Boing Boing

Fortnite Battle Royale Season 8 is here!Season 7 drew to a close with free Valentine's battle passes for everyone willing to brave holiday challenges. Season 8 lands with map changes, new weapons, and winter put in the vault.There be pirates and cannon balls!I haven't had a chance to check out Murder Island today, but after a short 11GB update I'll hop on the Battle Bus and see what madness Epic has achieved. Read the rest

Seattle's immensely popular business tax was designed to do something about the city's epidemic of desperate homelessness, but then Amazon threw its muscle around to get the tax canceled, mostly by threatening not to occupy its new offices in Ranier Square, a 30-story building currently under construction that Amazon was to be sole tenant of, with 3,500-5,000 employees working out of the building.Now, Ranier Square is advertising for new tenants to fill its 722,000 square feet, because Amazon has canceled its plans (though not the lease - the new tenants will sublease from Amazon, likely for 10-15 years). Unconfirmed reports have it that Amazon will instead expand its rentals in neighboring Bellevue. Seattle has upcoming municipal elections and some city councillors are signalling that they'll campaign on reinstating the tax and raising money to help fix the city's housing crisis. When Mayor Jenny Durkan and a council majority sought to compromise with business leaders in May by passing a smaller version of the tax, Amazon announced it would move ahead with Block 18, one of several new buildings going up in the Denny Triangle. But the company never recommitted to the Rainier Square space, even after an effort to nix the measure through a referendum, backed by Amazon and other local businesses, pressured the council into repealing the tax less than a month later.The annual tax of $275 per employee on companies grossing at least $20 million per year would have raised about $47 million in 2019 for low-income housing and homeless services. Read the rest

Researchers from Dojo/Bullguard investigated the security model of the Ring smart doorbell -- made by Amazon -- and discovered that the video was sent "in the clear" (without encryption) meaning that people on the same network as the doorbell, or on the same network as one of its owners, can easily tap into its feeds.Additionally, the researchers found that it would be easy to alter the feed coming from the doorbell (for example, you could insert a feed of an empty porch while you were breaking down the door).The security risks arose because Ring's designers chose not to encrypt their Realtime Protocol (RTP) packets. This means that an attacker who joins a network that is carrying the video feed (for example, the wifi at a conference center or coffee shop that Ring owner is using to monitor the feed from their home) can view or hijack the video streams.The latest version of the Ring app (version 3.4.7) corrects this error, but the release notes do not mention this fact, so some users may not have upgraded.This report is part of a growing pattern of serious security problems with Ring's products, which is particularly troubling, given that they are intended as security measures themselves.The main takeaway from this research is that security is only as strong as its weakest link. Encrypting the upstream RTP traffic will not make forgery any harder if the downstream traffic is not secure, and encrypting the downstream SIP transmission does not thwart stream interception. Read the rest

The Tiny Type Museum is a limited-edition handmade box set of traditional printing tech, including hot metal and wooden type, custom-made linotype slugs, plate molds, phototypes, plates, Monotype matrixes, other stuff besides, and a book about six centuries of reprographic technology that fits nice and kentucky in a slot.Glenn Fleishman:I realize the museum’s price isn’t low, but the intent is for it to be comprehensive, authentic, and long-lasting. Sourcing and commissioning material, building a custom case designed to last centuries (and likely longer), and having the book printed in a historically accurate and archival method adds up quickly. I wanted to do this right, have it be meaningful, and produce a treasure that will last the ages, and you’ll be proud to own, examine, and share. Read the rest

London's estate agents were notorious profiteers of the property bubble, listing on the stock exchanges and rewarding investors with soaring share-prices that reflected the human misery of a city where life got harder and more expensive every day, where communities were shattered, and where subprime lending and other sleazy financial practices helped to destroy the global economy in 2007-8, triggering more than a decade of crisis from which we have yet to recover.The princes of London's property-market hell were, undoubtably, Foxtons (previously), the most prominent and vicious and profiteering of all the estate-agents (I named the villain in my novel Pirate Cinema after them), and today, Foxtons announced that it would suffer a loss of £17.2 million in fiscal 2018, partly because it was forced to shutter six of its offices last year.Foxtons blames the losses on a "prolonged downturn" in London's housing market, exacerbated by Brexit. It's not just Foxtons, either: the Nationwide, a lender, confirms that housing prices are sinking.London is one of the most leveraged housing markets in the world, with many "owners" holding virtually no stake in their homes, having relied on capital appreciation to offset mortgage interests and low- or no-deposit purchases. Even a small dip in housing prices could put many of these homes "under water," with their owners owing more to the bank than the notional value of the property that secures their loans, and this could trigger forced sales. The flood of new inventory on the market will further reduce property values by adding to the supply of available properties, lowering prices, triggering more forced sales and panic selling -- lather, rinse, repeat. Read the rest

What happens when a stoppable force hits an immovable object? The stoppable force stops. The Korea Herald reports:The Korea Coast Guard (KCG) said the 5,998-ton Seagrand sailed into the side of the Gwangan Bridge at around 4:20 p.m. before turning back to head in the opposite direction. ... The KCG nabbed the vessel and questioned the crew aboard. It said the ship's Russian captain, whose identity is being withheld, had a blood alcohol content of 0.086 percent. The legal limit is 0.03 percent.I feel there must be more to the story, as 0.08 isn't very drunk—it's the legal limit for driving in most U.S. states and basically the tare weight of a merchant sailor.You may recognize the bridge, in Busan, from Black Panther. Read the rest

It's been 20 years since Napster burst on the scene, and after decades of lawsuits, draconian criminal penalties, even no-knock gunpoint search warrants, there remains no evidence that "copyright enforcement" has a measurable impact on copyright infringement -- and at the same time, there's persistent, credible evidence that infringement goes down when product offerings get better and prices get more reasonable.The latest example comes from New Zealand, where a survey of 1,000 people found that copyright infringement is in freefall, and that the biggest predictor of whether someone pays for something is whether it is available at a good price and in a timely manner (AKA "Netflix is killing content piracy").A couple important caveats: the study was paid for by telcoms company Vocus, and I can't find the survey's raw data or sampling methodology online.But the headline findings are pretty compelling: 75% of respondents use free-to-air TV as their preferred video service, 58% pay for movie tickets, and 55% subscribe to Netflix or one of its competitors; while only 11% use illegal streams and only 10% download infringing torrents.The findings replicate earlier research, and more importantly, they come at a critical juncture, when NZ is contemplating internet censorship orders inspired by the catastrophic Australian law that was recently rammed through Parliament. NZ has been a hotbed of copyright activism, with the country experiencing an uprising a decade ago that killed a proposal to have households disconnected from the internet if a single member was accused (without proof) of copyright infringement -- and then the law was revived by an MP who threatened to hold up aid to earthquake-stricken Christchurch if the disconnection orders were not attached to the emergency bill as a rider. Read the rest

"Found a bit of a crackin' one" Read the rest

If you love to travel, you love reminiscing about the places you've been. Aside from the photos, you might turn maps into keepsakes, putting pins or stickers onto each country you've visited. World Travel Tracker Scratch Off Maps® take that pastime and ramp up the fun, making it easy to keep tabs on your adventures by literally scratching each country off your list.Like all good ideas, this one is pretty simple. What you've got is essentially a 17" by 24" scratch-off ticket version of the entire world. Every country is covered in gold foil that rubs off to reveal a different color, highlighting your visit. Stateside road trippers can also keep a tally of their itinerary, with the US, Canada, and Australia broken down into different sections for their own states and provinces. There's also a gallery of scratch-off flags below the map - one for each of 210 countries.The World Travel Tracker Scratch Off Map® is available in gift-ready packaging for $22.99, 48% off the MSRP. Read the rest

Fox has been ordered to pay $179m to profit participants on the longrunning TV show Bones; the judgment includes $128m in punitive damages because the aribitrator that heard the case found that Fox had concealed the show's true earnings and its execs had lied under oath to keep the profit participants from getting their share of the take.The arbitrator singled out Fox execs Dana Walden, Gary Newman and Peter Rice for "giving false testimony to conceal their wrongful acts."The suit turned on Fox's "self-dealing," whereby one division would make a program and sell it to another division at well below market rates, then claim that the show hadn't earned very much money, thus denying payouts to those with a share of the profits: the show's stars, the author of the novels the show was adapted from, and the show's exec producer.Fox has vowed to appeal.Two of the Fox execs singled out by the arbitrator are set to move into executive roles at Disney after the Disney acquisition of Fox is complete. Disney CEO Bob Iger gave a statement in their defense.Liguori headed Fox at the time the series debuted in 2005. In 2009, he wrote a memo that may have outlined Fox’s efforts to avoid self-dealing liability as Fox considered giving “Bones” a three-season renewal in 2009. Quotations from what is described as the “Legal Action Plan” memo are heavily redacted in the arbitration filing. Liguori left his post as chairman of Fox Broadcasting in 2009, amid a shakeup in the TV division. Read the rest

After a raid in Miami, police Sgt. Manuel Regueiro approached and punched an 18-year-old cuffed suspect in the face. The victim warned the officers they were being filmed by the home security system. So officer Alex Gonzalez stole the evidence. But he had in fact taken the system's battery, and now both officers are being charged with crimes.Regueiro for misdemeanor battery ... Gonzalez with tampering with evidence, a third-degree felony, and misdemeanor petty theft.“Shameful we have to take these actions,” the department’s director, Juan Perez, said in a Tuesday tweet. “However, any officer violating the law will face the consequences, including arrest and prosecution.” Consider in silence how ignorant of modern technology you'd have to be to think that a modern surveillance camera's battery was a tape. Read the rest

A man who took radioactive medication in his final days was cremated in 2017, a mistake that released potentially dangerous Lutetium 177 into the environment.This alarming case, reported in a new research letter this week, illustrates the collateral risks potentially posed by on average 18.6 million nuclear medicine procedures involving radiopharmaceuticals performed in the US every year.While rules regulate how these drugs are administered to living patients, the picture can become less clear when those patients die, thanks to a patchwork of different laws and standards in each state – not to mention situations like the 69-year-old man, whose radioactive status simply slipped through the cracks."Radiopharmaceuticals present a unique and often overlooked postmortem safety challenge," researchers from the Mayo Clinic explain in a case note. Read the rest

The company says 190 employees in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, CA will lose their jobs.

In China, technology firms are working with the government to push voice and facial recognition to help pigs, many of which have been dying from a swine disease that's sweeping the country.African swine fever has spread quickly through China in recent weeks, affecting the world’s top pork producer and the reliability of supply for other nations.Today, the government announced plans to divide its hog industry into five zones in an attempt to halt the swine fever's spread. More on facial and voice recognition technology in the China swine story, from Sui-Lee Wee and Elsie Chen in the New York Times:Chinese companies are pushing facial and voice recognition and other advanced technologies as ways to protect the country’s pigs. In this Year of the Pig, many Chinese hogs are dying from a deadly swine disease, threatening the country’s supply of pork, a staple of Chinese dinner tables.So China’s ebullient technology sector is applying the same techniques it has used to transform Chinese life — and, more darkly, that the Chinese government increasingly uses to spy on its own people — to make sure its pigs are in the pink of health.“If they are not happy, and not eating well, in some cases you can predict whether the pig is sick,” said Jackson He, chief executive officer of Yingzi Technology, a small firm based in the southern city of Guangzhou that has introduced its vision of a “future pig farm” with facial and voice recognition technologies.China’s biggest tech firms want to pamper pigs, too. Read the rest

Witness tampering conviction? Lose your bar license? Why not both!

About 20% of the total posts were found to have been generated by seven anti-vax Pages.

Today's FTC ruling impacts how the TikTok app works for users under the age of 13.

I've written about melamine foam (sold as Magic Erasers) before. They're great for quickly removing mars, scuffs, and stains from almost any surface. I recommend buying 100 at a time.Latest use case: Some old stickers on my laptop that I wanted to remove. After peeling them off, the sticky, tough, adhesive remained on the laptop. Magic eraser knockoff to the rescue! It took about 90 seconds of gentle rubbing with a damp magic eraser to remove all traces.Before:After:Watch the video below to see different ways to use this wonder material. Read the rest

On Sunday in Bensheim, Germany, two children spotted a rat stuck in the vent of a manhole cover. Animal welfare organization Berufstierrettung Rhein-Neckar sent out two rescue workers who were unable to free the rodent. From Smithsonian:That’s when things get surreal. The 8-member Auerbach volunteer fire brigade soon arrived on the scene wearing their firefighting gear and began a 25-minute rescue operation posted on YouTube. First they subdued the rat around the neck using a pole with a restraining loop at the end. Then, using large, black professional-looking wedges they popped up the heavy manhole cover and animal rescuer Michael Sehr was able to wiggle and work the portly little nibbler loose before releasing him back into the sewer...The children who first found the rat also thanked the firefighters with a handmade, rat-themed thank you card.Here's video of the operation: Read the rest

In the first ever case of its kind, the Federal Trade Commission just reached a settlement that includes a $12.8 million fine against an herbal supplement company that paid for fake five-star reviews to boost its Amazon sales.The fraudulent company, Cure Encapsulations, contacted a site that churns out fake reviews — amazonverifiedreviews.com (now taken down) — and told them, "“Please make my product … stay a five star." They then paid the sleazy site "$1,000 for 30 reviews in order to bump the product’s ratings," according to Mashable.Along with the falsified reviews purporting to be from actual customers, the FTC also alleged that the company made “false and unsubstantiated claims” for the pills known as Quality Encapsulations Garcinia Cambogia. Garcinia cambogia is a tropical fruit found in Indonesia that has been used as a natural aid for weight loss. As The Verge points out, use of the herbal supplement has associated with acute liver failure.“People rely on reviews when they’re shopping online,” said director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Andrew Smith in a statement. “When a company buys fake reviews to inflate its Amazon ratings, it hurts both shoppers and companies that play by the rules.”Along with the hefty fine, Cure Encapsulations is also banned "from making weight-loss, appetite-suppression, fat-blocking, or disease-treatment claims for any dietary supplement, food, or drug unless they have competent and reliable scientific evidence in the form of human clinical testing supporting the claims," according to the FTC. You mean they're still allowed to run a business? Read the rest

Blue Marble 3 is Kaplamino's latest marble chain reaction video. I like the way that many parts of the track are formed as needed by the energy of rubber bands, deflating balloons, magnets, and even a firecracker.From the YouTube description:I present you my most ambitious project so far, blue marble 3 ! I'm out of my comfort zone this time because the chain reaction is taking place on two tables, and with 0 fidget spinners. It is the longest in terms of duration and the one that takes up the most space in my room. I tried to use a little bit of everything like rubber bands, magnets, and elements. I had so many failures that I stopped counting, as always only a few tricks were responsible for the majority of failures, can you guess which ones?Image: YouTube Read the rest

Mike Solomon, creative director at Hearst Digital Media, created Judge Fake People. Here's what he wrote about it on his website, The Cleverest:Like many internet addicts, I was blown away by NVIDEO’s demo using style-based Generative Adversarial Networks to generate faces. They seem to have crossed a threshold for generating artificial images that can genuinely fool our brains.Flash forward to last week when I saw Philip Wang’s amazing single-serving website thispersondoesosxist.com.It was fascinating to see a photo-realistic face of someone that doesn’t exist. Philip’s writeup does a great job explaining his motivations and this implications behind this groundbreaking technology.But I just wanted to turn it into hot or not.So I wrote a script to download an image from thispersondoesnotexist.com every 5 seconds and built up a collection of around two thousand fake people. Then I made a voting system with php/MySQL and some filters to show the highest and lowest rated faces. And I enabled comments just for fun. Read the rest

Recent rains have put this 'Glory Hole' into use for the first time since 2017.California's Lake Berryessa has an awesome overflow spillway built to relive the Monticello Dam known as a 'Glory Hole' -- essentially a drain that high water levels will activate. Read the rest

A 76-year-old-man was carrying an original Picasso in a large shopping bag while traveling by train in Germany. He tucked it under his seat, but when he changed trains he forgot all about it, leaving it behind. The 10-inch-high piece was a ceramic vase that was part of Picasso's "Owl" series made in the South of France in 1953. It's worth at least $11,000. According to CNN:Carrying his precious cargo in a large shopping bag, the 76-year-old man was traveling from Kassel in central Germany to the western city of Dusseldorf on February 15...According to German police, the owner contacted the crew immediately after departing the train. But despite a search, the vase was nowhere to be seen.Police described the incident as a case of "monumental forgetfulness" and said the vase had been pinched by an "unknown culprit." They called on witnesses to come forward. #bpol https://t.co/9MV1W5T9tF BPOL NRW: Teure VergesslichkeitPablo Picassos "Le Hibou" im Zug von unbekannten Täter unterschlagen— Bundespolizei NRW (@bpol_nrw) February 26, 2019 Read the rest

From the latest issue of Ali Griswold's Oversharing, a newsletter about the sharing economy: scooters have an average lifetime of a month or less, and the startups are losing money on every scooter they buy. Griswold used publicly available data sets from Louisville, KY to calculate how long scooters last before they stop generating revenue.At the rates calculated above, that company only recoups $65 to $75 on the cost of each scooter—in other words, it loses $295 to $285 per scooter. That doesn’t even include the $50 annual fee per dockless vehicle, the $3,000 in combined licensing fees, or the $100 fee for each designated parking area. Plug in the $551 sticker price for a scooter, and the losses are even greater.Image: bakdc/Shutterstock Read the rest

I can not wait to give this small LEGO Star Wars set to my daughter.The kit includes some great minifigs: R2, C3P0, and a really nice Stormtrooper, however I'm most excited about the escape pod.At 177 pieces this set will be a short activity for her, but for less than $20 delivered I can't pass it up.LEGO Star Wars: A New Hope Escape Pod vs. Dewback Microfighters 75228 Building Kit via Amazon Read the rest

Césares de Roma is a project to make hyperrealist sculptures of Roman emperors using existing portraits and sculptures as referencesThe latest creation is a silicone bust of Nerón Claudio César Augusto Germanicus, aka Nero, who wreaked havoc from 54 to 68 AD.and Nero:https://t.co/NgLIGISrze pic.twitter.com/aIzp79L9eW— Tom Harwood (@tomhfh) February 27, 2019Image: YouTube Read the rest

A Chinese high schooler purchased a handwriting robot to draw Chinese characters for her homework. When her mother discovered the machine, she destroyed it. These devices are available online for about $100.From Inquisitr:In China, students are often burdened with the task of writing complex characters over and over in order to learn them. It appears that the girl digitized her handwriting and had the robot complete her work for her. Predictably, the girl finished her homework in record time. All seemed to go well for the girl. That is, until her mom found the machine while cleaning her room and promptly destroyed it.The exact model of the robot is unnamed, but known robots that can “write” look like a square box with a black arm that holds a pen or pencil. For example, there’s a U.S. company called Bond that uses robots that can write in what looks like human handwriting. Some of these machines come with handwriting that’s already loaded onto the hardware, while others allow you to customize the handwriting.Image: Yoycart Read the rest

After a winter dump that left an area of Durango, Colorado with 80" of snow, one small dog got stuck. No matter what he did (including high jumps) he couldn't move forward. But that's what buddies are for. His bigger canine friend clears a trail for him, leading him back to his human. Read the rest

Last week, residents of a Sammamish, Washington neighborhood woke up to racist graffiti, including swastikas and the n-word, on their homes and garages. (Video report below.) Now, it seems the perpetrators returned to spray-paint an apology. From KIRO 7:“More graffiti was found at Klahanie Park. It was a couple different things,” King County Sheriff’s Sergeant Ryan Abbott told KIRO Radio. “First it was the word spray-painted ‘Sorry’, and then next to that there was another spray-paint — it was hard to read — that read, ‘Not hate, just’ something, and then another ‘Sorry.'”It’s in the same red spray paint as before,” Sergeant Abbott said, “and they were just trying to say that they didn’t mean any hate by their tags, which of course were offensive as you had read, but now they’re updating it to say this..."Police are continuing to investigate. They’re hoping that surveillance video will provide additional information. Read the rest

MGM and Mattel are developing a live-action movie based on the iconic View-Master stereo viewer. This news comes on the heels of the two companies' announcement of an American Girl film based on the insanely popular doll brand. From Hollywood Reporter:“Since the 1940s, View-Master has inspired wonder and joy in children of all ages, creating huge opportunities for storytelling,” said Brenner in a statement. “MGM Pictures has tremendous expertise and a proven track record in capturing audiences’ imagination through film, and we’re proud to be partnering with them to bring another Mattel franchise to theaters. This marks another important milestone as we transform Mattel into an IP-driven, high-performing toy company.”Stated Jonathan Glickman, MGM's motion picture group president: “View-Master was the first device that allowed families all over the world to escape their reality and take them places they never thought they could go. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Mattel to create a family adventure integrating the old school turn and click stereotypic device with the modern world of virtual reality.”(Thanks, Jason Tester!) Read the rest

Intruders crept into a crypt at Dublin, Ireland's St. Michan's Church, decapitated an 800-year-old mummy and ran off with the head. The Garda Síochána (Irish police) ask that anyone with information about the missing head or those who did the decapitating, please contact them. From CNN:The mummy is thought to be a soldier who fought in the Crusades, a series of eight expeditions sanctioned by the Church between the 11th and 13th centuries, which resulted in a religious war between Christians and Muslims.Intruders turned the body over while removing its head, and also desecrated the 400-year-old remains of a nun, according to the Church.The vandalism, which is being investigated by police, was discovered on Monday as a guide was preparing to open the church.From the New York Times:St. Michan’s attracts around 28,000 paying visitors a year, who come to tour its small but historically significant interior, which includes the organ on which George Frideric Handel wrote his “Messiah” oratorio, and view the mummified bodies in their open coffins.In the last century, visitors were even allowed to shake the Crusader’s leathery hand “for good luck..."Another section of the crypt was sealed after being vandalized in 1996 by three teenagers who broke in, dragged corpses into the churchyard and played football with the head of a little girl.image at top: "mummies in the St Michan’s Church crypt" by Jennifer Boyer Read the rest

Raf Grassetti, the Sony Art Director behind God of War's look, is painting realistic portraits of characters from Smash Bros. Ultimate. Some are charming, such as Princess Peach. One the other hand, there's always Sonic...Via Metafilter. Read the rest

Sandy Allen on how Marie Kondo helped them shed feminine things.I donated it all. I hung and folded the items that remained: flannel shirts, baggy jeans, t-shirts. I had kept a few dresses and heels and feminine winter coats, ones that had seemed really special when I’d bought them. I knew Marie Kondo wouldn’t have approved of my choice to keep them. Each day I passed them and they stared right back at me.During the months that followed, I steadily shed feminine things. One day, all my makeup: gone. Another day, all my earrings: gone. (My ears had been pierced when I was two!) I tried to do as Marie Kondo said and thanked these items for what they’d given me. I guiltily threw them out, and then felt wonderful. Read the rest

Virtually everyone who's ever had the credit-rating system explained to them immediately understood that this was a complete scam: these companies that most of us have never heard of nonconsensually ingest gigantic mountains of data about you and your life and produce a numeric score that is nearly impossible to explain and extremely frustrating to alter, and that number is used to determine your access to work, rental accommodations, loans, mortgages and more. And that's before you factor in the history of these companies, rooted in the idea of compiling secret dossiers to destroy the lives of political dissidents, activists, queer people, and other downtrodden people. And it's also before you factor in Equifax's monumental security blunder that leaked the most sensitive and personal data of virtually every adult American, as well as millions in other countries around the world. Enter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has made an art out of using her committee time to ask the kinds of pointed questions that reveal the extent to which the system is rigged and corrupt, and has been for a very long time (it's no wonder that corporate lobbyists dread approaching her). At a Tuesday meeting of the House Financial Services Committee, AOC grilled Equifax CEO Mark Begor over the business's practices, laying out the case against the credit reporting industry with just a few simple questions: first setting the scene by establishing that there is no way for Americans to opt out of having their data amassed by the bureaux, and then firebombing it by pointing out that 20% of Americans -- millions and millions of people -- have had substantial errors in those dossiers, with potentially life-ruining consequences. Read the rest

Blessed are the water main bursts, and the heavy rains. Reportedly taken at the Culinary Institute of Aerica in St Helena, California. [via] Read the rest

If you gave up on playing the piano as a kid, don't despair. Things have come a long way since those drills that had you playing "Chopsticks" endlessly. Take Pianoforall, for instance. This innovative new system lets students play keys right away, learning the structure of the music by playing rhythm-style hits.The 10-hour course is geared to beginners, but you won't stay at that level for long. Within the first series of lessons, you'll learn how to play hits by Billy Joel, Norah Jones and more - and as you do, you'll learn the music theory that underlies the structure of those songs. That provides a foundation for later lessons, where you'll learn other styles including blues, jazz and rock, not to mention the chords, inversions and other tools that will eventually have you writing and improvising your own songs.Right now, you can pick up lifetime access to Pianoforall: The New Way To Learn Piano & Keyboard at a newly discounted rate of $10.99. Read the rest

At the end of March, the European Parliament will sit down to vote on the new Copyright Directive, an unparalleled disaster in the history of internet regulation with the power to wipe out the EU's tech sector, handing permanent control of the internet over to US Big Tech, all in the name of protecting copyright (while simultaneously gutting protection for artists).Right after that key vote, MEPs will fan out across Europe, returning to their home countries to start campaigning for the May elections. This timing is crucial, because it means that MEPs are really interested in whether their actions will cost them support from voters.Voters hate the Copyright Directive and its internet-destroying Article 13. The petition to kill Article 13 has drawn more signatures than any other in EU history, and at this rate, a few days from now this petition will become the most popular petition in the history of the human race.If you live in Europe, you can let your MEP know that your vote depends on their vote: the 2019 Pledge, brought to you by Epicenter Works, calls on MEPs to publicly pledge to reject Article 13. 44 MEPs have signed it so far, and work has just begun.The pledge's website lets you enter your country and your phone number and it will connect you with MEPs who have not yet taken the pledge and let you talk to them about why it's important that they do.This is a key juncture, a moment when the fate of the internet itself hangs in the balance (and not just in Europe). Read the rest

ETS was originally called "Enterprise TLS," implying that it was an "enterprise-grade" version of TLS, the system used to secure internet sessions (if you visit a URL that starts with "https://", it's being protected with TLS).But BITS, a finance industry group, was forced to change the name to ETS after loud objections from the Internet Engineering Task Force.That's because ETS intentionally weakens TLS, disabling "forward secrecy," an amazing cryptographic tool that makes intercepted connections secure against decryption, even against someone who later gains access to the server's private key.Forward secrecy is standard in all kinds of cryptographic security, and is part of TLS 1.3, the latest version of the protocol. But BITS objected to this, saying that the inability to sneakily decrypt secure communications would interfere with its ability to "implement data loss protection, intrusion detection and prevention, malware detection, packet capture and analysis, and DDoS mitigation" -- basically, BITS wanted to preserve the ability of companies to provide their private keys to third-parties who monitored all their traffic.As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jacob Hoffman-Andrews writes, "there’s a real harm that comes from weakening a critical protocol to provide easier in-datacenter monitoring for a small handful of organizations." The IETF rejected the idea of disabling forward secrecy, even in limited ways.Since being turned down at the IETF, BITS has been attempting to standardize ETS at a lesser standards body, ETSI, where they initially called the project "ETLS," but, as noted, were forced to change this to ETS. Read the rest

Artist Zachary Knoles created a wonderful series of illustrations that pay tribute to video games by imagining them as pulp novel covers, with the game writers' names in the by-line slots (a very nice touch indeed!). (via Gameraboy) Read the rest

For many years, we've been following the research on phages, viruses that kill bacteria, once a staple of Soviet medicine and now touted as a possible answer to the worrying rise of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.Steffanie Strathdee is an infectious disease epidemiologist; she's written a book about her husband Tom Patterson's near-death experience: Patterson was nearly killed by a large ("soccer-ball sized"), infected cyst in his gut, and his life was saved by experimental phage therapy at UCSD medical center.That book, The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir, co-written with Patterson, is "one part medical mystery, one part personal memoir," and contains a wealth of accessible material on the potential of phages to treat nascent superbugs.Strathdee and Patterson were interviewed by Wired's Megan Molteni. It's fascinating stuff, and I've ordered a copy of The Perfect Predator after reading about it.SS: It’s been moving very quickly. After Tom’s case was publicized in April of 2017, we received funding to start North America’s first center devoted to better understanding the role of phage therapy for treating superbugs. It’s at UC San Diego, called IPATH, for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, and we now have two clinical trials in the works. One is for people with ventricular assist devices who tend to get infected with biofilm-forming bacteria, which are difficult for antibiotics to penetrate. And the other is for cystic fibrosis patients who develop resistance to the drugs that keep them alive by fighting off chronic lung infections. Read the rest

Unmute this one! Dachshunds are the cutest.Behold, “EXPLAIN THIS BLACK MAGIC BEFORE I SEND IT TO ITS MAKER. HUMAN!,” uploaded by IMGURian MayMyEnemiesLiveLong.Sound up.EXPLAIN THIS BLACK MAGIC BEFORE I SEND IT TO ITS MAKER. HUMAN! Read the rest

Politicians love introducing tax-cuts, because they're reliable vote-getters, even if they're structured to blow up later by giving massive breaks to the super-rich and more modest breaks to middle-class voters, resulting in mounting deficits and eventual service cuts. But Trump has managed the impossible: he signed trillions of dollars of tax-cuts into law and lost in the polls as a result.Trump managed this feat by handing middle-class and poor people tax bills instead of refunds, while cutting in a tiny number of super-rich people for unbelievably large breaks (and the 99% will get stiffed even harder in 2027, when their taxes go up again).Bill Black proposes a tantalizing thought-experiment: what if Trump had spread the tax breaks around, giving, say, $5,000 to every household with a combined income of less than $75,000? What if he tailored the breaks to his base, farmers, old people, blue-collar workers (while stiffing poor people)? Not only would this have stimulated the everloving fuck out of the US economy -- wage stagnation and austerity has left the US with tons of underutilized labor and plant that could churn out tons of goods for these people to buy without any inflation to speak of -- but the Democratic leadership would have hated it, because Pelosi, Schumer and the rest of the "paygo" crowd are crazy deficit hawks who don't want any unfunded liabilities in federal budgets. The result would have been a huge PR win for Trump and a massive PR hit for the Democratic establishment. Read the rest

GE Transportation workers were told after merger their new employer “wants to turn this into an Amazon warehouse,” says labor union.

Just when you thought Facebook couldn't get any sillier. Facebook reached out to offer Hard Drive early access to a "fan subscription" product. I asked my editors about it and the complete distrust amongst our team was kinda funny. We read through the terms and found a couple things that were hilarious when compared to Patreon's 5%.— Matt Saincome (@MattSaincome) February 26, 2019TechCrunch's Josh Constine reports that Facebook is launching a fan subscription service á la Patreon, but unlike Patreon's 5% cut of the tip jar, Facebook plans to take away 30%. Because of course.Excerpt: The policy document attained by TechCrunch shows Facebook plans to take up to a 30 percent cut of subscription revenue minus fees, compared to 5 percent by Patreon, 30 percent by YouTube which covers fees, and 50 percent by Twitch.Facebook also reserves the right to offer free trials to subscriptions that won’t compensate creators. And Facebook demands a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use” creators’ content and “This license survives even if you stop using Fan Subscriptions.”Distrust of Facebook could scare creators away from the platform when combined with its significant revenue share and ability to give away or repurpose creators’ content. Facebook has consistently shown that it puts what it thinks users want and its own interests above those of partners. It cut off game developers from viral channels, inadequately warned Page owners their reach with drop over time, decimated referral traffic to news publishers, and most recently banished video makers from the feed. Read the rest

SEDC is an Atlanta-based company that provides back-ends for utility companies; a security researcher discovered that the company stored his password in the clear. The company's products have more than 15,000,000 users, whose logins and passwords are potentially also stored in plaintext. When the researcher alerted the company about this, the company ignored them, then denied that there was any problem, then demanded that the researcher not communicate about this except to SEDC's general counsel.The responses from SEDC general counsel Mark Cole split hairs over the security implications of storing unencryted passwords, insisting that because this was not prohibited by PCI-DSS, an industry regulation governing storage of customer billing information; and because logging in would not reveal billing information, there was no problem.The security researcher who discovered the password problem has received assistance from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (disclosure: I am a consultant to EFF). Cole eventually sent the researcher an email that implied that the company had reformed its password handling, but with a great deal of worrying ambiguity.Storing passwords in the clear is an industry worst-practice. Because so many people re-use passwords, password breaches are a useful source of data for "credential stuffing" attacks on other sites; if SEDC or its customers suffer a breach, they could unleash millions of passwords that could be used to compromise the users of its services. So is the situation "fixed"? It's unclear. SEDC's counsel—who did not respond to Ars request for an interview—gave as little technical information as possible during the entire 120+ day saga with X. Read the rest

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra told two Berkeley-based reporters that it is against the law to even possess a copy of this never-before-publicly-released list of convicted cops.

Homelessness in New Orleans spiked after Hurricane Katrina, reaching 11,600 by 2007; today that number has been reduced by 90%, thanks to a "housing first" (previously) approach that starts by giving homeless people stable, permanent housing, and then addressing confounding factors like mental illness and substance addiction (on the grounds that these conditions are easier to treat when people have stable housing).Martha Kegel is executive director of Unity New Orleans, the nonprofit that led the housing first coalition. In an interview with WBUR, she explains how the program worked in NOLA, and how much money it saved, because housing is much cheaper than ER visits, jails, and/or policing petty crime and dealing with its consequences.The USA has an estimated homeless population of 500,000."Well we have reached what we call 'functional zero,' which means that we compiled a list using our outreach team [and] using our shelter lists that are updated every night. We housed, in their own apartments, every veteran on that list except nine that had refused housing, mostly because of mental illness. And we continued to work with those nine, at that point, [we] have housed four more of them. Then going forward, we have made a commitment that any time a veteran becomes newly homeless, we house them in an apartment within an average of 30 days or less. And we've maintained that now for over four years and we're extremely proud of that. It is very hard work. It requires a lot of organizations working together — and the VA and the Housing Authority — everybody working together to make that happen. Read the rest

The official cyberwarfare division of America's military successfully blocked off Internet access for the Russian government's notorious “troll factory” on the day of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Quite the story out today from Ellen Nakashima at the Washington Post.Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) in the city of St. Petersburg is reported to have been engaged in an active campaign “to sow discord among Americans during the 2018 midterms,” several U.S. officials told the Washington Post. The denial of service attack from the USA on voting day reportedly worked (not that we're in a position to verify it?), and was intended to serve as a warning that “the Kremlin’s operations against the United States are not cost-free.”Excerpt:The action has been hailed as a success by Pentagon officials, and some U.S. senators credited CyberCom with averting Russian interference in the midterms.“The fact that the 2018 election process moved forward without successful Russian intervention was not a coincidence,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who did not discuss the specific details of the operation targeting the St. Petersburg group. Without CyberCom’s efforts, there “would have been some very serious cyber incursions.”No comment from CyberCom or NSA. They typically don't comment.READ MORE: U.S. Cyber Command operation disrupted Internet access of Russian troll factory on day of 2018 midterms [washingtonpost.com] Read the rest

[TW: Suicide]A griefer has been reportedly splicing video of himself giving explicit instructions for committing suicide into animated videos on Youtube Kids; he lets the video run for several minutes before breaking in to say "Kids, remember, cut this way for attention, and this way for results"; despite "hundreds of reports" of this in the comments for the videos, they stayed online for several months until members of the Pedimom community (run by pediatrician/mother Free N Hess) made a concerted effort to report the videos.The Pedimom community has surfaced two videos with the suicide instructions spliced into them. They hypothesize that the griefer allows for a lengthy preroll of normal cartoons so that parents are lulled into a sense of security and walk away from their kids, never hearing the offensive material.The videos in question have been removed from Youtube so we only have the discussions at Pedimom to go on, as well as a camera video shot of a screen while one of the videos was playing. Four minutes and forty-five seconds into the video, a man quickly walked onto the screen, held his arm out, and taught the children watching this video how to properly kill themselves. What did I just see? Did I really just see that? I immediately turned off the video. My son’s nose stopped bleeding, and I further investigated the video in private while he went to play. I watched it again, certain that I had dreamt it up. I know YouTube had some sick videos, but I thought YouTube Kids was safe. Read the rest