ONES + ZEROS: MPEE3s, Bath Salt Zombies, and Obama's E-War

Billboard Brasil scattered Guitar Pee across Sao Paolo, proffering unsuspecting drunkards the opportunity to rock out with their cock out. The kicker? All urine-inspired jam sessions are recorded and uploaded to their mobile website in real-time in “MPEE3” form.

There’s no better way for a new designer drug to garner national fame than to have a naked guy chew off someone’s face. CBS Miami reported that “when [police] ordered the cannibal to stop, he looked up with blood on his face and growled at officers.” No need for infected chimps escaping from their top secret lab or an international team of super terrorists, the zombie apocalypse ignites from bath salts, or plant food, or any other off the shelf product you can buy at the gas station or order line that contains mephedrone. Created in an Israeli lab in 2007, White Rush, Cloud Nine, Ivory Wave, Ocean Snow, Charge Plus, White Lightning, Scarface, Hurricane Charlie, Red Dove, White Dove, or Sextasy offers a rush similar to meth, a cheap high for those looking for an alternative to coke:

“Its use was not as widespread as MDMA, but it certainly caused a ripple in the drug market,” says Andrew Camilleri, a forensic scientist at the South Australia Department of Justice. At the same time, it arrived in force in London and quickly took root in the underground club scene thanks to another marketing coup. Because it was being sold online as plant food, it had a certain curio value and cachet (in the “I’ll try anything” drug ethos). The mephedrone high is shorter than that of Ecstasy, says Camilleri, who cowrote one of the only studies of the drug. “Some users report a terrible comedown; others say it is far better than the comedown of MDMA.”

In fact, mephedrone packs two different highs, uniting two traditionally divergent drug crowds. It appeals to Ecstasy users because of its euphoric effects and to cokeheads because of its rush, which is less edgy, and thus more pleasant, than blow’s. On top of that, coke is often cut with harmful chemicals. The DEA estimates that one third of all U.S. cocaine is tainted with levamisole—a veterinary deworming medicine. Because you buy mephedrone directly from an online supplier and not, say, a street dealer, it generally arrives 100 percent pure. All of which makes mephedrone seem like a narcotic holy grail—an unadulterated drug for all the people all the time. Of course, sometimes a drug can be too pure.

It’s also ridiculously dangerous. Louisian Poison Center director Mark Ryan says it “among the worst poison centers have ever seen. The psychosis seen in some users is truly remarkable, in a very scary way. People high on these drugs have done some bizarre things to themselves and hurt others around them.” By that, he means eat face.

It’s probably not a good idea to talk about pork or clouds, or the flu, or waves, Britney Spears songs, or even exercise. Thanks to efforts by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the DHS has released a list of words the agency monitors on various social networking sites for “signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.” Here’s the desktop binder and the Twitter account they use to watch you. Now you know. Here’s the entire list.

Mainly because they are really messing up, according to the New Yorker:

But the bedlam of the past two weeks does matter in one important way: Facebook, more than most other companies, needs to worry deeply about its public perception. It needs to be seen as trustworthy and, above all, cool. Mismanaging an I.P.O. isn't cool, neither is misleading shareholders. Government investigations of you aren't cool either. To slightly recast a quote from "The Social Network," losing around five billion dollars—as Zuckerberg has done since the stock's peak—definitely isn't cool.

The problem with being uncool? If people don’t trust you, global partners don’t want to work with you. If the public doesn’t respect you, talented engineers don’t want to work for you, like George Holtz, “one of the most talented hackers in the country.” Not that they’ll stop using Facebook or anything. "Everyone does it here," he said. "But no one is proud of it." Mark Zuckerberg better figure it out while we’re all still here.

Stuxnet’s not evil. You know what’s evil? Flame. Over twenty times larger — and possibly a Stuxnet sibling — the virus is tailor-made for modern day espionage, swiping e-mails, documents, and instant messages, silently sending them back to its master, believed to be either the U.S. or Israel or an entity with similar capabilities:

Skywiper, as CrySys calls the virus, may have been active for as long as five to eight years. It uses five encryption methods, three compression techniques and at least five file formats. Its means of gathering intelligence include logging keyboard strokes, activating microphones to record conversations and taking screen shots, CrySys reported. It is also the first identified virus that is able to use Bluetooth wireless technology to send and receive commands and data, Schouwenberg said.

It’s modern day warfare in real-time. And this is only the beginning. Which brings us to our next point:

Is this the scoop of the year? Quite possibly, as the Times’ story (filled with a ridiculous number of intentional leaks) is some stunning reportage:

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program. Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

Okay, sure, we knew it was the US and Israel all along. But go read the thing now.

Alleged photos of the iPhone 5 surfaced this week but we’re not sure if we care. In fact, even without Chinese leaks I can tell you with confident certainty exactly what the new phone will be like: nicer screen, possibly bigger, definitely thinner, and it will for sure look exactly like all the other smartphones out there. There’s only so much you can do with a portable touchcreen. So we can stop all the rumors right now.

Sort of makes you wonder though, would leaks like this be on the regular if Steve Jobs was still around? Or are these simply the new realities of the global supply chain.

Using historical data, Google exposed a little of China’s censorship apparatus by offering a friendly new warning to Chinese Internet users who happen to type “sensitive” words:

“We’ve observed that searching for [the character for river] in mainland China may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside of Google’s control.”

It isn’t the first time Google has taken a swipe at China’s notoriously oppressive censorship controls. After the company suspected the country to have been involved in a series of cyberattacks, Google redirected mainlanders to the search engine’s Hong Kong site, free from the Great Firewall, an admirable move for a company that continues to lose marketshare in China as locals flock to more convenient, regulated alternatives like Baidu. If there’s one thing to be said of Google, they’ve been consistent in their fight against censorship.