Boing Boing

The election of authoritarian racist garbage person Donald Trump to the presidency was attended by many controversies, but none so salient as his inclusion in Walt Disney World's Hall of Presidents, wherein each newly elected president is represented as an animatronic figure whose dialog that president gets to record, using their own human voices.The Trumpbot's inclusion was controversial enough that Disney reportedly considered changing the show to deny Trump his speaking role (this was later kiboshed), and while the Trumpbot may not be a repurposed Hillarybot, he has certainly attracted his share of hecklers.Now, the memeslinging video-trickster @PaulLeeTicks has put their video-effects skills to work, putting the Trumpbot in the Nazi uniform that Cheeto Hitler implies with every public utterance.BREAKING: Antifa thugs break into the Disney World's Hall of Presidents attraction in Florida, and vandalize the Donald Trump animatronic. pic.twitter.com/XgEwRPQnx5— Paul Lee Ticks (@PaulLeeTicks) July 22, 2019 Read the rest

It's one thing to send a bogus legal threat in an effort to suppress criticism, because usually the only consequence of that is public humiliation and a little Streisand Effect heat; but if you really want to score an own-goal, the best way to do so is to send a fake court order to Google ordering removal of someone else's embarrassing post from its search index, forging a judge's signature to give it that really authentic look-and-feel.It's amazing how many people get this brilliant idea. Back in 2017, it was Michael Arnstein, CEO of the Natural Sapphire Company, who was sentenced to nine months in prison for it.Now, CBS has found more than 60 more of these forged court orders in the public database of takedowns that have been served to Google. Some of them reference clients of a "reputation management" company called Web Savvy, LLC, whose CEO, John Rooney, told an undercover CBS crew that other companies go to "risky...grey areas" that he won't enter.But Rooney couldn't explain why one of his clients was referenced in a forged court order sent to Google demanding removal of an embarrassing court order.Many of the fake court orders that CBS turned up were putatitively issued by a judge in Hamilton County, Ohio. The court clerk, local law-enforcement, and the FBI are investigating these.While some of the fakes that CBS found were seeming attempts to launder the reputations of businesses, two were censorship attempts that targeted factual information identifying their subjects as sex offenders who had targeted children. Read the rest

A man so vexed District Court Judge Marilyn Castle in Lafayette that she ordered his mouth taped shut. The Advocate reports that Michael C. Duhon, already found guilty of theft, repeatedly interrupted his sentencing hearing. Katie Gagliano reports how Castle lost control of her courtroom:According to court minutes, Duhon objected when the judge asked him to stop submitting motions on his own behalf in the case instead of through his attorney. He objected again when evidence was submitted. He attempted to offer arguments against the inclusion of the evidence and was told to speak through his attorney. After requesting at least twice for Duhon to remain quiet, Castle ordered the bailiff to tape Duhon’s mouth shut during witness testimony. The tape was removed after an objection from Duhon’s public defense attorney, Aaron Adams. He requested the judge remove his client from the courtroom instead of putting duct tape on his client's mouth.She also held public defender Michael Gregory —not representing Duhon, but in the gallery—with contempt of court for video-recording the incident, and ordered that the video be destroyed. Gregory apparently obviated the command by submitting the video as evidence in his own contempt hearing; Castle placed it under seal.Lafayette Judge Marilyn Castle ordered public defender Michael Gregory to pay a $100 fine and said he cannot bring his cellphone, nor use someone else's, to the Lafayette Parish courthouse for six months. ...Gregory said he felt there was “a compelling necessity to record the proceeding,” but Castle said the focus was on the inappropriate filming itself, not what the recording captured. Read the rest

A trucker replaced a broken tail light with a red sports drink, reports the Denver Channel. His ingenuity earned him police attention in Longmont, Colo., but they let him go without a ticket. While we appreciate the ingenuity of this tail light, this is not a permanent solution,” Longmont Fire, Police and OEM wrote in a Facebook post. “Working tail lights prevent accidents.”Photo: Longmont PD Read the rest

You may now cool or heat a small part of your body on the go, if you are in Japan and have ¥13000 to blow. The Reon Pocket is a roughly the size of a smartphone, hangs around your neck, and claims to cool that spot up to 13C or warm it 8.3C. As you can see from the photo, a special shirt will come with it so that it can be perfectly seated. Read the rest

Vxworks is a lightweight, thin OS designed for embedded systems; a new report from Armis identifies critical vulnerabilities (called "Urgent 11") in multiple versions of the OS that they estimate affects 200m systems (Vxworks' make, Wind River, disputes this figure).The defect is network-addressable, meaning that it can be remotely exploited, and can be triggered with the sort of communications that are unlikely to be blocked by firewalls. Because of the fire-and-forget nature of embedded systems -- coupled with the low-level tasks they perform, which can't be interrupted without disrupting many higher-level processes -- many of these devices will be subject to "forever day" vulnerabilities, in which they are likely to never be patched.Wind River says that many of the affected versions of Vxworks have been end-of-lifed, and that its current OS version is not affected. The more immediate challenge for organizations that use affected or potentially affected equipment will be to assess the risk they face. Armis researchers are presenting Urgent 11 as posing a serious and imminent threat, potentially at the scale of the Windows vulnerabilities that allowed the 2016 WannaCry worm to sow worldwide disruptions. Armis researchers are also warning that the difficulty of patching the flaws means this risk may be with us for the foreseeable future.But the threat may very well be much smaller than that assessment. What’s more (assuming the threat is as bad as Armis says it is), it may be possible to mitigate the risk through means other than patching, such as access control lists, which restrict the devices that can connect to a vulnerable device. Read the rest

It's got a long way to overturn the PS2's and Nintendo DS's ~150m hauls, but Sony's PS4 reached the 100m sold mark this summer and has a good shot at ending up the third best-selling game console (currently the Game Boy, 120m sold) of all time.The PlayStation 4 reached this milestone after just 5 years and 7 months, and less than 3 years after passing 50 million sales. Sony’s PS4 sales have been consistently strong throughout this generation, with 19 million sold in 2017 and 17.8 million last year. Sony also revealed that digital download share has passed the 50 percent mark, meaning more people are now purchasing digital games than physical disc copies. Sony’s next-generation PlayStation, most likely the PS5, now looks set to launch in fall 2020.Next year is the year 8K TVs become "affordable", hence the big marketing push for a new generation of consoles based around 20XX-series NVidia GPUs. Read the rest

Multinationals are excellent players of the global financial tax system, using "profit shifting" (through which operating profits are remitted to phony sister companies in tax havens as "licensing fees" or "management fees") to make it look like wildly profitable companies are losing money, making them eligible for tax relief and rebates -- thus it is that companies can rake in billions and then receive millions more in corporate welfare.To see this in action, look no further than Rockstar North, the Scottish branch of Rockstar Games, makers of Grand Theft Auto (owned by Take-Two Entertainment). Between 2013-2019, Rockstar North claimed so little revenue that it owed £0.00 in taxes, and actually managed to claim £42m in tax relief from the British taxpayers.Take-Two's market cap is £13.1b; over the period in which Rockstar North was pleading poverty (and making an estimated operating profit of £4b), the company dispersed £3.4b in executive bonuses. One of Take-Two's most profitable products is GTA, produced by Rockstar North.Rockstar North claimed 19% of all available video game tax credits in the UK. The tax credit scheme was created to reward companies whose games make "a significant contribution to British culture" through "British settings, characters and development, and promoting cultural diversity." GTA is set in a fictional California town.Taxwatch UK's Gaming the System report on Rockstar North's tax evasion notes that the whole scheme is perfectly legal -- in other words, the system is working exactly as it was designed to do.Although the statutory accounts of Rockstar North, the maker of Grand Theft Auto V, state that the company is hardly making any profit, the game is widely reported to be the most profitable media product in history. Read the rest

In 1855 a band of London thieves set their sights on a new target: the South Eastern Railway, which carried gold bullion to the English coast. The payoff could be enormous, but the heist would require meticulous planning. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the first great train robbery, one of the most audacious crimes of the 19th century.We'll also jump into the record books and puzzle over a changing citizen.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

TIL: There are folks not familiar with Lynyrd Skynyrd's concert-closing song "Free Bird." It seems nearly unimaginable for someone who grew up hearing the Southern rock band's signature 14-minute-long power ballad. (I mean, doesn't everyone know that you jokingly request bands to play it by yelling "Free Bird!"?) Enter YouTuber No Life Shaq. He claims he's heard the band's name before but has never heard the song. Watch this video of him listening to (and amusingly analyzing) it for the first time. I think he likes it, especially that guitar solo!(Soap Plant WACKO) Read the rest

Dehydration. Sun stroke. Quickly standing up from a vinyl chair whilst wearing shorts. There's lots of danger to be found on a scorching hot summer day. According to a team of Doctors from the University of Nevada, we can add another warm weather peril to the list: hot asphalt.From Gizmodo:The researchers, who published their study this April in the Journal of Burn Care and Research, took a look at cases from their own university’s burn center unit. Over a five-year span, they found 173 reported pavement-related burn cases. By cross-referencing the day’s recorded weather with the date of these cases, the authors also found that the vast majority (88 percent) happened when it was at least 95 degrees Fahrenheit outside. And once it was over 105 degrees, the risk of pavement burn got exponentially higher.While these cases might represent only a small portion of burn injuries that warrant medical attention, the authors say they’re an ever-present worry in areas where the climate is constantly hot and sunny, like the Las Vegas desert.If you're skeptical, ywhy not conduct a little field research of your own? On an insanely hot day, take off your shoes on your front lawn. Now, walk from the grass onto the sidewalk and on into the street. Stand there for five minutes. Feel that burn? Congratulations, you're now a scientist. The University of Nevada will no doubt be eager to hear all about your findings/blistered skin. As the study is quick to point out, pavement can grow hot enough to cause a second-degree burn to skin that comes into contact with it, in seconds. Read the rest

Several years ago, Jordan Guthmann, a VP at Edelman PR, interviewed for a job at Amazon. While he was on the company campus chatting with folks, someone asked to take his photo and he kindly obliged. Guthmann didn't get the gig, but apparently he at least looked like the right person for the job: Until a few days ago his photo appeared on Amazon's Talent Acquisition website. After Guthmann tweeted about it, Amazon quickly swapped out the photo. As Petapixel commented, hopefully the person in the current photo actually got the job!Years ago I went to Amazon for a job interview that I did NOT get but they were taking photos and the kind person taking photos asked me if she could snap my picture and I was like sure why not anywho that's why I'm on their jobs website today... https://t.co/ehhRvnYaC6— Jordan Guthmann (@JGuthmann) July 24, 2019 Read the rest

Aestetix sez, "2600 Magazine has hosted the biennial Hackers On Planet Earth conference since 1994. However, for 2020 the host hotel, the Hotel Pennsylvania, has tripled the fee charged to the conference. Rather than raising ticket prices and making the event inaccessible to all but the rich, HOPE is reaching out to the community to help solve the crisis."HOPE is the most politically engaged, progressive hacker con, a true gem. I really hope they survive -- the world will be much poorer without them.We've been sued, we've been threatened, and we've faced extinction on a number of occasions. And one thing we've learned is that times like these are when this community truly shines. We don't intend to be defeated by this and we have no intention of giving up on the prospects of HOPE in 2020. But we can't do it by magic.And so we call on you to put forth ideas, suggestions, and opinions. How important is HOPE to you? Do you know of a better place where we can host it? How can we come up with ways to make the event even better? Does HOPE have to be in a hotel? Does HOPE need to be in Manhattan? Etc.There are many things to think of and to brainstorm about. And there is no better group to turn to at a time like this for inspiration and new ideas. Time and again, it's right when we're supposed to be at our lowest that we come back stronger than ever, precisely because of our community's creativity, intelligence, and refusal to give up. Read the rest

Werewolf is one of my favorite games. My daughter and I played it almost every night on the JoCo Cruise last year. It's normally $25, but Amazon has it on sale today for just: Read the rest

This morning I woke up and my Great Pyrenees of six years Nemo was no longer with me.We were sleeping in our Volkswagen bus. Apparently, I had missed Nemo ingesting something poisonous on our last walk of the night, last night. Before bed, he threw up and acted less than happy, but then Nemo hopped into our Westy and was not really any more or less comfortable than any other night. He drank a lot of water and went to sleep. When he'd move around I knew because that lower bunk is small. It was a night like any other night.I woke up a bit surprised, however, that Nemo'd let Pretzel and I sleep in till 7:30 am. I went over the list of stuff I needed to do today for work in my head, and then I looked back and thought "Is Nemo breathing?"Nemo was a very special dog. I loved him very much. He spent 6 years living on a beach and then a few months driving around living on lots of beaches in a VW van. He never wanted for a thing, was always surrounded by love and had no idea that a Great Pyr is supposed to live a lot longer than 6.Nemo was rescued by fantastic folks who supported us and loved Nemo his entire life, even after they closed up shop. Randy has been there to answer questions or to help me with Nemo's training at every turn. Living with such a large dog that is bred to be a guardian would not have been possible without that guidance. Read the rest

If you are an adult human being living in the United States, Equifax is making a lot of money from your personal data (Equifax's annual revenue is $3.1 billion. Its CEO Mark Begor gets over $20 million a year in compensation). As you know, Equifax violated the trust of 147 million people in a massive data breach in 2017, opening them up to identity theft and other abuses. You've also heard that Equifax has agreed to pay everyone affected by the breach $125. That is not close to sufficient, but it's something. However, if you filed a claim for your $125, you will might be surprised that your actual check will be a fraction of that.From Equifax's FAQ:If there are more than $31 million claims for Alternative Reimbursement Compensation, all payments for Alternative Reimbursement Compensation will be lowered and distributed on a proportional basis.That means you will get $125 only if fewer than 250,000 people file a claim. It's likely many more people will file a claim. Suppose 10% of those affected (14.7 million) file a claim. They'd each get a check for $2.11.[via Lifehacker]Image: Shutterstock/ESB Professional (Modified) Read the rest

There are times in life when you're presented with something that you never knew you wanted but, once its in your head, you're certain you can no longer live without it.That this isn't a real film has gnawed out a sizeable chunk of my soul. Read the rest

In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my essay Adblocking: How About Nah?, published last week on EFF's Deeplinks; it's the latest installment in my series about "adversarial interoperability," and the role it has historically played in keeping tech open and competitive, and how that role is changing now that yesterday's scrappy startups have become today's bloated incumbents, determined to prevent anyone from disrupting them they way they disrupted tech in their early days.At the height of the pop-up wars, it seemed like there was no end in sight: the future of the Web would be one where humans adapted to pop-ups, then pop-ups found new, obnoxious ways to command humans' attention, which would wane, until pop-ups got even more obnoxious.But that's not how it happened. Instead, browser vendors (beginning with Opera) started to ship on-by-default pop-up blockers. What's more, users—who hated pop-up ads—started to choose browsers that blocked pop-ups, marginalizing holdouts like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, until they, too, added pop-up blockers.Chances are, those blockers are in your browser today. But here's a funny thing: if you turn them off, you won't see a million pop-up ads that have been lurking unseen for all these years.Because once pop-up ads became invisible by default to an ever-larger swathe of Internet users, advertisers stopped demanding that publishers serve pop-up ads. The point of pop-ups was to get people's attention, but something that is never seen in the first place can't possibly do that.MP3 Read the rest

We have a new newsletter at Cool Tools called "What's in my bag?" Each week, one interesting person shares four favorite things in their bag. This issue's interesting person is Lenore Edman, co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.Maldon Sea Salt Flakes Pinch TinFlake salt gives more flavor because of the huge surface area, and it has a pleasant crunch as well. It’s great on anything you would sprinkle salt on like tomatoes, cucumbers, home fries and more. I use this when I’m cooking in someone else’s kitchen, at work, or when I’m picnicking. I refill it from the larger salt cellar we keep at home.USB Flash DriveI’ve had this Keroppi flash drive in my bag for nearly forever. You never know when you’re going to need to move a file from one computer to another. This one hasn’t gotten lost because it’s distinctive.Etymotic High Fidelity EarplugsThese come in a package that doesn’t take up much space or get crushed in my bag. I use them for concerts or events and they’re always on hand for when there are unexpectedly loud things happening.UV keychain flashlightI have this on my keychain because there are so many interesting things that fluoresce under UV. Rocks, creatures, inks, paints, chemicals, and even my hair dye.About the bagMy bag is from Modcloth and has just enough useful pockets (3 inside and 1 outer pocket) and plenty of room in the main compartment for laptop and more. Read the rest

Discovery Channel's 2019 Shark Week is upon us and what better way to ring in this annual television event than by turning your bath water into a scene reminiscent of a recent shark attack. Etsy shop BareBumShop makes and sells shark-head-shaped bath bombs ($5.99 each) that "bleed" red as they dissolve in water.Watch (the accompanying "Baby Shark" music is a nice touch): View this post on Instagram #babyshark #daddyshark #jaws #shark #bathbomb #etsy #etsyshop #etsyseller #onlineshoppingA post shared by Jamie Main (@barebumessentials) on Jan 3, 2019 at 5:16pm PST(Apartment Therapy) Read the rest

Protestors in Hong Kong have figured out how to extinguish tear gas canisters that police throw at them. They cover it with a traffic cone then pour water into the hole at the top of the cone, which stops the canister from emitting tear gas.Truly awesome the way Hong Kongers deal with tear gas.#antiELAB #HongKongProtests#BeWater pic.twitter.com/ptWL4nKHn4— Alex Hofford (@alexhofford) July 28, 2019Image: Hong Kong 12th June 2019: Anti Extradition Bill Protest. Riot police bunch up next to a cloud of tear gas during clashes with protesters outside the Central Government Office in Hong Kong. By Dave Coulson Photography/Shutterstock Read the rest

When the Apollo 11 crew brought home a big stash of moon rocks in 1969, NASA scientists immediately kicked off a series of carefully-planned tests to ensure that even tiny amounts of lunar dust wouldn't be bad news for Earth's biosphere. "We had to prove that we weren't going to contaminate not only human beings, but we weren't going to contaminate fish and birds and animals and plants and you name it," said Charles Berry, who was in charge of medical operations for the Apollo missions. From Space.com:First, NASA chose the species it would use. In addition to the mice, the agency and its partners also selected other representative species: Japanese quail to represent birds, a couple of nondescript fish, brown shrimp and oysters for shellfish, German cockroaches and houseflies for creepy-crawlies, and more....Then, the agency tapped into its precious cache of 49 lbs. (22 kilograms) of newly delivered lunar material. Scientists ground everything to dust, half of which they baked to sterilize and half of which they left as it was. The prescription varied a little with animal type: mice and quail got the lunar sample as an injection, insects had the sample mixed into their food and aquatic animals had the moon dust added to the water they lived in.NASA watched the menagerie for a month in case anything seemed to suffer from the lunar exposure. The German cockroaches that were fed moon dust — true to the insects' reputation — thrived despite the exotic diet. Read the rest

Great Big Story went to Tokyo to visit five small restaurants that make different kinds of popular street foods: takoyaki (pieces of octopus in griddle-cooked balls of dough, yakisoba (fried noodles, meat, and vegetables), gyoza (Chinese dumplings), okonomiyaki (crepes with noodles, cabbage, pork, and egg), and taiyaki (fish-shaped pancakes with sweet fillings). My mouth was watering as I watched this.Image: Great Big Story/YouTube Read the rest

If you appreciate the true crime genre, this New York Times feature is a fantastic checklist of books to read. Tina Jordan and Ross MacDonald selected one true crime book to represent each of the fifty United States. I live in California and really enjoyed Jeffrey Toobin's “American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst." But even having grown up in Ohio, I hadn't heard of the heinous crimes of Billy Mulligan who “became the first person in this country’s history to be declared not guilty by reason of insanity on the grounds of a psychiatric diagnosis of ‘multiple personality.’” Here are a few more from the article that I've now added to my reading list:UtahMikal Gilmore, “Shot in the Heart”“A compelling volume that traces the sad, violent history of the Gilmore family and shows, in its author’s words, ‘how its webwork of dark secrets and failed hopes helped create the legacy that, in part, became my brother’s impetus to murder.’”LouisianaEthan Brown, “Murder in the Bayou: Who Killed the Women Known as the Jeff Davis 8?”The women — “all prostitutes and drug addicts, which made them vulnerable and defenseless, expendable in a jurisdiction that’s centrally positioned along the route of the Gulf Coast drug trade” — were killed between 2005 and 2009.OklahomaDavid Grann, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI”“Grann’s book, about how dozens of members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s were shot, poisoned or blown to bits by rapacious whites who coveted the oil under their land, is close to impeccable. Read the rest

This 6-minute VHS video from the Pyramid Earth Association is fiction. It's another great retrofuture alternate reality video from the brilliant Squirrel Monkey. Read the rest

Some of SoCal's finest skaters jumped the fence of Palm Springs' Wet ‘n’ Wild water amusement park when it was closed for winter. On their way out after a short session, they ran into the proprietor on their way out. Uh-oh? Turns out, the fellow was a new owner and planned to tear out the existing attractions. So he invited the skaters to come back for a week and shred the park to their hearts' content. Even Tony Hawk showed up. Tim Aguilar writes in Thrasher:We were given free reign [sic] to skate anything we wanted—and you better believe we did! The street dogs sniffed out the ledges and rails and the tranny lords terrorized the tunnels. Conquering the main attraction was on everyone’s bucket list, but few overcame the mental barrier to do so. The entire week was epic but the days Tony Hawk showed up were a true spectacle. Entire families watched as a 50-year-old man took the slams and eventually conquered a loop in the wild. Thought he wouldn’t?! Our time in Palm Springs was made possible by taking a chance and luckily finding generosity on the other side of a No Trespassing sign. You never know ’til you barge. Read the rest

In this new 14-minute mini-doc from Noisey, Brian Eno, his music-therapist brother Roger, and producer/musician Daniel Lanois, discuss their 1983 writing and recording of Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, their soundtrack for the Al Reinert film, For All Mankind. They also talk about the newly remastered Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks – Extended Edition and the 11 additional tracks they created for it.There is some wonderful stuff in here, like Eno revealing that the country music influences on the record were inspired by him learning that many Apollo astronauts took country with them on their missions. He loved the idea of space frontiersmen carrying the music of an older frontier and decided to try creating a cosmic, psychedelic version of country. He and Roger also talk about how they tried to assume the character of the astronauts as they composed, for example, imagining being Mike Collins staying behind in the command module, and translating that feeling of isolation and awe into music.There is also a touching moment when Roger chokes up talking about when Armstrong set foot on the moon, and how it seemed that, in a moment, humanity itself had jumped into a different mode, a more hopeful future, and how we now seem to have lost that leap. And that hope.In case you've forgotten how glorious Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks actually is, here's the remastered version of "An Ending (Ascent)." In the Noisey documentary, Eno reveals that this final version of the track is actually the original piece he was working on played backwards. Read the rest

Murray Hunter writes, "I'm a digital rights activist in South Africa - I've written and illustrated a silly, subversive kid's book about the Big Data industry, and a squiggly, wiggly robot sent out to track and profile all the babies. It's not an 'eat your vegetables' kind of book: all I wanted to do was tell a story that could delight young kids (ages 3-5) while also inviting them to imagine for the first time a secret and hidden world of data collection. I don't think it's been done yet, and - well, why not? I've just launched a crowdfunding campaign to publish it in hardcover and thought it might pique the interest of a few happy mutants. Read the rest

Every week, Kanye West hosts exclusive "Sunday Service" worship gatherings in Southern California for celebs and bigwigs. At yesterday's service, West's choir covered Nirvana's "Come As You Are" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" but rewritten with Christian lyrics. I wouldn't ordinarily presume to know what Kurt Cobain would or wouldn't appreciat e, but my bet is he would have frowned upon this and/or laughed hysterically. From Uproxx:In the new version of “Come As You Are,” some of the lyrics include, “Just confess, he’ll do the rest, Christ is here — hallelujah.” Meanwhile, the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was changed to, “Let your light shine, it’s contagious, here we are now, inspiration.”(Thanks, Gil Kaufman!) Read the rest

In the 1990s, student filmmaker Christopher Seufert talked his way into Edward Gorey's life and convinced him to record a series of memoirs and tales from his life; the project blossomed into a documentary, only to be derailed when Gorey died.Now, the doc (tentatively titled "Gorey") is nearly done and father-and-son animator team Benjamin and Jim Wickey have created some delightful shorts using some of the the audio offcuts, expertly capturing the spirit of Gorey's animation (familiar to anyone who ever watched the opening credits of Mystery!, only to be disappointed that the actual show was never half as interesting as that credit sequence).As Haute Macabre points out, this pairs very well with The Fantod Pack, a deck of Gorey-designed Tarot trumps. Goreytelling: Story Telling with Edward Gorey [Haute Macabre] Read the rest

Illustrating abstract articles is a pain in the ass, and in the age of social media, a post without an illustration is likely to disappear without attaining any kind of readership, which leaves those of us who cover the field endlessly remixing HAL9000 eyes using walls of code, Matrix text-waterfalls, or variations on hacker-in-a-hoodie.Eli Sugarman from the Hewlettt Foundation has partnered with design giants Ideo to launch the cybersecurity visuals challenge, designed to create a visual vocabulary for infosec that conveys "the huge stakes for governments, industry and ordinary people alike inherent in topics like encryption, surveillance and cyber conflict."It's a design competition, with the final output to be released under open licenses to enable "nonprofits, media outlets and anyone else in need of cyber imagery... to draw on a visual language that better reflects the reality of cybersecurity—in all of its salience and complexity—and what it means for individuals, corporations and governments around the world."25 runners up will win cash of $500, up to five grand prizes of $7K will be awarded to the finalists. Everyone gets "access to resources and community support," and the runners-up and finalists get "mentorship from a cybersecurity expert."The fifth and final design principle identified in the report is the need to make the invisible visible. The core challenge of depicting cybersecurity visually, of course, is that so much of it is not tangible. How should a visual creator depict a signal speeding along a fiber optic cable? Read the rest

When my first couple novels came out, I lobbied to add some kind of notation about "fair use" and "limitations and exceptions to copyright" on the copyright notice page and was told not even to try because legal would never allow even the slightest variance from the boilerplate; apparently Steve Stack is better connected than I am, because his book 21st Century Dodos, has a copyright notice that is full of whimsy and gags, as Rebecca discovered and documented.In the ensuing thread, I also learned that Dave Eggers had pulled off a similar stunt with "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.(Thanks, Javier!) Read the rest

Today Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced her version of Medicare for All, but over the weekend, she perked ears by issuing an oddly-specific policy proposal on Twitter: student loan debt forgiveness program for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities.Mockery of such thin-sliced bet-hedging came quickly—with about 7m Pell Grant Recipients and an approximately 8% total entrepreneurship rate with an approximately 60% failure rate within three years and then throw "disadvantaged communities" into the mix, it's ... not a great many people, especially compared to Bernie's promise of "everyone."Enter The Neoliberal Project with the Oddly specific Kamala Harris policy generator, pefectly capturing her angel-dancing-on-a-pinhead blend of moderate wokeness that tries to appeal to everyone but ends up, well, you know.Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I'll establish a basic income program for federal prosecutors who open a toy store that operates for 15 days in Silicon Valley.Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I'll establish a school prayer program for single fathers who open a market that operates for 7 years in California.Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I'll establish a net neutrality program for non-union members who open a drugstore that operates for 16 weeks in a food festival.Photo: shutterstock / Karl Sonnenberg Read the rest

Dem presidential hopeful Kamala Harris announced her cut of Medicare for All monday morning.Medicare for All will cover all medically necessary services, including emergency room visits, doctor visits, vision, dental, hearing aids, mental health, and substance use disorder treatment, and comprehensive reproductive health care services. It will also allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices.First, when we pass my plan, all Americans will immediately have the ability to buy into MedicareSecond, we will set up an expanded Medicare system, with a 10-year phase-in period.Third, in setting up this plan, we will allow private insurers to offer Medicare plans as a part of this system that adhere to strict Medicare requirements on costs and benefitsThe pundits of the floating world have been pushing hard on the "Medicare for All will divide the Dems" columns, but even the centrists know that it's a policy winner. The fight is over how it coexists with private insurance and how fast to do it.Sen. Kamala Harris, who has spent some time clarifying her stance on "Medicare for All," is now proposing her own version of the single-payer insurance plan. She'll remain a co-sponsor of the bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a campaign spokesperson said. But there are key differences between Harris' plan and that of the Vermont senator: Harris has proposed to double the transition period from the current health care system to the single-payer system, to reduce Sanders' proposed tax on middle-class families to pay for the plan, and she would allow private insurance companies to offer Medicare options. Read the rest

Textile artist Tessa Perlow has designed a stitched floral collection of temporary tattoos for Tattly that's really cool. Like their popular permanent counterpart, they make your skin look like it has been embroidered. A set of eight is $15 (some sold individually).Tattly's founder, Tina Roth Eisenberg of the blog swissmiss writes:In case you’re not familiar with Tattly: It’s a high-end temporary tattoo company I started 8 years ago. The designs last 2-5 days and are printed with vegetable based ink, here in the USA. We license art from professional artists and they get a generous cut of every single sale. Read the rest

Apparently July 17 is National Tattoo Day (it's also my birthday, which means I spend it offline, not paying attention to the internet); to celebrate, the NYPL rounded up a gallery of its workers' literary tattoos.My favorite is the card-catalog drawer, rocked by Chatham Square Library children's librarian Allie Affinito, but they're all pretty badass.Books and Ink: The Literary Tattoos of NYPL Staff [Colleen Gibson/NYPL](via Neatorama) Read the rest

Organize the week ahead with this handsome People To Kill notebook from Amazon. With 100 pages to accomodate a frenetic schedule, unlined to allow your deranged handwriting to freely wander the page and to provide space for scratchy, disturbing sketches, the A5-size hardbound book features liquid-resistant metallic lettering for a durable murder journal. Read the rest

Authorities raided an Arizona body donation clinic in 2014, uncovering "the bodies of different people sewn back together", a "bucket of heads", a "cooler with male genitalia" and other alarming finds. The story is coming to light years later due to a lawsuit filed against the facility by 30 family members.The FBI conducted the raid in hazmat suits back in 2014, but for the first time, we’re now able to see the testimony from one of the FBI agents who conducted the raid, and what he recounts is shocking. He said he found a “cooler filled with male genitalia," "a bucket of heads, arms and legs,” “infected heads” and a small woman's head sewn onto a large male torso "like Frankenstein" hanging up on the wall, one of the most disturbing findings called a “morbid joke” in the lawsuit. ... The lawsuit also says the bodies were cut up with chain saws and band saws and “pools of human blood and bodily fluids were found on the floor of the freezer” with no identification tags on the bodies.“Tools that are not appropriate for dismembering scientific bodies,” said Harp. Read the rest

In the Dept. of It's About Time: Attendees to San Francisco's upcoming Outside Lands festival will not be allowed to wear Native American headdresses anymore. The festival banned the headwear and included it in a long list of other no-nos such as fireworks, totems, and selfie sticks.In a statement, organizers of the three-day event explain why this form of cultural appropriation will no longer stand. KPIX:Out of respect for Native American heritage and culture, we do not allow headdresses at Outside Lands. We are committed to creating a safe, respectful and inclusive environment for all.SFist:Controversies about white people wearing Native American headgear at music festivals dates back at least five years, when the Bass Coast Festival chose to ban such headdresses out of respect for the fact that the festival was occurring on tribal lands. But the blog Native Appropriations has been calling out festival-goers since 2010. In 2017, one young woman who was called out on Instagram by Native Appropriations for her Coachella headdress issued a public apology that was picked up by Teen Vogue.image via Chris Beckett/CC Read the rest

Merriam-Webster welcomes the furries to its candidate list.Not all furries manifest their fursonas in the same way. Some see being a furry as a pastime and may only engage their fursona in online role play or chat, or they may participate in furry meet-ups or conventions wearing only a badge depicting their fursona, and maybe other representative accessories—such as a mask, animal ears, and a tail. Others embrace being a furry as a lifestyle and act out their fursonas in full costume—that is, in their customized fursuit. Photo: Rob Beschizza Read the rest

Android apps are tracking your every move. Amazon is watching and listening. Google's watching you watch porn. Facebook is up all of our shit, all of the time. Perhaps it shouldn't come as any surprise that Apple, a company that's been flogging user privacy as one of the greatest selling points of their mobile devices, is listening in on many of their customers as well.From The Verge:Apple is paying contractors to listen to recorded Siri conversations, according to a new report from The Guardian, with a former contractor revealing that workers have heard accidental recordings of users’ personal lives, including doctor’s appointments, addresses, and even possible drug deals.According to that contractor, Siri interactions are sent to workers, who listen to the recording and are asked to grade it for a variety of factors, like whether the request was intentional or a false positive that accidentally triggered Siri, or if the response was helpful.According to The Verge, Apple admitted to The Guardian (I'd love to quite this stuff directly, but European copyright laws yadda yadda) that a 'small number' of user interactions with Siri are analyzed to improve the virtual assistant and to buff up the dictation abilities of Apple's various operating systems. They also note that less than 1% of all user interactions are analyzed in this manner and claim that when they do their picking through of our private conversations, the audio they're focusing on has no user information attached to it. Read the rest

A gunman opened fire at Gilroy, California's garlic festival Sunday, killing three before being shot dead by police. At least fifteen more were injured and a 6-year-old boy was among the dead.There was "a white man in his early to mid-30s firing a rifle," eyewitness Julissa Contreras told NBC.It was the 246th mass shooting in the US this year, according to US tracking website Gun Violence Archive.The suspect entered the festival after cutting through a perimeter fence, Gilroy Chief of Police Scot Smithee told reporters. He said witnesses reported that a second suspect may have been involved, possibly in a support role.Another eyewitness: "I could see him shooting in just every direction. He wasn't aiming at anyone specifically. It was just left to right, right to left. He definitely was prepared for what he was doing." Read the rest

Despite the user interface issues with games like Wastelands 2 and Phantom Doctrine on the Nintendo Switch, I've still waited like a mook for Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity II to break cover for the console since late last year. The last time I checked on Amazon, it wasn't going to be available until New Year's Eve, 2019. So that sucks. In the meantime, Obsidian is throwing gamers a bone: if you didn't have the opportunity to play the original Pillars of Eternity a few years back, you'll be able to pick it up for the Switch, early next month.The announcement was made by the company in a tweet, late last week:I played the original when it was released for Mac, a few years back. It was pretty good! But I never got around to investing in the additional content that came out for the game. As Obsidian is releasing Pillars of Eternity as a complete edition for the Switch, I might be persuaded to pick it up to play through and see how it feels on a handheld.Image via Flickr, courtesy of BagoGames Read the rest

Jonathan Zittrain (previously) is consistently a source of interesting insights that often arrive years ahead of their wider acceptance in tech, law, ethics and culture (2008's The Future of the Internet (and how to stop it) is surprisingly relevant 11 years later); in a new long essay on Medium (shorter version in the New Yorker), Zittrain examines the perils of the "intellectual debt" that we incur when we allow machine learning systems that make predictions whose rationale we don't understand, because without an underlying theory of those predictions, we can't know their limitations.Zittrain cites Arthur C Clarke's third law, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" as the core problem here: like a pulp sf novel where the descendants of the crew of a generation ship have forgotten that they're on a space-ship and have no idea where the controls are, the system works great so long as it doesn't bump into anything the automated systems can't handle, but when that (inevitably) happens, everybody dies when the ship flies itself into a star or a black hole or a meteor.In other words, while machine learning presents lots of problems when it gets things wrong (say, when algorithmic bias enshrines and automates racism or other forms of discrimination) at least we know enough to be wary of the predictions produced by the system and to argue that they shouldn't be blindly followed: but if a system performs perfectly (and we don't know why), then we come to rely on it and forget about it and are blindsided when it goes wrong. Read the rest

The field of internet technology is wide open, for those who know their way around it. And with the infrastructure that drives it changing every day, the best way to learn is to dive right in - with a credible guide, of course. Here are 8 online courses in IT, networking and security that will give you the latest know-how and get you armed for the job market fast.The A to Z Cyber Security & IT Certification Training BundleThis course pack teaches you to defend systems of any size from any angle, with dedicated classes on cloud security, GSEC certification, SQL injection and more. The complete A to Z Cyber Security & IT Certification Training Bundle is now $39.The Ultimate Cisco Networking Expert Certification Training BundleBig networks use Cisco, and they invariably need a lot of nimble minds to manage it. These nine courses cover everything you need to launch and maintain a Cisco network: CCNP routing, IPv4 and MPLS protocols, the works. Get the Ultimate Cisco Networking Expert Certification Training Bundle now for $31.The Complete IT Project Management Certification BundleIf you've got the foundation of IT knowledge but not the certification, this bundle will bridge the gap. You'll get courses that not only teach you to ace most CompTIA and Microsoft exams but give you a firm foundation in project management methodologies like PRINCE2 that will allow you to move up the ranks. Pick up the Complete IT Project Management Certification Bundle for $29. Read the rest

If racist Gemma O'Doherty (banned from Youtube for hate speech) thinks that the Halal grocer in her Irish town is cause for alarm, how does she suppose people in every city and town in every country in the world feel about their Irish pubs?O'Doherty is a garbage person who thinks the Christchurch attack was a false-flag. It's delightful to watch Twitter school her on the creeping celtification of the entire rest of the world.There's literally been an Irish pub in every single country I've ever been to https://t.co/VhwRB0CBWJ— Tom Usher (@tom_usher_) July 26, 2019(Image: Tripadvisor) Read the rest

Buffet area sealed off as booze cruise ends in, wait, what?

What if Windows 3.1 was better than Windows95? How about that, huh?Every Windows 3.1 theme Read the rest

Hey, we get it. Not everybody's a master chef - or even a chef. And when all you see on the recipe is prep time, cooking even the simplest meals can seem like a hassle.But trust us, the simple act of dicing up some fresh veggies can make you feel in control of your kitchen again - if you're using the right tools. And once you get hold of this Damasukasu 3-Piece Japanese AKUMA Master Chef Blade Set, you'll see they are not just for looks.The nitrogen cooling used in the forging process not only gives them a stylish sheen but toughens them to a minimum of 62 on the Rockwell hardness scale. They're also stain-, rust- and corrosion-resistant, with a full tang triple-riveted in the handle. To boil down all that jargon: These knives will be around for a while. And if cutting with them wasn't meditative enough, the 3-piece set includes a whetstone so you can keep that 12-degree edge honed.Pick up the Damasukasu 3-Piece Japanese AKUMA Master Chef Blade Set & Whetstone for $79.99 today. Read the rest