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Leif Ryge is an artist, hacker, and journalist living in Berlin. He used to tweet as @wiretapped but is on hiatus until Twitter stops suspending Tor users' accounts.

In 2014 when The Washington Post Editorial Board wrote "with all their wizardry, perhaps Apple and Google could invent a kind of secure golden key they would retain and use only when a court has approved a search warrant," the Internet ridiculed them. Many people painstakingly explained that even if there were somehow wide agreement about who would be the "right" people and governments to hold such an all-powerful capability, it would ultimately be impossible to ensure that such power wouldn't fall in to the "wrong" hands.

Yet, here is a sad joke that happens to describe the reality we presently live in:

The middle of the 20th century was an exciting time for science fiction, filled with experimentation and new ideas, an endeavour helmed by genre icons like Harlan Ellison and Frank Herbert. If magazine, which ran between 1952 and 1974, played home to many of these names along with a myriad of now-historic work. And now, it’s all available for free in a variety of file formats.

According to BoingBoing, all 176 issues of If have been made available via the Internet Archive, including the ones edited by Hugo Award-winning Frederik Pohl. His greatest contribution to the magazine was, perhaps, the introduction of the "If-first" series, which showcased new authors. A number of these writers went on to become extremely well-known, most notably Larry Niven, who published his first story in the magazine.

What’s really interesting about If, however, is how its content parallels the optimism of the era. At the time, science was exciting, not dystopian—a gateway into new possibilities. Even as Russia and the United States rushed to be the first to put a man on the Moon, the world dreamt in unison of a better tomorrow. The stories in If reflected this sensibility to some extent, being very much action-packed and sometimes even geared towards a younger audience.

Not one, but two popular Blu-ray ripping tools have announced plans to scale back operations, and in one case, to shut up shop entirely.

SlySoft, the makers of the popular DVD and Blu-ray ripping tool AnyDVD, abruptly ended all operations this week. The official SlySoft website now simply displays a short message, which reads: "Due to recent regulatory requirements we have had to cease all activities relating to SlySoft Inc. We wish to thank our loyal customers/clients for their patronage over the years."

A thread on the official SlySoft forum provided slightly more information on SlySoft's demise. In posts by SlySoft team member "Tom", it was revealed that SlySoft has been under immense legal pressure for some time, from "Websheriff over Irdeto, US department of Justice to AACS-LA", and that the company held out longer than most in resisting the pressure.

Customers who purchased AnyDVD can continue to use the software for DVD and Blu-ray ripping, although the software may cease to work with newer titles that require access to the online database, which will go offline eventually.

In a related, but separate news story, rival ripping software maker Fengtao Software, makers of DVDFab, has announced that they will not be providing support for Ultra HD Blu-ray discs. The reason for the lack of support also appears to be related to unspecified legal pressure.

"The next version of AACS Copy Protection accompanying those newly released Ultra HD Blu-ray titles is the version 2.0 of Advanced Access Content System. According to a document called AACS 2.0 Draft, the new copy protection requires the Ultra HD Blu-ray players to support two AACS 2.0 functionalities, one named ‘basic’ and the other referred as ‘enhanced’," the company said in a statement.

"Fengtao Software Inc. makes it clear that the company will not decrypt or circumvent AACS 2.0 in the days to come. This is in accordance with AACS-LA, (which has not made public the specifications for AACS 2.0), the BDA and the movie studios."

As part of his ongoing fight with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) sent a February 22 letter that demanded documents related to the agency's analysis of global temperature data. NOAA handed over 301 pages of e-mails between NOAA officials (but not scientists) pertaining to a study published last year in the journal Science. There apparently wasn’t anything juicy in those e-mails, however, because Rep. Smith is now asking for a great deal more.

A new letter (initially acquired by the Union of Concerned Scientists) complains that “[i]t seems unlikely that documents and communications would be so scarce,” and Smith directs NOAA to cast a wider net. He requests e-mails and documents not just from officials in the offices that had been targeted by the previous requests but also from “agency employees” across a broad swath of NOAA. The list includes the National Centers for Environmental Information that houses the scientists behind NOAA's global temperature dataset—a group Rep. Smith has accused of manipulating data.

NOAA had apparently searched for e-mails including “hiatus”, “global temperature”, and “climate study”, but Rep. Smith wants that list expanded dramatically. Now, he wants NOAA to hand over anything that contains “Karl” (the name of the lead NOAA scientist on the Science paper), “buoy”, “ship”, “Night Marine Air Temperature”, “temperature”, “climate”, “change”, “Paris”, “U.N.”, “United Nations”, “clean power plan”, “regulations”, “Environmental Protection Agency”, “President”, “Obama”, “White House”, and “Council on Environmental Quality”.

As someone who has tried a lot of virtual reality demos, trust me when I say that the ability to see your hands—and to use them to reach out and interact with the virtual world—makes all the difference. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Sony Computer Entertainment has filed a patent application for a "glove interface object" that could help provide accurate virtual reality hand tracking without the need to actually hold a controller.

PlayStation VR already has a hand-tracking solution, of course, in the form of the PlayStation Move controllers that were first released for the PlayStation 3 in 2010. But this glove offers a bit more functionality than those handheld wands, including sensors that can "identify a flex of at least one finger portion," contact sensors that can detect when you touch a thumb to another fingertip, and sensors that measure the user's "finger position pose" (which can then be rendered on the screen).

The end goal is to "simply provide a way of touching, holding, playing, interfacing or contacting virtual objects shown on a display screen or objects associated with documents, text, images, and the like," according to the patent application.