Boing Boing

Hacking Team (previously) was an Italian cybermercenary company that sold surveillance tools to the world's most vicious autocrats and dictators, only to collapse when all of its internal documents were hacked and dumped online by an unknown person who claimed to be motivated by a desire to expose their complicity in human rights abuses including torture and murder.The Hacking Team mercenaries keep turning up anew in rebranded startups, but anyone who was involved with Hacking Team should be permanently disqualified from any role involving information security, the same way that ex-KGB officers should be permanently disqualified from roles in politics or policing (yeah, I know).The latest group of Hacking Team war criminals to find themselves reaccepted into polite society is the staff of Neutrino, a startup acquired by the cryptocurrency company Coinbase, to do forensic tracking of blockchain transactions.Many Coinbase users have concluded that they do not want to entrust their finances to a company that includes these unsavory characters, and so was born the #DeleteCoinbase movement to coordinate divestiture from the company.However, Coinbase will only allow you to delete your account if it has a zero balance, free of "dust" (infinitesimal residues left behind from fractional cryptocurrency transactions) and users are finding it impossible to rid themselves of their dust, which Coinbase insists is merely an accident and nothing to do with not wanting disgruntled users to leave.Self-described Bitcoin maximalist Jeremy Seaside participated in the #DeleteCoinbaseTrustChain, cleared all of his Coinbase accounts out, but still couldn’t close his accounts, he told me in a Twitter direct message. Read the rest

The majority of applications use "visualization" to give feedback and responses to users: think of graphs, alerts, and other visual cues about what is going on inside a computer, or what the computer has detected in the world.Sonification is the aural equivalent of visualization: communication from computers to humans by means of sound. There's some of this already in the world: alert chimes, system beeps, and talking voice assistants. But in an age of constant earbud use, there is lots of potential for more.Writing in Wired, Boing Boing contributor Clive Thompson (previously) discusses the growing use of sonification, from promising medical applications (using sound cues to help people with compromised movement and balance correct their gaits) to scientific analysis (transforming the hurricane telemetry into sound, allowing researchers to easily hear when hurricanes are about to intensify) to UI for everyday applications (adapting incoming message chimes to communicate something about their content, like whether they're coming from known senders or appear to be urgent).Thompson notes, in passing, a very important caveat: "done elegantly [emphasis added], sonification could help create a world where you’re still as informed as you want to be, but hopefully less frayed by nervous glances at your screens." The reason screens are anxiety-provoking isn't solely a factor of having to get your phone out of your pocket to see what's going on -- it's also the result of an arm's race between app designers and our limbic and attentional systems. Think of how Google Fi, Lyft, and other apps use the fact that they've got permission to send you alerts (for useful things, like telling you when you've lost service or when your cab is arriving) to send you promotional messages inviting you to sign up friends or buy additional services. Read the rest

A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science reports on new analysis of the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which tracks outcomes for 24,066 people aged 50-96 with a good balance of genders (56% female), and reports a strong correlation between "early affluence" and "faster cognitive drop" in "verbal fluency" (measured with an animal naming challenge). SHARE is the largest study of its kind, with more than double the subjects of similar projects.Overall, the data showed that people whose childhoods were characterised by early affluence (measured by the subject's life circumstances at the age of ten, including main breadwinner's job, books in the house, overcrowding and housing quality) experienced cognitive decline at 1.6 times the rate of the least advantaged group in the study.The decline was only for the "verbal fluency" measure; another measure, "delayed recall" (remembering items from a list of 10 words) did not worsen with levels of affluence.Also, the overall levels of verbal fluency and delayed recall rose with early affluence levels.That is, the wealthier you were as a kid, the more verbal fluency and delayed recall you had as an adult, but when you started to lose your verbal fluency, the rate of loss was faster than in those who were poorer than you as a kid.This finding is unexpected, because it seems to contradict the leading theory of "cognitive reserve" which holds that advantaged childhoods allow people to build up "brain reserves" which are used to repair cognitive damage later in life. Read the rest

Larry Baer, the CEO of the San Francisco Giants, was filmed manhandling his screaming wife in public, prizing away a cellphone from her grasp, and finally dropping her to the ground. He claimed she fell over due to a injured ankle:Larry Baer spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle after the incident."My wife and I had an unfortunate public argument related to a family member, and she had an injured foot and she fell off her chair in the course of the argument," he said. "The matter is resolved. It was a squabble over a cell phone. Obviously, it’s embarrassing." His wife has apologized for her behavior:"I took his cellphone. He wanted it back and I did not want to give it back. I started to get up and the chair I was sitting in began to tip. Due to an injury I sustained in my foot three days ago, I lost my balance. I did not sustain any injury based on what happened today. Larryand I always have been and still are happily married.”If this is what he'll do in broad daylight knowing he'll face no consequences, just imagine what he does behind closed doors knowing he'll face no consequences. Read the rest

On the stormy seas of modern business, data analysts are the navigators. Smart bosses steer where the trends are headed, which makes the techs who can follow those trends invaluable. And no matter what software your company uses to make sense of its data, there's likely a tutorial to be found in the Ultimate Data & Analytics Bundle.This online course pack is quite a database in its own right. It contains over 400 courses and 1,500 hours of training in all the major platforms. That includes comprehensive lessons on SAS, including key functions like Dataset and Format. It includes R and all its relevant environments, plus Oracle - with a focus on Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle SQL & RMAN. Hadoop, Tableau, MongoDB - even if you've never used these platforms, you'll have all you need to build out a database and put its information to work.Currently, you can get lifetime access to the Ultimate Data & Analytics Bundle for $29, 90% off the list price. Read the rest

Man-Eaters Volume 1 collects the first four issues of the Image comic by Chelsea Cain and Kate Niemczyk (and friends) and it's insanely great: the premise is that America's patriarchy has been given a huge boost by a mutant strait of toxoplasmosis that is benign for most carriers, but turns adolescent girls into unstoppable were-panthers that crave human flesh when they get their first periods.In response, America's city fathers (in their infinite wisdom) decide to add progesterone and other adulterants to the water supply to suppress menstruation (which they always thought was gross anyway), but don't worry guys, the Estro Corp has you covered: their corporate social responsibility program has paid for a nationwide string of "boys' lounges," girl-free safe-spaces, whose vending machines sell all manner of beverages designed to give you the testosterone you need!Maude is 12 and right in the middle of the dangerzone for turning into a big cat. Her dad is a homicide detective, divorced from her mother, a big animal vet on a special anti-big-cat SWAT team. Which would be fine, except that Maude has a plan to fight the patriarchy: she has acquired a massive stash of boys-only Estro Pure water and has convinced a group of her fellow 7th graders to swap out tap water for Estro Pure, and they have turned into a pre-teen gang of lethal werepanthers who are striking several blows and disemboweling swipes for women's rights.It's brilliant, hilarious, with the swag of Zdarsky and Fraction's Sex Criminals and the edginess and cleverness that has made Image Comics the press to watch in this decade. Read the rest

Human beings are strange. The unimaginative jackass Logan Paul has 18,819,071 YouTube subscribers, while the fascinating and talented Maxwell Helmberger has 105 subscribers. In my opinion, Paul should have 105 subscribers and Helmberger should have 18,819,071.Helmberger's claymation video about how the pincushion millipede (smaller than a grain of rice!) defends itself against ants trying it eat it has 94 views. Please watch and share with your friends. I want to encourage him to do more.Image: YouTube[Thanks, Pink Frankenstein!] Read the rest

Well, that didn't take long: after seven days on strike, the Oakland teacher's union has received an offer that they say capitulates on every major point at issue in the strike, including the stealth privatization of Oakland schools through vouchers and charter schools.The rank-and-file still have to ratify the settlement, but after that formality, they're good to go.It's another moment of brightness and hope, as teachers across America continue their one-year-plus streak of victories for quality public education for every child in the nation.A LIVING WAGE:11% salary increase over 4 years. PLUS a 3% bonus upon ratification. We FORCED OUSD to invest in keeping teachers in Oakland – which will give our kids experienced teachers in their classrooms. Dramatic increases for subs, and tying sub pay to the wage scale, so our substitutes never fall behind again.MORE STUDENT SUPPORTS:More counselors, RSPs, psychologists, speech pathologists and Newcomer support staff for our students! Bonuses and a new salary schedule to support nurse recruitment.LOWER CLASS SIZES:A one student reduction in class size at high needs schools next year. A one student reduction in class sizes across all schools in 2021-22. We FORCED OUSD to take this step to improve student learning conditions, especially at our highest-needs schools.SCHOOL CLOSURE MORATORIUM:Board President Aimee Eng has committed to introduce a resolution calling for a 5 month pause on school closures and consolidations, and more community input into the process. The power of our strike will help us organize against future closures! Read the rest

It's West Virginia Republican Party Day at the state's Capitol and Republicans from all across the Mountain State have gathered in Charleston to promote their party's values. Vendors have set up tables throughout the Capitol Building, offering the finest in wingnut lit including this classic from die-hard Islamaphobe Robert Spencer.One Democrat in particular, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is drawing heat of the racist, Islamophobic kind. West Virginia Democrats attending the gathering at the Capitol posted this photo on Facebook.When confronted, the yet-unnamed woman responsible for the poster seemed to lose all her self-righteous indignation.Her t-shirt and posters reference ACT for America, a group that calls themselves "the nation's largest grassroots national security organization." ACT for America was designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2015. (H/T Eric Engel) (Photos: Facebook/West Virginia Democratic Party) Read the rest

NASA and SpaceX have completed thousands of hours of tests to prepare for this unmanned test flight to the International Space Station.

Chinese nanotechnologists injected tiny particles into the eyes of mice resulting in the rodents demonstrating "infrared 'night vision'" that lasted for months. According to nanoscientist Tian Xue and colleagues the University of Science and Technology of China, the technology could eventually help those with certain kinds of color blindness and "provide the potential for close integration within the human body to extend the visual spectrum." From New Scientist:Like humans, mice cannot perceive light with a wavelength longer than 700 nanometres, which is at the red end of the visible spectrum. But the nanoparticles absorb light with longer – infrared – wavelengths and convert it into shorter wave light that retinal cells can detect. This converted light peaks at a wavelength of 535 nanometres, so the mice see infrared light as green...Some mice did develop cloudy corneas after the injection, but this disappeared within a fortnight and occurred at similar rates to those in the control group. The team found no other evidence of damage to the mice’s eyes two months after the experiment.The researchers published their findings in the scientific journal Cell: "Mammalian Near-Infrared Image Vision through Injectable and Self-Powered Retinal Nanoantennae" Read the rest

After taking over Whole Foods, Amazon is now launching a new, more mainstream chain of grocery stores, according to Business Insider. And it makes me wonder why, when they haven't yet mastered the managing of Whole Foods. At least not when it comes to keeping their markets stocked. In fact, it's incredible how consistently empty their shelves are. Ever since Amazon took over the "natural" food grocery store, I started noticing walls of shelves with gaping holes where food should be, and oftentimes even entirely without food. It was so surprising that I took photos several times throughout the year to text to friends. I do like the fact that they've lowered their prices, which has seduced me into coming into the store in the first place (I used to avoid the market for their astronomical prices), but it's frustrating to go in with the idea of buying some eggs only to find there aren't any uncracked ones left.So what's the problem? Via Business Insider:Business Insider spoke with seven Whole Foods employees, from cashiers to department managers, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.Order-to-shelf, or OTS, is a tightly controlled system designed to streamline and track product purchases, displays, storage, and sales. Under OTS, employees largely bypass stock rooms and carry products directly from delivery trucks to store shelves. It is meant to help Whole Foods cut costs, better manage inventory, reduce waste, and clear out storage.But its strict procedures are leading to storewide stocking issues, according to several employees. Read the rest

The United States Food and Drug Administration issued a warning Thursday about the use of surgical robots in breast cancer surgery. FDA says that use of the robotic medical devices in mastectomy, lumpectomy, and related surgery because of "preliminary" evidence that it may be linked to lower long-term survival..The warning was specifically directed at use of the devices for cancers that affect women, specifically breast and cervical cancer.Robotic surgery with devices like the da Vinci Surgical robot is also now increasingly used for cancers that affect men, like prostate cancer. The study doesn't appear to address this. From reporting by Emily R. Siegel and Andrew W. Lehren at NBC News:The FDA's official safety communication said that while robotic "surgery may help reduce pain, blood loss, scarring, infection, and recovery time," there is "limited, preliminary evidence" that using the devices for cancers that affect women, specifically breast and cervical cancer, may be associated with diminished long-term survival.In a statement, Dr. Terri Cornelison, assistant director for the health of women in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said the FDA is "warning patients and providers that the use of robotically assisted surgical devices for any cancer-related surgery has not been granted marketing authorization by the agency, and therefore the survival benefits to patients when compared to traditional surgery have not been established."Prior related reporting at NBC: "New Robot Surgeon Works on Its Own"IMAGE: Da Vinci Surgical Robot, courtesy davincisurgery.com Read the rest

Arduino is an easy-to-learn prototyping platform that lets you create interactive electronic projects. This Arduino compatible kit is the one I recommend to people who ask me how to get started. The reason I recommend it is because it's very cheap and it has a bunch of components that would cost a lot more if you were to purchase them separately.Two things it doesn't have, but should if you really want to have fun with Arduino: a potentiometer and a servo motor. This kit, which has these components and many more, is available for about twice as much as the basic kit above. Read the rest

“It appears as though their effort to partially pay people screwed things up and they are still getting their act together.” — Anonymous TSA official who spoke to CNN

42,000 Mozilla supporters contributed to Common Voice, a free-open dataset of 1,361 hours of voice recordings in 18 languages, which is now free for anyone to use as a set of "high quality, transcribed voice data... available to startups, researchers, and anyone interested in voice-enabled technologies" -- in a field plagued with sampling bias problems, this is a dataset that aims to be diverse, representative and inclusive, and it's growing by the day (you can contribute your voice too!) -- the whole project is inspiring. (via Four Short Links) Read the rest

The creative minds at Squirrel Monkey imagine what the new Galaxy Fold would be like if it had been released in the late 1990s. I don't know what technology they use to make these videos, but they do a perfect job of capturing the look and feel of the era. Read the rest

On March 8, Amanda "Fucking" Palmer (previously) will release There Will Be No Intermission, her third studio album and the first release in six long years: it's an ambitious 71 minutes long, and the whole thing is streaming as a preview on NPR's First Listen.I recommend starting with "Judy Blume" for sheer tear-jerking, and the two long confessionals, "The Ride" and "A Mother's Confession."Palmer's touring with the album, with dates across the USA and Europe; the purchase packages include gatefold vinyl, an elaborate accompanying book, and all the usuals. Read the rest

2019 has seen a string of bold and successful teachers' strikes that built on last years' #RedForEd strikes: the new wave of strikes goes beyond paychecks and funding, though, and takes aim at charter schools as a system for the stealth privatization of public education.The issue, long considered too complex and contentious for teachers' unions, has turned out to be a winner. First the LA teachers overcame some of the largest dark-money spenders and billionaire backers in the country's second-largest school district; then came Denver; and now teachers in West Virginia (who won legendary victories in 2018 in fights over pay and funding) have won another victory in a strike that targeted charter schools and privatization, to widespread public support.The West Virginia teachers only had to walk out for two days to score total, decisive victory.The next strike to watch is Oakland, a city where public activism has already struck pioneering blows for transparency and accountability by public officials, overcoming massive spending by private interests. Oakland is also a city on the front lines of racial discrimination, displacement, gentrification and inequality, and the city's schools are the front lines of these battles. 30% of Oakland's pupils are in charter schools, thanks to a cycle that underfunds and under-resources public schools, leaving parents with little choice but to send their kids to privatized, publicly funded charters, siphoning even more public money out of public schools, making their situation even worse.There are unique challenges in the Oakland strike -- many working class parents see the charters as the only schools that offered their kids a fair chance at a decent education -- but Oakland teachers get to build on the victory of the LA teachers, whose strike prompted state action on charter transparency and oversight. Read the rest

Fritz Kahn was a German physician and writer. In 1926 he created Der Mensch als Industriepalast ("Man as Industrial Palace"), an iconic illustration of the human body as a kind of industrial chemical plant. German animator Henning M Lederer did a fantastic job turning Kahn's illustration into a 3-minute animated video (with slightly gross sound effects).[via Aeon] Read the rest

The Amazon Dash button has gone the way of the CueCat and other oddball forms of consumer tech that were quickly made obsolete by newer technology. The $5 wireless Dash button was promised to be an easy way to order consumables from Amazon, but configuring the devices was sometimes confusing. The people who really enjoyed Dash buttons were those who hacked them into Internet-connected remote control devices to accomplish useful tasks other than buying stuff.From Cnet:The Dash button isn't nearly as necessary as it used to be. Today, plenty more appliances connect to the internet. Amazon also integrated its Dash Replenishment Service into hundreds of products from major manufacturers like Whirlpool and Samsung worldwide. DRS lets appliances automatically reorder the stuff they need, like a printer purchasing new ink. No need to even push a button.Plus, Amazon created virtual Dash buttons on its website and developed voice shopping through its Alexa voice assistant, which have both grown in popularity, Amazon says. Read the rest

This VW van made of LEGO is amazing. There are more photos on the VW site.The van was designed and built by Rene Hoffmeister, one of only 12 officially certified LEGO® professionals in the world. Along with colleague Pascal Lenhard, the duo used 3D modeling to assemble a plan for the van, including a precise figure for the number of bricks needed. Beyond ensuring the major flexible pieces like doors worked, the pair also had to ensure structural rigidity in the side walls and other vertical surfaces to keep all the bricks from collapsing. Read the rest

According to reports from gullible parents' organizations, police departments, and media outlets, Kids on the Internet are spreading memes featuring an image of "Momo" (actually a sculpture called "Mother Bird" created by Keisuke Aisawa for the Japanese SFX studio Link Factory) that includes explicit self-harm and suicide instructions (the "challenge" in "Momo challenge" is allegedly to get kids to hurt or kill themselves).It's a hoax, though. There are no verified sightings of Momo Challenge memes in the wild, and this isn't even the first time this hoax has gone around; it circulated in September 2018 as well.As Taylor Lorenz writes in The Atlantic, this is part of a genre of hoaxes that rely on parental anxiety about kids' use of technology to spread incomprehensible cultural ideas, from the Satanic Panic over backmasked secret messages in heavy metal lyrics to the "eating Tide Pods" hoax to the fictional deaths linked to the "cinnamon challenge."As it happens, there is someone who -- unrelated to the Momo hoax -- appears to have inserted at least two self-harm messages in kids' videos. These trends are “part of a moral panic, fueled by parents’ fears in wanting to know what their kids are up to,” Benjamin Radford, a folklorist and research fellow at the Committee for Skeptic Inquiry, told Rolling Stone. And spreading them can actually end up causing harm. “These stories being highly publicized, and starting a panic means vulnerable people get to know about it and that creates a risk,” the U.K.-based suicide-awareness charity Samaritans told The Guardian. Read the rest

Wow. This poem, titled Dyslexia, was written by a 10-year-old who goes by AO, and it's jaw-dropping.As part of a class assignment, his teacher, Jane Broadis, asked the students to write a poem that could be read forwards and backwards. This one "stunned" her, so she posted it on Twitter, which has since gone viral. After you read it, read it again in the reverse direction, not like a palindrome, but line by line. Today in Y6 we looked at poems that could be read forwards & backwards. I was stunned by this one written by one of my 10 year olds. Please share - I would love her work to be appreciated further afield. I wonder if it could even find a publisher? pic.twitter.com/tmEQpiRrhq— Jane Broadis (@Jb5Jane) February 27, 2019Here are some reactions via Twitter:Made this grown man cry. I must have read it over twenty times already.— James Simporis (@simporis) February 27, 2019As the mom of a teen with severe dyslexia, who was told repeatedly in grade school that he would never succeed, please tell the author this is the most insightful and beautiful poem I’ve ever read on the subject. -proud mom to a dyslexic honor student who proved them all wrong— Amy Eldridge (@amy_lwb) February 28, 2019I am dyslexic. I thought I was stupid. I was called names because I couldn't read like my peers. Eventually, I realized I am not dumb. I am different and I learn a different way. Read the rest

Nemo underwent a Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy. This RuffWear 'Webmaster' harness made a real difference in my dog's recovery. The Webmaster comes with snap-together closures for easy on and off, however, I've kept the harness on Nemo since his surgery on January 2nd. Once adjusted the harness slips over his head like a collar. Another strap runs across the chest, just behind the front legs. The third strap rides in front of the hind legs. There is a cross piece tying the collar to the chest strap as well.Titularly, the harness creates a 'web' of support under your dog! Said web allowed me to lift a doped up Great Pyrenees with a sawed-on leg up 3-sets of 27 total stairs without hurting the dog!Webmaster was the silliest dot-com era job title. I was able to use the harness to assist Nemo up and down stairs, or any difficult territory, while he healed. I also found it easier to move Nemo around when he didn't want to move. My Great Pyr now has a handle!It is machine washable, and super durable.RUFFWEAR - Web Master Secure, Reflective, Multi-Use Harness Dogs via Amazon Read the rest

Your very own Weezer World on @FortniteGame, created by @FN_TeamCre8 ft. @HELLRAISERGamin, @G_Schway, KK-Slider, @Wertandrew pic.twitter.com/GVopkGvIkr— weezer (@Weezer) March 1, 2019Seems Weezer likes Fortnite and covering Toto. Read the rest

A masterfully-executed selection of LP covers that "imagine how your current favorite singers would look like in a 80s version." The artist is Fulaleo from Australia. Read the rest

Two men were arrested Thursday after a fight broke out at the execution of murder Billy Wayne Coble in Huntsville, Texas. As Coble was finishing his statement, his son, a friend and a daughter-in-law became emotional and violent. They were yelling obscenities, throwing fists and kicking at others in the death chamber witness area.Officers stepped in and the witnesses continued to resist. They were eventually moved to a courtyard and the two men were handcuffed.“Why are you doing this?” the woman asked. “They just killed his daddy.”Coble, 70, killed his estranged wife’s parents and her brother, a police officer, in 1982, and was himself killed by lethal injection. The oldest inmate killed by Texas since it resumed executions in 1982, his final statement was “That’ll be $5.” Read the rest

Elsevier (previously) is one of the titans of academic and scientific publishing, a wildly profitable and politically potent corporation whose market dominance has allowed it to extract ever-larger sums from the universities whose researchers provide the vast majority of the material it publishes -- material it does not have to pay for, and in some cases, material it charges money to publish.The University of California system is one of Elsevier's biggest customers, and after eight months of unsuccessful negotiations over its subscription deals with the publisher, it has walked away and announced an indefinite boycott of the publisher, making it the largest Elsevier customer to do so.The sticking point was the university's insistence on a single price that covered both subscription fees for closed-access journals, and the fees that university personnel are expected to pay when they submit their work for publication in open access journals -- while Elsevier insisted on its right to "double-dip" from the system: charging it for submissions of papers and then again for access to its journals.The boycott will cost Elsevier $11m/year and about 10,000 papers that UC researchers will publish elsewhere. The move comes amidst a global uprising over the closed-access publishing model, which New Scientist called "more profitable than oil" and "indefensible." Europe's largest scientific funders have announced that they will only support research that is made free to read at the moment of publication.The stand by UC, which followed eight months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open access movement, in the United States and beyond. Read the rest

A thunderous pop.What it sounds like inside a nuclear power plants cooling tower. Matt Ballos and Kevin Peterson of WSDG were out in Elma, Washington this week to visit NWAA acoustic test labs. The lab is built in a nuclear power plant that was abandoned a few weeks before it received its first uranium. In between the acoustic lab parts of the trip they were able to go around and explore the rest of the abandoned facility. This video is in one of the cooling towers. Even though it has an open top it does have a convex curve on the inside bottom of the tower. This shape makes for some awesome acoustics as you hear in the video.The story of Elma's never-onlined nuclear plant:Satsop Abandoned Nuclear PlantThe Satsop Nuclear Power Plant was 75% complete in 1983 before the money ran out and work was abandoned. To avoid steep dismantling costs, the site was eventually handed over to a public corporation and became the Satsop Development Park, home to various light industry businesses who work in the shadows of the two cooling towers. You can enter the property freely but you can't go under the towers (they're fenced off, although supposedly they are planning to open them to the public someday). Still, you can peek inside them since their bases are not solid (the hollow structures are held aloft by a zigzag of beams.) The tower at the site entrance was completely empty inside save for a lone port-a-pottyObviously it's not too hard to gain entrance to at least one of the towers. Read the rest

Ulrich Kelber is the German Data Privacy Commissioner, and also a computer scientist, and as such, he is uniquely qualified to comment on the potential consequences of the proposed new EU Copyright Directive, which will be voted on at the end of this month, and whose Article 13 requires that all online communities, platforms and services block their users from committing copyright infringement, even if the infringing materials are speedily removed after they are posted. In a new official statement on the Directive (English translation), Kelber has warned that Article 13 will inevitably lead to the use of automated filters, because there is no conceivable way that the organisations that run online services could examine everything their users post and determine whether each message, photo, video, or audio clip is a copyright violation.Kelber goes on to warn that this will exacerbate the already dire problem of market concentration in the tech sector, and expose Europeans to particular risk of online surveillance and manipulation.That's because the smaller companies, based in the European Union, are required to block all infringement, even if they are very small and specialised (the Directive gives an online community three years' grace period before it acquires this obligation, less time if the service grosses €5m/year). These small- and medium-sized European services will not be able to afford to license the entire catalogues of the big movie, music, and book publishers, and will have to rely on filters to block all that material they can't license. Read the rest

Demand for IT professionals is high. Doubly so for those who are versed in cloud-based infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is one of the top platforms out there, and the AWS Certified Architect Developer Bundle 2019 is a reliable way to get up to speed - not just on how to build your systems, but monitor and manage them.Geared toward IT workers of any level of experience, the opening courses of this 51-hour bundle will teach you how to navigate Amazon's databases and technologies. It'll also give you a primer in DevOps, the system that more closely integrates the development and operations teams of any application. Armed with those fundamentals, you'll discover how to configure storage, set up security through Cloudwatch - all the skills you'll need to become a bona fide architect in AWS. And more importantly, the certification to prove it to potential employers.The AWS Certified Architect Developer Bundle 2019 is on sale now for $35. Read the rest

I have a friend who drives seven hours from Los Angeles to San Francisco instead of flying, just so he doesn't have to take off his shoes at the TSA checkpoint.I would rather fly than drive, but I can understand where my friend is coming from. TSA security is the worst part of flying for me - the lines, the liquids in a clear plastic bag, the laptop and kindles out, etc.Fortunately, I pay for TSA Pre, so I don't have to take my shoes off, but my belt buckle always set off the metal detector. Last year I bought a belt with a plastic buckle on Amazon, which allows me to walk through the metal detector without taking it off. I fly a lot, so it's worth it. As an added bonus, there are no holes in the belt. I can make the belt exactly as tight as I want it, rather than deciding between using a slightly too lose, or to tight belt hole. Read the rest

So you think American authorities' taste for asset seizure is bad? Try the city fathers of Ahlen in Germany, who seized a pedigree pug and sold it on eBay.Frank Merschhausm, spokesman for the city of Ahlen, told NPR in an email that the seizure of "the valuable pet" was "legally permissible," because of open claims by the city's treasury office.However, he acknowledged that the method used to sell the animal might be open to criticism."Obtaining the proceeds of the sale through a private eBay account was a very questionable decision by the enforcement officer," Merschhaus said in the email translated from German. He added that the city is undertaking an internal investigation.Today I learned you can buy dogs on eBay Germany. Read the rest

How could so much misinformation be packed into so few words?A “bombshell” psychological report in the latest National Enquirer reveals that “Princess Meghan” is a “ticking time bomb who could explode at any moment, according to royal insiders!” “She’s emotionally tortured!” screams the Enquirer cover, touting “The Secret Psych Report!" Setting aside for a moment that the former Meghan Markle is not a Princess but only a Duchess, one wonders: How did the Enquirer get their hands on such an incendiary top secret report? Simple. They commissioned it. Might I suggest that it’s not a “secret report” if you’re the ones who order it, pay for it, and are the first to know its results? But it’s “royal insiders” who put the report together, according to the Enquirer’s opening sentence. Except the story makes it clear that no royal insider, let alone any member of the royal family, ever contributed to this report. It’s been compiled "at the Enquirer’s request” by the dubious Institute of BioAccoustic Biology in Ohio, which claims to diagnose patients by analyzing their voice. That’s right: Duchess Meghan suffers from “huge emotional conflicts, trauma and confusion,” according to a report by analysts who have never met with or spoken to her. But they have listened to recordings of her talking, and they have a “computer algorithm to diagnose health issues and psychological characteristics.” It couldn’t be more high-tech if the Institute shot out laser beams and read her brainwaves – which is why we should all be wearing tin foil hats. Read the rest

The "Phoenix Checklist" is a set of questions developed by the CIA to define and think about a problem, and how to develop a solution.THE PROBLEMWhy is it necessary to solve the problem?What benefits will you receive by solving the problem?What is the unknown?What is it you don’t yet understand?What is the information you have?What isn’t the problem?Is the information sufficient? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?Should you draw a diagram of the problem? A figure?Where are the boundaries of the problem?Can you separate the various parts of the problem? Can you write them down? What are the relationships of the parts of the problem? What are the constants of the problem?Have you seen this problem before?Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form? Do you know a related problem?Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknownSuppose you find a problem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method?Can you restate your problem? How many different ways can you restate it? More general? More specific? Can the rules be changed?What are the best, worst and most probable cases you can imagine?=====THE PLANCan you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem?What would you like the resolution to be? Can you picture it?How much of the unknown can you determine?Can you derive something useful from the information you have? Read the rest

A team of scientists went to Peru's lowland tropical forest to document invertebrates and saw an uncommon sight: a large tarantula, the size of a "dinner plate" with "massive fangs" catching and eating a baby opossum. Although they didn't capture on video the part where the tarantula caught the animal, they were the first to ever record a tarantula feasting on an opossum.“When we do surveys at night, some of the spiders we see will have prey, typically other invertebrates like crickets and moths," said one of the scientists, Rudolf von May from the University of Michigan, according to National Geographic (click on the link to see a longer version of the video). Via NG:But one night [the survey revealed a sight none of the researchers had seen before: A tarantula the size of a dinner plate preying upon a small opossum."The opossum had already been grasped by the tarantula and was still struggling weakly at that point, but after about 30 seconds it stopped kicking,” co-author Michael Grundler, a Ph.D. student says in a statement."We were pretty ecstatic and shocked, and we couldn't really believe what we were seeing," Grundler says.Later, Robert Voss, a mammologist at the American Museum of Natural History, confirmed they had captured the first documentation of a large mygalomorph spider—commonly known as a tarantula—hunting and eating an opossum. Read the rest

In 2019 a single bluefin tuna, weighing 279 kilograms, sold at auction in Tokyo's famous Tsukiji fish market for $3.1 million dollars. That comes out to $315/ounce, making for a very expensive piece of sashimi.In this video from Abroad in Japan, we take a trip to the northern coast of Honshu, where Japan's prized tuna are caught.Image: YouTube/Abroad in Japan Read the rest

Facebook is said to be developing a 'stablecoin,' which is a kind of digital currency pegged to the U.S. dollar.

Android should let users deny and revoke permissions; Apple should let people encrypt Icloud backups, Twitter should end-to-end encrypt DMs; all these and more appear on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's #FixItAlready page, which calls out Big Tech's biggest players for their biggest security and privacy fumbles, and explains in clear terms why these changes are needed. Read the rest

Science will open the floodgates on cheap, reliable high-volume production of THC and CBD. Yeast's rapid growth and ease of culturing will likely enable new stronger-better-faster variants of both.UC Berkeley College of Chemistry:UC Berkeley synthetic biologists have engineered brewer’s yeast to produce marijuana’s main ingredients—mind-altering THC and non-psychoactive CBD—as well as novel cannabinoids not found in the plant itself.Feeding only on sugar, the yeast are an easy and cheap way to produce pure cannabinoids that today are costly to extract from the buds of the marijuana plant, Cannabis sativa.“For the consumer, the benefits are high-quality, low-cost CBD and THC: you get exactly what you want from yeast,” said Jay Keasling, a UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of bioengineering and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “It is a safer, more environmentally friendly way to produce cannabinoids.” Read the rest

In Sweden, officers of the Swedish Security Service have arrested a person who worked “in a high-technology sector” and is believed by investigators to be a Russian agent."This individual is suspected of having been recruited as an agent by a Russian intelligence officer who was working under diplomatic cover in Sweden," Daniel Stenling, the Swedish Security Service Head of Counter-Intelligence, said in a statement.The Swedish tabloid Dagens Nyheter first reported the spy bust.From NPR:The individual, whose name has not been disclosed, was passing information to Russia since 2017, the Swedish Security Service says. He or she was working in a high-technology sector "on tasks known by our Service to be the type of intelligence sought after by foreign powers," the agency said.Swedish police officers working with security service agents arrested the suspect on Tuesday evening, in the midst of a meeting in central Stockholm.(...)Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov did not comment on the arrest and instead redirected an inquiry to Russia's Foreign Ministry. Its embassy in Sweden has not made public remarks.Still no comment from Russia, beyond those remarks by Peskov, at noon on Thursday in the United States.Video footage that appears to show the suspect led out of a restaurant by 'Säpo' (Sakerhetspolisen) officers is circulating on Swedish media, as the BBC reported. Excerpt from the BBC:A witness quoted by Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet said several officers of the Swedish security police, known as Sapo, stormed the restaurant and surrounded a table where two people were sitting having a meal. Read the rest

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Rolling Stone interview with Alex Morris paints a portrait of a politician and activist whose brilliance as a tactician is matched by an unwavering, uncompromising commitment to principle.Whether talking about media strategy, theories of political change, the institutional structure of the two major US political parties, or the role demographics play in political consciousness, AOC reveals herself to be both entirely premeditated, working according to a well-developed internal playbook; and entirely motivated by a well-articulated principle.Plenty of politicians are good orators and good horse-traders, but AOC is playing a much bigger game here, not merely angling for power-for-its-own-sake, or carrying water for corporate paymasters, or showing off her debate skills: she's trying to change the entire political system, having recognized both the urgency and potential of our current political moment. She is keenly aware of the limitations of a freshman Member of Congress, but she's also aware that those limitations are grossly overestimated by the political establishment, who imagines that the freshman arrival in Congress is constrained by a need to forge alliances with the establishment as the opening act of a lucrative life in the political-industrial complex. AOC doesn't want to make friends, she's come to Congress to kick ass and chew bubble-gum, and she's fresh out of etc etc.If you doubt it for a moment, just compare her performance at yesterday's Michael Cohen hearing with those of her compatriots on both sides of the aisle -- while others merely politically grandstanded, AOC got new and devastating facts into the record, while still producing material perfectly tailored for sharing and repeating. Read the rest

“YouTube is disabling all comments on videos featuring young children as it attempts to head off an organised ring of paedophiles who were using its site to trade clips of young girls in states of undress,” says the Guardian's Alex Hern. In a YouTube blog post addressing the issue to creators, the company wrote: “We recognize that comments are a core part of the YouTube experience and how you connect with and grow your audience. At the same time, the important steps we’re sharing today are critical for keeping young people safe. Thank you for your understanding and feedback as we continue our work to protect the YouTube community.”“The company also says it has launched a new machine learning system that it says will remove twice as many comments as the old one,” tweeted Alex Hern.Excerpt from his report:YouTube will turn off comments on all videos that contain young children, the company says, as well as a number of other enforcement actions designed to stave off an advertiser boycott sparked by the discovery of an organised paedophile ring operating in plain sight on the video sharing platform.The company will disable all comments on videos featuring younger children, and will also disable comments on those videos of older children that have some risk of attracting predatory behaviour, YouTube says.It has also prioritised the launch of an AI moderator that is “more sweeping in scope, and will detect and remove two times more individual comments” than its predecessor, in an attempt to identify and remove predatory comments before they can cause harm. Read the rest

Yet another idiot calling the cops on a black person for doing normal person things. In this case, a white woman is on the phone reporting to the police that a black man's dog humped her dog at a dog park. You can hear the woman's friend saying about his dog, "That's inappropriate for the dog park." I double checked to see if this was a satire on racist people who call police on black people for made up non-crime reasons, but as far as I can tell, this is real. Read the rest

The GOP-led U.S. Senate today confirmed ex-coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to run Environmental Protection Agency, in a 52-47 vote mostly along party lines.52-47 The #Senate CONFIRMED Andrew Wheeler to be Administrator of the EPA.Senator Collins voted no joining all Democrats. Senator Sinema did not vote.— Senate Press Gallery (@SenatePress) February 28, 2019Wheeler has been serving as “acting” administrator of Trump's EPA since Scott Pruitt resigned over alleged ethics violations in July, 2018. On the GOP side, only Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) opposed Wheeler, and voted against him. She described his policies as “not in the best interest of our environment and public health."Arizona Senator Kristen Sinema did not vote.Below, tweets from lawmakers who voted "no," and from journalists and environmental advocates around the time Wheeler's confirmation was completed today..@SenatorCollins just accidentally voted for EPA nom Andrew Wheeler and quickly corrected to a no. She kind of shook her head and laughed at her mistake. She was the only Republican to oppose the nominee.— Jennifer Haberkorn (@jenhab) February 28, 2019U.S. Senate in 52-47 vote confirmed Andrew Wheeler for EPA Administrator: pic.twitter.com/IDnvtZ8ok1— Greg Giroux (@greggiroux) February 28, 2019.@SenatorCollins just voted "no" on @EPAAWheeler's confirmation https://t.co/Li9ms6XVMF— Zahra Hirji (@Zhirji28) February 28, 2019Senate Republicans just overrode bipartisan opposition to confirm ex-coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to be Trump Administration's next EPA Administrator.As with Wheeler's predecessor Scott Pruitt, it will be vital that Congress exercise oversight. House Democrats will be vigilant. Read the rest

"We'll send him back to Kenya, or wherever it is," GOP Rep Mark Meadows said about President Obama, while laughing hard. This is the second video to surface today where Meadows promotes the racist birther conspiracy theory. Uncovered by @TheDemCoalition. pic.twitter.com/USxMc8U98F— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) February 28, 2019North Carolina's Rep. Mark Meadows was aghast that Rep. Rashida Tlaib found his parading HUD official Lynne Patton, a black woman, before congress as prop, to be racist. He insisted he is not a racist.There is plenty of video of displaying Meadows smugly spreading racist "birther" theories about President Obama.TPM:Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) was very indignant Thursday when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) accused him of using HUD official Lynne Patton, a black woman, as a prop to counter Michael Cohen’s accusations of racism.He retorted loudly, saying that her implication was racist and citing black people in his life.Unfortunately for the self-righteous congressman, videos have surfaced since the fracas that show him espousing the thoroughly debunked “birther” theory about President Barack Obama. Read the rest

Towards the end of the Michael Cohen's Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) was highly insulted when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) suggested he had committed a racist act by bringing in one of his black employees "as a prop." “And it is insensitive..." Tlaib said, "the fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself.”Meadows immediately reacted, insisting with high emotion that he was not a racist, and that somehow having nieces and nephews of color proved his point. He and Tlaib went back and forth in a heated exchange, with Meadows saying she called him a racist, and with Tlaib saying no, she only pointed out that he had committed a racist act. The scene was was pretty much smoothed over within about five minutes or so. However, just hours later, videos of Meadows resurfaced that show that yes, sir, you ARE a racist.The Washington Post put together the video above, where we can hear Meadows saying about President Barack Obama (while he was in office), "We don't have to worry about it. We'll send him back home to Kenya, or where it is. We'll send him back home." And, in another location on a different day, "2012 is the time we are going to send Mr. Obama home to Kenya or wherever it is." Here's Mark Meadows, who just sidetracked the entire House Oversight Committee to assure him he's not racist, saying that "2012 is the time we are going to send Mr. Read the rest

Back in 2016, a "reputation management" company called Profile Defenders was caught forging court orders in order to get complaints about its clients removed from the site Pissed Consumer. This was a monumentally stupid thing to do, as judges are consistently unamused with people who forge their signatures.The latest reputation management shenanigans involve a lower-stakes legal forgery. Pissed Consumer has found that the notarized documents from people who'd complained about New York's Luxsport Motor Group (a used car dealership) asking to have their complaints removed were fraudulent. Though they were apparently notarized by a real notary public, Stephanie Chrysten Lynch, the people whose signatures were supposedly on these documents denied ever having signed them.It's not clear who is behind the fraud, nor whether Lynch was duped by someone using fake ID to impersonate someone, whether her seal was forged, or whether she was in on the fraud. But the fraudulent letters were supposedly signed by people from across the USA and even overseas, and Lynch is located in the same state as Luxsport's head office.After Pissed Consumer restored the fraudulently removed review, it got another notarized letter, supposedly signed by the original author, this one vouched for by a notary in Washington state.And so we started digging and investigating further. We found out that:* 4 notarized letters according to which we removed the reviews about Luxsport Motor Group were notarized by one and the same notary public from New York – Stephanie Chrysten Lynch coincidentally, Luxsport Motor Group is headquartered in New York* interestingly, the posters whose letters were notarized by the same New York notary public, Stephanie Chrysten Lynch, posted their reviews not just from different parts of the US but from different continents* when we checked correspondence we received from, allegedly, the authors of the above-mentioned 4 notarized letters – it turns out that it was their 2nd notarized letter that was accepted in 3 cases; we did not accept the initial notarized letters and wrote them about it, they did not respond and then some time later the second “good” notarized letter came in. Read the rest

Last November, the Pentagon's Inspector General presented Congress with a "little-noticed" report on whistleblowing in the US military, revealing that those who come forward with claims of misconduct including sexual harassment and safety problems face a "culture of retaliation" including black marks on their service records, demotion, and suspension of security clearance; the IG also reported that in nearly every case, the officers who retaliated against whistleblowers faced no consequences for their actions.The report also finds that the vast majority of wrongdoers whose crimes were revealed by whistleblowers did not face consequences for their bad acts, even after these acts were confirmed by investigators.The IG also found that the military had previously been warned about these deficits and had been given recommendations for reforming its practices, and had consistently ignored these recommendations, despite promises from top officers to act on them. The story appears in Roll Call, parent company of the political dirty tricksters suspected of sabotaging the FCC's Net Neutrality process by stealing the identities of millions of Americans in order to submit millions of comments supporting the corporate objectives of the country's largest telcoms operators. Ironically, the Pentagon IG is increasingly effective at processing a surging number of complaints of wrongdoing at the Defense Department — about sexual harassment, procurement fraud and other unethical behavior.The office is also speedily processing more and more allegations of retaliation against those who blow the whistle. But it’s had little impact on the culture of retribution within the Defense Department. Read the rest