A woman told police that casino mogul Steve Wynn raped her, and that she became pregnant and had a child from the rape, ' while another has reported she was forced to resign from a Las Vegas job after she refused to have sex with him,' reports AP.(more…)

Calling the FCC's decision to kill Net Neutrality the "road to serfdom" Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR] introduced the legislation he'd co-sponsored with Senator Ed Markey [D-MA] to restore Neutrality. (more…)

Amazon will acquire Ring, the Santa Monica, CA-based home video surveillance maker.(more…)

Anti-Semitic attacks rose faster in 2017 than any time in the past 40 years, The Anti-Defamation League today said.(more…)

Irish filmmaker Hazel Hayes sits down with Irish star Saoirse Ronan to chat about Brooklyn, Lady Bird, and what it’s like to leave the motherland. You can also enjoy Hayes’ hilarious, booze-infused conversation with director Taika Waititi:https://youtu.be/KlEoIswnDdc

Back in 2016, LEGO aficionado Hugh Scandrett wasn't able to get his Addams Family mansion replica into review as an official box set because it used 7,000 pieces, which were 4,000 too many according to rules at LEGO Ideas.His new build uses almost 3,000 pieces and qualifies to be voted for in the crowdsourced portion of the competition. (You might remember seeing the LEGO ship in a bottle that recently won.)Scandrett's new build is also equally as incredible, with many of the same details as the first.Here's a top-down look at the mansion's interior on the first level:And here's the Addams Family as creepy and kooky mini figs:There are lots more photos of this build over at LEGO Ideas. While you're there, cast your vote for it. It needs 10K votes to get into review and, as of this writing, it's got 4133.(Dangerous Minds)

Today Trump hired Brad Parscale to be his campaign manager when he runs again in 2020. And today said Parscale liked a Twitter comment that called Trump an idiot.The "idiot" comment was in response to a Tweet made by Trump: “'I’ve been skeptical about the collusion and obstruction claims for the last year. I just don’t see the evidence....in terms of the collusion, it’s all a bit implausible based on the evidence we have.' Jonathan Turley on @FoxNews"

On March 22, Institute for the Future, the nonprofit thinktank where I'm a researcher, is hosting an event celebrating the Voyager Golden Record at our Palo Alto, California offices/gallery! Joining me in conversation will be legendary astronomer Frank Drake, the father of the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence and technical director of the original Voyager Record in 1977. Tickets are $10 and RSVP is required: "The Voyager Golden Record: Celebrating a Journey Through Space and Time" I hope to see you there! Here's the full announcement...

The United States is a bit more corrupt than tight-arsed northern European and richer Commonwealth nations, but isn't particularly corrupt all considered. Trump's slackin'! Movers and shakers: Britain itself cleaned up its act after years of politicans dipping into the public kitty, but Australia's slipping--reportedly a crisis of perception more than actual corruption, but alarming all the same.

Kris Harbour shows off his delightully cosy off-grid cottage in the woods, powered by hydro and complete with all mod-cons. Door's a bit squeaky, though.

Waters along the Ohio River are at record levels, reports USA Today. Pittsburgh's still above water, mostly, but Cincinnatti is in trouble: the highest floodline in decades.

Aron D’Souza is the man behind Peter Thiel's successful campaign to destroy Gawker through litigation, according to an exposé by Buzzfeed News. The whole thing seems to dance pretty close to the line for what constitutes mainteneance. (more…)

INSIDER takes you inside the doughnut making process at a Krispy Kreme location in Burbank, California. It’s enough to make you want to order a whole bouquet of doughnuts.

https://youtu.be/lwZBlZhks44Sassy Trump, Peter Serafinowicz's alternate voicing of President Donald Trump's absurdly macho theatrics, has returned.(more…)

Nick Johnstone's "Programmer's Oath" is billed as "An oath for programmers, comparable to the Hippocratic Oath." Naturally, it's on Github and you can create a pull request if you think that Johnstone got something wrong. (more…)

Who believes a word this guy says? All of it was babble, for the most part.Video via NBC News

Designed by Ed Roberts and released in 1974, the MITS ALTAIR sparked the personal computer revolution and was the basis for Microsoft's first product, the Altair BASIC interpreter. It cost $439. While ALTAIR replica kits and online emulators have been available for years, there's now a $149 kit that substitutes the ALTAIR guts with an Arduino Due while duplicating its iconic LED-laden case. From Stephen Cass's review of the Altairduino at IEEE Spectrum:

A boy in China thought it was a good idea to hose down the buttons in his elevator by peeing all over them. I have to say, he's got an impressive spray, able to douse the entire panel. But soon after he zipped up and readied himself to disembark the lift, the doors jiggled around but didn't open for him. The buttons started blinking in a glitchy fit, going haywire as the lights went dark.The boy was trapped, and according to Metro, had to be rescued by a maintenance crew. He tried to deny any wrong doing – even his parents came to his defense and said it would be impossible to pee that high – but hey, that's where videos come in handy. His parents will have to pay for the damages.

According to time traveler Michael Phillips who will be born in the year 2043, another time traveler named Titor from 2038 prevented a civil war in the US by uniting the country around 9/11. What else does Michael have to report?“I do want to tell you about North Korea because they do attempt to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States – that happens later on this year in late 2018. Hopefully we can change the timeline so it doesn’t happen. That’s a partial reason for creating this video.”Also, SpaceX will bring humans to Mars in 2025 with the establishment of Martian bases in 2032.(Mysterious Universe)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y8fyIVhqXI&w=560&h=315]Further reading: WFMU's UBUWeb has an excellent survey of all ten issues of ASPEN.From an ongoing biography of John Wilcock, by Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall. (See previous Boing Boing posts)Ethan Persoff is currently working on a daily comic book/audio series called The Bureau. Listen to a complete playlist of all current tracks:[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/412720763" params="color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true" width="100%" height="200" iframe="true" /]Scott Marshall is currently working on a comics adaptation of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

Johnny Cash was born on February 26, 1932. That's today – except, 86 years in the past.When Cash died back in 2003, I was pretty shaken up. I grew up listening to his music. Once I had my own home, his music was in constant rotation, along with bands like The Clash, The Pogues, and James.Most of the people I know remember him from his latter day works, like his cover of "Hurt," or for Joaquin Phoenix's portrayal of him in Walk the Line. When I think of Johnny, it's for the fact that he never missed a chance to call bullshit on power or to highlight the plight of the less fortunate in the music that he wrote. "Man in Black" is a fine example of that.Cash was no saint, but he tried hard to be a better person than he really was. I suppose, being something of an occasional turd myself, I still look to him in that regard.

Parents who load their tablets and smartphones up with fun educational apps for their kids to play with may actually be doing them more harm than good. According to The Guardian, spending too much time tapping and swiping away at touchscreens is leaving the muscles in many children's hands too weak to hold a pencil.In the article, Sally Payne, a pediatric occupational therapist, explains that the nature of play has changed over the past decade. Instead of giving kids things to play with that build up their hand muscles, such as building blocks, or toys that need to be pushed or pulled along, parents have been handing them tablets and smartphones. Because of this, by the time they're old enough to go to school, many children lack the hand strength and fine motor control required to correctly hold a pencil and write. In order to correct the problem, some parents are going so far as to send their kids to pediatric occupational therapists, like Payne:

In this sweet HiHo Kids video, a group of young children chat with Alice, a kindly centenarian who once worked as a decoder in WWII. They ask some really direct questions which she answers with grace and wisdom.(Tastefully Offensive)

The YouTube channel Half As Interesting digs into the weird jurisdictional exemptions of freeports—special economic zones that exist within countries but aren’t governed by the same laws. And it turns out freeports have a strange and unexpected connection to the world of fine art too. You can read more about freeports, the art world, and the uber rich in this 2013 article from The Economist:

Beauty vlogger Sailor J is known for her biting social commentary, according to Allure:

Ann Reardon of the YouTube channel How To Cook That talks through her recipe for a “double rainbow unicorn apple pie.” Even if the dessert isn’t your jam, Reardon’s soothing voice is reason enough to watch her tutorial.

Consider the above Exhibit A. Below, Exhibit B.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAozgz3fLQk&feature=youtu.be&t=10s

For those who didn’t get a chance to watch much of the Olympics this year, NBC Sports helpfully edited together all nine Team USA gold medal wins into one short video. You can also watch a slightly more extended look at how Team USA won its first ever gold medal in curling right here:https://youtu.be/WiQeLGqBfcs

This ain't Mark Roberts' first rodeo.The British nudist who hopped onto an Olympic ice rink at PyeongChang in a pink tutu and a monkey-faced codpiece (strategically covering his junk, of course) has a long history of streaking. For 25 years now, Roberts has run bare (partially or completely) at hundreds of international sport events, including Super Bowls. Yahoo News reports that Roberts has performed his stunts at 562 events in 22 countries.With the message "Peace + Love" scrawled on his chest, the pony-tailed dad-of-three jumped over the rink's barrier Friday morning after the Men’s 1,000-meter Speed Skating event, slipping and sliding on the ice: https://youtu.be/hbMLGgOwJmAHere's a revealing (heh) interview with Roberts from 2001:https://youtu.be/vbHWgeHJyB0And here's a 2008 interview with him and then his mother (who admits dropping him on his head as a baby):https://youtu.be/IUWGXA5tcs0As my pal jessiejessup quipped, "Not all heroes wear capes."screengrab via Watch Life

Frank Howarth has "been into spheres lately."

https://youtu.be/O4-j4kwtu9Y?t=4m30sJump straight to 4:30 in this otherwise riveting examination of a fixed-displacement oil pump, posted by AvE. My favorite part is when the kid analogizes the pump's pentalobe shape to screws rather than flowers. Engineers!

Late last month, a woman in Alabaster, Alabama spotted an unusual bird in her backyard feeder, which was soon revealed to be an extremely rare yellow-pigmented Northern cardinal.AL.com reports:

We've certainly heard plenty of reporters and cable news talking heads marble-mouthing their way through "Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School" over the past week. It definitely doesn't want to roll off of the tongue. But who exactly is the school's namesake, Marjory Stoneman Douglas?Turns out, Marjory Douglas was a bit of a badass in her own right, a writer of some repute who became a relentless advocate for preserving the Florida everglades. She was also an outspoken suffragist and civil rights advocate. She died in 1998 at the age of 108. (more…)

Staying organized isn't always easy, and sometimes it takes more than a digital calendar to keep track of all the moving parts in a project. For those looking to get a better grip on their big-time to-dos, Aeon Timeline 2 delivers a host of tools designed to help you stay on top of events, divide and conquer big projects, and better organize your information, and it's on sale in the Boing Boing Store for $19.99.Whether you're working on a major project or just a simple assignment, Aeon Timeline 2 allows you to manage your task's events, materials, and relationships in an intuitive interface. You can link events with images and external documents as well as websites to better track research and supporting documentation. Plus, you can also filter events based on dates and durations, tags, and relationships, allowing you to navigate through your tasks without being bogged down by extra clutter.Aeon Timeline 2 is available for Mac and Windows, and it's on sale for $19.99.

A friend and I were talking last night about ego dissolution (something we've both experienced). I was telling him about this recent Vox article that shares the author's first-hand account of an ayahuasca trip at Rythmia, a luxury "life advancement" resort in Costa Rica.What really struck me about his tale is how he describes what he felt like on the fourth and final night (after drinking the most potent of all the brews):

In light of the forthcoming Ridley Scott-produced miniseries on the life of U.S. rocketry pioneer, JPL co-founder, and occultist, Jack Parsons, it's wonderful to see this brilliant discussion of Parsons, at least the occult dimensions of his work, making the rounds.On this Occulture podcast, host Ryan Peverly welcomes Boing Boing pal Erik Davis to discuss two significant academic papers that Erik has recently published about Parsons, "Babalon Launching" [PDF], exploring the odd interplay of techno-science and occultism in Parsons' work, and "Babalon Rising," which examines Parsons' relationship with the divine feminine and the form of witchcraft he was developing before his untimely death in 1952 in a home lab explosion. It is fascinating to speculate how modern witchcraft might have been different if Parsons' (and wife Cameron's) witchcraft had come to fruition in the early 1950s alongside Gerald Gardner's brand of Wicca. Erik and Ryan are joined in the discussion by Miguel Conner (host of Aeon Byte/Gnostic Radio) and Jeff Wolfe (Secret Transmissions).If you are unfamiliar with Parsons, he's an extremely important figure in both the development of American/California aerospace and modern occultism. The best book on Parsons, the one the miniseries is based on, is George Pendle's Strange Angel. The book Sex & Rockets, by the pseudonymous John Carter, delves more deeply into the occult and hedonistic aspects of Parsons' life.

This point-of-view footage from NBC Sports offers an exhilarating, terrifying glimpse into what it’s like to be an Olympic downhill skier.

Surfing on public Wi-Fi is convenient, but it's far from safe. Whether you're at a cafe or hotel, connecting to an unsecured network exposes you—and your personal information—to a host of hazards, including hackers, government spies, and trackers. Private Internet Access helps you navigate past these risks and tap into a safer, restriction-free internet, and plans are on sale starting at $34.95 in the Boing Boing Store.Boasting high-level encryption and IP cloaking, Private Internet Access lets you surf the web without forfeiting your browsing location or movements online, on up to five devices at once. You can bypass censorship filters, like the geo-restrictions placed on streaming sites, and block ads, trackers, and malware with the new MACE feature. Plus, Private Internet Access includes a traffic kill switch that engages if the VPN connection is unexpectedly terminated, keeping your data secure.You can see Private Internet Access' security features for yourself by checking out available plans in the Boing Boing Store, now on sale starting at $34.95.

Information security firm Bishop Fox's "Cybersecurity Style Guide" is 92 pages' worth of usage notes from the confusing world of technical jargon, a combination of glossary, pronunciation guide and style manual (in the manner of the jargon file), and includes the notation that "cyber-" is an ill-advised prefix. (more…)

GOP bigots in South Carolina and Wyoming have decided to try and weasel around the U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed "legal" marriage to everyone.I can not begin to understand the religious babble these 'lawmakers' enter into, trying to describe how two people committing to share their lives is anything wrong. Jeff March, the president of South Carolina Pride, commented “Pure prejudice is what that is. Pure outright prejudice."Via PinkNews:

While some can only think of the Burning Man as a party in the desert, diehard Burners, its citizens, will tell you that it's much more than it. They'll tell you that it's a year-round community whose leadership is, amongst other things, determined to protect their unique culture from commodification. People looking to exploit the culture with "commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising" will promptly be shutdown. Amazingly, besides some coffee and ice, nothing at the annual Burning Man desert event is for sale.In fact, decommodification is so important to them that they've made it one of their 10 Principles.Now, I've been in the Burning Man community since 1995 and I've just learned this week that the Project does actually have one product for sale: a calendar. You can buy it online, like I just did.Through a recent blog post on her site, I discovered that my pal Arin Fishkin has been the calendar's designer since its beginning in 2004. In the post, she not only shares the calendar's history -- highlighted by lovely sample pages of each year's edition -- but also tells why an organization that protects itself from commodification is selling it to begin with. She writes:

I give all of these babies a gold medal!

The world looks a lot cooler if you're a bug, as Craig P. Burrows demonstrates in his striking series of flowers shot in ultraviolet-induced visible fluorescence. (more…)

If you've had the sneaking suspicion over the past year that the world is going to hell, you're not alone. Amnesty International's 2017-2018 State of the World's Human Rights Annual Report says that in many countries, the politics of hate and fear are quickly becoming the norm.The report, which covers the activities of 159 countries paints a troubling picture of the conditions that many people are forced to endure on an alarmingly more regular basis. For those who keep track of human rights issues, this is old hat--the world can be a shitty place, full of shitty people doing shitty things to folks that don't deserve it. What's new this year, although it's likely news to no one, is that America is one of a small group of countries at the forefront of Amnesty International's concerns. In a press release for the report, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, Salil Shetty, states:

The web is vast, and while there's room for everyone, competition is stiff when it comes to landing on that first page of a Google search. That's why developers aren't afraid to spend exorbitant amounts of time and money on search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure their sites rank higher than others. However, not all of us have these resources, especially when we're just starting out. That's where SEOPop comes in. This tool helps you visualize your site's SEO performance and gives you tips on how to improve it, all for $9.99.SEOPop analyzes a website to generate an SEO report card based off of an extensive list of factors and then creates an in-depth audit of the URL being examined. From there, you can look at your site's report card, identify problems, and see how it stacks up against the competition. You'll get insights on your site's speed and loading times, plus you'll also receive breakdowns of your social signal impact in SEO, including Facebook and Twitter page analysis.SEOPop gives you the means to improve your site's exposure while keeping tabs on your competition, and it's on sale for a limited time. Normally retailing for $149.99, lifetime subscriptions are available for $9.99 in the Boing Boing Store.

Editor's note: I've known Shahid Buttar for years, in his capacity as an activist organizer, drawing on his background as a constitutional lawyer and his deep commitment to a just world to help start effective grassroots groups across America; now Shahid has taken leave from EFF to challenge Nancy Pelosi -- a consistent force for more surveillance and profits over people -- for the Democratic nomination to Congress in San Francisco's 12th District. I'm proud to endorse his candidacy. -Cory (more…)

When you try to buy online ads from Facebook's self-serve ad-auctioning platform, merely being the highest bidder isn't enough to guarantee that your ads will get through: Facebook multiplies your bid by a software-generated prediction about how responsive the audience will be to it, so the clickbaitier your ad is, the less it costs to place it. (more…)

Last November, evil Trump-supporting billionaire Joe Ricketts shut down Gothamist (and its sister sites) to punish its staff for forming a union. (more…)

Paul Manafort, one-time Trump campaign manager, has been indicted for cooking his books in order to qualify for a loan; prosecutors secured the evidence of his fraud by searching his email, which contained attachments that clearly showed him doctoring his financial statements and then emailing them to his co-conspirator Richard Gates so Gates could convert them to PDFs, which literally just involves selecting "Save As..." and choosing "PDF." (more…)

New Jersey State Senator Jeff Van Drew wants to run for Congress as a Democrat; he visited 17-year-old Emily McGrath's school, Egg Harbor Township High, where McGrath questioned him about whether he'd taken money from the NRA; Van Drew said he hadn't, and he was lying. (more…)