A recently concluded cybersecurity review conducted by the Trump White House and Department of Homeland Security finds most government agencies remain shockingly insecure, despite Trump's campaign promises for super great cybersecurity unlike the very bad hacker criminal Hillary Clinton who bleached emails and acid-washed her network devices, and should be in jail.(more…)

Federal prosecutors investigating Michael Cohen already have access to 300,000 pieces of evidence from the digital devices seized in April. They're about to get access to more than a million of 'em, because Trump's legal team vastly overstated how much would be legitimately 'attorney-client privileged material.' (more…)

Food Exposed with Nelufar Hedayat is a timely look at the future of food for the globe. In this episode, she visits a lab working on meeting the demand of consumers joining the "veg rev," including the growing numbers of flexitarians (semi-vegetarians) who only eat meat occasionally. (more…)

Mesmerizing and anxiety-inducing at once, this short clip of Kimi Werner descending into a cave has an otherworldly feel thanks to the stabilized camera used by Justin David Baluch. (more…)

German artist Guido Zimmerman's Cuckoo Blocks are an expansion of his project creating cuckoo clocks in the Brutalist style. (more…)

FOR THE KIDS IN YOUR LIFE, AND THEIR SUMMER READING: Get Ruben Bolling’s hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures."The EMU Club inhabits exactly the world I always hoped to live in when I was 12, when the answer to questions like 'Where did I put my toy' led inevitably to alien conspiracies and secret underground tunnels. A book for the curious and adventurous!" -Cory Doctorow, author of "For the Win" and "Little Brother""The type of non-stop action and improbably hilarious fun that only a kid could dream up. ... The EMU Club's adventures perfectly capture the intersection of imagination and wonder - the crossroad that's so often found in cardboard boxes, pillow forts and backyards everywhere." -GeekDadGet Book the First, "Alien Invasion in My Backyard," here.Get Book the Second, "Ghostly Thief of Time," here.--JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and much more.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Invisible London is a great primer on infrared filmmaking, with lovely shots of London as the backdrop. (more…)

Here's a gem from 1999: This is a self-aware Scooby-Doo-themed parody of the popular low-budget "found footage" horror flick, The Blair Witch Project.It's called The Scooby-Doo Project and those meddling kids at Cartoon Network got away with it too.In 2016, Paste reported this:

De Beers has long fought against the sale of "synthetic" carbon chunks as gemstones -- a losing battle given that telling the difference between lab-made carbon chunks and carbon chunks from underground isn't happening without very expensive machines. Now they've given up, and will sell their own carbon chunks.

This clip, posted by David Hoffman a few years ago, is going viral this fine Wednesday morning: "I was shooting a documentary called “The Information Society” in 1979 and filmed this in Cedar Rapids Iowa. Compushop had just begun selling the Apple II and this guy had a keen sense of what was coming."

Tim Hwang has announced a fun new venture: the "Trade Journal Cooperative." It's a subscription service to have a printed niche trade journal sent to you every quarter (US addresses only).

YouTuber Pop Culture Detective has a lovely video essay up on 1980s movies that shaped our humanity, and he chooses five often-overlooked favorites of his. What films would you list? His choices are: (more…)

Fortinte has eclipsed the previously reigning PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and now PUBG believes that success has come at the expense of their copyrights. So here comes the lawsuit! (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cyjN-dc2RcPhiladelphia's WHYY radio reports that visitors to the city's hospital emergency room are blitzed for weeks with ads for personal injury lawyers, thanks to "geofenced ad" brokerages. (more…)

Every year, a gaggle of lunatics gather at the top of Cooper's Hill in the Cotswold Hills of South West England. Following in the footsteps as well as the ambulances of those that came before them, they hurl themselves down the 45-degree grade of Cooper's Hill in pursuit of a nine-pound wheel of cheese.I shit you not.From Wikipedia:

Some folks believe that when it’s your time to go, you’re gonna go, no matter what you do. Were he still able to speak, at least one former citizen of the Roman city of Pompei might have something to say on the subject. In a press release pushed out by Parco Arceologico Di Pompei, it was announced that archeologists recently uncovered the remains of some poor bastard that managed to survive the initial eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, only to be crushed like a bug by a flying piece of stonework that was most likely tossed into the air by explosive volcanic gases which followed the eruption.From Parco Arceologico Di Pompei, via Google Translate:

Here's an unusual opportunity for a hardcore Star Wars fan. An authenticated, screen-used segment of the original Death Star (yes, from 1977) can be bid on through eBay.

When Sony announced in 2014 that support was ending for Aibo, their pioneering line of robotic dogs, former Sony employee Nobuyuki Norimatsu launched A-Fun, a repair service in Japan, to take care of any ailing Aibos. Things progressed from there. Video below. From National Geographic:

That's the current US Vice President on the House Floor in 2003 wishing happy birthday to Garfield the comic cat.Garfield creator Jim Davis was born in Marion, Indiana and at the time of the video Pence was an Indiana congressperson.(Thanks, UPSO!)

In the early 1970s, Levi's ran these fantastic psychedelic TV commercials with narration by Ken Nordine, the beat creator of the pioneering Word Jazz albums of the 1950s that melded far-out poetry with hip musical accompaniment. Far fucking out.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jCJURLuzdw

The older I get, the hairier I get. I combat my fast-growing ear and nose hair with a Panasonic trimmer. Amazon is selling it for $10. It is easy to clean, and runs on a AA battery.

A 3-year-old armless kid who learned how to eat with his feet was refused service by a disapproving IHOP manager.

ABC cancelled "Roseanne" after Roseanne, once again, went off on a racist tear.Via Variety:

Louisiana preacher Jesse Duplantis needs a new jet so he can share the good word with people around the world without having to stop and refuel, as he is forced to do with his current fleet of jets.Standing in front of framed photos of his jet, he delivers his pitch:

UPDATE*** ABC cancelled RoseanneDisney and subsidiary ABC are standing by quietly while vicious racist Roseanne Barr erupts with Islamophobic and anti-gay remarks.via HuffPo:

Red Giant's chief creative officer Stu Maschwitz used Adobe After Effects to painstakingly create Tank, a fantastic tribute to 1980s vector graphics videogames like Battlezone, the Vectrex system, and the original Star Wars coin-op machine. Below, "The Making of Tank."https://youtu.be/WRkYP7wnD40

In the 1970s psychologist David Rosenhan sent healthy volunteers to 12 psychiatric hospitals, where they claimed to be hearing voices. Once they were admitted, they behaved normally, but the hospitals diagnosed all of them as seriously mentally ill. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the Rosenhan experiment, which challenged the validity of psychiatric diagnosis and set off a furor in the field.We'll also spot hawks at Wimbledon and puzzle over a finicky payment processor.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Differential gears can be used for all sorts of interesting things, as YouTuber Maker's Muse demonstrates with this 3D-printed hand crank that only turns clockwise. (more…)

Coquina clams are so attuned to life in the foreshore that they all know exactly when to dig into the sand and exactly when to pop up. (more…)

A team led by Jean-Yves Rauch at FEMTO-ST demonstrated the μRobotex nanofactory's capabilities by building a tiny origami house from silica membranes. (more…)

A new California pilot program will let drivers replace their metal license plates with e-ink versions that will eliminate the need to use stickers to prove that you've renewed your tags, allow you to display arbitrary vanity messages when the car is stationary (the license plate number shrinks down and displays in a corner under these circumstances, allowing meter-maids to still ticket you), and to remote switch your plate display to STOLEN if your car is ripped off. (more…)

Pete Warden writes convincingly about computer scientists' focus on improving machine learning algorithms, to the exclusion of improving the training data that the algorithms interpret, and how that focus has slowed the progress of machine learning. (more…)

Ed Piskor's offering an annotated page-by-page look at the first part of X-Men: Grand Design, his epic retelling of how Marvel comics' pantheon of heroes came to be. Catch up here. — Eds.Director’s commentary…

Blowing smoke rings or the French inhale (blowing smoke out of your mouth and into your nostrils) are smoking tricks of yesteryear – how about vaping smoke through your ear? Pretty impressive, but according to a doctor on Quora, you can only perform this trick if you have "perforated eardrums.""Smokers have some smoke entering their middle ear, but it (like the air inside it) is absorbed through the membranes lining that space. There would only be a way for the smoke to come out through one’s ear canals if the tympanic membrane had a hole in it."

Emily Weinman, a smidge under drinking age at 20 years old, went to the beach in Southern New Jersey to enjoy Memorial Day with her daughter, her daughter's father, and a friend. A police officer suspected her of underage drinking, and he didn't take kindly to her screaming when he tried to arrest her, so he punched her a couple of times.From ABC13:

Last week, officials in charge of stemming the latest outbreak of Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo began the process of inoculating healthcare workers and other individuals who may have come in direct contact with infect individuals, in the Congolese city of Mbandaka. According to The Globe & Mail, inoculations are now also being doled out in Bikoro, a town in the northwest of Congo, where 5 of the 12 confirmed cases of Ebola are believed to have originated.It’s believed that there are at least 56 cases of the Ebola: 35 cases have been confirmed, leaving 13 probable cases and 13 suspected cases for doctors to deal with and patients to fret over.From The Globe & Mail:

In less than two decades, Portugal went from suffering an epidemic of heroin use, drug-related crimes and deaths to enjoying one of the lowest rates of drug-related deaths in the world. This excellent, short video from Bloomberg explores why this is the case.

It took 22-year-old Mamoudou Gassama just seconds to reach a child that was dangling from the fifth-floor balcony of a building in Paris, saving the four-year-old boy.The undocumented migrant worker from Mali was rewarded handsomely for his courageous act. French President Emmanuel Macron met with the man and granted him French citizenship and a job as a firefighter.USA Today reports:

In 1942, the US Book Republication Program permitted American publishers to reprint "exact reproductions" of Germany's scientific texts without payment; seventy-five years later, the fate of this scientific knowledge forms the basis of a "natural experiment" analysed by Barbara Biasi and Petra Moser for The Center for Economic and Policy Research, who compare the fate of these texts to their contemporaries who didn't have this semi-public-domain existence. (more…)

The Polish thinktank Centrum Cyfrowe commissioned designers to come up with "speculative designs" for products that could be enabled by a European approach to copyright reforms that favored a more equitable balance tilted towards creators and the public and away from large corporations -- even as the EU is preparing to kill this future by passing an extreme, corporate-aligned copyright regime that runs on censorship and mass surveillance. (more…)

It's been eight years since the Conservative government of David Cameron declared its austerity programme, slashing transfer grants to local governments and putting private firms in charge of rooting out people who could be denied benefits on any technicality. (more…)

plainbudget is a minimalist budgeting app that lets you sum your cashflow in plaintext: think Markdown, but it's a spreadsheet.

Dave writes, "Maxime Bernier, a far-right asshole who ran for leadership of Canada's Progressive Conservative party on a platform of 'fair gun policy' and 'standing up for rural Canadians,' decided that his colleague across the aisle (Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes) thought too much about her skin colour, and let it taint her point of view." (more…)

Gardner Dozois started his career in science fiction as a (very good) writer, but quickly transitioned to the role that defined his life in the field, as an editor, taking over Asimov's from 1984 to 2004, winning 40 Hugos, 40 Nebulas, 30 Locus Awards, and the best Professional Editor Hugo Award 15 times. (more…)

Enigma's Sadeness (part 1) was riveting when it appeared in 1991, a peak of remix culture that transported millions to another place, the old world and the new age meeting in a feast of futuristic EDM. But it also encompassed musical tropes (Gregorian chants, appropriated "world music", new age spirituality, that drum loop) that were quickly and thoroughly debased. Within a few years, Sadeness and its sequelae seemed not only cheesy but vaguely problematic, other histories fed pell-mell into a white guy's synthesizer. The criticism is a little unfair, given that other similar projects -- Deep Forest, Adiemus -- were much grosser on that front.Anyway, as Trump sailed into the White House in November 2016, Enigma finally released Sadeness (part 2) to little public attention or acclaim.It's a slow electronica mashup of Bach's Toccata and Fugue. It's all that was good and bad and very bad about the "sampler mannerism" that followed the second summer of love and acid house and "techno" and that book by the KLF. Especially the setting of esoteric imagery against electronic beats that you can't dance to and the echoing murmur of Poe's law. It's unexpectedly obvious.P.S. The best Enigma track is Out From The Deep, a one-off psychedelic rock trip to Atlantis that doesn't sound remotely like anything else they ever did.

Segregation was an institution of the American south, but the north had its ways and means. At the New York Times, Andrew W. Kahrl explains that recent startling examples of black people being hounded, threatened or lawed out of white spaces are nothing new.

The foghorn at Sumburgh in the Shetland Islands of Scotland is powered by more than one 44hp Kelvin K-Series diesel engines, powering the Alley and MacLellan compressors which blow the horn itself."Just so's you know," writes JJ Jamieson, who posted this footage to YouTube, "the horn was originally much louder at the end, but YouTube's audio algorithm turned the volume down. I tried several versions but it wasn't having it."

Most "gaming" laptops look like props from cheap 1990s sci-fi: greebled plastic carbuncles, all edgy red LEDs and bloated bezels, whirring like drones in a tiled bathroom as soon as gameplay begins. The new Razer Blade 15, though, is not only as sleek as an ultrabook, but looks beautiful: like a 2001: Space Odyssey monolith with a luminous Pride flag in it.It comes with a matte 1080-line display (optionally with a 144Hz refresh rate) or a glossy 4k one, both 15.6" across, a GTX 1060 or 1070 Max-Q video card, up to 32GB of RAM and an 8th-generation i7-8750H CPU. It's 14" wide, 9.3" deep and just under .7" thick, and weighs about 4.6 pounds, going an ounce either way depending on options.Prices start at $1900 for the entry-level model (HD, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, GTX 1060 GPU), up to $2900 [Amazon] with all the upgrades.It comes with softare to make the rainbow backlighting any color you please, and it is my tragedy and shame to be that "minimalist" guy who just makes it plain white.Full specs and prices after the jump.

Hobbs, N.M. is an oil town out in No Country For Old Men country, and I lived there for 7 years after moving to the United States. It's rarely in the papers, but thanks to a weeping Mary statue at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, it's become international news.