It has been 0 days since Facebook's last privacy scandal. The majority of period tracking apps transmit sensitive data to Facebook the minute you open them, before you interact with them at all, thanks to the common use of Facebook's analytics tool (which nominally gives app developers a free way to track their products' use, but which, not incidentally, allows FB to harvest all that usage data).The data that period-tracking apps share is often incredibly sensitive, including the last time the user had sex, which birth control they use, and so on. Some apps allow you to keep a private diary of your menstrual and sexual activities. This is also sent to Facebook.It's basically a rerun of the ghastly revelations about fertility tracking apps from 2016, except that now it's three years later and the companies involved have learned not one fucking thing from that scandal.One company, MIA Fem, threatened to sue Privacy International and Buzzfeed over Privacy International's handling of its unconvincing denials. Other vendors, like Plackal Tech, makers of the Maya app, minimized the concerns raised by researchers, suggesting that they simply don't take the issue seriously.Facebook is just for starters. The same apps often shared data with less well-known, even slimier analytics firms who largely fly under regulators' and lawmakers' radar (Facebook, for all its failings, is full of people who are terrified that some antitrust or privacy investigation is going to cost the company millions or billions and that they will face the blame -- but small startups that are one quarter away from going broke have no incentive to think about the longterm). Read the rest

Get down to the quark level in this amazing CGI animation by Pedro Machado. Read the rest

ReVae Arnaud-Jensen is deaf. She went to the drive through at a California Jack in the Box to order food, but when she got to the window to order (she reads lips), the employee screamed at her and mocked her. From WTAP:Arnaud-Jensen says she spoke to the store manager and was told the employee was fired. Even so, she intends to stand her ground and pursue legal action."Things done to us, not OK. I will stand and fight for that, for everyone in the community. It’s for you guys, the community, not me but for them, so there will be no more suffering for the deaf community,” she said.Arnaud-Jensen says she is demanding, at the very least, that Jack in the Box train its employees, including the CEO, to understand deaf culture. She hopes what happened to her never happens again. Read the rest

Here's a good tip for threading a needle, especially if you're traveling and need to reattach a button and the hotel sewing kit doesn't come with a threader: use a toothbrush as shown in this video. Read the rest

Margrethe Vestager (previously) is the EU competition commissioner who handed out a bouquet of multibillion-dollar fines to US-based Big Tech companies; she had resigned herself to being ousted after her previous term but in a last-minute surprise she has been granted another turn in office, with a new mandate to create a "Europe fit for the digital age." Vestager's heart is definitely in the right place, even if she has effectively taken forced breakups off the table, judging that the ensuing legal wrangle will do more harm than good, even if it might put Big Tech's execs on notice that bad behaviour has real consequences. Read the rest

Volkswagen upgraded its logo, which previously looked like a shiny button made of chromed plastic coated with a thin layer of diesel exhaust. The new logo sports a stripped-down simplicity that resembles earlier designs. Wisely, the designers didn't include the swastika incorporated into the original logo. Read the rest

The Black Blorchestra performs a gorgeous and stirring rendition of "Glory to Hong Kong" for an audience of protesters in HK, all dressed in the uprising's defacto uniform of masks and helmets. (Thanks, Jeff Wasserstrom!) Read the rest

Natalie Beach recounts her time as the friend, then gofer, then ghostwriter for Caroline Calloway, an Instagram influencer who (for reasons that eventually become clear) is famous only in retrospect. It's a startling and engaging tale, driven by Beach's recollections of envy toward a person she thought she loved, who did not love her back.One night, I went to sleep on my air mattress while Caroline stayed at her desk buying homegoods, and when I woke up the next morning, she was still hunched over eBay in her fur coat, having purchased $6,000 worth of furniture. I went to the communal bathroom and sat on the stone floor with my knees to my chest. I told myself that everyone needed furniture, and it wasn’t my problem. But Caroline’s problems weren’t just my problems; they were my whole world, and so while I was a supporting character in the book, I cast myself as the hero in her life. I reached out to Cambridge about therapy, spoke with her mom about her prescription-pill use. When she wore the same lace gown for two and a half days, even sleeping in it, I forced her into the shower. When she arranged a loose pile of sleeping pills on her nightstand before bed, I swept them into my palm when she wasn’t looking. I pulled open her desk drawer to find a pen, and empty Adderall capsules skittered around like cockroaches exposed to light. The manuscript was due in six months, and my notes were just lists of funny British foods (Scotch eggs, juicy bits). Read the rest

The MIT Media Lab is in crisis after the extent of child-abusing billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's donations became clear. Its director resigned in disgrace after an article at The New Yorker exposed the extent of those ties and apparent efforts to cover them up. Alumni participated in a public support campaign that came to exemplify the geek social fallacies. The lab is long-accused of being more a corporate advocacy playground than an incubator of research and the arts.Destroy it, writes Noah Kulwin:What, then, is the point of something like the MIT Media Lab? What is the justification for its continued existence? After all, elite academia is rotted through with corporate sponsorship these days, particularly from Silicon Valley; a 2017 Wall Street Journal report revealed that Google had funded “hundreds” of research papers written by professors from Harvard, UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois and elsewhere, which reached conclusions favorable to the company’s anti-regulation position. As the critic Evgeny Morozov notes in The Guardian, the purpose of the MIT Media Lab is something a little more grand, a little less visibly craven: to create a “third culture” of the elite, replacing “technophobic literary intellectuals with those coming from the world of science and technology.”Put into action, the “third culture” is a safe haven for breathless bullshit, a place where the ultra-rich might fantasize about, say, administering a eugenics scheme in New Mexico with the semen of a convicted serial sexual predator. Whether or not “third culture” progenitors like the Media Lab actually go forward with such an insane idea is beside the point, as they’re just happy to help cash a checkIn looking for a counterpoint, someone outlining how the lab might be saved, I came up blank today, but for an old tweet. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH we wonder whether this whole Alabama hurricane thing is blown out of proportion

Announced yesterday, the new iPhones' most interesting feature is its triple-lensed imaging system, making the tiny gadget comparable to much more expensive cameras. But the holes are making people shudder and shiver, the sensation named trypophobia in the annals of internet lore, if not medical science.Jennings Brown:Those three black circles. What monsters thought this was okay? I get that Apple wanted three lenses, but placed so close together they create a deeply unsettling image of trypophobic terror.Is this bad pic.twitter.com/Q7deYZyxPM— Rob Beschizza (@Beschizza) September 10, 2019 Read the rest

A random dude did about $15,000 worth of damage to the famous bronze "Charging Bull" sculpture, by attacking it with a banjo. He managed to cut a deep gash in the thick bronze.As Artnet reports:Onlookers watched with cell phones aloft as the man repeatedly bashed the sculpture. They were unsure whether the act was a work of performance art or simply violent vandalism. In the end, the bull was left with a six-inch gash and several scratches, according to reports.Shortly after the incident, authorities arrested Tevon Varlack, a 42-year-old truck driver from Dallas, charging him with criminal mischief, disorderly conduct, and criminal possession of a weapon (which, it seems, is the banjo, which was metal and had sharp edges). After spending the night in jail, Varlack appeared for arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court on Sunday. Varlack, wearing a white t-shirt with the words “Let Us Not Forget The Ten Commandments,” gave no motive for his actions. (The shirt may be a reference to Moses’s anger at the Israelites for worshipping a golden calf.) Varlack was released without bail and is due back in court on October 16. Judge Althea Drysdale ordered him to stay away from city landmarks in the meantime and warned him, “Do not go back and visit the bull.”Wait a minute, you might ask: One can actually cut into thick bronze by hitting it with a banjo?By all means. I've got a Goodtime banjo with a resonator back, and man those things are a) heavy as an anvil and b) possessed of a thick metal rim. Read the rest

I'm looking forward to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's memoirs, Permanent Record, (previously) and just pre-ordered a copy on Amazon. Given the title, I thought it might be interesting to share what Amazon represented as "Frequently bought together" with it and put in its "Customers who viewed this item also viewed" carousel. Under "Frequently bought together" are Randall Munroe's How To, a collection of "absurd scientific advice" offered by the cartoonist's famous stick-figure characters, and Talking To Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell's ill-received latest.In the "Customers who viewed this item also viewed" carousel are books from Glenn Greenwald, Philip Mudd and Snowden himself, all on similar topics. Books dominate the section, in fact, and Amazon reports that viewers of Permanent Record only checked out three things that were not to be read: Sarotti Scho Ka Kola, described as a "famous German chocolate", 20 orange snappy handles, which go on thin metal bucket handles to make them easier to carry, and the Old Smokey Jumbo Grill, pictured above.If you click the links in this post, our permanent records will be forever entwined in Amazon's database, and I'll get my cut. Read the rest

I love semicolons. I probably use too many of them, because of how incredibly flexible they are; how they loosely tie together loosely related ideas; how you can use them for lists. I often use them this way in my journalism, only to have the copy-editors rip out every usage, and instead put in periods. Barbarians.I was pleased, then, to run across Lewis Thomas' paean to the semicolon, in this excellent blog post by Maria Popova quoting from Thomas' essay "Notes on Punctuation". As Thomas writes:I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.Nailed it. I use too many colons, too, though I actually agree with Thomas when he argues that they're kind of ... preachy:Colons are a lot less attractive, for several reasons: firstly, they give you the feeling of being rather ordered around, or at least having your nose pointed in a direction you might not be inclined to take if left to yourself, and, secondly, you suspect you’re in for one of those sentences that will be labeling the points to be made: firstly, secondly and so forth, with the implication that you haven’t sense enough to keep track of a sequence of notions without having them numbered. Read the rest

Pop culture humorist Charles Phoenix (previously) has been busy this year. He's written a book:Holiday Jubilee is loaded with original eye-popping “test kitchen” recipes and over 500 vintage images, serving up an intoxicating, action-packed extravaganza of America’s favorite seasonal traditions past, present, and future. Your imagination will be inspired and your spirit will soar!And he's created this hilarious and kitschy "Raw" Turkey Tiki Meatloaf Mug ($80). This "meatloaf pan-shaped Moai" is inspired by his Tiki Turkey Dinner, an alt-Thanksgiving recipe found in the book.Hey! Charles will be at Soap Plant WACKO in Los Angeles this Sunday, September 15, signing that new coffee table book of his from 2 to 4 p.m. This line alone, from the event page, makes me want to hop down to LA this weekend: "LIFE ALTERING SNACK and ARTIFICIALLY COLORED AND FLAVORED REFRESHMENTS will be served." Read the rest

Scientists drilled into the Chixclub crater in the Gulf of Mexico to learn more about the end of the mesozoic era. They learned more than they expected, reports Katherine Kornei in The New York Times.The first day of the Cenozoic was peppered with cataclysms. When the asteroid struck, it temporarily carved a hole 60 miles across and 20 miles deep. The impact triggered a tsunami moving away from the crater. It also catapulted rock into the upper atmosphere and beyond.“Almost certainly some of the material would have reached the Moon,” Dr. Gulick said.The largest pieces of debris rained back down to Earth within minutes, Dr. Gulick and his team say, pelting the scarred landscape with solidifying rock. Smaller particles lingered for longer periods, and glassy blobs known as tektites, formed when falling, molten rock cools, have been found across North America and dated to the Chicxulub impact. Within about 30 minutes, ocean water began to flood back into the crater through a gap in its northeastern rim, the researchers suggest. Read the rest

Microsoft Excel has long been taken for granted in the modern office, but that's quickly changing as the field of data analytics becomes more vital. If you haven't moved beyond spreadsheets yet, it might be time to open up the functionality of this trusty platform - and this course on Microsoft Excel Data Analysis & Dashboard Reporting is the easiest way to do it.Taught by certified Microsoft Office Master Instructor Kyle Pew, this 3-hour course packs a ton of insight. In lectures and a series of videos, Pew starts you off with the basic principles of data analysis and some design principles that will help you present that data effectively. Then it's a deep dive into tools like PivotTables, showing you how you can use them to corral massive amounts of data into manageable streams. From there, you can use some common Excel functions to create an interactive dashboard that will be invaluable in any company's business plan.It's all simplified to be useful even for newbies to the field of data analytics, and you can get lifetime access to the entire course for just $19.99. Read the rest

Tarek Loubani is a Palestinian-Canadian doctor who works with the Glia Project, a group that creates open-source designs for 3D-printable medical hardware. Their goal is to let local populations manufacture their own medical wares at prices considerably lower than in the marketplace, and in situations where -- because of distance or war -- it may not even be possible to ship in equipment at any price. Some of their early work has been in blockaded Gaza, for example. So far, Glia has designed a stethoscope that can be made for about $2.83, and a tourniquet that costs about $7 to make.But Glia's also developing a project that's even more ambitious, and crazily interesting: An open-source dialysis machine. In the current issue of Logic magazine (which is amazing front to back, BTW), Loubani talked about how regulatory capture has jacked up the price of dialysis, and how to use open-source to design around it. I'll quote it at length here, because Loubani's description of the problem and the hack is super eloquent:Dialysis is also an interesting problem of capitalism. A good analogy is disposable razors. Broadly, in Canada, there’s Schick and there’s Gillette. You can’t use a Schick razor on a Gillette handle and vice versa. That’s called vendor lock-in. Fundamentally, dialysis machines are a pump, a controller, a flow meter, and a little bit of tubing. Nothing special. The only way for companies to make them profitable is to create vendor lock-in and collude with each other. Read the rest

PHOTO: Shutterstock. TX AG Ken Paxton, shown here, is leading nationwide probe into Google.The Texas attorney general today issued a 29-page civil investigative demand with more than 200 directives for Google to provide detailed information on its ad business. The deadline is October 9.“State attorneys general investigating Google are ordering it to turn over a wide range of information about its advertising business, according to an investigative demand that takes direct aim at the biggest source of the company’s revenue.”The investigative demand seeks details on ad technology and acquisitions, and shows that the investigation is targeting the heart of Google's business model.As Cory wrote earlier, “attorneys general from 48 states, DC, and Puerto Rico are collaborating on a joint antitrust investigation of Google's dominance in the ad- and search-markets, but two AGs are sitting this one out: California's Xavier Becerra and Alabama's Steve Marshall.”From tonight's updated reporting by Bloomberg News:Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office, which is leading the nationwide probe, on Monday issued a 29-page civil investigative demand obtained by Bloomberg. In more than 200 directives, investigators ordered the company to produce detailed explanations and documents by Oct. 9 related to its sprawling system of online advertising products.The Sept. 9 investigative demand, which is similar to a subpoena, was issued as 48 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico announced an antitrust investigation of Google from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. The attorneys general said they were looking at Google’s advertising practices, but their detailed demand to the company hasn’t been previously reported. Read the rest

You're going to want to unmute your sound for this one.A beautiful rendition of the Legend of Zelda theme song, played on the marimba by Mart0zz.NEVER forget the Legend!This happy blast from the internet past is a great reminder that back in 2011, when it was first posted, not everything in technology was horrible.Our very own arrangement of the Zelda theme. Played on Marimba, Snare drum, Cymbal, Bells, Timpani and fucking Triangle!Filmed and recorded in three days, however, we don't really enjoy drinking milk.Buy our album here. Read the rest

You definitely need some of this cuteness right now.“My cat Tofu REALLY likes her cheeks rubbed,” says IMGURian kokorifado.What a well-loved kitty cat.My cat Tofu REALLY likes her cheeks rubbed. Read the rest

One America News Network (OAN), a conservative news network for people who think Fox News is too liberal, has filed a $10 million dollar defamation lawsuit against Rachel Maddow, MSNBC and its parent companies Comcast and NBC Universal. The network claims Maddow defamed them during an episode of her nightly show when she referred to OANN as "paid Russian propaganda."Maddow was referencing OAN's employment of Kristian Brunovich Rouz as an on-air reporter covering US politics while he is also employed as a reporter for Sputnik, a Kremlin-owned news wire. If Sputnik sounds familiar, that could be because it was found to have been part of Russia's 2016 election interference scheme. From The Daily Beast: Rouz’s on-air reports for OAN include a wholly fabricated 2017 segment claiming Hillary Clinton is secretly bankrolling antifa through her political action committee. Clinton, Rouz claimed falsely, gave antifa protesters $800,000 that “went toward things like bricks, hammers, bats, and chains.” OAN's lawsuit also claims that Comcast is engaging in anti-competitive censorship by refusing to carry the channel. No response as of yet from Maddow, Comcast, et al.Herring Networks vs. Rachel Maddow (Scribd) (Photo: top, Shutterstock; below, Wikimedia Commons) Read the rest

Eleanor Saitta's (previously) 2016 essay "Coercion-Resistant Design" (which is new to me) is an excellent introduction to the technical countermeasures that systems designers can employ to defeat non-technical, legal attacks: for example, the threat of prison if you don't back-door your product.Saitta's paper advises systems designers to contemplate ways to arbitrage both the rule of law and technical pre-commitments to make it harder for governments to force you to weaken the security of your product or compromise your users.A good example of this is Certificate Transparency, a distributed system designed to catch Certificate Authorities that cheat and issue certificates to allow criminals or governments to impersonate popular websites like Google.Certificate Transparency is embedded in most browsers, which publish an automatic, cryptographically signed stream of observations about the certificates they encounter in the wild, with information about who issued them. These are appended to multiple log-servers in countries around the world, and anyone can monitor these servers to see if their own domain shows up in a certificate they don't recognize.The upshot of this is that if you run a Certificate Authority and your government (or a criminal) says, "Issue a Google certificate so we can spy on people or we'll put you up against a wall and shoot you," you can say to them, "I will do this, but you should know that the gambit will be discovered within an hour, and within 48 hours, we will be out of business." For an attacker to subvert this system, they'd need to compromise the browsers of everyone who they send the fake certificate to (if they can do this, they don't need fake certs!), or they need to hack multiple, well-guarded servers around the world, or they need to get the governments of all the countries where those servers are located to order their operators to secretly subvert them. Read the rest

George Stephanopoulos asked Stephen King to describe his new (and 61st!) book, The Institute. His answer, "Tom Brown's Schooldays go to Hell." Sounds like my kind of book, considering Tom Brown's schooldays were already pretty awful.Image: Good Morning America/YouTube Read the rest

The NCAA is notionally an "amateur" league, but the only thing amateur about it is that the athletes (who risk their health and even their lives) are unpaid, while the universities effectively own and operate wildly profitable pro sports teams.California state senator Nancy Skinner [D] has cosponsored the The Fair Pay to Play Act, which entitles California college athletes to get paid for "the use of their name, image and likeness." The bill -- popular with both labor activists and free market ideologues -- passed the Assembly on Monday 72-0. Governor Newsom is expected to sign the bill in the next 30 days, and it would go into effect in 2023.The NCAA and the colleges that back it strongly oppose the legislation. Athletes like LeBron James strongly support it (and James has received public support from Bernie Sanders: "College athletes are workers. Pay them.").The colleges say it spells the end of California's participation in collegiate sports, predicting that California teams will be excluded from national play (they don't mention the possibility that other states will pass legislation similar to California's). Reducing the importance of college sports to America's universities would be a net positive; American higher-ed has been wildly distorted by sports, with budgets and resources allocated to sports as a way of making alumni happy, without regard to the actual educational priorities of the institutions.Skinner expects opponents to mount court challenges during that time, but she also anticipates a growing corps of allies.Similar bills are in their infancy in state legislatures in Washington and Colorado, and United States Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina, introduced a federal bill this year that would allow college athletes to be compensated for the use of their name, image and likeness. Read the rest

The attorneys general from 48 states, DC, and Puerto Rico are collaborating on a joint antitrust investigation of Google's dominance in the ad- and search-markets, but two AGs are sitting this one out: California's Xavier Becerra and Alabama's Steve Marshall.Becerra's motives are easy to speculate about: although he talks a good game on reining in corporate power, he also depends heavily on Google for his election campaign funding, and he presides over the state where Google (and other digital monopolists) were founded, and which they notionally call home (though for tax purposes, all Big Tech companies are located at an indeterminate point somewhere in the Irish Sea).No one's sure what Marshall's up to, though. He's a rip-snortin' Republican from a red, rural state. It's possible that he's been so brainwashed by the weird Republican pro-monopoly cultists that he opposes the investigation on ideological grounds, I suppose.It's a pretty bad look for both of them. Google has been one of the top contributors to Becerra’s recent campaigns. The company contributed $US10,200 to his 2016 re-election campaign as a member of the US House of Representatives, making it his eight largest contributor in that campaign cycle, according to OpenSecrets. The search giant contributed $US7,300 to his campaign for attorney general last year, according to data from the California Secretary of State’s office.Becerra’s lack of participation in the Google investigation drew condemnation from the other side of the political aisle.“Attorney General Becerra’s refusal to join the bipartisan investigation into the tech giants is embarrassing,” California Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham, a Republican, said in an emailed statement. Read the rest

Amazon has a good sale on these four packs of Hanes black T-shirts with pockets. I usually get Gildan Ts, but these are even cheaper right now. Read the rest

For years, researchers have tracked the discrepancy in average life-expectancy predicted by income equality, and, as with the wealth gap itself, this life-expectancy gap just keeps getting wider.A new, Bernie Sanders-commissioned report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office reveals that, as with the gap in wealth between the 1% and the 10%, there is a large gap in life-expectancy between the top 1% and the top 10%, and the top 10% and the 11th-20th percentiles.As alarming as this might be to wealthy people who aren't quite wealthy enough to expect those extra years, things are worst for the poorest 80%, whose expected lifespans have decreased so much that the national median life-expectancy for all Americans is actually in decline, as the losses for poor people swamp the gains made by the rich, the super-rich, and the unfathomably rich.What kills old people without enough money? A major factor is a lack of retirement savings, which is an artifact of the annihilation of employer-managed, defined-benefit pensions in favor of 401(k)s and similar systems that make your ability to feed yourself in your old age contingent on your ability to successfully guess which stocks to buy (notably, your bad pension market decisions represent profit for the people who have the most money in America). Another factor: the lack of stable housing (thanks in part to the foreclosure crisis and the erosion of tenant protections).“Over time, the top fifth of the income distribution is really becoming a lot wealthier — and so much of the health and wealth gains in America are going toward the top,” said Harold Pollack, a health-care expert at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the creation of the report. Read the rest

This is a maneuver that would be hard to replicate. A Penske truck is headed down a highway in Ontario, Canada when it hits a ditch, crashes into a utility pole, and then somehow leaps up to the roof of a house. The video was caught on a dashcam from a driver headed home from work.Image: YouTube Read the rest

Seriously impressive re-creation of a Nintendo “Home Arcade” classic video arcade unit by an inspired retrogaming enthusiast.It runs on Windows 7 and uses HyperSpin as a frontend for loading games from over 70 systems.“After seeing some inspiration from /r/cade I was determined to spend some time building a home arcade cabinet for my basement,” says IMGURian rubee64. “I had little to no woodworking experience, but by the end I'd acquire a dozen new tools (including a table saw) and learned a great deal about materials and the assembly process.”The project took 5 months of planning and work.Once I had the overall model worked out, I needed to learn a little bit about wiring the buttons (something I’d never done before). After some research I settled on a 56pin I-PAC 4 from Ultimarc. This was just short of the total buttons I was going to need (after Player/Coin and Admin buttons) but I figured it would get me most of the way there.I ordered it along with several sample button types and built a test arcade pad out of MDF to get familiar with my wiring and drilling.Scroll through the entire gallery to get a sense of the intricate level of detail and mastery behind this project. Read the rest

Boing Boing is proudly sponsored by Privacy Safe!PrivacySafe is building the anti-cloud. For the first time, you can order a portable, private, and secure IoT storage appliance built on a fully-open stack.Pre-order now to take advantage of early-bird pricing and get discounts on other privacy-respecting services and open hardware.https://privacysafe.ai/indiegogoPocket-sized!Cutting edge, military-grade encryptionFree and Open-Source Software and Open Hardware, so it can be completely audited for malicious code.Your files are encrypted locally, in your home or business, on hardware you can touch.Tor .onion addressingBTCPay Bitcoin payment processing. Avoid payment fees, forever!Monero wallet on-boardMalware protection with real-time virus scan, network, and bluetooth monitorPassword vault with keyring and strong passphrase generator Read the rest

I gave my mother my treasured 5-quart Lodge deep skillet and lid when I found a lovely antique to restore. I've been using it while visiting with them.It was no easy thing when I gave my Mom my Lodge chicken pan. I had been using it for ages as my primary skillet and perfected fried chicken in it, as many of my colleagues here at Boing Boing will attest.I have been instructed that his style skillet be called a chicken ROASTING pan and the lid's stalactite-like points are what makes it a 'self-basting' lid. Evidently 1 roaster size chicken (3-5lbs iirc) will fit in it, and with the lid on the bird will roast up nice and juicy.I have never done this. I bought it to fry chicken. I learned it was awesome for frying eggs, bacon, pancake and sauteeing things. It became the most used item in my kitchen. Then I started baking in it like a Dutch Oven.The Lodge ended its daily use, however, when I found a larger Wagner pan at the Goodwill and restored it. I started baking in my dutch oven. It is a bit easier to maneuver. When cast iron sits and isn't used, it needs to be used and this pan was truly special. I tried alternating between it and my Wagner, but the extra space and smoother finish of the Wagner kept it on my stove. It was a little easier to fry bacon and sear steaks and fish in the #9 vs the #8 pan. Read the rest

If you're interested in learning about fruit you probably have never heard of, I recommend a book called The Fruit Hunters by Adam Leith Gollner. I read it over 10 years ago and often think about the odd fruits and delightful people who are obsessed with them. I was reminded of Gollner's book again when I saw this Great Big Story video about Robert Moehling, who has an exotic fruit stand in Florida. I really want to try some guanabana. The sign for it at Robert's fruit stand says, "Melts in your mouth like cotton candy. Virtually impossible to explain how wonderful it tastes. Best tasting fruit in the world!!!"Image: Great Big Story/YouTube Read the rest

Enjoy this hypnotic video of a honey harvest in the desert. IMGURian JohnDeCaux shares some wonderful DIY beekeeping footage documenting his dad's honey harvesting process.“To harvest honey, the wax cappings are removed with a honey paw before the honeycomb is placed in the extractor. “The honeycomb is then placed in revolving baskets where the spinning movement throws out the honey by centrifugal force.”“Little or no damage is done to the delicate honeycomb by this process, and when it is returned to the hive, the bees immediately set about removing any leftover honey plus repairing and polishing each cell in readiness for a new load of honey.”Watch this wonderful video that shows a Red Gum tree honey harvest from start to finish, from the web series John DeCaux and his dad Mark make about DIY beekeeping.You can buy the honey!You can follow them on YouTube for more cool wild beekeeping videos.Buy the honey here. They also have a Patreon. Read the rest

my dad sent me this vid of the dog picking and eating a tomato from the garden pic.twitter.com/L6q69fXdcm— jenny (@fvrmvn) September 8, 2019 So much better than supermarket tomatoes. Read the rest

This chair pic.twitter.com/iXoRpVUS99— Steampunk Tendencies (@Steampunk_T) September 5, 2019 Very cool! Read the rest

YoYo Factory's Loop 2020 is their top of the line competiton looping yoyo.YoYoFactory already made a really fantastic looping yoyo, the Loop 1080, before they partnered with the world champion, Shu Takada, to make one even better. This super customizable looper sports an interchangeable axel, spacers and response system. You can swap starbursts out for different types!I love this yo-yo but will be back to my Duncan Imperial when a daughter or niece swipes this one and loses all the parts.Here is how the world champion sets one up!While I have long held a preference for string-trick yo-yos like the Duncan Butterfly, I have been playing with loopers lately.YoYoFactory Loop 2020 Yo-Yo - Looping System - Shu Takada YoYo (Orange) via Amazon Read the rest

Washington Post columnist and Saudi Arabian dissident Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered by agents of the Saudi royal family at the country's embassy in Turkey. This video reconstruction by Al Jazeera shows the last minutes of his life and the first minutes of his death. It's based on transcripts and timestamps from surveillance recordings, as released by the Turkish government and published by Daily Sabah. The video appears to skip over stuff, though, implying that he was suffocated with a hood when there is apparently some debate over whether he was dead or merely drugged before the dismembering began. More details in print.Audio recordings of the horrifying conversations between the 15-man Saudi hit squad and their victim, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has been revealed to the public for the first time by the Turkish daily Sabah.....Mutreb: Is it possible to put the body in a bag?Al-Tubaigy: No. Too heavy, very tall too. Actually, I've always worked on cadavers. I know how to cut very well. I have never worked on a warm body though, but I'll also manage that easily. I normally put on my earphones and listen to music when I cut cadavers. In the meantime, I sip on my coffee and smoke. After I dismember it, you will wrap the parts into plastic bags, put them in suitcases and take them out (of the building). Read the rest

Tish! Would you like to see me blow up three trains?! Read the rest

Geoffrey Boycott was once a famous sportsman, but is now a domestic abuser convicted of beating up his girlfriend in a French hotel and leaving her to pay the bill. He's being knighted.Boycott was fined £5,000 and given a three-month suspended sentence in 1998 after being convicted of beating his then-girlfriend Margaret Moore in a French Riviera hotel. ... Asked about the criticism from Women's Aid by presenter Martha Kearney on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Boycott responded: "I don't give a toss about her, love. It was 25 years ago so you can take your political nature and do whatever you want with it."From the BBC's original story about his conviction and failed appeal, in 1998:During the trial, the court was told that Boycott pinned Miss Moore down and punched her 20 times in the face before checking out and leaving her to pay the bill.Margaret Moore said she was punched in the face 20 timesBoycott denied the allegations, saying 45-year-old Miss Moore had slipped after flying into a rage when he refused to marry her.He said he had decided to leave the hotel after "becoming sick and tired of telling her that I am not going to [marry her], I am not the marrying kind". Bear in mind that he was convicted in a French court decades ago; just last week, the New York Times reported on France's failed attempts to "Get Serious About Domestic Violence" in 2019. His behavior was egregious by such standards. Read the rest

For decades, people (including me) have predicted that cyberinsurers might be a way to get companies to take security seriously. After all, insurers have to live in the real world (which is why terrorism insurance is cheap, because terrorism is not a meaningful risk in America), and in the real world, poor security practices destroy peoples' lives, all the time, in wholesale quantities that beggar the imagination.But the empirical data shows that insurers routinely write policies for companies that do incredibly stupid shit, and don't offer meaningful discounts to companies that have good security policies (you don't even have to keep your patchlevel current to maintain your insurance!). Instead, insurers focus on "post-breach services" that help companies get back to work after the breaches have taken place. In a forthcoming paper in IEEE Privacy and Security, two computer scientists (Oxford U, U of Tulsa) investigate this question, documenting the dismal state of insurers' requirements for cyberinsurance, and the ease of making claims, even for incidents that were utterly preventable.One possibility that the authors don't delve into: cyberinsurance is cheap because the penalties for breaches are laughably light. While it's true that some incidents (e.g. ransomware) have a direct operational cost to the company, the vast majority of incidents involve data-breaches that affect the company's customers or stakeholders.The lack of a statutory damages regime for breaches means that customers whose data is compromised have to produce receipts for the harms they've suffered before a judge, and since it's hard to quantify those damages (many of them may not be incurred for years to come), which is why Home Depot paid literal pennies to settle claims when it lost 50,000,000 customers' data. Read the rest

Early this month, Google's Project Zero revealed a breathtaking attack on multiple OSes, including Apple's Ios, in which a website that served Uyghur people was found to be hosting at least five different kinds of Ios malware that exploited previously unknown defects in Apple's code (the attack is presumed to have been the work of the Chinese state, which has been prosecuting a genocidal campaign against Uyghurs, whose high-tech fillips have seen both cities and apps suborned to aid in the pogrom).The news prompted an industry-wide reassessment of the way that "zero day" defects are deployed by nation-state hackers: previously, these had been viewed as precious rarities deployed only in the most targeted ways, to preserve their efficacy (once a defect is known, it can be patched, and once the patching begins, fewer and fewer devices are left vulnerable). China's "watering hole" attack on Uyghurs represented an indiscriminate spraying of these Ios zero-days that had never been seen before.Last week, Apple fired back at Google, with a bizarre, whiny post attempting to minimize the scale of the attack and questioning Google's conduct in going public.Alex Stamos (previously) knows a thing or two about working in companies that get security wrong. He famously resigned as Yahoo's Chief Security Officer in protest of a plan to install an NSA spying tool to scan Yahoo Mail accounts. Then he quit his job as Facebook's CSO over the company's inaction on disinformation campaigns. He's a human warrant canary, a guy whose reliable ethics mean that whenever he departs a great job, there's probably some kind of scandal lurking behind the scenes (Alex hates it when I call him this. Read the rest

Here someone states the obvious, because it must sometimes be asserted in the face of caviling over the ethics of stating the obvious: the president is not well. Accepting the reality about the president’s disordered personality, writes Peter Wehner, is essential.Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating.It manifests itself in Trump’s impulsiveness and vindictiveness; his craving for adulation; his misogyny, predatory sexual behavior, and sexualization of his daughters; his open admiration for brutal dictators; his remorselessness; and his lack of empathy and sympathy, including attacking a family whose son died while fighting for this country, mocking a reporter with a disability, and ridiculing a former POW. (When asked about Trump’s feelings for his fellow human beings, Trump’s mentor, the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, reportedly said, “He pisses ice water.”) Read the rest

I've been a Charles de Lint fan since I was a kid (see photographic evidence, above, of a 13-year-old me attending one of Charles's signings at Bakka Books in 1984!), and so I was absolutely delighted to read his kind words in his books column in Fantasy and Science Fiction for my latest book, Radicalized. This book has received a lot of critical acclaim ("among my favorite things I've read so far this year"), but to get such a positive notice from Charles is wonderful on a whole different level.The stories, like "The Masque of the Red Death," are all set in a very near future. They tackle immigration and poverty, police corruption and brutality, the U.S. health care system and the big pharma companies. None of this is particularly cheerful fodder. The difference is that each of the other three stories give us characters we can really care about, and allow for at least the presence of some hopefulness."Unauthorized Bread" takes something we already have and projects it into the future. You've heard of Juciero? It's a Wi-Fi juicer that only lets you use the proprietary pre-chopped produce packs that you have to buy from the company. Produce you already have at home? It doesn't work because it doesn't carry the required codes that will let the machine do its work.In the story, a young woman named Salima discovers that her toaster won't work, so she goes through the usual steps one does when electronics stop working. Read the rest

Previously featured at Boing Boing as the titular "revenge porn shitweasel" in Mark Frauenfelder's classic post Revenge porn shitweasel abuses DMCA in vain effort to take down his own photos, revenge porn shitweasel Craig Brittain is now running for U.S. Senate. But he has another problem today: text messages posted by someone who claims he sent them.Andrew Chavez, the owner of Petition Partners, told the Arizona Capitol Times that Republican Craig Brittain lashed out at Chavez and his family after he declined Brittain’s request to hire Petition Partners to help gather enough nominating petitions to qualify for the 2020 primary ballot.On August 21, Chavez tweeted a screengrab of texts he received from an unnamed source. At the time, Chavez only wrote that the sender was a candidate he declined to work for.That candidate, who Chavez later identified as Brittain, lashed out at Chavez. “F*ckin piece of sh*t be glad you even get to stay in my country. Can’t wait to deport some of your family members. MAGA,” Brittain allegedly wrote. “Deport all invaders and deport anyone who is anti-deportation or pro-amnesty along with them… You are trash just like the invaders. Move to Mexico.” Read the rest

Atari's Lynx was a full-color portable 16-bit game console released in 1989. It was doomed in the face of Nintendo's all-conquering GameBoy, Atari's poor support, and its own overpowered hardware--given a couple of hours, every Lynx is a big box of dead batteries. But its beautiful graphics and unique design means it still has a lively homebrew scene. This year, 11 new homebrew games came out for it courtesy of a single competition. (According to Wikipedia, Atari didn't release this many games annually for the Lynx until its third year on the shelves, with only 76 official releases over the entire life of the system)Atari Gamer, has been running the Atari Lynx 30th Birthday Programming Competition over the past few months and we now have the final submissions! All eleven of them! That's right, that's eleven new games for you to play and rate. We do admit that some are very well polished and others are more on the "tech demo" side, but all are worth having a look at.Though the Atari Lynx may not have been as successful in the past, it really was and is an amazing gaming console. Its impressive feature set and the ease of developing games for it make it ideal for home brewers. Whether you're on the advanced side and code in Assembly or just starting out and writing games in C with the TGI library, you can have a lot of fun with the Lynx (see programming resources here). The amount of submissions for this competition has been overwhelming and it just shows how amazing the Lynx home brew scene is! Read the rest

For the first time ever, a collection of original paintings by the late TV painter Bob Ross will be exhibited on the east coast. "Happy Accidents" opens September 10 and runs through Oct. 15 at the Franklin Park Performing and Visual Arts Center in Purcellville, Virginia (which is just a hop, skip, and a jump from the Bob Ross headquarters in Herndon, Virginia).Hyperallergic:"...The exhibition will feature 24 original Ross paintings created on The Joy of Painting, the largest collection of Ross paintings to ever be displayed at a gallery. It will also be the first Bob Ross exhibition on the East Coast...This past March, following a torrent of requests from Bob Ross fans, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art announced that it’s including a collection of the artist’s paintings, along with other items from The Joy of Painting (including the converted stepladder he used as an easel), in its permanent collection. Alas, the Smithsonian later said it had no plans to exhibit the new acquisitions. In April, Ross made his first museum debut when DePaul Art Museum in Chicago included four of his paintings in the exhibition New Age, New Age: Strategies for Survival...Along with the unprecedented display of Ross’s paintings, Happy Accidents will also feature three workshops with Bob Ross-certified instructor Sandra Hill."If you can't make it to the show and want to see the entire The Joy of Painting collection, go check out all six seasons of his art at TwoInchBrush. Read the rest

augmented-ui is a stylesheet (a javascript library is in beta testing) that lets you apply cyberpunk styles to your web designs. Just include it in your HTML and tweak your CSS classes and ids, and you're off to the cyber-races.High Tech, Low Effortaugmented-ui is just CSS. Futuristic, cyberpunk-inspired UI shaping for any element Add the "augmented-ui" attribute to equip the augs, and a few CSS settings for each one to make it feel just rightNamespaced to avoid crossing wires. All custom properties begin with "--aug-" Selectors only use the "augmented-ui" attributeAutomatic fallbacks and feature detection. Full support with v1.1.0+ has a global user reach of ~91%! Great automatic fallback for older browsers (+ ~3.5% global reach). More details below!Use augmented-ui in any project, for free. Free :: BSD 2-Clause LicenseOpen Source :: NPM GitHubBasically, a "get 45 degree corners without going completely insane" CSS framework with a killer pitch. Read the rest

It's time to unplug. Wireless charging capability has truly arrived, and if you're looking to de-clutter your countertop or desk, we can't think of a better way to start. Here are 10 wireless chargers that will add a little feng shui to your charging routine, no matter what the device.Qi Wireless Fast Charging DuoWith 10W of transmission power, this elegant smartphone stand will have any Qi-enabled smartphone up to max power in no time. (And it'll preserve your battery life in the bargain.) The Qi Wireless Fast Charging Duo is now $34.99, over 60% off the retail price.Hudly 10 W Fast Wireless Car Charger & MountThis one is a lifesaver for those of us who forget to plug in our phones overnight. It's a snug silicone mount that fits into your dash, air vent or windshield, charging up your smartphone with 10W of power while making GPS apps accessible and safe on your commute. Pick it up for $30, down 62% from the MSRP.SCOUT Max 10,000mAh Portable ChargerHere's a great charger for those on the go. It not only comes equipped with Lightning, micro USB and USB-C ports for universal access but a wall charger so you can keep the 10,000 mAh battery up to capacity. It's now available for $39.99, half off the list price.3-Port Charger with Qi-Enabled Wireless Charger & Power BankNo matter what your device, you'll have juice with this versatile charger. It sports two high-speed USB ports and a USB-C port to supplement its Qi wireless charging capability, and the VAC outlet is even compatible in countries outside the US. Read the rest

Wow, my pal Shalaco (previously) really hit it out of the park with this ultra-high-definition video tour of (some of) Burning Man 2019's art. I didn't go this year, but this made me feel like I was there. Watch it in full screen, at the highest resolution possible to really get the full effect.I traveled over 200 miles exploring Burning Man art, and I still didn't see it all. Here's a taste of what was out there. Read the rest