It was non-functioning.

The National Security Agency is reportedly considering ending the mass surveillance program that gathered data about hundreds of millions of telephone call records each year, including ones by Americans. NSA is “considering” ending that bulk phone spying program not because of all the outcry, or the disgrace over Edward Snowden's revelations -- but after all these years, “because it lacks operational value,” as reported in the Wall Street Journal by Dustin Volz.Senior Senate Intelligence Committee member Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR] released this statement on the NSA telephone records program today:“I cannot comment on classified matters referenced in media reports. However, it is increasingly clear to me that the NSA’s implementation of reforms to the phone records dragnet has been fundamentally flawed. In my view, the administration must permanently end the phone records program and Congress should refuse to reauthorize it later this year.“The agency’s admission last year that it vacuumed up over half a billion telephone records indicates that, despite the intent of Congress, bulk collection of phone records never really ended. I warned in 2011 that the executive branch was using the Patriot Act in ways that would leave Americans shocked and angry, and later revelations demonstrated that was true. Last year, I called for a thorough investigation of the program. Today, the NSA owes the American people an explanation of where things stand. I will not stop pushing Congress and intelligence leaders to be straight with the American people and end unnecessary surveillance that violates our constitutional freedoms without keeping us any safer.”Last year, Wyden and Sen. Read the rest

The cryptocurrency service Coinbase recently acquired Neutrino, a forensics startup founded by cybermercenaries who were left unemployed by the collapse of the company Hacking Team, following a dump of internal documents that revealed the company's enthusiastic and highly profitable complicity in human rights abuses by the world's most torture- and murder-happy autocrats and dictators.The move sparked a user rebellion, with the accompanying #DeleteCoinbase hashtag. Now, after a few days of bad press and account cancellations, Coinbase has announced that the former cybermercenaries will "transition out" of the company. CEO Brian Armstrong blamed the acquisition on "gap in Coinbase's due diligence process." “While we looked hard at the technology and security of the Neutrino product, we did not properly evaluate everything from the perspective of our mission and values as a crypto company,” Armstrong wrote. “We took some time to dig further into this over the past week, and together with the Neutrino team have come to an agreement: those who previously worked at Hacking Team (despite the fact that they have no current affiliation with Hacking Team), will transition out of Coinbase.”It’s unclear if “transition out” really means “fired,” or what this means for Neutrino, which presumably just lost its entire C-suite. At the time of writing, Russo, Valleri, and Ornaghi are still listed as Neutrino’s executives on the company’s site. Coinbase spokespeople were not available to comment by publishing time. Coinbase Says Ex-Hacking Team Members Will ‘Transition Out’ After Users Protest [Jordan Pearson/Motherboard] Read the rest

Since 2001, the NSA has secretly ingested the calling records of virtually every US mobile phone subscriber, with the covert participation of the mobile carries; the program -- authorized by a secret order of then-president GW Bush -- remained secret until it was disclosed through documents provided to journalists by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.After the Snowden revelations, a cowardly Congress retroactively legalized the NSA's domestic surveillance program with a 2015 bill called the USA Freedom Act (yes, seriously). The Act expires this year and there has been little action to reauthorize the program after it does.Now, Luke Murry -- a national security advisor to the House Republican minority -- has claimed in a Lawfare podcast interview that the system has not been used "in months," and that the GOP has no appetite for renewing it.Murry is an advisor to Representative Kevin McCarthy [R-CA], who quickly threw Murry under the bus, stating that Murry "was not speaking on behalf of administration policy or what Congress intends to do on this issue."The NSA has never provided any evidence that the program has thwarted a single terrorist attack. Last year, it was forced to delete all data gathered under the program because an unnamed mobile carrier had provided the Agency with more data than it requested, causing it to overcollect, even by the lax standards set out in the (barf) USA Freedom Act.Problems with the system emerged last year, when the National Security Agency said it had decided to delete its entire database of records gathered since the Freedom Act system became operational. Read the rest

“She protecc, she attack, but first she naap.”“When counting sheep is part of the job description.”She protecc, she attack, but first she naap[via] Read the rest

Two sisters, age 8 and 5, spent 44 hours lost in the woods in Humboldt County, California before they were rescued on Sunday. They had simply gone on a walk from their Northern California house Friday afternoon, but soon realized they couldn't find their way back home. They were found at 10:30am Sunday morning less than two miles from their house, according to CNN. This is their first interview, in which the smart, resourceful girls talk about how they survived. #searchandrescue #update Leia and Caroline were found approximately 1.4 miles south of their residence near Richardson's Grove. Here's a first look from the scene where first responders located the girls. Press release with more information as soon as possible today. pic.twitter.com/k2bUTQOtrt— Humboldt County Sheriff (@HumCoSO) March 3, 2019 Read the rest

I buy my eyeglasses online, paying about $30 a pair (I use Optical4Less, though there are many other online prescription eyeglass stores with equally low prices). I've always suspected brick and mortar eyeglass shops to be a ripoff, and this excellent LA Times article by David Lazurus confirmed my suspicions.[E. Dean Butler, the founder of LensCrafters] said he recently visited factories in China where many glasses for the U.S. market are manufactured. Improved technology has made prices even lower than what Dahan recalled.“You can get amazingly good frames, with a Warby Parker level of quality, for $4 to $8,” Butler said. “For $15, you can get designer-quality frames, like what you’d get from Prada.”And lenses? “You can buy absolutely first-quality lenses for $1.25 apiece,” Butler said.Yet those same frames and lenses might sell in the United States for $800.Butler laughed. “I know,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s a complete rip-off.”Image: Iryna Inshyna/Shutterstock Read the rest

😲 Top 10 sneak attacks of all time, undisputed 😲

Last September, Facebook drew fire for abusing the phone numbers users provided for two-factor authentication messages, sending spam advertising messages over the same channel -- now, rather than reforming its ways, Facebook has doubled down on poisoning the security well, by adding a no-opt-out policy of allowing anyone in the world to search for you by phone number if you provide that number for two-factor auth. This feature has been around for a long time (Facebook promised to remove it in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal), but what's changed is that Facebook is now requiring some users to turn on two-factor authentication (which is a good practice, though SMS provides the worst security of all 2FA methods); that means that millions of Facebook users are now exposing themselves to potentially serious privacy risks as a condition of securing their Facebook accounts.We are in a great race to improve computer security before the existing bad-security debt comes due, creating breach-quakes that make all the infosec disasters to date look like the mere tremors that they are. Educating users about 2FA is a huge part of that process, and Facebook is poisoning the well, just because. This screw-up, intentional or not, could discourage adoption of two-factor authentication, leaving people at risk of getting hacked. Facebook’s decision to use phone numbers that were given to it for a specific security purpose for reasons other than security are a betrayal, and is training people more broadly that turning over more personal information to an internet company for security features could backfire. Read the rest

For years, college students have unofficially majored in weed. Now universities are beginning to offer cannabis studies programs because, y'know, marijuana is where the money is these days. From the Associated Press:"We're providing a fast track to get into the industry," said Brandon Canfield, a chemistry professor at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. Two years ago, he proposed a new major in medicinal plant chemistry after attending a conference where cannabis industry representatives spoke of an urgent need for analytical chemists for product quality assessment and assurance.The four-year degree, which is the closest thing to a marijuana major at an accredited U.S. university, has drawn nearly 300 students from 48 states, Canfield said. Students won't be growing marijuana, which was recently legalized by Michigan voters for recreational use. But Canfield said students will learn to measure and extract medicinal compounds from plants such as St. John's Wort and ginseng and transfer that knowledge to marijuana.Agricultural schools are also getting in on the action. A similar program is being launched at Minot State University in North Dakota this spring. The college said students will learn lab skills applicable to medical marijuana, hops, botanical supplements and food science industries."All of our graduates are going to be qualified to be analysts in a lab setting," Canfield said, noting that experience could lead to a position paying $70,000 right out of school. Those wishing to start their own businesses can choose an entrepreneurial track that adds courses in accounting, legal issues and marketing... Read the rest

Do ducks like peas? If you consider this video to be two successful pulls of a bayesian multi-armed bandit, the answer is probably.ducks love peas pic.twitter.com/XVI2JSxHyL— jon "only ducks now" rosenberg🍗 (@jonrosenberg) March 3, 2019Image: Twitter Read the rest

In 1984, Kid Stuff Records & Tapes released "2001: A Space Odyssey" as a book/7" record set for children along with "2010: The Year We Make Contact" to coincide with the latter's release that year. Audio of the "2001: A Space Odyssey" adaptation above. Spoiler: HAL still won't open the pod bay doors. Read the rest

Love Hultén made a Raspberry-Pi based retro-game handheld console in the form factor of a cheeseburger. Below, his making-of video, where we see how he makes good use of a laser cutter. Brilliant! Read the rest

Joe Biden's 2020 message pic.twitter.com/TNNox2kvGz— Thomas! (@Thomasurlatoile) March 4, 2019The last time you saw former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, he was perhaps delivering the Democrats' response to President Trump's 2017 state of the union address. But the chances are you forgot it, as he wasted it trying to appeal to Trump voters, because the only way mainstream Democrats can imagine electoral victory is by winning over white men suffering from "economic anxiety" and other euphemisms.Anyway, here he is boiling all that down to its depressing yet hypnotizing essentials. [via Thomasurlatoile]P.S. One of the interesting things about Beshear's career is that when you search the text of articles about it, the word "position" only ever refers to the various jobs he has held. Read the rest

Writing in the New York Times, Tim Wu (previously) describes the state of American politics after decades of manipulation dirty tricks and voter suppression, where policies with extremely high levels of public approval like higher taxes on the super-rich (75%), paid maternity leave (67%), net neutrality (83%), parallel importation of pharmaceuticals from Canada (71%) and empowering Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices (92%) are nevertheless considered politically impossible.Of course the thing that all these policies have in common is that they would make life vastly better for nearly all of us, while making the super-rich a very little worse off. As Wu points out, this is not a picture of a "heavily polarized" nation, as the pundits would have it. These policies are wildly popular and are outside of the political mainstream because a minority have figured out how to suppress the will of the supermajority.This is clearly by design. Libertarian thinkers -- at least those who subscribe to the Ayn Radnian idea that a small number of people are innately superior and thus should be liberated from the constraints of lesser people -- have long fretted about the danger that democracy poses to these supermen (see, for example, Peter Thiel's infamous belief that "democracy is incompatible with freedom").This point is forcefully and frighteningly made in Nancy MacLean's 2017 book Democracy in Chains, which, despite some serious defects, is excellent at explaining the "anti-majoritarian" project that has been at the heart of right-wing politics since Reconstruction. Read the rest

When I was in high school, it always felt very uncomfortable speaking a teacher's first name aloud, almost like they couldn't really have a first name beyond Ms., Mr., or Mrs. (In fact, it was an odd transition to university when many of my professors preferred to be called by their first names.) In the fun video above, Adam Lamberti walks through his high school greeting teachers by their first names. Some of them couldn't care less. Others are clearly discombobulated by the experience. Read the rest

BAE developed the London Counter Fraud Hub, which uses machine learning systems to detect benefit fraud; after trials in the boroughs of Camden, Ealing, Croydon and Islington, the system has been approved for regular use, despite an admitted 20% failure rate.The councils estimate that BAE's algorithm will be instrumental in terminating 40,000 allegedly fraudulent benefits claims in its first year of deployment, meaning that 8,000 households will be incorrectly accused of fraud and will have to undergo a lengthy, bureaucratic process to prevent loss of benefits, which could cost them their homes and the money they rely on for food and other necessities. These 8,000 households are already strained and cannot afford professional advice or help while they fight for their rightful benefits.Ealing Council defended the move, saying that the system will not terminate accounts, rather it will single out accounts for human review, which could lead to termination. Longstanding experience with automated fraud-detection systems has shown that the judgments of these systems come a veneer of empirical legitimacy that turns the presumption of innocence on its head.The Counter Fraud Hub is the latest in a series of brutal, automated benefits administration system, following on from the catastrophic Universal Credit scheme, which unjustly destroyed thousands of peoples' lives, costing them shelter, food, education and employment.Joanna Redden, co-director of Cardiff University's Data Justice Lab said: "When automating a system like this, when you know some people are going to be wrongly identified as committing fraud, and that many will have few means or resources there are serious concerns that need to be addressed. Read the rest

My next book of science fiction for adults is Radicalized, which will be published on March 19 (I'll be making tour appearances across the US, Canada and Germany starting on March 18); the early critical notices have started to come in and gosh, they are embarrassingly effusive!From Publishers Weekly: "Doctorow (Walkaway) captures the mix of hope, fear, and uncertainty felt by those in precarious situations, set against the backdrop of intriguing futuristic landscapes. The characters are well wrought and complex, and the worldbuilding is careful. This is a fine introduction to Doctorow’s work, and his many fans will enjoy its exploration of favorite themes."From Booklist (starred review): "Doctorow's combination of cutting edge speculation and deep interest in the social and political possibilities of the future make this collection a must-read for fans of Kim Stanley Robinson or of any sf where the future is always part of an engaged and passionate dialogue with the present."Color me extremely gratified. Read the rest

As of this writing, the petition opposing Article 13 -- the part of the EU's new Copyright Directive that mandates copyright filters for online communities, services and platforms -- has 4,920,535 signatories, making it the largest petition in the history of our species (edging out this one from 2017). The vote on this measure will be held the week of March 25 (despite dirty attempts to change the date), and there will be EU-wide mass demonstrations against it on March 23. The vote comes just weeks before EU elections, and you can use this easy, well-made tool to contact your MEP and demand that they pledge to vote against Article 13 as a condition of securing your support in the elections.Stop the censorship-machinery! Save the Internet! [Save the Internet/Change.org] Read the rest

A second HIV patient is reportedly clear of the virus after undergoing a bone marrow transplant during cancer treatment. The operation is so arduous, and HIV-resistant doners so dare, that the procedure isn't likely to become commonplace. But the second result will focus resources on the cure's mechanism of action in hopes of developing a more accessible treatment.Prof Ravindra Gupta from University College London and lead author of the paper on the successful treatment of the London patient, published in the journal Nature, said the way forward could be editing of the CCR5 gene, which allows HIV to enter cells.“A field was generated as a result of the Berlin patient looking at CCR5 gene-editing,” he said. “You may have heard of the Chinese babies that were having experimental knockout of that particular gene." Read the rest

The live-action Sonic was expected to be overly "realistic" in a possibly-unwholesome way, perhaps even hinting at the unofficial internet life of Sega's "fallen" mascot. But a leaked "style guide" from the forthcoming live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie exposes the design as, well, not even that. One popular comparison was to the mascot of a used car dealership, but it made me think of dollar-store cereal brands. The cheesiness hinted at in such comparisons is hard to tease out from the cheapness, but it comes down to this: the artist(s) seem unfamiliar with the squeeze and stretch of cartoon draughtsmanship and of the underlying anime conventions that inform the character's design.Like westernized box art from old Japanese video games, there's a mismatch between the product and its marketing. With Style Guide Sonic, a conscious effort's being made to somehow reconcile the "authentic" design with the smooth, realistic animation puppetry that Hollywood thinks is popular. Someone thought a lot about how to make Sonic's single weird eyeball work in three grossly-rendered dimensions...... but somewhere along the way, they slipped beyond the event horizon and now it's almost good enough to post on Deviantart.Another shot (below) leaked thereafter, and it's not so bad.... perhaps an effort to show that things have moved on since the "style guide" and that the movie's not going to be quite so dire as it suggests. But it still isn't great and, yes, those are Nikes. Read the rest

Rudy Rucker shared a link to this wonderful and idea-rich piece from Stephen Wolfram's blog. In the article, entitled "Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure," mathenaut and "undisputed king of the computerites" (Rucker) shares some really useful tips and ideas on personal workspace hacks and his ideas on productivity and workflow....I found out that by putting a gel strip at the correct pivot point under my wrists (and putting the mouse on a platform) I can comfortably type while I’m walking. I typically use a 5% incline and go at 2 mph—and I’m at least fit enough that I don’t think anyone can tell I’m walking while I’m talking in a meeting. (And, yes, I try to get potentially frustrating meetings scheduled during my walking time, so if I do in fact get frustrated I can just “walk it off” by making the treadmill go a little faster.)I’d actually been thinking about walking and working for a long time. Twenty years ago I imagined doing it with an augmented reality display and a one-handed (chorded) keyboard. But the technology didn’t arrive, and I wasn’t even sure the ergonomics would work out (would it make me motion sick, for example?)....Last spring, I was at a fancy tech event, and I happened to be just out of the frame of a photo op that involved Jeff Bezos walking with a robotic dog. I wasn’t personally so excited about the robotic dog. But what really interested me was the person walking out of the frame on the other side, intently controlling the dog—using a laptop that he had strapped on in front of him as if he were selling popcorn. Read the rest

Special counsel Robert Mueller today notified a federal judge that yet another Instagram post by Donald Trump's longtime friend Roger Stone may have violated Stone's gag order. If Judge Amy Berman Jackson agrees, Stone is going to jail.Monday's filing by Mueller's office mentions a CNBC story on Sunday detailing the Instagram post by Stone, which contained an image of him under the words "Who framed Roger Stone."New in Instagramland: Roger Stone, using Insta stories (which disappear after 24 hrs), suggests he’s being framed. pic.twitter.com/GK0tUsH4jq— Shelby Holliday (@shelbyholliday) March 3, 2019Stone is barred from commenting on Mueller's team of prosecutors under the gag order imposed by Judge Amy Berman Jackson in late February.Dan Mangan for NBC News:If Stone, who is currently free on a $250,000 signature bond, is found by Jackson to have violated that order, she could have him jailed without bail pending his trial on charges of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing justice.Stone deleted the "Who framed Roger Stone" image from a series of other rotating images on his Instagram story Sunday shortly after CNBC sent an email to his lawyer asking about it.The other images suggested that people donate to Stone's legal defense fund, with one saying "I am committed to proving my innocence. But I need your help," and another saying, "I've always had Trump's back. Will you have mine?""We note for the Court that according to public reporting, on March 3, 2019, the defendant's Instagram account shared an image with the title 'who framed Roger Stone.' A copy of the image is submitted under seal as Exhibit C. Read the rest

This is an adorable tiny human. Their glee at being suddenly released from a baby straightjacket is palpable. No babies were bummed out in the making of this viral video.I'm FREE!![via] Read the rest

In the same week that Democrats announce they'll hold hearings to probe why Trump's Interior Department shrank Bears Ears National Monument by 85%, the internet is abuzz with this image. Archaeologists have identified this artifact as a 2000-year-old tattooing instrument, unearthed from Bears Ears in Utah. New findings published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports this week show that this tool, found at the ancient Native American site, is a tattoo needle fashioned from cactus spines that was created between years 137–215 CE. The findings reveal new information about how body adornment and tattooing were practiced among indigenous people in this region. From Redefining the age of tattooing in western North America: A 2000-year-old artifact from Utah, from archaeologist Andrew Gillreath-Brown and colleagues and published on February 28:“We report the earliest evidence of tattooing technology in western North America through recent work on a legacy collection from the Turkey Pen site, located in southeastern Utah within the Greater Bears Ears Landscape, and curated at the Washington State University (WSU) Museum of Anthropology for 40 years. Based on morphological attributes, we identify this implement as a hafted cactus spine tattoo tool. The artifact was extracted from Layer C-4 of a well-stratified midden. (...) A date of 1833 ± 31 RCYBP (calibrated to 176 CE [137–215 CE]) was returned on a human coprolite from the layer containing the tattoo tool. We describe rigorous and comprehensive analysis of the Turkey Pen tattoo tool, including scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis, portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and experimental tattooing. Read the rest

An energy firm linked to uranium mining interests around Bears Ears National Monument in Utah met with a senior Department of Interior official just one month President Donald Trump issued a surprise request to review the monument's boundaries. When the review concluded, Trump shrank the monument by 85%. Some 100 uranium claims that were previously *inside* the monument's protected boundary were suddenly on the outside.Now, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul M. Grijalva (D-AZ) says Democrats plan hold a hearing on March 13, to look into that shady review. They sent an invitation to Ryan Zinke, who led the Department of the Interior under Trump at that time and was forced to resign in disgrace over other corruption charges. Zinke declined the invitation.Roll Call reports that documents show that Energy Fuels Resources (USA) Inc., a United States subsidiary of a Canadian energy and mining firm, met with a top DOI official who knew he'd be personally involved with such a review, before Trump requested it.The House Natural Resources Committee wants know if the 2017 reassessment “had a predetermined outcome of shrinking Bears Ears to benefit the uranium sector generally and Energy Fuels Resources specifically.”From Roll Call:When President Barack Obama designated the monument in December 2016, its boundaries encompassed or abutted over 350 uranium claims tied to the company. Its uranium processing mill, the only such facility in the United States, was located mere miles from the monument. Proximity to a national monument can lead to additional regulatory scrutiny. Read the rest

Terra Nullius is my latest column in Locus magazine; it explores the commonalities between the people who claim ownership over the things they use to make new creative works and the settler colonialists who arrived in various "new worlds" and declared them to be empty, erasing the people who were already there as a prelude to genocide.I was inspired by the story of Aloha Poke, in which a white dude from Chicago secured a trademark for his "Aloha Poke" midwestern restaurants, then threatened Hawai'ians who used "aloha" in the names of their restaurants (and later, by the Dutch grifter who claimed a patent on the preparation of teff, an Ethiopian staple grain that has been cultivated and refined for about 7,000 years).I gave a keynote based on this essay in January at the "Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain" event at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.Both the venality of Aloha Poke and the genocidal brutality of Terra Nullius reveal a deep problem lurking in the Lockean conception of property: all the stuff that’s “just lying around” is actually already in relation to other people, often the kind of complex relation that doesn’t lend itself to property-like transactions where someone with deep pockets can come along and buy a thing from its existing “owner.”The labor theory of property always begins with an act of erasure: “All the people who created, used, and improved this thing before me were doing something banal and unimportant – but my contribution is the step that moved this thing from a useless, unregarded commons to a special, proprietary, finished good.”Criticism of this delusion of personal exceptionalism is buttressed by a kind of affronted perplexity: “Can’t you see how much of my really top-notch labor I have blended with this natural resource to improve it? Read the rest

The text of the proposed legislation has not been released.

Time to pre-order some gladiolus. Morrissey announced a week-long residency on Broadway in Manhattan from May 2-11. Moz will hold court at the 1,500-seat Lunt-Fontanne Theater and, according to the poster, he'll be "singing the songs that made you cry and the songs that saved your life.” Apparently he'll play tunes from The Smiths and his solo career including material from his new covers album California Son. Unless, of course, he cancels the whole damn thing due to a hot dog vendor on the corner or just because.Above, the first single from California Son, Morrissey's take on Roy Orbison's "It's Over."Meanwhile, last week The Guardian asked Morrissey's recent collaborators to comment on the singer's distasteful right wing politics: "'I feel like I've been had'"(Spin) Read the rest

50 years ago, a boy named Brian stole a copy of Life magazine from an Ohio library that sported a photo of The Beatles on its back cover. But this week he decided to give the book back, along with an apology note: "Hello. I stole this magazine from the Parma Ridge Road library when I was a kid. I'm sorry I took it. I've enclosed a check for the late fee."Over the decades he racked up more than $1,800 in late fees, according to AP. But fortunately, for Brian, the library puts a $100 cap on library fines, so that is the amount he left them.The library, now called Cuyahoga County Public Library, wrote Brian back: “To the Beatles fan who "borrowed" this copy of Life magazine in 1968: Thank you for returning it this week and clearing your conscience.”Via Daily BeastImage: Life magazine Read the rest

I started drinking matcha every day, and the rest of my family decided they liked it, too. The tiny cans I had been buying were only lasting a few days, and it started to get really expensive. I looked around and found this 1 pound can of matcha for a tiny fraction of the price I'd been paying. I didn't expect it to be that good, but it turns out to be tasty. I've had it with hot water and whipped with half & half and almond milk. I made a bunch of matcha lattes for people who came over to our house for lunch yesterday and they all commented on how delicious it was. Read the rest

Elan Lee (previously) is part of the team that brought us the amazing card game Exploding Kittens (previously); writing in MAKE: Magazine, Lee explains how they built an awesome Exploding Kittens vending machine for Comic-Con, to go beyond the boring, traditional ideas of what a con booth was.The vending machine sold all the company's games, but it also had a $1 "random item" button that dropped, well, random items: "whole watermelons, toilet plungers, custom drawn artwork, brooms, a bag of rocks, sombreros, or asparagus." The random item button turned out to be the hit of the show.The Exploding Kittens vending machine was actually a vending machine costume built for our team. In addition to all the products and merchandise, the machine contained thousands of different random items, and a team of six to 12 people working non-stop to turn these items into a seemingly infinite number of possibilities. Audiences could watch this machine for hours and never see the same item twice.After the first day of running the machine we had underestimated demand for random items so drastically that we had to make an emergency run to the local dollar store and buy every item we could fit in our cars. We had expected to deliver 250 random items during the convention. We ended up delivering 1,400. That’s 40 items per hour for 35 hours over the course of the weekend.Fans lined up for hours spilling over into walkways, hallways, and other people’s booths. Read the rest

NASA astronaut Anne McClain captured this astonishing image of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule approaching her temporary residence, the International Space Station. "The dawn of a new era in human spaceflight," McClain tweeted with the photo.The SpaceX Crew Dragon, containing supplies rather than humans for this test, docked at the ISS yesterday morning and the hatch was opened a few hours ago. From NASA:(The mission, called) Demo-1 is the first flight test of a space system designed for humans built and operated by a commercial company through a public-private partnership. The mission also marks a significant step toward returning to the nation the capability to launch astronauts on a U.S.-built spacecraft from U.S. soil.“It’s an exciting evening,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said after the launch. “What today really represents is a new era in spaceflight. We’re looking forward to being one of many customers in a robust commercial marketplace in low-Earth orbit.” Read the rest

Roger Wood (previously), the bonkers steampunk assemblage clock sculptor, just sent this to his Klockwerks mailing list: "This is what I created in February." Read the rest

Last December, human rights advocates and Google employees cheered when they learned that internal dissent at Google had killed the company's secret plan to launch a search tool in China that would censor results to the specifications set out by state censors, and collect detailed histories of search activity that could be turned over to authorities hunting for dissidents.But a leaked confidential memo written by Caesar Sengupta -- a manager on "Project Dragonfly" -- reveals that the Chinese search tool has been kept alive by billing its workers to other projects in the organization; and indeed, the code repositories for the Chinese tools have been vigorously updated since then, with 500 check-ins in December and 400 more since then, approximately the same number of commits to those repos while the project was still under active development.It's not clear what's going on here, and since Google's senior management have refused to publicly commit to canceling the project and staying out of bed with Chinese political censors and secret police, many googlers are worried that they have been hoodwinked -- after all, Project Dragonfly was kept secret from the start in order to avoid an employee backlash.Google sources with knowledge of Dragonfly said that the code changes could possibly be attributed to employees who have continued this year to wrap up aspects of the work they were doing to develop the Chinese search platform.“I still believe the project is dead, but we’re still waiting for a declaration from Google that censorship is unacceptable and that they will not collaborate with governments in the oppression of their people,” said one source familiar with Dragonfly. Read the rest

I'm glad Maxwell Helmberger's YouTube channel nearly quadrupled its subscribership over the weekend after I posted one of his videos on Friday. He made a new video thanking Boing Boing (you're welcome, Maxewell!) along with some hints as to what bug he'll make a video about next. Read the rest

Building on her excellent work in 2017's Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Jane Mayer takes to The New Yorker with a deeply researched, lively and alarming 12,000-word longread on the radical shifts at Fox News that have taken place since the Trump election, as #MeToo has claimed the organization's senior leaders, leaving it rudderless and under the nominal command of an ailing Rupert Murdoch, whose main management contributions have consisted of purging the minor dissenting voices at Fox, leaving behind a kind of Hannity-and-Co version of Lord of the Flies.Mayer traces the current state of Fox to the disgraced departure of Fox's top brass, starting with CEO Roger Ailes (who promptly dropped dead) and then Bill O'Reilly, both implicated in a string of grotesque, longrunning sexual abuse scandals that also claimed Bill Shine, abettor of these abuses, who quickly took over as Trump's communications director, where he serves while collecting millions of dollars from Fox.The departures left Fox rudderless, for while Ailes was a monster who raped a female subordinate for decades (she was eventually paid off for $3.1 million) and kept a "Black Ops" department that performed oppo research on a long list of his enemies (including his biographer!), he also represented (incredibly) the voice of reason and balance at the company, punishing on-air talent who campaigned for and provided cover to Republican politicians.With Ailes gone, Murdoch himself took over, purging the company of those dissenting voices who had kept things somewhat in check in Ailes absence. Read the rest

Cottonelle and Walmart have both recently produced social media video commercials starring gay men. Predictably, social conservatives flipped out, calling for boycotts and for their god to mete out punishment against the evil doers. According to Curtis Sparrer, Bospar PR principal, this is exactly what Cottonelle and Walmart were counting on:“It looks like the marketers of both Walmart and Cottonelle were counting on social conservatives’ outrage to drive their business objectives,” said Curtis Sparrer, Bospar PR principal. “Neither video was a traditional broadcast segment, but rather produced for social media. So conservatives didn’t simply stumble across these segments, but rather they were alerted to them, likely by the companies themselves.”“There’s a method behind the madness: marketers count on public reaction to their campaigns,” Sparrer continued. “Conservatives can be reliably counted on to provide an immediate reaction to any pro-LGBT storyline, creating a newsworthy controversy for a journalist to cover. That media coverage will not only feature both sides of the controversy but also provide top-of-mind brand recognition that research has found is more effective than traditional advertising. That means social conservatives have become useful tools for marketers and public relations. As a marketer myself I am loathe to reveal this tactic because social conservatives might get wise and not take the bait the next time a campaign features LGBT people. However since I’ve been gay longer than I’ve been in marketing I am eager for the day when LGBT people can be featured in media and people will simply react to the spot on the merits of its content.”The American Family Association (AFA), which is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, issued the following statement about the Walmart commercial:We've seen many large corporations reject that in their marketing, but I honestly never thought Walmart would join the cultural revolution and reject the beliefs of its customer base," AFA president Tim Wildmon said in the release. Read the rest

Volante Design (previously) scored a huge win last November with a line of licensed heavy denim, cosplay-adjacent Starfleet jackets that could be worn like Star Trek: TNG uniforms or like motorcyle jackets, depending on how you zipped them.Now Volante has announced a second set of Trek jackets: the $330 Starfleet 2256 jackets, inspired by the crew uniforms from Star Trek: Discovery, with cuts for men and women, designed to flatter bodies of all sizes.The new jackets come in four colors: "Command Gold," "Sciences Silver," "Operations Copper" and "Section 31." Read the rest

I guess it's kind of like yelling fire in a crowded theater: Jacob Maldonado of Honolulu, Hawaii had been called as a possible juror in a misdemeanor assault trial but really didn't want to serve on the jury. So just before the selection process began, Maldonado yelled “He is guilty! He is guilty!” outside the courtroom. From TheGardenIsland.com:(Judge Edward) Kubo declared a mistrial, finding the man’s disturbance had affected the 44 other potential jurors, according to the judge’s order.The judge ordered Maldonado’s arrest on a contempt charge and set a $10,000 cash bail. Maldonado spent the night in jail and appeared before Kubo on Wednesday morning...(Attorney Jason) Burks told the judge that Maldonado’s father was recently diagnosed with cancer and his wife was also dealing with medical issues...Maldonado was released without being charged or fined.image: "An empty jury box at an American courtroom in Pershing County, Nevada" by Ken Lund Read the rest

When legendary grifter Elizabeth Holmes was 19 years old, she conceived of a medical device that could perform extensive diagnostics in an eyeblink from only a single drop of blood; she had no idea how such a device would work or whether it was even possible, but that didn't stop her from drawing up a patent application for her "invention" and repeatedly submitting to the patent office until, eventually, she was awarded a patent for what amounted to a piece of uninspiring design fiction.For Holmes, the patent was key to convincing investors, partners, and patients that her massive, years-long fraud (a company called "Theranos" bilked investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars) was legit; the USPTO helped her out by trumpeting the importance of patents to "inventors" like Holmes, comparing her to Benjamin Franklin in their public communications.Patents are only supposed to be issued for devices with "utility" -- that is, they have to actually work before you can get a patent for them. But it's been decades since the USPTO has paid meningful attention to this criterion when evaluating applications, handing out patents for imaginary "inventions" to con artists, delusional hucksters, and other "inventors" who are willing to pay the filing fees that keep the lights on at the Patent Office. And since most people only have a vague idea of the rigor used in patent examination, these patents for design fiction can be used as impressive "proof" when crooks set out to deceive their marks.(Another real problem with these fake patents: allowing con-artists to patent "inventions" that they have no idea how to make means that when someone really does invent that gadget, the con-man can use their bogus patent to threaten and extort real inventors). Read the rest

An 8-year-old boy and family were boarding a ski lift at Grouse Mountain ski resort in North Vancouver when the boy immediately slipped out of the chair. His father grabbed on to his son and told the operator to stop the lift, according to Global News, but the music was too loud for the operator to hear. By the time the operator noticed and stopped the lift, the boy was hanging from the chair, around 20 feet off the ground, gripping on to his dad for dear life. People on the ground were staring, not knowing what to do, until five boys ages 12-14 jumped into action. They saw a netted fence and grabbed a piece of it, along with some kind of pad they found, and held their makeshift safety net under the dangling boy. One of the teens told the boy to kick off his skis, and another said, "Trust us and drop." Which the boy did, and landed without any injuries. For their heroic deed, the teens are receiving free passes to the ski resort for a year.Here's the news story on Global News:Here's the raw footage: Read the rest

GDELT, a digital news monitoring service backed by Google Jigsaw, has released a massive, open set of linking data, containing 1.78 billion links in CSV, with four fields for each link: "FromSite,ToSite,NumDays,NumLinks."The dataset has been purged of boilerplate links from headers and footers and is intended to help researchers analyze trends in linking behavior, in service of GDELT's mission to "support new theories and descriptive understandings of the behaviors and driving forces of global-scale social systems from the micro-level of the individual through the macro-level of the entire planet."It's 396MB compressed, or 986MB uncompressefd.One of the most useful ways to use this dataset is to sort by the "NumDays" field to rank the top outlets linking to a given site or the top outlets that linked to another outlet. Using the NumDays field allows you to rank connections based on their longevity and filter out momentary bursts (such as a major story leading an outlet to run dozens and dozens of articles linking to an outside website for several days and then never linking to that website again).The entire dataset was created with a single line of SQL in Google BigQuery, taking just 64.9 seconds and processing 199GB.Who Links To Whom? The 30M Edge GKG Outlink Domain Graph April 2016 To Jan 2019 – The GDELT Project [GDELT Project](via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

Hannah Robbins and Scott Brink, two student interns at IBM division X-Force Red set out to study potential vulnerabilities in sign-in reception kiosks, found at many offices and retailers, and discovered 19 bugs in kiosks from industry leaders Jolly Technologies, HID Global, Threshold Security, Envoy, and The Receptionist (the vendors say they have now patched these bugs).The defects the interns discovered variously allowed attackers to dump the full contents of the reception system's databases (including Social Security Numbers and scanned driver's licenses), overwrite/delete/alter entries for previous visitors, and more.Though the interns did yeoman work in surfacing these defects, the fact that a pair of relatively junior security practitioners were able to find all these showstopper bugs bodes ill for the whole category, which has not been subject to much independent scrutiny (yet).I encounter these systems often, including in places like doctor's offices and schools, which sometimes ask you to scan sensitive IDs and input other sensitive information. I'd always had a bad feeling about them, so it's a little alarming to get hard data to support that impressionistic anxiety.Crawley says he would like to look more deeply in the future at visitor management systems that integrate with RFID door locks and can directly issue badges. Compromising one of those would not only potentially give an attacker extensive physical access within a target organization, but could also enable other digital compromises across the victim’s networks. And researchers have certainly found vulnerabilities in electronic access control systems over the years, and continue to. Read the rest

ASAP Science provides some excellent tips for intensive, last-minute studying of just about any subject where you need to remember a lot of information. The video covers a lot of ground, from memory palaces and cortisol to metacognition to other things I can't remember because I didn't study enough. Read the rest

Sleeping late on weekends not only won't help much when it comes to your sleep debt from the week, it can also lead to weight gain, insulin sensitivity, and nighttime hunger. University of Colorado Boulder sleep physiologist Christopher Depner ran a study involving young adults who were assigned different sleep regimens over a two week period, including a group of "weekend recovery sleepers." They report their results in the scientific journal Current Biology. From Science News:Lack of sleep disrupts appetite-controlling hormones such as leptin, Depner says. And shifts in the weekend sleepers’ natural biological clocks to later hours caused them to get hungry later. During the workweeks, both groups consumed roughly 400 to 650 Calories in late-night snacks, such as pretzels, yogurt and potato chips. By the end of the experiment, people in both groups had gained on average around 1.5 kilograms. But when it came to insulin sensitivity, the two groups diverged. Sensitivity across all body tissues in the weekend recovery group dropped around 27 percent, compared with their baseline sensitivity measured at the start of the experiment. That was substantially worse than the 13 percent decline in those who consistently had little sleep. And the weekend sleepers were the only ones to have significant declines in liver and muscle cells — both important for food digestion — after a weekend of trying to catch up on sleep....Peter Liu, a sleep endocrinologist at UCLA, questions whether these results are broadly applicable, especially in people who are chronically sleep deprived. Read the rest

Alias is an open source hardware/free-open firmware "parasite" that fits over your smart speaker's sensors and fills them with white noise; the Alias has its own (non-networked, user-controlled) mic and speaker and when you speak a magic phrase, the Alias temporarily stops the white noise and transmits your commands to the speaker; Alias also lets you specify strings of commands and other useful utilities that restore control over your smart-speaker to you.This is the first time I've ever considered getting a smart speaker, but I'd want a version of this thing that also blocks the smart-speaker's network connections except when it is responding to a query that Alias has relayed to it.Alias acts as a middle-man device that is designed to appropriate any voice activated device. Equipped with speakers and a microphone, Alias is able to communicate and manipulate the home assistant when placed on top of it. The speakers of Alias are used to interrupt the assistance with a constant low noise/sound that feeds directly into the microphone of the assistant. First when Alias recognises the user created wake-word, it stops the noise and quietly activates the assistant with a sound recording of the original wake-word. From here the assistant can be used as normally. The wake word detection is made with a small neural network that runs locally on Alias, which can be trained and modified through live examples. The app acts as a controller to reset, train and turn on/off Alias.The way Alias manipulates the home assistance allows to create new custom functionalities and commands that the products were not originally intended for. Read the rest

On the eve of Apple issuing a credit card (and following Carl Icahn's 2013 advice that "Apple should be a bank"), we seem to be reaching the end of financialization's dominance over the economy, a trend that started in the 1970s and has risen ever since -- but the tricks are wearing thin. See for example, the notorious Brazilian corporate raiders 3G bought out Kraft-Heinz and tried its usual MO of goosing profits by squeezing suppliers, paying its bills late, and cutting costs at the expense of growth -- only to have Kraft-Heinz's value drop by more than 50% in less than three years.This pattern is repeating everywhere: where once corporate raiders could seize a company, loot it, load it up with debt and sell it on to suckers, now everything from energy bonds to shale gas are being pounded by the markets after private equity looters tried their usual shenanigans, to say nothing of GE being forced into a $15B write-down as a direct result of private equity engineering.The debt-fuelled expansion of the financial economy seems to be reaching a breaking-point: financial assets are sitting at more than 300% the value of "real economy" assets, and debt has doubled since the financial crisis of 2008. Government bonds are being given failing grades by rating agencies, and the OECD is warning that private debt bonds are high risks for defaults.Every time we write about financial engineering here, where raiders borrow heavily to cash themselves out and leave behind empty husks in place of once-thriving businesses, the comments are full of questions about why anyone would lend these grifters so many billions of dollars (sometimes these questioners imply that private equity and its lenders must know something we don't). Read the rest

On March 23, Europeans will take to the streets to demand that Members of the European Parliament vote against Article 13, the part of the upcoming Copyright Directive that will replace the internet with a "filternet" where you aren't allowed to write, post, or say anything that might be a match for a copyrighted work, and where small, EU-based tech platforms will be snuffed out, leaving nothing but US Big Tech sitting in judgment of the continent's discourse.Article 13 has turned the Copyright Directive into the most unpopular measure in European history (the petition opposing it is only hours away from becoming the most popular petition in the history of the human race). The corporations and politicians who support it have a hard battle to pass it, and they've pulled out all the stops, stooping to raw disinformation campaigns and ad hominem smears to advance their cause.Breaking: @ManfredWeber and the @EPPGroup want the vote on #Article13 and the Copyright Directive moved ahead to next week to pre-empt the #SaveYourInternet/#StopACTA2 protests! We need a public outcry to stop this! pic.twitter.com/6XQSWNbgpa— Julia Reda (@Senficon) March 4, 2019But today, the Article 13 backers hit a new, undemocratic low. Manfred Weber, chair of the powerful EPP bloc in the EU Parliament, is trying to move the final vote on Article 13 to next week, ahead of the planned mass demonstrations, to help him whip Parliamentarians to vote for something that is massively unpopular just before European elections. Read the rest