Happy New Year to everyone, I wish you well

Drinking Vodka With Style

Jim Carrey - Players Club

Alcohol + Fireworks + Lack Of Judgement =

Too drunk?

iPad Air

At first glance, with the Apple Reality Distortion Field at full power, the iPad Air seems like an impeccable, immaculate device that could only ever be conceived by the magicians at Apple in California. The iPad Air is some 30% lighter and 20% thinner than the iPad that it replaces, while still retaining the same Retina display and 10 hours of battery life. Somehow, just somehow, Apple made us feel that it had yet again pulled off the impossible. In reality, the iPad Air, while very attractive, isn’t remarkable at all. The new Kindle Fire HDX, for example, has a higher-resolution screen, more battery life, weighs less, and even costs less than the iPad Air.

Apple has this amazing ability to dress up mundane advances in software and hardware as remarkable, life-changing features. This isn’t to say that Apple doesn’t have an industry-leading industrial design department and supply chain, but objectively the lead that Apple has over the software, design, and manufacturing departments of other companies is nowhere near as large as we think. This is what we refer to as the Apple Reality Distortion Field (RDF).

The cause of the RDF is multifaceted. The term was originally applied to Steve Jobs himself, who used a mix of charisma, hyperbole, and cult of personality to convince people — colleagues, developers, an adoring audience — that Apple was capable of regularly making the impossible possible. At some point, though, following a slew of beautiful and functional products — the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad — Apple itself became the source of the RDF. Without going into the sociological and psychological causes of the RDF, it’s simply enough to say this: If you sell hundreds of millions of devices that regularly score the highest marks in customer satisfaction surveys, and often provide the first high-quality computing experience the person has ever had, those devices become revered — and the maker of those devices is deified.

As you probably know, when reverence, faith, or love enter the equation, all hope of objectivity goes out the window. For those inside the RDF — for those who look at Apple with rose-tinted glasses — there is nothing particularly unusual about this behavior. Much in the same way that we find a lover’s mannerisms disproportionately adorable, or put up with friends and loved ones treating us poorly, Apple appears to be capable of doing no wrong. For those of us outside Apple’s RDF, however, this blind belief and adherence to a corporate and massively profitable god is puzzling at best and intolerably stupid at worst.

Which leads us neatly onto the topic of Apple’s latest illusory masterpiece: The iPad Air. If you take a quick look at your favorite tech websites, or ask a devout Apple fan for their opinion, you would think that the iPad Air is the thinnest, lightest, and most marvellous slab of technology to ever grace this planet of ours. If we take a step back and look at it objectively, though, we can see the Air for what it truly is: A very well designed tablet that is ultimately no better, and much more expensive, than an 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX.

8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX. Not quite as sexy as the iPad Air, but still a mean machine.

The 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX ($400) has a quad-core Snapdragon 800 SoC, a 2560×1600 (339 PPI) display, and battery life of between 12 (mixed use) and 18 hours (reading). Perhaps most importantly, though, the HDX is just 7.8mm thick and weighs 374 grams. The iPad Air is slightly thinner (7.5mm), but in almost every other way — weight, resolution, battery life — it is inferior to the HDX. The Snapdragon 800 is perhaps a little slower than the Air’s A7 SoC, depending on the benchmark. It’s also important to note that the iPad Air’s display is 10.1 inches at a 4:3 aspect ratio, while the HDX is only 8.9 inches at 16:10, which works out at around 20% more screen real estate for the iPad. The larger display could explain the iPad Air’s extra heft (469 grams), but the HDX’s svelte dimensions and better battery life are still very noteworthy.

It’s unfair, however, to naively compare the hardware without also looking at the rest of the package — and even the most hardened haters have to admit that Apple has a mighty fine package. Again, to put it in the most simple terms, if Apple didn’t produce devices that look and feel good, and operate almost flawlessly, then the Reality Distortion Field would’ve long ago faded. For those of us outside the RDF, we constantly look for flaws, no matter how small or meaningless, that can be thrown in the face of the Apple devotees — anything, really anything, to deconstruct their blind faith.

Deep down, though, we know such efforts are in vain. It will always be possible to find flaws in Apple’s software and hardware, but it’s evident that they’re ultimately of little or no consequence. Apple’s sales figures continue to swell. New users are trying Apple devices for the first time, being blown away by the experience, and becoming zealots in record quantities. Despite the continuing protestations of detractors who will do or say anything to push Apple from its pedestal, the Reality Distortion Field remains in place and in full effect.

Maybe the RDF isn’t around Apple any more, though. Maybe… the Reality Distortion Field has moved so that it’s now around us, around those who stubbornly refuse to admit how awesome Apple actually is.

Chinese monetize the moon

The Chinese space push is in full swing, but the CNSA (Chinese NASA) is nowhere near ready to compete in terms of PR. When Chang’e 3 — China’s first lunar rover — rolled from its lander this week, it made its country one of just three to ever drive a lander on the Moon. In celebration of the event, Chinese national news services broadcast some incredible live video of the rover (named Yutu, which means “Jade Rabbit”). However, the video does not seem to have been released to anyone but the Chinese media, and right now the internet has no adequate recording we can find. Two reports show the lander begin from two different angles, though both are low quality. Check out the videos below; fuzzy or not, they really are something.

Yutu rode to the Moon aboard China’s Chang’e 3 mission. The Chang’e series has been the standard-bearer for the Chinese space program for some time, and it will continue to be for at least two more missions. There are two more rovers planned, each with a different mission to research and survey. The ultimate goal is to land a Taikonaut (Chinese astronaut) on the Moon, and beyond that to set up a permanent lunar base. Their timeline for doing this isn’t so far removed from NASA’s musings about a mission to Mars. As the American space agency tries to drum up support for a mission to another planet, its Chinese counterpart could undercut them by focusing on a base much more likely to have economic benefits.

In fact, that’s a large part of China’s motivation to explore the Moon: the economic benefits. When the Apollo astronauts collected moon rocks for study, there was only the vaguest of ideas about the possible resources for exploitation. Now, this rover has an explicit mission to (among other things) survey the Moon for helium-3, a rare element that could be a clean, easily used fuel for nuclear fusion reactors. Only about 15 tons of the stuff is thought to exist on Earth, but estimates for the total compliment of the isotope on Luna range up to five million tons. A leader of the Chinese lunar program estimated that about 100 tons could provide for the world’s current energy needs for one year. Assuming we could extract 100% of that five million tons, that’s quite a bit of time to come up with the next stop-gap energy solution.

The Moon is also known to be home to rich deposits of titanium and other precious metals, and there’s no telling what other, unexpected wonders it might hold. Another lander on schedule for 2017 will attempt to collect and bring back rock and soil samples for analysis, and you can bet traces of precious or useful materials are first on their list of targets. China has said that it plans to spend the next couple of decades scouring our only satellite for helium-3 and anything else worthwhile, possibly securing an energy-independent future for China — that is, assuming fusion comes into its own and that the United States chooses to quietly accept Chinese dominance of the lunar oil fields. This is the stuff of which world wars and science fiction epics are made. Below is a video of the lander’s initial approach, in much higher quality than the footage above.

Yutu is equipped with a ground penetrating radar (GPR) that can probe several hundred meters into the Moon’s crust, and a spectrometer for basic sample analysis. That’s useless, of course, unless we find a more cost-effective way of getting material to and from the Moon. A space elevator would probably work best, but at present that’s almost as harebrained an idea as fusion itself. Perhaps the country’s population problems have made long-term problems more difficult to ignore, but the Chinese space agency appears to see the value of long-term investments and, if you’ll pardon the expression, moonshots.

Purely on its merits today, the Moon is anything but an investor’s dream. Still, an advantage based on the moon would be trivially easy to keep under a monopoly, and to exploit for extreme economic benefit.

Rethinking particle physics

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have been exploring the limits of physics by smashing particles together, but a team from Yale and Harvard has taken a different approach. The so-called ACME collaboration is taking a closer look at the electron as a way to uncover new exotic particles, but it also has the potential to upend some popular ideas in physics. By taking more precise measurements of electrons, the team has discovered these particles are much more round than they ought to be — so perfectly round that they could change our understanding of particle physics.

The Standard Model is the theory describing the interaction of forces affecting subparticles, like electrons and quarks. Physicists have long relied on the Standard Model to make experimental predictions, while at the same time knowing that it isn’t perfect. The Standard Model is simply the best answer we have right now, and it’s accepted to be close enough to reality to be a useful tool.

Many of the truly interesting things going on at CERN and other research facilities have to do with finding out where the Standard Model breaks down. Going beyond the Standard Model, physicists have proposed various explanations for these gaps in our knowledge.Supersymmetry is one such idea that holds each particle has a superpartner with the same mass and internal quantum numbers, but opposite spin. It is these particles the ACME project was looking for by observing electrons.

The team has been measuring electrons for a type of deformation called the electric dipole moment. If an electron were to interact with many particles predicted by supersymmetry it could change shape quite dramatically, possibly making it more egg shaped than round. However, the ACME researchers found that even very slight deformations were not present — electrons are consistently spherical.

So what does that mean? Some of the theorized particles would have caused massive deformation of electrons when observed under experimental conditions. Having not seen anything of the sort, that could mean the particles simply don’t exist and our understanding of the Standard Model is still incomplete, even with the addition of supersymmetry. Then there is the possibility that the experiment itself was flawed.

On that last count, the team seems confident its observations are correct. The electrons used in the experiment were within the polar molecule thorium monoxide, which amplifies the electric dipole moment. According to one of the lead researchers, if an electron were the size of Earth, this experiment would be able to detect a deformation 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. With that in mind, the smooth curve of the electron might mean the quantum soup of subparticles is much stranger than we thought. It could be a big revelation and we didn’t even need any gigantic supercolliders to figure it out.

Why do electric cars suck in cold weather?

In hindsight, it’s not surprising the Mitsubishi MiEV EV I drove barely made it to 50 miles rather than its rated 62 miles (100 km). It was a dark and chilly if not stormy early December night and that killed the range. When you drive an EV, “your mileage may vary” includes cold weather as well as hard acceleration and late braking. As temperatures dip below freezing, you could lose 25% of your electric vehicle’s precious range. Batteries are less efficient in cold weather, they don’t regenerate as well, and electric heating for the cabin, seats, and windows drains your range, too.

The same thing happened when I drove a Tesla Model S. With the 85 kWh battery, the Tesla is good for around 250 miles. During the afternoon with temperatures above freezing, the discharge rate indicated I wasn’t far off from that kind of efficiency. Driving at night as temperatures fell into the 20s (0C to -5C), I found the range fell noticeably faster than the distance gauge suggested at the start of the trip.

None of this should be surprising. The 12-volt batteries on mainstream cars are prone to failure in the first cold weeks of winter. A battery is a chemical reaction that gives off electrons, or power. When it’s cold, the reaction slows down in both directions, discharging and charging. See, there was a reason to pay attention in chemistry class. You can keep a chemical reaction going by applying heat, which is one way to get more energy out of a battery — but that can be a complex equation, if the energy to heat the battery comes from the battery itself.

How cold weather affects EV range

A cold battery is not as receptive to regeneration. Trying to charge at the same rate that’s possible during warm weather can shorten the battery’s life. The Nissan Leaf uses an electric heater to keep the battery warm; the energy comes from the battery, although the energy expended to heat the battery is outweighed by the additional power that becomes available. Tesla uses waste heat generated by the electric motor. It’s efficient once there’s waste heat available but that takes time.

There’s even more drain from cockpit-warming: using electric heat in the cabin, on the seats, and defrosting the front and bind windshields. Combustion engine cars give off enough waste heat to quickly warm the cockpit without hurting range. In both the MiEV and Tesla, as I saw range dropping, I dialed back the heat and put on a parka and gloves.

Researchers are looking into different battery electrolytes that would be conducive to quick charging without compromising conductivity. EV makers could also make thicker, less conductive window glass and better insulate the car. Both would also reduce road noise.

How to maximize the range of your EV

If you have a garage, park your EV there since it’s warmer than outside. Arrange charging to continue until you’re ready to leave. Use the preheat functions while the car is still connected to the charger; most EVs offer that as a feature of their smartphone apps.

If you can stand it, turn off the heat while driving, or dial it back. A fleece jacket and thin gloves are your friends. Even the infotainment system draws power and I’ve been in EVs that wanted to power down the head unit to conserve power. With its small battery pack, the MiEV was especially susceptible to the cold.

Cold weather is also the reason to consider ordering the extended range battery pack, even if it adds $10,000 or more to the price of your EV. Better you get nicked once by the price and enjoy longer driving distances than you remember all the little compromises made regularly to keep your EV going.

The problem of cold cars has existed for years. Air-cooled Volkswagens and Porsches took longer to heat the cabin than cars with water-cooled engines. The air-cooled cars used a heat exchanger wrapped around the exhaust pipe. Heat took a long time to arrive and when the heat exchangers weren’t perfectly sealed, the smell of exhaust gas and burning engine oil might invade the cockpit.

Google wins DARPA’s robotics challenge

DARPA’s Robotic Challenge took place in Florida over the weekend, pitting some of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots against each other in a series of complex tasks, and rather fortuitously for a famously acquisitive Silicon Valley company, the winning robot was fielded by a company called Schaft — a Japanese company that was recently acquired by Google as part of its rather sudden segue into robotics. Google now officially, and probably not unintentionally, has its hands on the best humanoid robot in all the land.

The Schaft robot, made by Shaft Inc of Japan — which is now one of Google’s primary robotics research labs —  is one of around 10 robots that were entered into DARPA’s Robotic Challenge (DRC). Over the weekend, the robots competed in eight different tasks to gauge the current state of semi-autonomous bipedal robots, and, of course, to find out who’s the best. (The winner has a strong chance of winning prize money and securing lucrative future contracts from DARPA and the Department of Defense.) The Schaft team won in four out of eight tasks — terrain, ladder, debris, and hose — and accrued a total score of 27 points. Second-place IHMC Robotics, which used Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot, came in second with two task wins and 20 points.

Rounding out the rest of the DRC results, Tartan Rescue (Carnegie Mellon + NREC) came in third with its CHIMP robot, picking up 18 points, and MIT came in fourth with an Atlas. NASA’s Valkyrie sadly scored zero points. A full break down of the contest and the results can be found on the DRC Trials website. Some cool videos from the event can be found on DARPA’s YouTube channel.

Schaft is a squat (1.48 meters, 4’11″), gangly-limbed robot that is primarily notable for its use of a capacitor to drive “high-voltage liquid cooled motors,” rather than a battery and normal servos. Capacitors have a lot of power (they can discharge very quickly), but cannot store much energy (they run dry after a few seconds). By using a capacitor, Schaft has much stronger and faster muscles. (Historically, despite how they’re depicted in movies likeTerminator, standalone robots are rarely fast or strong. Batteries, due to their low specific power, struggle to produce a lot of speed and torque.)

Despite being the runaway winner, if you watch the video above, it’s clear that robots are still very slow, sometimes taking more than a minute to plan their next move. This is partly due to the slowness of the on-board motors, but also because the robots are still primarily being operated by human controllers. The next step for Schaft, and for any other humanoid robot that wants a piece of the lucrative humanoid robot market, is to increase autonomy. The idea is that you should be able to tell one of these robots to do something — clear that debris, drive that ambulance to the hospital, go and fight on the front line — and then just leave it to carry out those actions. Such autonomy requires a lot more than just fancy motors and dexterous robotic limbs, though — we’re talking about highly advanced computer vision, problem solving, and other advanced applications of computer science that we can’t yet squeeze onto a robot.

Google, of course, is probably rubbing its hands together and cursing the fact that it publicly stated it wouldn’t take on any further military contracts. The grand final for the DRC is next year, and the winner — other than netting a $2 million cash prize — would almost certainly score a large contract from the US government, which initially wants to procure robots for disaster response, and eventually war. We still have no idea what Google plans to do with its newly acquired robotics department, and realistically it’ll probably be a long while before Google tells us — if it even knows the answer itself.

A Target store in Miami on Thursday. Cybercriminals appear to have targeted the point-of-sale systems in Target’s retail stores, which collect information from customers’ credit and debit cards.

In a statement, Target said that criminals gained access to its customer information on Nov. 27 — the day before Thanksgiving and just ahead of one of the busiest shopping days of the year — and maintained access through Dec. 15.

“As of Dec. 15, we identified an unauthorized access and were able to resolve the issue,” Molly Snyder, a Target spokeswoman, said in an email.

A security blogger, Brian Krebs, first reported the breach on Wednesday.

Target said that criminals had stolen customer names, credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates and three-digit security codes for 40 million customers who had shopped at its stores. The company noted that online customers were not affected by the breach, which appeared to have been isolated to the point-of-sale systems in Target’s retail stores.

Immediately after discovering the breach, Target said, it alerted federal authorities and financial institutions, and is currently working with a third-party forensics firm on an investigation.

Brian Leary, a spokesman for the Secret Service, which investigates financial fraud, said the agency was investigating.

Target advised its store customers to scan their credit and debit accounts for unauthorized transactions and check their credit reports.

“We take this matter very seriously and are working with law enforcement to bring those responsible to justice,” Gregg W. Steinhafel, Target’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

The company is encouraging everyone who shopped in its United States with a credit or debit card during the period, in all regions of the country, to monitor their accounts. Ms. Snyder said she could not disclose the number of people in that group. She said the company began alerting customers Thursday morning.

Citing the ongoing investigation, Ms. Snyder said she could not disclose how the company became aware of the problem.

At this stage, the company’s approach to outreach has been using social media, email and news coverage to alert customers, rather than targeting particular customers who may have been affected. The company also set up a dedicated hotline for its shoppers, with hundreds of people to answer the phones.

Some shopper data was also compromised in 2007, Ms. Snyder said, but the exposure and the number of accounts were “extremely limited.”

This time, however, the breach is massive, and it could hardly come at a worse time of year for the retailer, during the final surge of Christmas shopping. The holiday shopping season can generate anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of a retailer’s annual sales, according to the National Retail Federation.

Ms. Snyder said some Target Red Card holders were having trouble accessing their accounts online Thursday. She said Target was working to fix the problem as quickly as possible.

Point-of-sale systems have become a major target for cybercriminals in recent years. By breaching point-of-sale systems, they can steal the so-called track data on credit and debit cards, which can be sold, in bulk, on the black market and used to create counterfeit cards.

A similar breach affected Barnes & Noble stores last year. Last year, criminals also breached Global Payment Systems, one of the biggest card transactions processors. The biggest known security compromise to date was an attack at Heartland Payment Systems, another credit card processor, in 2009. Criminals used malware to break into the company’s internal network and steal data for 130 million cards.

In such cases, security experts said a company insider could have inserted malicious software into a company machine, or persuaded an unsuspecting employee to click on a link that downloaded software giving criminals a foothold into a company’s systems.

On Thursday, the Target website was festooned for the holidays with discounts, stocking stuffer suggestions, and a color palette of red and green. At the top of the festive page, however, was a stark alert in black and white: “Important notice: unauthorized access to payment card data in U.S. stores.”

Apple TV could really use an updated design, and this proposal is from Andrew Ambrosin which I think is very successful.

THE MORE YOU PLAY, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE TO PAY

As rumored earlier this month, Spotify is expanding its core free mobile streaming service, creating a tablet version of its app that offers the same features as the desktop version — on-demand streaming of tracks, playlists, and albums with ads every few songs. So far, mobile users in the free, ad-supported tier could access a streaming radio service with the option of skipping a handful of tracks, a service that was launched in mid-2012. Only $9.99 premium users could search and play songs on demand. But putting up a chart of declining PC sales, Spotify's Daniel Ek said that it no longer made sense to distinguish between traditional computers and tablets.

This was only one part of the news for Spotify's mobile business today. Ek also announced the arrival of a free streaming service for iPhone and Android phones, allowing users to listen to any of their playlists or favorite artists' catalogs on shuffle with interstitial ads, though offline playback and real on-demand listening will remain limited to paying users on phones.

The internet mystery that has the world baffled

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

“Hello,” it said. “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”

The message was signed: "3301”.

A self-confessed IT security "freak” and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson’s interest was immediately piqued. This was – he knew – an example of digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file. Most often seen in conjunction with image files, a recipient who can work out the code – for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel – can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomised background "noise”.

It’s a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had planned the September 11 attacks via the auction site eBay,

Sleepily – it was late, and he had work in the morning – Eriksson thought he’d try his luck decoding the message from "3301”. After only a few minutes work he’d got somewhere: a reference to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar” and a line of meaningless letters. Joel deduced it might be an embedded "Caesar cipher” – an encryption technique named after Julius Caesar, who used it in private correspondence. It replaces characters by a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. As Claudius was the fourth emperor, it suggested "four” might be important – and lo, within minutes, Eriksson found another web address buried in the image’s code.

Feeling satisfied, he clicked the link.

It was a picture of a duck with the message: "Woops! Just decoys this way. Looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out.”

"If something is too easy or too routine, I quickly lose interest,” says Eriksson. "But it seemed like the challenge was a bit harder than a Caesar cipher after all. I was hooked.”

Eriksson didn’t realise it then, but he was embarking on one of the internet’s most enduring puzzles; a scavenger hunt that has led thousands of competitors across the web, down telephone lines, out to several physical locations around the globe, and into unchartered areas of the "darknet”. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy and classical music. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult has also come in handy as has an understanding of Mayan numerology.

It has also featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, a femme fatale called "Wind” who may, or may not, exist in real life, and a clue on a lamp post in Hawaii. Only one thing is certain: as it stands, no one is entirely sure what the challenge – known as Cicada 3301 – is all about or who is behind it. Depending on who you listen to, it’s either a mysterious secret society, a statement by a new political think tank, or an arcane recruitment drive by some quasi-military body. Which means, of course, everyone thinks it’s the CIA.

For some, it’s just a fun game, like a more complicated Sudoku; for others, it has become an obsession. Almost two years on, Eriksson is still trying to work out what it means for him. "It is, ultimately, a battle of the brains,” he says. "And I have always had a hard time resisting a challenge.”

On the night of January 5 2012, after reading the "decoy” message from the duck, Eriksson began to tinker with other variables.

Taking the duck’s mockery as a literal clue, Eriksson decided to run it through a decryption program called OutGuess. Success: another hidden message, this time linking to another messageboard on the massively popular news forum Reddit. Here, encrypted lines from a book were being posted every few hours. But there were also strange symbols comprising of several lines and dots – Mayan numbers, Eriksson realised. And duly translated, they led to another cipher.

Up until now, Eriksson would admit, none of the puzzles had really required any advanced skills, or suggested anything other than a single anonymous riddle-poser having some fun. "But then it all changed,” says Eriksson. "And things started getting interesting.”

Suddenly, the encryption techniques jumped up a gear. And the puzzles themselves mutated in several different directions: hexadecimal characters, reverse-engineering, prime numbers. Pictures of the cicada insect – reminiscent of the moth imagery in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs – became a common motif.

"I knew cicadas only emerge every prime number of years – 13, or 17 – to avoid synchronising with the life cycles of their predators,” says Eriksson. "It was all starting to fit together.” The references became more arcane too. The book, for example, turned out to be "The Lady of the Fountain”, a poem about King Arthur taken from The Mabinogion, a collection of pre-Christian medieval Welsh manuscripts.

Later, the puzzle would lead him to the cyberpunk writer William Gibson – specifically his 1992 poem "Agrippa” (a book of the dead), infamous for the fact that it was only published on a 3.5in floppy disk, and was programmed to erase itself after being read once. But as word spread across the web, thousands of amateur codebreakers joined the hunt for clues. Armies of users of 4chan, the anarchic internet forum where the first Cicada message is thought to have appeared, pooled their collective intelligence – and endless free time – to crack the puzzles.

Within hours they’d decoded "The Lady of the Fountain”. The new message, however, was another surprise: "Call us,” it read, "at telephone number 214-390-9608”. By this point, only a few days after the original image was posted, Eriksson had taken time off work to join the pursuit full time.

"This was definitely an unexpected turn,” he recalls. "And the first hint that this might not just be the work of a random internet troll.” Although now disconnected, the phone line was based in Texas, and led to an answering machine. There, a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime and a new website: 845145127.com. A countdown clock and a huge picture of a cicada confirmed they were on the right path.

"It was thrilling, breathtaking by now,” says Eriksson. "This shared feeling of discovery was immense. But the plot was about to thicken even more.” Once the countdown reached zero, at 5pm GMT on January 9, it showed 14 GPS coordinates around the world: locations in Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii and Sydney. Sat in Sweden, Eriksson waited as, around the globe, amateur solvers left their apartments to investigate. And, one by one reported what they’d found: a poster, attached to a lamp post, bearing the cicada image and a QR code (the black-and-white bar code often seen on adverts these days and designed to take you to a website via your smartphone).

"It was exhilarating,” said Eriksson. "I was suddenly aware of how much effort they must have been putting into creating this kind of challenge.” For the growing Cicada community, it was explosive – proof this wasn’t merely some clever neckbeard in a basement winding people up, but actually a global organisation of talented people. But who?

Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately – and disappointingly – promote a new movie or car.

Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically acclaimed "I Love Bees” ARG campaign. Designed to promote the Xbox game Halo 2 in 2004, it used random payphones worldwide to broadcast a War of the Worlds-style radio drama that players would have to solve.

But there were complicating factors to Cicada. For one, the organisers were actively working against the participants. One "solver”, a female known only as Wind from Michigan, contributed to the quest on several messageboards before the community spotted she was deliberately disseminating false clues. Other interference was more pointed. One long, cautionary diatribe, left anonymously on the website Pastebin, claimed to be from an ex-Cicada member – a non-English military officer recruited to the organisation "by a superior”. Cicada, he said, "was a Left-Hand Path religion disguised as a progressive scientific organisation” – comprising of "military officers, diplomats, and academics who were dissatisfied with the direction of the world”. Their plan, the writer claimed, was to transform humanity into the Nietzschen Übermensch.

"This is a dangerous organisation,” he concluded, "their ways are nefarious.” With no other clues, it was also asssumed by many to be a recruitment drive by the CIA, MI6 or America’s National Security Agency (NSA), as part of a search for highly talented cryptologists. It wouldn’t have been the first time such tactics had been used.

Back in 2010, for example, Air Force Cyber Command – the United States’ hacking defence force, based at Fort Meade in Maryland – secretly embedded a complex hexadecimal code in their new logo. Cybercom head Lt Gen Keith Alexander then challenged the world’s amateur analysts to crack it (it took them three hours). And in September this year, GCHQ launched the "Can You Find It?” initiative – a series of cryptic codes designed to root out the best British cryptographers. As GCHQ’s head of resourcing Jane Jones said at the time, "It’s a puzzle but it’s also a serious test – the jobs on offer here are vital to protecting national security.”

_{GCHQ's 'Can You Find It?' puzzle}

Dr Jim Gillogly, former president of the American Cryptogram Association, has been cracking similar codes for years and says it’s a tried and tested recruitment tactic.

"During the Second World War, the top-secret Government Code and Cypher School used crossword puzzles printed in The Daily Telegraph to identify good candidates for Bletchley Park,” he says. "But I’m not sure the CIA or NSA is behind Cicada. Both are careful with security, the recent Snowden case notwithstanding. And starting the puzzle on [the anarchic internet forum] 4chan might attract people with less respect for authority than they would want working inside.”

But that doesn’t rule out other organisations. "Computer and data security is more important than ever today,” says Dr Gillogly. The proliferation of wireless devices, mobile telephones, e-commerce websites like Amazon and chip-and-pin machines, means the demand for cryptologists has never been higher. (Something the UK government acknowledged last year when it announced it was setting up 11 academic "centres of excellence” in cyber security research.)

"One of the more important components of security systems is the efficacy of the cryptography being used,” says Dr Gillogly. "Which means cryptanalysts are in higher demand than ever before - no longer just with the intelligence services. It could just as easily be a bank or software company [behind Cicada].”

Eriksson himself agrees. As a regular speaker at Black Hat Briefings – the secretive computer security conferences where government agencies and corporations get advice from hackers – he knows certain organisations occasionally go "fishing” for new recruits like this. But to him the signs point to a recruitment drive by a hacker group like Anonymous.

"I can’t help but notice,” he says, "that the locations in question are all places with some of the most talented hackers and IT security researchers in the world.” Either way, their identity would prove irrelevant. When the QR codes left on the lamp posts were decoded, a hidden message pointed the solvers towards a TOR address. TOR, short for The Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the "darknet” – the vast, murky portion of the internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the "surface" web, it’s in these recesses where you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks. And it’s here where the Cicada path ended.

After a designated number of solvers visited the address, the website shut down with a terse message: "We want the best, not the followers." The chosen few received personal emails – detailing what, none have said, although one solver heard they were now being asked to solve puzzles in private. Eriksson, however, was not among them. "It was my biggest anticlimax – when I was too late to register my email at the TOR hidden service," he says. "If my sleep-wake cycle had been different, I believe I would have been among the first." Regardless, a few weeks later, a new message from Cicada was posted on Reddit. It read: "Hello. We have now found the individuals we sought. Thus our month-long journey ends. For now." All too abruptly for thousands of intrigued solvers, it had gone quiet.

Except no. On January 4 this year, something new. A fresh image, with a new message in the same white text: "Hello again. Our search for intelligent individuals now continues." Analysis of the image would reveal another poem – this time from the book Liber Al Vel Legis, a religious doctrine by the English occultist and magician Aleister Crowley. From there, the solvers downloaded a 130Mb file containing thousands of prime numbers. And also an MP3 file: a song called The Instar Emergence by the artist 3301, which begins with the sound of – guess what – cicadas.

Analysis of that has since led to a Twitter account pumping out random numbers, which in turn produced a "gematria": an ancient Hebrew code table, but this time based on Anglo-Saxon runes. This pointed the solvers back into the darknet, where they found seven new physical locations, from Dallas to Moscow to Okinawa, and more clues. But that’s where, once again, the trail has gone cold. Another select group of "first solvers" have been accepted into a new "private" puzzle – this time, say reports, a kind of Myers-Briggs multiple-choice personality test.

But still, we are no closer to knowing the source, or fundamental purpose, of Cicada 3301. "That’s the beauty of it though," says Eriksson. "It is impossible to know for sure until you have solved it all." That is why for him, and thousands of other hooked enthusiasts, January 4 2014 is so important: that’s when the next set of riddles is due to begin again. "Maybe all will be revealed then," he grins. "But somehow, I doubt it."

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