Boing Boing

This kit comes with plenty of components to get you started learning how to use the Arduino electronics prototyping platform. It's at one of the lowest prices I've seen. If you don't know anything about Arduino and are curious, check out Tinkercad's Circuits website, which has an Arduino simulator. Read the rest

Newsweek reports that yoga classes were reinstated in Russian prisons this week after being suspended due to a "religious scholar's" warning that it cold make prisoners gay.Theological professor Alexander Dvorkin wrote a document suggesting yoga could cause uncontrolled sexual arousal and homosexuality in detention centers, leading to riots, the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomlets reported. Senator Elena Mizulina, who is known for her conservative views, used the document to appeal to the Prosecutor General's Office to check the legality of the yoga classes, and asked for them to be suspended, according to the paper. Read the rest

The New York Post reports: "An NYPD cop went on a wild dirt-bike ride in Harlem on Sunday afternoon — and injured himself when he tumbled off the bike and slammed into the road, video of the crash shows.The cop popped a wheelie, and then sped off into traffic on the bike on Lenox Avenue and 135th Street at about 6 p.m., according to the video and police."@THEKIDMERO @desusnice fam.... pic.twitter.com/MXQ0rISkq3— Scott Johnson (@_scottjohnson) April 8, 2019Image: Twitter Read the rest

China has a massive livestreaming industry, centered around the YY platform, which started out as a Twitch-style gamer livestreaming platform and now hosts a huge number of wildly popular vloggers who earn money when viewers toss them virtual tips that they can redeem for cash.The system is a toxic soup of misogyny and disaffectation, with both the streamers and the audiences drawn heavily from poor and rural Chinese people who sense that the country's prosperity boom is over and that they have lost out -- that all future gains in China will be captured by affluent people and their children and that they will forever be frozen out. This is also a cohort that has been denied postsecondary education (and may have also missed out on a decent secondary education).People’s Republic of Desire is a new documentary on the phenomenon (it won SXSW's Grand Jury Award for best documentary feature in 2018). In an interview with director Hao Wu, Sixth Tone's Matthew Walsh digs into the fraught world of Chinese livestreaming, and the ways that the authoritarian Chinese state are interacting with it.Sixth Tone: Your film also looks at the theme of gender. How does livestreaming reinforce traditional gender roles in China?Wu: The appeal of the male livestreamer lies in his ability to be an alpha male; fans rally around him, because they see him as both a funny drinking buddy and a natural leader. But a lot of the [female livestreamers] sell sex appeal — they have to sexualize themselves to win fans. Read the rest

Pete Buttigieg is one of the prominent members of the progressive wing of the Democratic party who opposes free college tuition, on the ground that the "benefits" of college accrue to those who attain a degree and that it's unfair to ask the majority, who don't attend college, to subsidize the minority who do. As sociologist (and economics critic) Elizabeth Popp Berman writes in the Washington Post, these objections only make sense in the context of two major, economics-driven shifts in how we think about education and public goods -- changes that are relatively recent, dating back to the 1960s.The first change is in how we evaluate the worth of public goods, like education: do we value them in and of themselves, or in terms of their cost-benefit? The triumph of cost-benefit framing for education led to the rise in both tuition and lending (and thus the student debt crisis); the argument had it that public college educations were "irrationally cheap" and that the predominantly better-off attendees should have to bear the cost of it. But consider J.W. Mason's rebuttal: "Suppose users of Central Park are higher-income on average; is progressive policy then to fence it off and charge admission?" In other words, if public goods disproportionately benefit the affluent, we can either strive to make them more inclusive or to recoup the cost of providing them, but not both.The other shift is in the worth of an education: education can be seen as intrinsically beneficial, creating "citizens as well as economic actors," and publicly funded education "socialized the risk" of pursuing educational attainments that have uncertain individual upsides, fueling class mobility. Read the rest

Here's a guy demonstrating how to exploit a loophole in McDonald's menu. He used one of the video kiosks to order 10 burgers, priced at one dollar each. Then he customized the burgers by removing the beef patties from the order, which knocks $1.10 of the price of each dollar burger. Then he added one more dollar burger to the order, but kept the meat this time. The total price for the 10 patty-less burgers and one regular burger was zero dollars. Read the rest

Floating communities aren't just for libertarian billionaires looking for places to do things they might not otherwise get away with. A UN partnership is looking into whether they could be part of a sustainable urban development program, for when the floods roll over the lowlands and don't go away.Oceanix City, or the world's first sustainable floating city, would essentially be groups of hexagonal platforms - anchored to the seabed - that could each house around 300 people, effectively creating a community for 10,000 residents. Cages under the city could harvest scallops, kelp, or other forms of seafood. Marc Collins Chen, the chief executive of Oceanix, said the technology to build large floating infrastructure or housing already exists."The biggest question in people's minds is if these cities can actually float," Mr Collins Chen told the BBC. Still waiting for Sea City 2000, the floating pyramid I was promised by the Usborne books in the 1980s. Read the rest

Web site operators who want to spy on their users can add a "ping" directly to hyperlinks in their pages; these "ping" URLs are invisibly, silently by the browser when the user clicks the associated link, allowing third parties to be notified about your clicking activities.When "ping" was standardized as "hyperlink auditing," browser vendors made it possible (if difficult) to disable it (for example, Safari had a hidden preference for this: "defaults write com.apple.Safari com.apple.Safari.ContentPageGroupIdentifier.WebKit2HyperlinkAuditingEnabled -bool false"). But in their latest versions, most browsers are removing this option. It's been eliminated from Safari and Chrome (and their derivatives like Chromium, Opera and Edge). The exception is Firefox (and Brave, which is a derivative of Firefox), where hyperlink auditing is turned off by default. With privacy and online tracking being such a large problem and major concern for many users, you would think that browser developers would give you the option to disable anything that could affect your privacy.Unfortunately, this seems to be going in the reverse direction when it comes to hyperlink auditing.Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk [Lawrence Abrams/Bleeping Computer](via /.) Read the rest

From My Mechanics, a restoration project that turned out to be "a lot more challenging" than expected. I'm very fond of the wordless, meticulous yet leisurely mode of crafting footage.A few weeks ago I bought an old bench grinder to restore on eBay. The guy who sold it was actually selling more antiques, he had a room filled with old items. I took a look at his other stuff and this unique coffee grinder caught my attention right away. So I ended up buying it for $35. The one thing that really impressed me on this coffee grinder was the metal body, usually they're made of wood. I also liked the colour very much. The restoration itself turned out to be a lot more challenging than I first expected. I'm very happy with the final result of this coffee grinder. I really like how the handle turned out. Read the rest

Jonas Olsen Woodcraft's YouTube channel is replete with wonders (my favorite is the coffee cup) but with the new season of Thrones coming up, it's his amazing dragons going viral.Here's a dragon skeleton:Previously: Chainsaw sculptor creates spectacular wooden dragon benches Read the rest

But wait, there's more:Previously: Dune without words Read the rest

Ken Shirriff presents Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes.This article describes the various S/360 models and how to identify them from the front panels. I'll start with the Model 30, a popular low-end system, and then go through the remaining models in order. Conveniently IBM assigned model numbers rationally, with the size and performance increasing with the model number, from the stripped-down but popular Model 20 to the high-performance Model 195.Each of the cabinets in the photo above contains a whopping 256 kilobytes of storage.Previously: How It Works: The Computer Read the rest

Big companies need to manage big stacks of data, and the language they use to access and manipulate it is SQL. If you want to make a career of IT, you'll need to master SQL like a native tongue to get started in the lucrative field of database management. With more than 120 hours of lessons and examples, the Complete Microsoft & Oracle SQL Certification Bundle is the surest way to do it.In 11 courses, this learning package covers everything you need to walk confidently into those server stacks in both Microsoft and Oracle platforms. You'll get a solid foundation in SQL, starting with a walkthrough doing basic queries and functions. Once you've mastered that, you'll quickly move on to learn the skills that set you apart from the IT herd: Developing data models and business intelligence infrastructure, designing and maintaining a database warehouse, safeguarding it against internal and external threats. You'll get prepared to take certification exams in all of the above and more by the time you complete the course package.Right now, you can pick up the Complete Microsoft & Oracle SQL Certification Bundle for $39. Read the rest

Toyota Engineering Society's CUE 3 is a 6'3" humanoid robot reportedly hits free throws with nearly 100 percent accuracy. From the AP:(The robot) computes as a three-dimensional image where the basket is, using sensors on its torso, and adjusts motors inside its arm and knees to give the shot the right angle and propulsion for a swish...Stanford University Professor Oussama Khatib, who directs the university's robotics lab, said Cue 3 demonstrates complex activities such as using sensors and nimble computation in real-time in what he called "visual feedback."To shoot hoops, the robot must have a good vision system, be able to compute the ball's path then execute the shot, he said in a telephone interview."What Toyota is doing here is really bringing the top capabilities in perception with the top capabilities in control to have robots perform something that is really challenging," Khatib said."Toyota robot can’t slam dunk but it shoots a mean 3-pointer" (AP/Asahi Shimbun) Read the rest

A suspected rhino poacher in South Africa's Kruger National Park was killed by an elephant and then eaten by lions. After the elephant attack, police said, "his accomplices claimed to have carried his body to the road so that passersby could find it in the morning. They then vanished from the Park.""Indications found at the scene suggested that a pride of lions had devoured the remains leaving only a human skull and a pair of pants," the statement said.From CNN:Three individuals who joined the illegal hunt were arrested Wednesday by the South African Police Service, and officers continue to investigate what happened.The suspects appeared in Komatipoort Magistrate Court on Friday to face charges of possessing firearms and ammunition without a license, conspiracy to poach and trespassing. Of special concern is the black rhino, which is considered critically endangered after its population tumbled from about 65,000 to 1970 to 2,400 in 1995, according to Kruger National Park. Conservation efforts have boosted their numbers, and the world's remaining 5,000 or so black rhinos live predominantly in South Africa, Namibia, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Read the rest

The main event begins! The boys, Ed Piskor, Jim Rugg, and Tom Scioli give their kayfabe commentary on the first volume of Katsuhiro Otomo's Magnum Opus, Akira!Get your hands on the newish 35 year anniversary box set and read along!Two earlier episodes tracked Otomo's previous works leading up to Akira:Part 1, FireballPart 2: Domu: A Child's DreamSubscribe to the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel for future episodes Read the rest

The Burning Man event is seeking a renewal of its 10-year permit to use the federally owned Black Rock Desert site managed by the Bureau of Land Management; the BLM has responded with a bizarre, overreaching Environmental Impact Statement that ignores the lavishly documented record of Burning Man's excellent safety and stewardship record.For example, the new Environmental Impact Statement calls for Burning Man to hire an outside security force to replace its all-volunteer, community-based Black Rock Rangers, and to have these rent-a-cops search all belongings of all attendees: 80,000 people in 30,000 cars, in a high-wind, low-visibility environment where, in addition to the threat to privacy there is also a massive risk of huge amounts of personal belongings being whipped away by the wind and blown all over the desert.The EIS also ignores Burning Man's status as the world's largest, best-managed "leave no trace" event, where every piece of waste down to individual sequins and metal shavings are picked up and packed out by attendees. Instead, the BLM wants Burning Man to install several football-fields' worth of dumpsters at the event's exit, with parking for 30,000 vehicles to pull up to them. In addition to eroding the norm of stewardship and waste-management that is intrinsic to the festival, this would also deprive the nearby Pyramid Lake Paiute dump sites of the millions they take in from burners who pay to have their waste legally disposed of.The EIS also calls for the creation of a 19,000,000 lb concrete jersey barrier to encircle the site, replacing the trash fence (a wildlife-friendly fence that catches blown waste) and the perimeter patrols (which are hugely effective at catching people sneaking into the event). Read the rest

Next week is my Southern California nonstop Radicalized and advocacy week: I'm starting with a signing at Burbank's Dark Delicacies on Sunday at 4PM, alongside Leslie S. Klinger & Lisa Morton, who are signing their new anthology Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror & Suspense.Next, I'm keynoting the San Diego Public Library's 40th anniversary celebration with a talk on Thursday from 7-9PM at the Central Library's Neil Morgan Auditorium (330 Park Blvd., San Diego 92101), talking about how "libraries are one of the few remnants of a world where people were valued because of their humanity, not their money, and how that works in the current moment of extreme inequality, epistemological incoherence, and fear of imminent collapse."The next day, I'm co-chairing the README/LA Cryptoparty event After Disruption, which is in two parts: a panel on the ways that Big Tech and monopolism have squeezed labor and the public interest, and what an inclusive and radical technological future might look like, and then a workshop where we try to design some of these futures. It's at UCLA on Friday from 7-930PM.Finally, I'm at the LA Times Festival of Books for a talk with John Scalzi on Sunday, April 14 at 3PM, followed by a signing at the Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore tent. I sure hope to see you! Read the rest

Ever heard of Agile? If you're on the ground floor of any big corporate project, it's more than likely you have. Agile is the methodology that major companies use to tackle big projects. And if you're looking to make yourself invaluable, a certification in Agile is what you need to lead that project development team. Packed with info for any level of experience, the Agile Expert Project Management Bundle is a direct path to that know-how.This online training course contains more than 50 hours of training and exercises, with a certification waiting for budding Agile practitioners at the end. It starts with a comprehensive primer on the overall Agile framework, plus the system known as Scrum that allows you to implement it by laying out group roles and targeting goals. From there, you'll be able to learn how additional methodologies such as Kanban and Lean fit into the overall scheme and get a bird's eye view of the whole process that will allow you to take any project across the finish line quickly and efficiently.Pick up the Agile Expert Project Management Bundle for $39 today. Read the rest

Shawn Smith, the soulful singer who was a legend in the Seattle music scene, died yesterday at age 53. I first encountered Shawn's voice in the early-1990s by way of Greg Dulli's bands the Afghan Whigs and Twilight Singers. But Smith's influence on the Seattle music scene, and rock in general, dates back to the mid-1980s when he was part of the tight-knit community of musicians that birthed Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. Eerily, April 5 was the anniversary of the deaths of Seattle singers Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) and Layne Staley (Alice in Chains).My condolences to Smith's son, family, friends, and the Seattle music community that adored him. From the Seattle Times:In recent weeks, Smith was working on a new album with the band Brad, which he founded in 1992 with Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, drummer Regan Hagar and bassist Jeremy Toback. They were recording at Studio Litho, owned by Gossard. Born in Spokane, Smith came to Seattle in 1987, and formed a band called Malfunkshun with Hagar and Kevin and Andrew Wood (who would go on to form Mother Love Bone with Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament).In 1992, he released his first solo album under the name Pigeonhed. That same year, Brad released its first album, “Shame” in 1993. The band would put out four albums, including “Interiors,” which features one of Smith’s best-known songs, “The Day Brings.”He made two records with the band Satchel, and appeared on The Afghan Whigs’ album “Black Love,” as well as Whigs founder Greg Dulli’s solo album. Read the rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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