Doing so allowed me to take some extensive walks on both days and burn off a lot of the food calories that would have accumulated otherwise. I was very happy to receive my invite to the closed beta on November 21 and found some time on the morning of Thanksgiving Day as well as on Black Friday to play the game on my Galaxy SIII. After completing a few training missions, players must choose a faction and either side with the Resistance, who are trying to protect mankind and prevent further Shaper influence, or side with the Enlightened, who consider Shaper influence to be beneficial and usher in the next logical step in the evolution of mankind. The objective is to hack the portals, link different portals, and create so-called control fields by forming triangles of linked portals.
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Players must move through the real world and visit these portals with their GPS-equipped Android smartphones to play the game. These portals are associated with Exotic Matter (called XM in the game) that needs to be collected to energize the player as well as the portals. The basic premise is that an alien influence called Shapers are trying to control human thought and are entering the world through portals that are often associated with historically significant locations, statues, or public displays of arts. Ingress defines a new category of game that could probably be best described as AR- MMOG ( Augmented Reality - Massively Multiplayer Online Game). On November 15 Google launched a closed beta of Ingress, a sci-fi themed game currently available only on the Android platform. I don't often write about games on my blog, but this one deserves an exception, because it is extremely innovative, unique, and a harbinger of things to come. Tagged: Cyberspace, Internet, Sci-Fi, Security, Society, Technology Musing about these things over coffee on a beautiful Sunday morning reminded me of an interview I gave to Erin Underwood at the Underwords blog a year ago, in which we talked about the importance of Sci-Fi for young adults and the oftentimes predictive powers of Sci-Fi literature… Like many other geeks of my generation, I devoured those books back then. Interestingly, in the real world, in 2010 the US Army activated their Cyber Command.Īnd when people talk about Cyberspace in the media today, let's not forget that that term, too, was coined by Sci-Fi authors such as Vernor Vinge and William Gibson in the early Eighties. These were the days of the early web and people still used AltaVista as a search engine - so a lot of the ideas in Net Force seemed pretty far out back then. The storyline quickly evolved from criminal investigations into cyber espionage and cyber warfare. Set in 2010 this was a gripping story about a new fictitious FBI division created to combat threats in cyberspace.
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It also reminded me of a Science Fiction series I read in the late Nineties and turn of the century: Tom Clancy's Net Force. Reading the NY Times over coffee this morning, I noticed the article " Nations Buying as Hackers Sell Flaws in Computer Code" which details how nations (and, in particular, their secrete service organizations) are now bidding for and buying zero-day exploits from hackers and security experts worldwide.Ĭertainly a very timely article, as the world still comes to grips with the evolving role of the NSA and what we've learned in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks.