Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "Imprisoned Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning has written a groundbreaking bill to reform the U.S. government's unpopular mass surveillance programs, starting by abolishing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court." (more…)

There's even a dancing baby! It's based on a mobile installation for hire that prompts your guests to turn themselves into loops that they can then drag around on a virtual stage. (more…)

The Motion Picture Association of America today announced that it had effectively shut down the popular Popcorn Time “fork” and movie-sharing torrent destination YTS after court orders in Canada and New Zealand.(more…)

Activision Blizzard announced Monday evening that it plans to buy King Digital Entertainment, the maker of Candy Crush Saga, for about $5.9 billion. It's the third-largest video game industry deal ever. It's quite a dollar amount, but it's significant for other reasons, too.(more…)

The space exploration game Sun Dogs comes with a promising description: "Sun Dogs is about exploring our inner solar system, altering your body, and embracing death." After playing, I deem it accurate. (more…)

Warning: TITTIES.Nipples, Nazi slogans, and racist slurs against Syrian war refugees have all collided on German Facebook to create the ultimate viral headline, and we at Boing Boing are *so very on it.*A German photographer came up with a provocative way to pressure Facebook to do something about the recent surge in racist, xenophobic slurs against war refugees. His point: Facebook will censor images of female breasts in an instant, but anti-migrant hate speech is just fine by the social network's terms of use.So last week, photog Olli Waldhauer posted this photo. The man is holding a racist sign that reads "Don't Buy From Kanaken," which references a Nazi-era slogan about stores owned by Jewish people. “Kanaken” is kind of like the n-word, but for refugees or migrants from the Middle East."One of these people is violating Facebook's rules," says the caption, and there's the hashtag #nippelstatthetze ("nipples instead of hate speech").The image and the story are total viral crack for news outlets in Germany, and hey, we love boobs and outrage here in America too -- as well as our own racism and xenophobia.Wonder if it'll lead to any change?More on Verge, Washington Post in English. In German: meedia.de, tagesspiegel.de.

Germany's Volkswagen is already in a whole heap of global trouble after the car maker was caught cheating on U.S. tests for nitrogen oxide emissions. Then, we learned “Dieselgate” also involved VW subsidiary brands Audi and Porsche.Now it gets worse. Today VW announced that an internal investigation has revealed "unexplained inconsistencies" in the carbon dioxide emissions from some 800,000 vehicles.[caption id="attachment_432099" align="alignnone" width="644"] Volkswagen logo is seen at a power plant in Wolfsburg, Germany. REUTERS/Axel Schmidt[/caption]From AP:

I thought Robert Crumb's unabridged graphic novel of the Book of Genesis was a herculean effort, but cartoonist R. Sikoryak has tackled an even more arduous task: incorporating the complete, unabridged iTune's user agreement into a graphic novel. Sikoryak is very good at drawing comics in the style of other cartoonists, and he uses this skill here to great effect. Take a gander:Page 48 (after Chester Gould)Page 46 (after Hergé)Page 42 (after Otto Mesmer)Page 41 (after Rube Goldberg)Unbelievable! You can buy hardcopies here: THE UNABRIDGED GRAPHIC ADAPTATION: ITUNES TERMS AND CONDITIONS, PART A & PART B | THE UNABRIDGED GRAPHIC ADAPTATION: ITUNES TERMS AND CONDITIONS, PART C & PART D

The high-water mark of American culture."If that's your best, your best won't do."

Classic strategy games have long been bested by computers: checkers is a solved puzzle, and the machines long ago surpassed human Chess grandmasters. But thinking meat is still the master when it comes to Go—for interesting reasons that Facebook is interesting in cracking..

El Casco began as a firearm company in 1920. By the 1930s, business wasn't booming so they expanded into desk accessories, starting with an elegantly machined handheld stapler. They still make that model stapler, along with many others including this $265 chrome stapling plier. If chrome isn't to your liking, it's also available in 23 ct. gold plating. It takes standard staples. If you think this caliber of stapler would outshine your other desk accessories, perhaps you need to consider purchasing new desk accessories, such as El Casco's tape dispenser, sticky note holder, turtle bell, pencil pot, or paper punch.El Casco M-85 Total Chrome Stapling Plier (Amazon)

At the Alaska Resources Library and Information Services, anyone can check out skulls, taxidermy mounts, pelts, and other bits and pieces of dead animals for free. Librarian Celia Rozen says that the most popular items are bear and wolf furs used in Boy Scout rituals and also snowy owl mounts requested by Harry Potter party planners. As you might expect, educators appreciate the opportunity to make their lessons more, er, tangible.“It gets them excited about being in biology class,” South Anchorage High School science teacher Chris Backstrum told the Alaska Dispatch News. “It starts the year off on a good foot.""Need a wolf fur? A puffin pelt? All you need is a library card and a visit to the ARLIS library" (ADN)"Something Preserved" (Great Big Story)(photos by Marc Lester/ADN)

Lahoma mayor Theresa Sharp says he "meant no harm" and that it was merely "four good ol' boys sitting around drinking and things got out of control."After the group headed out into the night, complaints started rolling into the local Sheriff, who reportedly notified Sharp—but not before photos of their antics were posted to Facebook by observers."Please don't tell me racism is dead!" Alfred Baldwin III wrote. "This just happened a few miles outside of Enid. A little town called Lahoma. And to make matters worse, one of them was the mayor of Lahoma's husband! The mayors HUSBAND!"Lahoma has a population of about 611, and Sharp has been its mayor for four years.She did not apologize for her husband's choice of attire, and saw fit to remind America that there's nothing illegal about setting wood on fire.

Filipino politicians have decried an alleged blackmail scheme by Manila airport security officers, who are said to drop bullets into passengers' luggage and then demand cash payouts to stay out of jail. (more…)

A purported exposé of KKK members is proving an enormous dud, with the flagship names revealed—U.S. Senators and mayors of major cities—obviously no such such thing.

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics! (more…)

The EPA, the California Air Resources Board and Environment Canada have detected more fraudulent firmware in VW products; this time in 2014-2016 cars from the super-profitable Audii and Porsche lines. (more…)

Rebecca MacKinnon, the journalist/activist who wrote the seminal Consent of the Network, has launched a new project called Ranking Digital Rights, part of the New America Foundation's Open Tech Institute. RDR issues report-cards that evaluate how Internet giants and other companies handle your data: what do they promise, do they encrypt, and who do they share it with? Virtually every company gets a failing grade in virtually every category. (more…)

Christopher has done this sort of thing before. His 2011 debut, Empire State, was weird and glorious and noir, but nowhere near as hard-boiled as Made to Kill -- indeed, very little is.Ray Electromatic is his own robot, even if his consciousness is modelled on the mind of the scientist who created him, he's got his own views and priorities. He's also got a profound disability: as a portable robot reflecting the state-of-the-art in 1960, he can only carry enough magnetic tape to store 24 hours' worth of memories. Every night, he goes home to Ada, the building-sized supercomputer that is his boss and friend, and she helps him take the tape out of his body, store it in her vaults, and plug in to recharge.Every morning, he wakes without being able to remember anything that had happened since his permanent programming was put in place, and Ada catches him up on the day's work, which usually involves discreetly killing people for money.Ada and Ray banter in a way that's beautifully Nick and Nora, and his murderous adventures around a Los Angeles haunted by its robot pogroms and its fear of Soviet double-agents are so cheerfully bloody and immoral that they conjure up an alternative universe whose most salient fact isn't robots, but rather, the absence of the loathsome Hays Code, which neutered film for decades.Christopher really gets to grips with the constraints of Ray's short term memory and the social implications of the mob-destruction of all the robots (save one), telling a story that's gripping, funny, deadly and suspenseful.Best of all, this is book one of three, so there's more of this kind of thing in the pipeline. That's great news, because Christopher has hit on something that I'd hardly suspected before, and now can't get enough of.Made to Kill [Adam Christopher/Tor]

James Bridle's new essay (adapted from a speech at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes event in Toronto last month) draws a connection between the terror of life in the nuclear shadow and the days we live in now, when we know that huge privacy disasters are looming, but are seemingly powerless to stop the proliferation of surveillance. (more…)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpajFQECzAkThe Wizard of Northampton in dialog with John Higgs, author of Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, describing HP Lovecraft's curious, twisted grasp of the awful anxieties of 20th century America, and how this created the racist, horror-flecked prose that resonates even today. (via m1k3y) (more…)

hBrian writes, "Avant-garde film maker and producer of the highly influential Anthology of American Folk Music series Harry Smith was also an avid collector of folk art. This book compiles some 251 paper airplanes Smith collected from off the streets of New York City, along with the date and location at which they were recovered. It's a really beautiful collection." (more…)

Awkward Engineer's Model AWK-105 Analog Voltmeter Clock costs $139; it began life as a successful Kickstarter and is now an object of commerce, in off-white or khaki. I love that the "twitchy" analog needles that display the time are connected to an Attiny44 CPU. (via Red Ferret) (more…)

Angry rich crackpot racist Donald Trump would like you to know that he is very angry, and that's why this is the cover of his new book. Extra points to The Donald for casually insulting every single American who has physical disabilities.(more…)

America boasts a collection of one-of-a-kind policies that send wealth from the poor to the rich: the lack of competition in cable operators gives Americans some of the most expensive Internet anywhere; the rules permitting pharma companies to pay generics companies not to make cheaper versions of off-patent drugs gives Americans the most expensive pharmaceuticals in the world. (more…)

From Walmart to Hershey to Campbell's Soup, America's biggest retailers and manufacturers are warning their shareholders that flat growth is a fact of life because of "consumer bifurcation," which is plutocrat-speak for "everyone is broke except the one percent." The companies' plan for rescuing themselves is to turn themselves into luxury brands targeted at the wealthy. (more…)

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin the Irish Minister of State for New Communities, Culture and Equality, announced that his government is opening safe injection sites, will introduce a new Misuse of Drugs Bill bill in early 2016 that will decrminalise possession of "small amounts" of drugs including heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, and "as far as possible drug addiction should be removed from the criminal justice system." (more…)

You may remember Elly Blue from Pedal Zombies, a kickstarted collection of feminist science fiction about zombies and bicycles. Now she's back with a new crowdfunding drive for a feminist steampunk cycling novel called The Velocipede Races. (more…)

I've been trying to cut back on the amount of caffeine I drink. I stopped drinking coffee, except on weekends, and have switched to mainly to tea (herbal and black tea). I feel less jittery. Recently I started making a hot drink out of cocoa powder and coconut oil and I love it. It has a bit of caffeine in it, but much less than a cup of coffee. According to this site, a glass of chocolate milk has about as much caffeine in it as a cup of decaf coffee.I use 1 rounded teaspoon of Now Foods Organic Cocoa powder that I buy on Amazon, and 1 rounded tablespoon of Organic Coconut Oil (unrefined, because it has that great smell and taste). I add them to about 10 ounces of hot water, and mix it with an immersion blender. The result is a creamy cup of coconut-flavored unsweetened cocoa. When I make for my daughter I use a little hot milk with the water.

The dynamic painter duo of Kelly Tunstall and Ferris Plock created these fantastic interpretations of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader on commission! Kelly and Ferris have a new collaborative exhibit, titled "Holding Pattern," opening on Friday (11/6) at San Francisco's 111 Minna Gallery. Check Boing Boing later this week for a sneak peak at their new work!

See more photos at Wink Fun.If you’re familiar with Pandemic then you’ve already got a handle on the basic game play of Pandemic Legacy. Fly around the world, cure diseases and save humanity. The first differences you’re going to notice with any Legacy game is the sheet of stickers, secret envelopes with little numbers and Advent calendar-like little packages in the main box. Pandemic Legacy takes place over the course of a really bad year for humanity. You’re going to be trying to save the world from four diseases, but this time, each individual game is going to affect the future ones as you place stickers on the board and the game changes permanently when certain events occur.We’ll not be going into spoilers here, but some of the common knowledge things that carry over from Pandemic as slightly changed are that when cities outbreak, the first one is free, but then they slowly spin out of control there, restricting travel to and from those cities, making it harder to move in and out. Also your role will be with you for the duration of the game, and being in a city when it falls means bad things happening to your character that’ll provide lingering effects.As far as play goes, you’ll get about 12-24 plays out of a single box of Pandemic Legacy. You get two chances per month to win, and the game adjusts difficulty based on how your record is going by varying the number of special cards in the player deck. Gone is changing the number of epidemics – now it’s a steady five. It is worth noting that you can play nice regular Pandemic on this board before you start adding things to it, and the game recommends doing just that if you haven’t played before to get used to the way it’s played before you start tearing up game components and putting stickers on the board. There are a few other little changes, like some of the routes that have been added to connect things up a little, but they’re minor enough that seasoned players should be able to strap in for a memorable ride. – James OrrPandemic Legacy

Andy G made these little Minimoog Synthesizers out of Lego bricks, If 10,000 people approve his proposal on Lego Ideas, Lego might create a kit and sell them.

This cute little video takes place in a Gumby-style universe and stars a little red ball named Biisuke who must go through a clever Rube Goldberg obstacle course to save his brothers who are imprisoned in a tower.

Lauren Urasek, 25, "the most popular heterosexual on OKCupid" according to the dating site, has a new book out, Popular: The Ups and Downs of Online Dating from the Most Popular Girl in New York City. As you might imagine, Urasek's got lot of fun, funny, and horrifying stories to tell, of guys who went for a kiss ten minutes into the first date, outright offered her cash for sex, and interviewed her as if being girlfriend was a job she had applied for. From an interview in The Daily Dot:

You've likely read about Italian physician Dr. Sergio Canavero's plan to perform the first human head transplant? There is precedent with non-humans and it ain't pretty. In 1965, Dr. Robert J. White and his colleagues at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital transplanted the brain of one dog to another. "The transplant … acted as a second brain in the animal’s neck," according to Science News Letter. In the 1970s, White continued his experiments by transplanting rhesus monkeys' head onto other monkeys' bodies. (See the diagram above.)Below, a special edition of The Midnight Archive profiles White, discusses similar research in Russia at the time, and touches on the ethical questions around these experiments. (Warning: this video is rather graphic.)https://youtu.be/V2P-teoc2ic

Steve Ross doesn't have the sweet 'fro, but he knows his way around a tube of Van Dyke Brown just like his dad.Here are a few tips and comments Steve offers on this video about painting a lake in the woods.

This very odd handgun is a c.1925 French "Union" automatic pistol with "a 35-round "horseshoe" magazine to provide maximum capacity without overly hampering the gun's handling." (Forgotten Weapons)

The first episode of Star Trek aired on Sept. 8, 1966. The fifty-year-old franchise has spawned a number of television series, and the last episode (Star Trek: Enterprise) aired 10 years ago. But the beloved series is returning in 2017 on CBS. It will produced by Alex Kurtzman, who co-wrote and produced the movies Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). (more…)

Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was released 40 years ago. Here is Queen's Brian May and Roger Taylor along with the group's studio engineer Justin Shirley Smith on the history of this feat of rock opera. This clip is from the bonus DVD on Queen's Greatest Video Hits 1. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is on Queen's LP A Night at the Opera and the track will be released as a special edition vinyl 12" this month on Record Store Day Black Friday!

Aurora is an exciting novel on its own merits: the story of a generation ship finally decelerating at the Tau Ceti system after 150 years of travel at 10 percent of lightspeed, its many arcologies each a miniature Terran biome, ready to terraform a wet moon of a superjovian planet 12 light-years from Sol.(more…)

Simulations of circumstellar disks, the vast dust-planes left over from stellar formation, suggest that planets ten times larger than Jupiter may lurk in the universe.Being far from the stars they orbit, these hypothetical worlds are so dark as to be all but invisible despite their enormity. But just as the presence of smaller worlds has been inferred, a team of astronomers believes the traces of the mega-Jupiters is seen in these proto-planetary swirls.

In a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling described his experiences fighting the "antiseptic, rigid" qualities of censorship.In this clip above, he describes "precensorship"—what would now be more often described as self-censorship—the prior knowledge of the writer of what he cannot get through, and therefore shies away from.Here's the full show:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpKkHCVbSyw&ab_channel=PaulEresThe buck, he suggests, stops not with censors or networks, but with the audience, with whose consent these authorities operate. Here's a transcript.

Jaimee Hills writes, "Gerry Canavan has done a short writeup in an academic publication called The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction on the (amazing) contents of the Octavia E. Butler papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California." (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhS_CjECO90It's when you carry a frame and door to someone else's door, while dressed as someone who's staying at home and giving out candy; you interpose your door between you and their door, ring the bell, and when they answer, they're confronted with your door, with a PLEASE KNOCK sign. They knock, you open up, and offer them candy. Trick-airity ensues. (via Reddit)

@ridetheory created 13 spooky anagrams for "THE HAUNTED MANSION" that spelled out scenes from the ride ("...THAT HEINOUS MAN: END" "HUH? NOT MANSE DETAIN!" "...I THEN UNTO HEADSMAN" and so on!). (more…)

Shardcore's latest twitterbot (previously) is @trippingbot, which trains a Character Level Recurrent Neural Network with drug reports from Erowid, where people post running logs of their drug experiences. (more…)

In September, Google caught Symantec issuing a fake google.com cryptographic certificate that could have been used to seamlessly intercept encrypted Google.com traffic. Symantec is one of the participants in Certificate Transparency, through which all new certificates issued and seen in the wild are logged to append-only, cryptographically provable logs, which create irrefutable audit trails for any bogus certs issued/discovered. (more…)

https://youtu.be/XnRapsAjTUETom Burtonwood creates 3D printed books of dimensional, public domain architectural elements: in 2013, he made Orihon and in 2014 he made Folium, which featured work from Ancient Egypt to Louis Sullivan department store decorations. Now he's released a new work: "Twenty Something Sullivan." (more…)