Caimans are such adorable little crocodilians! Here's one joining a Florida (?) couple for a late-night dip in the pool. Read the rest

For your records, the hook was sampled from Andrea's disco hit More More More. It happens all of a sudden at about 2:19 in this video:Isolated for your repeat pleasure:You can buy Steal my Sunshine on tape cassette from Alcopop! records. Read the rest

"But remember, I lie." In this video, legendary magician Penn Jillette watches clips from TV and movies that feature magic tricks of one kind or another, and then gives his honest opinion about what's actually going on. ("Instant Stooging" is totally going to be my next band's name.)Why is he doing this? Well, Penn & Teller are teaching the art of magic in a new MasterClass (which looks terrific!).Here's the full clip of him and Teller doing that magic trick upside down on Saturday Night Live that he talks about at the end of the video: Read the rest

Here's the trailer for CBS's forthcoming series focusing on the further adventures of Starfleet Captain Jean Luc Picard, starring Patrick Stewart. I'd hoped for a sci-fi mix of Murder She Wrote and Le Carre's George Smiley novels (Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy, etc), posing a well-retired and wryly dysphoric Picard getting reembroiled in things. That's the first impression the trailer offers, but it also lets the "quickly back in the saddle" cat out the bag, too. Even so, who isn't looking forward to a dozen more hours of Stewart-Picard? Read the rest

No one makes a cake-based zoetrope like French artist Alexandre Dubosc (previously). He spent three months on his latest caketrope, "Freequences," and it's a completely mesmerizing visual and auditory experience. Want to see how the sausage, er cake, is made? Visit his website to see the "Making OeuF."(Pee-wee Herman) Read the rest

Step 1: be small enough to fit in a trashcan.(Protip: recycling cans smell better) Read the rest

If you managed to miss watching Top Gun over the past three decades, lemme catch you up: FUCK YEAH JETS! As thin as the plot of the original was, you'll likely be able to dive into the film's sequel without too much trouble.If you enjoy short Scientologists reliving the glory of one of their most iconic roles, fast planes and young fells running around in short-shorts, you're in for a treat. Read the rest

We're no strangers to the delights of the rude drawings that monks doodled in the margins of medieval manuscripts around here (1, 2, 3), but University of Bonn medievialist Erik Wade's epic Twitter thread on the astonishing variety of snail-doodles is genuinely next-level.Whether it's the snail-gods that snail-monks pray to, or the snail jousting tourneys, the lives of these molluscs was rich and complex: from the snail/human friendships to the lost art of nude snail-riding.(via Super Punch)Thread: everyone knows that medieval art is filled with snails fighting knights, but there's actually a whole medieval snail ecology and society, from snail-birds to snail-monks. And, ofc, snail-cats. WARNING: this thread gets very very silly. (Paris, MS. 62) pic.twitter.com/VDxqRya481— Erik Wade (@erik_kaars) July 17, 2019 Read the rest

Escape from the Haunted Mansion is a massive, ambitious free papercraft project to download, print, mount on coreboard, cut out, assemble and play. I have no idea if the gameplay is any good, but the model is freaking gorgeous. It's from the good folks at Disney Experience, who have a wealth of papercraft Disney projects and other fan media for you to play with. (via Metafilter) Read the rest

Sytech is a private sector contractor to FSB, the Russian spy-agency that is the successor to the KGB; on July 13th, hacking group 0v1ru$ defaced Sytech's site and claimed to have hacked their internal network and stolen their files -- this week, the Russian hacking group Digitalrevolution began to pass these files on to Russian media, claiming to have 7.5TB of data in all, making it the largest breach of any Russian spy agency in history.The stories thus far reported reveal a range of secret internal FSB projects, including: a mass email-monitoring service keyed to sensitive phrases; a visualizing tool designed to aid in planning a disconnection of the Russian internet from the rest of the world; an old project for harvesting social media data from Myspace, Facebook and Linkedin; a Tor de-anonymizer that uses corrupt exit-nodes to gather data on Tor users; a P2P surveillance tool for Jabber, Bittorrent and other protocols; and a tool for manually removing entries from the Federal Tax Service database for people under state protection.Mentor was allegedly being developed for the Russian military unit No. 71330, which is reportedly the radio-electronic intelligence of the FSB of Russia. This project would monitor selected email accounts at specified intervals in order to collect information related to certain phrases.Nadezhda, or Hope in English, is a project designed to visualize how Russia is connected to the rest of the Internet. This research is part of Russia's attempts to create a "sovereign Internet" where Russia can isolate itself from the rest of the Internet. Read the rest

Vape technology has been around long enough that vapers are starting to get picky about their gear. Luckily, so are we. From disposable models to cutting-edge touchscreen atomizers, there's a vaporizer in this roundup to suit every taste.Hera 2 - World's Most Advanced Dual-Use VaporizerChoose between dry herb or oil extraction modes - not to mention 100 different temperature settings - by way of a VUI touchscreen on this sleek little number. Hera 2 - World's Most Advanced Dual-Use Vaporizer is on sale for $126.99, down 36% from the retail price.Limited Edition Platinum Chong Essential Oil VaporizerThe Cloud Tornado Atomizer makes for super-quick and precise heating of your favorite oils, and you can get the satisfaction of watching the vapor build-up through the transparent mouthpiece. Pick up the Limited Edition Platinum Chong Essential Oil Vaporizer for $44.99, a full 30% off the MSRP.RT4200 Digital Classic Vape PipeThe classic pipe shape is distinctive, but this vaporizer doesn't rest on its retro laurels. The isolation airflow tech on the RT4200 makes every hit as smooth as the last, and you can save your temperature settings with a handy memory function. Grab the RT4200 Digital Classic Vape Pipe for $79, 65% off the list price.Hippie Bee VaporizerEasy and ergonomic to use, this vaporizer fits snugly in the palm of your hand and features a leakproof construction that maximizes airflow. The Hippie Bee Vaporizer is now $29.99 (25% off), and the company makes a donation to the New York Bee Sanctuary with every unit sold. Read the rest

Benjamin Daley, Michael Miselis, and Thomas Gillen, members of the California Nazi group "Rise Above Movement (RAM)" have been given prison sentences by a Virginia court for their participation in the 2017 Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally; United States Attorney Thomas T. Cullen said, "They were not interested in peaceful protest or lawful First Amendment expression; instead, they intended to provoke and engage in street battles with those that they perceived as their enemies." All pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to riot. (Thanks, Kathy Padilla!) Read the rest

The Internet Archive, the Digital Public Library of America and Muckrock have released a version of the Mueller Report as an Epub with 747 live footnotes, fully compliant with both Web and EPUB accessibility requirements.The Mueller Report is arguably one of the most important documents in American Politics. However, when the report was made available to the public, by the Department of Justice (DOJ), on the morning of April 18th, 2019, the formatting left much to be desired. For one thing, it was initially published as a PDF image file with no text, which meant it could not be searched. That version of the report can be found here. An updated version of the report, with searchable text, was published by the DOJ on April 22nd, at the same URL and with the same filename (report.pdf). More importantly, while the report had 2,390 footnotes, only 14 of those referenced links to live web pages. In addition the report suffered from many formatting issues that made it less than accessible to reading disabled people and was not compliant with US federal law “508“accessibility standards.The Internet Archive hoped it could help make the report more useful, by adding links to as many references in the footnotes as possible, as well as help make it more accessible to the reading disabled community. To do this, we teamed with MuckRock to crowdsource the identification of web-based resources referred to in footnotes. Later we worked with a team of interns to carefully research every footnote and, in some cases, the multiple references each one contained. Read the rest

One of the more extravagant claims made by tech companies is that they can detect emotions by analyzing photos of our faces with machine learning systems. The premise is sometimes dressed up in claims about "micro-expressions" that are below the threshold of human detection, though some vendors have made billions getting security agencies to let them train officers in "behavior detection" grounded in this premise.A panel of eminent psych researchers have signed an open letter condemning these products as grounded in "outdated science." The authors cite more than 1,000 journal articles that show that facial expressions are complex and cannot be classified using the techniques promoted by the self-interested commercial peddlers of emotion detection systems: a scowl is not a reliable indicator of anger, nor is a smile a reliable indicator of happiness.We have arrived at a long-overdue and extremely welcome techlash, in which Big Tech's promises about how it stores and manages our data are being looked at with the skepticism they deserve. But many of these critics are remarkably unskeptical about the claims Big Tech makes about the efficacy of its products, taking at face value Big Tech's sales-literature boasts about being able to detect and manipulate our opinions. If we're ready to believe that Big Tech lies about its taxes, its infosec practices, its anti-harassment policies, its privacy policies, its lobbying activities, and everything else it claims about itself, shouldn't we also ask whether its products actually work? It may well be that Big Tech is full of people who believe that its products work, just as the private equity world is full of money managers who believe that they can outperform a simple, low-load index fund. Read the rest

Equifax doxed virtually every adult in America as well as millions of people in other countries like the UK and Canada. The breach was caused by an acquisition spree in which the company bought smaller competitors faster than it could absorb them, followed by negligence in both monitoring and responses to early warnings. Execs who learned of the breach used it as an opportunity to engage in insider trading, while failing to take action to alert the public. Equifax nonconsensually gathers dossiers on everyone it can, seeking the most sensitive and potentially damaging information to record. The company was founded as part of a corporate spy-ring employed to root out and identify political dissidents and sexual minorities.Despite Equifax's assurances to the contrary, there's scant evidence it's done anything to prevent future breaches.The company used the breach as a chance to lock Americans into years of payments for credit-monitoring services.Equifax's market cap stands today at $16.6B, and it posted $3.412B in earnings in 2018, up 1.48% increase from 2017.The company has settled virtually all the civil liability from its breach for $700m. The victims of the breach have effectively unlimited, permanent liability from this breach and will face identity theft, fraud and stalking risks for the rest of their lives -- and after they die, their estates will also be under threat from the breach.The settlement covers federal liability from the FTC and CFPB, class action suits, and most state attorneys general actions. Elizabeth Warren, who hopes to be the Democratic presidential nominee, has called for criminal prosecutions of the Equifax execs. Read the rest

The next version of Chrome will patch a bug that lets websites detect users who are in incognito mode by by probing the Filesystem API; they've also pledged to seek out and block any other vulnerabilities that will let servers detect users in incognito mode.This will cause problems for sites operating "soft paywalls" that allow you to visit a limited number of times for free before blocking you, such as the New York Times and LA Times (disclosure: I am a book reviewer for the LA Times and have written editorials and articles for the New York Times). Users who hit the limit can bypass it by flipping to incognito mode and reloading the page. Google acknowledges that this will cause problems for these soft paywalls and proposes that sites who rely on these can adapt by "reducing the number of free articles someone can view before logging in, requiring free registration to view any content, or hardening their paywall" and points out that blocking browsers that don't respond to Filesystem API would catch lots of different kinds of users, not just those using private browsing mode.Any concern from paywall operators is difficult to credit in any event, as users who hit the limit on soft paywalls always had the option to simply delete their existing cookies from the site. On that note, can anyone recommend an advanced cookie-manager for Firefox that allows you to accept cookies from soft paywall sites, but delete them when the browser closes? Firefox's cookie management panel implies that it can do this natively, but it doesn't work for me (e.g. Read the rest

With enough practice and commitment, anyone can be a visual artist. But without the right instruction, that time spent honing your skills could seem like an eternity. If you really want to see where your talent can take you, you need sound fundamentals - and no matter what discipline or genre you lean toward, the Drawing Fundamentals Bundle has valuable insights you can draw on (and draw with) online, anytime.In total, there are nine complete courses in this package, and the best part is that you can decide what it's worth. For a limited time, the whole thing is up for grabs on a "pay what you wish" basis. Fill in that price tag with any number you want, and you'll get at least a few courses. Beat the average offer, and you can take home the whole thing. Which, for the record, is pretty comprehensive:The Complete Ballpoint Pen Drawing Course For Beginners: A guide to making vibrant art with the most accessible tools.How to Draw a Flower & Pitcher with Colored Ballpoint Pens: A step by step exercise that will hone your hatching and detail skills.Portrait Drawing with Colored Ballpoint Pens: An entryway into portraiture, where you'll learn shading, volume and more.Colored Pencil Drawing Techniques: Expand your art vocabulary with the most versatile weapon in the sketcher's arsenal.Portrait Drawing Fundamentals Made Simple: A walk through the Loomis method and other failsafe portrait techniques.Digital Painting: Amazing Fantasy Art in Manga Studio 5: A fun dive into an affordable and essential piece of art software. Read the rest

Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy is filled with fantastically detailed grace-notes that give his lunar society an uncanny veneer of reality; one of the most fascinating and thoughtful of these details is the cocktails that McDonald's clannish lunarians consume, each great house with its own signature tipple.In a new essay for Tor.com, McDonald describes the worldbuilding behind his booze, which is always a cocktail made from hard spirits because of the carbon budget needed to grow grain or fruit for beer or wine.But: spirit alcohol. Yes! You can make it from anything. Vodka and gin! Liquor opened up an entire world for me. My moon is a cocktail culture. The underground cities run on three different time zones so it’s always Happy Hour somewhere. The Cortas have their own signature cocktail; the Blue Moon. (I tried it, oh my beloveds. When I write a book, I sink deep into the mindset of the characters—it’s like method acting. I have become a real gin connoisseur/bore. My favourite? The light and fragrant Monkey 47 from the Black Forest in Germany. I do it for you, dear readers.)And so, Dior. Because when you picture a Martini glass, you picture it in the gloved hand of Audrey Hepburn. And then I had it all. I didn’t want a Moon of people in coveralls and shorts and tank tops—these are people who have mastered 3D printing. If you can print clothes, why not in the style of one of the most elegant eras in fashion history? Read the rest

Lifehacker bravely read Starbucks' Terms of Service and reports that you can get free refills on certain drinks. This is news to me.According to the company’s website, to qualify, you have to have purchased your original drink using the Starbucks app with a Starbucks card connected to your account. You’ll have to present this to a barista to obtain a refill.One other thing: if you leave the store, the deal's off.(Just for fun, I'm using this photo of a Starbucks in Kyoto. I went there when I was in Japan last year, and it's by far the coolest Starbucks I've been to. See more photos here.)Image: Starbucks in old town Kyoto, by f11photo/Shutterstock Read the rest

"While most beds provide convenient ingress/egress from the sides, I wanted to design one where you need to crawl in and out through the foot of the bed. I also wanted it to be difficult to make the bed each morning."I'm so glad Core 77 started the Weekly Design Roast, in which they make sarcastic comments about poorly designed luxury garbage of the kind that appeals to criminal oligarchs and those who aspire to the lifestyle of criminal oligarchs.Previously: Enjoy this weekly dose of snark about bad product designs Read the rest

“Go back to where you came from.”

• Trump-linked businessman testified in Mueller probe• Search of 3 iPhones seized from George Nader in 2018 via search warrant turned up child pornography, say feds“Jailed Mueller witness George Nader showed up briefly in court this AM to hear he faces an indictment on child-porn and related charges,” writes Politico's excellent courts and law reporter Josh Gerstein, whom you should follow.“Defense suggests feds have never filed charges in a case like his.” One of Nader's defense lawyers was trying to convince the judge to reconsider earlier orders to detain Nader pending trial (just like Jeffrey Epstein!).“This is not a typical child pornography case,” the attorney said to the judge. A quote for the ages.Nader is a wealthy Lebanese-American businessman and Middle East expert was a witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation, and has been indicted on charges of importing child pornography and traveling with a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity.From the Politico story:George Nader, 60, made a brief appearance Friday morning in federal court in Alexandria, Va., to be arraigned on the new indictment, which was returned July 3 and unsealed Friday.Nader was involved in various meetings and discussions related to the Trump presidential transition that drew the attention of Mueller investigators, including a meeting that Erik Prince, the founder of private military contractor Blackwater, held with a Russian ally of President Vladimir Putin in the Seychelles in January 2017.When Nader flew into Dulles Airport outside Washington in January 2018, he was questioned by agents working for Mueller. Read the rest

Rent the Backyard is a startup that is building small standalone apartments in people's backyards and splitting the rent with the homeowner.From Techcrunch:That means Rent the Backyard works with a partner to build the apartment, finances the construction, lists the property, selects the tenant, collects the rent and serves as the landlord. In exchange for all that, it has an ownership stake in the unit and keeps 50% of the rent.The startup also handles the permitting, which co-founder Spencer Burleigh said has become much easier with recent changes in California law. In fact, he pointed to stories about how these changes have led to skyrocketing applications (16 in 2016, 350 in 2018) to build “in-law” units in San Jose, which is where the startup is focused for now.Image: Rent the Backyard Read the rest

Philanthropy is theoretically an expression of generosity and fellow-feeling, but in an increasingly unequal world, charitable giving is a form of reputation laundering for super-rich oligarchs who build their massive fortunes on savage programs of exploitation and immiseration. The idea is that you can paper over the fact that deliberately starting the opioid crisis made you richer than the Rockefellers by having your name plastered all over the world's leading art galleries and museums.Nowhere is this more on display today than in Paris, where the farcically wealthy millionaires and billionaires who collectively pledged €600m to rebuild Notre Dame Cathedra failed to pay out a single sou as of mid-June. It's desperately needed: Notre Dame is crying out for cash to pay its workers' wages and remove the lead from its ceilings so that it can start work on rebuilding, but the super-rich are holding out for the chance to endow a wing or a room or a gift-shop, the kind of thing that could provide some reputation-laundering ROI.When the cathedral publicly complained about the broken promises in June, the Arnault (Vuitton) and Pinault (Gucci) families coughed up €10m each. They had pledged €100m and €200m, respectively. Meanwhile, the L’Oréal family foundation is MIA, as is oil giant Total.Many of these same billionaires are the generous Macron benefactors, among the 600 super-rich donors who donated €3m and €4.5m to Macron's campaign slush-fund (Macron has since slashed taxes on the super rich, representing a 60,000% ROI on their campaign contributions). Read the rest

Kevin Kelly and I interviewed Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza for the Cool Tools podcast. Rob is a fascinating person, as you probably already know from the thousands of posts he's written here. He is an excellent artist, designer, coder, and writer, and has a delightful sense of humor. Rob is also the founder of Txt.fyi, an effectively invisible publishing platform and low-key internet cult. It's always a huge treat to be able to chat with him.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single pageShow notes:Vortexgear Tab 75 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard"Mechanical keyboards -- the appeal is in the old-fashioned key switches which have a more tactile, more clicky feel to them, and there's all sorts of different types that you can get depending on your preferences. It's just great for people who type a lot who just don't like modern keyboards or who are getting sick of butterfly keyboards from Apple. I think for anyone who listens to a tech podcast or is familiar with the cult of mechanical keyboards, a big part of the appeal is you can swap out the keys, so there's a cottage industry of key caps and sorts of different color schemes and styles. You can have a keyboard that looks like an old typewriter or one that looks like a very specific 8-bit computer that you had 30 years ago, or that looks like a nuclear missile launch silo console. Read the rest

Nostalgia time! Top Gun was not my favorite Val Kilmer film, but it did teach me that the Navy pilots are more pilot than Air Force pilots.Football? Not volleyball? Read the rest

The world is full of corrupt oligarchs looking to smuggle their money out of their countries and put it somewhere where the rule of law that they have helped to dismantle at home still reigns; a favourite safe asset class is luxury housing in major cities, which is viewed as easy to sell on short notice due to the large supply of other money-laundering oligarchs.Cities don't need more luxury housing, though (not least because a sizable fraction of it is never occupied and sits empty, a safe deposit box in the sky): they want affordable housing. But since neoliberal orthodoxy has made it nearly impossible to imagine that cities might publicly fund their housing, cities are left begging commercial developers to build "below-market rent" housing (that is, housing that is intended to be lived in) rather than hyper-profitable luxury housing.A favoured tool for accomplishing this is to offer developers exemptions to urban planning restrictions in exchange for designating a few of the units they build as "subsidised" or "low income" housing. For example, if a plot of land is designated for buildings that are no taller than 20 stories, a developer might be given permission to build to 25 or 30 stories, provided a couple of those additional floors are below-market-rent housing.But part of the appeal of luxury housing for oligarchs is segregation from poor people. The foundational belief of right-wing thought is that some people are intrinsically superior to others and that God tells you who the best people are (by giving them white skin, or penises, or a lot of money). Read the rest

A family-run restaurant in Bangkok has had a the same giant pot of soup simmering for 45 years. When it runs low, they top it off.From Great Big Story:It’s a beef noodle soup called neua tuna. It simmers in a giant pot. Fresh meat like raw sliced beef, tripe and other organs is added daily. But any broth leftover is preserved at the end of each day and used in the next day’s soup. It’s an ancient cooking method that gives the soup a unique flavor and aroma.Image: YouTube/Great Big Story Read the rest

On Friday, the Palm Beach sheriff opened an internal affairs investigation into the absurdly lenient handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, after Epstein entered a guilty plea in his prostitution case.“The release refers to examining his deputies' actions in overseeing Epstein's work release,” says Miami Herald investigations editor Casey Frank. “Will it examine his own actions in approving the work release in the first place? A question we would ask him if the sheriff was talking to Julie K. Brown, which he thus far refuses to do.”We don't wonder why.From the Miami Herald's story Friday morning:The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office has opened an internal affairs investigation into whether it properly handled the case of multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, the part-time Palm Beach resident accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls.Specifically, it will look at the decision more than a decade ago to allow Epstein to be free 12 hours a day on work release while serving a short sentence in the county stockade on a prostitution-related charge.On Friday, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw — the same sheriff who oversaw the controversial work release arrangement — ordered the investigation be done.“Sheriff Bradshaw takes these matters very seriously and wants to determine if any actions taken by the deputies assigned to monitor Epstein during his work release program violated any agency rules and regulations, during the time he was on PBSO work release program,” a news release said.[via @jkbjournalist] Read the rest

The American singer-songwriter-sexual-predator R. Kelly has been ordered to be brought in the custody of U.S. Marshals to New York, where he will be arraigned on August 2 on racketeering conspiracy charges. R. Kelly is alleged to have manipulated and coerced girls under the legal age of consent whom he met at concerts, and then sexually abused them.AND ALSO in R. Kelly legal news, one of his employees was arraigned today in the federal case out of Chicago:A former employee of R. Kelly, who was among those charged in the new indictments against the famed R&B singer, is expected to be arraigned in Chicago court Friday. Milton Brown was scheduled to appear in court late Friday morning for arraignment in the federal case.JUST IN: #RKelly has been ordered to be brought in the custody of U.S. Marshals to New York, where he will be arraigned on Aug. 2 on racketeering conspiracy charges alleging he groomed young girls he met at concerts and later sexually abused them.— Jason Meisner (@jmetr22b) July 19, 2019IMAGE: “Symbol of law and justice. Concept law and justice. Scales of justice, gavel and book” by Aerial Mike for Shutterstock Read the rest

Joe Karganis writes, "This is the 'Co-Assignment Galaxy' created by David McClure. It maps the top 160K titles in the new Open Syllabus 2.0 dataset, based on the frequency with which those texts are assigned (reflected in the size of the dot) and assigned together (reflected in the location and clustering of the dots). It's US centric given the composition of the syllabus collection, but also a unique representation of human knowledge as a collective, connected project. Read the rest

An article of faith among neoliberals is that monopolies are efficient because they are so profitable that they can offer better prices to their customers as well as better services.Reality has a well-known left-wing bias, however. A new Pcmag analysis of 356,925 broadband speed tests found that the super-concentrated communications giants -- universally loathed companies like Frontier, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Charter, etc -- underdelivered and overcharged, while independent and municipally owned ISPs (often small town operations, though Sonic has service in a few large cities, too) offered the fastest, cheapest broadband in America. “You can rapidly see that nonprofit business models have an important role to play in improving Internet access,” Mitchell said.A study last year out of Harvard showed that community-run ISPs tend to offer faster, cheaper broadband and superior customer service to private ISPs. Community ISPs also tend to offer clearer pricing with fewer hidden surcharges, the study found.Threatened by the specter of actual competition, the telecom lobby has convinced more than two dozen states to pass laws restricting or simply banning communities from building their own broadband networks. These laws also frequently restrict a local town or city’s ability to strike public private partnerships, even if locals have voted for the option. The Fastest ISPs of 2019 [Eric Griffith/Pcmag]Locally Run ISPs Offer the Fastest Broadband in America [Karl Bode/Motherboard](via /.) Read the rest

If you only look at porn with your browser in incognito mode, your browser will not record your porn-viewing history; but the porn sites themselves overwhelmingly embed tracking scripts from Google and Facebook in every page: 93% of 22,484 porn sites analyzed in a New Media & Society paper had some kind of third-party tracker, with Google in the lead, but also including trackers from some of the worst privacy offenders in Silicon Valley, like Oracle.The data extracted by these trackers (browser config, IP address, unique advertising IDs assigned by your phone vendor) can be used to link your incognito activity to the rest of your browsing.There are many privacy tools that block some or all of these trackers, though depending on how the porn site is configured, this may break the site's functionality: you could use some or all of Brave Browser and Privacy Badger to keep the tracking scripts at bay. However, your IP address will still be transmitted to porn sites, which may log the address indefinitely and is no better at preventing leaks of this data than anyone else (cough Equifax cough).To disguise your IP address, you need to use a VPN of some sort. There are many commercial VPNs -- though they, too, might be logging your browsing activity -- and there's also Tor and Tor Browser Bundle (and Brave also integrates with Tor), though this may be too slow for video-streaming.Ultimately, tools only get you so far when it comes to privacy, and unless they're backstopped by regulation (for example, if we had a statutory damages regime for privacy breaches that would make storing user data into a high-risk, high-cost, uninsurable business activity), you are stuck in an arms race that you're likely to lose. Read the rest

After Brexit, Tory leaders are hoping to strike a bilateral trade agreement with the USA that will begin the dismantling of the NHS, starting with a ban on price-controls for pharma and open doors for America's wasteful, cruel, useless health-care insurance mega-corporations. In this video, national treasure Stephen Fry explains how the UK and US systems compare, and how American media lies about the state of the NHS to credulous, mouth-breathing Fox News zombies. If you want to keep the NHS out of any UK-US trade deal, sign the petition here. Learn more about Brexit here. Read the rest

Theoretically, there's never been an easier time for marketers. The ubiquity of social media means a good word - or a good brand - can spread like wildfire with very little effort. But as limitless as the internet is, there's a lot of competition and noise to contend with. And the vast graveyard of failed start-ups out there pays testimony to the fact that what works on what platform won't necessarily get traction on another.Enter the Silicon Valley Digital Marketers Bundle, a master class for online advertisers that truly covers all the bases.This comprehensive series of 11 courses cover the principles that apply to any savvy marketing effort, but also dives deep into the specific social media sites that will give you the biggest bang for your marketing dollar - and if you're marketing right, you might not even need to spend a dollar.Copywriting - Write Marketing Headlines That Sell: Good copy is good copy, no matter what the platform. Learn how to write it and tailor it to your audience.Facebook Ads & Facebook Marketing Mastery Guide 2019: How to work the algorithms on the world's biggest social media site.MailChimp 101 - Learn Email Marketing: This course teaches you how to use the mass mailing service to reach eyeballs without your message landing in the trash folder.How To Start a Profitable Social Media Marketing Agency: Ready to take your marketing game to the next level? There are plenty of businesses that need a digital mouthpiece. Read the rest

In the Federal Register, EPA said “critical questions remained regarding the significance of the data” that show chlorpyrifos causes neurological harm to young children.

DoNotPay (previously) is a collection of consumer-advocacy tools automated the process of fighting traffic tickets, help homeless people claim benefits, sue Equifax for leaking all your financial data, navigating the airlines' deliberately confusing process for getting refunds on plane tickets whose prices drop after you buy them, and filing small-claims suits against crooked corporations.The service was created by Joshua Browder, a British hacker who moved to the USA to pursue a Stanford computer science degree and who funds operations with a mix of venture capital and cash donations.His latest feature is the "Free Trial Card" -- a virtual credit card that you use to anonymously sign up for services' free trials, using any name and email. When the trial period ends, any attempts to charge the card fail, freeing you from going through the onerous process of cancelling (newspaper paywalls are among the worst for this: the Wall Street Journal lets you create a trial account in seconds with your browser at any time of night or day, but requires you to wait three business days and call a toll number during business hours to cancel the trial, and when you do, you're met with a high-pressure sales-pitch from the person who processes the cancellation).If you want to continue to use the service after the free trial, fear not: the app automatically emails you when your free trial is about to expire so you can put down a real card to pay for ongoing access. Read the rest

The JNU Data Depot is a joint project between rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously), bioinformatician Andrew Lynn, and a research team from New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University: together, they have assembled 73 million journal articles from 1847 to the present day and put them into an airgapped respository that they're offering to noncommercial third parties who want to perform textual analysis on them to "pull out insights without actually reading the text."This text-mining process is already well-developed and has produced startling scientific insights, including "databases of genes and chemicals, map[s of] associations between proteins and diseases, and [automatically] generate[d] useful scientific hypotheses." But the hard limit of this kind of text mining is the paywalls that academic and scholarly publishers put around their archives, which both limit who can access the collections and what kinds of queries they can run against them.By putting 73 million articles in a repository without having to bargain with the highly concentrated and notoriously rent-seeking scholarly publishing industry, the JNU Data Depot team are able to dispense with the arbitrary restrictions put on data-mining. They believe that they are on the right side of Indian copyright law as well, as they are a scholarly institution that is making a single digital copy for local use, and not circulating the articles on the internet; they believe that these precautions might shield them from a lawsuit. They're relying on precedent set in a 2016 Delhi High Court Ruling that turned on the legality of a copy shop that sold photocopied selections from expensive textbooks, where the court held that section 52 of the 1957 Copyright Act allows reproduction of copyrighted works for education and research. Read the rest

Nacho Analytics sells browsing data from more than 4m users (they advertise "See Anyone’s Analytics Account"), a service it calls "God mode for the internet." The data is harvested by embedding Nacho's spyware (dubbed "Dataspii") in a variety of browser extensions, mostly for Chrome, but also some for Firefox.Nacho -- and the browser extensions it relies on to harvest data -- claim that everyone involved opts in, provides full consent, and can be assured that the data that Nacho gathers provides to its customers is anonymized first.But as an in-depth Ars Technica report demonstrates, all of these claims are highly dubious. The "consent" is often obtained through click-throughs that accede to lengthy sets of terms, which include cryptic notices about having your data harvested in this way.The supposed anonymization is even more problematic: though the company excises obvious personal identifiers from the URLs it harvests, many services unwisely embed personal information in their URLs, and still more rely on secret URLs as the only way of keeping personal data private -- researcher Sam Jadali found that it could use Dataspii/Nacho's "anonymized" URLs to log in to people's electronic health records, internal company documents, tax returns and other extremely sensitive data, including corporate trade secrets and sensitive information from Tesla, Blue Origin, Amgen, Merck, Pfizer, Roche, AthenaHealth, Epic Systems, FireEye, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, Trend Micro, Amazon, FireEye, BuzzFeed, NBCdigital, AlienVault, CardinalHealth, TMobile, Reddit, and UnderArmour.Some of the blame for this is on web developers who put sensitive info in URLs and rely on URL secrecy to protect user data. Read the rest

I have a Kano computer and they are a lot of fun, and actually can be used as an everyday computer, if you aren't looking for blazing speed. It comes with a wireless keyboard/trackpad, a Raspberry Pi 3 (with Wifi and Bluetooth built-in), speaker and amp, a microSD card with Kano's custom Linux OS, a case, and all the cables you need. The only thing it needs is an HDMI monitor. It comes with a lot of excellent custom software, including apps that teach you how to program in Python. Amazon is selling it for , which is less than you'll pay if you buy the components individually. Read the rest

Fraudster Martin Shkreli, who enjoyed a brief period of notoriety as an Internet troll and pharmaceutical price-gouger, must remain in prison after a federal appeals court upheld his conviction for multiple instances of securities fraud.From CNBC:The three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circut also upheld the more than $6.4 million in forfeiture that a judge imposed on Shkreli last year when she sentenced him for his conviction on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud.Shkreli, 36, is serving a seven-year sentence in a federal prison in Pennsylvania.In its ruling, the appeals panel disagreed with Shkreli’s claim that his trial judge’s instructions to the jury at his trial were incorrect and confusing to jurors.“The instruction given here correctly stated the law,” the appeals panel said in its decision. ” As such, we disagree with Shkreli that exclusion of additional language describing an element not required for the charged crime constituted a prejudicial error.”Image: JStone/Shutterstock Read the rest

FaceApp is a wildly popular smartphone app that alters people's faces with various filters. Its most popular filter is one that ages the person in the photo. It turns out when you upload your photos to FaceApp, the Russian company that made the app gets a perpetual license to your photos. In other words, your photo could end up on a billboard or online advertisement for any imaginable product or service and you can't do anything about it.From Fox 29:Small business lawyer Elizabeth Potts Weinstein tweeted out the “User Content” section of FaceApp’s terms, saying “if you use #FaceApp you are giving them a license to use your photos, your name, your username and your likeness for any purpose including commercial purposes (like on a billboard or internet ad).” “You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate... distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content,” the FaceApp terms read.If you use #FaceApp you are giving them a license to use your photos, your name, your username, and your likeness for any purpose including commercial purposes (like on a billboard or internet ad) -- see their Terms: https://t.co/e0sTgzowoN pic.twitter.com/XzYxRdXZ9q— Elizabeth Potts Weinstein (@ElizabethPW) July 17, 2019(Image: Adam J. Manley, CC-BY,modified (cropping)) Read the rest

A Pentagon cybersecurity contractor threatened to murder Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) if she advanced a bill to vaccinate children in public schools, The Daily Beast reports today. Yes, we are in a dystopian hellscape.The feds charged Darryl Varnum in late June after he told the Congresswoman he was ‘gonna kill your ass if you do that bill,’ report The Beast's Jackie Kucinich and Lachlan Markay. Varnum's LinkedIn says he's “a senior cyber systems engineer.” In his threats, the man told the lawmaker, who is black, to “get the fuck out” of America, which echoes the same sort of explicitly racist inflammatory speech that is increasingly used by Donald Trump at his hate rallies and on Twitter.According to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Maryland, Varnum left a voicemail for Rep. Wilson that said, in part: “I will fucking come down and kill your fucking ass. And you’re a Congressperson, that’s fine. I hope the fucking FBI, CIA and everybody else hears this shit. This is the United States of America, bitch. Get the fuck out.”Wilson was at the time working on the introduction of a bill that would require public schools to vaccinate registered students.Darryl Albert Varnum of Westminster, Maryland called the congressperson—identified only as “congressperson #1”—on June 28, 2019, according to the complaint, and left a voicemail threatening to kill the member if the bill was introduced. “I’m gonna kill your ass if you do that bill. I swear,” Varnum’s voicemail began. Read the rest

Amazon dun goofed on Prime Day by listing high-end camera gear that usually sells for thousands of dollars at the fire-sale price of $95. Petapixel has an article with screenshots of gleeful shutterbugs' bargain purchases.“Literally everything is $94.48,” one member writes. “I have bought like 10k worth of stuff that was like 900 dollars total.”“I got a $13,000 lens for $94,” another member writes regarding their Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L IS order. “LOL waiting for the cancellation but that's like 99.3% off.”Other members spoke to Amazon customer service about their order and were told that the order would indeed ship. Read the rest

The Sheffield-based experimental music act 65daysofstatic has a new album coming out in September, called "Replicr, 2019." Today, the band began its launch publicity by releasing a video from the album, only to have the video blocked on multiple services by copyright bots working on behalf of Sony, which distributed the band's label, Superball.It's an important example of the kinds of problems created by automated filtering systems, like the one that the EU turned into a continent-wide obligation with the passage of the new Copyright Directive in March (the EU is about to gut its online privacy protections to ensure that any future legal challenges to the Copyright Directive fail).This kind of absurd situation is intrinsic to the way that these filters work: large rightsholder organizations like Sony add "upload everything to the filter databases" to their workflows, so any time something is being entered into their catalog, they're also automatically blocked from being published by anyone else. But often, these copyright claims include works that don't belong to the rightsholder, who faces no penalties for making false copyright claims.Sony is a particularly egregious offender: it has claimed copyright over stock art that it licensed from independent artists and then blocked those artists from posting their own work; it claims all piano performances of Beethoven and other classical composers, etc. But this isn't limited to Sony: Back in 2012, multiple news broadcasters claimed copyright over NASA's Mars Lander footage, having aired NASA's livestream in their nightly newscasts, which were automatically uploaded to Youtube's copyrighted work blacklist. Read the rest

The Q makes whimsical mechanisms mainly from wood and cardboard, using basic hand tools. In this video, he shows how he made a "fully working gearbox made out of cardboard, Rock 'em Sock 'em board game, a skateboard from newspapers, incredible miniature railway with train track changes, and, last but not least, a semi-auto coin sorting machine from plywood!"Image: YouTube/The Q Read the rest

“For the first time ever, there's a comprehensive map on where local police departments have partnered with Amazon's Ring,” CNet's Alfred Ng writes.“Amazon and police have been working closely together with Ring partnerships, sometimes using taxpayer money to buy video doorbells and offer them to residents at a discount.”The technology rights nonprofit Fight For the Future just released its ' Read the rest

50 years ago this month, our species placed its first footprint on the moon... and we've been leaving space junk there ever since. I mostly kid: the limits of our technology at the time forced us to leave bits and pieces of what NASA's astronauts brought to the moon with them—I like to think of what's up there more as monuments to audacity than litter.If you're so inclined, CBS is streaming their coverage of Apollo 11's 1969 mission to the moon right now, from soup to nuts. They've even left in the OG commercials that those keeping up with the mission's progress would have watched. It's a great way to grasp a better understanding of the risk, tension and wonder that our venturing beyond our home brought to the world.Image via The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force Read the rest

Hey! Remember last month when the World Health Organization was like 'nah, let's not declare this outbreak of a viral hemorrhagic fever that's killed over 1,000 people this time around a public health emergency of international concern'? They were afraid that the flow of aid could be impeded into the outbreak's hot zone, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as nations around the world closed their borders to flights in and out of the disease and civil war-addled nation. Welp, screw that: earlier today, the WHO back-peddled on their nah, transforming it into a slightly panicked Yeah.From The World Health Organization:WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus today declared the Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).“It is time for the world to take notice and redouble our efforts. We need to work together in solidarity with the DRC to end this outbreak and build a better health system,” said Dr. Tedros. “Extraordinary work has been done for almost a year under the most difficult circumstances. We all owe it to these responders -- coming from not just WHO but also government, partners and communities -- to shoulder more of the burden.”At the time that this post was well, posted, the count for the number of individuals known to have died due to Ebola had risen to 1676 deaths (1582 confirmed, 94 probable) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What made the WHO change their minds on declaring an emergency? Read the rest

Donald Trump was directly and personally involved in the discussions that led to Stormy Daniels being paid to keep quiet about her story of an affair with the then presidential candidate, the FBI says.READ THE COURT DOCUMENTS HERE.According to court documents released today, Donald Trump spoke with Michael Cohen on the phone at least two separate times on the same day Michael Cohen initiated a $131,000 wire transfer which would eventually make its way to porn performer and alleged Trump paramour Stormy Daniels.Prosecution wrote in a letter to the judge that it has “effectively concluded its investigations of “who, besides Michael Cohen, was involved and whether certain individuals, made false statements, gave false testimony or otherwise obstructed justice with this investigation.”Trump lied about it. Repeatedly. Into the cameras. On Twitter. Everywhere, all the time.NEW: Pres. Trump tells reporters he did not know about $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. https://t.co/iM43w2tJSK pic.twitter.com/qmnpQDl8wE— ABC News (@ABC) April 5, 2018From last April. Just a bold faced lie: https://t.co/LeFyJeZ584— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) July 18, 2019Looks like a number of people are in brand-new trouble today.Breaking news responses from Twitter notables and reporters on the story, below.Trump, Hicks, and Cohen had a conference call the day after the Access Hollywood tape became public. Cohen had a series of calls with the National Enquirer right afterwards. https://t.co/FDbHiLDuWt pic.twitter.com/Our18Q0h6X— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) July 18, 2019NEW YORK (AP) — Court records show Trump was on calls with aides rushing to squash stories about alleged affairs before election. Read the rest