Sanders won an unprecedented six out of seven primaries in a streak that culminated with astounding, lopsided victories on Saturday night. MSNBC "covered" it by airing a couple of reality TV shows about life in prison, while CNN preferred to cover some breaking news about Jesus, who has been dead for at least 2,000 years, and who would have felt the Bern anyway. (more…)

The parliamentary vice-president from Fidesz -- the largest faction in the Hungarian government -- has asked parliament to "ban communication devices that [law enforcement agencies] are not able to surveil despite having the legal authority to do so." (more…)

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more.And/or buy Ruben Bolling’s new book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. Book One here. Book Two here.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Trains Botting/@choochoobot is a new twitterbot from prolific botmaster and EFF staffer Parker Higgins. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.I’m willing to bet that your relationships with significant others aren’t as convoluted or mind-boggling as the ones you will find in Weird Love, a collection of love comics from decades past. I know that because I’m also willing to bet that you are more culturally evolved than your ancestral fictional characters that populated these four-color pages culled from the heyday of making women feel bad about pretty much everything. That’s what makes this collection so ridiculous. Weird Love gives us a glimpse into a time when the needle on the social gauge floated somewhere between “rampant sexism encouraged” and “casual sexism customary.”While these stories probably weren’t intended to be comedic at the time, the warm blanket of history has swaddled them in ludicrousness. We have no analog for the petty, unflappable dickishness of the men, nor of the frank, almost callous lack of agency of the women depicted in the pages of Weird Love. Soap opera seems only a vague comparison, for soap opera tends to be at least a little self-aware. Nor can you compare it fairly to modern prose romance, for I would have to assume that modern romance writers likely enjoy what they do. The most important thing to remember about Weird Love is that literally all of these comics were written and drawn by middle-aged white men. They were either guys who typically wrote western, crime, horror, sci-fi, and superhero comics and liked doing those, or guys for whom creating comics was just kind of a job. Once you realize that, these stories start to make a kind of sense, in a middle-aged white-guy-from-the-50s kind of sense.Another thing to keep in mind: these comics had only so many pages in which to lay down some groundwork, plow through some conflict, and happily resolve their various entanglements, sometimes in a bizarre turn of events but always with a moral takeaway. Once you know these things, Weird Love can be enjoyed as a rich, velvety farce, veritably stuffed with melodrama, and featuring selections such as “You Also Snore, Darling,” “Slave to Despair,” and “Weep Clown, Weep!” Despite the clown-based love story, the highlight of this book, for me, was the political drama, “I Fell for a Commie.” In this lovely little Red Scare of a tale, the heroine makes the decision to join up with a group of communist sympathizers because she’s fallen real hard for a guy in the group – hard enough to go through the motions of being indoctrinated just so she can spend more QT with her boo. I’m not sure that a rational actor would so quickly opt for the ideological cult when the love of an acquaintance she had only met a few days earlier was at stake, but maybe good men were as hard to come by in 1953 as they are now.Surely, the faded, sepia newsprint of this fine collection will preserve for future generations the galling depths of what passed for mutual respect between man and woman during the 50s, 60s, and 70s (or, granted, some grizzled white guy’s interpretation thereof). I suggest the following for maximum enjoyment: snuggle up with your partner, crack open a bottle, and remind yourselves as you plumb the wacky depths of emotional infantilism that modern romance has come a long way indeed. – Garrett Gottschalk

Ted Cruz, on Jimmy Kimmel's show:

Well, that didn't take long, did it. Just days after the Justice Department dropped its high-profile case against Apple over the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, the FBI offered Wednesday to help a prosecutor in Arkansas hack an iPhone and an iPod in a double murder case. (more…)

“Luna and Lily have grown from helpless little chicks to near adult barn owls and now they're beginning to learn how to fly.”(more…)

Daniel Shaver said "please don't shoot me" moments before Officer Philip Brailsford shot him five times. Shaver was unarmed. (more…)

Envelope-pushing tech satisfies on two levels...it not only stimulates the gee whiz, what’ll-they-think-of-next pleasure center of your brain, but it opens you up to tantalizing possibilities that older tech limitations left unfulfilled. So what if you could snap an image with a SLR-quality camera, then utilize and manipulate the elements of your photo independently? Kind of like having your own in-camera Photoshop capabilities?If you ever saw “Blade Runner” and marveled at Deckard’s cool Esper device that turned 2D crime scene images into viewable 3D models, then the Lytro Illum Camera, now available for 71% off in the Boing Boing Store, is going to have fireworks going off in your lizard brain.The Lytro doesn’t just capture light rays in a split-second like a standard two-dimensional image. It records the actual direction of those light rays, allowing you to create a virtual 3D “living picture” reconstruction that you can later refocus or manipulate in incredible ways.With the Lytro, you won’t just have a picture of Tommy blowing out his birthday cake candles, ignoring other elements of the image. By using the Lytro Desktop app to import, process, apply filters and then interact with your photos, you’ll be able to refocus on Tommy’s birthday presents in the foreground or even Uncle Ray sleeping on the couch in the deep background. Or bring everything into focus at once for a nearly 3D image that jumps off the screen.The Lytro’s 8x optical zoom, 30-250mm equivalent focal length, constant f/2.0 aperture and 1:3 magnification allows for a greater variety of images without the traditional hassle of lens changes, poor light conditions or other photography nuisances.[vimeo 116106359 w=500 h=281]The Lytro Illum Camera normally runs $1,300, but get in on this deal now and you can pick up this impressive package for just $369.99 in the Boing Boing Store.

Three of America's sharpest copyright scholars have released a landmark study of the impact of copyright takedowns on free expression in America: Notice and Takedown in Everyday Practice, by Jennifer Urban (UC Berkeley), Joe Karaganis (Columbia), and Brianna L. Schofiel (UC Berkeley) uses detailed surveys and interviews and a random sample from over 100,000,000 takedown notices to analyze the proportion of fraudulent, malformed or otherwise incorrect acts of censorship undertaken in copyright's name, using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's takedown procedure. (more…)

As America's prison populations swell, as mental heath services for inmates are withdrawn, and as the range of offenses for which inmates can be sent to inhumane solitary confinement soars, the prison system has hit on an obvious solution: just lock two angry prisoners, possibly with untreated mental illnesses, in a cell so small they have to take turns standing up, for 23 hours a day. (more…)

Thinkgeek's $25 NES-themed shower curtain will class up your bathroom a treat; pose in the see-through panel to be the star of the cartridge (try to look as 8-bit as possible). (via Geekymerch)

I really like Finger Ease guitar string lubricant. While I doubt the spray does a thing for the sound of my strings, I find it allows me to play for quite a bit longer.(more…)

Bruce Francis transferred some money to his dog walker to pay for services to his pit bull, and wrote the dog's name, "Dash," in the notes field.(more…)

Karen Hallion, a frustrated Disney animator, has updated her brilliant Princess Leia/Haunted Mansion mashup from 2014 with an inspired, complete set of Star Wars inspired Haunted Mansion stretch-gallery portraits. (more…)

Mr Yogato, a DC frozen yogurt store, has a pretty rad set of discount offers for the discerning Seinfeld fan, Thriller zombie-dancer, and/or Scottish accent enthusiast. (more…)

Natalie Bursztyn created this fantastic pattern for a Wonder Woman sweater, which she has prototyped and modelled herself. (more…)

Historically, MIT Media Lab students who released their work under free/open licenses had to get approval from a committee (that always granted it). (more…)

The Pyxis Supplystation from Carefusion is an automated pharmaceutical drug cabinet system that's still widely used despite being end-of-lifed by its manufacturer -- a new report from CERT discloses that independent researchers Billy Rios and Mike Ahmadi have found over 1,400 critical remote-attack vulnerabilities. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.1766. A ship named the Kraken. A little girl tied to the mast, her face darkened by the shadow of a fearsome sea monster. It’s approaching, closer, closer, its teeth just inches from her face. But none of this is real.Pan back to reveal an audience – and that’s when we realize that we, like them, are being treated to a performance. All this comes in the first few pages of Brian Selznick’s The Marvels and it sets the tone for everything after. Stories within stories, books inside plays, real life lived out on a theatre stage.The Marvels is a novel of two halves. Part one consists of a 400-page collection of immersive black-and-white pencil drawings that tell the story of the Marvel family. From modest roots to fame and fortune, from lucky escapes to fiery ends. Part two is a short novel in itself, picking up in 1990 with young runaway Joseph Jervis absconding from boarding school in order to search out his enigmatic uncle, Mr A. Nightingale, and then discovering the history of the Marvel family for himself.The illustrations of part one are a real pleasure and very manageable in one sitting. With every image realized on a two-page spread, there are layers and intimate details to get lost in. A range of pencil techniques capture the story’s varied landscapes, which switch from brooding oceans to tropical forests to cobblestoned alleyways. Selznick obviously doesn’t believe in white space. He doesn’t even believe in margins. Every page is decorated to its very edge and the print quality is top-class. It all may look freshly drawn, but don’t worry about wiping your fingers, there’s no risk of smudging here.The Marvels’ story begins in classic adventure territory, then stands back and acknowledges its influences with pleasing allusions to Tintin, Robert Louis Stevenson and a healthy sprinkling of Shakespeare. When the story gets up to date in part two, however, it carries an emotional heft and grounds itself very much in the real world. This is a children’s book that is admirably progressive in its depictions of non-nuclear families – which is a bone of contention for some Amazon reviewers but gets a huge thumbs-up from me. Selznick’s Afterword is an interesting read in itself, citing his inspirations and adding a layer of non-fiction to this story about stories.Full of reversals and inversions, The Marvels is a work that is playful, inventive and has a few good surprises up its sleeve. Like the preface says, You either see it or you don’t.– Damien McLaughlin

[While I'm away for a week, I'm posting classic Boing Boing entries from the archives. Here's a gem from 2006.]I've been playing with this time-stopping test off and on all day, with surprising results. The page has a little analog clock with a sweeping second hand. If you follow the instructions by looking about 20 seconds ahead of the second hand, the second hand will appear to stop. I am almost certain it is some kind of optical illusion, but the time-stopping sensation sure feels real. LinkReader comment:

My two favorite foods are sweet potatoes and butternut squash. I typically cut them up like french fries and put them in a roasting pan with a lot of coconut oil and salt, then bake them at 425 degrees for about 40 minutes. I wanted to actually deep fry them, so a few days ago I bought a FryDaddy deep fryer. It costs just $21 on Amazon, and is very highly rated by reviewers there. After making sweet potato fries and butternut squash fries, I agree with the reviewers. This is a terrific tool, especially for the price.It couldn't be easier to use. You just add oil up the the fill line and plug it in. (I use Carrington Farms organic cold-pressed, unrefined coconut oil.) After the oil heats up, you add the chopped up potatoes or squash and fry them for about 10 minutes. Put them in a colander so the oil drips off (there's not a lot of oil) and shake a bunch of salt on it. The more salt the better.I learned how to prep the sweet potatoes after listening to Adam Savage describe how he makes them. He skins and cuts the potatoes, then soaks them in water for an hour, which gets some of the starch out (the water becomes very cloudy). Then drain the water and pat the potato pieces with paper towels until they are damp. Next, put a tablespoon of corn starch in a paper bag, dump in the pieces and shake them in the bag. The pieces should be coated with a fine layer of corn starch. I don't know why you are supposed to get rid of the potatoes' natural starch and then add corn starch, but if it is good enough for Adam, it's good enough for me.For butternut squash, you can skip the soaking part, and just shake the pieces in a bag with some corn starch. The butternut squash fries I made are nicely crispy on the outside, and tender on the inside. My family and kids' friends inhaled them.I save the used coconut oil in the FryDaddy. It's lasted for the last few days. I will replace it as soon as it smells funny.

I've been whining for months about the crap sandwich Apple and Google created by adopting USB-C for their new laptops without supporting the ecosystem: a writhing sea of dangerously low-quality third-party cables and adapters. Amazon is taking action, banning low-quality USB-C gadgetry from the store.

The most toxic debt in America is student debt: your student loans (originated by universities, backed by the federal government, and handed off to banks, who securitize them) are subject to virtually unlimited (and uncontestable) penalties and fees, and are immune to bankruptcy, and are the only form of debt that can be taken out of your Social Security. (more…)

eL Seed, a Tunisian-French artist, painted a mural whose Arabic calligraphy reads "Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eye first," spanning 50 buildings across Manshiyat Naser, a neighborhood where the city's largely Coptic Christian garbage collectors live. (more…)

The World Wide Web Consortium's decision to make DRM part of HTML5 doesn't just endanger security researchers, it also endangers the next version of all the video products and services we rely on today: from cable TV to iTunes to Netflix. (more…)

Designer Cornelius Commans gives us this amazing twist on the Piaggio Ape, a camper scooter. You can't buy it yet. It's just a concept--for now.(more…)

If you love and collect minifigs, May will be a big month for you! This via LEGO's twitter feed.(more…)

My favorite professor, the one who influenced me personally the most, was Michigan-born artist David Barr. He created iconic public sculptures and conceptual art that can be found throughout the world. If you've ever been to Detroit, you've seen his work without knowing it.(more…)

The FCC is considering expanding the Lifeline program, which currently subsidizes home phone service for Americans who can not afford it, to include internet connectivity.They absolutely should.From the SF Chronicle:

When you’re in the mood to light up, there’s not much else you want to have to think about. Relaxation is the goal and thus, the focus, not remembering your last temperature or chastising yourself for not cleaning your vape well enough. You simply want to chill and let the pipe do all the work for you, and now you can with the Hippie 2.0 Vaporizer that’s 25% off and has all the bells and whistles that are going to make your life a whole lot better and way more laid back.This small but mighty machine gives high-tech a whole new meaning. It’s smart enough to remember your last temperature setting so once you decide how you like it you can simply keep it that way. Using a USB cord, it charges up fast and once fully gassed up, lasts for an incredibly long time. It’s ideal for your favorite dry herbs with the full ceramic chamber and glass pipe attachment that extracts all the nuanced flavors and aromas that you enjoy.If anything goes wrong there’s even a two-year warranty to get you fixed up in no time. It’s as low maintenance as you are and you hardly ever need to clean it. When you do, it’s super easy. You can enjoy a good time with peace of mind now for 25% off that includes everything you need to clean, charge and enjoy this vape. Check out the link below for more details.Take 25% Off The Hippie 2.0 Vaporizer in the Boing Boing Store.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfVciQULGbY[/embed]

With the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I've been lobbying the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which sets the open standards that the Web runs on, to take measures to protect security researchers (and the users they help) from their own bad decision to standarize Digital Rights Management as part of HTML5. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGz5DPqU-p0With the release of more footage showing Donald Trump Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski manhandling Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields, he's been charged with battery by Jupiter police. Lewandowski's lawyer turns out to be Kendall Coffey, a former U.S. Attorney who lost his job after biting a stripper.https://twitter.com/jamisonfoser/status/714836191497981952In a statement, Trump and Coffey deny everything.

Like you, I know some people who are really hampered by an irrational belief that the people around them are judging them; I've long thought that these beliefs were linked to a sense that their lives were out of their control, and that this turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the more paranoid compulsions they expressed, the more their lives were made worse. (more…)

The median parental income of the parents of new med school students in America is $100,000 -- twice the national average. In Cuba, America's brilliant, working class med students pay nothing -- free tuition, lodging and meals -- and they come home to America and provide front-line medical services to families who are frozen out of the US system, in which debt-saddled doctors opt for lucrative specialties instead of family medicine. (more…)

Pumping all that waste water into the ground has really helped Oklahoma and Texas catch up to California! Man-made earthquakes in those regions are now as likely as the real ones in some of California's riskiest zones. These new maps from the USGS tell the tale pretty well.Via NPR:

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Back in the 1970s, a 14-year-old boy walking down a residential street in Springfield, Missouri found a cool-looking handmade, hand-bound book in a pile of trash. He opened the book to find 283 drawings, each on a ledger sheet with either “State Hospital No. 3” or “State Lunatic Asylum No. 3” printed at the top. The drawings depicted people in 19th-century clothing, Civil War soldiers, steamboats, antique cars, animals, and brick institutions. The boy held on to the book for 36 years.In 2006, the boy (now obviously a man) decided to unload the art portfolio. He also wished to remain anonymous and, after contacting a retired professor of Missouri State University about the book, he vanished from this story without a trace. After a couple of bounces, the book ended up in the hands of art dealer and artist (fabulous sculptor!) Harris Diamant, who researched and traced the mysterious art book back to its original owner.The creator of the book was James Edward Deeds Jr., born in 1908 and raised on a farm in southwestern Missouri. He resisted working on the farm, butt heads with his authoritarian father, and by the time he was 28 he was labeled as “insane.” He was admitted to the State Hospital No. 3 and stayed there for 37 years.The Electric Pencil, the name of this book as well as the name given to Deeds before his identity was discovered, is a complete collection of Deeds’ artwork. He numbered each piece at the top with a pencil. His pencil and crayon drawings - perhaps journal entries of sorts – never expressed violence, but instead were mostly wide-eyed portraits, still lifes and domestic, often calming pastoral images. As Diamant says in the foreword of the book, which was just released today, “Edward’s story speaks to the human need to communicate – and the artist’s need to make work in spite of horrendous circumstances.”

A Philadelphia-area police department is warning locals about fake emails sent in its name to try and get people to install malware. The clever part: the emails contain accurate speeding data, targeting drivers whose GPS data is leaked to the scammers by shady apps.

Philosopher John Danaher's new paper "Will life be worth living in a world without work?Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life" assumes that after the robots take all our jobs, and after the economic justice of figuring out how to share the productivity games can be equitably shared among the robot-owning investor class and the robot-displaced 99%, there will still be a burning question: what will give our life meaning? (more…)

I'm away from the office this week on a top secret mission, so instead of posting new stuff, I've scheduled a few vintage Boing Boing posts. I don't remember posting most of these, and I hope you don't remember reading them.In 2006 the editors of Boing Boing (Xeni, Cory, David, and I) tried to produce a podcast called Boing Boing Boing. It was really hard to find a time for the four of us to get on the phone at the same time. I don't remember how many episodes we made. Four or five at the most. A few of the episodes are floating around on Archive.org. This is one of them. It ran in 2006. Original post here. Episode #3 of the Boing Boing Boing podcast (our motto: "B cubed or be square") is ready for downloading. This time, our guest is Gareth Branwyn, our friend and senior editor of the bOING bOING print zine.Gareth is a writer, the founder of Street Tech, and the author of many books about technology and cyberculture, including The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots (for which I had the pleasure of providing the illustrations).In addition to interviewing Gareth about his critically-acclaimed 1993 Hypercard stack, Beyond Cyberpunk, we also discuss our favorite podcasts and look at some of our most interesting blog entries of the past week.

It's an open secret that the pharmaceutical industry spends billions marketing to doctors, deliberately misleading them about their products, raking in record profits that they shift into offshore tax-havens through legally questionable means, while lobbying for global treaties that benefit them at the expense of the sick. (more…)

Benjamin Stark explains how to make a Bowie knife. You'll need some AEB-L stainless steel, a bandsaw with metal cutting blades, a grinder with lots of rough belts, a drill, material for the handle, epoxy, clamps and finishing compounds.

The US Republican Party welds together two separate and sometimes conflicting ideologies: dogwhistles to Christian conservatives on abortion, LGBTQ issues, etc; and a doctrinaire commitment to "free markets" and deregulation, often at the expense of the working class Christian conservatives whose votes are coaxed forth with the campaign dollars funded by the one percenter beneficiaries of the deregulation movement. (more…)

The Turkish government privately contacted Germany's ambassador to demand the censorship of a video satirizing the thin-skinned, famously corrupt Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he of the 1,000-room palace whose erection required the razing of a nature preserve. (more…)

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Herman Yung is an enthusiastic photographer/taxi-spotter and over the years, he's managed to spot seven NYPD police cars disguised as yellow cabs (cab numbers 2W97, 6Y19, 6Y17, 2W95, 2W68, 6Y13, and 6Y21). Inspired by today's post about a Freedom of Information Act request about the cars, he's made his collection public for the first time, along with a spotter's guide for people who want to find their own. (more…)

The #FBIvsApple legal case may be over, but the fight over security, privacy, and the right to live free of surveillance has just begun. The Justice Department is expected to drop its legal action against Apple, possibly as soon as today, because an 'outside method' to bypass security on the San Bernardino gunman's iPhone has proven successful, a federal law enforcement official said Monday.(more…)

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Last week, Boing Boing pals Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and Marina Gorbis, executive director at Institute for the Future (where I'm a researcher), took the stage at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club to discuss why we've lost sight of the open Web and how the digital economy has gone terribly wrong. It was a fantastic freeform barrage of brilliant and witty criticism, insights, and ideas for rewriting the rules of this game that right now nobody can win.Listen to it here!Or download the podcast here.