A factory refurbished Thinkpad shipped with Windows 7 and a scheduler app that ran once a day, collecting usage data about what you do with your computer and exfiltrating it to an analytics company.The fact that this was taking place was buried deep in the user "agreement" that came with the machine.This is the third preloaded spyware scandal to hit Lenovo this year: first it was caught installing Superfish, which grossly compromised user security by installing a man-in-the-middle certificate into the operating system; then it got caught loading immortal, self-reinstalling crapware into part of the BIOS reserved for custom drivers.This latest scandal is particularly noteworthy because it impinges on Thinkpads, the rock-solid laptop brand the company acquired from IBM.As I've noted before, I'm a Lenovo Thinkpad user and none of this affects me because I throw away the hard drives that come with my laptops and install Ubuntu GNU/Linux on new SSD hard-drives. But this kind of terrible behavior speaks to a serious deficit in the company's management and calls into question the whole firm's strategy and attitude toward its customers.The 21st century quip has it that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. In the case of Lenovo machines this year, it seems that even if you are paying for the product, you're still the product.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has given New Jersey National Guard leader General Michael Cunniff 90 days to lose weight, or else.

See more photos at Wink Fun.The history of Communism intrigues me. I have traveled to and worked with game development companies in Russia, China, and Hungary. When I was growing up, I visited the Berlin Wall where my Father was stationed – he later spent time in the military on both the borders of then South Vietnam and South Korea.Queue succeeds where Monopoly failed in two distinct areas. Monopoly was originally designed to illustrate the pitfalls of capitalism, but gameplay actually rewards it. And, let’s all be honest, Monopoly, is not the most fun game in our collections. Queue is both fun and successfully educates the player on some of the inherent problems of communism.Queue was created by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance to ensure that a small portion of what it was like to live under Communist rule in the 1980s was kept alive. Specifically what is it like to shop in a country where production is controlled by the state and not the free market. For the MTV generation, you may remember that was the time of Solidarity/ Solidarność and Lech Walesa. You may have had a red and white pin with their logo on your jacket next to those of The Clash and Give Whirled Peas a Chance.The game is beautifully crafted, with 40-page manuals individually printed in seven languages. The game instructions themselves only take up 15 pages, including the FAQ. The rest of the manual is devoted to history and photos of the lines themselves. There is some amount of assembly required, specifically the somewhat tedious requirement of placing two sets of stickers on 50 cards from the language of your choice.I have a soft spot for educational/games for good, and Queue is among the best I have ever played in this genre. Not only is it educational, it is actually fun and the gimmick isn't just a one trick pony. Queue remains an enjoyable game, even after several playthroughs. A missing component of too many Educational Games. The context of the game is brilliantly reflected in the rules, cards and period items for sale. From the game and watch clone GRA ELECKTRONICZNA to the styles of the SUKIENKA dress to the industrial design of the TELEFON phone.Each player begins with their own unique shopping list for the week. The player who collects the most items on their list wins. Players queue outside the stores, but as there is never enough items for each store, shortages always occur and you are never sure which store will get any deliveries at all. To obtain the limited supplies, you must get to the front of the queue.But there are plenty of cards each player can use to alter the queue order (each based on actual Polish queue events): You may be moved back in line for “Criticizing The Authorities;” you may move up for "Carrying a Small Child" (and it doesn’t have to be your child); you may look at what will be delivered in advance because you have a “Friend in the Workers Party Provincial Community;” and you may want to bluff how desperately you want an item in the hope you will be moved to get the item you really need. With five rounds (the game ends on a Saturday), the game moves along quickly and can be played in 45 minutes.I played the game with my daughter and some colleagues. The biggest lesson that came through was that no matter how many regulations one imposes to create an equal economic system, there will always be some that are more equal than others, to paraphrase George Orwell. And the free market will always serve as a relief valve for some of the pressure caused by shortages. This is illustrated in the game by speculation and outdoor markets. You may buy an item you don’t need in hopes of exchanging it later for what you really need to win the game.– John E. WilliamsonQueue (Kolejka) Board Game

One of the most fearless and admired stagecoach drivers of the Wild West was discovered after death to be a woman."One-Eyed Charley" Parkhurst drove a stagecoach in California at the peak of the Gold Rush, renowned for his skill and courage. Only after his death at age 67 was it discovered that Charley was a woman. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we'll tell what's known of Charley Parkhurst's enigmatic life story.We'll also hear listeners' thoughts about the legalities of an anti-Christian town and puzzle over a lucky driver and his passenger.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

The XKCD Thing Explainer book -- which explains technical subjects using the thousand most common English words, in the style of Up Goer Five -- is due out in November, and Randall Munroe is going out on tour ("book trip") in November!See him in NYC, Seattle, Beaverton/PDX Oregon, San Francisco, Berkeley, Houston, Naperville/Chicago, and Toronto.I’m going on a book trip! [XKCD]Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words [Randall Munroe/Houghton Mifflin]

Regular deodorants give me a painful itchy rash that has me constantly scratching my pits like a cartoon baboon. I've tried everything from those crystals to the alcohol/herb based sprays. None of them work worth a damn.But the ridiculously named MenScience Androceuticals Advanced Deodorant actually does work. I don't stink, and I don't itch. There's only one problem: it costs $19 for 2.6 oz.Sensitive readers, what do you use? Do you have a stink solution that doesn't cost more, gram for gram, than fine caviar?MenScience Androceuticals Advanced Deodorant

In this symbiotic relationship, it is the human's job to place the cracked tile into its spot, and it is the cat's job to knock it out. It will be a sad day when someone comes along and replaces the broken tile. [via]

Well, for one thing, it's pretty weird that as soon as the story that UK Prime Minister/hereditary toff David Cameron allegedly stuck his penis in the mouth of a dead pig in a college initiation for a secret society of the ultra-rich, the UK's top establishment figures leapt to his defense, saying that even if he face-fucked a dead pig, it wasn't such a big deal.The seeming insignificance of necrophiliac bestiality for the great and the good raises the question: What did they do during their college years, that the pig incident isn't a "big deal"?But more interesting is the widespread anthropological phenomenon of grotesque and depraved initiation rituals for the upper echelons of societies' power structures. In nations and tribes all over the world and in all times, this norm (and rumors of it) has re-emerged.

Emma Lynam, 21, of Australia has Down Syndrome, a cleft palate, and autism. She can't read or write, but she is such an enthusiastic paper shredder that she now runs a successful business called Master Shredder. The name was inspired by a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

Mad Max: Fury Road has attracted praise for its deft handling of some of the themes that Hollywood normally gets very, very wrong. The way that women take charge, for example, the Gamergate crowd had the rare perspicacity to realize that Furiosa was a new, significant stride in the evolution of female action protagonists.Given this pedigree, it's understandable that there was widespread, vocal disappointment in the way that the all-male team responsible for the comic adaptation decided to give Furiosa a completely gratuitous and offensive rape backstory.Another real achievement in Fury Road was the way it handled disability, as a fact and not a problem. This was a source of real joy for people with disabilities who were able to see a rare positive disabled protagonist modeled on the screen.The launch of the new Mad Max game for PS4 and Xbox One was met with a mixture of anticipation and dread: would this adaptation be as terrible as the comic, or would it maintain some of the special magic that made the movie such a triumph?Writing in Polygon, Tauriq Moosa settles the question: the Mad Max game is an incredible game, and doubly incredible for the amazing way that it handles disabilities in a matter-of-fact, substantive, and beautiful way:

https://youtu.be/z13vGps9yoYOn certain days each week, the Nürburgring Nordschleife race track in Germany is open to the public to drive any road-legal vehicle at insane speeds around the challenging course. The amazing part of this particular video is that the driver of the Renault Mégane, a "family car," walks away from the insanely spectacular crash.

https://youtu.be/F50yjSws9gQTight scheduling and months of preparation are hallmarks of modern movie production. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, moments of genuine authenticity arise from ad-libs, disobedience and outright on-set screwups. Screenrant collected 10 of the best, from Tom Cruise's crazy-violent stunts to David Duchovny rambling perfectly through forgotten lines in Zoolander.And, yes, Midnight Cowboy is walkin' here.

The US government has given up on demanding backdoors in cryptography for now (advocates have announced that they'll wait until a terrorist attack and then use that as the excuse for fresh demands), leaving the UK government as the last man standing in the race to compromise the security of the technologies with the power of life and death over us.This is an awkward place to be. MI5 has started pushing messages about the new breeds of antibiotic-resistant superterrorists who will kill us all with their laser-breath if we don't all roll over and do what the spies tell us to.

Jamie King sez, "The Emergents Podcast, a new show from the creator of STEAL THIS FILM, considers the development of a new form of power inside our networked society. In this pilot episode (MP3), Peter Sunde (The Pirate Bay), Troy Hunt (Have I Been Been Pwned) and network security consultant Ella Saitta consider the Ashley Madison hack, strange 'network collectives' like Impact Team and the 'volatile, unstable, complex and arbitrary' world they're bringing into being."Jamie was a critical resource for me when I was writing Pirate Cinema; this is a very exciting development in podcastland!

Kevin Kelly and I had a great time talking to Limor Fried, an MIT engineer and the founder of Adafruit, a one-stop shop for makers to buy electronics kits and components as well as learn and share ideas related to electronics prototyping. Limor told us about the giant pick-and-place and stencil printers she uses at Adafruit to make her kits at her New York City factory.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Podcast on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single page(CC Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Litigation Finance involves loaning people money in return for the right to finance a lawsuit in their names. On its face, there's lots to love about this: it's a financial jiu-jitsu that turns every abusive act from a giant company into a target for an investor. The bigger the bully -- the deeper its pockets -- the more financiers there'll be waiting to sue it on your behalf when it screws you over.This practice, called champetry, has a checkered legal reputation. I used it as a major plot element in my novel Makers, and I've proposed it as a serious strategy for slaying copyright and patent trolls.Modern litigation financing is dominated by rapacious, hedge-fund-backed players who target really vulnerable people (a favorite: poor old women who live in agony thanks to a discredited surgery called "transvaginal mesh implantation"). These companies make deals with their surgeons to overcharge for the surgeries and then sue recalcitrant insurers for the inflated bill.

https://youtu.be/vpyeQeTDGFAPES created this advertisement for Honda. I hope they're grateful.

Bitcoin Savings & Trust founder Trendon Shavers pleaded guilty to fraud over his company's Ponzi scheme, whose victims believed they would earn one percent interest every three days -- an annual rate of 3,641 percent.Shavers used new depositors' money to pay the existing depositors, and skimmed enough cream to pay for a car, a $1000 Vegas steak dinner, and (naturally) a lot of casino gambling.He cost his depositors about $150M and was holding onto $40.7M in Bitcoin when he was arrested. At his peak, he controlled about 7 percent of all Bitcoins in circulation. He netted $164,758 from the scheme.

Zerodium, a new firm started by the founder of notorious French arms dealers Vupen, have put out the $1M bounty for unpublished vulnerabilities in the Iphone; they plan on keeping these vulns a secret so that they can be turned into cyberweapons and sold to repressive governments who want to use them to spy on their citizens using their own phone cameras, mics, and keyboards.Every time one of these cyber-arms dealers has a breach, we learn more about the abusive, authoritarian regimes who are the ultimate customers for these high-ticket items. Thanks to these firms' willingness to put profits ahead of ethics, we've turned backwards, totalitarian governments into turnkey surveillance states.Worse: the fact that these people can discover and weaponize vulns means that others can, too. When our governments become customers of these firms, they become complicit in keeping vulnerabilities secret and intact -- and those vulns can be and are used to attack their own populations. The Iphone hack that Zerodium decides to keep secret and weaponize will also be discovered by spies from other countries, who may use them to steal your employer's secrets and put them out of business; they may be used by voyeurs who use them to sexually extort your children, they may be used against you.

https://youtu.be/nv7sTTWRA7YThem's Fighting Herds is an in-development 2D fighting game starring deer and sheep and alpacas and things kicking each other and using magic. I thought this sounded really niche for about 20 seconds until I looked at its fundraising page, and all of a sudden I was a twelve year-old girl again with my eyes turned to massive cartoon hearts.I am clearly not alone; as I write this the game has raised over $100,000 in one day. Some of that is down to the fact the characters and universe are designed by Lauren Faust, creator of "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic". Clearly there is something about Faust's lovely hoofed mammals. I'm not saying I'm. on the verge of falling in love with a deer or going to a conference about it but, like, I can see that happening for others.The character designs and fighting game lore for Them's Fighting Herds are adorable and imaginitive and while the $436,000 target is quite steep for game crowdfunding these days, big numbers can be done when you have superfans behind you, and when you promise hoofed mammal fans an interactive graphical lobby probably anything can happen. (Thanks Simon!)

David Steffen is raising $1250 to defray costs on a collection of 2014 Hugo Award-nominated short stories; one of his stretch goals is an audio edition produced by the excellent Skyboat Media studios (where Wil Wheaton recorded the audiobook editions of Homeland and Information Doesn't Want to Be Free).$10 gets you the ebook; $25 gets you the ebook and the audiobook. There's also a bunch of handmade rewards from fans and writers, ranging from jam to art to a sestina. At higher tiers, you can ask questions of writers or get personal tutorials/critiques.Steffen runs a successful writer's website and does a lot of freelance writing; his bio doesn't list any specific ebook/print publishing experience, but the Skyboat people are old pros. As with all crowdfunding campaigns, caveat emptor -- you may get nothing for your money.

Niall Moody has released an interesting mixed media project called I've never been to Glasgow, but a location-specific audiovisual space genuinely appeals to me as a concept. If you could generate soundscapes solely out of images of your town, what would it be like? Mount Pleasant Radio makes it easy to engage in the fantasy of some staticky, magic old dial that you turn to get from place to place, from memory to memory, from the soul of one city to the next.

More and more companies look to Amazon Web Services for their cloud-computing needs, and the CDA exam is a surefire way to impress potential employers with your knowledge. AWS developers specialize in building and maintaining apps created specifically for the Amazon platform, and this course will dive into the concepts required to both be successful in the field and pass this highly-respected certification exam.Excel in the World of Cloud Computing--Pass the AWS Solutions Architect & Developer Exams For Only $19.

Luna has no government: it has contracts. You get to the moon by entering into a contract with the Lunar Development Corporation -- the nice folks who'll be selling you your air, bandwidth, carbon and water for the rest of your life -- and everything you do afterwards is also contractual: marriage, employment, and, of course, criminal redress. If you're murdered, your family will contract with a private court to adjudicate the damages they're owed for your death. If you want to get a divorce, you'll have to get a lawyer to argue your case in front of a private judge, and if you're lucky, your lawyer will challenge the opposite party to personal combat. In rare cases, they'll fight to the death.The moon has five Great Families, of differing vintage and national origins, and the story in Luna: New Moon centers on the Corta dynasty, founded by a poor Brazilian helium miner who built an empire that powers the Earth's fusion reactors. The Corta clan keeps Earth's lights on and this brings them enormous power, prestige and wealth -- and the intense jealousy of the other great families.Adrianna Corta, the family's matriarch, has cannily woven her family into the others through a web of strategic marriages. But Adrianna is nearing death, and the other families smell blood. At a family party, someone has the audacity to assassinate one of her sons with a neurotoxin-bearing cyborg insect -- he is saved at the last moment by Marina, an impoverished waitress who can barely afford to breathe. Marina's valor earns her a place in the great house, and all the air she can breathe, and money to send to Earth, which has bifurcated into a global underclass, and a tiny one percent elite.Ian McDonald's never written a bad novel, but this is a great Ian McDonald novel.When you read classic sf novels like Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, you can get the feeling that the author has imagined the whole world, from psychosexual relations to geopolitics, and has plucked out the telling details that let you know that this is more than a mere backdrop -- it's a kind of sociological macrocosm for the lives of the characters.But McDonald has ten details for every detail proffered by other sf writers. Not gratuitous details, either: gracious ones. The fashion sense of William Gibson, the design sense of Bruce Sterling, the eye for family drama of Connie Willis, the poesie of Bradbury, and the dirty sex of Kathe Koja and Samuel Delany.McDonald's moon is omnisexual, kinky, violent, passionate, beautiful, awful, vibrant and crushing. As the family saga of the Cortas unravels, we meet a self-sexual ninja lawyer, a werewolf who loses his mind in the Full Earth, a family tyrant whose ruthlessness is matched only by his crepulance, and a panoply of great passions and low desires.Luna: New Moon is the first book of a two-book cycle. Now I'm all a-quiver for the next one.Luna: New Moon [Ian McDonald/Tor]-Cory Doctorow

https://youtu.be/Dj4cSfNNBUgAnd Then We Held Hands, by Yannick Massa and David Chircop, is a tabletop game about silently negotiating the emotions of a partnership. While a free print-and-play version of the 2014 jam game has long been available, the developers have successfully Kickstarted a brand-new, professionally-illustrated edition with a new mode and some enhancements.The art is by the talented Marie Cardouat, of Dixit fame, and backers have the option to support a musician who has donated musical accompaniment for players. It's so exciting that Kickstarter funds will enable this deservedly well-loved, unusual board game to thrive in a market that tends to demand less sentimental or more explicitly-themed works.There are currently 7 days left for the campaign if you want to get one. The game will also see a limited release at the upcoming Essen Spiel 2015.

The GIF I've uploaded here doesn't do justice to Segawa Atsuki's incredible animations of pre-modern Japanese prints. [via]

If we learned anything from that one episode of Doctor Who with angels or something, it's that the only thing scarier than staring at a monster that wants to kill you is being forced to close your eyes.In Bloodsport, a free browser game by Winnie Song, that's exactly what you have to do when you find yourself trapped in the woods "with a beast and a compass," though the two heterochromic eyes staring back at you seem very human indeed. As do their careful instructions about what you need to do in order not to die: "Keep your eyes on me."This is easier said than done, especially since the monsters keep disappearing and reappearing into the woods around you. "I will move west of you," your would-be killer might announce, and then you'll have a few moments to rotate around to the right direction before your "blink meter" runs out and your eyes close. If you're not facing the monster when they open again, then it's time to die.Although you have to be pretty damn precise about lining up with those cardinal directions, if you lower your gaze to the ground you'll find a compass to guide you. This, too, is its own sort of risk; any time you aren't looking directly at the monster is a moment of potentially deadly vulnerability, so of course that's how you spend more of the game.Bloodsport is the prequel to Bad Blood, another game by Song that involves people murdering each other in fields (albeit in a more complex, multiplayer fashion). The prequel is free to play in your browser, but just in case you need a more targeted goal, Song has promised that the first three people who survive the night and send her a screenshot of the sun coming up will receive a free copy of Bad Blood.

Stassa Edwards' "History of Female Anger" is something more than that: a history of how society deals with and neutralizes a recurring challenge.

Uyen Vu, of Las Vegas, is the only woman in Nevada licensed to track down and capture people who jump bail. A second-degree black belt, she wanted a new challenge after selling her martial arts school. As you can surely imagine, she's had to contend with all sorts.Vice's Samantha Rea interviewed Vu and asked her about her unusual choice of career.

Ruined and strangely beautiful, the island prison of Coiba was once a truly ugly place. This concrete extrusion from the Central American jungle is now a silent guardian of Panama's dark secrets.

Stacey May Fowles explains why she has made her Twitter account private: because she is afraid of men on the Internet.

Most televisions look terrible. Frankly, the LCD era has only made the situation worse. With old sets, at least there was plenty of surface area for manufacturers to express tastes, good and bad, and foist them upon the public. But now they just pretend the bezel is (or should be) invisible, when neither outcome is the case, and everything looks very much alike. Enter Samsung's Serif TV, imagined by French designer Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec to acknowledge that sets are still major items of furniture, often seen from all angles rather than merely hung on walls.With this in mind, the set—when viewed from the side—embodies the letter "I" as seen in Roman typefaces. And from the front, its classical forms retreat into midcentury elegance and simplicity.

https://youtu.be/FBpQJ98rR4oYouTuber Cassetteboy remixes snippets of David Cameron's numbing enunciation into a song about his recent troubles in the press.

This news of the good doctor's idiocy is a couple of days old, but I'm an aficionado of the little flourishes of smack-talk that lawyers put in their responses to outrageous legal threats and wanted to share it with you.Carson's lawyers sent this cease and desist letter to CafePress to try and get it to nail people selling "unauthorized" shirts and other tat that tours "Ben Carson For President". A smorgasbord of legal rationales— "Digital Millennium Copyright Act, The Lanham Act, Federal Trademark Infringement, Federal Copyright Infringement, state misappropriation and privacy laws"—is offered without much to support any given one. It comes to K. Clyde Vanel, Esq. of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, to deliver the goods (PDF).

The Oct 10/11 event is run jointly by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Civic Media at MIT and will be hosted at the MIT Media Lab.The mission of the event is to "brainstorm and discuss ways to protect student hackers from future legal threats," to "reform laws like the CFAA, the DMCA, and other laws that are used to attack or silence researchers" and to figure out "how current students might bring similar legal clinics or other initiatives to their own institutions."I'll be leading a one-day brainstorming session for the "Catalog of Missing Devices," a collection of design fiction that demonstrates the tools, gadgets and services that could exist, except for bad laws like the DMCA and the CFAA. I hope to see you there!

https://youtu.be/OULuqNgEWmU“Our son was having some trouble blowing out his birthday candle,” explains Ashleigh Williamson of her adorable two-year-old son.Happy birthday, young dude, and way to find a workaround, older dude.[YouTube]

There may be as few as 2400 Sumatran elephants still alive on the planet. One of their tame brethren, who worked with humans to protect wild ones from being killed, was killed on Friday--apparently for his tusks. Indonesian authorities today described the incident as a “murder and a theft,” and called for a criminal investigation.The Sumatran elephant has been decimated by deforestation and habitat destruction, but also by the international poaching trade. Poachers can make a lot of money selling tusks to people who believe in bullshit Chinese folk woo that elephant tusks cure various illnesses. The incredibly rare and expensive black market tusks are also considered part of Chinese artistic cultural heritage, and carvings can fetch unbelievable sums from U.S. dealers mostly concentrated in San Francisco and Los Angeles.Yongki was no ordinary critically endangered Sumatran elephant, however. He performed a special job with humans, by acting as a sort of mediator or calm-the-fuck-down anti-hype man with wild elephants who lived in the area. When wild elephants became upset, Yongki could be employed to help chill them out, so villagers whose crops were being trampled wouldn't feel compelled to kill them.Agence-France Presse via Rappler:

"I am being called to lead by helping to clear the field in this race," said Walker, to the mirth of many, the lament of few, and the disinterest of all.

By reforming as a special purpose company, they are able to escape the cult of fiduciary duty that insists that management must screw people over whenever it will enhance shareholder value; they are legally able to put people before profits.Part of the new deal is that they have pledged never to sell or go public. Their new mission is to "help bring creative projects to life" and they are allowed to pursue this to the detriment of shareholder returns.It's a form of moral leadership from the founders, who have given up on a potential return of hundreds of millions in exchange for pursuing a mission.

https://youtu.be/HUm7RHi_6rUOh, this is full of some real gems, and will very likely improve your mood. The part where the mom is trying to teach her daughter about the planets, specifically how to say “Uranus,” is my favorite. Perhaps second only to the kid who does a spot-on impression of some of my least favorite former U.S. Presidents. [AFV]

This Circuit Scribe Basic Kit gives users a hands-on way to discover the world of electronics. At its core is a rollerball pen filled with conductive silver ink, allowing you to literally draw a circuit on paper. You can then augment your circuit using any of the six included modules: a power-supplying battery adapter, an SPSTswitch that turns your circuit on and off, and more. Consolidate your knowledge with the workbook’s lessons on electronics terms, and you’re sure to be a certified tech expert in no time.

I use this magnifier to doctor playing cards for magic tricks, but I imagine a 2X magnifying glass with foldable legs ($10 on Amazon) has other uses as well. It also comes with a 10X spotter and has a handle when you need to use it like a traditional magnifying glass.

https://youtu.be/UPXUG8q4jKU“A rat tries to bring slice of pizza down subway station stairs. OR. Master Splinter bringing food home to feed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?”[YOUTUBE/MATT LITTLE]

This week on the Startalk podcast, America's best-loved astronomer talks with my favorite whistleblower (MP3).The two cover a wide range of subjects, including SETI (!).

Tetra is a new online shop dealing with pot paraphernalia for people who appreciate fine design. A few weeks back I happened to meet co-founder Eviana Hartman, a well-known fashion and design writer, and really dug her enthusiasm and vision for this project. Congratulations, Eviana and crew! From the New York Times:

Audrey writes, "The Recompiler is a new feminist hacker magazine dedicated to learning about technology in a fun and inclusive way. The first issue of the magazine is now online, with articles about glitchy art, 80s tech, SSL bugs, and the flaws in DNS."

Fans of the iconic supersonic Concorde aircraft hope to bring the plane back into the skies in the next few years. Club Concorde, a group of enthusiasts including pilots and frequent fliers, has more than $250 million they will use to buy one of the planes for display as a London tourist attraction and to purchase and restore another for air shows, special events, and private charter. The last flight of a Concorde was in 2003. From The Telegraph:

Martin Shkreli (above) is a former hedge fund manager and the current CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. In August Shkreli bought a drug called Daraprim. It's been around for 62 years and is used to treat toxoplasmosis, a life-threatening parasitic infection. "Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars," reports the New York Times.It's fun to single out Shkreli for his questionable ethics, but plenty of other pharmaceutical companies also jack up the the price of formerly cheap drugs to levels that will bankrupt people who need them. The antibiotic Doxycycline was $20 a bottle in 2013. Today, the same bottle costs $1,849. Cycloserine, a tuberculosis treatment, used to cost $500 for a 30 pill bottle, until Rodelis Therapeutics acquired the drug and increased the price to $10,800.As seen by his tweet last night, Shkreli's response to the overwhelmingly negative reaction to his price increase is basically "fuck you."