SETI's a Gamble Worth Throwing a Few Chips At

Hidden away in Northern California, nestled between a highway and the Pacific Crest Trail, lies a huge collection of sleeping antennae.

The forty-two hulking behemoths are dormant, waiting for someone to pay the power bill. Until recently they had their namesake, Microsoft’s Paul Allen, and the budget of UC Berkeley to cover the cost.

Unfortunately, California is horribly in debt, and one of the first things to go was the radio antennae know as the Allen Telescope Array. However, rather than scrap these powerful tools altogether or sell them off to a different state or country, they remain still, ready to pop back into action when the time comes.

They’ll point to the sky, collectively absorbing radio wavelengths pouring in from the heavens, recording an unimaginably huge cache of data to be analyzed later. Most of this data will look like static: Random and useless, much like a TV with no signal.

Fortunately, despite the temporary decommissioning, a wealth of data is waiting to be analyzed, and you can be a part of it. And yes, it’s almost entirely random.

Its purpose is to search for broadcasts, intentional or accidental, from life forms beyond Earth—probably the easiest (and likely only possible way) for us to confirm that they exist. The program is SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life, and they can’t do it without you.

In 1999 I joined the program, donating my CPU’s spare processing power to downloading chunks of data and searching them for patterns with a screen saver called SETI@home. I never found anything.

In fact, in the entire history of the program, no one’s found anything. Well, that’s not entirely true; in 1977, after looking over the data in a sea of ones, twos, and threes, someone noticed a 6EQUJS. Dubbed the Wow! signal, this is widely considered to be the ultimate achievement of the program to date. Unfortunately, its results have never been replicated.

Back in ’99, I was running a 333mHz processor, which is less powerful than my mobile phone. I imagine that there are more participants now, and many of them are running dual- or quad-core CPUs, but still, no more Wows.

No doubt, when looking at the budget crisis, California politicians and educators decided that this program was not nearly as important as providing welfare, health care, road and public building maintenance, and everything else the state has to pay for. It seems entirely logical to re-distribute millions of dollars to something other than a cluster of antennae silently listening for nothing.

And even if they did notice something, what would be the benefit? No doubt in the minds of those concerned with problems here on Earth, even if a transmission from an alien life form was confirmed, it wouldn't benefit us in any way. We wouldn’t be able to interact with them, after all. If the signal was being broadcast from a thousand light years away, and we broadcast a signal right back, they wouldn’t get it until 3011, and they’d have to be pointing their antenna straight at us to listen, anyway.

Most likely, any alien life form that’s blasting a signal in our direction knows that there’s an H2O-covered globe sitting in the sweet spot just far enough away from the sun that the majority of the water stays in liquid form and that life is likely to exist here. To receive a signal from them that is custom-tailored for us would be mind-blowing, to say the least. They might even be sending a constant loop of solutions to some of our biggest problems: Famine, cold fusion, world peace. It could be the most important piece of data ever received, and we don’t even know it yet. Those universal secrets could be bouncing off of our heads right now as we stare at our computer monitors and search for 20-year-old song lyrics.

However, I like to imagine that we’ll pick up stray results that were unintentionally broadcast into space. In my version of SETI’s first success story, we get an HD signal of aliens getting hit in the reproductive vitals by activity spheroids.

Either way, it would be some of the best money we've ever spent. I feel that it is worth it to keep scanning space for signals from beyond, even if it feels like throwing money on a bonfire. By comparison to other public projects, it’s not really that expensive to maintain: One year of SETI funding roughly equals one interstate overpass. Either way, we’re gambling. Throw money at SETI and fail, and the house wins; if we succeed, it could be the biggest jackpot in human history.

But if we choose not to bet, we’ll never know what we could have won. Follow @torqtorq

DVDs Died Before I Even Started My Collection

There’s something exciting about owning physical media. In many of our living spaces, we’ve devoted an entire bookshelf to CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, 8-tracks, vinyl, and Edison wax cylinders. Then we step back and look at the rainbow of titles staring back at us and think of how much money we spent to amass that collection.

Downloading MP3s and XVID-fueled TV shows and movies is significantly less thrilling, but much more efficient. For example, when an earthquake strikes, all of our MP3s won’t fall onto the floor in an impressive but tragic destruction of jewel cases. We don’t have to worry about house guests discreetly lifting them during a Halloween party. Some of us even have the satisfaction of knowing that no wasteful packaging was used to transport a bunch of ones and zeros across the country, or the world (remember the original CD packaging?)

Being a tech-savvy youth, I jumped into all-digital media as soon as it became available, copying my friends’ CDs and downloading songs from various peer-to-peer networks to put onto my 64 megabyte Rio MP3 player (it holds one full album!) This was illegal, of course, but I bought back my karma by meeting my favorite bands at the venues they’d play and giving them gas money. This became a lot more popular when gas prices skyrocketed.

I never had the money for DVDs; if I ever wanted to watch one, I’d just rent it. As a result, my media bookcase is filled with embarrassing music from the 90s and VHS tapes like Motorvision. It’s more of a time capsule than something to gawk at. Its lack of timeliness has manifested itself in a steady decline in the number of CDs missing after every Halloween party.

Someone gave me a DVD player for Christmas one year which meant that I had something to collect dust while I used my Playstation 2 for the rare occasions during which a DVD would be screened in my living room. Though it’s still in my entertainment center now, it’s never powered on.

Yes, I’ll admit it. I sometimes take the rogue path and torrent movies I want to watch if it doesn’t show up on my wife’s Netflix account, but usually I’ll do it anyway if the Netflix movies don’t fit the proper aspect ratio of my TV. Hey, if we’re paying to stream it, and there’s no time limit for viewing it, it must be legal for me to download it, right? RIGHT?

So if I have an endless stream of media flying into my house via coaxial cable, do I need to start collecting DVDs and impressing my party guests? Of course not. That’s more of a waste of money than my monthly TiVo bill. Do I need to purchase a BluRay player and those even-higher-quality discs now? No, I really don’t care about movie quality.

I don’t hate to say it, but DVDs are dead, as are most disc-based media, and I hadn’t even started my collection yet.

However, I still buy CDs for reasons even I don’t understand. Follow @torqtorq

There's Too Many Pictures on the Internet, but It's a Good Thing

In the age of digital cameras, and accelerated by the nearly universal ownership of mobile phone cameras, pictures are everywhere. Literally trillions of them.

We’re documenting not just our lives, but our world, in brute force style. Hundreds of millions of people snap pictures of anything and everything every single day.

Most of these photos are never seen by more than a few people, but nonetheless, if they’re posted to the Internet, they’re waiting their chance. Somewhere along the line, possibly years from the date of the photo, someone is going to happen across that image, and it’s going to be exactly what they’re looking for.

The vast majority of these photos are terrible. Despite reasonably good auto-focus, auto-gain, and automatic shutter/aperture control, the typical photo-taker’s actual photography skills are lacking. Poor framing, ugly flash shadows, and ill-conceived subject matter are the likely offenders. As a result, the Internet is clogged with crisp, true color, horrible photos.

However, at the same time, a large collection of higher quality photos have appeared on the Internet, even if they’re hidden by the bad ones. Digital photography helps people grow as shutterbugs at a much faster rate than film cameras (which would require extensive technical knowledge, shooting with faith that the picture would be correct, painstakingly noting camera settings, and then waiting for the film to develop before learning what went wrong.) With digital cameras, everyone—even the pros—look at their shots to see if they need to tweak settings to get a better picture.

The good news is that you can now find a picture of just about anything, thanks to search engines. Need a picture of a man long-jumping over babies? Google Image Search to the rescue!

Photo by Israel L. Murillo

Want a picture of a random bridge—let’s say one over a river on I-65 in Alabama—but it needs to be at sunrise? Take your pick!

Photo by Aimee Deeds

Social networking websites ensure that you see everything your friends do, which usually translates into Everything There Is to Do in This Town. Wanna see what’s happening at that art show going on downtown that everyone’s been talking about? Check with your Facebook friends.

Mobile photo-sharing apps are all the rage right now, with each trying to pull some crazy new spin on the concept. From Color to Snapbucket to Path (the one I independently predicted the name of), people are betting lots of money on this.

Google Street View allows us to pick a street and see a panoramic view of what that slice of the Earth looks like. There’s no more worry about what your friend’s house looks like when they give you directions to it, or what a sign says at an exit ramp from the interstate.

Do there need to be pictures of everything? Probably not. But it allows us a preview before we get there, and it means that nothing is missed. Even if the quality is low, the picture you’re looking for is out there somewhere.

There’s too many photos, and most of them suck—but they’re enriching our lives. Follow @torqtorq

AT&T Proves that the Internet is Old

First came Living Social. Then Groupon popped up out of nowhere.

Many startups followed.

Following the failed purchase of Groupon for $6 billion, Google decided to start their own.

Facebook jumped on the bandwagon last month.

Now, AT&T’s joining the game, because that’s what they do.

It’s a big trend going on right now. So what’s the business that’s grasped the Internet by its Rocky Mountain oysters?

Coupons.

That’s right, coupons. The same things that your grandma used to drive you crazy with at the checkout line of the grocery store. The same things that save you 29 cents on toothpaste. Those things that you get in the mail all the time, even though you never signed up for them.

(My favorite one is the Money Mailer, which states on its cover that “It’s like getting money in your mailbox!” Each time I get this thing, I state, “It’s like throwing money in a trash can!” and promptly chuck it into the nearest dumpster.)

Yep, the Internet is officially elderly, as we’re all clamoring for coupons that will get us $10 off at a store or restaurant, a free pedicure with purchase of a manicure, or something completely inane like a helicopter ride.

But what really seals the deal for the aging Internet is AT&T. Formerly known as Ma Bell, this company was ancient in the 60s. They became so large, so powerful, that the federal government had to split them up, but like the asshole cop in Terminator 2, blasting AT&T to pieces just caused the disturbing globs of mercury-like liquid to slide back together again to re-form the same asshole cop.

AT&T and I go way back. We have an on-and-off-again relationship; sometimes I like them, and sometimes I want to strangle them with their own spirally telephone cord. They had my business in the days before cell phones, providing me with an affordable landline. Then the prices went up—way up—and I jumped into the cell phone scene, cutting off my land line like a leeching friend...

...and straight into AT&T’s lap, as it were. At the time the service was called Cingular, but less than 3 months after signing up, Cingular was flattened like its mascot to make way for the AT&T juggernaut.

For six years I held their cell phone service because I refused to get a smart phone until the service was affordable, and in the meantime, moved into an apartment with my future wife. Determined to stay far, far away from Comcast, we signed up for a local cable service called AmericaOne. It was bad, but cheaper than Comcast by far, and the Internet connection rarely dropped. Six months later, AmericaOne sent me their last letter, informing me that they would henceforth be known as AT&T.

We moved out of that apartment after another year and a half and into a complex that only served Comcast cable—and no satellite dishes! Eager to drop AT&T, I sold my soul and gave Comcast a valid credit card. The road with them has been rocky, but even when AT&T employees came directly to my door once their cable service became available in my area, I resisted the urge to set fire to my $7-a-month Comcast cable modem. I refused to be stuck with the ancient behemoth again.

During this time I washed my cell phone. Actually, I’m amazed that I had never done this before, but the thing was dead. It was my chance to get away from AT&T for good. I dropped their cell service and picked up an unlocked G1, took it to T-Mobile and had it set up for service with no contract. No problems.

Three months ago, as I logged in to pay my T-Mobile bill, I was greeted by a giant banner that said simply “AT&T to acquire T-Mobile USA.” Really? REALLY?! Come on!

 

Now, never to be outdone, and without the ability to be too big and too old, AT&T’s jumped into the group coupon scene. I swear, if online Bingo was the next big thing, they’d still be late to get involved, but they’d dump an insane amount of money into it.

The Internet is old, and it’s being stalked by this enormous, ancient, creepy-old-man equivalent of a media conglomerate. I have half a mind to file stalking charges against them. Right after I finish my online Scrabble game and watch my stories on Hulu.

[UPDATE MAY 5, 2011]: AT&T was camped out at the front gates to my complex today handing out "free breakfast." They were offering a choice of either orange or prune juice, granola bar or apple, and fruit snacks or raisins. And of course, every bag comes with breakfast spam as well.

Follow @torqtorq

Simple Puzzles Lead to Simple Math

Oh man, I’ve been waiting on this Manchester Orchestra album release for quite a while now. After hearing “I’ve Got Friends” by complete accident—a click-through from another YouTube video—two years ago, I grabbed a copy of the full album that spectacular single came from. As it ended up, Mean Everything to Nothing is one of those rare albums that I’ll put my full support behind. It’s perfect—every note, from beginning to end.

I liked it so much that I got my hands on the preceding album, Like a Virgin Losing a Child, which was unbelievably underwhelming. Seems around this time these Atlanta natives were more focused on being the next Death Cab for Cutie and not forging their own path. I still don’t listen to that album because, well, it’s just not that good.

So over a year ago, as I began the anticipated countdown to what would eventually be titled Simple Math, I read that Andy Hull (lead singer) said that the band’s intention was to make albums that were consistently better than the last, and if they were not happy with the results, they’d just split up. That’s a lot of pressure to put on your band after releasing one of the greatest albums of the decade!

Now they’ve leaked their own album a week ahead of the official release date, on the Columbia website. Fans need to put together a puzzle that reflects the geometry-inspired cover, placing objects representing individual songs in the correct order on the provided spaces.

The album’s opener, “Deer,” is an acoustic ballad reflecting Hull’s experience in the music industry, an introduction to the highly introspective album. The second track, Mighty, introduces the rest of the band, featuring much of the sound that we remember from Mean Everything. Inventive guitar sounds and a steady, comfortable rhythm drive the melody of this track, but it’s no “Shake it Out.”

Other parts of the album, including the light and bouncy “Pensacola,” show a different vocal side of Hull not seen since Like a Virgin Losing a Child. It becomes apparent very quickly that Hull is moving forward in an autobiographical manner. “April Fool” marks the point where the album really kicks off and starts moving with the feel that lead guitarist Robert McDowell has really tried to keep up his end of the deal and progress musically, taking chances in ways he never has before. The album’s climax, “Apprehension,” paints a portrait of shameful excess:

How could I misconceive I was owed something radically radiant?

Overall, it is clear that the band has definitely taken steps to expand their repertoire, and this album feels a lot more light-hearted than their last two full-lengths: Less tortured screaming, more happy melodies, but most importantly, strange bits that really work, like the orchestral hits in “Pale Black Eye” or the haunting choruses of “Virgin.”

I’m still not entirely sold on it, but it took several tries before I listened to all of Mean Everything to Nothing anyway. Maybe Simple Math is a step up from the masterpiece, and it hasn’t occurred to me yet; either way, I’d hate to see the band split up over a clearly well-planned and well-written album. Follow @torqtorq

The (Likely) Accurate Location of bin Laden's Pakistani House

[UPDATE, JULY 2013: The originally reported location is inaccurate, and there is still no placemark in Google Earth. Scroll to the end of this article for the correct location.]

Thanks to a placemark in Google Maps, the house where Osama bin Laden was (allegedly) killed today can be found. Of course, you have to wade through the pile of inaccurate placemarks first.

To find it:

1. Search for "Abottabad, Pakistan" 
2. Head north on the road marked Karakoram Highway, or N35
3. Turn right onto Awami Road
4. Almost exactly halfway between N35 and Kakul Road, north of Awami Road, is the compound

Conversely, you can just search for these coordinates:
34° 11′ 15″ N, 73° 14′ 33″ E

Here's what it looks like in Google Earth:

So what leads me to believe that this is the correct one? Here's what the news reports have to say about the compound:

• 18-foot-high walls
• Surrounded by relatively rural area
• Eight times larger than surrounding houses

You may not see all of this in this picture, but we can deduce from these shadows that the wall around this house is huge. It's definitely more rural than the city areas denoted by other Google Maps placemarks, and it's probably not visible from Awami Road.

It doesn't appear to be eight times larger than surrounding houses, but remember that this house is probably pretty tall. We'll have to wait for images from the ground to confirm that this is the place the U.S. military raided earlier today.

UPDATE:

CNN is now reporting that this house, one of the others suggested by the online community earlier this morning, is the correct building. However, this structure fits the "eight times larger" description even less than my suggested building. It does fit the description of being relatively new, as it is not visible in Google Earth's 2001 aerial photos. I remain skeptical because this doesn't seem consistent with the building shown in news videos released so far today, so I'll await further confirmation before declaring an exact building as the correct one.

You can find this location with these coordinates:
34° 10′ 10″ N, 73° 14′ 33″ E

[UPDATE, JULY 2013]

I decided to revisit this article to see if the location I had originally identified is accurate. Turns out I had a whole year to do it, since the compound was destroyed in April 2012. Take a look at these two photos (one from CNN, one from Google Earth) from May 2011, just a few days after the compound was raided and bin Laden's face was bulleted:

In both images, the smaller, angled-roof building across the street is visible. Then, just under a year later, the compound was destroyed even though it was only a few years old. I'm sure conspiracy theorists are frothing over that one. Here are two more pictures, both from April 2012, from the same sources:

Yep, totally flattened. If the news is correct, and they probably are, then this was definitely the place where Seal Team Six delivered lead justice to bin Laden. Mystery solved! Follow @torqtorq

How to Block Fast Windows Antivirus 2011 Annoyances

Anybody who’s a big fan of Google Image Search has probably noticed a major nuisance lately: The fake Fast Windows Antivirus 2011 scan. In the past couple of weeks this annoyance has become more prevalent while searching for images that would otherwise be safe to view. Many people want to know how to stop it from showing up or how to get rid of it altogether.

The fake scan has been causing panic in one of two ways among those who don’t understand exactly what’s happening:

1. Some people believe this is a real scan and panic, thinking that their computer is infected with multiple viruses (and might end up clicking on the provided link to install antivirus software).
2. Others immediately recognize this as a fake but worry that a virus is being loaded onto their computer anyway.

Here’s how you end up in this situation: First, you do a Google Image Search and results are shown; you click an image to see a preview and, since Google loads the full web page in the background, the page is redirected to http://avar-antivirus.cz.cc which triggers a browser alert. The alert looks like this:

All other tabs in that browser window are disabled; your choices are to minimize/maximize the browser window or click OK. Clicking OK here is safe, as we will discuss later.

You are then redirected to a page with the title “Fast Windows Antivirus 2011” which features a fake Windows Explorer window, and a fake progress bar counts its way from 0 to 100%. Along the way, multiple “viruses” appear in the progress window.

When it’s done, the webpage prompts you with a fake Windows Security Alert that features two actions: Remove all and Cancel. Clicking either will prompt you to download an executable file which is a virus.

 

At this point you should either navigate back by three or more pages or close the browser tab. Doing so will trigger yet another alert which looks like this:

In this case, clicking OK is also safe.

The end result is that no harm will come to your computer unless you install that executable file, which you must be prompted to do. As long as you don’t authorize that installation, your computer is uninfected. However, it’s a serious nuisance. I decided to take a closer look at the source code to figure out what’s happening here.

The initial popup does this:

window.resizeTo(0,0);
window.moveTo(width1,height1);

alert('Windows Security has found  critical process activity  on your PC and will perform fast scan of system  files');

It resizes your browser window to 0 by 0 pixels and triggers a standard alert with the above text. Your only choice is to click OK, but there is no consequence; it just allows the browser to proceed. At this point, whether immediately or hours later, you can navigate away from the page without damage being done to your computer.

Why is this happening?

The group that is behind this most likely has a web crawler which checks Google Image Search for popular pictures, archives them, and then repeats them over several domains (the most common one I’ve seen is ichthus.org) so that your search results are clogged with dozens of these images that send you to the fake virus scan page.

What can you do?

The very first thing you can do is navigate away from this page, but the most important thing you should do is avoid installing that executable file.

However, there’s more; you can block this website altogether so that attempts to load this page will show a browser error, like this:

This way your browser won’t be resized, you won’t have to deal with the redirects taking you back to the page, viruses trying to install, etc. You do so by adding a line to the hosts file on your computer. Here’s how it’s done:

In Windows:

• With Notepad, open the hosts file found here: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
• Move the cursor to the bottom line and enter this text:

127.0.0.1 avar-antivirus.cz.cc

• Now save the file.

In Mac OS X:

• Open the Terminal (found in the Applications/Utilities folder)
• Type sudo nano /private/etc/hosts
• Move the cursor down to the bottom line and enter this text:

127.0.0.1 avar-antivirus.cz.cc

• Now hit CTRL+X and press Y to save the changes.

Both methods perform the same action in different operating systems. Now when your computer tries to load avar-antivirus.cz.cc, it’ll send your browser to 127.0.0.1 which is a local IP address with nothing attached to it. Instead of sending you to the fake virus scan, you’ll just get the harmless error.

This method is a temporary fix; most likely this group will begin redirecting you to other domains. When this happens, you can use this same method to block that URL as well. Hopefully soon something more permanent will be done about this issue. Follow @torqtorq