During the bitter debate over the EU's Copyright Directive, with its mandate for copyright filters that would automatically censor anything that anyone claimed to be infringing, opponents repeatedly warned that these filters would be trivial to abuse.That's because rightsholder groups would insist that anything they claimed as their copyrights would need to be censored immediately, not after some human had had a chance to review it (even giving it a once-over might delay a blockade of a pre-release leak, to say nothing of the many days it might take a skilled legal practicioner or archivist to assess whether it would be appropriate to censor a piece of media). This is an invitation to sloppy and malicious overreporting of copyrighted works, resulting in massive, illegitimate censorship. For example, newscasters routinely upload their entire evening broadcast to Youtube's Content ID filter, meaning that any public domain footage or third-party materials (including clips from Youtube videos) are marked as their copyrights -- that's how NASA came to be blocked from uploading its own Mars lander footage.But it gets worse: the laws and threats that prompt tech companies to institute copyright filters are aimed at preventing infringement at any cost. That means that even if you have a repeat offender who routinely claims copyright to things they don't own, you can't stop taking requests from them, because if they ever do have a valid claim, they can sue you for ignoring it.The world is full of sloppy, brutal copyright bounty hunters that use a variety of tactics to remove their clients' materials, and whose lax standards mean that they often use those tactics to remove materials that their clients have falsely claimed to own. Read the rest

It's 4/20! Smoke 'em if you got 'em - and if you haven't got 'em, check out this roundup of deep discounts on pipes and other accessories. They're all on sale, but you can take an extra discount off the final price courtesy of the Boing Boing store by using the online code 420SAVE.Freeze PipeThere's nothing like a nice, strong pull on your favorite pipe - until you get the inevitable throat burn. The Freeze Pipe alleviates that with a freezable glycerin coil that cools the smoke on the way in, delivering a smoothness comparable to much bigger water bongs. Originally priced at $120, the Freeze Pipe is now half off at $59.95.Twisty Glass BluntLegions of smokers swear by the Twisty Glass, thanks to the smooth pull of its spiral design and easy setup. Just pack in your tobacco, twist the screw and light up. No rolling, no carb, no fuss. When you're finished, twist it back out again for easy cleanup. You can pick up the Twisty Glass Blunt now for $34.99 - 30% off the MSRP.The Weed DeckThink you know your herb? If there were a test for Cannabis 101, this casino-quality deck would be your flashcards. Each one contains trivia and history on everybody's favorite plant, with helpful illustrations throughout. You can get the Weed Deck for $13.50, a 15% discount.Geeky GrindersPrepare your favorite herbs with a touch of nerd flair with these miniature grinders, each one inspired by a different geek talisman. Read the rest

Ever wonder if you're cleaning your teeth well enough? If your last dentist visit has you getting a little more thorough about oral care, it might be time to save yourself some guesswork. A lot of electric toothbrushes promise deep cleaning, but there's a Platinum Sonic Toothbrush that has power plus the simple but effective innovation of a timer to make sure you're brushing for the right amount of time, every time.And that's the least of the bells and whistles. It charges by USB, which makes it perfect for travel. Plus, the case has a UV sanitizer which kills up to 99% of bacteria on the brush head while it's charging. Turn the power on, and the Platinum Sonic vibrates at 40,000 brush strokes per minute, which not only loosens fine particles from the teeth but is great for the gums. And best of all, there's an Auto Timer that makes sure you're brushing for the ADA-recommended two minutes. It's like having a dentist on the room with you, minus the guilt.The Platinum Sonic Toothbrush & USB Sanitizing Case are currently $49.99, a full 80% off the MSRP. Read the rest

First AOC gave a great speech about how the Green New Deal was good for workers, including coal workers; then she accepted GOP Rep Andy Barr's invite to visit the coal-miners in his Kentucky Appalachian district; then Barr disinvited him, citing her "incivility" in her response to the racist attacks on Rep Ilhan Omar; then it transpired that Barr has no coal mines in his district, but it doesn't matter, AOC is going anyway: "Luckily, we still have open borders with Kentucky, we are free to travel there. We hope to visit and have a town hall, listen to concerns of workers in Kentucky." Read the rest

GB Studio is a "free and easy to use retro adventure game creator for your favourite handheld video game system." Use a modern visual scripting interface to create Zelda-style 2D role-playing games that run on the Nintendo Game Boy or standalone on the web.· Visual game builder with no programming knowledge required. · Design your graphics in any editor that can output PNG files e.g. Photoshop, Tiled, Aseprite. · Example project included to get started right away. · Make top down 2D JRPG style adventure games. · Build real GB Rom files which can be played in an emulator or on device using USB Carts. · Build a HTML5 playable game that also works on mobile and can deployed to any webserver or uploaded to Itch.io. · Built for macOS, Windows and Linux. · Supports both macOS light and dark mode. · Includes the full tools that were used to build Untitled GB Game, free to play on Itch.io.It's by Chris Maltby (on Itch, Twitter) and downloads are available for MacOS, Linux and Windows. [h/t Agies] Read the rest

I'm coming to Halifax to give the closing keynote on day one of Atlseccon on April 24th: it's only my second-ever visit to the city and the first time I've given a talk there, so I really hope you can make it!From there, I'm headed to Toronto, where I'm giving a keynote called The Internet Isn’t What We Fight FOR, It’s What We Fight WITH on April 29th at the FITC Technology and Creativity Conference.Then I'm appearing at the Ottawa Writers Festival on May 4, presenting my newest book, Radicalized.After that, it's a quick trip to Berlin, where I'm the keynote speaker at this year's Re:publica conference, presenting a talk called It's monopolies, not surveillance on May 7th.Then I'm headed back to the USA for a weekend's worth of events at Houston's Comicpalooza, May 10-12. Hope to see you! Read the rest

Earlier this week, Kentucky Republican Congressman Andy Barr withdrew his invitation for Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to visit a coalmine in his district (made after AOC defended the Green New Deal as being better for working people, including coal miners, than GOP denial inaction on climate change).Barr claimed that he had withdrawn his invitation because of AOC's "incivility" in her defense of Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who has been at the center of a dangerous, Islamophobic smear campaign started by Republicans but also taken up by establishment Democrats.At the time, AOC speculated that Barr's true reason for rescinding his invitation was his fright: "GOP’s getting scared that up close, their constituents will realize I’m fighting harder for their healthcare than their own Reps 🙂." But there may be a simpler explanation: there are no coal-mines in Barr's district. However, his political career has been handsomely funded by coal companies, lobbyists and financiers, which might explain how he got confused. Uninviting Ocasio-Cortez is probably a smart move on Barr's part in the long run. For one thing, there aren't any active coal mines in Barr's district. And James Comer, another Republican representative from Kentucky, told local news that he didn't "see any upside" to having her come to Kentucky. "I think a lot of Republicans are making a mistake picking on her. I think we need to be very prepared when we debate her on issues that we're having a hard time with."Kentucky Republicans Worried Inviting AOC to Meet with Coal Miners Might Backfire [Spencer Platt/GQ](Image: Bigjigs) Read the rest

Guess used Burger King grease is the new copper wires nowadays.The Associated Press social media editor who composed this little beauty below deserves some kind of a prize today.A whopper of a haul: Police say a Virginia man stole hundreds of gallons of used cooking grease from a Burger King. But he couldn't give police the slip. https://t.co/lAK49gjwVQ #odd— AP Oddities (@AP_Oddities) April 19, 2019So does the headline writer.From “Grease is the way we are stealing in northern Virginia” — Alvaro Mendez Flores of Richmond admitted to the April 4 theft. Court documents state Mendez Flores backed up his box truck to the grease dumpster at the Annandale Shopping Center and used a hose to begin siphoning the used oil into a 1,600-gallon tank.So, apparently the used cooking grease this guy stole can be resold to make... biodiesel fuel. The suspect, one Mr. Alvaro Mendez Flores, told police he would get paid 25 cents a gallon for the stolen oil. From the local news report at WJLA: ABC7 obtained a search warrant that shows Alvaro Mendez Flores admitted to the April 4th theft.Surveillance video showed the 3:30 am crime—the driver backing up a white box truck, hooking up a green hose, and firing up a generator, which helped pump grease into a 1,600 gallon container in the back of the truck.The footage also showed the police, who said they caught Mendez Flores in the act.Court documents show the Richmond resident told detectives that his boss would give him 25 cents a gallon—around $300 to $400 a trip. Read the rest

“If these people follow our verbal commands, we hold them until Border Patrol comes. Border Patrol has never asked us to stand down.”

New York City's just-passed Climate Mobilization Act rolls up six climate-mitigation laws that comprehensively remake the city's approach to climate change (it's colloquially known as the Green New York Deal).70% of the city's carbon footprint is generated by heating and cooling for buildings, and a third of that comes from 50,000 of the city's biggest skyscrapers (Trump Tower is an egregious offender); the bill requires these buildings' owners to cut emissions by 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050 (rent-controlled buildings, hospitals, places of worship and similar buildings are exempted).Also in the bill: electrification of the city's school buses, and switching out gas power plants for wind turbines.So what finally got the job done? Thanks to scientific and governmental reports banging the drum, and superstorms putting New York temporarily underwater, more and more people understand that climate change is an existential threat—especially in coastal cities.New York’s Aggressive Climate Law Takes Aim at Skyscrapers [Adam Rogers/Wired](Image: New York 2140) Read the rest

Pot makes immigrants ineligible for citizenship even if pot is legal in the state where they reside.

Hell has frozen over.😳It's Trump's fault.the news today oh boy pic.twitter.com/F4noC2u7Lq— Armando Arrieta (@armandoarrieta) April 19, 2019[photo swiped from the wonderful @armandoarrieta, who you must follow.]NYT prints “I’m fucked” on the front page. pic.twitter.com/8WqvuTU9Kb— Armando Arrieta (@armandoarrieta) April 19, 2019But wait there is more.Yes, “I’m fucked” appears in the @latimes. No redactions here. pic.twitter.com/pjampHNGcj— Arash Markazi (@ArashMarkazi) April 19, 2019But if you’re into redactions, we got you covered too. pic.twitter.com/rZMLaOGMze— Arash Markazi (@ArashMarkazi) April 19, 2019As standards editor at @latimes, I fielded the occasional request to print a fully spelled-out F-word. I would say, "Sorry, the big bosses aren't going to go for that, but if it's the president or the pope next time, let's talk." Welp … pic.twitter.com/Dj0Rdg0U7u— Henry Fuhrmann (@hfuhrmann) April 19, 2019 Read the rest

Remember UC Berkeley researcher Pieter Abbeel's fantastic towel-folding robot? Now, Abbeel and his team have prototyped a new kind of robot arm design meant for the home and other human environments. Compared to robot arms common in factories, this manipulator, called Blue, is less expensive ( Read the rest

"Good evening buds!" the post read.

Samsung's folding phone, which will ding buyers about two grand after tax, is already in deep trouble: the review units sent to journalists are dying after hours of use.CNBC's Todd Haselton writes that it was "a tantalizing glimpse of the future — before it broke."During my second day of testing, the screen began flickering and would turn off and on at a rapid pace. It became completely unusable and at times wouldn’t turn on at all.Samsung had said not to remove a thin layer that sits on top of the screen. Other reviewers accidentally removed this layer and ran into similar issues that I saw. But I never removed the protective film or used the device outside any way a normal user might.The Verge titled its video review "after the break" and awarded it the not-so coveted "Yikes" rating.Whatever happened, it certainly wasn’t because I have treated this phone badly. I’ve done normal phone stuff, like opening and closing the hinge and putting it in my pocket. We did stick a tiny piece of molding clay on the back of the phone yesterday to prop it up for a video shoot, which is something we do in every phone video shoot. So perhaps a tiny piece of that snuck into a gap on the back of the hinge and then around or through its cogs until it lodged in between the screen and the hinge. It’d be sort of like Charlie Chaplin getting caught in the gears in Modern Times. Read the rest

Jason Scott has made the source available for every one of Infocom's classic and genre-defining text adventure games (previously) for the Apple ][+ and its successors, posting it to Github under the historicalsource account.The code is written in Zork Implementation Language, a Lisp-like programming language that you can learn with this manual.The source seems to have been posted under the general rubric of archival preservation, which is an activity that can fall under copyright's fair use doctrine. If Activision -- owner of the rights to Infocom titles -- decides to push the matter, we might end up with a fascinating and precedent-setting court battle.Included in the collection are all the Zork games, as well as the notorious and brilliant Douglas Adams game "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and partial sources for its unreleased sequel "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" and the complete sources for an unreleased adaptation of "The Abyss," James Cameron's 1989 movie.Dive in and you'll find that things are very different now than they were then. At the time Infocom was active, personal computers did not have a widely shared architecture, so the path ZIL's architects took was to allow game creators to write instructions for a virtual machine called the Z-machine, which was then brought to the various platforms of the day. There are interpreters available today for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, among other platforms.The interactive fiction community is still quite lively, and people are still making games using ZIL and the Z-machine today. Read the rest

Chuck Tingle (previously) has leapt into action with some of the most trenchant analysis of the Meuller Report yet seen: Redacted In The Butt By Redacted Under The Tromp Administration covers all the most significant details through an exquisitely crafted tale of gay pornography.Ron isn’t a fan of Domald Tromp, but he can’t help feeling like the doomsday predictions of the man’s upcoming presidency are a little overblown. As far as Ron can tell, nothing in his daily routine has really altered that much.All of this changes, however, when Ron notices a little black censorship bar lying out on the sidewalk, and even more hanging from a familiar apple tree. This is how Ron learns that Tromp has signed an executive order to redact the concept of apples, but Ron still does his best to ignore it.Soon, Dom Tromp is redacting things left and right, sending the entire country into turmoil. When a heroic REDACTED shows up to save the day, will him and Ron be able to prove love is real while there’s still time left?This erotic tale is 4,100 words of sizzling human on sentient censored being action, including anal, blowjobs, REDACTED, rough sex, and gay politically concealed information love.Redacted In The Butt By Redacted Under The Tromp Administration [Chuck Tingle/Amazon](Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

More than half of the US states have passed laws that ban or severely restrict local governments from investing in broadband: many of these laws were copypasted from "model legislation" circulated by corporate telcoms lobbyists (this is a disturbing, widespread practice in America's state houses); and many of the states that have passed these bills have large areas where every ISP is a Net Neutrality violator, and all across America, ISPs are underinvesting in network buildout (especially for rural subscribers) while raising prices and refusing to sell high-speed service to customers who don't also buy cable TV.Municipal internet is the answer: despite the documented lies of Trump's FCC, cities that build their own networks save money and the people who live there are the only Americans who are happy with their broadband. So municipal internet is a huge threat to ISP monopolists: not only do they stand to lose the $5 billion federal subsidies that they receive every year, they also have to compete with superior, lower-cost, higher quality offerings from municipalities. Cities want to offer broadband to residents: that's why so many have sued the FCC to cut off the telco monopolists' subsidies, and it's why the monopolists have been such aggressive litigators and shameless lobbyists against local governments' right to provide internet access to their residents.The figures on state laws blocking community broadband come from a report from Broadbandnow; it also documents how states voted to subsidize private-sector monopolists at the same time as they were banning cities from competing with them, resulting in worse offerings at higher prices. Read the rest

Michael Schiess is the founder of the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, California where he cares for nearly 2,000 pinball machines from across time. Schiess's mission in life? "To inspire an interest in science, art and history through pinball, and to preserve and promote this important part of American culture." Read the rest

At Bon Appetit, Kristen Arnett wrote a very funny appreciation of Olive Garden as the perfect place for her to take first dates. From Bon Appetit:The right kind of woman for me is someone who won’t give me a hard time about the things I like. The kind of woman who will let me pocket all the leftover breadsticks and doesn’t care if we only discuss our favorite sexual positions and what kind of appetizers look best off the limited-time-only menu. We’re at Olive Garden because it’s kitschy and cute. Nothing that happens needs to be a serious thing. It’s no big deal...Two people eating means you get three sticks total. I like to think Olive Garden did that on purpose, so that you’re forced to break bread with your date. You must share with each other, touch hands. It’s all very romantic, if romance is deciding who gets to take the bigger share of the carbs. "Why I Take All My First Dates to Olive Garden" Read the rest

The Google Cemetery is an online collection of the useful stuff Google has made (or replicated) and then destroyed. An elegy to things we should never have given over to it in the first place, a lament for the lessons never learned. Read the rest

For sale: Boleskine House, occultist Aleister Crowley's infamous digs on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland that Jimmy Page later owned. The Georgian home, sitting on 9.3 hectares (22.9 acres), burned in 2015 but the exterior walls remain. The real estate agent is open to bids over £200,000. According to the sales materials, "The opportunity now exists to restore the house and grounds to create an outstanding property subject to obtaining the necessary consents."Consents? I say, remodel as thou wilt.Here is the listing. Read the rest

MandalaGaba is a drawing board that specializes in mandalas and other artistic mathematical magic. Click and drag and watch what happens! You can save and share your work; the creators have a blog and an instagram featuring quality examples.After radial symmetry (mandalas) and tessellations, I just finished implementing recursive drawing. Do tweak the buttons & sliders, seeing their effect on a pen stroke is the best way to understand what they do. I hope this is fun. Read the rest

Now that's my kind of pyramid.FAITHLESS / OperatorsReleased April 5th, 2019produced by Napster Vertigo and Arlen ThompsonVisuals by Caleb Bardgett and Johnny DunnOperators is on tour; check them out on Spotify or Amazon if it's your cup of tea, Read the rest

The public markets are hungry: as Uber and Lyft look to IPOs to let their investors -- who have been subsidizing 40-50% of every ride -- redeem their shares through sales to the public capital markets, the companies are desperate for ways to reduce their unprofitability and increase those share prices.Luckily for them, the rideshare companies operate "two-sided markets," a darling of neoliberal economic orthodoxy, wherein they are able to control the prices that customers pay and the share of those payments that reach drivers, and that means they get to fuck everybody over.Both companies have been ratcheting up fares as they have increased their exposure to the public markets, but not only are they not sharing these new revenues with drivers -- they're actually cutting real wages to drivers.Drivers are figuring this out by sharing screenshots of the fares charged and their remittances with passengers (Uber and Lyft otherwise hoard all information about the spread between fare and wage). “I always check the rider app anytime before taking rides. During morning rush they’re charging passenger $145 to go to the airport. I only get $33. Lyft started doing this four weeks before IPO,” said one Lyft XL (larger vehicles) driver in San Francisco, California, who requested to remain anonymous because they are currently applying for a new job. The driver said they have to work 100 hours a week just to make the same amount of money they did last year. “It’s amazing they have been able to get away with everything they are doing. Read the rest

A pixel-perfect implementation of Super Mario Bros. is now available for the Commodore 64, a good three decades after that computer's (and the Nintendo Entertainment System's) heydey. This is a Commodore 64 port of the 1985 game SUPER MARIO BROS. for the Famicom and Nintendo Entertainment System. It contains the original version that was released in Japan and United States, as well as the European version. It also detects and supports a handful of turbo functionalities, and has 2 SID support.Home computers of the era typically saw sub-par conversions of console hits, even when there was no real technical reason. Below, see Super Mario Bros. as originally released on 8-bit computer platforms; quite a disaster.The Great Giana Sisters was a more accurate unofficial port that, for obvious reasons, displeased Nintendo and led to "pressure" that saw it withdrawn from sale (though it did not, per gamer legend, file a lawsuit). It ultimately became a franchise in its own right. Read the rest

Enjoy this fine collection of Freudian slips uttered by news presenters. Read the rest

The digital age is well and truly upon us, but let's not forget there's a load of free TV content floating literally over our heads. No, we're not talking about the internet. Signals from major broadcast networks are still gratis for anyone who can pick them up with an antenna. And before you envision those ugly metal "rabbit ears" above your TV set, get a load of the ANTOP Paper Thin 30-Mile AT-105 Indoor HDTV Antenna.As advertised, it picks up signals within approximately 30 miles of the broadcast area, unaffected by windy or rainy days. That's shows from ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox, Univision and more, relayed with support for HD and Ultra 4K content. At a mere .02 inches thick, it comes with a kit for mounting discreetly indoors and is fully compatible with existing digital TVs and converter boxes.Right now, the ANTOP Paper Thin 30-Mile AT-105 Indoor HDTV Antenna is more than 50% off at $16.99. Read the rest

The Sacklers (previously) are a reclusive, super-secretive family of billionaires whose fortune comes from their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of Oxycontin, the drug at the center of the opioid epidemic, which has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam war, with the death-toll still mounting.The Sacklers have gone to enormous lengths to launder their reputations, endowing galleries and museums in a bid to make their name synonymous with philanthropy rather than mass death (they also had an expensive lawyer threaten me over unflattering posts about them).But the states that are left dealing with the bodies have sued the Sacklers, and these lawsuits have resulted in mountains of court documents (which the Sacklers have sought to suppress), including a bizarre deposition of Richard Sackler that reveals his active role in maximizing the extent to which Oxytocin users became addicted to his company's products.The deposition is a stunning document, but as John Oliver points out in his latest segment, not many of us will sit still to listen to a talking head read a court record, and the Sacklers have blocked every attempt to get the video of Richard Sackler's deposition released.That's why Oliver has commissioned a quartet of A-list actors to re-enact Sackler's testimony, putting them on the deliciously named SacklerGallery.com: Bryan Cranston (reprising his role as TV's most memorable dope-lord from Breaking Bad); Michael Keaton (at his most sociopathic); Michael K Williams (giving us a long-overdue taste of The Wire) and Richard Kind (in comic relief, giving us a taste of all the times Sackler said "I don't know"). Read the rest

Pepsi's plan to pay a Russian company called Startrocket to loft an artificial constellation of cubesats with mylar sails to advertise a "nonalcoholic energy beverage" has been cancelled for unspecified reasons (the company says its prototype launch using high-altitude balloons was a "one-time event"). Read the rest

In 2017, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Kahn turned the antitrust world on its ear with her Yale Law Review paper, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, which showed how Ronald Reagan's antitrust policies, inspired by ideological extremists at the University of Chicago's economics department, had created a space for abusive monopolists who could crush innovation, workers' rights, and competition without ever falling afoul of orthodox antitrust law.Now, Dina Srinivasan, a self-described technology entrepreneur and advertising executive who trained Yale Law School has done it again, with a magesterial, deftly argued paper for the Berkeley Business Law Journal called The Antitrust Case Against Facebook. It's one of the most invigorating, significant contributions to a new theory of antitrust for the digital age that I've ever read, ranking with Kahn's 2017 paper.Srinivasan's paper is especially important in light of Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism thesis, which dismisses the idea that monopoly is the reason that Big Tech is able to control our behavior so thoroughly -- Zuboff posits that machine learning creates devastating behavior modification tools that allow tech companies to manipulate us so thoroughly that we're in danger of losing our free will.But Srinivasan shows how Facebook came to dominate our online discourse through activities that would have been prohibited under pre-Reagan theories of antitrust, and how, prior to these monopolistic tactics, Facebook was not able to conduct surveillance on its users, having to contend with multiple, bruising PR disasters and user revolts when it tried to do so. Read the rest

Matt Taibbi's (previously) latest Rolling Stone column traces the long history of rich Democrat donors and the officials whom they fund attacking progressive candidates, showing how the same playbook used to attack Dennis Kucinich in 2003 is now being rolled out to attack Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (I am a donor to both the Sanders and Warren campaigns).The wealthy and their captured lawmakers smear anyone who offers a progressive alternative as a "spoiler" who will "undermine" the party's chances to beat Republicans; this becomes a critique of the politicians, who are characterized as "narcissists" whose presidential bids are a matter of ego, not policy. This also conveniently switches the discussion away from the policies themselves, refocusing it on personalities, which are then smeared again.As Adam Johnson writes in FAIR, the press amplifies this tactic by calling the 1% and their enablers "mainstream Democrats" -- despite the fact that polls show 78% of Democrats holding a favorable view of Sanders, who also leads every poll on 2020 nominees, and whose polls also show that Sanders can beat Trump.The insistence that a handful of millionaires and some Congressional lifers who've enriched them are the "mainstream" of the party only makes sense if you take the voters for granted, assuming that they'll vote for whomever the Democrats put on the ballot.But voters care about substance, which is why I'm so bullish on Elizabeth Warren: as Doug Henwood writes in Jacobin, Warren has the policy details that we've been waiting for. Read the rest

Barr's redactions aside, I have questions.

In 2014, the British discount grocers Iceland Foods (so named for their pioneering role in selling frozen food) was granted an EU-wide trademark on the word "Iceland" by the EU Intellectual Property Organisation, which apparently saw no risk in giving a British grocer a monopoly over the use of the name of a sovereign nation that was also a member of the European Economic Area.Iceland Foods was not a measured steward over its monopoly, either: the company abused its trademark by attacking Icelandic businesses that used the word "Iceland" in their names, even ones that were in no way related to groceries. Then, when the country moved to block the nation of Iceland from getting a trademark for the tourist slogan "Inspired by Iceland," the nation finally sued to have the company's trademark invalidated and prevailed.Iceland Foods can still appeal the decision.Foreign Minister Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarson said he welcomed the ruling, but was not surprised by it. “…[I]t defies common sense that a foreign company can stake a claim to the name of a sovereign nation as was done [in this case],” he remarked. “What we’re talking about here is a milestone victory in a matter of real importance for Icelandic exporters. Our country is known for its purity and its sustainability, hence the value of indicating the origin of Icelandic products.”Iceland Wins Trademark Dispute Against Supermarket Chain [Larissa Kyzer/Iceland Review]The End Of The Absurdity: Iceland, The Country, Successfully Invalidates The Trademark Of Iceland Foods, The Grocerer [Timothy Geigner/Techdirt](Image: Adcro, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest

Dentistry has always been medicine's poor cousin, lower in prestige and funding, with much less definitive research; this means that it's harder for someone to point at a procedure and definitively say, "That was unnecessary."At the same time, better oral hygiene and fluoridation has increased our overall dental health; and as that was happening, dental school tuition was mounting alongside all other forms of student debt. You can see where this is going: dentists are graduating from university buried by punishing debt; dental patients need a lot fewer money-generating procedures, and it's easy to get away with performing unnecessary procedures. What coul possibly go wrong?Though this is something of a perfect storm of grifty, late-stage capitalism, the lack of evidence-based standards is a huge piece of the problem. While we're pretty sure that dental sealants are really useful for kids (though few dentists use them because they take a long time and don't generate a lot in billings), and that fluoridation is also good for kids, there just isn't enough evidence to say whether fluoridation benefits adults, whether flossing combats plaque (it is good for your gums though), whether you should have your wisdom teeth removed, etc. And the evidence for other common procedures is really poor or even nonexistent: everything from seeing your dentist twice a year (most people can go once every 12 or 18 months, assuming good oral hygiene); replacing metal fillings with resins, etc.Incredibly, some of the most invasive, painful and expensive procedures have not been studied in any depth, including whether root-canaled teeth should be repaired with fillings or crowns. Read the rest

Back when David Cameron was Prime Minister, he took advice from Patrick Rock (later revealed to be a a trafficker in images depicting the abuse of children) on how to stop children from seeing internet pornography.The solution they arrived at was bananas: every adult service in the UK would have to verify the identity of every user they had, assuring themselves that anyone who tried to look at porn was over 18. As the unworkability of this idea became more obvious, the UK government tried several different tacks: banning porn altogether, deputising newsagents to verify the identities of would-be porn viewers and then doling out official pornography-access cards; etc. Not everyone involved with these proposals was a child pornographer; some of them were merely vicious, technologically illiterate bullies.Now, with Brexit hanging over the country, food poverty and homelessness at record highs, the pound crashing, and CO2 emissions at crisis levels, HMG has finally found the political will to crack on with their "No sex, please, we're British," plan.Starting July 15, all websites that offer pornography will have to verify their visitors' age, primarily one operated by the Canada-based pornography monopolist Mindgeek, owners of Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, Brazzers, Digital Playground, Men.com, Reality Kings, and Sean Cody, and much, much more. Mindgeek will use credit-cards to validate users' ages, meaning that it will be producing a database of sexual kompromat, sortable by net worth, on every pornography-consuming person in the United Kingdom.The British Board of Film Classification -- the national movie censor board -- will decide which sites will need to use "age verification" technology. Read the rest

Guy Shrubsole is the author of Who Owns England? a forthcoming book that reports out a paintstaking researched data-set laying out, for the first time, a comprehensive view of the land ownership in England, finding that half of the country is owned by 1% of its people: a mere 25,000 aristocrats, oligarchs and corporations.Shrubsole's research breaks down land ownership, singling out the likes of Brexiteer James Dyson (who lobbied in favour of Brexit, then relocated his company to Singapore when it became apparent that the UK would be plunged into chaos by it).Shrubsole is also at pains to point out that he may be underestimating the extent to which land ownership is concentrated into a few hands in England, because 17% of England and Wales is undeclared at the Land Registry, and much of the property that is in the registry is nominally owned by anonymous, secrecy-shrouded companies that are often fronts for English and global elites.Guy Shrubsole, author of the book in which the figures are revealed, Who Owns England?, argues that the findings show a picture that has not changed for centuries. “Most people remain unaware of quite how much land is owned by so few,” he writes, adding: “A few thousand dukes, baronets and country squires own far more land than all of middle England put together.”“Land ownership in England is astonishingly unequal, heavily concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite.”The book’s findings are drawn from a combination of public maps, data released through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources. Read the rest

Muckrock's JPat Brown (previously) writes, "Wanted to let you know we've got a text-searchable version of the Mueller Report loaded into our crowdsourcing tool that might be of interest to Boing Boing readers." Read the rest

The fight over the EU's Copyright Directive was the biggest fight in European political history: more than 100,000 people marched against it in 50 cities; more than 5,000,000 people signed a petition against it, and ultimately the Directive only squeaked into law because (Jesus Fucking Christ I can't believe I'm about to type this) five Swedish MEPs got confused pressed the wrong button (seriously kill me now).No European politician was more important to the struggle than Julia Reda, the German Pirate Party MEP who is stepping down ahead of European elections next May, after five years of effective, dedicated service. On the eve of her departure, Reda has published her postmortem on the Directive and what it means. It's an uplifting and important missive, one that draws a distinction between the incredible political malpractice from European politicians who continue to treat the internet as though it were a video-on-demand service, or a jihadi recruiting tool, or a pornography distribution system; and the mass-scale, unprecedented popular perception that the internet is our planetary, species-wide electronic nervous system, whose regulation needs to take account of all that we do online, not just one industry or lobby's corner of it.We are living through an all-out, global blitz on online free speech, privacy, competition and self-determination, a realtime Chinafication of the western internet, and the past year has set us back a decade or more. But as Reda notes, the difference between the fight now and the fight a decade ago is the size of the army we're fighting with: the cause of online freedom has a self-recruiting mass movement of people, more of whom wake up every day and realize that their future is tied to the internet's future. Read the rest

When there’s nothing new to say, at least the tabloids say it loudly.

Dems fight for unredacted report's release

Martin Fitzpatrick built the Etch-A-Snap, a digital camera with an automated Pocket Etch-A-Sketch as its display on the back. Each photo takes between 15 minutes to one hour to be sketched. From Two Bit Arcade:Photos are processed down to 240x144 pixel 1-bit (black & white) line drawings using Pillow and OpenCV and then translated into plotter commands by building a network graph representation with networkx. The Etch-A-Sketch wheels are driven by two 5V stepper motors mounted into a custom 3D printed frame. The Etch-A-Snap is entirely portable and powered by 4xAA batteries & 3x18650 LiPo cells.Find links to the plans and code here: "Etch-A-Snap: The Raspberry Pi powered Etch-A-Sketch camera" (Two Bit Arcade) Read the rest

Once in 468 packs, found Eric Farmer.So, on 12 January of this year, I started buying boxes of packs of Skittles. This past week, “only” 82 days, 13 boxes, 468 packs, and 27,740 individual Skittles later, I found the following identical 2.17-ounce packs:Many excellent graphs in the report. I'm shocked and appalled by the distribution of total number of skittles per pack: there's a fair chance you'll get anywhere between 55 and 65 (though in fairness there's about a 2 in 3 chance of getting 59,60 or 61) Read the rest

Growing up in Britain, one of my favorite folk fascinations/media obsessions was the alleged presence of big cats in the countryside. Fueled by blurry photos and living at the margins on possibility, the phenomena helped tabloids move on slow days and sometimes shaded into cryptozoology, ufology and other more delicious myths. But they're out there! Aren't they?There have been 155 big cat sightings reported to UK police forces in the past three years, according to forces responding to FOI requests. There are likely many more never recorded. Local newspapers publish dozens of eyewitness reports every year, and have helped to firmly establish certain creatures – the Surrey Puma, the Beast of Exmoor – in local legend. Where might these cats have come from? One theory suggests they were released by their owners in the months leading up to the 1976 Dangerous Wild Animals Act. Exotic animals had been sold in Harrods; cheetahs could occasionally be seen being walked in Hyde Park. Given the choice of acquiring a costly licence or relinquishing their pets to animal sanctuaries, at least some owners chose a third option: sending cats out into the wild. And yet they are never captured—but for a few escapees and abandonments granted no mythic fanfare, such as an elderly and arthritic puma so chill she could be petted. UPDATE: There's a whole wikipedia article just about British big catsThe existence of a population of true big cats in Britain, especially a breeding population, is believed to be highly implausible by experts owing to lack of convincing evidence. Read the rest

Come on down and, more to the point, get on down to this full version of "Starcrossed," one of the many disco jams from Score Productions used as a musical cue on The Price is Right starting in 1976. Also, I hadn't realized before that Crystal Waters' 2001 cover of Score Productions' "Come on Down," aka the main Price is Right theme, hit number one on Billboard's Dance Club Songs Chart! I much prefer the original lyric-less version. Both are below. Read the rest

Leaked internal Facebook documents show that Facebook not only planned to sell user data, but that it ultimately"doled it out to app developers who were considered personal “friends” of Zuckerberg", reports NBC News.Olivia Solon and Cyrus Farivar:The thousands of newly shared documents were anonymously leaked to the British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who shared them with a handful of media organizations: NBC News, Computer Weekly and Süddeutsche Zeitung. Campbell, a founding member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, is a computer forensics expert who has worked on international investigations including on offshore banking and big tobacco. The documents appear to be the same ones obtained by Parliament in late 2018 as part of an investigation into Facebook. Facebook did not question the authenticity of the documents NBC News obtained. Read the rest

A few weeks ago, we learned that Facebook asked for the personal email passwords of some users logging in. Today, it admits that it used the passwords to harvest 1.5m users' email contacts without consent. Facebook claims that doing this was "unintentional," despite contact harvesting being the plainly obvious purpose of demanding people's email passwords and notifications in Facebook informing users that their contacts were being imported.Facebook harvested the email contacts of 1.5 million users without their knowledge or consent when they opened their accounts.Since May 2016, the social-networking company has collected the contact lists of 1.5 million users new to the social network, Business Insider can reveal. The Silicon Valley company said the contact data was "unintentionally uploaded to Facebook," and it is now deleting them.The revelation comes after pseudononymous security researcher e-sushi noticed that Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they signed up for new accounts to verify their identities, a move widely condemned by security experts. Business Insider then discovered that if you entered your email password, a message popped up saying it was "importing" your contacts without asking for permission first. Facebook's cycle of promises and lies depends upon journalistic objectivity being warped into a perverse assumption of Facebook's good faith. When we fail to report each privacy abuse in the context of all the other ones, we simply fail. Read the rest

When businesses need big cloud projects done right, they need experts in DevOps. For the uninitiated, that's shorthand for the framework that allows development and operations teams to work together toward the same goal - not as independent departments with their own agendas. There's an arsenal of software that has cropped up to help in the workflow, and the Complete DevOps E-Degree Bundle is the easiest way to learn them all.The six-course package includes a big-picture primer on the concepts that make DevOps work, then dives right in to show you how to install and manage a Linux framework. From there, you'll learn how to monitor it with Nagios and link up remote servers like RedHat, CentOS, and Ubuntu. Two entire courses are dedicated to the essential pieces of the development pipeline, including Jenkins, Ansible and Chef. All in all, it's more than 80 hours of reference materials and lessons, leading to a career-building e-degree in DevOps.Lifetime access to the Complete DevOps E-Degree Bundle is currently $25, more than 85% off the MSRP. Read the rest