Boing Boing

Rebecca Tickle is a PhD student in the Faculty of Science at the University of Nottingham, explains what big data is. She uses a handy "Five Vees of Big Data Mnemonic" -- volume, velocity, variety, value, and veracity. She mentions that other people have come up with the "Seven Vees of Big Data Mnemonic" and even the "Ten Vees of Big Data Mnemonic."Image: YouTube Read the rest

No acchiappaclick here: you're getting exactly what the headline promises. Weasels are a symbol of sexuality in portraiture and there are so very many to choose from.Dr Chelsea Nichols:Weasels sometimes also appear in Renaissance paintings where the woman is already successfully pregnant. In these cases, the weasel can better be understood to represent the hope for safe childbirth.Some believed that wearing weasel fur directly on the skin could also help ease childbirth. Letters between Christina de Medici, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and her daughter Catherine, for instance, show that the Dowager sent her daughter an ermine or marten belt when Catherine was believed to be pregnant, claiming that it had helped her during the birth of her children. Read the rest

Bitfont Maker 2 is a free online app that lets you design and save pixelated low-fi fonts. You can import TTFs too, if you just want to edit an existing one. Be sure to check out the gallery. Read the rest

Behold "Karen of the Boreal Valley," whose adventures are made perfect by epic music played so loud it clips like a VHS sword-and-sandals movie at maximum volume on the cheapest television set of 1982. Read the rest

The giant talking pitcher of Kool Aid was always absurd to me. Glad to see he is still out there "Oh YEAH!!!"ing. I never understood why it was acceptable to make fun of group suicide by using "drinking the Kool Aid" as a business term."Thinking outside the box" refers to a casket. Read the rest

Just seeing this FunkoPop of Jim Henson made me want to cry.Funko POP! Icons: Henson - Jim Henson with Kermit via Amazon Read the rest

Fortnite is constantly 'changing the meta' by altering weapon characteristics, adding or simply dropping weapons from the available arsenal. The new Tactical Assault Rifle takes the game a step further away from Close-Quarters-Combat and tries to open up the mid-range.The new Combat Shotguns, a faster firing, longer-range shotgun that can not 1-hit kill is joined by the Tactical Assault Rifle. With the introducion of the Combat Shotgun, Fortnite vaulted the extremely popular Pump Shotgun, formerly considered a must carry by most players. Similarly, the P90 heavy submachine guns have been removed.The old 'meta' for Fortnite was to hit someone with a pump shotgun and finish them with a spray of bullets from the SMG. In CQC this combo was so hard to counter that Fortnite just eliminated this style of play.The TAR is an accurate, fast firing and hard-hitting AR that uses SMG ammo! Players on PC, PS4 and Xbox were all loving it as we played last night. I was on my Nintendo Switch and could hardly hit a thing. I was effective with the Combat Shotgun, however. Read the rest

Season two of Future Man continues the hilarity while focusing more on your favorite characters.The first season of Future Man was a ridiculous comedy designed to feed lovers of science fiction nostalgia. I had hopes that Season 2 would be as good, but recent trends in television had me doubting. I enjoyed the first season so much I was actually reluctant to put this show on. I had nothing to worry about. Season 2 is wonderful.The first season of Future Man told the story of Josh Futterman saving the future. Josh and his allies from the Future, Tiger and Wolf, commit a heinous act of terrorism to destroy that which turns the future into an awful dystopia. Season 2 picks up where they left off with individual episodes focused on each character. The deep character building sets up a season more focused on their decision-making and growth, rather than simply stopping the evil from taking over the future.Insanely absurd takes on time travel, paradox, and gourmet cooking punctuate the storyline. Future Man continues to take irreverent pokes at favorite science fiction and fantasy themes, tropes and actual stories. Where season 1 seemed to be running a race to drop silly references to old movies, season 2 tries to be more subtle but no less dedicated.The actors work just as hard as the writers on Future Man. Josh Hutcherson, Eliza Coupe and Derek Wilson all shine. Each masterfully plays various versions of their characters, frequently playing off themselves, like Patty Duke talking to her 'cousin.'The story is wonderful, the jokes come fast and hilarious, and the actors deserve awards. Read the rest

Whether you're writing company memos or meticulously crafting a novel, everybody needs an editor - and we're not just talking about a spell checker. Writing software has gotten pretty intuitive, to the point where programs like ProWritingAid can guard against more than just silly mistakes. They can actually improve your style.Designed as the first line of defense between professional authors and their editors, ProWritingAid can be a boon for bloggers, copy editors, entrepreneurs or anybody who needs to communicate more effectively. With a click, it can comb through your manuscript and flag a range of issues, including excessive adverb use, vague sentence construction, and even passive language. What's more, it will suggest effective solutions to these common style snags with a context-sensitive thesaurus and dictionary, allowing you to learn from your mistakes. (And yes, it corrects spelling and grammar too.)You can pick up a two-year subscription to ProWritingAid Premium for $44.99, a full 50% off the original MSRP. Read the rest

Back in 2015, the incomparable Ian McDonald (previously) published Luna: New Moon, a kind of cross between Dallas and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, with warring clans scheme and fighting on a libertopian lunar colony where the only law is private contracts and you're charged for the very air you breathe; McDonald raised the stakes to impossible heights with the 2017 sequel Luna: Wolf Moon, and now, with the final volume, Luna: Moon Rising, McDonald proves that he despite the wild gyrations of his massive cast of characters and their intricate schemes, he never lost control.Luna: Moon Rising is a practically perfect concluding volume, and not just because it ties off all the loose ends -- before it does that, it brings the characters to places that are both utterly unexpected (in the moment) but totally justifiable (in hindsight).McDonald's richly imagined Lunar culture and interplanetary poleconomy make for a superb backdrop for literally dozens of richly realized human dramas, and it's hard to say which is more fascinating. McDonald's wildly imaginative worldbuilding (present since his debut novel, the utterly wonderful standout Out On Blue Six) and his ability to spin out intrigues are both in full flight in this final volume.CBS has the rights to adapt the series, and no wonder. McDonald's got the zeitgeisty magic with an intergenerational space opera that turns on a plan to make humans obsolete and cover the surface of the Moon with solar-powered cryptocurrency mining rigs, with set pieces as grand as any that Bollywood or George Lucas ever imagined, from hand to hand combat in a ring to massed armies battling on the surface of the Moon. Read the rest

On May 9, the whistleblower Chelsea Manning was released from jail after serving 62 days for refusing to testify before a Grand Jury about Wikileaks; she was released because the jury was dissolved.Now, a new jury has been impaneled and Manning has been summoned to testify before it again. She will appear before it tomorrow. Manning has announced that she will not testify before this jury, and as a result, she is facing likely re-imprisonment. Manning's supporters are asking the public to email the prosecutors of the Eastern District of Virginia to request that they rescind her subpoena. Below is a sample letter. If you are willing to support Manning, please use it as a template to write your own letter to the EDVA.To: usavae.usattys@usdoj.govcc:joshua.stueve@usdoj.govJoshua Stueve, Director of Communications for the Eastern District of VirginiaAlexandria DOJ office: (703) 299-3700 Subject: Rescind Chelsea Manning’s SubpoenaDear (USAO EDVA)I am aware that you have subpoenaed Chelsea Manning for a second time to appear before a grand jury. After Chelsea refused to testify before a previous grand jury, you had her held in civil contempt and jailed her for 63 days. (28 days of her 63 days were in solitary confinement conditions.) I urge you to drop the subpoena and decline to pursue any further civil contempt findings against Chelsea. Chelsea testified at length during her court martial and at least one target of the grand jury has been indicted. There is no need for her testimony. Given that Chelsea has already served an unprecedented prison sentence for disclosing information to the media, at times under conditions criticized by international human rights experts, further pursuit of her is excessive and cruel. Read the rest

In her latest detailed policy proposal, would-be 202 Democratic presidential nominee Elizabeth Warren sets out a Green New Deal for the US military, whose own policy analysts have identified climate change and energy independence as serious risks to US security.The Pentagon is America's leading energy consumer (unsurprising, given the size and scale of the US military, which dwarfs every other country's military in both absolute and per-capita terms). Warren reasons that any expense incurred to reduce the military's domestic and foreign carbon footprint will more than pay for itself in savings realized by not having to endure floods and other extreme weather events, and by averting the global conflicts generated by climate change and its force-multipliers (famine, disease, etc).And I’ll invest billions of dollars into a new, ten-year research and development program at the Defense Department focused on microgrids and advanced energy storage. The Pentagon has been responsible for countless technological breakthroughs, working together with colleges and universities, our national labs, local governments, and private companies. Let’s put that effort toward new clean energy solutions that will improve our security by allowing military bases to remain operational when traditional power sources fail, and save taxpayers money through lower overall energy consumption.Finally, I want the Pentagon to produce an annual report evaluating the climate vulnerability of every U.S. military base at home and abroad, using real scientific methodology, so that we can make more informed plans moving forward.We don’t have to choose between a green military and an effective one. Read the rest

'Mythbusters' TV star Adam Savage's first book is out. 'Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It' is a wonderful read, in which Adam shares his own personal guidelines for creativity, from inspiration to execution.In 'Every Tool's a Hammer,' the sci-tech TV host and longtime Boing Boing pal encourages each of us to explore, build, make, invent, and fully enjoy the thrill of being alive and capable of creating. It's a wonderful book, and couldn't come out at a more perfect time. We've got a lot of building and creating to do.It's his first book, and he's out on his book tour right now. Info on the book and the tour at adamsavagebook.com.From Adam and his team, about the book:"Every Tool’s a Hammer is a chronicle of my life as a maker. It’s an exploration of making and of my own productive obsessions, but it’s also a permission slip of sorts from me to you. Permission to grab hold of the things you’re interested in, that fascinate you, and to dive deeper into them to see where they lead you.Through stories from forty-plus years of making and molding, building and break­ing, along with the lessons I learned along the way, this book is meant to be a toolbox of problem solving, complete with a shop’s worth of notes on the tools, techniques, and materials that I use most often. Things like——don’t wait until everything is perfect to begin a project, and if you don’t have the exact right tool for a task, just use whatever’s handy; Increase Your Loose Tolerance—making is messy and filled with screwups, but that’s okay, as creativity is a path with twists and turns and not a straight line to be found; Use More Cooling Fluid—it prolongs the life of blades and bits, and it prevents tool failure, but beyond that it’s a reminder to slow down and reduce the fric­tion in your work and relationships; Screw Before You Glue—mechanical fasteners allow you to change and modify a project while glue is forever but sometimes you just need the right glue, so I dig into which ones will do the job with the least harm and best effects. Read the rest

Naked Captalism is one of my favorite sites, both for its radical political commentary and the vigorous discussions that follow from it; now, John Siman has posted a review of my latest book, Radicalized, which collects four intensely political science fiction stories about our present day and near future. Siman's review frames Radicalized as a critique of neoliberalism, which is just right: from the story Unauthorized Bread, about the use of DRM-locked appliances to make the lives of refugees in subsidized housing miserable, to the title story Radicalized, which supposes that men who watch their loved ones die slowly after they're denied treatment by their insurers might start murdering health insurance execs and the politicians they've purchased, and that if the men doing the killing are white and respectable enough, America might not immediately brand them as terrorists. And the proof of the devil’s active existence in the Neoliberal USA is in the details, which Doctorow gets right in a way that is enrapturing in its precision: Here is the alluring beauty that arises from staring squarely at and studying what is most abhorrent. The reigning devil is, of course, the Neoliberal dispensation by which the USA has been consumed for going on four decades now, in whose workshop the country has been purposefully divided into an oligarchy consisting of the billionaires and their Creative Class, hipsterocratic lieutenants on the one hand, and the lumpen deplorables and the immigrants of ambiguous documentation and the vestigial middle class and the poor of many colors on the other. Read the rest

Pappy van Poodle, a character in Nintendo's Rusty's Real Deal Baseball, was so obscure no-one ever uttered its name on the Internet record despite his having an extensive in-game backstory and hand-painted media. That's zero Google or Twitter results—at least as of the publication date of Nick Robsinson's video about Pappy and the game's inventive play mechanics.Particularly interesting (and tres Nintendo) are the game's use of "light patterns" -- user interface and narrative prompts that encourage the player to haggle with in-game merchants instead of just give Nintendo money: Read the rest

I have self-healing cutting mats in a few different sizes. One of them is over 30 years old. I used it to help make the zine version of Boing Boing in the late 1980s. I still use it today. If you have never used a self-healing cutting mat, you don't know what you are missing. You can make thousands of craft knife cuts and the mat will still look new. Amazon has them on sale now for cheap. Read the rest

The creators, producers, writers, and showrunner of The Office talk about how they came up with the stories for one of the greatest comedy series in TV history. It was especially interesting to hear about how the personality of Michael Scott was changed from a thoroughly unlikable person to a sympathetic character early in the series, and why it was a smart move.[via Doobybrain] Read the rest

Axon -- formerly Taser International -- makes police bodycams that they sell to towns on the cheap, betting that they'll make it up by gouging the towns for cloud-based storage for footage from the cameras (what could possibly go wrong?!). The town of Fontana, California bought some of Axon's bodycams to try them out with its police force, but after three years, decided to open up a general call for bids by Axon and its competitors to outfit the whole force. When a rival won the contract, Fontana tried to cancel its contract with Axon.Axon's sales reps falsely claimed that Fontana could not cancel its contract (the contract actually contained a "termination for convenience" clause that allowed the town to terminate the contract at will), and told town officials that they would arrange to have the town's credit rating damaged if the town did not continue to pay $4,000/year for a service it wasn't using.Muckrock used Freedom of Information Access requests to get a copy of the contract and the correspondence and discovered that the town had been lied to by Axon; when they contacted the town to ask about the discrepancy, officials finally reviewed the contract and discovered the lie. According to Muckrock, Axon's business relies on recurring payments from small towns for cloud services. Axon is entrusted with the most sensitive and potentially damaging information that many of these towns generate, and unethical conduct on Axon's part could lead to catastrophic consequences for people across the country. Read the rest

Mexico City has declared a smog emergency, warning residents to avoid spending time outdoors. From Mexico News Daily:At least 23 fires were reported in Mexico City yesterday, affecting nearly all of the capital’s 16 boroughs and contributing to poor air quality.To avoid possible respiratory ailments, the commission recommended that residents remain indoors with windows and doors shut, and avoid intense exercise or other outdoor recreational activities. According to Wikipedia: "after loosening regulations in 2015 by the Mexico City government, air pollution has steadily increased in recent years in Greater Mexico City."Ciudad de México, hoy a las 7pm. pic.twitter.com/dfgk4yoxA3— Santiago Arau (@Santiago_Arau) May 15, 2019Image: Shutterstock/Javier Garcia Read the rest

The US embassy in Austria has made a deal with the 194 McDonald's restaurants in Austria to help US citizens in distress by putting them in touch with embassy staff who can help with lost passports and other emergencies.From BBC:A 24-hour hotline to the embassy is part of the arrangement.The embassy said it was ensuring that American citizens had every option available to get in touch when in need - "the #1 duty of every embassy around the world".McDonald's said it saw itself as a type of support and telephone exchange and had agreed to the idea on the request of US ambassador Trevor Traina.A spokesman told the BBC it would also "help anyone who finds themselves in need of assistance, for example, by calling the police or emergency services".Images: grebeshkovmaxim/Silver Wings SS/Shutterstock Read the rest

Last year, Google was rocked by a succession of mass uprisings by its staff, who erupted in fury after discovering that the company was secretly pursuing a censored Chinese search tool and an AI project for US drones, and that it had secretly paid Android founder Andy Rubin $150m to quietly leave the company after women who worked for him accused him of sexually assaulting them.In the end, 20,000 googlers walked out in protest, and, after attaining victory for most of their demands, continued to press the company to hold itself to high ethical standards, successfully blocking the inclusion of a transphobic, racist, xenophobic ideologue on the company's "AI Ethics" committee.Google management didn't take this lying down: they illegally retaliated against uprising organizers Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton (leading to a predictable second uprising among googlers).Now, Google management is taking things further, circulating a company-wide memo warning employees what they can expect to be terminated if they access documents that are "need to know" (which would have included the documents that led to the unrest about the drone project, the China project, Andy Rubin's payoff, and the inclusion of a Heritage Foundation extremist on the AI Ethics committee). Googlers are predictably upset about this -- not least because there are no consistent standards for "need to know" classification, and not all "need to know" documents are correctly labeled, a situation that creates an employment minefield for googlers.It's part of a general trend towards secrecy within Google, including an end to the practice of archiving videos from the company-wide, weekly "TGIF" meetings, and also an end to the practice of allowing any employee to ask questions of management at these meetings. Read the rest

This week, we learned that the notorious Israeli cyber-arms-dealer NSO Group had figured out how hijack your Iphone or Android phone by placing a simple Whatsapp call, an attack that would work even if you don't answer the call.Apple has received a lot of praise for the security of its Ios devices, which are said to be so secure in part because of Apple's walled garden strategy, which prevents Iphone owners from running third-party software unless it comes through Apple's App Store; and which limits who can repair Apple devices, and whether they can use third-party replacement parts. All of this control is said to produce a much more limited attack surface, with fewer bugs, which are corrected more quickly.However, there are several cyber-arms-dealers that are in the business of selling exploits to hijack control over Apple's products, from Cellebrite to Grayshift to NSO Group. These companies keep the bugs they exploit a secret, making it harder for Apple to repair them.Meanwhile, security researchers who want to develop tools to perform forensics on Apple products to determine whether they have been compromised with one of these cyber-weapons are out of luck: Apple blocks the forensic apps from the App Store, and kicks the few that sneak in. That means that in order to test an Apple device, the user first has to jailbreak it -- and jailbreaking Apple devices has gotten harder and harder, as Apple defends its own security (against competing App Stores) while weakening its users' security. Read the rest

So soft. So relaxing.So sweet.So relaxing[via] Read the rest

Strawberry Short-fluff! “Oreo likes to talk with his mouth full,” says IMGURian OreoCat.Unmute it and turn up the volume.Strawberry shortfluff[via] Read the rest

Netflix released the trailer for the season 5 of the dystopic science fiction series Black Mirror. It launches June 5. Only 3 episodes!Image: YouTube Read the rest

Marginalized Native American communities throughout the United States could have better access to high-speed internet if the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decides to allow tribes to use the Educational Broadband Services (EBS) spectrum for services like telemedicine, transmitting medical records electronically, or an online high school.The FCC says it has granted 2,190 EBS spectrum licenses, each of which cover a roughly 35-mile radius, and those licenses have been granted to 1,300 licensees. FCC is asking asked for public comment on “realigning the boundaries of the licenses, eliminating the educational use requirement, and allowing tribes, current licensees or new educational entities to access unassigned spectrum before a possible auction,” writes Felicia Fonseca reporting for The Associated Press.“Despite its name, the spectrum isn’t used solely for educational purposes. Licensees can lease it to commercial providers. Sprint is among the largest users.”Excerpt:The Federal Communications Commission has not issued any new permanent licenses for the Educational Broadband Services spectrum in more than 20 years. It asked the public a year ago to weigh in on possible changes to the licensing system to better define geographic areas, build in flexibility, create priorities for tribes and educational institutions, and possibly auction off the 2.5 GHz-band spectrum. It’s not clear when the FCC will act.The agency estimates that about one-third of the people living on tribal lands don’t have access to high-speed internet, but others say the figure is twice as high. That’s partly because homes on remote reservations are spread far apart. Read the rest

Embassies are basically "mini countries abroad," according to this explainer video from Wendover Productions. I learned that diplomats in embassies are:exempt from taxes in their host countryallowed free movement around their host countrycan carry diplomatic bags that cannot be seized or searchedare granted diplomated immunitytreated by the host country the same way in their private residences as they are in the embassyImage: YouTube Read the rest

The Verge's Josh Dzieza continues his outstanding coverage of Foxconn's shell-game in Wisconsin, where the company -- promised billions in subsidies and tax-breaks by former governor Scott Walker, a Koch darling, and by Trump, who used Foxconn's promise of a major new Wisconsin factory to claim his policies were working -- has lived up to its reputation for overpromising and underdelivering by absorbing billions in subsidies but never delivering on promised jobs.Foxconn keeps waffling on whether they'll build a factory at all (there's absolutely no reason to build giant LCD panels in Wisconsin) and most recently, they tried to diffuse criticism by buying a bunch of buildings around the state and declaring that they would be "innovation centers" (a term that seems to variously mean "co-working space," "incubator," "accelerator," and "commercial real-estate we'll rent to just about anyone for any purpose).As of a month ago, all of these buildings were empty.Dzieza called Foxconn out on their empty "innovation centers" and they told him that the centers were about to be filled with vigorously innovating Wisconsinites who would justify the billions that the state was handing over the Chinese company -- finally making up for all the residents who had their homes taken away at pennies on the dollar and knocked down to make way for the (still nonexistent) factory.A month later, the buildings are still empty.What's more, Foxconn's promised acquisition of more buildings turns out to be a lie, too (though given that these buildings would doubtless be sitting empty, this is something of a mixed blessing) ("the food here is terrible and the portions are so small!"). Read the rest

U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed a new rule to allow carriers to block robocalls. “The American people are fed up with illegal robocalls,” he said.He's right. And no, it's not your imagination — robocalls really are getting so much worse, with more than 48 billion robocalls placed in the US in 2018.The FCC Do-Not-Call list does nothing to help.From Makena Kelly at The Verge:On Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission announced a new measure that would grant mobile phone carriers new abilities to block the growing number of unwanted robocalls.The new rule would make it easier for carriers, like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, to automatically register their customers for call-blocking technology. As of right now, customers have to opt-in on their own. It would also allow customers to block calls coming from phone numbers that are not on their contacts list. Commissioners are expected to vote on the measure at their June 6th meeting.“Allowing call blocking by default could be a big benefit for consumers who are sick and tired of robocalls,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said. “By making it clear that such call blocking is allowed, the FCC will give voice service providers the legal certainty they need to block unwanted calls from the outset so that consumers never have to get them.”Ajit Pai proposes new rule that would allow carriers to block robocalls [theverge.com]Are you sick of robocalls? The number of those frustrating calls is skyrocketing, but there could be some relief coming soon. Read the rest

Police in London conducted a public street trial with facial recognition cameras. A man who covered his face as he walked by the cameras was stopped by officers, forced to submit to being photographed, and then arrested on a charge of public disorder after complaining loudly. The segment starts at 3:35 in the embedded BBC video; here's more coverage from The Independent:The Independent revealed that more than £200,000 was spent on six deployments that resulted in no arrests between August 2016 and July last year. Two people wanted for violent offences were arrested after a trial in December.Critics have called the force’s use of facial recognition a “shambles” and accused Scotland Yard of wasting public money ... The Metropolitan Police has described the deployments as “overt” and said members of the public were informed facial recognition was being used by posters and leaflets. But no one questioned by The Independent after they passed through a scanning zone in central London in December had seen police publicity material, and campaigners claim the technology is being rolled out “by stealth”.I can barely beleive the motto of the Metropolitan Police is 'TOTAL POLICING'. Horseshoe theory is a limiting view of politics, but it is amazing how we get to the terminology of comic-book villainy by other means. The jobsworth "for your own protection" attitude of British cops is incredibly annoying, albeit less annoying than getting executed in the street by American ones. The real danger, though, lurks in how the cops dance their way between that nonsense and, as one plain-clothes officer puts it, "covering your face is grounds for reasonable suspicion." When authorities pick and choose rationalizations depending on the audience, the true answer is a secret. Read the rest

Classic video-clip humor site YTMND ("You're the man now dog!") is gone. Hailing from an era before web video was commonplace, its distinctive juxtapositions of images, superimposed text and looping audio had a towering influence over the emerging web culture of the 2000s.Death's approach was slow but inexorable. Gizmodo reported YTMND's imminent demise three years ago:On August 29, 2016, Max Goldberg announced that YTMND would likely soon be shutting down, citing ill health and the site's inability to fund its own hosting fees from ad revenue. Goldberg stated "Besides being a time capsule I don’t really see a reason for it to continue to exist... It seems like the internet has moved on...And I’ve moved on too. I don’t have much interest in the site beyond it being good memories."An explosion of abusive, politically toxic users appears to have been the point of departure for the site's creator; logins became impossible some time ago due to Google deprecating a Captcha library and Goldberg did not fix it.YOU'RE THE ARCHIVE NOW, DOGArchive Team just backed up YTMND because DUH. 787gb of repeating memesanity. Good work, team— Jason Scott (@textfiles) August 13, 2018 Read the rest

A man in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, was confused when the Tire Discounters next to Taco Bell refused to honor a quote, then bemused to learn that the place he'd called was actually Discount Tires—on the other side of the Taco Bell."What I experienced that day was crazy, funny, yet I'm still mad at the asshole who did this," adds Michael Gearlds.Gearlds offers a simple but perfectly cromulent critique of the hotelier model of location competition, the hotelling principle of minimal differention, and their spread to other retail segments. I wanted to see if the restaurant on the other side of the tire shop was a Chipotle, but according to Google Maps it's a Red Robin. Read the rest

Tesla cars have a "sentry mode" feature that amounts to dashcams pointed hither and yon: useful for video-recording accidents, road ragers, and vandals.Entire right side of car keyed and dented. MericaThe vandals' self-satisfied grinning really makes it. According to Reddit's crack team of investigators, it was at this location in old Town Sacramento and they were driving a Silver or Grey Dodge Ram pickup. Read the rest

[Austria's Epicentre Works is an incredibly effective European digital rights group, most famous for getting the EU's Data Retention Directive struck down; now, they're raising the alarm about a move to relax the EU's Net Neutrality rules to allow ISPs to conduct fine-grained surveillance and discrimination against services that aren't in bed with ISPs. I'm happy to provide Epicenter Works's Thomas Lohninger a space to highlight the group's efforts -Cory]Today 45 NGOs, Academics and Companies from 15 countries released an open letter outlining the dangers of the wide-spread use of privacy invasive Deep Packet Inspection technology in the European Union. The letter is referencing the ongoing negotiations about Europes new net neutrality rules in which some telecom regulators are pushing for the legalization of DPI technology. Deep Packet Inspection allows telecom companies to examine the content of our communications data. Information about which apps we use, the videos we watch and the specific news articles we read should be off limits for the telecom industry. Yet, with the proliferation of zero-rating to all but two European countries the industry has started to utilize DPI equipment on a large scale to bill certain data packages differently or to throttle services to cram more internet subscribers in a network already running over capacity. Europe's current net neutrality rules contain a clear ban on any Deep Packet Inspection technology that examines specific user information for the purpose of treating traffic differently. Yet, a mapping of zero-rating offers in Europe identified 186 such products which potentially make use of DPI technology. Read the rest

When you're half-asleep, nighttime bathroom breaks can get messy or even painful without a light. But let's face it: Nobody wants to think about their bathroom any more than they have to. That's why the LooLoo Automatic Toilet Freshener & Night Light might be one of the most useful gadgets you never knew you needed.First of all, the LooLoo is a night light that illuminates exactly where you need it, which not only might save you some stumbling but also money on your power bill. As soon as its motion sensors detect an approach, it lights up the toilet bowl. It's also equipped with infrared sensors on the interior of the bowl that detect body heat. When you sit down, the LooLoo hits the water with a quick spritz of essential oils, heading unwanted odors off before they even arrive.Right now, you can pick up LooLoo: The Automatic Toilet Freshener & Night Light for $39.99, 18% off the original MSRP of $49. Read the rest

“Alabama is one signature away from enacting a near-total ban on abortions.”

The guy sure has a knack for compounding the maximum number of lies into one line.President Donald Trump today, while speaking to Sempra Energy employees in Louisiana, referenced the Green New Deal advocated by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). He seems to be obsessed and upset by it. “That's a hoax like the hoax I just went through,” said President Trump. “Under that deal, everybody in this room gets fired. All of the thousands of guys and women standing on these buildings gets fired.” “[Democrats] don't like anything,” Donald Trump ranted. “They don't know what they like.” Then Donald said something even weirder."When the wind doesn't blow you don't watch television that night.” “Your wife says, 'what the hell did you get me into with this Green New Deal, Charlie?'"WHAT.Trump on the Green New Deal: "That's a hoax like the hoax I just went through... under that deal, everybody in this room gets fired. All of the thousands of guys and women standing on these buildings gets fired... [Democrats] don't like anything. They don't know what they like." pic.twitter.com/zDDv4Cih2I— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 14, 2019Trump on wind energy: "When the wind doesn't blow you don't watch television that night. Your wife says, 'what the hell did you get me into with this Green New Deal, Charlie?'"The crowd responds with extremely tepid applause. pic.twitter.com/sHtPuHB2by— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 14, 2019Trump on the Green New Deal: "That’s a hoax like the hoax I just went through."— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) May 14, 2019Trump speaking now at the Cameron LNG terminal in Louisiana, which just started liquefying— Timothy Cama (@Timothy_Cama) May 14, 2019Trump mentions the Green New Deal. Read the rest

This Claude Monet landscape painting just broke a record by selling for $110.7 million dollars at auction.Above, the painting in question, Monet’s “Les Meules,” image courtesy Sotheby’s. From Bloomberg's report by Katya Kazakina:A sun-drenched landscape by Claude Monet fetched $110.7 million at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday, setting a record for the Impressionist painter.Painted in 1890, “Les Meules,” from the artist’s series featuring haystacks, had been estimated at $55 million. The final price includes fees.The previous auction record for Monet was $84.7 million, for one of his water lilies works sold at Christie’s last year.The bidding war lasted for more than eight minutes and drew at least six bidders. The winning bid was placed by a woman sitting in the back of the room, with paddle 989. Her identity wasn’t immediately clear.Not clear, you say?Hmm.Who could it be. Read the rest

No deep dive of this legendary comic exists online from a cartoonist's perspective, let alone 3 cartoonists! The boys, Ed Piskor, Jim Rugg, and Tom Scioli continue to unpack the Frank Miller 1986 Batman classic over the course of 4 jam-packed episodes, one chapter at a time!Part 1 here:For more videos and deep dives like this make sure to subscribe to the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel You can support the channel by grabbing some stuff from our Spreadshop! Read the rest

This Saturday, May 18, I'll be appearing at the Nebula Awards Conference, at the Marriott Warner Center in Woodland Hills: I'll be participating in the 1:30PM mass signing in the Grand Ballroom and then I'll be on the "Megatrends for the Near Future" panel at 4PM in A/B Salon.And then on Thursday, May 23d, I'll be speaking at the Exposition Park Regional Library as part of the Los Angeles Public Library's Book to Action program, speaking on algorithmic manipulation, monopolies and technological self determination from 6PM-730PM. Read the rest

Back in 2018, evil got a shot in the arm when Nazi collaborators Bayer were allowed to buy Big Ag monopolists Monsanto, celebrating the marriage by getting rid of the Monsanto name (on the grounds that Monsanto's tactics had tarnished their reputation even worse than Bayer's use of concentration camp slaves and fatal medical experiments on Jews and others imprisoned by the Nazis, to say nothing of their notorious product Zyklon B). Monsanto's flagship product is Roundup (glyphosate), a weedkiller that works in combination with GMO strains of crops that are unaffected by glyphosate's active ingredients. Glyphosate has long been suspected of causing harm in humans and other living things, a conclusion supported by Monsanto's own accidentally exposed internal memoranda.Now, Bayer may be regretting its merger, after a California jury awarded a couple $2b in damages in a suit that alleged that Roundup had given them cancer (Bayer says it will appeal). 13,400 other Americans have pending suits against the company.Bayer's shares have dropped 45% over the past 12 months (2% this week!). Bayer management is facing a flurry of shareholder action from furious investors who say that Monsanto's future Roundup liability should have made the merger a nonstarter.Last month, over 55% of voting shareholders refused to endorse the actions of management at the company's annual meeting, a rebuke that Berenberg analyst Sebastian Bray described as "unprecedented" in Germany.Investors want to know whether management did their homework on Monsanto before moving ahead with a $63 billion merger, which closed in 2018. Read the rest

In 2017, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson campaigned for Trump's massive tax-cuts by promising that they would create 7,000 jobs with the $3,000,000,000 they stood to gain, as well as investing in new infrastructure: instead, the company has reduced its headcount by 23,328 workers (6,000 in the first three months of 2019!) while reducing capital expenditures by $1.4B (AT&T reduced capex by another $900m in Q1/2019).AT&T substantially increased executive bonuses over the same period.When contacted by Ars, AT&T didn't deny any of the CWA's findings. "We continue to hire in areas where we're seeing increasing demand for products and services, but technology is changing rapidly and that affects hiring and employment," AT&T told Ars. "There are fewer jobs in parts of the business that are declining and facing technology shifts."AT&T promised 7,000 new jobs to get tax break—it cut 23,000 jobs instead [Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica](Image: Mike Mozard, CC-BY) Read the rest

The DOJ has indicted three former Verizon and AT&T employees for alleged membership in a crime-ring known as the "The Community"; the indictment says the telco employees helped their confederates undertake "port-out" scams (AKA "SIM-swapping" AKA "SIM hijacking"), which allowed criminals to gain control over targets' phone numbers, thereby receiving SMS-based two-factor authentication codes.Once in possession of these codes, attackers could take control of targets online accounts, including their banking and cryptocurrency exchange accounts (and also web-based email accounts that could serve as a gateway to many other systems). The returns could be massive, and several cryptocurrency users suffered losses in the millions.SIM-swapping benefits from the overall lax security at phone companies, but the DOJ says that the insiders made it much easier to undertake these attacks against high-value targets. According to the DOJ, sometimes the insiders simply reached into the system and changed ownership of phone numbers; other times, they provided confederates with the information needed to trick customer service reps at the telcos into making the switch.Insiders have been implicated in SIM-swapping since the beginning, and criminals cultivated "plugs" (insiders) who would augment their low wages with bribes to help with SIM-swaps. The indictment paints a picture of plugs who made a few hundred dollars for helping with frauds that netted millions.The security economics are pretty straightforward here: phone numbers used to be low value, then they were repurposed to protect high-value assets, and the assumptions about how far attackers would go to steal phone numbers remained the same, while the actual lengths increased considerably. Read the rest

Warren Buffet is famous for identifying the need for businesses to have "moats" and "walls" around their profit-centers to keep competitors out, and data-centric companies often cite their massive collections of user-data as "moats" that benefit from "network effects" to make their businesses good investments.In a smart, eye-opening essay, Martin Casado and Peter Lauten from the VC firm Andreesen Horowitz dismantle the idea that data benefits from "network effects" and that it presents any kind of "moat" to protect businesses: instead, the VCs demonstrate how collecting data gets more expensive, and less useful, over time.To understand why, think of Netflix's data-collection, performed in service to its famous recommendation engine, which suggests programs you might enjoy based on the preferences of people who are similar to you. When Netflix is starting out, it needs to develop a "minimum viable corpus" in order to produce recommendations, but once that data is in place, new data produces diminishing returns in recommendations. Going from 100 to 1,000,000 users allows Netflix to dramatically improve its recommendations, but going from 1,000,000 to 1,000,100 (or even 2,000,000) produces very little new benefit.Meanwhile, adding in all that data is expensive: first, because once everyone who already understands why they might subscribe to Netflix is a customer, Netflix has a much harder job of convincing the remaining population that it's worth their while to join up (their "cost of user-acquisition" goes up). Second, the computational costs of incorporating new data into a prediction model don't necessarily go down with volume, so the cost of recomputing the model when you add your 1,000,001st user isn't necessarily cheaper than when you add your 101st user (it might even be more expensive), and since the new user adds less value to the model than previous users did, the real costs of new users' data (relative to the benefits) are constantly going up. Read the rest

From Practical Engineering:Traffic management in dense urban areas is an extremely complex problem with a host of conflicting goals and challenges. One of the most fundamental of those challenges happens at an intersection, where multiple streams of traffic - including vehicles, bikes and pedestrians - need to safely, and with any luck, efficiently, cross each others’ paths. However we accommodate it now or in future, traffic will continue to be one of the biggest challenges in our urban areas and traffic signals will continue to be one of its solutions. Read the rest

These vividly colored pens have a brush on one end and a fine firm tip on the other. I've been using them to take notes and doodle on important phone calls. This 18-pack is cheap, so if you routinely leave the caps off, like I do, there will not be a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Read the rest

Senator Elizabeth Warren didn't accept an invitation to a Fox News town hall because she says the company is “a hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists.”From The Washington Post:“I’ve done 57 media avails and 131 interviews, taking over 1,100 questions from press just since January,” she wrote. “Fox News is welcome to come to my events just like any other outlet. But a Fox News town hall adds money to the hate-for-profit machine. To which I say: hard pass.”Image: Faux News T-shirt on Amazon. Read the rest

NSO Group is a notorious Israeli cyber-arms dealer whose long trail of sleaze has been thoroughly documented by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab (which may or may not be related to an attempt to infiltrate Citizen Lab undertaken by a retired Israeli spy); NSO has been implicated in the murder and dismemberment of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi (just one of the brutal dictatorships who've availed themselves of NSO tools), and there seems to be no cause too petty for their clients, which is why their malware has been used to target anti-soda activists in Mexico.Now, NSO has been caught deploying its "Pegasus" malware via a new and frightening defect in Facebook's Whatsapp messenger. Facebook's description of the bug is that it is "A buffer overflow vulnerability in WhatsApp VOIP stack allowed remote code execution via specially crafted series of SRTCP packets sent to a target phone number." Practically speaking, that means that someone who initiates a Whatsapp call to your Iphone or Android device can seize control of the device, even if you don't answer the call.If you use Whatsapp, you should update it now.This vulnerability was used to target a lawyer in London involved in lawsuits against NSO Group over its role in attacks against "the phones of Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident in Canada; a Qatari citizen; and a group of Mexican journalists and activists." Citizen Lab suspects that other targets were attacked with Pegasus over Whatsapp.Amnesty International has called on the government of Israel to rescind NSO's export license, based on its long track record of abetting human rights abuses. Read the rest

Guy who won the election says nothing wrong with it.