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I've been using this picnic blanket for a few years, and it has held up very well. It's waterproof, padded, tough, and easily folds into its own compact carrying case. Amazon has it on sale now for $13.59.

For all we know, the drivers of these cars fighting to take possession of the middle lane of a freeway could be the nicest people in the world, beloved by friends, coworkers, and family members. But I doubt it.Dumb & Dumber

Tomorrow's the day: the EU will vote on the text of the new Copyright Directive, including the most sweeping and invasive internet regulations in European history: Article 11, letting news sites decide who can link to them and charge for the privilege; and Article 13, creating vast, unaccountable databases of "copyrighted works" and censoring anything that appears to be a match. (more…)

One of the nice things about owning a MacBook is that, more often than not, you don't have to give too much thought about what's going on behind the scenes. Mac OS is stable as all get out. Most users will never need to fart around with terminal commands or futz with file structures. As much of a cliché as it may be to say it, it just works. Most of the time.I discovered, over the years, that as stable as Apple's software experience typically is, there are a few ways to improve on things by tweaking and cleaning my SSD up. These are not tasks that I am good at. Admittedly, this is likely due to the fact that I've been too lazy to learn the ins and outs of making my computer do tricks outside of what my work requires. As such, I let apps do the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting for me. I've relied on MacPaws' CleanMyMac for years to clean junk files from my computer and maintain my drive's health. I can't remember how much I paid for it, back in the day, but I've very likely gotten my money's worth out of it. The only thing that I likely know less about than what goes on behind the scenes of Mac OS is what in the name of Hell makes Windows 10 run. While I find the OS and the software I run on my Surface Go to be adequate for churning out words and a bit of photo editing, I haven't got the slightest idea of what to do in order to keep my new Windows 10 PC healthy. So, lazy fella that I am, I checked to see if MacPaw had a solution for Windows. Yup.I've been using CleanMyPC with my Surface tablet for the past few days now. It works pretty well! I like how easy it makes it to reclaim drive space, repair my registry (I've ALMOST got a grasp on what that means) and noodle with my startup settings. Instead of having to go spelunking through Windows for interfaces that allow me to do all of these things, separately, it's all gathered together in one place. I've noticed that CleanMyPC's automatic drive cleaning protocol takes a lot longer to run on my Surface Go than it ever has on my MacBook Pro. I don't know if this is a consequence of how Windows 10 is set up or if it's because of the Go's pokey chipset. What takes five minutes on my Mac goes on for at least three times as long while I'm working under Windows. That said, as I can run CleanMyPC in the background while I continue to work, it doesn't really matter, I suppose. I've tried other applications in the past that do much the same work as CleanMyPC does, CCleaner, for example, but I found them more irritating--or at least in need of more human interaction--to use. If you're like me and just want your computer to work as well as it can without fully understanding how it is that it does its magic, you might want to consider taking Clean My PC for a spin. A single-user license will set you back between $40 and $50, depending on whether you find it on sale or not. Before taking this financial plunge, it's possible to use it in a limited, but telling, free trial.Images via MacPaw and Seamus Bellamy

Corrupt Baltimore police officers have a way to shoot anyone they want with impunity: they carry toy guns to plant on their victims. From Vice:Detective Maurice Ward, who's already pleaded guilty to corruption charges, testified that he and his partners were told to carry the replicas and BB guns "in case we accidentally hit somebody or got into a shootout, so we could plant them." The directive allegedly came from the team's sergeant, Wayne Jenkins, the Washington Post reports. Though Ward didn't say whether or not the tactic was ever used, Detective Marcus Taylor—another cop swept up in the scandal—was carrying a fake gun almost identical to his service weapon when he was arrested last year, according to the Sun.The revelation is just one of many egregious abuses that have come out of the sprawling trial that the Sun has called "Baltimore’s biggest police corruption scandal in memory." Prosecutors say the squad, which was tasked with getting illegal guns off the streets, abused its power by robbing suspects and innocent people, raiding homes without warrants, and selling confiscated drugs, among other crimes.Image: SALONIC/Shutterstock

One of the absolute all-time greats, Steve Caballero talks about his favorite skaters.I am always jazzed to see how awesome, and still so very cool, all my old skateboarding heroes turned out.

As the European Parliament prepares for tomorrow's vote on the new Copyright Directive with its provisions requiring mass-scale filtering of all public communications to check for copyright infringement (Article 13) and its provisions requiring paid permission to link to the news if you include as little as two words from the headline in your link text (Article 11), a dismaying number of "creators groups" are supporting it, telling their members that this will be good for them and their flagging financial fortunes. (more…)

I heard a rumor that Willem Dafoe will be filming a movie for Disney near where I've been dry camping these past six months. All of the employees at the lodge where he'll be staying have been instructed to only speak to him if he talks to them first. Gross. But not quite gross enough to keep me from wanting to see At Eternity's Gate, a new film starring Dafoe about the trials and tribulations in the life of Vincent Van Gogh.

LEGO Han in Carbonite is reason enough for me to buy the LEGO Star Wars Carbon-Freezing Chamber.While LEGO Lando isn't to be seen, he's clearly still a traitorous jerk! LEGO Han is getting frozen in carbonite! LEGO Boba and an Ugnaught are included to run the operation.LEGO Star Wars Carbon-Freezing Chamber 75137 via Amazon

In 1761 a French schooner was shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean, leaving more than 200 people stranded on a tiny island. The crew departed in a makeshift boat, leaving 60 Malagasy slaves to fend for themselves and wait for rescue. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the Tromelin Island castaways, which one observer calls "arguably the most extraordinary story of survival ever documented."We'll also admire some hardworking cats and puzzle over a racer's death.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Tackle winter's snow in over-the-top eighties luxury with this snowcat stretch limo, posted on Craigslist by its owner Robert Falck of Vancouver. This mashup of an old Bombardier SV250 Skidozer and a 1989 Cadillac Brougham limousine can be yours for the low price of $6,000 CAD (approx. $4,575 USD). Jalopnik:Falck said he built this contraption for a movie, which featured a rich guy who owned a ski resort. When filming was done, the Vancouverite decided to buy the Caddy back. Now it’s up for sale on Craigslist for a price that, he says, doesn’t reflect what he’s put into the vehicle. Falck says the thing will move, but it’s not likely to climb a mountain or blaze its own trail; the vehicle is best left on groomed trails, and it’s not likely to exceed 15 mph.Still, despite the vehicle’s limited practicality, the builder says the Cadillac Snowcat has been popular among Craigslisters. “I’m literally fielding about 30 calls a day,” he told me over the phone.Thanks, Eveline!

For better or worse, we've been trying to find ways to gauge human intelligence for hundreds of years. A century ago, Charles Spearman twigged to the notion that no matter what methodology one uses to figure out exactly how much cheese is on someone's mental cracker, the results from test to test, provided each of the methods employed are of equal complexity, should be the same. This is a very simple way of explaining the "g factor:" which Wikipedia describes as "...a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks." So, if you're wicked good at putting together Ikea furniture using nothing but the crap instructions that come in the box, chances are you'll also be good at solving other puzzles, too. A group of scientists from Germany and Denmark feel that this same principle can also be used to judge exactly how evil a given individual is: if you're a malicious jerk in one corner of your life, the chances are very good that you'll be a sociopath about stuff in other areas as well. They're calling this crosshatching of shitty tendencies a "D-Factor":From Scientific American:Morten Moshagen and his colleagues proposed that a D-factor exists, which they define as the basic tendency to maximize one's own utility at the expense of others, accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications for one's malevolent behaviors. In their definition, utility refers to goal achievement. For those scoring high on the D-factor, utility maximization is sought despite running contrary to the interests of others or even for the sake of bringing about negative outcomes in others.Utility in this definition does not refer to utility maximization that is irrelevant of the effect on others-- such engaging in sports to improve one's health, engaging in consensual sex, or recreational activities. Also, it should be noted that those scoring high on the D-factor aren't always uncooperative, as they can be very strategic in choosing when to cooperate. Their key prediction is that those scoring high on the D-factor will not be motivated to increase the utility of others (helping others in need) without benefiting themselves, and will not derive utility for themselves from the utility of others (e.g., being happy for the success of others).Over at Scientific American, Scott Barry Kaufman goes into great detail describing what information testing someone's D-factor may unlock and suggests a number of questions that could be used to do so. It's a short, fascinating read. Image by Unknown - Internet Archive, Public Domain, Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUgK8I0FGF4Rudy Rucker writes, "'Return to the Hollow Earth' is my new steampunk novel of the Hollow Earth." (more…)

“Putin’s Russia,” as ABC News reports today, would have featured the Russian President hunting, fishing, and generally being a very macho man outdoors. (more…)

A U.S. judge ruled Monday that the accused Russian military operative Maria Butina must remain in jail, saying she poses a “very real risk of flight,” and also granted the government prosecutors' request for a gag order in the high-stakes case. (more…)

Talk about bad sports. Holy cow! (more…)

Honest Guide made this 3-minute video about Vinohrady, "possibly the coolest district in Prague." It mainly focuses on restaurants and coffee shops, which look enticing.

Kazakh blogger Lyubov Kalugina has been charged under Russia's Article 282, an "anti-extremism" law now being used by men who claim women sharing jokes and memes offend them. Via Quartz: (more…)

Channel 4 in the UK: We stand up for diversity and inclusion. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. One of the dark sides of this is online abuse. To highlight this disturbing trend, we’ve partnered with some advertisers to show examples of real abuse against real people in their ads. It may shock you.Here are the ads. If the embed doesn't show, click the link above.https://twitter.com/Channel4/status/1038158715101298694T.S. Eliot, as dissatisfied by life's pettiness as he was satisfied by his own conservative fatalism, ended his poem The Hollow Men with the famous lines "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." He later regretted it. People who survived bombings told him they heard nothing at all.

Former Trump campaign adviser (and coffee boy) George Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in jail, a year of supervised release, 200 hours of community service, and a $9,500 fine after pleading guilty to lying to federal agents in connection with the Russia investigation. (more…)

Next Wednesday, the EU will vote on a potentially internet-destroying regulation that will ban linking to the news unless you're using a service that has paid for a "linking license" from the news site you're linking to; and that will force all user-submitted content (text, audio, video, code, stills) through copyright filters that will censor anything that matches a database of works that anyone can put anything in, whether or not it is in copyright. (more…)

Australian software engineer Sarah Spencer used a 1980s knitting machine to create a gorgeous equatorial star map in the form of a huge tapestry.From Space.com:The piece features all 88 constellations as seen from Earth, as well as the equatorial line with the zodiac constellations running along it, stars scaled according to their real-life brightness, the Milky Way galaxy, the sun, Earth's moon and all of the planets within our solar system. Spencer made sure to put the planets, sun and moon in specific, strategic positions so that the heavenly bodies indicate a specific date in time.After 15kg of wool and over 💯 hrs of knitting, I’m finally ready to fly to the UK. Now I just need to pack the entire universe into my suitcase! I’ll see you all soon 🤗 pic.twitter.com/orBWAmi3bW— Heart of Pluto (@HeartOfPluto_) August 26, 2018

Florida is one of three states where felons who have completed their sentences are still barred from voting; it's also a notoriously inhospitable place for Black people, where the combination of racial profiling, understaffed public defenders' offices, and the threat of farcically long minimum sentences has led to 1.5 million black people with fully discharged felony convictions on their records who are nevertheless banned from voting. (more…)

Here we see a drone operator pestering a man who appears frightened and confused. It's a shame the man didn't have a shotgun to take care of the pesky flying contraption.

John Frost writes, "Four members of the Williamston, Michigan Board of Education are being recalled because they enacted policies that enable schools to treat children with respect regardless of their gender identities." (more…)

Trump is mentally incapable of functioning as president, writes one of his administration's senior officials, anonymously, in the New York Times. But not to worry, America. An administrative coup has been effected and we're making sure the GOP's agenda will be executed for as long as we can strap him to his horse.Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.It's so uninformative and lacking in detail that anyone could fake it and were it not for the Times' imprimatur, no-one would believe it was real. Nothing good will come of this, other than the fun of speculating who authored it and why.What it smoothly describes is, in fact, worse than Trump: an administration run secretly by unnamed, unelected figures in the Republican Party. But that can't be the whole truth, because why would they publish an op-ed about it in the Times if they actually wanted to carry on with the plan?This is probably just blather from some palace functionary or a cabinet member who wants to look good when it's all over, someone who knows that the editorial page of the New York Times is 2018's best place for bullshit.Update: an unusual word in the article, "lodestar," is a favorite of Vice President Mike Pence. The "why" in this case is obvious, but the "how" becomes incomprehensibly dumb.

At $62.80 this is the best price I've seen for a SanDisk 256GB microSD card. (more…)

Robert Kyncl, Youtube's Chief Business Officer, writes about Article 13, the EU proposal to force all online services to evaluate all user-generated content with a copyright enforcement algorithm and censor anything that looks like a known copyrighted work (anyone can add anything to the databases of known copyrighted works and prevent it from being posted). (more…)

I'm a big fan of Christian Thompson's YouTube tutorials on the Python programming language. He explains his thinking as he enters code, in a way that is instructive and enlightening. In this 7-part series (each video is around 10 minutes or less) he shows how to program the classic Snake game.https://youtu.be/rrOqlfMujqQhttps://youtu.be/J5yJilI-Af4https://youtu.be/DxVPN1PIuLMhttps://youtu.be/VH-011awPyQhttps://youtu.be/duElRYWqLgYhttps://youtu.be/Vi0AhyUCCkE

Before the Internet was a thing, the postal service was a big deal for folks flung far from one another. Back in the mid-20th century, a phone call from one coast to the other, no matter how brief, would see you paying through the nose. As such, the postal service reigned supreme when it came to staying in touch in an intimate, personal manner. There was just one problem: unless you paid for rushed delivery, using the postal service to send a letter or other document was, and still is, slow as hell.Thank God for rocket-powered mail delivery! The future of mail! Well, they thought it was, at the time.

Yep, the Beatle was tripping balls. Specifically, he had just taken a hit of DMT with famed 1960s art dealer Robert "Groovy Bob" Fraser. From the NME quoting a paywalled Sunday Times interview:“We were immediately nailed to the sofa... And I saw God, this amazing towering thing, and I was humbled. And what I’m saying is, that moment didn’t turn my life around, but it was a clue.“It was huge. A massive wall that I couldn’t see the top of, and I was at the bottom.“And anybody else would say it’s just the drug, the hallucination, but both Robert and I were like, ‘Did you see that?’ We felt we had seen a higher thing.”Illustration: Mitch O'Connell's fantastic Paul McCartney poster art.

All summer long Epic Games has thrown huge money at their exciting series of tournaments, the Fortnite Summer Skirmish. Two players in particular made this weekend's grande finale burning hot! NickMercs and Ghost Gaming's Aydan made Tilted Towers their personal dueling ground.NickMercs is known for his brutal, efficient gameplay on console with a controller in a game dominated by keyboard and mouse PC players. He is also well known for going to Tilted Towers, a high loot, high action portion of the Fortnite Island. In the $1.5 million dollar showdown finale another console player decided to take him down! Ghost gaming's insanely aggressive Aydan repeatedly landed Tilted and the play was spectacular!I loved Aydan dancing on Nickmercs eliminated puddle of loot! Face to face they were gracious, clearly in awe of one another's play, and clearly the two players to watch.

We must secure the existence of white people and a future for white ... comics?Theodore "Vox Day" Beale, the Nazi-quoting nationalist most famous for gaming the Hugo Awards with bloc voting campaigns, has appropriated the "ComicsGate" name for a new comics publishing company. But adherents of the ComicsGate movement, though sharing his distate for diversity, are far from pleased.Richard Meyer, who runs the "Diversity & Comics" YouTube channel, offered a one-word response: "NOPE.""VOX DAY tried to steal #ComicsGate," wrote pro-ComicsGate artist Ethan Van Sciver. "ComicsGate destroyed him tonight, live."ComicsGate's followers are notorious for online harassment, from abuse aimed at women Marvel employees to recent attacks on Marsha Cooke, who had debunked the movement's attempt to claim her late husband Darwyn as an adherent. In recent weeks, major comics industry figures denounced it as a hate group.ComicsGate's leading lights have now drawn a line in the sand at overt affiliation with white supremacists. It's Beale's commercial grab at the word, though, that really threatens to upset the apple cart. Meyer recently raised nearly $400,000 crowdfunding a graphic novel marketed explicitly as a ComicsGate response to "SJWs", but it's an open question as to whether it amounted to a media stunt or a sustainable market for reactionary comics. Beale plans to answer it first, beating Meyer and co. to the market as a fully-fledged, operating imprint. Asked by an interviewer if he planned to launch a crowdfunding campaign, Beale replied "I expect we will do so, yes."Also raising ire among ComicsGaters was Beale's use of the GamerGate green-and-purple color scheme in the company's logo. Though ComicsGate was inspired by and is connected to the earlier movement, many adherents wish to avoid association with its reported excesses and disgraced figureheads. ComicsGaters and GamerGaters share one more thing in common, though, beyond politics: an obsession with appearances."Just call it literally anything else," one ComicsGate fan said on Twitter of Beale's publishing plans, "and I'm totally fine."

The New Yorker invited white supremacist sponge Steve Bannon to headline its festival. The magazine is famous for its cartoons' caption competitions, but it was discovered not so long ago that the phrase "Christ, what an asshole" perfectly captions all of them.I propose that editor David Remnick's excuse for inviting Bannon — "I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation" — is even better.

It's either unbearably cute or the prologue to a rabies epidemic. No matter how you see it, this raccoon takes a pass at every cat in the neighborhood, searching for the one that'll be the life-long pal he's looking for. Or at the very least, find one that'll tolerate him for a few hours.

Once dominated by triple-A studios with massive budgets, the game development landscape is changing, and now it's easier than ever for aspiring creators to make gaming hits all on their own—provided they start with the right training. Covering the game development process from start to finish, the Complete Unity Game Developer Bundle can get you up to speed with the essentials behind design, animation, and more, all for $39.This 7-course collection dives deep into the Unity game engine, an industry-favorite tool that developers use to build their titles. Following along more than 200 lessons, you'll explore how Unity can be used to create massive game worlds, cinematic cutscenes, and playable human characters. You'll learn how to develop a complete 2D mobile game and even make it more profitable by integrating monetization techniques, like AdMob banner ads.You can get your feet wet with Unity and work toward creating your own game with the Complete Unity Game Developer Bundle, on sale for $39 in the Boing Boing Store.

The life of Aretha Franklin is being celebrated today in Detroit, at what is already described as a legendary memorial service. Earlier today, the British Army paid tribute to the late singer during the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace in London. (more…)

For me, it amounts to a useful guide to the next step. I like Suntory Toki a lot......but haven't wanted to commit to more expensive or unusual options. Now I feel I know where to go, and I didn't even have to look anything up on the internet.The history and elaboration is neither exoticized nor blandly literal, with fascinating stories and descriptions of Japan's unique methods and personalities (it all starts with a business partnership falling apart, naturally) fitting into the larger context Ashcraft seeks to throw light on, which is that Japanese whisky has a deep and broad heritage to match its now well-established quality.It is, in all this, too dense: 135 pages is not quite enough for all the sidebars, photos, biographies and reviews to breathe, and as a result the basic historical narrative is as dense and occasionally superficial as a coffee-table book about famous generals or artists. But I did want to know about Japanese peats, bartender fashions, handcrafted ice spheres and risque interwar-period advertisements as well as specific distilleries and beverages, so there's nothing to complain about—except the Torys Extra. Japanese Whisky [Amazon]Photo: Mikael Leppä (CC)

E-scooter sharing companies Scoot and Skip scooted and skipped their way to the head of the permit approval processing line in San Francisco, but the city flipped the bird at Bird and left Lime feeling sour. Word on the street is that San Francisco is peeved that Bird and Lime deployed their scooters without securing permits, and retaliated by denying their applications and while accepting Scoot and Skip's, which have headquarters based there.Meanwhile, Santa Monica gave the green light to Bird, Lime, Lyft, and Uber's electric bike pilot programs. Axios has more.Image: Grendelkhan/Wikimedia.This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll that was conducted between August 26-29 shows Trump's approval and disapproval ratings to be at their worst for Trump since he took office. His disapproval rating is at its highest, with 60% who disapprove of his job performance, and a mere 35% who approve of it. Disapproval of Pres. Trump is at a new high, support for the Mueller probe is broad, and half of Americans favor Congress initiating impeachment proceedings against the president, new @ABC News/WaPo poll finds. https://t.co/Q7G4jb1LUo pic.twitter.com/4KkN1eHGg8— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 31, 2018According to ABC:Sixty percent in the national survey disapprove of Trump’s performance in office, numerically the highest of his presidency, albeit by a single point; that includes 53 percent who disapprove strongly, more than half for the first time. Thirty-six percent approve, matching his low...Trump’s average approval rating since taking office is the lowest for any president in modern polling since the 1940s. One factor: Contrary to his “drain the swamp” rhetoric, 45 percent say corruption in Washington has increased under Trump, while just 13 percent say it’s declined.Of course poll numbers change from poll to poll and from day to day, but hey, let us enjoy this snapshot moment while it lasts.

Earlier this week, police in Montgomery County, Texas were searching for this mysterious shackled woman who was apparently ringing multiple doorbells in the middle of the night at a subdivision over the weekend. The Sherrif's Office reports that she is now safe and considered a "family violence victim." Her boyfriend was found dead in their home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. "Boyfriend of distressed woman seen in doorbell video found dead in Lake Conroe home" (Click2Houston, thanks Pink Frankenstein!)

Five octogenarian patients died after air conditioning units at the Fujikake Y&M Daiichi Hospital in Gifu City failed. While some patients were moved to the cooler second floor, others were left in the hot floors for a week. Four of those who remained died between August 26 and 27, with the fifth dying on August 28. The recorded temperature in Gifu on the 26th was 36.2°C (97°F). The hospital reported they were using fans to cool the patients and that the deaths were from chronic illnesses. An investigation is being conducted on the suspicion of professional negligence.Japan is suffering from a heatwave with the some of the highest temperatures on record. The heat killed 133 people in the month of July alone and sent thousands to hospital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_01GUoKcXs

“Oh no! For the first time since 1981 there will be no Woody Allen this year,” lulzed Joe Berkowitz, speaking for me also, and everyone who's grossed out by Woody Allen.“NOW how will we get our required annual dosage of shrewish women complicating a nervous man's life?” (more…)

Hey, a lot can happen in 8 weeks.Donald Trump, President of the United States, said today he's keeping Attorney General Jeff Sessions around until after the midterm elections in November. (more…)

Drones capture stunning aerial photos, but not all of us have the piloting expertise to fly one without creating an impromptu shower of plastic confetti. Engineered with adjustable gyro sensitivity and a 6-axis flight control system, the SKEYE Nano 2 Camera Drone lets even novice pilots take beautiful aerial shots, and it's on sale for $19.https://www.youtube.com/embed/ovIcsqK4xSkThe world's smallest camera drone, the SKEYE Nano 2 is great for snapping photos from even the tightest spaces. Deploy your drone in seconds with Ready to Fly technology and keep it steady with simple hover controls. The built-in HD camera lets you capture sharp photos and videos while you fly, and the automatic landing function makes for easier retrieval once you're done documenting your adventures.Whether you're hiking through Yosemite or exploring Los Angeles, the SKEYE Nano 2 Camera Drone offers a fun and unique way to immortalize your travels, and it's on sale today. Get it in the Boing Boing Store for $19.

Every fall in Japan, McDonald's releases a Moon Viewing Burger (Tsukimi Burger). Basically, it's a burger with a perfectly round fried egg in the middle somewhere. This year added to the regular lineup is a new Golden Tsukimi Burger. Not only do you get a golden bun (that smells like butter!), but also a thick slice of golden-colored cheese.

This post is going to be super upsetting if you are a cat person. I am sorry. (more…)

Everything has a cost, especially in the realm of online services. It used to be a pretty common practice for providers of 'free' email services to scan their user's messages for data that'd be valuable to advertisers. The data got sold to keep the email provider's lights on, with in-browser advertising filling in the financial gaps. Most email providers abandoned the practice, years ago: they were amazed to find that it pissed off their users. Yahoo's parent company, Oath, however, is getting back on this particular brand of bullshit. From The Verge:Yahoo’s owner, Oath, is in talks with advertisers to provide a service that would analyze over 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes for consumer data, sources told WSJ. Oath did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Oath confirmed to the WSJ that it performs email scannings and said that it only scans promotional emails, usually from retailers. Users have the ability to opt out, it said. Oath’s argument is that email is an expensive system, and people can’t expect a free service without some value exchanged.That's greasy. Greasier still is the fact that even if you pony up the dough, on a monthly basis, for Yahoo's premium email services, your data will get scanned unless you opt to opt out. Finding the page that lets you do this, surprise, surprise is not easy to do. We've got your back, though. Follow this link to take control of your Oath-related privacy settings.Oath swears that the data scraping method they use ignores personal information and personal identifiers. Somehow, given the number of data breaches and user-related scandals that Yahoo and Oath have seen in the past, I have a hard time believing this--especially given the fact that Oath's privacy policy mentions that they think it's cool for your emails to be read not just by machines, but people in their employ and maaaaaaaybe contractors, too. Image via Wikipedia Commons

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“This is a pivotal moment for California, for the country, and the world.”On Tuesday, California state lawmakers passed SB100, a major bill that would commit to making the state’s electricity supply completely emissions-free by the year 2045. SB100 passed 43-32. (more…)