Cardstore -- a U.S. greeting card company -- recently launched a Mother's Day video ad featuring job applicants being interviewed for a fake position they listed online.
The job description is purposely gruelling, meant to represent the "job" that millions of mothers have across the globe in honour of Mother's Day.
In the video, applicants believe they are being interviewed for a real job. But as the employer talks about the duties, the candidates show their visible disgust and objections to the position, calling it inhumane.
"Nobody's doing that for free!" exclaims one applicant.
Also see: Researchers discover being 'hangry' is a real thing
The ruse is revealed near the end of the video when the employer tells them millions of people around the world already hold this job -- mothers.
The look of relief on the applicant's faces is priceless! One of the applicants actually breaks down in tears while thinking about her mother.
In just one day, the ad has gone viral with over one-million views and close to 900 comments being posted on its YouTube page.
What are your thoughts on the ad? Thought-provoking or gimmicky? Sound off in the comments below.
Ben Foster playing Medivh in upcoming Warcraft movie
We've known for almost half a year now some of the names attached to the Warcraft movie directed by Duncan Jones, but we haven't known who the actors would be playing. However, actor Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma, X-Men: The Last Stand) recently revealed to IGN that he will be playing the role of Medivh when the film hits theaters in 2016.
"He came up in a time protecting an area, and the way he protected this area was through magic," Foster said. "As peace returned to this land he took a break. He hung up his staff, so to speak, or let his guns get dusty. We meet him as his friends are returning asking for his help in a battle." We won't spoil how closely that does - or doesn't - fit with the established Warcraft lore, but you can always read up on the character if you like.
Warcraft has already finished filming, but will require extensive post-production work due to the movie's use of CG characters. Foster himself seemed impressed with the work done so far. "The way that they're pushing motion-capture - I just saw some of the test footage - it's unlike anything I've ever seen," he said. "It's performance-capture. It pushes it to the next level. It's going to be one hell of a 3D event."
NASA looks to post-2020 International Space Station operations
NASA and Boeing, the International Space Stationâ NASA
Barring a catastrophic malfunction or damaging impacts from space debris, NASA should be able to keep the International Space Station (ISS) in operation at least through 2020 and, with steady funding, careful planning and a bit of luck, through 2028 -- the 30th anniversary of the first module's launch -- officials say.
But reduced power from degraded solar arrays and other crippling consequences of decades spent in the extreme environment of space will slowly but surely take their toll and the cost-benefit ratio eventually will tilt in favor of abandonment and a fiery controlled re-entry.
The International Space Station.
NASA
While the engineering and management challenges associated with keeping the station operational are daunting, ISS program manager Michael Suffredini says they should be doable, as long as NASA has the resources to build spare parts, pay for cargo launches and provide transportation for U.S. astronauts, either aboard U.S. commercial spacecraft or Russian Soyuz capsules.
"We have a space station that is designed in a modular fashion meant for repair," Suffredini told CBS News. "So as long as you have spares for all the things that can break, you can last as long as the structure will let you last. Within reason.
"The structure, it turns out, most of it was originally designed for 30 years. So all that margin has made it relatively easy for us to get to 2020. 2028 will be a little bit more challenging. ... We may have to sharpen our pencils to get to 2028."
Boeing, NASA's space station prime contractor, is currently conducting a detailed engineering analysis to verify that the U.S. segment of the complex can safely operate through the end of the decade. Russian engineers are assessing their own hardware, as are the other international partners.
The Boeing analysis is not yet complete and additional work will be needed to to show the lab can be safely operated beyond 2020. But Suffredini said no major surprises have cropped up so far and he's optimistic the station eventually can be cleared to fly through 2028 -- in theory, at least.
"When we get to 2028, the solar arrays are going to be struggling, I'm probably going to have a handful of radiator lines that have been isolated," he said. "2028 might be possible, but it also might be very challenging because then you're talking about the cost of replacing big things that may be prohibitive.
"All our analysis kind of says we think we can get to 2028 and that's the path we're headed on. As we start getting beyond 2028, if it makes sense, and things aren't failing at a rate that makes it difficult for us to keep up, and the country thinks it's the right thing to do, then we can look at going beyond that.
"But 2028's kind of where we're drawing our line today based on the original design of the structure."
An Engineering Marvel
The first element of what would become the ISS was the NASA-financed, Russian-built Zarya propulsion and storage module, also known as the Functional Cargo Block, or FGB. It was launched 15 years ago this November by a Proton rocket. Two weeks later, a space shuttle carried the first NASA component into orbit, the Unity connecting node, and the two were "mated" to form the core of the station.
The Russian-built NASA-financed Zarya module, left, was the first component of the International Space Station to reach orbit. The second was the Unity connecting node, right. The two were connected during a 1998 shuttle flight.
NASA
NASA modified the assembly sequence in the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster and a subsequent decision by the Bush administration to retire the shuttle by the end of the decade. The U.S. segment of the outpost was declared complete after the final shuttle flight in July 2011.
To understand the engineering challenge facing space station operators, it helps to visualize the 900,000-pound structure as it orbits the Earth, 260 miles up, streaking through space at 5 miles per second and enduring temperature swings of 500 degrees Fahrenheit as it moves from sunlight to shadow and back again.
The long axis of the lab complex, normally oriented in the direction of travel, generally stretches out like a train, with pressurized modules connected fore and aft like passenger cars. At the front end of the complex -- the locomotive in the train analogy -- the U.S. Harmony module leads the way, with the European Space Agency's Columbus laboratory attached to a right-side port and Japan's Kibo lab extending to the left.
Harmony's aft port is connected to the U.S. Destiny laboratory module, which in turn is bolted to the central Unity connecting node. The U.S. Quest airlock extends to the right and the Tranquility module extends to the left. A cargo storage compartment extends straight down and a set of four massive gyroscopes, used to re-orient the station and maintain its commanded position, or "attitude," is housed in a short truss that extends from Unity's top port.
The U.S. segment of the station, which includes ESA, Japan and the Canadian Space Agency, extends from Unity forward. The Russian segment begins just beyond Unity's aft port where the Zarya module is attached. The Russian Rassvet module extends down from Zarya and serves as a docking port for unmanned cargo ships and manned Soyuz spacecraft. Bringing up the rear of the space station "train" is the Russian Zvezda command module.
The Poisk docking compartment extends upward from Zarya and the Pirs module, which serves as a docking port and an airlock, extends straight down. An aft port is available for manned and unmanned vehicles. The Russians plan to replace Pirs next year with a large laboratory module. Later, they plan to attach a multi-port docking compartment to the new lab and then a solar array assembly that will extend from that module to the right.
Mounted at right angles to the long axis of the station is its primary solar power truss, a huge assembly spanning the length of a football field that houses critical electrical components, ammonia coolant loops and steerable radiator panels.
The Canadian robot arm can move from one side of the truss to the other atop a mobile platform. On each end of the truss, four huge sets of solar arrays rotate like giant paddle wheels to track the sun as the station orbits the Earth.
The entire lab complex can be maneuvered, or re-oriented, by firing Russian rocket thrusters or by changing the speed of NASA's gyroscopes inside the Z1 truss atop the Unity module. Rocket thrusters are typically used for major maneuvers while the gyros are primarily used for more minor attitude changes.
The power truss is anchored to the long axis of the station by 10 massive struts that connect the central S0 truss segment to the top of the Destiny laboratory. Those struts, like all of the station structure, expand and contract as the lab moves into and out of sunlight.
NASA and Boeing, the International Space Station's prime contractor, are studying the feasibility of operating the outpost through 2020. So far, no show stoppers have emerged and station advocates say it may be possible to keep the complex in operation through 2028, the 30th anniversary of the first module's launching.
NASA
They also have to handle the stresses generated when the station is maneuvered, when visiting vehicles dock at the outpost and when Russian thrusters are fired to boost its altitude. Those same forces also act on module ports and attachment fittings.
While the station might appear to be a rigid structure, it actually bends and flexes under a wide variety of loads. And that flexing, repeated year in and year out, poses a threat to the lab's structural integrity.
To assess the long-term structural health of the station, Boeing engineers developed detailed computer models based on NASA's projected use -- the expected stresses caused by future dockings, reboosts, crew activity and thermal cycles -- and combined that with actual data from on-board accelerometers and strain gauges.
The idea was to characterize the stresses acting across the station to identify areas of particular concern and to find out how they will fare over an extended mission.
"What we're looking at is theoretical crack growth," Pamela McVeigh, the engineer in charge of the Boeing structural analysis in Houston, told CBS News. "So the failure mode would be you'd have a crack beginning, probably (at) a bolt hole, and the crack would grow to another edge. So you'd lose like a flange on a C-beam, or an I-beam. The stiffness of your structure would then change, the bolt hole you that you were growing the crack out of, now that bolt wouldn't be effective."
McVeigh's boss, Boeing space station vehicle director Brad Cothran, said the stress comes from a combination of mechanical loads and temperature.
"It doesn't really care which one broke it," he said. "If the loads get high enough in a piece of structure, it will cause it to either yield or hit ultimate, which means crack in half."
And once a crack starts, it can propagate and eventually weaken the affected component. McVeigh said the phenomenon is similar to bending a paperclip.
"If you bend that paperclip back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, eventually it snaps," she said. "That's essentially what we're trying to prevent from happening.
Repetitive stress, thermal and mechanical, is one area of concern. Another is making sure periodic rocket firings or other activities don't overly "excite" the station structure, setting up some sort of harmonic oscillation.
"That's what we want to avoid," Cothran said, "anything that hits a mode of the structure that would cause an interaction. Think about the Tacoma bridge. It starts rocking and it just violently comes apart, right? So those are the kinds of things we want to avoid."
The central S0 segment of the space station»»»s main power truss is seen shortly after attachment to the U.S. Destiny laboratory module. The struts connecting the two must carry the load when the space station maneuvers.
NASA
He was referring to the ill-fated Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a one-mile-long suspension bridge in Washington state that collapsed in 1940, four months after its dedication, when 40-mph winds coupled with the bridge's natural vibration mode to set up a catastrophic "torsional flutter."
"We have seen some of those kind of interactions," Cothran said. "Nothing like the bridge, it didn't keep going, but we've seen some things interact up there."
He recalled a yaw maneuver about a year ago, when the station was rotated 180 degrees so Zvezda was in front and Harmony was at the rear.
"A lot of times, we flip the station around and fly backwards when people come to dock and just in that simple yaw ... 180 degrees, that was one that really sent us into a tizzy," he said.
"What happened was, as the control system saw us spinning, there was flex in the structure, it appeared the structure wasn't moving. Then it would cut off and the structure would move ahead. Then it would fire on again. So we got into this oscillation setting up in the structure, that we were like whoa, time out. Don't do that again, right?"
Such oscillations can be corrected by updating the station's control software to change the timing of rocket firings and other activities. Even so, the station endures constant stress and strain from normal, day-to-day operations.
As it turns out, the struts connecting the power truss to the Destiny module are not the area of highest concern.
"The 10 struts that connect the S0 to the lab are definitely one of the areas we wanted to look very closely at," McVeigh said. "The lab side of that interface didn't turn out to be too much of a concern. The struts themselves are very beefy. It's the connections at the two ends. The S0 side is a little more challenging, but the teams were able to show the connections are good to 2020."
Interestingly, one of the areas of highest stress on the station is the integrated electronics assembly at the base of the far left P6 solar array. The P6 truss segment was launched early in the assembly sequence and because the solar panels turn to track the sun, the P6 IEA has experienced higher heating than other components.
But McVeigh said the hardware should be good through the end of the decade and while the Boeing analysis is not yet complete, "I'm feeling fairly confident in reaching 2020," she said. "I have not seen anything that rules it out. I've seen a few things that will be challenges."
STATION'S COMPLEXITY, SPACE ENVIRONMENT ADD TO MANAGEMENT CHALLENGE
Along with structural integrity, the Boeing study is focussed on three other areas: systems that could suffer catastrophic failures unrelated to fatigue; the availability of critical spares; and the expected lifetime of key components.
Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano floats in the multi-window cupola compartment aboard the International Space Station.
NASA
Even with a sound structure, the station still faces the possibility of catastrophic failures resulting from micrometeoroid impacts or collisions with space debris.
The station was designed to withstand the sorts of impacts expected over its lifetime and flight controllers are always on guard for possible "conjunctions" that might require the station to maneuver out of the way.
Boeing engineers are focusing on systems like the station's high-pressure oxygen tanks and 3,000-psi lines attached to the Quest airlock that are used to repressurize the compartment and service spacesuits.
"We wanted to make sure those kind of things weren't going to fail that could result in a catastrophic hazard," Cothran said. "We've been through all that analysis now and we've cleared all those systems. Our oxygen high-pressure system ... turned out to be very robust."
Other equally important systems include the station's ammonia coolant loops and radiators, which are used to get rid of the heat generated by the lab's electronics. But in that case, a failure would impact the operation of the station, not threaten its survival.
"If I ever get a hole in an ammonia line, it will be a challenge for us to find it and repair it," Suffredini said. "The only way to ID (a leak) is to actually see the ammonia coming out and the conditions usually don't stay right to see ammonia coming out very long once you start to lose pressure."
As a result, NASA has ordered a high-tech sensor that the station's robot arm can move about to sniff out low-level traces of ammonia. The sensor should be ready for launch in about a year and a half.
The availability of critical spares is another area of focus for the Boeing engineers, making sure the components currently in orbit have backups available or in the pipeline for launch before a failure might occur.
New lithium-ion batteries, which feed stored solar array power to the station when the lab is in Earth's shadow, are scheduled for launch in 2017 that will keep that system healthy through 2020.
More than a ton of spare parts are being readied for launch to upgrade the Zarya module, and a steady stream of components is in production for launches downstream, including high-pressure oxygen and nitrogen tanks and ammonia coolant pumps.
A camera aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft captured this view of the International Space Station with the shuttle Discovery docked to the forward Harmony module. With the shuttle program complete, NASA is relying on commercial cargo ships to fill in the gap hauling supplies and spare parts to the outpost.
NASA
The solar arrays themselves are degrading over time as a natural consequence of flying in space, but Cothran they will continue to supply the station's electrical needs through 2020. Getting to 2028 will require increased efficiency and at some point, the Russians, who currently get about 8 kilowatts of power from NASA's arrays, will have to rely on their own solar panels.
"We can be more efficient in our distribution system ... so the power to the end user, even though you've lost it at the transmission station, your end user will get some more power," Cothran said.
"We're even thinking out of the box. Ten years from now, if you just wanted to go throw some dumb blankets out there, if you will, and just wrap them around the truss (you would) get something out of them. There are all sorts of things the team is looking at that we could do."
Shelf life is another challenge facing station operators. Electrical components might be used, or stored, for many years and Boeing is doing a top-to-bottom analysis to identify internal systems that might be susceptible to failure after extended periods in storage, either in space or on the ground.
One problem already identified: programmable computer chips that somehow lose their internal charge over time.
"We've got a lot of data points that say that those (chips), once they start getting into double-digit years, they lose their internal charge and can't necessarily retain their memory," Cothran said.
"It's not something you find in the commercial industry because cell phones, laptops, anything we use down here on the ground has only got a useful life of three to five years, right?
"But since a lot of our parts were built back in the 90s and we've got spare units, it's something we're having to worry about. It's not that it totally fails, what we have to do is we have to go back in and refresh it. So it's not something that's a show stopper, it's just something we learned and as long as we're proactive, we're fine."
Assuming the primary structure passes muster and no show stoppers turn up in the areas of shelf life or catastrophic failure scenarios, ensuring a steady supply of spare parts will remain NASA's major technical challenge through 2020 and beyond.
"It's a whole integrated process to make sure every one of the (replaceable components) will last to 2020, and you've got the right sparing," Suffredini said. "And then every year, we redo our analysis to see is this better or worse? You can imagine that for everything that's failed, that's a new data point.
"If I do my job right, we really could go to 2028 if I don't have ... to buy a whole bunch of new hardware, I just keep going and just let the analysis year to year tell me what I have to do."
OVER the past decade, tech giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft have given the information technology (IT) sector a sexy facelift that is luring more students and graduates to the industry.
But the newly trendy image of the sector and the increasingly intense competition for tech talent have also made it difficult for some companies here to find the workers they need.
Part of the allure of the tech sector is that its salaries have been heading north, say local universities and companies.
Mr Anand Sampath, chief financial officer of eG Innovations, says pay has generally been rising - and quite steeply at that - especially in the past three years.
A Singapore Management University (SMU) spokesman also notes that survey data from 2011 to 2013 show that IT salaries have been progressively increasing.
SMU information systems management graduates earned a median of $3,300 to $3,725 last year. In 2012, they earned $3,000 to $3,775.
At the National University of Singapore (NUS), graduates of some IT-related courses earned a median monthly pay of $3,000 to $3,400 last year, compared with $2,880 to $3,300 in 2012.
For Nanyang Technological University (NTU) graduates in similar disciplines, salaries have stayed mostly flat, at a median of about $3,100 to $3,400 last year, from $3,200 to $3,400 in 2012.
The numbers come from the universities' surveys of students who graduated and started work last year.
Associate Professor Lee Wee Sun, vice-dean of undergraduate studies at the NUS School of Computing, says the NUS survey also found that fresh graduates in computing generally received higher pay than the overall average of full-time employed fresh graduates. He says computing graduates are keen on jobs not just with Google, Facebook and Microsoft, but also in the banking and finance sector.
On top of that, Prof Lee also notes a new trend: "We are also seeing more computing graduates who start their own businesses, such as Zopim, which was acquired by Zendesk for $30 million, and Touch Dimensions, an award-winning game developer."
As tech companies grow exponentially and start-ups begin making big bucks, companies across a range of sectors are clamouring for the same pool of IT-trained professionals.
More than 14 per cent of NTU graduates who found full-time jobs joined the IT industry last year, said Professor Kam Chan Hin, senior associate provost for undergraduate education at NTU, citing NTU's survey results.
An SMU spokesman says the most popular career choices for its School of Information Systems graduates include IT project manager, business consultant and software, Web and multimedia developer.
One of the university's graduates, computer science major Saraswathy Aruna Annamalai, is an associate analyst in the compensation and benefits team at LinkedIn, a professional networking website. Ms Annamalai, who graduated this year, says the salary was not a key factor in her choosing the job as she prefers to focus on the company culture.
Even though her role is in HR, she says the beauty of IT is that it is useful in any industry.
Mr Yasu Sato, LinkedIn's regional human resources director, notes: "The demand for and supply of software development talent in Singapore is the highest among all South-east Asian countries, based on LinkedIn's talent pool data.
"These professionals in Singapore are seven times more likely to be contacted by a recruiter than those in Indonesia."
LinkedIn has also grown its presence in the tech world in recent years. It started its Asia-Pacific centre in Singapore three years ago with two employees, and Mr Sato says that the talent required to support its growth has increased many times, with more than 150 employees here today.
Prof Lee from NUS says that the use of IT is becoming one of the main avenues for improving productivity, adding: "IT talent is becoming critical for companies in Singapore and there is increasing global competition for the best computing graduates."
But this competition is putting a strain on some companies like eG Innovations, which uses big data to monitor the health of corporate IT facilities.
Mr Sampath says: "There is a mismatch between the skills the IT industry needs and what graduates are trained to do."
He says the company has struggled for several years to hire Singaporeans for technical positions.
"Local graduates are unwilling to do pure technical work - what the industry calls 'grunt' work - even for a few years. They would rather do work that has some marketing or sales component in it."
He also notes that those willing to remain in technical positions would rather be in management than writing or fixing computer code.
He feels that Singapore should have a thriving homegrown IT industry, given its headstart in IT several decades ago and its superb business climate, but "what we have are branches and subsidiaries of software companies from the rest of the world".
While some blame the lack of homegrown entrepreneurial drive for this, Mr Sampath believes the education system and the expectations of graduates have contributed to the phenomenon.
He says: "We would have been happy to invest in more technical teams and groups in Singapore, but the lack of enough people of the kind we need has forced us to invest in research and development elsewhere. Singapore has definitely lost out on jobs that could have been created."
OVER the past decade, tech giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft have given the information technology (IT) sector a sexy facelift that is luring more students and graduates to the industry.
But the newly trendy image of the sector and the increasingly intense competition for tech talent have also made it difficult for some companies here to find the workers they need.
Part of the allure of the tech sector is that its salaries have been heading north, say local universities and companies.
Mr Anand Sampath, chief financial officer of eG Innovations, says pay has generally been rising - and quite steeply at that - especially in the past three years.
A Singapore Management University (SMU) spokesman also notes that survey data from 2011 to 2013 show that IT salaries have been progressively increasing.
SMU information systems management graduates earned a median of $3,300 to $3,725 last year. In 2012, they earned $3,000 to $3,775.
At the National University of Singapore (NUS), graduates of some IT-related courses earned a median monthly pay of $3,000 to $3,400 last year, compared with $2,880 to $3,300 in 2012.
For Nanyang Technological University (NTU) graduates in similar disciplines, salaries have stayed mostly flat, at a median of about $3,100 to $3,400 last year, from $3,200 to $3,400 in 2012.
The numbers come from the universities' surveys of students who graduated and started work last year.
Associate Professor Lee Wee Sun, vice-dean of undergraduate studies at the NUS School of Computing, says the NUS survey also found that fresh graduates in computing generally received higher pay than the overall average of full-time employed fresh graduates. He says computing graduates are keen on jobs not just with Google, Facebook and Microsoft, but also in the banking and finance sector.
On top of that, Prof Lee also notes a new trend: "We are also seeing more computing graduates who start their own businesses, such as Zopim, which was acquired by Zendesk for $30 million, and Touch Dimensions, an award-winning game developer."
As tech companies grow exponentially and start-ups begin making big bucks, companies across a range of sectors are clamouring for the same pool of IT-trained professionals.
More than 14 per cent of NTU graduates who found full-time jobs joined the IT industry last year, said Professor Kam Chan Hin, senior associate provost for undergraduate education at NTU, citing NTU's survey results.
An SMU spokesman says the most popular career choices for its School of Information Systems graduates include IT project manager, business consultant and software, Web and multimedia developer.
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One of the university's graduates, computer science major Saraswathy Aruna Annamalai, is an associate analyst in the compensation and benefits team at LinkedIn, a professional networking website. Ms Annamalai, who graduated this year, says the salary was not a key factor in her choosing the job as she prefers to focus on the company culture.
Even though her role is in HR, she says the beauty of IT is that it is useful in any industry.
Mr Yasu Sato, LinkedIn's regional human resources director, notes: "The demand for and supply of software development talent in Singapore is the highest among all South-east Asian countries, based on LinkedIn's talent pool data.
"These professionals in Singapore are seven times more likely to be contacted by a recruiter than those in Indonesia."
LinkedIn has also grown its presence in the tech world in recent years. It started its Asia-Pacific centre in Singapore three years ago with two employees, and Mr Sato says that the talent required to support its growth has increased many times, with more than 150 employees here today.
Prof Lee from NUS says that the use of IT is becoming one of the main avenues for improving productivity, adding: "IT talent is becoming critical for companies in Singapore and there is increasing global competition for the best computing graduates."
But this competition is putting a strain on some companies like eG Innovations, which uses big data to monitor the health of corporate IT facilities.
Mr Sampath says: "There is a mismatch between the skills the IT industry needs and what graduates are trained to do."
He says the company has struggled for several years to hire Singaporeans for technical positions.
"Local graduates are unwilling to do pure technical work - what the industry calls 'grunt' work - even for a few years. They would rather do work that has some marketing or sales component in it."
He also notes that those willing to remain in technical positions would rather be in management than writing or fixing computer code. (why? shit?)
He feels that Singapore should have a thriving homegrown IT industry, given its headstart in IT several decades ago and its superb business climate, but "what we have are branches and subsidiaries of software companies from the rest of the world".
While some blame the lack of homegrown entrepreneurial drive for this, Mr Sampath believes the education system and the expectations of graduates have contributed to the phenomenon.
He says: "We would have been happy to invest in more technical teams and groups in Singapore, but the lack of enough people of the kind we need has forced us to invest in research and development elsewhere. Singapore has definitely lost out on jobs that could have been created."
It starts out simply. One day, you're scrolling through the Naval Criminal Investigative Service database, identifying a perp's body when an alert flashes red on your monitor. "INTRUSION DETECTED," it screams. You're getting hacked and there's only one solution: Call your bumbling partner over and have him join you at the keyboard. The two of you frantically bang out rapid-fire key sequences as random program windows flash onscreen. The hacker's getting further and further into the system. Your partner's never seen code like this before and his usual tricks to combat it aren't working. That's when the display goes dead and your silver fox of a boss saves the day by pulling the power plug of your workstation.
That is how the entertainment industry wants you to think hacking works. But, like most Hollywood fantasies, it couldn't be further from the truth. Ubisoft (the studio responsible for Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) knows this and for its upcoming cross-platform release, Watch Dogs, the company went to great lengths to ensure its game world didn't fall into those same tropes. Watch Dogs focuses on mega-hacker Aiden Pearce as he manipulates a Chicago run by the CenTral Operating System (CTOS) using only the smartphone in his hand. This CTOS controls everything from the simulated Windy City's traffic lights and ubiquitous surveillance cameras, to the drawbridges that cross the Chicago River. It's a fictitious, near-future vision of connected urban life, but still Ubisoft wanted it to hew as closely to hacking reality as possible.
The development team's reasoning for this was simple: "We're trying to be relevant," Watch Dogs Content Manager Thomas Geffroyd told me. "We felt that by understanding how negatively this culture has been portrayed, we could try to present the public with a more positive and accurate view of hacking and hackers."
A Hollywood depiction of hacking on the show NCIS
To do this, Ubisoft tapped the cybersecurity experts at Russia-based Kaspersky Labs. Together, the companies worked to vet every shell script and brute-force attack portrayed in the game to keep the intrusions plausible. Accuracy is the linchpin of Watch Dogs' world, so having one of the largest internet security firms read over the script, play early versions of the game and point out any inaccuracies was integral to the game's development process.
AN UNUSUAL REQUEST
In January 2013, Kaspersky released a report on a long-running cyberespionage campaign, dubbed "Red October," that infected computers in 43 countries and stole countless encrypted files from government agencies, military contractors and nuclear research facilities. In the days that followed, the lab received a number of requests from private-sector companies asking for extra investigation about the attacks -- likely to see if they'd been targeted, as well.
In that batch of emails, though, was a different question from an altogether different firm. Ubisoft wanted to send the script for Watch Dogs over so Kaspersky could make sure all the hacking details were accurate. The studio had already spent three years researching cybersecurity and hacking; information the team readily found online. Still, they wanted a second set of eyes -- Kaspersky's eyes -- to make sure small details weren't overlooked along the way.
"We felt that by understanding how negatively this culture has been portrayed, we could try to present the public with a more positive and accurate view of hacking and hackers," Geffroyd said.
Principal Security Researcher Vitaly Kamluk said it was a pretty unusual query, but he didn't see the harm in his team helping. "We're fans of video games," he said, "and we said why not?" For Kamluk and his coworkers, the opportunity to work on Watch Dogs was a welcome change of pace and so they agreed to the task.
All of Ubisoft's research had paid off: The suggestions from Kaspersky were relatively minor. "We didn't do anything stupid in the first place," Geffroyd said. Though he acknowledged that research may have attracted the attention of a few three-letter agencies. "It'd mean we did our job right!" he said. "I'm pretty much on any watch lists the NSA may have. I don't have a doubt about that." To Ubisoft's credit, Kaspersky found little issue with Watch Dogs' script and instead focused on polishing the game from a technical perspective. "We know how hacking happens," Kamluk said. "What skills are required ... the order of the actions." This, he told me, framed the team's approach.
For example, at one point in the game, Pearce has to steal a sizable database and copy a hard drive from a server that's tucked away in a protected datacenter. The script's first draft had him log in by brute-force attacking the system (i.e., trying all possible character combinations of a short password) and then transferring the data to a network drive. That scenario wasn't quite right according to Kamluk. "It may happen in the movies, but not in real life."
Instead, Kamluk said a hacker would have to reboot the server via a hard reset, boot a custom operating system from an external device and then start copying an image of the hard drive. This type of action would realistically trigger an alarm, prompting security to come and check for physical intrusions. Which, as it turned out, was the immediate next part of Watch Dogs' story anyhow. In this case, Ubisoft's decision to not follow the Hollywood model should actually help intensify gameplay.
Watch Dogs' lead writer explains the project's origins
Another suggestion that added to the realism, while also likely upping the tension, was a change to an in-car sequence. Ubisoft had originally written for Pearce to throw a GPS tag on his target and then follow him, but Kaspersky changed the sequence to make it a little more authentic. "[Pearce] has access to the surveillance cameras, can see through them and hack the bad guy just by jumping from one camera to the next without moving a finger," Kamluk said. So, instead, he suggested Ubisoft have Pearce shadow his target while copying data over a Bluetooth connection. "That would make more sense to be in close proximity to the target; stealing data instead of just tracking where he goes," Kamluk said.
In Watch Dogs' version of Chicago, smartphones, closed-circuit TV surveillance cameras and even natural gas lines are all connected to the CTOS. With that many devices on one network, Ubisoft's initial idea to use IPv4, the current internet protocol system, for the game's IP addresses (e.g., the 192.1.0.11 used to log in to many routers) wasn't plausible. The problem? IP address exhaustion: The more users or devices on a network, the fewer unique, assignable addresses that are available. Kamluk advised the team to adopt IPv6 instead since it would offer more addresses and be more realistic for a near-future city. "We went through the whole game and fixed all the visuals to make sure we could get that right," Geffroyd said. "These are the little details [Kaspersky] helped us with."
Even though Ubisoft is striving for accuracy with Watch Dogs, Geffroyd maintained the developer's focus has always been on gameplay first. That goes for potential sequels, too.
Aiden Pearce identifies a hacking target with the in-game smartphone
"We're not a simulator. With Watch Dogs, we provide entertainment and we strive for authenticity," he said. "If we'd [implemented Kaspersky's input] sooner, it would have been harder to get all of their information and try to fit it in, because it probably would have had an effect on gameplay." And because of that, Geffroyd would have had to reject some of Kaspersky's suggestions. Having the lab run through the script afterward, he said, was probably the best way to go.
Where Watch Dogs strays from reality is in how long a hack actually takes. Depending on the complexity of a real-world security system, a hack can take days or, in extreme cases, months. That's where realism is a speed bump to fun and could make the game boring -- it's something Kaspersky acknowledged must be altered to fit the constraints of a video game. That isn't to say that Watch Dogs is inaccurate, though. "Everything happening in the game is feasible in one way or another," said Geffroyd. "The issue inherent with gaming is we have to extrapolate shortcuts. We have to respect the medium and make a compelling experience."
Geffroyd knows that hacking is often boring, but said its effects are "pretty straightforward" and he thinks that's what Watch Dogs does well. There are real shell scripts present in the game (UNIX command lines), but they're counterbalanced with interfaces and components that most people would understand. "They tried to be as accurate as possible," Kamluk said. "I was impressed that the developers actually asked us to share some typical screens of what hacking tools look like." To make the game's hacking more appealing, Ubisoft also emphasized physical results of hacking, like blowing up steam pipes and lifting drawbridges -- stuff that's immediately fun.
"Everything happening in the game is feasible in one way or another," said Geffroyd.
The day I spoke with Geffroyd, he said a hacker friend told him that work's being done to create a phone like Pearce's. And, more importantly, the project had just secured funding. How? By showing the investors some Watch Dogs trailers. "I would say that everything we've extrapolated is pretty ensured to happen," Geffroyd said.
These in-game hacks aren't video game fantasy, either. Kamluk said he's seen hacking tools like network and vulnerability scanners running on modern smartphones, and added that it's possible for a phone to act as a front-end device that's connected to a more capable, off-site file server. "The list of vulnerabilities that you see on the phone in Watch Dogs? Similar things are possible," he said.
According to Geffroyd, when Anonymous wants to attack a website with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), it uses a desktop app that you don't even need technical knowledge to operate. "It's a very simple app you can download after a Google search," he said. All you need to do is enter an IP address and the app will start to DDoS the target. "The reality of hacking applications is already there," he said. "We're just extending it a little." Essentially, anyone can be a hacker nowadays.
SMART CITIES FOR SMART MASSES
Instances of Watch Dogs' smart city tech are already in place around the globe, albeit on a much smaller scale. New York City's plans for Hudson Yards, a sensor-laden neighborhood that monitors seemingly every aspect of life, show progress on the domestic front. IBM has had Rio de Janeiro wired with a vast emergency monitoring system since 2010. And in Songdo, South Korea, Cisco has invested $35 billion to create an embedded telepresence infrastructure and energy-management system. There isn't a single operating system akin to Watch Dogs' CTOS running an entire city just yet, but, like mobile hacking tools, Geffroyd and Kamluk don't see it as being too far off. The threat of an Aiden Pearce may not be, either.
"The more we develop, the more devices we have, the more realistic this scenario [of hackers controlling a city] is," Kamluk said. "We're getting surrounded by an enormous number of digital devices connected over a network, which creates a lot of opportunities for hackers."
Sometimes the hacker becomes the hacked in Watch Dogs
When Kamluk says "devices," that term isn't limited to what's in your pocket. Case in point: Last year, a hacker took down a portion of Moscow's networked speed cameras by uploading malware to the police computer system, and destroyed some of the cameras in the process. The attack put the traffic system out of commission for several weeks. Kaspersky was hired to investigate, but is contractually prohibited from disclosing any further details.
"People tend to create systems extending capabilities and implementing new features that are so attractive to the customer, but they don't consider security," Kamluk said.
One of the easiest points of intrusion right now are the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that operate on unencrypted networks. In-game and in the real world, SCADAs control traffic lights, drawbridges and natural gas pipelines. "Thousands and thousands" of them have been installed in the past 15 years and are connected to the internet, according to Geffroyd. And because the laborers putting them in place aren't security technicians, an absurd amount of the SCADA traffic is open to the public and access is a search result away. "You'd be surprised what you can do without doing anything technically advanced," Geffroyd said. "You just have to put in the very easy-to-guess default password and login [credentials]." You don't need to be in the same city or even the same country to exploit these sensors, either.
Geffroyd told me that he hopes an actual smart city wouldn't have as many weaknesses as Watch Dogs' version of Chicago, but complex systems are more apt to have security gaps. Because the first smart cities will be the likes of New York or even London, they'll probably have a lot of legacy tech in place. Those older, unprotectable elements are what Geffroyd sees as weak links in a viable security system.
"People tend to create systems extending capabilities and implementing new features that are so attractive to the customer, but they don't consider security," Kamluk said. "Security must be considered extremely seriously; human lives will depend on how secure these systems are."
We've known for almost half a year now some of the names attached to the Warcraft movie directed by Duncan Jones, but we haven't known who the actors would be playing. However, actor Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma, X-Men: The Last Stand) recently revealed to IGN that he will be playing the role of Medivh when the film hits theaters in 2016.
-- ST ILLUSTRATION: CHNG CHOON HIONG
