When security firm Sucuri investigated the source of a 50,000-request/second DDoS attack on a jewelry shop, they discovered to their surprise that the attacks originated on a botnet made of hacked 25,500+ CCTV cameras in 105 countries. (more…)

If you want a quality vaping experience, it’s usually going to cost you. Vaporizers that deliver a fast, controlled burn will set you back up to $300, which is why the FEZ Vaporizer (now just $99) is an absolute steal.The FEZ dry herb pen does everything that more expensive models handle at a reduced price. It heats up in under 60 seconds, and you can switch between to three temperature levels to set the optimal burning speed for your herb.Specially designed for dry flower consumption, the FEZ sports a filtration system that eliminates any toxic compounds to produce as pure a vapor as possible.The FEZ’s simple design makes it easy to use, while its USB-powered battery provides a charge that lasts up to 2,000 puffs on a single charge. And while many models are clunkier, the FEZ is only 3.5 inches long, making it ultra-portable.[stackCommerce layout=“3" count=“6" sort="newest"][/stackCommerce]At 28% off MSRP, now’s the time to pick up your FEZ Vaporizer while this deal lasts.

Kyle writes, "The Volt is a fully open source, arduino-based, handmade analog clock that tells time with meters. Available in a DIY install kit, 2 pre-made models, and a mix & match hardware option. The clocks are but with solid black walnut and maple, with faceplates produced in brass, copper, and steel. Only on Kickstarter!" (more…)

I'll bet the tapa isn't fresh, eitherView post on imgur.com

Last July, McKinney, Texas police officer Eric Casebolt made headlines when video surfaced of him pulling his gun on a group of black children in their bathing suits at a pool party, tackling a young girl in her bikini. (more…)

Jeet Heer explains that Republicans fell for Trump because of years of conservative policy that told them science, reason and skepticism were bad. Put simply, they were primed to be suckers: “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” Conservative ideology, as Perlstein persuasively argues, is particularly vulnerable to grifters because of its faith in the goodness of business and its concomitant hostility toward regulation—which makes it easy for true believers to buy into the notion that some modern Edison has a miraculous new invention that the Washington elite is conniving to suppress. In Perlstein’s words, “The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.” There’s another factor at work here: The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks.

Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics, a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives analyzes the economics of hosting the Olympics, indicting the numbers game played by bid committees and the IOC. (more…)

Thea video feedback emulator offers a vague memory of fooling with video cameras and a strong flavor of crisp and fractal generative art, The results lurk somewhere between the decades. Click and drag your results for wild (and often brightly-flickering) variations. The creator explains how it works. [via Github]What we’ve found most interesting about video feedback is: the sheer complexity of the images it produces through such simply-defined and implemented spacemaps that really only have to do with the relative positioning of two rectangles. It’s somewhat intuitive, but always surprising.This is all just scratching the surface of the mathematics behind the patterns that video feedback is capable of, but hopefully it’s good enough for a start!P.S. You’ll notice that many of the “interesting” patterns contain regions of diverse sizes. That is, they appear to have a broad range of spatial frequencies. What’s up with that?

In Workarounds to Computer Access inHealthcare Organizations: You Want MyPassword or a Dead Patient?, security researchers from Penn, Dartmouth and USC conducted an excellent piece of ethnographic research on health workers, shadowing them as they moved through their work environments, blithely ignoring, circumventing and sabotaging the information security measures imposed by their IT departments, because in so doing, they were saving lives. (more…)

Well, this sounds like potentially a pretty big deal. Facebook is using smartphone location data to recommend new friends to users, which suggests many possible privacy invasions. This is also a technique NSA uses to track surveillance targets. (more…)

You might could also try Gangstagrass. (more…)

At "Share the Safety," you can buy one of three Smith & Wesson guns, and the good folks at the NRA will send another one just like it to a lucky person in a low income, inner-city neighborhood, "law-abiding urbanites who will for the first time be able to defend themselves against those who prey on the urban poor." It's just like Tom's shoes! (more…)

After Elizabeth Warren accompanied Hillary Clinton today on the campaign trail in Cincinnati, Ohio, former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown brought up the ol' not-a-Cherokee routine once again.Brown said on a call with the RNC that Warren was not Native American, an accusation he's recycled since 2012, when the two were both vying for the same senator seat. According to Politico:At the height of the 2012 campaign, it was reported that Warren had listed herself as having Native American roots at Harvard University. Soon, there was a “full-blown campaign frenzy,” Warren recalls, with Republicans demanding that she prove her Native-American roots and accusing her of getting her job at the elite university by making false claims about her personal background.Today, Brown brought up the tired accusations, once again asking for proof, this time suggesting she take a DNA test. According to the Washington Post:"As you know, she's not Native American," Brown, an early Trump endorser, told reporters on a conference call organized by the Republican National Committee. "She's not 1/32 Cherokee...Harvard can release the records, she can authorize the release of those records, or she can take a DNA test..."Recently, Trump, never to miss an opportunity to question or make fun of one's race, has repeatedly called her "Pocahontas." Never in recent politics has the topic of heritage played such a prominent role during the presidential campaign cycle, which has only just begun.

Dip your dollar into liquid anhydrous ammonia, dry it, and repeat. The surface tension of the boiling and evaporating ammonia shrinks the bill. Caveat: It could prove difficult to use a mini-dollar and mutilating a bill may even be illegal.(Applied Science via Weird Universe)

The monthly Report on Business magazine in the Canadian national paper The Globe and Mail profiled my work on DRM reform, as well as my science fiction writing and my work on Boing Boing. (more…)

The readership of Locus magazine have chosen their favorite fantasy and science fiction works of 2015, and the winners make for a very exciting summer reading list indeed! (more…)

For around US$115 for two hours, you can rent a friend via Tokyo company Client Partners. (No, this isn't code for prostitution.) From Chris Colin's article in The Week:As we nibble at pork with ginger, (rent-a-friend) Yumi cheerfully tells me about the gigs she has had since joining Client Partners. (The six-year-old agency is the largest of its kind in Japan, with eight branches across Tokyo and another that recently opened in Osaka.) There was the mystery writer who wanted her to read the novel he'd toiled away at for 10 years. Another man needed someone to talk with about his aging parents — not in person, but via months of emails. Like Miyabi, Yumi works weddings. For one, she was hired to play the sister of the bride — a real, living woman who was in a family feud that precluded her actual attendance. The mother of the bride was also a rental. The two impostors got along swimmingly.Yumi explains that these are just the more theatrical gigs. The bulk of her clients? They just want basic, uncomplicated companionship. From Yumi's vantage point, the breadth and depth of that need says something profound about her country.There's a word in Japanese, gaman, that translates roughly as "stoic forbearance in the face of the unbearable." It's a deep-seated Japanese value, this idea that you suck it up no matter what. A lot has been happening lately. Anxiety and depression spiked after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The country itself is shrinking, its population plummeting and aging rapidly. And there's the apparently growing problem of people who literally work themselves to death; a third of suicides have been attributed to overwork. All of that, Yumi and Taka say, but you act like everything's fine.Enter the rent-a-friend. Not a miracle cure, no. But maybe a pressure valve. "With us," Yumi says, "people can talk about their feelings without worrying what their real friends think.""Inside Japan's booming rent-a-friend industry" (The Week)

Taking pictures can be challenging. There are a million factors that can influence each shot you take - and unless you’re a trained photographer, you often just focus, click...and cross your fingers.Of course, you can take some of the ambiguity out of your picture-taking with this Hollywood Art Institute Photography Course & Certification package, now only $19.99 in the Boing Boing Store.Across 22 modules, this course will teach you what you need to know - and everything you should avoid - while snapping photos. Access premium video tutorials, articles, e-books, flashcards, and quizzes to really establish and consolidate your grasp of photography fundamentals.Backed by some of the industry's most experienced shooters and teachers, you’ll receive professional certification once the course is finished, plus long-term access to tutors and learning materials beyond your coursework.The Hollywood Art Institute Photography Course & Certification usually runs almost $2,600, so grab access to this course now at over 90% off until the offer expires.

Mian Wei, a Chinese student at the Rhode Island School of Design, has created an experimental series of fake fingertips with randomly generated fingerprints that work with Apple and Android fingerprint authentication schemes, as well as many others. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Wherever You Goby Pat Zietlow Miller (author) and Eliza Wheeler (artist)Little, Brown Books for Young Readers2015, 32 pages, 10.2 x 10.2 x 0.5 inches $13 Buy a copy on AmazonA hare packs its bags and takes a bicycle tour in this lovely rhyming picture book. Donning its jaunty chapeau and dapper pea coat, a hare cycles through forests and a covered bridge, past a paddlewheeled seaside inn, and into the evening lights of the big city. Exploring the neon-lit metropolis, it rides atop a trolley, pedals past a jolly carnival, and cruises over Seussian suspension bridges. Continuing on its way, it journeys through an arid desert, over indigo mountains, and back home again.Utilizing pale yellows, greens, and pinks, and drawn with an incredibly thin line, Wherever You Go's deep focus art fills every page with an expansive landscape. Little eyes could get lost for hours searching out minute details. Owls ride in baskets, mice chug along on tugboats, and alligators fish near ponds, and lazy afternoons can be spent examining the intricate scenery. A liltingly poetic storyline about traveling and new experiences is a delightful metaphor for life's journey. – S. Deathrage

It's been nearly a year since I moved from London to Burbank, and in that time, I've been slowly iterating through various online tutorials to be better at charcoal grilling, something I had almost no experience with when I got here. (more…)

The Journal of Sexual Medicine surveyed 1,000 students to determine "how many of them are removing or trimming their pubic hair, their reasons for doing so, the methods they use, as well as how they feel about pubic hair on a potential sexual partner," says Dr. Justin Miller of Sex & Psychology, which presented the findings as an infographic:

https://youtu.be/2eZ12Ez1C7AThis guy says, "I was about to insulate the walls of my house when Rambro broke in and started attacking the bale of glass wool." It looks like they both had a splendid time.

Geometry Global of Hong Kong recreated painting masterpieces with Lego bricks. Maybe they tinted the bricks after the fact in Photoshop, but the effect is still great - they are instantly recognizable despite being very low-rez. I swear I can see the pitchfork in American Gothic.

Gohilla says: "I found this [see photo embed below] on the chassis of my car while I was working on the exhaust system. I know it wasn't there a month ago, because I was under it working on the suspension. A quick search tells me that it's an rfid tracker. What does this mean for me? What do I do?"I found a tracker on my vehicle. I'm worried. What do I do?

"A Brief History of Video Game Controllers," starting with Tennis for Two (1958). My favorite is the pioneering Nintendo Power Glove (1989). (Super Deluxe)

Toward the end of World War II, Japan launched a strange new attack on the United States: thousands of paper balloons that would sail 5,000 miles to drop bombs on the American mainland. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we'll tell the curious story of the Japanese fire balloons, the world's first intercontinental weapon.We'll also discuss how to tell time by cannon and puzzle over how to find a lost tortoise.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

The sixth season of HBO's Game of Thrones concludes, with what many are sure to call a literally explosive trial and a named character death toll to match. Each week following the show, Boars, Gore, and Swords recaps everything that goes down in the world of Westeros. To discuss this week's "The Winds of Winter," Ivan and Red are joined by Kelly Anneken to discuss Cersei's continuing stylistic reinventions, possible GIF-based meme density, Arya pulling a Cartman, ginger pride, and the greatest ongoing debate within male culture: how many kids you could fight at once. Stick with us now that the season's over as we go into our ASOIAF book club, while alternating with episodes covering other television, movies, and various media.To catch up on previous seasons, the A Song of Ice And Fire books, and other TV and movies, check out the BGaS archive. You can find them on Twitter @boarsgoreswords, like their Facebook fanpage, and email them. If you want access to extra episodes and content, you can donate to the Patreon.

https://youtu.be/D8XGCimh9pYMatthias Wandel is a maker of incredible wooden machines. Check out all his videos on his YouTube channel. In this video, Matthias shows how he uses a club0like kitchen hammer to help chop frozen food. I could use one of these to help me chop sweet potatoes.

Artist Cindy Chin described her process of carving three elephants in the lead of a carpenter's pencil.

https://youtu.be/K5gPoZc8ZmsYouTuber Duggy made this machinima using narration from Carl Sagan and scenes from Grand Theft Auto V.

Arriving in my inbox at a steady clip this morning: a series of phishing emails aimed at Bitcoiners, promising that the sender has found a bug in "the Bitcoin client" and promising "Pay 0.07 BTC today, get 10 BTC for 15 hours." (more…)

Shot by New Horizons on its way out of town. [NASA, via]This picture provides a vivid illustration that Jupiter's atmosphere has more color contrast than any other atmosphere in the solar system, including Earth's. Data obtained from these and other New Horizons images taken during the encounter will provide valuable insight into the processes occurring on this gas giant.

John Quiggin (previously) delivers some of the most salient commentary on the Brexit vote and how it fits in with Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders (etc) as well as Trump, French neo-fascists, and other hypernationalist movements. (more…)

By Happy Toast, from the B3ta Brexit Challenge.

Ethan Zuckerman -- formerly of Global Voices, now at the MIT Center for Civic Media -- has spent his career trying to find thoughtful, effective ways to use technology as a lever to make positive social change (previously), but that means that he also spends a lot of time in the company of people making dumb, high-profile, destructive suggestions for using technology to "solve" problems in ways that make them much worse. (more…)

Photographer unknown, spotted on Sunset Boulevard.

Experienced shutterbugs with DSLR cameras have boatloads of lens options for capturing the moment. Unfortunately, smartphone photographers often get stuck with their one crummy lens, which means limited zoom and focus for their final image.Step up your smartphone’s photographic power with the Acesori 5-Piece Smartphone Camera Lens Kit, now just $9.99 in the Boing Boing Store.Magnetic rings easily attach one of three custom lens to your Android or Apple device, improving the range and clarity of your smartphone shots. The fish eye, wide angle and macro lenses are made with anti-scratch glass, so they'll handle easily as well.The package also come with metal lanyards and lens covers to keep your lens safe and ready at a moment’s notice.Find out how much better your smartphone pictures can be at 80% off the Acesori Lens Kit’s retail price, while this deal lasts.

Pete notes, "What is scary is how easy it was to make." (Thanks, Pete Smith!)

In his police report, officer Robert Cooper claims he was "barely able to get out of the way" as a teen driver tried to run him over, forcing him to shoot into a moving vehicle. But his own dashcam footage made a liar of him. A police video released Thursday by the State Law Enforcement Division of the May 19 shooting of a motorist by a Forest Acres police officer shows the officer firing seven shots into a slow-moving car as the motorist began to drive away.“Stop! Stop! Do not make me shoot you!” yells the officer, who is on foot in front of the vehicle with his weapon drawn and pointed at the car’s windshield. The driver is inside a small sedan and is the car’s only occupant.The officer fires seven shots, rapidly and from a close distance – perhaps less than 10 feet away – as the car moves slowly, turns toward the officer and then appears to try to go around the officer. The motorist then pulls away from the scene and moves out of range of the officer’s dash-cam, which recorded the event.The "don't make me shoot" line (like "stop resisting") is key to understanding the problem with cops in America: a device to justify escalating confrontations as fast as possible to violence. Forest Acres is giving officer Cooper a paid vacation during its investigation.

It's described as "nightmare fuel" by Digital Trends but I think it's adorable.

Here's a small gallery of the East German secret police's 26th Division, hard at work during the 1980s. (more…)

In many states in America, legislatures have erected punitive, vindictive barriers for women seeking contraception, requiring them to get prescriptions for safe, widely taken medications. (more…)

Some truths are universal. For one, your phone will always run out of power when you most need it. For another, the charging cords that come packaged with your Apple device will fray, split, and rip faster than Usain Bolt in a game of tag.Instead, pick up a charging cord that anyone would have a tough time damaging with the Armour Charge Steel iOS Charging Cable, right now as low as $24.95 in the Boing Boing Store.The Armour Charge isn’t your normal cable - it’s made from 100% stainless steel-woven cabling that’ll protect your phone’s charge from almost anything. Couple that strength with its aluminum housings and you’ve got reliable charging power for any USB 2.0 or Lightning device. Its compact durability make it a perfect travel accessory on the road and a great safeguard against accidental cord-ripping incidents at home.Grab the 1-meter version for $24.95 or the 2-meter edition for $32.95 before this offer expires.

On the Cool Tools Show podcast, Kevin Kelly and I had a wonderful, wide-ranging discussion with Adam Savage, the former co-host of Mythbusters and the editor-in-chief of Tested. Adam is erudite, funny, and very smart. Check out our show notes here.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single page

The Brexit vote wasn't mere xenophobia, it was self-destructive lashing out by people whom the political classes had written off for a generation. (more…)

In the runup to the Brexit vote, the "Leave" campaign repeatedly argued that the National Health Service could receive £350m/week in funds diverted from the money supposedly remitted by the UK to the EU (in reality, that number is radioactively false). (more…)

Accidental surrealism is the best surrealism.

Drivers in Mumbia must pay attention on crowded streets filled with scooters, taxis, and pedestrians.

Need something to sooth your jangled soul today? Pop in the buds, sit back, close your eyes and have a listen to the isolated vocal tracks on the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows." There... that's better. Carl Wilson and the Boys at their finest.[Via Playback FM]