Security researchers announced at RSAC today announced they have discovered a trove of 809 million personal records exposed on the internet. This time more than just emails and passwords were exposed -- data also includes physical addresses, personal mortgage details, social media accounts, and credit score analysis.The database was owned by "email validation" firm Verifications.io, and has been taken offline by the company.From WIRED News:Last week, security researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia discovered an unprotected, publicly accessible MongoDB database containing 150 gigabytes-worth of detailed, plaintext marketing data—including 763 million unique email addresses. The pair are going public with their findings today. The trove is not only massive but also unusual; it contains data about individual consumers as well as what appears to be "business intelligence data," like employee and revenue figures from various companies. This diversity may stem from the information's source. The database, owned by the "email validation" firm Verifications.io, was taken offline the same day Diachenko reported it to the company.While you've likely never heard of them, validators play a crucial role in the email marketing industry. They don't send out out marketing emails on their own behalf, or facilitate automated mass email campaigns. Instead, they vet a customer's mailing list to ensure that the email addresses in it are valid and won't bounce back. Some email marketing firms offer this mechanism in-house. But fully verifying that an email address works involves sending a message to the address and confirming that it was delivered—essentially spamming people. Read the rest

A couple who tested the effects of the poison ricin on their hamster have been charged by the government of Germany with plotting a terrorist attack.On Thursday, German authorities said suspects Sief Allah H. and Yasmin H. started plotting for attacks in 2018 after Sief Allah H. failed to cross into Syria from Turkey two times, one year earlier.After the suspects returned to Germany, GBA says he started posting Islamic State propaganda on the internet. Things escalated from there.From Reuters:A Tunisian man and his German wife who bought ricin and tested the lethal toxin on a hamster have been charged with plotting Islamist-motivated attacks using a biological weapon, German prosecutors said on Thursday.The GBA Federal Prosecutor’s Office said that 30-year-old Sief Allah H. and 43-year-old Yasmin H. had acquired knowledge on how to turn ricin into a weapon and ordered 3,300 grains of the poison, which can be found in castor beans, online.Sief Allah H. was arrested in Cologne in June and police detained Yasmin H. a month later. The couple also face charges of planning attacks using metal balls and homemade explosives as well as seeking membership of Islamic State.Prosecutors in Germany would not say if the suspects picked a date or location for their planned attacks.More at general-anzeiger-bonn.de. Read the rest

Martin Howard from Antique Typewriter (previously) writes, "In 1881, Thomas Hall, a Brooklyn engineer, invented the first portable typewriter that would enable a person to type with the machine anywhere, even on one’s lap. This was also the first index typewriter, a typewriter with no keyboard that requires one to use a selector. In this case, a black handle is depressed to choose the characters when typing. The Hall, despite its unusual design, proved to be quite successful over the next twenty years."Howard recently redesigned his site, which is a showcase for his impressive collection of 19th century typewriters.The Hall originally sold for $40, an economical alternative to the $100 keyboard machines; a good horse-drawn carriage could be bought for $70. At a time when few people knew how to type efficiently with both hands, it would have seemed reasonable to the operator of the Hall to pick out the characters using one hand.To type, the black handle is moved around over the holes (each hole is a different character) to select the characters. Then a styles, on the underside of the handle, is pushed down into one of the holes to print that character. Inside the typewriter, a rubber plate that has all the characters moulded on its surface, has moved into position allowing for the correct character to be pushed onto the paper.The rubber type could be quickly changed for different fonts and languages.Hall 1 Typewriter [Antique Typewriters] Read the rest

Master maker Tim Jacobs created a fantastic business card that's actually a Stylophone synthesizer complete with MIDI capabilities. It's based on the original 1967 Dübreq Stylophone, a small synthesizer played by touching a built-in stylus to the metal keyboard. The Stylophone was famously used on David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator." From Jacobs' project page about his StyloCard that ended up costing a bit more than $3 each:Printed Circuit Boards as a business card are a great gimmick. I'd seen ones with USB ports etched into them, which enumerate as a keyboard and then type a person's name or load up their website. It's just about possible to build them cheap enough to hand out as a business card, at least if you're picky about who you give them to.A couple of years ago I took a stab at making one for myself, but I didn't want it to be pointless. I wanted it to do something useful! Or at least entertain someone for longer than a few seconds. I can't remember quite how I got the idea of making a MIDI-stylophone, but the idea was perfect. A working midi controller, that's unique enough in its playing characteristic to potentially give some value, while at the same time costing no more than the card would have done otherwise, since the keyboard is just a plated area on the PCB, as is true on the original stylophone. Read the rest

The first season of Cobra Kai was wonderful. I am excited to binge watch Season 2. Read the rest

Frank Wu writes, "Today Brianna Wu, progressive Democrat and cybersecurity expert, is launching her 2020 bid for US Congress in MA-8! She has a brand new video, in which she introduces herself, and talks about being disowned by her family when she came out as queer. He also talks about the alt-right hate group Gamergate, founding her software development firm, and progressive policies she supports. Simultaneously, Brianna has re-designed her website, which outlines her platform, accepts donations, and allows supporters to volunteer. 'It’s time to be bold,' Brianna says." Read the rest

Ever since he killed Net Neutrality with dirty tricks and illegal tactics, Donald Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has been claiming that his actions had stimulated broadband growth in America, a claim his spokesvillain repeated yesterday in response to Democrats introducing legislation to restore Net Neutrality.But the data that Pai has touted was badly distorted due to a monumental error (or, less charitably, a massive fraud) by a company called Barrierfree, who seem to have incorrectly completed their their "Form 477" report of broadband availability in a way that vastly overstated the availability of their service, creating an error of such magnitude that it distorted the figures for the whole country.Barrierfree -- the trading name of the Barrier Communications Corporation -- claimed that it its first year of operation, it had made fixed wireless and fiber service available to 62 million people -- 20% of the population of the USA. In reality, Barrierfree offers a small number of people access to a poky wireless service that caps out at 25mbps.Companies submitting Form 477 are instructed to enumerate each "census block" where they offer service; Barrierfree appears to have simply reported that service was available in every census block in every state it operates in.The extent to which this distorts Pai's figures can hardly be overstated: for example, Barrierfree's claims account for 2m of the the 5.6m rural connections that Pai claimed had been made in 2017/8.More importantly, Barrierfree's entries allowed Pai to avoid a legislative duty -- under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act -- to intervene if the FCC determines that broadband deployment isn't happening quickly enough. Read the rest

This is the audio track from a 1984 children's read-along book adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The person who posted this to Reddit said, "If the abstract themes of this deep sci-fi classic escaped you watching the film, wait till you hear it crammed into 15 minutes for kids!" Here are photos of the pages from the book. Read the rest

Remember the scene below from The Office (US) in which the gang was captivated by the bouncing DVD player screensaver as they waited for the logo to hit the corner of the screen? There are now several online versions of this entrancing activity. Above is a livestream of a DVD screensaver simulation with chat available on the YouTube page. There's also a more minimal and realistic experience awaiting you at BouncingDVDLogo.com. (Thanks, Lux!) Read the rest

You're probably familiar with the labyrinth game that challenges you to move a steel ball through a wooden maze that has holes to avoid. This guy made a similar maze, but instead of a marble, he used a drop of water and rolled it across a surface coated in hydrophobic paint.Via Evil Mad Scientist Read the rest

It's hard to believe that snails like to play, but that's what this one looks like it's doing with a baby carrot in this time-lapse video.From YouTube description:I have two nerite snails named Randolph and Mortimer (yes, after the Dukes in Trading Places). They are sisters who have lived with me for over a year. Up until this point, I had offered them a few types of food that they were not interested in, but one day I offered this baby carrot to them and shortly after, found Randolph doing what you see in this video. I left the carrot in for about a week, during which time Randolph and Mortimer ate the whole thing. In this video, I don't think she's eating it, but simply playing. I have other videos of her eating where you can clearly see her moving her head and engaged in the activity of eating. This is just her having fun.Image: YouTube Read the rest

Even if you block cookies, many sites still track you with "browser fingerprinting," that use the unique combination of your screen resolution, browser and OS version, installed fonts and plugins, and other data that allows you to be reliably identified between sessions and across sites.To fight this, the Tor Browser uses a technique called "letterboxing," that reports browser size rounded down to 100px increments, meaning that in nearly every case, your browser has the same dimensions as millions of other users' browsers; once the page has loaded and your browser has ceased to interact with the server, the content is resized to the true dimensions of your window.The feature has been a part of Tor Browser since 2015; now it is being integrted into Firefox (Tor Browser is a derivative of the Firefox browser). It's part of "Tor Uplift," which is gradually moving privacy features from Tor Browser into Firefox. Firefox has already implemented other anti-fingerprinting techniques from Tor, including a blacklist of known-fingerprinting domains, protection for font-based fingerprinting, anti-HTML5 fingerprinting countermeasures, and per-domain cookie separation. According to a Bugzilla entry, this is how Firefox's letterboxing protection works in these two states: When the user maximizes the window, the largest possible viewport is used, again a multiple of 200 x 100. Empty gray margins in the chrome part of the window cover the rest of the screen. Similarly, in fullscreen, the viewport is again given dimensions a multiple of 200 x 100, and the chrome areas around it are set to black. Read the rest

This post was sponsored by Glowforge. Click here to get $100 off a Glowforge Basic, $250 off a Glowforge Plus, or $500 off a Glowforge Pro.This is the second of two videos on how to make a Raspberry Pi based tabletop retro-video game arcade machine. (Here's the first.)Once we bought the components and made sure everything worked it was time to design and print the cabinet.Any graphics program will work with the Glowforge. You can even use a hand-drawn image because the Glowforge has a built-in camera that scans your drawings and converts them to cutting, scoring, and engraving lines.CuttingOnce we had a design we liked, we uploaded it to the Glowforge app. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping the image file onto the page, then placing the design on the photo of the material You can move the images around the material in order to fit multiple components onto the same piece of stock.The first prototype we made had sharp corners, and they poked into our palms when we used the buttons and joystick. So for our second design, we used a living hinge, which is a cool way to bend wood. With these kinds of hinges, you can make beautiful and functional things.CustomizationThe Glowforge not only cuts material, it also engraves designs - even photos - in high resolution. We engraved one of our favorite characters -- Q*Bert, the famous cussing cube-hopper. And my daughter and I took a cue from the original Macintosh team and engraved our names on the inside of the cabinet. Read the rest

At a panel in West Hollywood last night to promote the new documentary series Punk, John Lydon gave a wonderful performance as Johnny Rotten in which he talked trash to both Henry Rollins and Marky Ramone. Highlights above and below. Please forgive the annoying auto-play. Also on the panel were Duff McKagan (Guns 'n' Roses), Donita Sparks (L7), and Punk producer/fashion designer John Varvatos. From Rolling Stone:“...You called Black Flag a bunch of suburban rich kids and we wanted to tear your ears off,” Rollins said (to Lydon.“Yes, I did, but I didn’t like the fucking music,” Lydon said. “It was boring.”After (Marky Ramone) spoke to how the Ramones blazed a trail for punk in New York and took that to London, Lydon said that he was “not even an original Ramone.” “But I did the Blank Generation album with Richard Hell, and you took his image,” Ramone replied. “All you guys took Richard Hell’s image. That’s all you did.”“And you’re still covering your fucking ears,” Lydon said, grimacing that he’d gotten a rise out of the drummer."And Sid Vicious was the star,” Ramone said, prompting Lydon to smile and stick his tongue out. “That’s right, he was,” Lydon replied. “He was the star for asshole fake idiots like you. Enjoy your drugs and fuckin’ have a happy death.” Read the rest

I can focus on helping my Great Pyrenees, Nemo, recover from really miserable surgery rather than worrying about the thousands of dollars it is costing.Five-year-old Nemo blew out his knees. A not-rare 'athletic injury' compounded by his size set my best buddy up for some serious recovery time. We've spent 2 months getting over the work that was done to his right leg, and in another month or so he is due to have the left sawed on. Nemo is more active than he has been since the injury. He stands without lameness or a limp and wants to walk miles more than I do.If our vet says the other leg needs to be worked on, I trust our vet!Today I received our estimate via email from the specialist veterinarian office. Within moments I had logged into my pet insurance's website and submit the claim for pre-approval. After hitting send I went upstairs to take a shower, and start worrying.By the time I got out of the shower and checked email (because we all check email whilst still wet, right?) the surgery had been approved! I am so glad not to be worrying about this for several days.When all is said and done Nemo's knees will have cost around $20k. Trupanion has been right there for us. I haven't had a single upsetting or gut-wrenching moment with insurance. Had we not bought insurance the day Nemo came home I am not sure how this would have worked out. Read the rest

Carolee Schneemann -- a performance art pioneer whose deeply provocative and thoughtful work focused on gender, sex, the body, and power -- died yesterday at age 79. My first exposure to Schneemann's work was in the mid-1980s on a grainy VHS dub of avant-garde art films that also included pieces by Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle. That videocassette, along with the RE/Search book Angry Women and a few other underground tapes and texts, opened my eyes and mind to a multitude of new genres in feminist art and radical thought. From an obituary by Andrew Russeth in Art News:Schneemann’s corpus of work is so gloriously diverse that it is impossible to summarize with a single defining piece, but among her most famous (and infamous) works is Meat Joy, a 1964 film of a performance featuring eight scantily clad dancers who writhe together, with animals parts soon joining the melee. It’s a bacchanalian display—unapologetic and exploding with pleasure—and an utterly indelible work of art.“Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent; a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope, brushes, paper scrap,” Schneemann wrote. “Its propulsion is toward the ecstatic, shifting and turning between tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon—qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent.”Describing the work on another occasion, in terms that could very well serve as a manifesto for her entire career, she said, “The culture was starved in terms of sensuousness because sensuality was always confused with pornography. Read the rest

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's recently-elected ultraconservative president, has a question for his Twitter followers: "O que é golden shower?"The New York Post:What is a golden shower?” Bolsonaro tweeted on Wednesday, a day after posting the video in which a barely dressed party-goer writhes atop a bus shelter, plays with his behind, and then bends over before another man urinates on his head.“I do not feel comfortable showing this, but … this is what many of the street parties in Brazil’s carnival have turned into,” Bolsonaro tweeted about the video, which local media said was filmed at a Sao Paulo street party, or bloco. Read the rest

In a brilliant Twitter thread, UCSB political scientist Matto Mildenberger recounts the sordid history of Garrett Hardin's classic, widely cited 1968 article "The Tragedy of the Commons," whose ideas are taught to millions of undergrads, and whose precepts are used to justify the privatization of public goods as the only efficient way to manage them.Hardin's paper starts with a history of the English Commons -- publicly held lands that were collectively owned and managed -- and the claim that commons routinely fell prey to the selfish human impulse to overgraze your livestock on public land (and that even non-selfish people would overgraze their animals because they knew that their more-selfish neighbors would do so even if they didn't).But this isn't what actually happened to the Commons: they were stable and well-managed until other factors (e.g. rich people trying to acquire even more land) destabilized them. Hardin wasn't just inventing false histories out of a vacuum. He was, personally, a nasty piece of work: a white supremacist and eugenicist, and the Tragedy of the Commons paper is shot through with this vile ideology, arguing that poor people should not be given charity lest they breed beyond their means (Hardin also campaigned against food aid). Hardin was a director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the white nationalist Social Contract Press, and co-founded anti-immigrant groups like Californians for Population Stabilization and The Environmental Fund.Mildenberger argues that Hardin was a trumpist before Trump: He served on the board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), whose talking points often emerge from Trump's mouth. Read the rest

This Taco Bell in Philadephia has a quick and effective strategy for dealing with customer complaints: beat the crap out of them.It happened around 10:45 p.m. at the Taco Bell at 10th and Chestnut streets. Bryan Reese of Northern Liberties says employees followed him outside the restaurant in an unprovoked attack. Six people in Taco Bell uniforms can be seen in cellphone video beating up Reese and his girlfriend outside the Taco Bell. The cellphone video was taken by a friend of Reese. Video of the alleged attack was posted to Twitter. A $20 gift card was offered after further complaints, according to the person who posted the video. Employees seen in the video were later fired, reports MSN News:In a statement to MSN News, Taco Bell said: “We’re shocked and disappointed to see this situation; we and our franchisees do not tolerate this behavior. The franchisee who owns and operates this location is retraining its staff, and all team members involved have been terminated.” Read the rest

At the end of February, the EU Parliament released a bizarre video "explaining" the Copyright Directive, a controversial and sweeping internet regulation that has inspired more opposition than anything else in EU history.The video was bananas: almost a parody of pro-Directive talking points that had long been debunked, blended with conspiracy theories about the role of "outsiders" (including me!) in the debate. These conspiracy theories keep getting repeated, and debunked. You can learn a lot about what your opponents are up to based on what they accuse you of: the Parliament and its corporate allies claim that the anti-Copyright Directive movement is driven by corporate lobbyists, working in the shadows and laundering their influence through front groups: it turns out that there are massive corporate expenditures behind the debate over the Directive, and it's almost all coming from the pro-Directive side.That also turns out to be the case with the Parliament's conspiracy video: MEP Julia Reda used Parliamentary privilege to force the Parliament to explain how this video came to be, and the answer won't surprise you: it was made by AFP, the giant French media company, who have been lobbying heavily for the Directive. In other words, the Parliament gave public money to a corporation that stands to make millions from a piece of legislation, and then asked that corporation to make a video that used false statements and hysterical language to discredit the opposition to the law. It's not even lobbying, where a corporation uses the promise of campaign cash and other incentives to get officials on-side: this is public officials paying lobbyists to sway public opinion to win a law that will vastly enrich the corporation the lobbyists represent. Read the rest

"We appreciate it very much, Tim Apple," said President Bankrupt. Read the rest

At a mercifully-unnamed diner, Mike Pailliotet professionally cleans some truly nasty carpet: low-pile commercial standard at a stage far beyond gross. It's been transformed into a rubbery, slightly shiny mat of congealed grease.“We live in a primitive time, don’t we, Will? Neither savage nor wise. Any rational society would either ban carpet in diners or let me take my dog in there.” — Hannibal Lecter.Here's another delight from Pailliotet's channel, titled "Manky Urine Filled Carpet Cleaning Fail - See The Funk That Hides In Carpeting." The delights are revealed about 6m30s in.A Zipper cleaning wand alone is more than two grand. The TruckMount forums seems a good place to find out how useless consumer-grade carpet cleaners are. Read the rest

The moving image is a powerful thing, whether it's telling a story or selling a brand. And with the advent of animation software, what used to be a painstaking process is now easy and available to anyone. All that's needed is creativity. If you've got that end covered, may we suggest CrazyTalk Animator 3 Pro for Windows.For aspiring 2D animators and seasoned pros alike, this suite is hard to beat. There are plenty of character templates to use or modify, and users can set them into motion right away with a vast library of motion frameworks. Fine tuning isn't much harder with CrazyTalk's bone rig editor, sprite layer controls and motion editing timeline. Of course, you're free to create your own characters from scratch, or you can import logos, drawings - even your own face. From there, you can tweak facial animations down to minute details, and make them speak with text-to-speech functionality and auto-lip syncing.Right now, CrazyTalk Animator 3 Pro for Windows is discounted to $79, a full 55% off the MSRP. Read the rest

For a decade, NASA scientists have worked on an air-to-air photographic technology that will be used to collect data for the agency's next-generation supersonic airplane project. They've just released these absolutely astonishing "first air-to-air images of supersonic shockwave interaction in flight." “We never dreamt that it would be this clear, this beautiful," says NASA scientist J.T. Heineck.From NASA:The images feature a pair of T-38s from the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, flying in formation at supersonic speeds. The T-38s are flying approximately 30 feet away from each other, with the trailing aircraft flying about 10 feet lower than the leading T-38. With exceptional clarity, the flow of the shock waves from both aircraft is seen, and for the first time, the interaction of the shocks can be seen in flight.“We’re looking at a supersonic flow, which is why we’re getting these shockwaves,” said Neal Smith, a research engineer with AerospaceComputing Inc. at NASA Ames’ fluid mechanics laboratory.“What’s interesting is, if you look at the rear T-38, you see these shocks kind of interact in a curve,” he said. “This is because the trailing T-38 is flying in the wake of the leading aircraft, so the shocks are going to be shaped differently. This data is really going to help us advance our understanding of how these shocks interact...”While NASA has previously used the schlieren photography technique to study shockwaves, the AirBOS 4 flights featured an upgraded version of the previous airborne schlieren systems, allowing researchers to capture three times the amount of data in the same amount of time. Read the rest

You can imagine his little tail wagging so hard inside that rollaboard luggage case he's riding in.Happy traveler Read the rest

Mark Zuckerberg's 3,000 word blog post about his plan to create a parallel set of Facebook services that contain long-overdue privacy protections has plenty to please both the regulators who are increasingly ready to fine the company billions and possibly even break it up, but also privacy advocates who will rightly cheer the announcement that the service will be increasing its end-to-end encryption offerings, only storing data in countries with good track records on human rights and the rule of law, and allowing users to mark some of their conversations as ephemeral, designed to be permanently deleted after a short while.But Zuckerberg's promises contain one important omission, as Wired's Issie Lapowsky and Nicholas Thompson point out: Zuck does not mention his company's future plans for data sharing and ad-targeting, two of the company's most controversial and potentially compromising activities.It's likely that Facebook plans to earn money from its end-to-end encrypted services by analyzing the metadata -- who sends things to whom, where, and in what context -- while ignoring the payloads of the messages, which it will no longer be able to access. This will severely limit the service's userfulness to law enforcement, spies, and other parties who might nonconsensually seek access to your conversations, but it still affords an enormous wealth of metadata that Facebook will likely mine to target ads to you.After all, the NSA's primary bulk-data collection focuses on metadata, not "data" (though in truth there is no firm line delineating the two) -- computers are really good at analyzing the kinds of metadata that other computers generate, after all, and struggle with the messy, unstructured data that messy, unstructured human beings generate. Read the rest

noclip.website hosts the extracted levels of various classic games and a simple interface to fly freely around them. Remember these?(That last one is the collision map of a Dark Souls region.) Read the rest

Even if you don't use it, Facebook is embedded across the web and in apps through ads, share buttons, tracking pixels and so forth, watching everything and everyone. Katherine Brindley set out to find how forthright the company was in its claims not to track users who engage privacy controls. Not very."I enabled a bunch of privacy settings and still felt like my Facebook/Insta ads were a little too relevant. So I faked a pregnancy by downloading the What to Expect app to see how long it would take for FB to hit me with a maternity ad. The answer? 11 hours."Facebook won't stop claiming the high ground, and will even present new high ground to claim. But the truth is that its algorithmic exploitation of human weakness is barely concealed, yet it lies chronically and decisively about every aspect of what it does, while respecting no master — not governments, not courts, not users — in turning political chaos and personal misery into profit. As Will Oremus puts it, Facebook is "a massive, global, highly sophisticated surveillance operation that no one can opt out of—and its privacy features are largely illusory." Read the rest

H&M makes a T-shirt with a sequinned message that changes depending on the nap. It says "Skate", and with a swipe of one's hand, it says "Chill". Catriona Black, however, noticed that you can, of course, choose to swipe only some of the sequins, thereby creating the ultimate Scottish t-shirt.Don't think H&M thought this through. My children did. You can take the child out of Scotland... pic.twitter.com/3uYw3Tlq6z— Catriona Black (@CatrionaBlack) March 3, 2019 Read the rest

As posted by Stance Grounded: "I've been doing it wrong this entire time 😭😒" Read the rest

I bought a USB microscope a few years ago because I wanted to examine kitchen knife edges after I sharpen them using different sharpeners. I'm still having fun with it. The tiny millipede in the video above is in a cup the size of a penny. Here are some images I've captured so far:Groovy Squirmy millipede.A Trader Joe's roasted and salted peanut. (See image full size)A playing card.My arm hair.A leaf, with what looks to be some kind of parasite.Smaller than a prescription pill bottle, the microscope has a USB cord that can be plugged into any computer. Download the software here and start looking up close at money, leaves, circuit boards, bugs, skin, hair, and anything else.The scope has a built-in, adjustable-brightness LED for illumination. The brightest setting is not always the best --- try different levels of illumination and let the software auto-adjust the contrast. I also learned that in order to see things at the maximum 250X magnification you need to follow the instructions in the FAQ.It comes with a suction-cup gooseneck mount that is very stable, and a plastic board with a grid pattern, which helps you align and locate the thing you are looking at. You can also simply hold the scope against things. The software takes still photos and videos, and hasn't crashed on me yet (the earlier version was buggy).For the price, the microscope is an amazingly entertaining device and I find myself grabbing it to check out all sorts of things, including splinters, skin cuts, bugs, and playing card designs. Read the rest

Credulity is stretched like a hamstring before a yoga class in this week’s eco-friendly tabloids, which do their bit for the environment by recycling old stories and passing them off as new again.“Prince Harry names REAL DAD Godfather!” reports the National Enquirer. Harry has allegedly named as godfather to his unborn child his longtime mentor Mark Dyer: his “real father” according to the Enquirer. Dyer was a friend of Princess Diana, and he’s a redhead, so if that isn’t definitive proof he’s Harry’s father, what is? Enquirer sister website RadarOnline touted this same story on February 8, and it doesn’t look any more convincing a month later.Prince Harry’s wife Duchess Meghan "Demands Panic Room!” proclaims another Enquirer story, claiming that British taxpayers are footing the $50,000 bill at “her hoity-toity new digs!” The plans are so secret that “only local politicians have seen them!” Presumably those “local politicians” are also known as the local council’s Building & Works Committee. It’s not only a story recycled from London’s Daily Mirror on November 28, 2018, but it also ran in the Enquirer on February 21 – but you can’t expect the editors to read what they write in past editions.“CIA Helped Hitler Escape Germany!” screams the Globe, taking old stories to new limits. Would it be churlish to point out that the CIA was created in 1947, two years after they allegedly faked the Fuhrer's death in a Berlin bunker and smuggled him to Colombia? The Globe offers readers a photograph of a former SS officer in Colombia after WWII seated with a man “whose mustache and haircut bear shocking similarities to the Nazi chief.” He has the same hair and whiskers as Hitler? Read the rest

Last weekend, a video surfaced showing students from Alabama's Spain Park and Hoover high schools making horrible anti-Semitic and racist comments. Yesterday, Spain Park help assemblies and small group discussions about the video so students and staff could openly address the issue. And apparently they, um, did speak openly. According to a student interviewed by Al.com, a Spain Park teacher "told her class that everyone uses the n-word, so she could use it, too." And so she did. From Al.com:The teacher was allegedly sent home for the day by administrators. Students confirmed she is not in class today."This alleged matter is being investigated," Murphy said in a brief statement to AL.com. Students told AL.com they were stunned to learn of the alleged incident. Read the rest

Vic Berger makes CPAC 2019 even weirder, with edits that reveal the hidden darkness we missed while watching it unfold live last weekend.Follow Vic on Twitter, or YouTube. Here's his Patreon.[via christiannightmares.tumblr.com] Read the rest

Michael Gardi (the same guy who made the Think-a-Dot "computer" toy replica, and the Dr. Nim game replica) made a 3D model of the mechanical Digi-Comp II marble computer so anyone can 3D print one of their own. "I now have the complete collection E.S.R. Inc. products!" says Michael.From his Instructables page:Digi-Comp II is a mechanical computer invented by John Thomas Godfrey and manufactured by Education Science Research (E.S.R., Inc.) in the late '60s. As can be seen in the pictures above, the device consists of a frame (about 14 by 28 inches) propped up at an angle. Computations are performed by balls rolling down channels on the top of and inside the platform through gates. Some gates are fixed switches that merely redirect the ball down a particular channel while others are flip-flops that both redirect the ball and change the state of the flip-flop in the process.Intended as an aid for teaching computer concepts, the Digi-Comp II can count, perform basic arithmetic, and obtain either the "1's" or '2's" complement of a number. The device can be run in auto mode where the balls are released automatically after each step of an operation until the operation is complete, or in manual mode where the user initiates each step.Along with the STL files and instructions for this project, you will find a PDF of the manual that came with the original Digi-Comp II. I brought this file to a local copy center and had them print me the spiral bound booklet you can see above and I'm really happy with the results. Read the rest

Bill Griffith is one of the great cartoonists and storytellers. I've been a fan for decades, both of his absurdist "Zippy the Pinhead" syndicated comic as well as his one-page comics of cultural criticism, "Griffith Observatory." His latest book is Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead, a 250-page hardbound comic biography of "Schlitzie the Pinhead" (1901-1971), who served as the inspiration for Griffith's fictional Zippy.Schlitzie, who had microcephaly and was sold by his parents to a traveling sideshow when he was eight years old, is best known for his role in the 1932 movie, Freaks, directed by Tod Browning, which starred real-life "freak show" circus performers. The disabilities of the performers were too shocking for audiences and the movie was banned in many places. I saw Freaks in high school (around the same time I was reading Very Special People) and was utterly fascinated by Johnny Eck, who didn't have a lower body but could run very fast using his arms, and Prince Randian ("The Human Torso") who had no arms or legs but could use his mouth to roll cigarettes and to shave with a straight razor. Griffith spends a good portion of the biography on the making of Freaks, and Schlitzie's life during that time.Griffith exhaustively researched Nobody's Fool, interviewing Ward Hall, his sideshow manager, Wolf Krakowski, a musician who worked in a circus with Schlitzie in 1965 , and others who knew Schlitzie. Griffith includes his own story of watching Freaks for the first time in 1963 as an art student and being deeply affected by the movie and its stars, especially Schlitzie. Read the rest

There's an audience for everything on the web, so if your brand or business hasn't found it yet, it's time to get smarter with your marketing. There are nearly as many ways to reach people as there are websites, but the Marketing, SEO & Affiliate Marketing Super Bundle teaches the ones that get successful companies the most bang for their buck - and a few effective methods that cost nothing at all.This nine-course package includes lessons that focus on all the major advertising platforms on the web. You can learn how to optimize both the presentation and placement of ads on Facebook, Google AdWords, and MailChimp. Several courses touch on the invaluable skill of search engine optimization, teaching you to embed the perfect SEO terms into your WordPress site, among others. And there are extensive tutorials about the exploding field of affiliate marketing, which is a boon not only for the big companies that soak up web traffic but can be a great source of revenue for the companies that direct it there.Right now, the Marketing, SEO & Affiliate Marketing Super Bundle is sale priced at $37. Read the rest

When volunteers for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America appeared before the New Hampshire state legislature, they were met by GOP lawmakers wearing prominent pearl necklaces as a symbol of casual, sexist dismissal of the women's experience with gun violence as "pearl clutching."At least five GOP lawmakers -- all men -- wore pearls at the hearing, and they were captured and posted to organizer Shannon Watts's Twitter.A rep from the Women’s Defense League, a group that advocates for more rights for musketfuckers and other ammosexuals, attempted to gaslight the Moms Demand Action volunteers by claiming that the pearls were worn in support of women's rights. WDL president Kimberly Morin called the Moms Demand Action volunteers "harpies."The three lawmakers clearly identifiable in her pictures, Reps. Daryl Abbas, Scott Wallace and David Welch, are all Republicans. Calls to their State House offices were either not returned or were met with busy signals and full voice-mail boxes.GOP lawmakers wore pearls while gun violence victims testified. Activists were outraged. [Reis Thebault/Washington Post](Thanks, Tim Soman!) Read the rest

Early in January, Motherboard's Joseph Cox broke a blockbuster story about how America's mobile carriers sold access to their customers' realtime location data to many shady marketing brokers, who then quietly slipped that data to bounty hunters and other unsavory characters -- a practice that they'd been caught in before and had falsely promised to end.Since then, things have only gotten worse, with revelations that the companies involved had lobbied for lax privacy rules, arguing that they could be trusted to police themselves; meanwhile, Trump's loathesome FCC Chairman Ajit Pai stonewalled Congress and America on his agency's actions on the practice.Now Cox has another blockbuster: bounty hunters don't need to use back-channels to procure location information from data-brokers: they can skip the middlemen and simply call up your phone company and pretend to be a cop hoping to find someone who has gone missing, or been the victim of a crime, and the carriers often give them all the data they want, including fine-grained E-911 data that can locate you within a few feet, even indoors. What's more, it's not just bounty hunters who use this trick: men with histories of spousal abuse, stalkers and other predators seeking to locate their prey make liberal use of it. There are even professional cop-impersonators who offer location data as a service: pay them and they will call up a carrier and fraudulently obtain your target's location for you.Thanks to the poor due-diligence at the carriers, this practice seems to be widespread. Read the rest

I'm heading back to Austin for the SXSW Interactive festival and you can catch me three times this weekend: first on the Untold AI panel with Malka Older, Rashida Richardson and Christopher Noessel (5-6PM, FairmontManchester AB); then at the EFF Austin Party with Cindy Cohn and Bruce Sterling (7PM, 1309 Bonham Terrace); and on Sunday, I'm giving a keynote for Berlin's Re:Publica conference, which has its own track at SXSW; I'm speaking about Europe's new Copyright Directive and its dread Article 13 at 1PM at Buffalo Billiards, 201 East 6th Street. Read the rest

After Bernhard Graumann, 59, was found dead last week, police linked him to a trap that killed another person and a "explosive piece of firewood" that hurt two more. If you suspect Herr Graumann held a grudge against you, the police in Mehlingen would like a word. Ideally, before you open any doors, start any engines, drink any brandy, etc.German media report that Graumann was known to be a member of a local medieval association which apparently included, among other activities, recreating antique firearms that use gunpowder."People who have had a problematic private or business relationship with Graumann are urged to contact the police immediately," the police said.They have already "received dozens of calls," they said.Photo: Shutterstock / Romolo Tavani Read the rest

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" -- Gandhi's aphorism neatly describes the trajectory to date of Modern Monetary Theory, the latest incarnation of "chartalism," which holds that money comes into existence through government spending, and is taken out of circulation when the government taxes it back -- which means that without government deficit spending, there is no money, and which also means that the government doesn't have to fund its operations through taxes, but rather, it can issue as much currency as it needs to operate, within limits.The limits are key to understanding MMT: the traditional account of deficit spending is that it is inflationary, because as the government issues more currency, it dilutes the existing supply, pushing up prices. But MMT says that inflation only occurs when government spending competes with private spending for the same labor and resources. If all the plumbers are working as hard as they can and the government prints a bunch of money to start a new nationwide plumbing initiative, then it will be bidding against anyone who needs some plumbing done for those plumbers' services, pushing up prices.But if there is a bunch of excess capacity in the economy -- factories running below capacity, skilled people who want to work sitting around idle -- then the government can buy up all that excess capacity without competing with private spenders and employers, creating full employment and broad, shared prosperity. And when full employment is attained, the government can prevent inflation by taxing some of the money it issued out of existence. Read the rest

Jerry Merryman, who co-invented the handheld electronic calculator in 1965, is dead at 86.Merryman told NPR's "All Things Considered" in 2013, "It was late 1965 and Jack Kilby, my boss, presented the idea of a calculator. He called some people in his office. He says, we'd like to have some sort of computing device, perhaps to replace the slide rule. It would be nice if it were as small as this little book that I have in my hand."Merryman added, "Silly me, I thought we were just making a calculator, but we were creating an electronic revolution."Kilby died in 2005: Microchip pioneer Jack Kilby Dies at 81Photos: Smithsonia Museum; Montage: Matt Novak / Gizmodo Read the rest

Charlie Stross (previously) has spent most of his career writing two very long-running series: The Laundry Files, a Cthulhu-tinged series of spy procedurals, like HP Lovecraft writing James Bond, except Bond is a sysadmin; and The Merchant Princes, a tricksy medieval high-fantasy story that's actually an alternate worlds story that's actually a primer on economics, totalitarianism, mercantalism, and theories of technological progress.Both series have been going for more than a decade, both run to more than a million worlds, and both have been periodically interrupted while Stross managed both the writing process and personal drama and trauma. Writing this kind of longrunning tale is a rather extraordinary thing to do -- though it may seem like the world is full of longrunning series, the commercial reality of this kind of thing means that a large number of trilogies (or more) die after the second book, because the normal trajectory of a series to lose readers with every installment, leading to a death spiral.Stross has been at this long enough, and is also reflective enough, that he has come up with some really fascinating insights on this process, of going from being a young writer to a middle-aged writer while telling a single story, for years and years and years, and having the story, the writer, and the world all change under you while you're at it.One observation about something that's missing from Stross's otherwise excellent piece: for critics and reviewers, series can be really hard sledding. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH teens will never forget their time at Homestead High, the punishment they receive for seeking asylum in America.

Earlier today, the FDA approved esketamine (brand name Spravato), a relative of the dissociative psychedelic/anaesthetic ketamine (Special K), as a treatment for depression. Spravato comes in nasal spray form meant to be administered weekly or every other week depending on the severity of the patient's depression. "There has been a longstanding need for additional effective treatments for treatment-resistant depression, a serious and life-threatening condition," said the FDA's acting director of the Division of Psychiatry Products, Dr. Tiffany Farchione, in a press release. "Because of [safety] concerns, the drug will only be available through a restricted distribution system and it must be administered in a certified medical office where the health care provider can monitor the patient."From National Public Radio:Many doctors who have become comfortable offering ketamine for depression probably won't switch to esketamine, said Dr. Demitri Papolos, director of research for the Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation and a clinical associate professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.For the past 10 years, Papolos has been prescribing an intranasal form of ketamine for children and adolescents who have a disorder that includes symptoms of depression."I'm very pleased that finally the FDA has approved a form of ketamine for treatment-resistant mood disorders," Papolos said. He said the approval legitimizes the approach he and other doctors have been taking.But he hopes that doctors who are currently using ketamine continue to do so. "It'll be a lot less expensive and a lot easier for their patients [than esketamine]," he said. Read the rest

Andy George made his own camera lens with borax, river sand, and soda ash. From PetaPixel:“It has been one of the most challenging projects I’ve ever done,” George says after completing his lens. “Every single step in the project has been a huge pain.”Making clear glass took over a dozen tries, annealing the glass pucks took at least four attempts, and grinding the lenses themselves took at least 30 hours of continuous grinding.Sure, the lens is cloudy and, er, imperfect, but HE MADE HIS OWN DAMN CAMERA LENS FROM SCRATCH! Read the rest

On Friday, an appeals court judge in Camden County, New Jersey tossed out a verdict against Dr. Abbas Husain who in 2011 a jury found guilty of having sexually harassed an office employee. It came out later that one of the jurors was "very passionate" and concerned that Husain, who is Hindu, hadn't put his hand on the bible when taking the oath to testify. The juror had raised her concern with other jurors. From NJ.com:“The juror's comment regarding the Bible raises the specter of religious bigotry,” the court’s ruling said.The decision reversed a Camden County Superior Court judge’s denial of a new trial for Husain in 2016. A jury in 2011 found Husain created a hostile work environment, sexually harassed and retaliated against a then-part time office employee, who was awarded $12,500 in the civil case...“The Law Division judge said the juror who made the observation was only concerned with Husain's credibility, i.e. that a person who refused to place his hand on the Bible was incapable of taking the oath seriously and was therefore incredible,” the decision said. “He contrasted this with out-and-out religious bigotry. But if he was correct, that too is simply impermissible. The exercise of a person's religion should not make him or her per se incredible.”“Only a new trial would ensure that the outcome was untainted,” the decision continued. “The possibility that the verdict was a miscarriage of justice is too great for us to decide otherwise.” Read the rest

For years, Something Awful forum members have reveled in user bEatmstrJ's blow-by-blow account of a terrible bathroom remodel, in which he sought to transform his bathroom "with a woman in mind" with an eye to a future home-sale ("woman play an unfair role in the home-buying process"); bEatmstrJ's saga combines terrible ideas about how a bathroom should look with total home-renovation incompetence, making it the perfect foil for Something Awful's pioneering brand of jeering insults and mayhem.Now, Something Awful user Dieting Hippo has celebrated bEatmstrJ's bathroom by immortalizing it as a level for the venerable first-person-shooter Doom II, and so was born BATHDOOM.more progress on BATHDOOM. got some textures in, and the plastic pebbles around the bath really hurt when you step on 'em pic.twitter.com/d2gsJVub4V— Dieting Hippo (@dietinghippo) March 3, 2019Dieting Hippo told Matthew Gault from Motherboard that bEatmstrJ had transformed his bathroom into "a bathroom that would appeal to cans of Axe body spray." BATHDOOM is the product of bEatmstrJ’s hubris and Dieting Hippo’s genius. Everything is there—the weird color scheme, the psychedelic paintings, and the rocks that hurt your feet (and cause the player to take damage).It’s not the first time that bEatmstrJ’s cursed bathroom has been injected into a video game. After he posted pictures of the finished bathroom and was roundly mocked, one poster recreated the bathroom in The Sims 4 and declared it too garish for use even by digital humans.Thanks to Dieting Hippo and the power of Doom II, bEatmstrJ’s cursed DIY bathroom project will live on in digital memoryThe Hot New ‘Doom’ Mod Is a Nightmare DIY Bathroom Renovation [Matthew Gault/Motherboard] Read the rest

Jibo was a "social robot" startup that burned through $76m in venture capital and crowdfunding before having its assets sold to SQN Venture Partners late last year. Earlier this week, reporter Dylan J Martin tweeted a video of a $899 Jibo robot bidding its owner farewell, announcing that the new owners of his servers were planning to killswitch it; the robot thanked him "very very much" for having it around, and asked that "someday, when robots are more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said 'hello.'"Then, the Jibo performed a melancholy dance.This is a neat little parable about the danger of the server-tethered, DRM-locked IoT future, a world where robot dogs and even juicers only work for so long as some people in a distant boardroom consider it worthwhile to keep them working (this is also the the McGuiffin of my novella Unauthorized Bread, which appears in Radicalized).The robot’s message tells owners to go to the Jibo website for more information on the shutdown, but Jibo’s website appears to be mostly shut down itself, with broken links and videos.Dying social robot Jibo goes out with a song and a dance [Ashley Carman/The Verge]The servers for Jibo the social robot are apparently shutting down. Multiple owners report that Jibo himself has been delivering the news: "Maybe someday when robots are way more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said hello." pic.twitter.com/Sns3xAV33h— Dylan Martin (@DylanLJMartin) March 2, 2019 Read the rest