the transmission. Someone had yanked the commlink from his ear.

It was probably the same person who was now pushing a gun barrel into his cheekbone.

* * *

John tried to stop shaking, but his body had checked out, stopped listening to the commands his brain was transmitting.

Calm down. Calm down.

It wasn't helping. Just seconds ago, one of the shades--they're men, just men; look at the dead man on the dance floor, that's what they all are, just men wearing special camouflage--had pulled John off the floor. The man's gun dug into the side of the clone's face.

A second shade had done the same to Dr. Mike and had taken his commlink. The two clones were hauled over to what was once, in a former life, a movie-house balcony. Now it was a dusty VIP lounge, and just outside the doors of the glass-encased room, the shades shoved John and Dr. Mike toward the balcony railing.

It was strange, being handled by these things. Even here, up close, John couldn't see their faces and could barely make out their shapes. The Vaporwear really did make these men nearly invisible. A subtle distortion of the surroundings was the only giveaway. John's mind flitted briefly to Star Trek reruns, Romulans and cloaking devices. Vaporwear was clearly a cloaking device for a person. But nothing could hide the odor of these men--they reeked of filth and booze.

Why would soldiers smell like this? It doesn't make sen--

The shades shoved John and Dr. Mike even closer to the balcony railing. The expanse of the club lay below them, the mammoth silver statue glimmered directly ahead. John spotted several bodies in the moonlight.

Christ, how many of us are left?

John felt the barrel of a pistol gnaw into the base of his skull. One of the shades behind him screamed over the sporadic gunfire. "Anyone moves, anyone fires another shot--and they die. Anyone tries to call for backup or transportation--and they die. There are two of us up here. There's another watching from the skylight. The angles are covered well enough. Try anything . . . anything . . . and their pretty freak faces go bye-bye."

Silence. Somewhere, a splintered chunk of metal clanged to the floor.

From below, Michael's voice: "What do you want?"

The shade behind John laughed. "To give you a message. A message from John Alpha. But to hear it, you have to come out. And not just you, marine. All of you. Come out. Come out!" A chuckle, then a whisper: "Wherever you are."

John squinted past the statue, to the dance floor. Nothing.

Finally, Michael's voice boomed from the shadows. "I have wounded down here. Some of them aren't going to make it. They need a doctor."

"We've got one up here, faggot--though it's not the kind you need," the shade behind John cried. The clone flinched as the gun pressed harder into his neck. "Play cowboy, now. Round up your tin soldiers and bring them out here in the open. We know where you're hiding--we can see you. Can you see us? Can you see us well enough to risk taking a shot when these freaks here are standing so close? Come out, homo, and bring your wounded."

More silence. John felt a bead of sweat slide down his nose.

"We can't trust you," Michael called.

"Of course you can't," the first shade, who stood behind Dr. Mike, replied. "To wit."

Dr. Mike's right biceps exploded in a shower of blood. The gunshot was almost deafening at this range.

"FUCK!" Dr. Mike howled. "He shot me! I'm fucking--"

"Shut up!" the shade bellowed. "Don't you fuckin' fall down, Doc. You stand right there, stand straight. Shut your face and listen. That's what you're best at, isn't it? Listening to killers? Writing about killers? Take notes, pretty boy."

Dr. Mike clutched his arm now; blood oozed between his fingers, soaking his combat jacket. He breathed heavily between clenched teeth . . . but he did not fall. And did not speak.

"Blame the cowards!" the shade cried into the darkness. John could smell the alcohol on the man's breath. It was nauseating. "Blame the gutless ones who won't do as they're told! You're good at following orders, marine, so why aren't you doing it now? I need not remind you that the next bullet is going into someone's cerebellum. And wouldn't that be a shame, all those shared childhood moments spraying onto the floor?"

In the low light streaming from the hole in the ceiling, John spotted movement from below. Michael stepped out of the shadows, from behind Folie á Deux's smashed, shattered DJ booth. He was covered in dust and grime. He held a XM8 machine gun in each hand.

"Good dog," the shade behind John said. "Drop the guns. Order the other mice to come out of their holes."

Michael tossed his weapons and made a quick motion with his hands. Slowly, the rest of the squad emerged from their positions. They, too, threw their guns to the floor. Of the eleven soldiers who had flown here with the clones, only five were now alive.

"So." Michael looked up at John, then past him. "We've made one enormous leap of faith with you punks."

Faith, John thought. We all need a little more of that right now.

The gun barrel dug into his neck again.

"Aw, you're all almost ready for big-boy pants," the first shade said. "So here we are. Three clones, five soldiers who have a hard-on for suicide missions, and us. Us. Three men who have your lives in our hands. Amazing, how so many can be cut down by so few."

"Picking off the enemy is much easier when you're invisible," Michael called. "Who are you people? Where'd you get that gear?"

The second shade chuckled from behind John. "When your employer has a connection with DARPA, there's plenty to borrow."

From the dance floor, Michael considered this. "DARPA. That's what I thought. The suits work a lot better than when I tested the prototypes a year ago. You know, you're giving away an awful lot--how many men you have here, where you got your duds, tidbits about who's funding you. Sloppy."

"True. But are we giving away an awful lot . . . or are we spoon-feeding you hints?" the first shade said. "Am I feebleminded, or are we playing a game? I'm mum on the subject. And speaking of Mum, let's talk about her."

"That's why we came here," Michael said.

"Wrong," the shade snapped. "You're here because you followed the bread crumbs. You worked from a supposition that John Alpha kidnapped your so-called mother and that you'd find her here and save her. But, as I'm sure you discussed at some point, you had no proof of any of those things. You made, as you just said, a leap of faith. Here's another possibility: you may be here simply because Alpha wanted an economical way to murder you. Perhaps the failure of tonight's mission isn't that you didn't find your mother, but that we didn't get to kill all seven clones at once."

"That's bullshit," Dr. Mike said from beside John. Sweat was dripping from his face. "If you wanted us dead, you could've killed us weeks ago. Years ago."

The first shade whipped his gun into the back of Dr. Mike's helmet. The clone nearly collapsed from the impact.

"Keep quiet!" the shade barked. "Unless you want to eat another bullet."

"No, he's right," Michael called from below. "This isn't about bringing us together to kill us all. It's about playing the game. He's testing us."

"You're smarter than you look, faggot," the second shade said.

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't call me that. That's my business, and my business ain't the business we're here to discuss. Is our mother alive?"

"She is."

"Is she in this building?"

The second shade behind John chuckled. "What's left of her, yes."

"Is John Alpha also here?" Michael asked.

"Indeed."

"Where?"

And on cue--because it's certainly on cue, John thought, Michael's right, it's a game, we're just little plastic cars in Alpha's board game of Life--a set of doors on the far end of the club swung open. The doors slammed theatrically against the walls. Out of the dimness stepped a man who looked just like John and Dr. Mike and Michael, only . . .

. . . only different.

His stride was measured. Confident. Deliberate.

The full moon shone though the wrecked remains of the skylight. The man stepped toward the center of the dance floor, now illuminated.

"Ta-daa," John Alpha said.

Twenty-eight

Jack, Jay, and Kilroy2.0 read the CDC report in silence, here in the 7th Son facility's circular Common Room. The report, filed by a CDC field agent five months ago, flickered on one of the hacker's five computer monitors.

That July, the corpses of ten men had been discovered in Heber Springs, Arkansas. Two maintenance engineers at Greers Ferry Dam had spotted the bodies lying on a maintenance catwalk used by employees. How or when these strangers had invaded the premises, no one knew. Also unexplained was how the ten men had received access to the catwalk, which was mounted approximately two-thirds of the way up on the 243-foot-tall dam wall.

According to Cleburne County Sheriff investigations, whose data was included in the CDC report, nearly all of the men had been reported missing by family or friends about three weeks before the gruesome discovery at the dam. Most of the men were friends, employees at a local metal-stamping factory. Reports stated that at least four of them had exhibited erratic behavior at home before their mysterious departure. The men acted as if they were unfamiliar with their surroundings, rejected favorite meals, and ignored family members outright.

What the ten men did during their three-week "lost time" was unknown, though at least one wife assumed her husband had left town to binge, purge, and "dip his wick into some sin-den hussy." The CDC agent did not elaborate on this accusation in her report.

The ten bodies were found at various places on the catwalk. Autopsy reports revealed no toxic substances in the bodies; in all cases, blood-alcohol content was practically nonexistent. No heart failure. No strokes. No long-term diseases. They had just died sometime in the night. Were they poisoned? The test results said no.

This dearth of explanations sparked the county coroner to call the CDC field office in Dallas. The bodies were flown to Dallas for further examination. The brains of all ten men were examined . . . and that's where things got spooky. An inexplicable pattern of cell and tissue damage had devoured their brains. Nerve centers had decayed. Entire lobes had lost their solidity. Their brains had liquefied. No carcinogenic or foreign elements were discovered after several tests.

The CDC field agent noted in her report that this discovery could not be classified by current CDC standards. No existing virus or illness--absolutely none--came close to describing the condition of these men's brains. It was as if the minds had physically burned themselves out and begun to cave in on themselves. A case of, as the agent put it, "brainrot." The cause could be environmental or viral, the agent wrote.

If the deceased are victims of an as-yet-to-be-identified environmental or viral invasion, the report concluded, the agency must consider further study of this incident and apply quarantine and outcome scenarios, if appropriate. However, this agent is reluctant to condone such an action at this time for the following reasons. (1) All ten subjects were found wearing an identical "dog tag"-style necklace featuring an unidentifiable symbol. (2) Each victim had a peculiar tattoo on the back of the neck featuring a unique letter/number combination. (3) Also found at the scene were inscriptions made on the dam wall by the men. These messages are either gibberish or in some kind of code.

These three peculiarities may imply membership in a local club or cult, a theory which is currently supported by local law enforcement. Attempts have already been made to keep the discovery of a so-called ritual suicide out of the local newspapers for this reason. Bearing these anomalies in mind, the results of this report should be considered once the lost-time activities of the deceased can be accurately determined by local law enforcement. At present, there are too many x-factors in the case to recommend an immediate course of action.

Included in this file are photographs of the bodies at the CDC Dallas office, and at the scene of discovery.

"My God," Jay muttered. He rubbed his eyes and looked to the others. "Is this . . . is this what we're looking for?"

"Could very well be," Jack said. "The NEPTH-charge symptoms that Kleinman told us about are all here, especially what this agent calls 'brainrot.' The personality change is evident in the men, too--a possible sign that the original memories were erased, and a new identity was downloaded into the mind. That may be the clincher. What do you think, Kilroy?"

Kilroy2.0 placed his hand on the computer mouse and directed it to the bottom of the page. The pointer rested over a link that read, Attached image 1 of 24: nu4446-ot-898vf-1.jpg.

"I want to see these photographs," he said, and tapped the mouse button.

It was a crime-scene photo, taken from one end of the dam's sixteen-hundred-foot-long catwalk. There they were, all of the men lying on the walkway. They didn't look dead. They looked as if they were sleeping . . . except for one strange detail. Each man held a fat permanent marker in his left hand. Near the body of each man was writing on the dam wall. The photo was taken from too far away for the messages to be legible, but one thing was clear: the writing looked like the chicken scratchings of a child, or of the elderly. Jagged, ghoulish. The men had written these words as their bodies went spastic, as the brains inside their skulls were rotting. Their last words.

"What does that say?" Jay asked, pointing to the message in the foreground of the photo. " 'Yg'? 'Ygcn'?"

"Let's find out," Kilroy said, and clicked another link.

"Jesus!" Jack hissed.

They stared at the photograph, the jagged red lines slashing across the slate gray of the dam's concrete surface. It was a madman's signature, a killer's taunt . . . in another language.

ygcn ygclj

"What the hell?" Jay said. "That's no language I know."

Kilroy clicked more links. The images appeared, and they looked at them in horrified silence. The rest were written in that same creepy nonlanguage.

"These were written by ten different men," Jack said. His face was pale. "But look. The handwriting is identical."

"So they were NEPTH-charged," Kilroy said.

Jay stared at the screen. His eyes were watering. He couldn't blink. "What does it mean?" he whispered.

"It means this is bigger than we thought," Jack said. "These are messages. For us. It's another goddamned puzzle."

* * *

Hugh Sheridan's quarters smelled of cigarettes and dust. Beneath that, an underlying aroma of mothballs. The place was a basement studio apartment, complete with kitchenette, dining alcove, and Murphy bed. In the dimness, Father Thomas spotted a couch and two comfy chairs; Sheridan was sitting in one of these. Most of the overhead track lights were out, either switched off or filled with long-dead bulbs. A single spotlight shone uselessly into a corner.

"Can I sit down?" Thomas asked.

The shadow of his father waved an arm toward the couch. "I certainly don't expect you to stand."

Thomas sat on the far end of the couch. That musty smell was everywhere now. He squinted through the dimness at his father. Most of the man's features were lost in the shadows, but the hair seemed familiar. So did the curve of his chin, his neck. His shoulders. The silhouette of his ears, of all things. Thomas stared at him. The sensation was like finding an old photograph in a closet-shelf shoebox--that feeling of discovery, of nostalgia, bittersweet, fragile, of emotions and memories furiously whipped together by a brain surprised with such a find. It was more than looking at an old photograph, of course. But for a moment, for Thomas, that's how it felt.

He cleared his throat. His palms were sweating. He pulled the pistol from his belt and placed it on the cushion beside him. He noted Sheridan's curious glance. The priest felt a moment of regression, as if he'd just been caught with a hand in the cookie jar.

"It was just for show," he stated, embarrassed. He sighed. "Okay. I know you're not my father. I know that I only remember you as my father, and that those memories are someone else's. I know that. But I don't feel that. Not yet. There's a difference."

Hugh Sheridan nodded.

"It's hard for me to look at you . . . to hear you . . . and not associate it to a childhood with you," Thomas said. "But I'm going to try. I have--"

"I heard some of what you said through the intercom. But let me be the first to ask a question. Which number are you?"

"Number? I don't follow."

The shadow-dad changed position in the chair; he was reaching for something in his shirt pocket. Smokes. Thomas heard the characteristic tinny chik-chik of a disposable lighter. His father's face glowed behind the flame, an orange portrait of not then but now: bags under blue eyes, wrinkles crisscrossing over eyebrows, trenches of crow's-feet above the cheeks. Thomas felt what all estranged children feel when they see a parent after years of absence: He looks so old. What happened while I was gone?

Sheridan's eyes flicked up from the cigarette and gazed into Thomas's. The flame hung between them for another second, then vanished.

"I guess Kleinman didn't tell you about that," Sheridan said. "The numbers."

Thomas watched the cigarette's amber tip, transfixed. "I think there's a lot Kleinman didn't tell us."

Sheridan smiled. "I wouldn't doubt it." His voice was low, acidic. "Complicity is best given by the uninformed. You clones were given numbers when you were plucked out of those plastic wombs years ago. When the Memory Totality of John--John Alpha--was downloaded into your vacant minds, each of you was given a number . . . the number being the order in which you received the data. Numbers. Unoriginal, I know, but we were excited new parents of septuplets. I suppose if we'd cloned only four of you, we could've called you Eenie, Meenie, Miney, and Moe. But '4th Son' just doesn't have the same ring, does it?"

"Stop it," Thomas said.

Sheridan's teethed glittered. "I'm being rude, I know. What you've learned in the past two days, I've lived with for the past thirty-four years. Pardon my insensitivity. So which one are you? Are you the oldest of them--the first to receive the mind of John Smith? Or perhaps a frustrated middle child? Don't tell me who you are. Tell me what you are. I'll tell you your number."

"What you heard from me out there in the hall. That's . . . that's me."

"That's who you are. You love, you dream, you put on your pants one leg at a time just like the rest of us. Eloquent, in an endearingly naïve way. But that doesn't tell me what you are. To wit: you don't look like a soldier. Or a U.N. analyst."

"I get it," Thomas said, crossing his arms. "I'm the priest. Enough for you?"

"Quite." Sheridan smirked. "Johnny Five. You're alive."

Thomas blinked, not understanding.

"I'm a little surprised it would be you to come here," Sheridan said. "Fascinating. This is behavior beyond what you'd typically do. You're a rule-follower, party-line LTP." He sucked a lungful from his cigarette, then exhaled. "I thought you might be the wild child. Lucky Seven, the youngest, the black sheep. Kleinman likes him best, you know. He admires the kid's spirit."

"Black sheep."

"Of all the clones, he was the only one who completely rejected the LTP we'd assigned him. A painstakingly devised and plotted LTP, I might add. He was called the 'failed experiment.' But not by Kleinman. He told us Seven was the triumph of human cloning and MemR/I integration. Independence. Free will, if there is such a thing.

"But you, priest. You followed the LTP to the letter. It's just as well. I'm sure you're doing good things for all those true believers in the heartland."

"Stop. Please," Thomas said. "I'm not with you. What is 'LTP'?"

"Life Template Plan." Sheridan took another drag of his cigarette. He blew the smoke toward the ceiling. "Your road map. Surely you've seen the significance of when you were awakened from your fictitious coma, all those years ago." Thomas stared blankly at him, and Sheridan tried again. "I'm referring to your age. Sixteen. The cusp of adulthood. The time when a youngster casts an eye to the future and to career--but also a time when he is still very, ah, impressionable. Malleable. The scientists here at 7th Son built a Life Template Plan for each of you Beta clones: careers in the military, psychology, biology--"

Oh. My God.

Thomas interrupted, finishing the thought. "And our respective Uncle Karls and Aunt Jaclyns pushed us in those predestined directions. And such a well-rounded childhood would have prepared us for almost any career. I get it now. I truly get it."

It felt as if Thomas's stomach were sinking in on itself, deflating his entire body. His mind quickly flashed to fragments of his junior year in high school, after the accident. Still a new school, still a stranger in a new city. Those first few years, he had clung to whatever advice his new foster parents had given him. And why wouldn't he? In a way, he'd known them his whole life--all the postcards they'd sent from those faraway places. Uncle Karl and Aunt Jaclyn were trustworthy. They were family.

They were anything but. You learned that yesterday, Thomas. But now you realize just how badly you and the rest of the clones were hoodwinked. They preached the faith, didn't they? Karl and Jaclyn practically pushed your nose into that Catechism. Just what does that mean?

"You took advantage of us," Thomas said, his voice rising, newfound anger coursing through him. "You woke us up in new cities with new parents and terrible news. And you had already plotted out our little lives for us. What a bunch of self-righteous pricks!"

"Tut, tut, Five. We had constructed the LTPs years before you were cloned and they were for career only. We based the Life Template Plans on future-centric social studies. What 'future' careers, technologies, and political climates would be like." Sheridan grinned. "Those projections were very accurate, I might add, considering that the future is now."

Father Thomas resisted an urge to reach over and smack the man's face. It would solve nothing. He fumbled for the rosary in his pocket.

"So I was destined to become a priest, in the great and powerful plans of 7th Son."

"Indeed. You didn't go rogue, like Seven. He charted a course into the unknown, damning any guidance thrown his way. You could have been anything you wanted to be, of course. We all have that drive. But you followed the plan. In contrast, Seven had the capacity to become a nuclear physicist. It would have rounded out the team quiet nicely, don't you think?"

"Team. Kleinman didn't say anything about a team." Thomas leaned forward; the rosary beads click-clacked, reassuring him.

"I don't doubt that, either."

"He said we were part of a grand nature-versus-nurture experiment. He said 7th Son was designed to observe what forms our seven separate lives would take, seeing how we came from the same 'past.' "

Sheridan threw his head back and laughed. It was a wicked, rattling sound. "Sounds like soggy marketing copy, doesn't it? Heh. Proof that absolute power corrupts absolutely. He's rewriting history. Changing the past just for you, Five."

"Stop calling me that. My name's Thomas."

Sheridan laughed again. "Of course it isn't. You're Five. Just as the marine is One and the geneticist is Four. Do you think something as insignificant as an identity actually matters in this place? A place where a lifetime of memories can be stored as ones and zeros . . . a place where we can grow a human clone to adulthood in two years? A place where we bent the will of you and five of your brethren to embrace the livelihoods we chose for them? Do you think something as dignified as a name has any place here? You're even more naïve than I thought."

Thomas shook his head. He's not making any sense. "What does that mean?"

"It means, my dear Thomas, that 7th Son was--and still is--something much more than a glorified master's thesis about nature and nurture. It's about teams. About creating . . . no, constructing teams. We're going to play a little game: I start the joke, you give me the punch line. It goes like this. Clone seven different children, give them the same memories, separate them, train them in different fields of study, and then bring them back together. After an adjustment period, what do you have?"

Thomas's head was swimming. "I don't know."

"Oh, come now. Think. You're a preacher. Think about allll of those Christian sects out there, across the world. Each of them uses the Bible as the foundation of their faith. Don't they?"

Thomas sat in silence for a few seconds. "Yes and no."

"Explain."

"There's different translations of the Bible. Different interpretations. Nuances. Variations on a theme."

Sheridan's eyebrows raised in approval. "Precisely. Variations. The same man--in body and in childhood memory--but in seven different adult incarnations. With seven different areas of expertise, brought together for a common purpose. Follow?"

And there it was.

"You're talking about building an army," Thomas said.

Twenty-nine

"Ta-daa," John Alpha said. The words echoed in the silence of the smashed Folie á Deux nightclub.

The killer wore a black business suit, Italian. Collarless white shirt. Alpha was pale, almost sickly, his blond brown hair slicked back. He grinned past a trimmed goatee and stretched his arms outward from his side, palms facing out.

John gazed down at the villain from the club's balcony. For a moment, the man looked like a car salesman. Or a mortician.

"I honestly didn't expect to see you here," Michael the marine finally said. His voice was low and calm. "I thought you'd be the hide-in-the-bunker type. The puppetmaster who doesn't get dirt under his fingernails."

John Alpha glanced down at his manicured nails, then folded his hands together. His eyebrows raised as he smiled. "Who says I'm not? But I couldn't let my little NEPTH-charged killers have all the fun."

"Fuck you," one of the 7th Son soldiers said. Fleming. John Alpha looked up at the ceiling, bored, as if he hadn't heard. John followed the man's gaze. He was looking through the hole in the ceiling, probably at the invisible sniper still posted up there.

"My shooters," Alpha said, turning back to the group on the dance floor. "I'm actually quite proud of them. They were all a mess when I found them days ago. Homeless and hungry, each one."

One of the Vaporwear guards behind John grunted his assent. The air was thick with that rancid, boozy smell again. John held his breath.

"But with a deep-fried personality change, even human garbage can become government-trained killers," Alpha continued. "You know a little something about that, don't you, Michael?"

"Who are they?" the marine asked. "Who'd you put inside their heads?"

Alpha laughed. That laugh sounds like mine, John thought.

"The direct approach is dollar-store material, marine," Alpha said. "It's tired, trite, and cheap--and it certainly hasn't gotten you very far today. Find the answer for yourself, if you live through this night." Alpha paused, and grinned. "That's called foreshadowing, by the way."

"We get it," Michael replied. "So I guess it comes back to one thing. We're here."

"Yes." John Alpha looked up toward the balcony, where John and a bleeding, wheezing Dr. Mike stood. His eyes met John's, and his face blossomed into a look of delight. John shuddered; it felt as if someone had poured ice water down his spine.

"Hello, walkabouter," Alpha called. "Untrained, untested--and yet you still charge into a battle zone such as this. Can I make a confession? Can I admit that I'm unsurprised by the surprise visit? That it's yet another fine piece of free will you--"

Suddenly, Alpha took a quick step backward. "Kill him!" he cried.

A single shot rang out from above, from the sniper in the skylight. John instinctively closed his eyes. He did not see Fleming's chest explode and spatter across the wooden dance floor. He did not see Fleming's body fall to the floor. He did, however, hear the knife Fleming had been holding clatter to the ground. John opened his eyes and watched the man's blood spread from his body, oozing across the floor, slipping past the fallen blade. Fleming had apparently intended to throw it at Alpha.

"Now where were we?" John Alpha said pleasantly. "Yes, the guitarist. It's only appropriate that you're here for the sacrifice. The highly exaggerated deaths of my parents hit you hardest, didn't they, John? Aimless wanderer you are, playing hopscotch all throughout your life, anchorless, wasting the gift the man-gods at 7th Son gave you."

Alpha smiled. It was a cruel expression.

"Oh, the life--the lives--you could have lived, Beta. And yet you idly strum and smoke away your existence, so confidently living in your leashless world, inventing the rules as you go, so damned driven to be something you know not what. You disgust me. You have no shackles like the others, and yet you're damned by your own mediocrity. You're not a triumph of free will. You're imprisoned by it. What a waste."

John felt a tittering doubt tickle at the base of his brain, a voice that insisted Alpha was right, so very right. Had he dedicted his life to being dedicated to nothing? It felt true, horrifyingly true.

But does it matter? he thought frantically. He's trying to break you before you can ever raise a fist to fight. Trying to . . .

"Shut up," John said, looking down at Alpha. "I'm not the damned one. I'm not a killer."

"Nor am I. I've killed no one. Not even Dania Sheridan, my--our--mother." Alpha nodded and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, toward the open double doors. "She's back there. In the cellar storeroom. The floors and walls must have shielded her thermal readings from your cute RadioShack toys. Well, that and the very special insulation I had installed. John, I haven't murdered a soul."

From beside John, Dr. Mike made a half-harrumph, half-groan. "No, you've just been the Bond villain calling the shots from the shadows," the profiler muttered. John turned to look at the man. The color was draining from Dr. Mike's face. The blood from his wound covered the entire sleeve of his jacket. Now one of the Vaporwear shades behind them was telling Dr. Mike to shut his yap . . . and John winced as Mike's head recoiled once again from a pistol-whipping. Dr. Mike swayed, then steadied himself.

And that's when John spotted the hand grenade hanging from Dr. Mike's chest holster/harness. His mind flitted to what Michael had said just minutes before--a leap of faith. John turned his eyes from his brother to the shimmering statue before them. He began to plan. He even whispered a prayer.

John Alpha laughed. "A Bond villain. That's nice," he called to Dr. Mike. "A compliment . . . if I thought what I was doing was evil. You see evil every day in your job, Mike. But I'm trying to save this world. Consider this: Only at the darkest hour does humanity pull itself together to become truly great. Only in times of calamity and chaos do signs of true unity and genius shine across the globe. Wars bring out the worst in mankind--but they also bring out its best."

John looked over at Dr. Mike, to the grenade strapped to his chest. I can do this, he thought. It won't take much. A distraction, just a second. He glanced behind Mike, trying to see the shade holding his brother at gunpoint. It was nearly impossible to make out exactly where the shade was. Whatever this Vaporwear was made of, it was doing a bang-up job--even at this close range. John squinted.

"Keep those eyes dead ahead," the shade hissed. John did as told. One fact played in his favor: he knew exactly where the second shade behind him was standing; the sour-sweet rank of booze was a dead giveaway. And John had a feeling he knew how the shade standing behind Dr. Mike did business.

Meanwhile, Alpha was saying, "Take World War Two. Axis powers decimate country after country, commit wholesale slaughter . . . and the Allies band together. Build the bomb. Win the war. Redirect the course of humanity."

Come on, come on, John thought. Wrap it up. Make a fuckin' quip. Just give me a second. Just one measly second.

"But we are complacent," Alpha droned, "lethargic, morbidly obese from our creature comforts. Humanity shines brightest when there is a problem to solve, but we no longer have problems. America's enemies are illiterates who live in caves and dream of suitcase bombs. There is no innovation of the human spirit. There are only sleepwalkers. I will wake them up, Mike. I suppose this would be my Bond-villain manifesto--the obligatory monologue the evil genius makes before the tide turns in favor of the heroes. What, pray tell, do you think of it?"

This is it. God, if you're up there, help us, help me . . .

Dr. Mike chuckled. "I think you're more Beale than Blofeld. You're mad. As hell."

The shade behind Dr. Mike snarled and again cracked his pistol across the back of Mike's helmet . . . just as John had hoped. Dr. Mike wasn't stoic this time--he couldn't be, not anymore--and staggered forward, toward the balcony railing. He cried out in pain.

You can't come back from this. Not ever. No takebacks.

John stepped over and steadied his brother. The shade behind him began to bark a protest, but John didn't let him finish. As he held Dr. Mike for leverage, John swung his leg backward in an improbable, ungainly arc--a downright ugly maneuver, graceless. But it worked. John's boot crashed into the shade's stomach. The shade belched a ridiculous sound--poooh!--and staggered backward.

In one smooth motion, John snatched the grenade from Dr. Mike's vest, pulled the pin, and threw it behind them. The grenade smashed through one of the glass walls of the VIP section, leaving a hole the size of a baseball. Somewhere far away, the first shade was beginning to shout.

"The hell?" Dr. Mike whispered.

John nodded quickly to the silver statue standing beyond the balcony.

"We're superheroes. Time to fly." He then pushed them both toward the waist-high railing. It wasn't much of a running start, but it was all they had. Just like track and field back in high school, John thought. Just like the hurdles.

They leaped over the railing, into the void, toward the shimmering statue. Behind them, all hell broke loose.

* * *

John and Mike soared through the air and slammed into the open arms of the Folie á Deux sculpture. Both men recoiled from the impact--the statue gonged its disapproval--and tumbled down the warped helix of its silver base. As they landed, the grenade upstairs unleashed its war.

The explosion was brief, but merciless. The glass walls of the VIP section exploded outward, flinging fire and millions of glass shards onto the balcony. For an instant, the air was filled with lost, glittering amber crystals . . . then they found their homes, slicing into the walls, the balcony furniture, and the Vaporwear shades. The blast shoved both shades forward, slamming them into--then over--the railing. They crashed onto the dance floor and flopped to rest like rag dolls.

Then both shades suddenly became men again, the technology inside their protective camouflage suits shredded by the shrapnel. Their bodies were covered in thousands of glass shards.

The diversion was more than enough for Michael and his soldiers. They dashed over to the pile of guns on the dance floor. The lone shade posted at the skylight began shooting at them. The wooden dance floor exploded upward from the gunfire. Lockwood's right calf disintegrated from a sure shot. Michael grabbed an XM8 and fired at the ceiling. Plaster snowflakes fell from above.

John Alpha scrambled back to the end of the club from where he'd emerged just minutes ago. The doors slammed shut behind him.

The sniper on the roof was going crazy now; his shooting was sloppy, unfocused. Several rounds ripped past John and Dr. Mike, who had taken cover behind the statue.

Michael sprayed more rounds toward the skylight. There was a shriek from up there . . . then silence.

Silence.

No, not quite. Police sirens were crying out in the distance now, getting closer.

"L.A.'s finest. My buddies," Dr. Mike croaked. His helmet was lost in the fall; a gash above his left eye spurted blood down his face. He looked up at John and grinned though the mess. "If we get out of here alive, I so owe you a beer."

Michael clomped up to John and Dr. Mike.

"Good work," the marine said. "Listen up. I just radioed both choppers to come and get us, emergency evac from the roof. They'll be here in about ten minutes." He nodded toward the center of the dance floor; what was left of the team was prepping the dangling rappelling ropes. He turned to Dr. Mike. "You're going up first, along with Lockwood. The rest will join you on the roof. If Alpha's goons were telling the truth, you won't have to worry about any more shooters."

"No argument here. I'm fucking over this place."

Michael then looked at John. "Anything broken?"

John shook his head. "We have to get Mom. She's still here."

"So's John Alpha," Michael replied.

Two of the four surviving 7th Son soldiers--Rubenstein and Weekley--ran up to the clones. "The gear's ready," Rubenstein reported. Michael nodded, and the soldiers pulled Dr. Mike to his feet. Dr. Mike slung an arm over each soldier's shoulder and was dragged off toward the skylight.

Michael stared into John's eyes. He pressed a Beretta pistol into the man's hand.

"We got ten minutes to find Mom and capture Alpha," Michael said. "We're not gonna have another shot, so don't hesitate. If you have to kill him, kill him. Understand?"

"Line's already crossed," John muttered. "Can't come back, not ever. No takebacks."

Michael's expression softened for a moment. He nodded.

They ran to the rear of the club, toward the closed doors.

* * *

RoboClam anchor based on sea creature

David Pescovitz — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 06:07:42 +0000

Inspired by the way razor clams dig into the seafloor sediment, MIT researchers have built a robotic anchor for autonomous water vehicles. About the size of a cigarette lighter, the prototype RoboClam imitates the way the real clam's "foot" works its way into the sand. Learn more at the MIT site and don't miss the video of a real razor clam in action. From MIT News:

"Our original goal was to develop a lightweight anchor that you could set then easily unset, something that's not possible with conventional devices," said Anette "Peko" Hosoi, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering whose collaborators on the work are Amos Winter, a graduate student in her lab, and engineers at Bluefin Robotics Corp.

Such devices could be useful, for example, as tethers for small robotic submarines that are routinely repositioned to monitor variables such as currents and temperature. Further, a device that can burrow into the seabed and be directed to a specific location could also be useful as a detonator for buried underwater mines.

RoboClam

Nicaraguan town wealthy from cocaine bricks that wash ashore

Mark Frauenfelder — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:04:56 +0000

The citizens of Bluefields in Nicaragua (population 50,000) enjoy a high standard of living thanks to the weekly (or sometimes daily) bales of cocaine that drift ashore. The cocaine comes from Colombian traffickers who throw it from their boats when the US Coast Guard pursues them. Law enforcement in the city doesn't do anything about it, and the drug is traded openly in the streets and even in supermarkets.

"They throw most of it off," says a Lt Commander in the US Coastguard. "I have been on four interdictions and we have confiscated about 6000 pounds [2720kg] of cocaine, and I'd say equal that much was dumped into the ocean."
Those bales of cocaine float, and the currents bring them west right into the chain of islands, beaches and cays which make up the huge lagoons that surround Bluefields on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast.
"There are no jobs here, unemployment is 85 per cent," says Moises Arana, who was mayor of Bluefields from 2001 to 2005.
"It is sad to say, but the drugs have made contributions. Look at the beautiful houses, those mansions come from drugs. We had a women come into the local electronics store with a milk bucket stuffed full of cash. She was this little Miskito [native] woman and she had $80,000."
Hujo Sugo, a historian of Bluefields, says the floating coke has created a new local hobby.
"People here now go beachcombing for miles, they walk until the find packets. Even the lobster fisherman now go out with the pretence of fishing but really they are looking for la langosta blanca - the white lobster."

Link (Via Digg)

Kevin Kelly: The Technium and the 7th kingdom of life

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 03:05:16 +0000

Snip from an essay at Edge.org by Kevin Kelly:

The main question that I'm asking myself is, what is the meaning of technology in our lives? What place does technology have in the universe? What place does it have in the human condition? And what place should it play in my own personal life? Technology as a whole system, or what I call the technium, seems to be a dominant force in the culture. Indeed at times it seems to be the only force - the only lasting force - in culture. If that's so, then what can we expect from this force, what governs it? Sadly we don't even have a good theory about technology.
I'm trying to investigate ways to understand the long-term consequences of technology in the world and place it into some position along with other grand things like biological nature, big history, the physics of the cosmos, and the future. It's a very ambitious project and, surprisingly, there isn't really much thinking about technology in terms of its sphere of influence in a way that might be useful to thinking about how to evaluate what we make.

Link to full text of essay.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine and author of books including New Rules for the New Economy, and Out of Control. He is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools, True Film, and Street Use websites. (thanks, John Brockman)

Cow shit kills farming family

David Pescovitz — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 04:17:23 +0000

From the Associated Press:

Exposure to methane gas led to the deaths of four family members and a farmhand, but whether they suffocated from the fumes or drowned in 18 inches of liquefied cow manure may never be known, authorities said.

Link

Photos of fast food in ads and in real life

Mark Frauenfelder — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 03:52:52 +0000

This is a great idea. These folks bought fast food items and photographed them, then placed the photos side-by-side with the photos in ads for the same product. Shown here: KFC Famous Bowl

Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all.

Link (Thanks, Stephen!)

Reader comment:

Christopher says:

I worked (briefly) in the photogoraphy studio of one of the biggest ad agencies in NYC. They paid a professional "food stylist" around $2000 a day to make the food look like that. Every golden sesame seed or drop of crystaline dew was hand placed. That maoynaise isn't mayo, it's hair gel and that chicken looks so good because aparently everything looks yummier when it's been sprayed with laquer. A lot of that "food" isn't food at all and the stuff that is food has been treated with more chemicals and "tricks of the trade" than most super models.

Boing Boing Emporium: True Films, by Kevin Kelly

Mark Frauenfelder — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:40:08 +0000

My friend Kevin Kelly, a co-founding editor of Wired and author of several excellent books, including Out of Control and Asia Grace, is a documentary movie junkie. True Films, his 56-page PDF book, reviews 100 of his favorite documentaries. Kevin says:

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)"True Films" contains the best 100 documentaries I've reviewed on True Films as of December, 2004. I winnowed some from the larger list, and came up with an alphabetical collection of 100 documentaries I feel are worth your time. Most people will enjoy the majority included. There's been one private film club launched around this list. What you get for your $3: a downloadable PDF file of a color version of the book (which was printed in B&W).

Buy for $3 | Other items for sale at the Boing Boing Digital Emporium

HOWTO turn a bathtub into an armchair or sofa

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 01:38:15 +0000

This is smart: recycle a bathtub into an outdoor armchair by slicing it in half and bolting the halves together, or do the same thing but lengthwise to make a weatherproof sofa. Link (via Cribcandy)

Update: Here's an alternative design from last year's Goldsmith's College Degree Show -- thanks, Isotonic!

Cow waste for power

David Pescovitz — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 10:47:29 +0000

Researchers from Ohio State University have shown that the fermented, liquefied feed extracted from a cow's stomach can produce about 600 millivolts. The juice comes from the rumen, the biggest portion of a cow's stomach. Unlike converting methane from cow shit into electricity, a method that requires expensive gear, this method generates electricity as the microorganisms in rumen fluid break down the complex carbohydrates in roughage. From a press release:

While rumen fluid itself won't be used as an energy source, some of the microorganisms found in the fluid are also found in cow dung, which may prove to be a good source for generating electricity. In fact, in a related experiment, the researchers used cow manure directly to create energy for a fuel cell...

This study represents the first time that scientists have used cellulose to help charge a fuel cell....

(The) output reached a consistent maximum of 0.58 volts. After about four days, the voltage fell to around 0.2 volts, at which time the researchers added fresh cellulose to bring the voltage back up to a higher level.

“While that's a very small amount of voltage, the results show that it is possible to create electricity from cow waste,” (bioengineerin Ann) Christy said.

Link

UPDATE: BB reader Kevin Deganhart writes, "When I read this it reminded me of something that my farmer dad told me the other day. An ethanol plant is being built in Yuma Colorado that uses cow manure to fuel the plant's processes."Link

Plastinated bodies decomposing

David Pescovitz — Thu, 26 May 2005 12:33:53 +0000

The Universe Within is an exhibit of plastinated corpses currently on display at San Francisco's Masonic Center. It's basically a knock-off of plastination pioneer Gunther von Hagens' Bodyworlds show. Apparently though, the people who plastinated these bodies didn't have von Hagens's chops. The bodies are leaking. City officials are investigating and may shut down the exhibit. From ABC7 News:

The I-Team spotted moisture beading up across faces, dripping inside chest cavities, and pooling beneath feet. Plastination experts tell us, it's evidence of a rush job.

Bob Henry, Int'l Society for Plastination: "It appears to be a classic example of someone not understanding the process and not realizing that it literally takes months to prepare a nice specimen."

The I-Team took samples from the bodies and sent them to a lab. It's silicone from the plastination process and liquefied human fat. The bodies were not degreased properly before they were filled with plastic. Link

There's also question about how the organizers acquired the bodies:

The Masonic's executive director and the show's promoter claim they were able to bring the bodies from China with the help of Peking University and Professor EnHua Yu. The promoter, Gerhard Perner, says he pays rent to the Masonic, keeps 15-percent of the show's profits for himself, and sends the rest back to China.

ABC7's Dan Noyes: "Do the profits go to Dr. Yu personally or to the university?"

Gerhard Perner: "To the university."

But university officials say all that's not true. They had no role in acquiring the bodies, they're receiving no money. In fact, they never heard of this body show until contacted by the I-Team. We've learned that Perner was able to get bodies meant for medical research and teaching from a factory in Nanjing, China. It worries San Francisco supervisors that these bodies are now on display on Nob Hill. Link (Thanks, April!)

$25 logo design

Mark Frauenfelder — Mon, 16 May 2005 06:02:19 +0000

Kevin Kelly reviews GotLogos.com, an outfit that designs take-it-or-leave-it logos for $25.

I bought one $25 logo for my emerging True Films website. Its style (identical to Cool Tools) is pretty minimal, an approach which is actually hard to design for. Here is the logo they sent me via email a a few days later.
I paid $10 for a revision, requesting even more simplicity, and a few hours later they provided this.

Link

Kevin Kelly's True Films documentary guide available as a PDF

Mark Frauenfelder — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 09:51:20 +0000

You can now buy Kevin Kelly's excellent True Films book as a PDF file for $3 via PayPal.

What it is: True Films contains the best 100 documenatries I've reviewed in True Films as of December, 2004. (There may be additional films reviewed in 2005 posted here but they will not be included until version 2.0.) I winnowed some from this list, and came up with an alphabetical collection of 100 documentaries I feel are worth your time. Most people will enjoy the majority listed. There's been one private film club launched around this booklet.

Link