Days after an appeals court panel ordered the unsealing of thousands of pages of documents from one of the civil suits arising from billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's secret sweetheart plea bargain that allowed him to escape any serious penalties for years of alleged trafficking and raping of young teens, he has been arrested by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force and now faces charges related to dozens of sex offenses against young girls.The billionaire traded evidence in an undisclosed crime (thought to be the financial frauds of Bear-Sterns, where he had worked, and who later lost a reported $57 million of his fortune during their collapse) for a light sentence in a minimum-security prison, which he was able to leave most days on a work-release program. The deal was kept secret from Epstein's victims, which is itself illegal. The prosecutor who brokered the deal, Alexander Acosta, is now Trump's labor secretary.Epstein faces up to 45 years in prison. As The Daily Beast reports, "The case is being handled by the Public Corruption Unit of the Southern District of New York, with assistance from the district's human-trafficking officials and the FBI." Details of the case are expected to be unsealed on Monday.Epstein is connected to many powerful people, some of whom, like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, got rides on the private jet Epstein is accused of using as part of an international sex-trafficking conspiracy. One of Epstein's lawyers is Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz, who is accused of sexually assaulting a woman who says she was trafficked by Epstein when she was a teenager. Read the rest

A leaked cable from the British ambassador to the US, sent home to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office has the ambassador calling Trump "insecure," "incompetent" and "inept." In the ambassador's defense, it's completely true. Trump has not yet commented on the news. Read the rest

News continues to worsen for marine mammals on the west coast. In addition to terrible domoic acid poisoning for seals and sea lions, whales are passing away at a record rate.HuffPo:Thirty-one dead gray whales have been spotted along the entire West Coast since January — the most for this time of year since 2000. Dozens more have shown visible signs of malnourishment, and sightings of mother-calf pairs are down significantly.Frances Gulland, a research associate at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, estimates that gray whale deaths could hit 60 or 70 by the end of the season.“If this continues at this pace through May, we would be alarmed,” she told the Los Angeles Times.Marine scientist Steven Swartz said 23% of the whales without calves his team has observed in Baja’s San Ignacio Lagoon this year were skinny. That’s more than three times higher than usual. Read the rest

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (previously) was dealt a stinging rebuke in March, when voters in Istanbul overthrew his AK Party, which had run the city for 25 years; Erdogan had previously said "whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey."Erdogan's 15+ years in Turkish high office has been a steady march to authoritarianism, including violent attacks on peaceful protest movements; mass arrests and purges of civil society groups, university faculties, the military and police, the seizure of sweeping dictatorial powers, mass-scale financial misconduct -- even building himself a $1b palace at public expense.So it was not really surprising that Erdogan's response to his electoral loss was to nullify the election, citing imaginary irregularities, and ordering a re-run. Erdogan began his national political career when he was elected as mayor of Istanbul in 1994.The election ran again at the end of June -- and Erdogan lost again, by a landslide. The March election was carried by a margin of 13,000 votes, while AKP and Erdogan lost the re-run by more than 75,000 votes. It's Istanbul's biggest mayoral election victory in 35 years.The new mayor of Istanbul is Ekrem Imamoglu of the Republican People's Party (CHP), whose campaign slogan was "justice, equality, love" and who ran on a promise to end AKP's lavish croynism and waste (the city's annual procurements budget is $4b). During the election, AKP smeared Imamoglu with a variety of ad-hominems: "terrorist, coup-supporter, fraud, Greek, even equating him with the Egyptian autocrat President Sisi,"Istanbul has 15m residents, almost a fifth of the population of Turkey, and accounts for about a third of Turkey's GDP. Read the rest

Sydney Ember is a news reporter who covers Bernie Sanders for the New York Times; her coverage is consistently negative (part of the Times's overall pattern of negative reporting on Sanders, including "stealth edits" to make its coverage less positive, to the dismay of the paper's public editor).Ember's negative reporting on Sanders might be the result of her deep connections to the finance world: she came to the Times after a career as an analyst at the coal-boosting hedge fund Blackrock and she's married to Mike Bechek, son of the former CEO of Bain Capital, where he also worked.FAIR's Katie Halper has dug deep into Ember's network of go-to sources for quotes on why no one should vote for Sanders, showing that they are drawn from the ranks of the finance and corporate lobbyist world. Ember quotes the likes of:* Jim Kessler, identified by Ember as "executive vice president for Policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank" (Third Way is a pro-austerity thinktank whose board is overwhelmingly made up of CEOs, bankers and corporate lawyers; it advocates for cuts to Social Security and Medicare and opposes higher taxes for billionaires); * Otto J. Reich, a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, who was quoted in a piece condemning Sanders for his opposition to Reagan's secret arming of death-squads that brought down Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega with a campaign of rape, torture and murder;* Jarrod Loadholt, whom Ember calls "a Democratic strategist who has worked on education policy in South Carolina" -- Loadholt is a consumer finance lobbyist who has worked to roll back Dodd/Frank, supporting a bill that would make it easier for banks to practice racial discrimination. Read the rest

I no longer think this famously accurate characterization of 1990s LA holds up. Neighborhoods that once had endless street parking now force you to circle.Plus, no one wants the duck unless it comes from a gourmet food truck. Read the rest

Sergio Moro was once the darling of the international press, lauded for his role as the judge in Brazil's Operation Carwash anti-corruption prosecutions, which saw public accusations against the country's most powerful people, from billionaire oligarchs to Dilma Rousseff, the successor to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (who had been term-limited out of office after a long career as the country's most popular leader); and her successor, the far-right Michael Temer; and Lula himself, who has been locked away in a special prison, denied access to the press, a situation that paved the way for the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a fascist who has publicly regretted the decision of the military dictatorship he once served in to merely torture dissidents, rather than murdering them. After Bolsonaro's election, Moro was appointed to serve as a kind of super-justice-minister, with broad powers that would help Bolsonaro implement his program of death squads, razing the Amazon, and prosecuting his political enemies. The inclusion of Moro in the Bolsonaro government conferred a veneer of respectability to the thuggish, kleptocratic state Bolsonaro was creating, because of Moro's impeccable credentials as a corruption fighter.Then came last month's incredible expose by The Intercept, in which elements of a vast trove of leaked documents revealed that when Moro was the Car Wash judge, he secretly colluded with the prosecutors to ensure that they could lock up Lula and deliver the election to Bolsonaro. Moro's response was to deny any wrongdoing -- but not by denying the authenticity of the leaks. Read the rest

Ben writes, "First featured on Boing Boing in 2010, the fan-supported TV series JourneyQuest has continued for nine years(!) and is now Kickstarting a fourth season. It's an open world with a copyleft license, proving that encouraging sharing, remixing, allowing commercial derivatives, and not treating fans like criminals can still lead to success."They're looking for $430K and they're up to $232K at the time of this writing. Rewards include your name in the credits, a patch, a DVD/Blu-Ray, naming rights to a new word in Elvish, a set of pewter miniatures, the right to put three questions to the show's oracle, a medallion, a photobook, a set visit, an associate producer credit, a co-producer credit, executive producer credit, an oil painting, and more!JourneyQuest 4 [Zombie Orpheus/Kickstarter](Thanks, Ben!) Read the rest

I love comic books and graphic novels. I'm not ashamed to say that dig me some cartoons. Sadly, I've never been able to get into anime and manga. It's a shame: I know that there are a ton of series available to watch, stream or buy online that I might potentially enjoy. I loved Robotech when I was younger. However, when I re-watched it recently, it didn't hold up for me. Every time I attempt to invest in something new, like Cowboy Bebop, Full Metal Alchemist or Bleach, I quickly lose interest. I think it's more about my tastes in entertainment than it is about the medium--there's lots of folks who love anime. I'm just not one of them.One of my earliest flirtations with anime was Akira. I was maybe 13, at the time. An arthouse theatre in the town I grew up in was playing it. I was drawn to the poster: Shotaro Kaneda astride his badass ride, holding what I thought looked like a bazooka. I bought the ticket and took the ride. I was way too young (or maybe too dense?) to be able to follow what the hell was going on. A few years later, I discovered the Akira manga, translated into English. I gave them a go. Better, but I still preferred Green Lantern. Also, I'm pretty sure that all the mutant blob weirdness gave me nightmares.But hey, maybe it's high time to give it another try.From io9:Announced yesterday evening at Otomo’s panel at Anime Expo, Akira will be reborn across two different initiatives: first, an ultra-HD remastering of the original movie, which is set to release on blu-ray in Japan on April 24, 2020, with a western release coming at a later date (interestingly timed, given that Warner Bros. Read the rest

In the 1980s and 1990s, the National Parks Service commissioned Heinrich Berann to produce gorgeous, panoramic paintings of America's beautiful national parks as part of an advertising campaign; this week the NPS published high-resolution scans of these images for free downloading.These have been available on Wikimedia Commons since 2007, when they were fetched from Berann's site, but those images are only about 2,000 pixels wide -- the NPS scans are 1200x8000 pixels!.Part of the appeal of Berann’s depictions of the national parks is that they look fairly realistic while at the same time greatly enhancing the landscapes in a number of ways. The end result is similar to what you might see from the window of a plane, and yet better than any possible real-world view, Patterson says.Berann made sure all the important features of each park were visible in the scene. Sometimes this required some creative distortion. On the Yosemite National Park panorama below, for instance, Yosemite Valley is widened to allow all the rock formations, waterfalls, and man-made structures to be clearly seen. All of the valley’s iconic natural features are exaggerated, with Half Dome and El Capitan much taller than in real life, and the waterfalls significantly longer.Heinrich Berann Panoramas [National Park Service]Gorgeous Panoramic Paintings of National Parks Now Online [Betsy Mason/National Geographic](via Kottke) Read the rest

In MobilBye: Attacking ADAS with Camera Spoofing, a group of Ben Gurion security researchers describe how they were able to defeat a Renault Captur's "Level 0" autopilot (Level 0 systems advise human drivers but do not directly operate cars) by following them with drones that projected images of fake roadsigns for a 100ms instant -- too short for human perception, but long enough for the autopilot's sensors.Such an attack would leave no physical evidence behind and could be used to trick cars into making maneuvers that compromised the safety or integrity of their passengers and other users of the road -- from unexpected swerves to sudden speed-changes to detours into unsafe territory.As Geoff Manaugh writes on BLDGBLOG, "They are like flickering ghosts only cars can perceive, navigational dazzle imperceptible to humans."The "imperceptible to humans" part is the most interesting thing about this: we tend to think of electronic sensors' ability to exceed human sensory capacity as a feature: but when you're relying on a "human in the loop" to sanity-check an algorithm's interpretations of the human-legible world, attackers' ability to show the computer things that the human can't see is a really interesting and gnarly problem.To be completely fair to Mobileye, again, this is just a level 0 ADAS. There's very little potential here for real harm given that the vehicle is not meant to operate autonomously. However, the company doubled down and insisted that this level of image recognition would also be sufficient in semi-autonomous vehicles, relying only on other conflicting inputs (such as GPS) to mitigate the effects of bad data injected visually by an attacker. Read the rest

ISPs in the UK are required to censor a wide swathe of content: what began as a strictly limited, opt-in ban on depictions of the sexual abuse of children has been steadily expanded to a mandatory ban on "extreme" pornography, "terrorist content," copyright and trademark infringement, and then there's the on-again/off-again ban on all porn sites unless they keep a record of the identity of each user and the porn they request..Much of the internet's underlying infrastructure is janky, out-dated, insecure, and an invitation to crime, privacy invasions, DDoS attacks and espionage. Consider NTP, the Network Time Protocol (which is used to synchronize clocks across the internet); until recently, this was an insecure, badly maintained mess that was exploited to create devastating Denial of Service attacks.Similarly insecure and problematic is DNS, the Domain Name Service, which converts human-readable domain names like boingboing.net into IP addresses like 151.101.193.175. DNS doesn't have cryptographic protections, making it vulnerable to surveillance (anyone on the same network as you can see which domains you're looking up), spoofing (malicious actors can serve you the wrong address in response to your queries, sending you to malware sites or raiding your bank account), and censorship (selectively blocking or redirecting blacklisted domains).But every feature is somebody's bug, and for governments and corporations who want to censor the internet, this fundamental insecurity is what makes it possible to effect internet censorship on the cheap. After all, laws that demand technically impossible things are unlikely to be enforced, so when a country like the UK makes sweeping internet censorship rules, their viability depends on whether there are easy means for ISPs to enforce them (enforcement also benefit from industry concentration: when there are only a handful of ISPs, it's possible to audit all of them to ensure they are complying -- if there were thousands of network providers, it would be impossible to do so). Read the rest

This Independence Day, how about getting a little more independence? We've got 10 e-learning bundles that can teach programming, management, data science - even guitar. And the best part is, they're all an extra 15% off for the summer holiday. Just use the online code FIREWORK15 to take an additional 15% off the final price on all these deals.The Ultimate MBA in 1 Bundle Ft. Chris HarounDesigned by successful venture capitalist and MBA grad Chris Haroun, this course pack actually goes beyond the knowledge you'd get in a business degree. In 5 courses, you not only learn about investing, financial analysis and how to write a business plan but how to build a professional profile and nail any interview. The Ultimate MBA in 1 Bundle Ft. Chris Haroun is available for $29.The Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class BundleWith the ability to implement algorithms, create data matrices and work seamlessly with other programming languages, the applications of MATLAB are nearly endless. This bundle teaches them all, from designing apps to electric car simulations. Pick up the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class Bundle for $28.99.The AI & Machine Learning Mastery BundleIn 27 hours, this course gives you an overview of machine learning and how to implement it using programs like Python and Arduino. The AI & Machine Learning Mastery Bundle is now $19.The Complete .Net & C# Developer Certification BundleIt's an invaluable resource even for experienced programmers, but this bundle is set up to allow the most inexperienced coder to start working with complex data structures and software. Read the rest

A woman in Converse, Texas was awakened by her doorbell at 1am on Sunday. Video from the doorbell camera revealed the visitor to be a snake that had slithered up the door frame and pushed the button with its face. No word on whether she she invited the snake in for a nightcap. (KSAT)Previously: Doorbell cam video of snake attacking man Read the rest

Astrophotographer Ralf Vandebergh captured an image of the US Air Force's X-37B space plane in orbit. The reusable, uncrewed space vehicle, designated OTV-5, is on a secret testing mission since its launch in September 2017. From Vandebergh's post at Spaceweather.com:I have been hunting for the OTV-5 since months and saw it visually in May. When I tried to observe it again mid June, it didnt meet the predicted time and path. It turned out to have maneuvered to another orbit. Thanks to the amateur satellite observers-network, it was rapidly found in orbit again and I was able to take some images on June 30 and July 2. This most recent pass was almost overhead. The OTV is a small version of the classic Space Shuttle, it is really a small object, even at only 300 km altitude, so dont expect the detail level of ground based images of the real Space Shuttle. Considering this, the attached images succeeded beyond expectations. We can recognize a bit of the nose, Payload Bay and tail of this mini-shuttle with even a sign of some smaller detail.Images were taken through a 10 inch F/4,8 aperture Newtonian telescope with an Astrolumina ALccd 5L-11 mono CMOS camera. Tracking was fully manually through a 6x30 finderscope. Read the rest

If you've ever used one of these electric flyswatters, you already know they work. Mine finally broke so I upgraded by getting this USB-charging zapper with an LED for swatting in the dark. Amazon has it on sale right now for: . Read the rest

Pyotr Basin (1793–1877) painted "The earthquake in Rocca di Papa, near Rome," in 1830. According to Bruce Sterling, these images are the result of a "couple of guys screwing around attacking a 19th century Russian painting with deep-dreamers." I can't find anything else about them but they're fantastic. Read the rest

The clip above is from Stay Tooned!, a 1996 computer game developed by Funnybone Interactive. From Wikipedia:The player takes the place of an ordinary patron living in an apartment. The player starts off simply channel-surfing with a TV remote and watching short cartoons and commercials that parody real-life shows (such as Seinfeld, which is parodied as Whinefeld). One channel even has the game's chief programmer providing hints on how to play the upcoming game. Several cartoon characters either forbid or encourage the player to push the red button on their remote as the player surfs the channels. When the player pushes the button, the cartoons break out of the television set, steal the remote, and cause the entire apartment complex to go into animated form. The player must recover the television remote, which is the only thing that can zap the escaped toons and send them back to TV Land, the fictional toon world found within the depths of the television. (via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

A fire outside Davey Jones Fireworks and the House of Fireworks in Fort Mills, South Carolina resulted in a massive and unexpected fireworks show. From WCNC:According to Capt. Jeff Nash with Flint Hill Fire Department the fire began at around 5:45 a.m. and started in the Connex Storage containers. Nash said those containers had dozens of cardboard boxes holding fireworks.Deputies confirmed the storage units where the fire started belonged to Davey Jones Fireworks. The cause of the fire was under investigation, and no injuries were reported. Deputy Fire Marshal Charles Williamson told NBC Charlotte that they believe the fire was intentionally set. According to officials, because of all of the explosives, it took crews about 45 minutes to put out the fire. Read the rest

This new ad campaign from Penguin appeals to those of us who think beat-up, torn, taped, scribbled-upon books are more appealing than pristine ones. I wondered if the books photographed here were found as is, or lovingly distressed by the art director, then I saw the small print in the lower right of each ad, which suggests they were found that way. [via @gray] Read the rest

User Inyerface is a web-based game in which your challenge is to fill out a poorly designed online form. It's loaded with frustrating examples of hostile user interfaces that we've all encountered at one time or another.It's how I feel every time I book airline tickets. Read the rest

bruh...😳🎳💪😂 pic.twitter.com/j26E2GlcR6— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) July 5, 2019 "Donny was a good bowler, and a good man. He was one of us. He was a man who loved the outdoors...and bowling. And as a surfer, he explored the beaches of Southern California, from La Jolla to Leo Carrillo and...up to...Pismo. He died, like so many young men of his generation. He died before his time." -- Walter Sobchak Read the rest

In the annals of hard-to-replicate works of brilliant, unsettling art, this must surely rank highly: an image created by a human subject sneezing during an X-ray scan. [via Reddit] Read the rest

Elfquest, my favorite series of fantasy comics books and graphic novels, is returning for a run featuring popular character Skywise. Elfquest: Stargazer's Hunt is out November: notify your comics retailer and demand it!Russ Burlingame writes:Fans of the series may be surprised to see the Pinis coming back to it; back in 2018, we asked the pair whether they might return do a "reunion tour" in the vein of Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise XXV, and they shot down the notion at the time."No, you have met few couples who are more completely in sympathy and in-tune about having no more deadlines in their lives for the rest of their lives," Wendy Pini told ComicBook.com at the time. "I will jump in say, though, that if I knew I was going to be drawing these blankety-blank elves for 40 years, I would have designed them quite differently. They all would have been bald and naked."ElfQuest: Stargazer’s Hunt goes on sale November 13, 2019, and will be available for pre-order at your local comic shop soon. Read the rest

Now you too can experience the joy and wonder of changing the BIOS configuration of a Lenovo-brand personal computer with the Lenovo BIOS Simulator Center. [via Hacker News] Read the rest

Janelle Shane, harbinger of the generative apocalypse, presents mutant fruit flies invented by a neural network: "Nothing to worry about."I knew that fruit flies are a mainstay of research labs, but I had never given them much thought until Prof. Greg Neely emailed me to point out how weird the names of mutant fruit flies are. There’s a strain of mutants called “Out Cold” where the fly loses motor coordination below a certain temperature, and another nicknamed “Moonwalker” that walks backwards. Could a neural network learn how to invent new names and mutations?An unsettling reminder that science fiction isn't a prediction, but the present placed in uncanny focus.P.S. AI Weirdness is proof that blogging is still great) Read the rest

Geographer Kate Edwards helps game developers avoid offensive and malignant stereotypes and tropes in their work. There are more than enough mistakes and blunders to keep her in business.A common and “safe” way of avoiding problems [is] inventing a whole pseudo-country. It’s worth noting that Ubisoft have since announced that their next big Clancyromp, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, will airlift our angry shootyboys out of Bolivia and drop them in a fictional Pacific Island nation called Aurora. But I want to know if transplanting your story like this really helps. Or if it’s just an ill-fitting patch.“I actually think that’s a very effective tool,” says Edwards. “Good science fiction and fantasy have been using allegory forever… [It’s] a very powerful way to make people think about the particular situation without just bluntly hitting them over the head with it. You can do that too if your narrative serves that purpose – and I don’t think we should instantly shy away from doing that. If you have a good reason to set your action and narrative in a certain locale that is real, then I would go ahead and explore that option.“Ultimately, you have to ask yourself… how much of a difference does it make to the narrative purpose of your game whether it’s set in Bolivia or it’s set in some fictional South American country? Is it really going to change things significantly for the narrative of the game?”But even Edwards admits that allegory can sometimes go wrongExample: they put an evil alien in Halo 2 and named it "The Dervish" until someone noticed and fixed it. Read the rest

"This turtle's obsessed with watermelon." Read the rest

Bruce Sterling republishes the acronyms in a recent Daimler white-paper on self-driving cars:Advanced Driver Assistance SystemAutomated Driving SystemAutomotive Safety Integrity LevelAutomotive Information Sharing and Analysis Center AUTOmotive Open System ArchitectureComputer Emergency Response Team Central Processing UnitCar Park PilotCyclic Redundancy CheckDynamic Driving Task(Statistisches Bundesamt) Federal Statistical Office of Germany Design Failure Mode and Effect AnalysisDriver-in-the-LoopDeep Neural NetworkElectrical/ElectronicElectronic Control UnitElectric Power SteeringEuropean UnionFailure Mode and Effects AnalysisFederal Motor Vehicle Safety StandardsFunctional SafetyEuropean General Data Protection RegulationGlobal Navigation Satellite SystemGlobal Positioning SystemGraphics Processing UnitHardware-in-the-Closed-LoopHuman-Machine InteractionHardwareHardware ReprocessingHighway PilotInput/Output PortInternational Electrotechnical CommissionInstitute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersInertial Measurement UnitInternet Protocol SecurityInternational Organization for StandardizationInternational Software Testing Qualifications BoardLight Detection and RangingMicrocontroller UnitMinimal Risk ConditionMinimal risk maneuverNaturalistic Driving StudyNational Highway Traffic Safety AdministrationNational Transportation Safety BoardOperational Design DomainOriginal Equipment ManufacturerOpen RoadOne True PairingObject Under TestProving GroundReliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety and Security Reliable Map AttributeSecure Development Lifecycle Simulation-in-the-Closed-LoopSystem on ChipSafety of the Intended Functionality (Straßenverkehrsgesetz) German Road Traffic Act SoftwareSoftware ReprocessingTraffic Jam PilotTransport Layer SecurityUnited Nations Economic Commission for EuropeUrban PilotVerification and Validation Read the rest

Competition scholar and cyberlawyer Tim "Net Neutrality" Wu's (previously) latest book is The Curse of Bigness: a tight, beautifully argued case for restoring pre-Reagan antitrust approaches.Wu isn't just good at laying these arguments out in static fashion: if anything, he's even more convincing when he's arguing with the most ardent defenders of monopoly.Case in point: at a recent appearance as the Aspen Ideas Festival, Wu was asked to rebut Mark Zuckerberg's four-point case for not breaking up Facebook. Zuckerberg argues that: 1. Breaking up Facebook will create a bunch of small companies competing on growth, rather than privacy.2. If we break up Facebook, they won't have enough money to hire 30,000 people to censor the bad things people post on social media.3. Breaking up Facebook will allow Chinese tech companies to take over the world.4. Facebook's acquisitions of companies like Whatsapp and Instagram were not anticompetitive.Wu's rebuttals are just excellent.Also, notice in that argument there’s a subtle idea where big tech starts promising it's going to do government's work for it: We’re going to provide security, we're going to fight Russia, and so forth. First of all, I don't think Facebook has a good track record of protecting this country against foreign attack. So if they're promising more of the same, I don't want to hear it. And I also think anyone who studies systems knows that centralized systems are dangerous, because they offer one big, giant target. Most people who have studied the Russian interference in the last election suggest that one of the problems is that you just had a couple of big targets. Read the rest

It’s the start of July, but it already feels like August in the tabloids, which this week reek of nothing-happening-desperation.

Here's Trump at his rained-out, sparsely-attended, $92m military parade:During his hour-long speech at the grounds of Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., Trump stayed largely off politics. Trump praised the Americans’ military efforts in the war against Great Britain. “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory,” he said.It's so perfectly mad that fact-checkers struggle to correct every element of wrongness in a single line. "Planes were not used in warfare until the 20th century", for example, allows the incorrect suggestion that there were airports (or indeed functional aircraft) in the 1770s. In 1784, French inventor Jean-Pierre Blanchard fitted a propeller to a hot air balloon, creating the first aircraft that went places; the first successful fixed-wing airplane was the Wright Brothers' Flyer, flown in 1903. Read the rest

Noah Scalin (previously) writes, "I'm so devastated to learn about Mad magazine's imminent demise. I just recently finished my own portrait of Alfred E. Neuman, made from stickers, inspired by the reboot of the magazine (which features new works by artists inspired by growing up reading Mad). Mad was such a seminal part of my childhood. As a budding activist I loved seeing popular culture, politics and advertising skewered in such a clever & subversive way (as children's entertainment!). The world is losing a shining beacon just as it needs it most." Read the rest

Phil Torrone from Adafruit writes, "A million internet years ago in 2008 when I was Senior Editor at MAKE Magazine, Ladyada and I went to DC Comics to meet the MAD Magazine folks for a collaboration issue with MAKE and MAD, it was the Spy vs Spy issue, volume 16 cover by Sam Viviano. Spy vs. Spy is a wordless black and white comic strip that has been published in Mad magazine since 1961. It was created by Antonio Prohias, a Cuban national who fled to the United States in 1960 days before Fidel Castro took over the Cuban free press."I visited the same year, as it happens, and even took photos of many of the same things! Read the rest

1852: "This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day."What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Read the rest

"Fireworks," a classic by PES. Happy Independence Day! Read the rest

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Read the rest

More than a decade ago, a federal prosecutor named Alexander Acosta set up a secret sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy, Trump-connected admitted multiple rapist of underaged teen girls who was thought to be running a trafficking ring for wealthy, well-connected sexual predators, that saw Epstein serving only 13 months in a minimum security facility, on a work-release program that let him spend most of that time out of a cell. Today, Alexander Acosta is Trump's Secretary of Labor, and, as documents later revealed, his actions ensured that the details of Epstein's sentence were hidden from the public; Epstein has used expensive legal tactics to keep those details out of the public eye. More than a decade later, the powerful, wealthy people who protected Epstein are still on the job, and Trump's DoJ is working overtime to make sure the dozens of women who say they were raped by Epstein when they were girls will not be able to seek justice.But the secrecy might finally be ending: last week, the Second Circuit appeals court ruled that 2,000 pages of previously sealed files implicating Epstein should be released to the press, overturning US District Judge Robert Sweet's decision to keep the files a secret because they would "promote scandal arising out of unproven potentially libelous statements."The files that will be unsealed come from a civil case pursued against one of Epstein's associates by someone who claims she was trafficked for sex by Epstein and his circle.Today’s ruling kicks off a lengthy process for unsealing the files. Read the rest

The President's ride is called Air Force One. What, then, is "Aircraft One?" Trump:People are coming from far and wide to join us today and tonight for what is turning out to be one of the biggest celebrations in the history of our Country, SALUTE TO AMERICA, an all day event at the Lincoln Memorial, culminating with large scale flyovers of the most modern........and advanced aircraft anywhere in the World. Perhaps even Aircraft One will do a low & loud sprint over the crowd. That will start at 6:00P.M., but be there early. Then, at 9:00 P.M., a great (to put it mildly) fireworks display. I will speak on behalf of our great Country!Google suggests it's meaningless and offers no exact results for the term from 2010 to 2018.Fast come the quips:I can help. I'm Adjunct Professor at Trump Univ Dept of Aeronautics & Planey Things. Aircraft One was the Wright Brothers' (Wilbur & Steven Wright) first airplane. It was a biplane, steam powered and invisible. It was lost in an unfortunate accident while investigating oranges— Tomi T Ahonen (@tomiahonen) July 4, 2019Elements of Resistance Twitter claim that it's an unofficial term for the Russian President's jet, but I was was unable to find evidence of that in English news reports, at wikipedia or in machine-translated items from Russian news and the Kremlin. Nor could I find the There is, however, a Russian documentary by that name about Putin's plane, as referred by Andrew Feinberg. Read the rest

The Fourth of July is nigh, and what better way to celebrate than with a little dose of capitalism? Here's a roundup of 10 of our favorite household gadgets and tech toys, all of which are already sale priced - but you can take an extra 15% off the final cost by using the online code FIREWORK15.Nomad 1.5M Battery Lightning CableHere's one cable that'll keep your phone charged even with no outlet in sight thanks to the integrated 2800mAh emergency battery. Right now, you can get the Nomad 1.5M Battery Lightning Cable for $19.99, a full 59% off the retail price.11-in-1 Smartphone Photography Accessory BundleThe best smartphones can take pictures as well as some high-end cameras. This kit gives your smartphone the ability to maximize that power with a tripod, 3-in-1 lens, Bluetooth selfie remote and much more. The full 11-in-1 Smartphone Photography Accessory Bundle is now $24.99, down 80% from the original cost.EvaSMART 2: Smart Personal Air ConditionerThis power-saving unit not only cools the air evenly in any room, but it also humidifies and filters the air with its natural EvaBreeze technology. Fully compatible with smart home devices, the EvaSMART 2 is now $179.99 - a full 29% off the MSRP.Lagu Sand Repelling Beach TowelJust in time for summer, this towel arrives with a special material that makes it not only quick-drying but naturally repellent to both sand and common allergens. Pick up the Lagu Sand Repelling Beach Towel for $24.99, more than 25% off the list price. Read the rest

Tim Cook waved goodbye as Jony Ive pulled out of the car lot for the last time. Without dropping the smile, Cook tilted his head at Jeff Williams. "Finally," he whispered though his teeth. "We can fix the fucking keyboards"Here's Benjamin Mayo, quoting Ming-Chi Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in 2019 MacBook Air and 2020 MacBook ProApple is apparently set to ditch the butterfly mechanism used in MacBooks since 2015, which has been the root of reliability issues and its low-travel design has also not been popular with many Mac users.In a report published today, Ming-Chi Kuo says that Apple will roll out a new keyboard design based on scissor switches, offering durability and longer key travel, starting with the 2019 MacBook Air. The MacBook Pro is also getting the new scissor switch keyboard, but not until 2020.The new scissor switch keyboard is a whole new design than anything previously seen in a MacBook, purportedly featuring glass fiber to reinforce the keys. Apple fans who have bemoaned the butterfly keyboard should be optimistic about a return to scissor switches.Tech analysts are often wrong, but this one reportedly has an unusually good record. Read the rest

Fashioned after the magnetic drawing boards of yore, "Baby Face" and "Hairless Hugo" take the genre into a whole new, and really amusing, direction. Like "Wooly Willy," you use a magnetic wand to turn a naked face into one adorned with metal shavings "hair." Amongst several funny ideas, it's suggested to turn the baby into a "TV Tough Guy" (Mr. T, is that you?) and the hairless cat into a familiar "TV Painter" (cough *Bob Ross* cough). Good fun! Both are available at Archie McPhee for $6.95/each. Read the rest

Jedadiah Leland:I just heard from a friend of mine who is in a Facebook group with a MAD writer that, after the next two issues, MAD will no longer be publishing original material. Instead, it’ll publish reprinted material until it’s subscription responsibilities are fulfilled and then the magazine will cease publication.ABC News confirms:"After issue #10 this fall there will no longer be new content -- except for the end-of-year specials which will always be all new," DC said in a statement to ABC News. "So starting with issue #11 the magazine will feature classic, best-of and nostalgic content from the last 67 years." ... The publication was founded in 1952 by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines, but it was Al Feldstein, who took over for Kurtzman and led the magazine for almost 30 years, who brought the outlet to national -- and international -- prominence, especially in the 1970s. It peaked at 2.8 million subscribers in 1973, but had just 140,000 left as of 2017. It certainly could not have influenced me more. I was obsessed with it as a kid.If had to articulate what my original idea for Tom the Dancing Bug was, I would have said, “a Mad Magazine where I’m the whole gang of idiots.” pic.twitter.com/7eAHZX8Hrt— Tom the Dancing Bug (@RubenBolling) July 4, 2019 Read the rest

If you're a fan of Kentucky bourbon, get ready to cry: According to a number of reports, 45,000 barrels of Jim Beam just went up in flames.From The New York Times:The fire started around 11 p.m. in Woodford County on Tuesday and was still burning at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, fire officials said. They expected the warehouse to burn for five more hours. No injuries were reported.“The biggest issue we are dealing with is the environmental aspect,” said Drew Chandler, the Woodford County emergency management director. “If we put the fire out, we are going to dump a lot of water on it and that water will be contaminated.”He said that fire officials did not know what had caused the fire, but a spokeswoman for Jim Beam said she believed lightning had sparked it.Because of the fear that water in the area around the fire could be contaminated with ethanol if firefighters turned their hoses on it, 'let is burn' was the order of the day. The good news for Jimmy B aficionados is that the barrels that burned were full of relatively young hooch. As such, there shouldn't be any interruption in the amount of the bourbon available to the public for the foreseeable future--the burnt out warehouse is one of many. The bad news is that the lost alcohol was worth a small fortune. According to the New York Times, each barrel contains enough bourbon to fill between 150 and 200 750 milliliter bottles. Read the rest

Remember when Amazon introduced the ability for folks easily delete their conversations with any of the Alexa wiretap they'd foolishly allowed into their homes? Boom! Gone! No more voice history! Everyone with one of the company's smart speakers could rest easy knowing that their personal information and shopping habits wouldn't be available for the marketing world to get its grubby meathooks on. HAHAHAAHAHAHA Yeah, that was bullshit. Even if you wipe your conversations with Alexa from your Amazon devices, Amazon still retains some information.From CNET:... Amazon noted that for Alexa requests that involve a transaction, like ordering a pizza or hailing a rideshare, Amazon and the skill's developers can keep a record of that transaction. That means that there's a record of nearly every purchase you make on Amazon's Alexa, which can be considered personal information.Other requests, including setting reminders and alarms, would also remain saved, Huseman noted, saying that this was a feature customers wanted.It gets better: Amazon says that they use this personal information to train Alexa to be an even better wiretap than it already is. What they don't say, however, is what third-parties, such as outside Alexa skill developers and marketers, are allowed to do with this leftover data.Apparently, the only way to be sure that all of a customer's user data has been obliterated from the company's servers is for them to call customer service and demand that the personal information be nuked from orbit. Of course, given that the company has already been all kinds of greasy about promising to make personal data deletion a simple task for folks to undertake once, there's no guarantee that they won't quietly screw their users again. Read the rest

Once upon a time, companies were able to insist -- with a straight face -- that the real problem with the security defects in their products was the researchers who went public with them, warning customers and users that the products they were trusting were not trustworthy.Then came the modern infosec movement, in which hactivists and researchers started to give companies a little grace period before going public, while still rejecting the whole idea of "security through obscurity." If your security depends on no one else independently rediscovering the defects you've identified, you're going to be very disappointed -- just ask all those American cities that are paying out to ransomware creeps who got hold of a defect that the NSA kept secret so they could use it against "bad guys."Infosec's watchword is "sunlight is the best disinfectant." If you want to prove that a product is genuinely defective, it's not enough to make the claim: you have to back it up with demos that anyone else can replicate -- otherwise the companies will straight up call you a liar and assure their customers that there's nothing to worry about.Yesterday, Youtube froze Kody Kinzie's longrunning Cyber Weapons Lab channel, citing a policy that bans "Instructional hacking and phishing: Showing users how to bypass secure computer systems." He now has a "strike," which prevents him from uploading any new videos.This may sound like a commonsense measure, but consider: the "bad guys" can figure this stuff out on their own. Read the rest

Bagaar's User Inyerface is a frustratingly hilarious set of web dark-patterns that you have to navigate your way through, as a kind of remarkably enraging game. I got stuck on the captchas, whose windoid was too small for the relevant checkboxes to be activated. Can you get further than me? (via Four Short Links) Read the rest

Cordell Jackson started out playing on her father's radio show in the mid-1930s at the age of 12; she was a talented musician who'd already mastered the guitar, piano, and upright bass; she continued to play and went on to found Moon Records (a play on Memphis's iconic "Sun Records") where she was the first woman sound engineer in the country.Moon Records put out music by rock and roll, rockabilly and country singers, including her own music, which she would "write, sing, accompany, record, engineer, produce and manufacture."Jackson continued to play and perform and her musical career got a second lease during the psychobilly revival in the 1980s, led by the Cramps and other musicians who mined the history of rock-n-roll for buried outsider treasure, like the music of Hasil Adkins (both Adkins and Jackson were backed by The A-Bones, a garage-rock act started in the sludgabilly era).When Jackson died in 2004, Moon Records was the oldest continuously operating label in Memphis.I only discovered Jackson's music this morning and I've been rocking out to it solidly, thanks to a smattering of videos on Youtube. Her stage-presence is incredible, and her music is even better. In 1956 Jackson founded Moon Records and released her first single under her Moon label, "Bebopper's Christmas." In her home studio she served as an engineer, producer, and arranger, releasing and promoting singles. Artists under Cordell’s label consisted of herself and a small group of rock and roll, rockabilly, and country performers that she recruited from several Southern states. Read the rest

In 2016, Google announced that it was renaming its small Google Ideas unit to "Jigsaw," giving the new unit a much broader, "wildly ambitious" mandate: to tackle "surveillance, extremist indoctrination, and censorship."In the years since, the company -- now a separate entity under Google's Alphabet parent-company -- has made a lot of headlines for products that, on closer inspection, were deeply flawed: the troll-detecting AI that could be terminally confused by typos (which was then used to produce a deeply flawed map of America's most trolly places). Other projects (generally more modest than the "wildly ambitious" mission statement implied) were more credible, but so far have not borne much fruit: turning Change My View into a standalone, separate from Reddit; publishing a giant, amazing open data-set of news links; producing a censorship-busting DNS proxy; providing a pop-up dictionary of security terms.Some of the other "wildly ambitious" projects were never released: the company crushed its own report on the use of trolling by state actors to achieve authoritarian ends.One project stands out as living up to Jigsaw's promise: Project Shield, which helps journalistic organizations defend themselves against Denial of Service attacks, a frequent tactic employed by state actors to silence unflattering reportage.People who work at (or partner with) Jigsaw are bound by tight, far-reaching nondisclosure agreements, but Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (previously) got many current and former Jigsaw employees to speak anonymously about the conditions inside the mysterious "think/do" tank. They describe a toxic work environment where complaints are met with vicious retaliation; where women are demeaned, sidelined and degraded (the women of Jigsaw have a secret bathroom kit "with mascara, moisturizing spray, and other items to help employees in distress hide their tears"); and where women on Google's anonymous gwe-anon message board warn any woman thinking of applying for a job at Jigsaw that it is a misogynist cesspool. Read the rest

If you need to sneakernet a large amount of data, or store it away, this SanDisk 128GB Flash Drive is on sale at Amazon for Read the rest