Batman Says ‘Raise My Taxes’ as Occupy Movement Comes to Comics

From Wired – Top Stories:
Bruce Wayne just wants to pay his fair share for the good of the people.
Image courtesy Anjin Anhut

The Occupy Wall Street movement has come to comics.

One of the first salvos is from Berlin-based artist Anjin Anhut, whose Occupy Gotham (above) illustrates Batman’s sympathy for people sick of being sold out to jet-setting market sharks.

“I liked Warren Buffett’s public demand to be taxed more,” Anhut told Wired.com in an e-mail. “So I needed a popular super-rich guy, and that was either Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. I went with Wayne, because he basically always makes the right decision and is prepared for everything. Rich people should ask themselves, ‘What would Batman do?’”

It’s a worthy question to ask the comics industry and fandom alike, especially as DC Comics’ underwhelming reboot campaign, dubbed “The New 52,” has returned Batman to familiar territory fighting gangsters and monsters from his past. While Scott Snyder’s serviceable new iteration of Batman throws in a few scenes of Bruce Wayne promising to battle rapacious capitalism, they come during tony dinner parties for the rich that take place far from the mean streets where the little people live and die.

“Occupy Gotham is radical,” said Matt Pizzolo, founder of indie multimedia distributor Halo-8, which has produced compelling documentaries on comics superstars like Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis.

Pizzolo’s new project, Occupy Comics, is an arty protestation of similar mind built around the movement that has spread from New York City to the rest of the nation, shining a spotlight on widespread unemployment, government bailouts for banks and other toxic issues.

“It’s a great conversation to be having,” he said. “The Occupy movement is a paradigm-buster. Anyone who tries to impose a left-right paradigm on it winds up looking out of touch and irrelevant.”

Matt Pizzolo’s Occupy Comics project kicks off with artist Anna Muckcracker’s illustrated protest.
Image courtesy Halo-8

Still in its formative stage, Pizzolo’s Occupy Comics was originally designed to bring public awareness to the Occupy Wall Street movement. But a combination of growing protests, as well as possibly illegal police pushback, solved the exposure gap. Now Pizzolo is interested in providing illustrative and material support to protesters through a Kickstarter project whose contributors would donate all proceeds to the Wall Street occupiers.

“I think it’s cool to expand the Occupy movement out of physical spaces and into abstract spaces like comics, so its culture can start occupying shared mindspaces as well as cities,” Pizzolo said. “The occupation has to be as pervasive and immersive as possible.”

It’s a pattern well-suited to comics, whose superheroes often become lightning rods for social change.

“Superheroes have usually faced the issues of their times and led by example,” Occupy Gotham artist Anhut said. “Their strongest stories are those where social issues are reflected. They can stand with and inspire us, because their stories play out in a world that is a reflection of ours.”

Perhaps, but times seemingly have changed. Anhut’s Batman, like the billionaire Buffett before him, may be asking the government to raise his taxes. But DC Comics’ New 52 delivers only one major superhero for social justice — Grant Morrison’s Superman from Action Comics. In the new series, truth-seeking journalist Clark Kent and his superheroic alter ego spend the majority of their time fighting injustice after injustice. Elsewhere in the DC reboots, Superman’s compatriots mostly settle into ultraviolent routines with more scantily clad arm candy than ever.

“What I am trying to do with Action Comics is perhaps provocative,” Morrison told Wired.com in July, when Supergods, his autobiographical cultural history of comics, landed. “Because I’m looking back at the original Superman as a champion of the oppressed, and not necessarily a figure of law and order or patriotism.”

The rebooted Superman is a shirt-and-jeans catalyst for social change in Grant Morrison’s Action Comics, out now.
Image courtesy DC Comics

Scott Thill covers pop, culture, tech, politics, econ, the environment and more for Wired, AlterNet, Filter, Huffington Post and others. You can sample his collected spiels at his site, Morphizm.
Follow @morphizm on Twitter.

iPhone 4S Teardown Shows Siri’s Guts

From Wired – Top Stories:

You knew it’d be coming soon, and here it is: iFixit’s iPhone 4S teardown. All its glorious parts, laid out for your eyes to behold.

Thanks to iFixit’s director of technical communication Miroslav Djuric, we were given permission to repost their entire teardown, so here it is.

Unsurprisingly, taking it apart is a similar process to disassembling the iPhone 4, but the 4S features an improved battery, the same vibrator motor as in the Verizon iPhone 4 and an upgraded chipset.

Thanks Miroslav!

Christina is a Wired.com staff writer covering Apple, robotics, and everything in between. She’s also written for Gizmodo and Wired magazine. Check out her Google+ profile here.
Follow @redgirlsays and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

Dennis Ritchie, Father of C and Co-Developer of Unix, Dies

From Wired – Top Stories:

Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica

Linus Torvalds once said, in reference to the development of Linux, that he “had hoisted [himself] up on the shoulders of giants.” Among those giants, Dennis Ritchie (aka dmr) was likely the tallest. Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system passed away on October 8 at the age of 70, leaving a legacy that casts a very long shadow.

I got my start with technology because of Ritchie’s work on the Unix GENIE time-share system. It made it possible for my high school to time-share the PDP-11 at SUNY-Stony Brook—the same model computer that Ritchie, Kenneth Thompson and their team used to create Unix—and for me to write my first lines of code on a DECwriter II TTY terminal.

But Ritchie’s C is even more important, in many ways, than Unix. It is the fundamental building block upon which much of what we consider to be the modern world was built.

Ritchie didn’t invent the curly-bracket syntax—that came from Martin Richards’ BCPL. But the C programming language, which he called “quirky, flawed, and an enormous success,” is the basis of nearly every programming and scripting tool, whether they use elements of C’s syntax or not. Java, JavaScript, Objective C and Cocoa, Python, Perl, and PHP would not exist without dmr’s C. Every bit of software that makes it possible for you to read this page has a trace of dmr’s DNA in it.

Dennis Ritchie receives National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999

By creating C, Ritchie gave birth to the concept of open systems. C was developed so they could port Unix to any computer, and so that programs written on one platform (and the skills used to develop them) could be easily transferred to another.

In that way, Ritchie has shaped our world in much more fundamental ways than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates have. What sets him apart from them is that he did it all not in a quest for wealth or fame, but just out of intellectual curiosity. Unix and C were the product of pure research—research that started as a side-project using equipment bought based on a promise that Ritchie and Thompson would develop a word processor.

Imagine what the world would be like if they had just stuck to that promise. What would your life be like without C or Unix? When was the first time your life was touched by dmr’s work?

Top photo: Dennis Ritchie poses after receiving the 2011 Japan Prize at Bell Labs headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey, on Tuesday, May 19, 2011. Ritchie was awarded the 2011 Japan Prize for his role in co-developing the UNIX operating system in 1969. (Victoria Will/AP Images for Japan Prize Foundation)

Felix Salmon: How To Lose A Bet In Style, Nick Denton Edition (Video)

From Wired – Top Stories:

Nick Denton lost his bet with Rex Sorgatz by the narrowest of margins — just 10 million pageviews, or alternatively just four days. But he handed over a check for $100 with a smile, and even threw us a huge party into the bargain! Hence, obvs, my not-entirely-sober status by the time we’d waited for Lockhart Steele to finish his eleven-course dinner and make his way up to the Gawker Media rooftop.

Here’s to next year — when Denton will have to achieve 700 million pageviews in order to avoid writing a second check. I promise to film the outcome, whoever the winner might be.

Felix Salmon is the finance blogger at Reuters. Any views expressed may or may not be his own, but in any case are very unlikely to be those of his employer.
Follow @felixsalmon and @felixreuters on Twitter.

Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On

From Wired – Top Stories:
Dennis Ritchie (standing) and Ken Thompson at a PDP-11 in 1972. (Photo: Courtesy of Bell Labs)

The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.

And then some.

“When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is,” says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs.

On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn’t quite do justice to Ritchie’s sweeping influence on the modern world. Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language, and with fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson, he used C to build UNIX, the operating system that so much of the world is built on — including the Apple empire overseen by Steve Jobs.

“Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Pike tells Wired. “The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.

“It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.”

Even Windows was once written in C, he adds, and UNIX underpins both Mac OS X, Apple’s desktop operating system, and iOS, which runs the iPhone and the iPad. “Jobs was the king of the visible, and Ritchie is the king of what is largely invisible,” says Martin Rinard, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

“Jobs’ genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday.”

From B to C

Dennis Ritchie built C because he and Ken Thompson needed a better way to build UNIX. The original UNIX kernel was written in assembly language, but they soon decided they needed a “higher level” language, something that would give them more control over all the data that spanned the OS. Around 1970, they tried building a second version with Fortran, but this didn’t quite cut it, and Ritchie proposed a new language based on a Thompson creation known as B.

Depending on which legend you believe, B was named either for Thompson’s wife Bonnie or BCPL, a language developed at Cambridge in the mid-60s. Whatever the case, B begat C.

B was an interpreted language — meaning it was executed by an intermediate piece of software running atop a CPU — but C was a compiled language. It was translated into machine code, and then directly executed on the CPU. But in those days, C was considered a high-level language. It would give Ritchie and Thompson the flexibility they needed, but at the same time, it would be fast.

That first version of the language wasn’t all that different from C as we know it today — though it was a tad simpler. It offered full data structures and “types” for defining variables, and this is what Richie and Thompson used to build their new UNIX kernel. “They built C to write a program,” says Pike, who would join Bell Labs 10 years later. “And the program they wanted to write was the UNIX kernel.”

Ritchie’s running joke was that C had “the power of assembly language and the convenience of … assembly language.” In other words, he acknowledged that C was a less-than-gorgeous creation that still ran very close to the hardware. Today, it’s considered a low-level language, not high. But Ritchie’s joke didn’t quite do justice to the new language. In offering true data structures, it operated at a level that was just high enough.

“When you’re writing a large program — and that’s what UNIX was — you have to manage the interactions between all sorts of different components: all the users, the file system, the disks, the program execution, and in order to manage that effectively, you need to have a good representation of the information you’re working with. That’s what we call data structures,” Pike says.

“To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consist and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge. They needed a way to group all that data together, and they didn’t have that with Fortran.”

At the time, it was an unusual way to write an operating system, and this is what allowed Ritchie and Thompson to eventually imagine porting the OS to other platforms, which they did in the late 70s. “That opened the floodgates for UNIX running everywhere,” Pike says. “It was all made possible by C.”

Apple, Microsoft, and Beyond

At the same time, C forged its own way in the world, moving from Bell Labs to the world’s universities and to Microsoft, the breakout software company of the 1980s. “The development of the C programming language was a huge step forward and was the right middle ground … C struck exactly the right balance, to let you write at a high level and be much more productive, but when you needed to, you could control exactly what happened,” says Bill Dally, chief scientist of NVIDIA and Bell Professor of Engineering at Stanford. “[It] set the tone for the way that programming was done for several decades.”

As Pike points out, the data structures that Richie built into C eventually gave rise to the object-oriented paradigm used by modern languages such as C++ and Java.

The revolution began in 1973, when Ritchie published his research paper on the language, and five years later, he and colleague Brian Kernighan released the definitive C book: The C Programming Language. Kernighan had written the early tutorials for the language, and at some point, he “twisted Dennis’ arm” into writing a book with him.

Pike read the book while still an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, picking it up one afternoon while heading home for a sick day. “That reference manual is a model of clarity and readability compared to latter manuals. It is justifiably a classic,” he says. “I read it while sick in bed, and it made me forget that I was sick.”

Like many university students, Pike had already started using the language. It had spread across college campuses because Bell Labs started giving away the UNIX source code. Among so many other things, the operating system gave rise to the modern open source movement. Pike isn’t overstating it when says the influence of Ritchie’s work can’t be overstated, and though Ritchie received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998, he still hasn’t gotten his due.

As Kernighan and Pike describe him, Ritchie was an unusually private person. “I worked across the hall from him for more than 20 years, and yet I feel like a don’t knew him all that well,” Pike says. But this doesn’t quite explain his low profile. Steve Jobs was a private person, but his insistence on privacy only fueled the cult of personality that surrounded him.

Ritchie lived in a very different time and worked in a very different environment than someone like Jobs. It only makes sense that he wouldn’t get his due. But those who matter understand the mark he left. “There’s that line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants,” says Kernighan. “We’re all standing on Dennis’ shoulders.”

Additional reporting by Jon Stokes.

Size Matters for Samsung’s Growing Suite of Galaxy Tabs

From Wired – Top Stories:

SAN DIEGO — Samsung wants to place a different sized tablet in every pocket you’ve got.

You’re probably already familiar with the Galaxy Tab 10.1. It’s a bit larger than Apple’s iPad, and best suited for the outer pocket of your laptop bag. Then there’s the newly released 8.9-inch Galaxy Tab, a scaled-down version of its bigger brother. This one’s good for toting in a trenchcoat or perhaps even a sport blazer. And now we have the yet-to-be-released 4- and 5-inch Galaxy Player multimedia devices, which slide nicely into a pair of jeans pockets.

Samsung’s strategy is similar to RIM’s with the PlayBook, and Amazon’s with the upcoming Fire tablet: Smaller form factors will attract hesitant, would-be tablet adopters who haven’t sprung for an iPad.

But is a small size and cheap price enough, or must companies like RIM, Amazon and Samsung offer deeper levels of product differentiation? Aside from offering a more totable form factor, the idea behind RIM’s PlayBook is to attract the enterprise sector by playing up RIM’s proprietary security systems and BlackBerry Messenger network — though after this week’s network outages, RIM hardly still has that ace up its sleeve. Amazon, meanwhile, has an entire application ecosystem, extensive media library and its Amazon Prime service to back the Fire. In all, it’s a compelling set of reasons for any tablet newcomer to play with Fire, so to speak.

The Galaxy Player devices are interesting, though don’t seem very compelling compared against their competitive set. They’re essentially Galaxy S2 smartphones without the whole phone part. In other words, they’re the Android equivalent of the iPod Touch. So here’s my question: In a market where iPods are going down in sales with the rise of smartphones, why launch a media player? Are people willing to carry two devices, if not more? Microsoft doesn’t seem to think so.

And then we have Samsung’s not-so-alluring pricing tiers. Despite its reduction in size, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 costs only $30 less than the Tab 10.1, down to $470 and $570 for respective 16GB and 32GB options. Similarly, the Galaxy Players cost $230 and $270 for the 4-inch and 5-inch versions, respectively. Compared to the iPod Touch, however, the Galaxy Players offer less bang for the buck. For $300, you can pick up a 32GB iPod Touch. The 5-inch Galaxy Player costs a bit less at $270, but comes with just 8GB of storage. If storage isn’t important to you, Apple offers an 8GB iPod touch for $200, while the 4-inch Galaxy Player is $230.

Samsung needs to do more with its devices than just switch up their measurements. The adage may be tired, but rings more true than ever: Size may matter to some, but it sure as hell isn’t everything.

Mike is a Wired.com staff writer covering Google and the mobile beat. He’s written on a number of different tech topics, from startups to social media. Check out his Google+ profile here.
Follow @mj_isaac and @GadgetLab on Twitter.

Alleged Celeb Hacker Glad He Got Caught; Was Addicted to Hacking

From Wired – Top Stories:

A Florida man who was arrested on charges that he hacked the e-mail accounts of actress Scarlett Johansson and at least 49 other celebrities and their friends says he’s glad he got caught because he was addicted to the hacking and couldn’t stop.

Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Florida, told a local Florida news station that his hacking began simply as a “curiosity” but soon turned into an addiction for stealing celebrity secrets.

“It just happened and snowballed,” he said, adding that he was “almost relieved months ago” when law enforcement agents seized his computer during a search.

“I didn’t know how to stop doing it myself,” he said.

Last month, photos that Johansson took of herself in the nude appeared online and showed her looking seductively at a phone camera as she snapped images of her bare breasts while lying on a bed. Another image showed her bare backside, taken as she looked into a mirror.

The celebrity website TMZ announced around the time that it had also seen photos of actress Mila Kunis that someone had obtained, which showed her in a bathtub with only her head peeking above the edge of the tub. A separate photo of Justin Timberlake showed him lying shirtless in a bed with a pair of pink women’s underwear over his head, TMZ reported. The website did not publish the images.

A number of Chaney’s victims are identified only by their initials in the indictment (.pdf) (such as B.G., B.P., D.F., J.A., L.S. and L.B.) though Kunis, Johansson, Christina Aguilera and Renee Olstead are identified in full, as is Simone Harouche, a fashion stylist and handbag designer.

Chaney, who used the online nicknames “trainreqsuckswhat,” “anonygrrl,” and “jaxjaguars911,” has been indicted on nine counts of computer hacking, eight counts of aggravated identify theft, and nine counts of illegal wiretapping. His nickname “trainreqsuckswhat” is a reference to another alleged celebrity hacker named Josh Holly who told Threat Level in 2008 that he had hacked Miley Cyrus’s email account and stole suggestive photos of her that were later posted online.

According to CNN, Chaney was able to guess the passwords celebrities used for their email accounts by monitoring their social media accounts for possible clues — such as a pet’s name — that might point to a password.

Once he hacked into a celebrity’s e-mail account, he’d search the celebrity’s contact list for other celebrity e-mail accounts and then target those victims, authorities say. He’d then alter the account settings to automatically forward a copy of any e-mails the celebrity received to an e-mail account Chaney controlled.

Chaney said in the interview just after being released on bail that he didn’t begin the hacking with the intent of selling photos he found or otherwise exposing them on the internet.

Instead, he did it just to see how easy it would be to do it. He says he never sold any celebrity pictures or information that he gleaned from reading emails, but he says someone did contact him at one point wanting to get pictures from him to sell, but he says he refused. Authorities, however, say he did distribute some information he received from celebrity accounts.

He now regrets his activity, saying he takes responsibility for what he did.

“I deeply apologize,” he told the WAWS news station in Florida. “I know what I did was probably one of the worst invasions of privacy someone could experience. And these people don’t have privacy to begin with. And I was in that little sliver of privacy they do have.”

Chaney has been released on a $10,000 unsecured bond and faces a possible maximum sentence of 121 years if convicted on all charges.

See Also:

Kim Zetter is a senior reporter at Wired covering cybercrime, privacy, security and civil liberties.
Follow @KimZetter on Twitter.