THR is reporting that the man who leaked Wolverine a month before the release date has been found and arrested:

Gilberto Sanchez was arrested at his Bronx, New York home this morning and is expected to go before a magistrate judge later today on charges of violating federal copyright law. According to the FBI, the 47-year-old man was indicted by a Los Angeles federal grand jury last week. A copy of the unsealed grand jury indictment indicates that Sanchez uploaded the film to file sharing network Megaupload.com under an alias. Information on how Sanchez allegedly obtained the feature film is still yet unknown. He faces up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Though Wolverine was a box office smash, the studio still claims this leak caused damages.

Meanwhile, it seems that the law has been kinder to Samantha Tumpach, 22, who was charged with criminal use of a motion picture exhibition facility after she got busted recording parts of New Moon in Rosemont, IL. She got off pretty easy, seeing as she had only recorded about two scenes, and was actually taping a birthday party that was taking place inside the theater and not the actual movie itself. The New Moon scandal went straight to the top. Director Chris Weitz eventually defended Tumpach's actions.

And that's justice, Hollywood style.

Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has a full account of what happened. Watts was returning to Canada via the Michigan border after helping a friend move house in Nebraska. After border guards asked to search his car, Watts got out of the vehicle and questioned what they were doing - and immediately was pepper sprayed, handcuffed, and placed under arrest. Witnesses in the car with him said he did nothing more than question the guards; he did not attempt to attack them. Nevertheless, he has been charged with felony assault against a federal officer.

While Watts was being detained, Doctorow called Cindy Cohn, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She called her contacts in Michigan, and luckily got help from a civil rights lawyer there who got Watts released the next day. He is safe at home now, but still faces felony charges that could land him in jail for two years, and prevent his ever crossing back into the United States again.

Doctorow explains:

Defending this charge will cost a fortune, and an inadequate defense could cost Peter his home, his livelihood and his liberty. Peter's friends are raising money for his legal defense. I just sent him CAD$1,000, because this is absolutely my biggest nightmare: imprisoned in a foreign country for a trumped-up offense against untouchable border cops. I would want my friends to help me out if it ever happened to me.

If you want to help, here's how. Watts' friend David Nickle writes:

We're going to think of something suitable in the New Year - but immediately, anyone who wants to help can do so easily. Peter's website, rifters.com, has a link to a PayPal account, whimsically named the Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund. He set it up years ago for fans of the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight and his Rifters books, to cover veterinary bills for the cats he habitually rescues from the mean streets of Toronto. Peter has made it clear that he doesn't want to use the veterinary money to cover his lawsuit. But until we can figure out a more graceful conduit for the legal fund, that's the best place to send donations for now. Just let Peter know that the donation's for his legal defense, and that's where it will go.

Here's the link to the backlist page on Peter's website, rifters.com, or you can just send a PayPal donation to donate@rifters.com.

The link to the Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund is in the middle of the page. The page also links to Creative Commons editions of all his published work, which he's made available free. Peter would approve, we think, if you downloaded one or two or all of them. Whether you make a donation to the legal fund or not.

via BoingBoing

In New South Wales, Australia, members of the local Church of Scientology are being investigated by a Senate group for allegedly shunting unpopular members into labor camps:

NSW police are now looking into the shocking allegations, which include the use of labour camps known as the Rehabilitation Project Force, for church members who rated poorly on tests using a device known as the electropsychometer, or E-meter. Ex-Scientologist Peta O'Brien told [senator Nick] Xenophon, in a letter tabled in the Senate, that she was forced to spend five hours a day breakingrocks with crow bars to help build a road and carparking area at the church's Dundas base, in Sydney's west. O'Brien alleged Scientologists in the RPF were not allowed to speak until spoken to, were banned from listening to music or driving, and were not given any medical or dental assistance.

Another ex-Scientologist says that pregnant women in Scientology were pressured to have abortions, sometimes to the pont of being locked up if they refused. Another former member of the church says both his young daughters died under suspicious circumstances:

Paul David Schofield claims in his letter tabled in parliament his toddler daughter Lauren died while being babysat in the Sydney church, when she was "allowed to wander the stairs by herself and fell". Church officials not only discouraged him and his wife from seeking compensation, he alleges, but encouraged him to request that no inquest be held. Schofield wrote that his second daughter, Kirsty, died after ingesting potassium chloride kept at his house. "I covered up that this substance was widely used in both the Sydney church's `purification' programs and a similar program at the church's drug rehab organisation," he wrote. "I perjured myself . . . I did not tell the whole truth either to police or the court (to my shame) but omitted details which would have `embarrassed' the church. I knew if I didn't do this I would be heavily penalised by the church for getting it into trouble." Schofield wrote that most Scientologists did not trust non-believers - referred to as wogs - and thought that "wog justice just made people worse".

The Church has responded that the children's deaths were investigated by police at the time. They say their freedom of religion is being threatened.

Senator Xenophon replied:

Religious freedom did not mean the Catholic or Anglican churches were not held accountable for crimes and abuses committed by their priests, nuns and officials, albeit belatedly. In Australia there are not limits on what you can believe but there are limits on how you can behave. It's called the law, and no one is above it.

via The Australian

Image via Steve Garfield.

Defendor, Peter Stebbings' directorial debut, is cut more from the same cloth of Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn's upcoming film about an average kid who puts on a superhero costume, than Special, about a man whose antidepressants cause him to believe he has superpowers. But Defendor has a very different tone from Kick-Ass, and is less about the gleeful joys of living out one's comic book fantasies than it is about one man using a superhero identity to right the wrongs in his life. Harrelson plays Arthur Poppington, the man who becomes Defendor in order to bring to justice Captain Industry, a drug and weapons dealer he blames for his mother's death.

The folks at Twitch watched Defendor's premiere at the Toronto Independent Film Festival last night, and reported that the film is not only smart and funny, but contains a surprising amount of depth. Check out the trailer below:

[via Twitch]

Several episodes of Canal Livre featured Souza, a former police officer and politician, discovering the bodies of murdered drug lords in the jungles outside his home city of Manaus. You can see one such sequence in this clip, where Souza and his camera crew just happen to stumble on the still-smoking remains of a murdered man. Souza often ranted about problems with the police on his show, which is now off the air.

To prove the police's incompetence, Souza would air segments like these, saying that his TV crew was doing a better job finding dead bodies than the police.

Last year, his bodyguard was arrested for the murders of five men, whom he claimed Souza had ordered him to kill so that they could "discover" them on the show. Souza and his son were arrested, though Souza's status as a politician prevents him from being held in jail. Now the chief prosecutor of Amazonas, Brazil, has brought Souza up on drug trafficking charges too. It seems that he was also running a drug ring along with several other ex-police officers, and that the killings he ordered helped eliminate his competition in the world of drug selling, as well as on television.

This kind of scenario was predicted fairly accurately in the disburbing near-future movie Network, released in the 1970s, which is about a news show whose ratings go through the roof when their disillusioned anchor threatens to shoot himself on the air. To maintain their ratings, a craven TV executive (played by Faye Dunaway) arranges for the increasingly-deranged anchor to keep delivering his violent rants, until eventually he's murdered on air. At the same time, she uses her success with his show to jumpstart a reality program devoted to the activities of a terrorist group.

I can't wait for Survivor - the Wallace Souza Edition.

via ABC News

Way before the advent of comic books or paperback novels, our geeky forebears got their fill of escapist exploits from those descendants of the penny dreadful, the cheaply printed, but oh so delectable pulp magazines. Starting with Argosy in 1896 and peaking in the 20s and 30s, the pulps or dime novels were a fecund morass which nurtured the genres of Science Fiction, Westerns, Crime Drama, Historical Romance, Mystery, and Horror as well as the Science Heroes that developed into the Superheroes we see conquering the box-offices of today.

I was born at least a generation and a half too late too experience the pulps when they came out, but they do figure in my memories as a very young reader. Visiting my Great-Aunt Vicky and Great-Uncle Bob at their used bookstore in Maine I would beg to spend the night in the attic. With a flickering Coleman lantern I'd wile away the hours devouring Pogo comics, the Heinlein juveniles, and the adventures of none other than The Shadow. My favorite lullaby was a pair of pearl-handled .45s blazing into the night. Even now Lamont Cranston/Kent Allard's terrifying laughter echoes through my fondest memories. But I digress, constantly.

This anthology of all previously unpublished work tears out of the gate with Joe Lansdale's "The Crawling Sky" The Reverend Jebediah Mercer from the novel Dead in the West is once again Hell-bent for leather hunting down eldritch horror in the East Texas badlands. Here the Rev gives an accounting for himself:

I am on a mission from God. I do not like it, but it is my mission. I'm a hunter of the dark and a giver of the light. I'm the hammer and the anvil. The bone and the sinew. The sword and the gun. God's man who sets things right. Or at least as right as God sees them. Me and him, we do not always agree. And let me tell you, he is not the God of Jesus, he is the God of David, and the angry city killers and man killers and animal killers of the Old Testament. He constantly jealous and angry and if there is any plan to all this, I have yet to see it.
...It is my lot in life to destroy evil. There is more evil than there is me, I might add.

Oh. Yeah.
How's that for a cover letter? Try reciting that over a few belts of whiskey at your local watering hole in your best approximation of a Nacogdoches drawl. The results can be quite efficacious. I need more Rev. Mercer stories.

The Weird West feel is also strong in "Quiet Bullets" by Christopher Golden, but owing more to Rod Serling or Ray Bradbury than H.P. Lovecraft. Golden takes us back to those simple innocent times of being ten years old and all the fear and confusion that entails mixed with the cozy chills a really good ghost story can deliver. The creepiness continues as we discover something terribly wrong with William F. Nonaln's "Perfect Nanny" and pull back the lid of what we think we know in Cherie Priest's "Catastrophe Box". Ms. Priest was inspired by a case of real-life psychic researcher Harry Price (1881-1948) but her conclusion goes way past mere table-rapping at séances or wimpy cold spots.

The wild times to be found in the pulps didn't have to rely on fantastic elements. Plenty of gritty two-fisted tales were inspired the the greed and savagery to be found in the all too real mean streets. "A Gunfight" is David J. Schow's homage to Donald Westlake, a breathless blow by bloody blow report of a hardened criminal's desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of the Mob. FPS games are rarely this exciting. Tim Truman, the artist who collaborated with Lansdale on the infamous Jonah Hex comic books in the late 90s and did the cover illustration for Son of Retro Pulp Tales also has a story here. Turning away from the rotten core of the Big Apple, "Pretty Green Eyes" is a piece of hard-boiled nastiness of moonshiners and corrupt strike-breakers in the old West Virginia backwoods of Truman's own family history. Although this is his first published all-prose fiction, no one familiar with his work will be surprised to find he hits every crime pulp note square in the jaw. "Border Town" also draws from it's author's roots. James Grady presents a snowbound Montana train station in 1938 with a woman on the run and rat-bastard Nazi spies.

Speaking of fascist monsters, we veer back towards the bizarre for Matt Venne's "The Brown Bomber and the Nazi Werewolves of the S.S.". I'll just let the over-the-top title speak for itself adding only that the final paragraph was surprisingly stirring. Plunging even deeper into the lurid ridiculous potential of pulp are "The Forgotten Kingdom" "The Lizard Men of Blood River" by Mike Resnick and Stephen Mertz respectively. Both these adventures of Lost Cities and Nearly Nekkid Native Princesses have tongue thrust full through cheek. Resnick's hysterical pun-spewing rogue, the Right Reverend Lucifer Jones was probably the class clown at the same seminary Reverend Mercer went to. It seems in this day and age we can't take the Great White Hunters or Jungle Explorers seriously any more — somehow I feel Shia LaBeouf is all to blame. I wonder if a serious reinterpretation of Allan Quatermain or the like can still be done. Maybe he's as off-limits as another favorite of mine, the sinister Fu Manchu. It seems a shame really.

There's only one story here with Rocketships and Bug-Eyed Monsters and that's this one humble offering from Harlan Ellison. Yeah, you read that right, Harlan Muthafuckin' Ellison!. If his story intro is to be believed, "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" was originally penned in 1991 for a Bantam Books project that never saw the light of day. It's a wild take on the old fairy tale set in a seedy Mars colony with exploited native labor and an ancient artifact men and martians would kill for. A dark reflection of 1940s cosmic dreams that would not be out of place along side some of the "New" Space Opera of today. But what it really reminded me was the kick-ass thrills I got when I first read Deathbird Stories. This is pure balls out Ellison. I don't know if I'd want to be stuck in an elevator with him, but he writes a damn good story.

With four or five the stories being quite excellent and great fun to be had all the way through, Son of Retro Pulp Tales is way ahead of the curve and a mighty satisfying read. I wish Subterranean would come out with more affordable trade paperback editions, but that's just how they roll. In every one of these stories you sense the pure glee the writers had in shaping these cheap thrills from their own fond memories. This has the sense of wonder, adventure, and just plain fun that should never go out of style.

Son of Retro Pulp Tales will be available any day now directly from Subterranean Press,
or from the Usual Clowns.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the agents of Shadowskeedeeboomboom as Chris Hsiang. He has the power to cloud his own mind and as yet lacks a boon companion. What a surprise.

Carnegie Mellon's Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross have correctly calculated the complete SSN for 8.5 percent of people born between 1989 and 2003 in less than 1000 attempts, proving that any system that relies on SSN and date of birth for security is seriously flawed. As Acquisti explains:

It's possible that criminals are already using this.

The US Social Security Administration is already working on a way to avoid this problem in future by randomizing the selection of the nine digit number - currently, the first five digits are selected depending on zip code of your birthplace - but the workaround won't help the millions of Americans with SSNs currently. For them, their best hope is that would-be cyberthieves give up before their 1000th try.

Social security flaw leaves way open for cyber-theft [New Scientist]

39-year-old Christopher Handley, an office worker, was brought up on charges of possessing child pornography in 2006 when customs officials seized a package for him. It contained several manga, some of which were "lolicon" that showed what officials said were children being sexually abused. There were also images of bestiality. Handley has a huge collection of manga, and only a few are lolicon. He also had absolutely no child pornography of any description in his house or on his computer.

Nevertheless, Handley entered a guilty plea. According to Threat Level, it was simply because his attorney had exhausted all other options:

"It's probably the only law I'm aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can't tell them," says Eric Chase, Handley's attorney.

Chase says he recommended the plea agreement (.pdf) to his client because he didn't think he could convince a jury to acquit him once they'd seen the images in question. The lawyer declined to describe the details. "If they can imagine it, they drew it," he says. "Use your imagination. It was there."

The manga collector faces up to 15 years in prison for possessing comic books.

Handley is the first person to be convicted under the controversial Protect Act, which makes drawings of fictional characters into potential child pornography. How did this happen?

In 2002, the Supreme Court struck down the so-called Morphing Law, which held that fictional cartoon or photoshopped images depicting minors having sex would would also be treated as obscene (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition). Under that decision, last week's conviction of Handley could not have happened. But in 2003, the Protect Law passed, which held that "a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting" showing children in sexual situations could be ruled illegal if local community standards consider it "obscene." This is particularly relevant given that Handley was tried in an area, Southern Iowa, where average community members may not be aware of the styles and content of typical manga.

In the United States, the original intent of the child pornography laws was to protect children from sexual abuse. The idea is that when actual, living children (not images of them) participate in the making of sexual images, they are harmed. The US Supreme Court heard a case in 1982 (New York v. Ferber) whose outcome, in short, made any sexual images containing minors obscene and illegal - even if those images had redeeming social value. New York v. Ferber did not cover fictional images, only photography and film which involved actual children.

The Protect Act dramatically expands the scope of laws permitted under Ferber. But will actual children be protected by sending a man to prison for collecting fictional comic books?

As Comic Book Legal Defense Fund executive director Charles Brownstein put it:

This art that this man possessed as part of a larger collection of manga … is now the basis for [a sentence] designed to protect children from abuse. The drawings are not obscene and are not tantamount to pornography. They are lines on paper.

via Threat Level

NOTE: Image above comes from the manga/anime Oh! My Goddess, a typical children's title. It is not considered Lolicon.

In his seminal Perdido Street Station, Miéville introduced us to the bizarre metropolis of New Crobuzon, a rich tapestry alive with chimeric monsters, clockwork robots, warped magical science, and shadowy politics. These days, the New Weird Atlas is crowded with entries from dozens of authors, but few can match Miéville's gift at making even the most surreal cities appear lifelike. Now he again defies our expectations changing not just setting but his very writing style. The City & The City is a classic police procedural set in a world almost exactly like our own. The modern city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma might seem familiar to a traveler in Eastern Europe or Turkey, but they're just as weird as any old marching band of steam-driven gorilla crabs.

The streets of Besźel have seen better days. The old-fashioned architecture left quaint decades ago and now sits squarely in shabby — attractive only compared to the brutal concrete housing projects. The alleys are stalked by packs of actual wolves, scrawny critters fighting over trash. There are few jobs and less hope. The Besź citizens might describe themselves as saturnine or defeatist, but would probably settle for a corner of the mouth "feh".

An unidentified woman has been found brutally murdered at a skateboard park. Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad has been called in to investigate. Borlú has been around and around the block more times than he cares to remember. More reserved and a bit less corrupt than some of his policzai colleagues, he's a world-weary cop cut from the same cloth as Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander or perhaps Georges Simenon's Commissaire Maigret. We follow the investigation through Borlú's eyes, seeing the clues and his city as he does. The characters show only what moods and motivations they choose to reveal. Miéville totally nails the stripped-down voice of a great police procedural – "Just the facts, ma'am." – a far cry from the abundantly verdant prose of the Bas-Lag novels or King Rat. When the victim's identity is discovered, Borlú must continue his hunt for the girl's murderer in foreign Ul Qoma, Besźel's ancient rival and uneasy partner.

Okay, from here on out I get way SPOILERY about the two very odd cities but not the actual plot. If you hate it when the weird twist in worldbuilding is spoiled, just click away and buy the book, because it really is quite good.

Are all the babies gone? All right, let's proceed.

Where Besźel has sooty crumbling stonework, Ul Qoma boasts glittering skycrapers. This city has adapted handsomely to the modern world, attracting foreign investors and high-tech industry. This would be a surprise considering Ul Quoma's dalliance with Soviet-style communism in the last century. Before that, they backed the losing side in WWII. Once a devout kingdom worshiping something like Islam, they are now a secular Westernized state on the cutting edge of global society. That giant grumbling sound? It's from their neighbors in Besźel. Once he gets through the red tape, Inspector Borlú won't have far to travel – the two cities occupy the exact same geographical space.

This isn't like Budapest or Minneapolis/St. Paul, nor are they divided cities like Cold War Berlin or Jerusalem. Through some unexplained quirk of topology you can be in either Ul Qoma or Besźel and never notice the other except for overlapping areas called "crosshatching". Citizens of both cities are raised from birth to ignore or unsee elements from the alternate side. To travel through these crosshatched zones, or even acknowledge a person or shop sign, is strictly forbidden. Any transgressions are swiftly acted upon by a mysterious force or agency known only as Breach. The punishments cannot be appealed, and Breach does not bother to share its guidelines or agenda. To avoid trouble, certain colors, fashions, even gestures are accepted in one city but illegal in the other. Tourists must complete classes in recognizing crosshatches and un-seeing the other city. Driving in busy traffic must be a nightmarish test of self control.

This is an absurdist extension of what many of us city-dwellers already do. We daily ignore the more unpleasant truths on our streets and often unsee lots of cool stuff: "Feh, that's for the tourists" Yah, I can be a jaded schmuck sometimes. Miéville doesn't lean on this point and I may just reading something he never meant, into the novel. He can get very soapboxy (ahem, The Iron Council) . Not surprising considering his strong convictions. But The City & The City is fairly free of politics, and instead concentrates on the story.

As the murder investigation unfolds, Borlú runs afoul of different political fringe groups who desire to either destroy or unite with the opposite city. The ever present bureaucracy adds to the tangle of conspiracies and shoals of red herrings. The case also involves controversial research into the distant past when the two cities may have been one. The Besź and Ul Qomans have great difficulty with subjects like these. It's hard to have a conversation about things you are not allowed to think about. But Borlú forges ahead: a woman is dead and someone must pay. Everybody does what they must, or gets destroyed by a faceless system that answers to no one. Orwell and Kafka would love this.

Oh wow, that sounded pretty bleak, huh? The plot is grim, but I was charmed by the wealth of details of daily life and characters in the The City & The City. The pacing is deliberate but with a spare writing style, and at just over 300 pages this is a very brisk read. The crime novel feel is tone perfect, although Miéville might have focused on this aspect too much, sacrificing the fantastical elements. After all the imagination he used making Besźel; Ul Quoma, and Breach so different, he never attempts to explain how it all works. Personally I didn't mind this — trying too hard to describe the numinous can ruin credulity (see The Iron Council- time golems, really?). A writer without Miéville's considerable intelligence and talent would have made this a confusing mess.

Readers should shed their preconceptions and treat themselves to a highly original and gripping experience.The City & The City is still Urban Fantasy, yes, but don't look for elves on motorcycles or spell-casting cops. China Miéville has done something very different, new, and — oh yeah — weird.

The City & The City is available now from Amazon,
or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the old worker-priests as Christopher Hsiang. His passport to Besźel was revoked after that incident on the Street of Crocodiles.

The year is 2040, and Southern California is pretty much the same — only more so. The weather is hotter, and water is in more demand than ever, especially since the destruction of the Hoover Dam. Racial tensions continue to seethe and, despite ubiquitous surveillance, violent crime is more popular than ever. California's prison population and the annual cost of keeping each prisoner alive has tripled since the beginning of the century. After years of doing nothing useful and still not getting any results, the Legislature privatizes most of the prisons. One of these new companies, ValCorp/KRK Holdings, has lobbied aggressively for changes in state law and now has an exciting new financial opportunity for some of its incarcerated clients.

In 2040, felons with a life without parole conviction, for example kidnapping for ransom or murder with special circumstances (California Penal Code § 190.2, if you're curious), can look forward to an average of fifty-four years of soul-crushing deprivation and crappy food, punctuated by the occasional gang rape. Actuaries figure the cost to keep them housed, fed, clothed, and healthy from incarceration until death is a whopping 36 million dollars each. Market research shows that up to 90% of the inmates in question would rather have been executed than serve their entire terms.

So a private firm, Nautilus Casualty and Property (a ValCorp subsidiary), comes up with a way to solve everyone's problems: the life term buyout. How does it work? Glad you asked. The prison owners are required to keep a portion of that $36M as a reserve to ensure liquidity. Nautilus is prepared to turn over some of that reserve – say, six million dollars tax-free — for the prisoners to distribute however they see fit, as soon as they sign the papers and prematurely terminate their life sentences.

Yes that means lethal injection, and you can't take it with you, but hey — think of the good that money could do for your family, or that of your victim(s). Or you could do something for the community: build a Rec Center for the kids in the old neighborhood, an old folks' home, set up scholarships, or donate it to any charity or organization you want. The lives that have been taken can never be replaced, but now you have the opportunity to make a positive change in the world, to make your life mean something. So how's about it, Killer? What do I need to do to convince you to sign here...today?

And that's pretty much Martin Kindred's new job as Life Term Buyout Facilitator. At first he's shocked by the idea but decides by giving these murderers a shot at a sort of redemption, he'll find meaning in his life too. The metric fucktons of cash he makes off each buyout doesn't hurt either. His best and possibly only real friend Charlie Rhodes, Private Investigator, rolls his eyes at Martin's justifications and is certain all this cannot end well. Charlie, as well as many of Kindred's close family, acquaintances, and even his new bosses were, or are, LAPD officers. Martin grew up with their pragmatic if bitter worldview, so he understands it well... even if he finds it at odds with his own idealisim. Charlie agrees to do some freelancing for Nautilus, digging through information to make sure the buyout candidates have no ulterior motives; not for the cash, as much as to keep his naive younger friend out of trouble.

Of course there's no lack of trouble. From the get-go, organizations spring up to protest the buyouts and harass Martin and his family. Foremost among them is Priceless Life, made up from the strange bedfellows of religious fundamentalists, lefty Social justice activists, and pro-life extremists. It can only be a matter of time before one of them pulls out a copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook. The buyouts further grab the world's attention when a famous Hollywood director convicted of murder, Carl Marks, opts for Nautilus' "Golden Needle," in order to spout his radical politics from the bully pulpit one last time. Martin's marriage is hanging by a thread, and he tries to convince himself he's doing the right thing. When a murder plunges life into further turmoil, Martin Kindred faces a complete nervous breakdown, if not worse, as he desperately digs for the truth about his job and himself.

For all the drama and high-concept,Buyout is a remarkably understated and thoughtful novel. The story is rife with dark humor but Irvine reserves the sharpest of his satiric barbs for the voice of "Walt Dangerfield", self-appointed Gonzo Journalist /Greek Chorus, whose daily podcasts that introduce each chapter and serve as exposition for the world of 2040 at large. At first glance, the cover art reminded me of Richard K. Morgan's very cool Market Forces (I know, I know, don't judge a book...) But you won't find cartoony evil corporations or blockbuster action here. Nor is the technology portrayed much flashier than what we see around us now. Martin wrestles with ethical dilemmas and social issues, not gun-festooned cyborgs. Buyout lacks many of the obvious trappings of a genre novel, but it does what any well-written Science Fiction book should. It makes you think; about life and death, ethics and society, justice and loyalty — and about the cynic and the idealist, and how sometimes they can be the same person.

Published last month by Del Rey, Buyout is in bookstores now. You can purchase Buyout from Amazon, or support your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the next generation of law enforcement, as Christopher Hsiang. Similar to Diogenes, he walks the street with lantern raised high looking for a decent book.

I Come In Peace is pretty much an all-time classic, thanks to inserting an alien thug into the standard buddy-cop cliches. There are two cops, and they don't get along even though they both have unorthodox methods for cleaning up the streets. And then it turns out the main baddie is an alien, who's just the first of millions of alien endorphin-harvesting drug dealers — unless Dolph and his partner Brian Benben can stop him. There are fight scenes, shootouts and car chases, all of it to the tunes of Miami Vice's Jan Hammer. Really, what's not to like? [IMDB]

Here is the story, translated from a Swedish newspaper:

A company must pay fines of 25,000 kronar because it has been deemed responsible for the [robot attack].

"I have never heard of a robot who beat a man in this way," said prosecutor Leif Johansson.

In June 2007, a man who is employed at a factory in Bålsta north of Stockholm took a look at a malfunctioning robotized machine. The machine was used for lifting heavy stones. When the man went into the building he thought that he had cut the power to the machine but he had not. Instead, the robot was activated and forcibly grabbed the man's head. He managed to defend himself, but received serious injuries on the body.

"The man was very lucky. He had four broken ribs and was almost killed," said Leif Johansson

via SvD (thanks, Lars!)

The US is negotiating with the pirates who took the freighter Maersk Alabama. Though crew retook the ship, their captain is still being held in a lifeboat by pirates while the ship itself is being escorted by crew from the US destroyer Bainbridge to safer waters. Over the past five years, hundreds of ships have been attacked by pirates off the coast of East Africa, as you can see using the International Chamber of Commerce's live piracy map (a snapshot from today's map is below). France has even gotten into intense firefights with some of them, sparking UN debate.

Sea-going piracy is back, and is likely to grow into the foreseeable future as government controls in countries like Somalia weaken. Late last year, the BBC reported that pirates are working with radical Islamic groups in East Africa, helping them smuggle weapons and training them in maritime battle techniques. You could say piracy is a symptom of unstable governments and a growing population of people who are stateless. In the absence of national identity, it makes sense to claim a pirate identity, which has elements of tribalism and a kind of rogue internationalism.

Interestingly, sea piracy as we know it got its start with another rogue state - England. During the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth enlisted the aid of "privateers," a term that referred to state-authorized pirates. In return for safe harbor on British shores, these privateers would give the Queen a cut of their booty (often stolen from British rival Spain), and pledge to plunder only ships belonging to England's enemies. Francis Drake was one such privateer/pirate, as was Walter Ralegh.

Other pirates, like the infamous Irish pirate queen Gráinne Mhaol (pictured here meeting with Elizabeth), fought against Elizabeth. Gráinne Mhaol used her booty to fund local Irish rebellions against the crown.

My point is that pirates have a long and rich history of springing up at times when nations are unstable. They are the anarchic military wing of upstart states. It's quite possible that the rise in piracy we're seeing in East African waters may (ironically) be the bleeding edge of a coming stability for the region. After all, pirates brought England the stability it required to become a world power. The allegiances of Somalian pirates and their counterparts from other regions may someday decide the fate of nations.

Top image via Sergent Dupont Sebastien / ECPAD / Reuters. Photo of fleeing Somalian pirates via Petty Officer 2nd Class Jason R. Zalasky / U.S. Navy.

First, the question is what exactly was the crime committed? A person or group of people got an early version of the movie Wolverine - pre-effects, and according to FOX pre-final edits. (Harry Knowles at Ain't It Cool News spoke to a producer on the film who confirmed that the leaked version was several months old.) Then our thieves put a digital file of it up online, where it promptly got circulated out into the public BitTorrent sites.

We also know that the leak was almost certainly an inside job, coming from somebody working at Fox or one of their partners. Industry insiders say it's the only big budget film that's ever been leaked this early online.

So what's the punishment for a crime like this?

According to the US Criminal Code, a person like our thief:

Shall be imprisoned not more than 3 years, or fined in the amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense consists of the reproduction or distribution of 10 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of $2,500 or more.

So far nobody has been brought up on charges, though Fox columnist Roger Friedman may have been fired for reviewing the leaked version. Still no official word on whether he's been fired, or just reprimanded severely.

Though Fox officials said initially that it would be easy to catch the people behind the heist, no arrests so far. Reports have come in that a recent raid on a Dallas data center may have been related to the FBI's investigation of the Wolverine leak. (UPDATE: The FBI has revealed the raid was not related to the Wolverine case.)

What's likely to happen when our culprit is caught? If the 2003 case involving a leaked rough copy of the Hulk movie is any guide, our lawbreaker could get jail time. The Ang Lee Hulk movie was leaked to file-sharing networks in 2003 about two weeks before the movie hit screens. Advance press was incredibly bad, and studio exes claimed that the leak hurt their box office returns. Eventually Feds tracked the leak down to New Jersey man Kerry Gonzalez, who pled guilty to felony charges of copyright infringement. He was ultimately sentenced to 6 months home confinement, 3 years probation, and about $7 thousand in fines.

I'm guessing that our Wolverine thieves may not get such lenient treatment, partly because so many more people are using file-sharing networks these days. In 2003, releasing Hulk online meant hitting a small audience, but in 2009 it means hitting most of the world. Audiences across the globe are now spoiled for the film. I think Fox (rightfully) believes that audiences who download the Wolverine movie might choose not to go see it in theaters because the extremely rough print seems so flawed. So money will be lost.

But an interesting counterpoint to this scenario was the leak of Fiona Apple's unfinished album Extraordinary Machine in 2005. The singer's record company had mothballed the 2003 album because it wasn't considered commercially viable, but when a few songs from it leaked onto the internet it became a cult sensation - finally making it onto mainstream radio. It also received a huge groundswell of support, and eventual commercial release, though many critics pointed out that the studio was ultimately correct that the album could not achieve the same commercial success her previous albums had. (Indeed the album sold fewer copies than her previous albums by several hundreds of thousands.)

Regardless of whether the Wolverine leak will lead to the resounding failure of the film ala the Hulk scenario, or will ironically buoy the film's fanbase ala the Fiona Apple one, there is no denying that the crime committed here is one of the gravest in the sections of the criminal code devoted to copyright infringement. The only way for the crime to become more serious would be if the thieves had tried to sell the movie or if it were not the first time they had committed such a crime.

As we wait for the Feds and MPAA to track down the person or people behind this heist, there's no doubt that we're looking at one of the biggest Hollywood crimes of the decade.

Most of these crimes seem to have taken place on auction sites where either buyers or sellers got ripped off. According to AP:

The Internet Crime Complaint Center [a division of the FBI] said in its annual report released Monday that it received more than 275,000 complaints last year, up from about 207,000 the year before . . . About one in three complaints were for nonpayment or non-delivery. The other most common complaints were for auction fraud or credit and debit card fraud.

Here's the interesting demographic moment: Men are victims of 'net crime far more than women. According to the ICCC, "Men reported losing $1.69 for every dollar that women lost." Of course this may just be reporting bias. Perhaps women are less eager to step forward and report internet crime.

via AP

I'm pretty much a noir addict, especially the works of Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Stark and MacDonald. (I also loved Frank Miller's Sin City comics, back in the day.) There's tons of science fiction noir out there, but it's rare for an SF book to hit my noir sweet spot quite as well as Hammond's first two novels, KOP and Ex-KOP. Hammond avoids any hint of pastiche or satire in his tale of over-the-hill bruiser Juno Mozambe. And he never makes Mozambe remotely loveable or even cool. Mozambe's just as revolting and broken as the world he inhabits.

That's the world of Lagarto, an Earth colony that's gotten royally screwed over by the rest of the human race. It's sort of a New Orleans-esque place, mixed with some third-world country. Lagarto's brandy-making industry collapsed years ago, taking the planet's economy with it, and now all that's left is tourism and vice, which usually turn out to be the same thing. Offworlders come to Lagarto and treat it like their own private playground, and all the locals are corrupt, from the slumdogs of Tenttown to the local money-skimming elites. In a neat metaphor for Lagarto's fuckedness, the steamy planet includes particularly aggressive flies that lay their eggs inside of an open wound within seconds. Any time people get injured, or even nicked, they'll have maggots breeding inside their wounds in no time. There's also something called "the rot" that can eat you alive if you're not careful.

When we first Mozambe, he's a bag-man for the police department, going around collecting protection money from brothels, smack dealers and gambling parlors. He kids himself that he, and the corrupt squad he works with, are helping to keep the city safe by working with organized crime and preventing the city's criminals from running amuck. But Mozambe's just kidding himself, plus the nice stable crime organization he's used to working with is on its way out, and nothing but chaos and worsening corruption are coming in its place. Good honest poppy farming and ass peddling are giving way to snuff films and human trafficking. Mozambe's a dinosaur, increasingly unable to throw his weight around the way he used to. By the second book, Mozambe is pretty much a punching bag for all the lowlifes he used to terrorize. (But it's not much of a spoiler to say Mozambe always comes out on top, mostly because he's still more vicious and cunning than everyone else.)

At times, you could almost kid yourself you're reading a regular noir detective story, because Lagarto is a low-tech backwater, where criminals and cops both use knives and fists a lot of the time. But Hammond uses science-fictional elements to add to the bleakness and paranoia, rather than just at random. The offworld visitors to Lagarto are perfect physical specimens, with lily white skin and chiseled physiques in contrast to the locals, who are all mixed-race and show their ages. The offworlders frequently have enhanced muscles, super-genitals and built-in defenses (like electrocution and poison claws) making them almost impossible to beat in a fair fight. Pretty much every offworlder we meet is a sadistic fuck, who toys with the locals for temporary amusement.

And there are other science fiction touches, as well. Like the holograms people use to communicate, which always wear an eerily happy face no matter how freaked out or pissed off the person's voice may be. And the occasional bits of surveillance technology that the hardscrabble cops manage to scare up.

The main glimmer of optimism in both novels comes from Maggie Orzo, a spoiled rich girl who becomes a police officer and tries to convince Mozambe to help clean up the sewer of the police department. She's young and idealistic, but you also never forget that she's almost as privileged and sheltered as those psychotic perfect offworlders.

Both KOP and Ex-KOP are super fast reads, with enough brutality and corruption to keep you riveted, while they still offer up the occasional glimmer of hope that Mozambe (and Lagarto) can be redeemed. You can probably read either book in one or two sittings. A warning, though: They're not especially well-written, and KOP in particular has some super clunky exposition. At his absolute worst, Hammond doesn't just tell instead of showing. He tells, and then he tells using slightly different words, and then he comes back a page or two later and tells again a couple more times. At his best, his writing is pulpy and cheesetastic, as in this scene, where a kinky pornstar is trying to seduce Mozambe (unsuccessfully):

"Ooh, is it interrogation time?" Liz turned on her "Liz Lagarto: Porn Star" persona. "I don't know anything about any of that, offither." She little-girl lisped the word officer...

I felt weak as I took in her parted lips, her jasmine-smelling hair, her erect nipples... "I said stop it." The words came out limp, as another part of me was becoming anything but.

Really, the writing is no worse than a hundred other detective novels. I used to consume crime fiction like popcorn, and I've encountered far worse prose. The saving grace of KOP and Ex-KOP are the unrepentant nastiness of Mozambe - even when he's trying to be a better person, he expresses it by being a foul bastard - and the slow spectacle of this lifelong asskicker becoming the world's hacky sack. Plus the unrelentingly cruel worldbuilding that goes into Lagarto, which is dystopian and unrelentingly horrible, and almost beyond saving. Supposedly, Hammond is working on a third Mozambe book, and I'm totally on board. [Amazon]

After reviewing every scientific study published about children's activity online, as well as consulting with experts from social networks and legislators, the group wrote up their conclusions and published them free online.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery, at least for people expecting the group to uncover horror stories about child molesters and porn trauma, was that children's most upsetting experiences online were usually instigated by other children. The group found that the most bullying and sexual come-ons to young people were extensions of their real-life social networks - kids they knew from school or the neighborhood were treating each other online the same way they've treated each other offline in generations past.

The report concludes that there is no such thing as online safety - only safety. Rules that parents teach kids about not getting into cars with strangers in real life apply online as well. The researchers found that, for example, there was a similar pattern between teens who respond to sexual solicitations from strangers online and teens who respond to similar solicitations on street corners. The troubles these teens face exist in their home lives, say the researchers, and have nothing to do with the kind of media they are using.

The researchers also found that web filtering programs - often dubbed "censorware" - seemed to be an ineffective way of preventing children from seeing upsetting content online.

Check out the report, or read the excellent summary on Ars Technica. Definitely worth a read.

SOURCES:

Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies [Harvard's original Berkman Center report]

Biggest online threat to kids is other kids [via Ars Technica]