Josh Ellingson's $43 Drinking Tentacles dress comes in sizes XS-XL. It's fun, flirty and fhtagn! (via Bonnie Burton) Read the rest

One parish suffered 3 fires at 3 different churches over the course of 10 days. A fourth church fire, located several hours away, may be connected.NYT:Three historically black churches have burned in less than two weeks in one south Louisiana parish, where officials said they had found “suspicious elements” in each case. The officials have not ruled out the possibility of arson, or the possibility that the fires are related.“There is clearly something happening in this community,” State Fire Marshal H. Browning said in a statement on Thursday. “That is why it is imperative that the citizens of this community be part of our effort to figure out what it is.”The three fires occurred on March 26, Tuesday and Thursday in St. Landry Parish, north of Lafayette. A fourth fire, a small blaze that officials said was “intentionally set,” was reported on Sunday at a predominantly black church in Caddo Parish, about a three-hour drive north.“But just as we haven’t connected the three in St. Landry, we haven’t connected the one in Caddo,” said Ashley Rodrigue, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Office of State Fire Marshal, on Friday.Local officials said that they were still investigating the fires, and did not say if they knew of any suspects, a motive, or whether racism was an element.“There certainly is a commonality, and whether that leads to a person or persons or groups, we just don’t know,” Mr. Browning said at a news conference on Thursday. Read the rest

Pontus Hugosson has style, ...and vertical video.(Thanks, Scot!) Read the rest

The Whiskey River Soap Company's funny soap varieties mostly fall flat for me, but there's one exception: the Grammar Police edition. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

Airbnb has a hidden camera problem: Airbnb hosts keep getting caught using hidden webcams to spy on people staying in their unlicensed hotel-rooms, and while the company proclaims a zero tolerance policy for the practice, the reality is that the company tacitly tolerates Airbnb hosts who engage in this creepy, voyeuristic behavior.Andrew Barker is a Kiwi infosec professional who checked into an Airbnb in Ireland and used an Android app to scan the house wifi; he discovered an unencrypted webcam stream on port 80, and used the video feed to find the hidden camera in the house's living room. That's when things went from bad to worse. After the Barker family relocated to a hotel, they first notified their host (who initially hung up on him and then protested that there was only one hidden camera in the house), then they notified Airbnb of their finding, whose reps "treat[ed] it like a canceled booking." Then, after a week-long "investigation," Airbnb told the family that "the host had been 'exonerated,' and the listing reinstated."The Barkers went public with their frustrations at not having been contacted for the investigation or given any explanation for Airbnb's decision, and with the listing being reinstated with no mention of the hidden camera.After media attention, Airbnb reversed itself and apologized.Airbnb's policy says that hosts must disclose "any type of surveillance device" in listings, "even if it's not turned on or hooked up." Cameras are allowed in certain spaces if they are disclosed, but Airbnb "prohibit[s] any surveillance devices that are in or that observe the interior of certain private spaces (such as bedrooms and bathrooms) regardless of whether they've been disclosed.""If a host discloses the device after booking, Airbnb will allow the guest to cancel the reservation and receive a refund. Read the rest

Change My View (previously) is a wonderful subreddit founded by a Scottish highschooler named Kal Turnbull as a forum where people can conduct honest inquiry and debate, where the house-rules ensure that there is an open-minded willingness to have your views changed, and where those changes are marked with a Δ (delta) symbol. Turnbull is now 23 with a degree in civil engineering, and he and his community members have built a standalone Change My View site with help from Google/Alphabet's Jigsaw, which has trained some comment-ranking tools on Change My View's data-set (which is unique in that it has explicit, human-generated markers signalling which posts were effective at changing someone's view). The new site, Change A View, has a bunch of features that don't readily fit into Reddit's forum framework, and features a paid moderation staff that uses the features and Jigsaw's tools to keep the discussions productive.As I've written before, Change My/A View is a fascinating use-case, but it's also got heavy selection bias going for it. It doesn't so much prove that reasoned debate can change people's minds, but rather than, if you're the kind of person who goes looking for reasoned debate, your mind may change.And also, as previously noted: there is more than one reason to engage in online debate. It's not just about changing someone's mind, sometimes, it's about playing to the gallery: "Playing to the gallery this way is a proven way to change minds, and in those cases, it often helps if your opponent is overheated and rude, because their affect can make you seem more reasonable by comparison (but this doesn't always work -- sometimes being the passionate one facing down the robotically cool one makes you seem like your side is the one whose proponents have the most at stake and the most to offer)." The new Change A View website works a little differently. Read the rest

In 2009, the IRS created a Global High Wealth Industry Group to audit the super-wealthy, staffing it with skilled lawyers and accountants who could unravel the webs of "trusts, foundations, limited liability companies, complex partnerships and overseas operations" that were used to hide the income of the super-rich from the tax-collector.A decade later, the group's track record is dismal. IRS privacy rules mean that little is known about how the group's audits were undertaken, defeated, and then gutted, but Propublica's Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel have pieced together a vivid picture from the fragmentary evidence, showing why the project was "dead on arrival."The case-study for the group is billionaire Georg Schaeffler, whose own tax lawyers warned him that a transaction was likely to attract IRS scrutiny, and who was eventually served with a $1.2 billion tax/penalty bill by the Global High Wealth unit in 2012 -- and who, seven years later, only paid "tens of millions" according to Propublica's sources.Propublica delves into the court records to show how "battalions of high-priced lawyers and accountants that often outnumber and outgun" the IRS's team were able to draw out the case for years and years -- even as the Global High Wealth unit's headcount was being cut and cut by successive administrations. The unit was supposed to have 242 investigators by 2012, but by 2014, it was only 96, and today, it's only 58. This is despite the potentially massive upsides for the general treasury: it's estimated that the richest Americans cheat on their taxes to the tune of $50 billion/year. Read the rest

When wireless earbuds first came on the scene, they seemed too good to be true. And in a lot of ways, they were. For a while, going wireless meant you had to sacrifice a little sound quality at best and suffered spotty connection at worst. Luckily, times have changed. Today, models like the Brio True Wireless Earbuds are packing that promised convenience with solid sound and connectivity, and better battery life to boot.Bluetooth 5.0 capacity means the Brio buds stay connected consistently up to 65 feet away. Thanks to the 6.2 mm carbon nanotube drivers, the sound is as crisp and the range as wide as most any wired earbuds. The battery life is a particular highlight here, with the Brios able to hold 8 hours of listening time on a single charge (50 hours with a portable charging case). For the record, that beats the already impressive staying power of Samsung's significantly more expensive Galaxy buds - by a wide margin. And if that marathon listening session involves an actual marathon, you'll be happy to know they have IP67-rated waterproofing.The Brio True Wireless Earbuds are 56% off today at $64.99. Read the rest

“Best part is when she passes out, revives and realizes she's still on the ride.”“I like how they start out holding hands, but once the ride starts, they both disconnect and it quickly become each person for themselves.”Man, this is totally me on any rollercoaster.Cool as a cucumber.Cool as a cucumber Read the rest

"The system is full. Can’t take you anymore. Sorry folks."

Research by Oxford University scientists finds “little evidence of a relationship between screen time and wellbeing in adolescents.” Based on data from over 17,000 teenagers, the study “casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people’s mental health.”This isn't the first time a scientific study has disproven the notion of a direct link between the amount of time teenagers spend on devices and their well-being, but it's good to know we can worry less about teens' time on-screen.The new Oxford University study is titled “Screens, Teens, and Psychological Well-Being: Evidence From Three Time-Use-Diary Studies,” and you can read the full text here.Looking at your phone before bedtime, being online, gaming, watching TV -- none of these ways of spending time on-screen is damaging young people's mental health, the study authors said.They question the methodology of previous studies."While psychological science can be a powerful tool for understanding the link between screen use and adolescent wellbeing, it still routinely fails to supply stakeholders and the public with high-quality, transparent and objective investigations into growing concerns about digital technologies," said Professor Andrew Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and co-author of the study.From the BBC News recap:The Oxford University study used data from three countries - the UK, US and Ireland - and 17,000 adolescents, and used both self-reporting and time-diary techniques (which ask teens to record what they are doing at specific times of day). Read the rest

The “Baby Trump Balloon” was flown by activists to protest President Trump's proposed border wall, during the President's visit to the US-Mexico border to make the case for more racist policies against brown people.Video: “Giant inflatable balloon depicting President Trump as a diaper-clad baby flew at the border wall where Trump is scheduled to visit Friday.”Activists opposing President Trump's proposed border wall flew a giant inflatable balloon depicting Trump as a diaper-clad baby during his border visit pic.twitter.com/aNBe0c02VZ— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) April 5, 2019 Read the rest

ISPs want it both ways: they want to be receive billions in indirect public subsidies (access to rights of ways that would cost unimaginable sums to clear) and direct public subsidies (grant money) but still be able to run their businesses without regard to what the public actually wants (a neutral internet, supported by 87% of Americans, in which your ISP sends you the bits you request, as quickly and efficiently as it can). Under Colorado's new net neutrality law, ISPs that practice network discrimination will lose access to public grants and other direct subsidies. Predictably, ISP monopolies have gnashed their teeth and wailed about the falling skies and government overreach (something they never complained about when they were getting government subsidies!). But the law passed, because Democrats control the legislature, and the governor, regular Boing Boing reader Jared Polis, will sign it.“What I was really looking for in this year’s bill was the appropriate nexus of action. A lot of the bills we saw getting in trouble in other states, or bills that were facing a lot of opposition, were more about sending a message of net neutrality instead of looking for a fulcrum point for state action,” said Sen. Kerry Donovan, a Democrat from Vail who sponsored last year’s bill and wrote this year’s bill. “This bill says that if you’re going to ask to be funded by the people in Colorado directly out of their paycheck then you need to adhere to these principles.” Gov. Polis is about to sign a Colorado net neutrality bill — one with some serious teeth [Tamara Chuang/Colorado Sun] Read the rest

Doug Ford (previously) is the trumpian buffoon elected to the office of Premier of Ontario by rural voters who never experienced his laughable bumblefuckery firsthand (the people of Toronto -- who suffered under his tenure on city council while his asshole crackhead brother was mayor -- resoundingly voted against him).As part of his nonsensical "anti-government waste" campaign, Ford has ordered a review of provincial health spending, with an eye to eliminating "unnecessary" procedures. Among the procedures he wishes to eliminate: giving sedation during colonscopies (Ford is apparently an expert on narcotics: Canada's national paper of record says he was once one of the nation's leading hash dealers)Instead, the people of Ontario will be offered his personal, bulletproof edition of "Atlas Shrugged" to bite down on.Ford also wants to severely curtail treatment for chronic pain.Christ, what an asshole.In total, 28 services are on the list for potential savings including sedation offered during colonoscopies which would save $16 million. According to the documents, anesthesiologist-assisted colonoscopies has increased five-fold over the past decade and the government has questions about the appropriateness of this usage.Eric Thompson from Crohn’s and Colitis Canada says the proposal is not realistic.“It is unthinkable to have a colonoscopy without sedation,” he says. “Its a very uncomfortable, invasive procedure, so its extremely critical that patients are very comfortable when they are having this procedure.”He adds that not having sedation would discourage patients from choosing to have a colonoscopy.“Any barrier to access would ensure that some patients would opt out of the procedure,” says Thompson. Read the rest

William S. Consovoy, the attorney hired by Trump last Friday, told Treasury it should not turn over Trump's tax returns until it receives a legal opinion from DoJ.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) is fighting inmate Calvin Weaver's 10-year request for a blanket that doesn't cause "itching, open sores, and sleep deprivation resulting in hypertension and anxiety" according to a lawsuit Weaver has filed against the TDCJ.From Reason:Weaver's suit named five people as defendants: the warden of his unit, a unit supervisor, the executive director of the TDCJ, a medical doctor employed by the agency, and a manager at a prison unit medical practice. The warden and the executive director cannot be sued, Hoyt says, but the three other employees can, because Weaver claims they knew he had complained about his medical reaction to the blanket yet either ignored him or denied his requests for relief."Under the liberal reading required on a motion to dismiss, these allegations are sufficient to state a claim for deliberate indifference to Weaver's serious medical needs," Hoyt writes. Weaver cannot sue them for monetary damage in their official capacities as TDCJ employees, though he can seek damages "in their individual capacities."It's hard to understand why prison officials would be so opposed to granting a man's simple request of a cotton blanketImage: By אשדחי - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link Read the rest

Comedian Alyssa Limperis did a great job impersonating AOC. Check out her Twitter feed for other funny videos.a clip of @AOC meeting @tanfrance & the @QueerEye boys pic.twitter.com/3A2t9QB9JK— Alyssa Limperis (@alyssalimp) April 4, 2019 Read the rest

Dave Rupert put together a gallery of voice chat app screenshots, to show how the mute indicators are inconsistent across applications. For example, the mute indicators for the iPhone and Slack are almost opposite from each other. (See above).He writes:I hope you, dear reader, know by now that it’s a best practice to mute yourself if you’re not talking. Normally I’d say non-muters deserve public shaming but looking at this chart, it’s maybe not the non-muters’ fault. As you can see, the active mic indicator varies wildly. Sometimes it’s a microphone with a background fill, sometimes it’s a microphone with a slash, sometimes muted is treated as a background fill with a slash, sometimes the icon fills up with green when talking. It’s all even more confusing if someone is sharing out their screen and your entire UI disappears. Read the rest

Hornbach, a German home-improvement chain made a TV commercial that shows a Japanese woman buying a bag of dirty clothes worn by white men from a vending machine, then becoming aroused when she sniffs the clothing. Asian Boss hit the streets of Tokyo to see what people there think of the ad. Read the rest

Staples has unveiled a new logo, pictured above (with the old logo beneath it).Notice what's wrong with it? The store is called Staples but the logo depicts only a single staple. The old "L" hinted at the physical object, to be sure, but so abstractly it wasn't a problem. The fix:Now we can sleep at night. You're welcome! Read the rest

Correctly blaming her parents for the smoking wreck that is her fashion and beauty career, Olivia Jade Giannuli has also physically withdrawn from the college she didn't want to attend anyway.It is like when Will wanted Adidas and got Zips.US:“Olivia blames her mom and dad for this scandal and for the downfall of her career.”Loughlin, 54, and Mossimo, 55, were arrested in March after they allegedly “agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team — despite the fact that they did not participate in crew — thereby facilitating their admission to USC.” They were each released on a $1 million bond.While Olivia is technically still enrolled in the University of Southern California, a separate source told Us she “has withdrawn physically” due to fear of bullying.Remember, Olivia! If they are laughing you don't need'em, and they aren't good friends! Read the rest

Last month, Myspace sheepishly admitted that it had "accidentally" deleted 12 years' worth of its users' music during a server migration; now the Internet Archive has revealed that they were able to preserve two years' worth of that music, 50,000 tracks from 2008-2010, downloaded by an anonymous group of academics for research purposes.The tracks are online in a special collection at the Archive called The Myspace Dragon Hoard (2008-2010), whose accompanying browser, Hobbit, mimics the original Myspace music player.The Internet Archive uploaded the cache and dubbed it “The Myspace Dragon Hoard (2008-2010).” You can browse the music using an interface called Hobbit, which looks much like MySpace’s old music player. However, it can be a bit slow loading up the music, so be patient. It is still undergoing optimizations and will eventually be open source.Internet Archive recovers half a million 'lost' MySpace songs [Cal Jeffrey/Techspot] Read the rest

If you run most paint-spatters through OCR software, it will generate valid perl programs.The discovery -- documented in this SIGBOVIK white-paper by Colin McMillen and Tim Toady -- came about as the result of Jake Archibald's snarky twitter response to Adrienne Porter Felt, who said that she didn't want her kid to learn to program, she wanted him to "smear paint on the walls" -- to which Archibald answered "but is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?"McMillen and Toady set out to answer the question and found that 93% of all paint spatters OCR to valid perl programs.While the results presented in this paper are novel and important, they only begin to break ground on what could be a very fruitful area of further research.The dataset used in this paper is a relatively small dataset of only 100 paint-splatter images. It would be good to confirm these results on a larger dataset, and with a greater variety of images. Perhaps next time ImageNet won’t be down.We also noticed far too late that while the original question referred to paint smears, we elected to search Pinterest only for paint splatters. It is unclear at whether these results would change significantly for paint splatters vs. paint smears.Similarly, our choice to select images from Pinterest ensured that they were reasonably high-quality paint splatters, as at least one Pinterest user had chosen to “pin” that image as something worth saving for later. It would be worth investigating whether amateurish, lower-quality paint splatters — such as those produced by a young child — are less likely to be parsed as valid Perl programs. Read the rest

This week, thousands of googlers and many others (including me) signed an open letter objecting to the inclusion of Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James on the company's Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), on the the grounds that James had frequently evinced viciously transphobic, racist, anti-immigrant sentiments. ATEAC barely survived a week: the googler protests and high-profile resignations from the board have convinced the company to shut it down. Here's the company's statement on the shutdown: "It’s become clear that in the current environment, ATEAC can’t function as we wanted. So we’re ending the council and going back to the drawing board. We’ll continue to be responsible in our work on the important issues that AI raises, and will find different ways of getting outside opinions on these topics."Much more compelling is the statement of board member and Oxford philosophy of ethics professor Luciano Floridi: "Asking for [Kay Coles James’s] advice was a grave error and sends the wrong message about the nature and goals of the whole ATEAC project. From an ethical perspective, Google has misjudged what it means to have representative views in a broader context. If Mrs. Coles James does not resign, as I hope she does, and if Google does not remove her, as I have personally recommended, the question becomes: what is the right moral stance to take in view of this grave error?"Google’s next stab at external accountability will need to solve those issues. A better board might meet more often and have more stakeholders engaged. Read the rest

One of my mottoes is that the important thing about tech isn't what it does, it's who it does it to, and who it does it for; this is especially important in discussions of "smart city" tech, which can easily be turned to systems of population-scale surveillance, control and oppression.China's imprisonment of up to 1,000,000 ethnic minority Muslims in concentration camps in Xinjiang province is well known, but less-well-understood are the systems of oppressive technology that are being deployed outside of these prison camps: mandatory mobile malware that spies on every step you take, used in combination with DNA-level surveillance and other tools.In a chilling, beautifully reported multimedia package, the New York Times's Chris Buckley, Paul Mozur and Austin Ramzy paint a picture of life in Kashgar, a historically significant city in Xinjiang where the majority of the population are drawn from predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities: Uighurs, Kazakhs, and Tajiks.If Xinjiang is the living lab for oppressive technologies that China eventually rolls out across the whole country (and then sells to belt-and-road client states around Asia and Africa), then Kashgar is the lab for trialing new oppressive techniques before they are rolled out across Xinjiang.The report paints a picture of a city forested with CCTVs, indoors and outdoors, where checkpoints every 100m are used to verify facial recognition biometrics and to spot-check that each person is running mandatory state malware on their mobile devices. The checkpoints are often staffed by Uighurs who are complicit in the oppression of their neighbors -- there just aren't enough Han Chinese in Xinjiang to accomplish this kind of artisanal, hand-crafted retail oppression. Read the rest

Behold the music of Lombolo (Spotify); the song is titled Bärsärkagång and features an unusual combination of death metal and folk flute. [via]I used to make death metal, but after feeling stuck in a rut, I started a band with my flutist friend, making metal mixed with Scandinavian folk music. This is our first song. Read the rest

Posted this morning, this stands among the more spectacular can openings to occur beneath the 11-foot-8 bridge at Gregson and Main.In the evening hours of March 28, a semi truck hit the 11foot8 bridge in quite a spectacular fashion, at pretty high speed scattering debris across the intersection. Luckily no one was injured! The busted semi trailer was wedged under the trestle for over 90 Minutes before the recovery operators were able to winch it out of the canopener's "jaws" ... the beast has been fed! This was crash # 145 since April 2008 ... and probably the biggest mess we have seen here, yet. Read the rest

An oddly epic tweet thread by a reporter who stakes out Julian Assange of Wikileaks for promised news, and nothing happens.

The annual space party 'Yuri's Night' happens in L.A. on Saturday April 6th, and then in a bunch more cities the following weekend: Washington, DC, Seattle, Colorado Springs, Kennedy Space Center on the Florida Space Coast, April 12-13, 2019.This year, JPL is bringing the amazing JPL Europa Lander model (shown here) for Los Angeles Yuri's Night attendees to marvel at and imagine what it would be like out in orbit around Jupiter. How great is that? Plus space celebs and science fiction stars, astronauts, science personalities, and fellow fans of spaceflight. LA.YURISNIGHT.NET has tickets, and they start at $75 and include a ton of fabulousness.Here's what's going down, in celebration of the first human being who managed to go up into space:• L.A. Sat April 6: Virgin Galactic's 1st pilot astronaut Mark Stucky, Bill Nye and 6 time shuttle astronaut Story Musgrave kick off an epic night of VR, DJs and fun under Space Shuttle Endeavour. (Yuri's Night founder Loretta Whitesides will be there)• Seattle Fri April 12: The Museum of Flight welcomes the Apollo 11 Command Module to Seattle with a massive grand opening party in partnership with Noise Complaint. (Yuri's Night founder Loretta Whitesides will also be there)• Washington DC Fri April 12: The Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum will again be hosting a mind-blowing Yuri's Night in partnership with Brightest Young Things.• Kennedy Space Center Sat April 13: Private space explorer, 2nd gen astronaut and legendary video game designer Richard Garriott will talk about his time on ISS followed by DJ dance party under Space Shuttle Atlantis. Read the rest

The CBC's Ryan B Patrick interviewed me about my latest sf book, Radicalized and how the four novellas in it relate to struggles for liberation, racial justice, technological self-determination, inequality and a sustainable climate plan.Some of the stories in Radicalized are darker than the ones I've written in the past decade, reflecting my own anxiety (I call this my "Trump derangement syndrome book," and the stories were written to master my own concerns as the darkest timeline has only gotten worse), but I don't think they're "pessimistic" stories so much as they are warnings and allegories, cautionary tales about the risks of inaction and passivity.When you're writing fiction in 2019, is it hard to not be cynical or jaded? "Being cynical or jaded is another way of being pessimistic. I decided a few years ago to reorient the way I see the world — but not around pessimism or optimism. Instead, I like to think human beings have agency in the world and that the future changes based on what we do."There are stories in this book that have unhappy endings. But there are also stories of people who, when confronted with impossible circumstances, without being able to see a clear path from A to Z, can nevertheless see a path from A to B. They take it on faith that if can get as high as B, that one might be able to see a way to get up to C and D — and so on and so forth. Read the rest

Sharon Ringel and Angela Woodall have published a comprehensive, in-depth look at the state of news archiving in the digital age, working under the auspices of the Tow Center at the Columbia Journalism Review; it's an excellent, well-researched report and paints an alarming picture of the erosion of the institutional memories of news organizations.Ringel and Woodall find that news organizations are cavalier, even negligent, about archiving their news, and contrast this with the heyday of newspapers where dedicated librarians staffed a "morgue" of carefully clipped and cross-referenced print articles. By contrast, today's news organizations rely primarily on their CMSes, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, reporters' personal Google Docs accounts, and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to store their articles, social media posts, and other materials. Although the Internet Archive has done yeoman service in this field, Ringel and Woodall are rightfully skeptical that a single institution should be entrusted with being the sole entity recording our collective history -- not least because the Archive only saves pages it discovers in its crawls, and cannot traverse paywalls (let alone recording alternative headlines, associated social media posts, comments, personalized layouts shown to logged-in users, etc). The authors document some nascent archiving tools that news institutions can use to move these functions back in house, and praise the New York Times's efforts to do so, but point out that there's not much movement on this front.For all that the report covers a lot of ground -- it's 17,000 words long! Read the rest

Australia leads "developed democracies" in the adoption of poorly thought-through, dangerous tech laws, thanks to its ban on working cryptography, rushed through in late 2018; now, with no debate or consultation, the Australian Parliament has passed a law that gives tech companies one hour to remove "violent materials" from their platforms with penalties for noncompliance of up to 10% of annual global turnover.The law was rushed through in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings, after which the platforms completely failed to enforce their own policies, allowing millions of reposts of the footage streamed by the killer. This is part of a culture of negligence and willful blindness by the platforms, whose unwillingness to confront these matters is the stuff of legend and set them up for this outcome.But if we think the platforms suck at moderation now, just wait until they can lose 10% of gross revenues for not having a sufficiently itchy trigger finger when it comes to censorship. We've already seen how platforms routinely block and censor the victims of crimes who are seeking justice. We've also seen that trolls are happy to expend the time and energy needed to master the policies of platforms and skate right up to them, while goading their opponents into crossing them so they can get them censored.The EU was hoping to pass nearly identical legislation but failed to do so in the last Parliament, largely because its focus shifted to mandatory copyright filters, but the passage of the Australian law is sure to influence the European debate after May's EU elections. Read the rest

Katt Gu and Suji Yan's Anti 996 License allows developers to prohibit the use of their code by companies that do not adhere to basic labor practices (996 is a Chinese software industry term for shops where coders work 9AM-9PM, 6 days/week).Under the license terms, the software can only be used by companies that adhere to the most restrictive of International Labour Organization standards and the labor laws in every country where the company has offices (ILO guidelines safeguard the right to unionize, among other important labor rules).The license was inspired by China's burgeoning anti-996 movement, though there are many US firms that fall short of the terms set out by the Anti 996 License.75 projects on Github have adopted the license since it was created last weekend, and a crowdsourced blacklist enumerates the companies whose practices mean that they cannot use anti-996-licensed code, including Alibaba, and Bytedance, the parent company for the popular kids' social media app Tiktok.The anti-996 license may violate the Open Source Initiative's canonical Open Source Definition, which excludes licenses that limit re-use "in a specific field of endeavor."It's a fascinating addition to the chaotic tumult roiling the open source licensing world.Evan You, the Chinese-American developer behind the open source programming framework Vue, says he's "empathetic to developers that have to deal with 996" but that Vue won't adopt the Anti-996 License."I believe open source software should be free for all, and adding discriminatory clauses is against the very spirit of free software," You says. Read the rest

Writing new software licenses is a seemingly irresistible vice in the free and open source world, and the decades since the first GPL have been filled with bitter disputes and splits over licensing, with new licenses proliferating for motives both noble and base.Benjamin "Mako" Hill's seminal Libreplanet keynote described how "open source" had mutated to eliminate software freedom, allowing large companies (especially those with cloud-based products) to hoard all the benefits of openness without giving anything back to the world. Some licenses have tried to halt and reverse this process, but with limited success.At the same time, the domination of the tech industry by a handful of monopolistic giants has made it harder than ever to run a profitable business, leading many businesses to introduce elements of their products that are proprietary.This "open-ish" model is hugely controversial and often lands with giant companies on the side of "pure open" against small challengers who attempt to close off parts of their tools -- because giant companies can used cloud-based deployment to hoard their improvements, but benefit when the rest of the toolchain is open and receiving contributions from all the other users.Eric Anderson's table of open-ish tools and review of 2018's licensing controversies are an important map of where openness stands today, and, if you read between the lines, you can also get a sense of where software freedom is endangered.Speaking about the new normal of 3-tier products, Elastic CEO Shay Banon summed it up, saying “We now have three tiers: open source and free, free but under a proprietary license, and paid under a proprietary license.”You see the same high-level licensing structure in Confluent and Redis Labs’ offerings as well. Read the rest

Elton John, then around 23, takes a TV crew through the structure of "Tiny Dancer," a song with lyrics written by John's longtime writing partner Bernie Taupin about his girlfriend (later wife) Maxine Feibelman who at the time was the Elton John Band's seamstress.(via Laughing Squid) Read the rest

Unsurprisingly it sounds like public charter schools are big anti-vaxx magnets.Tonic:At two public charter schools in the Sonoma wine country town of Sebastopol, more than half the kindergartners received medical exemptions from state-required vaccines last school year. The cities of Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Nevada City, Arcata, and Sausalito all had schools in which more than 30 percent of the kindergartners had been granted such medical exemptions.Nearly three years ago, with infectious disease rates ticking up, California enacted a fiercely contested law barring parents from citing personal or religious beliefs to avoid vaccinating their children. Children could be exempted only on medical grounds, if the shots were harmful to health.Yet today, many of the schools that had the highest rates of unvaccinated students before the new measure continue to hold that alarming distinction. That’s because parents have found end runs around the new law requiring vaccinations. And they have done so, often, with the cooperation of doctors—some not even pediatricians. One prolific exemption provider is a psychiatrist who runs an anti-aging clinic.Doctors in California have broad authority to grant medical exemptions to vaccination, and to decide the grounds for doing so. Some are wielding that power liberally and sometimes for cash: signing dozens—even hundreds—of exemptions for children in far-off communities.“It’s sort of the Hail Mary of the vaccine refusers who are trying to circumvent SB 277,” the California Senate bill signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in 2015, says Brian Prystowsky, a Santa Rosa pediatrician. Read the rest

Lori Lightfoot is Chicago's newest mayor, succeeding the notoriously corrupt establishment figure Rahm Emmanuel (who quit after two terms, triggering a race), and beating out Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who had been anointed by Chicago's legendarily unassailable Democratic machine as the next mayor.Lightfoot -- who is Black, queer, and a woman -- ran her campaign as an anti-incumbency, anti-corruption, anti-machine campaign, and caught the mood of the voters, winning in all 50 wards, despite having been viewed as a longshot/lost cause when she kicked it off last year.Unofficial totals give Lightfoot 74% of the popular vote.Two other Black people served as mayor of Chicago; one other woman has held the office. Lightfoot is the first openly gay mayor in Chicago history.Lightfoot also campaigned on affordable housing, police accountability, and increased public services.The prime example became Lightfoot and Preckwinkle’s disagreement over so-called aldermanic privilege or prerogative, in which aldermen have veto power of zoning and permitting decisions in their wards. That power played a key role in the charge against Burke, who has been accused of holding up a permit for the owner of major fast-food chain in his ward in exchange for the business owner giving property tax appeals business to Burke’s law firm.Lightfoot called for an end to aldermanic privilege while Preckwinkle, a former alderman, defended the practice and said instead council members shouldn’t be allowed to hold outside jobs."There is no doubt in my mind that in the coming days, and weeks at the most, we're going to see a series of indictments from my former colleagues at the U.S. Read the rest

The Instant Pot Ultra 6 Quart electric pressure cooker is on sale at a low price today. I use my Instant Pot a few times a week or more (chili, yogurt, soup, stews, borscht). You can find tons of cookbooks with recipes designed for this versatile cooker. One thing a make a lot is chicken curry. I cut up two packs of chicken thighs (10 thighs), add them to a quart of chicken stock, a bag of baby carrots, a can of coconut cream, a tablespoon of salt, a lot of crushed garlic, a tablespoon of curry powder, and a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. The meal takes 30 minutes to make. Read the rest

As Easter approaches, my mind naturally goes to pencil erasers, as I'm sure yours does, too. Why didn't anyone think of this before?A limited edition, bean to bar craft chocolate Easter egg, handmade by the wonderful Pump Street Chocolate in Suffolk. Each dark milk chocolate egg houses 10 new & vintage erasers. With 150g+ of chocolate, measuring 17cm in length, this egg will satisfy your appetite & your desk. Image: Present and Correct Read the rest

A reporter for Fox & Friends went to a diner in Missouri to ask patrons about the New Green Deal. He found a guy in favor of the New Green Deal who presented his ideas so well that the only thing the reporter could do was respond nonsensically with "but how are we gonna pay for it" over and over again.Fox's Todd Piro seems genuinely confused by a diner guest supporting higher taxes to fund the Green New Deal and fight climate change. pic.twitter.com/aX38cGpwMO— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) April 4, 2019Image: Twitter Read the rest

The world's law enforcement agencies have a terrible blind spot when it comes to far-right, white supremacist terror groups, treating them as unimportant lone wolves despite their prolific and bloody acts of violence.The pro-Brexit side in the UK has more than its share of murderous right-wing thugs, who were critical to the passage of the initial Brexit vote, going so far as to stab an anti-Brexit MP to death for her political views.Now, with the future of Brexit in doubt, there's reason to worry that these terror cells will exact vengeance on the UK. Yesterday, a video surfaced of British soldiers using a picture of Jeremy Corbyn -- who could well be the next Prime Minister of Britain -- for target practice. On the same day, the trial of a neo-Nazi who had plotted the murder of an anti-Brexit MEP concluded.Other soldiers have been recorded cheering for Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defense League, a far-right hate group, who is now an advisor to the UKIP, the political party that led the pro-Brexit movement. Priti Patel, a Tory MP, has called Corbyn "a man who sides with terrorists and socialist dictators." The right-wing terrorist Darren Osborne -- who murdered a man when he drove his van onto the pavement in front of the Houses of Parliament -- has said that one of his goals was to murder Corbyn, saying "it would be one less terrorist [on] our streets."Labour MP Rosie Cooper gave a speech in the House of Commons about the neo-Nazis who were caught planning her assassination over her anti-Brexit stance "to send a message to the state, to send a message to this place" (the plot was not foiled by the police, but rather by the anti-fascist campaigning group Hope Not Hate, who infiltrated the terror cell and exposed its plans). Read the rest

As part of the effort to rescue the 12 boys and their soccer coach from Tham Luang cave last year in Thailand, rescue divers gave the boys "unspecified doses of ketamine," according to CNN.Via CNN:According to details of the rescue released in a medical journal Thursday, the boys were given unspecified doses of ketamine, also known as party drug Special K, by the rescue divers as they were taken out of Tham Luang cave.Reports at the time had suggested that the children, who had been trapped for two weeks, were sedated during the operation, but officials gave few details."We had to use the means that could keep the children not to be panicky while we were carrying them out," Thai Navy SEAL commander Rear Adm. Arpakorn Yookongkaew told CNN shortly after the rescue. "Most importantly, they are alive and safe." ...The medics said ketamine was a good choice to give to the boys, given the risk of hypothermia, as ketamine impairs shivering and is associated with smaller drops in core body temperature.Image: by Capt. Jessica Tait/Kadena Air Base Read the rest

Incredible #pictures of giant multi-coloured squirrels set #social media alight!#Photographer Kaushik Vijayan snapped the animals in their native habit. The Malabar Giant #squirrel - double the size of their grey relatives - live deep in the #forests of #India. pic.twitter.com/BLFRZf6VHy— SWNS.com (@SWNS) April 2, 2019Photographer Kaushik Vijayan snapped beautiful shots of rainbow-colored Malabar giant squirrels in the Pathanamthitta District in Kerala, Southern India. "I felt so amazed by how drop-dead gorgeous it looked," he told CBS News. While University of Miami evolutionary biologist Dana Krempels was quoted in National Geographic suggesting that someone may have jacked up the color intensity of the photos, the squirrels do have far-out purple coloring. From Nat Geo:The squirrel’s purple patterns likely play some sort of role as camouflage. This is because the broadleaf forests these squirrels inhabit create a “mosaic of sun flecks and dark, shaded areas"—not unlike the rodents’ markings, (according to University of Arizona conservation biologist John Koprowski, author of Squirrels of the World.) Read the rest

It is raining trash in the suburbs of Seattle. Or, rather, bald eagles – around 200 of them – are dropping trash into people's yards every day, and the suburbanites are not happy.The trash – including a blood-filled biohazard container that landed in one lucky resident's yard – is coming from a nearby landfill that takes in two tons of fresh trash a day. The bald eagles pick out the juicy morsels of food found in the landfill, and then discard the junk that they don't want in the nearby neighborhoods. According to Popular Mechanics:The main issue is the open-air landfill in the area, the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill in King County. That landfill was supposed to have been closed years ago, but a proposed expansion has kept it open. In fact, that expansion is meant to keep the landfill exposed until 2040...Many of the residents want the county to cancel the proposed expansion and finally close the landfill. In the meantime the residents are hoping to implement some sort of anti-eagle measures at the landfill, although it’s not entirely clear what those would look like.There’s something almost poetic about the American national bird reminding people that the trash they throw in a landfill doesn’t simply disappear. In a way, these birds are a visceral demonstration of the usually hidden consequences of extreme consumption. We create too much trash, and that much trash creates consequences. That could mean eagles dropping biohazard containers in your front lawn, or it could mean nearly 20 tons of plastic washing up on one of the most remote beaches in the world. Read the rest

The "Mystery Man" scene from Lost Highway (embedded above) has become a YouTube classic, a bite-size précis of everything distinctive about the director's unique style and tone, that weird unnerving place between terrifying and cheesy. Here's Sean T. Collins on "David Lynch's scariest scene"Our hero’s an avant-jazz saxophonist; it’s possible this isn’t the oddest person he’s met this week. Nevermind that he’s had nightmares about his wife Renee, whom he can no longer satisfy sexually, in which she had this man’s face. Nevermind that this guy is saying they met at Fred and Renee’s austere house, where an unknown intruder has been breaking in to film them as they sleep and then dropping off the videotapes at their front door. Nevermind that all the music and party chatter has faded out and all we hear beneath the dialogue is the proverbial ominous whoosh. We may know we’re watching something frightening, but Fred doesn’t, not yet.“As a matter of fact,” the Mystery Man says regarding the house, “I’m there right now.”Blake's perverse intensity gets instantly under your skin even if you think it's silly, which it is. In the real world, dangerous people are often ridiculous and I wonder if this is why David Lynch let Robert Blake design the character and do his own makeup.See also Collins' article about monumental horror images. Read the rest

It is now damn near impossible to screw up applying a glass screen protector to your phone.My daughter has slowed down on her previous monthly shatter of a glass screen protector. I was paying $9 for 2 packs of these shields, but now, lo-and-behold! $6 for 3!Compared to the $25 for 1 "brand name' screen protector at Best Buy, I order these every time.Omoton also supplies a frame to guide your application of the sticky glass sheet to your screen. Using said brace my 11-year old daughter achieved dead-on-balls-accurate screen protection results.These are for the iPhone XR -- please make sure to find the right screen for your phone.OMOTON Tempered Glass Screen Protector Compatible with Apple iPhone XR 6.1 inch [3 Pack] via Amazon Read the rest

Cats recognize the sounds of their names within sentences, report researchers in Japan, though it's not clear they understand that they are being named.The team chose not to attempt to test cats’ abilities by asking them to retrieve named objects they had previously been shown – as is often used in experiments with dogs. The authors said: “the training of cats to perform on command would require a lot of effort and time.”Instead they took a different approach, playing a voice saying four words followed by the name of the cat – all in the same intonation – and noting the animal’s responses and movements through video recordings made in the cat’s normal surroundings.The results showed that cats rarely did more than twitch an ear or move their heads in response to the voices, with very few so much as moving their tail, let alone meowing. Read the rest

In the UK, the routine vaccination of young girls has virtually eradicated new cases of cervical cancer associated with human papilomavirus.Researchers said the vaccine has nearly wiped out cases of cervical pre-cancer in young women since an immunisation programme was introduced 10 years ago. They found the vaccine had led to a 90% cut in pre-cancerous cells. And they said the effects of the programme had "exceeded expectations". Over the last decade, schoolgirls across the UK have routinely received the HPV vaccine when they are 12 or 13. Boys are now vaccinated too. HPV vaccination is very controversial in America and only a few states require it. Studies show that getting the vaccine doesn't increase risky sexual behavior among teens, but to be discussing it that way in the first place accepts a frame of reference that can never allow progress. Loudly, the arguments are about whether "risky sex" is worse than cancer. Quietly, the arguments are about God punishing those who have sex before marriage. To participate in debates like this is to instantly lose them. Read the rest

I am on keto! So videos that offer marginal variations on the theme of "cook bacon" are of great interest to me. This one was a lot of fun, but I'm really not sure I learned anything.(Spoiler: bake it.) Read the rest