After days of crunch negotiations with the European Union, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally announced his Brexit deal. It solves the problem of the Irish backstop—the need to avoid a hard border between northern Ireland (which is part of the U.K.) and the Irish republic—by leaving Northern Ireland in the EU in all but name. Northern Ireland's ultra-conservative Democratic Unionist Party, upon whose votes the deal depends, already say they will be voting against this deal, and Britain's hardcore brexiteers hate it too. The pressure's on: the October 31 deadline threatens to trigger a no-deal Brexit which most experts say would be economically disastrous, but appears to be the Conservative right's barely-hidden agenda.Most of the deal is the same as the one agreed by Theresa May last year - the main change is the Northern Ireland proposals. What's changed?Northern Ireland will be aligned to the EU single market.The controversial "backstop" - that critics feared could have kept the UK in a customs union with the EU indefinitely - has been removed.Northern Ireland will instead remain a part of the UK's customs territory, so it will be included in any future trade deals struck by the government after Brexit.But Northern Ireland will also remain an entry point into the EU's customs zone. The UK will apply tariffs to products entering Northern Ireland as long as they are not destined for onward transportation across the border. Read the rest

I downloaded Untitled Goose Game to my Nintendo Switch a few days ago. It's the most self-abusive fun that I've had (with a video game, I mean we're all friends here) since I owned an NES back in the day. If you're not familiar with the game's premise and don't care to watch the video, here's the short of it: You are a goose. You're kind of a dick (becasue goose). You fuck people's shit up. Constantly.Or if you're me, you try to.The controls of this game are simple. The laundry list of objectives the goose must fulfill before moving on to each new area are simple too. Completing said list to-do list? That's often more difficult. Some tasks are a breeze: scaring a kid so badly that he locks himself into a phone booth to get away from you was a piece of cake. Attempting to steal multiple items from the same person, collecting them at a single drop point? Kind of a pain. If the person you're stealing from sees you take their stuff, they'll give chase. The best policy is to drop whatever you had in your bill as soon as you're noticed: run too far towards your stash of swag and your hard-won loot will be found and returned from whence it came, forcing you to start all over again, often with your loot stashed in slightly more difficult locales than where you first snagged them from. I didn't expect a goose-related game to take careful planning or involve stealth. Read the rest

Analogue Pocket is a forthcoming handheld game console that runs old Nintendo carts and offers a built-in synthesizer and sequencer. A multi-video-game-system portable handheld. A digital audio workstation with a built-in synthesizer and sequencer. A tribute to portable gaming. Out of the box, Pocket is compatible with the 2,780+ Game Boy, Game Boy Color & Game Boy Advance game cartridge library. Pocket works with cartridge adapters for other handheld systems, too. Like Game Gear. Neo Geo Pocket Color. Atari Lynx & more. Completely engineered in *two FPGAs. ... Pocket has a digital audio workstation built in called Nanoloop. It’s a synthesizer and a sequencer. Designed for music creation and live performance. Shape, stretch and morph sounds. Capture music or play and sculpt live. From the spec sheet, the 3.5” 1600x1440 display—615 ppi!—and a dock with USB and HDMI connections stand out. It ships "in 2020 for $199". Read the rest

For a little over $1500, you can own a machine that will cut vinyl records in the comfort of your own home. This machine, the Phonocut Home Vinyl Recorder, is being promoted as a way to make your own analog "mixtapes," for musicians to record on demand, and for "people in love" to woo their beloved. But, primarily, they think pro studios will want it to "produce unlimited amounts of super affordable test cuts of recording sessions." From the look of their already-funded Kickstarter campaign, they're probably right on all accounts.Fast Company:The Phonocut’s interface is as simple as possible by design. You plug into the device via an audio cable, connecting it to a music source like your computer or your phone’s headphone jack... Then you hit play, and the 18-pound vinyl lathe uses a diamond-tipped needle to cut 10-inch records in real time to the music. These records are small and are only able to hold about 15 minutes of music per side...The idea of creating custom vinyl at home might sound too good to be true, but its founder, Flo Kaufmann, is a record specialist with over two decades in the business. He’s partnered with Florian “Doc” Kaps, who has already successfully brought back another analog technology thought lost to the ages—Polaroid film—with his Impossible Project. So if anyone can pull off the Phonocut, it’s probably this team. Read the rest

We have a theory about those throw blankets that are barely big enough to cover your legs. The only people who seem to make them or use them are grandmothers, and the blankets are only that small because Nana got bored halfway through the sewing job.Look, we're sure she means well. But if you want a cozy blanket that's sizeable enough to actually use, the Big Blanketâ„¢ is here.In case you haven't caught up to the high concept yet, allow us to sum up the primary asset of the Big Blanketâ„¢: It is big. Like, really big.How big? Oh, about 10' x 10'. That's four times the size of your typical throw. It's big enough for you, your significant other, two decent-sized dogs and your Nana. And needless to add, it will cover all of your legs just fine, plus at least two bonus limbs. It's built for maximum snuggliness, made from premium, ultra-soft fibers that are machine washable and stretchy. (Not like you need to make it any bigger.)Pick up the Big Blanketâ„¢ plus a polybag now for almost a few hundred dollars off. Read the rest

One of the great moments of my adulthood was my discovery -- courtesy of Mark's posts here on Boing Boing -- of the incredible work that Ernie Bushmiller did on Nancy from 1933 until his death in 1982. He was succeeded by a series of station-keeping cartoonists, some of whom were very adept at aping his unique comic timing, sense of the absurd, and confident draftmanship, but none of whom every made me have that aha moment -- until 2018, when the mysterious, pseudonymous Olivia Jaimes took over, kicking off a run of astoundingly great new Nancys that have been collected into one of the greatest new comic-strip collections I've read in a decade.

Remember when the default state of your online presence was anonymity? That's not so clear-cut anymore, and the worst part is you may not even know who is using your data or what they're using it for.Small wonder that so many people are choosing to surf through virtual private networks. VPNs filter web access through international servers to make sure your private identity stays private, and that just the beginning of their benefits.Looking to try out a service? Here are three top options that just happen to have subscriptions on sale.Disconnect VPN PremiumThe malware blockers on Disconnect don't just keep you safe, they also free up bandwidth, allowing you to surf up to 44% faster. And you can do more while you're online too, with the ability to access sites normally blocked by provincial restrictions while your own data stays hidden behind top-of-the-line encryption. Take your pick of subscription plans, all of which are at least 93% off the MSRP.Disconnect VPN Premium: Lifetime Subscription (1 Device) - 93% offDisconnect VPN Premium: Lifetime Subscription (3 Devices) - 94% offDisconnect VPN Premium: Lifetime Subscription (5 Devices) - 94% offFastestVPNTrue to its name, you can count on 99.9% uptime on one of FastestVPN's 200 servers. Their 256-bit AES encryption is enhanced by a host of anti-malware protocols including a NAT firewall and ad blocker. And their strict no-logs policy means no one is keeping track of your digital footprint - not even the company itself. Read the rest

Isn't 13 one less than 14?People reports:Felicity Huffman‘s release from prison for her role in the college admissions scandal has already been set.According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator, Huffman, 56, will finish her sentencing on Oct. 27 — exactly 13 days after she reported to the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif. on Oct. 15.The FCI in Dublin is a low security correctional institution for female offenders which currently holds 1,227 total inmates. It’s located just under 5 and a half hours from the Los Angeles area, where Huffman lives with her family.In May, Huffman pleaded guilty to paying disgraced admissions consultant Rick Singer $15,000 to have a proctor change her 19-year-old daughter Sophia’s SAT answers after she took the test. On Sept. 13, the Emmy-winning actress was sentenced to 14 days in federal prison, plus a $30,000 fine, 250 hours of community service and a year of supervised release.Huffman reported to FCI Dublin on Tuesday morning to begin serving her sentence.Go figure! Read the rest

Amazing parenting and crafting here.“I was asked to build this by Fatherly.com after they saw the tree I built in my daughter's bedroom.” “I used my own garage workshop and had help from a buddy who taught me the basics of fiberglass.”“Here's the finished product after about 90 hours and $1,250.00 in materials.”“I plan to auction this to raise money for Seattle Children's Hospital later this year.”Step-by-step gallery with some cool video below.I turned a regular crib into a submarine crib Read the rest

They named her SarahDee.Because they found her on a Saturday night.So cute.This is my mom and her squirrel that she found. Aren't they cute. Read the rest

The oldest leftovers in world history have been discovered, stashed inside Israel's Qesem Cave You'll never guess what they preserved for posterity.Bone marrow. From deer.Researchers have discovered the earliest evidence for storage and delayed consumption of food, deer bone marrow, at Qesem Cave in Israel. The deer bones show clear signs that people were cracking them open to get to the marrow inside.This previously unidentified behavior "offers insights into the socio-economy of the human groups who lived at Qesem and may mark a threshold to new modes of Palaeolithic human adaptation," the research said.The discovery is believed to be between 200,000 and 420,000 years old, which suggests that people have been storing food as leftovers for about that long in human history.Bone marrow storage and delayed consumption at Middle Pleistocene Qesem Cave, Israel (420 to 200 ka) [advances.sciencemag.org]The world's oldest leftovers stashed at Israel's Qesem Cave [CNN]PHOTO, TOP: Archaeological (Qesem Cave) and experimental [outdoor scenarios (SC 1 and SC 2)] damage on metapodials.Chop marks, cortical scars, and chipped marks on the anterior (C and G) and posterior (A, B, D, E, and F) surface of metapodial shafts. Note the short and slight chop marks combined with flat incisions/sawing marks in (F) and the inclination angle in the mark section almost parallel to the bone on posterior surfaces of metapodials in (A), (F), and (G). Experimental bones in the image are labeled as “EXP” followed by the abbreviation of scenario (SC 1 or SC 2) and exposure week. Read the rest

Folks have been protesting about our species' slow turning of the knife deeper into the belly of Mother Earth for a long time now. However, once it became evident that it was a killing wound we inflicted on the environment, leaving us well and truly fucked, the protests escalated in size and numbers. Quickly.Kids have been walking out of class, taking to the streets by the thousands. The pillaging of the Amazon, which has been going on for decades, is suddenly on the agenda in a big way with the United Nations and popping up in news broadcasts around the world. The climate activist group Extinction Rebellion is all up in everyone's grills around the globe, too. Recently, members of the group took to the streets to block traffic and generally fuck shit up (in a good way!) in major cities around the globe. London was on their hit list and man, did they hit it: shutting down streets in the city's downtown core, primarily in Trafalgar Square. Flights out of Heathrow Airport were disrupted. Over an eight-day period, London's Metropolitan Police Service threw over 1,300 of the protesters in the clink. It seems that the MPS was so sick of filling out paperwork for the arrests that they opted to make it illegal for Extinction Rebelling to do their thing within the city's borders... which, when you think about it will likely result in more paperwork. But hey: I am but a simple writer.From The Guardian:The Metropolitan police issued a revised section 14 order on Monday night that said “any assembly linked to the Extinction Rebellion ‘Autumn Uprising’ ... Read the rest

“This is like the Gold Rush in the 1840s.”

Bryony Dalefield pasted up the London Review of Books in the early 1980s. In this video she shows how she did it back in the the good old days of rubber cement and X-Acto knives. I laid out the first issue of bOING bOING in 1987 this way.Image: YouTube[via Open Culture] Read the rest

One can always use some good life advice, no matter the source!“Let's work out a good deal!”“Don't let the world down.”“Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!”“I will call you later.”Don't be a fool. Read the rest

Donald Trump, nominally the President of the United States of America, recently withdrew U.S. troops from Kurdish-held lands and greenlit a Turkish invasion of same, at Turkish president Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan's request. As soon as the humiliations of this outcome became clear to Trump, we now learn, he began sending threats to ErdoÄŸan instead. ErdoÄŸan ignored them, began his attack, and now those formerly-American bases are occupied by Syrian and Russian forces called in by the desperate Kurds. The New York Times' Katie Rogers pointed out that she "felt the need to ask" the White House for confirmation that this letter is "real". It is. Read the rest

Donald Trump to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, on the occasion of his slaughtering of Kurds and Syria power-grab with Russia:“Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool.”Here's a scan of the White House letter first tweeted by Fox Business Channel's Trish Regan. “Let's work out a good deal!”“Don't let the world down.”“Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!”“I will call you later.”This is real.Basically he stuck some tweets on White House letterhead.... "let's work out a good deal!""don't let the world down.""don't be a tough guy. don't be a fool!""i will call you later."@katierogers of the @nytimes has confirmed this letter is authentic. pic.twitter.com/S6EJRojr4F— fake nick ramsey (@nick_ramsey) October 16, 2019Felt the need to ask WH if this is actually real and it is. pic.twitter.com/bHyIFw6cvO— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) October 16, 2019Question then becomes - was it actually sent that day (3 days after Erdogan call)?— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) October 16, 2019So the letter is dated October 9, which is days after the phone call where he gives the greenlight. Then he tweets about destroying the economy as the backlash builds, and this appears to be an attempt to save face/get a re-do on the call.— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 16, 2019everybody out here clutching their pearls that they basically just printed his tweets on a WH letterhead— David Mack (@davidmackau) October 16, 2019The letter from Trump is dated three days after the White House released a late night statement announcing Turkey’s imminent invasion of Syria and stating that US troops would steer clear of it. Read the rest

Spotted today in my Lyft app: a new set of terms and conditions that require you to "agree" to binding arbitration (an onerous condition heretofore reserved for downtrodden drivers), through which you agree to waive your right to join class action suits or pursue legal redress through the courts should Lyft, through its deliberate actions or negligence, cause you to be killed, maimed, raped or cheated -- something that, not coincidentally, Lyft is in a lot of trouble over at the moment. Read the rest

Beginning with the end of things, the premiere episode of The Life Cycle asks: is there going to be a future to speak of at all? Why is it that the apocalypse is no longer just the reserve of religion, but now dominates everything from our Netflix viewing to our conversations with friends and family? And what can we learn from global climate strikes? Featuring Joshua Tan, Ph.D. in Computer Science, Oxford.Subscribe to The Life Cycle on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.Follow The Life Cycle on Twitter and Instagram. Read the rest

Burning Man announced that its theme for 2020 is The Multiverse, which seems appropriate for this week’s crop of truth-defying tabloids, which in an infinite number of possible universes might actually be accurate in one of them.

The #RedForEd movement swept America in 2018 and 2019 as teachers in both "red states" and "blue states" staged massive -- sometimes illegal -- strikes, demanding a fair deal for themselves, their students, and their colleagues who drive buses, clean classrooms, and do other related work.The incredible, hard-won victories of the teachers' strikes are a harbringer of a profound shift in the American view of public services, after 40 years of Reagan-derived, neoliberal contempt of any state-provided service and a concerted effort by billionaires dilettantes to hollow out the public education system and replace it with underperforming charter schools that allow for public money to be funneled into the pockets of educational charlatans and religious maniacs.Chicago's teachers have struck before, fighting pitched battles against austerity in a notionally Democratic stronghold that is dominated by a neoliberal, scheming, corrupt establishment epitomized by Rahm Emmanuel and Rod Blagojevich.Now, Chicago's teachers are back on the line, 26,000 of them, striking alongside "special-ed classroom assistants, security guards, bus aides, custodians, and parent workers" and 2,500 parks workers -- 45,000 workers in all.Their demands: help housing 20,000 homeless students, a nurse in every school, smaller class sizes, fully staffed schools, better pay and benefits, and restorative justice. “We feel it is our responsibility to figure out how to get the nearly 20,000 homeless students in our schools housed,” says Stacy Davis Gates, a high school social studies teacher and the current vice president of the union. “There is no way in the world you can expect the students to keep it together in a classroom, to take a test in a classroom, to complete homework in a classroom, if they don’t have what they need in terms of a stable home environment.” Although Lightfoot likes to point out she’s “not Rahm,” she’s actually retained the same chief contract negotiator as Rahm and many mayors before him. Read the rest

Emily Wilson is the author of a new "lean, fleet-footed translation" of Homer's Odyssey that "recaptures Homer's 'nimble gallop.'"To celebrate the publication, Wilson has converted the Odyssey to an epic series of limericks ("A majestical goddess, Athena/swooped down from the sky -- you'd have seen her") that she's posted to Twitter.This is my favorite text-to-verse translation since Seth Schoen risked felony prosecution by converting the DVD-descrambling code to a series of haiku.There was a young man called Telemachuswho was bullied and in a dilemma 'causehe missed his lost dadand his mom made him madand he almost got killed by Eurymachus.A majestical goddess, Athena,swooped down from the sky -- you'd have seen heras some kind of bird ¬–when she gave the word,men's yearning for fighting got keener.A man who lived all on his own-somewas invaded by someone called no-one,who gave him some wineand then made him blindso he called to his father, Poseidon.There was a young man called Telemachuswho was bullied and in a dilemma 'causehe missed his lost dadand his mom made him madand he almost got killed by Eurymachus. https://t.co/F4AZ5dDmjT— Emily Nekyia Wilson (@EmilyRCWilson) October 9, 2019(via Kottke) Read the rest

Modern Monetary Theory is an economic paradigm that treats money as a utility that governments issue and tax in order to mobilize resources needed to provide the services that the public wants; it explains why some kinds of government spending leads to inflation while other kinds do not, and how sovereign states use different levers to control inflation, even when they're spending extraordinary sums, as in WWII.MMT is key to understanding how bold and vital social programs -- from Medicare for All to a federal jobs guarantee to the Green New Deal -- can be enacted, and why austerity and its absurd comparisons between sovereign nations' spending and household or small business budgets are cruelty dressed up as prudence.In The People's Money, MMT theorist JD Alt takes a swing at a comprehensive explanation of what we mean when we say "money" -- and what the difference is between "money" in the national bank, "money" in your local commercial bank, and "money" you have in your pocket right now.It's a crisp and comprehensive explanation, blissfully easy to follow and light on finance or accounting jargon. This is only part one, and Alt has promised a sequel dealing with the relationship between the public and private sectors.Reserves, then—even though they are the “real” U.S. fiat dollars—are not the “money” American citizens and business borrow and spend every day. That money comes in two other forms: Federal Reserve Notes (the cash dollars we have tucked in our wallets) and bank-dollars which is the money we have on balance in our demand bank-accounts (checking and money-market accounts). Read the rest

Companies that make successful Mac apps live in constant fear of being sherlocked -- having Apple release a feature-for-feature clone to compete with your product, bundling it in with Macos.In June 2019, Astropad got sherlocked when Apple cloned its successful Astropad Studio and Luna Display apps in a new Macos feature that Apple called "Sidecar."Astropad marketing director Savannah Reising describes how Apple had lionized their company and its products prior to cloning them, during a "false romance" that in which Apple "routinely invited us to demo our products at their headquarters, and offered to help us out with whatever business and engineering challenges we faced. They also ordered thousands of dollars’ worth of our hardware, and we naively thought it was because they were interested in our product. It turns out that they were… just not in the way we were thinking."What's more, Apple had bound over Astropad with nondisclosure agreements that limited how they could speak about their sherlocking, though Reising doesn't describe what happened to those NDAs now, she's pretty frank about the experience.As Reising puts it, in platform capitalism, your main competitors aren't "other companies creating similar products to yours" -- it's the platform itself: "if your platform provider decides to step into your domain, it’s a tough battle to position your product against a free, native feature."Reising has some advice for surviving a sherlocking (manage the PR carefully, have other products to fall back on, go cross-platform and don't get locked in with proprietary toolchains like Apple's APIs and Objective C). Read the rest

Christopher Robin is a Stockholm designer who makes realistic miniature models of aged Tokyo storefronts. He's got an Instagram account with photos of his work. View this post on Instagram Panic working here, lots of stuff left to do and aprox one week left until deadline. Working on the vending machine, added the glass and did some weathering. A real mental workout to figure out how to build this one in the best way, and I can only blame my self since it is I who designed the kit... Also been working on adding more wiring and electric stuff. Also did the roof. Used a very fine grit sandpaper cut into strips and glued and folder. Think it worked out ok. These flat roofs are tricky to get interesting. Now back to work. Stay tuned. #artwork #art #artist #sculpture #mini #miniature #miniartmodels #tokyo #tokyohouse #japanhouse #instaart #pic #picoftheday #progress #scratchbuild #scalemodel #modelhouse #modelhouses #aircondition #rust #hobby #workshop #handmade #handtool #weatheredmodels #weatheringA post shared by TokyoBuild (@tokyobuild) on Sep 29, 2019 at 8:14am PDT[via Nag on the Lake] Read the rest

Dynasties is the latest special series from Canadaland Commons, a podcast that deeply investigates the sleazy, dysfunctional wealthy dynasties that dominate Canadian politics, media and business.In the latest episode (MP3), host Arshy Mann takes a deep dive into Ontario's Ford family (previously), which includes Rob Ford -- the wildly corrupt, crack-addicted former mayor of Toronto -- and Doug Ford (often billed as "the smart one") who is now the second-most powerful politician in Canada.The Ford family isn't just grifty, though: Rob Ford's widow is standing as a candidate for a white nationalist party in the upcoming national elections, and the Ford siblings themselves have been implicated in violent crimes, major drug trafficking, sexual misconduct, and connections to organized criminal white supremacist organisationsFor this episode, Mann leans heavily on Jonathan Goldsbie, co-host of the outstanding Wag the Doug podcast, who is encyclopedic in his knowledge of the Ford family's violence, corruption, racism, and long history of gaffes, blunders and catastrophes. The call themselves the Canadian Kennedys. And they’re one of the most famous political dynasties to ever exist in this country. But the rise of the Ford family has been marred by violence and self-destruction at almost every turn. The story of the Fords is tragic — for them, for everyone who falls into their orbit, and for the people of Toronto.DYNASTIES #3 – The Fords [Commons/Dynasties] Read the rest

Blizzard has suspended Casey Chambers, Corwin Dark, and TJammer -- American University Hearthstone team players -- for six months after the trio displayed a "Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blizz" sign in a streamed competition.The players were following in the footsteps of Blitzchung, a Taiwanese Hearthstone champ who was stripped of his title and denied his winnings after he expressed solidarity with Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement during a tournament.It's just another way in which Blizzard's own customers are exerting pressure on the company, and the company is clearly feeling the heat. “We knew exactly what we were doing,” said Chambers to me over Discord this morning. “No regrets.”As teased in a piece with VICE Games last week, this incident resulted in Chambers starting to play God’s Unchained, a Hearthstone competitor that openly criticized Blizzard after taking action against Blitzchung. Chambers said the team behind God’s Unchained reached out after the three players took their public stand, saying they “support” them and wouldn’t have a problem if, in the future, they decided to talk about the Hong Kong protests in public.Blizzard Bans Three College ‘Hearthstone’ Protesters For Six Months [Patrick Klepek/Vice](via The Verge) Read the rest

In this beginner's guide to whetstone sharpening you'll learn how to give a cheap knife an edge so fine you can split atoms with it (or at least slice paper). The idea is to have different whetstones of varying grit (size of abrasive particles) and start from the coarse stones and move to finer ones. It's important to keep a fairly consistent angle as you draw the knife over the stones -- you can do this by matching the edge that the manufacturer put on the knife to begin with.This is the knife used in the video, and these are the two whetstones. Read the rest

Blizzard's cowardly decision to appease Chinese authoritarians by ejecting a champion player who expressed support for the pro-democracy struggle in Hong Kong has kicked off a global rebellion by the company's customers, who are furious that the firm has put its profits over an entire nation's right to self-determination and basic democratic freedoms.The decision to capitulate to China continues to exact a price from Blizzard: now, the company has canceled a much-ballyhooed Overwatch event scheduled for NYC today, and while the company hasn't explained the last-minute cancellation, it's obvious that they fear more bad publicity from players, press and attendees.Blizzard, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, has been struggling to contain a backlash after it punished the gamer Chung Ng Wai, known as Blitzchung. The player wore a gas mask and chanted a pro-Hong Kong slogan in a post-tournament interview, leading Blizzard to ban him from events for a year and strip him of $10,000 in prize money.Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event as It Tries to Contain Backlash [John J Edwards III/Bloomberg](via /.) Read the rest

Asher Burke died in March after a helicopter he'd chartered to visit the Kenyan ranch he'd invested in as an "entrepreneur playground" crashed in high winds; his stateside obits called the 27-year-old deputy political director of the Republican Party of San Diego as an entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Ads, Inc, "on a mission to disrupt the lifestyle industry with our advanced approach to product creation and marketing."But Ads, Inc was a huge con, a sophisticated and elaborate Facebook hustle that combined ever trick in the Republican-affiliated grift playbook: it was a pyramid scheme recruiting stay-at-home moms, a quack remedy company that used celebrity endorsements to market to low-information boomers with pages that were dolled up to look like Fox News, an offshored con that used low-waged workers in the Philippines to manage the dull, repetitive aspects of the con. Here's how it worked: Ads, Inc, pitched itself to stay-at-home Facebook moms as a multi-level marketing scheme and payed them to recruit their friends to "rent their Facebook accounts." Recruits were sent a Raspberry Pi-based gadget to plug into their routers that would impersonate them on Facebook and plant millions of deceptive ads.The ads would feature a photo of a celebrity along with a false claim of some scandal they were embroiled in (internally, the company called these "jail bait" since ads that falsely claimed that beloved celebs were in jail generated tons of clicks).People who clicked the links were automatically vetted through Facebook's own query system to weed out Facebook employees who were checking on these ads -- the Facebook version of Uber's illegal greyball system that wouldn't accept bookings from transit regulators checking up on the service. Read the rest

How much untreated sewage spilled from Tijuana to California as the result of a human body clogging a screen? The International Boundary Water Commission was quite specific: 14,497,873 gallons. The body was discovered by a cleanup crew at a pump station. An investigation is underway to identify the body and find out how it ended up in the pumping station wastewater.Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash Read the rest

Visit Merriam-Webster's "Time Traveler" and select a year from the drop-down menu. Instantly you'll see the English words that were first used in print that year! More specifically, "the date is for the earliest written or printed use that the (dictionary) editors have been able to discover."Above are the words first used in print in 1989, the year of the very first bOING bOING print 'zine! Cybernaut! Nanobot! Cyberporn! Those sure were the good ol' daze... Read the rest

John Darnielle, the singer/guitarist of the acclaimed indie band the Mountain Goats, has never hidden his nerdy inclinations. Even his 2014 novel debut, Wolf in White Van, was a mesmerizing downward-spiral descent into the maddening mind of a disfigured man who runs mail-order tabletop RPG games from his bedroom. As a musician, his band had previously released "concept albums" (of a sort) loosely themed around such things Biblical verses, Goth bands, and professional wrestling—so it was only a matter of time before the Mountain Goats put out a self-proclaimed "dragon noir" record, in the form of 2019's "In League With Dragons."(Or, as the ever-delightful Hard Times put it, "Mountain Goats Make Second Album In a Row About People Who Don’t Get Enough Sun.")To celebrate the new album (which is excellent, by the way), Darnielle sat down with Vice to play a Dungeons & Dragons campaign loosely inspired by his own album, including a a red dragon and a wizard king who craves clemency. (The album also features songs about Ozzy Osbourne and cadaver-sniffing dogs, but alas, these are absent from the game). Along the way, Darnielle shares his thoughts on storytelling and D&D in general, and the catharsis we can find through communal fantasy gaming.During the video, Darnielle is also gifted a custom figurine which is so eerily accurate that I'm pretty sure it's actually a voodoo doll. I fully plan to steal this artifact to force him to cover more Fall Out Boy songs for me. Read the rest

NASA is "committed" to landing the first woman and the "next man" on the moon by 2024 as part of the Artemis program (next stop Mars!). And as part of that program, unveiled two new spacesuits.The orange suit is the Orion Crew Survival System suit, also commonly called a flight suit or a launch and entry suit. New features include a helmet that comes in more than one size, and suits that are custom fit. The color is intended to make astronauts easy to spot if they end up in the ocean, and the suit itself includes a "suite of survival gear":Even though it’s primarily designed for launch and reentry, the Orion suit can keep astronauts alive if Orion were to lose cabin pressure during the journey out to the Moon, while adjusting orbits in Gateway, or on the way back home. Astronauts could survive inside the suit for up to six days as they make their way back to Earth. The suits are also equipped with a suite of survival gear in the event they have to exit Orion after splashdown before recovery personnel arrive. Each suit will carry its own life preserver that contains a personal locator beacon, a rescue knife, and a signaling kit with a mirror, strobe light, flashlight, whistle, and light sticks.The white suit is the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit or xEMU. The xEMU provides dramatically superior range of movement to the suits worn on previous missions:You can learn more about the Artemis Program at the official site and see a bit more of the suits in action below: Read the rest

In the Netherlands province of Drenth, a family of seven adults were found living inside a hidden room in their farmhouse for nine years "waiting for the end of time." The family included a father, 58, and six male children, aged 18 to 25. Apparently one of the young men had enough and visited a nearby pub. After drinking five beers, he told the bar owner that he had run away and needed help. From the BBC News:Officers visited the remote farmhouse and carried out a search. They discovered a hidden staircase behind a cupboard in the living room that led down to a secret room where the family were housed...The farm is outside the village and is accessible by a bridge over a canal.The farm, which is part-hidden behind a row of trees, also has a large vegetable plot and a goat...The local postman said he had never delivered a letter there. "It's actually pretty strange, now I come to think about it," he told Algemeen Dagblad news website....Police in Drenthe confirmed that a 58-year-old man had been arrested and was under investigation after refusing to co-operate. Read the rest

Don't think his manager won't raise hell over their client working under these unsafe conditions. Read the rest

Facebook has announced that it will not remove political advertisements on the grounds that the ads contain false statements:"we do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact-checkers, and we generally allow it on the platform even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules.”However, Buzzfeed discovered that Facebook absolutely will remove political ads that are misleading to the eye, or violate other technical rules. For example, a pro-Trump advertisement was removed for profanity--it included a soundbite of Biden saying "son of a bitch." Facebook also removed dozens of pro-Biden ads that featured non-interactive graphics resembling buttons like the advertisements seen above. And Facebook is likely to remove any advertisement that mentions the state of Washington:Last year, the state of Washington sued Facebook and Google for allegedly violating its campaign finance laws by failing to maintain data on the purchasers of election ads and later adopted new laws on ad disclosures. In response, Facebook implemented a blanket ban on "ads that relate to Washington's state or local elected officials, candidates, elections or ballot initiatives."Accordingly, pro-Warren ads were removed for mentioning Washington governor Jay Inslee.You can see the banned advertisements uncovered by Buzzfeed here. Read the rest

Evidently Port Townsend, Washington has a real sense of humor. Read the rest

Roko's Basilisk is a notorious thought experiment regarding artificial intelligence and our own perceptions of reality, particularly as it relates to a hypothetically powerful AI. It's kind of like Newcomb's Paradox, with a little more Battlestar Galactica-style AI genocide.If you want to know more about it, feel free to click the link. But be warned: the whole point of Roko's Basilisk is that the mere knowledge of Roko's Basilisk also makes you complicit in Roko's Basilisk. If Roko's Basilisk is real—a question which is intrinsic to the thought experiment itself—then the potential contained within that hypothetical idea is enough to sow the seeds to self-destructive doubt. And that's how Roko's Basilisk wins.You don't need to know the specific details of Roko's Basilisk to understand how the concept could relate to the growing phenomenon of deepfakes—the manipulation of deep Learning technology to create deceptively realistic videos, like adding Nicholas Cage's face into every movie. The cybersecurity firm DeepTrace recently released a report on the myriad ways that deepfakes threaten our trust in knowledge, and in our own eyes. And their conclusion? The mere idea of deepfakes is enough to bring the worst case scenario to life—even if we never actually reach that worst case scenario in practice.Nicholas Cage as Amy Adams, because Deepfakes.In reality, deepfakes haven't actually been used to successfully falsify videos of politicians to use as large-scale propaganda; like most things on the internet, they're mostly used for porn. But the fact that they could be used to deceive the public is itself enough to make public trust spiral downwards, causing us to debate both what is true, and the methods by which we determine what is true. Read the rest

For years, Her Majesty's Government has been pursuing a plan to use the Great Firewall of Britain to block all porn sites unless they collect and retain personally identifying information on every porn user attesting to their age, thus fashioning the world's largest kompromat database, which -- thanks to the use of credit-cards as part of the verification scheme -- could be conveniently sorted by its members' net worth by would-be blackmailers.This was meant to go into effect in July, but a month before the rollout, the project began to collapse and now it is officially dead.It's nice to see that some of the UK's worst tech regulations sometimes die, rather than coasting into disastrous official policy on their inertia (Tabloids: "Something must be done!" Parliament: "There, we did something!").The government's plan was to put recalcitrant sites on an official blacklist—and then require Internet service providers in the UK to block traffic from those sites. Critics warned that this approach could block access to legitimate content while doing nothing to prevent access by Brits who knew how to use a VPN.The other big concern was about privacy. Rather than mandating that websites use a specific age verification technology, the rules would have left it up to each porn site to decide on the best method. Most sites were expected to verify users by asking for credit card numbers or information from government-issued IDs.Critics argued it wasn't a good idea to encourage British adults to turn over identifying information to porn sites that might not have the strongest security—or the highest ethical standards. Read the rest

Earlier this month, Google announced a new collection of auto-delete settings for your personal information that allows you balance some of the conveniences of data-collection (for example, remembering recent locations in Maps so that they can be intelligently autocompleted when you type on a tiny, crappy mobile device keyboard) with the risks of long-term retention, like a future revelation that you visited an HIV clinic, or a political meeting, or were present at the same time and place as someone the police have decided to investigate by means of a sweeping "reverse warrant."Writing in Fast Company, Jared Newman suggests that the new features are just window-dressing,, "practically worthless for privacy." Newman's argument is that after three months -- the minimum duration for the self-deleting feature -- "Google has already extracted nearly all the potential value from users’ data, and from an advertising standpoint, data becomes practically worthless when it’s more than a few months old."This is true! But that doesn't make it useless. First, the privacy threat model isn't that you'll be targeted for ads. This can be obnoxious or even distressing, but despite all Big Tech's self-serving boasts to the contrary, there's not much evidence that ad-targeting is a form of mind-control (instead, it's that ad-targeting allows disinformation pushers to find people whose trauma makes them vulnerable to conspiracy theories).The privacy threat is that the data that Big Tech collects on you could be used to harm you: weaponized by identity thieves or stalkers, or by repressive states or petty martinets who fancy themselves the president's Praetorian Guard, or by insurers or other price-gougers who use that data to gouge you, or by elite colleges' corrupt admissions committees. Read the rest

Brazilian skateboarder Felipe Nunes, 20, is on the cover of this month's Thrasher magazine. He just joined Tony Hawk's elite Birdhouse squad. He also has no legs. Nunes lost them in an accident when he was six years old. From Thrasher:What did it take to get back to where you were mobile again? Were you in a wheelchair at first? What were the biggest challenges to regaining your movement and independence?I was six when it happened but the doctors said it was super fast. I didn’t really hesitate because I was so young. I used a wheelchair until about the age of 11. I was a kid who wanted to do everything. Regardless of not having two legs I wanted to do it all. I rode my bike, played soccer, pretty much everything out in front of my house. I was a normal kid. It didn’t even look like I was missing part of my legs. My parents were essential in my recovery because they never stopped me from doing anything. They were afraid of me getting hurt like any parents, but they never held me back. When I wanted to give up the wheelchair and ride the skateboard full time, they let me go. Read the rest

The New York Times is still great: Photos of Kim Jong-un on a HorseNorth Korea’s state news agency said the dictator’s eyes were “full of noble glitters” during his Putin-esque photo shoot. Pics from the Korean Central News Agency. Read the rest

Kansas is a living laboratory for far-right experimentation with extreme economic cruelty: a state where Medicare expansions were thwarted, where xenophobia has penetrated the state bureaucracy, where a grifty, incompetent lawyer has apologized for slavery and driven women out of his own party, even as neighboring states thrive by tending to the needs of working people, rather than the super-rich.As Kansas sinks into poverty and ruin, its people are growing ever-sicker: poverty is strongly correlated with poor health outcomes, especially in America, where being poor means you can't afford preventative care, and even more especially in Kansas, where limits on Medicare expansion exclude even very poor people from access to subsidized care.Enter hospital debt collectors. Propublica's Lizzie Presser reports from Coffeyville, Kansas, home to Coffeyville Regional Medical Center, the only hospital for 40 miles, now that its rivals have all shut down.In Coffeyville, magistrate judges are appointed, and need no special training to hold the office. Judge David Casement -- a cattle rancher who never studied law -- presides over medical debt cases, which he hears quarterly at "debtor's exam" days.At these proceedings, debt-collectors -- who do have law degrees, and whom the judge relies heavily on for legal advice -- are allowed to quiz sick people, or the parents or spouses of critically ill or dying people, about their assets and income and to ask the judge to order them to divert what little they have to Coffeyville Regional Medical Center, minus the debt-collector's healthy cut. Read the rest

Bart Baker is a YouTuber who specialized in vulgar videos and pop-star parodies, but his income withered when the site demonetized all the horrible things we didn't realize our kids were watching. So he's abandoning his 10m subscribers there to focus on conquering Chinese social media instead. Baker's even learned enough of the langage to pander to its nationalist vanities and bottomless consumerism, which Vice highlights in this 7-minute interview.Now, Bart’s days start with live chat and song sessions with his millions of Chinese followers on Kwai, a Chinese social media app. Then, his Chinese manager sends him a Chinese song, which Bart translates into English, with the help of Google Translate. Hours later, Bart’s English version of the track is burning up the top ranks in Douyin (China’s version of TikTok).Bart sees immense potential in the Chinese market, and has already announced that he is quitting YouTube. Meanwhile, his Chinese manager is concerned that Bart’s American persona could be trouble in China, if it isn’t properly handled.I liked his boss in Shanghai, who knows two things: that westerners who can speak Chinese are a media gold mine, but also that it's likelythey will eventually utter something offensive to Chinese authorities and get everyone involved in trouble.Right now Americans are fascinated (and appalled) by how quickly the progressive ethics of large corporations (Apple, the NBA and Activision-Blizzard) are being switched off by Chinese power and money. But Baker is a sign of what's to come: American kids blathering in machine-translated Mandarin about the superiority of China, happy to humilate themselves for a little money and fleeting attention. Read the rest

Ferdinand Demara earned his reputation as the Great Impostor: For over 22 years he criss-crossed the country, posing as everything from an auditor to a zoologist and stealing a succession of identities to fool his employers. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll review Demara's motivation, morality, and techniques -- and the charismatic spell he seemed to cast over others.We'll also make Big Ben strike 13 and puzzle over a movie watcher's cat.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

I have a whetstone, faucet and a knife, but never quite get the results I want. So Cook with E's guide to using them ("the only time I've ever seriously hurt myself in the kitchen was using a dull knife") has sent me right back to the kitchen. Ethan recommends a fancy japanese model, but I have a less expensive Whetstone-brand stone [Amazon, but I got it from Williams-Sonoma] with both 400 and 1000 grit sides. Read the rest

Five years after giving his supposedly-last interview, the Great Wizard of Northampton Alan Moore has once again deigned to allow someone to record a conversation with him for public consumption. This time, it's part of Paperback Writers: Graphic Content, a new BBC series where comic book writers discuss their musical influences.Moore is surprisingly delightful over the course of the two-hour interview-slash-DJ-session, sharing great songs alongside tidbits from his life. He talks a bit about the end of his comic book career, as well as his upcoming work in opera and film. In a rare instance, he also talks briefly about adaptations of his work. Not the upcoming HBO TV sequel-adaptation of Watchmen, of course—rather, Terry Gilliam's attempted adaptation during the late 1980s. Moore says:I did hear that when Terry Gilliam was supposed to be doing Watchmen back in the 1980s. I remember he told me that he’d had a number of phone calls from David Bowie asking to play the Rorschach character. There’s an alternate world we can only imagine.As if I needed any more proof that we're living in a divergent Hellworld that splintered off the main timeline after Bowie's death. Now I'll be cursed with dreams of another, even better world where Bowie played Rorschach in a Joel Silver-produced Terry Gilliam movie penned by Gilliam's Brazil co-writing partner, Charles McKeown. (Okay so maybe that Joel Silver part still would ruined it.)You can listen to Moore's two-hour BBC interview here. Read the rest