The New Yorker did a lengthy profile on George Hotz - the young man responsible for the first iphone jailbreak and the first Playstation 3 hack – and how a lawsuit brought against him by Sony was the catalyst for the hacker wars.

After Hotz uploaded a video of his hacked iphone to youtube:

Hotz’s YouTube video received nearly two million views and made him the most famous hacker in the world. The media loved the story of the teen-age Jersey geek who beat Apple. Hotz announced that he was auctioning off the unlocked phone. The winning bid, from the C.E.O. of Certicell, a cell-phone-refurbishing company, was a 2007 Nissan 350Z sports car and three new iPhones. Later, on CNBC, Erin Burnett asked Hotz if he thought that day’s uptick in Apple stock was due in part to his efforts. “More people want iPhones now if they can use them with any sort of provider,” he said, and added that he “would love to have a talk right now with Steve Jobs” about it.

I like this Steve Wozniak quote:

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, who hacked telephone systems early in his career, sent Hotz a congratulatory e-mail. “It was like a story out of a movie of someone who solves an incredible mystery,” Wozniak told me. “I understand the mind-set of a person who wants to do that, and I don’t think of people like that as criminals. In fact, I think that misbehavior is very strongly correlated with and responsible for creative thought.”

+ Nate Jackson’s Open Letter to Future Football Stars

Nate Jackson addresses Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III, two players that will (or did) go 1-2 in the NFL draft, on how their lives will change once drafted.

I think you can draw many comparisons to being in a band or any passion that takes you away from home for stretches of time.  Basically, don’t lose touch with the reasons you started playing the game.

And there’s more. You’ll buy a few cars, attend charity events and autograph signings, do endorsement deals, film commercials, go to golf tournaments, meet local investors and owners and politicians and more rich people on more Xanax and the surreal will become the real. The game that you fell in love with as a child will seem lost; a thump on the floorboard of your new Mercedes, swerved at high speeds to avoid a shadow in the night. The sights and sounds and smells of football, sensual memories that stir the passions in the soul, will be reconceived and recategorized, buried behind newer, odorless versions.

With all of this pushing against you, the role of friends and family becomes very important. There are people in this world to whom you’re just Andrew and Robert. Son, brother, lover, friend. You need to lean on these people when the Weirdos start to make sense. You need to run to the familiarity of genuine friendship. But even in this, there will be a loneliness, because, as a defense mechanism, you will have assumed a piece of your new identity, and your loved ones won’t understand it. Caught in between these two worlds you’ll drift. You’ll feast on the fruits of excess, and will only grow hungrier. You’ll dine with familiar faces, and find you’ve lost the taste. And so you’ll get in your Mercedes on your days off and drive to the facility and watch film. Ah yes. Football. That’s what this is all about.

Stevenson traveled extensively to conduct field research into reincarnation and investigated cases in Africa, Alaska, Europe, India and both North and South America, logging around 55,000 miles a year between 1966 and 1971.^[3] He reported that the children he studied usually started to speak of their supposed past lives between the ages of two and four, then ceased to do so by seven or eight, with frequent mentions of having died a violent death, and what seemed to be clear memories of the manner of death.^[3] After interviewing the children, their families, and others, Stevenson would attempt to identify if there had been a living person who satisfied the various claims and descriptions collected, and who had died prior to the child’s birth.

Stevenson believed the strongest cases he had collected in support of this model involved both testimony and physical evidence. In over 40 of these cases Stevenson gathered physical evidence relating to the often rare and unusual birthmarks and birth defects of children which he claimed matched wounds recorded in the medical or post-mortem records for the individual Stevenson identified as the past-life personality.

+ Jaroslav Flegr found that a parasite which passes from cats to humans is responsible for changing how an infected person thinks and behaves.

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

The link to schizophrenia is also kind of cool…

“Textbooks today still make silly statements that schizophrenia has always been around, it’s about the same incidence all over the world, and it’s existed since time immemorial,” he says. “The epidemiology literature contradicts that completely.” In fact, he says, schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,” says Torrey, but the trend spread rapidly—and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia soared.

Robert Budd Dwyer (November 21, 1939 – January 22, 1987) was an American politician in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He served from 1971 to 1981 as a member of the Pennsylvania State Senate representing the state’s 50th district. He served as the 30th Treasurer of Pennsylvania from 1981 to 1987.

In the early 1980s, Pennsylvania discovered its state workers had overpaid federal taxes due to errors in state withholding. Many accounting firms competed for a multimillion-dollar contract to determine compensation to each employee. In 1986, Dwyer was convicted of receiving a bribe from a California firm trying to gain the contract. Throughout his trial and after his conviction, he maintained that he was innocent of the charge and that he had been framed.

On the morning of January 22, 1987, he committed suicide with a gun during a televised press conference at his office in Harrisburg, the state capital.

(via Wikipedia)

Two of my favorite bands, At the Drive-in and Refused, are reuniting to play Coachella.  Hopefully both of them will tour because I don’t want to fly to California – or pay for Coachella tickets – to see them.  I go back and forth on how I feel about these bands doing reunions because a) it’s viewed as heretical for a punk band to reunite to cash in, and b) it’s rare for a reunion show to top past performances.  On the other hand, it’s great that I’m going to hopefully get the chance to see two incredibly influential bands and why should it matter that they are reuniting since they both make great music.

Here’s an article that sums it up pretty well.

+ Louis CK Interview

Here’s an interview with comedian Louis CK that’s worth reading.

Speaking about his first encounter with the Conan O’Brien writing team:

Then I was so nervous, and Dino Stamatopoulos and all the other writers were saying, “You’re the new writer here,” and I was like, “I haven’t been hired yet,” and Dino was playing games with me, saying, “Congratulations, you’ve been hired,” and I was like, “I haven’t even been interviewed yet.” I hung out with him while I was waiting, then I hung out with Smigel and Conan, who were in this really weird position, that in two months from now, they were going to be on the air to replace Letterman, a complete unknown replacing this massive…they started pitching ideas to me for their opening, and they had just started talking about this open where Conan’s really excited to go to work. Everybody goes, “Good luck, you’d better be as good as Letterman,” they keep saying that to him and he doesn’t care, and he goes into his dressing room and puts his head in a noose and they knock down the door and he has to go on. He told me he was going to put a gun in his mouth, and I was the new guy, and I said, “Are you really going to do that?” and they were like, “You think that’s too dark?” and I said, “You can’t do that, that’s vicious, that’s really hard for people to take.” I talked them out of it, and it was like they were asking me for permission. “Really, is it too much?” “Yeah, guys, that’s crazy.” A gun in the mouth, Jesus.

 + Pianos/Xerxes & Pianos/Touche Tours Announced

So we announced two tours today.  One with Xerxes in Canada and the northeastern US and the other with Touche Amore & Goodtime Boys in Europe.  I’ll post the Europe dates when they are finalized.

Pianos/Xerxes Tour Dates:

Feb. 24 – The Studio at Webster Hall – New York City
Feb. 25 – The Space – Hamden, Ct.
Feb. 26 – 242 Main St. – Burlington, Vt.
Feb. 28 – Cafe L’ Agitee – Quebec City, Quebec
Feb. 29 – L’escogriffe – Montreal, Quebec
March 1 – Mavericks – Ottawa, ON
March 2 – Hard Luck – Toronto, ON
March 3 – The Mansion House – St. Catharines, ON
March 4 – Lounge @ London Music Hall – London, ON
March 6 – Sugar City – Buffalo, NY
March 7 – Carabar – Columbus, OH
March 8 – Bangarang’s – Covington, Ky.
March 9 – Smiling Moose – Pittsburgh, Pa.
March 10 – Altoona Masonic Temple – Altoona, Pa.

+ By Surprise – $600 Dollar Exorcism

I’ve been jamming this By Surprise song a lot lately.  Good stuff – insanely catchy emo – but it took a while to grow on me.  Which reminds me, you should go download the Topshelf Records sampler because that’s where I discovered this song.

+ Longform.org

Longform is a blog that “posts great new and classic non-fiction articles, curated from across the web.”  If you have to spend a lot of time in front of a computer, this site will keep you entertained.

A few articles I’ve enjoyed:

+  DISPATCH FROM ANGOLA: FAITH-BASED SLAVERY IN A LOUISIANA PRISON

+  ENTER THE CYBER-DRAGON

+ The Usual – Light Letters

My friend Matt’s band The Usual recently released a new album called Light Letters.  They play a controlled driving style of screamo that instantly brought L’antietam to mind.  Apparently they recorded most of the album themselves, with the exception of drums.  Cool stuff, check it out!

+ No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency

Raffi Khatchadourian’s article focuses on Julian Assange and the wikileaks team in the days leading up to the release of Collateral Murder – “a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists;”

The article provides a nice back story on Assange and his chaotic life

What I find most interesting is the how Assange’s mother shaped his upbringing and presumably influenced his outlook on world affairs:

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible.

When Assange was eight, Claire left her husband and began seeing a musician, with whom she had another child, a boy. The relationship was tempestuous; the musician became abusive, she says, and they separated. A fight ensued over the custody of Assange’s half brother, and Claire felt threatened, fearing that the musician would take away her son. Assange recalled her saying, “Now we need to disappear,” and he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to sixteen. When I asked him about the experience, he told me that there was evidence that the man belonged to a powerful cult called the Family—its motto was “Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard.” Some members were doctors who persuaded mothers to give up their newborn children to the cult’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in government, Assange suspected, who provided the musician with leads on Claire’s whereabouts. In fact, Claire often told friends where she had gone, or hid in places where she had lived before.

Read more HERE.

+ Master of Play: The many worlds of a video-game artist

Nick Paumgarten profiles Shigeru Miyamoto – better known by video game nerds as the creator of Mario.

Miyamoto’s games are widely considered to be among the greatest. He has been called the father of modern video games. The best known, and most influential, is Super Mario Bros., which débuted a quarter of a century ago and, depending on your point of view, created an industry or resuscitated a comatose one. It spawned dozens of sequels and spinoffs. Miyamoto has designed or overseen the development of many other blockbusters, among them the Legend of Zelda series, Star Fox, and Pikmin. Their success, in both commercial and cultural terms, suggests that he has a peerless feel for the pull, that he is a master of play—of its components and poetics—in the way that Walt Disney, to whom he is often compared, was of sentiment and wonder. Certainly, in Mario, the squat Italian plumber who bops around the Mushroom Kingdom in a quest to rescue Princess Toadstool, Miyamoto created a folk hero—gaming’s first—with as great a reach as Mickey Mouse’s

Read More HERE.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!

+ Heathers – Waiter

I haven’t perused IfYouMakeIt in a while so today I’ve been going over all the sessions I’ve missed out on.  IIOI just did a pink couch session that’s well worth your time.  Koji recorded a session at the same time but it looks like it hasn’t been posted yet.  Bummer.  This Cara Beth Satalino video is still the best thing on IYMI.

Here’s another old favorite.

Click here to view the embedded video.

+ How to become a Millionaire in Three Years

Thinking about starting a company?  Read this.

Obvious, but good advice none the less.

“Be an unrelenting machine- Brick walls are there to show you how bad you want something. Commit to your goals and do not waver from them a one bit regardless of what else is there. I took this approach to losing weight and fitness.  I have not missed a single 5k run in over a year. (Here’s how I lost 50 pounds btw). It did not matter if I had not slept for two days, traveling across the country, or whatever else. If your goal is to become a millionaire, you need to be an unrelenting machine that does not let emotions make you give up / stop. You either get it done with 100% commitment or you don’t. Be a machine.”

+ Tigers Jaw – Two Worlds

From the few posts I’ve read on the internet it looks like they don’t want people sharing download links for this so I won’t post it up.  But it’s out – go download it from their bandcamp for $8 bucks.

Ugh, Digging a hole:

I saw 12 deaths inside. Three of them were at the hands of screws. One of those was a gunshot to the head while a guy was trying to escape. The other two were beatings, and I didn’t know they’d died until later. It’s not right to call a prison shanking a ‘stabbing’ because that’s not how you die. Inside, we called it ‘digging a hole’ or ‘digging a well’ like ‘he got a well dug in him’ or ‘pulled out a hole’. The reason for this is the make shift weapons used inside are not easy to kill with. You basically make a hole as fast as you can, by stabbing as fast as you can, and then you try and get a grip inside it and just start pulling. I saw this right up close one time. I had the distinct misfortune of having my cell behind a pillar, like a bulkhead kind of thing in the middle of the block. So if you wanted to shank someone, it was a great place to hide. On the flip side, it meant the boss’ gave it a lot of extra attention, which was bad for rubbing one out or taking a hit. Two guys were loitering around the pillar one day, waiting for this fresh kid to wander past. Prison gossip said he’s been worked over on his first night by someone who wanted him for a wife, but the kid fought back and nearly bit some fucker’s nuts off. So his friends wait with a t-shirt, and a filed down toothbrush. They’ve cracked down on plastic toothbrushes, but there used to be enough of them that a lot of guys have them stashed away. You can file down the ends on the concrete to a point. One guy wraped a t-shirt around the kid’s neck and lifted him off the ground from behind, and the other starts stabbing his gut. After a few stabs, he starts trying to get his fingers inside and he just pulls all this meat out. I thought he was going to pull out his intestines like you’d see in a horror movie, but instead, he just pulls out fist after fist of this yellow jelly shit, and then big hunks of meat like raw mince. Screw’s arrived and tasered everyone. Even the kid. He was on his side, right in front of my cell, and every jolt from the taser made the big hole in his stomach smoke.

It’s interesting to see how the national economy affected the black market value of goods in prison:

“I joked to my cell mate on the first day that at least the GFC couldn’t fuck us inside. He’d been done for assaulting a cop when his house got taken by the bank. But within months ‘GFC Nigger’ became the standard reply to any query as to how black market prices were suddenly going through the roof. The price of a deck of smokes tripled. There was an actual economic reason about this. I went away in Michigan, where a lot of people lost their houses, mostly poor people already. When they had to move away from the prison, it meant they couldn’t bring their loved ones as much contraband group, which meant the price of what there was sky rocketed. And the worse things got, the more the people who worked in the store would wonk and take home with them, which meant stocks ran low which fucked us even further.”

And I’ve always wondered how I would react to solitary confinement:

My first time in solitary was during a mass transfer, which is when our pen would be filled with extra inmates from another pen over night before being moved on. I was there for three days. The first day wasn’t so bad. In the beginning, I thought ‘this is interesting’ at least. And I kind of enjoyed being alone. I jacked off a lot. The second day, I read the bible. Which is the only book allowed in ad seg. The third day… I began to imagine I’d been forgotten about, and I started to panic. Like Mau-dib says “Fear is the Mind Killer”. Once you start down the road, there is no going back. You think you can handle it, like being alone isn’t so bad, like it’s almost a relief… But they make the room just the slight little bit too small. You lose track of time. You can’t see the light or figure out what day it is. You resort to counting out loud the seconds. You can’t distract yourself anymore and you start pacing but there isn’t enough room to pace and it just makes it worse. I’d never had a panic attack before, so I didn’t know what to expect. My heart just started pounding out of my chest and I felt like I was going to faint. I wanted to faint, so I could at least sleep and waste some time. But I couldn’t. I ended up by stay in ad seg screaming for help, until they came in and tasered me. I woke up back in my old cell.

Read the entire article HERE.

The Monster with 21 Faces sent its first letter on May 10, 1984, to the giant food company Ezaki Glico following the kidnapping and escape of Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of Glico. The letter stated that it had laced the company’s confections with potassium cyanide soda, and it later threatened to put them on store shelves. None of these poisoned candies were found, but Glico products were removed from stores, resulting in a loss of more than $21 million and the laying off of 450 part-time workers.

Meanwhile, The Monster with 21 Faces also sent letters to the media, taunting police efforts to capture the culprit(s) behind the scare. An excerpt from one such letter, written in hiragana and with anOsaka dialect, reads, “Dear dumb police officers. Don’t tell a lie. All crimes begin with a lie as we say in Japan. Don’t you know that?” Another taunting letter was sent to Koshien police station. “Why don’t you keep it to yourself? You seem to be at a loss. So why not let us help you? We’ll give you a clue. We entered the factory by the front gate. The typewriter we used is PAN-writer. The plastic container used was a piece of street garbage. Monster with 21 faces.”^[3]

On June 26, The Monster with 21 Faces issued a message proclaiming its forgiveness of Glico, and subsequent harassment of the company ceased. However, it began targeting Morinaga, another confectionery company, and food companies Marudai Ham and House Food Corporation with similar criminal campaigns, using the same alias.

In October 1984, a letter addressed to “Moms of the Nation” and signed by The Monster with 21 Faces was sent to Osaka news agencies with a warning similar to those sent to Glico. It stated that 20 packages of Morinaga candy had been laced with deadly sodium cyanide. After receiving this letter, police searched stores in cities from Tokyo to western Japan and found over a dozen lethal packages of Morinaga Choco Balls and Angel Pie before anyone was poisoned.^[4] These packages had labels, such as “Danger: Contains Toxins”, put on them. More tampered confections were found in February 1985, making a total of 21 lethal sweet products.^[5]

via The Monster With 21 Faces wiki entry.

Unfortunately the Monster with 21 faces was not defying authority for some noble cause – he, she or they – were just being greedy assholes and trying to extort money from a mega-corporate candy company.  But still, the impact that the monster made is astonishing.

Cliffs:  An american fur trapper stumbles upon a mother grizzly bear and her two cubs, is attacked but manages to kill the grizzly with a knife.  His companions leave him for dead.  When he regains consciousness he’s badly injured, alone in the middle of enemy Indian territory and without weapons or equipment.  His trek back to civilization takes 6 weeks and is filled with danger.  After his recovery he sets off on a journey to track down his companions and avenge himself.

Just a little taste of how much of a badass this guy was:

Despite his injuries, Glass regained consciousness. He did so only to find himself abandoned, without weapons or equipment, suffering from a broken leg, the cuts on his back exposing bare ribs, and all his wounds festering. Glass lay mutilated and alone, more than 200 mi (320 km) from the nearest settlement at Fort Kiowa on the Missouri.

In one of the more remarkable treks known to history, Glass set his own leg, wrapped himself in the bear hide his companions had placed over him as a shroud, and began crawling. To preventgangrene, Glass laid his wounded back on a rotting log and let the maggots eat the dead flesh.