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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

In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my new Locus column, DRM Broke Its Promise, which recalls the days when digital rights management was pitched to us as a way to enable exciting new markets where we'd all save big by only buying the rights we needed (like the low-cost right to read a book for an hour-long plane ride), but instead (unsurprisingly) everything got more expensive and less capable. The established religion of markets once told us that we must abandon the idea of owning things, that this was an old fashioned idea from the world of grubby atoms. In the futuristic digital realm, no one would own things, we would only license them, and thus be relieved of the terrible burden of ownership. They were telling the truth. We don’t own things anymore. This summer, Microsoft shut down its ebook store, and in so doing, deactivated its DRM servers, rendering every book the company had sold inert, unreadable. To make up for this, Microsoft sent refunds to the custom­ers it could find, but obviously this is a poor replacement for the books themselves. When I was a bookseller in Toronto, noth­ing that happened would ever result in me breaking into your house to take back the books I’d sold you, and if I did, the fact that I left you a refund wouldn’t have made up for the theft. Not all the books Microsoft is confiscating are even for sale any lon­ger, and some of the people whose books they’re stealing made extensive annotations that will go up in smoke. Read the rest

The Canadian activist group Open Privacy Research Society has discovered that Vancouver, BC hospitals routinely wirelessly broadcast patient telemetry and admissions data, without encryption to doctor paging systems. It is trivial to intercept these transmission.The organisation contacted Vancouver Coastal Health in 2018 to notify them of the breach, and after nearly a year of inaction, they decided to go public. VCH has since been spurred into action, though they continue to deny that there is any serious risk of data interception.Open Privacy's report paints a picture of a health system sorely lacking in technical expertise, with the hospital privacy officers "unaware of the radio broadcasting component of the pager system(s)." The paging system doesn't log third-party access, but despite this, the health system's spokespeople blithely asserted that no breach had taken place.We cannot say for certain how many patients have been impacted by this breach. We suspect that this breach has likely been on going for several years. We have asked that VCH answer the following questions related to this breach: * How many patients’ information has been broadcast to date in this breach?* When were the legacy pager systems installed?* Can a patient determine if their individual information was broadcast in the breach? If so, how?* As some of the pager messages appeared to contain unstructured text data, is there any mechanism for patients to inquire what non-standard information in particular of theirs was broadcast unencrypted? If so, how?* How many VCH patients continue to have their personal information broadcast unencrypted on a daily basis? Read the rest

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (a 1986 anti-hacking law passed after a moral panic over the movie Wargames) does not ban accessing public information from websites, even if you do so against the wishes of the website's operator.The case involves Linkedin and Hiq, a company that does "employer analytics" and scrapes public Linkedin profiles to do so. Linkedin launched a competing service and threatened to sue Hiq under the CFAA; and Hiq responded by seeking a declaratory judgment that the CFAA did not reach to accessing publicly accessible information.The CFAA defines hacking broadly: "exceeding authorization" on someone else's computer is banned under the plain language of the act. But, as the appeals court found, the CFAA was trying to capture "computer intrusions," not terms-of-service violations on services you were permitted to use. The appeals court also ordered Linkedin not to interfere with Hiq's scraping, as doing so would put Hiq out of business before the case could be litigated. It remains to be seen whether Linkedin will continue to sue Hiq under other legal theories, or seek other courses of action that might allow it to block Hiq's scrapers."None of the computers to which the CFAA initially applied were accessible to the general public," the court writes. "Affirmative authorization of some kind was presumptively required."When the law was extended to more computers in 1996, a Senate report said its goal was to "increase protection for the privacy and confidentiality of computer information." As a result, the 9th Circuit reasons "the prohibition on unauthorized access is properly understood to apply only to private information—information delineated as private through use of a permission requirement of some sort."In contrast, hiQ is only scraping information from public LinkedIn profiles. Read the rest

It looks like a keyboard. It's warm. It's the perfect way to keep your cat from sitting on your real keyboard. Meet the"Laptop or keyboard simulating pet bed." Patent 10398125, issued September 3, 2019.[via @GazEtc] Read the rest

Jerry Falwell, Sr founded the Moral Majority, brought evangelicals into the voting booth, elected Ronald Reagan, and changed the face of American politics forever; his son, Jerry Jr now commands the Falwell empire, including Liberty University, which now has $3b in assets.Politico's Brandon Ambrosino, a Liberty U alumna who has written extensively about the Falwells, the university and their associated scandals, has published an explosive, deeply reported story about corruption at Liberty University, and the central role that Jerry Jr plays in that corruption.Liberty University is organized as part of a nonprofit and is bound by strict IRS rules banning self-dealing, conflicts of interest, electioneering, and so on.But Ambrosino's report -- backed up by numerous whistleblowers at the highest levels of Falwell's organization, and denied strenuously by Falwell himself -- reveals numerous serious ethical problems with the management of the nonprofit, with massive financial wrongdoing and cronyism protected by a vicious personality cult ("It's a dictatoryship") centered on Jerry Jr and his wife, Becki. Ambrosino's sources were terrified of reprisals for speaking out; one bought a burner phone out of fear that the Falwells had planted surveillance malware on his device. The Falwell's inner circle is an unsavoury mix of grifters and yes-men and fixers, including John Gauger, who runs a black SEO company called Redfinch that made headlines when it took money from Michael Cohen to rig a poll to make Donald Trump seem more popular than he was (Cohen then burned Gauger and refused payment in full, which contributed to the episode coming to light). Read the rest

An elementary school student showed up to school wearing an orange T-shirt with a hand-drawn logo representing the University of Tennessee Volunteers and was bullied by the other students for it. When the university found out, they used his logo on an official T-shirt. ABC News reports that "demand for the product is so high that it crashed the school’s website."The University of Tennessee decided that they would take the boy’s design and make it an official school shirt with a portion of the proceeds being donated to STOMP Out Bullying, a national non-profit organization that is dedicated to eradicating bullying of all forms.“Thank you Vol Nation! Currently, our website has crashed due to the overwhelming support,” the online store tweeted. “We are working on the problem. Once the server restarts, we anticipate the issue to be resolved. #GoVols #EverywhereUT.”Share in a Florida elementary student's Volunteer pride by wearing his design on your shirt too! Pre-order today for a late September expected delivery. A portion of proceeds from every shirt sold will be donated to @STOMPOutBullyng .https://t.co/NdnTtYREFL pic.twitter.com/OeTZvgC09Y— VolShop (@UTVolShop) September 6, 2019Image: Laura Snyder/Facebook Read the rest

Many westerners are familiar with Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent, but I'd never heard of Pinduoduo before today: it's gamified, group-purchasing bargain-hunting site founded by an ex-Googler four years ago, with 336m active monthly users and a $40b market-cap (analyst and author Rebecca Fannin calls it "Groupon on steroids"). Pinduoduo's core users are people in rural China, or recent arrivals to cities, who are looking for bargains, rather than status, from their purchases. The best bargains are to be had from "team buying" exercises that require customers to use services like Wechat to find other buyers to club together with them to attain very deep discounts.Tencent (owner of Wechat) is an investor in Pinduoduo, and it blocks links to rival Alibaba on its platforms. The company is not profitable despite massive sales, and diverts nearly all its income to aggressive sales and marketing pitches. Li Suzhi scrolls through the front page of Chinese ecommerce app Pinduoduo, browsing T-shirts, electronics, and fruit, all priced at a fraction of the cost of similar products on other platforms. “I have to be careful not to use this app too much. It has so many deals that I want to spend all my time and money on it,” says the 46-year-old housewife and ayi (the Chinese term for nanny) from rural Inner Mongolia.Shoppers like Li—price conscious and far from China’s big cities—have made Pinduoduo China’s hottest ecommerce player. Its 366 million monthly active users trail only Alibaba, outranking better-known rivals such as JD.com. Read the rest

Andy Greenberg (previously) is Wired's senior security reporter; he did amazing work covering Russian cyberwarfare in Ukraine, which he has expanded into a forthcoming book: Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (I read it for a blurb and a review; it's excellent).Last month while I was offline, Wired ran a long excerpt from the book, and it's a great introduction to the tenor of the work (which, again, I can't recommend highly enough -- it's a superb introduction to the equities, technicalities, personalities and ethics of cyberwarfare, that most problematic of metaphors).For the past four and a half years, Ukraine has been locked in a grinding, undeclared war with Russia that has killed more than 10,000 Ukrainians and displaced millions more. The conflict has also seen Ukraine become a scorched-earth testing ground for Russian cyberwar tactics. In 2015 and 2016, while the Kremlin-linked hackers known as Fancy Bear were busy breaking into the US Democratic National Committee’s servers, another group of agents known as Sandworm was hacking into dozens of Ukrainian governmental organizations and companies. They penetrated the networks of victims ranging from media outlets to railway firms, detonating logic bombs that destroyed terabytes of data. The attacks followed a sadistic seasonal cadence. In the winters of both years, the saboteurs capped off their destructive sprees by causing widespread power outages—the first confirmed blackouts induced by hackers.But those attacks still weren’t Sandworm’s grand finale. In the spring of 2017, unbeknownst to anyone at Linkos Group, Russian military hackers hijacked the company’s update servers to allow them a hidden back door into the thousands of PCs around the country and the world that have M.E.Doc installed. Read the rest

This is the lowest price I've seen for a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ single board computer. It has a 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, WiFi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet. These Pis are great for playing retro video games (emulators for almost every game platform from the 80s and 90s you can think of are available). This Amazon deal is 16% claimed so far. Once it's fully claimed the price will go back up. Read the rest

Someone in another car spotted this couple sleeping in a self-driving Tesla that was zipping along the Massachusetts Turnpike, according to NBC on YouTube. The person honked, trying to wake the driver up, but "it didn't work at all." Read the rest

Having managed to be so vile as to be kicked off Twitter, a darling of the white supremacy market complains about how hard it is to be him.Vice:The provocateur made no mention of the harassment that landed him in social media jail. Nor did he touch on being forced out of Breitbart the following year, after he made comments that seemed to endorse pedophilia.While Telegram allows Yiannopoulos to share such important commentary with more than 19,000 followers directly, it does not offer the mass reach of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The same goes for Gab and other social networks set up in protest of Big Tech’s increasingly aggressive content-moderation efforts.“I can’t find anyone who’s managing to grow a really big channel here,” wrote Yiannopoulos, whose Telegram posts typically reach around 2,000 pairs of eyeballs. “Everyone is hitting a wall. There’s no future to Telegram for social media refugees if this is the best it gets.” Read the rest

You really need this cuteness.Follow @ddalgi_o on Instagram for more adorables. View this post on Instagram 마침 휴지를 다썼어요 그토록 기다리고 기다리던 돌아온 딸끼리 와씸다🐘🐘🐘 쫌 크셨다고 알아서 쳐 빼보림ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ #코끼리 #딸끼리A post shared by 🍓김딸기🍓 (@ddalgi_o) on Aug 5, 2019 at 8:20pm PDT Read the rest

Felix the dog got some yogurt today and he's very excited about licking the extra smooshes off his nose.This dog has a missing/deformed eye, and is obviously well loved and living life excellently.Scroll down in this IMGUR gallery for the wonderful video by thevaiobandit101. Felix got some Greek yogurt this morning. Read the rest

Robert and Tiffany Williams of Pennsylvania were surprised to find $120,000 in their bank account. They didn't put it there. Who gave them the mysterious gift? Perhaps thinking it wise not to ask the bank and get an answer that would be disappointing, they instead went on a 2.5 week spending spree. With an apparent fondness for vehicles, they bought an SUV, a camper, a race car, and a trailer to tow the race car behind the camper.Imagine their surprise when the bank contacted them and informed them that their bank balance was negative $107,416. But we had $120,000 in our account, the confused couple told the bank, and we haven't spent it all yet. The bank explained the $120,000 had been accidentally deposited into their account and didn't belong to them. Please return all the money immediately, said the bank.According to Pennsylvania State Trooper Aaron Brown, Tiffany told the bank that “she no longer had the funds because she had already paid off bills. She told the bank her husband had spent a great portion of the funds and purchased a four-wheeler. She said she would speak to her husband and attempt to construct a repayment agreement.”You already know how this ends up, but for the sake of completion, here's how the Sun Gazette reported it:State police were contacted in early July after further attempts by the bank to communicate with the couple were unsuccessful.In separate interviews with investigators in late July, both Robert Williams, 36, and his wife “admitted to knowing the mislaid money did not belong to them, but they spent it anyway.”The two were arraigned Tuesday before District Judge Gary Whiteman on felony charges of theft and receiving stolen property, and released on $25,000 bail each. Read the rest

Purism (previously) is a company that crowdfunds free/open laptops and phones whose design goal is to have no proprietary software, even at the lowest levels. The company is best known for its Purism laptops, and I'm very fond of mine (it didn't end up replacing my Thinkpad, only because I'm addicted to the trackpoint for mousing, and trackpads give me raging RSI) (that said, getting any GNU/Linux to run on a current-model Thinkpad is so hard and results in such a rotten experience that I'm reconsidering whether to switch back).For years, the holy grail of free/open hardware has been a competitive mobile phone, with software that respects your privacy and hardware that respects your autonomy (user-replaceable batteries ahoy!). The Librem 5 may be that phone: it runs a free/open OS called Pureos that's not based on Android or Ios, offers far greater user control without surveillance from the manufacturer, OS isolation from the notoriously insecure baseband module, hardware disconnections for networking/cam/mic, a replaceable battery, a mic jack, and a promise to release "lifetime" updates that improve performance and features of old hardware over time.Purism is now shipping the first batch of its Librem 5s, as part of a planned set of manufacturing batches that iterate between runs to improve hardware and address manufacturing issues. That's pretty exciting! The important thing will be how well this batch works, and what kinds of improvements come from Purism's experience with it.Due to the high volume, growing demand for the Librem 5, and in the interest of openness and transparency, Purism is publishing its full, detailed, iterative shipping schedule. Read the rest

Luna Lee does't just play the gayageum well, she's spectacular. This cover of Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child is absolute perfection.For more, watch her play David Bowie's Man Who Sold the World (from our 2017 post).Via Mashable Read the rest

In the wake of the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, a new debate opened up, about the mundane, everyday ways that wealthy people buy their way into elite institutions: from hiring, poorer, smarter kids to write their kids' essays, to surrendering custody of your kids in order to misappropriate low-income tuition grants, to simply "donating" shit-tons of money to the school.But nothing epitomizes life on the lowest difficulty-setting like the system of "legacy college admissions," wherein the fact that your parents were privileged enough to attend an elite institution entitles you to preferential treatment if you want to literally inherit that privilege.Now, the New York Times editorial board has come out for the abolition of legacy admissions, pointing out that virtually every other developed nation on Earth has already done so. The Times calls legacy admissions "anti-meritocratic" and yeah, it is, but meritocracy has always been anti-meritocratic, literally since the coining of the term. There are plenty of good reasons to abolish legacy admissions, and the Times enumerates many of them, but the idea that "meritocracy" should get a look in here is something of a sick joke.Colleges counter that the children of alumni — partly by virtue of the education their parents received — are well qualified for admission into their schools. That raises the question: If the value of a degree is indeed generational (research shows that it very likely is), why do the progeny and grandprogeny of graduates deserve yet another thumb on the scale? Read the rest

Purdue Pharma (and its richer-than-the-Rockefellers owners, the Sackler family are increasingly being dragged into state courts to account for their role in the opioid epidemic, which has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam War.The cornerstone of the Purdue/Sackler defense is to insist that the company -- manufacturer of Oxycontin -- was only a bit-player in the epidemic, and therefore it's unfair to hold them to account for the actions of their rivals who were the real villains of the crisis.To this end, Purdue has repeatedly cited its analysis of FDA data that showed that the company only accounted for 3.3% of all opioid sales during the period.However, a new analysis of the same data set, performed by Propublica and Stat (building on more limited work from the Washington Post), shows how Purdue massaged the data to produce a wildly misleading picture of its role in the epidemic. The trick works like this: Purdue's analysis treats all opioids as being equivalent to its deadly widowmaker, Oxycontin. Thus, a 5mg Percocet is treated as equivalent to an 80mg Oxy (Propublica: "It’s analogous to measuring alcohol sales by equating a 12-ounce glass of 100 proof whiskey with a similar-sized can of light beer").When the data are reanalyzed with the doses taken into account, Purdue's contribution quintuples to more than 16%, and Purdue becomes the nation's third-largest peddler of opioids during the crisis. What's more, these figures are even worse for Purdue in some states: for example, Purdue told a judge in Massachusetts that it sold 4.6% of the opioids in the state. Read the rest

The University of Tennessee has lovingly adopted an elementary student's design as their own, after hearing that some girls at the next lunch table gave him grief over it.CNN reports:A Florida student obsessed with the University of Tennessee wanted to represent the Volunteers during his elementary school's "College Colors Day," but didn't own any of their apparel -- so he took the matter into his own hands.Laura Snyder, his teacher at Altamonte Elementary School in Altamonte Springs, says he drew a "U.T.", the university's logo, on paper and pinned it to an orange t-shirt."When the day finally arrived, he was SO EXCITED to show me his shirt," Snyder wrote Wednesday on Facebook. "I was impressed that he took it one step further to make his own label."But by lunch time, the spirited Vols fan was in tears."Some girls at the lunch table next to his (who didn't even participate in college colors day) had made fun of his sign that he had attached to his shirt. He was DEVASTATED," said Snyder.In hopes of raising his spirits, Snyder said she planned on buying him an official University of Tennessee T-shirt, and asked friends if they had contacts with the school who could "make it a little extra special for him."Kids in orange shirts, man. Read the rest

Asian Boss went to the streets of Tokyo to interview people from Nepal, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, who moved to Japan to become convenience store staffers, fast food employees, farm workers, translators, and blue collar workers. Read the rest

The Senate filibuster is an "overused tool of obstruction," says John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, and it shouldn't exist. I agree, it should be abolished, along with electoral voting and lifetime Supreme Court appointments. Read the rest

I've been repairing my phones and computers for years—I don't like being at the mercy of hardware vendors, especially when there's a sea of original and gray market replacement parts out there to be had. Upgrades? Same thing. While companies like Microsoft and Apple are making it almost impossible to tinker with the toys they make, it feels good to know that I can still at least install a fresh battery or increase the size of an old laptop's on board storage for hundreds less than it would cost me were I to take it into one of their repair centers. As I plopped a replacement battery into my 2012 11" MacBook Air earlier this week. I found my self feeling a lot of gratitude for the folks who talk me the fundamentals of puttering about with electronics. However, I know that not everyone has access to folks that can help them learn the skills they need in order to diagnose or correct a problem with their laptop, game console or other devices. This can make getting started with repairing you gear feel pretty intimidating.You can get around this intimidation in a couple of ways. You can, if you're lucky enough to have one where you live visit a repair cafe or other similar business. They have the tools and instructions you'll need in order to learn how to do it yourself. And of course, there's the Interwebz. You'll find no end of videos that suggest how to tinker out a technical problem. Read the rest

New York continues to innovate in rat termination technology. Buckets of rats, indeed!Chicagoans just name the things and ride them to work.CNN:A new rat-dunking gadget will be rolled out in Brooklyn's most infested neighborhoods after a successful trial, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams revealed at a press conference on Thursday.The device, called Ekomille and created by private company Rat Trap Inc., attracts the rodents with food and then drops them through a trap door into an alcoholic substance."It knocks them out and they drown eventually," company president Anthony Giaquinto said at a press conference announcing its use in New York, the AFP news agency reported.Rats will climb a ladder to reach the bait on the device, at which point a sensor deploys a trip lever that plunges them into a tray that can hold 80 rat carcasses."The rodent feels safe and secure within the device. The transparent cover provides natural light," Rat Trap Inc. adds about the method on its website."The natural, non-toxic solution in the tank renders the rodent instantly unconscious," it adds.Sanitation workers opened the container at Thursday's unveiling to show reporters the gruesome -- but apparently effective -- results: a bucket filled with lifeless rodents. Read the rest

Breaking Away teaches us many things. One is that we can experience a good ol' existential crisis and not go all goth. Read the rest

Turns out fast food hits crows the same way as it does humans: In the cholesterol levels.Scientists measured the cholesterol levels of crows in different parts of the country -- and found that the more urbanized the area, the higher the cholesterol in the crows. Why? Probably because the crows are eating the scraps from our terrible, tasty processed food. To test whether fast food could actually be the culprit, the scientists ran an experiment, leaving McDonald's cheeseburgers near the nests of crows in the rural area of Clinton, NY. Sure enough, the cholesterol levels of those rural crows shot upwards.But wait, what about the ethics of intentionally raising the cholesterol levels of crows? It's not so big a deal for them, necessarily. Higher cholesterol correlates with better health in some animals, so it's okay for crows to supersize it, apparently?As the New Scientist reports:She and her team found that while urban crows had lower survival rates overall, the cholesterol didn’t seem to hurt the crows, and even boosted the body condition of the nestlings, leaving them a little plumper.Still, Townsend doesn’t recommend flinging burgers to birds at the park. “We know that excessive cholesterol causes disease in humans, but we don’t know what level would be ‘excessive’ in a wild bird,” says Townsend. “It is also possible that, if elevated cholesterol does have negative effects, they would show up later. In humans, it can take many years for excessive cholesterol to lead to disease.”Jukka Jokimäki at the University of Lapland in Finland was surprised the fast food didn’t have a bigger negative influence on the birds’ health. Read the rest

This is pretty brilliant: A rap battle between Alexander Hamilton and Satoshi Nakamoto over the merits of centralized, government-fiat currency, versus decentralized cryptocurrencies.It's a note-perfect homage to the terrific "cabinet rap battles" in the musical Hamilton (worth listening to, #1 and #2). Over at freeCodeCamp, Quincy Larson transcribed the lyrics:[Satoshi Nakamoto]Decentralized currency. Yes, I invented it.I’m sure many governments wish they had prevented itTheir national cash is how they keep control,But freedom to the people was my ultimate goal.Am I a pseudonym? A group of men? It doesn’t even matter.I invented Bitcoin cause fiat is a disaster.A man from Japan or a damn hologram?I’m the reason open season on crypto began.[Alexander Hamilton]Does anybody know what this crypto-thing means?To me, sounds like the new Get Broke Quick scheme,A bunch of fools from across the landInvesting in something they don’t even understand,Buying Litecoin, Dash, Bitcoin Cash,It’s all gonna crash, and be gone in a flash.All this unsupported money’s an irrational prank,And I’ll be laughing all the way to my National Bank. Read the rest

On the iconic PlayStation game controller, a design refined but fundamentally unchanged since 1994, the main buttons are an ◯, ⬜, △ and ✕. The last of these is called an "X", right? Pronounced "ecks" or some such. NO. It is, Sony insists, the cross button.Responding to an enquiry on Twitter, the official PlayStation UK account writes:TriangleCircleCrossSquareIf Cross is called X (it's not), then what are you calling Circle?🤔 Fans are shocked and appalled. But true believers know that the buttons are in fact 1,2,3 and 4. If you know why, well, why ruin it for everyone else? Read the rest

In the early days of busing kids to school, buses were painted all sorts of colors, and built to different specs. But in the late 1930s, education expert Frank Cyr started agitating for a national standard -- so manufacturers could mass-produce to one spec, making buses cheaper.In 1939, Cyr met for one week with school-transportation officials from across the country, and they hammered out a spec. One key decision? Setting the official color of school buses. They hung "hung strips of different paint colors from the wall, in '50 shades ranging from lemon yellow to deep orange-red'", as Smithsonian writes -- and the winner was an orangish-yellow.Why that color? Because it's easy to see, making buses readily identifiable on the road, very useful for safety. What's more, the particular shade of yellow they picked has some cool spectral qualities that make our perceptual apparatuses jump to attention, notes Ivan Schwab, clinical spokesperson at the American Academy of Ophthalmology:The wavelength of the popular school-bus color is “right smack in the middle” of the peak wavelengths that stimulate the photoreceptor cells our eyes use to perceive red and green. The red and green photoreceptor cells, or “cones” as they are commonly known, are the two most predominant cones in our eyes. Schwab says, “If you get a pure wavelength of one color…and you hit just one cone with it, you’re going to have x amount of transmission of signal to the brain. But if that [wavelength] were to stimulate two cones, you’ll get double the amount of transmission to the brain.” Remarkably, “That color that we are calling school bus yellow hits both peaks equally.” So although they may not have fully comprehended the science behind it, the color Cyr and his colleagues chose at the 1939 conference makes it hard for other drivers to miss a school bus, even in their peripheral vision. Read the rest

Writer Andy Weir's popular short story from 2009 (it's been translated to 30 different languages) about reincarnation, The Egg, has been beautifully animated by German studio Kurzgesagt. It was more than two years in the making. The story begins:You were on your way home when you died.It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.And that’s when you met me.Posters are available. Read the rest

Andy Riley compiled and tabulated a full breakdown of jobs & occupations by the frequency of their mentions in the lyrics of David Bowie, of which the top 5 are excluded in this screenshot of his work. Can you guess them before clicking through? Read the rest