What data does your car gather about you? Where does it go? Who has access to it? Quite the story today from Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler [@geoffreyfowler], and quite the viral quote: “Cars now run on the new oil: your data.”Most cars sold in America in 2020 will ship to consumers with built-in and always-on Internet connections, and multiple on-board computers. Where does all that data go? “We’re at a turning point for driving surveillance — and it’s time for car makers to come clean,” Fowler writes. Make sure to read the whole piece in the Washington Post, in addition to the insightful extras in his Twitter thread.And -- Get a load of the forensics experiment he did with the help of a computer security professional. It's not easy getting them out of the vehicle's hardware, for starters!What does your car know about you?In my latest @washingtonpost privacy experiment, I tried to find out from a Chevy.The dashboard didn’t say. It wasn’t in the manual or GM’s obtuse privacy policy.To glimpse my car data, we had to hack our way in: https://t.co/I4oBBjyrkb pic.twitter.com/HTDqIuSGaQ— Geoffrey A. Fowler (@geoffreyfowler) December 17, 2019I had help doing a car privacy autopsy from Jim Mason, a forensic engineer.That involved cracking open the dashboard to access just one of the car's many computers.Don’t try this at home — we had to take the computer into the shop to get repaired.https://t.co/9vRRwZgD3V pic.twitter.com/zaCNGRdVCd— Geoffrey A. Read the rest

That Rudy Giuliani is really out-Giuliani-ing himself this week. What's he up to? This feels like a set-up, a prelude to a greater Act yet to come.Said Giuliani just last night on Fox News:"I forced her out because she's corrupt," said Rudy Giuliani, a private citizen who was once Donald Trump's personal lawyer, about America's former ambassador to Ukraine. And a new doozy of a quote from him in the New Yorker:“I needed Yovanovitch out of the way. She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”In January, 2019, Giuliani spoke by phone with Viktor Shokin, the previous prosecutor general, about alleged misconduct by the Bidens, which set him on a new path of inquiry. That month, Lutsenko flew to New York, and, in the course of several days, spoke with Giuliani at his Park Avenue office. Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were there, too. Lutsenko knew what would interest Giuliani, so he had brought along financial information purportedly drawn from bank records, which, he said, proved that Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, had paid Hunter Biden and his business partner to “lobby” Joe Biden. “Lutsenko came in with guns blazing,” Parnas told me. “He came in with records showing us the money trail. That’s when it became real.” Giuliani seized on Lutsenko’s claims, offering to help him secure high-level meetings in Washington and encouraging him to pursue investigations beneficial to Trump.In a long conversation with me this past November, Giuliani largely confirmed Lutsenko’s account of their relationship. Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just hired two new staffers focused on the EU: Icelandic poet, artist, and free expression activist Birgitta Jónsdóttir, and European Internet policy expert Christoph Schmon.They each have different areas of expertise and different kinds of projects, but in general they'll be working to ensure that the major new online policies in the EU take account of human rights like privacy and free expression and that they don't inadvertently create situations guaranteeing the dominance of big US tech companies (say, by enacting rules that only the largest companies can afford to comply with, driving smaller, EU-based companies out of business).I've known Birgitta for years, and met Christoph recently, and both of them are hugely impressive, talented, knowledgeable activists. I was EFF's first-ever EU staffer, and I'm so excited to watch this process unfold!Birgitta Jonsdottir, EFF’s first Internet Archive Fellow, will be working across Europe as an advocate for the public interest Internet, focusing on protecting and balancing online speech, privacy, and innovation. In her years of activism in Iceland’s Parliament for the parties she co-founded, the Civic Movement and Pirate Party in Iceland, she championed for democracy in the digital era, with special focus on making Iceland into a digital safe haven for freedom of expression, freedom of information and speech and the right to privacy both online and off. Birgitta’s role is financially supported by one of the strongest examples of the public interest Internet: the Internet Archive, the non-profit digital library that aims to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”“Digital rights are human rights. Read the rest

Superman's cape, as worn by Christopher Reeve in Superman (1978), sold at auction yesterday for $193,750. From Julien's Auctions:Includes a copy of Superman #331, which advertises on a banner above the front cover logo “YOU COULD BE A WINNER IN THE SECOND SUPERMAN MOVIE CONTEST!” Within the comic book is a full-page advertisement for the contest that lists “FIRST PRIZE” as “THE ACTUAL CAPE WORN BY CHRISTOPHER REEVE IN THE FILMING OF SUPERMAN THE MOVIE!..."Accompanied by nine pages of supporting documents of authenticity, including a letter to the winning recipient of the cape, signed by DC Comics President Sol Harrison and dated February 27, 1978, and a letter from DC Comics’ Steven Korte to Sotheby’s, New York, dated October 21, 1997. Read the rest

There's no shortage of wireless chargers out there. So when one scores a Best of Innovation Award at the Consumer Electronics Show, we take notice. And, those industry nods mean good news for just about anybody with a smartphone, because the HyperCharger X Wireless Charger means there's no excuse for losing power when you're out and about.As a straight-up wireless charger, the thing packs a punch. It has 7.5 watts of power for Qi-compatible devices. No plugs in sight? It's also a power bank with 6,000 mAh of capacity, more than enough to get multiple devices throughout the day.For old-school gadgets, you can charge by a 15W universal USB port. You can even charge up your phone wirelessly while recharging up the unit via the port, so there's no downtime.And the cherry on top? The entire thing is as small as an iPhone X.Right now, you can get a 2-pack of HyperCharger X Wireless Chargers for more than 40% off the retail price, but you can take another 15% off that final cost by using the holiday discount code MERRYSAVE15. Read the rest

As a kid, I devoured cheap paperback books about “strange but true” phenomena. The short stories were anthologized from men’s adventure magazines of the 40s-60s and recounted mysteries such as: Who made the eerie statues on Easter Island? What happened on Amelia Earhart’s final flight? How do rocks in the desert move by themselves and leave trails in the mud? How do people spontaneously combust? Why did hundreds and hundreds of fish rain from the sky onto the heads of astonished residents of a small town in Australia? These stories set my imagination on fire.Unfortunately, as I learned years later by going online, most of the stories turned out to be poorly researched or outright bogus. Mysteries of the Unknown is like these old books, but the stories are backed by solid research and a healthy amount of skepticism that does not detract from the fun. In fact, it makes the stories more fun. As an added bonus, the ample photos and illustrations bring the mysteries to life, making them even more mysterious. Read the rest

Each plate of sushi at this joint has been blessed with the clammy hand of a toddler, at no extra charge.Hands-off parenting at a conveyor belt sushi bar from r/trashyImage: Reddit Read the rest

Storyscape is a freemium mobile app that offers several choose your own adventure-style stories. The vast majority of choices are free, and the choices made don't seem to have a meaningful impact on the story. So far, I've experimented with stories based on the X-Files, James Cameron's Titanic, and a snowbound post-apocalyptic scenario.In the X-Files adventure, you meet the stars of the show and soon join the team. The first episode delivers the core elements of the X-Files--a gross monster, humor, and winks to the relationship between Mulder and Scully:But there isn't an interesting monetized choice in the first episode of the X-Files story. On the other hand, the first monetized choice in the Titanic storyline is supremely well-crafted. As the story opens, you're a gorgeous young orphaned immigrant suffragette who has found herself imprisoned in a jail in London. Over the ensuing episodes, you find yourself on the Titanic, choosing between various intrigues, suitors, and outfits (the diamond icon represents a choice requiring spending premium currency):You encounter the occasional familiar face, as well:However, that's all in the future. At the start of the story, you're in dank cell with little hope for release. Your younger sister is in the city, helpless without you. A guard enters with apparent ill intent. The game offers you this choice and explanation, since it's the first monetized choice I encountered:I absolutely decided to know jujitsu:That's the most I've ever enjoyed spending premium currency. You can try out the Storyscape app on your mobile device. Read the rest

🤔Nikki Nutjob Haley is at it again.In this clip blowing up the internet today, Trump's UN ambassador Nikki Haley says the Confederate flag was about “service, and sacrifice, and heritage,” not white supremacy or slavery or any of that stuff -- until Dylann Roof “hijacked” it.Jesus take the wheel.The stupid truly burns.Nikki Haley says the Confederate flag was about "service, and sacrifice, and heritage" until Dylan Roof "hijacked" it pic.twitter.com/pqdhKIezRl— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) December 6, 2019Also Glenn Beck is still a racist evil POS. Read the rest

Warning, Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass spoiler ahead.It's fascinating to follow explorers discovering the bizarre out of bounds landscapes of Red Dead Redemption 2, like the mysterious pyramids, and seams where the land meets unfinished low-res geography.Although Mexico is seemingly not part of the game, dataminers say they have found models for familiar Mexico locations hidden in the PS4 version. Gamers have also discovered a hidden path into Mexico. As this video shows, you have to ride your horse into a canyon and then press through the strange barrier at the end. If successful, you emerge in Mexico. The land is almost entirely barren, aside for an abandoned fortress:Ahh, seems so simple to create an entire Wizard and Glass campaign for the game.Speaking of, the apparent Big Coffin Hunters in Amazon's upcoming series look great: View this post on Instagram #thankyou #newproject #film #movie #actor #filmmakers #instagood #instagram #fotografie #fotoshooting #foto #pic #hair #hairstyle #hashtag #follwme #munich #berlin #hamburg #stuttgart #gunslinger #hollywood #darkA post shared by emir muller (@mulleremir) on Jun 20, 2019 at 12:38am PDT Read the rest

Otherti.me presents a new example of Raphael Bastide's digital artwork each day. Today, I am starting a series of web based artworks: one page a day for 30 days. It is called https://t.co/Z49qqAy9pa and it is starting with the first release: https://t.co/M1JkcFcPHb#othertime #netart pic.twitter.com/HT6oxrwSTd— Raphaël Bastide (@raphaelbastide) November 16, 2019 Read the rest

In 2003, artist Tom Kiefer took a part-time job as a janitor at a Border Patrol facility in Ajo, Arizona. It was just something to subsidize his creative work. But he watched first-hand as things got more crowded, and policies became more cruel. He saw canned food taken away from migrants and donated to a food pantry, then later thrown away entirely, even though it was still good. The same thing happened with water bottles. Then there were the personal possessions deemed "non-essential" — the toothbrushes, rosaries, medication, and toys. Some things — like shoelaces — were thrown away as potential weapons.So Kiefer began to collect these discarded items and photograph them. He gathered more than 100,000 items over the course of a decade or so, and saved them in his studio to photograph.He's barely made it through the pile. But now the photographs are on display at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, providing a compassionate insight into migrant lives, and how the things that we discard might matter to some people.You can learn more in the video, or check out the gallery website below. El Sueño Americano | The American Dream: Photographs by Tom Kiefer at the Skirball Cultural Center Read the rest

Trypophobia is an aversion to holes and similar textures, with an obvious evolutionary explanation in its suggestion of the cruelty and regularity of infection. But the science is as weak as the memes are strong. Is trypophobia a social contagion?...trypophobia is more powerful when holes are shown on skin than on non-animal objects like rocks. The disgust is greater when holes are superimposed on faces. ... On one of the two main trypophobia Facebook groups, one user explains their own love–hate relationship with trypophobic material:“Since I realized I wasn’t alone I tried to desensitize myself to the images that affect me horribly. In trying to do that i came across a YouTube video of a vet clinic in Gambia. Now I’ve become obsessed with watching their videos of a specific condition. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m obsessed; it’s one of the first things I watch when I wake up. I have to watch it several times throughout the day.”Another writes: “I almost feel drawn to look at the images of it because maybe my brain is telling me that if I look at it enough it will stop bothering me.” Read the rest

For many of us, smoking provides relief from the stress of everyday life and a good excuse to take a break. At home, getting a quick fix is pretty easy. But when your schedule involves dashing from one place to the next, you may end up missing out.The Allin1E Smoking Tool is designed for smokers on the go. This smart little device contains a lighter, a one-hitter pipe, a grinder, and a cleaning poker — everything you need for a quick hit.The tool is actually more like a small canister, made of aerospace-grade aluminum. Flip the cap at one end, and you will find a Bic lighter on one side and a cig-shaped pipe on the other. The pipe is made from quartz glass, and it holds up to two grams of ground-up tobacco.At the bottom of the Allin1E is a two-piece grinder. This grinds directly into the built-in storage chamber, ready for action. Once you have got your fix, the stainless steel cleaning poker helps you prepare the pipe for next time.The Allin1E is a neat little kit to take around with you, and it makes a great gift for smokers. It is normally priced at $59.99, but you can get it now for $30.99 — that is 48% off the MSRP.Note: This product is for tobacco use only. Customers must be 21+ to purchase. Read the rest

With the season of shopping in full swing, now is an excellent time to go looking for new tech and holiday gifts. Of course, that means everyone else has the same idea. Instead of fighting through the crowds, take a look at these Cyber Monday deals — now with an extra 20% off the sale price when you use coupon code CMSAVE20.Beard Head Stubble PopulousBilled as the first-ever beard headwear, the Stubble Populous beanie hat comes with a cozy fake beard to keep your face warm. The beard makes a fun addition to your outfit, and the Velcro attachment makes it easy to remove.MSRP: $24.99Sale Price: $19.99Price with CMSAVE20 code: $15.99MEE audio EarBoost EB1 Adaptive Wireless EarphonesThe unique EarBoost earphones connect to a companion smartphone app to provide tailor-made sound. They also have Qualcomm aptX Low Latency technology for better Bluetooth syncing, and the 6mm drivers deliver rich audio.MSRP: $99.99Sale Price: $49.99Price with CMSAVE20 code: $39.99Leather Notebooks & JournalsThese beautiful notebooks have pages made from recycled cotton paper pages, and covers decorated with hand-stitched embossed leather. They are environmentally friendly and small enough to take anywhere.MSRP: $39Sale Price: $35.10Price with CMSAVE20 code: $28.08Wilfa Precision Automatic Coffee MakerStraight out of Norway, the Wilfa Precision offers state-of-the-art brewing technology. This award-winning machine keeps tight control over the water content and temperature of your coffee to ensure consistent, flavorful results.MSRP: $349.99Sale Price: $74.99Price with CMSAVE20 code: $59.99Whoosh!® Screen Shine Go + Diamond Defense Protection BundleThis bundle includes a screen cleaner and screen protector for touchscreen devices. Read the rest

Christine Feehan is the author of several bestselling series, including one simply called "Dark" -- in her trademark application with the USPTO, she has applied for the exclusive right to use the word "Dark" (in "standard characters without claim to any particular font style, size, or color") in "Series of fiction works, namely, novels and books." Literally thousands of books have the word "dark" in their titles, including several series such as Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials and Stephen King's Dark Tower books.In 2018, the independent author Faleena Hopkins created a stir when she trademarked the term "cocky" in connection with book titles, and then used the trademark to attack fellow authors who, it turned out, were part of a group of Amazon Kindle Unlimited writers who had colluded to boost sales by gaming the keyword system (Hopkins later lost her trademark).Hopkins isn't alone: the Austin-based erotic fantasy author Michael-Scott Earle sought a trademark on "Dragon Slayer" in book titles, and then a trademark on any book cover featuring a person holding a weapon. (In both cases he was denied his mark).Feehan's application has not yet been assigned to an examiner. It was filed on her behalf by Greg Mavronicolas, a New York based attorney from the Mavronicolas Law Group PLLC.USPTO application 88699997This person is trying to trademark the word "dark" so only they can use it in titles.https://t.co/FWtf5e8azeMeanwhile, on Amazon: 1-16 of over 40,000 results for Books : "dark"— Cat Rambo (@Catrambo) November 28, 2019 Read the rest

Comcast, frequent winner of "most hated company" polls, brought E.T. back to Earth to advertise its third-rate services.Comcast, the owner of the Universal movie studio that distributed the creature’s blockbuster 1982 film, has placed him in a new longform commercial for the company and its broadband, cable and satellite products. In the ad, which debuted during the Thursday broadcast of the annual “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade” on Comcast’s NBC, E.T. returns to see his friend Elliott. The character is once again played by Henry Thomas, the same actor who portrayed him decades ago. Read the rest

Vox's 9 questions about the Hong Kong protests you were too embarrassed to ask by Jen Kirby does an excellent job of sketching out the political relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China, the history that created that relationship, the political controversies since the handback of Hong Kong to China in 1999, the eruption of protests last spring, the state's (mis)handling of those protests, and the political situations in both China and Hong Kong that led to the catastrophic failures in Chinese leadership. (Image: Studio Incendo, CC BY) (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

Melania Trump, perhaps best known for promoting a racist birth certificate hoax on national television, was loudly booed in Baltimore today as she took the stage to give a speech on opioid awareness..@FLOTUS was loudly booed as she took the stage at a youth summit for opioid awareness in Baltimore today. pic.twitter.com/7DiQ5ntPCi— Monica Akhtar (@Monica_Akhtar) November 26, 2019From someecards:CNN Reporter Kate Bennett was on the scene, and described the booing as loud and substantial. As Bennett notes, Donald Trump has a history of insulting Baltimore, most recently calling the predominantly black city a "rodent infested mess." The feeling is mutual.At youth opioid awareness event in Baltimore for a speech to attendees mostly of high school and middle school age, @FLOTUS was loudly booed upon introduction. Talking continued throughout her five minute remarks. pic.twitter.com/eItNDbc6fu— Kate Bennett (@KateBennett_DC) November 26, 2019More via pool:"As the press pooler with perhaps the most FLOTUS event coverage under my belt, I cannot recall another event where she was more negatively received. I believe it is also the first loud booing by an audience at a solo event with Mrs. Trump."— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) November 26, 2019 Read the rest

It's not just Florida: Motherboard sent public records requests to DMVs across America and found that they were routinely selling off access to drivers' license databases to some of the sweatiest, sketchiest companies and individuals, on the cheap, and doing so much of it that they're making millions (California's DMV makes $50m/year selling off driver's license data).Among the most prolific buyers of DMV data are private investigators, whose access to the data is federally blessed under the 1994 Driver's Privacy Protection Act (DPPA), passed to limit PIs' access to DMV data (a PI used DMV data to tell a actress's stalker where to find her, and he went on to murder her) but which also created a framework under which the data can be sold.Credit bureaux are also prolific customers for DMVs. Some states have deals with hundreds of third parties who get to plunder DMV databases -- Wisconsin has deals with three thousand, one hundred entities.Some states allow bail-bondsmen, skip tracers, and other lightly licensed (or unlicensed) investigators to buy their way into DMV records. The public records obtained by Motherboard showed that DMVs use these sales as a way to generate operating revenue for themselves, and only lightly investigate abuses of the data.Asked if the sale of this data was essential to the DMV, Marty Greenstein, public information officer at the California DMV, wrote that its sale furthers objectives related to highway and public safety, "including availability of insurance, risk assessment, vehicle safety recalls, traffic studies, emissions research, background checks, and for pre- and existing employment purposes.""The DMV takes its obligation to protect personal information very seriously. Read the rest

An AI startup called Dessa made a deepfake that allows people to sound like podcaster Joe Rogan. I can't tell the difference between the fake Rogan's voice and the real Rogan's voice. They also made a deepfake that looks like Rogan, but it's easy to tell it's phony.Image: YouTube/Dessa Read the rest

I spent the first part of the year co-writing a book with Ryan Bates for Apress called Raspberry Pi Retro Gaming: Build Consoles and Arcade Cabinets to Play Your Favorite Classic Games. You can buy a hardcopy or Kindle version on Amazon. But if you go directly to the Apress site and use code CYBERWEEK19, you can get the DRM-free eBook (PDF and EPUB) for $7. Read the rest

Captain Elle Ekman is a US Marine Corps logistics officer; in a New York Times op-ed, she describes how the onerous conditions imposed by manufacturers on the US armed forces mean that overseas troops are not permitted to fix their own mission-critical gear, leaving them stranded and disadvantaged.Instead of fixing their equipment as armies have done since the time of the Caesars, US armed forces personnel ship their faulty gear back to the USA for warranty repair, waiting months to get it back into service. She describes maintenance bays full of broken equipment and idle 3D printers, water-jets cutters, and lathes that were once used to effect field repairs. Now, the gear just waits to be shipped stateside.She traces this to monopoly power among manufacturers, which has allowed them to erode the historic right to repair, and to impose onerous conditions on their customers -- even the Department of Defense.Last year, a coalition of large manufacturers led by Apple killed 20 different state level right-to-repair bills. Apple and ag companies like John Deere are currently lobbying the federal government hard to head off any federal right-to-repair bill, promising that allowing independent repair would open up a floodgate of counterfeits, unsafe equipment, and cybersecurity problems.With every engine sent back, Marines lost the opportunity to practice the skills they might need one day on the battlefield, where contractor support is inordinately expensive, unreliable or nonexistent.I also recalled how Marines have the ability to manufacture parts using water-jets, lathes and milling machines (as well as newer 3-D printers), but that these tools often sit idle in maintenance bays alongside broken-down military equipment. Read the rest

Robert Skidelsky is an eccentric British economist: trained at Oxford, author of a definitive three-volume biography of Keynes, a Lord who sat with the Tories as their economics critic during the Blair regime, who now sits as an independent who is aligned with Labour's left wing. Back in September, Yale University Press published Skidelsky's latest book, Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics, a retelling of the history of economics as a discipline that seeks to uncover how economics' failings created the 2008 crisis and have only made things worse since. David "Debt" Graeber (previously) has written a fascinating and important review of Money and Government for the New York Review of Books, describing how, for decades, mainstream economists have claimed hold over the empirical truth of where money comes from and how it works, despite the catastrophic failure of their theories to perform as predicted in the real world, and how "Britain’s notoriously independent civil service" created a parallel theory of money -- one that does work -- and use that to operate quietly in parallel to the mainstream monetarist orthodoxy.After the 2008 crisis, the Queen of England famously demanded to know why no one saw the crash coming. Skidelsky (and Graeber) have an answer: because everyone who was in a position to do something about the coming crash refused to adapt their dogma to reflect the facts, and everyone else, who could see the crash coming, was sidelined because they refused to buy into the dogma. Read the rest

TeranGroup presents a "novel thermomechanical model" for simulating rising dough and the properties of bread, cookies, pancakes, etc.Heat transfer with thermal expansion is used to model thermal variations in material properties. Water- based mass transfer is resolved through the porous mixture, gas represents carbon dioxide produced by leavening agents in the baking process and dough is modeled as a viscoelastoplastic solid to represent its varied and complex rheological properties. Water content in the mixture reduces during the baking process according to Fick’s Law which contributes to drying and cracking of crust at the material boundary. Carbon dioxide gas produced by leavening agents during baking creates internal pressure that causes rising. The viscoelastoplastic model for the dough is temperature dependent and is used to model melting and solidification. We discretize the governing equations using a novel Material Point Method designed to track the solid phase of the mixture.Can't wait for the next generation of sadistically realistic sandbox survival simulators. [via Dean Putney] Read the rest

Two students were killed and several more injured Thursday in a mass shooting at a California high school. A suspect is in custody, writes ABC News citing police sources. The victims are 16 and 14 years old, according to the report. The shooter is 16 years old and is in critical condition; police say he shot himself. Detectives reviewed video from the scene which showed the gunman in the quad of Saugus High School in Santa Clarita when he took a gun from his backpack, shot five people and then shot himself in the head, authorities said. The early morning school shooting was on the suspect's birthday, authorities said.The surviving victims are a 14-year-old girl, a 15-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy. Read the rest

A Hong Kong motorcycle cop drove into a group of people were already running away. After hitting some people in the crowd, he circled back and hit them again. He's been suspended.From Channel News Asia:"We understand that this is a serious matter, we place high priority on this case," said Tse, adding that the case is under investigation.Hong Kong saw one of its worst days of violence on Monday with a police officer shooting a 21-year-old protester and a man being set on fire.Image: YouTube Read the rest

This is an anti-fascist puzzle made in occupied Netherlands circa 1940. Can you find the 5th pig? (Hint: Al Jaffee would have no problem finding it.)Solution[via r/interestingasfuck] Read the rest

James Dean died in a car crash in 1955, but that isn't stopping the actor from starring in an upcoming Vietnam War era movie called Finding Jack. From The Hollywood Reporter:"We searched high and low for the perfect character to portray the role of Rogan, which has some extreme complex character arcs, and after months of research, we decided on James Dean," said [the film's director, Anton] Ernst ... "We feel very honored that his family supports us and will take every precaution to ensure that his legacy as one of the most epic film stars to date is kept firmly intact. The family views this as his fourth movie, a movie he never got to make. We do not intend to let his fans down."While Finding Jack will be live action, The Hollywood Reporter understands that Dean’s performance will be constructed via "full body" CGI using actual footage and photos. Another actor will voice him.Image: By In-house publicity still - Warner Bros. publicity still for for the film Rebel Without a Cause, Public Domain, Link Read the rest

Toadette is definitely black bloc Antifa, straight-up. Read the rest

Scary stuff! These 'Haunted House' operations require their patrons to sign a 40-page legal waiver. Before entering the venue, Halloween revelers must also possess insurance.The 'McKamey Manor' haunted house venues in Summertown, Tennessee, and Huntsville, Alabama, also require that you be at least 18, pass a background check and drug test, and have a 'safe word.'Warnings:Intense audio, lighting, extreme low visibility, strobe and fog effects, damp and wet conditions, phycially demanding environments, close contact with creatures (you might be touched), very real and graphic scenes of horror.Rules:No smoking, drinking, eating, running inside, or touching of props and/or actors. McKamey Manor reserves the right to refuse admission to anyone for any reason. The guest voluntarily assumes all risks/dangers associated with participation in this event.Owner Russ McKamey offers thousands of dollars to any visitor who can complete what he says is a grueling Halloween adventure, WFLA-TV reports. McKamey says no one has managed to complete the course yet. McKamey records each tour on video, including the humiliating defeat, and he says the videos are for his own legal protection. He also posts the videos online. The guests sign a waiver saying this is all okay.All you have to do to enter is donate a bag of dog food. The website warns that the Haunted House is physically demanding, but McKamey says it's mostly mental.The attractions have been featured on Netflix’s “Haunters: Art of the Scare” and on an episode of “Dark Tourist.” READ MORE: [Scariest haunted house in U.S. Read the rest

My Institute for the Future colleague Jane McGonigal is teaching a series of 5 online courses on Futures Thinking and they're free to audit! Of course nobody can predict the future but imagining the longterm future can certainly help you make better decisions in the present. Congrats Jane and IFTF! From Coursera:Do you want to think about the future with more creativity and optimism? Do you want to see what’s coming faster, so you can be better prepared for disruptions and more in control of your future? Do you want to get better at changing what’s possible today – in your company, your industry, your community, and in your own life?This course will introduce you to the practice of futures thinking, as developed and applied for the past 50 years by the Institute for the Future, a Silicon-Valley-based research and learning group founded in 1968. In this course, you’ll build your understanding of what futures thinking is and what you can do with it. You’ll master essential foresight techniques. You’ll meet some professional futurists. And you’ll choose one or more future topics you want to investigate with your new foresight skills.This course is for anyone who wants to spot opportunities for innovation and invention faster. You can gain the skills and confidence to help YOU become someone who makes the future, instead of letting the future happen to you.Ready, Set, Future! Introduction to Futures Thinking (Coursera) Read the rest

It's an old story: someone searches Google for a common keyword -- "jews," "women," "black people" -- and gets back a bunch of far-right conspiracist/genocidal garbage; Google gets embarrassed, twiddles some search-weighting knobs, and the results change.This is a problem, if you're a dark search-engine optimizer trying to hasten the end-times race-war. You put all this effort into link-farming and other sleazy tactics, only to have your work wiped out at the stroke of a keyboard.But there's a more enduring way to dominate the information landscape: "keyword signaling." That's when you dream up a conspiratorial term that no one else is using (think: "crisis actor") and then totally own the information space around that term, so that anyone who searches on it finds your confirming information. Then you get your media-political machine to spread the term around -- say, by getting Devin Nunes or Sean Hannity to talk it up -- and the potential supporters for your conspiracy who are downstream of their rhetoric search for the term and only find information that bolsters their case. In the absence of disconfirming information, their theories seem credible. And since the "reality-based community" isn't bothering to search on these nonsense terms, they rarely, if ever, generate the kind of PR crisis that will prompt Google to put its thumb on the search-results scales to change the kinds of results those terms generate.The far right is locked in an information-domination Cold War with the big platforms. From Boris Johnson's tactical use of nonsense to push down unflattering search results to gaming the refs at Facebook, the right understands that making their fringe ideology seem central requires the successful domination of the information sphere. Read the rest

Action Man: Battlefield Casualties is a set of black-comedy parody ads for a more realistic war-themed childrens' toy. It was produced by Veterans for Peace UK, to challenge a British Army ad campaign aimed at youngsters, and voiced by Matt Berry.A Veterans For Peace UK Film challenging the British Army's policy of recruiting 16 year olds into the most dangerous army jobs. More details at www.battlefieldcasualties.co.ukDirector: Price JamesWriter: Darren CullenBased on Original Artwork by Darren CullenNote that it's British and therefore nastier than the Saturday Night Live-esque chortle you might be expecting. NSFW with all the warnings.Previously: Scarfolk's waterboarding accessory set for Action Man Read the rest

The New York Times reports that John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, might turn out to be the loudest whistle of all in the case of Rudy Giuliani's demented efforts to get Ukrainian officials to help Trump win a second term as President.Mr. Bolton got into a tense exchange on July 10 with Gordon D. Sondland, the Trump donor turned ambassador to the European Union, who was working with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, to press Ukraine to investigate Democrats, according to three people who heard the testimony. ... “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Mr. Bolton, a Yale-trained lawyer, told Ms. Hill to tell White House lawyers, according to two people at the deposition. ... It was not the first time Mr. Bolton expressed grave concerns to Ms. Hill about the campaign being run by Mr. Giuliani. “Giuliani’s a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up,” Ms. Hill quoted Mr. Bolton as saying during an earlier conversation.Giuliani is already being investigated, Xeni Jardin writes. So the appearance of this particularly sharp quote in the press suggests witnesses (such as Bolton) turning on Trump and his clique to avoid any possibility of getting caught up in it.The funny part is that everyone just assumes it's about Trump's corrupt efforts to get foreign governments to thumb the 2020 election scales for him, but then it'll turn out to literally involve Rudy trucking cash by the kiloton out of Kiev's finest jellie labs. Read the rest

On November 12, Disney Studios is opening its treasure trove of films and videos as a streaming service for $7 a month. But its marketing team made a crucial mistake by not including The Million Dollar Duck, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, and The Barefoot Executive in its promo video. They should have hired me to make it. Read the rest

The Internet is always finding arbitrary new ways to compile ranked lists of musicians and their songs. Sure, the content mill demands it, as seen on Pitchfork, AV Club, Ranker, and so many other sites that have built their reputations on such systems. But it's our fault, too— we, the music-loving audience that we are, so eager to compare our preferences to others. No list is ever quite right; even our own personal Definitive Musical Rankings may change over time. Perhaps that's why we consuming new music lists every year, in hopes of finding that one true objective arbiter of our sonic truth.That search ends today. Because David Steffen has finally found the answer, in his delightful new piece of epistemological fiction about the Horowitz Method, a metrics-based approach to ranking musical groups:But what mathematical measure? If we were talking about comparing one song with another, it might be easier, for the music itself is inherently mathematical–meter, tempo, time, number of notes, pitches. But a single musical group could have any number of songs, and the number could grow every day—what particular songs would one use to judge a group? Their newest? The whole body of their work? And some bands release songs so regularly that any conclusion drawn would have to be re-examined very frequently. And that’s not even to speak about what particular measure to use which, we know from personal experience, becomes a dispute of its own.No, if we are going to compare musical groups and expect a somewhat stable outcome, we must not compare their songs, we must compare traits of the group themselves. Read the rest

Arcade Game Typography [Amazon] is a forthcoming book by Toshi Omagari that "definitively surveys" the pixelated fonts of arcade games from the 1970s to the 1990s. It's full of gorgeous-looking full-color spreads, with grids, offering both a beautiful item and a formal tour of a distinctive artform.Arcade Game Typography presents readers with a fascinating new world of typography: the pixel typeface. Video game designers of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s faced color and resolution limitations that stimulated incredible creativity. With each letter having to exist in a small pixel grid, artists began to use clever techniques to create elegant character sets within a tiny canvas. This book presents typefaces on a dynamic and decorative grid, taking reference from high-end type specimens while adding a suitably playful twist. Arcade Game Typography recreates that visual aesthetic, fizzing with life and color.Featuring pixel typefaces carefully selected from the first decades of arcade video games, Arcade Game Typography presents a completist survey of a previously undocumented outsider typography movement, accompanied by insightful commentary from author Toshi Omagari, a Monotype typeface designer himself. Gathering an eclectic range of typography, from hit games such as Super Sprint, Marble Madness, and Space Harrier to countless lesser-known gems, Arcade Game Typography is a vivid nostalgia trip for gamers, designers, and illustrators alike.300 color illustrations Read the rest

Bullshit.js is a javascript bookmarklet that replaces all the managerial and marketing jargon and other buzzwords on the page with the word "bullshit." For example, if I were to write that it was a "keyword-driven synergy of empowered innovation and in-context dynamic content" it might replace that with "bullshit bullshit bullshit of bullshit bullshit and bullshit bullshit bullshit". Read the rest

A beloved dog that was lost in 2007 has been found -- over one thousand miles away from home, in Pittsburgh, PA.After being lost for 12 years, Dutchess finally met her owner again, and Humane Animal Rescue captured the moment on video.The toy fox terrier disappeared from their south Florida home in 2007, says Humane Animal Rescue, and Dutchess was discovered under a shed on Monday. The 14 year old senior dog was hungry, shaking, and needed some grooming. The person who found the dog took it to a Humane Animal Rescue location, where staff scanned the dog's microchip, which led to its owners contact information. Duchess's mom Katheryn Strang drove from Boca Raton, FL to Pittsburgh, PA on Friday.She couldn’t believe it when she got the call, Strang says in the video livestreamed on Facebook —— she says she kept paing the microchip service fees all those years, hoping one day it'd pay off.It did.[via AP] Read the rest

Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg is the world's most popular streamer, a goofy gamer whose reactionary tendencies were relentlessly encouraged by YouTube and its engagement machinery. Now he faces the consequences, rich but frozen out of mainstream media and invoked half-ironically by alt-right spree killers. Kevin Roose interviewed Pewds for the New York Times, the first interview he's agreed to in years. What Does PewDiePie Really Believe?The platform’s algorithms promoted engaging videos, with little regard for what made them engaging, and showered ad revenue on the most successful channels. And as all kinds of boundary-pushers raced to fill this void, it became harder to tell who had an actual ideology and who was just feeding the machines what they wanted. ... Kjellberg attributes this period to a combination of immaturity, boredom and YouTube’s platform incentives — which encouraged creators to increase their watch time by doing outrageous things. He says that he grew sick of playing video games and that his channel’s growth had plateaued, which gave him the urge to let loose. “Looking back, it was a bubble waiting to burst — this bubble of, how far can we push this?” Kjellberg told me. “I think YouTube at that time was at a place where no one really knew where the limit was.”It's a good profile, especially its succinct explanation of YouTube's inner party of popular channels, influencers and streamers.In Roose's portrayal, PewDiePie comes off as having been too stupid to understand what he does beyond its transgressive profitability. Read the rest

The Deep Dark is a recurring art installation by Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett:To develop the installation, the artists conducted interviews, asking: why do we fear the dark? Is darkness a presence or an absence? What separates real fears of nighttime from imaginary fears of things we cannot see? By unearthing commonalities between interviewed participants, a loose narrative emerged, exposing a collective insight into our human relationship with the deep dark.The Deep Dark uses domestic doorways as an entry point, inviting you to move through ghostly architecture. As you pass through each frame, you are blinded by intense white light that overexposes your eyes. The darkness beyond the frames is magnified to blackness, much darker than before. As your eyes adjust to the dark, the next illuminated doorframe becomes visible in the distance, beckoning you onward. From an outward perspective, as viewers step through the gates, they disappear completely. Intended to impose artificial light into the wild darkness, The Deep Dark is light by which the darkness grows darker and disillusions the night.You can get a glimpse of the eerie effect below: View this post on Instagram The Deep Dark on Citadel Hill for @responsive_lightart. #Halifax, come see it tonight until Sept 28, 8 pm - midnight. . . . #TheDeepDark #lightart #darkartsA post shared by Caitlind R. C. Brown (@incandescentcloud) on Sep 26, 2019 at 12:29pm PDT Read the rest

Donald Trump's former Russia adviser Fiona Hill is reported to have agreed to testify before three House committees on Monday, October 14, in the Democratic impeachment inquiry. Bloomberg was among the first to report the news on Thursday morning, citing two House officials familiar with the plans. NBC's Josh Lederman later on Thursday broke the additional news that Fiona Hill's planned testimony to Congress is expected to allege that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and EU/Ukraine Trump administration ambassador Gordon Sondland circumvented the National Security Council and standard White House protocol to run a shadow Ukraine policy.From NBC News:Her plans to testify also pose a key test for whether congressional committees pursuing an impeachment inquiry can obtain testimony from other former officials who have left the administration, given the possibility that the White House may try to assert executive privilege to stop them from testifying.Hill plans to say that Giuliani and Sondland side-stepped the proper process for accessing Trump on Ukraine issues, the person familiar with her expected testimony said, including circumventing John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser until September.Text messages recently released by Congress showed Sondland, Giuliani and former U.S. envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker working to facilitate Trump’s goal of getting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to commit to investigate the president’s political opponents — and making a White House visit for Zelenskiy contingent on such a commitment. Official notes from Trump’s call with Zelenskiy released by the White House showed Trump asking the Ukrainians to work directly with Giuliani, and NBC News has reported that Sondland was also in direct contact with Trump about Ukraine. Read the rest

Cartoonist Phil Foglio (previously) writes, "I designed a cool t-shirt!" They're $22 from Offworld Designs. Read the rest

Mapquest was once the leading map site in the world; they were bought by Yahoo as part of Yahoo's decades' long spree of buying successful companies and running them into the ground -- finally, they were sold, along with the rest of Yahoo's mangled acquisitions, to Verizon.Verizon has now dumped Mapquest to an ad-tech company called System1 for such a small sum it was "not material enough for Verizon to file paperwork."This is part of a string of lowball Verizon selloffs of their Yahoo companies: WordPress parent-company Automattic bought Tumblr in August for "less than $3 million" (actual price undisclosed; Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1b in 2013); in April 2018, Smugmug rescued Flickr from Verizon hell.The whole ignominious tale is a perfect parable about market concentration and antitrust: Yahoo was allowed to make all these acquisitions because of Reagan-era reforms to antitrust enforcement, and it was a catastrophe for dozens of promising startups (though it certainly transferred a lot of money to Yahoo execs and shareholders). Then Yahoo sold those holdings to Verizon for $4.48b, and Verizon has since written down those assets by $4.45b (that is, more than 99%). They even lost Shingy.Mapquest claims a (dubious) 38m monthly users. The company blamed its precipitous fall on getting downranked by Google, whose competing Google Maps product claims 154.4m monthly users. Google insists it downranked Mapquest results because no one clicked on them.It's clear that Google's attempt to corner the whole online vertical was bad for its competitors, but it's also obvious that Yahoo is the poster-child for diseconomies of scale, a place where good companies went to die, helmed by inverse King Midases who turned everything they touched to shit. Read the rest

Netflix's big movie release this past week was In the Tall Grass, based on a short story by Stephen King and Joe Hill, and directed by Vincenzo Natali. To say much about the plot would spoil the fun of a first viewing, but there is already an incredible amount of information about the making of the film online.Natali told SyFy about acquiring the option from King and Hill for a dollar, only to see the project seemingly reach a dead end:Usually, these kinds of high-profile options run can five to seven figures, but that's not how they do it in Maine.“You option the material for a dollar, but you have to reach certain benchmarks,” Natali said. “It's a very clever thing he does, because he avoids getting his projects trapped in development hell. You have to reach certain benchmarks, and if you don't then you can lose the option.”One of those benchmarks is a tight turnaround time on the writing of the script. Natali was given three months to deliver a draft, but the timing of the deal was problematic for the writer/director. He had already committed to some TV projects, which meant that he had to bang out the first draft in just about three weeks.“The very thought that Stephen King would read something I wrote, let alone something I had to write in three weeks, was really, really frightening,” he said.But he met his deadline, and while he'll never know for sure if either King or Hill actually read the script, the option continued to the next step, which was to get it set up at a studio or production house in a timely matter. Read the rest

After the rollout of its own game store, Epic (of Unreal and Fortnite fame) published a string of exclusives, most recently the all-conquering Untitled Goose Game. Today it launched Unreal Indies, an onboarding initative to get more devs onto the platform. Alan Noon writes:Today we launched Unreal Indies, our initiative that demonstrates Epic Games’ commitment to independent game developers everywhere. The Unreal Indies Portal packages together all of the great resources that Epic offers to indie devs, all in one place. In addition we are making available the indies@unrealengine.com email alias. If you’re an indie dev and you need to talk to somebody at Epic, you can use the alias to reach out to Epic’s Evangelism team. We are here to offer guidance and put you in contact with the right people.The thing I like best about the Epic game store is that there are no Gamers in it. Read the rest

Nike, which already has two lawsuits pending against Skechers, filed a third complaint for patent infringement last month. This time, the complaint targets the Skechers version of the VaporMax and Air Max 270. Aside from the Nike's actual chances of winning, the lawyers filing the complaint on Nike's behalf made the curious decision of highlighting a video that says Nike's VaporMax "looks like garbage":Among other things, the reviewer identifies the VaporMax as one of his "least favorite sneakers of all time, at least visually" and adds, "it also looks like football payers should be wearing this--and not on their feet. In their mouths." He certainly calls the Skechers version a "blatant knockoff," but mostly because he doesn't understand why Skechers wouldn't have "at least tried to make [a shoe] that looked better." Presumably, Nike will not emphasize that part of the video at trial. Read the rest

Todd Alcott -- purveyor of "Cultural Mashups" and "Ephemera Set to Music" -- created this incredible set of six posters that mash up vintage ads, pulp covers, and posters with Talking Heads songs, which leaves me both excited at the thought that these will soon grace my walls (they're available as giclee prints ranging in size from 11" wide to 48" wide, at prices from $33 to $300), and enraged that apparently the artist has been eavesdropping on my most deeply held obsessions. Get out of my head, you magnificent, mindreading bastard!Talking Heads Posters [Todd Alcott/Etsy](via Talking Heads Tumblr) Read the rest

I'm glad they didn't wreck but the driver's facial expressions in this clip are really something. He's be a great character actor. The whole clip is like a scene from a Jim Jarmusch film. Read the rest