Boing Boing

thispersondoesnotexist.com generates realistic human faces; refresh for a new one. Most are disturbingly convincing, a warning against trusting images and a whisper of just how gnostically paranoid everything is going to get. But the more you see, the more you learn the little tells. Read the rest

A remarkable easter egg from the Windows 95 era, fully anticipating what became of the world's most beautiful operating system.The developers of Office 95 left an interesting little easteregg with a name which does seem a little unsettling. I am exploring this easteregg and showing it in this video. Read the rest

The Internet of Dongs is Brad Haines's term for the world of internet-connected, "teledildonic" sex toys, and Haines, along with Sarah Jamie Lewis, have exhaustively documented all the ways in which internet-connected sex toys can screw you, from leaking private data to physically attacking your junk.But Lewis and Haines's work remains an obscure curiosity that is mostly followed by information security geeks; and now the do-not-buy advice for these gadgets is going mainstream. Just in time for Valentine's Day, Mozilla updated its Privacy Not Included guide (previously) (a review of tech gadgets' security and privacy practices),to include a suite of "romantic" gifts, from fitness trackers to "smart beds" to sleep trackers to sex toys, that track you, transmit your personal details to distant corporations, and sell, leak, or endanger your private information.I was pleased to see Lovesense blacklisted by name, given the company's incredible, appalling history of security blunders, including making secret audio recordings of your sex sessions (the company called this a "minor bug"). Not all the products are do-not-buys: there's a kegel exerciser that looks pretty good, but others, like the Lovense Lush 2 get failing grades for "shar[ing] your information with 3rd parties for unexpected reasons"; while the charmingly named Vibratissimo Panty Buster flunks for not using encryption (!).So what makes for a cyber-safe sex toy? According to Mozilla, you'll want to look out for things like whether the product uses encryption, automatic security updates, strong password requirements (where applicable), an accessible privacy policy, and a way for the company to manage security vulnerabilities in its products. Read the rest

Back in the 1980s, the giant German sf publisher Heyne tried out an experimental partnership with a soup company Maggi (they're still around), and it was bonkers.Under the terms of the deal, science fiction novels would be periodically interrupted by scenes in which the characters would drop everything and start eating Maggi soups, smacking their lips and exclaiming over just how delicious they were.But to keep readers from confusing the soup ads with the novels, these scenes would be set in different type and set off with other weird textual flourishes. To German sf fans of a certain vintage, these Maggi ads are legendary: I first heard tell of them from Tim Powers, who told me how he'd been leafing through a German edition of one of his books and discovered this weird stuff and asked a German fan about it and been told, "Oh, those are the soup ads, of course!"Of course.Heyne publishes some of my German editions, including the forthcoming German edition of Unauthorized Bread, and the editors I've spoken to there all seem weirdly proud but embarrassed by the soup ads (I'm sure there's a long German compound word to describe this emotion). I think they should do an anthology of these weird, food-oriented fanfic short stories.Here are the soup ads from William Gibson's Count Zero, the sequel to his seminal novel Neuromancer. For reasons no doubt lost to history, this book was called "Biochips" in German, and boy, did it have a hell of a cover! Read the rest

Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander has introduced a plan to completely upend the existing student loan payback system. How big is this plan? About 40 million borrowers big.Under Alexander's proposal, there would be just two repayment routes: one in which borrowers' monthly bills are capped at 10 percent of their discretionary income and another that spreads their payments out over a decade. Employers would be responsible for taking the funds from their employees' paychecks and sending them to the government. (Of course, student loan borrowers currently can set up automatic payments with their lender. They also typically get a discount on their interest rate for doing so.)"I think this proposal is likely to become law, after some tweaks," said Mark Kantrowitz, a student loan expert.Needless to say, consumer advocates are alarmed. For many borrowers, including those who lack stable employment or work in the gig economy, forced automatic payroll withholding may mean diverting money away from rent, heat or food in order to pay their student loans. It could also mean that they would have to give their employers a lot of information about their families (potentially including a spouse’s income) and their student loan debt in order to calculate the student loan payment amount.This is a recipe for disaster, especially considering it would make the borrower's amount of debt known to their employer who could easily use that information to tailor promotions, offers of overtime, and raises. An estimated 44 million Americans owe over $1.5 trillion dollars in student debt. Read the rest

The Right to Repair movement got state legislatures to consider more than a dozen Right to Repair bills last year, and have made great strides in the EU and elsewhere, but for every two steps forward they manage, they're forced a step or two back by giant corporate lobbyists, led by Apple, who want to ensure that third parties can't repair products, and that a manufacturer's decision it's time to retire a product from the market won't be challenged by independent repair depots.Repair is a huge industry -- depending on how you measure it, it's between 1-4% of US GDP. And most of that business is done by mom-and-pop shops and medium-sized service depots.That diffused market means that repair dollars stay in their communities, rather than being stashed overseas by tax-dodgers like Apple. But it also means that the companies who lose when Right to Repair is defeated have to overcome a lot of coordination costs to push back effectively.All that is about to change: Allstate, a giant insurance company, has just acquired Icracked, a large phone repair chain (Allstate made the acquisition through its Squaretrade subsidiary, which offers third-party warranties on a variety of products). Allstate has pledged to use its might to fight for Right to Repair, loaning R2R activists its state lobbyists to help see bills through. Allstate, the fourth-largest insurance company in the country, is an ally the movement is happy to have."Right now, the struggle on right to repair is us Davids versus a whole slew of Goliaths,” Nathan Proctor, the Director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at US PIRG told me in an email. Read the rest

I bought this nifty little lapel pin of a video arcade machine for my daughter's birthday. It uses two pins to keep it upright. It looks cool! Read the rest

The news that Facebook had spent years paying teens to install a surveillance kit called "Facebook Research" had a key detail: as part of the program, Facebook had its users install a new "root certificate."Root certificates are a key vulnerability in the public key infrastructure (PKI) that is used to protect virtually all of our secure communications, from protecting your privacy when exchanging messages or viewing web-pages, to ensuring that the software updates you install are what they appear to be, and not malicious code masquerading as legit updates.And because of how PKI works, installing a single untrusted root certificate makes every connection you make from then on unreliable. A single mistake, in other words, can make you comprehensively, totally vulnerable.So it's especially disturbing that installing a root cert is really easy to do: major OSes throw up a few pro forma warnings, but nothing that even hints at the kind of trouble you could be getting yourself into -- seriously, the warnings are less stern than the injunction you used to get by default before you made your first Usenet post.In an excellent Deeplinks post, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Sydney Li and Jacob Hoffman-Andrews show just how underpowered the warnings over root certs are, and discuss what a good warning should look like. On both iOS and Android, users installing a root certificate click through a process filled with vague jargon. This is the explanation users get, with inaccessible jargon bolded. Android: “Note: The issuer of this certificate may inspect all traffic to and from the device.” iOS: “Installing the certificate “” will add it to the list of trusted certificates on your iPhone. Read the rest

After years of outstanding work as a cyberlawyer and science fiction/policy wonk, Kevin Bankston (previously) has published his debut science fiction story, Early Adopter, and it's a doozy.Bankston uses chatlogs and other exhaust from digital communications tools to spin a gorgeous and haunting tale of romance that starts with "met cute" and goes farther than you'd ever believe. If you're not at least a little choked up by the end, then I don't wanna know you.Craigslist> SF bay area> san francisco> community> missed connections: September 27: Atari Teenage Riot in Dolores Park (Mission District).We passed each other yesterday while I was walking my dog Baxter in Dolores Park. You (brunette curls, green eyes, wry smile) stopped to pet the dog (terrier, Jack Russell, brown and white) and then commented on my old Atari logo t-shirt because you were wearing an Atari Teenage Riot band t-shirt ("I guess that means I'm the more aggressive one" you said). But then you kept going before I (tall, dark, momentarily speechless) could really talk to you. I've never used CL missed connections before--it always seemed like a long shot--but my friend said that even if you didn't see it, maybe someone who knows you would, and I'm going to be kicking myself for a long time if I don't try something, so...hope we can connect!To: w5cjq-6599435498@comm.craigslist.orgFrom: her@gmail.comSubject: Atari Teenage Riot in Dolores ParkDear Old Skool Atari Boy--Glad you posted despite not being familiar with this so very newfangled technology. Read the rest

Facebook is expected to be slapped with the largest fine the FCC has ever imposed on a tech company, but the exact dollar amount is yet to be determined.

"I must have stood some three minutes by the counter," the 54-year-old later said to a reporter.

The NSO Group is an Israeli firm that has long marketed itself as a "cyber warfare" company, selling mobile surveillance technology to governments that include notoriously corrupt human rights abusers. One of these is Mexico, where NSO spyware played a key role in targeting teachers and journalists, and missing students. On Thursday, NSO Group announced it has been “re-acquired” by its founders.Security researchers found evidence NSO sold spyware to governments that are established human rights abusers. The company has been accused of creating tools that help bad regimes invade privacy, conduct abusive surveillance, and target political enemies for detention, torture, and assassination. From the Associated Press:The NSO group announced that U.S.-based private equity firm Francisco Partners sold the company to its management, with support with the European private equity firm Novalpina Capital.The company did not reveal terms of the deal, but Israeli media said the transaction valued NSO at $1 billion. NSO was sold in 2014 to Francisco Partners for $130 million.NSO says it sells its technology to Israel-approved governments to help them stop militants and criminals. It says it has dozens of customers and posted revenue over $250 million last year.“I am proud of what the company and our employees have achieved since we were founded in 2010. Together we have built an amazing technology company that is making the world a safer place,” said company co-founder Shalev Hulio.PREVIOUSLY ON BOING BOING• Spies tried to infiltrate Citizen Lab and trick them into talking about their research on Israeli spytech company NSO Group• Evidence of NSO Group surveillance products found in 45 countries, including notorious human-rights abusers• Investigators into mass murder of Mexican student teachers were attacked with NSO's government spyware• Israeli company's spyware used to target corruption-fighting journalists and lawyers in MexicoObservations from Twitter, below. Read the rest

Lori Stroud is an ex-NSA spy who also contracted with the NSA through Booz Allen, who says that after she left the NSA, she was recruited to work on Project Raven, a secret, offensive surveillance and digital attack squad working for the autocratic United Arab Emirates regime alongside other ex-US intelligence operatives, working with the knowledge and approval of the NSA. Stroud says that while she originally believed she was only targeting non-US persons for surveillance and electronic attacks -- primarily journalists and dissidents, including children who had spoken out against the UAE's rulers -- she eventually realized that Project Raven was also targeting US people, including journalists and activists.Stroud was responsible for hiring Edward Snowden, and after he blew the whistle on wrongdoing in the NSA, she says she and her colleagues were in such bad odor with the NSA that she left. She was recruited by Cyberpoint, a Maryland-based cybersecurity company founded by Karl Gumtow, and relocated to a converted mansion in Abu Dhabi codenamed "the Villa."Reuters has obtained documents from Cyberpoint that say that while Project Raven was publicly tasked with defensive targeting of terrorists, that a secret "Black Briefing" described a second "offensive, operational division," called Project Dread, that " will never be acknowledged to the general public."Stroud worked at the Villa for years, and some of the dissidents she helped target have since been arrested and tortured by the UAE. But what really made the situation untenable was eventual attempts by the UAE to force Cyberpoint to sell out to a UAE-based company, and the subsequent power-struggle that saw the US Project Dread staffers isolated from their UAE counterparts, who had their own target lists, including -- as Stroud eventually discovered -- Americans. Read the rest

The only national emergency in America is Trump.

The LA Times Guild has been negotiating a new contract with the newspaper, but has hit a wall thanks to an unprecedented demand from the paper's owners: they want writers to sign away the rights to nonfiction books, novels, movies and other works they create separate from their reporting for the paper. The newspaper is also demanding the right to use reporters "byline, biography and likeness" to market these works.The Times has falsely claimed that this is standard at other papers. LA Times factcheckers and factcheckers from other papers have researched and debunked this claim.The Guild's 400 newsroom staffers are calling on the paper to drop the demand.This is an excellent example of how bargaining power -- not copyright -- is the biggest factor in determining the fortunes of creative workers. In an unequal market dominated by a few giant players, the suppliers -- creators -- have little negotiating power without the ability to unionize or take other forms of collective action. Without these balancing measures, giving creators more copyright is just a roundabout way of giving their corporate exploiters more copyright -- because every new right you give to creators is simply taken from them by a monopolistic employer as a condition of doing business. It's like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money: it's not going to buy them lunch, because the bullies will simply take that money, too.The LA Times runs an annual, excellent Festival of Books (I'm a guest again this year) where the kinds of books that LA Times staffers -- and other newspaper writers -- have written for decades are rightfully celebrated. Read the rest

A man identifying himself as "Michael from Florida" called into Infowars when federal indictee Roger Stone was a guest on the show. Michael first told the host he was angry that Trump's tax cut has increased his annual taxes by over $4,000. He then turned his attention to Stone (who was sporting fabulous eyebrows, by the way) by calling him a marshmallow and a snowflake for complaining about his treatment by the FBI when he was arrested.“They didn’t throw you down on the ground!" said Michael. "You say your dogs were terrified and your wife was out in the street without her shoes on in the Florida freezing cold: 59 degrees. You guys are snowflakes and you’re going to go down in prison. You’re facing 40-plus years, Stone. It’s coming down on you.”Displaying his trademark wit, Stone shot back, "Don't bet the ranch, muchacho.""michael in florida" called into roger stone's infowars show, complained about the gop tax bill raising his taxes, and then told roger stone he's going to jail.stone then demands that the caller tell them his full name and address. pic.twitter.com/XISNbXAPXY— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) February 11, 2019Image: Twitter/Infowars screen grab Read the rest

Joe Pinsker, writing for The Atlantic, interviewed more than a dozen people who used the decluttering process described in Marie Kondo's best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. He found that most of the people don't regret tossing their belongings and that their places are still tidy years after tossing everything that didn't spark joy.Even with all this throwing out, people have had very few regrets. Most told me they now don’t miss a thing, even stuff that they hesitated to discard. Some recalled isolated instances of (usually fleeting) second-guessing. Velma Gentzsch, a 40-year-old in St. Louis who KonMari-ed in 2017, says she wishes she still had the pair of brown leather boots she parted with. “I loved them, but they were half a size too big … [but] it’s not a huge deal,” she says.Christina Refford, whose fourth KonMari-versary is this year, remembers twice going to her bookshelf—once for a stack of cooking magazines, once for Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women—only to realize that she’d tossed out what she was looking for. She wasn’t too bothered. “Almost anything I would’ve gotten rid of can be found somewhere else,” Refford says.Image: Interior Design/Shutterstock Read the rest

In 2017 the private credit information of 143 millions Americans was stolen from Equifax. But the records have never been offered for sale on the black market, which is highly unusual. (The only person who has so far profited from the breach seems to be Equifax CEO Richard F. Smith, who resigned with an $80 million retirement package.)So, who stole the records of 1/2 the US population, and why? CNBC interviewed "experts, intelligence officials, dark web data 'hunters' and Equifax" and the consensus seems to be China or Russia did it as a way to recruit spies.One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the Equifax investigation summarized the prevailing expert opinion on how the foreign intelligence agency is using the data. (This person asked to speak on the condition of anonymity because he isn't authorized in his current role to speak to media.)First, he said, the foreign government is probably combining this information with other stolen data, then analyzing it using artificial intelligence or machine learning to figure out who's likely to be — or to become — a spy for the U.S. government. He pointed to other data breaches that focused on information that could be useful for identifying spies, such as a 2015 breach of the Office of Personnel Management, which processes the lengthy security clearance applications for U.S. government officials.Second, credit reporting data provides compromising information that can be used to turn valuable people into agents of a foreign government, influencers or, for lower-level employees, data thieves or informants. Read the rest

Brilliant culture critic Rob Walker, author of the forthcoming book The Art of Noticing, just launched a new column at Lifehacker about "navigating the modern workplace," a continuation in some ways of his long-running New York Times column "The Workologist." Naturally, Rob's first column in the new series is about getting fired:...What I’m suggesting is that you should not wait for a major crisis (getting fired, a horrible reorg, your worst rival becomes your boss) to start thinking about other objects. It’s better to always have a kind of low-grade, ambient awareness of and openness to other professional opportunities. That’s true even if you’re ecstatic with whatever you’re doing. Always take the lunch or have the meeting or go on the informational interview that pops up on your radar...The absolute flat-out most irritating piece of career advice is this: Reframe challenges, failures, slap-downs, and humiliations as exciting opportunities. Yes, we all get the logic. In fact we all get it so well that we don’t need to hear this advice anymore. Particularly right after we just got fired and it doesn’t feel exciting at all! So let me try to offer a slightly different reframing. As noted, it totally sucks to lose your gig. But take a deep breath and try to keep an open mind about what might come next. This, in a way, is just a restatement of the “permanent job search” idea, with a little panglossian polish. "How To Get Fired" (Lifehacker) Read the rest

Literally the only kind of monopolistic behavior that the US government is willing to prosecute is price fixing, and that's why it's so important to read Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion, a paper by four Italian economists from the University of Bologna who document how price-fixing is an emergent property of pricing algorithms -- the systems online merchants use to price-match with their competitors. The researchers find that "even relatively simple pricing algorithms systematically learn to play sophisticated collusive strategies," through iterated turns in which each tries to meet the others' prices without losing money, and that it's seemingly impossible to design pricing algorithms that don't evolve collusive strategies ("the propensity to collude is stubborn – substantial collusion continues to prevail even when the active firms are three or four in number, when they are asymmetric, and when they operate in a stochastic environment").Pricing bots usually come to our attention when they made weird decisions that produce hilarious outcomes, but this paper suggests that the unsexy, invisible workaday world of algorithmic pricing is ripping off everyone who buys just about anything, even by the narrow and lax standards of modern antitrust enforcement.What is most worrying is that the algorithms leave no trace of concerted action – they learn to collude purely by trial and error, with no prior knowledge of the environment in which they operate, without communicating with one another, and without being specifically designed or instructed to collude. This poses a real challenge for competition policy. Read the rest

Founded with a grant from the from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Apeel Sciences is a California-based startup that's developed a thin "second skin" for fruits and vegetables to preserve them for longer periods. Avocados coated with Apeel will soon hit shelves in Europe. From Technology Review:The thin coating is made from the pulp, peels, and seeds of other fruit and vegetables. These are turned into powder, which gets mixed with water and then applied to produce by spraying, dipping, or brushing. It's then left to dry. This “second skin” acts like a barrier, slowing down loss of water and exposure to air, the main factors that lead to food spoiling. A lemon that might stay fresh for one month could stay fresh for two or more once it’s been treated with Apeel. And because it’s just made from fruits and other plants, it’s also edible. Read the rest

All you need is love, love / Love and paper is all you need Read the rest

Amazon will instead focus on Northern Virginia and Nashville, after an organized effort by New Yorkers to hold the company and lawmakers accountable for sneaky dealmaking.

Crimetip for cop impersonators! Police departments do not issue fully loaded 4Runners to officers. The Miami Herald:“I thought, that’s weird. Well, they must have better undercover cars than they did when I was undercover,” he said.When the driver in the SUV finally gave up trying to pull over Martinez, he changed lanes and tired to pass the commissioner, Martinez said. But Martinez said he stuck with the vehicle and eventually flagged down an officer in a squad car on the roadside, who radioed for help.Martinez, 61, said he was there when the driver was pulled over on State Road 836 near Northwest 45th Avenue. The driver, he said, wasn’t wearing a police uniform and he had a firearm. Read the rest

If you're thinking of buying an Epson printer, think again (if you were unlucky enough to buy one already, consider switching): in an industry marked by the dirtiest of tricks to force customers to spend vast fortunes on ink that costs pennies to manufacture, Epson has marked itself out as a true innovator of sleazy tactics.Epson claims that third-party and refilled ink cartridges infringe its patents, and thanks to the overbroad EU E-Commerce Directive, it can simply notify Amazon, Ebay and other online marketplaces that a product is violating patent law and the product is immediately removed from sale.But Epson isn't targeting the alleged patent infringers here: the manufacturers who make compatible cartridges, who have deeper pockets and might actually defend themselves. Instead, it's targeting the small businesses, people who sell these cartridges in the EU.And because the E-Commerce Directive has no counternotice system, once a listing is taken down, it's down -- without the chance to defend yourself from these overbroad claims.In the end, the losers are the European people, who are locked in to a monopolistic form of illegal tying, where manufacturers insist that you must arrange your affairs to benefit their shareholders, rather than your own interests.Policy attention on online platform regulation has largely focused on increasing responsibility for illegal or unwanted content; however, in this circumstance, platforms are taking action to remove content but this is having a significant negative effect on UK enterprises, both in terms of business viability and in terms of free speech. Read the rest

Ard Gelinck poses celebrities with their younger selves. Fantastic. More on Instagram at: photo_time_traveling(via Kottke) Read the rest

The original local news story seems to have vanished, so maybe all was not as it seems, but I prefer to believe that this corgi was caught secretly riding the neighbor's pony at night. Read the rest

Learning a new language like Spanish doesn't have to be hard. Either you can buy a ticket to a Spanish-speaking country, immerse yourself in the culture and pick it up intuitively - or you can do it from the comfort of the chair you're in right now by logging on to Rocket Spanish.There are a lot of language learning apps out there, but this is a full online course, designed to get you speaking Spanish confidently at the intermediate level - fast. Rocket Spanish makes full use of tools like voice recognition and interactive flashcards to fine-tune your pronunciation and assist in memorization. But the foundation of the course is rooted in "chunking," or breaking complex topics down into quickly digestible lessons without overwhelming your memory or patience. You'll even get lessons on Spanish culture to help you settle into the language and truly speak like a local.Right now, you can get Rocket Spanish Language Learning: Level 1 for $59.99, a full 59% off the original price of $149.95. Read the rest

The composition of the shot is perfect. You know it's going to happen. And when it does, it's delightful rather than horrible. I'd spend at least an hour sliding down again and again, and might even install a rope and traffic barriers to expedite and ensafen the joy. Read the rest

Legendary cryptographer and security researcher Matt Blaze (previously) somehow acquired a key engraver and now he's "using it to engrave entirely serious labels on my keys that are not in any way ironic or confusing."I just got a key engraving machine. Because I am a very responsible adult I’m using it to engrave entirely serious labels on my keys that are not in any way ironic or confusing. pic.twitter.com/M2BIAet8sC— matt blaze (@mattblaze) February 13, 2019 Read the rest

Despite ringing denunciations from small EU tech businesses, giant EU entertainment companies, artists' groups, technical experts, and human rights experts, and the largest body of concerned citizens in EU history, the EU has concluded its "trilogues" on the new Copyright Directive, striking a deal that -- amazingly -- is worse than any in the Directive's sordid history.Goodbye, protections for artists and scientistsThe Copyright Directive was always a grab bag of updates to EU copyright rules—which are long overdue for an overhaul, given that it's been 18 years since the last set of rules were ratified. Some of its clauses gave artists and scientists much-needed protections: artists were to be protected from the worst ripoffs by entertainment companies, and scientists could use copyrighted works as raw material for various kinds of data analysis and scholarship.Both of these clauses have now been gutted to the point of uselessness, leaving the giant entertainment companies with unchecked power to exploit creators and arbitrarily hold back scientific research. Having dispensed with some of the most positive versions of the Directive, the trilogues have also managed to make the (unbelievably dreadful) bad components of the Directive even worse.A dim future for every made-in-the-EU platform, service and online communityUnder the final text, any online community, platform or service that has existed for three or more years, or is making €10,000,001/year or more, is responsible for ensuring that no user ever posts anything that infringes copyright, even momentarily. Read the rest

People who are into computers and the internet and such often say that we are approaching a 'singularity', whereby machine 'intelligence' surpasses our own and inaugurates an inevitable yet unknowably glorious paradigm shift in human existence. I, however, anticipate an 'annihilation', whereby machine 'intelligence' flattens and dissolves all the structures we have built and our facile interactions generate a formless, explosive hatred that will ultimately destroy civilisation. In weighing which outcome is more likely, consider the case of childrens' entertainer and YouTube star Blippi, hailed as the Mister Rogers of the 21st century, who "Shat On His Nude Friend For A Meme Video".Katie Notopoulos:In a hard R–rated twist, in a 2013 video that BuzzFeed News has viewed, Stevin "Blippi" John takes an explosive diarrhea shit on his nude friend’s ass in a truly shocking rendition of the “Harlem Shake” meme.“Yes, I did make a gross-out comedy video when I was in my early twenties, long before I started Blippi,” John said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.Everyone has a past — Blippi’s just happens to involve a widely viewed, comedic video of him taking a deuce on another man. It seems that even in his former incarnation, Stevin John was destined for viral fame, but no one could have foreseen the dancing poop guy’s pivot to mainstream children’s entertainment. Read the rest

"Predictive policing" is the idea that you can feed crime stats to a machine-learning system and it will produce a model that can predict crime. It is garbage.It's garbage for a lot of reasons. For one thing, you only find crime where you look for it: so if you send out the cops to frisk all the Black people in a city, they will produce statistics that suggest that all concealed weapons and drugs are carried by Black people, in Black neighborhoods.But once you feed that biased data to an algorithm, the predictions it reaches acquire a veneer of empirical respectability, as the mathematical oracle tells you where the crime will be based on calculations that can never be fully understood and so cannot be interrogated, let alone objected to.Some of the dirtiest police forces in America have bought predictive policing tools, often in secret.The iron law of computing states: "Garbage in, garbage out," but predictive policing is worse than mere GIGO: it produces computer-generated marching orders requiring cops to continue the bad practices that produced the bad data used to create the bad model.In a forthcoming paper for The New York University Law Review, Rashida Richardson (AI Now Institute, previously), Jason Schultz (NYU Law, previously) and Kate Crawford (AI Now, previously) describe how at least thirteen cities whose police departments experimented with predictive policing after being placed under federal investigations or consent decrees for "corrupt, racially biased, or otherwise illegal police practices."That means that in at least 13 cities, the data that cops were feeding to the predictive policing systems had been generated by practices known to be biased. Read the rest

Eyewitnesses say the publisher of the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette drunkenly stumbled through the newsroom screaming at journalists, firing them-- and demanded that a photo of him and his daughter be published on the front page. Meanwhile, his daughter screamed, “Please, please Daddy no!”Good gracious.The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh today released some of the eyewitness accounts of an incident involving Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Publisher John Robinson Block and his daughter “that transpired on the night of Saturday, Feb. 9, 2019 in the paper’s North Shore newsroom.”The following is an excerpt from one of these eyewitness reports, published today at NEWSPAPER GUILD OF PITTSBURGH EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF THE INCIDENT INVOLVING PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE PUBLISHER JOHN ROBINSON BLOCK:As Mr. Block stepped off the elevator and proceeded to walk briskly — in a slightly stumbling, awkward manner — through the newsroom toward the “web hub” area, he was immediately yelling about various topics, pointing and waving his finger repeatedly up in the air and swinging his arms.He was very angry and irate. The entire newsroom could hear his voice.As he got closer to the hub area, he walked straight to the Guild bulletin board, and pointed to and touched the Guild “Shame on the Blocks!” sign.It was clear he was intoxicated.Mr. Block yelled at Tim to immediately call Sally Stapleton, which Tim did and told Mr. Block that she was on her way.He shouted that he wanted a picture of himself and his daughter taken in front of the Guild sign and demanded it run on the “front page of tomorrow’s paper.” He fervently demanded the photos be taken NOW, right away and forcefully grabbed his daughter’s forearm, pulling her into the picture as she tried her best to pull away from him. Read the rest

That massive Equifax data breach on September 7, 2017, shocked everyone, but a year and a half later, where the data of all those 143 million Equifax users ended up is still a mystery.CNBC reports that the current prevailing theory is that “the data was stolen by a nation-state for spying purposes, not by criminals looking to cash in on stolen identities.”Excerpt:CNBC talked to eight experts, including data "hunters" who scour the dark web for stolen information, senior cybersecurity managers, top executives at financial institutions, senior intelligence officials who played a part in the investigation and consultants who helped support it. All of them agreed that a breach happened, and personal information from 143 million people was stolen.But none of them knows where the data is now. It's never appeared on any hundreds of underground websites selling stolen information. Security experts haven't seen the data used in any of the ways they'd expect in a theft like this — not for impersonating victims, not for accessing other websites, nothing.But as the investigations continue, a consensus is starting to emerge to explain why the data has disappeared from sight. Most experts familiar with the case now believe that the thieves were working for a foreign government and are using the information not for financial gain, but to try to identify and recruit spies.Good, gritty detail on the methodology behind the theory. Read more: The great Equifax mystery: 17 months later, the stolen data has never been found, and experts are starting to suspect a spy scheme Read the rest

Manafort now faces the rest of his life in prison. Will he finally be motivated to tell the whole truth about Trump?

One letter different, but a world apart. So, Bryan Adams is the '80s MTV pop star your trusty Gen-Xer blogger grew up listening to and watching. He's this guy. Here's one video, here's another. He's great!Now, Ryan Adams is this guy, below. Not great.Ryan Adams is accused by multiple women, recording artists and others, of being a self-confessed “like R. Kelly” sexual predator whose predations include a minor.Ava was 14. She played bass, and she was serious about it.Excerpt, NYT:Their conversations were on and off, but a constant theme was Adams fretting about Ava’s age — and asking to keep their exchanges secret — while also indulging in sexual scenarios.“I never see pics of you anymore,” Adams wrote in November 2014, when he had just turned 40 and Ava was newly 16. “You were blowing my mind.” He had pet names for her body parts.Days later, Adams expressed anxiety: “If people knew they would say I was like R Kelley lol,” he wrote.Yet within 10 minutes, the conversation again turned explicit. “I just want you to touch your nipple,” he texted, before again asking about her age. “And tell me that your mom is not gonna kill me if she finds out we even text.”In response to Adams’s repeated pleas that she tell him she was 18 — “You have to convince me,” he wrote — Ava at times said she was. Sometimes he asked to see identification — “in the hottest way that has ever been done Lol.” She never showed him any ID. Read the rest

There is a time in every artistic and scientific field when a precocious and promising young star appears. More often than not, as time goes by, the young star proves to be a meteor, blazing their ephemeral light for too a short time. Very few cultivate and nurture their spark of genius into adulthood and see the full fruition of their gifts.In the realm of prestidigitation and sleight-of-hand artistry, such a very young practitioner of magic was a kid called Joshua Jay, who has passed the test of time, having grown into the artist true to his early vocation. Unanimously acclaimed and esteemed by his peers, Joshua is presently a successful international performer, lecturer, author, magic creator and consultant, event producer and Guinness World Record holder. He has fooled Penn & Teller and recently has appeared on Jimmy Fallon. Although still in his mid-thirties, Joshua has skillfully played his cards. From Ohio, Jay is now based in New York, and has made the world his stage. I recently had the good fortune of catching Jay's latest show, Six Impossible Things. Whatever your notion of a magic show, this is likely something different: the audience is not expected to simply watch magic but to experience it. With only 20 guests allowed at every show, Six Impossible Things is an immersive hour-long experience, brimming with mystery, intrigue, and spellbinding magic. Directed by Luke Jermay — another well-respected magical performer in his own right — Six Impossible Things is a show with a soul. Read the rest

“They can't hug [their own siblings] goodbye. If they do, they're told they will be written up and it could affect their immigration case."

You can pre-order an official Dungeons and Dragons/Stranger Things RPG, packaged like a pre-distressed Red Box Basic D&D box, including a (barely) painted and unpainted demogorgon mini, character sheets, a starter campaign, a rulebook, and a set of polyhedral dice: $25 at Big Bad Toy Store. I've been recreating my perfect RPG shelf in pieces, and this kind of thing skewers me right through the guts. (via Super Punch) Read the rest

Jason from the Comedy on Vinyl podcast writes, "I've spent the last eight years interviewing people from Rachel Bloom to Harry Shearer about their favorite vinyl comedy albums on my podcast, 'Comedy on Vinyl.' A few weeks ago, inspired by the brilliant podcast 'Mystery Show,' I decided to do something new, as I attempted to uncover the true identity and life story of long-lost comedian Dick Davy. A character comic, a white guy who won over The Apollo, and a civil rights activist who later settled into obscurity, Dick Davy's story temporarily took over my life and renewed my faith in comedy as a potential agent for change." (MP3) Read the rest

Mark Patterson is Chuck Schumer's general counsel; he used to be a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, and he had 20 important clients, 19 of whom he has declined to name on his financial disclosure statements.Schumer has foot-dragged and fumbled his way through two years during which he was supposed to be putting an end to the revolving door between lobbying and government oversight. Patterson's opacity doesn't bode well for the future of the fight to get money out of politics.A coalition of 20 organizations recently wrote to Schumer demanding that he work to fill Democratic vacancies at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. The letter faulted Schumer for allowing Trump’s judicial nominees to win confirmation by unanimous consent. Schumer could have used those vacancies as leverage to force votes on his party’s regulatory nominees, the progressives argued.Goldman Lobbyist Turned Schumer General Counsel Is Hiding Most Former Clients’ Names [Andrew Perez/The Intercept] Read the rest

Burning Man has long struggled with the tension between its commitment to "radical decommodification" and grifters and their ultra-high-net-worth marks who organize "turnkey camps" where you can pay giant sums to pretend to be a Burning Man "participant" while being looked after by paid "sherpas" (including, rumor has it, sex workers), in luxury settings designed to repel non-paying attendees (sometimes guarded by private security guards).The Burning Man Organization (affectionately: "The Borg") has struggled to craft policies to address this phenomenon. They have been hampered by their own divided sensibilities and by the difficulty of cleanly distinguishing between turnkey camps and camps that are simply very large and complicated (I know of a multi-hundred person camp where a few attendees are compensated for taking a month off work to organize the kitchen prior to the event -- are these "paid staff" or "compensated volunteers?"). The Borg announced a crackdown on turnkeys in 2015, but it was clear to attendees that this was a largely ineffective exercise. As noted, some of this was clearly related to the Borg's own divided sensibilities: founder Larry Harvey (who died last year) defended the idea of the super-rich attending amid a certain amount of luxury, on the basis that everyone experiences Burning Man in their own way.And the super-rich have a wealth (heh) of resources to deploy to get around policies intended to ensure participation: some one-percenter camps have "solved" the problem of building welcoming public spaces without surrendering their exclusivity by simply attaching an elaborate stage or bar to their private-security-guarded high-net-worth camps, and then paying performers or bartenders to appear in these public spaces. Read the rest

'Bring back our #ChildhoodDiseases.' Ugh.

The video for Weezer's cover of A-ha's "Take On Me" stars Calpurnia, the rather wonderful indie rock band fronted by Finn Wolfhard who plays Mike on Stranger Things. The song is included on Weezer's new "Teal Album," a collection of 1980s cover songs including their acclaimed version of Toto's "Africa."And just for kicks, here's Calpurnia's "Greyhound": Read the rest

In another example of life imitating Seinfeld, Melville, Saskatchewan citizen Dave Assman (pronounced Oss-men) applied for a personalized license plate of his last name but the Saskatchewan Government Insurance (like the DMV) put the kibbosh on the request and also his appeal. So Assman created a large decal inspired by the Saskatchewan plate design and slapped it on the rear end (ahem) of his truck. Based on the SGI's Twitter post below, they seem to be ok with that."It's just a name and censorship should be out of the window..." Assman said. "It upsets me, but I'm not one of those guys to take offence to it."(CBC)Looks like Mr. Assman got the last laugh after @SGItweets denied his request for a vanity plate with his last name!CC: @JohnGormleyShow, @TylerMcMurchy pic.twitter.com/tjvj9NbtqM— Taylor MacPherson (@TaylorMacP) February 13, 2019 Read the rest

Hulu is bringing back Howard the Duck. People may laugh at this new master of Quack-Fu as Kevin Smith has signed up to write for him.Variety:“Howard the Duck” will be written and executive produced by Kevin Smith and Dave Willis. Smith is known for his Askewniverse films, including “Clerks,” “Mallrats,” and “Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.” Smith has also written for Marvel Comics in the past, writing for popular characters like Daredevil and Spider-Man. Willis previously co-created popular animated shows like “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and “Squidbillies” for Adult Swim in addition to his work as a voice actor.Smith is repped by WME. Willis is repped by CAA and Brillstein Entertainment Partners.In the series, Howard the Duck is trapped in a world he never made, but America’s favorite fighting fowl hopes to return home with the help of his unstoppable gal pal Beverly before the evil Dr. Bong can turn him the crispiest dish on the menu.He shot an arrow straight into her heart. Read the rest

The following essay was written by Dr. Leonardo Trasande, MD, MPP, a renowned pediatrician, associate professor at NYU, and prominent leader in children’s environmental health. He's the author of a new book, Sicker, Fatter, Poorer: The Urgent Threat of Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals to Our Health and Future . . . and What We Can Do About It. -- Mark FrauennfelderAs a consumer, when it comes to chemical safety you’d be surprised how powerful your voice really is. When the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned bisphenols A (BPA) from baby bottles and silly cups, it wasn’t the scientific knowledge that moved the needle to trigger that decision. There had been a huge outcry in the media about the effects of this synthetic estrogen. Manufacturers changed their process for making these materials, and literally ran to FDA to ask for a change in the rules so that they didn’t lose market share and profit.In the current political climate, you might think this is less likely to happen, as chemical companies might feel emboldened. But it’s quite the opposite actually. A small study recently found perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), chemicals known to mess with thyroid hormone and our metabolic rate, in the linings of those buffet-style food carry out boxes you see in supermarkets. The findings from a small sample of measurements literally triggered two major supermarket chains to insist that their suppliers either shape up or literally be shipped out.This article focuses on five other examples where the same phenomenon is not that far away. Read the rest

In the Pacific Northwest 54 are confirmed infected with the once eradicated measles, as an outbreak also emerges in Texas.Think Progress:A large measles outbreak in Washington state shows no sign of abating.According to the State Department of Health, there are now at least 54 cases of the illness, all but one of which were located in Clark County, Washington, just across the river from Portland, Oregon. Directly to the south, the Oregon Health Authority has reported at least four cases. Within Clark County, the vast majority of diagnoses are of children 10 years old or younger.Measles — an airborne virus that can lead to lung infections, brain damage, and death in the worst cases — was responsible for thousands of deaths in the U.S. each year prior to the discovery of a vaccine in 1963. Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, but in the last year, there has been a worldwide resurgence of the virus, with cases increasing 30 percent, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). One of the main drivers of this trend is a growing reluctance to vaccinate children, so much so that the WHO listed the anti-vaccination movement as one of its top ten threats to global health in 2019.“The reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines…threatens to reverse progress made in tackling vaccine-preventable diseases,” the WHO report reads. “The reasons why people choose not to vaccinate are complex; a vaccines advisory group to WHO identified complacency, inconvenience in accessing vaccines, and lack of confidence are the key reasons for the underlying hesitancy.” Read the rest

I've bought a lot of Tacklife tools in recent years, and have always been happy with them. So when learned Tacklife was selling this feature-filled cordless drill at a great price (when you use promo code I9AEAS92), I bought it without hesitation. It has an adjustable torque setting, a light, and a charger. Read the rest