(EFF co-founder) John Gilmore summed up the accomplishments of the cypherpunks in a recent email: "We did reshape the world," he wrote. "We broke encryption loose from government control in the commercial and free software world, in a big way. We built solid encryption and both circumvented and changed the corrupt US legal regime so that strong encryption could be developed by anyone worldwide and deployed by anyone worldwide," including WikiLeaks.

As the 1990s rolled forward, many cypherpunks went to work for the man, bringing strong crypto to financial services and banks (on the whole, probably better than the alternative). Still, crypto-activism continued and the cypherpunk mailing list blossomed as an exchange for both practical encryption data and spirited, sometimes-gleeful argumentation, before finally peaking in 1997. This was when cypherpunk’s mindshare seemed to recede, possibly in proportion to the utopian effervescence of the early cyberculture. But the cypherpunk meme may now be finding a sort of rebirth in one of the biggest and most important stories in the fledgeling 21st century.

Right now, Dan Tan's programmers are busy reverse-engineering the safeguards of online betting houses. About $3 billion is wagered on sports every day, most of it on soccer, most of it in Asia. That's a lot of noise on the big exchanges. We can exploit the fluctuations, rig the bets in a way that won't trip the houses' alarms. And there are so many moments in a soccer game that could swing either way. All you have to do is see an Ilves tackle in the box where maybe the Viikingit forward took a dive. It happens all the time. It would happen anyway. So while you're running around the pitch in Finland, the syndicate will have computers placing high-volume max bets on whatever outcome the bosses decided on, using markets in Manila that take bets during games, timing the surges so the security bots don't spot anything suspicious. The exchanges don't care, not really. They get a cut of all the action anyway. The system is stacked so it's gamblers further down the chain who bear all the risks.

What's that — you're worried about getting caught? It won't happen. Think about the complexity of our operation. We are organized in Singapore, I flew from Budapest, the match is in Finland, we're wagering in the Philippines using masked computer clusters from Bangkok to Jakarta. Our communications are refracted across so many cell networks and satellites that they're almost impossible to unravel. The money will move electronically, incomprehensibly, through a hundred different nowheres. No legal system was set up to handle this kind of global intricacy. The number of intersecting jurisdictions alone is dizzying. Who's going to spot the crime? Small-town police in Finland? A regulator in Beijing? Each of them will only see one tiny part of it. How would they ever know to talk to each other? Dan Tan has friends in high places; extradition requests can find themselves bogged down in paperwork. Witnesses can disappear. I promise; you'll be safe. Who can prove you didn't see a penalty? We're fine.

Best part? Pro soccer is so corrupt that they don't give a damn, despite the fact that there is no game there, just a network of frauds that may exceed $1B:

Let me answer that question by referring you to the phrase that I hope will be your primary takeaway from this piece. Soccer. Is. Fucked. Europol announced the investigation Monday, leaving everyone with the impression that this was an ongoing operation designed to, you know, stop a criminal, maybe catch a bad guy or something. On Tuesday, multiple journalists reported that Europol is no longer pursuing the investigation. They've turned the information over to the dozens of prosecution services in the dozens of countries involved, which should keep things nice and streamlined. The man at the center of the whole story, the Singaporean mobster Tan Seet Eng, known as Dan Tan, has a warrant out for his arrest, but the Singaporeans won't extradite him and Interpol won't pressure them to do so.3 UEFA and FIFA talk about stamping out corruption, but, and I'll try to be precise here, FIFA rhetoric is to action what a remaindered paperback copy of Pippi in the South Seas is to the Horsehead Nebula. FIFA is eyeballs-deep in its own corruption problems, being run, as it is, by a cabal of 150-year-olds, most of them literally made out of dust, who have every incentive to worry about short-term profit over long-term change. They all have streets named after them, so how could they have a bad conscience? FIFA sees the game as a kind of Rube Goldberg device, or, better, as a crazed Jenga tower, and their job is to keep it standing as long as the money's coming in. Doesn't matter how wobbly it gets. Nobody look at the foundations.

Match-Fixing in Soccer [Brian Phillips/Grantland]

(via Schneier)

(Image: FIFA visita as obras da Arena Fonte Nova, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from agecombahia's photostream) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/20/soccer-match-rigging-straight.html/feed 23 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/26/luminous-retro-cyberpunk-costu.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/26/luminous-retro-cyberpunk-costu.html#comments Wed, 26 Dec 2012 20:54:14 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=202903 Mike Vickers In the Boing Boing Flickr pool, Melissa Li shares some wonderful photo documentation of a cool costume she developed in multiple editions, over a period of years.]]>

Photo by Mike Vickers

Costume is an original design inspired by the 'cyberpunk'/fantasy genre work of artists including Masumune Shirow, Eric Canete, Joe Benitez, and various modern gaming concept art. The process was a lot of fun and took approximately 3 months of on-and-off planning and building. The assembly is made from over 60 parts designed in Solidworks and sewn/cut/glued/laser-cut/heat-formed using various techniques.

The costume includes color changing LEDs on the spine and front that are controlled by an Arduino microcontroller and onboard RGB controllers (respectively), and is powered by 16 AA batteries, 1 LiPo rechargeable battery, two 2032 coin cells, and one 9-volt battery. In total there's more than 70 LED's on the entire costume and over 60 parts.

And below, the 1.0 version she created for DragonCon 2011:

Design was based on actual spinal transverse sections and lit with ~40 LED's. Design and assembly of smaller accessory pieces for shoulders, chest, and arm were found pieces or designed in Solidworks. In total, ~46 pieces put together over a period of ~2 months.

Photo by Anna Fisher

Miku was “born,” as Itoh puts it, on August 31, 2007, with the launch of her software. The program would soon become popular, but from the start Miku attracted her own fans, and they began riffing. Crypton set up a site where they could post their creations, and by that first afternoon, according to Itoh, illustrations of her had appeared. Thousands followed. Fan sites proliferated. Creation myths were assembled.

Electronic musician Tettix's latest is Cool Pizza, the soundtrack to a bizarre and brutally difficult iOS game by the same name, which renders Space Harrier-style gameplay in pink spot color and halftone patterns. "This is different from most of my stuff," writes T. "It's fast and furious cyperpunk and all the titles are demonic pizza toppings."]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/26/weird-cyberpunk-game-has-pound.html/feed 14 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/13/the-incal-classic-w.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/13/the-incal-classic-w.html#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:01:02 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=143496 The Incal, (allegedly salvaging a bunch of material Jodorowsky created for an aborted film adaptation of Dune).]]> In 1981, comics writer Alejandro Jodorowsky teamed up with French comic artist legend Moebius and created a new French comic serial called The Incal, (allegedly salvaging a bunch of material Jodorowsky created for an aborted film adaptation of Dune). The Incal's story is barely comprehensible, a mystical, satirical space-opera that anticipates many of cyberpunk's tropes. But the story isn't the point of The Incal. Reading Self-Made Hero's new English edition of Incal is an exciting and delightful experience for reasons having nothing at all to do with the consistency or comprehensibility of its plot.

Rather, The Incal is a triumph of glorious, self-indulgent, eyeball-kicking science fiction high weirdness. Jodorowsky's plotting strategy seems to have consisted of making up the weirdest stuff he could think of, getting bored, chucking in a bunch of new, weirder stuff, and repeating as necessary. New plot elements are conjured up from thin air without explanation or rhyme or reason. No pretense is made to any kind of underlying physics or poleconomy or philosophy.

Instead, Moebius just draws the hell out of Jodorowsky's fevered notions, producing a strong and curious aesthetic sensation that is quite pleasing and a little freaky. The creators of The Incal sued The Fifth Element for allegedly ripping it off (they lost), and Fifth Element is a pretty good point of reference for what goes on in The Incal: innumerable stylish, semi-erotic, high-tech incoherencies sprayed at the reader at a furious pace, fast enough that the fact that none of it makes much sense hardly has time to sink in.

I feel like I should try to summarize the storyline here, but in truth, there's not much point. Wikipedia says "The story begins in the dystopian capital city of an insignificant planet in a human-dominated galactic empire. (The Bergs, aliens who resemble featherless birds and reside in a neighboring galaxy, make up another power bloc.) DiFool receives the Light Incal, a crystal of enormous powers, from a dying Berg. The Incal is then sought by many factions: the Bergs; the corrupt and decadent government of the great pit-city; the rebel group Amok; and the Church of Industrial Saints (commonly referred to as the Techno-Technos or the Technopriests), a sinister technocratic cult which worships the Dark Incal. Animah (an allusion to anima), the keeper of the Light Incal, seeks it as well."

And yeah, I guess that's what happens. But it's not particularly the point of this volume.

Marvel previously collected these comics in English, and then DC did it again (censoring the nudity and changing the really excellent coloring), and this latest edition from Self-Made Hero restores the colors and the boobies, as Moebius intended. It's very good, very funny, very odd, and awfully silly.

The Incal (Amazon US)

The Incal (Amazon UK)

The Sprawl (via Super Punch) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/08/17/t-shirts-inspired-by-gibsons-sprawl-novels.html/feed 16