What is the Niantic Project? In November 2012, a series of leaks began to emerge, revealing a conspiracy that would reshape the destiny of mankind. Exotic Matter Portals, Ordered Data, a mind-altering signal that some say can change the way we think, and Ingress, a government tool camouflaged as a mobile phone game. P.A. Chapeau’s Investigation began with revelations about ‘The Niantic Project,’ a secret government think tank run by a defunct intelligence agency, and continued on, ultimately revealing a hidden movement to co-opt the highest positions of leadership in governments and cultural power-centers worldwide. From the initial discovery of the Niantic Project in The Sphere of Weirdness to the unearthing of a global conspiracy in Operation Cassandra, each document from P.A. Chapeau’s daily investigation is presented here, in Volume 1 of The Niantic Project Files.

At the start of his latest adventure, Hank Johnson finds himself on a journey back to the 13MAGNUS Nest in Afghanistan. Jahan, the new leader of Anti-Magnus, has taken Hank and Azmati captive with plans to use them to summon the N’Zeer, an ancient force attempting to guide the development of mankind. Meanwhile, Devra Bogdanovich and Hubert Farlowe follow closely behind, with Ezekiel Calvin covertly keeping watch over the course of events. What transpires in the 13MAGNUS Nest has far-reaching consequences for all 13 of the original Niantic Investigators. With their fate still unknown, Volume 4 of The Niantic Project Files presents the correspondences and investigation materials that will help to solve that mystery.

A year into the investigation, P.A. Chapeau must come to terms with his role in two tragedies: The death of Carrie Campbell, a brave, visionary woman who sacrificed herself to save human civilization from self-destruction, and the takeover of a human mind by an AI that he helped create. Chapeau walks away, leaving the duty of uncovering the truth about Exotic Matter to the mysterious Verity Seke, and there’s much to investigate: An ancient society that has been protecting the secrets of XM-induced immortality, the resurrection of an Enlightened leader, and a desperate movement to save humanity from embarking on a path to its own destruction. From the efforts to resurrect Roland Jarvis in 13MAGNUS to Hank Johnson’s Recursion, each document from Verity Seke’s daily investigation is presented here, in Volume 2 of The Niantic Project Files.

Determined to shield humanity from the harmful effects of Exotic Matter (XM), Devra Bogdanovich unleashes a Portal Virus designed to shut down the XM flow in Portals worldwide. The interruption of XM flow drives Roland Jarvis, who is deeply dependent on it, to the brink of death. ADA is also negatively affected. Agents around the globe respond with efforts to eliminate the virus and protect the Portals. Unbeknownst to them, efforts to resuscitate the Portals using a set of ancient objects known as the ‘Helios Artifacts’ send out a surge of XM to the far corners of the Universe, awakening a long dormant force. Hank Johnson re-emerges from the ‘nest’ in Afghanistan where his body has been entombed to warn of an ancient entity that has acted as a rival to the Shapers throughout history. His search for answers leads him to India and an encounter that will forever alter his future.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

In 2016, Googleâ??s Site Reliability Engineering book ignited an industry discussion on what it means to run production services todayâ??and why reliability considerations are fundamental to service design. Now, Google engineers who worked on that bestseller introduce The Site Reliability Workbook, a hands-on companion that uses concrete examples to show you how to put SRE principles and practices to work in your environment. This new workbook not only combines practical examples from Googleâ??s experiences, but also provides case studies from Googleâ??s Cloud Platform customers who underwent this journey. Evernote, The Home Depot, The New York Times, and other companies outline hard-won experiences of what worked for them and what didnâ??t. Dive into this workbook and learn how to flesh out your own SRE practice, no matter what size your company is. Youâ??ll learn: How to run reliable services in environments you donâ??t completely controlâ??like cloud Practical applications of how to create, monitor, and run your services via Service Level Objectives How to convert existing ops teams to SREâ??including how to dig out of operational overload Methods for starting SRE from either greenfield or brownfield

A sophisticated critical take on contemporary game culture that reconsiders the boundaries between gamers and games. This book is not about the future of video games. It is not an attempt to predict the moods of the market, the changing profile of gamers, the benevolence or malevolence of the medium. This book is about those predictions. It is about the ways in which the past, present, and future notions of games are narrated and negotiated by a small group of producers, journalists, and gamers, and about how invested these narrators are in telling the story of tomorrow. This new title from Goldsmiths Press by Paolo Ruffino suggests the story could be told another way. Considering game culture, from the gamification of self-improvement to GamerGate's sexism and violence, Ruffino lays out an alternative, creative mode of thinking about the medium: a sophisticated critical take that blurs the distinctions among studying, playing, making, and living with video games. Offering a series of stories that provide alternative narratives of digital gaming, Ruffino aims to encourage all of us who study and play (with) games to raise ethical questions, both about our own role in shaping the objects of research, and about our involvement in the discourses we produce as gamers and scholars. For researchers and students seeking a fresh approach to game studies, and for anyone with an interest in breaking open the current locked-box discourse, Future Gaming offers a radical lens with which to view the future.