In Shopshifting: The potential for payment system abuse, Karsten Nohl and Fabian Bräunlein showed attendees at Hamburg's Chaos Communications Congress just how poor the security in payment terminals is, and demonstrated several attacks that would let them harvest card numbers and PINs, make undetectable phantom charges and refunds to merchant accounts, and commit other mischief. (more…)

There's no way to turn off the "recovery" feature that sends your disk encryption keys to Microsoft by default, without notice -- though you can (and should) ask Microsoft to forget the keys later. (more…)

Legendary poet and high priestess of punk Patti Smith posted photos and details of what she packed for a recent tour.Smith is on tour right now, playing her iconic album Horses in its entirety (and then some), and I hope to catch one of her always-incendiary and inspiring performances.

I loved this documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky's quixotic quest to make a movie based on Frank Herbert's Dune in the mid-70s. In this 2104 film, we get to see and hear Jodorowsky, an energetic and charismatic octogenarian, describe with great passion his dream to combine the talents of Moebius, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Pink Floyd, H.R. Giger and top special effects artists to produce what has been called "The Greatest Movie Never Made." There's one scene in the film where Jodorowsky is describing a trippy space flight scene, accompanied by Moebius' stunning storyboards, which momentarily lets you see the mind-blowing awesomeness of a movie that exists only in the mind of Jodorowsky.Right now, Amazon has the Blu-Ray/DVD of Jodorowsky's Dune for just $10

See sample pages from this book at Wink.On October 2, 1950 a boy named Charlie Brown first appeared in American newspapers. Peanuts popularity grew steadily and on January 6, 1952, the strip’s first Sunday edition debuted. For the next 48 years, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, and all the other players appeared in full color on the comics page.But I wasn’t there for any of that. Rather, I found Peanuts in the early 1980s, when comics pages had already started to shrink and the famous characters of the strip were more readily accessible to kids through specials. Even then, I didn’t read the comics page as much as I did the dusty paperback collections with titles like Happiness is a Warm Puppy and A Boy Named Charlie Brown.Growing up as a fan, the single greatest headache was trying to find all the strips. I wanted to know when Snoopy changed from being a dog to being another kid in a funny costume. I wanted to know when Charlie Brown first fell in love with the Little Red Haired Girl. But it couldn’t be done. Although most had been reprinted in one collection or another, there was no single resource that had all the strips.Enter Fantagraphics Books. Beginning in 2004, Fantagraphics collected and published The Complete Peanuts. While this series collected all the daily strips, the Sunday strips were spun off into a second series, Peanuts Every Sunday, the third volume (of ten) of which has just been released. These are the strips I never had access to as a kid. These strips were not collected in those old black and white trades.Peanuts Every Sunday reprints the strips in chronological order, in full, glorious color. While some commentary is provided in both the foreword and afterword, mainly the strips are left to speak for themselves. Each strip is given its own page, in its original size, complete with the date the strip originally appeared in newspapers.These are beautiful books. Full color dust jackets and numbered bindings make for books that look great next to each other on the shelf. But you’ll need a big shelf. At close to $50 per volume, this is not a collection to get into lightly. But for the fan, they are a collection absolutely worth having. – Joel NeffPeanuts Every Sunday: The 1950s Gift Box Set is a collection absolutely worth havingPeanuts Every Sunday: The 1950s Gift Box Set

These are not the groceries you are looking for, pup.

Christopher Ulman is the four-time national and international whistling champion. Among other tricks, he does not kiss anyone 24 hours before a performance because kissing "makes your lips mushy. We cannot have mushy lips and be a champion."

This is the back of Elijah Jefferson Bond's gravestone. Bond patented the Ouija board in 1891. In 1907, Bond trademarked another oracle game called "Nirvana the Magic Swastika Talking Board," which is now exceedingly rare. According to this website, which features photos of hundreds of planchettes from vintage oracle boards, there is only one Nirvana planchette known to exist.

Artist Robby Kraft feed a bunch of Instagram photos of objects tagged with #FacesInThings into a face detection algorithm and averaged them into a composite image that looks a lot like a creepy human face.[caption id="attachment_441356" align="alignnone" width="800"] Composite face made with no human face as input[/caption]

Methane gas has been leaking from a storage facility in California’s Aliso Canyon since October 2015 at a rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. You can see the plume in this infrared video shot on December 17, 2015. So far, 1,700 homes have been evacuated. The Southern California Gas Company thinks it will be able to stop the leak "by late February or late March."From Motherboard:

"I can't tell you how wrong you've always been," says the Cigarette Smoking Man.Mulder and Scully (and yes, apparently CSM too) return on January 24.

Is this cat going up the stairs or down the stairs? And what is in the woman's drinking glass below? Here are the top 7 optical illusions of 2015.

Volvo's pitching LifePaint, a supposedly easily-washed off reflective spray paint for cyclists and other at-risk road users to cover themselves in at night.

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Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

In Cary Huang's evolution simulator, one first generates 1000 random geometrical beasties. Then one watches them iterate until equilibrium prevails, commanding the most successful to reproduce and decimating the failures. The measure of the monster is how far they can flop and wobble along in a simple a 2D landscape: most fail rather fast and hard.(The game window will start out too large for the website: scroll down and click the "full screen" icon at the bottom of the window.)The wireframe life forms remind me of an early and massively-overhyped "evolution simulator" called Eco, released in the late 1980s for 16-bit computers.

Johannes writes, "'Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl' -- our award-winning feature-length post-apocalyptic agitprop nerd comedy extravaganza -- is finally online on Vimeo! Free (as in lunch)! Enjoy!" (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_9QOgg0GREFlorian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess downloaded the sourcecode for Red Star OS, North Korea's homegrown, paranoid fork of Red Hat's Fedora, a flavor of GNU/Linux. The researchers analyzed the OS and presented their findings to the thirty second Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg yesterday. (more…)

The death of the bookselling as a big-box business has a positive side-effect: the return of smaller, more specialized retailers. They operate more efficiently than doomed out-out-town B&Ns and offer a shopping experience Amazon can't compete with, capturing foot traffic and filling nostrils with the delightful scent of biblichor.

UK Home Secretary Theresa May has introduced the Snoopers Charter, through which your ISP will be required to retain a record of everything you do on the Internet and make it available to government and police without meaningful checks and balances or privacy protection. (more…)

How quickly Star Wars Episode VII is achieving escape velocity is the obvious thing, but look how fast most of these movies made their money then plateaued.

Passport to Dreams Old in New is the absolute king-hell best Disney design criticism blog, written by Foxxfur, a former cast member who is thoughtful, encyclopedic, and razor-sharp in her observations of the Disney theme parks, especially Walt Disney World. (more…)

The long-dreaded death of Terry Pratchett finally arrived in 2015, years after his inital prognosis predicted it would come. Pratchett spent his last years on Earth working his guts out, leaving behind a literary legacy of enormous breadth and depth. (more…)

Bruce Schneier explains the short, terrible history of the Internet of Things, in which companies were lured to create proprietary lock-ins for their products because the DMCA, a stupid 1998 copyright law, gave them the power to sue anyone who made a product that connected to theirs without permission. (more…)

When you’re in battle, you need the right weapons. This expandable, portable controller has everything your video games offer at home: shoulder buttons, a joystick, and all the action buttons to make you the hero on screen. You can finally play your favorite mobile games with the benefits of a controller. Plus it’s platform agnostic, so it hooks up to your phone or tablet no matter the brand. So don’t just tap and swipe – dominate.“Phonejoy’s new controller has a unique design that means it’ll fit your phone perfectly — no matter what phone you have.” TechCrunch

Facebook is desperate to ensure that the Internet never takes hold in developing nations -- they want a walled garden that they get to own and operate. (more…)

In America, your belongings can be confiscated by the police without warrant or evidence as proceeds of a crime, and then the government sues your possessions (not you), in lawsuits like "Township of East Bumblefuck vs $50,000 in $100 bills." (more…)

No need to struggle with remembering long and complicated passwords, Sticky Password is your password management and form filler solution, available for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. This lifetime Sticky Password Premium subscription protects your online identity by providing strong encrypted passwords for all your accounts, managed by a single master password known by you, and only you.

"Cybersecurity": it's the new "terrorism," a word to conjure with, a source of bottomless no-bid procurements for the military-industrial complex, full employment for snake-oil salesmen. (more…)

Archconservative David Frum delivers a brutal, unflinching look at the contradictions between the Republican party's elites and kingmakers -- who favor redistributive policies that suck money out of the middle class and deposit it in their own offshore tax-free accounts -- and the rank-and-file voters, who want social programs and high wages, but not for brown people. (more…)

The Pope's message, contained in an open letter, is more directed to the faithful than the nonbelievers, and is a repudiation of millennias' worth of Church doctrine that equates heresy with sin. (more…)

Every designer, from amateur to pro, would benefit from creating every pixel from scratch. But who has the time? That's why we've gathered the year's best assets to both inspire and enhance each and every one of your design projects. Plus, this deal is so amazing, we're letting you pay what you want - beat that, we dare you.Here's everything included in the bundle:1Reclameworks: 60 Business Templates$1,208 Value22700+ Icons & Graphics from Bogdan Rosu$1,083 Value3CreativeVIP Icons & Mockups$530 Value4Artist of Design: 25 Fonts$525 Value5Freebo: 15 Graphics & Templates$270 Value6OnRepeat: 14 Font Sets$235 Value7Templates, Fonts & Vectors from Brainik$177 Value82 Icon Sets from Webbicon$138 Value99,000 Icons from Smashicons$127 Value10iPhone Mockups + 1,200 Icons$118 Value11Vectors, Icons & Brushes from Vandelay Design$117 Value12100 Customizable Infographics (with Ingram's Royalty Free Usage License)$100 Value

I've know John for a dozen years, and he's a cool customer. When he's targeted by insulting jerks, he never loses his cool. (more…)

We should all be this happy on Christmas Day.

It’s been a year since I sat down at the mic, but it’s Christmas and we have a tradition to uphold. Now we’re settling in here in Burbank and I’ve got a new computer, I’m hoping to get everything running again and get back to a regular schedule. (MP3, podcast feed)

I've read a bunch of new indie zombie novels, via Kindle Unlimited, this week! Here are two very funny, fasted paced stories that will help pass the time, as you wait in ambush for an overweight, red suited home invader to exit your chimney.David Achord's Zombie Rules series was a serious page turner. I read all 4 novels in the series, Zombie Rules, Z14, Zfinity, and Destiny, in about a day! Achord tells the tale of Zach, an under privileged 16 year old who turns out to be the smartest, and most important guy on earth! Told from the pov of a teenager who is full of himself, the story never lacks for silly.Achord writes great action, and builds a fun post-zombie apocalypse world. This is a really fun series, where the gore isn't too gory, and the plot has some unexpected twists and turns! The action and world building are good enough you ignore the plot holes and ridiculousness of some situations, as they are done to keep the pace up. Watch Zach save the world, and just not understand girls.Second up is Chaos Theory by Rick Restucci. A super-sized survivalist, a teenaged girl, and an escaped convict make their way south, from New England to the Gulf of Mexico, trying to survive the zombie menace. The convict also happens to have been bitten, but did not turn, so naturally the remnants of the US Federal government are after him. Being a criminal, he doesn't seem to care much about helping the world find a vaccine. Perhaps he is a Jim Carrey fan.Restucci blends horror and comedy incredibly well. The sarcasm, joking, and self-deprecation make this novel fly. The world is falling apart fast, believable bad things are happening and the only way to survive is to laugh. Some of the locations are pretty fresh, and fantastic for zombie adventure too!If you want an escape from all the cheer, Zombie Rules or Chaos Theory may be what you need. I found both on Kindle Unlimited.

The Come Back With a Warrant" doormat is an American classic (I prefer my suburban take on the motif). (more…)

Last week, security researcher Chris Vickery discovered a database containing 3.3 million accounts from Sanriotown, a commercial Hello Kitty fansite operated by Sanrio, Hello Kitty's corporate owners. (more…)

Online communities like Ravelry's "Knot a Problem" invite knitters to ship them their most tangled yarn, which they patiently unravel and wind into usable skeins, as a kind of knitting-adjacent hobby, one that combines problem solving with topology. (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…)

What Is EFF Reading? Books, Movies, and TV Shows of 2015: a media diet for Internet freedom activists.

Dr. Linda Salvin is a "spiritual doctor, famous psychic, healer, medium" who sells Wicks of Wisdom, $90 candle sets alleged to have special powers. The Rebound Power candle "reverses negativity to the sender" and the Sweetening Judgment Power candle is "excellent for court cases, legal issues and brings them in your favor." (Martin Shkreli should hock his Wu-Tang Clan album on load up on that one.)"I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe in the power of Wicks of Wisdsom" says Salvin in her spectacularly avaricious infomercial. "I have testimony after testimony, and I would not be wasting my time, my energy, or my reputation on national TV. Wicks of Wisdom works, like a prescription for your soul."The infomercial co-stars Kris Jenner (who she?) as product pitchman.The YouTube comments on the video will have you weeping with shame for the human race.Here comes JR "Bob" Dobbs to set things straight:Slavin's retort:[via]

The Bowman family shot this excellent home movie of the odometer on their family van reaching 100,000 miles. Can anyone who isn't car-blind like me figure out exact year this was made?[via]

As a kid I’d watch my dad as he’d throw (his unit of measurement) some olive oil, onions, garlic, lemon, and olives into a pan to make a quick pasta. It’s learning to cook this way that gave me a love and appreciation for food and cooking. That’s what was so amazing about Twelve Recipes. When you read it, you feel like you’re getting that private cooking lesson from a family member. A family member who happens to be a really really good cook.Through the book Cal Peternell, chef at renowned restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA, lays out twelve-ish basic foods and techniques that he believes will let you eat well for the rest of your life. If you’re a novice in the kitchen, the first chapter eases you in by teaching you how to make toast. No, seriously — toast. I was skeptical at first too, I consider myself to be somewhat of a toast veteran, but after reading a few pages I actually learned something. I had no idea that to make thin crisp toast you should actually use a loaf of stale bread since it’s easier to cut. That’s the beauty of the book – even if you’ve been making toast, grilling meat, or cooking rice all your life, there’s still something to learn.In the best way, this isn’t your standard cookbook. You won’t find a single recipe on each page, you’ll actually find two or three, interweaved by a story about a family ping pong game. The photos are beautiful, but they’re not your standard food-porn shots that make your home cooking feel insecure. Then there are the sweet little illustrations that were done by Peternell’s wife and kids peppered throughout (see what I did there?). All these ingredients add up to a beautiful book that’s sure to inspire your inner cook.– JP LeRouxTwelve Recipes

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Henry Cole invented the Christmas Card in 1843 as a way to escape the drudgery of hand-writing a bunch of letters to his friends. In this article, Hunter Oatman-Stafford of Collectors Weekly presents the curious history of the Christmas card.

In my latest Guardian column, The problem with self-driving cars: who controls the code?, I take issue with the "Trolley Problem" as applied to autonomous vehicles, which asks, if your car has to choose between a maneuver that kills you and one that kills other people, which one should it be programmed to do? (more…)

Google's lawyers fought strenuously against the DoJ's demands for access to the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum, a journalist, activist and volunteer with the Wikileaks project; they fought even harder against the accompanying gag order, arguing that Appelbaum had the right to know what was going on and have a lawyer argue his case. (more…)

Here is New Jersey governor Chris Christie's explanation why trans children shouldn't be given the right to use the school restroom they feel most comfortable in: