40 years ago, antitrust law put strict limits on mergers and acquisitions, but since the Reagan era, these firewalls have been dismantled, and now the biggest companies grow primarily by snapping up nascent competitors and merging with rivals; Google is a poster-child for this, having only ever created two successful products in-house (search and Gmail), with all other growth coming from acquisitions and mergers.When companies grow this way, they experience "diseconomies of scale" -- dysfunctions brought on by their inability to integrate the acquired companies into their culture and technology. Yahoo (more than Google) is the obvious poster-child for these diseconomies, a company that will go down in history as a voracious acquirer and murderer of the best technology startups of a generation (Flickr, Delicious, etc etc etc).One Google's most prominent acquisitions is the Internet of Things company Nest, whose "smart thermostats" were a beachhead for the company's "ecosystem" -- a group of surveillance devices and controllers that were bound to the Nest by DRM, meaning that independent security researchers who audited these actuators and sensors faced potential criminal and civil liability.This limited scrutiny, plus Nest's inability to integrate with Google's security systems, has proven to be a uniquely toxic mix. Today, for as little as $20, you can buy "credential stuffing" software that will take the massive dumps of billions of passwords that have accumulated over the years and try them on Nest devices that are discoverable on the internet. Once a working username/password combo is hit, the system is yours: you can listen in and watch the owner, and play audio through the devices' speakers (terrorizing toddlers with pornography on their baby monitors is an intruder's favorite), etc. Read the rest

Fran Blanche explains "the greatest effect ever created" in the recording studio: plate echo. Get out your good headphones and prepare to experience the awesome sound of plate echo through this 1980 vintage Ecoplate II! Thanks for watching and enjoy! Read the rest

For musicians, clubgoers or anyone in the thick of a loud environment, earplugs aren't just an option. If you plan on keeping your hearing through sustained exposure to levels over 85 decibels (roughly the sound of a blender), they're a must.The good news is, most earplugs will muffle the sound. The bad news is, that's exactly how it sounds: muffled. If you love music as much as you love your ears, Vibes Hi-Fidelity Earplugs are a high-tech alternative.Thanks to specially designed tubes in the casing, Vibes can filter sound selectively, lowering the volume by 22 dB across frequencies while keeping (and in some cases enhancing) clarity. They're made to be discreet, with a nearly invisible profile and three interchangeable, washable tips to fit any ear size. And they've got staying power in any environment too, thanks to a detachable cord that clips onto each earplug.Right now, you can pick up a pair of Vibes Hi-Fidelity Earplugs with Attachable Cord for $19.99 - a full 25% off the list price. Read the rest

It could happen to you.A new report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) says online theft, fraud, and exploitation caused losses of $2.7 billion dollars worldwide in 2018. This is up from $1.4 billion in 2017.[ Here's the full FBI report in PDF. ]“The 2018 report shows how prevalent these crimes are. It also shows that the financial toll is substantial and a victim can be anyone who uses a connected device.” said IC3 chief Donna Gregory in today's announcement.The FBI's advice to any unlucky person who realizes they have been scammed online?To improve the chances of a successful recovery, it is imperative that victims contact their bank immediately upon discovering a fraudulent transaction as well as report the crime to the IC3.From the FBI's report:In its annual Internet Crime Report, the FBI reports the IC3 received 351,936 complaints in 2018—an average of more than 900 every day. The most frequently reported complaints were for non-payment/non-delivery scams, extortion, and personal data breaches. The most financially costly complaints involved business email compromise, romance or confidence fraud, and investment scams, which can include Ponzi and pyramid schemes.Reports came in from every U.S. state and territory and involved victims of every age. There was a concentration of victims and financial losses, however, among individuals over the age of 50.“The 2018 report shows how prevalent these crimes are,” said Donna Gregory, chief of the IC3. “It also shows that the financial toll is substantial and a victim can be anyone who uses a connected device. Read the rest

The bot network repeatedly denounced the Mueller report as a 'RussiaGate hoax.'

“Big friendly potato boy thoroughly examining my canoe.”Another gem from the wonderful IMGURian SeeThroughCanoe, who sells these personal watercraft.“This overly friendly manatee spent a really long time thoroughly checking out the canoe and the camera attached to the bottom of it,” he says.Big friendly potato boy thoroughly examining my canoe Read the rest

I have a small collection of How and Why Wonder Books that were published in the 1960s and 1970s. The interior and cover art is great. According to Wikipedia, there were 74 titles in this series of illustrated kids science and nature books. Flickr user X Ray Delta One uploaded 10 covers from the series. Read the rest

Health officials say potential sites include UCLA, LAX

Rosa Golijan is a privacy engineer at Google. She snapped this photo of a seatback video display in a Japanese taxicab. The text says: This taxi tablet is using a face recognition system with an image received by the tablet's front camera. The image data is used to estimate gender in order to deliver the most optimized content. The gender estimation runs once at the beginning of the advertisement program and the image data is discarded immediately after the estimation processing. Neither the tablet nor the server records the data.🤨 pic.twitter.com/uXWOUXz25S— Rosa Golijan (@rosa) April 20, 2019 Read the rest

"Run, Daniel, run!"(via /u/TheNatureLover) Read the rest

GB Studio' looks like a cool way to quickly build retro-games using visual scripting. You can play the games on a mobile phone, a Raspberry Pi, Itch.io, the web, or even a Gameboy. It's free and runs on OS X. Read the rest

Tatsunori Iwamura, 61, professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Japan's Matsuyama University, was busted for teaching his students how to make MDMA (aka Molly/Ecstasy) and 5F-QUPIC, a cannabinoid agonist. At some point, Iwamura had a license to manufacture illegal drugs for academic purposes but it had expired. From The Guardian:Local drug enforcement authorities believe 11 students produced the drug (MDMA) under Iwamura’s instruction. Four students, along with an assistant professor, have also been referred to prosecutors, Kyodo said.The university said it would discipline Iwamura and the assistant professor once the investigation had ended.“We sincerely apologise for causing serious concern to students and their parents,” said Tatsuya Mizogami, the university’s president, according to Kyodo. Read the rest

Architecture hacker/maker Ben Uyeda of HomeMadeModern designed and built his house out of shipping containers in the high desert of Joshua Tree, California. And he documented the process in fascinating detail.How to Build A Shipping Container House (YouTube) Read the rest

"Your Face is Your Boarding Pass" is the headline from a jetBlue press release from November 15, 2018. "JetBlue continues to lead the industry as the first domestic airline to launch a fully-integrated biometric self-boarding gate for international flights..." Journalist MacKenzie Fegan had first-hand (first-face?) experience with the new procedure, and when she asked jetBlue about it on Twitter, the extraordinary correspondence resulted:I just boarded an international @JetBlue flight. Instead of scanning my boarding pass or handing over my passport, I looked into a camera before being allowed down the jet bridge. Did facial recognition replace boarding passes, unbeknownst to me? Did I consent to this?— MacKenzie Fegan (@mackenzief) April 17, 2019You're able to opt out of this procedure, MacKenzie. Sorry if this made you feel uncomfortable.— JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) April 17, 2019Follow up question. Presumably these facial recognition scanners are matching my image to something in order to verify my identity. How does @JetBlue know what I look like?— MacKenzie Fegan (@mackenzief) April 17, 2019The information is provided by the United States Department of Homeland Security from existing holdings.— JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) April 17, 2019So to be clear, the government provided my biometric data to a privately held company? Did I consent to this? How long is my data held by @JetBlue? And even if I opt out at the scanners...you already have my information, correct?— MacKenzie Fegan (@mackenzief) April 17, 2019We should clarify, these photos aren't provided to us, but are securely transmitted to the Customs and Border Protection database. Read the rest

Matt Carthy is a Sinn Fein MEP from Eire; he's standing for re-election in the upcoming EU elections and has had fliers prepared with his headshot.Carthy says that he noticed that his laptop battery seemed to be draining of its own accord. He solved the mystery when he realized "the kids have been using my election leaflets to get through the facial recognition lock..."So, I was wondering why the battery on my laptop was running down every time I left it at home.Turns out the kids have been using my election leaflets to get through the facial recognition lock...I’m not sure whether to be proud by the wit or concerned by the sneakiness? pic.twitter.com/rtDsuNRB8B— Matt Carthy MEP (@mattcarthy) April 23, 2019 Read the rest

In Anchorage, Alaska anyone with a public library card can visit the Alaska Resources Library and Information Services library and check out a taxidermy ring-necked pheasant, black rockfish, or hundreds of other mounted animals, skulls, and furs. From Smithsonian:While the majority of users are local teachers, who incorporate the pieces into their lectures and lesson plans, and biologists and researchers using items for studying, non-educators are also known to check out pieces too.“We have a snowy owl that has been used on several occasions as a decoration for a Harry Potter-themed party,” Rozen says. And filmmakers reportedly used a number of items during the making of the 2013 movie The Frozen Ground to design the basement lair where the film’s villain would keep hostages captive. Just like with library books, ARLIS expects that lendees take good care of any items checked out.Interestingly, ARLIS’s existence is largely known by word of mouth, both for patrons and locals who want to donate a piece of realia to the collection. The vast majority came from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game with a lesser amount from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, however the library does also take donations from the public.“Earlier today someone called me and offered us a raven that he found in the wild that had been killed,” she says. “Ravens are frequently requested, even by English students doing presentations on Edgar Allan Poe."This Library in Anchorage Lends Out Taxidermic Specimens" by Jennifer Nalewicki (Smithsonian)Learn more in my post from 2015: "Library where you can check out dead animals" Read the rest

Level Scapes' desktop microterrariums are matchbox-sized, stackable sealed boxes with miniature ferns and mosses that only require water and sunshine; they're $39 for a set of six (25% of with the coupon code yankodesign). (via Yanko Design) Read the rest

Parking enforcement officers who mark car tires with chalk are guilty of violating the 4th Amendment, according to a new ruling by a federal appeals court. The three-judge panel likened the practice to that of police attaching a GPS device to a car without the driver's consent.Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of Southern California, offered his thoughts about the ruling on Twitter:Thread by @OrinKerr: "Fascinating CA6 opinion today holding that chalking a tire for parking enforcement -- to see if the car had been there a while in violation […]" #NImage: Shutterstock/Alex Millauer Read the rest

Back in September 2018, the state of New York ordered Charter to leave: the company had made a bunch of promises about investing in high-speed broadband for New Yorkers as a condition of approval for its acquisition of Time Warner Cable, and then it lied like crazy, defrauding the state and attracting a $172.4M penalty (the largest penalty ever paid by a US ISP); since then, the company has been begging New York state to commute its death sentence and give it another chance.Even as it was promising that it would do better, Charter spent all of 2018 systematically underinvesting in its network while raising prices and returning massive windfalls to its investors -- all tax-free, thanks to Trump's tax plan, and all permitted, thanks to the FCC's commitment to "self-policing" by the telcoms industry.Now, for some fucking reason, the state of New York has given Charter a reprieve. The company will continue to operate in New York State, will not have to divest itself of Time-Warner Cable, and will have to cough up an additional $12m, half of which can be distributed in grants to Charter's rivals to help them build out competing services. Charter is eligible to bid for the other $6m, to defray the cost of additional broadband rollouts.Charter also promises, for realsies this time, that it will bring high-speed broadband to 145,000 households in New York. The settlement does not include any admission of wrongdoing by Charter.New York's Public Service Commission will open a 60 day notice-and-comment proceeding soon, after which it will have the option to approve or strike down the deal. Read the rest

From the BBC's "Earth from Space" series. Read the rest

Behold The Pasta PC, a computer that has a nutrition label in addition to a spec sheet, because he used sheets of pasta as the case. It works, but between the build (consider the thermals) and the antiquity of the Atom-based computer he sacrificed to make it, it's pretty hinky. [via MeFi]My wife said something one day joking about making a PC out of Pasta... Never joke with me on such things because I may just do it... and do it I have. Behold... The LASAGNA PC V.1 Clickbait you say?! NAY! This is the real deal. The first ever crazy PC build on this Channel, and the first ever Pasta PC in the world. You're welcome.Beautiful as it is, I'll admit that I'm slightly disappointed he didn't actually bake a PC into a lasagne. You could get away with what, about 160° without melting stuff on the board? Tasty. Read the rest

Greta Thunberg is the Swedish teenager whose climate change school-strike spread around the world, leading to her addressing the COP24 conference, the World Economic Forum, and many other forums where she has distinguished herself with her brilliant oratory and leadership. In an interview with Great Big Planet, Thunberg attributes her ability to focus on climate change despite the crushing terror and the enormous forces arrayed against her on her autism, saying, "I think if I wouldn’t have had Asperger's I don’t think I would have started the school strike, I don’t think I would’ve cared about the climate at all… That allowed me to focus on one thing for a very long time." (Image: Anders Hellberg, CC-BY) (via Kottke) Read the rest

One thing that immediately struck me in Lauren Gambino's excellent analysis of the Democratic nomination campaigns in The Guardian: a quote from GOP never-Trump political consultant Rick Wilson, who counseled Democrats not to select Bernie Sanders and make the election about actual policies, "Democrats have two choices: make this a referendum on Donald Trump or lose. That’s it. There are no other options."I think every Democrat and Democratic voter loves it when lifelong Republican grandees offer advice on how to win elections, but this is especially rich given that this is exactly the strategy that Republicans used to get their base to vote against Trump during the 2016 primaries and it failed spectacularly.There is plenty to dislike about Trump, to be sure, but if there's one thing we've learned from the 2018 midterms -- the incredible outpouring of grassroots support, votes and small-money donations for progressive candidates (including longshots like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who unseated an establishment Democrat who thought running against Trump, rather than for a better future, would be enough), it's that the American people actually care about policies. They want reform. The much-vaunted polarization is a fiction of the political classes, while there is national, bipartisan consensus on issues of substance, from universal health-care to free tuition to Net Neutrality. These are all policies that progressive candidates support, and policies that Trump will lose debates on.Candidates like Bernie Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren) want to make the 2020 election a referendum on broadly popular progressive policies that will deliver shared prosperity and a better quality of life to hundreds of millions of Americans -- who are smart enough to understand that and vote for it. Read the rest

Douglas Preston's search for a boyhood friend led to a dark discovery. He fled from any hint of conflict, usually with a wiseass comment flung over his shoulder, and he could outrun any goofus who took up the chase. I couldn't begin to fathom the trajectory that brought him from an upper-upper-middle-class home in Wellesley to a cramped boarding house in New Jersey. Details of his life came flickering back into my memory: Petey singing songs to his hamster Gertrude; Petey cradling his dying dog after she'd been hit by a car, even though she was bleeding and peeing all over him; Petey writing silly stories about a magical valley where the animals talked like people; Petey and I burying a treasure.It's better to know, because you never know who might not. Read the rest

An overwhelming vote in the European Parliament last week means that the EU will merge a grab bag of existing biometric databases to create the Common Identity Repository (CIR), with biometric data on 350,000,000 people (both EU- and non-EU persons) that will be available for use by all EU police and border authorities.The database contains identity information (passports, biographical info like name and date of birth) linked to biometric identifiers (face scans, fingerprints).This will be the third largest identity repository in the world, behind the Chinese state's internal surveillance system and India's Aadhar system.The EU claims that the safeguards on CIR will be sufficient to protect its subjects' privacy.The vote passed just weeks before an EU election that is expected to deliver new powers to authoritarian, xenophobic ultra-nationalist parties, who have also been surging at the national level, and whose officials will be able to use the database to track and target migrants, people accused of crimes, etc. Its primary role will be to simplify the jobs of EU border and law enforcement officers who will be able to search a unified system much faster, rather than search through separate databases individually."The systems covered by the new rules would include the Schengen Information System, Eurodac, the Visa Information System (VIS) and three new systems: the European Criminal Records System for Third Country Nationals (ECRIS-TCN), the Entry/Exit System (EES) and the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS)," EU officials said last week.EU votes to create gigantic biometrics database[Catalin Cimpanu/Zdnet](via /. Read the rest

There are so many major annoyances that I fear we don't give the minor ones enough attention. [via] Read the rest

Banned from the Cloudy Nights telescope forums, IT consultant David Goodyear angrily posted its address on a skeevy hacking site with a request it get nailed. It was down for more than a week thanks to the resulting DDOS. The FBI knocked on his door. They made a show of being friendly and amused by the whole thing, and because middle-aged IT consultants think they're smarter than anyone else, Goodyear admitted everything while giving the officers a tour of his telescope collection. Now he's in jail for two years.A jury found Goodyear responsible for one count of “intentional damage to a protected computer.” A judge sentenced him to a $2,500 fine, $27,352 in restitution, and 26 months in prison.[Cloudy Nights' Michael] Bieler had assumed the case was closed until the FBI arrested Goodyear a year later and summoned Bieler to court. He was shocked when he learned about the length of the sentence. He never wanted Goodyear to be imprisoned at all, let alone for two years. “Honestly, I think it’s extreme, what happened,” he says. “We actually asked in our letter [to the court] that he not get prison time. We just wanted him to stop attacking our website.”The 34-year-old Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which tech policy expert Tim Wu has called “the worst law in technology,” is controversial for many reasons. One of the most common is its harsh sentencing rules. Read the rest

Jennifer Newstead helped craft the Patriot Act, a cowardly work of treasonous legislation foisted on the American people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; later, she served as the Patriot Act's "day-to-day manager" in Congress; today, she is Facebook's general counsel. Read the rest

OSMC is an open source media center for Linux computers that works with the Raspberry Pi. This video from ETA Prime shows you how to install and configure the software. The Air Mouse looks like a good remote control to use with OSMC. Read the rest

Meredith Whittaker (previously) and Claire Stapleton were two of the principal organizers of the mass googler walkouts over the company's coverup and rewarding of sexual assault and harassment, as well as other Google employee actions over the company's involvement in drone warfare and Chinese censorship; now, in a widely circulated letter to colleagues, they say that they have been targeted for retaliation by Google management.Whittaker says that she been tolkd that her "role would be changed dramatically" and that has been ordered to cease her work on AI ethics and end her association with the AI Now Institute (previously), a nonprofit she co-founded to explore ethical questions in machine learning (disclosure: I am a volunteer on the board of Simply Secure, another nonprofit founded by Whittaker, and consider her a friend).Stapleton says that she's lost half her reports, has had a previously approved project cancelled, has been advised to take medical leave, has had her work given to other people, has been told she would be demoted -- though this was walked back when she hired a lawyer. She says "the environment remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day."For whatever it's worth, I offer my sincere solidarity, admiration and gratitude to Whittaker and Stapleton. You two have been an inspiration and a beacon, and do not deserve any of this.Hi all,This was a hard email to write.Google is retaliating against several organizers.We are among them and here is what’s happening to us:MeredithJust after Google announced that it would disband its AI ethics council, I was informed my role would be changed dramatically. Read the rest

Elizabeth Warren has proposed a $1.25 trillion plan to forgive student debts and make all public college and university undergraduate education free, as well as earmarking $50B for historically Black colleges, and expanding federal grants to help pay for all students' non-tuition expenses.The plan will be funded through Warren's proposed annual wealth tax on family fortunes over $50M (this will also fund expanded public housing and universal child care). The plan joins her other progressive policies, including lowering drug prices by producing pharmaceuticals under compulsory licenses; an antitrust breakup of Big Tech; abolishing the Electoral College; and a slate of farm reforms including a national Right to Repair rule for agricultural equipment.Warren was also the first 2020 candidate to call for Trump's impeachment.(I am a donor to both Warren and Sanders's 2020 campaigns)Under the debt relief program, each person in a household earning less than $100,000 would be eligible to have $50,000 in debt forgiven; higher income families would have smaller amounts of debt forgiven.We must do more to correct these historical injustices and to ensure that opportunities are fairly available to everyone. My plan will:* Create a fund for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs). The fund will have a minimum of $50 billion, but the Secretary of Education will have the authority to increase the amount of money in the fund as needed to ensure that spending per-student at those schools is comparable to colleges in the area. Read the rest

Olivia Jade Giannulli is the millionaire heiress of actor Lori Laughlin and fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, who are accused of paying a $500,000 bribe to the University of Southern California to secure her admission; Jade's university career was bound up with her other career as an "Instagram influencer," with sponsor deals for the decor in her dorm room and other collegiate trappings.Olivia Jade Giannulli has a line of cosmetics (formerly sold through Sephora, since discontinued in light of the scandal); as part of that licensing deal, she had sought trademarks; the US Patent and Trademark Office did not grant those trademarks, citing "punctuation errors."Clearly, the trademark application was made by a lawyer and not by Giannulli herself, but there's still a rather delicious irony in someone who is said to have bribed her way into university being frustrated in her commercial ambitions because of an inability to punctuate.Giannulli "blames her mom and dad for this scandal and for the downfall of her career."“Proper punctuation in identifications is necessary to delineate explicitly each product or service within a list and to avoid ambiguity,” officials wrote in the March 15 letter. “Commas, semicolons, and apostrophes are the only punctuation that should be used.”Olivia Jade’s Trademark Application Rejected Over Incorrect Punctuation [Ron Dicker/Huffington Post](via Lowering the Bar)(Image: William Murphy, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest

By the time Prince died in 2016, he had completed 50 hand-written pages of his memoir, titled "The Beautiful Ones." The memoir, filled out with photos and other material, will be published by Random House on October 29. From the Associated Press:″‘The Beautiful Ones’ is the deeply personal account of how Prince Rogers Nelson became the Prince we know: the real-time story of a kid absorbing the world around him and creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and the fame that would come to define him,” Random House announced.“The book will span from Prince’s childhood to his early years as a musician to the cusp of international stardom, using Prince’s own writings, a scrapbook of his personal photos, and the original handwritten lyric sheets for many of his most iconic songs, which he kept at Paisley Park. The book depicts Prince’s evolution through deeply revealing, never-before-shared images and memories and culminates with his original handwritten treatment for his masterwork, ‘Purple Rain.’”(Prince's collaborator on the book Dan) Piepenbring’s introduction will touch upon Prince’s final days, “a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated.” Piepenbring, whom Prince had called “my brother Dan” and “not a yes man at all,” is a Paris Review advisory editor who also contributes to The New Yorker. Read the rest

[I've been in love with Negativland since their legendary copyright battle with U2 and they've been a part of Boing Boing since 2001; it's a pleasure beyond words to be able to debut More Data, their characteristically trenchant video about data privacy and surveillance; see below for notes from Negativland's Mark Hosler. -Cory]When did online life become a non-stop Turing test? And when did humans become the ones who are failing it? It began nearly two decades ago, when advertising models staked out their territory over the data we use to structure our online lives. Without a legal recognition of the right to digital self-ownership, this resulting 'person' must not exist. As Negativland nears the finish line on an ambitious pair of interconnected albums of all new content (a project begun over ten years ago, and including material that dates back to the earliest workings of the group), there is a track from the second album that is asking to be heard sooner rather than later. In collaboration with director Ryan Worsley, here is the video for our new song entitled 'More Data'. Read the rest

Summit Learning is a nonprofit, high-tech "customized learning" group funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's family charity; under the program, students are equipped with high-surveillance Chromebooks and work on their own "at their own pace" and call on teachers to act as "mentors" when they get stuck.It's a high-tech version of student-led education, where a high teacher-to-pupil ratio allows students to pursue self-directed education based on their own proclivities and interests, and mentor one another. But in the Zuck version, students work alone in front of screens, in social isolation, taking automated quizzes to assess their progress.Many students and parents find this incredibly invasive and frustrating. Students with special needs -- exactly the group that you'd expect to benefit most from "customized learning" -- find the systems especially troublesome, and for students with screen-triggered epilepsy, the systems are pure torture.The result is rebellion, with parents withdrawing students from school altogether, or demanding that alternative accommodations be made for them; students in Brooklyn have staged mass walkouts to protest the systems; other districts have canceled the program in the face of student protests, and one University of Pennsylvania study found that 70% of students opposed the program.US education has been the plaything of billionaires since the GW Bush era, when "accountability" measures like No Child Left Behind began to starve the neediest schools while reorienting education around preparation for high-stakes testing, all thanks to wealthy right-wing ideologues who insisted that education could be improved by "running it like a business."Then came the charter schools, which directly integrated for-profit businesses in providing tax-funded education, supported by a coalition that welded together parents' whose public schools had been so starved that they had degraded beyond hope; religious fanatics who wanted publicly funded parochial education that omitted sexual health, evolution and other evidence-based curriculum; and wealthy people who wanted to opt their kids into racially and class-segregated environments. Read the rest

The new episode of the always-fascinating Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast is a play-through of the Voyager Golden Record, the iconic message for extraterrestrials attached to the Voyager I and II space probes launched in 1977. Listen below.The Golden Record tells a story of our planet expressed in sounds, images, and science: Earth’s greatest music from myriad peoples and eras, from Bach to Blind Willie Johnson to Chuck Berry, Benin percussion to Solomon Island panpipes to, yes, Mozart's The Magic Flute.This wonderful episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz features insightful track-by-track commentary by science and philosophy writer Timothy Ferris, producer of the original Voyager Record, and a rare interview with Linda Salzman-Sagan who compiled the greetings on the record.Two years ago, my friends Timothy Daly, Lawrence Azerrad, and I released the Voyager Golden Record on vinyl for the first time as a lavish box set. Our project's resonance with the public, and the Grammy that we were honored to receive for it, are really a testament to the majesty of the original record and the brilliance of its creators -- Ferris, Salzman-Sagan, Ann Druyan, Frank Drake, and of course Carl Sagan who directed the project.The Voyager Golden Record 3xLP Vinyl Box Set and 2xCD-Book edition is available from Ozma Records. Read the rest

Robert Crumb launched Weirdo magazine in 1981. I bought the first issue from the comic book store I worked at in Boulder, Colorado, and it blew my mind. It had comics by Crumb (many people, including me, think Crumb's work in Weirdo is his best), a selection of incredible illustrations from the late Polish artist Stanislav Szukalski's bizarre theory about human evolution (Netflix has a new documentary about Szukalski produced by Leonardo DiCaprio), comics by homeless Berkeley cartoonist Bruce Duncan, tracts from the Church of the SubGenius (Weirdo was the first place I came across the Church), and Foto Funnies (starring Crumb and amateur models recruited from UC Davis). I had never seen anything like Weirdo and I instantly fell in love with it, looking forward to every issue.Here's the intro, where Crumb describes Weirdo as, "another MAD imitation, another small-time commercial venture with high hopes, obviously doomed to failure."Weirdo was partly inspired by MAD, but it really took the look and feel from the short-lived Humbug magazine, launched in 1957 by MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman. (Crumb drew comics for Humbug and became Kurtzman's friend). Like Humbug, Weirdo had a small circulation (never topping 10,000 copies per issue) even though both magazines were loaded with talent (Terry Gilliam, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, and Will Elder worked for Humbug, and during its 28-issue run between 1981 and 1993 Weirdo ran comics by Peter Bagge, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Kim Deitch, Julie Doucet, Debbie Drechsler, Dennis Eichhorn, Mary Fleener, Drew Friedman, Phoebe Gloeckner, Bill Griffith, Rory Hayes, Gilbert Hernandez, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, John Kricfalusi, Carol Lay, Joe Matt, Diane Noomin, Gary Panter, Harvey Pekar, Raymond Pettibon, Spain Rodriguez, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, Dori Seda, Art Spiegelman, Carol Tyler, Robert Williams, S. Read the rest

Frequent Boing Boing contributor Clive Thompson (previously) has a great short piece in this month's Wired about platform cooperativism: replacing parasitical Silicon Valley companies that sit between workers and their customers with worker-owned co-ops that take the smallest commission possible in order to maintain the apps that customers and workers use to find each other.Thompson tells the story of Up & Go, a worker-owned co-op for house cleaners where the average worker earns $22.25/hour. The Up & Go app does all the things that other gig economy apps do: makes it easy for workers and customers to find each other, contract for services and pay for them -- but because "there's no venture capitalist demanding hockey-stick growth or profits," the workers get to keep all the money.Platform cooperativism has been popularized by the New School's Trebor Scholz, who leads a team writing free/open source code that groups of workers can set up and run in the field.The lesson here? If we want better gig labor, the hard part isn't the code. It's the social stuff—getting workers together to form a co-op and setting up rules for selling their labor and resolving disagreements. An app can help things along, but it's humans who really change the world.When Workers Control the Code [Clive Thompson/Wired] Read the rest

German actress-model Palina Rojinski responded to the lewd and rude commenters on her Instagram by delivering a perfect prank. With help from German TV show Late Night Berlin, Rojinski turned the sexist creeps into the, er, butt of a joke. The image above that she posted brought out the usual male buffoonery but, as you can see below, all was not quite what it seemed. View this post on Instagram Danke Bernd, @damitdasklaas und @latenightberlin Wir hatten unseren Spaß! Ihr auch? Der ganze Prank #Busengate LINK IN BIO A post shared by Palina Rojinski (@palinski) on Mar 26, 2019 at 12:06am PDT (via PetaPixel) Read the rest

It's Monday again, and I am here to provide the content you crave. WHO WILL WIN? Best of Trucks vs Stumps. Toughest Dodge, Ford, Chevy Trucks and more pulling out tree stumps. Cool and funny ways to remove tree stumps with trucks. Some win and some fail when trucks take on stumps. If you've only got time for one, 0:55 is pretty good, but this one at 7:34 is best.Previously: Men arrested for stealing shed by trying to drag it down the road behind a truck Read the rest

Jason Bailey is curating a show of generative art, among the first major retrospectives of computer-mediated work. It comes at an important time, too, as the art business's Morf Vandewalts fuss over machine learning as if it were born yesterday.In the last twelve months we have seen a tremendous spike in the interest of “AI art,” ushered in by Christie’s and Sotheby’s both offering works at auction developed with machine learning. Capturing the imaginations of collectors and the general public alike, the new work has some conservative members of the art world scratching their heads and suggesting this will merely be another passing fad. What they are missing is that this rich genre, more broadly referred to as “generative art,” has a history as long and fascinating as computing itself. A history that has largely been overlooked in the recent mania for “AI art” and one that co-curators Georg Bak and Jason Bailey hope to shine a bright light on in their upcoming show Automat und Mensch (or Machine and Man) at Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich, Switzerland. Read the rest

How does the amazingly concise 1-kilobyte chess program that came with 1981's Sinclair ZX81 fare against a modern PC armed with the powerful StockFish chess engine? Ha ha, it gets its ass kicked!The game of chess is an ancient one, dating back to sometime around the 6th century. While the Sinclair ZX81 isn't quite that old, it is now 37 years old. Standard ZX81 models came with only 1KB of RAM, but somehow David Horne managed to squeeze a playable chess game into that space. The question is, can 1K ZX81 chess compete with a more modern chess engine, in this computer vs computer chess game. Read the rest

Rossi Lorathio Adams II, a social media "influencer", built a brand around "State Snaps." Telling people to "Do it for State" became a catchphrase in the comments. The owner of doitforstate.com was not interested in selling the domain, however, so Adams sent his cousin to force the owner to transfer the domain at gunpoint. The owner disarmed the intruder, shot him several times with the weapon, then called the police. Now Adams and his cousin are going to jail."Between 2015 and 2017, Adams repeatedly tried to obtain 'doitforstate.com,' but the owner of the domain would not sell it. Adams also threatened one of the domain owner's friends with gun emojis after the friend used the domain to promote concerts," court records show. Then he had an idea: Why not take it by force? Read the rest

On Friday, the Washington state legislature passed a bill legalizing the "recomposition" of human remains, defined as the "contained, accelerated conversion of human remains to soil." If signed by Governor Jay Inlee, the bill will become law next year. From CNN:Katrina Spade is the CEO of the human composting company, Recompose, and told CNN affiliate KIRO-TV she is hoping her company can be one of the first to build a facility for the practice..."(The) body is covered in natural materials, like straw or wood chips, and over the course of about three to seven weeks, thanks to microbial activity, it breaks down into soil," she said.While the dead body is being broken down, Spade said families of the deceased will be able to visit her facility and will ultimately receive the soil that remains of their loved. It is up to the family how they want to use that soil, Spade said."And if they don't want that soil, we'll partner with local conservation groups around the Puget Sound region so that that soil will be used to nourish the land here in the state," she said.Having already passed the Senate, Sen. Jamie Pedersen's SB 5001 -- a less expensive way of dealing with human remains that is better for the environment -- is moving quickly through the House. #waleg pic.twitter.com/W0HgLkwCPK— WA Senate Democrats (@WASenDemocrats) February 22, 2019image: "Vision of a Future Recompose Facility" by MOLT Studios Read the rest

"Back in 1976/77, I worked at the Rustler Steak House in Alameda, California," writes Take2MarkTV. "One night, I took my Super 8 camera with me to document a typical shift."Growing up, my family preferred the local Ponderosa Steakhouse over Rustler, and even Bonanza and Sizzler for that matter. That said, I'm sure the employee experience was similar at all four establishments.(r/ObscureMedia, thanks UPSO!) Read the rest

A once-underground movement of Finnish girls who conduct elaborate dressage routines with toy hobbyhorses has gone mainstream, with coaches, competitions and trainers, and is spreading abroad.The subculture came together through quiet internet message boards that attracted girls and young women who traded tips on routines, making their own hobbyhorses, and created an informal network of competitions and routines.The girls come from a variety of backgrounds: some are the popular kids, some are outcasts, but they are united by a form of intense shared fantasy and athleticism.The practice has become more widely known thanks to Selma Vilhunen's 2017 documentary Hobbyhorse Revolution (Vilhunen stumbled on the scene through internet message boards in 2012). Alisa Aarniomaki is the hobbyhorse scene's "unofficial spokesperson" and has traveled around Europe giving hobbyhorse demonstrations, kicking off local scenes in the Netherlands, Russia and Sweden. There's an annual championship every year in Finland.It sounds like an incredibly good time: playful and inventive and creative all at once, imaginative and physical at the same time.On a recent afternoon, the two girls trudged home through the wet snow.Then Maisa brought over Tarzan — “He is a very gentle horse, he learns fast, and he really loves to jump” — and the two girls set out into the cold.They broke into a run, pounding the slush with their boots. Then they cut into the forest into deep snow.They galloped through stands of straggly pines until their cheeks burned. They knew the terrain by heart, running along pathways that were invisible under the snow. Read the rest

Josh Quiggin's essay about "Transactional Trumpism" really nailed it for me: if the story is that Republicans chose Trump as their candidate because they were sure that he would enact "the Republican agenda" they didn't get a very good deal: all Trump has managed is the bare minimum that any Republican would have done, putting far-right ideologues on the Supreme Court and handing gigantic tax-breaks to the super-rich.But Trump has failed to do anything about Obamacare, failed to divert the movement to remediate climate change, failed to repeal equal marriage. What's more, the shambolic administrative incompetence of the Trump administration has made Trump's minimal victories hollow ones: Trump's SCOTUS picks are forever compromised by their #MeToo associations, the Roberts court will be forever illegitimate, and there's surging popular support for expanding and packing the Supreme Court when the Democrats regain control of the Senate.The tax cut has accomplished the impossible: Trump (temporarily) cut middle class peoples' taxes and still pissed them off, by doing so in a way that reduced their refunds ("if you can’t win votes while giving money away, your communication skills are seriously lacking").So if Republicans picked Trump because they thought he'd deliver on their agenda, they picked wrong. But if they picked him because he said what had been on their minds all along -- if the GOP is the party of paranoid, vicious bigots -- then they picked the candidate that best represented their priorities.As regards regulatory change, the US system is full of checks and balances to make this difficult. Read the rest

Northeastern grocery chain Stop & Shop has been goosing its profits at its workers' expense, increasing their healthcare costs, reducing company pension contributions, and reducing holiday and Sunday overtime pay; the United Food & Commercial Workers, who organize the Stop & Shop employees called for a strike nearly two weeks ago, and since then, 31,000 workers from 240 stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have been off the job.A surveillance capitalism company called Skyhook -- which conducts involuntary covert surveillance of huge numbers of Americans by tracking their mobile devices, allowing the company to build complex dossiers of the public's movements over time -- has released a report detailing the drop in foot traffic from people who are "loyal customers" of Stop & Shop (Skyhook describes the data it analyzed as "anonymized"). Skyhook found that the number of visits from "loyal customers" declined by 75% after the strike began, while foot traffic overall dropped by 50%. It found that these "loyal customers" switched to buying their groceries at rivals Hannafords (up 300%), Market Basket (up 115%), Trader Joe's (up 75%), Shaws and Star Market (up 50%).The Boston Globe quotes unspecified "analysts" who say that once grocery customers switch to a rival, about 60% of them will never return.For its Stop & Shop analysis, Skyhook identified 840 customers in the strike-affected region who visit the grocery chain at least once a week, using location data from the 100 million mobile devices it has access to through software running in apps on those phones. Read the rest

The Notre Dame fire is a global tragedy, and it's also raising complicated questions about our present moment, including trenchant inquiries into which church fires merit global outpourings and whose sacred sites get mourned when they are destroyed.In France, the political conversation has been dominated by the Gilets Jaunes, whose yellow vests have become a global symbol of unrest, with both the right and the left vying to define the movement. The French Yellow Vests have never stopped demonstrating, despite brutal suppression tactics by French police, who have terrorized and maimed protesters with impunity while the neoliberal Macron continues his billionaire-friendly policies.Those billionaires are at the center of the French controversy over Notre Dame. Though members of the Gilets Jaunes were among those mourning the damage to a national symbol when Notre Dame burned, the fact that a handful of French super-rich oligarchs were able to pledge all the money necessary to rebuild by fishing in the sofa cushions for their lost pocket-change has reinvigorated the debate over France's priorities. This weekend's Gilet Jaunes demonstrations are full of signs making wry references to the billionaires' outpourings: "Victor Hugo thanks all the generous donors ready to save Notre Dame and proposes that they do the same thing with Les Miserables."As wealth inequality has increased and faith in social mobility and fairness has waned, we've seen the growth of both left- and right-wing anti-establishment movements. Famously, both the Occupy and Tea Party movements kicked off around the same time, tapping into the same concerns, with very different political valences (and of course the Tea Party was lavishly funded by oligarchs who saw them as useful idiots who would vote for the politicians who would accelerate inequality). Read the rest

Believe it or not, PDF files have been the go-to format for contracts and forms of any type since 1993. And sure, they're easily shareable - but that's about it. When you need to edit or sign a document - and you will - that's when frustration can set in. Luckily, there are workarounds, and PDF Expert for Mac is one of the best out there.This all-in-one piece of software hacks through all the stubborn aspects of any PDF, allowing you to edit any text, images or links in the document - and that's just for starters. It also allows you to easily fill out forms, redact sensitive pieces of info or annotate portions of a file. You can even merge multiple pages into a single file, then password-protect them or share them remotely across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If you get even a couple of documents per year, it can save a ton of headaches.Lifetime access to PDF Expert for Mac is available now for $54.99, more than 30% off the list price. Read the rest