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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FKSR)
Oculus Quest, the so-called 'iPod of VR', is now shipping.
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| Link | https://boingboing.net/ |
| Feed | https://boingboing.net/feed |
| Updated | 2024-11-25 20:31 |
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FKSW)
Newly obtained documents show that under the administration of Donald Trump, thousands of ICE detainees who are mostly from Central America are “sometimes forced into extended periods of solitary confinement for reasons that have nothing to do with rule violations.â€In other words, not as punishment or corrective measure, but just for cruelty. Just to dehumanize and torture.Reports out today on the documents from an NBC News team including @HRappleye @lehrennbc @spencerwoodman @Vanessa_Swales.There's a separate and related report at the Intercept. "I began to scream and scream when they locked me up," said Joselin Mendez, a transgender woman from Nicaragua about the time ICE agents locked her in solitary confinement. "I told them, 'Release me. I can't stand it. I am short of breath."Mendez is one of many immigration detainees who have been placed in solitary confinement while in ICE detention. Solitary confinement is widely recognized as a form of torture. The practice is rightly increasingly seen around the world as a human rights abuse that offers no benefit to the public. The people who are applying for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border like Joselin Mendez are not criminals. The way you present your case for asylum to the United States is to present yourself physically at the border. What Trump's ICE is doing is performative cruelty.Thousands of immigrants suffer in solitary confinement in U.S. detention centers, an @NBCInvestigates report shows. https://t.co/ccQ1wi6nLd@GabeGutierrez has the story tonight on @NBCNightlyNews pic.twitter.com/BTbctkhMTE— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) May 21, 2019Ellen Gallagher spent years trying to bring information about solitary confinement in immigration detention centers to light. Read the rest
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by Rob Beschizza on (#4FKQ2)
In this footage from 2016, tornado-hunters get rather too close to a big'un near Wray, Colorado: "we're out of gas!" Read the rest
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FKQ4)
A new study on polar ice sheet melt warns that global sea levels could rise by almost six feet by the year 2100, an estimate twice as high as previously predicted.The newly modeled sea level rise would devastate parts of major cities around the globe, and displace hundreds of millions of people.The study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS] journal [Link].Here's an excerpt:Future sea level rise (SLR) poses serious threats to the viability of coastal communities, but continues to be challenging to project using deterministic modeling approaches. Nonetheless, adaptation strategies urgently require quantification of future SLR uncertainties, particularly upper-end estimates. Structured expert judgement (SEJ) has proved a valuable approach for similar problems. Our findings, using SEJ, produce probability distributions with long upper tails that are influenced by interdependencies between processes and ice sheets. We find that a global total SLR exceeding 2 m by 2100 lies within the 90% uncertainty bounds for a high emission scenario. This is more than twice the upper value put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the Fifth Assessment Report.Despite considerable advances in process understanding, numerical modeling, and the observational record of ice sheet contributions to global mean sea-level rise (SLR) since the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, severe limitations remain in the predictive capability of ice sheet models. As a consequence, the potential contributions of ice sheets remain the largest source of uncertainty in projecting future SLR. Read the rest
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FKMB)
Russian nuclear capable long-range bombers flew within 200 miles of Alaska's coast
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by Mark Frauenfelder on (#4FKKM)
Windell Oskay of Evil Mad Scientist was at Maker Faire Bay Area again this year and this time he and Lenore Edman made large models of integrated circuits to show how they worked. In this video Windell walks the viewer through the process of a dual 2-input NOR gate made by Fairchild Semiconductor in the late 1960s. Read the rest
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FKKN)
Trump Did Not Pick HUD Secretary for Smarts, Nope
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FKKQ)
The House Judiciary Committee today asked for testimony from Hope Hicks (at left, in the image shown here) and Annie Donaldson (at right) by next month. The subpoenas are part of an ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.Multiple news organizations on Tuesday afternoon reported that members of the House Judiciary Committee have issued subpoenas to Trump aide Hope Hicks and to Annie Donaldson, Don McGahn's former chief of staff, whose notes turned out to be central to Robert Mueller's obstruction report. They've been subpoenaed for testimony and for more documents.Subpoenas to Hope Hicks & Annie Donaldson are interesting. Hicks was very close w/Trump and family and was there for most everything in early days. Donaldson took detailed notes that became somewhat famous in Mueller report. Expect White House to resist. https://t.co/86YYYYUjsr— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) May 21, 2019The House Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas to Hope Hicks and Annie Donaldson today for documents and testimony tied to its investigation into obstruction of justice, @mkraju reports.— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) May 21, 2019BREAKING: Chairman @RepJerryNadler Issues Subpoenas for Hope Hicks & Annie Donaldson. Nadler: The Judiciary Committee’s investigation into obstruction of justice, public corruption and abuse of power by @realDonaldTrump and his Administration will continuehttps://t.co/etwJuYAzzd— House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) May 21, 2019The Summer of Subpoenas sounds fun!— Emily Jane Fox (@emilyjanefox) May 21, 2019[PHOTO SOURCES: wikimedia commons, federalist society bio] Read the rest
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FKF2)
Russian agent's Instagram video from Oklahoma jail asks for funds from internet supporters
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by Jason Weisberger on (#4FKF4)
Sourdough baking is only hard if you want it to be. I took my starter on the road and made a lovely loaf of rye bread with my first try.I am heading out on an early summer of adventure with the dogs, in our VW Westy. As we were leaving the house, I grabbed the sourdough starter and put it in the bus' fridge. We're stopping at my brother's for a bit and I decided to bake some bread.A small container formerly used to house take-out Chinese or Indian serves as the perfect size for my counter-top starter.I started with 1 cup of h20, 1 cup of bread flour and 1 heaping tablespoon of starter. I add 1/2 cup of each four hours later and then feed as I deem necessary. Usually once a day, discarding 1/2 cup and adding 1/4 cup h2o and the same of flour.Bob's Redmill Dark Rye was on sale. I combined 2 1/2 cups of bread flour with 1 cup of Rye and a heaping tsp of salt. In a measuring cup I combined 1/4 cup of the starter with 1 1/2 cups of warm water. Then I mixed them together to make this sticky doughball.I gave the dough about 18 hours in its first rise. It more than doubled and was super sticky. That is a wonderful sign!I then spread out the dough and folded it into a loaf. I let that loaf rest for 10-15 minutes while I improvised a banneton. Read the rest
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by David Pescovitz on (#4FKBS)
An increase in armed muggings have caused a spike in sales of dummy smartphones that on first glance look real. (You can buy one from Amazon for around $20.) Apparently they were first sold as display items to electronic stores wanting to protect their real inventory from smash-and-grabs. From the Associated Press:Axel says he sells three or four dummy phones a week out of his stall in a downtown electronics marketplace, next door to a colonial college building that dates to 1767.Axel, who asked his full name not be used for fear police would accuse him of selling fake merchandise, said all of his customers know they are buying fakes.“It’s useful for robberies, the large number of muggings happening in Mexico City,†said Axel. “They say ‘hand over your cellphone, give me everything’, and people know now they have to hand over the phone quick, in a matter of seconds, so they hand over these phones and often the thieves don’t realize it.â€But Axel admits the victim would be in trouble if a thief caught them handing over a “dummy†phone.“Obviously there are problems, because if the criminals search it or find out ... there is going to be a problem.â€Because of that, some try a different strategy, spending a little more to buy a cheap but real second phone. Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FKAV)
In Social media’s enduring effect on adolescent life satisfaction, a pair of Oxford psych researchers and a colleague from Stuttgart's University of Hohenheim review a large, long-running data-set (Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study, 2009–2016) that surveyed 12,672 adolescents at eight points over seven years.The researchers conclude that social media use (or non-use) accounted for a very small part of a teen's sense of wellbeing ( Read the rest
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by Jason Weisberger on (#4FKAZ)
It was suggest I watch European magnet fishing videos. These Dutch master fisherman hit the jackpot. Read the rest
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by David Pescovitz on (#4FKB1)
PWC reports that the top reason that CEOs from large companies are fired is no longer related to bad financial performance or board conflict as has been the case for nearly two decades of their CEO Success studies. It's because the ousted CEOs are, surprise, slimeballs and crooks! From PWC:For the first time in the study’s history, more CEOs were dismissed for ethical lapses than for financial performance or board struggles. (We define dismissals for ethical lapses as the removal of the CEO as the result of a scandal or improper conduct by the CEO or other employees; examples include fraud, bribery, insider trading, environmental disasters, inflated resumes, and sexual indiscretions.) The rise in these kinds of dismissals reflects several societal and governance trends, including more aggressive intervention by regulatory and law enforcement authorities, new pressures for accountability about sexual harassment and sexual assault brought about by the rise of the “Me Too†movement, and the increasing propensity of boards of directors to adopt a zero-tolerance stance toward executive misconduct. "Succeeding the long-serving legend in the corner office" (PWC/Strategy&) Read the rest
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by Mark Frauenfelder on (#4FK7D)
Recent headlines from satirical articles published at Reductress:“I Believe God Gave Us All Free Will — Except Pregnant Womanâ€â€œSenator Says the Only Acceptable Way to Kill a Fetus Is With a Gun""Life Is Sacred, That’s Why This Nonviable Fetus Should Stay Inside Me So We Can Both Dieâ€â€œLife Begins the Second a Girl’s Uncle Decides on Incestâ€Vice interviewed Reductress co-founders and editors Sarah Pappalardo and Beth Newell about their approach to covering extreme anti-abortion legislation:What does humor add to this conversation that straight news reporting can’t?Pappalardo: Satire allows us to zero in on the hypocrisies built into the pro-life movement and the political strategies they’ve employed. It’s a way to shed light on less-talked-about subjects [...] and hopefully make people feel a little less alone right now. And they aren’t: Pro-choice people are in the overwhelming majority right now. Nothing that happened or will happen in the Supreme Court was achieved democratically.Newell: We’re able to push the logic of these bills further, which helps to highlight their absurdity. I think we all get a little too used to certain talking points, even when we disagree with them. This is a nice affirmation to ourselves of how incredibly flawed they are.Image: Twitter Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FK7F)
Nearly two weeks after the city of Baltimore's internal networks were compromised by the Samsam ransomware worm (previously), the city is still weeks away from recovering services -- that's weeks during which the city is unable to process utility payments or municipal fines, register house sales, or perform other basic functions of city governance.911 and emergency services are OK, because after they were hit by a ransomware attack last year, they were hardened against future attacks. The city did not allocate funds to improve its security, or improve its training, or take out cyberattack insurance, despite a recommendation from the city's information security manager.Baltimore's city government has been wracked by a string of corruption scandals, including the abrupt resignation of Mayor Catherine Pugh this month, as well as the precipitous departure of four CIOs over the past five years in a string of firings and forced resignations. The ransomware crooks who seized control over Baltimore's servers asked for $70,000 to restore them. Baltimore will spend far, far more than that on recovering its servers the hard way, in part because it was so vulnerable to begin with, thanks to the city officials' decision not to appropriate funds to improve its resiliency and security.Until the ransomware attack, the city's email was almost entirely internally hosted, running on Windows Server 2012 in the city's data center. Only the city's Law Department had moved over to a cloud-based mail platform. Now, the city's email gateway has moved to a Microsoft-hosted mail service, but it's not clear whether all email will be migrated to the cloud—or if it's even possible. Read the rest
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by Jason Weisberger on (#4FK7H)
I am hoping the LEGO Boost creative toolbox will pair one hobby my kid loves with another she doesn't yet have.My child builds LEGO as if she were Zach the maniac of old. We have a very large collection of Star Wars and some Ninjago LEGO sets. Slowly she has taken over every bookshelf I'll let her. She loves to build LEGO. Maybe this set will also teach her to code.I used to play with Mindstorms. I just saw my two OG sets with a few expansion packs, as I cleaned out a basement and packed things into storage. This I hope this set brings her as much fun as those did for me back in the 90s. Boost seems to be the modern evolution of Mindstorms.My friends and I used to build LEGO Mindstorms robots and pitch them against one another on a conference room table, late at night at our Dotcom-era start-up. The idea was to throw the other person's robot off the table. We'd devise all manner of sticking ourselves to the table, or prying, bashing, smashing and disassembling the opposing Mindstorm. People got frustrated after a few sessions as the robots took hours of assembly and moments to become LEGO pieces once again.This set is more structured than I remember Mindstorms as being. This 847 piece set has instructions to make Vinnie, a dancing and guitar playing robot, Frankie the robo-cat, a working guitar and some other things I can't quite identify. Coding occurs via an IOS, Android and Windows app. Read the rest
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by Mark Frauenfelder on (#4FK6J)
Even if Shane Morris's Elmore Leonard-esque story. about accidentally transporting a brick of heroin and then ripping off the dealers who owned it, has been embellished, I can almost guarantee Hollywood is in a bidding war for the movie rights.Thread by @IamShaneMorris: "Y'all wanna hear a story about the time I accidentally transported a brick of heroin from Los Angeles to Seattle? I bet. Alright, let's do t […]"Image: Twitter Read the rest
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by Jason Weisberger on (#4FK6M)
I somehow doubt this will be the final word.Scientific American:After the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter. Read the rest
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by David Pescovitz on (#4FK6P)
Next year, NASA's Artemis 1 mission will carry a baker's dozen of small cubesats to space, including one that's home to a colony of yeast cells. That cubesat, BioSentinel, will orbit the sun to help scientists understand how space radiation affects living organisms outside of Low Earth Orbit. NASA hasn't purposely sent any lifeforms beyond Low Earth Orbit since the last Apollo moon landing in 1972. (Purposely is a key word because of course every probe launched carries some accidental microbial contamination.) From Space.com:But Apollo 17 lasted less than two weeks. BioSentinel will gather data for nine to 12 months, opening a window on the long-term effects of deep-space radiation on DNA and DNA repair...The 30-lb. (14 kilograms) satellite will carry two different varieties of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae: the normal "wild type," which is quite radiation-resistant, and a mutant type, which is much more sensitive because it can't repair its DNA nearly as well. "Importantly, yeast's DNA damage-repair process is highly similar to that of humans, making it a robust translational model," NASA officials wrote on the BioSentinel fact sheet. "BioSentinel's results will be critical for interpreting the effects of space radiation exposure, reducing the risk associated with long-term human exploration and validating existing models of the effects of space radiation on living organisms." From NASA:BioSentinel’s microfluidics card (seen above), designed at NASA Ames, will be used to study the impact of interplanetary space radiation on yeast. Once in orbit, the growth and metabolic activity of the yeast will be measured using a 3-color LED detection system and a metabolic indicator dye. Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FK12)
Mike Moffitt sums up the empirical work on the impact of rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft for cities: an increase in congestion, especially downtown, especially during "surges" (Uber and Lyft insist that they reduce congestion, especially in downtowns, and especially during surges!); lower wages, longer hours and more precarious work for drivers (accompanied by the slow death of the taxi/limo businesses); huge losses for car-rental companies; and less walking, cycling and use of public transit (awithnd accompanying cuts to transit).The (wildly unprofitable) rideshare companies' path to profitability involves cutting driver pay much more and recruiting many more drivers.It's not all bad news: the taxi/limo businesses that are being killed by rideshares are often really dirty, and the demand for parking in cities is also way, way down.Congestion is much worse in high-density city business centers, such as the Financial District, than in residential areas. A June 2017 study found that on a typical weekday in San Francisco, ride-hailing drivers make more than 170,000 vehicle trips and that the trips are concentrated in the densest parts of the city.Both Uber and Lyft say they support congestion pricing, such as the plan New York legislators approved for Manhattan that would charge drivers entering the borough about $12 to sit in traffic. But if congestion pricing discourages people from driving into the city in their own cars, ride-hailing services could see a surge of new customers.During periods of high demand for rides with a limited supply of cars, Uber and Lyft raise their prices dramatically — doubling or tripling them, for example, on New Year's Eve. Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FK1A)
Hans from the Dutch activist group Bits of Freedom writes, "Wednesday May 15, 2019, Facebook’s Head of Public Policy for the Netherlands spoke at a round table in the House of Representatives about data and democracy. The Facebook employee reassured members of parliament that Facebook has implemented measures to prevent election manipulation. He stated: 'You can now only advertise political messages in a country, if you’re a resident of that country.' Bits of Freedom then went on to show how easy it was to buy political ads targeting people in Germany from the Netherlands and vice versa."Bits of Freedom wanted to know if it were possible to target Dutch voters from a foreign country, using the type of post and method of advertising that were employed in, among others, the Leave campaign in the UK. From Germany, we logged in to a German Facebook account, created a new page and uploaded a well-known Dutch political meme. We then paid to have it shown to Dutch voters and settled the bill using a German bank account. Contrary to what Facebook led members of parliament to believe, there was nothing that stood in our way of doing so.The other way around was just as easy. Facebook failed to stop us from targeting German voters interested in “CDU†and “AfD†with a CDU/AfD meme, even though we were using a Dutch Facebook account, had signed in from the Netherlands and payed for the ad with a Dutch bank account. Better yet, Facebook suggested we add to our demographic, people with the additional interests “Nationalism†and “Militaryâ€. Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FK1C)
Roguelike games (previously) are "a subgenre of role-playing video game characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character" (Wikipedia). Jonathan Lessard and Pippin Barr's Rogess is a mashup of roguelike combat and chess, for two players ("mediocre AI available" -Pippin Barr), built from HTML5 elements and playable on mobile devices. Barr calls it "Surprisingly fun and different to regular chess." Read the rest
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by Rob Beschizza on (#4FJWC)
Watching this video is the closest thing to shrooms I've yet experienced online. Not so much in the content, but rather the way hallucinatory changes to reality outpace your conscious awareness of them by uncanny moments.(It's a Bill Hader impression of Arnie where they deepfake him to look like Arnie in precise proportion to the waxing and waning effort put into the impression) Read the rest
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by Rob Beschizza on (#4FJWE)
It's not quite natural selection—creator Johan Eliasson picks which cars get to reproduce—but there's something amazing about these virtual cars learning to drive around a track without even knowing they are cars.Teaching a neural network to drive a car. It's a simple network with a fixed number of hidden nodes (no NEAT), and no bias. Yet it manages to drive the cars fast and safe after just a few generations. Population is 650. The network evolves through random mutation (no cross-breeding). Fitness evaluation is currently done manually as explained in the video. Read the rest
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by Jason Weisberger on (#4FJQZ)
Improv doesn't have to be funny, but it is a lot easier to watch when it is. This conversation with Jason Mantzoukas, who portrayed Tik Tok in the John Wick series and Rafi in the phenomenal The League, sheds a lot of light on the arcane art. Read the rest
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by Rob Beschizza on (#4FJHG)
Here's an interesting example of how journalists sometimes use a version of the facts to support faleshoods. Check out the following, posted by Daily Mail reporter David Martosko, quoting a teenager on Trump's use of the racist "Pocahontas" slur.At the Elizabeth Warren rally I asked a 17-year-old supporter who will vote next year to comment on Trump's "Pocahontas" nickname for the senator. This is a verbatim transcript of her answer."I think that it's really hypocritical because not only is he making fun of someone for like, something that she didn't really like, say, um, but I do feel like he says so many like, racial slurs against like, and she just like presents themselves to be like, so like negative towards like minorities and stuff like that, that the fact that he is mocking her and calling her Pocahontas when he does nothing for Native American rights is really freaking dumb.What Martosko wanted to establish here was that the teen—and perhaps by implication young Warren supporters in general—is confused and foolish. He did this by including all the ums and ahs of speech, filler terms such as "like", and extraneous commas.Most people saw this "verbatim" text for what it was, and Martosko was thoroughly ratioed by readers.But what, like, is going here?The fact is that most of us talk just as the teen did, when challenged to speak extemporaneously. This can be true of even polished and well-prepared speakers. Listen to politicans and pundits on cable news panels, with an ear for the fillers, and you might be surprised. Read the rest
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by Boing Boing's Shop on (#4FJ99)
Raspberry Pi is one of the world's most versatile open-source computers. Alexa is a home automation hub with limitless potential. Together, they're a dream team for ambitious makers, opening the door to everything from automatic lights to voice-controlled robots. Learning Raspberry Pi is meant to be relatively easy for newbies, but its applications with Alexa require a whole new toolset.The Complete Raspberry Pi & Alexa A-Z Bundle can give even the greenest beginner those tools.The first of these four online courses focuses on Raspberry Pi, giving new programmers a taste of its potential. This opening boot camp lays out all the components of your Pi and lets you prepare your first SD card. Within the first few lessons, you'll be building rudimentary LED circuits, and by the end of the course, you'll be able to play retro Sega, Playstation and Nintendo games on your own makeshift game console.Another Raspberry Pi "essentials" course will build on that knowledge, diving into how your computer can link up to the Internet of Things with simple Python commands.In a Raspberry Pi3 course, you'll be learning how to configure the unique Raspbian Operating System in no time. In less than 5 hours of lectures and examples, you can progress through file work and basic system commands to the final project: The creation of a complete Amazon Echo clone.Finally, you'll use those newfound Python chops to program any Alexa device. Here's where the possibilities really open up, as you work with GPIO pins and incorporate infrared sensors into the new skills you'll create. Read the rest
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FH1X)
Betsy DeVos used personal email accounts for her government work as the Secretary of Education in 'limited' cases, the Inspector General said. The report also found DeVos did not consistently preserve her government-related email messages properly, as is required by federal law.Most of the violating emails were people congratulating her on getting a job in the Trump administration.BUT HER EMAILS. From the Associated Press:The agency's Office of Inspector General released a report finding "limited" instances in which DeVos sent work emails from four personal accounts.Investigators say they found fewer than 100 emails to or from DeVos' personal accounts on the department's email system, and found no evidence of "active or extensive" use of her personal accounts.But they found that the emails, which should have been forwarded to her government account, "were not always being properly preserved."House Democrats asked for a review of her emails back in 2017. [PHOTO: Official US Gov portrait via wikimedia.org] Read the rest
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FH0W)
“PLEASE let us take the gloves off trump!†he texted another agent.
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FH0X)
Trump directed ex WH lawyer McGahn NOT to testify before House Dems about Mueller report
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FH0Z)
“The Trump administration is ending funding for a network of research centers focused on environmental threats to kids, imperiling several long-running studies of pollutants' effects on child development,†report @CorbinHiar & @ArielWittenberg for @EENewsUpdates.The changes at EPA are seen by critics as an attack on science and a green light for polluting industries.Andrew Wheeler, who lobbied for fossil fuel companies prior to randomly being tapped by Trump as the head of the EPA, said earlier in 2019 that "protecting children's health is a top priority for EPA."EPA's budget proposal directs $50 million toward "healthy schools" grants that are about removing lead and rats from school sites. It also ends roughly $220.6 million from four different research programs that work on toxic chemicals in drinking water. Flint, Michigan still does not have clean water.From Corbin Hiar and Ariel Wittenberg, reporting for E&E News:At issue are 13 Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research Centers located at institutions across the country, from UCLA to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.Jointly funded by EPA and the Department of Health and Human Services' National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) for more than two decades, the children's centers study everything from childhood leukemia to the development of autism spectrum disorders. Grants to those centers have long been considered unique in the public health world for including funding for both research and public outreach.Children's health advocates have been worried about the loss of EPA support for the centers since at least 2017. Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FH11)
Billionaire Goldman Sachs alum Robert F Smith made headlines when he donated enough cash to pay off the student loan debt of the entire Class of 2019 at Morehouse College; but Smith is also an ardent supporter of the carried interest tax loophole, which allows the richest people in America to pay little to no tax on the bulk of their earnings, while working Americans (like the Morehouse Class of 2019 will be, shortly) pay their fair share.If people like Smith were taxed at a rate comparable to the little people, there would be ample funds for free universal post-secondary education. Merely closing the carried interest loophole would generate enough tax revenues to pay off the student debt of 450 Morehouse Classes of 2019.Anand Giridharadas's latest book, Winners Take All, is a scorching critique of the way that gifts like Smith's are used to diffuse the political energy for real tax justice. In an excellent Twitter thread about Smith's gift, Giridharadas writes, "Generosity is great. But it‘s not a substitute for justice. Gifts like today’s distract us from what is really going on in our economy, and it can cover up the way in which the giver is fighting on both sides of a war. If plutes paid fair taxes, this gift might be unnecessary."Elizabeth Warren has proposed debt forgiveness for all student loans and free tuition at all state colleges.Despite his egalitarian streak, Mr. Smith is also every bit a private equity chieftain. Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FGWZ)
TOSsed Out is a new project from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that catalogs the myriad of ways in which Big Tech platforms' moderation policies backfire spectacularly, like the anti-terrorism policies that delete evidence of war-crimes needed by investigators and prosecutors.The project comes at a critical juncture, where the monopolies enjoyed by the platforms have made them irresistible targets for both bad actors (harassers, terrorists, white nationalists etc) and governments, who are willing to hand the platforms eternal dominance in exchange for taking on state-like duties to monitor and control all user-speech (a move that is too often cheered by progressives, who assume these policies will only be used against people they dislike, despite evidence to the contrary).These case histories are important, because they showcase how trolls can and do master the rules and policies of the platforms and turn them against the people they were designed to protect, from journalists who are railing against harassment (who are then reported as harassers) to sexual health materials deleted after being mistaken for pornography, to Tumblr's world-beatingly shitty anti-porn-bots, which not only scrubbed one of the internet's best-loved havens for positive sexual expression, it also caught plenty of dolphins in its tuna net, including things like patent drawings (!).When high school teacher and activist Carolyn Wysinger saw a post about actor Liam Neeson that angered her, she shared it on Facebook with a comment: “White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a black person challenges every single thing in them.†The company deleted the post within fifteen minutes, according to Wysinger, and warned her that if she posted the same thing again, she’d be banned for 72 hours. Read the rest
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FGX1)
U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves is scheduled to hear arguments on Tuesday
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by Mark Frauenfelder on (#4FGX3)
I always travel with a pack of Sugru, because it is great for repairing things like broken zippers, frayed cables, and cracked plastic parts. It's like silly putty that dries into hard rubber. Amazon has the black-colored Sugru on sale today. Read the rest
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by David Pescovitz on (#4FGTJ)
Last week, an employee of a Starbucks in Mill Valley, California, just north of San Francisco, found a tiny digital camera hidden in a bathroom air freshener. At the time of the police statement below, they hadn't determined whether the camera had wireless connectivity. This particular Starbucks is a bustling hangout for kids from the nearby middle school and high school. Gross. And it probably happens in public restrooms more than I'd care to imagine, which is never.(KRON) Read the rest
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FGTM)
A massive database hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Mumbai-based internet company Chtrbox that contained contact info for millions of Instagram accounts for influencers, celebrities and brands has been discovered leaked online.The database, hosted by Amazon Web Services, was left exposed and without a password allowing anyone to look inside,†writes Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch. At the time of his report, the database had over 49 million records, and was “growing by the hour.†From TechCrunch:From a brief review of the data, each record contained public data scraped from influencer Instagram accounts, including their bio, profile picture, the number of followers they have, if they’re verified and their location by city and country, but also contained their private contact information, such as the Instagram account owner’s email address and phone number.Security researcher Anurag Sen discovered the database and alerted TechCrunch in an effort to find the owner and get the database secured. We traced the database back to Mumbai-based social media marketing firm Chtrbox, which pays influencers to post sponsored content on their accounts. Each record in the database contained a record that calculated the worth of each account, based off the number of followers, engagement, reach, likes and shares they had. This was used as a metric to determine how much the company could pay an Instagram celebrity or influencer to post an ad.TechCrunch found several high-profile influencers in the exposed database, including prominent food bloggers, celebrities and other social media influencers.We contacted several people at random whose information was found in the database and provided them their phone numbers. Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FGSV)
OG Users is a forum for people who steal login credentials for online services, mostly to sell desirable login-names for popular services like Instagram; it attained notoriety when Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai linked the forum to an epidemic of SIM-swapping attacks; a few months later, the Reply All podcast devoted an episode to the forum.Now, someone has hacked OG Users, and dumped "email addresses, hashed passwords, IP addresses and private messages for nearly 113,000 forum users," which can now be had via the rival hacking community Raidforums.If you're worried about being attacked by the likes of OG Users, taking a set of small, easy-to-follow steps will provide an enormous amount of protection, with some measures providing effectively 100% protection. The publication of the OGuser database has caused much consternation and drama for many in the community, which has become infamous for attracting people involved in hijacking phone numbers as a method of taking over the victim’s social media, email and financial accounts, and then reselling that access for hundreds or thousands of dollars to others on the forum.Several threads on OGusers quickly were filled with responses from anxious users concerned about being exposed by the breach. Some complained they were already receiving phishing emails targeting their OGusers accounts and email addresses. Meanwhile, the official Discord chat channel for OGusers has been flooded with complaints and expressions of disbelief at the hack. Members vented their anger at the main forum administrator, who uses the nickname “Ace,†claiming he altered the forum functionality after the hack to prevent users from removing their accounts. Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FGRD)
When Radio Shack released the Model 100 in 1983, it was a breakthrough for portable computing: an AA-battery-powered laptop that you could fit in a briefcase, with a built-in modem and an instant-on Microsoft OS that contained the last production code Bill Gates ever wrote himself.The Model 100 was so seminal that it had its own sales-training literature, including Selling the TRS-80 Model 100, an industrial training film designed to help Radio Shack clerks explain why a customer should shell out for the $800 system.Most of this is a straightforward walk-through of the Model 100’s capabilities by a guy with a stentorian voice. Then, at the end, there are bits with scenes of a typical Model 100 owner (who also has a TRS-80 Model III) getting stuff done. He’s a he, of course, with a three-piece suit and a secretary. But he’s shown dialing up financial data from his hotel room, which would have sold the Model 100 to some people all by itself.Here’s how RadioShack sold its breakthrough laptop circa 1983 [Harry McCracken/Fast Company] Read the rest
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by David Pescovitz on (#4FGRF)
The great Patti Smith collaborated with New York City experimental audio artists Soundwalk Collective on the forthcoming LP "Peyote Dance," a celebration of French avant-garde dramatist and poet Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). I've been fascinated with Artaud's "Theater of Cruelty" since my first exposure to him in my friend Adam Parfrey (RIP) and Bob Black's seminal 1989 anthology Rants and Incendiary Tracts: Voices of Desperate Illumination 1558–Present. Knowing Smith's admiration for French 19th century poets like Arthur Rimbaud, this glorious homage to Artaud makes perfect surrealist sense. "The will of that man, the energy," Smith said. "If we, the living, send out radio and energy waves, the energy of those last poems is still reverberating."Above, the track "Ivry." Background from the Bella Union record label:The Peyote Dance focuses on a brief part of Artaud’s time, who travelled to Mexico City in early 1936 to deliver a series of lectures at the University of Mexico on topics including Surrealism, Marxism and theatre. In the summer, he travelled by train towards the Chihuahua region, and saddled by horse to the Tarahumara mountains with the help of a mestizo guide – which the album’s opening track, recited by Gael Garcia Bernal, evokes. Artaud was drawn to the story of the Rarámuri: Native Indian people who live in the Norogachi region of Mexico’s Copper Canyon, the Sierra Tarahumara. One of Artaud’s goals was to find a peyote shaman who could heal him; allowing him to recover from an opioid addiction. Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FGRH)
Writing in Wired, Zeynep Tufekci (previously) echoes something I've been saying for years: that the use of Digital Rights Management technologies, along with other systems of control like Terms of Service, are effectively ending the right of individuals to own private property (in the sense of exercising "sole and despotic dominion" over something), and instead relegating us to mere tenancy, constrained to use the things we buy in ways that are beneficial to the manufacturer's shareholders, even when that is at the cost of our own best interests.Tufekci's analysis points out a serious problem in the "Surveillance Capitalism" critique that says that paying for devices and services (rather than getting them through an advertising advertising subsidy) would restore dignity and balance to the tech world. When Apple charges you $1,000 for a phone and then spends millions killing Right to Repair legislation so that you'll be forced to buy repair services from Apple, who will therefore be able to decide when it's time to stop fixing your phone and for you to buy a new one, then it's clear that "if you're not paying for the product" is a serious misstatement, because in a world of Big Tech monopolies, even when you're paying for the product, you're still the product.My latest book, Radicalized, gets deep on this subject, with the lead story, "Unauthorized Bread," about refugees whose lack of political and economic agency dooms them to living in housing where all the appliances force them to buy authorized bread for the toaster, authorized dishes for the dishwasher, and authorized clothes for the laundry machines, and how they push back by seizing the means of information. Read the rest
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by Mark Frauenfelder on (#4FGRK)
"Romania under Ceausescu created a dystopian horror of overcrowded, filthy orphanages, and thousands died from back-alley abortions," writes Amy MacKinnon for Foreign Policy. "When communism collapsed in Romania in 1989, an estimated 170,000 children were found warehoused in filthy orphanages. Having previously been hidden from the world, images emerged of stick-thin children, many of whom had been beaten and abused. Some were left shackled to metal bed frames."Image: aerial shot of a group of volunteers praying before serving an underdeveloped orphanage in Romania. By Shawn Reddy/Shutterstock Read the rest
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by Xeni Jardin on (#4FGRN)
Huh. Looks like vanilla.
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FGMH)
Google has published the results of a study of the efficacy of standard anti-account-hijacking techniques like two-factor authentication (2FA), secret questions, and passwords: the good news is that when these are used, they are incredibly effective at stopping both automated and targeted attacks, including "advanced" attacks of the sort that are often characterized as unstoppable.The research confirms that even comparatively weak 2FA through SMS messages to your phone are very effective, preventing 100% of automated attacks, 96% of bulk phishing attacks, and 76% of targeted attacks.Using specialized authenticator apps (like Google's Authenticator, which has a by-design weakness that could potentially allow Google or someone with access to its systems to hack you; or stronger apps like Authy) raise the efficacy bar, preventing 99% of bulk attacks and 90% of targeted attacks.But safest of all are security keys, which were 100% effective against all attacks (!!), confirming the emerging consensus in the security community that these are "game-changers."Google still recommends that "high-risk users" sign up for advanced protection services, which combine Google's server-side anti-fraud tools with security keys, data minimization, auth codes, and other measures.The key takeaway here is that security nihilism -- the idea that it's impossible to be secure, especially against sophisticated attackers -- is based on an inaccurate impression of how well even simple countermeasures work against common attacks. Even taking the most basic steps -- turning on 2FA, using a password manager that gives you good passwords -- will protect you from the vast majority of attacks, and even if you're a high-risk user, you can protect yourself against the most sophisticated attackers with comparatively little effort. Read the rest
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by Mark Frauenfelder on (#4FGKN)
“I don’t think I could concoct a more predatory scheme if I tried. This was modern-day indentured servitude.†That's what Roger Bertling, the senior instructor at Harvard Law School’s clinic on predatory lending and consumer protection told The New York Times about sleazy operators who hyper-inflated the price of taxi medallions (which allow you to own a taxi in New York) and bankrupted drivers who took out loans to buy them.From the article:“People love to blame banks for things that happen because they’re big bad banks,†said Robert Familant, the former head of Progressive Credit Union, a small nonprofit that specialized in medallion loans. “We didn’t do anything, in my opinion, other than try to help small businesspeople become successful.â€Mr. Familant made about $30 million in salary and deferred payouts during the bubble, including $4.8 million in bonuses and incentives in 2014, the year it burst, according to disclosure forms.Image: Leonard Zhukovsky/Shutterstock Read the rest
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by Cory Doctorow on (#4FGKQ)
Writing in Fortune, Beth Kowitt gives us a look inside the Googler Uprising, wherein Google staff launched a string of internal reform movements, triggered first by the company's secret participation in an AI/drone warfare project for the Pentagon, then a secret attempt to build a censored/surveilling search engine for use in China, then the revelation that the company had secretly paid off an exec accused of sexual assault, to tune of $150m.Participation in the protests rose and rose, peaking with a 20,000 googler worldwide walkout. Kowitt frames the story as a somewhat inevitable result of Google's years of rhetoric about its transparency and responsiveness, as well as the company's "Don't Be Evil" motto, all of which gave the company a competitive edge in the white-hot techie labor market, which lets potential recruits shop around for more than a good financial package -- it lets them shop for a good ethical package, too.The company is worth billions, and it is overseen by execs who are to some extent beholden to investors (if not for direct control over the company, which is held by the founders, then for the company's share-price, on which rests the vast bulk of the top execs' net worth), and these leaders have gradually and persistently pushed the company toward profitable work that is in the company's no-go zone of projects that the staff are unlikely to support and may actively oppose.To balance out this tension, the company doubled down on secrecy, hiding its plans from the majority of employees. Read the rest
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by Mark Frauenfelder on (#4FGKS)
Brian Brushwood of Scam Nation invited Rick Smith Jr. to come on his show and teach people how to toss a coin and control which side it lands on.Image: YouTube Read the rest
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by Mark Frauenfelder on (#4FGKV)
A Vice correspondent went to a New Jersey tanning salon called Sizzle Tans, which "has received a heap of one-star reviews from people claiming to have experienced bad customer service — and subpar tanning results." Here's his video about the experience.Image: YouTube Read the rest
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by Jason Weisberger on (#4FGA2)
I just laugh and laugh. The calm announcer could only be improved with the addition of Yakety Sax. Read the rest
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