If you've got a spare bedroom and never plan on having company over, then you've got the space to build and run your own desiccant-based air conditioning system.I mean, sure, some of the stuff that makes the system work are a lil' toxic and you'll need to be cool with having an open flame burning in your home. Also, you'll need several hundreds of dollars if not a couple of grand's worth of diagnostic tools to make it happen, if this video is anything to go by. But hey: DIY air conditioning!Or maybe just set up a swamp cooler instead.Image via YouTube Read the rest

The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans: Read the rest

Now on Airbnb: gonzo journalism master Hunter S. Thompson's guest cabin on his infamous Owl Farm compound in Woody Creek, Colorado. Eventually, the late writer's wife Anita intends to turn the property, including their living quarters, into a museum and writer's retreat. For now, you can rent the two-bedroom guest cabin for $550/night. According to the listing, Anita Thompson "will try to be available at least once per visit depending on circumstances." HST fan Kevin EG Perry spent a night at the cabin and wrote about it for The Guardian:It is 4.30 on a Thursday morning and I am writing these words on the big red IBM Selectric III that once belonged to Hunter S Thompson. Owl Farm, Thompson’s “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, is dark and silent outside. Even the peacocks he raised are sleeping. The only sound anywhere is the warm hum of this electric typewriter and the mechanical rhythm of its key strikes, as clear and certain as gunfire.In April, Thompson’s widow, Anita, began renting out the writer’s cabin to help support the Hunter S Thompson scholarship for veterans at Columbia University, where both she and Hunter studied. It sits beside the main Thompson home on a 17-hectare estate marked with hoof prints and elk droppings that gradually rises towards a mountain range. A short walk uphill is the spot where Thompson’s ashes were fired into the sky from a 153ft tower in the shape of a “Gonzo fist”, a logo he first adopted during his unsuccessful 1970 campaign to be sheriff of nearby Aspen... Read the rest

“The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives.”

"Well, I'm a gum chewer, normally. But when I heard about these ticket things of Wonka's, I laid off the gum and switched to candy bars, instead. Now, of course, I'm right back on gum. I chew it all day, except at mealtimes when I stick it behind my ear." - Violet BeauregardeDenise Nickerson, who at age 13 played the wonderfully sassy Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), has died. She was 62 and hadn't fully recovered from a severe stroke last year. From Vanity Fair:Nickerson’s first onscreen gig was an appearance in the series Flipper in 1965. She joined the cast of Dark Shadows in 1968, going on to play three characters in the series—Amy Jennings, Nora Collins, and Amy Collins. One year after her run on the ABC show, Nickerson made her big screen debut in Willy Wonka, playing one of the ill-fated children touring the factory in a clandestine competition to inherit the eccentric chocolatier’s fortune.After Willy Wonka, Nickerson also joined the educational program The Electric Company as a member of the Short Circus—a five-member singing group aimed to boost viewers’ reading skills. After that, Nickerson took a handful of television and film roles before she retired from acting in 1978. Although many reports have said Nickerson retired to pursue nursing, her family clarified that she worked in doctors’ offices in a career they’d most closely identify as “accountant."Support for the family of Denise Nickerson" (GoFundMe) Read the rest

ODNI, RIP? Huge and also completely unsurprising if true. Trump wants to fire Dan Coats, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, and nuke the entire ODNI from orbit, per Axios today -- citing “five sources who have discussed the matter directly with the president.”Jonathan Swan from Axios tweets, and Axios reports, that Trump says “he wants to get rid of the entire 'unnecessary' Office of the Director of National Intelligence,” and “has been told that eliminating the ODNI is not politically possible.” Swan cites “A source with direct knowledge.”A source with direct knowledge told me that Trump has also said he wants to get rid of the entire "unnecessary" Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He has been told that eliminating the ODNI is not politically possible... https://t.co/tAQPt2H6Rn— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) July 12, 2019Here's a snip from the Axios report:The state of play: Trump hasn't told our sources when he plans to make a move, but they say his discussions on the topic have been occurring for months — often unprompted — and the president has mentioned potential replacements since at least February. A source who spoke to Trump about Coats a week ago said the president gave them the impression that the move would happen "sooner rather than later."The director of national intelligence serves as an overseer of the U.S. intelligence community and a close adviser to the president and National Security Council, producing each day's top-secret Presidential Daily Brief.A source with direct knowledge told me that Trump has privately said he thinks the Office of the Director of National Intelligence represents an unnecessary bureaucratic layer and that he would like to get rid of it. Read the rest

Two U.S. House of Representatives panels plan to hear testimony from Special Counsel Robert Mueller on July 17, but there are reports today, Friday July 12, of a possible one-week delay that would push that date to July 24 or thereabouts.The House Judiciary Committee is intensely negotiating to delay former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's testimony by one additional week, according to NBC News. According to Reuters, the testimony is still on for the previously scheduled date of July 17.The ongoing negotiations are said to be focused on providing lawmakers a longer time in which to question Mueller. No resolution yet, so no confirmed date for Mueller's testimony at this time, per NBC.New reporting on @MSNBC: NBC's Ken Dilanian reports that the Judiciary Committee is in serious negotiations to delay Robert Mueller's testimony by a week. The talks involve giving lawmakers more time to question Mueller. The situation is still fluid.— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 12, 2019However: Reuters is still reporting that the July 17 date is on.In response to a query from Reuters, a committee aide said in an email, “At this moment we still plan to have our hearing on the 17th and we will let you know if that changes.”Politico reported that the hearing of the House Judiciary and the House Intelligence panels had been postponed until July 24, citing multiple lawmakers. And the Washington Post reported that Mueller has offered a delay until July 24 to spend more time answering questions from lawmakers. Read the rest

On January 26, 1972, a suspected bomb exploded on board a Yugoslav Airlines DC-9 and the debris of the plane rained down on mountains in the former Czechoslovakia. Everyone died except flight attendant Vesna Vulovic. After a long but full recovery, she returned to work for the airlines until she was fired in 1990 for protesting against President Slobodan Milošević's nationalism. Vulovic died in 2016. Watch her story above.More in this BBC News obituary. Read the rest

Trump Labor Secretary under fire for his previous handling of Jeffrey Epstein case in Florida

Enjoy this video of drugrunners in a semi-submersible vehicle getting collared by the U.S. Coast Guard. How dangerous that thing must be! U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Munro (WMSL-755) crew members board a self-propelled semi-submersible drug smuggling vessel (SPSS) June 18, 2019, while operating in international waters in the Pacific Ocean. SSPS vessels ride low in the water, half-submerged to evade detection. Apparently newer models are fully submersible. Read the rest

As Michigan State Police have it, 27-year old Carlos Martinez was at fault when his vehicle and one driven by an officer collided at a Detroit intersection. But security footage from a nearby porch has made a liar of the officer, showing him driving through a stop sign, causing the accident, then treating Martinez like a criminal.The Drive:"The police officer say [sic] 'you're 27 years old, you're old enough, you don't need no parents, and plus you don't have no rights right now.'"Maria Martinez told the channel that her son is a U.S. citizen without any criminal history or involvement with gangs.Fox News:MSP says after reviewing both the black box from the officer's undercover vehicle, and security camera from a nearby homeowner, police confirm the officer failed to stop at the stop sign. MSP is currently investigating both the crash and the arrest the officer made. Read the rest

It can be hard enough finding graphics for a personal website. If you're a graphic designer looking to create or customize several of them every day? Forget about it. Deadlines are a thing, and clients don't want to hear about roadblocks like copyrights or licenses.This is why StockUnlimited is almost essential not only for designers but almost any kind of creative. As TechCrunch puts it, they've brought "the Netflix model to Stock Imagery," and they've got the content to back up that comparison.There's currently a deal on their Vector Plan, which is a godsend for any project in need of images. A subscription gets you unlimited downloads from a library of more than 500,000 vector images which you can incorporate into work presentations, mobile apps, websites, newsletters, or anywhere you need an eye-catching visual. It's all royalty-free, and there's new content added every month.A lifetime subscription to the StockUnlimited Vector Plan is now on sale for $34.99. Read the rest

It's not often talked about but people with pets see a lot of animal butt. Too much, really. Well, now the folks at Honey Badger Coloring have made coloring books that offer the same view – the backside of cats and dogs. Get out your crayons, colored pencils, and/or gel pens because it's time to decorate some #Catbutt and #Dogbutt ($6.55 each). (The Awesomer) Read the rest

I'm all for stainless steel straws of the sort that we sell in the Boing Boing Store. They're an environmentally-friendly way to stop yourself from making the idiot-stick move (unless you need to use a straw, due to medical issues, then we're cool) of using one of the 175 million plastic straws that end up in landfills each year. If you opt for a metal straw, fair warning: don't pop it into your drink until you're seated and ready to sit and sip.From The Boston Globe:A British woman was impaled by a metal straw after falling at her home, a coroner said in an inquest this week that warned about the dangers of metal straws. Such straws have surged in popularity as cities, states, and even countries have banned single-use plastic straws.The woman, Elena Struthers-Gardner, 60, who had a disability, fell and sustained a traumatic brain injury in November when the 10-inch straw pierced her eye, according to the coroner’s report.“As a consequence of the fall, a stainless steel straw that was in a glass Kilner-style cup Mrs. Struthers-Gardner was carrying penetrated her left eye,” the report said.Sadly, Mrs. Struthers-Gardner, died as a result of her injury.Now, here's the thing and, don't ask me how I know, but you could very easily do the same thing with an OG plastic straw, so long as one end of the appliance has an air-tight seal. Are the odds as high of a plastic straw will fucking you up like stainless steel can? Read the rest

I always thought that the reason people look so grim in antique photos is because it would have been exhausting to hold a smile for long exposures that I imagined were required by ye olde cameras. Nope! From the always-informative Smithsonian magazine:...Exposures from the early days of commercial photography only lasted about 5 to 15 seconds. The real reason is that, in the mid-19th century, photography was so expensive and uncommon that people knew this photograph might be the only one they’d ever have made. Rather than flash a grin, they often opted to look thoughtful and serious, a carry-over from the more formal conventions of painted portraiture, explains Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery.According to Shumard, it wasn't until Eastman-Kodak founder George Eastman's 1888 invention of the mass market portable camera that informal snapshots of smiling people became common."Why Don’t People Smile in Old Photographs? And More Questions From Our Readers" (Smithsonian)image: Eugene Pelletan portrait c.1855 by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon Read the rest

Everyone in the tech world claims to love interoperability—the technical ability to plug one product or service into another product or service—but interoperability covers a lot of territory, and depending on what's meant by interoperability, it can do a lot, a little, or nothing at all to protect users, innovation and fairness.Let's start with a taxonomy of interoperability:Indifferent InteroperabilityThis is the most common form of interoperability. Company A makes a product and Company B makes a thing that works with that product, but doesn't talk to Company A about it. Company A doesn't know or care to know about Company B's add-on.Think of a car's cigarette lighter: these started in the 1920s as aftermarket accessories that car owners could have installed at a garage; over time they became popular enough that they came standard in every car. Eventually, third-party companies began to manufacture DC power adapters that plugged into the lighter receptacle, drawing power from the car engine's alternator. This became widespread enough that it was eventually standardized as ANSI/SAE J563.Standardization paved the way for a variety of innovative new products that could be made by third-party manufacturers who did not have to coordinate with (or seek permission from) automotive companies before bringing them to market. These are now ubiquitous, and you can find fishbowls full of USB chargers that fit your car-lighter receptacle at most gas stations for $0.50-$1.00. Some cars now come with standard USB ports (though for complicated reasons, these tend not to be very good chargers), but your auto manufacturer doesn't care if you buy one of those $0.50 chargers and use it with your phone. Read the rest

Hearthcabinet's "Ventless Fireplaces" use "pre-filled alcohol gel cartridges" -- that is, proprietary logs. When Drew quizzed the company's reps about this on Facebook, they danced around the question, but yeah, it's proprietary logs all right. The company notes that the design is patented (the founder, a product liability attorney named Michael Weinberger, has many related patents) so presumably this is the firm's primary method to prevent third-party log makers or log refillers. From what I can tell, there aren't any digital countermeasures that would allow the manufacturers to invoke other anti-adversarial interoperability measures like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And as clever as the design may be, it is yet another example of the rising tide of proprietary, single-use consumables, from Juicero juicers (RIP) to proprietary coffee pods. 8-packs of replacement logs sell for $80-$93with options for "unscented, vanilla, pine and cinnamon." (Image: Hearthcabinet) Read the rest

Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist, created Show Your Stripes as a way to easily visualize the past century's climate change: give it a location and it will render a series of stripes representing a century's worth of average annual temperatures (above: global average temperature); as Kottke notes: "The warming patterns for particular regions are not going to be uniform…some places are actually forecast to get cooler and wetter rather than hotter and dryer." (via Kottke) Read the rest

Nicole Prause is a sex researcher who wanted to design a gender-neutral orgasm-measuring tool that would fit in the anus and detect and measure pelvic contractions but all the buttplugs she tried to modify ("We ordered like 20 of these butt plugs off Amazon, and it messed up my recommendation engine for all time") were designed to be pistoned in and out, and thus had a taper that made it prone to popping out at the moment of orgasm.Prause tweeted about her troubles and forged a partnership with a German cosplayer who had extensive 3D printing experience; they designed a research-optimized butt-plug they call the "anal pneumatic base for psychophysiology research" and released it as an open source hardware design that you can download from Thingiverse and 3D print at home or work.Prause can explore a range of questions beyond the physiology of the orgasm. This includes direct health problems like postorgasmic illness syndrome, in which men are struck with headaches and fatigue following ejaculation. It might be due to some sort of autoimmune response to ejaculate, or it might have something to do with the number of contractions these men have, which the device can measure.“We want to make sure there are no distinct qualitative differences between the climaxes of those patients and the control population,” says Prause. “We don't currently have a reason to believe that would be the case, but if there is then that leads us down a very different path.” The Strange Saga of the Butt Plug Turned Research Device [Matt Simon/Wired] Read the rest

This battery-powered (4 AA cells, included) adjustable work light is bright and has a clamp, making it a great option for people with fewer than three arms. The clamp even doubles as a stand, so you can put it on a floor or desk while you work on your project. Read the rest

In Q2 2018, Chinese investors sank $2.87b into AI startups; in Q2 2019, it was $140.7m.It's part of a massive slowdown in China's AI industry, which kicked off with massive political/economic fanfare from the Chinese state, which promised that the sector would be worth $150b by 2030, a boast that touched off anxiety about a global AI arms race.Two years later, valuations for the companies that bet biggest on AI are plummeting. Baidu has sunk to a valuation of 10% of the worth of rivals Alibaba and Tencent, though they were all level as recently as 2017; the company's top AI scientists have quit, and the company just booked its first losses since 2005. Many of the early promising AI demos have fizzled or turned out to be smoke-and-mirrors: much-vaunted demonstrations of health-tech companies like Ping An to diagnose diseases early and head them off before they could spread represent mere incremental improvements over techniques that were documented and demonstrated in the 1970s.The other problem is that China simply can't produce the semiconductors that it needs for AI research; as a nation, China now spends $300b/year importing microchips (largely from South Korea) -- more than it spends on imported oil.McKinsey, noting China’s modest progress in the field, points to the exponential growth in money and effort required as chips advance: it takes about 500 steps to create a 20nm chip, but 1,500 steps for a smaller 7nm chip.Meantime, the wealth of fab projects has triggered a scramble for talent and exposed a talent shortfall of more than 400,000 employees. Read the rest

London bobbies were quick to arrive on the scene after a Mercedes driver tried to drive down the wrong side of a street, endangering a cyclist. When the cyclist told the driver to back up and drive on the correct side of the street, the driver took umbrage and bumped the cyclist. Other than the driver, who was incandescent, everyone else in the video kept a stiff upper lip, enforcing a stereotype of British people. The cyclist also demonstrates a good working knowledge of the NATO phonetic alphabet when he recites the license plate number of the vehicle. Here's the video without the perpetrator's face fuzzed out.Image: YouTube Read the rest

In a characteristically brilliant essay, historian, activist and writer Rebecca Solnit connects the dots between the sexual abuses of Jeffrey Epstein, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and the unnamed 16-year-old boy whose admitted rape was excused because the judge said that This young man comes from a good family who put him into an excellent school where he was doing extremely well: in each case, there was an elaborate scheme to silence and discredit the survivors of sexual violence, abetted by networks of (mostly) men who treat the disclosure of sexual assaults as a worse offense than committing the assaults themselves.Patriarchy is thus, first and foremost, a denial of the rule of the law, which relies on no man being above the law (contemplate that one of Epstein's survivors did a longer prison stint for drug dealing that Epstein did for raping her as a child). Even when powerful men settle the rape claims against them, the settlements are invariably shrouded in nondisclosure agreements: worse to speak of the thing than to do the thing.Patriarchy is part of a culture of impunity: where power means the power to get away with stuff, and where the more power you have, the more you get away with, and where the people who have more than the rest of us combined can get away with anything. Monsters rule over us, on behalf of monsters. Now, when I think about what happened with Strauss-Kahn, who was subsequently accused of sexual assault by several other women, and with cases like his, it’s the secondary characters who seem to matter most. Read the rest

This gentleman sowed discord and strife at a rooftop party and a coffee shop by affixing fake electrical outlet stickers to walls. People in need of a smartphone charge were dismayed to discover that free electrons would not be forthcoming. Such stickers are readily available at Amazon.com, a popular "e-tail" outlet on the World Wide Web. Read the rest

Magecart is the hacker gang that pulled off the British Airways and Ticketmaster credit-card heists; now they've build an Amazon cloud scanner that systematically probes S3 storage "buckets" for configuration errors that allow them to overwrite any Javascript files they find with credit-card stealing malware.Security researchers Riskiq have identified 17,000 domains that they say Magecart has compromised this way, including 2,000 of "the world's biggest sites." It's not clear how many of those actually have credit-card processing scripts that would allow Magecart to steal card details from their customers.Amazon S3 buckets are secure by default. Companies run into trouble when they actively change those permissions, either somewhere in the development process or when they hand off cloud work to a third-party contractor. Those Amazon S3 bucket misconfigurations have caused plenty of problems before. The fallout, though, was usually limited to the exposure of personally identifiable information, huge databases of usernames and passwords and birthdays and Social Security numbers that wind up for sale, or for free, on the dark web and elsewhere. That’s because those goofs typically give read permission to interlopers, but not the ability to write code. The Magecart hackers figured out a way to scan for misconfigurations that do both—and now they know 17,000 vulnerable domains.“This is a whole new level of misconfiguring,” says Klijnsma. “These buckets are pretty much owned by anybody who talks to it, which is on a different scale, a different type of data leakage. Pretty much anybody can do anything in those S3 buckets, and the reach of those is quite big.”Hack Brief: A Card-Skimming Hacker Group Hit 17K Domains—and Counting [Brian Barrett/Wired](Image: Mary Rose Trust, CC-BY-SA, modified) Read the rest

On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday expanded its investigation into Donald Trump and obstruction of justice by authorizing subpoenas to 12 officials, including the President's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and former top National Enquirer executives David Pecker and Dylan Howard. David Pecker served as American Media's CEO, and Dylan Howard as its CCO.Here's the list of the names the Judiciary Committee has voted to authorize subpoenas for:1 Rick Dearborn2 Michael Flynn3 Jody Hunt4 Jared Kushner5 John Kelly6 Corey Lewandowski7 Rob Porter8 Rod Rosenstein9 Jeff Sessions10 Keith Davidson11 Dylan Howard12 David PeckerIt's official: National Enquirer bosses David Pecker and Dylan Howard have been subpoenaed... https://t.co/9yCZhHeWoi— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) July 11, 2019House Judiciary approves subpoenas for 12 key witnesses, including AMI executives David Pecker and Dylan Howard https://t.co/JwNfaQFrPn— Brian Schwartz (@schwartzbCNBC) July 11, 2019Here's Trump's response:....conflicted and compromised Mueller again. He said he was “done” after his last 9 minute speech, and that he had nothing more to say outside of the No Collusion, No Obstruction, Report. Enough already, go back to work! I won, unanimously, the big Emoluments case yesterday!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 11, 2019From Politico's coverage of the Thursday House vote:On a party-line vote, the committee empowered Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) to issue subpoenas to current and former Trump administration officials who were central figures in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation of Russian contacts with the Trump campaign. Read the rest

Four years ago, there were 15 known black rhinos left in Tanzania -- "ground zero of the poaching crisis" -- and today there 167 of them; elephant populations (which dropped 60% between 2009-2014) are rebounding too, up to over 60,000 from a low of 43,330.The recovery is attributed to the administration of resident John Magufuli, whose 2015 election campaign included a promised military crackdown on poachers, with stiff criminal penalties. Following the election, poachers -- many of them Chinese nationals -- were caught, arrested and sentenced; four men are serving 20 years for smuggling rhino horns, and the so-called Chinese "ivory queen" has been jailed for 15 years.Wildlife experts say that the rising numbers can't be attributed solely to fertility, as rhinos and elephants gestate too slowly for the rebound to come solely from births in the wild; they say that some of the rebound is due to migration of animals into Tanzania (however, now that they're there, they're safer from poachers than they've been in a long time).Tanzania’s figures were released as wildlife investigators worldwide revealed thousands of species had been seized in a major crackdown at borders last month.“Operation Thunderball” led to seizures of 23 live primates; 30 big cats; more than 4,300 birds; nearly 1,500 reptiles and 10,000 turtles and tortoises globally.UK teams seized two bear skulls and skins, and four products derived from crocodiles, 10 tanned skins, and four ivory products including binoculars.Endangered rhino numbers ‘soar by 1,000%’ in Tanzania [Jane Dalton/The Independent](Image: Bernard DUPONT, CC-BY-SA)(via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

Every day, the world's poorest countries lose $3b in tax revenues as multinationals sluice their profits through their national boundaries in order to avoid taxes in rich countries, and then sluice the money out again, purged of tax obligations thanks to their exploitation of tax loopholes in poor nations.The secret to all this tax-dodging is a complex grift called "base erosion and profit shifting" (BEPS). Like many of the most important and dangerous things in the world, it's boring, complicated, and very important, and the reason it persists is that the boringness and complexity baffles and bores people so they stop paying attention to it, leaving it to chug along, despite its importance.At its core, BEPS involves using bookkeeping fictions to transfer your profits to low-tax jurisdictions and your costs to high-tax jurisdictions. BEPS abuses "transfer pricing," which is the pricing of goods and service between multinational companies, by using prices of convenience for transactions within a single company's international divisions. Here's how that works, in a real-world example detailed in an IRS lawsuit against Amazon, which is one of the world leaders in BEPS tax-avoidance. Amazon transfered all its "intellectual property" assets to a company called Amazon Lux, in Luxembourg, where taxes are very low. Then, every time Amazon's other divisions make a profit, they send that profit to Amazon Lux, which sends them an invoice for their use of Amazon's trademarks, software, etc. That way, Amazon's other divisions break even (or even lose money, if that makes them eligible for a tax-credit on the loss), and Amazon Lux makes all the company's profits in a tax-free jurisdiction (Luxembourg). Read the rest

In 1994, Pizza Hut aired this TV commercial in the UK that was reportedly the first completely non-English advertisement on British television. The entire thing is in Klingon. (via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

Bird, the electric scooter company that foolishly took on Boing Boing and had their asses handed to them, is reportedly in fresh financial distress.The electric scooter company has been having conversations with investors about raising more money for several months, and wants to raise $200 million to $300 million by the end of the summer, report The Information's Cory Weinberg and Amir Efrati:The company is seeking to raise at a higher price than its current $2.3 billion post-money valuation, which it attained last summer after less than a year of existence. Since then—when it was able to increase its valuation from $1 billion to $2 billion in just a few weeks between deals—the investment frenzy has cooled. (...)In the third and fourth quarters of last year, Bird said it generated about $25 million and about $40 million in gross revenue, respectively, the person said. Net revenue was more than $20 million in the third quarter and about $25 million in the fourth quarter, this person said. Some of that gap was due to rider discounts, which Bird eliminated in the first quarter of this year, when it pulled in just $15 million in gross revenue. A year earlier, in the first quarter of 2018, Bird generated several million dollars in revenue when it was in few markets, said a person briefed on the matter.Bird executives, including Mr. VanderZanden, have been open about the company’s decision to sacrifice growth to trim losses over the winter. After the $100 million loss in this year’s first quarter, Bird made several quick moves to reduce its cash burn. Read the rest

In recent years, Chinese oligarchs have been buying up vast swaths of Vancouver real estate as a way to park their money. They often don't set foot in the luxury townhouses they buy, which has led the Vancouver city government to issue a 1% Empty Homes Tax. A Chinese woman named He Yiju, who is married to a "top politician in China's rubber-stamp parliament" according to CNN, owns a $200 million waterfront mansion and is suing the city to avoid paying the $200,000 tax bill. She and her husband have a combined net worth of $925 million according to Forbes. $200,000 to someone with a net worth of $925 million is equivalent to $210 to someone with a net worth of $1 million.From CNN:In 2018, Vancouver's government ruled that He was subject to Vancouver's Empty Homes Tax, which requires owners of unoccupied homes to pay a 1% levy on their properties' value.He [Yiju] denies, however, that the property was empty. In a petition filed last month to the Supreme Court of British Columbia, her legal team argued that the lot was being prepared for renovations pending the city issuing redevelopment permits.He's attorney, Joel Nitikman, declined to comment when asked by CNN about the case.Image: Shutterstock/Spiroview Inc Read the rest

Police in Guthrie, Oklahoma arrested Stephen Jennings and Rachael Rivera after pulling them over due to an expired license tag. Turns out, the car was reported stolen. Also turns out that inside the car, the pair had a pet rattlesnake, a gun, open bottle of Kentucky Deluxe, and "a canister of radioactive powdered uranium." From KFOR:"When that happens of course, we call in a company that deals with that specifically and it`s taken safely into possession," (Guthrie Police Sgt. Anthony) Gibbs said. "The uranium is the wild card in that situation."The uranium hasn't resulted in charges. Guthrie police are still trying to figure out exactly what the suspects were going to use it for. There are no charges from the rattlesnake either."It happens to be rattlesnake season at the time, so he can be in possession of this rattlesnake because he has a valid lifetime hunting and fishing license," Sgt. Gibbs said."Logan Co. man allegedly driving stolen vehicle filled with uranium, a rattlesnake, and Kentucky Deluxe" (KFOR via Fark) Read the rest

Allyson Medeiros (32) was riding his bike home from his job as a tattoo artist in Chicago when a person riding a rental scooter on the wrong side of the street ran into him and caused a number of injuries, including a broken nose and a broken jaw. He received 20 stitches. The scooter rider didn't stick around to identify himself or offer aid, and Medeiros filed a lawsuit to force all 10 e-scooter companies to disclose their records of who was using scooters at the time of the accident.From The Chicago Sun-Tribune:He plans to use the information to prosecute “the negligent company and rider,” according to the statement.“The responsible parties must be held accountable, including covering the costs of the medical bills, lost wages and pain,” Greening said in the statement. He said Medeiros has had multiple surgeries and owes thousands of dollars in medical care.Medeiros has launched a GoFundMe campaign to pay his medical bills. The photo is from his GoFundMe page. Read the rest

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first human Moon landing on July 20, Vernacular photography collector Robert E. Jackson curated a lovely collection of vintage snapshots related to the Moon. I've always gotten a kick out of how TV viewers around the world used to snap photos of their screens to commemorate momentous moments. Read the rest

The dark lords of the underworld are best summoned by sparkly glitter bait.What an adorable murder kitty!How to summon a demon Read the rest

Report says legalization associated with decline in youth cannabis use

A woman in a grocery store directed a bigoted rant at another shopper, all captured on video. NBC News reports that the incident occured in Abingdon, Pennsylvania, and kicked off when the woman heard people speaking Spanish.Santana said the altercation had its genesis when a child spoke Spanish to the cashier while shopping with his grandfather. ... “I was born here, you don’t belong here … go back to your own country,” Santana is told, with the white woman adding, “You don’t belong here, you came here illegally. You should be deported…I hope Trump deports you,” before calling her a “b*tch” using a Spanish slur.Protip for racists: one cannot deport Puerto Ricans to Puerto Rico because Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Read the rest

We're through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole in this week’s tabloids that give Alice in Wonderland a run for her money in their wild imaginings.

A plane made an emergency landing at Raleigh-Durham International Airport earlier this week after "mechanical issues arose," according to reports.“The flight crew of Delta flight 1425 from Atlanta to Baltimore elected to divert to Raleigh, N.C., out of an abundance of caution after receiving an indication of a possible issue with one of the aircraft’s engines,” a Delta spokesperson said in an email. “The flight landed without incident.”A video of the incident posted to social media shows the engine's spinner loose and rattling around whatever is left of the turbofan. It's really quite alarming! Video I took from my seat on my flight from Atlanta to Baltimore yesterday! Thanks @Delta for the silly smooth emergency landing! #perfect #execution To use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please email licensing@storyful.com pic.twitter.com/TUFzREl0Lc— Logan Webb (@Micahlifa) July 9, 2019 Read the rest

Much like the "War on Drugs," no one won the Cola Wars.In 1975 Pepsi started a blind taste test called 'The Pepsi Challenge' the idea was to show folks enjoying Pepsi far more than Coca-Cola, and thus steal Coke's customers.WAR.Coke abandoned its peaceful methods of attracting customers, like teaching folks to sing about the unifying joys of sweet soda, and started to play on our patriotism.Thus a massive escalation began, and the Cola Wars destroyed society. Many commercials were flighted, many lives were destroyed, and teeth. Those sugary drinks are bad for your teeth!Now look where we are: Read the rest

Came for the classic BMWs, stayed for the fun.(Thanks, Airheads!) Read the rest

You might be popular, but are you Chinese hacker following your every move, no matter where you go popular?No? It's cool. Not many people are.According to cybersecurity firm Cybereason, Softcell, is digital attack and surveillance operation being run by a Chinese hacker group, most likely working their keyboards for the Chinese government. The focus of the operation: keeping track of around 20 high-profile targets that Chinese intelligent officials aren't all that crazy about.From IntelNews:The operation is thought to have compromised close to a dozen major global telecommunications carriers in four continents — the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa. According to Cybereason, the hackers launched persistent multi-wave attacks on their targets, which gave them “complete takeover” of the networks. However, they did not appear to be interested in financial gain, but instead focused their attention on the call detail records (CDRs) of just 20 network users. With the help of the CDRs, the hackers were able to track their targets’ movements around the world and map their contacts based on their telephone activity. According to The Wall Street Journal, which reported on Cybereason’s findings, the 20 targets consisted of senior business executives and government officials. Others were Chinese dissidents, military leaders, as well as law enforcement and intelligence officials.What makes this even more impressive is that, as Operation Softcell's targets bopped around the globe, switching cellular carriers as they traveled, the hackers were able to crack the target's new wireless carriers to continue surveillance. Read the rest

There are 25 of them in this video -- tricks, that is, not guinea pigs -- but I was happy to lose count. Read the rest

From the look of things, The Art of Self-Defense looks to be full of toxic masculinity and Iron John bullshit--to hilarious effect. Jesse Eisenberg is at his best in movies where he plays the straight man: deadpan, confused and terrified.It looks like that's all going on here.I haven't been interested enough in a film to bother seeing it in the theater, for a while now. This flick might just break my watch-it-at-home streak. Read the rest

After the Snowden revelations, US-based Big Tech companies raced to reassure their non-US customers that the NSA wasn't raiding their cloud-based data, moving servers inside their customers' borders and (theoretically) out of reach of the NSA; then came the Cloud Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act), in which the US government claimed the right to seize data held on overseas servers and the companies began consolidating their servers back in the USA.Microsoft recently moved its cloud servers -- the ones hosting data for Office 365 users -- out of Germany to the USA, a mere two years after their decision to site data-centers inside Germany.The privacy commissioner for the state of Hesse has responded by advising schools to discontinue their use of Office 365 and Windows 10 (which transmits a steady stream of usage data to Microsoft). The move came after Microsoft repeatedly failed to answer the commissioner's repeated requests for clarification on its data-handling practices.As Office-Watch points out, all of the US Big Tech companies have a version of this problem -- even if they continue to locate servers in Germany, the specter of the Cloud Act means that all that data might as well be in Fort Meade. “…in connection with the use of Office 365 in the cloud, …. the security and traceability of the data processing processes are not guaranteed. Therefore the data processing is inadmissible” – Translated from original German.It seems Microsoft is staying quiet on the issue “… data is also transmitted when using Office 365. Read the rest

What a cool idea! Here's a music video for a cover of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" that over 2100 kids contributed to, by coloring with crayons.Colossal: An animated music video for Meg Myers’ cover of a Kate Bush song brings kid’s coloring books to life. Director Jo Roy first filmed Myers on a green screen, performing the crawling, climbing, and flying shown in the music video (see behind-the-scenes below). Then, each of the 3,202 frames was printed off as a black and white coloring book page. Elementary school-aged children from ten schools and an art program in the U.S. and Canada colored the pages however they wanted, with a provided crayon color palette.(Colossal) Read the rest

I spent a long time in Mexico this past winter. My wife and I traveled to Play Del Carmen and stayed there for months while she completed some rigourous scuba instructor training. While she was in the water, which was most days, I stayed ashore to write, drink and nosh. Many a chilled beverage was had on beach front patios (I was there for the WiFi, honest.) I squeezed lemons and limes into my drinks. They were amazingly fresh--like nothing I'd ever had up north. Apparently, I dodged a number of bullets.From The CBC:On a sunny day in June, Amber Prepchuk spent an afternoon by the lake making margaritas for a group of friends. The following morning she ended up with much more than she bargained for — a painful side effect entirely unrelated to tequila."I can handle pain, but I woke the next morning and I was in pain. I was crying my eyes out." she told CBC's Radio Active. "I was covered in little blisters."Amber Prepchuk... learned the hard way the meaning of 'margarita burn,' when she juiced limes in the sun and the next morning woke up with blisters all over her hands. Margarita burn. Never heard the tell of that. So, I looked it up. Oh my stars and garters.Margarita burn, better known as margarita photodermatitis, is a condition which occurs in folks who are exposed to a photo-sensitizing agent (lime juice, for example,) and ultraviolet light (ye olde sunlight.) According to Wikipedia, those dinged by Margarita burn will notice the first symptoms of the ailment within 24 hours of exposure to the photo-sensitizing agent that they came into contact with and ultraviolet light. Read the rest

When it comes to storage, you've typically got a couple of options: Keep those priceless pics and videos on your phone or laptop (then lose them when either breaks down), or cough up hundreds every year for a decent Dropbox account or another cloud service like iCloud.Trust us, you're not the only one asking how cloud storage can so ubiquitous and so expensive at the same time. Turns out it doesn't have to be because Degoo has an affordable middle path.This service packs more backup space than Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive combined, and you can access it easily. Files can be shared via email or link, and the automatic file change detection means modified files will be saved and up to date. Everything you backup on Degoo is protected behind 256-bit AES encryption, and there's a variety of plans available. The important thing they have in common: They're all lifetime access; pay once and never get charged or pestered again. Check out the offers below:Degoo Premium: Lifetime 10TB Backup Plan - $99.99 (97% off the MSRP)Degoo Premium: Lifetime 3TB Backup Plan - $69.99 (95% off, and a price drop off the previous sale price of $73.99)Degoo Premium: Lifetime 2TB Backup Plan - $59.99 (95% off, and a price drop off the previous sale price of $65.99)Degoo Premium: Lifetime 1TB Backup Plan - $49.99 (94% off the MSRP.) Read the rest

After Bloomberg revealed that Amazon secretly sent recordings from Alexa to subcontractors all over the world in order to improve its speech-recognition systems, a whistleblower leaked recordings from Google Home to investigative reporters from VRT, revealing that Google, too, was sending audio clips from its voice assistant technology to pieceworkers through the Crowdsource app.The contractors who review Google voice assistant recordings say that they often screen audio from people who aren't even talking to their Google devices: instead, the devices mishear conversations and mistake sound for their "wake-words."The whistleblower told VRT that he transcribes 1,000 recordings per week in Flemish and Dutch, and that once, he transcribed a recording that appeared to capture a domestic violence incident.Tech policy researcher Michael Veale of London's Alan Turing Institute (who filed a complaint with the Irish data regulator over Apple's Siri) (Apple, like many tech giants, pretends that its business takes place in Ireland, a legacy of Ireland's willingness to assist multinationals with illegal tax-avoidance schemes) says that Google could also face GDPR jeopardy, particularly because it did not disclose its practice, which may be because the public would have found it "creepy."Google says it is seeking redress from its subcontractors for sharing the secret recordings with journalists.It is true that Google does not eavesdrop directly, but VRT NWS discovered that it is listening in. Or rather: that it lets people listen in. We let ordinary Flemish people hear some of their own recordings. ‘This is undeniably my own voice’, says one man, clearly surprised. Read the rest

This is not a riddle, but two questions inspired by two very weird stories circulating about financier Jeffrey Epstein, who is in federal custody over charges of trafficking and sexual abuse of young girls.First, from today: Why did Jeffrey Epstein build a temple on his private island?Go see the photos.“A contractor and engineer who spoke with INSIDER highlighted an odd design anomaly: The medieval-era lock on the front door appears designed to keep people inside.”Gulp.Second, also from today: The Intercept reports that right after Epstein reached that ridiculously sweet non-prosecution deal in July 2008 with then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta in Florida, maritime records show that Epstein shipped himself a paper shredder from the U.S. Virgin Islands to his Palm Beach home.But that's not all. In March of this year, not long after federal judge in Florida invalidated that sweet Acosta agreement, the records show that Epstein shipped a tile and carpet extractor from the Virgin Islands to his Manhattan townhouse.Totally normal.Excerpt:On July 7, 2008, federal prosecutors told Epstein’s attorneys via email that they intended to notify the 32 victims about the agreement. Epstein’s lawyers and the prosecutors debated how much of the agreement to reveal, settling on a less than full accounting.A week later, on July 15, Epstein received a shipment at his Palm Beach home from the port in the U.S. Virgin Islands closest to his home there, according to maritime shipping records compiled by ImportGenius and provided to The Intercept. Read the rest