Boing Boing

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

Cory Helford Gallery in Los Angeles is exhibiting paintings by Jana Brike. The show is called Soulsearching and it runs from August 10 to September 14, 2019.Mostly using the traditional medium of oil painting on canvas, Brike's art focuses on the internal space and state of a human soul - dreams, longing, love, pain, the vast range of emotions that the human condition offers and the transcendence of them all, the growing up and self-discovery. Her work is her poetic visual autobiographyGrowing up under Soviet occupation had a profound effect on everything from Brike's work ethic to her subject matter and aesthetic sensibilities. A self-described "reclusive and dreamy child," Brike showed burgeoning talent at a very young age. By 15 years old she was participating in international exhibitions, later going on to receive her Master of Arts degree from the Art Academy of Latvia in 2005.Brike's surreal and haunting imagery is informed by everything from Russian Realism and Soviet animation to her Grandmother's religious postcards featuring biblical works of the European masters. Her subject matter is culled from folklore, fairytales and children's book illustrations. The subjects of her oil paintings embody a fantastical quality, illustrating what Brike viewed as the "forbidden...imagery of Western pop culture" which took on a "mystical, almost religious tone for Soviet children."Over the past 15 years, Brike has created 13 solo exhibitions and been part of nearly 100 other projects and group exhibitions in established and emerging galleries in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, Finland, Belorussia, Switzerland, Australia and several parts of the United States. Read the rest

Mary Blair was an artist who did a lot of work for Disney, including concept art for animation and Disneyland (It's a Small World After All is her great work, if you ask me). My friend Jenny Hart, who is a wonderful embroidery artist and who makes and sells embroidery pattern kits, has a new Mary Blair embroidery pattern kit with some of Blair's non-Disney work. You can see the patterns here. You can by the patterns as a hardcopy with iron ons, or as a PDF file. Read the rest

I have a Berni Wrightson zine (The Berni Wrightson Treasury) that I bought as a kid when I worked at Mile High Comics in Boulder, Colorado in the 1970s. The cover of the zine had this 1969 painting on it, but it was reproduced small and kind of blurry. What a treat to see it full size on the auction listing page! It's just one of the hundreds of incredible pieces of art offered at Heritage Auctions' "Glynn and Suzanne Crain Science Fiction Collection Auction."“This sale includes classic examples from the genre, many of which are very rare or even unique, with just single paintings typically brought to market, or even traded privately without being made available to the public,” Heritage Auctions Vice President Todd Hignite said. “To offer a collection with the breadth and quality found in this one is simply unprecedented—and we expect many bidders from diverse collecting areas to compete for these iconic images created for some of the most popular and historically important stories by the greatest writers in the genre.”Other pieces that I like:James Allen St. John (American, 1872-1957). At the Earth's Core book dust jacket, 1922. James Allen St. John (American, 1872-1957). Thuvia, Maid of Mars interior book illustration, 1920 Read the rest

If you fill in this form, Equifax will send you $125 as part of its settlement with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the FTC, and 48 out of 50 states.Equifax doxed the nation and profited handsomely from it. $125 is a laughably small sum given how much damage the data they hemorrhaged all over the internet could cause you. Equifax should have faced the corporate death penalty, the execs who oversaw the disaster should have had their assets seized and diverted to anti-identity-theft measures and charities.Instead, the FTC et al are hitting the company for a maximum of $700m (how much they pay depends in part on whether you fill in this form. Equifax's market cap stands today at $16.6B, and it posted $3.412B in earnings in 2018, up 1.48% increase from 2017. As meaningless as the $125 is, as piddling as the $700m is, you should still do this. As Josephine Wolff writes for Slate, breaches should be as expensive as possible. Anything you can do to make them more expensive will help people inside companies who are arguing against data-collection and retention, making the world safer for everyone else. Anything you can do to make breaches more expensive will hit the share price of companies that overcollect our data.Go on, do it. You may be thinking, But I don’t want to give Equifax the last six digits of my Social Security number and my birthdate and mailing address after it’s demonstrated just how much it can’t be trusted! Read the rest

Once a year or so I replace our dishtowels with a new set. I learned today that Amazon has a good deal on a 24-pack of 15 x 25 inch cotton towels: . I ordered them. When they arrive the old ones will become cleaning and shop rags. Read the rest

My guest this week on the Cool Tools Show is Dan Shapiro. Dan is the founder of Glowforge, the 3D laser printer. He's also the creator of Robot Turtles, the board game that teaches programming to preschoolers. He wrote Hot Seat: The CEO Guidebook, and his latest hobby is throwing his wife and twin 10-year-olds in dungeons with dragons. You can find him on Twitter @danshapiro.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single pageShow notes:Cast iron skillet and Random orbital sanderRaw transcript excerpt: "I love cooking for the family and my favorite cooking tool is something that my wife got me for my birthday. She went on eBay and she got a 1950-something 12-inch vintage cast iron skillet. You say, "Okay, vintage cast iron. What's the fuss?" And I wound up super geeking out on this. It turns out that nowadays cast iron skillets come directly out of the cast and they have this rough bottom. You read about cast iron being the ultimate nonstick cookware, but you've got this grating surface on the bottom of your cast iron. Modern cast iron has this, but the old stuff didn't. The old stuff they actually ground down so it was smooth on the bottom. But geeking out, I wanted to figure out, is this something you could replicate today? And I found a really cheap achievable way of doing this. Read the rest

Danielle Stella is a pro-Trump candidate with aspirations to beat Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar in the the 2020 election. She has one more thing to add to her resume that will surely win the hearts of people wondering if she is the kind of person who shares their values: felony charges for "stealing 279 items valued at $2,327.97 from a Target store," according to The Guardian. Stella has said publicly that she was the victim of a severe violent assault in 2008. She is charged with the thefts under her former surname, which the Guardian agreed not to report because she said it could endanger her safety.She is charged with felony theft over the incident at Target and faces a punishment of up to five years in prison and a fine of $10,000 if convicted, according to court filings.Police and court records said a warrant was put out for Stella’s re-arrest for alleged contempt of court on 4 April, after she failed to show up for a court hearing.Officers in nearby Bloomington then arrested Stella on 28 April after she was allegedly seen by security staff at a Cub Foods grocery store stealing a bottle of tick spray for cats, and placing other items “under her purse so that they could not be seen.”When they checked her identification, police officers discovered the open warrant for Stella’s arrest over her failure to appear in court for the earlier alleged shoplifting, their incident report said.Photograph: Bloomington police department Read the rest

In the wake of the Senate's predictably grandstanding "Protecting Digital Innocence" hearings (on how to keep kids from online harms), my EFF colleagues Elliot Harmon and India McKinney have posted an excellent, thoughtful rebuttal to proposals to segregate a "kid internet" from an "adult internet" in order to ensure that kids don't see "harmful" things.They start by pointing out that there is no consensus on what constitutes "harmful material": a ban on kids seeing "any pictures of human genitalia" (proposed by Sen. John Kennedy, R-LA) would block Our Bodies, Ourselves and even Where Did I Come From? (as a parent, I've given both to my daughter, who is now 11). Attempts to determine what is and is not "safe for kids" have resulted in a grotesque string of laughable failures, from Tumblr's hilariously terrible filter to SESTA/FOSTA, an "anti-sex-trafficking" law that has led to a resurgence in street prostitution, violence against sex-workers, and a golden age of pimping, as sex-workers seek out physical protection now that they can't use the internet to screen clients.Rather than requiring platforms to block material that might be harmful, Harmon and McKinney propose that we should empower users: allowing kids and their parents to use third-party services and tools that filter, block and sort the materials the Big Tech platforms serve to them, so they can make up their own minds about what is and is not appropriate.Particularly interesting is their critique of a proposal to put "kid material" in separate silos where there is no tracking for behavioral advertising purposes: "Platforms must take measures to put all users in charge of how their data is collected, used, and shared—including children—but cleanly separating material directed at adults and children isn’t easy. Read the rest

My eyes are loaded with floaters and I get more of them every year. I try to think of them as free entertainment, but I hope this new research into reducing floaters takes off.From Chemical and Engineering News:In experiments with human eye fluid samples, researchers have found that gold nanoparticles heated with a low-energy laser can help reduce these problematic clumps (ACS Nano 2019, DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.9b04050). The technique could lead to a clinical therapy that’s superior to those currently in use.Healthy eyeballs are filled with a transparent, jelly-like substance known as the vitreous humor that’s largely a mesh of collagen and the polysaccharide hyaluronic acid. The collagen can form insoluble globs that float within the gel, scattering light and potentially disrupting vision. Clinicians treat these problematic floaters by vitrectomy, an invasive and irreversible process that replaces the vitreous fluid with a saline solution, or by shining a high-energy laser beam into the eye to break clumps apart. Studies have found that only 38% of patients report that laser treatment helped their symptoms, and the procedure carries risks of damage to the lens or retina.Image: Shutterstock/hareluya Read the rest

Well, it's finally official. After more than a year in regulatory limbo, The United States Justice Department has approved a $26 billion dollar deal between mobile carriers T-Mobile and Sprint.Here's the official announcement from DoJ.Department of JusticeOffice of Public AffairsFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEFriday, July 26, 2019Justice Department Settles with T-Mobile and Sprint in Their Proposed Merger by Requiring a Package of Divestitures to DishDivestiture Will Enable DISH’s Entry as a Fourth Nationwide Facilities-Based Wireless Competitor and Expedite Deployment of High-Quality 5G for American ConsumersThe Department of Justice announced today that it and the Attorneys General for five states reached a settlement with T-Mobile and Sprint regarding their proposed merger. The settlement requires a substantial divestiture package in order to enable a viable facilities-based competitor to enter the market. Further, the settlement will facilitate the expeditious deployment of multiple high-quality 5G networks for the benefit of American consumers and entrepreneurs.The Department’s Antitrust Division, along with the offices of five state Attorneys General (Plaintiff States), filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to block the proposed transaction. At the same time, the Department and the Plaintiff States filed a proposed settlement that, if approved by the court, would resolve the Department’s and the Plaintiff States’ competitive concerns. The participating state Attorneys General offices represent Nebraska, Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota.Under the terms of the proposed settlement, T-Mobile and Sprint must divest Sprint’s prepaid business, including Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, and Sprint prepaid, to Dish Network Corp., a Colorado-based satellite television provider. Read the rest

Comic Code is a monospace version of the classic and "over-hated" Comic Sans. Comic Code was designed by Toshi Omagari and published by Tabular Type Foundry. Comic Code contains 14 styles and family package options. The font is currently #21 in Hot New Fonts.I'd make a screenshot of it in vivo, but apparently they want money for it. Read the rest

The IRS knows about the cryptocoins and wants you to pay taxes on them. The Wall Street Journal reports that the warning letters are going out.An IRS spokesman declined to say whether the letters stem from information turned over by digital-currency platform Coinbase. In mid-March of 2018, Coinbase provided data—under a federal court order—on about 13,000 accounts requested by the IRS. ... The Coinbase customers whose information was turned over bought, sold, sent or received digital currency worth $20,000 or more between 2013 and 2015. For federal tax purposes, cryptocurrencies such as as bitcoin are treated as investment property akin to stock shares or real estate.You may not be interested in paying taxes, but the government is interested in the companies that helped you not pay taxes and it turns out those companies are happy to help the government help you pay your taxes. QED! Read the rest

Taylor Jackson challenged himself to photograph cheap pre-packaged frozen dinners so the look like a fancy food photo of a dish from a posh restaurant. To get it done, he sought the help of a professional chef pal who is a master at plating. From PetaPixel:The actual shooting starts around the 14 minutes mark (in the video below), if you want to skip straight to that to see how Jackson made this shoot work using only one camera (Nikon Z6) and one lens (NIKKOR Z 35mm f/1.8S). No macro lens. No artificial light. None of those crazy food photography tricks we’ve all heard about. View this post on Instagram $3 TV Dinner Challenge! Yesterday @liamgoodvisuals and I challenged @the_nomad_chef to plate TV Dinners to look like 5 star meals. Full video out Monday. Until then - left is a Swanson’s Salisbury Steak, middle is a no name fettuccine alfredo, and the right is a Korean Beef Bowl. Shot on a Nikon Z6 with the 35mm S. #cheflife #nikon #nikonz6 #foodphotography #foodstagram #foody A post shared by 📷 Taylor Jackson (@taylorjackson) on Jul 18, 2019 at 6:19am PDT Read the rest

Emmet Till was 14 years old when he was tortured and murdered in 1955 because he was accused of offending a white woman in a grocery store in Mississippi (the woman later admitted she made up most of her story). The two white men charged with torturing and murdering him were acquitted by an all-white jury, though they later admitted killing Till. The murder and trial were instrumental in kicking off the civil rights movement.The above photo was taken and posted to Instagram in March. It shows three white men, all students of the University of Mississippi, posing in front of a sign honoring Till. Two of the men are brandishing rifles, and are grinning.From ProPublica:Kappa Alpha suspended the trio on Wednesday, after the news organizations provided a copy of the photo to fraternity officials at Ole Miss. The fraternity, which honors Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder” on its website, has a history of racial controversy, including an incident in which students wore blackface at a Kappa Alpha sponsored Halloween party at the University of Virginia in 2002.Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, takes down a bullet-riddled sign honoring the slain youth, whose death helped propel the civil rights movement in America. (Courtesy of Emmett Till Interpretive Center)“The photo is inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable. It does not represent our chapter,” Taylor Anderson, president of Ole Miss’ Kappa Alpha Order, wrote in an email. “We have and will continue to be in communication with our national organization and the University.”After viewing the photo, U.S. Read the rest

Jeremy Mayer is a San Francisco sculptor who creates incredibly intricate creatures from torn-apart typewriters. One of Jeremy's preying mantises has lived in my home for many years and I still marvel at its construction. Wired visited Jeremy's studio for the short documentary above. For more, here are a slew of Boing Boing posts about his astounding work. Read the rest

I've spent most of my adult life in Los Angeles, so musician/magician/actor Rob Zabrecky's new memoir Strange Cures hit home, literally. Growing up in a lower-middle-class 1980s family in Burbank, California, Rob was a shy, awkward kid who kept his wart-covered hands in his pockets. He idolized his uncle, who told Rob he was a special government agent. Rob was too starstruck and too naive to understand that his uncle was an unemployed drunk sadist, until an incident took place that made him realize just how seriously messed up Uncle Ed was. Strange Cures is one amazing true story after another, told in chronological order. During a summer spent in a village in Scotland (where his mother was born) Rob's aunt told him he could get rid of his warts by plunging his hands into warm fresh cow dung every morning. Rob followed her advice, and to his surprise, the strange cure worked. That same summer trip also brought Rob into contact with a group of kids who introduced him to punk rock (which became one of the three things that mattered to Rob, the other two being video games and junk food).When Rob returned home and went back to school, he was shocked to discover that the girls who had ignored him as a gawky, warty kid had taken a sudden interest in him. His love for music grew and he formed the band, Possum Dixon, which was signed by Interscope to much fanfare. He also developed a drug addiction. Read the rest

Amazon quietly struck deals with dozens of local law enforcement agencies across America that gave the police access to a distributed surveillance feed from its Ring "smart doorbell" products in exchange for the cops providing free advertising for the products without revealing their contractual requirement to do so.The deals also included free Ring surveillance cameras.Under the deals, the police would promote the Ring products and the associated distributed surveillance tool Neighborhood, which allows multiple Ring users to collaborate on putting their streets under surveillance.Cops then were able to see where Ring doorbells were installed and contact Ring owners via their app to informally request surveillance footage.Motherboard obtained one of the confidential memoranda of understanding that Ring used with the Lakeland, FL police force. They're live on Documentcloud. There is evidence that the number of towns and cities that have partnerships with Ring is far larger than is currently known. An email obtained by Motherboard includes an introduction of a Ring “Account Manager,” who a fellow Ring employee says “has worked with dozens of agencies in Florida.” This suggests that there are dozens of unknown partnerships between Ring and local police departments in Florida alone.This is also not Ring’s only collaboration with law enforcement. As reported by Motherboard, Amazon and Ring have provided Amazon-branded boxes, tape, lithium-ion stickers, and Ring doorbell cameras to police to craft package theft sting operations. The explicit goal of these operations is to catch someone stealing a package on a Ring doorbell camera and apprehend them. Read the rest

David Tinley developed complex spreadsheets under contract to Siemens, which used them to manage its equipment orders; Tinley hid "logic bombs" in the spreadsheets' scripts that caused them to malfunction every couple of years, which would gin up new work for him as he was called in to fix them.But when Tinley got a support call while out of town, he passed the admin passwords on to Siemens IT, which discovered the scam. Tinley has pleaded guilty and faces up to 10 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines. Other contractors who've used logic bombs to do this sort of thing have received multi-year sentences, and Zdnet says its likely Tinley will go to prison.The spreadshees included custom scripts that would update the content of the file based on current orders stored in other, remote documents, allowing the company to automate inventory and order management.But while Tinley's files worked for years, they started malfunctioning around 2014. According to court documents, Tinley planted so-called "logic bombs" that would trigger after a certain date, and crash the files.Every time the scripts would crash, Siemens would call Tinley, who'd fix the files for a fee.Siemens contractor pleads guilty to planting logic bomb in company spreadsheets [Catalin Cimpanu/Zdnet](via Schneier)(Image: XKCD) Read the rest

Proof that yes, any party is a monster costume party, if you have the determination to pull it off.The perfect kid at a wedding.Don't know the source uploader, or the identify of those involved — anyone? I need to know the story behind this video.[via IMGUR] Read the rest

For more than a decade Shane Claiborne has worked with gun violence survivors, teaching them to use a forge to melt down guns and an anvil to makes farm implements out of the metal.Claiborne (coauthor of last year's Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence) tours America working with survivors to help them work through their trauma with fire and hammers. Last week he helped Reverend Sharon Risher, whose mother was killed in the 2015 racist Charlestown mass-shooting, to beat a gun into a plowshare.He wants to establish a nationwide collection of storefront smithies devoted to breaking down guns. Locally, Claiborne helped state Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell smash steel a few years ago in memory of her father, her brother and her teenage son — all of whom died in gunfire. The first-term legislator, who is the first Muslim woman elected to the Pa. House, participated in a state hearing on gun violence earlier this week, working to determine causes, effects and potential solutions to gun violence.“It was very cathartic,” Johnson-Harrell told Billy Penn about the forging session. “You’re just basically hammering at the gun. It becomes soft, when you hit it with a metal hammer. It was like a release.”Using fire and force, this Philly author turns guns into garden tools [Danya Henninger/Bill Penn](Image: Shane Claiborne)(Thanks, Kathy Padilla!) Read the rest