A gentleman jailed for his part in a $5.4m scam wanted Google to remove links to news stories about the wheeze. His cunning plan to get them to do it – file a DMCA takedown notice claiming copyright in his own name and criminal record – perhaps offers a clue about why he got caught in the first place.From the FBI's press release:

My new favorite subreddit is r/techsupportgore, where people who fix computers post the nightmare scenarios they find themselves in. It's not always the grand-guignol horror of Playstation 4 cockroach farms or, as pictured, loaves of solidly-baked dust. Some of them are subtle problems that can take a while to spot or which might even be invisible to nontechnical folk. Sometimes, the name is literal.Previously: Toner Explosion.

Purdue cynically created the American opiod epidemic through a combination of bribing medical professionals to overprescribe Oxycontin, publishing junk science, and aggressively lobbying regulators at every level to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the lives of millions of patient; while the company settled a record-setting criminal case, the name of the secretive family of billionaires who run Purdue and profited from the Oxy epidemic is best known for philanthropy, not profiteering: the Sackler family. (more…)

CWilock, tired of people who make use of others' artwork without permission, made this enamel pin to celebrate the best response to entitlement of the relentless quality that artists must deal with online. (Saying "no", as the addictive Twitter account @forexposure chronicles, often invites a stream of bigoted abuse.)It's not for sale just yet, but keep an eye on their Etsy store for updates.

This photocopier's already had enough Monday. [Origin unknown; via Cursed Images]Previously: What is a photocopier?UPDATE: This is from a subreddit called Tech Support Gore! BB reader Grey_Devil has found more.

I'm so inspired by these Halloween bento boxes. Not sure I could stomach eating some of them though!https://twitter.com/kiyo_0130_D/status/920403998884036609https://twitter.com/SnapDishJP/status/916060582561943557https://twitter.com/lovefirstbento/status/920689218397097984https://twitter.com/FU__mika/status/920453047288872961https://twitter.com/miyatake_u39/status/920132479528312835https://twitter.com/8magua8/status/918256811681050624(Twitter)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36rW9Pjg6_oChristian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery is a scandal-haunted forced-labor program that addicted convicts in Oklahoma were diverted to; they were put into back-breaking, unsafe labor for long hours with little or no pay and no care or compensation when they were maimed on the job. Rather than meaningful addiction counseling, prisoners were directed to pray and work. (more…)

The Europe Together conference in Brussels brought together party leadership from "centre-left" parties across Europe; Jeremy Corbyn got two standing ovations for a barn-burning speech in which he called on European left wing parties to abandon Blairite anti-union/pro-bank policies and embrace policies that helped working families and reduced inequality. (more…)

I bet this Petersburg, Virginia home is the last place local trick-or-treating children want to hit up for candy on Halloween.The Tombstone House" was built in 1934 using the lower half of marble tombstones procured from Poplar Grove, the nearby Civil War cemetery. There are 2,200 discarded headstones in total, all from Union soldiers.Atlas Obscura shares the house's story:

I have a 1956 Hammond M3, youtube and this here book. Wish me luck!I bought Hammond Organ Complete because I literally had no clue how to even turn on the Hammond M3 I decided would complete my living room.Took me a while to figure out it wasn't broken, just that all the drawbars were pushed in and there were no tones. Let us not dive into the whole dual switch Run/Start boot-up sequence either!I've always found music to be non-intuitive. The keyboard layout of notes really appeals to me and music theory, in my old age, makes a lot more sense than it did before I knew it was just science.Time to practice scales.Hammond Organ Complete via Amazon

Dropshare is a dead-simple file sharing utility that doesn’t tie you to any specific cloud service. A license for the Mac version is available now in the Boing Boing Store for $12.99.Sharing files with other people usually kicks off the same tedious dance: deciding which proprietary cloud vault to temporarily stuff the thing that’s too big for an email attachment, only to later realize that you didn’t set the right access level for whoever’s on the receiving end, which then leads to unnecessary back-and-forth to sort things out.Dropshare aims to vastly simplify the process. It works with private servers, as well as most cloud storage providers, including Rackspace, Amazon S3, Backblaze, and Google Drive. Once you’ve chosen where to keep everything, just drag any file or folder onto the icon to quickly get a download URL. It can upload from your clipboard, so you don’t need to poke around in Finder just to send an image. Dropshare also provides a better way to share the contents of your display. You can take screenshots and screen recordings right from the menu bar, and even capture screens from your mobile device when it’s connected to USB — it works with Android and iOS alike.If you are looking for a streamlined but still highly configurable file sharing solution, pick up the Mac version of Dropshare 4 here for $12.99. Take an a

Remember last year? Remember the above figure (direct link), where all was laid out? This is how SCIENCE ranks your Halloween haul. Kit Kat and actual cash at the top, dental floss and anything whole wheat near the bottom.Well, now it's time for the 2017 Candy Ranking Games. Go and fill out this 10 minute survey into the best and worst Halloween candies. Do it for science. Do it to fight #fakenews. Go forth, go go!COMPLETE THE CANDY SURVEYNote that data will be collected for analysis until noon, PST, Oct 25th. This year’s Candy Hierarchy will be published on October 27th.THINGS TO CONSIDERYou probably thought all we’d talk about this year is David S. Pumpkins and candy corn. Ask David S. Pumpkins to guest co-author, they said. He’s got a Wikipedia page and you don’t, they said. Just because that’s a year-old and only half-interesting reference, still, it’ll never get old and it’ll never die, they said, and by then they’ll forget you said something about candy corn in the first sentence. Because what the hell is going on with candy corn debates this year? How did 2017, of all years, become the one where candy corn blew up? It’s not a bell curve, it’s bi-modal, you know. People love it or hate it and never the twain shall meet. No twain meeting. You do know that don’t you? This comes up every year, obviously, given its importance, but wow, it’s all over the place this time. And then some dude told us they’re making Hershey bars with candy corn in them? What the dip-shit is that?We don’t care, that’s what the dip-shit it is. We leave it up to you. That’s where we were headed with this. It’s up to you. Because David Ng and B.R. Cohen (that’s us) are again re-presenting the official universal survey about your candy favorites for The 2017 Candy Hierarchy.If you want to spend your BoingBoing time reading about our vaunted methodology and sharp insights about survey logistics, if you feel like you need more debriefing on our statistical acumen and scientific ambitions, if you like talking about longitudinal studies and you’re not thinking of maps, go on ahead, read the back catalog. You’ll find that in just the past two years, we’ve tabulated 6000+ individual responses with over 600,000 preferences. But maybe you don’t care for numbers. Maybe you care only for the enormous skill the industry has for congealing sugar into bar, disc, dot, glob, cluster, dud, chip, wafer, cup, jack, cap, egg, or Donald Petersen. If you’re just here to define a candy hierarchy, that is, then have it. We give you the Fourth Annual Candy Hierarchy Survey. Go forth. Rank. We’ll be back next week to present this year’s hierarchy in full.GET CRACKING THEN

My guest on the Cool Tools Show podcast this week is Simon Quellen Field. Simon is a chemist and former Google software engineer and is the author of over a dozen books, including Gonzo Gizmos, Return of Gonzo Gizmos, Culinary Reactions, Why is Milk White, Elements Vault, Why There's Antifreeze In Your Toothpaste, Electronics for Artists and, most recently, Boom!: The Chemistry and History of Explosives. He's the author of the science toy website SciToys.com and several novels.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single pageShow notes:

A train trestle in Gregson St. in Durham, NC has a clearance of 11' 8". Despite the warning signs and flashing lights advertising the lower-than-normal clearance, trucks collide with the trestle often enough that an enterprising person has set up a video camera to catch every spectacular collision. The latest incident, which happened on 10/14/2017, is a doozy.

Such a Great Speech: Applaud Xi Jinping has been played 860 million times; players score points by button-mashing an "applause" button while watching outtakes from President Xi Jinping's 3.5 hour speech to the Communist Party Congress last week. (more…)

The Outline's Casey Johnson rages at the design of Apple's recent laptop keyboards, where the pursuit of thinness has resulted in keyboards that fail at the sight of a speck of dust, and where the said speck demands complete replacement of the keyboard assembly. Jonathan Mann (previously) turned it into a song!

Argentinian motion graphics designer Esteban Diacono produces the most amazing, surreal little animations for his social media, especially the weird, motion-deforming humaniform figures. (more…)

1960s/70s Italian industrial design was led by Olivetti, featuring products with "touches of joy that enliven everyday tasks" featuring bright color and playful forms, very different from the Braun look of minimalist, "Snow White" gadgets that are the precursor to Apple's design language. (more…)

Prominent American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer held a failed rally in Florida yesterday. Three enthusiasts, of the dozen or so who apparently showed up, were arrested after firing into a crowd of folks waiting for the bus. To ensure their intentions were well understood the trio yelled epithets at the folks waiting for the bus, and gave them the Nazi salute.Local police took the three shameful failures of our education system into custody.Via NBC-2 Gainesville:

Jim Davis, creator of the lasagna-living Garfield, has finally commented on his infamous May 30, 1990 comic strip in which Garfield's owner, Jon, appears to guzzle a cup a dog semen at a veterinarian's office.

Scientists are coming closer than ever to stopping aging. The latest video from Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell explores how we would change as individuals and a society if people could live as long as they wanted.In 2011, Drew Magary wrote a book called The Postmortal, a fictional first-hand account of what happens to the world when a cure for aging is discovered. I reviewed it here.

The Canadian Communications Security Establishment -- the most secretive of Canada's spy agencies -- has released the sourcecode for Assemblyline, a "Swiss Army Knife for malware analysis" that rolls up several malware analysis tools into a single unit, which can scan files for known malware and also assign a score to files indicating the likeliness that the file has a previously unseen form of malware. (more…)

Sheriff Joe Arpaio accepted a presidential pardon for his crime, then tried to have the verdict overturned. That isn't how it's going to works, says U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton, who refused to erase the criminal's conviction.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General office is the place where spies and spook contractors who discover wrongdoing are supposed to be able to confidentially report their suspicions and know that they'll be investigated and acted upon. Dan Meyer, who is in charge of liasing with whistleblowers is now prohibited from talking with whistleblowers, from briefing agencies or congress or send out the office's newsletter. He has been stripped of his deputy and staff. (more…)

National Geographic interviewed geneticist Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes. "In many ways, genetics makes a mockery of race," he notes. (more…)

Choosing art to be inked permanently on your body can be a crippling decision, at least for some folks.Elm Street Tattoo in Dallas, Texas thought of a fun way to make the process simpler. They created a vending machine that picks the art for you.Yup, for $100 you get one turn of their "Get What You Get" machine. "What you get" is an old-school tattoo design which pops out in a plastic toy capsule and is then inked on your person. If you aren't cool with the design, don't throw a fit because for another $20 you can buy yourself another spin. No one is forced to put the design on their body; however, there are no refunds.Boogie, a shop employee, told the Dallas Observer, "All of these tattoos I would price out between $160 and $180 ... maybe $250."

The best paper towers for mopping tears as reviewed by Wirecutter, which is to say McSweeneys.

Sir Richard Attenborough exposes the secret lives of those mysterious creatures that make apps and websites.

Brimstone & Glory is a new documentary about the annual National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico, a ten-day orgy of sparks and sulfur. Almost everyone in town manufactures fireworks, so the festival is beyond the beyond. (more…)

Earlier this month, California Senator Kamala Harris dropped a tantalizing truth bomb during a speech: many official flags in use in California were made by state prisoners. Via Mother Jones:

Jills veranda is a lovely Swedish music showcase filmed in Nashville. Here Swedish pop star Veronica Maggio joins host Jill Johnson for a cover of "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac. (more…)

If we can’t even trust our friendly four-legged athletes to not use performance enhancing drugs, which athletes can we trust?The committee responsible for overseeing the 45th Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race found multiple dogs from the same team tested positive for the opioid pain relieving drug tramadol – one of Iditarod's banned substances – six hours after the race ended in March, according to NPR. This is the first such case of a doping scandal for the Iditarod since testing for banned substances began in 1994.The dogs face extreme temperatures and difficult obstacles during their 1000 mile trek through Alaska, which can tempt Mushers to increase their dogs abilities for hefty prize packages.Image: Frank Kovalchek

The clearly politically incorrect Supreme leader of Iran dubbed President Donald Trump and his administration as “mentally retarded” after Trump declined to re-certify Iran’s compliance in the 2015 nuclear deal.Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has stated his approval for the “death to America” slogan, also said he won’t waste his time responding to Trump’s “nonsensical comments,” according to CBS.This hasn’t been the first time a world leader has mocked the president’s mental capacity. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un labeled Trump a “dotard,” back in September. Even Trump’s own Secretary of State reportedly called the president a “F---ing moron,” which Rex Tillerson refuses to outright deny.The United States’ role in the Iran nuclear deal is now placed in the hands of congress, and Khamenei is asking Europe to do more to maintain the multi-country accord.Image: Gage Skidmore

2017 has not been the easiest year. Terrifying storms. The car crash of Brexit. Threats of nuclear war. F-bombs in Star Trek. It’s all a bit much, and even artwork of dinosaurs – yes, dinosaurs – aren’t safe. Boing Boing recently reported that “dinosaur art is mostly bullshit,” it being argued that so much data is lost in Deep Time that our attempts to bring non-bird dinosaurs to life in art are folly. How can our dinosaur art be anywhere close to reality when it’s all based on bones left out in the rain for millions of years? Well, consarn it, I’m not going to let 2017 take the credibility of dinosaur art away from us along with everything else. As someone who researches and illustrates fossil animals for a living, I’m here to tell you that dinosaur art isn’t BS – unless you’re doing it wrong.Restoring fossil animals in art is a practise known as ‘palaeoart’, and it’s a pretty science-heavy medium. In fact, there's not many aspects of contemporary palaeoart that are not informed, at some level, by data of some kind. We might imagine that a fossil record mostly composed of broken bones and shells doesn’t tell us much about ancient animal appearance, but that’s not really true. As more fossils are found and our ability to interpret them improves, we’ve started to make robust inferences about the life appearance of non-bird dinosaurs that were unthinkable just a decade or two ago.Chief among these are abilities are our newfound appreciation of fossil colour. As a child of the 1980s and 1990s I was confidently told that we’d never know what colours extinct animals were but, thanks to modern science, this is no longer the case. ‘Palaeo colour’ is now predictable for a number of fossil animals, including many non-bird dinosaurs, penguins, marine reptiles and insects. In some cases we can only tell patterning, but in others we can reconstruct specifics of actual colour and even iridescence. This not only informs our take on the appearance of these species, but shapes our understanding of their behaviour and preferred habitats. Take that, 2017.We’re also stacking up fossils with preserved skin and other forms of soft-tissue, giving us direct insight into tissue types and bulk in certain species, as well as evolutionary maps of anatomical evolution. With these, we can make ever tighter predictions about, say, whether a dinosaur was covered in feathers or scales. Sometimes, we get it wrong, as we might have for Tyrannosaurus. Recently described Tyrannosaurus skin impressions suggest that – contrary to all its closest relatives and the expectations based on them – Tyrannosaurus was probably mostly or entirely scaled, and not covered in fluff as we’ve recently assumed. What this tells us is that tyrannosaur skin evolution was more complex than we thought, with some earlier species having feathers, but later species losing some or all of them. But rather than sobbing over the need to scrub feathers from older artwork, artists can be happy about this: our data has taken a step forward, and all future artwork of Tyrannosaurus can be just that little bit more accurate. In other words, our tyrannosaur palaeoart BS-level has just dropped a notch, and will continue to fall as artists have more and more information to work with.Of course, there are instances where artists are left largely in the dark and we have to forge ahead with minimal insight and information. Depending on the subject of our artwork, this might be something small – the last scrap of unknown information about a superbly known organism – or it might be vast chunks of anatomy. But palaeoart has climbed to a level where, even on the bleakest frontiers of restoration, we can narrow down some restorative possibilities. Evolutionary models allow us to track development of anatomy over hundreds of millions of years, ruling out some anatomical possibilities because they never arose on a given lineage. We’re learning more about the relationship between bones and soft-tissues, allowing us – in some cases – to predict skin types even when the soft-tissues of animals have been entirely lost. Not all prehistoric species can be restored with high confidence, but increasingly few leave artists entirely clueless. It’s an overstatement to say there is only one way to restore fossil dinosaurs in art, but there are not infinite ways, either. Good palaeoartists do not make these things up as they go along, but create art through a deductive process that follows the best modern science.This is not to say that all palaeoart is of equal credibility, of course. Indeed, some is nonsensical because of awful proportions relative to the fossil skeleton, and lousy understanding of animal form and anatomical evolution. But this only happens because these artworks are not well informed – they’re palaeoart hack jobs produced because no one thought to look, or had time to understand, how their subject animal was constructed. Blowing off the whole genre because of these works throws the baby out with the bathwater, and the last thing 2017 needs is upset babies blocking already stormed-strained drainage systems. Keep hold of those infants, folks, and find out about an art form before writing the whole thing off.Our new book, Dinosaur Art II, is a great place to see examples of palaeoart aimed at those top scientific standards. It’s stuffed full of lovely artwork of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals as well as artist interviews, giving insight into the process and methods of recreating worlds otherwise lost to time. If you’re after actual insights into extinct animal appearance, and not BS, it’s an excellent place to start.

12-term Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen [R-NJ] raised $157k last quarter, while two of the Democrats who're challenging him in 2018, former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill and family advocate Tamara Harris both outraised him by big margins -- $498,000 for Sherrill! (more…)

Ernie Smith's Motherboard article on the early years of DRM gets into some fascinating stories about things like IBM's Cryptolope and Xerox PARC's Contentguard (which became a patent troll), Intertrust's belief that it is "developing the basis for a civil society in cyberspace" and the DeCSS fight. (more…)

Martin Kirkholt Melhus's workplace bans connecting his development computer to the internet, so he hacked together a modem using HTML5: by plugging over-the-ear headphones into his laptop's 3.5mm audio jack and then placing the headphones over a network-connected built-in mic, he is able to tunnel a network connection outside the firewall (or that's the theory; as he notes, "This was only ever intended as a gimmick and a proof of concept - not something that I would actually use at work.") (more…)

This is the lowest price I've seen for this super popular, cheap 10 piece camping cook set.The pot and pan, with lids, neatly stack. Netly stack into a size that is just right to fit into my VW Vanagon's sink, with some dishtowels and a cutting board, for storage as I drive around. It also comes with a sponge, stainless steel spork, a spoon and some bowls.Handles on the pot and pan are not terrible to use, which inspired my purchase. Most camp cook set pots and pans come with burn the shit out of you handles, or complicated weird latch systems. These just fold out and have some silicone for grips.The set is worth it just for the pot and pan. At $15 you can throw this kit into your emergency/bugout bag and have something to boil water in once the apocalypse comes.Honest Portable camping cookware mess kit folding Cookset for hiking backpacking 10 piece Lightweigh durable Pot Pan Bowls Spork with nylon bag outdoor cook equipment via Amazon

CNet has started a new book-club podcast, and they honored me by picking my novel Walkaway as their second-ever title. (more…)

The American prison system is home to one of the greatest market-failures in the history of telephony (which is saying something): a monopolistic system in which sole-supplier, hedge-fund owned telcoms operators charge as much as $14/minute for prisoners to talk with their lawyers, families and loved ones. (more…)

As any author will tell you, the way to become a better writer is to do it every single day. To help promote your daily writing habit, BlankPage provides a clean environment that tracks your progress over time. This app is currently being offered in the Boing Boing Store for $24.99.Since writing well demands focus, it can be tough to stay on task when your interface is cluttered with unnecessary formatting options. BlankPage keeps it minimal: only the title, content, and the current word count are on display while you work. Each piece you write can be treated as a standalone article, or freely arranged into a larger work.BlankPage also lets you set goals for how much you would like to get done during each session, and gives motivational messages to keep you on task while working on big or small projects.You can get lifetime access to BlankPage from the Boing Boing Store now for $24.99.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nZN2ueu13EBeamMG.drive is a driving simulator that's acquired a cult following due to its uncannily realistic modeling of soft-body physics. YouTube is full of crash videos created with it: the thanato-erotic Ballardian lure of mangled automobiles, but with mercilessly bad electronic dance music.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h93Yn1ZoRjw

For twenty dollars, you can download 1600 1-bit sprites for use in artwork, games, icons or whatever other project you desire. [via]

Lorem Ipsum is the not-really-meaningless dummy text used by designers when they need to "greek" some type into a template. (more…)

According to her mom, blogger Christy Keane, baby Charly was born "profoundly deaf." In this truly heartwarming video, you'll see this precious child responding to her mom's voice for the first time ever through the miracle of hearing aids.Charly gets quite emotional and seems unsure whether to smile or cry. Who can blame her?On Instagram, Keane writes, "We didn't think she would hear anything so this was more incredible than I can put in to words."Oh, my heart.(Neatorama)

My Montreal-based tech-entrepreneur friend Evan Prodromou has behind the launch of several companies, including his current one, fuzzy.ai.Evan's also a married dad of two. Additionally, he says he spends three to five hours a week helping friends, or friends of friends, with their business. It's safe to say that he's a busy guy.[caption id="attachment_551956" align="alignnone" width="480"] Evan Prodromou[/caption]To help manage his schedule, he's made it possible to buy (and sell) his time by creating EvanCoin, his own personal cryptocurrency.Wired explains:

For a publicity stunt for his new movie The Foreigner, the lovable Jackie Chan signed up for a bunch of new online accounts under the name "ActuallyJackieChan" and humorously started answering questions from fans. Of course, without verified checkmarks on those accounts, the martial arts actor just looked like someone posing as Jackie Chan.Here's what he wrote on Reddit:

Peter T Lesson writes that the trial by ordeal was "an effective test of guilt", contrary to its brutal suggestion of divine judgment. As unscientific as it seems to determine guilt by dunking someone's arm in boiling water, the threat of it is a cunning way to elicit truth in the absense of evidence—so long as the subject is confident God will protect them if they are innocent.It's rather like modern lie detectors, generally inadmissible in court but used pervasively in interrogations.

Once, humanity was challenged with the effort of scrambling eggs. Then came Ron Popeil.Ron Popeil is like the dad in Gremlins, except he was real. The man invented everything cool you could buy from a tv commercial when I was a kid. The Popeil Pocket Fisherman? The Smokeless Ashtray? The Snaffler? Who tried GL-9 Hair Spray?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fh_YwAnv7wRon's inventions were so prolific, and so effectively sold, he formed RonCo to front them all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8WMXyXBGpMSomehow Donald Trump is President and not Ron Popeil.