The Washington Post reported Friday evening that the CIA says Russia intervened in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Donald Trump win, rather than just to undermine confidence in the political system as was reported during the campaign.(more…)

The Facial Fitness PAO is a rubbery device with weighted wings that you put in your mouth and then, apparently, shake up and down to train your face muscles to look young. [via JWZ] (more…)

Authorities say in recent weeks there has been an unprecedented wave of hate crimes targeting library buildings, books, and the people who read them. The officials told the New York Times they'd rarely seen such before. These crimes are intended to terrorize, and they follow a recent report by the F.B.I. which says hate crimes against Muslim people in America shot up over the past year.(more…)

Russian science fiction authors Boris and Arkady Strugatsky created worlds and shared stories so fantastic, so well imagined, and so terrifyingly believable their work may create an existential crisis in even the most solidly confident individual. It has long been a challenge to find their work in English but a translation of The Doomed City, long considered their magnum opus, is finally available.(more…)

Since 2011, the UK's Government Digital Service has radically transformed the way Britons interact with their government, streamlining bureaucratic processes, opening up data, and making APIs available for community groups and commercial players -- alas, the GDS has become a political football in Westminster and has hemorrhaged talent, becoming a sad reminder of a once-glorious dream of government delivered humanely, with the public in mind. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a5aBs_ih9oAliaksei Zholner's Youtube account features various small, clever papercraft engines that he's made over the years, but the latest one, measuring a mere 18 x 13 x 22 mm, is the daintiest, most lovely one yet, and well worth the long hiatus since Zholner's previous outing. (more…)

Actor Judge Reinhold was flying out of Dallas Love Field on Thursday and his bag set off an "alarm" on a TSA scanner, so security personnel demanded to pat Reinhold down; Reinhold objected that he'd already passed through the naked scanner and didn't believe he should have to get a government-mandated genital massage as well. Police were called and he was arrested. (more…)

Fans looking for tie-ins between the various Star Wars properties spotted a ship that looks an awful like the Lothal rebels "Ghost" at :07.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe7-MYliEzMGulzada Ryskulova's musical version of the Manas epic -- a folkloric tale usually recited by Kyrgyz men -- is nothing short of amazing, as is the tale itself, which was preserved through furtive oral tradition during the Soviet era, in which it was suppressed. (more…)

Drew Magary offers The 2016 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog.

Israeli artist Uri Shapira creates beautiful photos and timelapse videos of chemical reactions and algae growth, generating beautiful patterns that seem otherworldly. (more…)

"What's your handle, creep?" "Don't tell us to move to another channel!" "You sound like you're dying... why don't you go ahead and drop dead!" Trolling was alive and well on CB radios in the 1960s, as these vintage South Philly conversations from 1969 prove. (more…)

Visteon makes high-definition dashboard displays for instrument clusters, navigation panels, and entertainment systems. They also know the future is autonomous driving, and to help anxious customers get a sense of the technological possibilities, they are developing driving simulators that demonstrate manual vs. autonomous driving conditions. (more…)

Kirby Ferguson, who created the remarkable Everything is a Remix series, has a new podcast hosted by the Recreate Coalition called Copy This and he hosted me on the debut episode (MP3) where we talked about copying, creativity, artists, and the future of the internet (as you might expect!). (more…)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new series, 12 Days of 2FA, in which every installment explains how to turn on two-factor authentication for a range of online services and platforms. (more…)

Xiaolizi is a design collective in Jiaozuo in Henan province, China; they've produced a remarkable line of gorgeous and moderately priced dieselpunk women's coats that are just on the line separating fashion and cosplay, much like Chicago's Volante Design -- my top pics are the Navy wool coat and the gray military coat, both $190 (with customizations available). (via Diesel Futures)

John Glenn, a war hero and the first American to orbit planet Earth, has died after being hospitalized in Ohio for the last two weeks.(more…)

Social scientist/cybersecurity expert Susan Landau (previously) and Cathy "Weapons of Math Destruction" O'Neil take to Lawfare to explain why it would be a dangerous mistake for the FBI to use machine learning-based chatbots to flush out potential terrorists online. (more…)

Evan from Fight for the Future sez, "Chelsea Manning has already spent more time behind bars than any other whistleblower in U.S. history. She's been systematically mistreated, subjected to torture, and denied access to desperately needed health care while serving a 35 year sentence in an all-male military prison." (more…)

Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Donkey Kong, Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and countless other videogame masterpieces, sits in with Questlove and The Roots.

The Data & Society institute (dedicated to critical, interdisciplinary perspectives on big data) held an online seminar devoted to Cathy O'Neil's groundbreaking book Weapons of Math Destruction, which showed how badly designed algorithmic decision-making systems can create, magnify and entrench the social problems they're supposed to solve, perpetuating inequality, destabilizing the economy, and making a small number of people very, very rich. (more…)

An "authorized" reproduction of the legendary Voynich Manuscript is finally available in print form, published by Yale University from new photographs taken for the purpose. Yale's Beinecke Library owns the document and has taken its sweet time putting out a decent art book. The quality is better than the popular "unauthorized" edition published last year; that one uses older scans widely available on the web, but I suppose was good enough to force the university's hand.

The comedian’s performance is even Lin-Manuel Miranda approved:https://twitter.com/Lin_Manuel/status/806203896024694785

The Pantone Color Institute announced its "color of the year" and it is Pantone 15-0343, aka "Greenery."“We know what kind of world we are living in: one that is very stressful and very tense,“ Leatrice Eiseman, the executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, was quoted saying in the New York Times. “This is the color of hopefulness, and of our connection to nature. It speaks to what we call the ‘re’ words: regenerate, refresh, revitalize, renew. Every spring we enter a new cycle and new shoots come from the ground. It is something life affirming to look forward to.”

Le Monde has published a new collection of documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden, showing that the British spy agency GCHQ targeted the leaders of allied countries in Africa, as well as business executives and employees of telecommunications companies, whose accounts were a means to gaining access to communications infrastructure across the continent. (more…)

Bora Barroso created a compilation of imagery from postapocalyptic movies, creating the ultimate depressing-yet-curiously-liberating vision of human doom.

Miami-based artist Topher Cody makes T-shirts stenciled with bleach like these cool Overwatch designs. (more…)

An anonymous reader writes, "(Anonymous) Macedonian designers have submitted posters calling for a vote against a dictatorship on the 11th December. Their motto "#GlasamProtiv [#VoteAgainst] is an initiative by a group of Macedonian designers to topple the dictatorship that has all of us captive. Vote your will on the 11-th of December and stand AGAINST corruption, crime, freedom of speech, party harassment, torture, submission..." (more…)

If you were missing the classic “Where You Lead” theme song during Netflix’s four new Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life mini-movies, this impeccably edited video is just what you need.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSCMwOiczCsQuadriplegic alcoholic John Callahan was one of the most controversial American cartoonists from the age of newsprint. Now he may finally be getting a long-awaited film about his life starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Gus Van Sant. (more…)

London-based designer Katheryn Benedict-Perri takes embroidered text to the next level with intricate overlapping letters using multiple colors. (more…)

You can find more information on the Sandy Hook Promise website.

The Vorrh is Brian Catling, an accomplished visual artist's, first foray into novel writing. It is a magnificent display of world building, and perhaps sheer madness.The Vorrh is a vast, perhaps endless, forest. Inside the Vorrh live all sorts of magical creatures and mystery. No one has every transversed the Vorrh and lived to tell the tale, until now.This novel is an adventure in and of itself. Catling adopts a prosaic style that initially I thought was going to be pretty difficult to read, but it isn't. The text doesn't fly by, but I was absorbed and quickly fell into a rhythm where it worked.This isn't a novel to start lightly, there is a Finnegan's Wake-like element here.The Vorrh by Brian Catling via Amazon

Neil Gaiman writes: "A little over a year ago I released my rarest, earliest, and hardest to find work -- books and comics -- through Humble Bundle to fund charities that do good work. People were all so generous and enthusiastic that we broke records. More importantly, they made it possible for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and for the charities supported by the Gaiman Foundation, including the CBLDF, to help make things better for people." (more…)

In much of the world, copyright ends 50 years after the creator's death, in some of the rest of the world, it ends 70 years after the creator's death; in the USA, things have stopped going into the public domain until 2019 (unless America decides to retroactively extend copyright...again!). (more…)

Eset's report on Stegano, a newly discovered exploit kit, reveals an insanely clever, paranoid, and devastatingly effective technique used by criminals to infect their victims' computers by hiding malicious code in plain sight on websites that accepted their innocuous-seeming banner ads. (more…)

Annoying song stuck in your head? This BrainCraft video explains that listening to it from beginning to end may free you from its burden. It's a technique based on the Zeigarnik effect, the tendency we have to remember things which are uncompleted.To try it yourself, listen to this first:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U2zJOryHKQ

Firefighters and police have announced that they completed their search of Oakland's smoldering Ghost Ship warehouse, the artist community that burned during an electronic music party Friday night. A total of 36 people died. Our deepest sympathy goes out to those who lost friends and family in this heartbreaking tragedy for the Bay Area's creative community and beyond. What a loss.The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts organized a Fire Relief Fund for victims.(via SFGATE)

Published by the fine fringe culture explorers at Daily Grail, the new essay anthology Spirits of Place features stories by the likes of Alan Moore, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, Warren Ellis, Gazelle Amber Valentine, Iain Sinclair, Mark Pesce, and many other mutant thinkers riffing on how we connect with the locations we inhabit. You can read editor John Reppion's introduction to the collection for free. Here's a description of what lies inside the book:

The Intercept continues its work analyzing SID Today, the NSA's internal employee newsletter, with a fresh release of 262 articles -- these are in addition to the 166 articles published last spring. (more…)

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 so much more. Join by 12/24 and more than double your sign-up cost will be donated to promote Freedom of the Press. For more information, click here.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Gabriella Coleman is the "hacker anthropologist" whose book on the anthropology of Anonymous is among the best books on hacking I've ever read; her new paper in Current Anthropology, From Internet Farming to Weapons of the Geek, poses a fascinating question: given that hackers are as well-paid and privileged as doctors, lawyers and academics, how come hackers are so much more political than other members of the professional elites? (more…)

Mr Robot is the most successful example of a small but fast-growing genre of "techno-realist" media, where the focus is on realistic portrayals of hackers, information security, surveillance and privacy, and it represents a huge reversal on the usual portrayal of hackers and computers as convenient plot elements whose details can be finessed to meet the story's demands, without regard to reality. (more…)

The first formal modern anger room was Donna Alexander's 2008 experiment on Chicago's south side, where customers paid $5 to smash things she'd found set out on neighborhood curbs on garbage days -- now Alexander runs a 1,000 square foot business called "Anger Room" in Dallas, and she's got competition. (more…)

"Note to Breitbart: Earth is not cooling, climate change is real and please stop using our video to mislead Americans."

SethBling says: "I built an Atari 2600 Emulator in vanilla Minecraft using a couple thousand command blocks." Download the world and watch the technical video here.

The Independent reports that "more money was spent on vinyl than album downloads last week for the first time ever, new figures have revealed."

Brazil-based artisan Guilherme Casagrande makes handcrafted wooden sunglasses from reused skateboard decks. (more…)

For years, entomologist Brandon Hopkins has argued for the establishment of a germplasm repository for cryopreservation of honey bee semen. Unfortunately, bee semen us very hard to collect and even harder to preserve, but Hopkins found better ways to extract and store their genetic material. (more…)

Unlike traditional lighters, the SaberLight features an electronic plasma beam that's both rechargeable and butane-free. This sleek lighter is even approved by TSA, so you'll never be stuck buying lighters you'll just have to throw away partially used. For some people, like me, this is a pretty big game-changer.The SaberLight’s beam is actually both hotter and cleaner than a butane flame, meaning it’s less toxic to humans. Just place you cigarette or candle wick in the arced beam and easily light up. Plus, with wind and splash proofing, the SaberLight guarantees a clean light no matter the weather conditions.One of the best features is that it's totally rechargeable and offers up to 300 uses on a single charge. You'll save major cash down the line and do a good deed for the environment while you're at it. For a limited time, the SaberLight is 81% off, just $37.99. If you hurry, this lighter could be just about the coolest stocking stuffer ever given.