My wife, Carla Sinclair, is editor of Wink Books. Yesterday, she used Paypal to pay Ben Marks his fee for reviewing a photo book published by Taschen called "Castro’s Cuba: An American Journalist’s Inside Look at Cuba 1959-1969." Carla included a message to Ben in the Paypal transaction, which read, "Hi Ben - Your Castro's Cuba review is up! Thanks so much! Carla."As soon as she pressed the send button, she got a pop-up message on the PayPal site that informed her that the payment was being held for review. This had never happened before and she had no idea why PayPal was holding up the transaction. Last night, an email arrived from PayPal. It turns out, the problem arose because Carla's message included the forbidden word "Cuba" (and/or possibly "Castro"). Here's the email from PayPal:As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in thePayPal system. During a recent screening, we noticed an issue regardingyour account.PayPal's Compliance Department has reviewed your account and identifiedactivity that may be in violation of United States regulations administeredby the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).PayPal is committed to complying with and meeting its global regulatoryobligations. One obligation is to ensure that our customers, merchants, andpartners are also in compliance with applicable laws and regulations,including those set forth by OFAC, in their use of PayPal.To ensure that activity and transactions comply with current regulations,PayPal is requesting that you provide the following information via emailto compliancetransactions@paypal.com:1. Purpose of payment 0B463347YT949791N attempted on August 16, 2016in the amount of $30.00USD, including a complete and detailed explanationof the goods or services you intended to purchase. Please also explain thetransaction message: "Hi Ben - Your Castro's Cuba review is up! Thanks somuch! Carla."Please go to our Resolution Center to provide this information. To find theResolution Center, log in to your account and click the Resolution Centersubtab. Click Resolve under the Action column and follow the instructions.If we don't hear from you by September 01, 2016, we will limit what you cando with your account until the issue is resolved.The lesson: don't use forbidden words when sending someone money via PayPal. Better yet, use Bitcoin instead. I wonder what other words will trigger this kind of action?

I've tried a few different door stop wedges and this nickel door wedge is the only one that keeps a heavy spring loaded door in our house open. Its made of metal, so it would be pretty hard to crush, unless you are trying to stop a hydraulic press. It's a $7 add-on Item for Amazon prime members.

A psycholinguist reports that some of the factors that make headlines more clicky also apply to the titles of academic journal papers. Researcher Gwilym Lockwood of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics analyzed the titles of 2,000 papers published in the journal "Frontiers in Psychology" and their Altmetric Attention Score that measures social sharing, mentions in the news, and other metrics of attention. From Phys.org:(The titles of the 2,000 papers were) coded for positive framing (e.g. using "smoking causes cancer", rather than "the link between smoking and cancer") and phrasing arousal (e.g. referring to "gambling" rather than "mathematical decision making").It turned out that articles with positive framing and phrasing arousal in their titles received higher Altmetric scores, meaning that they were shared more widely online. In contrast, having wordplay in the titles actually lead to lower Altmetric Attention Scores, while having a question in the title made no difference. This is independent of the length of the title or how interesting the topic was."This suggests that the same factors that affect how widely non-scholarly content is shared extend to academia, which has implications for how academics can make their work more likely to have more impact," Lockwood writes in her own paper. Do you think she applied what she learned to her paper's title, "Academic clickbait: articles with positively-framed titles, interesting phrasing, and no wordplay get more attention online"?

See sample pages from this book at Wink.The Sweetapolita Bakebook: 75 Fanciful Cakes, Cookies and More by Rosie AlyeaClarkson Potter2015, 208 pages, 8.6 x 10.5 x 0.5 inches (softcover)$15 Buy a copy on AmazonSince she was a teenager, Rosie Alyea has been obsessed with “whipping up a sweet life.” She began as a professional baker and then veered into the world of entrepreneurship, launching a decadent beauty product line. In 2010, Alyea began dreaming up creative confections for her blog, Sweetapolita. Her ribbons of Swiss Meringue Buttercream piled up rave reviews, and with each colorful cake creation she cultivated an adoring crowd. Today, Sweetapolita has nearly half a million followers on Facebook, and now Alyea is also an author with her first cookbook, the The Sweetapolita Bakebook.This bakebook is a showstopper, full of bright, vibrant pastels. Rosie obviously has a passion for color, evident in the line of every dazzling dessert she fashions. Her cookies transcend bakery staples into the realm of fine art. The buttery rounds are swimming with swirls of watercolor frosting and then dipped in edible gold so that they look like gilt-edged framed paintings, worthy of gracing any museum wall. Her infamous cakelets stand like fairytale towers, adorned with charming children’s fondant doodles in carnival colors.If the Sweetapolita recipes look daunting, don’t despair. Rosie has included lots of basic baking and decorating techniques, as well as an extensive section stocked with easy favorite frostings and simple cakes. Even beginning bakers will find bite-sized inspiration in the shape of Jumbo Frosted Animal Crackers. If you appreciate the art of baking, this beautiful, drool-worthy book will become a source of inspiration.– Kaz Weida

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…)

(more…)

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…)

(more…)

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.)