Welcome! - Introduction

Something we dreaded all our lives is finally here.

World War III

The world is divided and Google is to blame.
I'm talking of course of Ingress, Google's Augmented Reality game for Android that went into beta in November.

I'm an avid reader of XKCD.com.
As a computer scientist, I love the cleverness of the comic. However recently they released a comic entitled Ingress that I didn't understand. This perplexed me as I often find myself laughing when others are staring befuddled.
I didn't get it. Odd.

So I did what every self respecting programmer does and turned to Google for an answer.

Ingress
[search]

Neat! What a great idea for a game! It's the high school game of "Dots" mixed with geo-cacheing and a feel of intrigue and clandestine cyber warfare. As someone who specialized in cyber security for my undergraduate, I was hooked.

I downloaded the app, only to realize the game is in closed beta and I needed an invite. Luckily I had a friend with an extra code so I jumped right in.

I started the app and immediately got a loading screen.
"Ugh... I hate thes-" I started to say, a little disappointed, to my friend, when I was cut short by a minimalistic tactical map of the globe, and a sexy computer woman:

>>Acquiring Position...Lock Established
>>Downloading Latest Intel Package

Oh very cool. Ok I'll keep going.
After going through a tutorial, my phone went black. Black. Not like, oh its obviously changing screens... black.

No status bar, nothing.

"Beta" I thought when suddenly the screen was flooded with various hex and command line calls.
I was being hacked! Seriously? This is awesome.

I was informed of a faction known as The Enlightened Ones who saw the portals for what they are: the next step in Human Evolution. My friend and I are generally know-it-all's so we thought it'd be funny to take this path.

 Sweet, I'm in and can start hacking portals. Oh wait there's only 7 in my town and a lvl4 resistance guy owns them all... A challenge! He has no idea whats coming. I will destroy him from the bottom up.

This blog is an account of my journey through Ingress. From this point forward, it's no longer a game, but a struggle to maintain control of the minds and guide them all to the Path of Enlightenment.