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Microsoft Research deployed a tween-simulating chatbot this week, only to recall it a few hours later because it had turned into a neo-Nazi, and the next day, they published a bewildered apology that expressed shock that it had been so easy for trolls to corrupt their creation. (more…)

NC State University researcher Max Scott and colleagues have engineered a strain of transgenic blueflies whose maggots secrete human growth factor, which they hope to use to fight infections in patients with non-healing wounds for whom antibiotics do not offer any hope. (more…)

“A new shipment of science, spacewalk gear and crew supplies is on its way to the International Space Station,” NASA says. Astronauts on the International Space Station will grapple an arriving Cygnus supply spacecraft this morning, with coverage starting at 5:30 a.m. EDT (0930 GMT). (more…)

A woman in San Diego, CA is reported to have contracted the Zika virus through sexual transmission. (more…)

The Republican presidential campaign just got even weirder. After a pro-Ted Cruz group ran a nasty ad about Donald Trump's wife, Trump said something nasty about Cruz's wife, and a too-timely story appeared in the Trump-friendly National Enquirer about the Cruzes' private life. All nasty stuff. In his denial today, however, Cruz was talking about about Roger Stone, Trump's political advisor, when he went off on a rather bizarre tangent."Stone is a man for whom a term was coined for copulating with a rodent. Let me be clear. Donald Trump may be a rat, but I have no desire to copulate with him."Ooookaaaay, Ted.

Legendary punk Bob Mould (Hüsker Dü, Sugar) has a killer new album out today, Patch the Sky! One of Bob's pals is singer-songwriter Ryan Adams who was a fan before becoming a friend. Earlier this week, Ryan invited Bob over to his studio to hang out, shoot the shit, and play some songs. NPR has the audio evidence....For the next hour you'll hear Bob and Ryan play music and hear a sprawling, geeky and fun conversation. Sometimes it's about Bob's record, other times it's about Metallica bootlegs, caveman sounding lyrics, favorite cereals, fasted band, how the revival of vinyl helps make better, more focused records, praying, the quietness of church, zombies, Einstürzende Neubauten, noise rock and recording/mixing/soundboards."Hear Ryan Adams and Bob Mould Play Music And Talk About Everything Under The Sun" (NPR's All Songs Considered)Bob Mould "Patch The Sky" (Amazon)Bob Mould's "Voices In My Head":https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLKIkmiLCzM

https://youtu.be/SLoukoBs8TEI've been avidly watching these Primitive Technology videos. The fellow who makes the videos lives in "Far North Queensland, Australia," and so far has made a hut with a kiln-fired tiled roof, underfloor heating and mud pile walls, baskets, a stone hatchet, charcoal, and a sling using only his hands on primitive stone tools. In his latest video, he builds a bow and some arrows.He stresses that doing these things is a hobby for him, not a way of life. From his FAQ:Primitive technology is a hobby where you make things in the wild completely from scratch using no modern tools or materials. This is the strict rule. If you want a fire- use fire sticks, an axe- pick up a stone and shape it, a hut- build one from trees, mud, rocks etc. The challenge is seeing how far you can go without modern technology. If this hobby interests you then this blog might be what you are looking for.Also It should be noted that I don’t live in the wild but just practice this as a hobby. I live in a modern house and eat modern food. I just like to see how people in ancient times built and made things. It is a good hobby that keeps you fit and doesn’t cost anything apart from time and effort.

There are rubber bouncy balls in between my couch cushions, under ever piece of furniture, and filling my desk tray. I feel like someone re-wrote the Trouble with Tribbles, starring bouncy balls.It started out innocently, I have a gumball machine. I noticed that my daughter ALWAYS wants the bouncy ball at a local pizza parlor, and never candy from their machines, so guess what I did? This bag of 250 more than filled the tank, and there were quite a few left over. I say were.Throwing handfuls of bouncy balls in a small room never gets old. Bouncy balls loose in the car on a windy road can be kind of scary. While rubber bouncy balls can be a lot of fun, they are a real choking hazard around small kids and pets. Like my dog Pretzel. I was constantly removing them from her mouth for a while, lucky she wants to chew them up and not swallow them hole. We've gotten more careful. The cat wants to chase them, and bat them around too. You can also make your own. DIY cornstarch and borax balls are not as long lived as rubber ones, which may be good. They also will destroy a gumball machine, don't use them for that.250 Rubber Bouncy Balls via Amazon

Games are awesome. They were awesome when you were a kid, slamming buttons on the old Nintendo controller. And now games are extra awesome with all the technology at hand for mobile play and now, virtual reality. Today you can do more than just play with this Virtual Reality & 3D Game Developer Bundle that’s 92% off. You’ll learn from top experts how to build the most exciting games in the industry with hands-on experience. It’s a whole new kind of fun.These three courses together offer over 95 hours of content. Using the Unity game engine, you’ll build 8 games, mastering C# and object-oriented programming concepts. From the beginners stage, you’ll tackle basic scripts to create games using minimal code at first. With the Virtual Reality course, get an overview of fundamental concepts and even create a Google cardboard game for mobile. Then 3D modeling will teach you the Blender suite of skills to have you creating and moving basic shapes you’ll need for game design. The quizzes at the end of each section will guarantee you’ve learned it all.Because you’re creating actual games here, your programming and design portfolio is about to look a lot more impressive. Show the work you’ve built to existing or potential employers for a whole new career now that all these courses are available for 92% off. Apply these skills to making your own games or to simply appreciating the fun that much more. Check out the link below for more details.Take 92% Off Virtual Reality & 3D Game Developer Bundle in the Boing Boing Store.

More Americans are riding public transit than ever before, and not a moment too soon, because between oil's direct and indirect costs, climate change, the expense of roadworks, and the scaling problems of private cars, the increasingly urbanized nation needs something to keep its cities from imploding under the logistical challenge of getting everyone everywhere. (more…)

https://youtu.be/clbbMt2sl0kSreedharan Subramaniam shot a video of impatient waterfowl walking over to the tardy man who feeds them every morning.

Would you like to see how a sewing machine works? How braces straighten teeth? How a key and lock works? How an ant walks? This collection of 25 GIFs will show you.

Microsoft has pulled the plug on on Tay, a twitter AI chatbot that went from zero to Nazi in a matter of hours after being launched. And not the strangely-compelling Kenneth Branagh-type Nazi, either. bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we've got.@TomDanTheRock Repeat after me: Hitler did nothing wrong!The problem seems obvious and predictable: by learning from its interactions with real humans, Tay could be righteously trolled into illustrating the numbing stupidity of its own PR-driven creators. The Daily Telegaph:All of this somehow seems more disturbing out of the 'mouth' of someone modelled as a teenage girl. It is perhaps even stranger considering the gender disparity in tech, where engineering teams tend to be mostly male. It seems like yet another example of female-voiced AI servitude, except this time she's turned into a sex slave thanks to the people using her on Twitter.

I'm giving the closing keynote at this year's Information Security Summit, which is being held at the Universal City Hilton in Los Angeles. (more…)

The crowning paradox of the touring comic's life may be this: You have to leave home to make a name, but without the grounding and security of home you may not have anything to say. This week on HOME: Stories From L.A., three experienced comedians on striking the tricky balance between the road and home.HOME is a member of the Boing Boing Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving the show a rating and/or review at the iTunes Store. Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | RSSThanks to Cathy Ladman, whose one-woman show, "Does This Show Make Me Look Fat?", opens soon; Brad Upton, whose upcoming tour schedule is available here; and Jackie Kashian, who can be heard on The Dork Forest and The Jackie and Laurie Show.

Stop by the Collector's Shangri-La booth at WonderCon this weekend, and check out this beautiful collection of "Cabinet Cards" by artist Alex Gross. From Collector's Shangdi-La's website:His (Alex Gross') mixed media “cabinet card paintings” reinterpret traditional studio portraiture, translating each cabinet card beautifully from the original 19th century medium into a completely new image and reimagining the working class faces of the nineteenth century as everything from superheroes to villains, escape artists, animals, wizards, Godzilla, and Darth Vader. Published by Collector’s Shangri-La, the artwork is printed with archival inks on museum-quality fine art paper. 8.5 x 11 inches. COAAlso at booth 505 will be: a drawing for a $100 gift certificate, free "art cards", and signings with Olivia De Berardinis, Gris Grimly, the incredible Martin Olson, Miss Mindy, Johnny Ryan and filmmakers of Death if Superman Lives!If you are at WonderCon, be sure to stop by!

Everything requires a login these days, and you’re only one person. Experts tell you to mix it up with your passwords, never use the same one twice, add numbers, then symbols, on and on. But how to remember all that? You spend way too much time resetting your passwords, and don’t feel much more secure at the end of the day. Well, that jig is up. Get Password Boss now for 86% off and rest assured that you just need one master password, and the pros there handle the rest, keeping you safe and sound.This app saves all your passwords and autofills your usernames for everything you do online. It randomizes and creates ultra-strong passwords for every account of yours, letting you do the easy part and simply use one master password to login here. It syncs across all your devices so you won’t have to remind yourself of that random string of letters from your iPad somewhere either. If you so choose, you can even share your passwords with select friends of family members. The custom two-step verification process keeps you extra safe by preventing data theft and even deleting data if compromised.No more letters and numbers that you’ve used a million times and you know are way too easy for hackers to guess. This one hub keeps your mind at ease and your data safe. For 86% off right now, streamline that crazy password process once and for all. This is a lifetime promotion so your online security is set for life so check out the link below for more details.Save 86% on Password Boss in the Boing Boing Store.

Malik Taylor, aka Phife Dawg, of pioneering hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest has died at age 45 from complications arising from diabetes. (more…)

Panorama photos of scenery are nice. Panorama photos of things that move from shot-to-shot are better. Huh magazine has a gallery of some great ones.[via]

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…)

Tassos writes, "I’m one of Coney, who make all kinds of play where the audience can take meaningful part. I’m writing and game-designing REMOTE, a new piece of ticklishly interactive theatre, exploring the limits of human agency inside big pervasive systems of capital and technology." (more…)

Textbook giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishes Randall Munroe's amazing Thing Explainer, and a lucky accident happened when someone in the textbook division noticed Munroe's amazing explanatory graphics, annotated with simple language (the book restricts itself to the thousand most common English words) and decided to include some of them in the next editions of its high-school chemistry, biology and physics textbooks. (more…)

The perfect accompaniment to your home-made poop emoji peeps: a marshmallow Jabba the Hutt. (more…)

Rentdownstairs was expecting a new baby, so they commissioned Atlanta woodworker Garrick Andrus to carve this amazing tentacled crib out of walnut for the impending bundle of joy. (more…)

An exceedingly rare and historically important Beatles record sold at auction today for $110,000. The 78 RPM 10" acetate includes "Hello Little Girl," apparently the first song John Lennon ever wrote (or at least recorded). The flip side is a song Meredith Wilson wrote for the 1957 play The Music Man, titled "Til There Was You." Take a listen below. The Beatles manager Brian Epstein handwrote the label on this particular record that now belongs to an anonymous collector. From Omega Auctions:This unique 10" 78RPM acetate record featuring 'Hello Little Girl' on one side and 'Til There Was You' on the other was cut in the Personal Recording Department of the HMV record store on Oxford St, London. Brian Epstein had the disc cut from the Decca audition tapes before presenting it to George Martin (EMI) on 13th February 1962 in his desperate attempt to get them a recording contract. This meeting, despite Martin's initial reticence, was to eventually lead to the breakthrough they were looking for. The disc was later given to The Fourmost to record their own version of Hello Little Girl (recorded 3 July 1963) and then to Les Maguire of Gerry & The Pacemakers (recorded Hello Little Girl 17th July 1963). This is the first time it has come to the marketplace, having been tucked away in Maguire's loft until now. Epstein's handwriting on the labels reads as follows: side 1 Hullo Little Girl, John Lennon & The Beatles, Lennon,McCartney' and side 2 'Til' There Was You Paul McCartney & The Beatles'. The acetate is in VG (Very Good) condition with light scuffs and scratches - nothing heavy. It has been played through once when digitally recorded at BBC studios and it played through well with crackle but no skips or jumps.More at CNN: "'Holy Grail' of Beatles records sells for $110k"https://youtu.be/wucEZvFL2pMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRDu7V7QCDQ

Artist, and Boing Boing pal, Gus Harper continues to create beautiful things. This collaboration with videographer Isaac Rodriquez is lovely. Gus has been experimenting with body painting.Gus had this to say about the project: It's a collaborative piece with me as the artist and professional cameraman Isaac Rodriquez as the videographer. We had this as a video installation at the last show. It was a big hit. The models are mostly body painted in front of my backdrops. It was just a way of documenting my body painting by capturing the ephemeral body art on film. The title comes from the fact that there is a lot of copper in the imagery. It made a port friend of my think about the iron age, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age… How through all this roughness there is always been the soft beauty of femininity.

You’re a saver. Maybe even a little nostalgic. You want to hang on to all your data, all the time, because you just never know when you’re going to need it next or want to look at it again. Those old pictures, videos, emails and files are going to come in handy one day, you know it. Plus, it’s the smart move, because if something happens to your computer, you want to be ready for it. Now, for whatever you want to pay, you can back up 500GB of data using Zoolz Cloud. Every system, every file, every which way, this is the easiest and most reliable storage option available.Of course it’s automatic, meaning that cold storage files are backed up instantly. Want to make sure something in particular is saved for life? You can manually add items too using the smart selection feature. And when they say lifetime, they mean it: your files are safe and sound for keeps. Once you back everything up, it will add and adjust any changes you make to existing files using its duplication technology so that you don’t needlessly double up on existing files. But don’t think they skimp. All your data is backed up redundantly across multiple facilities here, so you’re extra secure.Storage this good can usually be pricey but lucky for you this is a pay what you want system. No matter your price, you’ll get access to this incredible backup technology that you can trust all your files with. It works automatically and seamlessly, backing up as you go, but giving you control over adding, editing, removing and sharing any files anytime. Check out the link below for more details.Pay What You Want for the Zoolz Cloud Backup Bundle in the Boing Boing Store.

In Dan Baum's excellent article in Harper's about the devastating consequences of the US government's war on drugs, there's a revealing quote from John Ehrlichman, Nixon's Watergate co-conspirator:I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest. At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.Harpers.org is offline right now. Here's Archive.org's snapshot.

In response to the terrorist bombings in Belgium, Ted Cruz said, "We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized." Of course, sending security patrols into Muslim neighborhoods will definitely radicalize them. Then Cruz can call for a massive militarized police force to occupy the radicalized Muslim neighborhoods, making the problem even worse. Then he can boast how he was right all along.

Michael C Ford has been sentenced to four years and nine months in prison, having pleaded guilty to running a sextortion/phishing operation from his work computer at the US embassy in London for two years. (more…)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, "Readers may recall a long-simmering dispute over the use of common abbreviationsrequired in citations, a technical standard known as the Uniform System of Citation.One explanation of that standard is a manual every law student knows, The Bluebook,long published by the Harvard Law Review Association in cooperation with 3 other lawschools." (more…)

The latest figures on government-backed student loans are in, and with them, the news that the US government took $176 million out of ex-students paychecks and Social Security in the last three months of 2015. (more…)

In a surprising turn of events, the U.S. government on Monday paused its battle with Apple over an iPhone, and what may be its greater goal of mandating “backdoors” in consumer encryption. On Monday afternoon, the Justice Department told a judge it needs a couple weeks to try 'new' ways of accessing whatever may be on the device, without Apple's help--and with an assist from unnamed experts from outside the agency. (more…)

Not for the squeamish!What might human flesh taste like? It's apparently illegal to eat people, even yourself, so Greg Foot of the BBC's Brit Lab settled for having a tiny morsel of his own thigh removed and cooked so he could sniff it, and speculate. (Brit Lab, thanks Sean Ness!)

Author John Biggs, who cranked 'em out for Techcrunch and Gizmodo, is quitting blogging. He writes about the things he's learned and earned generating 11,000 posts.The first thing, of course, was the complete ruination of his health: he now "looks like a nervous beluga." But there are other perils—ambiguous ones, professional tradeoffs in the 3,300,000-word accumulation of mastery at something. You learn how to write fast and with dense precision, but it wrecks your ability to work long-form, to let a story unfold. You gain an uncanny awareness for what people want to read, but you can't remember what you want to read. You realize that while you're not really being read, authenticity works.And you won't believe what happens next…You learn that you can help people. In 2005 I wrote this post. It was about a WD-40 straw holder. It was a throwaway. A few months later I got a call. A nice lady was on the phone. She was trying to track me down. She said that the WD-40 straw holder post saved her company. She was able to sell hundreds of them and stay in business. I felt good for a minute and then wrote 16 more posts that day.

https://youtu.be/Kpu8pNcANbkStep 1: Buy a catnip banana for $3 on Amazon.Step 2: Give the catnip banana to your cat. Step 3. Record a video of the cat playing with it. Step 4: Edit the video, using the song "Whats It To Ya Punk" by Audionautix (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license) Step 5. Upload the video to YouTube. Step 6. Enjoy the mean-spirited YouTube comments, many of which will begin with "Step 7...."

If your website looks like the above, it just got old. HEY LOOK, IT'S EVERY BOOTSTRAP WEBSITE EVER [adventurega.me]Want to make an original website yourself?Forget that! Who would ever want to put in all of that effort for a website? Just open up your web browser and type "bootstrap template" into your favorite search engine, like Yahoo! or Bing, and you're on your way! There are hundreds of templates to choose from, but go ahead and pick this same exact template from the first result on google, edit a few lines, and you're on your way! No one will notice!GOOGLE THAT SHIT

Adam West still wins.

Minecraft's combat system always reflected its simplicity, and basically amounted to clicking things until they died. It's just been overhauled with a game update centered entirely on combat. Ideas that seem simple become more challenging when you have to account for lag. (more…)

Ken Shirriff embarked upon a teardown of counterfeit Apple laptop chargers. On the outside, they're typo-free and very convincing. Inside, though, they're a dangerous mangle of cheap parts and inexplicably bad decisions.The most important feature of a charger is the isolation between the potentially-dangerous AC input and the low-voltage output… The counterfeit MagSafe charger has a dangerously small distance between the low voltage side (top) and the high voltage side (bottom). This is why you shouldn't buy counterfeit chargers.I'm puzzled as to why counterfeit chargers never manage to have sufficient clearance distances. They use simple, low-complexity circuits so the circuit board layout should be straightforward. Except in the smallest cube phone chargers, they aren't fighting for every millimeter of space. It shouldn't take much additional effort to make the boards safer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arOkGC9lCAkLove Hulten writes, "The Echo Observatory is a handcrafted tribute to fractals and self-similar patterns. It's a mysterious artifact that both generates and visualizes complex mathematical formations, in real-time." (more…)

Russian law provides for a national censorwall that entertainment companies can populate with the URLs of websites they dislike, without much oversight or review (it's similar the system used in the UK in that regard). (more…)

I haven't read T.W. Piperbrook's Contamination post-apocalyptic zombie series but it has 4.1/5 stars with 744 customer reviews on Amazon. Right now you can get the first 4 books as the Kindle editions for free.

On Tuesday, Jason Thompson and his four-year-old son Xavier were riding home on a Toronto bus. Suddenly the bus stopped and the driver told everyone to stay in their seats. A police officer got on the bus went up to Thompson, and told him to get off the bus. Thompson asked why but the officer wouldn't explain, repeating his order to get off the bus. (more…)

On Wednesday night, the person who runs the Twitter feed for San Francisco's BART system began answering riders' frustrated tweets with frank, honest statements that eschewed the bland "thank you for your feedback" and the chipper "we're working on it!" norms of corporate social media in favor of brutally honest assessments of the sorry state of the system, starting with, "BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality." (more…)

Fanfreak's Space Skull tee is $20 at the Neatoshop; how is it that I've never seen this design concept before?

Imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning writes, "I filed my Freedom of Information Act request in 2014 for Training Material related to theInsider Threat Program. I had almost forgoten about it, when the package arrived in the mail. In it was this slideshow." (more…)

For Christianity Today, theologian Michael Horton explores the "theology" of Donald Trump and his followers. It reads as superficially civil, yet completely contemptuous and comically unprepared: a growing trend among conservative and Christian commentary on Trump.Vague on doctrine, infiltrated by consumerism and a sentimental moralism intent on helping us all “become a better you,” and sort of interested in “family values” as long as they don’t interfere with our own family breakdowns, many cultural evangelicals are tired of losing the culture wars. They want a winner—“a strong leader.” I’m hardly the first to point out that it’s the stuff of which demagogues are made.It is not that Trump has caused this transformation in portions of the so-called “evangelical electorate.” Rather, his candidacy has revealed the inner secularization of significant portions of the movement, which surveys have documented for some time now. Four theological words highlight the problem.I made the digital paintover above in honor of the trash fire currently consuming evangelical political hearts. In other Trumpery news, a Republican National Committee member today suggested that they're going to freeze Donald Trump out of the nomination irrespective of how many delegates he secures. Riots it will be, then.

Today we travel to a future without pets. What would it take for us to give up our fuzzy, slithery, fishy friends? Should our pets get more rights? And if we didn’t have dogs or cats, would we domesticate something else to take their place? Flash Forward: RSS | iTunes | Twitter | Facebook | Web | PatreonIn this episode we also run through a couple of possible ways we might wind up in a pet-free world. Which, to me, sound really sad. Thankfully (spoiler alert) it’s probably never going to happen. Illustration by >Matt Lubchansky▹▹ Full show notesCheck out all the great podcasts that Boing Boing has to offer!

Ladar Levison shut down his secure email service Lavabit in 2013, when the Feds served a warrant and gag-order on him, seeking to get him to backdoor his service to let them snoop on someone. Everyone since then has known that the target of the order was Edward Snowden, but Levison faced jail time if he ever admitted it out loud, under the terms of the gag-order. (more…)