In a world oversaturated and overcomplicated with gadgets, it's good to see a laptop stand that knows how to just be a laptop stand. That knows how to do its job in the best way possible, getting out of the way when not in use but always there when you need it.That's MOFT, billed as the "Invisible" Laptop Stand.Minimalism is the new black, and MOFT is the perfect example of it. We first caught wind of the stand on its Indiegogo page, where it raised over $1 million. Yes, that's a one and six zeroes. When the hivemind is willing to drop that much dough, it's a good bet that someone is on to something.In this case, that "something" is a rock-solid design ethic.The MOFT is lighter than a pen thanks to its polyurethane construction. An adhesive strip secures it to the back of your laptop, where it lays flat - you might say almost invisible - when not in use. When you need to elevate your laptop, just flip it open. Instantly, it pops out into one of two configurations, providing a lift of 2 or 3.2 inches to the back of your laptop screen. That elevation can make a world of difference by reducing strain on your back and neck, not to mention your wrists. It basically transforms any surface into the ideal workspace, and you'll notice the results right away.The MOFT fits laptops and tablets up to 15.6". Not that you'd need it to, but the architecture of the design is so sturdy it can hold up to 18 pounds. Read the rest

Lightning hit a Russian Soyuz rocket right after liftoff today. The direct hit resulted in nothing more (and nothing less) than this thrilling video. From Space.com:The lightning strike occurred during the launch of a Glonass-M navigation satellite from Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome about 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of Moscow at 9:23 a.m. Moscow time (0623 GMT). In a statement, officials with Russia's space agency Roscosmos announced that the rocket successfully reached orbit. "Lightning is not an obstacle for you!" Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter while congratulating the Glonass-M launch team and military Space Forces. Поздравляем командование Космических войск, боевой расчёт космодрома Плесецк, коллективы РКЦ "Прогресс" (Самара), НПО имени С.А.Лавочкина (Химки) и ИСС имени академика М.Ф.Решетнёва (Железногорск) с успешным запуском КА ГЛОНАСС! Молния вам не помеха pic.twitter.com/1cmlZ4hD1g— Дмитрий Рогозин (@Rogozin) May 27, 2019 Read the rest

San Francisco: It's time again for the always-outstanding annual Kronos Festival, several days of fantastic global and experimental music curated by the seminal avant/classical/global Kronos Quartet. Every Kronos Festival I've attended has turned me on to a spectrum of new sounds, artists, scenes, and regions. From KQED:At SFJAZZ on June 1, singer-composer Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté of Malian group Trio Da Kali performs her new Fifty for the Future piece inspired by tegere tulon, the impromptu hand-clapping songs and dances Malian girls create in the countryside. Ethnomusicologist Lucy Duran, who specializes in African music, will give a pre-show talk contextualizing Diabaté's performance.On May 30, the quartet will also premiere a Fifty for the Future piece by Stanford professor Mark Applebaum, whose playful compositions have been known to include junk-as-instruments, non-musical players such as florists and even a piece for three conductors and no musicians. Plus, there's a new work Fifty for the Future work by Missy Mazzoli, a boundary-pushing rising star of the classical world and the Chicago Symphony's current composer-in-residence.Also on May 30, Kronos Quartet pays homage to the work of left-wing historian Howard Zinn. Ethio-jazz singer-songwriter Meklit, cultural critic Rebecca Solnit, folk musician Lee Knight and poet/actor Michael Wayne Turner III will accompany the musicians with readings from works by Zinn and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Zinn's A People's History of the United States highlights how abolitionists, labor organizers, feminists, civil rights leaders and other dissenters shaped American history.) Meklit performs with Kronos once again on June 1. Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hiring a new staff copyright/trademark litigator, and "experience with or strong interest in patent, unfair competition, administrative law, privacy and/or First Amendment litigation is preferred but not required."It's a junior position for litigators with 3+ years of experience, based in San Francisco. EFF is committed to diverse hiring and encourages applicants of "all races, genders, ages, abilities, orientations, ethnicities, and national origins."Fun fact! 14 years ago, Corynne McSherry responded to a job listing here for a new EFF copyright lawyer, and now she's EFF's legal director!The Electronic Frontier Foundation is looking for a litigator who is excited about fostering digital creativity, justice and innovation to join our legal team. Ideal candidates will have substantial experience in copyright and/or trademark litigation. Experience with or strong interest in patent, unfair competition, administrative law, privacy and/or First Amendment litigation is preferred but not required.Responsibilities will include all aspects of litigation, including case development and management; writing amicus briefs; blogging and other social media writing; public speaking and media appearances; consulting on policy matters related to technology and the public interest; and occasional direct client counseling This is a junior-level position, but candidates must have at least 3 years of litigation experience. That experience should include: devising and carrying out case strategy, and handling day-to-day projects and deadlines. Candidates must have excellent writing and analytical skills and an eagerness to be part of a team of highly motivated lawyers and activists working collaboratively in a nonprofit environment. Read the rest

Bloomberg's Ben Steverman offers a long and exciting profile of Gabriel Zucman (previously), a protege of Thomas Piketty (Zucman was one of the researchers on Piketty's blockbuster Capital in the 21st Century) who has gone on to a career at UC Berkeley, where he's done incredibly innovative blockbuster work of his own, particularly on estimating the true scale of the wealth gap in the USA and worldwide.Zucman's research on wealth inequality formed the evidentiary basis for Bernie Sanders's 2016 election campaign, and his later work on modeling responses to wealth taxes and crafting of wealth-tax legislation that blocks loopholes has been the basis of Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax (Zucman also created an online wealth tax simulator that allows skeptics to check his reasoning about the likely returns from and responses to such a tax (I am a donor to the presidential campaigns of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren).Zucman connects inequality with the rise of far-right demogoguery: America's world-leading love-affair with "lower taxes on the wealthy, weaker labor protections, lax antitrust enforcement, runaway education and health-care costs, and a stagnant minimum wage" have "further enriched the rich" and "incentivized greed" (recall Gordon Gecko's summing up of the ideology as "Greed is good"). This leads to "political capture" and a chaotic scramble to survive in a game of musical chairs where there are fewer and fewer chairs and they cost a lot more to get hold of.Zucman and his colleague Emmanuel Saez have co-authored a forthcoming book on the subject, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, that sounds fantastic. Read the rest

Neal Stephenson's next novel is Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, an 880-page Stephsonian brick of a novel that has ample room for two novels, and that's because Stephenson actually stuck a second novel inside the first one.Fall is the story (first) of how practical consciousness uploading becomes a reality even as the internet is being deliberately dismantled and (then) it's a fantasy novel about the elaborate mythologies and weird spiritualisms that thrive in the post-internet, uploaded-consciousness noosphere.In a long and fascinating interview with Bob Marvin in PC Magazine, Stephenson describes the vision he had for the novel(s), and how it was driven by his revelation that social media is a "doomsday machine" that leads to a fragmented chaos of belief with no commonly agreed-upon truth. Stephenson says that he had to refactor much of the novel after the 2016 election (just as William Gibson did with "The Agency," the sequel to "The Peripheral").PCMag: You stuck a fantasy novel inside a sci-fi novel.NS: It's kind of a weird move. But my hope is that a lot of readers will sort of get the joke in the sense that fantasy and science fiction, those genres have always been kind of weirdly coupled together. On the surface they seem like very different things; one's about magic, one's about technology. And yet it is the case that they appeal to the same people.Well we're in kind of a golden age of epic storytelling with Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and the big storytelling universes that people can go into in great depth. Read the rest

In 1954 a social psychologist started a war between two teams of fifth graders at an Oklahoma summer camp. He wanted to investigate the sources of human conflict and how people might overcome them. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll review the Robbers Cave Experiment and examine its evolving reputation.We'll also dredge up a Dalek and puzzle over a hazardous job.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

Factor Daily's Gautham Shenoy (who reviewed the Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction) reviews Magical Women, a new Indian feminist science fiction anthology edited by Sukanya Venkatraghavan.Shenoy summarizes the 14 stories in the volume, which span a wide variety of themes and modes, and sound genuinely excellent, calling it "long overdue" and identifying the ways that these stories both play with, and refute, old narratives of gender and India.From urban fantasy and supernatural horror to mytho-fiction and science fiction, the stories in Magical Women span a gamut of speculative fiction sub-genres and there is nary a dull page — even at its weakest moments — in this anthology that clocks in at 210 pages. While it is a great addition to contemporary Indian SF literature, one hopes that this anthology is but the first step in a long journey, with more volumes to come; for there are more magical women who have a story to tell and whose stories need telling, who are waiting for their voices to be heard. If this Magical Women anthology is anything to go by, and as things stand, one can see no better platform through which their stories can be told — no longer held hostage by old narratives.Pulling their own strings: India’s first all-female feminist SF anthology is a celebration of feminine strength [Gautham Shenoy/Factor Daily](via Beyond the Beyond) Read the rest

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a vast storm system visible on the gas giant since at least the 1830s and perhaps the 1660s, is reportedly "unraveling." “I haven’t seen this before in my 17-or-so years of imaging Jupiter,” reports veteran observer Anthony Wesley of Australia, who photographed a streamer of gas detaching itself from the GRS on May 19th: The plume of gas is enormous, stretching more than 10,000 km from the central storm to a nearby jet stream that appears to be carrying it away. Wesley says that such a streamer is peeling off every week or so. Read the rest

AT&T has come a long way from the supernormative, feel-good messages of its You Will ads; now CEO Randall Stephenson predicts a future where his company will dynamically alter your TV ads based on what it thinks you will buy; and chase you with that ad from your TV to your computer to your phone, and then spy on your location to see whether you go to a retailer to buy the thing you've had advertised to you; and use that intelligence to command high advertising rates from advertisers.On The Verge, Nilay Patel points out that this requires an enormous, vertically integrated scaffolding of surveillance, made possible by the company's ownership of the video services you watch, the device data showing what you're watching from moment to moment, location tracking from your devices, data from ad-partners tracking your purchases, all in realtime, available to a huge number of ad-sales associates who will use it in their pitches to advertisers.One important element of this mix is how much it relies on Reagan's radical rewrite of antitrust laws, which allow for companies to grow by merging with rivals (as AT&T grew by reabsorbing the "Baby Bells" it was forced to spin out in the 1982 antitrust breakup), and acquiring nascent competitors (as AT&T has done with dozens of small tech companies that might have challenged it someday), and to acquire vertically integrated monopolies (as AT&T has done in acquiring Time-Warner and other media companies, each of which had grown by violating pre-Reagan antitrust). Read the rest

CNBC profiles a small handful of young Americans who have moved abroad and ceased payments on their student debt, relying on international borders to protect them from their edu-creditors.It's not clear how many young Americans have gone this route. That said, the story is fascinating, since -- as an expert in the story says -- this is effectively permanent exile. Once you stop paying your student loan, your lenders get to add penalties and compound interest on the penalties, then add more penalties and compound even more interest. Walk away from those debts and they will balloon to the point where you can never pay them back -- and since student debt is the only debt you can't effectively escape through bankruptcy (it's also the only debt that can be taken out of your Social Security), turning your back on student debt means never reestablishing residence or holding assets in the US or any country that could be reached through a treaty arrangement.The exiles had struggled with low credit scores in the USA before leaving -- scores that were tanked by their nonpayment of student loans, which made everything else (housing, employment, access to credit) even harder, making it impossible for them to repay their loans.One of those profiled is living for $50/month in rural India, where he gets to see elephants all the time -- but where he was also hospitalized by eating bad goat meat. The others are teaching English in China, Japan, Ukraine, and other places where the wages are low, but the expenses are also low. Read the rest

You need your gadgets, and your gadgets need a charge. We've rounded up ten pieces of gear that will do the trick, from sleek wireless pads to manual-powered emergency chargers. The best part: They're all an additional 15% off the final price you see. Just use the promo code WEEKEND15 for your bonus discount.iPM Wireless Charging Docks with Removable Charging PadA must for any techies' workspace, this pad has docks for your Apple Watch, AirPods and Apple Pencil, plus USB and Qi wireless charging capabilities for all your other devices. Get the iPM Wireless Charging Docks with Removable Charging Pad for $69.99, more than 50% off the MSRP.SCOUT Wireless 5,000mAh Portable ChargerThis slim unit is easy to recharge on any wall socket thanks to a convenient pull-out plug. Its 5,000 mAh battery can juice up gadgets either wirelessly or with a Lightning, USB-C or MicroUSB cable. The SCOUT Wireless 5,000mAh Portable Charger is now $39.99, a full 50 % off the list price of $80.GoSpace SuperCloud 5G Wireless Storage & ChargerIt's effective enough as a charger, with 7,000 mAh of power available through Qi wireless or USB. But it can also back up your files while you're at it, thanks to its expandable cloud storage available for up to 8 devices simultaneously. The GoSpace SuperCloud 5G Wireless Storage & Charger is now $89, 25% off the original price of $119.AlsterPlus: Ultra Powerful USB-C Battery PackThe 27,000 mAh battery on the AlsterPlus means it can charge even two laptops at the same time. Read the rest

The New York Times reports that in 2014 and 2015, Navy pilots flying off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt reported frequent encounters with UFOs and captured video of the sightings. I'm not saying they're extraterrestrials... Really, I'm not. But that's some weird shit. Video below. Apparently it's these encounters that spurred the US Navy to issue new guidelines for its personnel to report "unexplained aerial phenomena" (UAPs). From the New York Times:The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect...."The sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts provided by senior officers from the Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series of incidents.” Read the rest

The government of Poland has filed a complaint with the European Court of Justice, arguing that the recently passed Copyright Directive amounts of a form of censorship, "forbidden not only in the Polish constitution but also in the EU treaties."The Directive included a rule that will cause virtually all online expression to be submitted to unaccountable, black-box copyright filters, which will block anything that appears similar to works that someone has made an unsubstantiated copyright claim over. The rule does not contemplate any penalties for false claims of copyright, whether through error or deliberate intent to defraud or censor.Poland was one of the notable opponents of the Directive, despite the national newspapers running blank front pages the day before the key vote, with op-eds threatening retaliation against Polish politicians who crossed them.The vote carried by five votes; later, ten MEPs admitted that they'd been confused and pressed the wrong button. There's scant details about the Polish complaint, apart from interviews in the Polish press, and a snappy infographic tweeted by the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland.Poland files complaint with EU's top court over copyright rule change [Agnieszka Barteczko/Reuters](via The Verge) Read the rest

In January 2018, Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd -- already an $93 million investor in Grindr -- bought out the company for a further $152m. Despite assurances to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States that the company would not access Americans' sensitive data via its offices in China, the acquisition led to a rapid drawdown of its US engineering staff through attrition and layoffs, and an increased emphasis on development and data-processing in Kunlun's Beijing office.Eight former Grindr employees have come forward to say that this led to some of its Beijing-based engineers having access to Americans' data, including private messages and HIV status in early 2019. Now, CFIUS has asked Kunlun to sell the company and divest itself of its interest in it. Kunlun shut down its Beijing office in February, citing "policy reasons and concerns about data privacy."Kunlun says it will sell the company by June 2020.“CFIUS operates under the assumption that, whether through legal or political means, Chinese intelligence agencies could readily access information held by private Chinese companies if they wanted to,” said Rod Hunter, an attorney at Baker & McKenzie LLP who managed CFIUS reviews during President George W. Bush’s administration. Exclusive: Behind Grindr's doomed hookup in China, a data misstep and scramble to make up [Echo Wang and Carl O'Donnell/Reuters](via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

Without generous financial support of six companies (AT&T, Eli Lily, Walmart, Pfizer, Coca-Cola, and Aetna), the politicians who are enacting bans on legal, safe abortion would not have attained office; these companies don't fund these politicians because they want women to die; they fund them because they're indifferent to the death of women, provided that they get tax breaks and other favorable treatment -- the garden variety get the turkeys to vote for Christmas strategy that exchanges unlimited oligarchy for performative acts of grotesque cruelty against brown people, sexual minorities and (of course) women.Thanks to monopolism (another legislative favor that was bought at fire-sale prices by the ultra-rich), it may be impossible to boycott these companies. But to the extent that you would like to avoid funding the death of desperate women, AA Newton presents a guide to maximizing the efficacy of your boycott against these companies.If you’re not able to stop buying from these corporations—or you’re just feeling a little extra vindictive—focusing on their reputation rather than their bottom line could be more effective. According to Brayden King, a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg school, boycotts tend to work best when they’re able to bring sustained mass media coverage to an issue. In a 2017 interview with Northwestern’s Institute of Policy Research, he said that “the no. 1 predictor of what makes a boycott effective is how much media attention it creates, not how many people sign onto a petition or how many consumers it mobilizes.” The longer a corporation spends in the headlines, the more its stock will drops—and the more likely it is to change the behavior that caused it. Read the rest

Young ones, gather round, and let Ole Grampa Doctorow tell you about the glory days, before the creation and deprecation of the <blink> tag, when tables were still a glimmer in a data-structure's eye, when a DOM advertised in the back pages of your weekly freesheet and CSS was a controversial DVD-scrambling system. In those heroic days, dinosaurs still walked the Earth, the doomed cousins and hopeful monsters that forked off from WorldWideWeb: forgotten relics of a nobler age with names like NCSA Mosaic, Erwise, ViolaWWW, Midas, Samba and Cello! These fossils are excavated and lovingly cataloged in Matthew Lasar's 2011 article, revived for Memorial Day weekend content-shoveling by Ars Technica (who note, dryly, that "This story originally ran on Oct 11, 2011, and it appears unchanged below"). ViolaWWW was released in April of 1992. Developer Pei-Yuan Wei wrote it at the University of California at Berkeley via his UNIX-based Viola programming/scripting language. No, Pei Wei didn't play the viola, "it just happened to make a snappy abbreviation" of Visually Interactive Object-oriented Language and Application, write James Gillies and Robert Cailliau in their history of the World Wide Web.Wei appears to have gotten his inspiration from the early Mac program HyperCard, which allowed users to build matrices of formatted hyper-linked documents. "HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know graphically, this hyperlink thing," he later recalled. But the program was "not very global and it only worked on Mac. And I didn't even have a Mac."But he did have access to UNIX X-terminals at UC Berkeley's Experimental Computing Facility. Read the rest

Just look at it.(Thanks, Mom!) Read the rest

Need to upgrade your sound? Bluetooth technology has never been better, but that's not the only reason to look into a new set of speakers or headphones. We found ten pieces of audio gear that are already on sale, and you can take an additional 15% off the final price for Memorial Day weekend by using the promo code WEEKEND15.B&O H4 Bluetooth Over-Ear HeadphonesNo matter where you're going, you've got options with these great-looking headphones. They connect either by Bluetooth or audio cable and provide up to 19 hours of listening time on a charge. B&O H4 Bluetooth Over-Ear Headphones are priced now at $179.99, a 39% discount. Take an additional 15% off with coupon code WEEKEND15. OontZ Angle 3 Splash-Proof Portable Bluetooth SpeakerPerfect for beach parties, this Bluetooth speaker is protected by an IPX5 water-resistant shell. Through splashes, spills or even rain, it delivers up to 7 hours of music on a charge. Pick up the OontZ Angle 3 Splash-Proof Portable Bluetooth Speaker for $28.99, nearly 50% off the MSRP. Take an additional 15% off with coupon code WEEKEND15. Bluepot Bluetooth Speaker and Power Bank This pocket-sized gadget pulls double duty as a speaker and charger, juicing up iPhones through a 10,000mAh power bank. While that's charging, you can listen to crystal-clear audio thanks to the Bluepot's Flat Core Speaker Technology. Right now, you can get the Bluepot Bluetooth Speaker and Power Bank for $34.99, more than 50% off the list price. Read the rest

On May 26th, Europeans will vote for the next EU Parliament, and the region's far-right, "nationalist/anti-establishment" parties (AfD Germany, UKIP/Brexit UK, PiS/Poland, etc) are expected make large gains, possibly prompting a realignment of power in the EU; the far-right parties have campaigned as "anti-establishment," tapping into frustration with elites and their corruption.But careful research from the Corporate Europe Observatory (previously) reveals the massive gap between the far-right parties' rhetoric and their actions. Even as these parties are campaigning as insurgent anti-establishment forces, they have been largely funded by massive cash infusions, sometimes laundered through financial secrecy havens like Switzerland, sometimes openly attributed to the richest, most powerful people in Europe. What's more, the voting records of these parties reflect their debt to the super-rich, consistently opposing progressive taxation, anti-tax-evasion measures, strong labour laws, social benefits, and other measures that would benefit the voters who have backed these parties.Predictably, the leadership of the far-right parties have been frequently embroiled in corruption scandals, lining their own pockets with taxpayers' funds, embezzling millions from party coffers, and handing out patronage appointments and lucrative contracts to connected insiders.Some of these scandals have revealed that Russian billionaires and banks with close ties to the Kremlin are funding these parties, either through cash loans or out-and-out gifts in the millions.Getting turkeys to vote for Christmas is a time-honoured tradition in right wing circles: convincing working people that they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires who should vote for policies that benefit the rich people they're sure they'll be someday. Read the rest

The recent redefinition of the kilogram based on quantum physics and Planck’s constant has had major ramifications in this week’s tabloids, where such weighty issues as celebrity body fat and how many Angelina Jolies it takes to make up one Brad Pitt are the subject of intense scientific debate.But even the measurement of mass using universal verities about light and energy doesn’t come close to the level of accuracy achieved by the former Guess-Your-Weight fairground carnies who can pin-point a celebrity’s weight sight unseen with zero margin of error.This week the tabloids bring us the formula (A - 17) x 2 = B - 20, where “A” is Angelina Jolie three months ago, 17 are the pounds she’s reportedly lost in the past few weeks, “B” is Brad Pitt in 2018, and 20 are the pounds he’s lost lately.Jolie, who earlier this year was reportedly a slender 97 pounds, has dropped to 80 pounds according to the mathematical geniuses at the ’National Enquirer,’ who claim that her six “scared kids” are “begging her to eat.”In the other half of the equation, the ‘Globe’ reports that “Bony Brad is Wasting Away!” Jolie’s ex may be suffering “manorexia.” says the rag, using the scientific term for an eating disorder rarely found outside of academic medical journals. If a page falls out of an atlas has it undergone a mapendectomy? Just asking. Pitt has reportedly dropped 20 pounds, so that he is now a mere 160 pounds.All of which answers the question which has perplexed mathematicians almost as long as Fermat’s Last Theorem: how many Angelina Jolies does it take to make one Brad Pitt? Read the rest

Trying to earn a promotion? Memorial Day weekend might be a good place to start. There are tons of e-learning packages that can help you build professional skills a lot quicker (and cheaper) than any technical academy. Whether you want to earn IT certifications, learn to code, become a designer, or anything else, these comprehensive bundles are all on sale. Plus, you can take an additional 60% off the final price by entering the online code WEEKEND60.The Complete 2019 CompTIA Certification Training BundleCompTIA certification is a big highlight on any IT resume, and this bundle gets you that certification in a wide range of skills. A fundamentals course gets you started, then you'll move on to mastery in A+, Linux and cybersecurity practices, just to name a few. The Complete 2019 CompTIA Certification Training Bundle is currently $69, a full 97% off the MSRP. Take an additional 60% off with coupon code WEEKEND60. The Complete Start A Side Business BundleNo matter what kind of product you've got to sell, this bundle will help you find a buyer online - even if that product is your talent. Each of these 12 lessons focuses on a different outlet for internet income, including Fiverr, eBay, Amazon Affiliates and much more. The Complete Start a Side Business Bundle is on sale for $25, 98% off the cost of the individual courses. Take an additional 60% off with coupon code WEEKEND60. AWS Solutions Architect Certification BundleBig companies need specialists who can build a cloud computing system, and the platform of choice to do that is Amazon Web Services. Read the rest

First American Financial Corp is a Fortune 500 company that insures titles on peoples' property; their insecure website exposed 885,000,000 records for property titles, going back 16 years, including bank accounts (with scanned statements), Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, scanned drivers' licenses, tax records, mortgage records, etc -- when notified of the error, the company (which employs 18,000 people and grossed more than $5.7B last year) closed the misconfiguration.It's not clear whether or which records were compromised.The error was in the company's customer portal, which anyone who ever closed a real-estate purchase mediated by First American would have accessed. All it took to gain access to other peoples' records was to change the customer number in the portal, adding or subtracting one to step through every customer on file, back to 2003. KrebsOnSecurity confirmed the real estate developer’s findings, which indicate that First American’s Web site exposed approximately 885 million files, the earliest dating back more than 16 years. No authentication was required to read the documents.Many of the exposed files are records of wire transactions with bank account numbers and other information from home or property buyers and sellers. Ben Shoval, the developer who notified KrebsOnSecurity about the data exposure, said that’s because First American is one of the most widely-used companies for real estate title insurance and for closing real estate deals — where both parties to the sale meet in a room and sign stacks of legal documents.“Closing agencies are supposed to be the only neutral party that doesn’t represent someone else’s interest, and you’re required to have title insurance if you have any kind of mortgage,” Shoval said. Read the rest

“Welly, welly, well, to what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this ganjy gadget? What’s it going to be then, eh? There was me, that is Lexa, and my pelendus Pria, Georgina, and Dim, all sat in the So Milkbar with the package sent my way, safe of the rainy blacklight without. As everybody is fast to forget, newspapers not being read much these days, this thing is quite the jem, folding like a zagamine and opening up to play any viddytube or app. A dayback marvel, as the literature has it, so here we are ignoring the sayjaylays at the bar in favor of this mystic slab. It was the jang, or so we were told, and two grand to boot. Unspun from its box, the ol' android came on and the hardware was alive. Oh, jala, jala! Like a sheet of rarespun heaven metal or silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now under my flicking and tapping fingertips. Gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh, flipping and folding, a wonder of wonders, even its music a cage of silk. Ah sa, my sisters, who well wanted a go and made grabby grabs at the magic machine."Over my baejae body girls," said I, recoiling and fending. There was yet a film on it, the protector that comes on all such things. Off I pulled this sheeting, daksal and slippy, as any would do. But within seconds there was a line and a flutter and then another and more. Read the rest

Making a Turing machine is a kind of nerd rite of passage, like manually editing your X11 settings or building a two-second time-machine. As far back as 2005, we were chronicling the adventures of Lego Turing-machine builders (the state of the art advanced rather a lot by 2012), as well as the ongoing effort to attain Turing completeness in wood and also baked goods.Here's the latest iteration, a Lego Turing machine created by comp sci Masters students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyons, which comes with its own 7 minute documentary.(via Evil Mad Scientist Labs) Read the rest

Hashimoto Baku ("a Tokyo based video director/visual artist/developer") digs into fascinating depth on the "slit-scan" technique: "[imagine] a quite thick flipbook that all frames of a video are bound page by page. If you just rifle through it, the original video will be just played. Slit-scan intrinsically means slicing the flipbook diagonally."Applied to digital video, this "means displacing a cross section of 'world volume' (like a flipbook, it is an imaginary 3D cube consists of 2D image + 1D time) along with 'time axis'. Part of time displacement whose cross-section is planar is so-called slit-scan."The effect is to make things stretch, distort, shrink and produce landscapes that are reminiscent of Inception.advanced slit-scan pic.twitter.com/gzSua8dlED— Baku 麦 (@_baku89) May 17, 2019(via JWZ) Read the rest

*not reallyAnxiety and depression are deeply inter-related and both are among the most terrible things I have ever experienced.This is in no way to say that they are worse than other things. It’s not a competition and one of the many terrible things anxiety and depression do is make you feel guilty about feeling bad because so many people have it worse off than you, because of disaster or illness or poverty or circumstance, which just makes the whole thing worse.Anxiety often starts with a specific concern, something you are worried about, either personal [aggh money, agggh relationships, aggg jobs, aggg illness] or public [agggh run around screaming the whole world is on fire and no one seems to be able to do anything oh dear god I can never look at the news again did that really say nuclear war why won’t it stop and gosh isn’t it getting hot recently].At some point, it metastasizes, spreading from a particular thing you have been over-thinking about and becomes a persistent feeling of dread and discomfort that will then alter your perception of anything that you think about.Or sometimes it just turns up for no fucking reason at all.Dread and discomfort do not do it justice, however.It makes getting out of bed sort of…terrifying. In fact, it makes anything you have to do at all sort of…terrifying. Even the thought of doing something is terrifying. The sensation is like when you get frightened and there is this clenching in your chest but it never alleviates and turns into a rat that is constantly gnawing at your insides, a thin ribbon of indescribable panic that sits under your ribcage and pulls your focus away from the world. Read the rest

There are so many things to love about Stephen Colbert. For me, his unapologetic nerdiness is high on that list. His obviously large and tender heart is, too. These two impulses come together in this Critcal Role video, done as a fundraiser for Red Nose Day, dedicated to the fight against childhood poverty in America.In the 52-minute one-on-one D&D adventure, Matt Mercer does a masterful job of taking Stephen, as the half-elf bard, Capo, and his bee sidekick, Eric, on a harrowing adventure in search of the Crimson Sphere of Generosity.Besides the fun D&D adventure and the do-gooder intent of the episode, we also get to see Stephen play D&D for the first time in some 30 years. His joy and sense of wonder are palpable. He even has to stop to tell Matt how much he's freaking out as childhood memories of playing with friends overwhelm him. "I can feel the chest hairs growing as we speak," he jokes. At one point, Stephen laughs at one of Matt's colorful descriptions of a gory encounter with an undead beast. "I haven't heard the word ichor in over 30 years."We also learn more about the origins of Stephen's gaming past. He was a Metamorphosis Alpha player before D&D and he got in on D&D early. He even says that he went to GenCon the year that the first AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide was released. And he admits that he still has his friend's copy (they got switched at the con) which was signed by Gary Gygax. Read the rest

Amazon has a good sale on the 11-3/4" x 8-1/4”, twin wire bound, 70 sheets/140 pages Black n' Red notebook. It has a 4.3 star rating with over 523 customer reviews. Read the rest

From a Cornell University paper by Egor Zakharov, Aliaksandra Shysheya, Egor Burkov, and Victor Lempitsky titled "Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models"Several recent works have shown how highly realistic human head images can be obtained by training convolutional neural networks to generate them. In order to create a personalized talking head model, these works require training on a large dataset of images of a single person. However, in many practical scenarios, such personalized talking head models need to be learned from a few image views of a person, potentially even a single image. Here, we present a system with such few-shot capability. It performs lengthy meta-learning on a large dataset of videos, and after that is able to frame few- and one-shot learning of neural talking head models of previously unseen people as adversarial training problems with high capacity generators and discriminators. Crucially, the system is able to initialize the parameters of both the generator and the discriminator in a person-specific way, so that training can be based on just a few images and done quickly, despite the need to tune tens of millions of parameters. We show that such an approach is able to learn highly realistic and personalized talking head models of new people and even portrait paintings.Image: Egor Zakharov/YouTube Read the rest

I bought a bread lame.A friend of mine is doing all sorts of fancy scoring to his bread. Mine just tastes good.I will try to make some fancy cuts in some bread soon, it will probably taste the same. This lame is as cheap as I could find, as I do not think they make much difference. I have seen some fancy stuff tho. I think I have had and lost other lames, so I am going cheap.Premium Hand Crafted Bread Lame Included 5 Blades and Leather Protective Cover via Amazon Read the rest

"It’s a lie. I made the whole thing up. Now I'm in huge trouble." That's what Shane Morris is now saying about his epic twitter story about buying an old van, finding a brick of heroin taped to the wheel well, then pulling a con on an MS-13 gang member. In a Medium post, he wrote:But this lie has been incredibly stupid, and it comes with a heavy cost. A few hours ago, my weed man came by for his usual delivery. I don’t know how you are with your weed man, but my weed man and I have a good relationship. (Life lesson: Keep a good relationship with your weed man. Tip for delivery.) While he was at my house, I was showing him the thread, the whole story, and how I went viral. When I got to the very end, he said, “Wait. Hol’ up. Hol’ the fuck up. Did you actually just casually throw out how you robbed MS-13? Bro, that is the fucking whitest shit I have ever heard in my entire life. Like, bro, you know me. I used to bang. I know these n****as. These n****as ain’t just gonna murder you. They’re gonna make that shit last for six fucking hours. Bro. I don’t even know if I can be at this fucking house right now.”The narrator voice went off in my head: “At moment, I realized I had fucked up.”He demanded I leave my home. I don’t recollect his exact words, but it was, “If you don’t get the fuck outta this house, right now, I’m gonna kill you myself, so at least I know you died a painless death. Read the rest

Germany's Interior Minister Horst Seehofer -- a hardliner who has called for cameras at every "hot spot" in Germany -- has announced that he will seek a ban on working cryptography in Germany; he will insist that companies only supply insecure tools that have a backdoor that will allow the German state to decrypt messages and chats on demand.He's said that he'll ban any service or app that does not comply with the rule.If this sounds familiar, it should: it's basically the rule Australia enacted in December 2018. It's also been repeatedly proposed by Rod Rosenstein in his capacity as US Deputy Attorney General; and by GCHQ's Technical Director, Ian Levy.I wrote a comprehensive explainer about this in 2017 when Theresa May proposed it. Here it is again, because honestly, the idea hasn't gotten any less stupid over two years.Aaron Swartz once said, "It's no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works."He was talking to law-makers, policy-makers and power-brokers, people who were, at best, half-smart about technology -- just smart enough to understand that in a connected world, every problem society has involves computers, and just stupid enough to demand that computers be altered to solve those problems.Paging Theresa May.Theresa May says that last night's London terror attacks mean that the internet cannot be allowed to provide a "safe space" for terrorists and therefore working cryptography must be banned in the UK.This is a golden oldie, a classic piece of foolish political grandstanding. Read the rest

How do quartz watches keep time? Steve Mould gives a great demonstration explaining how they work. Quartz is piezoelectric, which means when it is deformed it generates an electrical signal. A quartz watch has a tiny quartz tuning fork that's been calibrated to vibrate at 2 cycles per second. This signal is fed through a series of 14 flip-flop circuits, each of which divides the frequency of the signal by 2. By the time the signal goes through the 14th flip-flop, the frequency is one cycle per second. Read the rest

A group of Quaker investors called Friends Fiduciary have introduced a shareholder motion that was backed by the owners of more than a million Comcast shares, calling on the company to voluntarily disclose its state-level lobbying activities; the company strenuously objects to making such disclosures, calling the measure an "unnecessary burden."The company falsely stated that "much of this information is already publicly available either through our own filings or those of any trade associations of which we are members" -- some (but not all) of the information about federal lobbying is in the public record, but 22 states have no disclosure requirements and generally state disclosures are less comprehensive than federal ones.Comcast CEO Brian Roberts holds 33.3 percent of the voting shares, making it unlikely, but the Friends Fiduciary proposal has gained more support every year, rising from 16.7% in 2017 to 19.1% in 2018 (that's 32% of the outside shareholders).The Friends Fiduciary proposal argued that more lobbying disclosures are necessary in part because "Comcast's lobbying spending is perceived to go counter to its public statements, a sentiment which has only grown given recent debates over net neutrality." As evidence, the group pointed to a November 2017 Slate article titled "Comcast wants you to think it supports net neutrality while it pushes for net neutrality to be destroyed."Separately, Comcast should say how much it gives to Broadband for America, a "group which has been subpoenaed by the New York attorney general in the course of an investigation into the potential fraudulence of some of the 22 million comments submitted to the Federal Communication Commission" during the net neutrality repeal proceeding, Friends Fiduciary said. Read the rest

Remember when Russia was our friend? Read the rest

It is, as they say, a running joke. One meticulously catalogued here by Noah Spongy and Jasbre. Read the rest

The bookends ($79) are the clear winner here, but the robot hand tankard ($58) is pretty sweet too; they're made of painted resin (with a stainless steel insert in the tankard), pre-order now for July shipping. (via Geekologie) Read the rest

Despite 15 years of legal action, jailed founders, and countless takedown demands, The Pirate Bay still remains live on the 'net.This is the story of a plain-looking website that sprung from the most fertile period of the early internet, blatantly raised its middle fingers at intellectual property laws and copyright owners and lived for what is an eternity in the timeline of digital evolution. It’s thrived, growing from 25 million users to reportedly more than double that figure over the last 10 years, and shows little sign of slowing down. “It’s a testament to what an anonymous crew can do if they really believe in the cause of giving us access to these products that are so corporatized and endlessly monetized,” John says. Google is happy to list it: Read the rest

I spun til I was dizzy as fuck on that exact same Sit and Spin!Rockin' out. Read the rest

British Prime Minister Theresa May announced she would stand down as the leader of the Conservative Party on June 7, triggering a party leadership race. She will remain Prime Minister until a replacement is chosen, probably in July.The BBC:In an emotional statement, she said she had done her best to deliver Brexit and it was a matter of "deep regret" that she had been unable to do so. ... In her statement, Mrs May said she had done "everything I can" to convince MPs to support the withdrawal deal she had negotiated with the European Union but it was now in the "best interests of the country for a new prime minister to lead that effort".She added that, in order to deliver Brexit, her successor would have to build agreement in Parliament."Such a consensus can only be reached if those on all sides of the debate are willing to compromise," she said.Under the UK's parliamentary system the majority party (or a coalition, if there is none) forms the government, meaning that the PM's job often changes hands without a new election.May succeeded David Cameron three years ago, called a general election in hopes of winning a beefy democratic mandate, failed to win the election, was nonetheless able to form a government with the help of an Irish cult, then was unable to pass a Brexit deal. Read the rest

Lo, how the mighty have fallen.Theresa May, yes, but also Steve Bannon.Steve Bannon is in Almaty, Kazakhstan, today, just a few of days before the long-planned handover of power from President Nursultan Äbishuly Nazarbayev to his hand-picked successor.Here is Bannon, fresh off the plane from stoking race war in Paris and advising Boris Johnson on what to do after Theresa May, in Kazakhstan, giving a consoling embrace to RT propaganda persona George Galloway.Where's old white nationalist Steve Bannon off to next? “Steve Bannon, Nick Griffin, and Jeff Monson headline the Novorossia Friendship Congress at Moscow’s President Hotel.”Caption this. Now. Steve Bannon and George Galloway congratulating each other after hearing news of @theresa_may’s expected resignation. pic.twitter.com/uX7iv50uej— Ghida Fakhry (@ghida_fakhry) May 24, 2019“Theresa May has resigned” announced George Galloway. “Let me give you a hug,” Steve Bannon replied. I pulled a camera out just as they let go of tight embrace but here is the far right and far left very much on the same page in Almaty #Kazakhstan pic.twitter.com/96YNBmhv0X— natalia antelava (@antelava) May 24, 2019Says everything about Steve Bannon’s fall from grace that he’s sunk to the level of hanging out with George Galloway in Kazakhstan. That is a Seagal-level grind https://t.co/HgUY2esCOa— max seddon (@maxseddon) May 24, 2019Steve Bannon's speaking in Kazakhstan this week, alongside RT stalwart George Galloway (lol): https://t.co/utZUhoKlnc ht @ReidStan pic.twitter.com/mYoDXJDdfr— Casey Michel 🇰🇿 (@cjcmichel) May 21, 2019Steve Bannon was supposed to be on the opening panel I was moderating on ‘de-globalization.’ He missed it because he arrived late from France where he was busy helping Marine Le Pen’s party in the European parliamentary elections. Read the rest

There's no sound in this video, posted by KARK 4 News, depicting two barges slurped inexorably into a dam on the Arkansas River.According to locals, the unmanned barges were loaded with fertilier and broke free of their moorings.two runaway barges broke loose Thursday on the Arkansas River, crashed into a dam in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and sank.Police shut down major thoroughfares and ordered evacuations in the area after the barges came unmoored and threatened to crash through an Interstate 40 bridge and a dam on the bloated Arkansas River. Read the rest

Hackers have breached Perceptics, which sells border security technology and license plate reader systems and the like to governments and other entities. The U.S. government uses their readers, including along the US-Mexico border. “The hacker known as 'Boris Bullet-Dodger' has published what appears to be internal data belonging to Perceptics, which provides license plate reader technology for the Mexico border,” reports Motherboard.Perceptics has contracts with U.S. Customs, The government of Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Motherboard confirms the breach, and reports that hackers have dumped data online.Excerpt:“We are aware of the breach and have notified our customers. We can’t comment any further because it is an ongoing legal investigation,” Casey Self, director of marketing for Perceptics said in an online message. The Register first reported the news on Thursday.The data appears to include a variety of databases, company documents, and financial information, according to the file directory giving an overview of the stolen material. Boris Bullet-Dodger, the hacker who listed the data online, contacted Motherboard with a link to the stolen data on Thursday."perceptics.com hacked, dat[a] leak," the hacker wrote in an email.Perceptics, once a subsidiary of major government contractor Northrop Grumman, mainly distributes license plate readers, under-vehicle cameras, and driver cameras to the U.S., Canada, Mexico to place at border crossings. According to a company slide presentation from 2016, its readers and cameras are designed to be combined with federal “biographic/passport data” of the passengers.U.S. Customs Service has used Perceptics services since 1982, and the company has had licence plate readers at all U.S.-Mexico border crossings since 2002. Read the rest

Abuse happened at Snapchat a "few times," staff tells Motherboard

Author Naomi Wolf has a new book coming out titled "Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love". It's about the emergence of homosexuality as a concept and its criminalization in 19th-century England....the story, brilliantly told, of why this two-pronged State repression took hold—first in England and spreading quickly to America—and why it was attached so dramatically, for the first time, to homosexual men.Before 1857 it wasn’t “homosexuality” that was a crime, but simply the act of sodomy. But in a single stroke, not only was love between men illegal, but anything referring to this love became obscene, unprintable, unspeakable. In a BBC interview with Wolf, her host, historian Matthew Sweet, points out two serious problems with her work. First, she assumes "sodomy" refers to homosexuality, but a key example she uses was a child abuser and it often refers to other sexual offenses.Secondly, she assumes the 19th-century legal term "death recorded" (for example) means the convict was executed, when in fact it means the opposite: the sentence of death being merely recorded rather than carried out, because the prisoner was pardoned and freed. A term she thought signaled draconian punishment turns out to demonstrate leniency.A quick look at a newspaper report from the time might have sorted things out:Oops!Here's the tape. Sweet is polite and professional, and Wolf takes the news well, but it's very painful listening.Everyone listen to Naomi Wolf realize on live radio that the historical thesis of the book she's there to promote is based on her misunderstanding a legal term pic.twitter.com/a3tB77g3c1— Edmund Hochreiter (@thymetikon) May 23, 2019Fortunate that it isn't out yet (and perhaps not even printed, as the release date is months hence) so Wolf and publisher Virago can fix it. Read the rest

An Orlando homeowner owned a second lot next to the house. He added a pool that straddled the property lines. Then, following foreclosure, the two lots were sold to different owners, one of whom erected a fence. Over the pool. Through the garage. When you're just dipping your toe in the real estate marketIt's all so very "Florida"! Cities that don't enforce setback rules. Cities that tolerate structures spanning multiple residential lots. Sales that split combined lots into multiple lots without consideration of what is on the lots. Inspectors, appraisers and mortgage lenders saying "this is fine!". People building fences over pools and through garages. Read the rest

If you're into tools or gadgets, Memorial Day weekend is your Christmas. Take an extra 15% off the final price of these DIY accessories - all of which are already on sale - by entering the promo code WEEKEND15.LUXJET Universal 24-in-1 Magnetic Screwdriver Set & Repair KitThis small but sturdy kit won the 2019 IF Creative Design Award in Germany, and you can bet they know their engineering. Its magnetic storage kit keeps the aluminum alloy pieces from straying, so they're always there when you need them. The LUXJET Universal 24-in-1 Magnetic Screwdriver Set & Repair Kit is 25% off at $29.99. Save an additional 15% with coupon code WEEKEND15.Laser Distance MeasurerAnother IF Design award winner, this digital ruler does the job of the longest roll of measuring tape you have, and then some. It's accurate up to .08 of an inch, with a max range of 131 feet. Right now, you can get the Laser Distance Measurer for $29.99, a full 25% off the MSRP. Save an additional 15% with coupon code WEEKEND15.Multi-Function Folding Emergency ShovelWhether you're gardening or camping, this shovel will go where you need it. And thanks to its collapsible design, it can fit into even the smallest of trunks - or even a backpack. The Multi-Function Folding Emergency Shovel is currently more than 60% off at $22. Save an additional 15% with coupon code WEEKEND15.Mini Cinder Blocks With Pallet & Shipping CrateEmbrace your inner construction worker- no sweat or hard hat necessary. Read the rest

[UPDATE 5/23/19. 2:44pm PT: a Google spokesperson contacted me with the following statement: "We have restored access to the Gmail accounts for the Baltimore city officials. Our automated security systems disabled the accounts due to the bulk creation of multiple consumer Gmail accounts from the same network." An anonymous source told me that the accounts were disabled when Google detected bulk account creation, which is "highly correlated to spammy and fraudulent behavior."]"Gmail accounts created by Baltimore officials as a workaround while the city recovers from the ransomware attack have been disabled because Google considers them business accounts that should be paid for," reports Ian Duncan of The Baltimore Sun. As my IFTF colleague Dylan Hendricks pointed out on Twitter, this is an "amazing signal about the massive security vulnerabilities of technology-based bureaucracies."From The Baltimore Sun:Mona Rock, a spokeswoman for the Health Department, said she logged in Thursday morning and can see old messages but not send or receive old or new ones. She said there was no notice showing why the account wasn’t working.The ransomware struck on May 7, locking up city records and shutting down baltimorecity.gov email addresses. The hackers behind the attack demanded payment in the digital currency bitcoin to turn over the keys to the files.The mayor’s office has said it could take months to recover. In the meantime, many officials have been using Gmail accounts along to communicate.Ransomware --> heroin overdoses. This is... such a good story for someone with the right expertise please get out of your bubbles and come cover it. Read the rest