Hey, Book World: Sexism is Way Bigger Than the Hugos

I am a novelist. I also have a Master’s degree from MIT. So numbers appeal to me, especially numbers that provide clear data on thorny issues, like, oh, sexism and racism in literature.

This year, the Hugo Awards—probably the most famous and visible awards in speculative literature—were hijacked by a coordinated campaign of conservative writers who felt they’d been shut out of the community. I was bummed, because for the first time, I had a dog in the fight—my debut The Girl in the Road came out last year and got rave reviews, and I did harbor a small hope that I’d follow in the footsteps of my heroes Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, both multiple Hugo nominees.

Monica Byrne

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Monica Byrne is a novelist and playwright based in Durham, North Carolina. She’s on Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, and Instagram.

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’Twas not to be. Since the Hugos are determined by popular vote—basically, anyone who buys a $40 membership to the convention that hosts the Hugos, which means a pool of only a few thousand—the system is vulnerable. And this year, it was taken over by “Sad Puppies,” an online “protest group” led by three conservative writers and editors: Vox Day, Larry Correia, and Brad Torgersen, men for whom I honestly can’t rouse myself to feel much more than pity. Clowns are sad.

Meanwhile, the actual leaders in the field—including Nora K. Jemisin, Kameron Hurley, and George R. R. Martin, raining down righteous hellfire from his blog—have mobilized en masse to explain to them and to the public exactly why they’re cartoonish fools who not only don’t represent the field, but in their vehemence, serve as proof that the field as a whole is diversifying brilliantly.

And while the state of speculative literature is far from perfect, that’s why I’m actually not worried about it. At all.

But that’s only half of my story. Just a few days after the Hugo nominations were announced, the sixth annual VIDA Count was released. Tracking trends in another genre, literary fiction, the study tallies bylines by women and coverage of books by women—and, for the first time this year, a separate data set for women of color—in the most influential literary journals in the English-speaking world.

The results are pretty awful. Though the overall numbers are inching closer to parity than when VIDA first started tracking them, most have made little to no change. There’s no accountability on the part of the journals—and usually no comment at all. Either they simply don’t care, or they believe they’re not constitutionally capable of unconscious bias.

Whereas the numbers clearly demonstrate that they are. Statistics are helpful like that.

I’ve never been comfortable identifying fully with the literary genre or the speculative genre. My novel is both. I admire work in both. I’m influenced by work in both. But as a writer who also happens to be a woman, I’ve been watching both fields carefully over the last year. And here is a difference that ends up mattering quite a lot: the speculative community hashes out its sexism and racism issues right on the surface, whereas the literary community has convinced itself it doesn’t have any. As such, the leaders in the latter are far more dangerous to diversity in literature as a whole than Day, Correia, or Torgersen could ever be.

For example, editor of The New York Review of Books , Robert Silvers.

Or editor of the Times Literary Supplement , Peter Stothard.

Or editor of The New Republic , Chris Hughes.

Or The Atlantic . Or Harpers . Or The London Review of Books . Or The New Yorker . Or The Nation .

The statistics not only show systemic bias, but a conscious refusal to change. It’s easy to shun Day, Correia, and Torgerson as embarrassing dinosaurs. Why should it be any harder to point to Silvers, Stothard, and Hughes as the same?

At last year’s National Book Awards, Ursula K. Le Guin spoke of art as a tool of change. A writer with serious cachet in both speculative and literary genres nevertheless claims proud membership in the former, among those who are “writers of the imagination” and “realists of a larger reality.” And true to that charge, over the past ten years, speculative literature has been measurably diversifying.

How many VIDA Counts will it take for the literary establisment to do the same? Hungry young writers of all colors, all races, all genders, all faiths, all philosophies, and all orientations are moving up through the ranks, not waiting for permission to be heard. The future belongs to us. We’re already writing it. Now, where will we do so?

Where we feel welcome.

That may still be the Hugos. That may still be The New Yorker. It’s a matter of institutional will, as always. To quote Le Guin again, “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

But of the literary and speculative genres, I see only one truly doing so.

Don’t Starve’s Developer Has a Stealthy New Game

Invisible, Inc. , a new tactical espionage game from Klei Entertainment, is graduating from Steam’s Early Access service and officially launching on May 12.

Klei is known for its stylish takes on familiar genres, such as the ninja-platformer Mark of the Ninja and the survival-horror roguelike Don’t Starve.

Invisible, Inc. continues this legacy with the company’s take on tactical espionage, the genre best known as home to the Metal Gear Solid franchise.

The official release brings several major improvements over Invisible’s last early access update, including an all new voiceover, fully-animated 3-D cinematics, new gameplay elements, and a fully realized story and world.

In the month leading up to release, Klei has ceased new sales of the early access version of the game—though if you already own it, you can keep playing the development build.

Invisible, Inc. will be available on PC, Mac, and Linux via either Steam or DRM-free on Klei’s website. A PlayStation 4 version is also in the works, but there’s no release date for that just yet.

EU Formally Accuses Google of Antitrust Violations

European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager gives a press conference at European Commission headquarters in Brussels on November 20, 2014. Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty

Five years ago the European Union began an investigation into whether Google violated its antitrust laws. Now it will finally bringing charges against the company as well as open a new investigation into Google’s Android operating system.

On Wednesday the EU’s executive branch, the European Commission, announced it had served the company with a formal complaint known as a Statement of Objections. If Google is ultimately found guilty of violating the law, the EU could reportedly level fines as large as $6.4 billion—roughly 10 percent of Google’s operating revenue.

At issue is whether the company uses its position as the dominant search engine company to muscle out competition from specialized search services, specifically comparison shopping sites, by prioritizing its own Google Shopping search results. European shopping search company Foundem filed a lawsuit against Google in 2010 and triggered the European Commission’s investigation. Although the investigation has dragged on for years, new European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager seems determined to bring it to an end.

The European Commission also confirmed that it is opening an investigation into Android as well. Although the operating system is open source, meaning that any manufacturer can install it on the phones and tablets they sell, many core applications, including the Google Play store, are proprietary. Manufacturers must enter into special agreements with Google to include these proprietary apps. The investigation will attempt to determine whether Google is using its position to discourage the inclusion of rival applications on Android-based phones.

Saw It Coming

Google saw this coming. On Tuesday tech news site Re/code published what it says is a leaked internal memo from Google that acknowledged the EU’s move and asked employees not to comment on the matter either internally or externally.

Google’s defense is that it’s facing increased competition both in search, from services ranging from Bing to Apple’s Siri, and in mobile, from iOS and from mobile apps created by companies such as Facebook. The memo includes four graphs showing increased traffic to competing shopping and travel search sites in Europe based on data from comScore.

“All told, consumers have a lot of choice — and they are exercising it,” the memo says.

The Federal Trade Commission’s Take

Federal Trade Commission staffers quite didn’t see it that way in 2012. Earlier this year the Wall Street Journal obtained a staff report by the FTC’s bureau of competition recommending that the agency bring a lawsuit against Google for unfair practices. The document was apparently released to the paper by mistake. The report lodged several complaints against Google, such as its practice of displaying content from sites such as Yelp and Amazon on its own competing services. “When competitors asked Google to stop taking their content, it threatened to remove them from its search engine,” the Journal reported.

The paper also reported that the staffers concluded that Google demoted or refused to display links to certain specialized search services, but recommended against an antitrust suit based on the because Google had adequate pro-consumer justifications for its actions. And in a footnote, the staffers wrote that although Google had at one point sought to demote search results for all comparison shopping sites, the company had since tweaked its algorithm based on negative feedback from testers.

Ultimately, the FTC commissioners chose not to pursue a lawsuit and ended the investigation after Google elected to make a few changes to its practices. Most notably it agreed to allow competitors to opt-out of having their content used in its services.

Harsher Climates

Google might not be able to reach as favorable an agreement in the EU, which has been more aggressive in its dealings with the tech industry. Last November the EU’s legislative branch, the European Parliament, passed a resolution recommending that Google’s search engine be “unbundled” from the rest of its business.

The European Parliament doesn’t actually have the authority to force Google to split-up, according to the Financial Times . But it does illustrate how different the climate towards technology companies is in Europe, which has much more strict privacy laws than the U.S. Goole was also recently hit with the so-called “Right to be Forgotten Law” that requires it to remove outdated search results that might unfairly damage individual reputations. The policy has already become a nightmare for the company.

Meanwhile six European countries are investigating Facebook’s privacy practices, such as how it uses “like” buttons to track browsing habits. And many European cities have banned Uber’s controversial car service. On the other hand, Google was fined only $189,000 in Germany in 2013 for inadvertently but illegally collecting data from private WiFi networks as part of its Street View scanning process, indicating that these cases don’t always result in hefty fines or increased regulatory oversight.

Google still has time to negotiate with the European Commission. But it will certainly face a harsher environment there than in the U.S.

Small Packages of Code Are the Biggest Thing in App-Making

Open source is everywhere. On our phones, running the servers behind the world’s largest web services, and sometimes even in our cars and appliances.

But even though we hear a lot about big open source projects such as the Linux operating system or the Hadoop data-crunching platform, a bigger movement is afoot just beneath the surface of practically all of today’s software. Instead of building big, monolithic applications, programmers are increasingly stitching apps together using open source software packages. As the package paradigm has taken hold, app-making has become more efficient than ever.

You wouldn't believe how many modules you end up using. You might only have ten but each of those have ten modules that they depend on, so before you know it you're up to 100. Edmond Meinfelder, DocuSign

These smaller software packages are a lifesaver for many developers, rescuing them from writing common features from scratch, taking the busywork out of everything from password verification to complex mathematics. But packages can also create new forms of complexity, even as they make other jobs simple. Each one needs to be upgraded when new versions arrive, and many packages depend on other packages to work properly.

“You wouldn’t believe how many modules you end up using,” says Edmond Meinfelder, a software architect at DocuSign. “You might only have ten but each of those have ten modules that they depend on, so before you know it you’re up to 100.”

Developers often mitigate this complexity by using tools called “package managers” to automatically install and update these chunks of software. And if a package requires another package, the package manager will go out and fetch the required software from centralized servers.

Package management is so important, in fact, that one company is trying to make it a business. The company, npm, makes a package manager of the same name, just raised $8 million in venture capital to make that plan a reality.

From Walmart to Uber

Some package managers work at the operating system level, but many others are designed for specific programming languages. The Node Package Manager—known universally among developers as “npm”—is designed for the popular backend development platform Node.js.

Node lets developers to use the programming language JavaScript, initially developed for adding interactivity to web pages, to write full-blown applications that run on servers. Because it helps developers create complex applications using only one language instead of a mix of JavaScript and more traditional server-side languages, it’s become wildly popular with a companies ranging from huge startups such as Uber to huge corporations like Walmart.

Isaac Schlueter created npm in 2009 shortly after Node was first released to the public. He quickly found himself using many other people’s modules in his own Node applications and needed a way to manage them. But Schlueter did something different from most other package management systems. He designed npm so that anyone could add a package to his servers without him having to approve it first. This helped it grow quickly, and it soon became the standard way to install Node software.

Still, despite its widespread use, Schlueter’s package manager remained a side project for the next several years. In 2012, he took over managing the core Node project when creator Ryan Dahl stepped down. But by the next year, it was becoming clear that npm needed full-time support.

Since npm was released, its servers have experienced a few outages, making it impossible for developers to download packages, and at least one significant security issue was discovered. Schlueter knew that he had to devote more time and resources to keeping the servers up and running, and to making the product work well. “The best way to make good software is to hire people and pay them like grown-ups rather than expecting them to do it in their free time,” he says.

The issue, of course, is how to pay those engineers for that time. Fortunately, companies were not just willing but eager to pay for npm. So Schlueter quit his job and stepped down as the manager of the core Node project and to found npm the company.

Small Software Is Big

The company’s first product was npm Enterprise, which enables customers to run their own private npm system in their own servers. And starting today, npm will also allow customers to host private packages on the company’s servers but only share them with certain people, such as co-workers or partners, for $7 per person.

“The basic idea is that anything you publish into open source will be free forever,” Schlueter says. “But anything you need to keep secret, you need to pay for that.”

In addition to secrecy, customers can gain more control over the code they use, says DocuSign’s Meinfelder. “We want all the code that we use to undergo a rigorous security review process,” he says. By hosting their own mirrors of npm’s open source packages, companies can rest assured that they’re installing code that has already been reviewed and only switch to updated versions after proper vetting.

While the value of npm to Node developers is clear, the big question for npm is whether enough companies will adopt Node in the coming years to make its business viable. Given Node’s explosive growth recently, it’s certainly a possibility. Still, the most important thing about npm might not be the specific platform that it supports today, but what its popularity says about rise of packages as the new paradigm for constructing apps. Small software, it turns out, is a really big deal.

Smart Surf Watch Tells You When to Head to the Beach, Brah

The market is awash in wrist-worn digital tech. You can wear an Apple Watch, a Pebble, or one of many Android Wear offerings, all of which will put every last notification on your wrist. Your tweets, your faves, texts from your sweetie. You can wear a fitness band that will count your steps and tell you when to take a jog.

This watch is different. It will not nag you or interrupt your life, except to deliver perhaps the most important notification of all: It tells you when your local surf spot is going off.

The Ultratide ($300, available later this month) is the latest surf watch from Nixon. The company has a few other surf watches, including last year’s excellent Supertide. But while all of those models will tell you which way the tides are moving, only the Ultratide grabs real-time data from Surfline and displays the current surf conditions at any beach of your choosing. And there’s no better place to get your surf reports—Surfline has been watching the oceans for 30 years now, and delivers detailed local condition reports as well as 48-hour surf forecasts.

To get the watch working, you pair it with your phone over Bluetooth using Nixon’s Ultratide app (iOS only, Android coming late 2015). From there, you can set it to track a few different spots. Surfline collects live data for over 2,700 locations around the world, so there’s a very good chance your local break can be programmed into the watch. Even better, the smartphone app can geolocate you, so you can just get updates from the beach closest to you if you’re island-hopping.

Current conditions are displayed on the watch’s face at all times. The reports are detailed, too. You get tide status, wave height, wind direction and speed, swell direction, and the temperatures of both the air and the ocean. You also get Surfline’s general assessment in a tidy one-word note, like “Fair” or “Good”. I programmed two local spots into the watch, Ocean Beach and Bolinas Jetty, plus one in Hawaii. A button on the side of the watch lets you flip through your programmed locations and check the conditions. Your phone collects the up-to-the-minute reports and delivers the data to the watch, so at any time, you can also view more detailed reports inside the app.

As is typical for spring in the Bay Area, things rarely got above “Poor” at Ocean Beach. But that’s where the alerts come in—you can program a notification to sound whenever your local spot is kicking. You can rely just on Surfline’s one-word ratings (so it pings you whenever conditions are “Epic,” for example) or you can set the watch to tell you whenever conditions are just to your liking. A particular wave height, a south swell, offshore winds. I asked the Ultratide to alert me whenever Ocean Beach was rated as “Good” or higher. It went off exactly once, in the middle of the night. Maybe I should move.

Once you’ve paddled out, you press another sequence of buttons on the watch, and it logs your session. If that session ended up happening on a particularly glassy and gorgeous day, the Ultratide can find out what the conditions report was for that hour you were in the water, then set up an alert that’ll go off whenever the conditions at that location are similar. It’s pretty smart.

It’s also sharply designed. The Ultratide uses a battery like a regular watch, so charging isn’t something you ever have to think about. The battery lasts at least one year, and to restore it, you ship it back to Nixon. The company will replace the battery for free and service all the gaskets to make sure the watch stays water-tight. The stainless steel case is smooth and classy, and the silicone band is extraordinarily soft and comfortable. Behind the buckle, there’s a little nub on the strap that fastens into a hole on the looper, locking the strap into place. It never slips. This will come in handy when (not if) I get sucked over the falls.

WIRED’s Guide to Produce That Won’t Make the Drought Worse

Save this graphic to your cellphone so you can reference it on the go. WIRED

Summer weekends find me at San Francisco farmers’ markets, buying up as much local stone fruit as I can carry. The peaches, plums, and cherries are burstingly delicious. They are also, it turns out, terribly thirsty crops. California’s historic drought has brought renewed attention to the water-suckingness of beef and almonds, and deservedly so. But look, about half the vegetables and three-quarters of the fruit grown in the US comes from California. So the question is, if you want to be environmentally sensitive and exert a bit of business pressure on water-users, what should you be eating? What’s the most drought-friendly part of the produce aisle?

To figure that out, we analyzed data produced by M.M. Mekonnen and A.Y. Hoekstra at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, showing the water required to grow crops around the world. We then ranked the crops by water usage and organized them by season.

The result: the WIRED Guide to California Produce.

It’s not all bad news: Go ahead and toss that salad! Er. Rather, feel free to throw lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, spinach, and yes, kale into your shopping cart—they all fare well in our analysis. For your fruit plate, you’re safe with strawberries, grapefruit, and cantaloupe. But when you start to reach for the avocados, asparagus, and cherries, you’re getting into more dangerous territory. They are the produce aisle’s biggest water hogs.

Oh, and speaking of hogs. Yes: Compared with animals like pigs and cows, fruits and vegetables are a cactus. As the Los Angeles Times reported, raising animals for human consumption requires an enormous amount of water; producing a pound of bacon, for example, requires eight times more water than a pound of asparagus. The animals don’t drink it; it’s because of the huge amounts of water required to grow the plants they eat. Gizmodo’s Alissa Walker smartly notes that one of agriculture’s biggest drought offenders is alfalfa, grown as animal feed and then exported.

Clearly fruits and vegetables aren’t the bad actors in the drought. Drop for drop you are better off eating just about any kind of produce instead of a steak, a ham, or (animal proteins’ worst offender) cow’s tongue. Another caveat, while we’re on the subject: Our data doesn’t consider foods’ nutritional properties, a considerable X factor. You could imagine, for example, that a water-intensive food that was also high-calorie and highly nutritious might be worth it.

But how do I know, you might be asking, if this artichoke (or whatever) was grown in California? Well, it pretty much was: 99 percent of the nation’s crop is grown here. Other produce that you can be pretty certain came from the Golden State includes garlic, plums, figs, broccoli, grapes, lettuce, celery, strawberries, lemons, and nectarines (ouch). California’s responsible for more than 90 percent of the United States’ production of those foods.

Now, about the nuts: Everyone’s tsk-tsking about California’s enormous almond crop. And it’s true. They suck up a lot of water. But if you want to hate on nuts, walnuts are equally thirsty, and the nation’s domestic supply comes almost entirely from California. Consider instead the pistachio: pretty, nutritious, and way less thirsty.

An App That Hides Secret Messages in Starcraft-Style Games

China’s internet cafes full of young nerds glued to Starcraft 2 might soon be taking on more than Zerg hordes and Protoss Colossi. One group of anti-censorship researchers wants to turn those games themselves into a weapon in the war for web freedom.

A group of graduate researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have built what they describe as a prototype tool for exploiting “covert channels” in real-time strategy games, the genre of desktop videogames that includes Starcraft, Warcraft, Shogun 2, and Company of Heroes. Their program, which they call Castle, is designed to encode secret messages into those multiplayer games’ communications with opponents and teammates across the Internet, translating emails, articles, and even web pages into the game’s commands and siphoning them to players who live in censorship regimes like China or Iran.

The researchers published their open source stealth tool this week on GitHub, and they’re still testing it for security. They hope it will not only circumvent censorship and surveillance, but that it will also impersonate normal game data closely enough to avoid even alerting authorities that their filters have been thwarted. “Tools which have distinctive features can be detected and blocked by censors. As a result, there is increasing interest in disguising censorship circumvention traffic as benign protocols,” they write in an as-yet unpublished paper they plan to submit to security conferences. “The current video game landscape [presents] advantages that distinguish games from other covert channels and make them amenable to winning the arms race between censors and circumvention tool developers.”

Castle doesn't impersonate a game's data so much as it simply <em>plays</em> the game.

Castle works by converting messages into scripts—a series of game moves that it executes automatically. It takes advantage of some universal tropes of real-time strategy games: “units” of soldiers that can be selected and moved around a map from overhead and commanded to “rally” at certain map points or buildings. Castle loads the same custom map on both players’ screens, then runs scripts coded in Autohotkey and python to execute commands like moving and rallying those units in patterns. Real-time strategy games tend to keep a log on all players’ computers of those moves as part of their “replay” function. And that log of in-game commands can be read by the other player’s copy of Castle on the receiving end and interpreted to decode the hidden messages.

Here’s a quick demo:

The advantages of that game-based technique, the researchers say, include the fact that real-time strategy games can switch between a server-based mode and one where players connect directly to one another if the server is blocked. The games already send a lot of data between players, which is usually encrypted to prevent cheating. This further obscures the communications channel from censors. And unlike other protocols that secret communications have impersonated in the past, such as Skype, a communications session of video game data can last hours without raising suspicion. “A three- to six-hour Skype call could look strange,” says Phillipa Gill, one of the Stony Brook researchers. “One of the nice properties of games is that the packet timings match and the session durations match.”

Another advantage of games as vessels for secrets is that the modern gaming industry has provided plenty of real-time strategy games to choose from, all using a similar map-based gameplay, the researchers say. That means that they can easily port their system over to a new one in a matter of hours, spreading their secret traffic among potential targets. So far, they’ve adapted Castle to send secret messages through an open source game still in development called Zero AD, as well as a more popular commercial game they declined to name for fear of creating controversy for the developer. “If the censors begin to block one of those games, we can move it to another,” says Rob Johnson, the computer science professor leading the group. “We have a lot of flexibility and mobility.”

In their testing so far, the researchers say that they’ve achieved communication bandwidths of up to 1.5 kilobits a second while still keeping their secret communications hidden. That’s a ridiculously slow speed for most kinds of modern communication, but they suggest it’s enough for sending emails and sharing articles, and if it were built into a browser plugin, web browsing with images disabled. And they’re working to widen that thin straw of bandwidth in future versions of the software.

Stony Brook’s real-time strategy game technique may have the potential to be more secure than some other methods of steganography—the science of trying to make secret data look like other less sensitive data, says Paul Vines, a graduate researcher at the University of Washington who has worked on steganographic techniques. Castle, after all, doesn’t impersonate a game’s data so much as it simply plays the game. And the fact that it’s playing it with automated scripts could be tough to spot, given that a typical game’s normal communications are encrypted and as much as 70 percent of those messages are routine game-state checking between computers that has nothing to do with the player’s commands. Vines says there may be enough room for randomness or “entropy” in game data to hide messages more effectively than by embedding them in a Skype call, as other tools like SkypeMorph and FreeWave have done. “Games have a lot of user input,” he says. “That provides a lot of natural entropy compared to some applications.”

In fact, the Stony Brook researchers aren’t the only ones using games as a covert data channel. Developers at a Human Rights Watch conference last year proposed using steganographic videogames to smuggle data into North Korea, albeit on off-line USB sticks. And Vines at the University of Washington is experimenting with hiding data in games, too: Last month he and another researcher released Rook, a tool for hiding messages in the communications of first-person shooter games. (Bizarrely, Vines says they had never heard of Castle when they named their tool Rook.) But unlike Castle, Rook doesn’t assume the data sent by the game is encrypted. So to hide that data, it has to much more closely mimic human playing. That restriction vastly reduces the amount of data Rook can send, Vines says.

Castle’s dependence on the game’s own encryption, however, means that Castle users could be more vulnerable to detection if game makers quietly gave censors access to decryption keys, says Vines. “I could see policies put in [by game companies or governments] to break that encryption,” Vines says. “If you stripped away the encrypted layer on the game channel, you could detect it relatively easily.”

In fact, it’s still far too early for anyone to trust Castle with truly sensitive data. The system’s Stony Brook developers claim it’s undetectable with traditional port blocking or deep packet inspection, but they admit they’re still testing it against machine learning techniques that might be able to distinguish Castle traffic from normal game traffic.

But despite its early stage, Vines says that Castle, and the more general videogame approach to stealthy messaging, holds promise. “It’s a pretty good system, and it could be practical to use this in the near future,” he says, “Right now it’s already a very compelling use of games for this kind of work.”

Read the researchers’ full paper below.

Games Without Frontiers: Investigating Video Games as a Covert Channel