In New Jersey, four crosswalks have been permanently painted in rainbow stripes. The Maplewood Township is the first in its state to permanently honor its diverse community in this way.NJ.com reports:

Fashion designer Virgil Abloh has been working on pieces for an upcoming IKEA collection. One of the first pieces to be unveiled is this pop-art rug that looks like an oversized shopping receipt. Dezeen writes:

Be seeing you, Anthony.

I’ve always felt the urge to leave. Any place. No matter how beautiful. I want to go. When I was 18 and finished with high school, I attended my graduation ceremony, for the sake of my family, but I skipped my prom – Canada’s east coast was calling. I’d never been there before. I didn’t know what I’d find. But I was going. I made a life for myself out there, with university, work and music. I traveled up and down the coast. Cape Breton feels like a second home to me. I love the people of Maine. New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island have a place in my heart.But eventually, I left the east. Rage, the self-entitlement that sometimes comes from surviving a shitty childhood and a need for control left me very much out of control. I destroyed a fine long-term relationship looking for who I was. I burned bridges. I did terrible things to myself and others. It was time to move on. My travels took me back home to Ontario. My father was dying. I loved and hated him for who he was and what he had done to our family. Coming home was a terror.Uneasily settled back into my hometown, I fought to push the dogs of my recent past down into the cellar of my soul where their bark did not seem so loud. I’d gone to university for journalism, but felt too shattered by life to write. I took on a job I despised and worked it for years. I was haunted by nightmares, flashbacks and a mind full of mayhem. I met someone, even though I was in no shape to be dating. She was from what you might call a good family. They loved each other: open, seemingly honest people. I thought that, if I could be a part of something that seemed so right, then maybe there would be a chance for me. But there wasn’t. I told them the truth of where I’d been and what I’d done; why I worked a gig that required no training or thought in favor of even trying to write for a living. I wanted to be as open with them as they seemed to be with me. It was a mistake. Despite my time with them at church, which I tried to believe in and with the very best behavior that I could muster, my partner and her parents saw the darkness in me and called it madness. For a time, I gave into despair. I felt unwanted anywhere, by anyone. I wanted to do violence to someone—anyone, really.It was the first time that I can remember feeling the urge to kill myself.Soon after. I left my hometown once more, this time headed west, to British Columbia. I had no expectations of happiness, but I could not bear to stay in the same place as something I had loved and wanted, so dearly. Reminders of her and my rage against life were everywhere I turned. While the wounds were still fresh, I landed in a new relationship: a poisonous thing with a woman who, in her own way, was just as broken as I was. We argued loudly enough that the police would come. I would drink. She’d do dope. We screamed at each other for a decade. In the end, we were nothing but roommates sharing a bed. In the time that we were together, I had found the strength to write again. A friend, who I can never repay, gave me a chance at working as a journalist for a well-known publication. It was very part-time and paid shit. But it was a start. It did not feel like enough.So, once again, I found myself on the move.I briefly returned to Ontario. I had not spent more than a few weeks with my mother in the ten years since I’d moved to the west coast. My father was years dead, burned and buried. I wanted time to get to know her new husband, a good man, before moving on to whatever would be next for me. My mother had moved on from my hometown of Guelph, setting up shop in the Grey Highlands. The winter I spent there was unforgivably cold, with blowing snow and whiteouts so frequently that the OPP often shuttered the highways and byways of the region for days at a time. When I wasn’t writing, I watched a lot of Anthony Bourdain on Netflix. No Reservations. Parts Unknown. Whatever I could get my eyes in front of.Something about how he viewed the world meshed with my need for motion and distance. He was a realist and at the same time, an idealist. He found beauty in places rank with pragmatism. He drank, perhaps not as much as I did at the time, and at times, still do. I felt that something dark followed him. I got around to reading his writing. We shared similar demons. It made me respect his looking for light in all places all the more. Driven by a yearning to explore as he did, I felt that, after a few months in Ontario, the time was coming to ramble on. I decided that I would go to Spain. I wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago. I’d start in the French town of Saint Jean Pied de Port. I’d cross into Spain and keep walking until I could smell the salt damp of Galicia and Santiago de Compostela.Somewhere amidst my planning and training for the 791 km (500 miles) hike, I decided that I’d like to die in the Pyrenees Mountains. The idea of the quiet that the end of all things would bring felt like a warm bath to me. I was tired – but not so tired that I could bring myself to die in a way that would leave my family with a body and a mess to dispose of. Heavy from years of alcohol abuse, a lack of exercise and too much crap food, I thought that I could work towards a heart attack at the higher altitudes of the hike. Dying of exposure, by misadventure or falling off a cliff would have been fine too. My ticket was purchased, my pack was packed and I was off. I remember falling asleep on my flight, listening to The Clash, sure of my plans.You may have noticed, close to five years later, I’m still here.The day before my Camino was to begin, I toured Saint Jean Pied de Port, collecting supplies, having the occasional drink and sampling the local Basque cuisine. It was lovely. The people who served it were lovely. The other pilgrims I spoke to or, when no language was shared, drank with, were lovely. They made me feel ashamed in the darkness of my intent.The next morning, so early that I saw my way by starlight, I began my walk into the mountains. The tang of sweat in my mouth and the smell of dew-fresh fields and turned manure in my nostrils made it hard to contemplate an end. As I gained altitude, the ache in my back from the 23 pounds of gear I’d brought with me made we want to lay my burdens down, once more. But there was so much beauty. I could find no ugly place in the Pyrenees where bringing an end to my life felt fit. Hours into the day, with the sun high, burning the side of my face, I fell in with a group of hikers from New Zealand. It was unintentional. We were all keeping the same pace. We spoke the same language. I couldn’t find a way to be unpleasant in their company. It’s hard to die, for me at least, when there’s folks around you that think you’re alright. That night, still alive, I ate a dinner of pub grub and wine in Orreaga, thinking that death could wait until morning. I would meet it rested and fed. At the cusp of daylight, I was woke by a monk who wished me a good journey. I dressed and walked. I did not die.For a month, I planned on killing myself: each day, that evening, the next morning, in the seclusion of the Spanish countryside. For a month, I found reasons to live in the food, drink and people on the trails and in the villages I haunted. Along the way, I shed pounds of clothing, fat and hardware that I did not need for my journey. I found, with each step, that my depression, PTSD and the desire to die was left just a little bit further behind me. I never lost it, but it had to jog to keep pace. In a little under a month, I finished my Camino.The manic pace I’d set for myself came at a cost of three trips to the hospital along the way, a slipped disk in my back and two lost toenails. It was a small price to pay for a journey that gave me, with each footstep, another reason to draw breath.Finished with Spain, I took a week in Porto, Portugal, to rest and reflect upon what I'd just accomplished.In the time since then, I’ve married. My wife sees me for what I am. She knows what I once was, and who I aspire to be. My urge to ramble has given way to a nomadic lifestyle where I have no roots save the love that I carry with me. My little family splits its time between Canada, the Rio Grande Valley and Mexico. My writing affords me the occasion to travel from time to time. I’ll be headed to Boston and New York City this month. Last year, I roamed China and Japan. It feels like enough and more than I could have had if I’d taken my life. I still feel the urge to do it, at times. But I’ve found the strength to open myself to counseling and medication: treatment for my PTSD. My wife has so much patience for my bullshit. Mine is not a perfect life. But it has, of late, felt like a good one.For many years, I wanted to meet Anthony Bourdain. Not for his celebrity, but to offer him my heartfelt thanks. His writing and television work showed me that there is delight and deep understanding of life to be found in the most simple of things: eating, talking and exploration. His work stoked my already burning wanderlust. I came to understand that, at least for me, inner peace is not something that one finds and keeps. It’s something that one has to search for, each day and in each moment. There could come a time where I will be unable to find a reason to keep such peace. I could take my life. But the spirit of what he showed me and what I have found since my first day in the Pyrenees Mountains has been enough to sustain me years beyond where I thought I would end.Thank you, Anthony, for the years that you helped to give me.Image: by Peabody Awards - Anthony Bourdain and Charlie Rose, CC BY 2.0, LinkAll other images via Seamus Bellamy

"This is better than The French Laundry, man."RIP, Anthony Bourdain.

Anthony Bourdain died today. He was 61.You may have seen his CNN program, or read a book, but you don't know all the world lost until you first read the New Yorker essay that set his career as a journalist, educator, and broadcast star into motion.(more…)

NEW REPORTING CONFIRMS what previous stories speculated: chief of staff John Kelly's phone was hacked, and now they know where. They still don't know by whom, or how, or why, or what the damage was.(more…)

Hurricane season is on. Hurricane Aletta is now a Category 4 storm, and is the first major hurricane of the 2018 Eastern Pacific hurricane season. A second, as-yet-unnamed and still-forming storm is right behind it. That storm could become the year's second named hurricane within the next few days.(more…)

Special Counsel Robert Mueller today brings new charges against Trump's former campaign chair Paul Manafort. Also named in the Friday court filing is Manafort's longtime Russia/Ukraine business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik.(more…)

Most politicians are smart enough to stick their snouts in the trough when no one is looking. EPA head Scott Pruitt is one of the dumb ones. His pea-sized brain would rattle in his skull if it wasn't cushioned by an enormous ego, one that causes him to think he's a famous and important person who needs to be protected from all the little people out to get him. Hence the first class and chartered flights, the luxury hotels, the soundproof offices, and the 24/7 security detail. It's gross overreach for a man whose only job is to hand over the department he runs to companies that want the freedom to eject pollutants into the air and water.I barely had time to get over being squicked out by the news that Pruitt ordered a staffer to procure for him a used mattress from one of Trump's hotels, when I learned that Pruitt used his expensive security detail to drive him to different hotels in a desperate search for a certain kind of special moisturizer he is fond of and is available at Ritz-Carltons.I'll bet the manufacturer of the lotion is terrified over being outed. Sales would tank. It might even spell the death of the company.From CNN:

Yesterday marked Dean Martin's 101st birthday. Happy birthday to the King of Cool.Fabled performer Dean Martin was born on June 7, 1917. Mr. Martin passed away on December 25th, 1995. I've never enjoyed Christmas.

This video was captured on Wednesday in Laramie, Wyoming. If I had a TV channel, I'd love to broadcast this. Wonder if anyone would mind.(Live Storms Media)

Apparently it's a tradition for cosmonauts to urinate on the rear right tires of the bus transporting them to the launch pad. Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev reportedly did just that Wednesday before the Expedition 56/57 crew took off for the International Space Station. While male cosmonauts release the stream directly from the source, females carry a cup of urine that they pour onto the tire. Space.com explains why:

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has dug up organic molecules, the raw building blocks of life. The robot drilled out the organic carbon samples from 3-billion-year-old sediments in Mars’s Gale Crater that was once filled with water. From the New York Times:

https://youtu.be/tCRI22ewnY4Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog was hugely influential on my life. I saw a copy when I was about 10 years old and it was a portal to a mind-blowing new world of possibilities. My outlook on everything changed that day. Years later, I traded subscriptions of The Whole Earth Review for bOING bOING (the zine, which Carla and I launched in 1987). Whole Earth Review was edited by Kevin Kelly, and he later hired me to work at Wired (he co-founded it with Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe) as an editor, even though I had zero experience editing anything other than a zine.Today, Kevin and I run a website called Cool Tools, which, like the Whole Earth Catalog, runs recommendations of tools written by people who use them.The Whole Earth Catalog is 50 years old this year. Stewart Brand has continued to do interesting things over the decades, and in this video, recorded last night in San Francisco, Stewart talks about his life and interests in front of a live audience.

No narration, no chyrons, no ads. Just a 10-hour loop of sea creatures living their lives in a world that seems light years away.[via Kottke]

In 2011 the American Physical Society estimated the cost of pulling a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere to be $600. A new study, based on the analysis of a pilot CO2-extraction plant that's been in operation since 2015, says the price has dropped to between US$94 and $232 a tonne, which "suggests that the geoengineering technology is inching closer to commercial viability," reports Nature.

It’s extraordinary! Exclamation points are flying in this week’s tabloids like they’re going out of style!Ellen Storms Out! RFK Junior Confronts Dad’s Killer! Taliban Targets Harry & Meghan! Harry’s Secret $90G Hair Transplant! Prince Was A Secret Porn Star! Eminem Turns Back on Dying Dad! It’s exhausting! And that’s just the National Enquirer!Hillary Can’t Walk Without A Back Brace! screams the Globe. Goldie Leaves Kurt For New Man! My Dad Ryan O’Neal Made Me A Junkie! Meghan’s Plastic Surgery Exposed! Roseanne’s Career Suicide! Eating Fish Won’t Cause Autism! (Who thought it would?)The celebrity mags can’t help but get in on the act. “Planning For Baby!” shouts the cover of Us mag, wildly speculating about the newlywed Royals. "Roseanne Put Us Through Hell!” tell the axed sit-com’s cast and crew. And there are photographs galore (Hot Pics!) of celebrities: Justin’s Getaway! Zach’s Snack Attack! Keeping Up With Trump! Soaking Up Some Sun! In True Gaga Fashion!Of course, the stars are just like us: They catch up on reading! They tote luggage! They take selfies! They go for a run! Their love of exclamation points is nothing short of extraordinary!Is People magazine above the fray? Of course not! Meghan and the Queen! Back Together! New Couple! Angelina Returns to Work – with the Kids! TV foodie Ree Drummond tells “How I Made My Dreams Come True!” Brody Jenner and bride Kaitlynn share their “Wedding in Paradise!” Even their cooking tips are exclamation-worthy: “20 Vegan Add-In Ideas!”Like the boy who cried wolf, this continual shower of exclamation points dulls readers to the possibility that an occasional story might genuinely be extraordinary. Instead, it all becomes pablum, as commonplace as the word “Exclusive!” above so many stories that appear elsewhere in countless other media outlets.So little of it matters, except to the participants, and as vicarious cautionary tales to middle America's aging La-Z-Boy generation.Did TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres really “dump” Portia de Rossi as the Enquirer cover proclaims? They’ve been making this claim for more than a year, and the couple seem as together as ever.Does political pundit Jon Stewart plan a TV “comeback” in Dancing With The Stars? Just because he’s a fan of the show doesn’t mean he’s ready to humiliate himself for our pleasure.Are machine gun-toting guards watching over Prince Harry and bride Meghan as the Enquirer claims that “Terror Stalks Royals’ Honeymoon”? Wherever the couple honeymoon – the magazine says they have been in Canada, though this remains unconfirmed – it would hardly be unusual for there to be a security detail armed with machine guns, regardless of the threat level.Has Meghan really persuaded Harry to have $90,000 hair transplant surgery in Los Angeles? Don’t hold your breath.“Crippled Hillary’s Bones Shattering!” declares the Globe, explaining that Mrs. Clinton’s recent use of heavy coats during heatwaves is covering up a cumbersome back brace. “I’m worried she may have had a spinal fracture,” says a doctor who has not treated Clinton, and who admits that osteoporosis is “not at all unusual in aging women.”Fortunately we have the crack investigative squad at Us mag to tell us that Katie Holmes wore it best, that Ashlee Simpson “would never jump out of a plane,” that actress Carrie Preston carries Listerine strips, a Tide bleach pen, and sunscreen in her Vera Bradley purse, and that the stars are just like us – but you already knew that you’re just like Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel and Chris Hemsworth, give or take a few million.Naturally, the ads in the tabloids are equally awash in exclamation points. "Only 10,000! Hurry!” cries the ad for a car-themed cuckoo clock. "Don’t Fear Your Stairs Any More!” says an ad for an automated stairlift. An ad for slippers screams: “Act Now & Get Free Shipping!” Or buy the "rotating musical glitter globe” decorated with kittens – “It Moves!”Most extraordinary is the ad for an officially-licensed Peanuts-themed illuminated Christmas tree – in June, two weeks before the first day of summer...Complete with snowflakes, Christmas decorations, Xmas lights and Snoopy in a Santa hat, topped by a large glowing star, the ad promises it’s “The Perfect Peanuts Christmas.” If that doesn’t deserve an exclamation mark, I don’t know what does.Onwards and downwards . . .

The BBC has weighed in on the debate over Article 13, a controversial last-minute addition to the EU's new Copyright Directive that will be voted on in 12 days; under Article 13, European sites will have to spy on every word, sound, picture, and video their users post and use a black-box copyright algorithm to decide whether or not to censor it. (more…)

Asian Boss, a YouTube channel that features person-in-the-street interviews around Asia on different topics, went to Shanghai to ask people about what they thought of white foreigners living in China, about skin lightening, and about "white monkey workers" -- white people hired by Chinese companies to appear at dinners and events to make the company seem more international.

It might sound counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to bring down a hacker is with another hacker. Commonly known as "white hats," or ethical hackers, these professionals use a cybercriminal's tools against them, sniffing out network vulnerabilities and patching them up before they can be exploited. In today's heightened cybersecurity climate, demand for these professionals is high, and you can train to join their ranks with the Certified Ethical Hacker Bootcamp Bundle, available today for $39.Complete with 19 courses and more than 70 hours of training, this collection is designed to prepare you for the EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker v9 exam, a powerful credential and stepping stone for anyone looking to pursue a career in cybersecurity. You'll learn from industry experts in a lab-filled environment, exploring common hacking threats, penetration testing techniques, and a myriad of other concepts critical to protecting networks from attack.The Certified Ethical Hacker Bootcamp Bundle is available in the Boing Boing Store for $39 today.

3D printing complex shapes is hard; the additive nature of most 3D printing means that the printer has to create sprues (struts that support parts of the structure during printing, which have to be removed later), or add in material that can be dissolved in a solvent bath after main production. (more…)

Muso is a London-based anti-piracy contractor, helping big entertainment companies conduct surveillance and legal threats against online infringers; in a new CitizenMe study they commissioned, 1,000 British internet users were surveyed; the headline finding: 83% of infringing downloads are triggered by an unsuccessful search for a commercially available version of the same work. (more…)

Gabriele Trovato is an Italian human-computer interaction researcher at Tokyo's Waseda University; along with colleagues from Peru's Pontificia Universidad Católica, he presented Design Strategies for Representing the Divine in Robots (Sci-Hub mirror) at March's ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction. (more…)

In 2004, Paul Bush released When Darwin Sleeps, 3,000 digital stills of insects in the Walter Linsenmaier in the Lucerne Nature Museum. They flash by so quickly they feel animated, or as if evolution itself is happening on screen. Now he's released a better quality copy than has been previously available online. (more…)

Dozens of people were killed and injured when London's Grenfell Tower went up in flames last year. The fire spread under dangerous ornamental cladding designed to make the aging structure, which lacked sprinkers, look modern. The BBC made a set of graphics to show the terrible speed of the blaze, which leapt up through 20 apartments within 10 minutes.

Well, not really a roast, but a warm light chafing, perhaps. (more…)

What's Dan Harmon's secret to creating viral moments in cult hits like Rick & Morty? He and co-creator Justin Roiland have license to "take this really dumb thing incredibly seriously." (more…)

This year's snow cyclone led to an ocean phenomenon called slush waves, or slurpee waves. A few hardy souls decided to try to surf them. (more…)

In Washington today, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan received a letter signed by 47 Senate Democrats and two independents calling on him to schedule a vote to keep Net Neutrality rules active. Under Trump's FCC chief Ajit Pai, the Obama-era rules to help keep the internet free, fair, and equal will die next week.(more…)

Alphabet, Google's parent company, promises not to allow use of its artificial intelligence technology in weapons and in certain forms of surveillance.(more…)

Covering Alex Van Halen's drumming on "Hot for Teacher" has become its own YouTube genre, but few have nailed it as well as 13-year-old Mia Morris. (more…)

I was recently asked by USA Today's technology site, Reviewed.com, to sort out a feature on the best rechargeable batteries. I called in a ton of the things, in a number of sizes, and got down to testing. One of the tests that I decided to run was to pop the various AA cells I had on hand, by brand, into a battery-powered fan to see how long they could run the thing for. I opted to order the least expensive fans I could find that I felt, based on my past experience testing fans (if you work as a hardware journalist for long enough, sooner or later, you'll have tested damn near everything), wouldn't crap out on me after running for a few hours: the Honeywell HTF090B Turbo on the Go Personal Fan. In order to cut down on the amount of time it'd take me to run the tests I needed to conduct, I ordered four of them.To my surprise, I fell in love with an $11 piece of hardware.This little Honeywell fan can be run off of a USB connection, making it a great choice for using at your desk, or four AA batteries. When running the fan on rechargeable battery power, I was able to get a maximum run time of close to 10 hours. Not bad! It's light and compact enough that you could stick it in a carry-on bag to take with you traveling or toss it in the back of a car to keep you cool during a bit of tent camping on a weekend. The fan's stand, which collapses down for storage, is adjustable and can also be used to hang it from a hook.Now that I'm finished running the tests I bought the fans for, I've got one plugged into my MacBook's USB port to keep me cool as I work, and another one, running off of batteries, set up for my pooch to keep her cool on the floor.I love being surprised by how much a simple, inexpensive device can improve upon my quality of life. In a world where we increasingly covet items that are priced out of reach for many, it's a joy to discover.

The eufy body scale, made by Anker, has a bluetooth radio to store your weight in your Google Fit, Fitbit, or Apple Health account. It also records body fat, bone mass, and muscle mass, but I think home scales like this don't do a good job of measuring anything other than weight. If you use code EUFYS789 it's just $29 on Amazon.

A gentleman turned his SUV into a battering ram, repeatedly bashing another car. Eventually exiting his vehicle to climb atop the target of his anger, the rage filled driver slips and is apprehended.Via CBS:

The Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors' Kei Truck Garden Contest challenges people to transform the beds of their miniature pickup trucks into lovely mobile gardens. From Spoon & Tamago:

Jerry Maren, the last of the living munchkins from the Wizard of Oz (1939), has died at age 98. Maren, who was 18-years-old at the time of the film, was a member of the "Lollipop Guild." After the Wizard of Oz, he appeared in The Twilight Zone, Where the Buffalo Roam, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Seinfeld, and many other films and TV shows."I've done so many things in show business, but people say, ‘You were in The Wizard of Oz?’ It takes people’s breath away," Maren said in a 2011 interview. "But then I realized, 'Geez, it must have been a hell of a picture, because everyone remembers it everywhere I go."(Rolling Stone)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KSiyaqnZYs

When a South Korean tries to visit a porn site, they will discover that the government's National Police Agency Cyber Bureau has blocked it. In this Asian Boss video of street interviews, people explain how they route around this censorship, using P2P networks, social media, and redirecting IP addresses. As one woman says, "according to our male friends, they search for porn using some code. They all have their ways of downloading it."

This bear smartly checked out a couple cops suspiciously loitering in their car on the side of the road. Reportedly the officers were just eating their lunch. This time.

David MacNeil, the founder and CEO of a company that makes floor mats, just bought a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO for $70 million, making it the most expensive car in the world. Only 39 Ferrari 250 GTOs were ever built and most current owners refuse to part with theirs for any price.From CNN:

The video below makes it clear that EPA head Scott Pruitt has learned from his boss how to defend himself when people call him out for breaking laws and wasting extravagant sums of taxpayer money -- make no apology, make no sense, attack the accusers, and hide behind religion and patriotism.Here's Pruitt's response after reporter Jessica Smith asked him about the revelation that he ordered one of his staffers to set up a meeting with the head of Chick-fil-A with the intention of securing a franchise for his wife:

It's enough to look at the recent text being discussed in the European Parliament under Rapporteur MEP Axel Voss in the lead JURI (legal affairs) committee: it's a barely literate hodge-podge of inchoate ideas. And that's before some of the 1000 amendments proposed for the final JURI report have been voted on and shoved into the text to butcher it further.Legislative rough-and-tumble is normal enough for complex legislation. It wouldn't matter too much if (a) the end results were good and (b) the public weren't being misled by some of the claims made about what the constantly shifting text really means. But, unable to respond to the justified criticisms of the proposals, it seems that some of the copyright directive's supporters are trying to muddy the waters. The plan is evidently to hide what is really going on here -- the destruction of the Internet as we know it in the EU -- until it's too late.Once the directive is done and dusted, the copyright industry can safely celebrate the passing of a law that diminishes the online public space while propping up lazy companies that have refused to propoerly embrace the digital world. Even once the harmful consequences of Articles 3, 11 and 13 become evident as they enter into force, there's no chance the copyright directive will be revised or revisited for many years. It matters little how misleading or downright mendacious the campaign in favour of the copyright directive becomes: once it is passed, it is passed.That effectively irreversible nature of the EU law makes the current fight against the copyright directive's worst elements all-the-more vital. If we don't stop them now, we never will. The key action is contacting MEPs explaining why the proposed versions of Articles 3, 11 and 13 are so harmful, and what the consequences would be for the EU and its digital realm if they are not thrown out or at least greatly modified.Mythbusting Misinformation on the Article 13 Censorship MachineThe new SaveYourInternet site has plenty of resources to help people do that, including tools that make it easy to contact MEPs via email, phone or Twitter. Those resources deal with the facts of the situation. Here, I'd like to address some of the fiction that is floating around, because it's part of the toxic atmosphere of calculated misinformation designed to make it hard to discuss effectively the copyright directive with MEPs.The EU Legislative Process, and why we need to act nowOne of the problems here is that the EU's legislative process is poorly understood by most people. That's not a criticism of the latter: the EU has done a terrible job of explaining itself, so it's no wonder that the public finds it hard to follow how the sausage machine of government grinds up proposals and spits out new laws.As a result, people may not appreciate how important the text in the JURI report, to be agreed later this month, is in terms of the final result. Currently, the JURI text is very similar to that of the Council, as drawn up under the Bulgarian Presidency. This means when the legislative discussion enters the so-called "trilogue" negotiations, which involve representatives of the European Commission, the Council and the European Parliament, the final result will inevitably be very close to the deeply-flawed Council/JURI text.We need MEPs to stand up for EU citizens, and to introduce strong alternatives, particularly for Article 13, the most pernicious part of the current text. Here, the only acceptable solution is removing it completely.It's still filtering, even if you don't say the word "filtering"It is striking that the different draft versions of the copyright directive texts all assiduously avoid using the tell-tale word "filtering". But it is clear from the obligations imposed by Article 13 that a constant, general filter is the only technology capable of spotting files that copyright companies want removed automatically. In order to ensure that there is no copy of material on a site, it is obvious that every single upload has to be inspected, compared against a list of "forbidden" material, and then filtered out if necessary. There is simply no other way, so it is entirely false to claim that Article 13 does not impose a general filtering obligation on companies. It most certainly does, just not explicitly. And a general, omnipresent filter is surveillance, and leads inevitably to censorship - which is why the draft directive avoids using the term.This goes way beyond notice-and-takedownThere's another misapprehension about the upload filter. Sometimes, people claim that it is nothing special or onerous, since it's just like the current take-down system employed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, and the e-commerce directive in the EU. But the crucial difference is that those only apply to allegedly infringing material; the copyright directive would allow companies to send vast lists of material and require that every upload be filtered against them.The Council text makes this clear: "it may not be proportionate to expect small and micro enterprises to apply preventive measures and that therefore in such cases these enterprises should only be expected to expeditiously remove specific unauthorised works and other subject matter upon notification by rightholders." Other companies, though, are expected to apply "preventive measures" -- that is, to filter out pre-emptively anything the copyright industry cares to send through. As well as being a completely disproportionate obligation, this also confirms that a general upload filter would be needed since it is the only technology that could even to attempt to achieve that.There's no magic filter for all types of contentOne claim in this context is that this massive filtering effort of every single upload isn't a problem. After all, some point out, Google has adopted it on a voluntary basis for uploads to YouTube. This shows that the technology already exists, they say, and so rolling it out more widely is straightforward. This overlooks a number of issues.Google's Content ID video filtering technology required 50,000 hours of coding, and cost $60 million to develop. It's not only a huge project, it's proprietary, which means that Google probably won't want to share it with rivals. And if it did, it would doubtless charge high fees for a licence. If other companies wanted to offer filtering technology, they would probably have to spend similar amounts to Google. The high costs involved, and the relatively small market for this specialised software - completely separate and different solutions need to be developed for video, music, images, text and software code, making it even more unattractive as an investment - together mean that only very deep-pocketed companies would be interested.As a result, they will probably be US-based, like Audible Magic. The company offers a filtering system for music, and will be well-placed to pick up business thanks to the copyright directive. This means that the EU's Internet would not only be automatically censored by black boxes running inscrutable software, but the embedded rules for that censorship would probably be set by US companies. Does the EU really think this is the best way of encouraging a vibrant indigenous digital economy?The GDPR is an ally, not the enemyFinally, one of the more absurd claims flying around is that the resistance to Article 13 has nothing to do with concerns about surveillance and censorship as a result of general upload filtering. Instead, some say, this is simply another attack by big US companies that hate the EU's approach to regulation, particularly the GDPR, which imposes stringent privacy protections on hitherto freewheeling online services. While it is certainly true that the major US online services such as Facebook and Google dislike the GDPR, and continue to press for it to be interpreted in the weakest way possible, this is unrelated to the fight against Article 13.Indeed, the constant monitoring required for the upload filter to work is not only the antithesis of the GDPR, but contravenes it. Article 22 of the GDPR states: "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing." Filtering is an automated decision process that has major negative consequences for EU citizens, notably in limiting their right to freedom of expression. Since filtering algorithms cannot capture the rich complexity of EU copyright law -- even courts find it hard - they are inevitably unable to "safeguard the data subject's rights and freedoms and legitimate interests" as required by the GDPR, and are thus illegal under that law. So, far from being a reaction against the GDPR, efforts to get Article 13 thrown out actually build on it.Please try to Save Your InternetAlthough many of the "mythbusting" points above may seem like quibbles, discussions about the copyright directive in general, and Article 13 in particular, very often hinge on these subtle points. Forewarned is forearmed, and being able to counter any misleading points that MEPs might raise -- either maliciously or simply through lack of knowledge -- should help to make conversations with them more fruitful and ultimately more successful. Please try.(Image: Georgie Pauwels, CC-BY)

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