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Some models of Russian GAZelle Next commercial vans and trucks have Tetris integrated into the instrument cluster as an Easter egg. Here's the Google translation of the YouTube poster's instructions of how to bring up the game: 1) Turning the ignition on2) Start a car3) Three times the right turn signal4) Two times distant5) Five times on the clutch6) raise the speed to 2000and at that moment we light the arrow to the left

Radioactive toys for kids? Hell yes! In 1947 these Kix Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb rings were all the range.For .15 and a box top you could have your own wearable spinthariscope. The advertising claimed you could see atoms smashing themselves to smithereens inside this ring. It also declared the action perfectly safe. The polonium alpha particles were smashing against a zinc screen. The half-life of the polonium was super short. My ring does not work. Hell, it can even be a real pain in the posterior removing those red plastic fins, just so you can see the "reaction chamber."I like it.

Tired: cosplaying the carpet at Dragoncon (even if you do get bonus points for attracting spurious copyright threats from the venue!); Wired: cosplaying the venue itself!. (via Neatorama) (more…)

Alexis Madrigal describes What Facebook Did to American Democracy and why it was so hard to see it coming. Foreign exploitation of Facebook's ad system in the 2016 election was just the end result of Facebook's filter bubbles and its wildly successful efforts to get media to fill them. tl;dr: the horse was already dead before Russia flogged it.The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken and hidden from view. It wasn’t just liberal bias that kept the media from putting everything together. Much of the hundreds of millions of dollars that was spent during the election cycle came in the form of “dark ads.”The truth is that while many reporters knew some things that were going on on Facebook, no one knew everything that was going on on Facebook, not even Facebook.Facebook's uncanny method is to trickle enough traffic to publishers so they chum it constantly with Facebookish content, but not so much that publishers can assimilate Facebook visitors into their own audience. Unfortunately for this clever and destructive arrangement, the new far-right sites represented such a cohesive emergent affinity group that Facebook's machinery was co-opted.It's said (usually on Twitter) that no-one is better than Nazis at exploiting a libertarian dropout's ideological impostures. This sort of thing usually strikes me as pompous and vague, but Facebook so perfectly embodies it I'm going to need two leftist energy bars for breakfast this morning.

US CERT has privately circulated an advisory warning key stakeholders about the imminent publication of Key Reinstallation Attacks (KRACK), which exploit a heretofore unknown flaw in the WPA2 wifi security protocol, allowing attackers to break the encryption and eavesdrop upon -- and possibly inject packets into -- wireless sessions previously believed to be secure. (more…)

Mike Monteiro writes about his experience of Twitter over the years, and the growing failure of its leadership to take responsibility for what it has become....when companies tell you they need to be more transparent it’s generally because they’ve been caught being transparent. You accidentally saw behind the curtain. Twitter is behaving exactly as it’s been designed to behave. Twitter, at this moment, is the sum of the choices it has made. Even when the coop is covered in chickenshit, the chickens will come home to roost. Twitter never saw Donald Trump as a problem, because they saw him as the solution. Trump is key because his threats have long passed the nebulous, never-quite-defined point where Twitter tends to eject toxic internet celebrities. So it looks like cowardice is at hand: Twitter's brass won't take him on because they're scared of him. And the obviousness of it is unraveling the last faith anyone has in Twitter to get anything significant done about the broader problems of abuse, harassment and general addicted-to-misery behavior on the site.I still love Twitter and think it could be fixed, and that the people in charge of it are in an "impossible" place where all options lead to pain. I hope they wake up and find the strength to deal with it.

I just read Marco Arment's lament for the dire state of the USB-C ecology, where you never know if any given machine, gadget or cable will do the thing you want it to. I thought about all the ports in my life, over the years, and my experiences of the moral qualities thereof.Previously: Shopping Cart Alignment Chart

Turns out it's not just cats who like to watch videos on smartphones. InsecthausTV played one for a praying mantis, who responded in quite a catlike manner. (more…)

Springing from the august tradition of esoteric programming language Brainfuck, behold the mind-mangling power of JSFuck. (more…)

Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers are making the rounds to support The Long-Awaited Album, including this stop at NPR. (more…)

Tens of millions of Americans have had packages stolen from their porches and mailboxes. Now major online retailers are looking at novel ways to deliver packages to car trunks, lockboxes, and even inside locked homes. (more…)

I'm going to brag about my friend Kyle Kesterson for a minute. A few years back, I listened to him tell his story on stage at Dent, a fabulous retreat we both attend. I was immediately captivated by him and we soon became friends.Without a doubt, he's one of the most incredible, soulful human beings I've ever met AND he's a true multi-creative with an endless imagination. A big win-win in my book!Right now he's blogging about his past "30-day challenges," times in his life when he's pledged to do something consistently for a month straight. In his latest "30-day challenge" blog post, he shares about that time when he committed to drawing one doodle a day.He writes: As I started to get into doodling in my late teenage years, and more specifically, intricadoodling, the world around me changed, and the sickness of Pareidolia really started to take hold."Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists (e.g., in random data)."Basically, everywhere I look, I see faces and characters hidden in objects, stains, clouds, light, and the really obscure relationships among objects overlapping. They can haunt me, tease me, keep me from feeling lonely, make me laugh, and make me appreciate the power of perspective...As I'd walk around during my day, if I saw an interesting shape, I'd just snap a pic on my phone, then sometime later that day, sit down for 10-60 minutes and bring it to life to show how I saw it. It was my daily 👁 Spy.Here's a peek at those doodles:Aren't they fun?Go check out all 30 drawings at his blog. Then, go to his Instagram feed to follow his many adventures with his dog, Bean.

Pep rallies were never this cool at my school. Watch the dance team at Walden Grove High School in Sahuarita, Arizona slay it with their energetic interpretation of The Wizard of Oz.(Pee-wee Herman)

Happy Sunday!

Jake Tapper explains to the United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, why folks care if he called Orange Julius a "moron." Tillerson doesn't care.

Bellevue Theatre Amsterdam's Sunday with Lubach sets their scopes on the NRA.

Telcos provide API access to your phone's location, along with your name and address, writes Philip Neutstrom. With two links, to danalinc.com and payfone.com, he shows that these sites can access this data when your phone connects. The pages are demos for the API and serve some of the data provided back to the visitor.In 2003, news came to light that AT&T was providing the DEA and other law enforcement agencies with no-court-warrant-required access to real time cell phone metadata. This was a pretty big deal at the time.>But what these services show us is even more alarming: US telcos appear to be selling direct, non-anonymized, real-time access to consumer telephone data to third party services — not just federal law enforcement officials — who are then selling access to that data.>Given the trivial “consent” step required by these services and unlikely audit controls, it appears that these services could be used to track or de-anonymize nearly anyone with a cell phone in the United States with potentially no oversight.It knew my name and address and more besides, and located to me to a few hundred feet's accuracy. I certainly never knowingly opted-in to it.

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Though Puerto Rican law prohibits ownership and bearing of most long-guns and especially semiautomatic weapons, the streets of the stricken US colony now throng with mercenaries in tactical gear bearing such arms, their faces masked. They wear no insignia or nametags and won't say who they work for, apart from vague statements in broken Spanish: "We work with the government. It’s a humanitarian mission, we’re helping Puerto Rico." (more…)

Since the 1990s, North Korea has aggressively pursued development -- and importation -- of CNC mills, the ubiquitous makerspace staples that automatically machine complex forms out of blocks of metal, wood, plastic and other materials. (more…)

It's been nearly a decade since the first proof-of-concept demos showing that keys could be reproduced on 3D printers from distant, angled photos surfaced, and six years since the first parametric Openscad models that could turn easy key-measurements into working house-keys appeared. (more…)

Trisha Weir writes, "In the wake of the massive fires in Northern California, one of the biggest problems was a lack of centralized infrastructure for information. A group of engineers at a non-profit maker space in Sebastopol banded together to make Sonoma Fire Info, a website with information on evacuations, shelters, donations and support, and have been working around the clock to update it with verified information from a variety of sources."

Under US copyright law, creators who have signed away their copyrights for the "full duration of copyright" can still get their rights back from publishers under something called the "Termination of Transfer," which is a hellishly complex and technical copyright provision that is almost never used, since it requires that creators wait decades and then successfully navigate all that complexity (even knowing how many years you have to wait is complicated!). (more…)

Strawberries are delicious, but is DNA extracted from strawberries delicious? Chemist NileRed extracted some DNA using food safe ingredients, then dried it and tasted it so we don't have to. (more…)

Keith Calder has been looking around on Reddit and has found a string of messages from baffled, distressed women whose male romantic partners literally don't wipe their asses because touching themselves between the cheeks might make them gay. (more…)

You probably remember indie Canadian band Walk off the Earth from their 2012 viral cover of Gotye's "Somebody that I used to know." In the video, five band members cover the song by playing just one guitar... all together. Well, they're still doing their thing, and by "doing their thing," I mean "covering pop music in clever and unusual ways."They pull out some wacky instruments for their latest, a fun and entertaining cover of Outkast's 2003 hit "Hey Ya!"The band starts a U.S. tour in March 2018.(reddit)Previously: "Little Boxes" performed on little boxes

Python is an amazingly versatile programming language. Aside from being a primary tool for both data scientists and web developers, it’s also very well-suited for building network infrastructure. To teach you how to build, maintain, and secure software for distributed computer systems, this Python Network Programming Bundle is currently available in the Boing Boing Store.Throughout the 28 hours of video content included with this collection, you’ll learn the fundamentals of Python programming while writing a wide variety of apps for networks. Get introduced to essential concepts like SSH/Telnet communication, task automation, and basic information security, and discover how to use Python scripts to remotely configure hardware, scan networks for threats, and maintain device inventories.If you’re looking to gain practical programming experience working with business-critical IT systems, take a look at the Python Network Programming Bundle. Pick it up today in the Boing Boing store for $24.BUY NOW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rujeOqadOVQThere's knowing about it, and there's knowing where your bread is buttered, and then there's this.

Protesters against ICE's campaign of mass deportations were treated to a bizarre public stunt by Portland, OR police, who put them in isolation hoods and sound-muffling ear-protectors reminiscent of the treatment described by Gitmo prisoners and other survivors of US torture. The police were attempting separate the protesters from the bonds they used to stick themselves together and the measures were nominally taken to protect the protesters' hearing and vision from police power-tools. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Justin Delay breaks down and recreates the otherworldly 1980s synth sounds of Vangelis's stunning score for the original Blade Runner.

The US is the only developed country in the world without universal healthcare. Americans pay more for their healthcare than anyone else, and get significantly worse outcomes than people in every other developed nation. The majority of Americans support universal healthcare. And yet, we are told that universal healthcare is impossible in America. (more…)

On Wednesday, security researcher Randy Abrams visited the Equifax site to contest bad information in his credit report and was attacked by malicious software that tried to get him to download a fake Flash updater that was a vector for an obscure piece of malware called Adware.Eorezo. (more…)

Actor Ben Affleck expressed surprise after Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a serial abuser of women, but few seemed to have time for his denunciation of the famous producer. It was remembered that Affleck not only groped Hilarie Burton on camera, but was well-aware of Weinstein's behavior.After this, McGowan, who received a $100,000 settlement from Weinstein, was kicked off of Twitter. Here's The New York Times:The message in the screenshot said that the lock was in effect because Ms. McGowan’s account had “violated the Twitter rules.”It was not clear which tweets had resulted in the suspension. However, on Tuesday, after Mr. Affleck tweeted that the allegations against Mr. Weinstein “made him sick,” Ms. McGowan called him a liar, saying he had long been aware of what Mr. Weinstein had done.Grim irony in the attempt to silence a Weinstein survivor speaking out. And another warning of the power social media companies wield, their blindness to its consequences, and their growing complicity in the harm caused.

A version of Yes, an app that says "y" at maximum speed, is built-in to unix-based operating systems. You can test it by firing up a terminal, typing "yes", and then watching it fill your window; you'd usually pipe it to another app or script. But there's a problem: it can only generate 51 megabits per second worth of yes, and something must be done about it.Lessons learnedThe trivial program yes turns out not to be so trivial after all. It uses output buffering and memory alignment to improve performance. Re-implementing Unix tools is fun and makes me appreciate the nifty tricks, which make our computers fast.As benchmarked by the author's computer, 3GB/s of yes is now possible!

https://youtu.be/EzdQE3fJW2EI'm not a guitar player (though I did take lessons in my youth), but I am a huge Nick Drake fan and have always been haunted by the very unique, dark, and moody guitar tones that he achieved. In this fascinating video by YouTube guitar teacher, Josh Turner, he presents and demonstrates his theory for how Nick got his signature sound. Spoiler Alert: He identifies these four characteristics that he thinks are the most significant contributors:1. Small-bodied guitar (probably)2. "Dead" nickel strings3. Medium-length fingernails, long thumbnail4. Classical guitar-style hand position with bent wrist and thumb angle (and playing over the sound hole)At the end of the video, to demonstrate the sound, he launches into the first part of Things Behind the Sun. It sounded so beautiful, it made my eyes want to roll back in my head. And made me immediately run to the original as soon Josh's video was over.https://youtu.be/L1AkYgBTc4MIf you are also a fan of Drake's, you'll want to check out Remembered for a While, the the lovingly curated scrapbook of all things Nick that his sister, Gabrielle Drake (perhaps best known as the purple-haired Lt. Ellis on the cult-fave 70s British TV series, UFO) put together. Here's the review I wrote of it here on Boing Boing.

People will share anything on camera. These 100 were asked, "What's the worst thing you've ever done?" Their answers ranged from the innocent to the downright criminal, like that girl at the 1:29 mark. Yikes.

Tucked away in a quiet neighborhood in Alameda, California is "A Very Very Trump Halloween," a lawn display that may well be the world's scariest.The decor is the brilliant creation of Alamedans Cathy and Dan Balsam who shared, "These decorations are the scariest thing we could possibly think of."What makes their lawn decor so spooky?Well, it features an all-star monstrous cast of the ghouliest of all ghouls in American politics.Like...Lizard man Mitch McConnell...Putrid undead Pence...The ever-grim Steve Bannon...Dark puppetmaster Vladimir Putin...(Skeleton Putin riding a horse skeleton is a nice touch on that one.)Scary Steven Mnuchin...The eerily-silent Sarah Huckabee Sanders...Brainless Ben Carson...Melancholy Melania Trump...The resemblances are spooky, aren't they?! And, there's lots more frightening faces here. "A Very, Very Trump Halloween," indeed. photos by Rusty BlazenhoffPreviously: 'Fuck Trump' projected on a building in California's 'Mayberry by the Bay'

Vigilante mobs in Malawi have killed five people accused of ritualistic human blood drinking and the threat has left a bad taste for United Nations officials. The U.N. has pulled staff from two southern districts where the vampire scare has spread from neighboring Mozambique, according to the BBC. U.N. staff members were temporarily relocated to safer areas when the organization reported villagers began placing roadblocks to hunt for “vampires.” The Malawi government put a curfew in place from 5pm to 7am local time to try and prevent more deaths, which is appropriate considering would-be vampire hunters are likely to work during peak nighttime vampire hours, according to most vampire folklore. Image: Illustration by David Henry Friston, 1872

In September 2016, we learned that the University of New Hampshire was going to use $1 million that an incredibly frugal librarian saved while working as a library cataloger for 50 years to buy a new scoreboard for its stadium. (more…)

Of all the outlandish technologies I propose in The Punch Escrow, the one nobody seems to ever take umbrage with is “printing.” For those who haven’t read my book, a base assumption I make about 22 century Earth is that we will be able to 3D print pretty much anything: the food we eat, the silverware we eat it with, heck, maybe even some people to join us for dinner.Tal M. Klein's The Punch Escrow is available from Amazon.How? E=mc. Really, it all comes down to E=mc; Einstein’s energy-matter equivalence principle. This equation tells us that mass is just another form of energy. That means we should be able to take some mass and directly convert it into pure energy, a thesis supported by real evidence. For example, it’s how we explain the energy that keeps atomic nuclei together. If we were to weigh the nucleus of any atom, we’d find it weighed slightly less than the sum of its parts. Where’d the extra heft go? It was converted into energy -- the “glue” holding everything together (in other words, dude, energy is the carpet of our universe). Since E=mc is a balanced formula, we should be able to -- at least in theory --convert energy to mass.In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows energy to briefly decay into particles and antiparticles which then transmogrify back to pure energy. At small enough scales, the energy of these fluctuations would be large enough to cause significant departures from the smooth spacetime seen at macroscopic scales, giving spacetime a "foamy" character. This “quantum foam,” were we to harness it, could be used to essentially construct anything — it is the quintessential building block of the universe. Quantum foam’s a hell of an ink.In The Punch Escrow, “replication printing” is the catchall name for the process used to create objects in this way. Basically, everything is available anywhere, provided one has the “blueprint,” printer, and “ink.” Replication of valuable or patented items is prevented through safeguards such as unique molecular signatures. I looked to the way we handle digital rights today as a model for how we might handle a world where anything could be printed. For example, if someone managed to illegally replicate a gold bar, it would have an identical signature to the original blueprint. Any piece of gold with that bar’s molecular signature could only be sold once, thus branding any other copy a fake. That doesn’t prevent two of the same bar of gold from existing, but only one of them could have market value. And lest you still think printers would collapse the market value of consumable things like expensive liquor, fancy cheese, and truffles, these are all things which could be licensed, either permanently or ephemerally. I use the Big Mac as an example in the book.My thesis is that we humans place a lot of stock in originality -- our culture has always focused on “the real thing” having true tangible value, and with the use of authentication techniques such as the aforementioned molecular signatures, it could become nearly impossible to make illegitimate replications of anything patented. The printing infrastructure itself would need to be built to enforce legitimacy, akin to an Amazon Prime of things -- one only has access to things that come with the service or they’ve which they have already purchased -- such that if someone illegally replicated a Big Mac, the printer that printed it would flag it as illegitimate. To enforce this illegitimacy, we need mechanism for governing and tracking folks.Because The Punch Escrow’s 22 century Earth is a corporatocracy, infrastructure, federal institutions, and the legal system are all semi-privatized. “Semi” in that I didn’t reinvent law. A company could only hold one equal seat on a nine governing corporate panel, that is in essence what we now know as the executive branch in America. Each seat is doled out annually based on the nine firms with the respective highest valuations that year. There’s a legislative branch too. It ensures further checks and balances, as well as prevents collusion, by providing companies from specific geographies with a voice and a vote. There is also a judicial branch entrusted with enforcing common law. There are no elected officials -- companies make decisions and people vote with their chits (we’ll get to those in a sec). Minimum basic needs are provided for everyone free of charge. That way, the corps reckon, nothing is out of reach for anyone. The rich could still be rich, but things like food and shelter are readily available to all.The Punch Escrow’s global economy is powered by “chits” -- an elastic global blockchain cryptocurrency. Chits are secure and unforgeable by design and make most financial crime obsolete. What do I mean by “elastic”? The idea is that the “price” of something is a moving target based on real-time demand, the wealth of the procurer, and the percentage of the procurer's wealth that the procurement transaction represented. This allows a rich jerk to buy the last piece of bread in a hypothetical municipality, but it would make the cost of bread incredibly prohibitive to that person (because 80% of their income might be worth more to them than 80% of the income of the local municipality’s denizens. Since 80% of zero is zero, if someone is truly broke, the bread is free, and they could afford to pay 100% of their income to buy it). It sounds complicated, but we’re also talking about a world in which no one can effectively lie to “the system” about their worth; the tradeoff for these societal capabilities is the loss of privacy.So, is a world where basic needs are provided for and we can print anything a utopia? I posit: No. But it’s no dystopia either. Is a system that ensures nobody goes hungry and that no one person or corporation could manipulate the market beyond its natural elasticity worth the loss of what many of us believe is a fundamental inalienable right? Only the future will tell.Tal M. Klein was born in Israel, grew up in New York, and currently lives in Detroit with his wife and two daughters. When his daughter Iris was five years old, she wrote a book called I’m a Bunch of Dinosaurs that went on to become one of the most successful children’s book projects on Kickstarter —something that Tal explained to Iris by telling her, “your book made lots of kids happy.” Iris then asked Tal, "Daddy, why don’t you write book that makes lots of grownups happy?" Tal mulled this over for a few years, and eventually wrote his first book, The Punch Escrow. It won the Inkshares Geek & Sundry Hard Science Fiction Publishing contest, and will be the first book published on Inkshares’ Geek & Sundry imprint.Photo: Lai Long

Stevie Wonder can see again, the Las Vegas killer joined a cult before the massacre, and Tom Petty could have been saved, according to this week’s fact-distanced tabloids.How wrong can the tabloids get?Having killed off country music star Loretta Lynn months ago, the Globe now reports “Loretta Lynn is back from dead!” Less than five months after a supposedly fatal stroke, she was back on stage this month and “showed no ill effects from the stroke.” Or maybe reports of her death were premature?Robert Redford, who beat polio at the age of 11, is suffering a “relapse fear” claims the Globe - because at 81, he “was seen struggling to get out of a vehicle.” Sure, that couldn’t possibly be the result of old age, rheumatism or arthritis, having overdone it in the gym, or soreness after a long horse ride. It’s polio, naturally.“Sex-starved O.J. heading right for hookers!” reports the National Enquirer, which claims to have followed the recently-paroled ex-con O.J. Simpson for a week. And after seven days, how many hookers did he visit? None. It’s just the owner of the Moonlite BunnyRanch brothel saying vaguely: “It’s going to happen . . . the BunnyRanch girls are anxious for O.J.’s visit.” Right.“Hugh Hefner didn’t have to die!” claims the Enquirer, citing a “toxic cloud of black mold” in the Playboy mansion for hastening the Lothario publisher’s demise. “Everything in the mansion felt old and stale,” says Hef’s former girlfriend Izabella St James. But that’s just a failure to renovate (as well as a description of Hefner in his later years) and there’s no evidence of mold. Rocker Tom Petty also didn’t have to die, and “could have been saved” reports the Globe, which claims he was “too frail” and worked “too hard” on his last concert tour. “People tried to tell Tom to slow down but he wouldn’t hear of it,” says a typically unidentified source. Yet the Globe tells us that “Tom Petty was ready to die!” Evidently he knew “last concert would be his farewell.” He allegedly “needed vitamin shots to boost his energy, and was set for hip replacement surgery, insiders said.” The last time I checked, vitamin shots are used routinely by performers to maintain health and boost energy, and pending hip replacement surgery is no precursor to cardiac arrest.Continuing its flights of fancy, the Enquirer reports that Las Vegas mass killer Stephen Paddock had joined a “cult of death” before the shooting, finally explaining his “chilling motive.” What cult was this? The Enquirer has no idea, because it simply offers a series of supposed experts saying that Paddock had the profile of “the sort of people who fall victim to cults,” and speculate that he “may have reached out to a cult-like group.” Wild, unsubstantiated wishful thinking, matched with unequivocal declarative headlines: a tabloid specialty.The Enquirer publishes a photo of the dead gunman sprawled lifeless on the floor of the Mandalay Hotel, except editors have spared squeamish readers any discomfort by air-brushing the photo so that he appears nothing more than a dark smudge across a blood-stained carpet. It could be a photo of spilled red wine, for all we know.Sister publication the Globe has no such qualms, however, and prints the same photo in every glorious blood-drenched detail, lovingly showing a river of blood gushing from Paddock’s mouth and nose after he blew his brains out, a glistening pool of blood still wet beneath him. Why does the Enquirer think its readers are too delicate to view this gruesome image? Enquiring minds want to know.Will singing legend Stevie Wonder read the Enquirer cover story claiming that he can “see again”? The Enquirer claims to have "uncovered evidence” that the entertainer, blind since birth, “has undergone a secret, high-tech procedure that has given him some vision.” They speculate that he has had a retinal microchip implant that restores some vision.It’s true that scientists have developed an artificial retina implant that restores lost vision in rats, but clinical trials in humans are only set to begin this year. And the “evidence” that Stevie Wonder has undergone this highly experimental surgery? He reached out and hugged a winner of TV’s Star Search in 2004, claimed he was losing weight to appear on TV’s Dancing With the Stars in 2011, apparently caught a falling microphone while performing with Paul McCartney at the White House in 2012, and attends basketball games where he cheers the action. All “evidence” of sight restored by a surgery which can’t have taken place back in the day when this “evidence” occurred. Details, details.Fortunately we have the crack investigative team at Us magazine to tell us that Cindy Crawford wore it best, that Anne Heche “had no TV growing up,” that actress Madelaine Petsch carries sunglasses, lip gloss and mints in her black backpack, and that the stars are just like us: they shop for coffee, shoes and toilet paper. Shocking, as ever.Us and People magazine this week seem to be having a competition to see which can put the most boring couple on their cover. People gives it a good shot with the stars of TV’s Fixer Upper, Chip and Joanna Gaines, explaining that they are quitting their show because “our family comes first.” But Us magazine has the winning edge, with a mind-numbingly vacuous cover story on Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt’s “miracle baby.” Didn’t we all stop caring about this a couple years ago? How was their 6 lb, 12 oz baby – as yet unnamed, because they’ve only had nine months to think about it, just give them a little longer – a “miracle”? Was Heidi told she could never conceive? Did the labor last 72 hours? Was there a dramatic life-or-death battle to save the newborn’s life? None of that. From what I can tell, the miracle is that anyone’s interested in this pablum. Labor lasted only five hours, and Spencer Pratt brought $27,000-worth of healing crystals into the labor room, “so literally as my contractions are going, he’s running in, putting these huge crystals all over,” says Heidi. “It was mayhem!” But I’m sure their unnamed son appreciated entering the world thinking he was in a Topanga Canyon rock store.Leave it to the National Examiner to tell us that “Flying Alien Beasts Terrorize Chicago!” The story describes how “hideous humanoids plunge to within feet of petrified pedestrians.” The story is true – at least, it’s true that numerous Chicagoans have alleged to have been swooped upon by a large flying creature that some claim appears humanoid, echoing tales of Mothman sightings in West Virginia in the 1960s. There have been 29 alleged sightings in Chicago this year alone, and supernatural phenomenon researcher Lon Strickler tells the Examiner: "I have long theorized that the Mothman, and other unknown winged beings, are multidimensional life forms . . . that can be summoned by the high-energy incorporeal entities that reside on our Earth plane.”Well, that makes perfect sense. Or it could just be a large owl, or a man in a winged flying suit, or even a drone decorated to look like a flying creature, as experts suspect.Onwards and downwards . . .

During a survey of New Yorkers who fly the failed symbol of Confederate racism, a fantastic moment occurred. (more…)

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Babbling Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke somehow feels native tribes people have a deep love and respect of the Confederacy. The United States must keep its Confederate memorials for the sake of the natives!Employing racism to excuse racism, Zinke referred to first tribes people as "native Indians" and attempted to draw a false equivalency between Union commanding officers and Southern ones. Americans should remember both Grant's heroic work as an extremely drunk General in our Civil War, AND the fact he ran the most corrupt administration in American history... right up until about that time Orange Julius appointed Ryan Zinke.I do not see how these folks who may well never have been to India benefit from the display of memorials to people who invaded Pennsylvania.Via TPM:“Where do you start and where do you stop? … If you’re a native Indian, I can tell you, you’re not very happy about the history of General Sherman or perhaps President Grant,” Zinke said during an interview with Breitbart Sunday, referencing the Union generals’ monuments around the U.S. despite their roles in creating federal policy that caused great harm to native Americans.While Zinke has maintained this opinion about Confederate monuments since at least July, tensions over memorials for Confederate soldiers has risen significantly since August when a counter protester was killed at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The white supremacists gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in the city.Zinke said removing the statues will inhibit the U.S. from being able to “learn” from history.“I think we should never hide from our history or erase our history. I think we should embrace the history and understand the faults and learn from it. But when you try to erase history, what happens is you also erase how it happened and why it happened and the ability to learn from it,” Zinke said.

Oh, Equifax: "Equifax says that for approximately 14.5 million of the 15.2 million affected, the stolen records contained only a small amount of information, limited to name and dates of birth."

Brett Gaylor from Mozilla writes, "The FCC received 22 million comments in response to its plan to repeal Net Neutrality legislation. So we've created a virtual way for you to drop 22 million virtual leaflets on Ajit Pai at the FCC headquarters. And we're almost there! Folks have dropped over twenty million so far, and in the process made weird cyber graffiti appear all over DC. Help us get to 22 million!"

Section 108h of the Copyright Act gives libraries the power to scan and serve copies of out-of-print books published between 1923 and 1941; it's never been used before but now the mighty Internet Archive is giving it a serious workout, adding them to their brilliantly named Sonny Bono Memorial Collection (when Bono was a Congressman, he tried to pass a law that would extend copyright to "forever less a day" and was instrumental in moving millions of works from the public domain back into copyright, "orphaning" them so that no one could preserve them and no one knew who the copyrights belonged to). (more…)

Orange Julius wants "equal time" in the media. Jon Stewart attempts to balance out Colbert's obvious bias, and show Trump some love.

A Detroit firearms enthusiast scared off an attacking pitbull by shooting its victim in the leg! Apparently the force of the impact caused ol' Cujo to run away.The mauling/shooting victim was taken to a local hospital where the 53 year-old woman was pronounced dead.The shooting is under investigation.The dog is still on the loose.Via CBS:Police say a woman who was being attacked by a stray dog in Detroit has been fatally shot after a man fired a gun at the dog and hit her instead.CBS Detroit cites police as saying the woman, 53, was mauled by a pit bull while walking on Monday evening, was shot in the hip and taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Her name wasn't immediately released.Police responded and searched for the dog, but it wasn't immediately found.Detroit police Captain Darin Szilagy says the man lived in the area. Szilagy says he was trying to be a "good Samaritan" and had a license to carry a concealed weapon. Szilagy says it's a tragic story, but notes "we're responsible for every round we fire."The shooting is under investigation and prosecutors likely will review the case.

Equifax division TALX has a product called The Work Number, where prospective employers can verify job applicants' work history and previous salaries (it's also used by mortgage lenders and others): you can create an account on this system in anyone's name, provided you have their date of birth and Social Security Number. The former is a matter of public record, the latter is often available thanks to the many breaches that have dumped millions of SSNs (the latest being Equifax's catastrophic breach of 145,000,000 Americans' data). (more…)