Boing Boing

The S1 (AKA the "Slip-Slide Seat") is a radical rethink of airline middle seats from Colorado's Molon Labe Designs; it sits a little back of the seats to either side of it, is slightly wider, and has slightly lower arm-rests -- and in some configurations, it allows the aisle seat to be slid over it, temporarily widening the aisles and speeding boarding and unloading.The S1 has just had limited approval from the FAA and an unnamed airline will be trying it on 50 planes by the end of 2020. The seats are 5% heavier than regular seats and don't recline, and are intended for short-haul flying. They're working on other designs for long-haul flights.“We have discovered that what looks like a small stagger actually makes a huge difference. The trick is to actually sit in the seat. In fact our main sales tool is to ship seats to airlines so they can sit in them,” says Molon Labe founder Hank Scott. “I have watched this several times—airline executives see the seat, nod their head and then say they get it. Then we ask them to actually sit down, next to a big fella like our head sales guy Thomas [6-foot-6, 250 pounds]. Within a few seconds they [really] get it—they stop being an airline executive and switch into passenger modes.”The seat pairs this staggering effect with a two-level armrest design to eliminate the inevitable elbow fights that happen when six arms battle over four armrests. This approach works better in visuals than explained, but basically, the aisle and window passengers end up using the front ledge of the rest, and the middle passenger uses the rear portion. Read the rest

How long does it take to dig a hole six feet deep and eight feet long using just a fork?

This year for Burning Man, my lovely campmates and I at Liminal Labs are running a big, playa-wide squirt-gun game called Assassination Army: come and get a gifted squirter from us (or bring your own!), don a brightly colored wristband, undergo our rigorous strategy-and-tactics training, and then go and soak other players out in the world, collecting trophies when you zap 'em!We're at 8:30 and Center Camp, and you can/should sign up in advance by emailing playa.assassin@gmail.com.We're also throwing our annual cocktail party on Thursday at sunset, for players, friends, and passers by.Also: on Wednesday at noon, I'll be interviewing Andrew "bunnie" Huang, the legendary hardware hacker (previously) for our annual Liminal Speaks lecture series. Come early, seating is limited!BEAR IN MIND!All targets must be bracelet-wearing consenting players, no mass casualties (spraying a crowd). There’s no finesse in that kind of sloppy squirtfest. WATER ONLY in your weapon. No dosing, no liquor, just sweet H20. Safe Zones: Target’s home camps and Liminal Labs are safe for all assassins and targets. Need a break from the game? You can always remove your bracelet or come chill on our shady couches, indulge in our nightly mirrored movie madness or enjoy our playa safehaus (21 and up, you will be checked). Strategize, stargaze and study up on skillful saturations. You’re safe with us! For Extra XTRA Credit!DUELING CIRCLEGot a gripe with someone?A nagging difference of opinion?Has your delicate honor somehow been besmirched? Read the rest

"Anonymized data" is one of those holy grails, like "healthy ice-cream" or "selectively breakable crypto" -- if "anonymized data" is a thing, then companies can monetize their surveillance dossiers on us by selling them to all comers, without putting us at risk or putting themselves in legal jeopardy (to say nothing of the benefits to science and research of being able to do large-scale data analyses and then publish them along with the underlying data for peer review without posing a risk to the people in the data-set, AKA "release and forget").As the old saying goes: "wanting it badly is not enough." Worse still, legislatures around the world are convinced that because anonymized data would be amazing and profitable and useful, it must therefore be possible, and they've made laws that say, "once you've anonymized this data, you can treat it like it is totally harmless," without ever saying what "anonymization" actually entails.Enter a research team from Imperial College London and Belgium's Université Catholique de Louvain, whose Nature article Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models shows that they can reidentify "99.98 percent of Americans from almost any available data set with as few as 15 attributes." That means that virtually every large-scale, anonymized data-set for sale or circulating for scientific research purposes today is not anonymized at all, and should not be circulating or sold. (Rob discussed this earlier today)The researchers chose to publish their method rather than keep it a secret so that people who maintain these data-sets can use it to test whether their anonymization methods actually work (Narrator: They don't). Read the rest

Looks like Frampton has fun with it too. Read the rest

The $5 billion FTC fine isn't the only fine Facebook must pay.

I picked up one of these Kaweco Sport fountain pens the other day...I am unclear what is 'sport' about this pen, but it is a classic. The barrel is a bulbous octagonal design, something like a Rotring pencil that needs a diet. This shape feels wonderful in my hands. The plastic is lightweight and the nib puts down ink.I bought a converter because I hate using cartridges, however the blue cart that came with the pen is just fine. I will prefer using this with Noodler's Ink however, I am an ink snob.I tested a medium nib but was sent out the door of the shop with a fine. I will be swapping it, as the paper I am most enjoying these days really needs the broader nib. I do believe their fine is a fine and their medium a medium.I still enjoying writing letters to folks I like and dropping them in the mail. I think it freaks people the fuck out.Kaweco Sport Classic Fountain Pen Black M (Medium Nib) via Amazon Read the rest

Proposals to ban working cryptography were all the rage in the Clinton years, but then they fell out of vogue for a decade, only to come roaring back in the form of bizarre proposals each stupider than the last, with Australia bringing home the gold in the Dumbfuck Olympics.One feature of all this foolishness is the oft-repeated claim that it is possible to produce cryptography that fails every time the cops need it to, but never fails when criminals, spies, stalkers and identity thieves need it to. This is so implausible and obviously wrong that even people who only have the vaguest idea of how crypto works still immediately grasp that it is either a) bullshit or b) wishful thinking.Enter William Barr, the new US Attorney General, who also wants to ban working cryptography. Though Barr's desire to ban working crypto is no less deadly and awful than, say, Rod Rosenstein's, Barr is doing one thing different: he's admitting that banning working crypto will make all the people who rely on crypto less secure, with the "trade off" that it will make society more secure because cops will find it easier to spy on "bad guys."Even if Barr less wrong than other people on his side, he's still wrong. For one thing, it's impossible to keep working crypto out of the hands of bad guys, because working crypto tools are made all over the world and are licensed as free/open source software, and they run on any general-purpose computer, which is every computer, so as a practical matter, any ban on working crypto will only work if people who are willing to commit acts of terror and other bad deeds are intimidated at the thought of facing civil penalties for installing illegal software. Read the rest

Mathieu Stern is curator of the Weird Lenses Museum.This lens spent 100 years in the dark, the last think it captured must have been the horrors of the World War I ... i think it was time to use it for something more light and positive. I took this Kodak Vest Pocket camera lens with me for a short trip to Vienna (Austria) to shoot some test footage. I must say i was pretty amazed by the sharpness and the quality of the image i saw on my screen.It does look great. The go-to practical glass for getting this old-timey look is Soviet M42-mount Zeiss Biotar knockoffs, especially the Mir 1-B 37mm and the Helios 44-2 58mm.I figure that the magic happens because old uncoated glass offers poor contrast, effectively compressing light and shadow into a thinner range: a bug in 1960 but a useful feature in 2020, where the resulting flat, grayish image can graded in real-time on pocket computers. The upside is capturing a filmlike range of light on everday video sensors. The downside is the loss of information in general--push too hard in the lab and it'll just look nasty. Which is good. Read the rest

Oops! Facebook says allowing Sony and Microsoft access was “our mistake.”

Settlement between FTC and Facebook ends 16-month probe that began Cambridge Analytica, Russia, and Trump.

"Hey! Heeeey! HEY! Oh my God."UPDATE: Charges and a lawsuit were filed against Marlin Lee Larsen, the skipper of the speeding boat. Larsen claimed it was "fake news".Mr Larsen’s son-in-law, who also was on the boat, told investigators that he had warned his father-in-law to pay attention, that he sometimes saw him using his mobile phone while driving the boat and he had been off-and-on his phone the morning of the crash, according to the sheriff’s report. ... Mr Larsen told The Oregonian the accusation that he was using his phone at the time of the crash was “fake news.” He pleaded not guilty to charges of reckless endangerment and assault and said the lawsuit was unnecessary because no one was seriously hurt.The charges were dropped upon Larsen's death at 75. Read the rest

After being elected leader of Britain's governing Conservative party yesterday, Boris Johnson today becomes the unelected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, an undemocratic process he once described as "fraudulent" and a "palace coup".Trump loves him, of course—or at least the things Boris has privately promised to him. Meet "Britain Trump," as America Trump puts it.The comparisons between the two Anglophone leaders have come fast and furious - some facile and others more nuanced. Even Mr Trump himself got in on the game, in a speech in Washington on Tuesday afternoon."He's tough and he's smart," Mr Trump said of Mr Johnson. "They call him 'Britain Trump', and it's people saying that's a good thing. They like me over there. That's what they wanted. That's what they need."There are plenty of other opinions, of course - that Mr Johnson is either the second coming of Donald Trump in a good way or in a bad way; a British original or a knock-off nationalist. 1. Trump humiliates all who supplicate to him.2. Boris will channel this humiliation to an entire nation when it befalls him.3. There is nonetheless a good chance Boris will immediately call Trump "America Boris".4. This story's a good example of how some U.S. media "edit" Trump to make him look more normal. Some are rendering Trump's description of Boris as "Britain's Trump" when he clearly said "Britain Trump." Such speech patterns are unique to the President and should never be "edited for clarity." Read the rest

In The New York Times, Gina Kolata writes that a team of scientists has proven a method of identifying specific individuals from "anonymous" data sets.Scientists at Imperial College London and Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, reported in the journal Nature Communications that they had devised a computer algorithm that can identify 99.98 percent of Americans from almost any available data set with as few as 15 attributes, such as gender, ZIP code or marital status.Even more surprising, the scientists posted their software code online for anyone to use. That decision was difficult, said Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, a computer scientist at Imperial College London and lead author of the new paper.They had to publish because to do the research is to realize that criminals and governments already did the research. Read the rest

VLC, the exceptional open-source media player that pretty much runs on everything, has been one of the first programs I install on a new computer or smartphone for years. It's simple, powerful and free—I couldn't ask for anything more. Well, except maybe not having it play host to a critical security vulnerability, but aside from that NOTHING MORE.From Gizmodo:Discovered by German security agency CERT-Bund (via WinFuture), a new flaw in VLC (listed as CVE-2019-13615) that has been given a base vulnerability score of 9.8, which classifies it as “critical.”The vulnerability allows for RCE (remote code execution) which potentially allows bad actors attackers to install, modify, or run software without authorization, and could also be used to disclose files on the host system. Translation: VLC’s security hole could allow hackers to hijack your computer and see your files.So, all y'all that said viewing porn offline with VLC instead of letting Google watch you steam it was a good idea? Maybe put a pin in that, for the time being. The good news is that the bungalow-sized software security hole isn't found in all iterations of the app. Windows, Linux and Unix users should take necessary precautions to ensure their digital security. Mac users can keep on keeping on.If you do find yourself having to go without VLC for your own damn good, it shouldn't be for too long. According to Gizmodo, VideoLAN is on the case: they're hip-deep in the development of a security patch as we speak with, reportedly, 60% of the work on the patch complete. Read the rest

Every language has its quirks. The gendered pronouns in French and Spanish can raise an eyebrow for some, and the verb placement in Japanese can confound English speakers. But when learning any new language, the brain pretty much works the same way: It needs total immersion. Rosetta Stone understands that better than anyone, and that's why they're still the go-to language software after 27 years in the business.Their secret? In a way, there really isn't one. If you want to really make a new language stick, there aren't any shortcuts - so Rosetta Stone doesn't take any. What it does do is move easily from those fundamental first few words to key phrases with a presentation that makes you want to learn.That presentation is primarily visual, with very few cues in your native language apart from the menus. You'll start by pairing some words of your chosen language to pictures of them that appear on the screen. As you move through the lessons, Rosetta Stone is great at using context to guide you into similar words, then joining those words into sentences. Before you know it, you'll have the key components to a conversation down pat.Along the way, you'll get steered in the right direction by Rosetta Stone's TruAccentâ„¢ speech recognition tech, which not only corrects you on basic pronunciation but can compare your accent to that of a native speaker. And the newer online version of Rosetta Stone makes full use of its vast user base: You can enhance your language chops by playing games against other learners or get tutoring help if you want to go the extra mile. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH spunky little Donald and his imaginary publicist John protect America from brown-skinned Congresswomen

Novelty plates marked "mom jeans" "favorite jeans," and "skinny jeans" have been yanked off of Macy's store shelves after people criticized the company for being fat-shaming jerks. Ok, maybe Macy's wasn't called that exactly but critics did claim these controversial "portion-control" plates carry a body-shaming message for women. People:Alie Ward, a writer and podcast host, ignited the conversation after she tagged Macy’s in a tweet on Sunday. “How can I get these plates from @Macys banned in all 50 states,” she wrote beside a photo she took of the dishes in a display at the Macy’s flagship store in New York City...Within hours, Macy’s had reached out to Ward on Twitter, letting her know that they would be pulling the product as soon as possible. “Hi, Alie — we appreciate you sharing this with us and agree that we missed the mark on this product,” Macy’s wrote. “It will be removed from all STORY at Macy’s locations.” STORY at Macy’s is a brick-and-mortar retail initiative in which small businesses are given space in-store to sell their products that follow a certain theme. The plates, created by a company called Pourtions, were for sale in STORY at Macy’s. They were never available online on the Macy’s website.Hi, Alie — we appreciate you sharing this with us and agree that we missed the mark on this product. It will be removed from all STORY at Macy's locations.— Macy's (@Macys) July 22, 2019The plates are still available at the Pourtions website. Read the rest

Conversational language is not the same as formal language: chatter over the dinner table does not follow the same rules as a speech from a podium. Informal language follows its own fluid, fast-moving rules, and most of what we know about historic informal language has been gleaned from written fragments, like old letters and diaries -- but now, the internet has produced a wealth of linguistic data on informal language, which is explored in Canadian linguist Gretchen McCulloch's new book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.Informal language has always been hard to study. Even after the development of systems for recording speech, large-scale analysis depended on accurate transcription and hand-coding of these recordings. The internet changes all that. Charlie Stross has called the internet "the beginning of history," in which the minutae of everyday people's lives are being recorded for the first time ever. As historian and sf writer Ada Palmer once told me, the internet is producing one of the very first records of what normal people eat and future historians who study our time will not be forced to pore over the food in the backgrounds of oil paintings to get a sense of our culinary moment.One of the disciplines to benefit from this new world of recorded and machine-parseable everyday activity is linguistics. Large-scale analysis of internet communications -- old BBSes and forums, mailing lists and blogs, social media and texts -- is yielding new insights into the patterns and evolution of informal speech, and McCulloch's insightful, lively chronicle of that new discipline and its conclusions make for fun, informative reading. Read the rest

There's a new wine-and-cheese pairing in town. But it's not real cheese, it's one with Cheez-It snack crackers. Yep, for a limited time, Cheez-It and red-blended House Wine are being sold together in the same packaging, a box. PRNewswire:Summer is full of moments to grab a glass of wine and your favorite cheesy snack. Beginning July 25, you can purchase a limited-edition House Wine & Cheez-It box at OriginalHouseWine.com for $25, while supplies last. If you miss the chance to purchase a box, you can still enjoy mixing and matching Cheez-It and House Wine pairings on your own all summer long.(AdWeek) Read the rest

Our friends at eBoy, who have designed a lot of stuff for Boing Boing, MAKE, and Institute for the Future over the decades, have released a new version of their tilt-to-solve game, FixPix. It features their excellent pixel-based art, natch. Free to download!The game features 180 hand crafted puzzles made from eBoys unique pixel art. The graphics are split into layers and you have to tilt the phone to the right angle to “fix” the puzzle. Hidden in the puzzles detailed pixels, you will find a hint to solve the puzzle. For the new "expanded" version of the game we had to massively expand the pixel art puzzles - from the iPhone 3 to the iPhone X aspect ratio (320x480 points to 320x812 points) which means 70% more pixels per puzzles. They look crisper and more vivid than ever on the new phones. We also now organised the puzzles in packs of 10 and there is a new level selection scene in which you drive a bus through a pixel art city from station to station which adds a lot of fun. Additionally we have a new hard mode that unlocks once you have solved all levels. It messes with the tilt behaviour and adds visual effects to the puzzle layers. Read the rest

RJ Jones writes, "My friend gave me a tip! If you need to drown out fascists, bring a speaker & play copyrighted music at their rallies cause it will be easy to report their videos & get them taken down for copyright."This is a reference to Youtube's idiotic Content ID automated takedown system (soon to be mandatory for all online platforms in the EU), which indiscriminately blocks anything that it believes to contain a copyrighted work. It's not clear whether Jones is describing a hypothetical or a reality, but a reliable source in Berlin tells me that this is an established counterprotest tactic there.The thing is, as much as it's a cute way to sabotage Nazis' attempts to spread their messages, there is nothing about this that prevents it from being used against anyone. Are you a cop who's removed his bodycam before wading into a protest with your nightstick? Just play some loud copyrighted music from your cruiser and you'll make all the videos of the beatings you dole out un-postable.The reality is that incidental background music at a political rally is not a copyright infringement, but automated systems can't make sense of fair use claims, which require human judgment.The inability of Content ID to tell fair use from infringement is a feature, not a bug. It's why 7 hours worth of lectures at a scientific symposium were wiped out when the cameras picked up some copyrighted music being played during the lunch break. Read the rest

In 2018, Steve Bannon teamed up with a group called Catholicvote to acquire mobile phone location-tracking data to identify people in Iowa who'd visited a Catholic church and target them with political ads.Bannon revealed that he'd purchased the idea in a deleted scene from The Brink, a documentary about Bannon's life and political tactics. The scene was viewed by Thinkprogress, who have reported out the story.Bannon boasted to the documentary's director that "If your phone’s ever been in a Catholic church, it’s amazing, they got this data. Literally, they can tell who’s been in a Catholic church and how frequently. And they got it triaged."A spokesperson for Catholicvote called Kathleen Storen said that the data the organization used "does not allow you to collect personal information" and then said, essentially, that everyone else does it too.Regardless, as Karl Bode points out, this kind of data collection is generally illegal even though the carriers have aggressively sold the data off and Trump's FCC has refused to stop them.The campaign that Bannon and Catholicvote ran was largely a failure. As Thinkprogress says, "Democrat Abby Finkenauer beat out Republican incumbent Rod Blum by 51% to 45.9%, while Republican Kim Reynolds held on to the governor’s mansion."“This is terribly disturbing. This is like a total infringement on everybody,” said Sister Gwen Hennessey, a Franciscan sister and longtime social justice activist in Dubuque.“I have not used it to target religious groups specifically, and I will say that, for me, morally that seems like a step too far,” said one executive at an advertising firm that regularly uses geofencing, who asked not to be named. Read the rest

Women wearing seatbelts are 73% more likely to be killed or seriously injured in a car crash than men in seatbelts, and while it's not entirely certain why this is, it's a pretty good bet that sampling bias in crash-testing is to blame.Specifically, until very recently all crash-test dummies were male-bodies; when woman-shaped dummies were added, they were shorter and smaller than most women, so that the researchers could capture a wider range of datapoints, from small people to big people.Female bodies and male bodies have typical differences in fat distribution and skeletal structures, so crashes that don't injure male dummies might still present problems for female dummies -- and crashes that involve women who are shaped different from the petite dummies now in use might also cause injuries that are not visible with the dummies that are a proxy for them.All this is uncertain, but not because it's impossible to increase certainty -- rather, there's been next to no research on the subject, and that research will take a long time, even if we start studying it now. The statistical picture built up with male-bodied dummies has been decades in the making, and simply diversifying the shape of dummies in tests starting from today will not provide that longitudinal picture that we need to make real improvements.Mueller says retooling crash-test dummies can’t happen overnight—it takes 20 to 30 years of bio-mechanical research and testing to build and fine-tune each model. Many of the dummies manufacturers are using now were built using data from the 1970s and 1980s, which skewed heavily male. Read the rest

When Tod Kurt of ThingM recommended these reversible Micro USB cables, I bought a 3-pack on Amazon for . They really do work. Both the USB male plug and the micro plug can be inserted without regard to the orientation, like a USB C plug. There is no "right side up." Why aren't all USB cables made this way? Read the rest

No, this isn't a concept design for a Space: 1999 reboot but rather an illustration of the new moon rover in development by Toyota and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Toyota has just signed a three year agreement with JAXA and created a Lunar Exploration Mobility Works department that they will staff up with 30 people in the next few months. Unlike NASA's 1970s Apollo moon buggies, this vehicle will be pressurized so astronauts won't need to wear oxygen-supplying spacesuits when tooling around the lunar surface. It'll be powered by "fuel cell electric vehicle technologies." From Space.com:If all goes according to plan, Toyota and JAXA will build a full-scale prototype in the 2022 time frame, design the flight model and build and test an engineering model about two years later, and build and test the flight model around 2027.Launch would follow in 2029."The rover will be used for missions to explore the moon's polar regions, with the aim both of investigating the possibility of using the moon's resources ― such as frozen water ― and of acquiring technologies that enable exploration of the surfaces of massive heavenly bodies," Toyota representatives wrote in the statement. Read the rest

Seymour Hersh (82) has been an investigative reporter for over 50 years. In this Salon interview conducted by Chauncey Devega, Hersh says Trump has trolled journalism by getting them addicted to his "kitty-litter box of tweets."America is a kakistocracy and a pathocracy. Donald Trump's regime is just the crystallization of that fact. You have decades of experience as a reporter and journalist. How should one write about something that is so utterly outrageous and yet still find a way to make the public care, in a time when so many Americans are numb to it all?Do you really want me to try and make you feel better? Because I want you to make me feel better. This is where we are. It is incredibly messy. One mistake that was made by the media — and which is constantly being made — is living off Donald Trump's tweets. I call it the kitty-litter box full of Trump's tweets.The way it works is Donald Trump sends out a tweet. The cable news immediately repeats Trump's tweet, instead of doing what I would have done if I were king of the world and editor. I would look and see the changes inside the bureaucracy and the system. What is Trump doing? He is replacing good people everywhere with these extreme conservatives — they are not all necessarily fascists. These Trump government types do not want to give food to the poor. They don't think that immigrants should be treated well. Read the rest

This incredible offshore fortress and defense gun tower at Pembroke Dock, South West Wales, UK is for sale. It was built in 1851 and "designed to be operated by one officer and 33 men." Offers above £70,000 will be entertained. From the real estate listing:The North East Dockyard Tower was originally built to accommodate officers and men with storage for powder and provisions. The roof had guns mounted on traversing platforms and 12-pound brass howitzers in order to defend the Royal Dockyard of Pembroke Dock. The building is three stories in height and as you would expect solid in construction, however, it requires maintenance. Being offshore, the tower offers sweeping views of the Cleddau River, Pembroke Dock, Neyland and Llanstadwell.(via Neatorama) Read the rest

Trying to see the world through someone else's eyes is a great way to build empathy and understanding between people. Turns out, this approach -- when taken literally -- also works with robots. Researchers from the University of Bourgogne, University of Trento, and their colleagues used a head-mounted display to put people "inside" a robot and then studied their "likeability and closeness towards the robot.""We have demonstrated that by 'beaming' a participant into a robot we can change his or her attitude towards the robot," says University of Trento psychologist Francesco Pavani. "By 'beaming', we mean that we gave the participants the illusion that they were looking through the robot's eyes, moving its head as if it were their head, look in the mirror and see themselves as a robot.""Unlike exercises in which the participants couldn't t move the robot's head or do that in a coordinated manner with other body movements, in our study the experience of walking in the shoes of a robot led the participants to adopt a friendlier attitude, to perceive them as socially closer."From the abstract of their scientific paper published in Scientific Reports:When participant’ and robot’s head movements were correlated, participants felt that they were incorporated into the robot with a sense of agency. Critically, the robot they embodied was judged more likeable and socially closer. Remarkably, we found that the beaming experience with correlated head movements and corresponding sensation of embodiment and social proximity, was independent of robots’ humanoid’s appearance. Read the rest

The Right to Repair movement has introduced dozens of state-level laws that would force companies to support independent repairs by making manuals, parts and diagnostic codes available, and by ending the illegal practice of voiding warranties for customers who use independent repair services, but these bills keep getting killed by overwhelming shows of lobbying force from members of the highly concentrated manufacturing sector, particularly Apple, whose CEO, Tim Cook, warned investors in January that the number one threat to Iphone sales is that customers are choosing to repair, rather than replace, their mobile devices.Last week, the FTC held a workshop on how a national Right to Repair regime could function, under the banner of Nixing the Fix; though most of the material presented at the workshop will be familiar to anyone who's followed the debate at the state level, the fact that the hearing happened at all is a hopeful sign, the first step on a long journey to a nationwide Right to Repair rule.Wiens of iFixit and US PIRG’s Proctor spoke in favor of fewer restrictions imposed by manufacturers when it comes to product repairs, as well as increased education for consumers and repair shops. Manufacturers have access to specific instructions and specialized tools, the argument goes, making it difficult or nearly impossible for consumers and repair shops to fix the products they own.Jennifer Larson, the CEO of the Minnesota-based IT hardware reseller Vibrant Technologies, said at the workshop that she’s “lost millions in revenue—I can’t even quantify over twenty years how much I’ve lost,” due to repair barriers that prove to be too costly and time-consuming for the clients she sells servers to. Read the rest

This is • real• not normal• not okay.Donald Trump: “Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”FACT CHECK: False.The president was speaking on Tuesday to the Turning Point USA event audience.Article 2 of the United States Constitution does not, in fact, grant the president any such power.Video from Vox media journalist Aaron Rupar.TRUMP: "Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."(Article 2 does not in fact empower the president to do whatever they want.) pic.twitter.com/qIFP1AbHw6— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2019 Read the rest

Accountability time.

Friends, you're going to wish you were still making the scene with a magazine after reading this sentence: Google's web trackers are all up in your fap time and there's pretty much nothing (except maybe using a more secure browser like Firefox, read up on cyber security tips from the EFF, refusing to sign into a Google account and never going online without the protection of a VPN) that anyone can do about it.From The Verge:Visitors to porn sites have a “fundamentally misleading sense of privacy,” warn the authors of a new study that examines how tracking software made by tech companies like Google and Facebook is deployed on adult websites.The authors of the study analyzed 22,484 porn sites and found that 93 percent of them leak data to third parties, including when accessed via a browser’s “incognito” mode. This data presents a “unique and elevated risk,” warn the authors, as 45 percent of porn site URLs indicate the nature of the content, potentially revealing someone’s sexual preferences.According to the study, trackers baked up by Google and its creepy always-watching-you subsidiaries were found on over 74% of the porn sites that researchers checked out... for purely scientific reasons, of course. And the fun doesn't stop there! Facebook's trackers appeared on 10% of the websites and, for the discerning surveillance aficionado, 24% of the sites the researchers checked in on were being stalked by Oracle. According to The Verge, "...the type of data collected by trackers varies... Read the rest

Prosecutors accuse Epstein of coercing under-18 girls into sexual abuse, and paying victims to recruit others

“Beer hops earrings I made, I'm pretty proud of these,” says IMGURian Shancar1. Seriously cool! Turns out Shaun runs The Shores Woodshop, out of Saint Clair Shores, Michigan. They make lots of cool things including... these earrings! Buy these very beer hops earrings on Etsy for the homebrew nerd or craft beer otaku in your life.Also I love these Michigan shaped creations from The Shores Woodshop, offered in post earrings that are “first cut from an 1/8 piece of maple, 'inlaid' with a metallic epoxy resin, and finished with a gloss lacquer. They are about 1\2" tall and use a stainless push back post.”Very cool. Read the rest

Yesterday, I published a brief analysis of Elizabeth Warren's plan to close the loopholes that allows private equity to defraud investors, creditors and workers to make billions while destroying the real economy.Today, I'm going to suggest that you read Yves Smith's analysis of the proposal on Naked Capitalism. Private equity is one of the most politically and economically consequential forces in the USA and the world today, behind much of our inequality, looting, and policy dysfunctions.Private equity is a bezzle, protected by deliberately dull layers of obfuscation and complexity that allows its practicioners to claim that the reason they seem to be out-and-out crooks is that none of us are smart enough to figure out what they're doing.Warren isn't buying it. Her proposal builds on the scholarly investigations of Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt (here's some of Appelbaum's commentary on the proposal) to fashion a series of killing blows aimed at the industry's soft, vulnerable spots, from a two-year ban on dividends after PE acquisitions to giving worker pay and pensions bankruptcy priority, to treating gift cards as consumer deposits for bankruptcy purses.As Smith says, there's no chance that the current Congress and Senate would pass this, but that's not the point. The point -- as with Sanders' 2016 Medicare for All proposal -- is to shift the political center, normalizing ideas that sound impossible as part of our daily political discourse. If it's one thing the whole progressive wing of the Democrats have gotten good at in the past four years, it's changing the width of the Overton Window, from Warren to Sanders to AOC. Read the rest

I'm a few years late to the Expanse party, but I am totally into it. I just finished devouring season two on Saturday evening and will likely dig into the third season later this week. Late or not, it looks like my catching up on this pretty damn delightful bit of sci-fi is timely because LOOK: the trailer for season four just popped!Being as I'm not an Amazon Prime member, it could be some time before I get to watch it, but it's good to know that the saga of the Rocinante is gonna keep on keeping on. You can catch season four, starting on December 14th. Read the rest

Adrian Storey decided to use a 5" portable TV--a monochrome cathode ray tube the size and weight of a bag of sugar--as a computer monitor. The first problem: it uses a 3.5mm jack as its sole RF input. There were further problems.1980s 5″ BW TV connected to a PC as 3rd monitor – Display port to HDMI cable into HDMI to composite video adapter, composite video adapter into old VCR, old VCR RF out into coaxial to 3.5mm mono jack adaptor. Mono jack to TV!!Achievement unlocked :)Ultimately the whole exercise was a little pointlessFun, though! Read the rest

After all the hoopla surrounding the new and creepy Cats movie trailer, this delightful 1986 PSA from the American Lung Association may provide some relief.(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

Scientists have used laser light to activate neurons in a mouse's brain so the rodents "sees" non-existent lines. The technique, called optogenetics, switches on and off neurons that have been previously genetically engineered to be light-sensitive. According to Science News, "the results, described online July 18 in Science, represent the first time scientists have created a specific visual perception with laboratory trickery." In this case, the mice had been trained to drink water from a spout upon seeing the lines. From Science News:When optogenetics first debuted about 15 years ago, everyone was hoping to achieve this level of precise control over perception, and the behaviors that follow, says Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who pioneered the technique. “It’s exciting to get to this point,” says Deisseroth, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Stanford University....Similar approaches could let scientists create other sorts of perceptions, such as smells, touches and tastes, Deisseroth says.Previously: "Scientists remote control a mouse with a wireless LED brain implant" Read the rest

By Facebook's own admission, more than 10 billion of the 12 billion Facebook accounts ever created have been fake; Facebook's growth has stalled out in high-income countries like the USA (where the company is actually losing users), and the majority of growth the company posted in 2018 came from "India, Indonesia, and the Philippines," which also happen to be places where Facebook says it has "meaningfully higher" rates of fake account creation, exacerbated by "episodic spikes" of fake accounts.Facebook claims to have 2.3 billion users, but it also has made a series of contradictory and confusing disclosures about that number that make it hard to credit: they told the SEC that 5% of their accounts were fake and 11% were duplicates (up from 1% and 6% in mid 2017), but no one knows what that number means because in 2018 the company stopped releasing quarterly numbers and switched to annual reporting. And in any event, Facebook won't reveal its methodology for determining fake and dupe accounts, saying that they use a "limited sample of accounts" and then apply "significant judgment" when interpreting their findings.But separately, Facebook says it saw 2.2 billion fake accounts created in Q2 2019 (that it knows about). That's the same number of active users the company claims to have. It's a big number.We're left having to take Facebook's word for the size of its user-base. The number of active Facebook users has a direct relationship to the rates that FB can charge to its advertisers, so it has a powerful motivation to, uh, optimistically interpret its data, and the fact that no one else is allowed to check its work makes the whole thing pretty dubious. Read the rest

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it cross it.Watch as first-time riders, Tyler and Ariel, get bucked off by an uncooperative horse. (Digg) Read the rest

Meet Maximus Mighty-Dog Mueller II, the mayor of Idyllwild. He won the election with two thirds of the vote and will serve in perpetuity. Max has an instagram page. [via] Read the rest

Two weeks ago, Puerto Rico's Center for Investigative Journalism published one of the most consequential investigative stories in the island's history: a trove of leaked private Telegram chats between Governor Ricardo Rossello and his most senior advisors and officials, in which the group use crude, homophobic and misogynist labels to mock and degrade opposition figures, Puerto Rican celebrities, and the people of Puerto Rico as they struggled with the aftermath of hurricanes Maria and Irma, left to swelter and die by a local and national government that had abandoned them.Since then, Puerto Rico has been roiled by mass demonstrations, initially calling for Rossello's resignation, but now for deep, structural reforms to an island whose long history has been one of colonial occupation, oppression, and looting.The protests have been led by feminists and queer activists, supported by the likes of Ricky Martin, a beloved, gay Puerto Rican pop star who was targeted for homophobic slurs in the leaks. As they've gained strength, the protests have drawn out more and more people from all walks of life -- with the vanguard still made up by political radicals who will not accept cosmetic compromises.The Puerto Rican government has responded with riot squads and violent suppression, in a spectacular miscalculation that has only brought out more people. To make things worse, the police appear to have manufactured a casus belli by setting off fireworks behind their lines, a fraud so transparent that it has robbed them of any credibility they had left. Read the rest

A few months ago I got a sneak listen to the pilot episode of Sam Greenspan's podcast of speculative journalism called Bellwether. Sam was a producer at 99% Invisible and he knows how to tell a great story. The thing I love about Bellwether is how Sam did real reporting (about the driverless car fatality that took place last year) and presents it as a piece of history from the future. I got chills when I heard it. The soundtrack is great, too!Here's the pilot episode. It's a must-listen:The good news is that Sam is Kickstarting the series, so there will be more episodes coming. I can't wait to find out what happens in the metastory.If you support the Kickstarter at a level of $20 or above, you get a cassette of music from Bellwether, produced by Beaunoise. Read the rest

In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my essay SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects, published last week on EFF's Deeplinks; it's a furhter exploration of the idea of "adversarial interoperability" and the role it has played in fighting monopolies and preserving competition, and how we could use it to restore competition today.In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone is using Facebook, then your Facebook replacement doesn't just have to be better than Facebook, it has to be so much better than Facebook that it's worth using, even though all the people you want to talk to are still on Facebook. That's a tall order.Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects, using incumbents' dominance against them. To see how that works, let's look at a historical example of adversarial interoperability role in helping to unseat a monopolist's dominance.The first skirmishes of the PC wars were fought with incompatible file formats and even data-storage formats: Apple users couldn't open files made by Microsoft users, and vice-versa. Even when file formats were (more or less) harmonized, there was still the problems of storage media: the SCSI drive you plugged into your Mac needed a special add-on and flaky driver software to work on your Windows machine; the ZIP cartridge you formatted for your PC wouldn't play nice with Macs.MP3 Read the rest

After Alex Acosta helped Jeffrey Epstein get off the hook in Florida for “soliciting prostitution from a minor,” Epstein is reported to have received a number of odd visits while in detention -- from young women and from powerful men. One of the men was “James E. Staley, a top JPMorgan Chase executive and one of the highest-ranking figures on Wall Street,” reports the New York Times.Why was a JPMorgan Chase exec visiting Jeffrey Epstein?Apparently, to ensure that a pipeline of high-value clients kept flowing from the convicted sex predator and accused serial child sexual abuser to JPMorgan Chase.Kate Kelly, Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and James B. Stewart reporting for the New York Times:Mr. Staley had good reason to maintain his relationship with Mr. Epstein, who received him at his Palm Beach office, where he had been permitted to serve some of his 13-month sentence in 2008 and 2009. Over the years, Mr. Epstein had funneled dozens of wealthy clients to Mr. Staley and his bank.Mr. Epstein, who was charged this month with sex trafficking of teenage girls, liked to portray himself as a financial wizard, someone whose business and investing acumen made him indispensable to corporate executives and other leaders. But there is little evidence to support that notion. The financial services that Mr. Epstein dispensed appear to have been mostly pedestrian, and his list of clients small.Mr. Epstein nonetheless managed to affix himself to a handful of prominent Wall Street veterans, including Mr. Read the rest

It really is amazing how stupid some people are.Yes, that dude on the e-scooter is nonchalantly crossing five, count 'em, 5 lanes of traffic on I-35 in Dallas. Josh Weatherl's car dashcam shot this incredible footage of a complete idiot zooming through freeway traffic on a LimeBike e-scooter."Bro! What are you doing?!" says Weatherl as he drives. "Oh my gosh, that is the most wild thing I have ever seen," laughs the motorist as he watches the scooter guy. "How did he get on here?!"The footage was recorded shortly before 9AM local time, and shows the scooter guy wearing a backpack and exiting south of the Dallas North Tollway exit.From the Dallas News:Dallas' dockless vehicle ordinance does not prohibit scooters from being operated on the interstate, but the city's website says they can be used on streets where the speed limit is 35 mph or lower. (The scooters are banned from sidewalks in downtown Dallas, Deep Ellum and the Cedars, as well as the Katy Trail.)A measure sponsored by state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, that would've banned scooters from the Texas' highways, among other regulations, failed to get a vote on the House floor in the recent legislative session. Read the rest

• The change is expected to be a massive expansion of the government's power to seize, detain, and abruptly deport.• Previously, “expedited removal” was limited to undocumented immigrants caught within 100 miles of the U.S. border who had been in the U.S. for less than two weeks. The Trump administration's extrajudicial 'Expedited Removal' of undocumented immigrants will be radically expanded to apply everywhere within the United States, not just within 100 miles of the Mexico border, after the new rule is published in the Federal Register on Tuesday.On Tuesday, the Trump administration is expected to radically expand its power to rapidly deport undocumented immigrants who entered the United States within the past two years, using the 'Expedited Removal' fast-track deportation process which removes the involvement of any immigration judges.From the Washington Post's ICE beat reporter Maria Sacchetti:Officials are calling the new strategy, which will take effect immediately, a “necessary response” to the influx of Central Americans and others at the southern border. It will allow immigration authorities to quickly remove immigrants from anywhere they encounter them across the United States, and they expect the approach will help alleviate the nation’s immigration-court backlog and free up space in Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails.The stated targets of the change are people who sneaked into the United States and do not have an asylum case or immigration-court date pending. Previously, the administration’s policy for “expedited removal” had been limited to migrants caught within 100 miles of the U.S. Read the rest