Link-Pool

Deadpool’s Shocking $135m Opening Is The Biggest Ever For An R-Rated Film. Wow, that's kinda crazy huh? Word around the internet is that Deadpool is actually a pretty good movie and there are already people clamoring for more rated R superhero movies. Here's what I'm clamoring for: More movies made by creative people that really care about the movie they're making. Deadpool took almost 11 years to make, it was a labor of love with a tiny budget. It was the kind of movie that the studio barely cared about but the film makers fought extremely hard over. I feel like those are the kinds of movies people are looking for. You know... good movies. It doesn't matter if they're rated R or not.

A Producer Is Tweeting Descriptions of Women from Movie Scripts and It's Hilariously Awful. Speaking of movies and how awful Hollywood can be...

Star Wars R2D2 Computer Case mod. This case mod is really cool. I wish I had the time or talent to do something like this. Maybe when my kids are a bit older and actually need a computer of their own. Yikes, that's a scary thought. How did I get so old?

Through the Ars lens: Looking at Justice Scalia’s opinions, dissents. Wow, the reaction to Antonin Scalia dying this weekend was super weird. To say he is not well liked in a lot of circles is probably a huge understatement. Some people I know/follow we're downright giddy on social media.

I don't follow the supreme court that much but I knew he was a conservative judge with a rather surly reputation. A couple of the Sunday morning news shows aired interviews with him and I found him to be really interesting. I don't agree with most of his politics, probably at all, but at the very least I understood his viewpoint and opinion. He was so consistent with his reading of the constitution that on occasion he would find himself on the "liberal" side of the argument, something Ars points out here nicely.

On a side note do you know the last amendment to the constitution was passed in 1992? It had to do with congresses salaries. I'll let you make of that what you will..

Wyclef Jean just had the worst Reddit AMA ever. Here's the deal, don't do a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) unless you really are prepared for people to ask you about like the worst thing you've ever done. If you're cool with that, then please go right ahead. However, if the worst thing you've ever done is stolen millions of dollars from a Haitian charity maybe you should just skip it.

Will it Bend: iPhone eddition

So as you may or may not have heard yet, the new iPhone 6 plus gets a little bendy. Whoops. A lot of keyboard commanders are blaming Apple's choice of "premium grade" aluminum as the culprit but redditor FlyingTinOpener gives the absolute best explanation of the problem you'll ever read:

"This isn't right. iPhone's bending problem has nothing to do with aluminum. It has everything to do with geometry. ((Edit: Material choice matters, always. But material has to work together with the geometry it's been shaped into. The choice of aluminum here isn't the limiting factor. The geometric design of the aluminum chassis is.)) Nobody uses pure aluminum for general purpose manufacturing. They use aluminum alloys instead. And the alloys themselves are incredibly diverse.
You can get extremely rigid alloys that will be incredibly difficult to bend even in thin structures prone to bending (such as 7075), but the disadvantage of that is difficulty of machining (and often welding too). This type is dominantly used in transportation industry (automotive, marine, aircraft, etc). Manufacturers take the additional manufacturing costs in order to reap the great strength-to-density ratio.
And then there are buttery soft alloys that are extremely easy to machine (3031 for instance), even manually, but they're also way too deformable to be useful for any load bearing purposes. I don't have too much experience with these, but they're cheap, and generally a good choice for decorative uses.
Apple uses anodized 6000 series aluminum (most likely 6061, possibly a tempered variant like -T4 edit: apparently it's 6003, which is similar to 6061 in properties). This is a good compromise between the extremes, and is the most ubiquitous aluminum alloy out there. It's got good mechanical properties, easy to machine, easy to weld. Their choice of material was correct in this case.
The problem with the iPhone 6 chassis comes from something we call "stress concentration" in engineering and this phenomenon is related to the geometry of an object. More specifically, it has to do with the cross section profile that is being bent.
If you watch the bending test video, you'll notice that iPhone 6 bent exactly at the root of the volume buttons. And if you look even more closely, you'll notice that the bending is actually on just one side -- the side of the volume buttons. The opposite side is actually mostly unscathed. This is because the cross section area of the bending profile decreases dramatically right at that point. They have cut out a hole to accommodate the volume buttons, and when under loading, the internal stresses of the structure are being concentrated at the base of this cutout. So when the structure fails, it fails at that point. The lower cross section area decreases the resistance to bending, and makes it possible to bend the chassis at a lower applied force than what it would take otherwise, had the volume buttons not been there (but of course they have to be there).
The result here wouldn't have changed if Apple had used plastic in place of aluminum. In fact, it probably would have been worse. Typically phone manufacturers use brittle plastic in their devices (ductile plastic is the kind that feels really cheap and terrible), so the chassis would have broken entirely at the same point. They could have avoided the issue, maybe, if they opted for steel or a tougher aluminum alloy but then you run into other problems and have to retool essentially your entire product line. The reason why Galaxy Note 3 passes the bending test doesn't have anything to do with the material it's made out of. It has everything to do with the internal geometry of the chassis. The internal magnesium alloy chassis (which isn't any better than aluminum as a material) has an I-beam cross section that is great against bending, and it's further sandwiched between two shells, which are in this case plastic. It's reinforced very thoroughly, to the point where human-applied forces cannot bend the device beyond its "elastic range" (this is the deformation range within which the device can recover to its original state when loads are removed).
Apple could have designed the aluminum chassis in a way that would accomplish the exact same thing, and if they had, people wouldn't be mistakenly criticizing the aluminum here. They would just be talking about how nice the material feels to the touch (because it does, and yes, it is "premium" much more so than plastic). Unfortunately, they fucked it up. Again, it's all in the geometry.
Edit: Some more detail because people are pointing out the magnesium alloy internal chassis in Note 3, even though the material is not what makes the difference."

-FlyingTinOpener

Leaky Links

"If you don't want nude pics leaked, don't take nude pics with your phone —" *Tasers you* *steals your shoes* SHOULDN'T WEAR SHOES BRO

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) September 1, 2014

A PSA About Nude Photos. Chuck Wendig has a pretty good rant/article on the response to The Fappening. One of the most common things heard was "don't put nude pictures on your phone, (insert insult here)" or "maybe you should try not taking nude pictures". While not taking nude pictures will assure that no one steals your nude pictures it isn't really the point. These people (remember celebrities are people too) had something stolen from them. They didn't accidentally drop their intimate pictures while at the grocery store. Someone broke into something they owned and took them. Were the pictures safe? Obviously not, but were the victims negligent? No, unless it comes out that Kate Upton was tweeting her passwords. When when I do my taxes on-line I have an expectation that TurboTax keeps that shit in a vault, these celebs had similar expectations. They never thought someone would be able to break into their virtual gym locker and steal their panties.

I hate to use buzzwords like "rape culture" because I believe most of the time using them actually hurts your point but in today's society we're sure quick to blame the victim. Doesn't matter if you were jaywalking after stealing some cigars or getting drunk at a frat party there's a knee jerk reaction to say "well if only you had...". I think it's a way we protect ourselves. A feeling like something could never happen to us because we always (insert practical advice here).

Whatever the reason, all deflecting the blame does is empower the culprits and help minimize the nature of the crime. The real story here with The Fappening is that there's a guy, or more likely a group of them, that are breaking into people's phones and personal accounts. If the dates some of the celebs have given are accurate they probably have been doing it for years. That's big news. That's the kind of stuff everyone that uses the internet should be concerned over, not whether or not Kirstin Dunst likes to get it on.

Jennifer Lawrence & Anita Sarkeesian & Zoe Quinn & Brianna Wu are Not To Blame. Sweet Jebus, have you read this stuff about Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn? Long story short a woman made a youtube video where she presented evidence of sexism in video games and the internet LOST IT. Seriously, this goes from "I think your wrong" to "I'm going to rape you" in under 12 parsecs. Equally deplorable the treatment of video game developer Zoe Quinn who was accused of trading sexual favors for good reviews of some game I've never heard of. Somehow that thing snowballed into a massive flame war over video game journalism and a bunch of Fedora festooned redditors are going to boycott the shit out of everyone. I don't get it.

I understand the visceral reaction to criticism of something you hold dear. I get how that can feel like a personal attack. I don't understand how anyone in their right mind can think that death and rape threats are a perfectly crommulant reaction to that criticism. Maybe that's the problem, these people aren't in their right minds.

Prostate Cancer Foundation Does Not Want Reddit's Sleazy Money. In what I can only described as an act Group Guilt a bunch of redditors decided that in honor of Jennifer Lawrence and The Fappening they were going to donate a bunch of money to prostate cancer research. The research foundation said "no thanks".

I find this particular sequence of events fascinating. If I'm dying of cancer I can't say I'm particularly thrilled that a research group would turn down a bunch of money. Yes, the motivation behind the donation is totes skeevy but is that a crime now? Do you suppose they turned down the money on moral reasons or because they didn't want the bad press? Is donating to charity the modern day form of buying indulgences? "I'm sorry I did whatever I did, here's a giant novelty check to make up for it."

Camera Phone Hacking, I’ve Seen Them All Naked. In an effort to be fair and balanced here's an unrepentant post regarding The Fappening from WWTDD. While I think he's minimizing the actual crime committed I like his enthusiasm and use of swears. I for one don't believe if you look at the pictures you're perpetuating abuse. As someone who was browsing reddit Sunday night these pictures were everywhere, I looked at some of them. Seriously, the posts were EVERYWHERE on reddit. You open up a browser see a dozen threads that say "J-Law hacked cell phone pics!", "topless Kate Upton!", "Justin Verlander's naked ass" and not click on them.. Ok, that last one didn't happen but I wish it had. I would have known what NOT to click. That doesn't make me a terrible person, that makes me a normal flawed human that spent like 20 years of his life desperate to see boobs (kids these days have no idea what it was like pre-internet). Now if I had saved those pictures and immediately seeded a bunch of torrents THAT would make me a terrible person.

One of the unfortunate things to come out of this is that all redditors have been painted with a pretty wide pervert brush. The most common subreddit groups I visit is the Lego subreddit. I'll have you know, almost no one posts nude pictures there. There's a lot of nice people on reddit just looking to talk about things they love. Don't let a bunch of vocal and very active redditors cloud your opinion of the whole group. I mean by all means keep making the fedora/neck beard jokes just realize that #notallredditors are like that.

Also I feel like this would be a good time to remind everyone that Edward Snowden says that there 's a group of analysts at the NSA that trade nude pictures they've found off phones they've "legally" hacked. If this alleged hacking ring all leads back to the NSA that's going to be some glorious schadenfreude.

August 31st 2014, The Fappening

Sunday was a pretty ordinary day for me. I slept in, cleaned out the crawlspace and around 4pm I finally put on some pants and went to Papa Murphys for a take n' bake. Just an ordinary day at casa de Newburn. Of course unbeknownst to me the internet was collectively losing it's shit.

Some time in the early afternoon a veritable buttload of celebrity nudes were posted onto 4chan. Then imgur and reddit and pirate bay and before you knew it the entire series of tubes was clogged with stolen cell phone pics. The event was quickly dubbed The Fappening.

Celebrities involved were pretty wide ranging and seemingly random from Kate Upton to Hope Solo to Jennifer Lawrence to other celebs I've both heard and never heard of. A couple of celebrities have confirmed the pictures were real, a few have denied it. A couple spokespeople have threatened lawsuits. Websites are taking them down as quickly as they're going up but you don't have to be a level 20 netwizard to find them. Literally the first thing that pops up on a google search for The Fappening is a reddit subreddit dedicated to the leak. Let's face it, this is the internet. Once something is out there it's out there for good.

Frankly, that's an old lesson. I think there's a new lesson to be learned here: Once it's "out there" on the cloud you don't control it anymore.

If the original leaker is to be believed, these pictures were acquired by a hacker/hackers resetting the passwords on iCloud accounts. Once he or she was able to reset the password they had unfettered access to whatever the celebs had been syncing. There's rumors floating around that the actual phones had been hacked through wifi hotspots but that seems like a lot of work. Easier to go to wikipedia find out someone's mother's maiden name and request a password reset over the phone. The crazy rumor hot from 4chan is that this is deepweb type stuff. A group of hackers that specifically trade in celebrity nudes. Sorry, I'm meandering.

The point here is that the cloud is really convenient but a terrible place to put things you want to keep secret. Great for uploading your grandma's chili recipe or pictures of your kids at Disneyland but a terrible place for financial records and keeping pictures of you boning MLB Allstar Justin Verlander. Remember that when the iPhone 6 comes out and they start touting it's new iWallet feature.

Customize these Links

Custom D-Tech Me Stormtroopers Action Figures. These are crazy expensive, and you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get one but man they are pretty pretty cool. There's a joke here about playing with yourself but I'm too busy to properly word it. Just pretend it was really clever.

10 Wrestling Matches that Became Real Fights. A couple of these aren't real "fights" just examples of wrestlers getting sick of another wrestlers BS and throwing a couple real punches, still fun to watch. I love behind the scenes stories in wrestling. There's Something about the real conflict behind the fake conflict that I find super interesting.

The Truth About Reddit. I don't spend a lot of time on Reddit, I'm not a redditor or anything but I do check out the front page a couple times a day. Over the last few years It's sort of turned into an accessible 4chan (for better and worse). They're always ahead of the trends and memes but if you really hang around for a while you will loose hours of your life.

Marvel Studios Has Blade, Iron Fist And Ms. Marvel Movies Somewhere In The Pipeline. First off another Blade movie? Why? Secondly, wouldn't that be the ultimate kick to the crotch if Marvel produces a Ms. Marvel movie before DC can get a Wonder Woman movie off the ground. Third, and Iron Fist movie should be a license to print money. Just take Brubaker/Fraction/Aja's comic and transcribe it word for word into a movie script. It's just a great comic and would work perfectly on the big screen. It would also give the Marvel movie universe a film with a different feel. Not to say that Iron Fist isn't a perfectly cromulant superhero but the mysticism, kung-fu action and darker tone would really stand apart from the rest of the capes and tights fare.