I'm keynoting the O'Reilly Security Conference in New York in Oct/Nov, so I stopped by the O'Reilly Security Podcast (MP3) to explain EFF's Apollo 1201 project, which aims to kill all the DRM in the world within a decade. (more…)

Since 1896, the 100m dash remains the best thing at Olympic track & field apart from the weapons-throwing events. Usain Bolt dominates now, but would he have dominated then? Yes, of course he would have: by several seconds! (Not included: Ben Johnson's steroid-fueled 9.79s win at the '88 Games, for which he was disqualified. Bolt beat it in 2008 and 2012's race, and other athletes have outside the Olympics)

Vojislav Seselj, leader of the Serbian Radical Party and loud-mouthed bigot whose racist invective kicked off Serbia's horrific ethnic cleansing campaign, led a pro-Trump rally in Belgrade to protest the state visit of Democratic VP Joe Biden. (more…)

Francis Tseng's simulator game invites you to "grow your startup and please those investors until there’s nothing left to give" by building biotech, defense, machine learning, cloud computing, drone and space companies with a crew of employees whose low wages can be mitigated with bulletproof coffee and whose products can be sold with "causewashing" sponsorships of hip music festivals. (more…)

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more. And/or buy Ruben Bolling’s new book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Economist Tim Harford writes about holidaying in prosperous Bavaria, where hotels let you run up bills of €1000+ without a credit-card and all room-keys are stored in a cupboard where any guest can get at them, and asks how this can all work without being destroyed by dishonesty? (more…)

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As our Cory Doctorow reported previously, a previously unheard of hacker group calling themselves The Shadow Brokers announced this week it had stolen a trove of ready-to-use cyber weapons from The Equation Group (previously), an advanced cyberweapons dealer believed to be operating on behalf of, or within, the NSA.The Shadow Brokers are auctioning the weaponized malware off to the highest bidder. (more…)

We don't know what may have caused a young Florida man to commit a gruesome attack late Monday night. We do know how the victims died. It was gruesome. The details that follow may be disturbing. (more…)

https://youtu.be/ThrXkYwTBP8Gus the hacker puppeteer writes, "Many of us hoped the Internet would disrupt the music industry along with all other media industries, giving more power -- and more pay -- to musicians and songwriters. And yet, somehow the amount musicians get paid each time their songs stream is a tiny fraction of a cent." (more…)

I'll have to ask the waiter for another. (more…)

Having driven the LA to Vegas route more times than I can recall, I've often marveled at the Zzyzx Road sign. I'd been told the name was intentionally chosen to ensure it the last spot on a list of US road names. Seems there is a little truth in that...Road Trippers shares:Zzyzx (AKA Camp Soda and Soda Springs) is located at the end of Zzyzx Road, a 4.5-mile-long rural road off Interstate 15, in San Bernadino County, California. The unicorporated community is also located within Mojave National Preserve. In its former life, it was the the Zzyzx Mineral Springs and Health Spa. What makes Zzyzx, California such a weird and wonderful place is that it was founded by a crackpot preacher who stuck his middle finger up at the government when he named the town with the last letters of the alphabet. So, who the heck came up with that crazy name?!Well, that's where things get a little weird. Curtis Howe Springer was one of those old-timey radio evangelists, way back in the day. However, he wasn't actually a minister of any kind. He was born in 1896 in Birmingham, Alabama, and spent much of his early life convincing people he was a doctor. He proclaimed himself to be the "last of the old-time medicine men", but the American Medical Association disagreed. They proclaimed him "King of the Quacks" in 1969. Throughout his life Curtis also claimed to be a boxing teacher in the U.S. Army, the "Dean of Greer College" (a defunct/bankrupt school in Chicago), he was a rabble-rouser during Prohibition (he was in favor of it, and railed against "Demon Rum"). He also loved making up universities. Like "National Academy, The Springer School of Humanism, the American College of Doctors and Surgeons, the Westlake West Virginia College, and two non-existent osteopathy schools in Meyersdale, Pennsylvania and New Jersey." He sounds like a real catch. My favorite though is how he'd write his name on pamphlets for speaking engagements: Curtis Howe Springer, M.D., N.D., D.O., Ph.D. In 1934 he began his career in radio broadcasting, which included selling his "medicines" (as pictured below, right). His Antediluvian Tea was basically a laxative dressed up in a teabag. The Journal of the American Medical Association published a lengthy article titled "Curtis Howe Springer: A Quack and His Nostrums" in 1936, which details all of Springer's get-rich-quick schemes. Curtis founded several health spas during the 1930s and 1940s. Including the Haven of Rest in Fort Hill, PA, and one in Wilkes-Barre, another in Cumberland, MD, and one in Davenport, IA. However, Curtis really hated paying taxes, so most of his "spas" were seized by the Feds. Then in 1944, Curtis hooked up with a new lady and she filed a claim to 12,800 acres of Mojave Desert in California. Springer named the land Zzyzx Mineral Springs resort. The purpose was so that it would be known as "the last word in health", and to build his resort he hired a bunch of homeless men from L.A.'s infamous Skid Row. Springer even faked the hot spring! Seriously! He used a boiler to heat pools around the resort, which ultimately included a 60-room hotel, spa, mineral baths, a radio studio, and a church, of course. So, even though he wasn't a minister or a doctor, over 200 radio stations carried his program. Listeners would send in donations for his "cures", which he claimed could relieve constipation, hemorrhoids, hair loss and, oh yeah, cancer. However, what people were getting was, well, actually a bit better than snake oil. It was mostly celery, carrot and parsley juices.

The news that a group of anonymous hackers claimed to have stolen some of the NSA's most secret, valuable weaponized vulnerabilities and were auctioning them off for bitcoin triggered an epic tweetstorm from Edward Snowden, who sets out his hypothesis for how the exploits were captured and what relation that has to the revelations he made when he blew the whistle on illegal NSA spying in 2013. (more…)

Last month I added this garden hose bib extender to my outdoor faucet. It's held up so far. I also bought this $5 metal pistol grip nozzle on Amazon, which allows me to select the kind of water stream I need, from a wide cone to a high-pressure jet, by squeezing the handle. Releasing the handle shuts off the water completely.

Mophie's gadgets are reliable, minimalist, and stacked with all the right features. We use these two gadgets to keep our phones, tablets, e-readers, and other electronics charged.Recharge on-the-go with the Mophie Powerstation XL External BatteryThe Mophie Powerstation XL ($39.95) packs enough power to re-charge your phone eight times over. It has three levels of charging, so you can control how fast of a charge you want. Plus, you can charge up to two devices simultaneously. The powerstation is compatible with any USB-outfitted cable and provides 12,000mAh for high output fast charging.Protect your phone and charge it at the same time with the Mophie Juice Pack Air Battery CaseThis case delivers legitimate iPhone protection and extra charge. The Mophie Juice Pack Air Battery Case ($49.95) provides an additional 28 hours of talk time and 20 hours of web browsing with a flip of a simple switch. It's saved us from a dead battery multiple times while at concerts, the beach, or just out and about with friends.

Bobby Hutcherson, a pioneering jazz vibraphonist whose style pushed the iconic Blue Note label into more spiritual and experimental directions, died yesterday at age 75. He was under ongoing treatment for emphysema. Along with a phenomenal career as a band leader on dozens of records, Hutchinson famously played on the jazz classics "Out to Lunch," by Eric Dolphy and "Mode for Joe,” by sax player Joe Henderson. From the New York Times:The first album (Hutchinson) released as a leader was “Dialogue” (1965), featuring Mr. Hill, the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and the saxophonist and flutist Sam Rivers. Among his notable subsequent albums was “Stick-Up!” (1966), with Mr. Henderson and the pianist McCoy Tyner among his partners. He and Mr. Tyner would forge a close alliance.After being arrested for marijuana possession in Central Park in 1967, Mr. Hutcherson lost his cabaret card, required of any musician working in New York clubs. He returned to California and struck a rapport with the tenor saxophonist Harold Land. Among the recordings they made together was “Ummh,” a funk shuffle that became a crossover hit in 1970. (It was later sampled by the rapper Ice Cube.)In the early ’70s Mr. Hutcherson bought an acre of land along the coast in Montara, where he built a house. He lived there with his wife, the former Rosemary Zuniga, whom he married in 1972. She survives him, along with their son, Teddy Hutcherson, a marketing production manager for the organization SFJazz, as does his older son, Barry Hutcherson, a jazz drummer."Bobby Hutcherson, Vibraphonist With Coloristic Range of Sound, Dies at 75" (Thanks, Jordan Kurland)"Ummh" from San Francisco, with Harold Land (1970):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV6ZAdUuSlM"Wrong or Right" from Cirrus (1974):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNAPxn4qULY

The wonderful stop-motion filmmaker PES is back, this time with five retro arcade game death sequences.

"We wanted to see how far we could push Trump's loyal supporters," says Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. So his team invited a group of Trumpkins to attend a focus group meeting where they were shown some fake Trump campaign ads, voiced by a convincing Trump impersonator. The attendees were not told that the commercials were fake, even though the ads had proposals that were crazy, even by Trump standards: outlawing abortion everywhere except in depressed areas like Atlantic City, trapping Mexican day laborers in porta-potties and shipping them back to Mexico, locking shock collars on the neck of every Mexican citizen in Mexico so they'd get zapped if they tried to go past an invisible electric fence on the US-Mexico border.The focus group members seemed a little surprised at first, but quickly came around to the seeing the logic of these proposals, and expressed their support. One woman was concerned about the dog collar proposal, though. She said the Mexicans were likely to cut off the dog collars and sell them.This video is like a scary Milgram experiment.

This anti-theft feature has apparently been standard on all Rolls-Royce models since 2004. Also, the hood ornament has a name: The Spirit of Ecstasy.(via Geekologie)

If this was a special effect, we'd call it fakey looking, but apparently it's real lightning, captured in Tampa and posted to Reddit by UnobtrusiveElephant.

The Shadow Brokers, a previously unknown hacker group, has announced that it has stolen a trove of ready-to-use cyber weapons from The Equation Group (previously), an advanced cyberweapons dealer believed to be operating on behalf of, or within, the NSA. (more…)

An anonymous Quora commenter has written an exhaustive and fascinating response to the question, "What is it like to understand advanced mathematics?" (more…)

DON'T PARADE IN MY RAIN (via Metafilter) is a blog collecting scans of the magazines that were once our only guide to what's on the box. Replaced by the digital menus provided by cable boxes, they often featured striking illustrations by artists such as Gary Viskupic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GigpnsJ84xc&feature=youtu.beZephyr Teachout (previously) is the anti-corruption candidate in New York's Hudson Valley who raised more than $500K from small-money, Bernie-Sanders-style donors (I was one of them); then vulture fund billionaire Paul Singer gave $500K to the PAC for John Faso, her Republican opponent, catapulting him into contendership. (more…)

Who the fuck is my D&D character generates succinct character concepts for you to roleplay. It's clever how evocative it is! It's by Ryan Grant; the underlying code uses the WTF Engine. (more…)

The trademark was granted to discount eyewear company Specsavers, whose slogan is "should've gone to Specsavers." If you object, you have until October 12 to file with the IPO. (more…)

No Man's Sky is a new game featuring quintillions of worlds, all created by procedural generation to create a vast illusion of design. LeiluMultipass hilariously sums up the epic promise of this type of game content against the all-too-common reality. (more…)

There they are, fluffy floofblobs. “Cat legs appear to function like airplane landing gears as the stow safely away in the floof,” observes one commenter. (more…)

Swirling a ball in a cup gets it spinning in the direction of the swirl, but adding six more starts them swirling in the opposite direction. (more…)

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Mark Carpenter made this spot-on Google Map of Frodo's journey from Hobbiton to Mount Doom. (more…)

Not a good thing. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_sWe've been following the trade in remote kill-switches for cars sold to subprime borrowers since 2009, and watched in dismay as they got worse and worse: though John Oliver's report on the billions inflating the subprime auto-lending bubble touches on these, he focuses on the economic factors -- sleaze, corruption, moral hazard -- driving the tech. (more…)

Stanford computer science student Joshua Browder, whose DoNotPay bot helps you fight parking tickets in London and New York (it's estimated to have overturned $4M in tickets to date) has a new bot in the offing: a chatbot that helps newly homeless people in the UK create and optimise their applications for benefits. (more…)

Tony Fullman is one of the only people that we know to have been targeted by Prism, the NSA's signature mass-surveillance tool: he's a Fijian-born expatriate with New Zealand citizenship, and had his passport seized and his name added to terrorism watchlists after the NSA helped their New Zealand counterparts spy on him, intercepting his bank statements, Facebook posts, Gmail messages, recorded phone conversations, and more. (more…)

I've used this elephant ultrasonic humidifier for over 10 years (not every day) and it still works. It has a dial to adjust the amount of vapor, and at the highest setting it pumps out a thick cloud. Right now it's $34 on Amazon. If you don't want an elephant humidifier, you can get a hippo, a unicorn, a pig, a tiger, an owl, a penguin, a frog, a duck, a hippo, a dragon, a panda, a cow, a puppy, a monkey, or Hello Kitty.

As this spectacular cross-section of the NYPL main branch demonstrates, the library was designed to service the needs of all the city's dwellers, even the CHUDs. (via From Deco to Atom) (more…)

Richard Carter, proprietor of Mystical Moments, Huddersfield, England's New Age supply shop, does not permit Harry Potter fans to purchase his handmade magic wands. Carter says he is selling "spiritual tools," not toys. Carter, who reportedly fashions the wands under supernatural control, tells The Telegraph:"JK Rowling has obviously done her research but Harry Potter is for children. It has done nothing for business.... You wouldn't believe how many real witches and wizards there are knocking about. You would be amazed. They know they can come here in reveal themselves without people thinking they're mental...If I had someone come in wanting a wand just because they liked Harry Potter I would not sell them one, not matter how much money they were offering....I can tell what people are like when they walk in by their aura."

https://vimeo.com/178334883MIT and Microsoft researchers demonstrated a system of gold leaf temporary tattoos for "on-skin user interfaces" including a touch sensor, near field communication antennae, and a low-res thermochromic display that changes color. From the research description:DuoSkin draws from the aesthetics found in metallic jewelry-like temporary tattoos to createon-skin devices which resemble jewelry. DuoSkin devices enable users tocontrol their mobile devices, display information, and store information ontheir skin while serving as a statement of personal style. We believe that in thefuture, on-skin electronics will no longer be black-boxed and mystified; instead,they will converge towards the user friendliness, extensibility, andaesthetics of body decorations, forming a DuoSkin integrated to the extent thatit has seemingly disappeared.DuoSkin (MIT)

Stuck for something smug to say? The Idiomatic randomly generates idioms by gluing together parts of other idioms, allowing you to control conversations and stymie unwelcome trains of thought through the power of confusion. (more…)

Pandyland generates random comics featuring two generic-looking webcomic dudes. The stricter formula of panels and texts gives it a nastier, less computer-zany vibe than most "humorous" comic generators. Lots of unsafe combinations. (more…)

This Jeep Desk made from a reclaimed hood is approximately $1700 from Canett Furniture:Primary material: Metal Secondary material: Wood | Primary pattern: Worn out Secondary pattern: PlainJeep Desk (Canett Furniture via Geekologie)

The The Totally Useful Loot Generator (by JKTerrezas) both lampoons and perfects the random drops found in role-playing games and low-quality journalism alike.

Watch this video to get exactly what the headline promises: a squirrel's-eye view of what it's like to squirrel around the treetops. It was reportedly shot in Westmount Park, Montreal with a GoPro Session (low quality, but light enough to be grabbed by/attached to a squirrel.)

Private prison titan Corrections Corporation of America has extensively diversified its holdings into the entire carceral-industrial sector: halfway houses, electronic monitoring, mental health -- and family immigration detention, a growth industry where the human rights standards are rock-bottom and the payouts are guaranteed to jackpot. (more…)

Every Sith Lord has his price.

Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, received $12.7m in secret cash payments as a consultant for Ukraine's ruling political party, according to a ledger seen by the New York Times.And Mr. Manafort’s presence remains elsewhere here in the capital, where government investigators examining secret records have found his name, as well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections during the administration of Mr. Manafort’s main client, former President Viktor F. Yanukovych.Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.Trump, himself a millionaire, has been vocally and some say oddly solicitous toward Russia and its strongman leader, Vladimir Putin. Manafort is plainly denying the NYT's report, or at least the part of it where he pockets $12.7m. With his ties to one of Putin's stickier tentacles exposed, though, rival candidate Hillary Clinton is becoming more forceful about demanding answers.Donald Trump's campaign team must disclose all pro-Russia links, Hillary Clinton's manager has said, following new allegations in the New York Times. ... It said Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau had discovered the listed payments in the ledgers of Mr Yanukovych's then governing Party of the Regions - allegedly part of "an illegal off-the-books system". The bureau is also investigating business deals worth millions of dollars put together with the help of Mr Manafort's business.

Whether you’re trying to start a quirky news blog, open a local Irish pub, or sell handmade furniture out of your garage, one thing’s for sure: your business is not going to succeed if you don’t build it a professional-looking website. That’s why we’re excited to share the WordPress Wizard Bundle.This is a bundle that includes 12 courses about everything from the basics of Wordpress through how to make an app for your site. You can start out knowing nothing about WordPress and still create a website that scores you the customers you need by investing a little time each day.If you’re ready to stop working for The Man and just be yourself, check out the Wordpress Wizard Bundle: it's on sale today for just $49.

"Gig economy" scooter drivers for London's Deliveroo service earn £7/hour plus £1/delivery, and that's nowhere near a living wage: but rather than giving their a pay rise (£9.40/hour, plus £1/delivery, plus petrol, plus tips), Deliveroo wants to cut them all to zero-hours contracts with no hourly wage and £3.75/delivery and they fired all the drivers who asked for a living wage, so naturally, drivers are crowdfunding a strike-fund to fight back. (more…)

Two years ago Shannon Morgan of New Jersey ordered a vanity license plate that read 8THEIST. State officials denied her order, explaining that it might be considered offensive. She sued and won. The state Motor Vehicle Commission will also have to pay Morgan $75,000 to resolve her claim. They don't give a damn, because it's taxpayer money that they'll use to pay for their foolishness. Everyone in the chain of command who rejected the license plate request should be fired and barred from working for the government ever again, and forced to wear a colander on their head for the term of their natural lives, if you ask me.Bonus: as a result of the lawsuit, the DMV must also issue the following vanity plates or "combinations that are substantially similar": SECULAR, RATIONL, HUMANST, ATHEISM, GODLESS, HEATHEN, HERETIC, SKEPTIC, BLASFMR, REASON, EVOLVE, TRANS, LGBTR.TS, LGBTQ, PRIDE, QUEER, GAYPOWR, LGBTALY, FEMINISM, FEMINST, EQUALITY and 4WOMEN.[via]