The You Own Devices Act (YODA) was first introduced by Reps Blake Farenthold (R-TX) and Jared "Happy Mutant" Polis (D-CO) in 2014: it's a bill that limits the enforceability of abusive EULA terms, preserving your right to sell, lease, donate, and access security fixes on devices you buy, even when they have copyrighted software within them. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0KloWxffpcIn this video, a mini subwoofer on the bottom of a laptop turns out to be a cosmetic divot impressed into the casing of a removable optical drive. The "subwoofer" is just a grill with a hole looking into the divot. Fans of the manufacturer have a range of superb excuses, such as it being a cleverly-disguised airflow structure. [via]

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and extra Other Stuff.GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”A book for the curious and adventurous!” -Cory Doctorow) Book One here. Book Two here.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

The Huffington Post reports tonight that President Donald Trump recently phoned up General Mike Flynn at 3 AM to ask him whether a strong or weak dollar is good for the American economy. The question is one thing, as you'd expect someone who managed to scam his way in to the presidency might know basic economics and civics stuff. More alarming is the report that Trump called his Secretary of Defense nominee for the economic information.(more…)

Technology companies including Amazon, Google and Microsoft donated considerable amounts of both cash and technical services for the ceremonies and events around the inauguration and swearing in of President Donald Trump, according to reports making the internet rounds on Tuesday night.(more…)

On the Senate floor tonight, an extraordinary event. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) led a vote in which 49 GOP Senators chose to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) for reading aloud the words of Coretta Scott King, civil rights activist and the wife of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.Warren was reading King's historic letter protesting the confirmation of noted white supremacist Jeff Sessions as a federal district court judge in the Southern District of Alabama.(more…)

Just paint daisies over them. Do it. Do it now!

Richard Hatch, who starred in the original television science fiction series 'Battlestar Galactica' and the mid-2000s reboot, died today of pancreatic cancer. He was 71. Hatch was nominated for a Golden Globe award in 1979 for his performance as Captain Apollo in the iconic science fiction series.(more…)

My guest on the Cool Tools Show week is Robyn Miller. Robyn co-founded Cyan Worlds in the late 1980s, where he designed and directed the landmark video games Myst and its sequel Riven. In 2010, he co-founded Zoo Break Gun Club LLC, with producer/filmmaker Mischa Jakupcak. ZBGC has produced several films and has projects in development for film, television and virtual reality. (more…)

Zuck That says, "Have you ever been on the Internet when you came across a checkbox that says “I’m not a robot?” In this video, I explain how those checkboxes (No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHAs) work as well as why they exist in the first place."

William Pennings built this wonderful machine that automates the arduous but necessary task of sorting M&Ms and Skittles by color. (Insert Van Halen joke here.)"It's pretty quick and sorts about 2 pieces of candy per second" Pennings says. "It uses Arduino microcontrollers and stepper motors for quick and precise movement. A TCS34725 color sensor performs the measurements. Furthermore, the device is equipped with LEDs in several spots which nicely complement the overall look of the machine."M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine (via Laughing Squid)

One of the nation's most respected polling services reports today that so-called President Donald Trump's *disapproval* rating among Americans is now 54%. Sad!(more…)

Steve Feltham has been camped at Loch Ness for 25 years keeping a constant vigil for Nessie. He seems like a delightful happy mutant doing exactly what he wants with his life."Some people think it's a giant eel," Feltham says. "Some people think there's a rip in time. Others believe there's a spaceship on the bottom of the Loch. It's more likely to turn out to be a big catfish."

Another day, another grim historical first for America. The Senate just confirmed Betsy DeVos as education secretary after a 'historic tiebreaking vote' from Vice President Mike Pence.Both DeVos and Pence are fans of widely discredited LGBT 'conversion therapy,' a damaging and inhumane bullshit practice we'll probably see a lot more of now, along with guns in schools to protect kids from grizzly bears and jihadists.(more…)

Vladimir Kara-Murza works for the pro-democracy group Open Russia and is openly critical of Putin's policy of assassinating people he isn't fond of. Last week Kara-Murza hospitalized with organ failure on the day he was to travel to the United States. He has been diagnosed with "acute intoxication by unidentified substance" and is in a life-threatening coma.From the NYTimes:

Gifts for Lovers in the Death Throes of The American RepublicShare a final candle-flicker of joy before the annihilation begins: Twitter / Facebook.Silver heart pill container pendant / $100Compartment will fit 6 small antipsychotic pills comfortably.Jasmine Absolute Essential Oil / $55An uplifting, hopeful, and romantic scent. Beautiful as a pick me up, or an aphrodisiac. — XeniPersonalized End Grain Chopping Block / $190This personally engraved chopping block is to die for! As you shall, in the brutal civil war portended by the election of Donald Trump. — RobSquare, lightweight plastic flask from Stanley / $15Sturdy, multicolored flasks that go around the world with you, perfectfor a sneaky V-day cocktail with your sweetie (Previously) — CoryThe Womanizer: comes with a "100% orgasm guarantee"It's not a vibrator. It's a gadget that suckles the clitoris. Vanessa Marin, a licensed psychotherapist specializing in sex therapy, said it "induces powerful orgasms in a shockingly short amount of time." — MarkBarry White: All-Time Greatest Hits / $4Want to set the mood? Here's the soundtrack your evening needs. — JasonDefenders Mushroom Extract Blend / $35Say it with shrooms! This is a high-quality Asian medicinal mushroom extract tonic, an exotic blend with purported adaptogenic properties. It may brighten up your brain and help you cope with stress. Chaga, Reishi, Shiitake, Maitake and Turkey Tail. — XeniKey Knife / $12A blade cleverly hidden in a key-shaped handle, which many report having successfully taken through TSA checkpoints — CoryFlashing LED Heart Kit / $10Solder up a special something for your loved one or, better yet, have a romantic maker date and do it yourselves. Ah, love just makes everything glow. — DavidCrystal Ball / $13Your loved one might need this to see into the future of our country. You may want to buy one for yourself. — XeniDiamond-Accent Pendant Necklace / $80For those who just need to get the Valentine's Day situation dealt with immediately, which is everyone, frankly, because we're all going to be obliterated, our atoms blasted onto the winds of space, our ultimate fate no nobler or less magnificent than to become the matter of new stars — RobSuch romance. Much feelings. / $5A Very Doge Valentine Card — JasonUnfuck Your Habitat / $13Unfucker-in-chief Rachel Hoffman has distilled the Unfuck-your-habitat philosophy into a brilliant, breezy book — CoryStar Trek: The Original Series Adult Coloring Book / $10If you are home alone, chances are you'll enjoy this TOS coloring book. — JasonBookBook laptop covers / $80Show your loved one that you love them, but don't want to look at their ugly laptop. One of the best looking and feeling laptop covers, BookBook protects your device from a drop. It looks enough like a book you may be able to keep your laptop in the seatback when traveling by air. — JasonLatex Skull Bag / $75Also available in black and pink, this glow-in-the-dark molded memento mori handbag features a spooky lining and an inside pocket — CoryGiant Testes Door Knocker / $200Are you meeting a romantic partner's family for the first time this Christmas and at a loss for a gift idea that will impress them with your suitability as a potential addition to the clan? Look no farther. — CoryLotte Lenya Sings Berlin Theatre Songs / $7The great bittersweet voice songs of romance, hope, hedonism, and a reminder that life and love endure, even when dark clouds fill our skies — XeniBarefoot Dreams Bamboo wrap / $90A soft and cozy feminine gift that looks amazing. Depending on the season, usually these are in the $80-$100 range on Amazon . With proper care, they stay fuzzy and fresh for a long time. — XeniBelgian Darts Set / $120End grain basswood board, scoring rings separated by hydraulically inserted brass, and polished steel-tipped darts with birch wood barrels and shafts. A perfectly subtle way to prepare your offspring for the generations-long struggle against nameless enemies, in which guns and tanks will be but legendary vestiges of the once-great civilizations of man, spoke of in hushed and revential terms as more darts are carved and sharpened in the fire. — RobLaser-cut birchwood landscape rings / $24Beautiful landscape rings to mix and match from Britain—there are houses, trees and mountains (there's also an acrylic tsunami). Read more — CorySex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits / $25A classic book of blissed-out altered consciousness by Boing Boing patron saint Robert Anton Wilson. — MarkAnatomical Heart Necklace / $48Designed by Lost Apostle, the heart is white bronze, approximately 3/4" tap, and comes on a gunmetal chain. Also available as a ring! — DavidPilot Vanishing Point retractible nib fountain pen / $140I love my unique, never leaking Pilot/Namiki Vanishing Point. I have carried it for years and the pen writes as beautifully today as when I bought it. Read More — JasonFull Body Spandex Lycra Suit / $40Enjoy a close encounter of the 4th kind with your loved one!Kawaii Heart Stickers / $5Five bucks a sheetMoleskine, Large / $16For scrawling the final secrets of humanity by the light of a smog-veiled and uncertain sun, the recollections of a lover long-lost yet clung to amid the vast and shearing weight of death and war. And maybe a bit of saucy slashfic too! - RobNote that however sexy it may be, an Inflatable Tyrannosaurus Rex Costume will not fit in a bug-out bag.Thank you for clicking on the lovingly-curated affiliate links included in these selections.Add your suggestions in the comments

Vox has a new video series called Strikethrough. Its purpose is to look at the "challenges in journalism and news media under the Trump presidency."

Nathan writes, "Wanting a more immediate and responsive way to do something about the outrage a friend and I felt every time we read about the latest assaults on civil liberties, I built an Amazon Dash button that sends $5 to the ACLU every time I press it. Repurposing the technology to do good, not just buy goods." (more…)

The FBI has always been hostile to Freedom of Information Act requests: it habitually violates the law by allowing these requests to go more than 30 days without a response, and maintains a lab full of 1980s-vintage computers that it uses to (badly) fulfill public records request, so that it can reject requests on the basis that it lacks the technology to respond to them. But it's about to get a whole lot worse. (more…)

Readers of Neil Gaiman's essay collection The View From the Cheap Seats know how influential Jack Kirby's Mighty Thor and Roger Lancelyn Green's Myths of the Norsemen were on his work -- an influence that shows in books like American Gods and Odd and the Frost Giants -- so we were all excited when WW Norton announced that Gaiman would write a novelistic retelling of the Norse myths for them. (more…)

Harvard law lecturer Ian Samuel -- a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia -- has written an extensive primer for civil servants who are worried about getting fired for defying illegal orders from their superiors, and if you follow his advice and get fired anyway, he's offering "to represent, pro bono, any government official who refuses to execute a Trump order on the grounds that the order is illegal" (he notes that there are many other "lawyers, paralegals, law students, legal secretaries, and even (my favorite) a bartender in Cleveland" who've made the same offer). (more…)

Sam Blakeslee, a retired Republican California state senator, worked with Cal Poly students to create Digital Democracy, a service that aggregates videos of the interminable, innumerable -- and vital -- local government hearings and meetings and then use machine-learning systems to generate automated transcripts so that activists, journalists and citizens could search and analyze them. (more…)

Python is one of the most popular and most versatile programming languages in use today. Powering a wide variety of web software, it’s also one of the simplest languages for data scientists to master, thanks to readable syntax and powerful scalability.Without any prior coding experience, you can even learn to code in this multifunctional language online. The All-Level Python Programming Bundle is the simplest and most affordable option I've found for doing so.Featuring two courses with 14 hours of content, this bundle will get you acquainted with fundamental concepts like variables, functions, and object-oriented programming. After mastering the basics, you can test your skills with advanced lessons in graphic user interfaces and multimedia creation.With a wealth of knowledge and several projects under your belt, you’ll be prepared to take your coding skills to the next level and will have a wide-range of employment opportunities to choose from. For a limited time, save over $2,000 and get this All-Level Python Programming Bundle for just $19.99.Explore other Best-Sellers on our network:

Brick Burger in Pasig, Philippines sells hamburgers on buns molded to look like giant (non-interlocking) (alas) 2X2 Lego bricks, in multiple colors. (more…)

Pachinko machines are traditionally purely mechanical, so Ben Heck thought he'd mod one to include electronic lights and sounds. The 8-bit gaming sound program is a great option, but Ben's fart sound program may be the keeper. (more…)

Clear hydrogel robots that can quickly move and exert measurable force were inspired by glass eels, "tiny, transparent, hydrogel-like eel larvae that hatch in the ocean and eventually migrate to their natural river habitats." (more…)

Coober Pedy is an Australian mining town with such an extensive labyrinth of depleted opal mines that half the town's residents live underground. There are bookstores, churches, and other public spaces. (more…)

Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison aired last night after a successful festival run. The film is an unflinching look at life in solitary confinement at Red Onion supermax, where prisoners spend 23 hours a day or more in solitary confinement. (more…)

Late on Monday, the U.S. Justice Department under the Trump administration urged a federal appeals court to reinstate the so-called President’s so-called “targeted travel ban.” The DoJ said this evening that immediate action was required to protect America from the global menace of terrorism.(more…)

Song: Bag Raiders, 'Shooting Stars.' One Hour Version is here, and below. It's making me happy. (more…)

The Kremlin demanded an apology on Monday from Fox News over what it said were "unacceptable" comments by Bill O'Reilly about Russian President Vladimir Putin in last Friday's interview with Donald Trump. (more…)

John Bercow, the Tory-appointed, historicaly scrupulously neutral Speaker of the House has said that Donald Trump will not be permitted to address Parliament during his hugely controversial upcoming state visit. (more…)

The customer service operatives for the criminal gang that operates the Spora ransomware are relentlessly customer focused, working to soothe upset victims and streamline their payments in order to recover their data. (more…)

According to a lawsuit, Corey King, a police captain in Washington County, Georgia, conspired with his friends magistrate Ralph O. Todd and Sheriff's Investigator Trey Burgamy to arrest King's ex-wife, Anne King, and her friend, Susan Hines, for a Facebook exchange in which they commiserated over Captain King's refusal to pick up medicine for his sick children. (more…)

Despite Kellyanne Conway's insistence that she meant to say "Bowling Green plot" when she invented an imaginary terrorist massacre perpetrated by Iraqi refugees (she was trying to justify Donald Trump's illegal, racist Muslim Ban), it turns out that she mentioned the "Bowling Green massacre" on tape in an interview with Cosmo last month. (more…)

Waterstones was at death's door when it was purchased by Russian billioniare Alexander Mamut, who hired James Daunt -- an investment banker who'd founded the successful, six-store Daunt Books -- to run the chain. (more…)

The FBI's Rap Back ("Record of Arrest and Prosecution Background") system is a service that employers can use to continuously monitor their employees' criminal and arrest records, getting alerts when an employee with a "clean" record is alleged to have gotten into some kind of trouble. (more…)

In 2009, then-PM Vladimir Putin engineered a Russian ban on slot machines in a bid to starve Georgian mafiyeh of funds, the resulting glut of used slots gave Russia's own criminal gangs cheap testbeds to use in a project to reverse-engineer the machines and discover their weaknesses -- now, Russian gangs roam the world's casinos, racking up careful, enormous scores. (more…)

The Resolution Foundation's Living Standards 2017 is an eye-opening look at the current state of the British experiment in allowing wealth inequality to expand without any check, to use a combination of austerity, the elimination of protection for tenants, reckless lending, offshore money-laundering and public subsidies for speculators to turn the human necessity of shelter into the nation's leading asset-class. (more…)

Yesterday's anonymously sourced New York Times story is the most detailed picture yet of the bizarre, brooding nightmarescape that is the Trump White House: it's not just the cut-throat power games (and Steve Bannon tricking Trump into helping him stage a coup); it's a big, complicated government building whose knowledgeable core has been purged, leaving the new administration literally in the dark. (more…)

Makes me wonder what I looked like this morning attacking that chocolate donut.(BBC Earth Unplugged via Neatorama)

Rich countries have low birthrates (in part because they have more rights for women, and women who can control their bodies and fates choose to have fewer children on average than women who live in poor countries with fewer rights for women); Japan, one of the most xenophobic of all the rich countries, has the killer combination of a near-total ban on immigration from poor countries (where all the young people are) and a high standard of living. (more…)

Who you gonna call?

Steve Mould, maker of science videos, says, "You might have seen some videos of stick men floating of water recently. This is how you can do it and how it works."

Here's an interesting suspicion: Trump is only marginally literate, and hates reading so much he deals with even complex correspondence by talking it out and trusting that whatever is put in from of him at the conclusion is an accurate reflection of the discussion. This strategy has come into contact with one Stephen K. Bannon, and Bannon has already done well by it.

Imagine the horror being trapped in a hostile landscape surrounded by snowflakes that were one objects of amusement but now form a blizzard of menacing proportions. Then smile because you're not a fascist, and are merely stuck on a polar icebreaking vessel for 10 hours.

Cathy "Weapons of Math Destruction" O'Neil nailed Trump's tactics when she compared him to a busted machine-learning algorithm, throwing a ton of random ideas out, listening for his base to cheer the ones that excited their worst instincts, and then doubling down on them. (more…)

Making great games has never been more accessible, thanks to a variety of development tools like Unity3D. But getting your idea off the ground still takes a fair amount of advanced programming skills. Fortunately, I've discovered that learning to make games online with the Master Game Development Bundle is incredibly easy (and not costly).In addition to gaining familiarity with a wide array of game engines and development environments, this bundle gave me a foundational knowledge of programming real-time applications on game platforms and the web. Using tools like Construct 2 and Phaser, I quickly learned to build single- and multi-player browser games. I can also now make console-grade experiences with Unity and Unreal Engine, and even monetize via in-app purchases if I so choose.These comprehensive courses prepare willing students to handle all aspects of game production, from designing graphic assets to implementing complex logic and mechanics. Pay what you want for this 2017 Master Game Development Bundle, and kickstart your path to proficiency.Explore other Best-Sellers on our network: