Boing Boing

Dune is arguably the best-selling science fiction novel of all time. A first edition copy of Frank Herbert's 1965 epic novel of adventure, betrayal, and palace intrigue on the planet Arrakis is worth $10,000. Here's your chance to get the Kindle edition at a lower price.Image: kamin Jaroensuk/Shutterstock Read the rest

Time 4 Machine is a Ukrainian design shop led by Denis Okhrimenko; their latest project is "The most beautiful construction set in the world", a set of thin steel parts that you bend together to make (yes) beautiful mechanical models: a business-card case, a tractor, a working clockwork timer, a vintage sportscar, a springpowered cabriolet, a sedan, a Hercules eight-motor aircraft and a dieselpunk steamliner engine. Each model is assembled with two fine-nosed pliers, and features mechanical linkages, gears and hinges to animate it. The project's creators designed and fulfilled a similar project in 2017, which bodes well for backers of this one.The models range in price from $18 (card case) to $112 (steamliner) with breaks for quantity: the full set will cost you $432. They are fully funded. The most beautiful construction set in the world [Time 4 Machine/Kickstarter](Thanks, Katia!) Read the rest

In the 1960s and 1970s, Los Angeles's Laurel Canyon neighborhood was flowing with sex, drugs, and folk-rock and roll. Joni Mitchell, the Byrds, Jackson Brown, Carole King, the Mamas & The Papas, and countless other musicians made the scene or had homes in the hills. Echo in the Canyon is a new documentary about that magical moment and the influential sound that emerged. The trip back in time to this "legendary paradise, as Tom Petty called it, was directed by Andrew Slater with Jakob Dylan as executive producer. “The best test of songwriting is that it transcends its moment in time,” Dylan said in a statement. “And there is no doubt that the songs we explore in this film are as powerful today as they were in 1965.”Echo in the Canyon will see a national release in June.(Rolling Stone) Read the rest

The preachersnsneakers Instagram is 🔥🔥🔥.We've long chronicled the excesses and corruption of megachurch preachers, including those who threaten violence against the news organizations that dig into their apparent grift and curious financial arrangements.But whoever is behind this preachersnsneakers account does it as best as anyone can. Juxtapositions of megapreachers and the insanely expensive kicks they're wearing as they spout bogus god bullshit.[via Christian Nightmares] Read the rest

The Mexican media company Cultura Colectiva and an app called "At the Pool" used their access to their users Facebook data to make local copies of it, then left that data exposed, in the clear, without a password, on the public internet -- 540 million records in all, stored in publicly accessible Amazon S3 buckets.The leaks include "comments, likes, reactions, account names, FB IDs and more." The At the Pool leak also includes user passwords, presumably for the app (but many users recycle passwords); as well as 22,000 passwords for Facebook itself, stored without encryption.At the Pool has been shuttered since 2014, implying that its data has been exposed for many years. After a formal notification email, someone took its user data offline.Cultura Colectiva -- which is still in business -- has been repeatedly notified about its breach (both by the security researchers at Upguard, who discovered the breach, and by Amazon, after they were notified by Upguard) but has not replied nor did it take any steps to protect its user data until it was sent a query by Bloomberg news, months later.These two situations speak to the inherent problem of mass information collection: the data doesn’t naturally go away, and a derelict storage location may or may not be given the attention it requires.For app developers on Facebook, part of the platform’s appeal is access to some slice of the data generated by and about Facebook users. For Cultura Colectiva, data on responses to each post allows them to tune an algorithm for predicting which future content will generate the most traffic. Read the rest

A new bill from Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes personal, criminal liability for top executives of companies turning over more than $1B/year when those companies experience data breaches and scams due to negligence (many of the recent high-profile breaches would qualify, including the Equifax giga-breach, as well as many of Wells Fargo's string of scams and scandals).It is part of a raft of excellent policy proposals that Warren has introduced in conjunction with her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination (I am a donor to her campaign, as well as the Bernie Sanders campaign): lowering drug prices with federally commissioned generics, an annual wealth tax on family fortunes over $50m, antitrust breakups of Big Tech, an end to the Electoral College and a national Right to Repair law for farm equipment. I believe that the major distinction between Warren and Sanders is that Warren believes that a market-based distribution system will work so long as the state corrects its failures, while Sanders believes that at best, markets are tools to solve the odd allocation problem.My sympathies are more with Sanders than Warren, but I'm consistently impressed with Warren's extensive, specific policies.I also think that Warren is laying a trap here. Plenty of people will say that no CEO can possibly oversee the operations of a billion dollar company well enough to prevent it from engaging in widespread fraud or suffering catastrophic breaches, but of course, the natural rejoinder is that this means that we shouldn't have companies that are too big to effectively oversee (let alone too big to fail). Read the rest

Florida Man is the inaugural kickstarter from Los Angeles's incomparable comics store Secret Headquarters (previously): it challenges players to fill in the blanks from hundreds of cards capturing actual headlines about actual Floridians, creating hilarious, Cards Against Humanity-style madlibs. $20 gets you a game (early bird, rising to $25), $50 gets you a game and expansion pack, and there are tiers with tons of swag and of course a retailer bulk-discount pack. Read the rest

Christina Ward has a new book out called American Advertising Cookbooks: How corporations taught us to love Spam, bananas, and Jell-O. It's beautifully designed book with lots of color photographs from mid-century food corporation cookbooks that takes a deep dive into the sociological and geopolitical implications of American eating in decades past.Here's an excerpt (PDF): Good Housewife photo section from American Advertising Cookbooks Ward for boingBoingBackground image: By dexterous simpson/Shutterstock Read the rest

I'm not a Las Vegas fan, but I wish I could plop myself at the Bellagio hotel for just four minutes one night this week to watch their Game of Thrones water show, which began last night. It looks spectacular.From Las Vegas Review Journal: A medley of the theme for HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and the song “Winter Is Here” from the show premiered at Bellagio Fountains water show on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday night. The new number will run at 8 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. daily, in rotation through April 13. The final season of Game of Thrones premieres April 14th. Read the rest

Researchers from Tencent Keen Security Lab have published a report detailing their successful attacks on Tesla firmware, including remote control over the steering, and an adversarial example attack on the autopilot that confuses the car into driving into the oncoming traffic lane.The researchers used an attack chain that they disclosed to Tesla, and which Tesla now claims has been eliminated with recent patches.To effect the remote steering attack, the researchers had to bypass several redundant layers of protection, but having done this, they were able to write an app that would let them connect a video-game controller to a mobile device and then steer a target vehicle, overriding the actual steering wheel in the car as well as the autopilot systems. This attack has some limitations: while a car in Park or traveling at high speed on Cruise Control can be taken over completely, a car that has recently shifted from R to D can only be remote controlled at speeds up to 8km/h.Tesla vehicles use a variety of neural networks for autopilot and other functions (such as detecting rain on the windscreen and switching on the wipers); the researchers were able to use adversarial examples (small, mostly human-imperceptible changes that cause machine learning systems to make gross, out-of-proportion errors) to attack these. Most dramatically, the researchers attacked the autopilot's lane-detection systems. By adding noise to lane-markings, they were able to fool the autopilot into losing the lanes altogether, however, the patches they had to apply to the lane-markings would not be hard for humans to spot. Read the rest

Teslas are incredibly data-hungry, storing massive troves of data about their owners, including videos of crashes, location history, contacts and calendar entries from paired phones, photos of the driver and passengers taken with interior cameras, and other data; this data is stored without encryption, and it is not always clear when Teslas are gathering data, and the only way to comprehensively switch off data-gathering also de-activates over-the-air software updates for the cars, which have historically shipped with limited or buggy features that needed the over-the-air updates to fix them.Tesla has a history of being secretive about the data its cars collect, fighting customer attempts to recover data from their cars, and selling a special cable needed to access limited car telemetry for $995. Tesla employees told CNBC that the company uses telemetry to secretly identify Tesla owners who tinker with or investigate their cars, and flags them for late software updates.Two pseudonymous security researchers called GreenTheOnly and Theo recovered "hundreds" of wrecked Teslas from scrappers and junkyards and systematically investigated the data left behind on the cars. Much of the data that these junked Teslas store is not unique -- other manufacturers' "smart" car systems store mountains of driver data in the clear (this is especially a problem for rental and fleet cars, which harvest data from many different drivers). But Tesla does store more data than its rivals, and goes further than other manufacturers in disincentivizing independent security research through its alleged blacklisting system; the fact that Tesla also operates a robust bug bounty system reveals a deep ambivalence about independent scrutiny about its products. Read the rest

Watch CNN's @ryanobles try to ask Betsy DeVos about proposed federal cuts to the Special Olympics. pic.twitter.com/69yzJsq5Hy— Daniel Lewis (@Daniel_Lewis3) March 28, 2019This week inherited wealthy person and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos tried to cut all Federal funding to the Special Olympics. Watch as she smirks and smiles while ignoring CNN's Ryan Nobles. Read the rest

Belka and Strelka, who both survived their trip to orbit, are immortalized here on a pair of shoes. Soviet Space Dog Shoes [$59, octophant.threadless.com] Read the rest

Wait for it. Wait for the mlem.:PHere it comesThere it is.:P:P[via] Read the rest

Office Depot, OfficeMax and other retailers will pay $35 million to the FTC over their use of fraudulent software that falsely reported malware infections on customers' PCs.Customers who took their computers in for a free “PC Health Check” at Office Depot or OfficeMax stores between 2009 and November 2016 were told their computers had malware symptoms or infections — but that wasn’t true. The FTC says Office Depot and OfficeMax ran PC Health Check, a diagnostic scan program created and licensed by Support.com, that tricked those consumers into thinking their computers had symptoms of malware or actual “infections,” even though the scan hadn’t found any such issues. Many consumers who got false scan results bought computer diagnostic and repair services from Office Depot and OfficeMax that cost up to $300. Suppport.com completed the services and got a cut of each purchase.It's likely that anyone reading this knows that handing over your computers to teenagers at big box stores is the exact opposite of computer security and the temptation to victim-blame will be overwhelming. Instead, consider this: if a human was held responsible they'd be jailed, but the humans who did this won't be getting in any trouble at all. Read the rest

In January on Twitter, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now, shared 13 tips for writing:Reverse-engineer what you read. If it feels like good writing, what makes it good? If it’s awful, why?Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.Don’t go meta. Minimize concepts about concepts, like “approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency,” and “variable.”Let verbs be verbs. “Appear,” not “make an appearance.”Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use “for example” liberally. Show a draft around, & prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else.Omit needless words (Will Strunk was right about this).Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end.Save the heaviest for last: a complex phrase should go at the end of the sentence.Prose must cohere: readers must know how each sentence is related to the preceding one. If it’s not obvious, use “that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, as a result, because, nonetheless,” or “despite.”Revise several times with the single goal of improving the prose.Read it aloud.Find the best word, which is not always the fanciest word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes, and a thesaurus. Read the rest

Buzzfeed's Julia Reinstein reports that Yale “has rescinded admission for a student whose family allegedly paid $1.2 Million to get her into the school.”This is believed to be the first such rejection of a student by an American college since the admissions scandal broke over the past few weeks. Dozens of parents, coaches, and university administrators were indicted in a series of interconnected scams.From her report:As part of the scandal, former Yale women's soccer coach Rudy Meredith, was charged with accepting bribes in exchange for designating two applicants as soccer recruits to get them admitted.According to the school, one applicant was rejected despite Meredith's endorsement, but the other was granted admission."Yale investigated the allegations, and the admission of the student who received a fraudulent endorsement has been rescinded," the school said in a statement posted to their website.The school did not disclose the student's identity due to federal privacy laws and university policy.According to the indictment, the family of the admitted student paid $1.2 million to William “Rick” Singer, the ringleader of the admissions operation, who sent Meredith a $400,000 check.In exchange, the coach helped to falsely present her as a competitive soccer player, including lying that she was co-captain of a prominent soccer club.Yale said today the Department of Education has launched a preliminary investigation into Yale and seven other schools as part of the scandal.[IMAGE: An aerial view of the Yale University campus, via yale.edu.] Read the rest

I bought this Tacklife cordless driver/drill earlier this year and really like it a lot. The speed can be varied with the trigger button and it has adjustable torque. It comes with the battery pack and a charging station. Use code A5YBDAL5 to get it for a low price. Read the rest

I use the idea of peak indifference to describe the moment when activists no longer have to try to convince people that a problem is real (the problem does that itself, by ruining ever-more-people's lives), and then the job switched to convincing people that it's not too late to do something about it (if the day you finally decide to take rhino population declines seriously is the day they announce there's only one rhino left, there's a powerful temptation to shoot that rhino and find out what it tastes like).Ove Wired, Boing Boing contributor Clive Thompson (previously) asks whether we're at that point, and, if so, what can be done to avert the nihilism that so often follows from denialism.That means the current political moment is incredibly interesting. Anyone who wants to deal with climate change may have only a brief window to sell the public on a plan. In his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, the writer David Wallace-­Wells talks about the value of panic to pushing collective action; Doctorow says it’s the point “where you divert your energy from convincing people there’s a problem to convincing them there’s a solution.”This is why the stakes are so high in the debate over the Green New Deal that Democrats recently introduced in Congress. The young environmental activists of the Sunrise Movement flooded DC this winter to push for a resolution. Six Democratic presidential candidates now support it in principle. And the Yale–George Mason survey found 81 percent of all Americans support the general concept, including—remarkably—57 percent of conservative Republicans. Read the rest

Hudson Yards is a notorious (and spectacularly badly timed) new "luxury housing development" in New York City: a massive, gated, privatized "neighborhood" in Manhattan, a city that has been literally hollowed out by runaway luxury real-estate speculation, to the exclusion of working people and mere millionaires alike.Hudson Yards's capstone is a piece of monumental "public" architecture called "The Vessel" (also known by less flattering nicknames, like "the giant shawarma," "the beehive," "the pinecone," and "the wastebasket." The open-air structure is composed of staircases and landings that visitors can trudge up and down for the purpose of taking selfies. In true grifter capitalism style, the trudgers of the Vessel, agree, by passing under a series of threatening legal notices, that they are assigning a perpetual copyright license to the Vessel's corporate owners for any of those photos (this being an improvement on the original legal regime, in which visitors surrendered title to their copyrights, even to images taken later from distant places from which any part of the Vessel could be discerned). Oh, and you also "agree" to be recorded and to have the recordings retained indefinitely and used as the Vessel and its corporate managers see fit.Enter Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner (previously), the century's most acerbic and delightful critic of late-stage capitalism's architectural excesses. In a perfectly delightful column in The Baffler, Wagner lays out the case for The Vessel as a perfectly encapsulated symbol of all that is wrong with our economic moment and its intrusions into our built environments. Read the rest

I got one of these RAVPower portable chargers for my nephew a couple of years ago, and he told me it was great to use with his Nintendo Switch, because he could play the Switch with the charger connected and the battery charge would increase at the same time. This newer version is available at a discount when you use the promo code LKWZQ4C3. Read the rest “Good deal on USB C portable charger that can charge a MacBook and a Switch”

John Oliver shows how innocent people's lives can be destroyed by unwarranted public shaming. As an example, he gives the example of the woman who "sued her nephew" for injuring her by hugging her too hard. The real story is more complicated - the woman was forced to sue her nephew to get the insurance company to pay her bills (and her nephew and her parents were happy about it). As a result of the public shaming online, no one would hire her, and she had to change her identity. He also interviewed Monica Lewinsky about her thoughts on public shaming, having been a victim of it for years. Read the rest “John Oliver looks at public shaming on the internet”

Pioneering psychonaut Ralph Metzner who co-led the seminal psychedelic research at Harvard University in the early 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and co-authored The Psychedelic Experience, has died at age 82. (Above image, Metzner at left with Leary.) Through his life, Metzner helped a great many people through his psychotherapist practice, spoke frequently on eco-consciousness, and also composed visionary ballads. (Erowid)Pioneering psychedelic researcher Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., passed away yesterday at the age of 82. We are thankful for his lifelong dedication to providing the world with new insights and discoveries about the scientific and medical potential of psychedelics. https://t.co/XOPfk3t8xt— MAPS (@MAPS) March 15, 2019I'm sorry to learn of the death of Ralph Metzner intrepid explorer of consciousness, author, environmentalist & part of the original Harvard psychedelic project w. Timothy Leary & Richard Alpert/Ram Dass. He used to drop by the Mondo house occasionally. A lovely gentle presence.— MONDO 2000 (@2000_mondo) March 15, 2019 Read the rest “Psychedelics pioneer Ralph Metzner, RIP”

"Consciousness is what allows us to be aware of both our surroundings and our own inner state." In the first of a three part video series, "Kruzgesagt - In a Nutshell" examines "how unaware things come aware." Stay tuned for theories of consciousness that of course may be as much about philosophy as they are neuroscience. Sources here. Read the rest “Where does consciousness come from?”

The second Lego movie includes a memorable scene in Apocalypseburg, an homage to the final scene in Planet of the Apes, complete with a Beyond Thurderdome-style settlement in Lady Liberty's tilted shadow; this is now immortalized as a $300 Lego set. (via Beyond the Beyond) Read the rest

I've had quite a few fun afternoons playing with dry ice from making spooky fog in the kitchen to exploding plastic bottles in the yard. But I've never had the opportunity to pour hot lava over dry ice. In this video, the lava is 1400 °C and the dry ice is -78C°. So cool! And hot! Read the rest

It took place a few weeks ago, but it's a good day for it all the same.Credit: NASA, ISS, Riccardo Rossi (ISAA) Music: Inspiring Adventure Cinematic Background by Maryna Details: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap181126.html Comments: http://asterisk.apod.com/discuss_apod... Attribution: NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Read the rest

Filmmaker Benjamin Lancaster spent four years secretly shooting a science fiction movie called "The Further Adventures of Walt's Frozen Head," working with actors Daniel Cooksley and Ron Schneider to make a movie about a WDW cast-member who discovers the (urban)-legendary frozen head of Walt Disney, kicking off a series of adventures around the park. The movie premieres online later today. This is (at least) the second time someone has secretly shot a movie at Walt Disney World. (Thanks, Hugh!) Read the rest

The binoculars I bought at a very steep discount are on sale again, and this time they are even cheaper. Use code 63U3YPBN to get them at the sale price. I bought a second pair so Carla and I will each have one for the upcoming Rolling Stones concert. Read the rest

Back in 2016, the Dr Seuss estate won a preliminary court action against "Oh, The Places You'll Boldly Go!" a crowdfunded parody of Dr Seuss's "Oh the Places You'll Go!" and Star Trek, written by veteran Star Trek creator David "Tribble" Gerrold and illustrated by the comics giant Ty Templeton. In 2017, Comicmix, the publisher, secured a partial legal victory, but the Seuss estate wasn't done -- they have been litigating ever since, but now it appears the fight is done, and Comicmix has prevailed, with a Southern District of California judge declaring, in no uncertain terms, that the mashup was protected by fair use. The judgment is long and well-reasoned and comprehensive, and not the sort of thing that you'd expect to go on appeal to the Supreme Court (though who knows: the court has been terrible on copyright, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg never met an expansive theory of copyright she didn't like).Timothy Geigner has published a detailed analysis of the judgment on Techdirt. It's quite an amazing read: the judge is very clear that no one is going to mistake Comicmix's parody for the Dr Seuss original, nor would they buy the parody as a substitute for Seuss, and the court is especially down on the Seuss estate's theory that the (terrible) decision in Oracle v Google means that mashups are illegal. Examining the cover of each work, for example, Plaintiff may claim copyright protection in the unique, rainbow-colored rings and tower on the cover of Go! Read the rest

The new EU Copyright Directive will be up for its final vote in the week of Mar 25, and like any piece of major EU policy, it has been under discussion for many years and had all its areas of controversy resolved a year ago -- but then German MEP Axel Voss took over as the "rapporteur" (steward) of the Directive and reintroduced the long-abandoned idea of forcing all online services to use filters to block users from posting anything that anyone, anywhere claimed was their copyrighted work.There are so many obvious deficiencies with adding filters to every message-board, online community, and big platform that the idea became political death, as small- and medium-sized companies pointed out that you can't fix the EU's internet by imposing costs that only US Big Tech firms could afford to pay, thus wiping out all European competition.So Voss switched tactics, and purged all mention of filters from the Directive, and began to argue that he didn't care how online services guaranteed that their users didn't infringe anyone's copyrights, even copyrights in works that had only been created a few moments before and that no one had ever seen before, ever. Voss said that it didn't matter how billions of user posts were checked, just so long as it all got filtered.(It's like saying, "I expect you to deliver a large, four-legged African land-mammal with a trunk, tusk and a tail, but it doesn't have to be an elephant -- any animal that fits those criteria will do). Read the rest

Angélique Kidjo is a Beninese musician of enormous talent and repute (and three Grammys!); with 10 brilliant albums to her credit; album number ten is special, though: a tribute to Talking Heads' 1980 album Remain in Light (available for $7.92 as DRM-free MP3s); I've been listening to it all morning and, speaking as someone who would give any of the Talking Heads principals one of my kidneys if need be, I am head-over-heels in love with this album: Kidjo is touring the world with it and judging by the videos, she's an electrifying performer. Read the rest

Sometimes life comes at you fast, and you just have to make the best of a challenging situation.This clever birdie finds a way to make it work.Clever Read the rest

Since 2016, there have been multiple instances of attacks on keyless entry car-locks, and there's a burgeoning industry of expensive ($5000) aftermarket alarm systems that are billed as protecting your car from these radio attacks on its security.Pen-Test Partners evaluated several of these systems and found that the two leading models, Pandora and Viper (AKA "Clifford") were very defective, with a mix of vulnerabilities that allow attackers to track cars in realtime, extract the car and its owner's details, disable the alarm, remotely enable/disable the immobilizer, stop the car while it's in motion, eavesdrop on the in-car mic, and even steal the car.Pen-Test Partners attacked the companies' APIs, which allow their apps to communicate with and configure the in-car systems; by modifying the parameters in API calls, they were able to hijack users' accounts, changing the associated email and password. Once that is done, "It’s possible to geo-locate and follow a specific vehicle, then cause it to stop and unlock the doors."There's plenty of room for research on even more extravagant attacks: the alarm systems interface with cars internet networks over the CAN bus -- a common data infrastructure system that all the car's subsystems use to talk to each other. Pen-Test Partners estimates that $150B worth of cars are exposed via these flaws -- about 3M high-end cars.This is a superb example of how security systems can expose users to risk: once you design a system that treats the person using it as an adversary and a remote party as trusted, then, by design, a remote party who compromises the system can attack the person who's using it. Read the rest

When critics want to dismiss Bernie Sanders's bid to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, the say that he is too old and too white, and incapable of bringing young people and racialized people to the polls, the way that, say, Obama did in 2008 (after all, American politics is as much a contest of who votes and who doesn't as it about whom they vote for).The same people who say this often have other iron laws of Democratic policy, like "Democrats can't support Medicare for All" and "Democrats can't support a Green New Deal" and "Democrats shouldn't try to tax the rich." When they say this, they really mean "Establishment Democrats' big-money millionaire/billionaire donors won't back Democrats who support these policies," and so, despite the enormous popularity of these policies, the Democrats shouldn't run on them.Sanders favors all of these policies, and more, and so it's no surprise that his critics are grasping at (evidence-free) straws to neg him in the public sphere, but of course, reality has a well-known left-wing bias, so it's no surprise that they're (very, very) wrong.For example, Sanders is beating Kamala Harris 2-to-1 in polls of African American voters (possibly because Harris supported the preservation of forced prison labor, joked about her actions to jail parents whose kids were truant, and let Steve Mnuchin walk away from grotesque financial crimes that victimized poor people and stole their homes). And 18- and 19-year-old first-time voters are big on Sanders because his policies matter more to them than his age, especially his support for immediate, meaningful action on climate change -- even though Sanders will be dead before climate change makes most of the USA uninhabitable, these kids won't be, and they know it. Read the rest

Would-be Democratic Presidential nominee Elizabeth Warren (I've donated to her campaign, as well as Bernie Sanders') has published her latest policy prescription: a plan to break up Big Tech monopolists to protect the public's privacy and the interests of small-business competitors.Under Warren's plan, large tech companies (with more than $25b in global revenues) would be designated "platform utilities" and would be required to give all commercial users "fair, reasonable and nondiscrimatory" access to their services, and the owners of these utilities would be prohibited from participating in their marketplaces -- that would mean, for example, that Amazon would have to accept all sellers on the same terms, and would not be allowed to sell its own products to compete with them.Companies with annual global revenues of $99m-$25b would also be platform utilities, but would be permitted to sell on their own platforms.Enforcement would come through a right for state Attorneys General and private parties to sue platforms for violating the deal, "to enjoin any conduct that violates these requirements, to disgorge any ill-gotten gains, and to be paid for losses and damages." Violators will face statutory damages of 5% of global revenues.Next, Warren will force tech giants to divest themselves of former competitors that they acquired: Amazon would have to sell off Zappos and Whole Foods; Facebook would have to sell of Instagram and Whatsapp; and Google would have to sell off Waze, Doubleclick and Nest.Then there's a bunch more squishy stuff, like "we must ensure that Russia — or any other foreign power — can’t use Facebook or any other form of social media to influence our elections" and "We must help America’s content creators — from local newspapers and national magazines to comedians and musicians — keep more of the value their content generates, rather than seeing it scooped up by companies like Google and Facebook" (this rhetoric is scarily similar to the notional basis for Europe's terrible Article 13 proposal, but there are some ways to imagine it going well, if we keep in mind that enriching media companies has little relationship to enriching creators). Read the rest

Let's get this done and get home. No time for lollygagging.This “Pup knows what he's about.”Pup knows what he's about. Read the rest

x6udpngx's x6ud is a single-purpose search engine that offers high-quality animal photographs for use by artists seeking reference material. It also has a 3D head that you can rotate Read the rest

What an amazing DIY castle playroom-bedroom for some seriously lucky grandkids. Truly epic, from IMGURian jshepherddesign2000.About the top image: “Mural and drawbridge bed. Chains are plastic and easily removed as well as breakaway from the top for safety.”The "curtain" and "stained glass" in the image below? Trompe l'oeil. “All one piece of art printed on fabric.”Wow. I'm an adult and I seriously want this!Original below.Our DIY Medieval Castle playroom/kids bedroom for our grandkids. Read the rest

The Apollo 11 documentary is premiering in theaters tomorrow. It makes use of a "newly discovered trove of 65mm footage," which is very crisp, making it look like it was shot yesterday instead of 50 years ago.Image: YouTube Read the rest

Measles is no joke. Anti-vaxxers are dangerously inviting infectious disease back into our society.NBC:In the Washington county that is home to one of the nation’s largest measles outbreaks, the effects go far beyond the 71 confirmed cases.The Seattle Times reports over 800 students considered exposed to the highly contagious disease in Clark County have been ordered to stay away from classrooms for up to three weeks, disrupting their education.Since January, field trips, after-school activities and an assembly honoring Martin Luther King Jr. have been canceled or postponed. Some students are doing homework off prepared handouts; others are using school-issued laptops to keep up. Read the rest

Full Frontal's Samantha Bee presents the Sackler family, "art patrons, cosmopolitans, and, believe it or not, almost single-handedly responsible for the nationwide opioid crisis."The Sacklers aren't just rich. They are rich. They have wings named after them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, an entire museum at Harvard, a center at the Guggenheim...So how do you get to have this many museums name shit after you? By having a fortune of $13 billion, which you, whoops, largely made by creating the opioid crisis. The Sacklers' family business, which they own in full, is Purdue Pharma, a company best known for developing OxyContin, one of the most prescribed and abused opioids in the United States. Read the rest

House Democrats have made good on their promise to introduce the Save the Internet Act, legislation mandating Network Neutrality, which would force the FCC to reinstate the policy that Trump's Chairman Ajit Pai used a string of dirty tricks and illegal maneuvers to destroy.Such legislation cannot pass without the support of Senate Republicans, but it's still a canny move by the Democrats, since many of those Republicans represent the largely rural states that are ground zero for the worst price-gouging and under-servicing by the telcoms industry, and Net Neutrality enjoys broad bipartisan support (83%!!), so forcing Senate Republicans to go on the record about the rule before the 2020 elections will do good for the Democrats' election plans even if they can't get the bill passed. The legislation is being lead-sponsored by Massachusetts Sen. Edward J. Markey in the Senate and Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Doyle in the House. Markey also tweeted out a copy of the bill on Wednesday, saying nearly every Democrat in the Senate had joined him to introduce it.Save the Internet Act [Ed Markey/US Senate]Democrats introduce 'Save the Internet Act' to restore net neutrality [Marrian Zhou/Cnet] Read the rest

Cynthia Newman, dean of the college of business administration at Rider University in New Jersey, has resigned from that position after her school denied Chick-fil-A a campus location "based on the company's record widely perceived to be in opposition to the LGBTQ+ community." (Newman will continue as a tenured professor though.) According to the university administrators, Chick-fil-A's "corporate values have not sufficiently progressed enough to align with those of Rider."I first suspected Newman stepped down because she loves Chick-fil-A's waffle fries so much, but she says she actually has "a problem with University leadership passing judgement on Chick-fil-A’s values which are reflective with the values of the Christian as well as other faiths.” “I endeavor every day to do exactly what Chick-fil-A puts forward as its overarching corporate value: to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to me and to have a positive influence on all who come into contact with me," Newman said in her resignation speech.From CNN:Newman wrote that she asked administrators to apologize for offending Christians, but ultimately decided to step down after the university stuck to its original stance."While we respect Dr. Newman's personal decision, we maintain that the decision about choosing an on-campus restaurant franchise was in no way a judgment on religious values," Kristine Brown, a spokeswoman for Rider University, said in a statement to CNN."Rather, our intention was to foster a sense of respect and belonging of all members of the campus community, including those who identify as LGBTQ+."More in the Rider University newspaper: "Dean steps down from position due to religious beliefs" (The Rider News) Read the rest

A new report from Data & Society (previously) goes into depth on the ways that employers are increasingly rolling out workplace surveillance and monitoring technologies that "exert greater control over large workforces, rapidly experiment with workflows, detect deviant behavior, evaluate performance, and automate tasks."While some of these technologies offer legitimate solutions to real problems, they're more often deployed in ways that simultaneously make life harder for workers and make it harder for workers to push back against employer overreach.The report is a neat illustration of what I've called the adoption curve for oppressive technology, which goes, "refugee, immigrant, prisoner, mental patient, children, welfare recipient, blue collar worker, white collar worker." Remote monitoring and time tracking through GPS-location, computer monitoring software, app-based activity trackers, and remote sensors allow managers or clients to manage large groups of workers indirectly. Many workers on platforms are classified as independent contractors despite the company having significant control over worker actions. Gig platforms like Handy.com and Uber, for example, use apps to decentralize their control of worker activities, but still collect detailed data about trips, communications, and pay. This information can allow companies to nudge workers in ways that advantage the company, but not necessarily the worker (such as directing workers to perform a poorly compensated task that they might not accept if given more information). Recently, Instacart came under scrutiny for using tips that drivers receive in order to supplement pay when they didn’t earn enough to meet the minimum wage. Read the rest

An hero cat of unknown origin bravely fights off invisible attackers.Hang in there kitteh, you can do it.Fighting off your dream attackers.[via] Read the rest

If someone wants to steal your phone number -- say, to intercept the two-factor authentication SMSes needed to break into your bank account or other vital service -- they hijack your SIM by impersonating you to your phone company (or by bribing someone at the company to reassign your phone number to them), and this has made the security of phone numbers into a top concern for security experts and telcoms companies, as there are millions of dollars at stake.Enter Comcast, all-time champion "most-hated company in America," whose Xfinity Mobile cellular service assigns the same unchangeable PIN to every customer: 0000.But don't worry, Comcast says that this only puts you at risk if you recycle user-names and passwords, and nobody does that.Because of that 0000 PIN, getting a victim's Xfinity Mobile account number was the main obstacle for attackers. A Comcast spokesperson told Ars that this account number is available only by logging into the Xfinity Mobile Web portal and is therefore protected by a Comcast's user's password. Comcast told Ars that it does not send out paper bills for Xfinity Mobile and does not include that account number in emails to customers, cutting off two potential ways that attackers could get the account number.Comcast indicated that the number-porting attack affected only customers who reused passwords across multiple sites.Comcast set mobile pins to “0000,” helping attackers steal phone numbers [Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica](Image: Specious, CC-BY-SA)(via /.) Read the rest

Samsung and Huawei wowed early-adopters (and their creditors) this week with cutting-edge designs for foldable tablet-phones. LG's genius answer is to just clip two screens together. The BBC:It has created a second display as a detachable accessory. The end result may look less elegant thanks to the gap between the screens, but it is likely to cost less. The 6.2in (15.7cm) V50 ThinQ handset and its matching Dual Screen add-on both use OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology. Read the rest

Ken Gude, senior fellow at Center for American Progress in Washington DC, wrote a Twitter thread listing all the felonies Trump may have committed, based on Michael Cohen's congressional testimony yesterday.Thread by @KenGude: "I don't think people have appropriately processed the incredible number of felonies that Cohen directly implicated Trump in today. And its u […]"Image: Federico Fazzini/Shutterstock Read the rest