‘Contra’ is still cool enough to get a vinyl soundtrack

Mondo’s skill at curating some of the coolest pop-culture art is unparalleled. Whether it’s posters, enamel pins, T-shirts or classic soundtracks on vinyl, even if you don’t like one piece, it’s hard to deny that it’s at least interesting. Well, with San Diego Comic-Con just around the corner, the purveyor has unveiled what’ll be on offer at its booth. Headlining this year (so far; more on that in a bit) is a killer limited-edition poster and vinyl soundtrack for Contra.

The former is an 18″x24″ screen print by artist Eric Powell limited to 225 copies. The latter is a bit more generous in terms of numbers. The wax version features the score for both the NES and Arcade editions of the game pressed to 1,000 tri-color 180-gram LPs for $25 each.

Beyond that is a very cool screen-printed poster for Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. You know, in case the Netflix show stoked your nostalgia for the series. Mondo is doing surprise reveals for a bunch of other stuff too. Currently, it’s all pixelated on the listing site, but if you squint it’s not too hard to discern that there will be at least one more vinyl release.

Comic-Con is always a madhouse, so if you can snag any of this stuff and bring it home intact, you should pat yourself on the back. Mondo is at booth #835 at the San Diego Convention Center and what’s mentioned here will be available starting at the show’s Wednesday night preview. But if you can’t make it, Mashable reports that the Contra soundtrack, at least, will be available online albeit with a different color scheme.

Source: Mondotees

White House releases voter-fraud comments, personal info included (updated)

The White House is bad at technology. The President has a Twitter problem, he faces a suit over blocking users on the service and he doesn’t seem to mind talking “Cyber Security” with Putin, who runs the country that allegedly hacked our (and other) elections. The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity continues to seek the personal, identifying information of everyone who voted in the last election, something it is also being sued for. The commission also asked citizens to write in with feedback. As noted by former Deputy Secretary of Labor Chris Lu on Twitter, however, the commission published 112 pages of public comment “without redacting email addresses, home addresses & phone numbers.”

While it may seem like a good thing that the commission has solicited and shared public comment on its request for voter info, publishing the list of emails it has since received — without any redaction — seems like a pretty tone-deaf thing to do. Either they didn’t check for personal information, or they didn’t care. The crazy thing is that either is possible.

The 112-page document contains phone numbers, email and even real world addresses in several of the signatures. This information can be used to identify and harass people with ease. It’s possible the committee is required by law to release such public commentary, but they really should have redacted full names, email and home addresses. It’s bad enough that the commission wants to spend the time and money to prove rampant voter fraud (that doesn’t actually seem to have happened), but to gather and expose those who respond is sincerely irresponsible. How can any state trust the White House with its voter records if the executive committee in charge of the process can’t even black out a few email addresses? We’ve reached out to the White House for comment and will update this post when we hear back.

Update: The White House returned our request with the following email (redacted for privacy).

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Via: Chris Lu/Twitter

Source: White House

Satellites may predict when a volcanic eruption will end

We’ve discussed how satellites are being used to research natural disasters, including monitoring the Earth’s movement to predict landslides. Now, scientists have begun using satellite data to predict when volcanic eruptions’ lava flow will end.

Graduate student Estelle Bonny, along with her mentor Robert Wright, drew from a 1981 hypothesis on the flow rate of lava during a volcanic eruption. When lava flows during a volcanic eruption, the model says, it quickly rises to a peak rate and then tapers off much more slowly. When the lava stops flowing altogether, the eruption is over.

Using existing infrared satellite data on volcanic eruptions, the team was able to measure the rate of lava flow by measuring the amount of heat. They then used the existing model to predict when the lava flow would end. The results of the model and the satellite data matched up, confirming that the 1981 model was indeed accurate. Their findings were published in the July issue of Bulletin of Vulcanology.

It’s not hard to see how this will make a difference to those who live in areas with active volcanoes. “Being able to predict the end of a lava flow-forming eruption is really important because it will greatly reduce the disturbance caused to those affected by the eruption, for example, those who live close to the volcano and have been evacuated,” said Wright. The next step will be to turn this into a predictive model

Source: Bulletin of Vulcanology, EurekAlert

Verily’s answer to Fresno’s mosquito woes is 20 million more

Last year, executives of Alphabet’s life science arm, Verily, discussed a project aimed at controlling invasive mosquito populations, the results of which are now going into effect. To combat the mosquito species that carries viruses like Zika and dengue, the company will release a ton of bacteria-infected male mosquitoes in Fresno, California where they should drastically bring down numbers of wild mosquitoes.

When female mosquitoes mate with males infected with the bacteria Wolbachia pipientis, the resulting eggs aren’t viable. However, females also infected with the bacteria can produce offspring after mating with infected males, and wild mosquitoes of both sexes are found to be infected in some regions of the country. However, because the bacteria isn’t found in wild populations around Fresno and because the males can’t transfer the bacteria to females, enough infected males and enough time should render the invasive species moot.

Starting now, Verily will release one million mosquitoes per week for 20 weeks in two Fresno neighborhoods as part of its Debug project. The company developed automated mass mosquito production and sex-sorting technology, allowing for much larger release efforts. These mosquitos are not genetically modified, though last year the FDA did approve the use of genetically modified mosquitoes to fight Zika, and male mosquitoes don’t bite, so no worries, Fresno residents.

In a blog post, Verily said, “For the Debug team at Verily, moving our work from the laboratory to the field is not only an important milestone for our group of biologists, engineers, and automation experts, but it’s also a critical step in bringing our long-term vision to reality. Field studies allow us to test our discoveries and technologies in challenging, real-world conditions and collect the necessary evidence to bring them to a broader scale.”

Source: Verily

Twitter will livestream the Electronic Music Awards September 21st

If festival season has left you tapped out financially and physically, Twitter has a way for you to watch this year’s Electronic Music Awards. Come September 21st, the microblogging service will broadcast electronic music’s Grammy’s from a “custom multi-stage warehouse venue” in Los Angeles’ Downtown Arts District, as spotted by AdWeek. Other details are scarce at the moment, but the show promises more news will arrive ahead of the big night. Hopefully legendary producer Paul Oakenfold helping run the event will keep everything from devolving into a series of incomprehensible bass drops. But honestly, this seems like something that’d be better suited for Twitch than it is for Twitter’s livestreaming efforts at this point.

Source: The Electronic Music Awards, AdWeek

Researchers find coral reefs in a place they shouldn’t exist

While the waters of the North Atlantic and South Pacific tend to have what hard corals need to survive, the North Pacific doesn’t, and it has been thought that deep-sea coral reefs were a near impossibility in that part of the ocean. But researchers at Florida State University and Texas A&M University have discovered a few reefs in the North Pacific that don’t seem to be following the rules. Their findings were recently published in Scientific Reports.

One factor that prevents reef formation is the aragonite saturation horizon, which refers to the ocean depth where levels of the mineral aragonite drop off. Hard corals need aragonite to form their skeletons, so when there isn’t a lot of it around, coral reefs tend not to form. Additionally, coral skeletons are more prone to dissolve in the North Pacific compared to other areas. “Even if the corals could overcome low aragonite saturation and build up robust skeletons, there are areas on the reefs that are just exposed skeleton, and those should be dissolving,” Amy Baco-Taylor, an author of the study, said in a statement, “Even if the species could survive in the area, we shouldn’t be finding an accumulation of reef.”

But they did find reef accumulation, six of them in fact, near the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and Emperor Seamount Chain despite everything we know about coral reefs saying they shouldn’t exist. Most of them exist below the aragonite saturation horizon and in areas with high dissolving rates.

The researchers found a couple of factors that might contribute to the reef formation. For one, the aragonite saturation horizon does get deeper along the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, but the depth of the discovered reefs doesn’t seem to follow the aragonite levels, suggesting that’s not the main contributor to the growth. They also measured higher levels of chlorophyll — meaning more food and, therefore, more energy to help overcome low aragonite levels — and ocean currents that might boost reef formation. But those don’t fully explain the reefs’ existence. “Neither the chlorophyll nor the currents explain the unusual depth distributions of the reefs, why they actually get shallower moving to the northwest along the seamounts. There’s still a mystery as to why these reefs are here,” said Baco-Taylor.

Overall, how these reefs were able to form and survive isn’t yet understood, but figuring it out will be important in light of ongoing climate change-induced reef loss. “If more of these reefs are there, that would run counter to what ocean acidification and carbonate chemistry dictates,” said Baco-Taylor, “It leaves us with some big questions: Is there something that we’re not understanding? How is this possible?”

Source: Scientific Reports

Here’s our first look at Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One’ movie

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ready Player One will be making a big splash at San Diego’s Comic-Con next week, but ahead of that Entertainment Weekly has given us our first look at the film. And, well, it looks a lot like the worn out, nostalgia-filled world described in Ernest Cline’s popular novel. Front and center is Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts (or Parzival online) wearing a VR headset and haptic gloves. He uses that gear to tap into the OASIS, a global virtual reality network that serves as his one escape from his harsh life in the year 2044.

What’s most interesting about this image is how down-to-Earth everything seems. The VR headset Watts is using doesn’t look too far off from what we’re seeing today — in particular, it seems reminiscent of the Windows-powered headsets currently in the works. And we’ve also seen haptic gloves, like those from Manus, that give us another layer of interaction with virtual worlds. Hopefully at Comic-Con we’ll also get a glimpse at how Spielberg will visualize the VR world of the OASIS.

The photo, which shows off Watts’ private hideout in an old van, packs in plenty of Easter Eggs. There’s a classic He-Man lunchbox on the right side, along with some Garbage Pail Kids and Garfield stickers. The newspaper on the left celebrates the launch of the OASIS, as well as the fact that 21 VR headsets had been sold by then. And, it’s worth noting that Watt’s outfit looks like almost like a character from Back to the Future.

There’s also a Businessweek cover featuring James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the founder of the OASIS. Shortly before he died, he announced a final game, which involves solving increasingly esoteric pop culture quests. The first person to win it will inherit his fortune, the OASIS and its parent company, Gregarious Games. As you’d expect, the story follows Watts as he tracks down all of the clues for the final game, along with some of online friends (played by T.J. Miller, Lena Waithe and Olivia Cooke). All the while, they’re hunted by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), an employee of the IOI organization, which hopes to take over the OASIS and make it much more expensive for average consumers.

Ready Player One is a particularly intriguing project for Spielberg, since his filmography plays a huge impact on the book’s 1980’s pop culture nostalgia. To avoid getting too self-referential, the director chose to cut most of the book’s references to his work, aside from featuring the Delorean from Back to the Future (which he produced). But I’m sure there will still be plenty of Easter Eggs to find when the film hits theaters on March 30th, 2018.

Source: EW

Juicero admits its hype machine is still too expensive

The next chapter of Juicero’s troubled saga will include staff layoffs, according to a company letter obtained by Fortune. The company’s CEO, Jeff Dunn, told employees that along with a focus on its second generation juicer, and bringing down its cost in particular, Juicero would be cutting around 25 percent of its staff. Most of those layoffs will affect sales and marketing teams.

Juicero’s first machine, originally priced at $700 and later reduced to $400, was put on blast by Bloomberg, which showed that you don’t actually need the juicer to get juice from its packets, you just have to squeeze them. And its components were found to be unnecessarily complicated. Now the company is reportedly aiming for a $200 price point for its next version. “The current prices of $399 for the Press and $5 – $7 for produce Packs are not a realistic way for us to fulfill our mission at the scale to which we aspire,” said Dunn in the letter.

Juicero will be concentrating its efforts on product development and manufacturing as it continues to design its next juicer. Dunn also noted that Juicero founder Doug Evans, while staying on as a board member, would be stepping back from daily operations. In his letter, Dunn claims that after Juicero offered returns for full refunds following the Bloomberg report, less than five percent of customers chose to return their press. But, regardless, the planned price cuts and staff reductions show that the company knows its current model isn’t sustainable.

Source: Fortune

Australian bill would make tech companies decrypt user messages

Weeks ago, the Australian government introduced a new strategy at the Five Eyes security conference to combat terrorism: Force tech titans like Google and Facebook to decrypt communications from users suspected to be extremists or other criminals. It seems they’re moving ahead with it on their own turf, as the Australian government proposed a new bill today that would grant Australia’s intelligence agencies this authority to compel tech companies to hand user messages over to law enforcement.

The bill, which will be introduced to Australian Parliament in November, will be modeled on Britain’s Investigatory Powers Act that the UK passed last fall. Under the new law, internet agencies would be forced to turn over user communications the same way telephone companies hand over records when presented with a warrant.

The tech companies that would be affected — Facebook, Google and others — have expressed concern that any weakening of their end-to-end security (like, say, installing backdoors) might introduce vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit. But the Australian Attorney-General George Brandis believes law enforcement agencies could be granted access without creating backdoors, according to Bloomberg. That puts it between the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act and the EU’s law proposed in June that requires user communications to be end-to-end encrypted and outright forbids backdoors for law enforcement.

Source: Bloomberg

Apple’s Autoscanning iTunes Card Promo Codes Work via Hidden Font, Can be Replicated by Devs

When you purchase an iTunes gift card and redeem it in the App Store, the camera on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac can scan the code on the card to recognize it automatically, saving you the time of typing the numbers in manually.

Equinux, the company behind Mail Designer Pro 3, dug into how Apple’s promo code engine works in an effort to make their own scannable cards, and the results are quite interesting. As it turns out, the scanning feature in the App Store is tuned to recognize two things: a unique, hidden font and the dimensions of the box around it.

Equinux tried the box alone with a range of fonts like Courier and Monaco, and attempted to identify the unique characteristics of the font to find it, but were unsuccessful. Ultimately, the team realized the font that Apple’s using is hidden deep within iTunes.

The breakthrough came when we noticed that when you scan a card with your iPhone, the app briefly displays a “scanned” overlay of the code. This means the font must be embedded in the app somewhere. We tried the same with iTunes on macOS. And voilà – the iTunes on Mac behaves the same way.

When you look at some of the other folders inside iTunes, we found a tantalizing plugin called “CodeRedeemer.” It showed promise. But alas, no font files there either. The app binary does give a hint of where the heavy lifting is being done: “CoreRecognition.framework.”

Hidden in the CoreRecognition.framework, there are two fonts: “Scancardium,” for entering and recognizing codes, and “Spendcardium,” which appears to be for obscuring credit card details as they’re entered. The two fonts can be found by going to Finder on a Mac, clicking Go, choosing Go to Folder and pasting the following: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreRecognition.framework/Resources/Fonts/

With a simple double click, the fonts can be installed on a Mac and can be used within different apps. While this is a neat breakdown for end users, it’s of particular interest to developers because these fonts can be used to create custom App Store promo code cards that can be scanned in the same way as iTunes gift cards.

Equinux outlines the exact font height to use and how to position it within the surrounding box to get Apple’s engine to recognize it, details the company uncovered after investing a lot of time in tweaking fonts and the border of the required box.

Equinux even went one step further and created helpful Sketch and Photoshop templates that developers can use to create App Store promo code cards that can be automatically scanned using a device camera and recognized by the App Store.

Tags: App Store, iTunes
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