We Need More Science

Longer-Lasting Batteries Are Almost Here (Really!)

The most important spec on any portable gadget—phone, tablet, laptop, watch—isn’t processor speed or a pixel-packed display. It’s how long you can use it before it becomes a blank brick in need of an outlet. And while the next big battery-life breakthrough may still be a few years away, recent advances are bringing us oh-so-close to giving our gear more of what it needs most of all: time.

Let’s acknowledge that, yes, there’s chatter of a new miracle battery every few years if not months, and nothing ever seems to come of it. That silence doesn’t always equate to failure, though, according to the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research’s Jeff Chamberlain.

“We hear about a new battery announcement every month, or every couple of weeks; the problem is solved, the next generation is here. And then years go by,” Chamberlain tells WIRED. And the problem isn’t always the battery itself, but how hard batteries are to manufacture, he says.

Help, however, really is coming. In some ways it’s already here.

Work With What You’ve Got

The basic lithium ion battery that we use today hasn’t changed dramatically since Sony first started selling them to consumers in 1991. Economies of scale and various tweaks along the way have helped improve efficiency about 10 percent a year, says Chamberlain, but that still makes lithium ion a relative tortoise in a world more accustomed to progress in Moore’s Law-style leaps. It’s no wonder we’re all hungry for a major breakthrough.

That could come one of two ways. The first is what produces all of those flashy headlines that never seem to amount to much: Figure out what what kind of chemistry comes after the tech we’ve been using for decades. That’s the moonshot, the flash fix that will make today’s batteries seem downright Neanderthalic. The more realistic goal though, at least in the near term? Make the most of what you’ve got. And what we’ve got is lithium ion.

It’s not impossible to imagine a lithium ion that doubles the performance of what we use today.

The most recent example of creative ways around lithium ion’s limitations came from a perhaps unlikely source: Apple’s new MacBook, announced earlier this month. The entry-level laptop features a unique battery design that uses “terraced” battery cells to stuff every available centimeter of a device with power. It doesn’t make batteries any more efficient or any safer, but it does give Apple the ability to squeeze as much juice into any device as is physically possible.

It’s an important development both because it doesn’t require lithium ion technology itself to advance to reap benefits, and because it can be applied to devices of any size and shape. The smaller the device—a phone, a watch—the more crucial it becomes to use all available space.

There are other ample opportunities in the lithium ion space. Because so much money is tied into the industry—annual sales are in the tens of billions—the work going on in most labs is understandably secretive. But Chamberlain points to potential in everything from a better coating process to experimenting with changes in the electrolyte, anode, cathode, and beyond. It’s not impossible to imagine a lithium ion that doubles the performance of what we use today.

And if you look further down the horizon, to the point where we’ve moved past lithium ion altogether? The possibilities are even more impressive.

A Solid Lead

There are plenty of cutting-edge battery types to choose from. Multivalents promise increased electrical current in the same density, while rechargeable flow batteries have much longer life spans than their lithium ion counterparts. Batteries with gelatinous electrolytes could generate higher voltage. But the next-generation tech that’s caught the most attention recently, thanks to a hefty investment by Dyson, is solid state.

Dyson, famous for its vacuums but producer of a wide array of products that would benefit from a longer-lasting, faster-recharging battery, recently pumped $15 million into a company called Sakti3, one of several labs looking into the potential of solid state electrolyte batteries. As the name suggests, these differ from traditional lithium ion batteries by using solid electrodes and electrolytes instead of liquid. The net result? A battery that can pack in more energy while also presenting less of a safety risk by doing away with the flammable liquid electrolytes used today.

The applications of solid state batteries are also myriad, according to Chamberlain. A cordless vacuum, sure, but you could also conceivable squeeze one into something as small as a smartphone or as big as a car.

Sakti3, like all private battery researchers, hasn’t provided much detail about its process, but does claim to have already generated twice the energy density of the most advanced lithium ion battery on the market today. The real question is whether they can produce that affordably and at scale; even with the Dyson infusion, the company’s commercialization timeline is still a matter of years, not months.

And that’s the catch. It’s likely—in fact, almost inevitable—that Sakti3 will fall into the same pattern that so many battery headline-grabbers have before. Quick burst of hope, just as quickly forgotten.

What that doesn’t mean, though, is that progress has disappeared with it. Work continues on solid state, and on myriad other research into new materials that could give us five times what we’re used to, both by Chamberlain’s team at the Argonne National Laboratory and in privately labs around the world. What battery research is lacking isn’t potential. It’s patience.

Big Vulnerability in Hotel Wi-Fi Router Puts Guests at Risk

Guests at hundreds of hotels around the world are susceptible to serious hacks because of routers that many hotel chains depend on for their Wi-Fi networks. Researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the systems, which would allow an attacker to distribute malware to guests, monitor and record data sent over the network, and even possibly gain access to the hotel’s reservation and keycard systems.

The security hole involves an authentication vulnerability in the firmware of several models of InnGate routers made by ANTlabs, a Singapore firm whose products are installed in hotels in the US, Europe and elsewhere.

The vulnerability, which was discovered by the security firm Cylance, gives attackers direct access to the root file system of the ANTlabs devices and would allow them to copy configuration and other files from the devices’ file system or, more significantly, write any other file to them, including ones that could be used to infect the computers of Wi-Fi users.

The researchers found 277 of the devices in 29 countries that are accessible over the internet, though there may be many others that they weren’t able to uncover over the internet because they’re protected behind a firewall. Devices behind a firewall, however, would still presumably be vulnerable to the same malicious activity by anyone who gets on the hotel’s network.

Of the 277 vulnerable devices accessible over the internet, the researchers found more than 100 of them were at locations in the US. But they also found 35 vulnerable systems in Singapore, 16 in the UK, and 11 in the United Arab Emirates.

The vulnerable systems were found primarily at hotel chains, but the researchers also found some convention centers with internet-accessible vulnerable routers. They also found that a top data center company uses an InnGate device to manage guest Wi-Fi at several of its locations in the Asia Pacific.

The InnGate devices function as a gateway for hotels and convention centers to provide guests with internet access. But Justin Clarke, a researcher with Cylance’s new SPEAR (Sophisticated Penetration Exploitation and Research) team, says the devices are often also connected to a hotel’s property management system, the core software that runs reservation systems and maintains data profiles about guests. Clarke says they found a number of hotels where the InnGate was configured to communicate with a PMS. This presents additional security risks in itself, allowing an attacker to potentially identify guests and upcoming guests at a hotel and learn their room number. But PMSes are often, in turn, integrated with a hotel’s phone system, point-of-sale system for processing credit card transactions, and the electronic keycard system that controls access to guest rooms. This would potentially give an attacker a gateway to access and exploit these systems as well.

“In cases where an InnGate device stores credentials to the PMS [property management system], an attacker could potentially gain full access to the PMS itself,” the researchers write in a blog post published today, which they shared with WIRED in advance.

The property management systems that were used in the vulnerable hotels Cylance examined include ones made by Micros Fidelio, FCS, Galaxy, and Prologic.

Oracle purchased Micros Fidelio last year and now markets its PMS as the Opera Property Management System. According to Oracle’s web site, the Opera PMS “provides all the tools a hotel staff needs for doing their day-to-day jobs—handling reservations, checking guests in and out, assigning rooms and managing room inventory, accommodating the needs of in-house guests, and handling accounting and billing.” But, the site notes, the system also includes interfaces to connect the PMS to “hundreds of third-party hospitality systems” including telephone and electronic switching and key lock systems.

Gaining access to a guest room through a compromised key lock system wouldn’t just be of interest to thieves. One of the most famous cases involving the subversion of a hotel’s electronic key system resulted in the assassination of a high-ranking Hamas official in a Dubai hotel in 2011. In that case the assassins, believed to be Israeli Mossad agents, reprogrammed the electronic lock on their victim’s hotel room door to gain entry while he was out of the room and lie in wait for him to return. It’s not known exactly how the attackers compromised that key system.

How the Hotel Vuln Works

The vulnerability lies in an unauthenticated rsync daemon used by the ANTlabs devices. The Rsync daemon is a tool often used to backup systems since it can be set up to automatically copy files or new parts of files from one location to another. Although the daemon can be password-protected, the ANTlabs device that uses it requires no authentication.

As a result, once an attacker has connected to the rsync daemon, “they are then able to read and write to the file system of the Linux based operating system without restriction,” the researchers write in their blog post. “Given the level of access that this vulnerability offers to attackers, there is seemingly no limit to what they could do… Once full file system access is obtained, the endpoint is at the mercy of the attacker.”

The vulnerability requires little sophistication to exploit at its most basic level to infect users with malware or sniff unencrypted traffic. But “a slightly more sophisticated attacker,” they note, “could use a tool such as SSLStrip in order to attempt to downgrade the transport layer encryption in order to increase the amount of plaintext credentials gathered.”

Clarke discovered the vulnerable systems by accident one night. While taking a break from another project he was working on, he glanced at the results of an internet-wide scan his company had conducted using a new script to look for rsync routers. Among the IP addresses the scan uncovered was one pointing to an ANTlabs device. Curious about what it was, Clarke ran a command to see if he could view the file directory and discovered that he could access the entire file system and write to it. A subsequent scan of the internet uncovered more than 100 other ANTLabs systems, all similarly open and vulnerable.

His team eventually uncovered vulnerable systems at hotels belonging to eight of the world’s top 10 hotel chains. Cylance won’t name the companies, but many lists ranking the world’s top hotel chains can be found online and generally include the following: Intercontinental Hotel Group, Marriott, Hilton, Wyndham Hotel Group, Choice Hotel International, Accor, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Best Western, Shanghai Jin Jiang International Hotels, and Home Inns, an economy chain based in China.

“Eight of those 10, we have verified that at least one of their hotels is running a vulnerable device that we were able to validate this vulnerability on the internet,” says Clarke, though he notes they found no instance where every hotel in a chain was vulnerable and accessible via the internet. He assumes this means that hotel chains generally use different network router brands at each of their hotel sites or that they have them configured securely in some cases behind a firewall, making them invisible to an internet scan.

The discovery of the vulnerable systems was particularly interesting to them in light of an active hotel hacking campaign uncovered last year by researchers at Kaspersky Lab. In that campaign, which Kaspersky dubbed DarkHotel, the attackers conducted a surgical strike against specific guests staying at five-star hotels in Asia and the US by subverting the guest Wi-Fi system.

When victims attempted to connect to the Wi-Fi network, they got a pop-up alert telling them their Adobe Flash player needed an update, and offering them a file to download that contained malicious code. Kaspersky never learned how the attackers got onto the hotel servers to serve up their malware. Although they appeared to have ongoing persistent access to the networks—the attacks would occur in spurts with the attackers gaining access to install their malware on a network at a particular time, then erasing all evidence and leaving after the targeted victims had been hit—there were no signs of a backdoor found on the hotel networks that would have given them ongoing access.

The Cylance researchers don’t know if the hotels targeted in the DarkHotel attack are the same ones they found using vulnerable InnGate systems, but the vulnerability they uncovered could be used to conduct this kind of attack.

The researchers have contacted a number of the hotels they were able to identify as using a vulnerable InnGate device, and also reported their findings to ANTlabs and the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team. ANTlabs has produced a patch, which it is releasing today in conjunction with an alert about the vulnerability being issued by US-CERT.

The Deep Interdisciplinarity of Everything Around Us

Well, it’s time to say goodbye. I’ve been privileged to be writing the Social Dimension blog for Wired for over three years now but it is drawing to a close. Over the course of this blog’s run, I’ve tried to highlight the deep interdisciplinary connections all around us, often using mathematical ideas to stitch together different domains, from science to popular culture. Inspired by Christian Jarrett, whose blog is also ending, I’ve been going through the blog’s archives. So I wanted to wrap up with a selection of some of my favorite things that I’ve had the pleasure to write about and share with you, my readers, grouped into a couple of emergent themes:

For one, I’ve combined the humanities with mathematics in a huge number of ways. I’ve calculated the inbreeding of superheroes and Greek gods. I’ve written about the mathematics of LEGO, Spider-Man’s taste in applied mathematics textbooks, and a Twitter account I created that creates one’s own vanity scientific eponyms. And here’s some data analysis about television shows.

I like long-term thinking a lot, especially related to long data , and have looked at information that shows whales living a long time (and their relationship to technological change) as well as historical data on Jewish expulsions. And don’t forget thinking about Asimov’s psychohistory, the long-term reading of a single publication, or that one billion seconds is between 31 and 32 years.

Of course, on more scientific topics, I explored how to evolve an equation for the constant of the universe and new ways to measure science.

And I also made a tiny algorithm that mimics snowfall.

For more, please feel free to browse the archives.

Anyway, it’s been incredible having the chance to examine such a wide-ranging approach to the world’s complexity through science and mathematics. Thank you to all of my long-time readers; it’s been a great ride.

If you are interested in keeping track of what I’m writing elsewhere online and offline, follow me on Twitter. I’m currently working on my next book, this one is about how our technology is becoming just too complicated. And please consider signing up for my newsletter.

See everyone out on the Internet.

The Galaxy S6 Edge Is Totally Beautiful—And Pointless

On Wednesday morning, Samsung’s two new phones arrived at my desk. The Galaxy S6 and S6 edge are two of the most anticipated, most important devices of the year. They represent an entirely new design direction from Samsung, with glass and carefully machined aluminum where there was once dimpled plastic that looked a lot like a Band-Aid. They’re Samsung’s attempt to keep up with the iPhone, which has entered the big-phone market with no subtlety and lots of success. They’re almost certainly going to be enormously popular.

The two S6 models go on sale on April 10th, and they’ll be available on all four major carriers in the US—and many more besides. Off-contract pricing isn’t available yet, but a 32GB version of the S6 will cost you $22.84 per month over two years on AT&T’s Next upgrade plan. That’s slightly under $550 in all. The Edge, at $27.17 per month, works out to about $100 more over the course of your contract.

I’ve only had a day to spend with the devices, and a full review is coming soon, but there are a couple of things that are already obvious. Some are small: the fingerprint reader is a pain to set up but now works incredibly well. Others are much bigger, like the ability to delete almost any app, even the pre-installed bloatware. But the most surprising thing I’ve found so far is that the beautiful sloped-screen Galaxy S6 Edge is entirely pointless. It’s the first phone I can think of that is a fashion play through and through—no one will ever buy this device because it does something special. It doesn’t.

On one hand, that’s great! Samsung is latching on to the idea that fashion can drive technology, and that looks and emotion do matter. But I can’t help but also see this as Samsung giving up on what could have been a great idea. When it announced the Galaxy Note Edge in September, it was a wild and new kind of smartphone. It was a Galaxy Note, except that on the right side where there was once bezel, there was now more screen. A sloping, thin panel that fell off the side and wrapped around the edge, entirely separate from the flat display on the top of the phone. It looked strange, and it felt a little lopsided in your hand, but it was just cool as all hell.

The best part, though, was that Samsung had dreamed up some clever functionality for the Edge’s, er, edge. It became the home for a lot of the phone’s buttons and settings; instead of the shutter button obscuring your subject in the camera app, it was set off to the bottom. It could act as a quick launcher for your most-used apps, or a ticker for notifications or news. There were omnipresent controls in games, and easy access to notebooks you were using. It took some time to learn the workflow, but it was really useful when it worked.

The implementations were somewhat scattershot, and the whole idea needed some refinement and testing from Samsung and its developers, but the sliver of screen on the side seemed to be a cool new place to display ancillary information or offer simple actions without getting in the way of what you’re doing on the big screen. Developers seemed tentatively on board, too, especially with music apps. Having your controls on the side, no matter what app you’re in, is awesome. The Edge’s edge was a bit of a gimmick, but it had real potential.

The S6 Edge is a dramatic step backwards in this department. It doesn’t have two screens, or cool new ideas about smartphone interaction. It’s just curved. It has exactly two functional differences from the regular S6: You can access your favorite contacts with a swipe in from the right side when you’re on the home screen, and when you set the phone on a table it can light up notifications or a clock you’ll be able to read with your head on a pillow. Both features would be welcome on the regular S6, and neither comes close to justifying the price increase for the S6 Edge. (There’s a third feature, a notification light for when the phone is face down, but since people only put their phones face down to not be distracted by them, that light is unhelpful and thus doesn’t count.)

Samsung

The Edge does look better this time: since it curves on both sides, it feels more symmetrical and less like a chipped tooth. Mostly, it looks just like the S6, which is itself a marvelous object. They both feel incredibly luxe and carefully designed, in a way no Samsung device ever has before. The Edge is even a little cooler, all thanks to the infinity-pool sloping screen.

The aesthetic appeal is a huge part of the point, which is new territory for Samsung. It’s charging more for the Edge, and marketing it as the higher-end device. It’s like buying the Apple Watch Edition: It doesn’t do anything beyond the base model, but it’ll be worth the money to some people because of how it looks and the air of exclusivity it communicates.

That’s fine, but it’s also a missed opportunity for Samsung to keep trying to reinvent how we use our smartphones. The Note is forever a niche device, the Note Edge even more so—a phone that big just won’t appeal to everyone. But the Galaxy S is Samsung’s flagship line, the one you see in the hands of every kind of person around the world. The S6 Edge could have brought the edge idea and functionality to more people, which would have in turn helped get developers on board, but instead it ensured that only a few people will ever try this different kind of smartphone. All the promise of functionality, all the funny little edge-screen games and utilities I hoped people would build, just don’t seem to be part of the plan anymore. The Edge is all about aesthetics, about Samsung showing it can make beautiful, unique devices with the best of ‘em. It’s a single screen, curved twice. That’s hard work, and I’m impressed Samsung pulled it off. I’m just not going to buy it.

Of course, Samsung’s rumored to already be on to the next thing — flexible, foldable smartphones. Things might get crazy after all.

Twitter’s Periscope App Lets You Livestream Your World

Periscopes Kayvon Beykpour, CEO & Co-Founder and Joe Bernstein, Co-Founder, photographed at their headquaters in San Francisco, CA, on March 25th, 2015. Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

On Monday morning, I watched the Today Show. Not on TV, though, and not standing and screaming alongside middle-aged Texans in the vicious cold outside the show’s Rockefeller Center digs. My view was from the middle of the set, between two hulking broadcast cameras, as the three anchors wrapped up a segment. I don’t remember what they were talking about, only that as soon as they threw to commercial, I was suddenly walking up to Al Roker, the show’s anchor and weatherman and all-around hilariously weird dude. Just as he bent over to grab something from underneath the set’s table, a voice I couldn’t see said, “hey Al, say hi to Periscope.”

Roker looked directly at me, and smiled. “Heyyy, Periscope. How ya doing, Periscope?”

In a week of beta-testing Periscope, the live-streaming app that Twitter bought for a reported $100 million early this year and is officially launching today, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things. I’ve watched astronaut Chris Hadfield’s feet as he lay on the beach in Playa del Carmen. (He has a weird big toe.) I’ve gotten a tour of Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s operating room. I’ve watched venture capitalist Megan Quinn wander around Croatia and attempt to pronounce the name of its capital, Zagreb. I’ve seen Tim Ferriss, he of the four-hour workweek and various other crazy self-hacks, show off his screwed-up shoulder, then go through the long regimen he’s using to help it heal. I’ve lounged inside the pit of an orchestra as a french horn tooted away. And I’ve absorbed hours of mundanity—the walking down the street, the dogs, the out-the-window shots of bridges and buildings—from the odd mix of Twitter employees, journalists, and celebrities (Tyra Banks!) allowed into the beta.

Like any good citizen of an app designed to stream quick and simple moments in our lives, I’ve also turned my phone’s rear camera into a window to my world. I walked upstream through the throngs of people heading to work in downtown New York City. I asked for commiseration as I walked the two blocks and six flights of stairs that I trekked back and forth, from my apartment to the car, as my girlfriend and I prepared to move out of New York City. I watched a delightfully gruff old man fix a pair of shoes, and a couple of strangers watched with me.

Periscope is consensual voyeurism. That’s not a new idea—millions use Twitch to watch other people play videogames, while YouTube, UStream, and a dozen others have tried to make businesses out of live-streaming video—but it feels like the right platform and the right time. We all have smartphones now, with good cameras and fast LTE connections. And we’re desperate for more unmediated access to the people we care about.

Any doubts about the demand for something like Periscope can be answered by looking at Meerkat, a live-streaming app that has, in the weeks since it launched, shown its users how cool it can be when people invite you into brief, almost always totally unstaged and unmediated moments in their lives. That’s what Periscope promises, too, plus the ability to put the viewer in the director’s chair and actually participate in the stream. It’s more immediate than Twitter, Instagram, even Snapchat. It’s life, right now, through anyone’s eyes I choose. It’s intoxicating.

Watch this

The idea for Periscope began in the summer of 2013, as Kayvon Beykpour was planning a trip to Istanbul. He’d quit his job at the education-tech giant Blackboard, which had acquired his startup more than four years earlier, and decided to travel the world.

Just before Beykpour left, however, protests broke out in Taksim Square—near the hotel he was scheduled to check into—and quickly turned from peaceful to violent. He dove into TV news and Twitter, trying to figure out if it was safe for him to go to Istanbul. But all he got were the craziest images, the most dramatic stories, not the answer to his real question: what’s actually going on outside my hotel? Is it safe? There are probably thousands of people with smartphones and high-speed connections in Taksim Square right now, he figured. Why couldn’t he see what they were seeing in real time?

He eventually made it to Istanbul, and came back with an idea. He and co-founder Joe Bernstein began to build the app that would become Periscope. After experimenting with a prototype that involved dropping a pin on a map and hoping someone replied with photos, the pair settled on creating a live-streaming app that would let you broadcast what you were seeing to anyone in the world, in real time.

Cooking lessons, live on Periscope The mechanics of Periscope are really simple: tap a button, and start streaming whatever your camera lens sees. Anyone who follows you gets a notification to tune in, and they can watch in the app or any web browser. Some streamers are silent, others prefer to narrate the action. Some streams are selfies, which makes onlookers feel like they’re in a Baby Bjorn attached to the broadcaster’s chest, watching them talk down into the camera.

If that sounds a lot like Meerkat, that’s because it is, with a few key differences. Meerkat becomes useless as soon as a broadcast ends; there are no profiles, no timeline, no nothing outside of what’s live at this moment. Periscope is a much more complete experience. It’s better-looking, for one, with a super-clean interface, the Facebook to Meerkat’s flashing-neon MySpace. When you open up Periscope, you immediately see a grid of live broadcasts from people you’re following, and people Periscope thinks you might like to follow. Below the grid is a timeline of past broadcasts; one big advantage for Periscope over Meerkat is that it lets you save a stream when you’re finished if you want, so people can view it later. User profiles don’t really exist right now, but Beykpour says you’ll be able to see a running timeline of anyone’s broadcasts. He keeps using Beyonce as an example, like: how cool will it be to go back through and see all of Beyonce’s spontaneous streams and behind-the-scenes footage?

As you’re watching someone stream, you can leave comments, which the Broadcaster (in Periscope parlance) can see and respond to. This, Beykpour says, is the app’s real secret sauce. “The magic moment of Periscope is not when you see video for the first time,” he says. “Because you’ve experienced that before, whether it’s YouTube or another live broadcasting tool. The magic moment for Periscope is when you as viewer say something and you end up influencing the broadcast.” With most streaming apps, from Meerkat to Livestream, there’s a long gap between when something is captured and when it actually appears on your screen. It makes for awkward, asynchronous interactions, because one of you is way behind. Meerkat’s commenting feature is crushed by that latency, which never goes below about ten seconds and often goes much higher; Periscope worked to get streaming latency down to as little as two seconds, which means you really can converse with the broadcaster in real time.

That interaction isn’t just limited to text. If you like a Periscope broadcast, you don’t drop a solitary fav or thumbs-up. You mete out your approval with hearts, and you can do it over and over and over. And over. In one five-minute broadcast, I got 34 hearts from one person. (I love you too, whoever you are.) A performance from the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus at Twitter’s offices received a constant stream of different-colored hearts on the bottom-right side of the screen throughout the whole performance. It’s a clever way to approximate cheering someone on, saying “you’re doing great!” while they perform.

“The hearts were born out of an observation that being on stage is just really hard,” Beykpour says. “It’s anxiety-inducing.” There’s a dopamine hit that comes from seeing the hearts on the screen as you broadcast, enticing you to keep going or do it again.

Periscope is all about the love: hearts are the service’s most visible number, measuring not just how many people like your broadcasts but how violently they like them. There’s even a list of the “Most Loved” users. #1 in the beta-tester group? Ryan Goodman, a design exec at Twitter. Mark Cuban, Tony Hawk, and Felicia Day are all in the top ten.

Coming to you live

Beykpour says he had no interest in selling Periscope when it started, or even as talks began with Twitter. But the union actually makes perfect sense. Twitter’s always been about immediacy, and Periscope removes even the tiny frictions found in character limits and empty text boxes. You don’t need to explain it, or capture it—just let people see what you’re seeing.

Starting a broadcast takes no time at allBeykpour assures me that Periscope is an independent entity within Twitter. It has its own team, its own app, even its own offices. The app does have some connection to its new parent, suggesting people for you to follow and (once it’s officially live) automatically tweeting to your followers whenever you start a stream. Then, whenever someone you follow starts broadcasting, you get a notification that they’re live. When you’re watching a broadcast, you can also quickly invite a few or all of your followers to watch with you; it’s the digital version of “get over here, you gotta see this!” There will be nice-looking Twitter cards for live broadcasts, too—being part of the Flock does have its perks.

Oddly, though, Periscope has fewer ties to Twitter than its main competitor. Before Twitter shut down its API access, Meerkat snagged huge growth by aping your entire network, following everyone in Meerkat you’ve followed on Twitter. Beykpour says Periscope intentionally doesn’t do that. “The visibility that you get is significant, but at the risk of being downright spammy,” he says. Push notifications are the whole reason an app like Periscope or Meerkat can work—they solve the synchronicity problem that killed apps like Justin.tv, because now I know immediately when you’re broadcasting—but if they’re not “a good push notification citizen,” Beykpour says, people will just turn them off. He’s not wrong: a lot of Meerkat users have already complained about its incredible notification spam. Periscope does have a bit of the same problem right now, though. I only follow a couple dozen people, and my phone’s already dinging constantly with that weird Periscope-y chirp.

Meerkat’s growth is hard to ignore: it was the darling of this year’s SXSW conference, and has raised $12 million to do exactly what Beykpour wants. Hell, their names even evoke the same thing: something sticking its funny-looking head up, looking around to see what’s going on. Periscope is in most ways a better app, but it does feel a bit a bit like déjà vu.

Late last week, for instance, I watched Jimmy Fallon rehearse his Tonight Show monologue. I was a little late to the party: by the time I got a Meerkat notification on my phone and started watching, Fallon was already in full swing. He was talking about Kevin Pillar, the Toronto Blue Jays outfielder who apparently sneezed so hard he strained a muscle and couldn’t play. “When asked about the injury,” Fallon said, “he hiccuped and passed away.” I laughed, the audience laughed. The joke worked. And he’d say it again later, this time in a suit and in front of a big blue curtain, on the show.

I get a heads up from Meerkat about Fallon’s monologue rehearsal almost every day now, because that’s what he uses. And I tap it, because I want to watch it regardless of Fallon’s chosen app. Meerkat’s already caught on with some important people, and Periscope isn’t so obviously better that it will destroy the competition on impact. Especially not when the the competition has a slight head start. For now, having both Periscope and Meerkat on your phone is easy enough, and as people continue to learn about live-streaming in general, each probably benefits from the other. But eventually, as the apps try to build larger and more exclusive social networks, it’s hard to imagine two live-streaming apps both winning out. Beykpour wasn’t first, but he thinks Periscope can be the last one standing.

He’s got time to figure it out. There’s a lot left to be perfected with the Periscope experience. The app has some basic content controls—you can block users, or report broadcasts for abuse—but it’s going to be an uphill battle to police live broadcasts that evaporate. And, at some point, it’s going to have to figure out how to make money. Beykpour says that’s the furthest thing from his mind right now, but it can’t be long before we’re watching sponsored stream of someone eating Taco Bell, right?

Well, at least—oh, hang on, sorry. This guy is singing in the subway station—he’s amazing, you gotta see this. I’ll be live in two seconds.

Facebook’s Big Challenge to Make VR a Social Experience

Mark Zuckerberg talks about virtual reality while delivering the keynote address during the Facebook F8 Developer Conference, March 25, 2015, in San Francisco. Eric Risberg/AP

Suddenly, you’re on the roof of a skyscraper, looking down on the city below. The roof is tiny and you’re close to the edge and a sense of vertigo sets in. You feel the need to step back before you fall.

But the edge isn’t really there. You’re really at Facebook’s annual developer conference, and there’s an Oculus headset strapped to your face. The city and its skyscraper are part of an Oculus virtual reality demo that Facebook is sharing with conference attendees this week at Fort Mason Center on San Francisco Bay.

Yes, it’s an impressive experience. You do feel like you’re atop a skyscraper in a city not all that different from New York. When my colleague Jessi Hempel entered the same virtual world yesterday morning, she stepped off the skyscraper, knowing that she was really standing in a tiny room at the back of an old maritime warehouse. But when she stepped, she still panicked—“I freaked out,” she says—and stepped back.

But there’s another thing you notice while standing atop that virtual skyscraper. As you look down, you realize you can’t see your own feet. You’re completely disembodied. An Oculus employee is in there with you, in the (real) room. But you can’t see them. And you feel rather uneasy about talking to them.

This is the gap Mark Zuckerberg must bridge in combining Facebook with virtual reality, now that his company owns the startup that built the Oculus headset. Facebook’s official mission is to make the world a more open and connected place. And Zuckerberg says the Oculus is integral to this mission. But the VR of today is rather closed and it disconnects us in many ways—ways that few other technologies have before. Sure, a smartphone has a way of disconnecting us, too. But it doesn’t cover our eyes.

Stepping Stone to Virtual Reality

On Wednesday, during his conference keynote, Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook is now testing a kind of 360-degree video that can put you inside recreations of real places, in much the same way the Oculus demo puts you inside wholly imagined places. At first, these “spherical videos” will show up in your Facebook News Feed. You’ll be able to “move through” these videos by tilting your smartphone to and fro. But the plan is to eventually push these videos onto headsets like the Oculus.

Zuckerberg says his smartphone videos are a stepping stone to the world of VR. The implication is that we’ll eventually spend our days watching not just good old-fashioned internet videos, but completely “immersive” videos streamed through something like the Oculus. But that’s an enormous leap to make. It’s one thing to open a video on your phone. It’s quite another to strap some goggles onto your head.

Yes, the Oculus—and the Samsung Gear VR, where Facebook is already demoing its 360-degree videos—provide a far more nuanced experience than their non-immersive video counterparts. Undoubtably, an enormous number of people will use these headsets for games. And down the road, they’ll use them to watch 360-degree video, real footage from sporting events or museums or, yes, sky scrapers. But you wonder how often people will wholly separate from the real world in order to enter a new one. And if they do embrace this as an everyday activity, you wonder if that’s a good thing—if it’s really a social thing.

Total Disconnect

Mike Deerkoski strapped on a Samsung Gear VR to see the “spherical video” of Facebook’s Menlo Park campus, and he was impressed. “You feel like you’re there,” says Deerkoski, a technical advisor at a San Francisco startup called Depict. But he hesitates when asked how much time he’s likely to spend with something like this on his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s a good question.”

Another attendee, Hulker Heschberger, points out that 3-D movies—the theater variety—have never really succeeded because of the headwear problem. “It’s artificial,” he says. And Deerskoski says that although he doesn’t necessarily like the idea of goggles on his head, he does like the idea of viewing a 360-degree video on his smartphone, moving it around in front of him to explore the image.

Like so many others, Brian Blau, an analyst with research firm Gartner, who worked in VR for years, sees the enormous potential in head hardware like the Oculus. “How compelling is it going to be to sit beside your favorite movie star or get in a race car with your favorite Nascar driver?” he says. But he too wonders how much this will really bring us together. Down the road, we’ll have a completely immersive way of communicating with people across the globe, but maybe something simpler is the better option—or at least the typical option. “Zuckerberg has said that VR is the most social thing,” Blau explains. “But in fact, it’s not.”

Social Separation

Today, Facebook is about so easily sharing what you have with others. But as it stands, VR is about big companies sharing what they have with the masses. Individuals can’t build games. They can’t afford the 3-D cameras needed to take 360-degree videos. And when individuals strap on the goggles, they’re separated from those in their online social network (let alone the people standing beside them)—not drawn closer to them.

What we need is something that lets you seamlessly move between those two worlds. And the answer may lie in the Samsung Gear VR, which is really just a phone with some extra stuff attached to it. In theory, this kind of thing can give us Facebook, but then let us move easily into the world of VR whenever it makes sense.

The trouble is that when you strap on the headset, it still takes you so far out of the real world—something you may not want to do that often. But as Herschberger says, this kind of hardware will evolve. It will shrink down to something tiny, something that will fit on a pair of ordinary glasses that don’t completely separate us from this world, something like, well, Google Glass.

Of course, people don’t necessarily like that idea either. Virtual reality is here. But there’s so much to sort out.

Adventure Time Minifigs Are the Best Legos You’ll Never Buy

In the world of collectible toys, perhaps none takes as many forms as the venerable Lego minifigure. There are close to 4,000 distinct varieties, and the company has licensed so many pop-culture properties that The Lego Movie needed a scene set in a meeting hall to cram in as many cameo appearances as it could.

But last year, the Simpsons minifigure series famously paired standard-issue bodies with non-standard-issue heads to add more realism to the denizens of Springfield. That move created an opening that Chris Malec didn’t hesitate to jump through. Malec, an artist based in Buckinghamshire, England, has borrowed that technique to create a range of custom minifigs from another fanciful animated series: Adventure Time.

The Land of Ooo, as navigated by Jake the dog and Finn the human, is an otherworldly playground of never-ending surreal adventures; in other words, it’s perfectly suited to the imaginative creativity of building with Lego. Kaleidoscopic colors and a vaguely medieval fantasy setting—with a cavalcade of extraordinarily weird characters in tow—makes Adventure Time a potent pipe dream for future Lego endeavors.

Malec has worked on other Adventure Time-related projects before; his series of Batman crossover figures featured Ice King as Mr. Freeze, Gunter as The Penguin, and BMO as Alfred. But this project ventures much farther—he’s working on designs for 16 minifigs, the same number that Lego initially created for that Simpsons set. As of now, he’s created Finn (with four of the swords he uses throughout the series), Magic Man (a recurring villain voiced by Tom Kenny), Party Pat (voiced by Andy Samberg), four-faced deity Grob Gob Glob Grod, two Earls of Lemongrab, and a Banana Guard.

For superfans, there’s even Farmworld Finn from the Season Five premiere episode “Finn The Human,” which depicts an alternate timeline where The Lich “never even existed.” Obviously, there are some glaring oversights—two Lemongrab figures but no Jake?—but Malec says he’s hard at work on finishing up the rest of his designs, which will include Marceline, Princess Bubblegum, Flame Princess, Ice King, BMO, The Lich, and Hunson Abadeer. In the meantime, take a look at the gorgeous renderings of what he’s completed so far.