Fifty years ago, San Francisco's DeYoung Museum exhibited Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones's striking photo essay depicting Oakland's Black Panther Party at the peak of their community activism and political activity. Starting this week, those powerful images will be displayed again as part of the Vanguard Revisited: Poetic Politics & Black Futures exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute. The work is still pertinent today and will serve as a platform to discuss issues of documentary photography, social activism, and how the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s in many ways manifests itself in the social context of today...Black Futures is not delivered with a passive voice, but a voice steeped in deft poetics and sharp politics that continue to accumulate power from its own rich history.See more of the images at Juxtapoz.To learn about the Black Panthers's inspiring, polarizing, and ultimately tragic history, I recommend the fantastic documentary "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution." Read the rest

The video begins in medias res during the annual "Wheels Up, Guns Down" bicycle ride, with a group of teens and an older woman engaged in a heated dispute over the riders' blocking of traffic. As the woman and one boy face off, another teen rides up to them on his bicycle and she accuses him of running over her foot (apparently falsely, though perhaps it happened before the video begins). A man, who may well be the human incarnation of whatever ancient stupid god looks over Miami, barrels up waving a handgun and gets started with the racial slurs. The woman complains about "thugs" and begins filming, but this is not her video. One of the boys tells them they're going to be "on the news". A taut self-awareness flashes over the woman's face as she finally looks into the camera. "That's fine," she says. Then she and the man quickly depart.And now they are on the news.A man was arrested Monday after he was caught on camera threatening a group of black teenagers with a gun in Miami's Brickell neighborhood.Police did not identify the man late Monday. ... Keon Hardemon, a Miami commissioner, suggested the man should be charged with a hate crime."Assault with a deadly weapon and calling them n-----s sounds like a hate crime to me. ... He is not a hero. He will kill someone next time if he isn’t arrested," Hardemon said on Instagram. UPDATE: Video shot by another driver shows the same pink-shirted man yelling racial slurs at the teenage bicycle protestors, apparently prior to the other confrontation. Read the rest

The New Orleans Saints lost the NFC Championship on Sunday to the Los Angeles Rams in overtime. The Saints were the victims of one of the worst blown pass interference calls in recent memory and ended up losing 26-23 after a 57-yard field goal by the Rams' Greg Zuerlein. A clearly disappointed Saints fan expressed his displeasure by obliterating his flat screen TV with a single punch.Some fans are handling the Saints loss perfectly fine. pic.twitter.com/kp7mfZLHQy— Ryan (@Haggs_88) January 21, 2019Ouch.The Rams will play Tom Brady (🐐) and the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl on February 3rd in Atlanta.(Photo: Douglas Peale/Wikimedia Commons) Read the rest

When Latvia attained independence in 1991, the retreating KGB left behind two sacks and two briefcases containing indexed records of the secret informants who had been paid to turn in their neighbors for offenses including anti-Kremlin activism and watching pornography.After decades of deliberation, the Latvian Parliament voted to release the contents of the bags, naming 4,141 KGB informants, many of whom are still alive, and vigorously deny any involvement with the KGB; also named in the release is at least one journalist who was killed by Soviet forces while sympathetically covering the pro-independence movement.The people who say they were falsely accused offer different theories to explain how their names came to be in the files: some say that they were added to KGB operatives' rosters of informants as part of the operatives' campaigns to impress their bosses and/or line their pockets with payouts for informants who were not, in fact, working for them. Others say it was a false flag planted by the KGB as they left Latvia, a way to slowly poison the independent state by sowing internal discord.“It is impossible that the K.G.B. would leave behind a real list of agents in what it considered enemy territory,” Mr. Tjarve said. The files, he said, must have been doctored and deliberately left as a “special gift” to Latvia, now a member of NATO, as part of a “disinformation operation” by retreating Soviet officers.Latvians found “in the bags,” the term of art for people who have turned up in the files, include a two-time former prime minister, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, a onetime foreign minister, leaders of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, three post-independence rectors of the University of Latvia, celebrated filmmakers and assorted television stars and writers. Read the rest

A sequel to the first two Ghostbusters movies is in the works. Leslie Jones, who played Ghostbuster Patty Toland in the latest Ghostbusters film, a reinvention of the entire franchise, is unhappy with the apparent decision to abandon the new cast.Without Harold Ramis' Egon Spengler, why even bother trying to reunite the OG cast? The Wiig/Jones/McCarthy/McKinnon film was genius! Bring them all together! Read the rest

Ever since academic Shoshana Zuboff coined the term "Surveillance Capitalism" in 2015, it's become a touchstone for the debate over commercial surveillance (we've cited it hundreds of times). This week, Zuboff published her (very thick) book on the subject, to excellent early notices; I haven't read it yet, but it's next on my list.Though I'm familiar with the general shape of Zuboff's argument, I'm really eager to get to grips with the specifics, and to see how it's evolved over the last three-and-some years.Here's a head-start: in this weekend's Observer, John Naughton (previously) interviewed Zuboff at length about her book, and what she said bodes well for the book.That said, I want to mark out an area of caution that I have with what I've seen so far of her argument -- a problem that I've had with other critical books about the rise of Big Tech: locating the original sin of Big Tech in advertising and surveillance, rather than concentration and monopoly.Derek Powazek's memorable phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is true, but incomplete. It's true that companies that use surveillance and data to pay their bills view their "customers" as the advertisers, rather than the users."You're the product" is true in advertising models, but it's also true in for-pay models. Whether it's Apple sustaining itself by blocking third-party repairs, extracting rents from app vendors, and sneakily degrading the performance of its products over time; or John Deere ripping off farmers for repairs to six-figure purchases, or GM locking out independent repair and third-party spares. Read the rest

This fine sign from Stephen Zunes facebook page. Read the rest

An EVA airlines flight attendant, supported by her union, complains the airline has failed to curb a routine problem flyer. Her recent experience sounds absolutely dreadful.Folks need different types of assistance on a plane. I can absolutely understand the hardship of using an awful airplane restroom that is barely designed to work for the base human model. No one should feel shame for asking for legitimately needed assistance. The more you read this story, however, the more it seems that this passenger was not just asking for help.Focus Taiwan:Accompanied by representatives from the Taoyuan Flight Attendants Union, the flight attendant, who declined to give her name, said an overweight man confined to a wheelchair informed her he required assistance going to the bathroom about two hours into the flight.The man asked the flight attendant making the complaint and two other female members of staff to help him remove his underwear, indicating he was unable to do so himself."I felt that as a flight attendant, removing a passenger's underwear was beyond the scope of my responsibilities," said the deputy cabin service head.Despite their reluctance, three female members of the flight crew, EVA has no male flight attendants, tried to cover the passenger's genitals with a blanket while taking off his underwear.The flight attendant said it was then that the passenger slapped her hand causing her to drop the blanket and exposing himself. He also demanded that the lavatory door be kept open, otherwise "he couldn't breathe."The crew managed to keep the door closed, but when the man was finished, he refused to leave the bathroom unless they help him wipe his bottom. Read the rest

THIS. IS. GOLD.There's a lot of MLK interviews out there but this is my best.Seriously deep.pic.twitter.com/NcETBCv6bU#MLKDay#MartinLutherKingJrDay— The Hummingbird 🐦 (@SaysHummingbird) January 21, 2019This interview is amazing. Read the rest

The red MAGA hat is the new white hood. Without white boys being able to empathize with other people, humanity will continue to destroy itself. #FirstThoughtsWhenIWakeUp— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) January 20, 2019Alyssa Milano tells it like it is. Read the rest

Margrethe Vestager (previously) has been the EU antitrust commissioner for five years, and now she is getting ready to step down (her party is unlikely to prevail next year, so she will likely be replaced), having presided over an unprecedented era of antitrust enforcement that has seen billions of euros extracted in penalties from Google, Apple and Facebook, with Amazon now under her microscope.Vestager formerly served as the Danish deputy PM and economy minister, as part of a centre-left, market-oriented party founded by her great-grandfather. Her record in Danish politics is something of a mixed bag (among other things, she presided over swingeing welfare cuts).She's got a much better record as antitrust commissioner. Her enforcement hasn't been limited to the tech sector: she's also gone after Starbucks, McDonald's, Nike, Fiat and Gazprom, taking on both anticompetitive behaviour and tax dodging (she's also done much to end competition among EU governments to create tax-havens that lure in multinationals to create headquarters-of-convenience).That said, her vision for the next steps of antitrust enforcement are a little...weird. For example, she wants to build on the GDPR's requirements to disclose how personal information is used by encouraging the creation of "Independent digital assistants that will make sure that your privacy settings are maintained no matter where you go."The upcoming EU elections are going to be game-changing in more ways than one. The insurgent parties are ascendant, and some are left wing, and others are far-right xenophobes, suggesting a kind of scaled-up version of the current state of Italian politics, which is to say: a mess. Read the rest

Nineteen years ago today, Mark decided to do some research on the new Blogger service for an article in The Industry Standard, and so he created a blog and started posting to it (the Standard spiked the story, on the basis that blogging was probably a passing fad).Less than a year later, I started a stint as a guestblogger that is still going, more than 18 years later.David came on board a couple months after me, and Xeni's guestblogging stint started late the next year and, like mine, never ended; Rob kicked off in 2005, and Jason's first post was in 2010, tho he joined us in 2006.And now we are 19, and old, and still weird, but the internet is less weird in some important ways ("a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four"). Read the rest

"I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems, it falls victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.""As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. …"“I started thinking about the fact that right here in our country we spend millions of dollars every day to store surplus food. And I said to myself: ‘I know where we can store that food free of charge — in the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God’s children in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even in our own nation, who go to bed hungry at night.’" Dr King: "... Read the rest

From 1989, Fingers Inc.'s beautiful mix of "Can You Feel It" with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech: Read the rest

The nonprofit organization to which I belong recently put the personal data of around 410,000 people on the internet, connected to interactive street maps of where they lived. The data includes their full names, date and place of birth, known residential address, and often includes their professions and arrest records, sometimes even information about mental or physical handicaps. It also lists whether any of their grandparents were Jewish. How would you feel if somebody published your personal data on the internet along the same lines? The website described above is based on the personal data of victims of Nazi persecution and is part of a memorialization project. But given that much of personal data is probably available on a number of corporate servers to which the government could have unrestricted access, what is to stop this data from being misused? Even if the information was never made public, how would your personal data be exploited if a right-wing Christian extremist government were to take power in the United States? Is it so far-fetched to imagine such personal data exploitation in a Handmaid’s Tale future?The Nazi German government conducted a census on 17 May 1939 in which a special “supplementary card” was included, where every person had to list if each of their four grandparents was Jewish or not. In the 1980s, a census was conducted in West Germany that led to a lot of resistance from the left, including massive street demonstrations. Several academic works about the planned 1980s census were published at the time, in which the thesis was put forth that the Nazis misused the 1939 census data to create the deportation lists to send the Jews to concentration camps and their subsequent deaths. Read the rest

"Horrific" CCTV footage shows a group of Aussie cops savagely beating a teen with autism, and the resulting outrage is drawing attention to the country's worsening reputation for police brutality. In another case, Victoria police beat up a teenager who had ridden his scooter in front a police car, claiming that the baby-faced kid was the middle-aged, bearded car thief they were unable to find.Tommy Lovett was riding by a police car on his scooter when he was wrongly arrested. ... Documents obtained by The Age reportedly support Mr Lovett’s claim that he was hurled into a fence, assaulted while handcuffed and capsicum sprayed — leaving his body bruised, grazed and bleeding. Victoria Police vehemently denied the claims and an internal investigation found nothing wrong with Mr Lovett’s arrest. However, a human rights lawyer who spoke to 7.30 said the cases — including one where a Melbourne doctor claims police threw her to the ground and punched her in the head — outlined in the investigation are alarming.“These cases keep going on,” he said. “There’s clearly cultural systemic issues at work."More footage shows another Aussie cop attacking a disabled senior.WARNING: This video contains footage some viewers may find distressing. CCTV footage shows a disability pensioner being assaulted by a police officer at a police station. More tonight on #abc730. @Chris_Gillett_ @Ageinvestigates pic.twitter.com/zxNP4KFRP2— abc730 (@abc730) January 20, 2019A Victorian policeman retained his job and rank despite being caught on CCTV assaulting a drunk disability pensioner at Geelong Police Station. Read the rest

Too bad, conservatives! Fox & Friends apologized on Monday after briefly airing a graphic suggesting that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead.As the show came back from commercials, they briefly showed a graphic of Ginsburg with the caption 1933-2019.It's established journalistic practice to have pre-written graphics and obits and whatnot ready to roll for famous people. But having them floating around in production databases and content management systems, one click of a "Publish" button from disaster, is a common mistake. Read the rest

California Senator and former attorney general Kamala Harris is running for President.Kamala Harris announced Monday that she is running for president in 2020, arguing that the time has come to fight against what she views as the injustices of the past two years of the Trump presidency. In a brief video from her campaign that was released on social media Monday morning at the same time she appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America," Harris called on her supporters to join with her to "claim our future.""Justice. Decency. Equality. Freedom. Democracy. These aren't just words. They're the values we as Americans cherish. And they're all on the line now," Harris said in the video, teasing her official kickoff in her birthplace of Oakland next Sunday.Harris offers a progressive platform, but she is also a dyed-in-the-wool authoritarian who fought relentlessly to shield bad cops, prosecutorial misconduct and reactionary policies while in office — and who found it hard to explain why its decisions sometimes shielded well-connected men suspected of serious corporate crimes. It's rare you find someone whose professional hostility to constitutional rights is so throroughly described in public record that her launch literature centers entirely on recasting her career.Photo: Public Domain, uncredited Read the rest

Jit Ray Chowdhury attended CES in his capacity as an autonomous vehicle engineer, and while there, snapped a picture of a self-driving car equipped with a LIDAR system from Aeye; he says the LIDAR's laser lanced through his camera's aperture and zapped its optical sensor, burning a permanent spot into it and ruining the camera (Aeye has offered to replace it).LIDAR systems need to comply with rigorous safety rules to ensure that they don't blind human eyes, but camera eyes are much more sensitive (this is the basis for IR-reflective materials that confuse CCTVs).Self-driving cars use both conventional cameras and LIDAR to guide themselves so any camera-blinding potential in LIDAR systems on autonomous vehicles could wreak havoc with other nearby cars. AEye uses 1550nm lasers. And unfortunately for Chowdhury, cameras are not filled with fluid like human eyes are. That means that high-power 1550nm lasers can easily cause damage to camera sensors even if they don't pose a threat to human eyes.AEye is known for claiming that its lidar units have much longer range than those of competitors. While most lidar makers say their high-end lidars can see 200 or 300 meters, AEye says that its lidar has a range of 1,000 meters. When I talked to AEye CEO Luis Dussan about this claim last month, he said that one factor in AEye's long range is the use of a powerful fiber laser."One of the most important things about fiber lasers is that they can be amplified," Dassan said. Read the rest

Slip of the tongue! We just can't help ourselves! Kevin Steincross, a veteran morning anchor on Fox2 St. Louis, was discussing an upcoming tribute to the civil rights leader when he pronounced Dr. King’s last name as an anti-black slur during the 5 a.m. broadcast.Hours later, during the 9 a.m. show, Mr. Steincross said the station had heard from a viewer that he had mispronounced the name.“Please know I have total respect for Dr. King, what he meant and continues to mean to our country,” Mr. Steincross said. “This was not intentional in any way, and I sincerely apologize.” Read the rest

2019 started off with a rather interesting tweet from Elon Musk. He was showing off the "Starship test flight rocket" from SpaceX. This thing evokes a strong bit of imagery that has been so deeply integrated into our culture through science fiction for so many years that it just feels... right.Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This is an actual picture, not a rendering. pic.twitter.com/k1HkueoXaz— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2019Just look at that thing! Well, as you can imagine, seeing that beautiful piece of work inspired me to yank out some retro science fiction and look at the old illustrations. There are so many examples that you could just swap the test rocket into and they'd seem nearly untouched. The issue I've chosen for today's Sci-Fi Sunday is one of these.Publication: Analog Science Fact - Science FictionIssue: December 1962, Vol: LXXX, No. 4Cover Art: Schoenherr for Blind Man's LanternWhen I scan one of these, I'm always curious what the public was thinking and seeing about space. NASA has a convenient website where you can go and see details on major events. In December of 1962, the public was hearing about how Mariner 2 had flown by Venus, which was a pretty huge deal considering this was the very first time we had "conducted a planetary encounter". Just picture that for a second. When someone was relaxing and reading this issue, we had not yet put a human on the moon. Read the rest

These days, there isn't much our iPhone camera can't do - except feel like an actual phone. Despite years of steadily increasing resolution and image sensing technology, we're still taking shots awkwardly with two hands, fumbling for the shutter button. Leave it to an avid photographer to design Shuttercase, a versatile iPhone case that solves that problem and more.Most significantly for photographers of any experience, the Shuttercase moves the shutter button to the side - just like the classic 135 point-and-shoots. It further replicates that feel with the case itself, which supplies enough heft that you can grip it and shoot with one hand. It also packs an embedded stand, and - because long photo sessions can drain your phone like nothing else - a 3,000 mAh battery that will charge as you go. Now you're set to unlock the full potential of your camera, whether that's panoramic vacation shots or perfectly composed family photos.Originally $79.99, the Shuttercase for iPhone is now 37% off at $49.99. Read the rest

Burbank's amazing quarter-century institution Dark Delicacies is a horror book-, memoribilia- and clothing-store that is a community hub for genre creators, hosting a wonderful stream of events, signings, and even an annual chance to get your photo took with Krampus at a Christmas open-house.It's also a potential casualty of the skyrocketing rents in Magnolia Park, where greedy landlords are throwing out the neighborhood's unique indie tenants as fast as they can in the hopes of luring in multinational corporations to open stores that can already be found in every mall and that will destroy any reason for people to come to the neighborhood in the first place.I live a five-minute walk from Dark Delicacies and they've hosted events and fulfilled signed-book orders for me in the past. They're great, community-minded people, and due to a rent-hike, they're moving to a space around the corner (it could be worse -- until they found the new space, they were going to shut down altogether). But having run a shoestring, passion business for so many years, they lack the funds to pay for the move, so they're hoping their supporters in the neighborhood will kick in for a GoFundMe where they're hoping to raise $20,000. They're at $3,400 right now and I just kicked in $100.One of our greatest joys has been giving back, by sponsoring and hosting numerous charity events for both our two and four-legged friends. We are very proud of the “people of horror,” whose support and generosity have helped so many. Read the rest

UPDATE 1-20-19: This story appears to be more complex than what was seen in the video above and from news reports in the Washington Post, CNN, New York Times, and other major news media. After watching a much longer video that shows the lead-up and aftermath of the incident, it doesn't look like the high school students were harassing the Native Americans as was reported yesterday.James Martin, a Jesuit priest, an editor at large America Magazine has excellent insight into the complexities of this still-unfolding story, which he wrote in the form of a Twitter thread:Thread by @JamesMartinSJ: "Re : I will be happy to apologize for condemning the actions of the students if it turns out that they were somehow acti […]" #CovingtonHighSchoolAnd I don't agree with Reason all the time (I agree with their stance on civil liberties and disagree with their stance on unfettered free markets) but the Reason essay the Jake Tapper retweeted is worth reading if you are interested in this story:.@reason: “Video footage strongly contradicts Native American veteran Nathan Phillips' claim that Covington Catholic High School boys harassed him. The media got this one completely wrong,” writes @robbysoave https://t.co/9Ki4iiTkQ9— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 20, 2019I'll continue to update this post as new information emerges.Kentucky's Covington Catholic High School's Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts are on lockdown this morning after a video was posted that shows a mob of students intimidating a Native American elder in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Read the rest

Neil Gaiman says Edgar Allan Poe should be read aloud, and he's right: he recorded this video of him reading "The Raven" in 2016 as part of Pat Rothfuss's Worldbuilders charity drive. It's Poe's birthday today, and I can think of no better way to celebrate it than to listen to it again.Other ways to celebrate this magnificent torch:* The spectacular pop-up edition* The 50s hipster argot edition* The 1969 rock-and-roll version* Vincent Price and Boris Karloff's Raven-inspired magic duel(Reposted from last year) Read the rest

This Monday, the final "trilogue" (a meeting between the European Parliament, the European Presidency, and the EU member-states) was supposed to convene to wrap up the negotiations on the first update to the Copyright Directive since 2001, including the controversial Article 13 (mandatory copyright filters for online services) and Article 11 (letting news sites decide who can link to them and charging for the privilege). But that meeting has been cancelled and now the whole thing is on life-support. If the Trilogue can be reconvened in a matter of days, then it's just possible that it could finish it work and send a final draft to the Parliament to be voted on, but that's getting less likely by the second, and a delay of more than a day or two will mean that this is off the table until after the next EU Parliamentary elections in the spring -- which is also after Brexit -- and which will likely result in a very different landscape for this kind of legislative gift to corporate lobbyists (between the rise of insurgent parties in the EU, and Brexit eliminating the UK MEPs most likely to carry water for companies like EMI and Sky).Here's a very short version of how the Trilogue got cancelled and the Directive got put on life-support: back in the spring, Axel Voss, a German MEP, took over the drafting of the Directive, and revived the no-compromise versions of Articles 11 and 13, throwing out years of negotiations in order to give the record industry and aristocratic German newspaper families a huge legislative favour. Read the rest

It's been three days since C-SPAN posted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's amazing, stirring freshman speech from the floor of Congress, and it has smashed all Congressional C-SPAN records with 3.1m views (as of the time of writing); at this rate, it may catch up with C-SPAN's most popular Senate video, the Kamala Harris/Brett Kavanaugh video, with 7.14m views.First House Floor speech from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC): “The truth of this shutdown is that it's actually not about a wall...The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms." pic.twitter.com/r8tmsGSNtT— CSPAN (@cspan) January 17, 2019In just over 12 hours C-SPAN tweet of @RepAOC floor remarks last nite have become most-viewed twitter video by @cspan of any remarks by a member of House either party. 1.16M https://t.co/lkd0vK33cjMost viewed tweet video of a Sen? @KamalaHarris questioning Kavanaugh (7.14M views pic.twitter.com/2ulf1fNddc— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) January 17, 2019Complete exchange between @senkamalaharris and Judge Kavanaugh on Mueller Investigation. pic.twitter.com/FXhW3XmV19— CSPAN (@cspan) September 6, 2018 Read the rest

After marketing executive Clementine Crawford published an essay about being banned from eating at the bar at her favorite New York restaurant, Nello, because the owner (already notorious for labor abuses) was "cracking down on escorts" and had decreed that only men would be permitted to dine at the bar, The Cut tried to get a comment on it from Balan, whose employees repeatedly hung up on them.According to Crawford, when she told the owner that his policy was unfair and discriminatory and reminded him that she was a regular who'd spent a small fortune eating at his bar, the owner said "he could run his business as he pleased, and that I was no longer welcome to eat at the bar, only at a table."I travel a lot and one of my favorite things to do when I'm out of town is "take myself out on a date." Often I've been in intensely social situations all day, speaking to a crowd, or being in close company with a group of colleagues, and -- hermit that I am -- I'm ready for some solo time.So I'll go to a nice restaurant, the kind of place you usually need a reservation for, and just get a seat at the bar, where I can eyeball the whisky selection and find a really nice one to sample, and then I order stinky things that I normally avoid because my wife won't kiss me after I've eaten them (she's allergic to shellfish, so this is my chance to eat a lot of oysters). Read the rest

Unicorn poop [Amazon] appears to be pastel-colored gourmet marshmallow chunks flavored with strawberry, lime, lemon and orange, guaranteed to be gluten- and nut-free. But don't let that put you off: I'm sure they're delicious.Proudly ★ MADE IN THE USA ★ – Guaranteed to be the safest, tastiest, freshest, fluffiest Poop in town! Beware! ..other brands may come from China. Other brands? Just how many brands of unicorn poop can the market support? Read the rest

Still determined to keep those New Year's health resolutions? If you're going to stick with the exercise plan, it's enough of a challenge to budget your time. No need for your financial budget to take a hit, too. Here's a more convenient - and cheaper - alternative to a gym membership or Peloton bike: Two of our favorite virtual fitness clubs, tailor-made for any schedule and any income.Live Streaming FitnessThe wealth of content on this streaming service should be enough to keep you sweating well into your fitness goals and beyond. Along with daily exercise challenges, there's 24 /7 access to on-demand workouts in yoga cardio, strength training and more. And because it takes more than sweat, this service offers peer support through their Live Streaming Fitness community, plus meal plans, cooking shows and recipes made by certified nutritionists.A lifetime subscription to all of this through Live Streaming Fitness is now $99.99.Fitterclub Personal TrainingFor a more traditional touch, Fitterclub replicates the personal trainer experience with all the convenience of streaming. Answer a simple questionnaire, and the service builds you a workout regimen and nutrition program suited to your goals and body type. From there, it's on you: Access your daily, curated workouts and enjoy the flexible, tailored meal plan. Fitterclub tracks your progress and adjusts your plan every month using complex data analytics, so things never get too hard or easy.Fitterclub Personal Training is a full 91% off for the new year - that's $49 for a five-year membership. Read the rest

Two high school students from Minnetonka, Minnesota, photographed themselves performing Nazi salutes and holding a dance invitation full of Hitler-themed puns. “While I do not know whether it was an intentionally hateful message or was created out of ignorance, be assured the students will be disciplined for their actions,” Superintendent Dennis Peterson wrote in an e-mail Friday denouncing the post.“The larger issue is that we, as a community, must do an even better job of educating students about Hitler and the Holocaust,” he wrote. “While we do units on this in middle school, and we have had several Holocaust survivors speak at MHS, it has apparently not been enough to prevent yesterday’s incident.”I don't think it's the school's place to discipline students for political speech but it's good that they've recognized this sort of "j/k but yeah" giggling Nazism for what it is. In November, the "comedy" Nazi salutes of a high school class in Baraboo, Wi., three hours up the road, were initiallly laughed off as dumb teens not knowing what they were doing, but quickly exposed a school culture tolerant of racism and sexism where students shouted white power slogans in the halls.1. Instead, school administrators should explain why they never teach children anything about the holocaust or fascism, and start doing it, and then lets see who complains about that. Read the rest

Chinese TV is blurring out the ears of men wearing earrings. From CNN:It's unclear if Chinese regulators have issued a specific directive barring men from being shown wearing earrings, or whether TV stations are reacting to a shift in what is considered culturally appropriate.Last year, China's media regulator banned TV stations from featuring actors with tattoos. Depictions of "hip hop culture, sub-culture and immoral culture," were also banned according to Chinese state media...When it comes to television, the country's regulations previously barred programs from airing content that expresses "overt admiration for Western lifestyles," jokes about Chinese traditions or defiles "classic materials..."The country's censors have also been quick to black out content on LGBT issues. Guidelines released in China in 2016 characterized homosexuality as an "abnormal sexual behavior" unfit for Chinese television, alongside incest, sexual abuse and "perversion." Read the rest

Malware authors have a problem: they want their software to run aggressively when no one is looking at it, but to shut down entirely if the device it's running on is actually in some malware researcher's lab. So malware authors have a whole host of tricks they use to determine whether they're running on a device in the field, or inside a researcher's emulator where all of their secrets are laid bare. For example, the creator(s) of the Wannacry malware had the program try to reach a nonexistent website (iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com). Malware researchers' emulators usually answer any attempt to research an outside website in the hopes of gaining insight about how the software interacts with its command and control server, so by checking whether the nonexistent website existed, each copy of Wannacry was able to decide whether it was living in reality or trapped in the Matrix. That's why when a security researcher registered Wannacry's nonexistent domain and stood a webserver up at that address, every copy of Wannacry in the world shut down.A new Matrix-detecting tool in malware has been discovered: strains of Android malware distributed through the Google Play store were found to be using calls to the phone's motion-detector to determine whether it was running on a real phone or inside an emulator. Mobile emulators don't bother to fake data from emulated motion-sensors, so from the malware's perspective, emulators have an unnatural stillness that tips it off to stay hidden.As with the Wannacry killswitch, this technique won't be hard to overcome, since spoofing plausible data from an emulated motion-sensor is pretty basic stuff. Read the rest

Watch live video from TwitchPresents on www.twitch.tvI stopped watching Doctor Who after the War Doctor episode. I've never watched again, and I wasn't going to -- I completely lost interest. I just happened across Twitch Presents streaming some old Tom Baker and it is too good to pass up.K9! Don't overstrain your databanks!An encore presentation of the Classic Doctor Who Marathon on Twitch begins January 5th at 10AM PT / 6PM GMT!Event runs from January 5th to January 25th. We'll be broadcasting 11 to 12 hours of new episodes per day (~27 episodes), repeating once so you can catch Doctor Who nearly 24 hours a day, every day with the global Twitch community. Read the rest

I've written about ball-end hex keys before. They are much easier to use when clearance is an issue. They fit into sockets at an angle. Tacklife has a great deal on this dual set of metric and US hex keys'. Use code P6GBSRIX for a big discount. Read the rest

Stop by and charge your phones @shmoocon! Courtesy of @NSAGov pic.twitter.com/yxIL8mohvi— Rob Joyce (@RGB_Lights) January 18, 2019Let me think about that... nope.(h/t Bob Lord) Read the rest

You've probably played with one of those toy cars that you drag back to wind up and then let go to let it zoom across the floor. In this video, Jared Owen uses 3D animation to clearly show how the mechanism works. This guy deserves a lot more subscribers than he has. Check out some of his other cool explainer videos: Read the rest

The Drone, currently in post-production, is a real movie about a killer drone. From the trailer description:A serial killer transfers his consciousness into a consumer drone right before he is killed, then flies off to terrorize newlyweds Rachel (ALEX ESSOE) and Chris (JOHN BROTHERTON). The couple must fight to stop the insidious device before it destroys them both.Director Jordan Rubin is a comedian, his prior film was Zombeavers, and The Drone is obviously a tongue-in-cheek tale. But I kinda wish it was straight-up splatterpunk sci-fi. Read the rest

Freedom, published in Harlem during the Cold War and McCarthy years, was Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham's radical black paper that "ppenly challenged racism, imperialism, colonialism, and political repression and advocated for civil rights, labor rights and world peace"; NYU's Freedom archive holds browsable (but not searchable, alas!) scans of issues with contributions from "W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry" and many others. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

A Japanese start-up built a microsatellite that was launched into orbit today. The satellite contains 400 tiny balls that can be released on demand and will burn brightly enough to be seen on Earth as they burn up in the atmosphere.From Channel NewsAsia:ALE Co. Ltd (Astro Live Experiences) says it is targeting "the whole world" with its products and plans to build a stockpile of shooting stars in space that can be delivered across the world.When its two satellites are in orbit, they can be used separately or in tandem, and will be programmed to eject the balls at the right location, speed and direction to put on a show for viewers on the ground.Tinkering with the ingredients in the balls should mean that it is possible to change the colors they glow, offering the possibility of a multi-colored flotilla of shooting stars.Each star is expected to shine for several seconds before being completely burned up - well before they fall low enough to pose any danger to anything on Earth.They would glow brightly enough to be seen even over the light-polluted metropolis of Tokyo, ALE says.From ALE:ALE is a Japan-based space entertainment startup that creates shooting stars on demand using microsatellites. Its mission is to contribute to scientific research through entertainment. It was founded in September 2011 by Lena Okajima, a serial entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Tokyo.Natural shooting stars occur when dust particles of several millimeters in size enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn due to plasma emission. Read the rest

Criminals are using stolen credit cards to buy Fortnite V-bucks, then selling the in-game currency for bitcoin at a discount on the dark web as a way to launder money. From The Independent:Discounted V-bucks are being sold in bulk on the dark web – a hidden section of the internet only accessible using specialist software – as well as in smaller quantities on the open web by advertising them on social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter.By posing as potential customers, Sixgill agents uncovered operations being conducted around the globe in Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic and English.“Criminals are executing carding fraud and getting money in and out of the Fortnite system with relative impunity,” Benjamin Preminger, a senior intelligence analyst at Sixgill, told The Independent. Read the rest

Amazon just sent me a text saying The Grand Tour Season 3 is now available. I'll be back in a few hours! Read the rest

In 2012, Facebook settled a class-action suit with parents who claimed that their kids were being tricked into spending real money on game items, thinking they were spending virtual in-game currency; the parents said that Facebook had structured its system to allow kids to use their parents' credit cards without the parents' intervention, unlike competitors like Google and Apple, who required password re-entries when a card was re-charged for in-game purchases.When the case was settled, the court records were sealed, but thanks to legal action from Reveal, they are now in the public domain, and they paint a picture of a company whose internal staff raised multiple red flags about kids using their parents' cards in this way, and whose concerns were brushed off in the name of profits.One very disturbing exchange has a Facebook employee referring to a child who had charged thousands of dollars on their parents' credit card as a "whale," a term the casino uses to refer to high-rollers who lose fortunes while gambling.Gillian: Would you refund this whale ticket? User is disputing ALL charges…Michael: What’s the users total lifetime spend?Gillian: It’s $6,545 – but card was just added on Sept. 2. They are disputing all of it I believe. That user looks underage as well. Well, maybe not under 13.Michael: Is the user writing in a parent, or is this user a 13ish year oldGillian: It’s a 13ish yr old. says its 15. looks a bit younger. she* not its. Read the rest

When teachers from the largest school district in America walked off the job this week, they were not campaigning for wages: rather, they were demanding smaller classes; more librarians, counselors, aides and special-ed teachers; and to rein in the Charter school movement, and that last demand is the key to understanding the whole thing.Charter schools were developed in the wake of the Brown v Board of Ed decision, which found that racially segregated public schools were illegal; charter schools let white supremecists skirt the decision by diverting public funds into private schools that could exclude Black children.Today, the charter school movement has evolved into a darling of billionaires and vast, illegal dark-money pools, working in alliance with racists and Christian Dominionists who want Biblical doctrine taught at public expense. Like the Reagan coalition, the fundamentalists supply the warm bodies, the billionaires supply the seed capital, and then the billionaires make out like bandits while the poor evangelical rank-and-file get screwed.But even if you want to send your kid to a public school, charter schools can make it impossible to make such a choice. Charter schools can cream off the kids with wealthy parents, high test scores and no special needs, sucking money out of the public system, which still has the same per-pupil funding that has to stretch farther to cover fixed costs (just because your students leave, it doesn't make your school cheaper to heat or maintain).The results is that schools end up raiding the per-pupil educational budget to cover fixed costs, leaving the public system with a disproportionate fraction of kids who need extra support, and less money per pupil to pay for it. Read the rest

Sascha Baron Cohen put on a funny disguise and went to a small town in the United States to tell the residents of a plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy. The townsfolk were excited by the prospect until they found out the plan involved the construction of an enormous mosque. When the townsfolk complained about terrorists, Cohen told them that the worshippers would be well protected from terrorist attacks against them. Read the rest

Holly, a Harvard seminarian and activist, invited Twitter users to DM her the dirty secrets of their industries, which she then anonymized and posted in a megathread with more than 600 parts (as of this writing); while many of them are mild or self-evident, many of them are the kind of sphincter-tightening or blood-boiling confessions that you always suspected might be true but hoped like hell were not.Some of them are also a little uplifting (library workers are reliably helpers with immigration paperwork, say, but also increasingly wracked by violence and the effects of unchecked poverty and the erosion of social services), and others are, well, just terrible:* Arkansas teachers beat the shit out of their students, especially disabled kids, kids with developmental delays, etc* Whether you get arrested in NYC is largely a function of whether the cop is eligible for overtime* Your always-on smart speaker is sending your private conversations to random, badly paid contractors* "Celibate" priests are getting laid like crazy* Starbucks' rulebook is full of gotchas that let managers discriminate against troublemakers, racialized people, and anyone else they dislike* Billion dollar battleships are built by stoned meth-freaks* Remote disconnect meters are crapgadgets built by low-bidders and they are prone to bursting into flames* Southern universities have a quiet understanding with racist old white alums that their donations will only to scholarships for white kids* Environmentally sound plastics are ignored so that big companies can shave pennies off their costsLots more, too. Read the rest

Launched as a NYC skateshop in 1994, streetwear brand Supreme has become a religion for hypbeasts (and the flippers who serve them). Now, a private collector is auctioning off their collection of every single Supreme skate deck ever made, many of which are emblazoned with graphics from esteemed contemporary artists. The lot of 248 skateboard decks along with the Louis Vuitton Boite skateboard trunk with tool kit, trucks, wheels and shoulder strap is expected to bring around $1 million but I bet it goes for much more. From Sotheby's:Supreme started producing their own skateboards in 1998 and have collaborated with many well-known brands over the last 20 years - most famously with Louis Vuitton. Supreme is also known for their artist collaborations, featuring the likes of George Condo, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, KAWS, Marilyn Minter, Nate Lowman, and Takashi Murakami, among others."Own the Entire Supreme Skateboard Collection, Now Open for Bidding" (Sotheby's, thanks Lux Sparks-Pescovitz!)Decks by Marilyn Minter and Jeff Koons and Louis Vuitton Boite skateboard trunk with accessories: Read the rest

Here's an incredible collection of digitized historical LPs you can listen to online. A lot of them remind me of podcast episodes, like this record about "big-lie-technique" master Senator Joseph R.McCarthy. This is a browser's treat. Read the rest

In the early 1990s, the burgeoning black metal scene in Norway was plagued with jealousy, violence, arson, and eventually murder. Lords of Chaos, named after Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind's excellent non-fiction book, is a new film coming to theaters February 8 that tells the story of those loud, weird, dark times. Jonas Åkerlund directs and the cast includes Rory Culkin, Emory Cohen, Jack Kilmer, Sky Ferreira, and Valter Skarsgård. Read the rest

We are in serious bad sci-fi movie territory here.Ambrosia is a start-up offering "young blood" to people who are not "young." This blood is supposed to make you all awesome again! Like before your blood got all old! Only problem being the scientists who conducted the study say it is dangerous.Apparently, folks are lining up to get injected with the blood of the young.Business Insider:Does young blood hold the keys to a long and healthy life? Startup founder and and Stanford Medical graduate Jesse Karmazin believes it might, so he launched a startup called Ambrosia Medical that fills older people's veins with fresh blood from young donors.But researchers who study the procedure say it poses major risks for patients, including an elevated risk of developing several serious conditions later in life, such as graft-versus-host disease, which can occur when transfused blood cells attack the patient's own cells, and transfusion-associated lung injury.Irina and Michael Conboy, two University of California at Berkeley researchers who've published research on young blood transfusions in mice, called Ambrosia's plans "dangerous.""They quite likely could inflict bodily harm," Irina Conboy told Business Insider.The Conboys' concern stems from an awareness of what happens in the body when it receives foreign blood from a donor."It is well known in the medical community — and this is also the reason we don't do transfusions frequently — that in 50% of patients there are very bad side effects. You are being infused with somebody else's blood and it doesn't match," Conboy said. Read the rest