Adventuron is an online text-adventure creation system. Like Pico-8, it uses the conventions and limitations of the 8-bit era to simplify code and suggest a distinctive aesthetic. Like Twine, it makes it easier to get creative with interactive fiction and to publish your work. Creator Chris Ainsley describes its objectives and offers a basic tutorial:Adventuron is a browser-based Text Adventure authoring system and game engine. Adventuron requires no installation and it executes via the web without any fuss. ...Adventuron is unashamedly anachronistic. Old-school text adventures used to feature a number of locations, paths between locations, objects in the gameworld, puzzles to be solved using textual inputs, and usually using items in your possession.A cliche example of a puzzle is, when faced with a locked door, you must have a key in your possession to unlock the door, and until the door is unlocked, you can’t enter a room, that has a another object to be used elsewhere. There can be dozens of overlapping puzzles.Adventuron introduces light programming concepts such as variables, conditional statements and instructions. Adventuron should be quite useful as a first programming language once a few tutorials are created. Read the rest

PPEngine isn't just a 3D remake of the 1982 arcade game Pole Position, but a complete reverse-engineering of the original game's code. The result is something truly uncanny, following all the plays, beats and moves of the classic but rendering it with modern high-definition lowpoly graphics. Creator Jonathan Thomas described his plan on Reddit:I started back in 2013 reverse engineering the code from the original arcade ROM with the help of the MAME debugger and some primitive self-made tools to analyse instruction traces and create assembly source files that could be assembled back to the original arcade ROM.Following this, I worked through the assembly source file to produce a portable C-based library containing the game logic for Pole Position. This library was used in two projects - the one you see here, and another project to convert Pole Position to the Atari ST - a 16-bit computer that was released in 1985.Thomas also used the reverse-engineered code to create a near-perfect conversion to the Atari STE home computer. Gen X surely remembers how often home ports of arcade games were crudely remade from scratch, ending up as completely different games behind a facade of graphical similarity, so this'll be bittersweet viewing for some: Read the rest

I'm not a fan of Twitter's new design: in addition to all the other complaints people have, I hate the fact that if you load a tab with your mentions in it, there's no easy way to refresh it to see new mentions; I also hate the fact that when you click on a tweet to see its context, hitting escape no longer brings you back to the feed (instead, you have to target a tiny on-screen back-arrow that my old eyes have a hard time making out).But as Dylan points out, the web was designed to solve this kind of problem by allowing each user to design and apply their own stylesheet to any site they visit. That's harder today than it used to be, thanks to obfuscation and a heavy reliance on javascript, but it's still possible, as he demonstrates in his short essay "The Mutable Web."Dylan experiments with using plugins for this like Stylus, and also checks into the browsers' own tools for changing page layouts (Local Overrides in Firefox, Style Editor in Chrome). The design he comes up with for Twitter deletes the useless "who to follow" and "trending topics" bars, along with a color scheme that matches his blog.I'm going to have a play with this. I'm not a big fan of yellow backgrounds (see above, re: old eyes), but I'm hoping that I can bash Twitter into something closer to my use-case.However, one of the web's really revolutionary features is the ability of every user to easily inspect and modify a running system. Read the rest

In Is Labor Green? (Sci-Hub mirror), three Oregon sociologists investigate the correlation between high rates of trade unionization and low carbon footprints.The authors hypothesize that unionization's contribution to lower carbon emissions comes from a variety of factors, including weakening the grip of industry on government thus generally improving the quality of regulation, agitating for better workplace health and safety conditions, and political alliances with left-wing causes, including environmentalism.These effects are tempered by unions' sometime commitment to "growth" at any cost, including environmental costs, and capital's tendency to neutralize unions by relocating their production to low-regulation, poor, corrupt states where they can pollute freely.In this article, we assess whether unionization of national workforces influences growth in national carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per capita. Political-economic theories in environmental sociology propose that labor unions have the potential to affect environmental conditions. Yet, few studies have quantitatively assessed the influence of unionization on environmental outcomes using cross-national data. We estimate multilevel regression models using data on OECD member nations from 1970 to 2014. Results from our analysis indicate that unionization, measured as the percentage of workers who are union members, is negatively associated with CO2 emissions per capita, even when controlling for labor conditions. This finding suggests that unionization may promote environmental protection at the national level. Is Labor Green? (Sci-Hub mirror) [Camila Huerta Alvarez, Richard York and Julius Alexander Mcgee/Nature and Culture](Thanks, Michael Pulsford!) Read the rest

Every day, for reasons best understood by herself, Megan Amram ("it's this weird, sexual, anti-comedy comedy that's 'in' right now") posts "Today was the day Donald Trump finally became president" to her Twitter feed. Andy Baio has scraped the metadata associated with all 800 of these tweets and analyzed them, finding that the tweets are probably manually posted, mostly between 4-8PM PT (never between 0:00h-07:15h PT), with the average tweet getting 983 likes, 47 retweets, and 44 replies (outliers: six have had more than 5,000 likes, and Aug 21, 2018's tweet got more than 10,000 likes!), though the trend is generally downward.He's posted his data in a Google sheet so you can do your own analysis.For the last 800 days, @meganamram has posted this tweet every day. So I scraped those 800 tweets and put it in a spreadsheet to make some charts, like a normal person. pic.twitter.com/pvGOfhXAV6— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) July 24, 2019 Read the rest

Thanks to Trump's tariffs and saber-rattling, Hasbro is investing in factories in Vietnam and India, de-emphasizing its China operations: the world's biggest toymaker insists that the initiative -- which will cut China's share of its manufacturing from two-thirds to one-half -- is about "spreading our footprint and adding new geographies for production."Notably, despite Trump's insistence that trade war would shift jobs from China to America, the impact seems to be primarily about moving jobs from China to other low-waged countries, a process that has been underway for a decade as Chinese labor costs have risen.Chief Financial Officer Deborah Thomas said some retailers briefly paused direct import orders from manufacturing locations during the second quarter as they watched the trade situation. Last year, 35% of Hasbro’s U.S. and Canada revenue was delivered through such direct imports. It expects the percentage to decline this year, forcing Hasbro to take on more imports itself.World’s Top Toymaker Joins Companies Leaving China’s Factories [Jeff Sutherland/Bloomberg] Read the rest

Finally! Holy cow this is huge news. Beginning on September 23, 2019, Amtrak will offer weekday nonstop service from the nation's political capital to its financial and media capital. Washington DC to New York and NYC to DC, weekdays only. From the Washington Post:Acela Nonstop will include one northbound and one southbound train per day on weekdays only. The southbound train will leave New York’s Pennsylvania station at 6:35 a.m. and arrive at Washington, D.C.'s Union Station around 9:10 a.m. The northbound train will leave Union Station at 4:30 p.m. and arrive in New York around 7:05 p.m.“This new service will offer an ideal solution for travelers who want to save time and travel between city center D.C. and New York,” said Richard Anderson, Amtrak’s president and chief executive.Even so, those with dreams of a super-fast, bullet-train-type ride will need to adjust their expectations. Acela Nonstop will get you to your destination only about 15 minutes sooner than the regular Acela service.Tickets for the new nonstop service are on sale. Fares for Acela Nonstop will be the same as for the regular Acela service.Amtrak will launch nonstop service between Washington, D.C. and New YorkPHOTO: commons.wikimedia.org, an Amtrak Acela train arriving at Boston Station. Photo: Loco Steve from Orpington, UK. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Read the rest

Justice Department says federal government re-starting capital punishment after nearly 2 decades. AG Barr ordered 5 inmates executed ASAP under new policy.

In The Independent, Dora B writes about experiencing a growing and disturbing awareness that they were being shunned and excluded from their field of specialism. Dora eventually used the GDPR—Europe's recent law providing access to the data held on you by companies and institutions—to expose what was going on. Dora was not only professionally blacklisted, the emails revealed, but privately the subject of insults, scorn and abuse from peers that Dora trusted and depended upon for references and appointments.Firstly, my eminent and influential PhD supervisor had let it be widely known that they thought I was an unpleasant person, impossible to work with, fundamentally stupid, and that I definitely shouldn’t be doing a doctorate.They complained vigorously about having such an awful student, but never mentioned the two hour-long interviews they conducted with me before agreeing to take me on. After that, one of my PhD examiners had been asked about me off the record, and had advised against me. They repeatedly used insults and demeaning adjectives to block me from several employment positions and speaking engagements.I approached the individuals and the institutions concerned about the content of my Subject Access Request. They all refused to discuss the matter with me, so I can only speculate as to what was going on. If my conduct had been that awful, I would have received a warning or been subject to some kind of disciplinary procedure, but I wasn’t, so where my supervisor thought I was difficult, it is equally possible that, as a mature student, I merely had clear boundaries. Read the rest

Formations House is a London "financial services" firm that has been implicated in some of the world's most notorious money-laundering and fraud schemes, a company that has formed more than 400,000 companies, trusts and partnerships for its customers, many of them prefabricated, anonymous "shelf companies" that have been used to disguise the parties behind breathtaking frauds, some perpetrated by corrupt heads of state.Counterpunch is in receipt of 15 years' worth of data from Formations House (courtesy of the activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets), totalling 85gb (mailboxes of "specific employees of interest"; SQL table for every email received by the firm; faxes; phone messages; and miscellanea). They've formed a coalition with other news orgs, including Propublica, CNN, The Daily Beast, and the Columbia Review of Journalism, to sort through the leaks and report out the stories they find there. They've also offered to search their database on behalf of nonaffiliated journalists and anti-corruption officials who want a peek.It's hard to overstate how notorious and suspicious the firm is: for one thing, one of its directors was convicted of using an anonymous Formations House shell company to launder proceeds from a Spanish Prisoner fraud (!!). Formations House companies were also the vehicle of choice for corrupt Ukrainian dictator Viktor Yanukovych, who used them in many ways, including to assume ownership of vast state assets that he'd stolen.Counterpunch hopes that their reporting will end up with the return of vast sums stolen from poor nations. They writes, "If even one of the '400,000 companies, partnerships, and trusts' Formations notes having set up for its clients since the turn of the century are discovered to serve a similar function, and the stolen funds returned to the developing the nation that can scarce afford to have lost them, this project will have served its purpose."As it happens, we can expect more. Read the rest

Charlotte Madelon's Rosa's Garden exemplifies a flowering genre: the bucolic, relaxing gardening game. Lewis Gordon explores what's growing: a growing claustrophobia and despair among the young, a need for control and for peaceful study, an overwhelming ecological anxiety.Curiously absent from these titles’ digital flora is the death, decay, and decomposition integral to not only the ecosystems of gardens, but also their psychological benefits. “Gardens can often be a place of retreat and escape but also a place to see the continuity of life,” Gross explains. “Things come and go, life goes on but life also ends.” In Stardew Valley crops can indeed fail, made clear to the player by turning a queasy brown color, but it’s because of player action, not natural processes. Closer to a natural cycle is an early version of Rosa’s Garden, which is still available through Itch.io. Almost as quickly as the roses sprout into life, so too do they wilt and die, the garden floor quickly becoming a carpet of murky grays and greens.Some games do emphasize rot, though. Read the rest

Virtual Private Networks can make the internet a much safer place, but that's not all. They can offer freedom from local content restrictions, anonymity and even protection from popup ads - and a really good one will do all that while still keeping you surfing at top speed. Before you go browsing the web, browse these five unique VPNs, the better to decide which one is right for you.KeepSolid VPN UnlimitedHighly trusted by sources like PC Mag and Laptop Review Pro, KeepSolid gets high marks when it comes to ease of use. You can choose from a number of protocols like IKEv2 and OpenVPN, and use the Favorite Servers feature to bookmark your favorites from among more than 70 worldwide. Get a lifetime subscription to KeepSolid VPN Unlimited for $39.99.NordVPNOne of the big names in VPN service, and it's still around for a reason. Its more than 3,500 worldwide servers provide unmatched accessibility and the double data SSL-based 2048-bit encryption is a welcome extra layer of protection. You can get a 3-year subscription to NordVPN for $107.55.Disconnect VPNIf trackers and malware are a particular nuisance, the encryption and sophisticated blockers on this highly-rated service prompted The New York Times to call it their "anti-tracking tool of choice." Pick up a three-year premium subscription to Disconnect VPN for $29.FastestVPNTrue to its name, FastestVPN has roster of more than 200 P2P-optimized servers outfitted with military-grade encryption. With 99.9% uptime, you'll barely notice you're using it, apart from the absence of ads. Read the rest

I scream, you scream, we all scream when babies eat ice cream off their own foot!I don't have any information on who this little person is but if you talk to them, tell'em I approve.(Rock 95)Thanks, Andy! Read the rest

Hilarity fading to horror, like everything else on the internet. NBC News reports minor injuries for the little boy who found his way into ATL's bowels.The small boy walked away from his mother at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport while she attempted to print out her boarding pass at a kiosk, according to an Atlanta police report. The mother told police she looked away from her son "for one second" and he disappeared. ... Eventually the boy reached a Transportation Security Administration baggage area where TSA immediately noticed him come through on the belt and a man picks him up off the belt and to safety. Emergency medical services treated the boy for a "severely swollen and bruised" right hand before he was transported to a hospital, according to the Atlanta police report. Read the rest

In 1943 an isolated sledge patrol came upon a secret German weather station in northeastern Greenland. The discovery set off a series of dramatic incidents that unfolded across 400 miles of desolate coast. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow this arctic struggle, an often overlooked drama of World War II.We'll also catch some speeders and puzzle over a disastrous remedy.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

E-scooter companies like Bird and Lime have sued Scootscoop -- a self-financed startup that tickets and impounds e-scooters that have been abandoned on private property -- claiming that the repo men are violating the same traffic laws that the same companies also say don't apply to scooters, a belief that is their basis for filling the sidewalks, streets, lawns and alleys of every city with e-waste that blocks wheelchairs, strollers and pedestrians.Scootscoop is a San Diego company founded by repo man John Heinkel and his partner Dan Borelli (a bike-store owner who views scooters as an attempt to muscle out bicycling), who self-financed the firm and now do a brisk business impounding more thank 10,000 abandoned scooters. They don't advertise, relying entirely on word-of-mouth.The thing is that the scooter companies are losing hundreds of millions of dollars and have no conceivable path to profitability, and are hoping for a miracle (like some company in China deciding to make a scooter that is simultaneously much cheaper and longer-lasting) to save them before their investors stop throwing even more millions at them.Anything that accelerates the pace at which they are hemorrhaging money drastically increases the likelihood that they'll bleed out altogether before their Smurfs Family Christmas miracle arrives.Bird -- who previously made a laughably baseless legal threat intended to prevent me from reporting on cheap kits that will let you convert impounded scooters into your own personal vehicle -- claims that the act of taking scooters abandoned on private property ("unlawfully impounding micro-mobility devices") and demanding an impound fee to return them is a "demanding a ransom." Scootscoop charges scooter companies a $30 tow fee and $2/day in impound charges. Read the rest

I like this mesh steel Apple watch band mainly because it is not tiny belt. The magnetic latch makes it easy to wear and remove the watch from my wrist. It is infinitely adjustable, so I have the perfect fit rather than being a the mercy of the hole spacing. I think it looks great, and it's just on Amazon. I've had mine for over a year now and I wouldn't want any other kind of band. Read the rest

In 1950, French street photographer Robert Doisneau captured his iconic image Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville (The Kiss). It wasn't until the 1980s that Doisneau was forced to reveal that the photo was staged. Over at PetaPixel, Martin from All About Street Photography writes:To be fair, Doisneau was actually commissioned to take photos of kissing couples by Life magazine, and he later justified his actions by explaining that he would not dare to photograph kissing people on the streets.The fact is that the secret was actually hidden to the public until the 1980s, when a retired couple named Jean and Denise Lavergne (Lavern) thought they recognized themselves. When they confronted Doisneau, he did not initially refute their claim. Then, seizing the opportunity, the couple sued Doisneau for money for violating their privacy. That lawsuit led Doisneau to finally reveal that the subjects of the photo were actually hired models paid to pose for the photo.To make matters worse for the photographer, the hired model sued him too and demanded a percentage of future sales, but she lost. This was a very unpleasant and shocking experience that, as his daughter later said, “ruined the last years of his life.” Read the rest

Bangkok's family-run Wattana Panich restaurant has been cooking the same pot of beef noodle soup for a very long time. Forty-five years, to be exact. Every day they simmer the stew -- locally called "neua tune" -- in that big pot, and every night they drain its broth to use in the next day's soup. You'll notice that the pot is encompassed by a dark residue, that's hardened soup that's been accumulating since the early seventies!Great Big Story shares the tale of the 45-year-old broth:"Fresh meat like raw sliced beef, tripe and other organs is added daily.... It’s an ancient cooking method that gives the soup a unique flavor and aroma."(Nag on the Lake, Neatorama) Read the rest

A group of visitors to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming got too close to an American Bison, prompting it to charge and toss a 9-year-old girl into the air like a toy. Fortunately, her injuries were minor. Image: YouTube Read the rest

Yesterday, a satellite smaller than a shoebox unfurled a solar sail making it the first spacecraft to orbit the Earth powered by sunlight. LightSail2 is a project of the Planetary Society, a fantastic nonprofit organization co-founded by astronomer and science educator Carl Sagan. From the New York Times:For centuries, it was only a dream: traveling through space propelled by the sun’s photons. It was first imagined in the 1600s by Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer who described the laws of the planets’ orbits. In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke moved it into the realm of science fiction in “Sunjammer,” a short story. Carl Sagan, the cosmologist, believed it could be more than a speculative fantasy, and in the 1970s began promoting the building of solar sails for space exploration.After 10 years of planning and over 40,000 private donations worth $7 million, that idea took flight on Tuesday, as LightSail 2, a spacecraft built for the Planetary Society, co-founded by Mr. Sagan, began what its creators hope will be a year of sailing around Earth.“This is still one of the most feasible pathways to have real interstellar space travel in the future,” said Sasha Sagan, a writer as well as the daughter of the astronomer.If it succeeds in its mission, it will contribute to overcoming one of the greatest limitations on the outer bounds of space travel — that the power that steers spacecraft, usually hydrazine fuel, eventually runs out. Read the rest

GPT-2 is OpenAI's language model that produces astonishingly lucid text responses to short text inputs. I've been playing around with a small model of GPT-2 (here are installation instructions) for a while and am shocked by the quality of many of its responses. The language model is probabilistic, too, so it gives a new output every time you enter the same prompt. For example, I fed it with this fake news prompt:Food scientists have developed a process to turn people who have died from ebola into delicious food. The disease victims' bodies are freeze dried, then ground into fine powder and mixed with salt and spices. "Tastes like chicken," say taste testers. The first batch of “Ebola Bowls” will be released on a limited basis at Whole Foods stores by Thanksgiving.Here are five outputs from the above prompt:GPT-2 OUTPUT (1): The bowl is made from raw chicken and other animals, which are ground and cooked in water to release oil and protein. This is the best way to cook the human body, says Dr. John D'Agostino, who led the study and now works for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).The researchers believe that the Ebola bite is the most common way that people develop Ebola and that some people may carry the virus to other parts of the body. The virus can spread from person to person by contact with bodily fluids.The study was published in the journal Infectious Diseases. Other scientists are still studying the safety and efficacy of the meal. Read the rest

The Jolly Roger Telephone Company is a service that answers phone calls with pre-recorded bots designed to keep telemarketers on the line as long as possible. In these recording, we can hear a scammer trying to trick a bot into paying money for bogus vacation credits. The bot keeps her on the line for 14 minutes.From the YouTube description:Here's our newest and my current favorite Jolly Roger bot. His name is Ox-Gut McGee and he has a few new surprises for the telemarketers. In this call, a telemarketer is trying to convince us that we have $2600 in "vacation credits" with a travel agent and we're about to lose all this credit if we don't act now. Naturally, the goal is to get some payment information from us so we can hold this incredible vacation. It breaks my heart that this scam is so effective. We at Jolly Roger Telephone are intercepting as many of these calls as we can, engaging the telemarketers with bots, and wasting as much of their time as possible.As with all of our bots, Ox-Gut uses IBM Watson to process the speech from the telemarketers. We have found that IBM provides the best speech recognition for low-fidelity telephone calls, and it sure was effective for this particular call. The telemarketer was getting impatient and ready to hang up several times, but Ox-Gut sucked her back into the conversation. Also, I was able to isolate and enhance the inbound audio so we can hear a quiet conversation between the telemarketer and her supervisor. Read the rest

Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, who famously played replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982), has died at age 75. Above is his unforgettable death soliloquy from Blade Runner, much of which Hauer wrote himself the night before the scene was shot. From Variety:Handsome, energetic and fluent in several languages, Hauer made his first mark in the late ‘60s in the Netherlands as the star of Paul Verhoeven’s medieval TV series “Floris.” He vaulted to the top ranks of Dutch stardom in 1973 opposite Monique van de Ven in Verhoeven’s sexually explosive drama “Turkish Delight,” which became a box-office smash and garnered an Oscar nod as best foreign film.After three more Dutch features with Verhoeven that became art-house successes in the U.S., Hauer segued to a Hollywood career with a flashy role as a terrorist in the 1981 Sylvester Stallone thriller “Nighthawks.” Read the rest

Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) escaped to be become one of the most heroic and effective activists and abolitionists leading up to the American Civil War and after. Her courageous efforts as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad directly saved the lives of hundreds of people and inspired countless others. She is a true American hero whose courage and impact can't be overstated. And now she's the subject of a big Hollywood biopic. Harriet, directed by Kasi Lemmons and starring Cynthia Erivo, will be released November 1. Read the rest

Without naming any companies, the DOJ has announced that it will investigate Big Tech platforms that dominate "search, social media and retail services."The most notable thing about the announcement is the breadth of issues that the DOJ proposes to investigate: " competition, 'stifled innovation' and the impact on consumers." The notable thing about this is that it is a direct rebuke to the conservative (and totally batshit) theory of antitrust advanced by Ronald Reagan and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who claimed that antitrust law was never about fighting monopolies or ensuring competition, but rather only ever about preventing "consumer harm" in the narrowest sense: price raises in the short term.This orthodoxy is why Amazon has not faced scrutiny for the way it has dominated the books market, while Macmillan paid millions for colluding with Apple and other publishers to fix prices, and why Brett Kavanaugh sided with liberal justices in a Supreme Court ruling that allowed an antitrust suit against Apple for price-fixing in the App Store to go ahead.But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st Century: by focusing narrowly on short term price raises and neglecting anti-competitive conduct, the Borkers have allowed for massive concentration in the tech sector, which means that if you piss off half a dozen tech execs, you disappear from the public eye, prompting some Borkers to regret their stance and begin to call for extremely selective broader enforcement of anti-monopoly rules.The move is the strongest by Attorney General William Barr towards Big Tech, which faces increased scrutiny from both political parties because of the expanded market power the companies have and the tremendous amount of consumer data they control. Read the rest

The S1 (AKA the "Slip-Slide Seat") is a radical rethink of airline middle seats from Colorado's Molon Labe Designs; it sits a little back of the seats to either side of it, is slightly wider, and has slightly lower arm-rests -- and in some configurations, it allows the aisle seat to be slid over it, temporarily widening the aisles and speeding boarding and unloading.The S1 has just had limited approval from the FAA and an unnamed airline will be trying it on 50 planes by the end of 2020. The seats are 5% heavier than regular seats and don't recline, and are intended for short-haul flying. They're working on other designs for long-haul flights.“We have discovered that what looks like a small stagger actually makes a huge difference. The trick is to actually sit in the seat. In fact our main sales tool is to ship seats to airlines so they can sit in them,” says Molon Labe founder Hank Scott. “I have watched this several times—airline executives see the seat, nod their head and then say they get it. Then we ask them to actually sit down, next to a big fella like our head sales guy Thomas [6-foot-6, 250 pounds]. Within a few seconds they [really] get it—they stop being an airline executive and switch into passenger modes.”The seat pairs this staggering effect with a two-level armrest design to eliminate the inevitable elbow fights that happen when six arms battle over four armrests. This approach works better in visuals than explained, but basically, the aisle and window passengers end up using the front ledge of the rest, and the middle passenger uses the rear portion. Read the rest

How long does it take to dig a hole six feet deep and eight feet long using just a fork?

This year for Burning Man, my lovely campmates and I at Liminal Labs are running a big, playa-wide squirt-gun game called Assassination Army: come and get a gifted squirter from us (or bring your own!), don a brightly colored wristband, undergo our rigorous strategy-and-tactics training, and then go and soak other players out in the world, collecting trophies when you zap 'em!We're at 8:30 and Center Camp, and you can/should sign up in advance by emailing playa.assassin@gmail.com.We're also throwing our annual cocktail party on Thursday at sunset, for players, friends, and passers by.Also: on Wednesday at noon, I'll be interviewing Andrew "bunnie" Huang, the legendary hardware hacker (previously) for our annual Liminal Speaks lecture series. Come early, seating is limited!BEAR IN MIND!All targets must be bracelet-wearing consenting players, no mass casualties (spraying a crowd). There’s no finesse in that kind of sloppy squirtfest. WATER ONLY in your weapon. No dosing, no liquor, just sweet H20. Safe Zones: Target’s home camps and Liminal Labs are safe for all assassins and targets. Need a break from the game? You can always remove your bracelet or come chill on our shady couches, indulge in our nightly mirrored movie madness or enjoy our playa safehaus (21 and up, you will be checked). Strategize, stargaze and study up on skillful saturations. You’re safe with us! For Extra XTRA Credit!DUELING CIRCLEGot a gripe with someone?A nagging difference of opinion?Has your delicate honor somehow been besmirched? Read the rest

"Anonymized data" is one of those holy grails, like "healthy ice-cream" or "selectively breakable crypto" -- if "anonymized data" is a thing, then companies can monetize their surveillance dossiers on us by selling them to all comers, without putting us at risk or putting themselves in legal jeopardy (to say nothing of the benefits to science and research of being able to do large-scale data analyses and then publish them along with the underlying data for peer review without posing a risk to the people in the data-set, AKA "release and forget").As the old saying goes: "wanting it badly is not enough." Worse still, legislatures around the world are convinced that because anonymized data would be amazing and profitable and useful, it must therefore be possible, and they've made laws that say, "once you've anonymized this data, you can treat it like it is totally harmless," without ever saying what "anonymization" actually entails.Enter a research team from Imperial College London and Belgium's Université Catholique de Louvain, whose Nature article Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models shows that they can reidentify "99.98 percent of Americans from almost any available data set with as few as 15 attributes." That means that virtually every large-scale, anonymized data-set for sale or circulating for scientific research purposes today is not anonymized at all, and should not be circulating or sold. (Rob discussed this earlier today)The researchers chose to publish their method rather than keep it a secret so that people who maintain these data-sets can use it to test whether their anonymization methods actually work (Narrator: They don't). Read the rest

Looks like Frampton has fun with it too. Read the rest

The $5 billion FTC fine isn't the only fine Facebook must pay.

I picked up one of these Kaweco Sport fountain pens the other day...I am unclear what is 'sport' about this pen, but it is a classic. The barrel is a bulbous octagonal design, something like a Rotring pencil that needs a diet. This shape feels wonderful in my hands. The plastic is lightweight and the nib puts down ink.I bought a converter because I hate using cartridges, however the blue cart that came with the pen is just fine. I will prefer using this with Noodler's Ink however, I am an ink snob.I tested a medium nib but was sent out the door of the shop with a fine. I will be swapping it, as the paper I am most enjoying these days really needs the broader nib. I do believe their fine is a fine and their medium a medium.I still enjoying writing letters to folks I like and dropping them in the mail. I think it freaks people the fuck out.Kaweco Sport Classic Fountain Pen Black M (Medium Nib) via Amazon Read the rest

Proposals to ban working cryptography were all the rage in the Clinton years, but then they fell out of vogue for a decade, only to come roaring back in the form of bizarre proposals each stupider than the last, with Australia bringing home the gold in the Dumbfuck Olympics.One feature of all this foolishness is the oft-repeated claim that it is possible to produce cryptography that fails every time the cops need it to, but never fails when criminals, spies, stalkers and identity thieves need it to. This is so implausible and obviously wrong that even people who only have the vaguest idea of how crypto works still immediately grasp that it is either a) bullshit or b) wishful thinking.Enter William Barr, the new US Attorney General, who also wants to ban working cryptography. Though Barr's desire to ban working crypto is no less deadly and awful than, say, Rod Rosenstein's, Barr is doing one thing different: he's admitting that banning working crypto will make all the people who rely on crypto less secure, with the "trade off" that it will make society more secure because cops will find it easier to spy on "bad guys."Even if Barr less wrong than other people on his side, he's still wrong. For one thing, it's impossible to keep working crypto out of the hands of bad guys, because working crypto tools are made all over the world and are licensed as free/open source software, and they run on any general-purpose computer, which is every computer, so as a practical matter, any ban on working crypto will only work if people who are willing to commit acts of terror and other bad deeds are intimidated at the thought of facing civil penalties for installing illegal software. Read the rest

Mathieu Stern is curator of the Weird Lenses Museum.This lens spent 100 years in the dark, the last think it captured must have been the horrors of the World War I ... i think it was time to use it for something more light and positive. I took this Kodak Vest Pocket camera lens with me for a short trip to Vienna (Austria) to shoot some test footage. I must say i was pretty amazed by the sharpness and the quality of the image i saw on my screen.It does look great. The go-to practical glass for getting this old-timey look is Soviet M42-mount Zeiss Biotar knockoffs, especially the Mir 1-B 37mm and the Helios 44-2 58mm.I figure that the magic happens because old uncoated glass offers poor contrast, effectively compressing light and shadow into a thinner range: a bug in 1960 but a useful feature in 2020, where the resulting flat, grayish image can graded in real-time on pocket computers. The upside is capturing a filmlike range of light on everday video sensors. The downside is the loss of information in general--push too hard in the lab and it'll just look nasty. Which is good. Read the rest

Oops! Facebook says allowing Sony and Microsoft access was “our mistake.”

Settlement between FTC and Facebook ends 16-month probe that began Cambridge Analytica, Russia, and Trump.

"Hey! Heeeey! HEY! Oh my God."UPDATE: Charges and a lawsuit were filed against Marlin Lee Larsen, the skipper of the speeding boat. Larsen claimed it was "fake news".Mr Larsen’s son-in-law, who also was on the boat, told investigators that he had warned his father-in-law to pay attention, that he sometimes saw him using his mobile phone while driving the boat and he had been off-and-on his phone the morning of the crash, according to the sheriff’s report. ... Mr Larsen told The Oregonian the accusation that he was using his phone at the time of the crash was “fake news.” He pleaded not guilty to charges of reckless endangerment and assault and said the lawsuit was unnecessary because no one was seriously hurt.The charges were dropped upon Larsen's death at 75. Read the rest

After being elected leader of Britain's governing Conservative party yesterday, Boris Johnson today becomes the unelected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, an undemocratic process he once described as "fraudulent" and a "palace coup".Trump loves him, of course—or at least the things Boris has privately promised to him. Meet "Britain Trump," as America Trump puts it.The comparisons between the two Anglophone leaders have come fast and furious - some facile and others more nuanced. Even Mr Trump himself got in on the game, in a speech in Washington on Tuesday afternoon."He's tough and he's smart," Mr Trump said of Mr Johnson. "They call him 'Britain Trump', and it's people saying that's a good thing. They like me over there. That's what they wanted. That's what they need."There are plenty of other opinions, of course - that Mr Johnson is either the second coming of Donald Trump in a good way or in a bad way; a British original or a knock-off nationalist. 1. Trump humiliates all who supplicate to him.2. Boris will channel this humiliation to an entire nation when it befalls him.3. There is nonetheless a good chance Boris will immediately call Trump "America Boris".4. This story's a good example of how some U.S. media "edit" Trump to make him look more normal. Some are rendering Trump's description of Boris as "Britain's Trump" when he clearly said "Britain Trump." Such speech patterns are unique to the President and should never be "edited for clarity." Read the rest

In The New York Times, Gina Kolata writes that a team of scientists has proven a method of identifying specific individuals from "anonymous" data sets.Scientists at Imperial College London and Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, reported in the journal Nature Communications that they had devised a computer algorithm that can identify 99.98 percent of Americans from almost any available data set with as few as 15 attributes, such as gender, ZIP code or marital status.Even more surprising, the scientists posted their software code online for anyone to use. That decision was difficult, said Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, a computer scientist at Imperial College London and lead author of the new paper.They had to publish because to do the research is to realize that criminals and governments already did the research. Read the rest

VLC, the exceptional open-source media player that pretty much runs on everything, has been one of the first programs I install on a new computer or smartphone for years. It's simple, powerful and free—I couldn't ask for anything more. Well, except maybe not having it play host to a critical security vulnerability, but aside from that NOTHING MORE.From Gizmodo:Discovered by German security agency CERT-Bund (via WinFuture), a new flaw in VLC (listed as CVE-2019-13615) that has been given a base vulnerability score of 9.8, which classifies it as “critical.”The vulnerability allows for RCE (remote code execution) which potentially allows bad actors attackers to install, modify, or run software without authorization, and could also be used to disclose files on the host system. Translation: VLC’s security hole could allow hackers to hijack your computer and see your files.So, all y'all that said viewing porn offline with VLC instead of letting Google watch you steam it was a good idea? Maybe put a pin in that, for the time being. The good news is that the bungalow-sized software security hole isn't found in all iterations of the app. Windows, Linux and Unix users should take necessary precautions to ensure their digital security. Mac users can keep on keeping on.If you do find yourself having to go without VLC for your own damn good, it shouldn't be for too long. According to Gizmodo, VideoLAN is on the case: they're hip-deep in the development of a security patch as we speak with, reportedly, 60% of the work on the patch complete. Read the rest

Every language has its quirks. The gendered pronouns in French and Spanish can raise an eyebrow for some, and the verb placement in Japanese can confound English speakers. But when learning any new language, the brain pretty much works the same way: It needs total immersion. Rosetta Stone understands that better than anyone, and that's why they're still the go-to language software after 27 years in the business.Their secret? In a way, there really isn't one. If you want to really make a new language stick, there aren't any shortcuts - so Rosetta Stone doesn't take any. What it does do is move easily from those fundamental first few words to key phrases with a presentation that makes you want to learn.That presentation is primarily visual, with very few cues in your native language apart from the menus. You'll start by pairing some words of your chosen language to pictures of them that appear on the screen. As you move through the lessons, Rosetta Stone is great at using context to guide you into similar words, then joining those words into sentences. Before you know it, you'll have the key components to a conversation down pat.Along the way, you'll get steered in the right direction by Rosetta Stone's TruAccentâ„¢ speech recognition tech, which not only corrects you on basic pronunciation but can compare your accent to that of a native speaker. And the newer online version of Rosetta Stone makes full use of its vast user base: You can enhance your language chops by playing games against other learners or get tutoring help if you want to go the extra mile. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH spunky little Donald and his imaginary publicist John protect America from brown-skinned Congresswomen

Novelty plates marked "mom jeans" "favorite jeans," and "skinny jeans" have been yanked off of Macy's store shelves after people criticized the company for being fat-shaming jerks. Ok, maybe Macy's wasn't called that exactly but critics did claim these controversial "portion-control" plates carry a body-shaming message for women. People:Alie Ward, a writer and podcast host, ignited the conversation after she tagged Macy’s in a tweet on Sunday. “How can I get these plates from @Macys banned in all 50 states,” she wrote beside a photo she took of the dishes in a display at the Macy’s flagship store in New York City...Within hours, Macy’s had reached out to Ward on Twitter, letting her know that they would be pulling the product as soon as possible. “Hi, Alie — we appreciate you sharing this with us and agree that we missed the mark on this product,” Macy’s wrote. “It will be removed from all STORY at Macy’s locations.” STORY at Macy’s is a brick-and-mortar retail initiative in which small businesses are given space in-store to sell their products that follow a certain theme. The plates, created by a company called Pourtions, were for sale in STORY at Macy’s. They were never available online on the Macy’s website.Hi, Alie — we appreciate you sharing this with us and agree that we missed the mark on this product. It will be removed from all STORY at Macy's locations.— Macy's (@Macys) July 22, 2019The plates are still available at the Pourtions website. Read the rest

Conversational language is not the same as formal language: chatter over the dinner table does not follow the same rules as a speech from a podium. Informal language follows its own fluid, fast-moving rules, and most of what we know about historic informal language has been gleaned from written fragments, like old letters and diaries -- but now, the internet has produced a wealth of linguistic data on informal language, which is explored in Canadian linguist Gretchen McCulloch's new book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.Informal language has always been hard to study. Even after the development of systems for recording speech, large-scale analysis depended on accurate transcription and hand-coding of these recordings. The internet changes all that. Charlie Stross has called the internet "the beginning of history," in which the minutae of everyday people's lives are being recorded for the first time ever. As historian and sf writer Ada Palmer once told me, the internet is producing one of the very first records of what normal people eat and future historians who study our time will not be forced to pore over the food in the backgrounds of oil paintings to get a sense of our culinary moment.One of the disciplines to benefit from this new world of recorded and machine-parseable everyday activity is linguistics. Large-scale analysis of internet communications -- old BBSes and forums, mailing lists and blogs, social media and texts -- is yielding new insights into the patterns and evolution of informal speech, and McCulloch's insightful, lively chronicle of that new discipline and its conclusions make for fun, informative reading. Read the rest

There's a new wine-and-cheese pairing in town. But it's not real cheese, it's one with Cheez-It snack crackers. Yep, for a limited time, Cheez-It and red-blended House Wine are being sold together in the same packaging, a box. PRNewswire:Summer is full of moments to grab a glass of wine and your favorite cheesy snack. Beginning July 25, you can purchase a limited-edition House Wine & Cheez-It box at OriginalHouseWine.com for $25, while supplies last. If you miss the chance to purchase a box, you can still enjoy mixing and matching Cheez-It and House Wine pairings on your own all summer long.(AdWeek) Read the rest

Our friends at eBoy, who have designed a lot of stuff for Boing Boing, MAKE, and Institute for the Future over the decades, have released a new version of their tilt-to-solve game, FixPix. It features their excellent pixel-based art, natch. Free to download!The game features 180 hand crafted puzzles made from eBoys unique pixel art. The graphics are split into layers and you have to tilt the phone to the right angle to “fix” the puzzle. Hidden in the puzzles detailed pixels, you will find a hint to solve the puzzle. For the new "expanded" version of the game we had to massively expand the pixel art puzzles - from the iPhone 3 to the iPhone X aspect ratio (320x480 points to 320x812 points) which means 70% more pixels per puzzles. They look crisper and more vivid than ever on the new phones. We also now organised the puzzles in packs of 10 and there is a new level selection scene in which you drive a bus through a pixel art city from station to station which adds a lot of fun. Additionally we have a new hard mode that unlocks once you have solved all levels. It messes with the tilt behaviour and adds visual effects to the puzzle layers. Read the rest

RJ Jones writes, "My friend gave me a tip! If you need to drown out fascists, bring a speaker & play copyrighted music at their rallies cause it will be easy to report their videos & get them taken down for copyright."This is a reference to Youtube's idiotic Content ID automated takedown system (soon to be mandatory for all online platforms in the EU), which indiscriminately blocks anything that it believes to contain a copyrighted work. It's not clear whether Jones is describing a hypothetical or a reality, but a reliable source in Berlin tells me that this is an established counterprotest tactic there.The thing is, as much as it's a cute way to sabotage Nazis' attempts to spread their messages, there is nothing about this that prevents it from being used against anyone. Are you a cop who's removed his bodycam before wading into a protest with your nightstick? Just play some loud copyrighted music from your cruiser and you'll make all the videos of the beatings you dole out un-postable.The reality is that incidental background music at a political rally is not a copyright infringement, but automated systems can't make sense of fair use claims, which require human judgment.The inability of Content ID to tell fair use from infringement is a feature, not a bug. It's why 7 hours worth of lectures at a scientific symposium were wiped out when the cameras picked up some copyrighted music being played during the lunch break. Read the rest

In 2018, Steve Bannon teamed up with a group called Catholicvote to acquire mobile phone location-tracking data to identify people in Iowa who'd visited a Catholic church and target them with political ads.Bannon revealed that he'd purchased the idea in a deleted scene from The Brink, a documentary about Bannon's life and political tactics. The scene was viewed by Thinkprogress, who have reported out the story.Bannon boasted to the documentary's director that "If your phone’s ever been in a Catholic church, it’s amazing, they got this data. Literally, they can tell who’s been in a Catholic church and how frequently. And they got it triaged."A spokesperson for Catholicvote called Kathleen Storen said that the data the organization used "does not allow you to collect personal information" and then said, essentially, that everyone else does it too.Regardless, as Karl Bode points out, this kind of data collection is generally illegal even though the carriers have aggressively sold the data off and Trump's FCC has refused to stop them.The campaign that Bannon and Catholicvote ran was largely a failure. As Thinkprogress says, "Democrat Abby Finkenauer beat out Republican incumbent Rod Blum by 51% to 45.9%, while Republican Kim Reynolds held on to the governor’s mansion."“This is terribly disturbing. This is like a total infringement on everybody,” said Sister Gwen Hennessey, a Franciscan sister and longtime social justice activist in Dubuque.“I have not used it to target religious groups specifically, and I will say that, for me, morally that seems like a step too far,” said one executive at an advertising firm that regularly uses geofencing, who asked not to be named. Read the rest

Women wearing seatbelts are 73% more likely to be killed or seriously injured in a car crash than men in seatbelts, and while it's not entirely certain why this is, it's a pretty good bet that sampling bias in crash-testing is to blame.Specifically, until very recently all crash-test dummies were male-bodies; when woman-shaped dummies were added, they were shorter and smaller than most women, so that the researchers could capture a wider range of datapoints, from small people to big people.Female bodies and male bodies have typical differences in fat distribution and skeletal structures, so crashes that don't injure male dummies might still present problems for female dummies -- and crashes that involve women who are shaped different from the petite dummies now in use might also cause injuries that are not visible with the dummies that are a proxy for them.All this is uncertain, but not because it's impossible to increase certainty -- rather, there's been next to no research on the subject, and that research will take a long time, even if we start studying it now. The statistical picture built up with male-bodied dummies has been decades in the making, and simply diversifying the shape of dummies in tests starting from today will not provide that longitudinal picture that we need to make real improvements.Mueller says retooling crash-test dummies can’t happen overnight—it takes 20 to 30 years of bio-mechanical research and testing to build and fine-tune each model. Many of the dummies manufacturers are using now were built using data from the 1970s and 1980s, which skewed heavily male. Read the rest