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Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Top Stories from the last 24 hours
The Best Replacements for Privacy-Invading Services
December 4th, 2012Top StoryThe Best Replacements for Privacy-Invading ServicesBy Thorin Klosowski
Some services, like Google or Facebook, are very transparent in their privacy policies and you know what you're getting into when you sign up (if you actually read it). They also typically collect data for their own purposes, rather than anything nefarious—but they still collect a lot of data. In Facebook's case, they have enough of your personal info that it routinely causes paranoia about their privacy practices. This week, Facebook is even giving you a chance to vote on your ability to vote on future site changes (including privacy changes). Obviously, we can't provide privacy-centric alternatives to every service out there, but here are a few replacements for popular services that collect too much data. Piecemeal Service or Glassboard Instead of Facebook
We've talked about making your own piecemeal service using different networks before, and that's one of the best replacements for Facebook. Instead of handing over all your private data to one service, you can piece together your various services, say Flickr (who gives you a lot of control over your own copyright), and make your own blog so you can control the content that's shared easily. As an alternative, we like Glassboard because it's incredibly easy to use, and the Privacy Policy is very simple. Your data is encrypted on Glassboard's servers, and Glassboard doesn't sell your personal information for targeted ads. Perhaps most importantly, Glassboard doesn't have privacy setting because everything you do on the service is private and is only seen by people you approve. Of course, a social network is only as good as the people on it, so you'll have to convince your friends and family to pick up a different service if you want it to truly work. Other alternatives: Turn your email into a private social network. DuckDuckGo Instead of Google Search
DuckDuckGo is already one of our favorite alternatives to Google Search, and its Privacy Policy makes it a good choice for privacy advocates. DuckDuckGo doesn't use cookies to track your searches, it doesn't save personally identifiable information (not even your IP address), and most importantly it doesn't use targeted ads. DuckDuckGo doesn't have the advanced search options that Google has, and since they don't track your browsing history the results aren't nearly as tuned to you personally as Google's. Still, if you're worried about the amount of data collected on your browsing habits, both are better options than Google. Other alternatives: Ixquick, Blekko, Startpage Lavabit Instead of Gmail
If you're more worried about privacy in general, your best bet is a service that doesn't hold onto information for very long. Lavabit is an email service that logs the least amount of data as possible while still maintaining a service that actually functions. Most importantly, according to their Privacy Policy, Lavabit doesn't store your IP address, outgoing messages are only stored on the server for about 7 days, and every email you send is encrypted in a way that even the administrators can't access it. Other alternatives: Make your own mail server, Valtletmail, Enigmail for Thunderbird App.net Instead of Twitter
As an alternative, App.net has a Privacy Policy that doesn't use your information to serve ads. They only share your information with third party vendors required for the service to work (like the payment processors for your account), law enforcement (when required), and anonymized data with other third parties. Also, when you delete something from App.net, it's gone from the servers within two weeks, and unlike Twitter there's no Library of Congress initiative to save that data. It's not a completely private experience, but it's about as close to one as a social network can get, and at the very least you're not served ads or recommendations based on your browsing history. Other alternatives: Identica. SpiderOak Instead of Dropbox
The best alternative is SpiderOak, for a pretty simple reason: they have no idea what you're storing online. Their Privacy Policy outlines that they only collect information from you necessary to provide you a service (like your name and billing information). Other than that, they don't know much about you or your files. They don't know your password, and all your data is encrypted using that password—which essentially means employees at SpiderOak have no way to access it. SpiderOak isn't nearly as slick and easy to use as Dropbox, nor does it have the simple file-sharing for collaborative projects, but as a secure place to back up your private data it's a solid alternative to Dropbox. Other alternatives: Roll your own personal file sharing service, Encrypt all your data on Dropbox, Wuala. TuneIn Radio Instead of Pandora
Unfortunately, it's basically impossible for a service to exist that mimics Pandora's intelligent radio recommendations and also respects your privacy. If you want to just listen to the a programmed radio station, TuneIn Radio has a Privacy Policy that doesn't track you for advertising. However, they hold any information you give them, but at least you can listen to most of their radio streams without a profile. If nothing else, most of the other streaming music services don't make your account public by default. Other alternatives: None (most streaming services track you for at least advertising) Jitsi Instead of Skype
For an alternative, we like the open source software Jitsi. Jitsi has encryption on both ends of the conversation, messages aren't saved online, and it uses the more private Session Initial Protocol so your data doesn't go anywhere. Essentially, everything you do with Jitsi is encrypted, and since nothing is stored online you don't need to worry about that data falling into the wrong hands. Other alternatives: VSee Of course, nearly every single web site you visit has a privacy policy, and some are better than others. What really matters is how much of your data you're willing to let companies have and use. In some cases, data collection is under the guise of building a better service, but with advertising and the ever-increasing danger of having your personal information leaked in a hack, it's a good idea to use services that store the least amount of information about you as possible. If you're mostly upset about how your data is sent to advertisers, we like the Collusion and PrivacyScore extensions because they show you exactly where your browsing data is going. You can also snag the Disconnect extensions to stop Facebook, Google, and Twitter from tracking you. To opt out of the other advertising that tracks you and invades your privacy, the Network Advertising Initiative has a opt-out page that shows who's tracking you in your browser and allows you to disable it.  |
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Before You Start: Tips For Playing Far Cry 3 The Best Way
December 4th, 2012Top StoryBefore You Start: Tips For Playing Far Cry 3 The Best WayBy Kirk Hamilton
The game does a good job of setting you loose pretty quickly—get a couple of basic missions under your belt and you'll be off to see Dr. Earnhardt and begin your adventure. Once you've begun, there are a few things you can do (and keep in mind) to make your trip through the Rook Islands more fun and survivable. First Thing You Do, Go HuntingAfter taking down your first outpost, you'll be more or less free to do whatever you want. While one of your first priorities should be to climb some radio towers to unlock more free guns (more on that in a minute), you'll need something in which to store those guns. So, you'll need to get crafting. Go and hunt deer, goats, and boars in order to expand your loot carrying capacity and ability to hold weapons. Hunt down the three animals you'll need to upgrade your holsters as soon as possible. (Sharks aren't actually that hard, just find a rock outcropping and shoot them when they draw near.) Craft hard at the start, and you'll be much more prepared for the challenges the game throws your way. Second Thing You Do, Don't Stop HuntingEven if you're doing some other mission or sidequest, remember that you can always be hunting. You'll need multiples of every type of hide to craft the various types of containers and holsters, so if you see an animal, take it down, especially in the early goings. This is one reason the bow or another silent weapon can be great—you can take down an errant goat, skin it, and go about your business without alerting every bad guy within earshot. Never stop hunting. Save After Hunting/CraftingOne of the weirdest features in Far Cry 3 is its odd save system. You can't quicksave, and only have one save slot in addition to your game's auto-save. I actually played Far Cry 2 on 360 before I played it on PC, and got used to that game's stringent save system, but still, the fact that you can't save multiple times in Far Cry 3 is pretty annoying. More annoying still is the fact that the game doesn't autosave after everything you've done—it autosaves after you finish a mission or buy new gear, but not after you've crafted or gathered crafting materials. However, it's possible to offset this annoyance by remembering to save. If you're about to infiltrate an outpost and happen to take down a boar you'd needed, save afterwards and if you die, you should start up again at a checkpoint, but with the stuff you've collected intact. In other words: When in doubt, save. Don't Buy GunsIn Far Cry 3, you have two options for obtaining weapons: You can purchase them outright from weapons dealers, or you can unlock them by climbing radio towers. You have no reason to ever buy a gun in the game. Rather, you should make it an early priority to climb five or six towers, at least until you've unlocked the grenade launcher and top LMG. Money is constantly in scarce supply on the Rook Islands, and is almost always better spent on weapon upgrades than on the weapons themselves. Get the guns for free, pay for the silencers and long-range scopes. And speaking of choosing what to pay for… Don't Waste All Your Money On Ammo & ArmorAmmo is right expensive in Far Cry 3, and if you're not careful, ammo-refilling stops can become like a tax on your wallet. Remember that you don't have to fill up your ammo all the way, every time—it can feel better to go into a fight with a full stock of ammo, but once you've upgraded your ammo and explosive capacity, you'll have enough bullets and bombs to take on three or four of the story missions. Same goes for body armor—it gets shot off really quickly and doesn't actually keep you alive for that much longer, but it's a $200 tax if you buy it every time you stock up. Most missions that require lots of fighting leave some lying around, so you're almost always better off stocking up on health injections than on armor. Never stop scavenging and looting, and you can save your money for better things, like the custom weapons that open up as you collect runes. Space Out The Story MissionsThe best parts of Far Cry 3 are the parts where you're taking enemy outposts, exploring nooks and crannies, and climbing radio towers. That said, the story missions are pretty fun, too, and wonderfully varied. The sweet spot the game hits is in the balance, but it's a balance that you can upset if you plow through the story too fast. At various points in the narrative, the (annoying, unavoidable) notification telling you about the next mission will helpfully suggest you explore the island first, if you want. Take that opportunity! Get into scrapes, try out different weapons, improve your skills. Think of the story missions almost as super cool, interactive cutscenes to break up all the open-world adventuring you'll be doing. Circle, Circle, CircleThis one's old hat for Far Cry 2 veterans, but the key for surviving Far Cry 3's often difficult shootouts is to keep moving. Staying put and behind cover as you would in Call of Duty or a similar game will lead to a quick death, particularly if you're up against any molotov berserkers. Instead, stay low, and circle, circle, circle. Pulling back and around can allow you to flank even the most aggressive enemy, and with enough circling and quick thinking, you can take on almost anyone. Use A BowThe best weapon in Far Cry 3 is the bow and arrow. This is not opinion, it's just the best weapon. It's silent, it's deadly, it can one-shot most normal enemies, and it can eventually be fitted with fire and ruinously powerful explosive arrows. Get used to the bow early on, and use it religiously. And remember: Once you kill an enemy or animal with it, run over their body to snatch your arrow back. Bonus: You'll save money on ammo later. Watch Out For CrocodilesActually, ignore this one, because no matter how vigilant you are, they WILL GET YOU. Hoard Green PlantsGreen plants are your friends. Some of the other plant types give you syringes that increase your awareness or flame resistance, but they never last that long and I've never gotten much use out of them. But health syringes are worth their weight in gold. As cool as the gnarly healing animations look, they're slow as hell, and if you're under fire from a bunch of dudes, the syringe will save your life when the regular animation would get you killed. Which reminds me... Never Go In Without Some Health SyringesIt's easy to forget this one, but never go into battle without at least a couple health syringes in your pouch. Health gets chomped down pretty quickly in Far Cry 3, and there's no worse feeling than stumbling behind cover, bleeding out, only to realize that you're a long healing animation away from not being dead. Loot, Loot, LootSince scarcity is such an issue in the game, you'll want to loot every container you find. Develop an eye for those glowing boxes, and everywhere you go, just run by and press "loot" really quick. You'll get a piece of random loot (if you're lucky, a Shark Fetish item!), and some money or ammo. Sometimes, loot boxes will have a few hundred dollars in 'em, so it's always worth checking. Don't Forget The Easy Ways To Earn CashSure, you can earn money going on assassination and hunting missions, but those take time and can be dangerous. There are also some really easy ways to earn money in Far Cry 3. For starters, each time you activate a radio tower, you'll get a medical supply-run mission—these take under a minute, and are generally very easy. They're also fun—a quick, wild ride down a mountain or over a beach, and you're $200 richer. The sharpshooting competitions and trials of the Rakyat are also an easy way to earn dough—these are also fun, don't take very long, and get you good amounts of cash. Just be sure you've crafted a big enough wallet! And that's it! Keep that stuff in mind, and you'll be marauding your way from mountain to lagoon in no time. But seriously, and I feel like a broken record here, but: Mind the crocodiles.  |
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Ke$ha Is a Misfit Just Like Everybody Else, But She Isn't Stupid
December 4th, 2012Top StoryKe$ha Is a Misfit Just Like Everybody Else, But She Isn't StupidBy Rich Juzwiak So goes the counter-narrative to the knee-jerk reaction that the pop-rapper knowingly incites: those who dismiss the star as stupid, say her supporters, are missing the point of her art. They argue that Ke$ha - the same woman who three years ago introduced herself as a hard-partying hedonist who brushes her teeth with Jack Daniels and who "ain't got a care in the world, but got plenty of beer" - is, in fact, liberated with a spirit as political as it is free. "Precisely because Ke$ha challenged double standards by seizing male rock's license to misbehave, she became a lightning rod for contempt," Simon Reynolds wrote in the New York Times last month in a feature on Ke$ha's sophomore album, Warrior (out today). Over at The Atlantic, Ashley Fetters described Ke$ha's new photo book/vague memoir, My Crazy Beautiful Life, as "the answer to The Feminine Mystique." Ke$ha, 25, agrees - whether or not you do. In Life, released last month, she writes that her second single, "Blah Blah Blah," was a conscious move to talk about men like they talked about women. (Sample lyric: "I don't really care where you live at / Just turn around, boy, let me hit that / Don't be a little bitch with your chit chat / Just show me where your dick's at.") Her right to invert the binary—or, to be as piggish as men are—is one of her platforms. "If men can talk about drinking in every awesome rock 'n' roll song and every awesome rap song," she recently wondered aloud to the Financial Times, "why can't a woman?" To the Daily Star, she said, "A man can sit around and talk about sex and they're a rock star. If a woman says it, they sound like a slut. I drink and I bone – so get over it." Fair enough, I suppose—although just because you can be a douchebag, you shouldn't be a douchebag, regardless of what's in your pants. Reducing feminism to tit-for-tat teasing ("Wham! Bam! Thank you, man!" she chants on the "metaphor for [her] hoo-ha," Warrior's "Gold Trans Am") doesn't strike me as useful on anything but a superficial level, but this is simple pop music we're talking about so maybe superficial is the proper mode. It's also unlikely that a guy could get away with talking about women in 2012 the way that Ke$ha does about men, without at least a shrill Internet backlash – as long as there is Twitter and bored people, no one "gets away" with anything. But none of this bothers me so much because I believe in the importance of sexual expression. If this is sincere expression and not just a way of leveling the playing field by using tools created by men, then good for Ke$ha for being able to get that out to millions of people. But this idea that Ke$ha's public attitude toward men makes her a revolutionary is absurd. She isn't leading a line; she's part of a human chain. It's a lineage that includes people like Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, who made women's sexuality socially acceptable pop music material. It includes those who came after, who did their own male objectification (especially rappers like Salt-N-Pepa and Missy Elliott). Ke$ha's musical influences fan out from there. Her tart yelp wouldn't resound so commercially if it weren't for Alanis Morissette; her stylization as a purveyor of this era of house music would be unlikely without Lady Gaga; her rap flow conjures the Beastie Boys and JJ Fad. No album this year is as open in its debt to Daft Punk as Warrior. The rock attitude of Marc Bolan and Iggy Pop inspired it (the latter guests on "Dirty Love"). Even at her brashest and most direct – "I'm over it, so suck my dick," in Warrior's "Thinking of You" – she is echoing irony already expressed by her peers Nicki Minaj and Rihanna in those very words. What is particular to Ke$ha, though, is her open use of vapid superficiality as an aesthetic. "You must realize by this point that I'm in on the joke. I know I sound like a jackass half the time. I do it on purpose," she told the Times. Even Warrior, a more delicate and introspective collection of songs than the last time around, still revels in id, packing in hook after exploding hook that calls to action or is the result of such a call ("War-eee-errrr-eee-errrr-eeee-errrr!" "Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young!" "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!" "I just want your dirty love!" "This is our last goodbye!" "No one's getting out alive!"). Ke$ha assures us that this is a pose or at least a thrust of one part of her personality. "I think you can be this total maniac onstage and act like a complete idiot, but also be really respectful, really positive and smart," She told Seventeen. "You don't have to be just one thing." Indeed, and the idea of being at once mindless and provocative - of abandon having resonance, as Ke$ha claims when she talks about gender equality - is one that understands a cultural climate in which smart things are being said about supposedly dumb entertainment (like, say, reality TV) all the time. The pop culture we consume now comes in packages, and Ke$ha is packaged extremely well. Bringing a transparency to playing dumb may be playing dumb's final frontier, and it certainly creates a more lifelike image than we are accustomed to getting from pop stars. In Life, Ke$ha describes herself as "messy and imperfect" and returns to the idea a few times. Going against the grain is just a matter of being slightly unkempt, and because media training has a way of ironing and starching the personality out of the pop star (see Katy Perry or, to a certain extent, Gaga), Ke$ha is able to stick out in her field. The problem, though, is that she must explicitly remind us of this because there is little indication that she is actually smart in her music – book smart, that is, as she claims she was in the international baccalaureate program before dropping out of high school to pursue her music career. Her intelligence is mostly felt in retrospect, when she pulls back the wrinkled curtain to reveal a fairly thoughtful person behind it. Certainly, the lyrics of Warrior's second single "C'Mon," which plays like best-case-scenario Karmin, speak for themselves ("Feeling like I'm a high school…er/Sipping on a warm wine cool…er/Hot 'cause the party don't stop/I'm in a crop top/Like I'm working at Hooters"), but they don't bespeak a level of operation higher than the ability to rhyme and have fun. She pronounces "degenerates" on the title track like "DeGeneres." It's for effect and the sake of meter, but still. Sometimes her music is wise – framing the deeply sad "Last Goodbye" as a jubilantly strummed, sung-along recollection of a finished relationship is a beautiful way of paying homage to what made it worth singing about in the first place – but even at its wisest, it's only implicitly so. Ke$ha is a supposedly normal girl who spreads lore all over her like glitter. She got a 1500 on her SATs and rejected acceptance letters to college ("I was going to go to Columbia University and study psychology," she's claimed.) She was conceived basically by a game of Button Button Who's Got the Button played in her mom's womb. Her mom's songwriting inspired her own and she began composing at a very early age. She came up with the idea to put a dollar sign in her name after doing a tequila shot she bought with savaged change. She vomited in Paris Hilton's closet. The open fostering of a pop-star image is a sign of a time that values full disclosure (or, failing that, the illusion of it). But all the explaining begins to undo Ke$ha. Last year, a man stepped forward to counter the oft-told story that she never knew her dad – Bob Chamberlain said he was in fact her father and gave Star photo evidence that he had indeed been a part of her life. She dismissed this claim with a single tweet and neither publicly spoke of it again, from what I can tell. Furthermore, instead of achieving the dumb-smart multi-dimensionality she strives for in individual songs, her various explanations of the idea behind Warrior just sound contradictory. On one hand, she told The Sun, "I have a lot of gay and lesbian fans and they said how my music had helped them deal with bullying, so I wanted to write a record that's about love and acceptance." On the other, she told The Hollywood Reporter, "I wanted to give the finger to anybody who thought I was a one-trick pony." One for you, many for me, fine, but please let's not confuse a pop album with activism, especially when it boils down to, "The underlying theme of this next record is warrior, with the positive message being that everyone has a warrior inside." That's just Mariah Carey's most treacly anthem, "Hero," rewritten in neon war paint. In her book, Ke$ha writes, "I'm still a misfit and I will always stand up for people who feel they don't fit in." But then a few pages later, there's this: "Coming back to the West Coast and selling out huge amphitheaters makes me see that I have realized my dreams." Those dreams were of mass acceptance, of fitting in writ large enough to make her part of the cultural fabric. And the price you pay for being an accepted misfit is all over Warrior. Ke$ha has openly admitted to altering her vision — that thing that makes her the misfit she claims to be — for the sake of popularity: "I really wanted to bring as much rock 'n' roll as I could to this record, but after a from-the-business-standpoint conversation with my producer [her mentor Lukasz 'Dr Luke' Gottwald], he was like, if you want to have a successful record you can't just abandon that sound." So she didn't. She chose fame and relative conformity. And so what we are left with is a gentle freak, someone who can maybe work within the system to promote her seemingly benevolent ideals while not exactly acknowledging that self-conscious weirdness and individuality is all the rage and were it not, Ke$ha and her raggedy spin on it wouldn't be nearly as visible. Her music works in the moment — Warrior is far superior to the album and EP that preceded it. Here, her nonstop joy is infectious, her hooks are undeniable and her production has a wider range of textures than your typical radio EDM. But #YOLO and lasting depth are opposing forces that Ke$ha cannot yet reconcile. As much as she reveals, as disarming as her honesty can seem, make no mistake: we are not dealing with an iconoclast. What we have on our hands is the picture of a modern pop star. Ke$ha herself said it best: we r who we r.  |
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![Did <i>Vice</i> Magazine Accidentally Reveal the Location of Fugitive Anti-Virus Pioneer John McAfee? [UPDATE: Yes]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sYOvEjX30FjbdyIX-3E3kuuXtxoBJIjK9GxgR9fATB81W3jN9PDK66_g9cV54R1C51OzWmMx4qCZO84dCC6rYTQ5MSVB5EMhAQn7hWsrmSFEb0XMoDDo6aiscUaZSQ=s0-d "Did <i>Vice</i> Magazine Accidentally Reveal the Location of Fugitive Anti-Virus Pioneer John McAfee? [UPDATE: Yes]")
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