Quantity has a quality of its own. Lexar is the first to get 1TB SD cards to market.As ever, there’s a price premium associated with this breakthrough in capacity; you’ll pay more for a single 1TB card than you would for two 512GB cards. Lexar has set the price at $499.99 for this model, although B&H has it available to order at $399.99 — that’s still quite a hike considering the same retailer has various 512GB cards for under $150. The first 1TB hard drive you could buy was back in 2007. According to Hitachi, the drive ships in the first quarter of 2007, and will cost $399--less than the price of two individual 500GB hard drives today. The drive, called the Deskstar 7K1000, will be shown this weekend in Las Vegas at the 2007 International CESHitachi notes it took the industry 35 years to reach 1GB (in 1991), 14 years more to reach 500GB (in 2005), and just two more years to reach 1TB. Western Digital announced the first 15TB hard drive a few weeks ago, but the largest I can find to buy is the 14TB model from Toshiba. But spinning disks are yesterday's news. Seagate sells a 60TB SSD. Call for pricing. Read the rest

The Tappan Zee will meet its maker on Saturday as New York state contractors plan to blow up what's left of the 63-year-old bridge. Replaced by the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge in 2017, the iconic Tappan Zee will be loaded up with explosives and sent to a watery grave in the Hudson River. The steel will be recovered by a marine salvage team. Restaurants and businesses in the area are planning watch parties for Saturday morning, including the “Dim-Sum-struction of the Tappan Zee Bridge," and "The Big Bang Brunch." Several New York news outlets plan to carry the detonation live. Lyndhurst, local restaurants host Tappan Zee Bridge farewell, specials on Saturday (lohud.com)(Photo: Brett Weinstein/Wikimedia Commons) Read the rest

Uber and Lyft are still waiting for feedback from the U.S. securities regulator on their confidential submissions for IPOs, Bloomberg reports tonight, citing people familiar with the matter who aren't disclosing their identities.Donald Trump’s government shutdown over his demand for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border has effectively halted all but basic operations at the Securities and Exchange Commission. No SEC means no IPOs. From Bloomberg, on how this impacts the Uber and Lyft IPO plans:The San Francisco ride-hailing companies, likely to have two of the year’s biggest offerings, believe the shutdown could slow their public debuts depending on how long it takes for the SEC to reopen and how substantial the agency’s feedback is when it does, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans were private. Uber and Lyft had been targeting their IPOs for the first half of the year.Spokesmen for Uber and Lyft declined to comment. In an emailed statement, the SEC wrote: “Prior to the shutdown taking effect, we encouraged filers to reach out to us to ask for acceleration of the effectiveness of pending registration statements, and we declared approximately a dozen registration statements effective.”The U.S. shutdown has left hundreds of thousands of workers furloughed or instructed to work without pay. It’s poised to affect deals of all sizes. Eli Lilly & Co. said Tuesday that the SEC is creating “a problem” for the company’s plan to sell stock in a unit it spun off last year. Read the rest

Could this be the eleventh-hour bid that saves Sears from liquidation? Good news for fans of the 126-year-old iconic American retail brand.Sears Holdings Corp Chairman Eddie Lampert today submitted a new and increased bid to take over the company -- “roughly $5 billion,” Reuters reports Wednesday evening. Lampert's bid earlier this week was rejected. Today's news provides one seemingly final chance that the more than century old U.S. department store will escape liquidation.From Reuters:In a concession, Lampert agreed to assume tax and vendor bills Sears has incurred since filing for bankruptcy protection in October, the sources said. The billionaire’s revised bid was submitted through an affiliate of his hedge fund, ESL Investments Inc, on Wednesday afternoon along with a $120 million deposit, the sources added.Lampert’s previous bid, which Sears had rejected, was valued at $4.4 billion.The new bid, which Sears will consider during a Jan. 14 bankruptcy auction, proposes assuming up to about $300 million of tax and merchandise expenses the 126-year-old company has racked up since its Oct. 15 bankruptcy filing, the sources said.The offer, which aims to preserve up to 50,000 jobs, also would assume up to roughly $350 million in additional Sears bankruptcy expenses, severance benefits for employees and other liabilities, one of the sources added. Sears employed about 68,000 people when it filed for bankruptcy.Ensuring Sears can pay its expenses, which include bills for legal and financial advisers and are known as administrative claims, was a main point of contention as the company negotiated the deal with Lampert. Read the rest

I have followed the work of the brilliant indie hardware engineer, Sarah Petkus, for years. Her first projects to capture my attention were her delta robot army and NoodleFeet (see her YouTube feed for project videos). Sarah is an extremely talented engineer and artist whose design and fabrication skills are undeniably impressive. With her high-tech engineering skills, her unique and sincere presence, and her overall deep-geek badassery, Sarah wouldn't be out of place in a Gibson cyberpunk novel.Her latest project is courageous. Called She Bon, it is a series of body-borne devices designed to sense and express female arousal. As Sarah has openly discussed in her videos, she has struggled with her sexuality and how she wishes to embody and express it. She Bon is her bold "coming out." The She Bon system's heart is a backpack, called the "Pulse Pack," that controls the various She Bon sub-systems. These include Propeller Pasties, activated as the wearer's nipples are aroused, the Beat Box, soundwave-vibrating "panties" that respond to the wearer's heart rate, and Hot Spot, a butt-winching system for creating that coveted(?) thigh gap. POP Girl is the name Sarah has given to the wrist-borne user interface and status indicator for everything that's going on throughout the She Bon system. "I believe that all of this technology that we are creating for ourselves, as hackers and makers, can also be used to add another layer of self-expression and individuality to everyday life," says Sarah. "What I am hoping to achieve is encouraging a healthier, more approachable dialog about sex among humans. Read the rest

In Illinois today, a law firm announced they are filing a lawsuit against Tesla to hold the electric car maker accountable for a teen who died in an accident involving a car they say had a defective battery pack.The lawsuit filed by Chicago firm Corboy & Demetrio claims Tesla's 2014 Model S sedan had a defective battery pack that was responsible for the death of an 18-year old passenger in an accident last May. Some 12 cases of Tesla S batteries spontaneously bursting into flames, while parked or driving out on the road, have happened in the last five years, the law firm says.Elon Musk's electric car company has been in the news over the past year or so with stories that raise concerns about the conditions in which these Tesla batteries are produced. There's also the whole thing about a Mexican drug cartel dealing meth inside one of the factories where the batteries are made.From Reuters:Last May, a Tesla driven by Barrett Riley with passenger Edgar Monserratt Martinez crashed into a concrete wall and erupted in flames in Fort Lauderdale, Florida killing both the teenagers, according to the lawsuit.The law firm represents the estate of Edgar Monserratt Martinez.Less than two months before the crash, Riley’s parents had a limiter installed at a Tesla service center to prevent the vehicle from reaching over 85 mph, but it was removed at another Tesla service visit without his parents’ knowledge, the law firm said.An additional count in the lawsuit alleges Tesla was negligent in the removal of the limiter. Read the rest

Bell Canada is the giant, diversified former national monopoly carrier that has been allowed to buy magazines, TV channels, and other users of its infrastructure, violating the cardinal separation of telcoms between services and carriers.As Bell has grown, the quality of the services it delivers and its relationship with its customers have declined, as the company sought ever-more-invasive, rapacious ways of serving its shareholders instead of the taxpayers who paid for its creation and buildout.Now, Bell has reached a new low: they've sent out opt-in agreements asking Canadians to grant them permission to "track everything they do with their home and mobile phones, internet, television, apps or any other services they get through Bell or its affiliates... customers' age, gender, billing addresses, and the specific tablet, television or other devices used to access Bell services...number of messages sent and received, voice minutes, user data consumption and type of connectivity when downloading or streaming." In exchange, they promise to tailor ads and promos. Teresa Scassa, who teaches law at the University of Ottawa and holds the Canada Research Chair in Information Law and Policy, says Bell has done a good job of explaining what it wants to do.But Scassa says Bell customers who opt into Bell's new program could be giving away commercially valuable personal information with little to no compensation for increased risks to their privacy and security."Here's a company that's taking every shred of personal information about me, from all kinds of activities that I engage in, and they're monetizing it. Read the rest

A XVIth Century book held in the National Library of Sweden's collection features a "sixfold dos-a-dos binding," meaning that the book could be opened in six different ways to reveal six different texts ("devotional texts printed in Germany during the 1550s and 1570s,including Martin Luther, Der kleine Catechismus"), with the hinges doubling as latches. You may remember a blog I posted about dos-à-dos (or “back-to-back”) books. These are very special objects consisting of usually two books, which were bound together at their, well, backs. When you were done with the one book, you would flip the object and read the other. The dos-à-dos book you see here is even more special. Sixfold dos-à-dos binding Read the rest

CNLohr discovered that underclocking the ESP8266 wifi module's Baseband PLL made the wifi channel progressively narrower, until it could not longer be detected by an unmodified wifi receiver -- but a similarly modified wifi module can detect the narrow signal, creating a s00p3r s33kr1t wifi channel; here's sourcecode (which may violate FCC Part 15 rules, so please use responsibly). (via Four Short Links) Read the rest

EU privacy rules force European companies to surrender data they hold on anyone, anywhere; and that includes SCL Elections, which owned Cambridge Analytica, the notorious Facebook data-miner and election-manipulator that extravagantly claimed to have won the election for Donald Trump.Back in 2017, Parsons School of Design prof David Carroll teamed up with PersonalData.io to request data from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica that they hope will reveal the way the targeted ads worked; but Cambridge Analytica and SCL stonewalled the UK regulators when they were told to produce Carroll's data. The UK regulator sued, and now, the bankrupt remains of SCL/Cambridge Analytica have entered a guilty plea and will have to pay about $26,000 in fines and fees.The settlement comes the day before the trial was to begin, and follows SCL's claim that Carroll had no more right to see the data they held on him "than a member of the Taliban sitting in a cave in the remotest corner of Afghanistan."The UK Information Commission has seized Cambridge Analytica's computers and 700TB of data. SCL/Cambridge Analytica had refused to provide the decryption keys to the data, but their former employees have now done so.There was no suggestion the administrators will now grant Carroll’s request for access to the full data on him. That information is held on computers seized from Cambridge Analytica by the ICO, and stores around 700 terabytes of data, which the court was told equated to around 81 billion pages of information.Ben Summers, for the prosecution, admitted that finding the information on Carroll was like searching for a needle in a haystack. Read the rest

One distant galaxy, one "very unusual repeating signal." But it's never aliens. ...a very unusual repeating signal, coming from the same source about 1.5 billion light years away. Such an event has only been reported once before, by a different telescope. ... The CHIME observatory, located in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, consists of four 100-metre-long, semi-cylindrical antennas, which scan the entire northern sky each day. Read the rest

Samsung's sleazy deals with Facebook mean that owners of Samsung phones are not able to uninstall the Facebook apps that come pre-installed with their devices. This is true even of flagship phones like the Galaxy 8.Facebook claims that if you don't login to the app or run it, it won't spy on you.This hasn't stemmed the tide on social media, where Samsung owners are complaining that they can't exorcise the zuckermonster from their pocket surveillance rectangles.A Facebook spokesperson said the disabled version of the app acts like it’s been deleted, so it doesn’t continue collecting data or sending information back to Facebook. But there’s rarely communication with the consumer about the process. The Menlo Park, California-based company said whether the app is deletable or not depends on various pre-install deals Facebook has made with phone manufacturers, operating systems and mobile operators around the world over the years, including Samsung. Facebook, the world’s largest social network, wouldn’t disclose the financial nature of the agreements, but said they’re meant to give the consumer "the best" phone experience right after opening the box.Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook [Sarah Frier/Bloomberg](via /.) Read the rest

Fertility doctors often advise men that wearing boxers instead of briefs lowers scrotal temperature and possibly increase sperm count. The CoolMen device takes that idea to the extreme, instrumenting the wearer's testicles with temperature, pulse, and motion sensors while also cupping them in a specific position conducive to coolness. From the Polish start-up CoolTec:CoolMen is an innovative device that stabilizes the temperature of the testicles in the optimum range. In a short time, CoolMen significantly improves semen parameters, contributing to increased fertility of the pair.CoolMen can record data about temperature and time of use as well as types of activity (sleep, sitting, physical activity) by wirelessly transferring it to the mobile application on the smartphone. These data can then be analyzed by the andrologist to improve the treatment process...CoolMen has been designed to be completely invisible under clothing, providing full discretion during use.CoolMen (CoolTec) Read the rest

Gambling site Bookmaker took quite a punch last night after losing $276,424 to people who correctly bet that Trump would make at least 3.5 "false statements" (aka lies, or alternative facts) during his Oval Office address last night – in fact, 92% of the people who placed a bet got it right."Bookmaker.eu asked people to wager on the president's truthfulness, offering odds of -145 for more than 3.5 lies and +115 for less than 3.5 lies. That means if a person bet $145 dollars that Trump would lie at least four times, they would win $100," according to BuzzFeed. Bookmaker used The Washington Post's Fact Checker to determine which Trump statements were falsehoods.The big question is, why would a gambling site offer such a stupid bet in the first place? Apparently, they were banking on the fact that Trump wouldn't be able to squeeze in enough lies in the short 8-minute time allotment he had. Huge miscalculation – we're talking about Trump, after all.Via BuzzFeed:The site used the Washington Post's Fact Checker as the arbiter of Trump's truth and lies. The Post's live blog has corrected six statements that Trump made during the televised address seeking a border wall. (Here's the reality of what's going on at the border.)Lester said Bookmaker expected Trump to lie, but that it had also factored in the time constraints the president would be under in delivering Tuesday's speech."We figured the president's strategy going in would be a bit of fear mongering to create pressure on the Democrats to approve the funding of the wall (or barrier), however the president was also constrained by an approximate 8-minute time limit," Lester said. Read the rest

A Turkish court has sentenced journalist Pelin Ünker to 13 months' imprisonment for her participation in reporting the Panama Papers, a massive leak of documents from the tax-evasion enablers Mossack-Fonseca.Ünker published the true (and undisputed) facts about former Binali Yıldırım and his sons, whose ownership of Maltese companies was revealed in the leaks. Despite the truth of the matter, Ünker was convicted of "defamation and insult."Ünker is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The ICIJ’s director, Gerard Ryle, condemned Ünker’s jail sentence of 13 months, as the latest in a long series of attacks on free speech in Turkey.“This unjust ruling is about silencing fair and accurate reporting. Nothing more,” Ryle said. “ICIJ commends Pelin Ünker’s brave and truthful investigative reporting and it condemns this latest assault on journalistic freedom under Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s autocratic rule.”Journalist Pelin Ünker sentenced to jail in Turkey over Paradise Papers investigation [Julian Borger/The Guardian] Read the rest

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a wireless battery powered sensor that can be attached to a bee's back. The sensor logs temperature and humidity as the bee flies, and the battery is wirelessly recharged when the bee returns to the hive.[A]fter the bees have finished their day of foraging, they return to their hive where the backpack can upload any data it collected via a method called backscatter, through which a device can share information by reflecting radio waves transmitted from a nearby antenna.Right now the backpacks can only store about 30 kilobytes of data, so they are limited to carrying sensors that create small amounts of data. Also, the backpacks can upload data only when the bees return to the hive. The team would eventually like to develop backpacks with cameras that can livestream information about plant health back to farmers.“Having insects carry these sensor systems could be beneficial for farms because bees can sense things that electronic objects, like drones, cannot,” Gollakota said. “With a drone, you’re just flying around randomly, while a bee is going to be drawn to specific things, like the plants it prefers to pollinate. And on top of learning about the environment, you can also learn a lot about how the bees behave.”Image: University of Washington Read the rest

Sinclair Target's long, deeply researched history of the format wars over RSS are an excellent read and a first-rate example of what Charlie Stross has called "the beginning of history": for the first time, the seemingly unimportant workaday details of peoples' lives are indelibly recorded and available for people researching history (for example, Ada Palmer points out that we know very little about the everyday meals of normal historical people, but the daily repasts of normal 21 centurians are lavishly documented).I was there for the RSS format wars: I had some of the key players like Rael Dornfest and Aaron Swartz in my home while these flamewars were going on, and I talked about their mailing list contributions as they worked through the issues; I also was there during face-to-face arguments among some of they key players (I volunteered for several years as a conference committee member for the O'Reilly P2P and Emerging Tech conferences, where much of this played out).That all said, I think Target's piece focuses too much on the micro and not enough on the macro. The individual differences and personalities in the RSS wars were a real drag on the format's adoption and improvement, but that's not what killed RSS.What killed RSS was the growth of digital monopolies, who created silos, walled gardens, and deliberate incompatibility between their services to prevent federation, syndication, and interoperability, and then fashioned a set of legal weapons that let them invoke the might of the state to shut down anyone who dared disrupt them. Read the rest

Librarian, artist, and bookbinder Sharalee Armitage Howard of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho decided that rather than dig up the stump of the 110-year-old cottonwood tree in her yard, she'd transform it into a little free library, or rather little tree library. Her creation sparks the imagination and exudes a sense of wonder and welcoming. Like a good book.(via Bored Panda) Read the rest

I just started working on this maze. It looks easy, but you have to proceed by passing colored dots in red, green, yellow order. Is it cheating to work backward? Does it help? Read the rest

In December, a woman at Hacienda HealthCare in Phoenix, Arizona who has been in a coma for at least a decade gave birth. This week, police served a warrant for DNA samples from the men who work at the facility to hopefully identify the rapist. A member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the victim had never regained consciousness after a near-drowning. From CNN:"The family obviously is outraged, traumatized and in shock by the abuse and neglect of their daughter at Hacienda HealthCare," the family's attorney, John Micheaels said. "The family would like me to convey that the baby boy has been born into a loving family and will be well cared for."Hacienda officials have called the situation "a deeply disturbing incident" and said they are cooperating with law enforcement and state agencies.The company's chief executive officer, Bill Timmons, resigned Monday. Read the rest

When top German officials had their emails and social media hacked and dumped, people wondered whether the attack was some kind of well-financed act of political extremism, given that the targets were so high-profile (even Chancellor Angela Merkel wasn't spared) and that politicians from the neofascist Alternative for Germany were passed over by the hacker.Now, a politically unaffiliated, unemployed, 20-year-old male German citizen who lives with his parents in the state of Hesse has confessed. He may be tried as a minor, as Germany's youth court hears cases until the accused reach the age of 21. Reportedly, the hacker exploited normal failings in security: weak passwords, no two-factor authentication, vulnerability to phishing attacks. Apparently, he did not use any sophisticated techniques. Celebrities are just like us, so it’s likely that some of the people targeted used less-than-complicated passwords on their accounts and didn’t use two-factor authorization, which makes it more difficult for someone to break into online accounts. And once a hacker is in one email account or social network, it opens up a world of possibilities: He can use it to reset other accounts’ passwords or scrape contact lists. If the target reuses the same password across all their accounts, even better. Child’s play, really.The idea that the federal police should hire the hacker, a proposition raised during the press conference, is laughable. By that measure, every jerk who doxxes someone on Reddit should be swimming in job offers.20-year-old German hacker confesses in doxxing case [Grace Dobush/Handelsblatt] Read the rest

The Ferguson uprising was triggered by the police assassination of Michael Brown, but even before that killing, the city was a powder-keg, thanks to the practice of financing the city government by levying fines on the poor and putting those who couldn't pay in debtors' prison to encourage the rest to cough up.The US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that debtors' prisons are unconstitutional and has banned the practice of imprisoning indigent people who can't pay fines for petty offenses, it is still routinely practiced across America, and the practice is growing.Fines levied on poor people are now a major source of revenue in thousands of small American cities and towns, and since poor people don't have any money to pay these fines, fines are inevitably accompanied by the threat of debtors' prison, which makes taking out predatory loans, or borrowing from poor relatives who can't afford to pay, a relatively attractive option.The practice is especially virulent in red states where rich people enjoy massive tax breaks, starving the public coffers of the money needed for basic services: as the rich increasingly gain the political power to making taxing them impossible, public funding comes from those who have money to give, because their very poverty makes them incapable of flexing the political muscle needed to change things.Debtors' prisons aren't just a way to discriminate against poor people: they're also a way to make poor people poorer.In a long, deeply reported piece, the New York Times's Matthew Shaer tells the story of Corinth, Tennessee, where judges like John C. Read the rest

Austrian train workers were clearing tracks that go through the Gesaeuse national park when they noticed a mountain goat that wouldn't move from the sidelines of their path, even after honking the train. They then saw a snowdrift completely bury the creature. So the workers stopped all operations, grabbed some shovels, and got to work. Yay for good deeds.Via AP Read the rest

Luca Stricagnoli has the funk of 40,000 years. Read the rest

30,000 employees of the LA Unified School District are preparing to go on strike tomorrow, demanding a reversal of the trend to privatizing public education.In response, the nation's largest public school district has sourced 400 high-paid scabs to cross the picket line, raising $3 million to pay "teachers, campus aides, special education assistants, nurses and teachers aides" sourced through at least five temp agencies. The 400 will be joined by 2,000 non-teachers-union LAUSD employees with teaching credentials who do not currently teach (these employees may end up sympathy striking instead). 4,400 more scabs are lined up and ready to go if the strike continues.The scabs will be paid steep premiums for crossing the picket line: for example, union K-12 substitute teachers make $190/day, while the scabs who replace them will make $227-$315/day.The school board is also hoping that parents will cross the picket line and volunteer in schools. Parents who want to help support the teachers can join We Are Public Schools instead.In theory, any L.A. Unified employee who is not a UTLA member is supposed to report to work during a teachers strike. But workers in some of the five other employee unions in L.A. Unified may choose not to cross the picket line.The unions have different stances on the issue.SEIU Local 99, which represents close to 30,000 service employees including teacher assistants, bus drivers, food service workers, gardeners and custodians, has warned members that their jobs may be at risk if they choose to strike, but is asking members at schools to let the union know if at least 80% on a given campus plan to join a sympathy strike. Read the rest

A helicopter pilot pulls off an amazing rescue, with incredible precision flying, in the French Alps.Global News:Nicolas Derely wrote on Facebook that he was skiing on Jan. 2 with his family and his son’s friend, Emmanuel De Bellavoine, when the latter began complaining of a knee injury.Derely says it was a miracle that he had “four bars and 4G” in the middle of the Anterne Pass to call emergency services. Read the rest

Archaeologists make mistakes. I recently ran across this crown-that-was-actually-a-bucket story as well.The Art Newspaper:In a bit of serendipity, the curators realised during research for the show that an object they had long assumed was a vase had actually been displayed upside down. They now understand that it is actually the head of a fired-clay mace, or heavy club, made for King Gishakidu of Umma. After comparing the object with a similar one at Yale University, “we realised how daft we’d been”, says Irving Finkel, a co-curator of the show. Now displayed right-side up, the mace head is topped by a painted representation of a net that was used to immobilise enemies for execution. Read the rest

Do you like the idea of listening to Trump "struggling to breathe"? Splinter's Jon Eiseman has the video for you.Not the normal, everyday breathing that you and I would do. His breathing was labored but also panicked, as if he knew that he desperately needed to get air into his system but just didn’t quite know how. Read the rest

Mass protests have wracked Serbia after critics of nationalist strongman president Aleksandar Vučić were attacked in a series of failed assassination attempts, compounding Vučić's own human rights abuses and indifference to popular will.Among those who were attacked are Serbian Left president Borko Stefanović and two Serbian Left party activists, who was beaten with iron bars in the city of Kruševac; another assassination attempt was directed at the journalist Milan Jovanović.The opposition has demanded that Vučić accede to a set of demands around respect for basic human rights; in response, Vučić has said that he would not accede to the demands, "even if five million people show up on the streets" (Serbia's population is six million). In response, protesters have taken up the slogan "#1od5miliona ("one in five million").Protesters are also marching under the slogan "#STOPkrvavimkošuljama ("stop bloodying shirts") in reference to a TV appearance by Stefanović in which he showed the bloody shirt he was wearing when he was beaten.The protests have united Serbia's left and right for the first time since the 1990s, when similar protests brought down the regime of genocidal dictator Slobodan Milošević (in whose cabinet Vučić served).Another slogan spotted both in the streets and on social media says “it has begun” (#počeloJe), a cry of hope that the protests would grow into a country-wide movement similar to that of the late 1990s.In the past decade, Aleksandar Vučić has re-branded himself as a moderate centrist by paying lip service to Serbian integration into the European Union, something his opponents claim is mere camouflage of both his growing authoritarian tendencies at home and his servility to the Kremlin. Read the rest

Fatbergs -- vast agglomerations of human waste, toilet paper, sanitary products and general filth held together by fat -- are often found in the sewers of major cities such as London. But a 64-meter monster now lurks under Sidmouth, a cosy English seaside resort on the Devon coast. [via]South West Water (SWW) said the fatberg was the biggest it had found and it would take about eight weeks to remove. The firm's director of wastewater said he was thankful it was discovered "in good time" with "no risk" to the quality of sea bathing waters. Andrew Roantree said the discovery showed fatbergs were not only found in the UK's biggest cities, "but right here in our coastal towns". At 210ft, it is longer than the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, longer than a Boeing 747SP (185ft), and more than twice as long as a tennis court, (78ft).The BBC points out that it is exactly as disgusting as you think.Does the fatberg smell?Your imagination is correct. This is a huge congealed mass of fat, rubbish and anything that people flush down the toilet, whether it's meant to be flushed or not. Southwest Water has asked residents not to feed the fatberg. Read the rest

Backward Picnic is like a terrifying and fascinating cross between David Lynch and the Coen Brothers. Read the rest

Entertainment giant Lionsgate is allegedly using contentID, YouTube's internal copyright arbitation process, to remove criticism of its movies. (Note that "Angry Joe", the author of the viral video embedded above, uses a lot of NSFW language and gets very angry indeed.) The top comment on the main Reddit thread sums up the key problem with contentID: if the claimant refuses to back down, the claimant wins automatically after it manually affirms the claim. Counterclaims are a sham that dooms the counterclaimant to penalties and jeopardizes their account. YouTube tells the victim to sue the claimant in court if the video is in fact falsely claimed.False contentID claims can therefore be used to take control of the revenue generated by videos that would, at least, pass muster as fair use under copyright law, but which sometimes contain no copyrightable material at all!Some fraudsters profit from contentID claims on content they know they don't own. But the ContentID system is so shambolically defective it can also be gamed by victims. Popular games YouTuber Jim Sterling includes numerous short clips in every video which he knows will generate competing contentID claims for the whole upload. This prevents YouTube contentID bots and sharks from monetizing his work or taking it down.The brick wall that all YouTubers face, though, is that YouTube gets to decide what is on its own website and who it wants to give money to. If you choose it as a platform, you are agreeing to subject yourself to its intentionally-broken copyright arbitration system, and you are agreeing to let it pay other people for your work. Read the rest

From @rainmaker1973 on Twitter: "Your visual system constantly adapts to all the external stimuli, and this is why if you stare at this picture, it will slowly disappear"Doesn't work for me!Previously: Optillusions. Read the rest

In Saudi Arabia, women can only get a divorce after proving abuse in court, but men can simply file -- in secret -- for a divorce from their wives, and sometimes, they don't even tell their wives, continuing to live with them so they don't have to pay alimony, fraudulently using power of attorney to access their funds, etc.In a giant leap forward for women's rights, the Saudi government is going to start sending women a text message after their husbands divorce them.This is "part of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s Vision 2030 project for Saudi Arabia which seeks to reinvent Saudi Arabia as an open and inviting modern nation."Saudi Arabia is the most important Arab state ally of the US and Canada, and both countries sell arms and other materiel to the Kingdom. Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered his state assassins to kidnap, torture and dismember the critical journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi proxy war in Yemen has resulted in the worst human rights crisis in living memory, leading to the indiscriminate death of noncombatants, including children, the elderly, and women.The Saudi Ministry of Justice said the step was “aimed at protecting the rights of female clients,” but it’s not clear to me how it could do that if the notice—which, again, is a text message—only goes out after the decree has been issued. And that does seem to be what will happen. As Bloomberg put it in a (not-very-helpful) subheading, “Measure ensures women know about marital status change,” not that they will be able to do anything to affect what the decree looks like. Read the rest

Robotics: It's a field that used to exist only as science fiction. Now it's science fact, and it's not just a playground for MIT prodigies. Thanks to the ROS (Robot Operating System) framework, anyone willing to learn robotics can practice robotics. And the easiest way to learn ROS? The Complete Robotics eBook Bundle.Combined, the five books in this bundle offer a complete master class in ROS. By the end of the first book (ROS Robotics Projects), you'll have a grasp of fundamentals like the importance of image recognition and deep learning - enough to build your own moving, autonomous robot and a self-driving car. Later books let you fine-tune the connections between 3D sensors and actuators, and use I/O boards like Arduino and ESP8266. By the end, you'll even be able to hack a Wiimote and use it as a robot controller.Right now, the Complete Robotics eBook Bundle is available for $19. Pick it up today and start your own robot uprising. Take an additional 19% off with code NEWYEAR2019. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH little Donald really, really wants a wall.

Editor's Note: Richard Metzger is a connoisseur of cannabis, and recently started growing his own. He's test-driving high-end rig good for small-scale grows from Cloudponics. This is not a sponsored post, Boing Boing is not getting anything from Cloudponics. Metzger's just really *that* enthusiastic about weed, and spoiler alert, so far he likes the Cloudponics setup. Here's an early photo from the grow, and the first installment of Richard's ongoing lab notes. — XeniI am a 53-year-old wake-n-bake stoner and I've been high since 1979. Leaving much of that, er, loaded statement aside (and yes, as a definitive study of one, I do plan to leave my body to science) think of all the money I've spent staying massively stoned since I was fourteen. At approximately $20 a day over 365 days per annum ($7300) for 39 years that comes to $284,700 but do consider that I had to make nearly twice that and pay tax on that income before I could spend it on herb. Money doesn't grow on trees, of course, but there was a time not all that long ago when an ounce of pot and an ounce of gold were the exact same price, for a little perspective.I kid myself that all my money was spent on books and records, but I know the truth. And the truth is, I have no regrets. Frankly I cannot imagine what my life would have been like without marijuana nor do I wish to try. It seems obvious in retrospect that I was, and am, self-medicating, but who cares about that? Read the rest

Cannon Harrison, 24, was on dating app Bumble when he connected with a woman in his area who quickly bragged to him that she had just shot a "bigo buck," a large deer, in the darkness. She even sent Harrison a photo posed with her prey and admitted that she had been "spotlighting," taking advantage of the real deer-in-the-headlights behavior to get an easier shot. The woman didn't know it at the time, but Harrison is a warden with Oklahoma’s Department of Wildlife Conservation. And not only is spotlighting against the law but the season for hunting deer with rifles is over. From the Washington Post:“Honestly, the first thing I thought was that it was someone who was messing with me because they knew who I was,” he told The Washington Post. “It seemed too good to be true.”Armed only with the woman’s first name, a photo and a rough sense of her location, Harrison searched through social media until he had figured out her identity. The next morning, game wardens showed up at her home...The woman ultimately pleaded guilty to hunting deer out of season and possessing game that was taken illegally, Harrison said...(She received a fine of) $2,400, according to the Tulsa World — a total that also includes the fines incurred by a man who had been out hunting with her and took home the buck’s head afterward. Because the woman has agreed to pay her share of the fines, she will not face jail time, Harrison said. Read the rest

Mind metaphysics, or positive thinking, is a fascinating and mysterious field of personal exploration and inquiry. The guiding principle and basic tenet of mind metaphysics is that thoughts are causative, i.e. thoughts — those intangible acts of cognition, attention and intention — can actually shape reality and the material world in accordance with our wishes and desires. With roots in ancient Hermetic traditions, this profound idea made its way into culture, though not without resistance, via the New Thought and Human Potential movements, and more recently, Positive Psychology, as well as myriad incarnations in business motivation and the self-help industry. The latest noteworthy work on the contemporary metaphysical scene, already hailed as a modern classic, is The Miracle Club, How Thoughts Become Reality by Mitch Horowitz. A longtime Boing Boing pal, Horowitz is among the most articulate and authoritative voices in the fields of alternative spirituality, occult and esoteric history. He has curated and authored dozens of books, such as the fundamental Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, and One Simple Idea: How the Lessons of Positive Thinking Can Transform Your Life. The Miracle Club is part memoir, part historical map, part "operating manual" for manifesting your true will and your heart's desires. The promise of the book is pretty simple: you can make miracles happen. There's a catch though: miracles ain't free — there is work to do.Grounding his reflections in personal history and a life of experimentation, Horowitz comes across as the real deal: he is an authentic "adept mind" and he knows his stuff. Read the rest

Salinas, California police nabbed Roberto Daniel Arroyo, 33, after homeowners the Dungan family captured video of the gentleman licking their doorbell, many times, in the middle of the night Saturday. Arroyo allegedly also swiped some extension cords from the Dungan's Christmas decorations. According to an interview with David Dungan in the Salinas Californian, they have since cleaned their front porch and "bleached the doorknobs." From the newspaper:Officers knew Arroyo because they have encountered him several times previously, (Salinas Police spokesperson Miguel) Cabrera said...The case has been sent to the Monterey County District Attorney's Office, which will decide whether to file charges. Police are seeking misdemeanor prowling, theft and violation of probation charges, Cabrera said. "This Salinas doorbell camera caught some truly bizarre behavior, police say" (The Salinas Californian) Read the rest

Today is R. Kelly's birthday. Today, news is breaking that the singer is under investigation in Georgia. R. Kelly has been accused of abuse, predatory behavior, and pedophilia for decades. A new investigation has launched into charges he committed crimes against girls in Fulton County. Dream Hampton, executive producer of 'Surviving R. Kelly,' said it best.Happy Birthday @rkelly https://t.co/vJsPMKYMF9— dream hampton (@dreamhampton) January 8, 2019From TMZ, this afternoon:R. Kelly is being criminally investigated in Georgia -- and it's all because of Lifetime's docuseries ... TMZ has learned.Sources connected to the case tell us the Fulton County District Attorney's Office has opened an investigation into allegations made against the singer in "Surviving R. Kelly." We're told the probe was launched over the past few days as a direct result of what 'Surviving' depicted. We're told investigators have been reaching out to several survivors featured in the TV project. We have confirmed investigators reached out to Asante McGee, one of the women who allegedly escaped R. Kelly's home.The attorney for Joycelyn Savage's family was contacted by Chief Investigator Cynthia Nwokocha and has been fully cooperating.Why hasn't R. Kelly faced criminal charges or an investigation of this kind before? Perhaps because he already got off once. From the New York Times, May 2018:Since the first major newspaper investigation by The Chicago Sun-Times into allegations of abuse by the singer in 2000, Mr. Kelly has consistently denied that he has been violent and sexually coercive with women and young teenagers even as he has settled lawsuits, dating to the mid-1990s, with accusers. Read the rest

Trump's government shutdown, now on day 17 and counting, has led to the closure of Joshua Tree National Park. The park announced today, Tuesday January 8, that it will temporarily close “effective 8 am on Thursday, January 10, to allow park staff to address sanitation, safety, and resource protection issues in the park that have arisen during the lapse in appropriations.”Officials at the popular California park say some of the iconic desert trees (Yucca brevifolia) and other ancient elements of the landscape have been damaged by people and their cars since the shutdown began, severely limiting park staffing."While the vast majority of those who visit Joshua Tree National Park do so in a responsible manner, there have been incidents of new roads being created by motorists and the destruction of Joshua trees in recent days that have precipitated the closure. Law enforcement rangers will continue to patrol the park and enforce the closure until park staff complete the necessary cleanup and park protection measures," park officials said in the release.In related news, Rep. Jackie Speier is dumping some of the national park trash right on Trump's doorstep.⁦@RepHuffman⁩ and I are delivering trash that he and I cleaned up in national parks in our districts last weekend and that I personally paid to have shipped to DC so that we can deliver it to the White House. pic.twitter.com/kutje4Ue6F— Jackie Speier (@RepSpeier) January 8, 2019Your faithful Boing Boing writer is among the many Americans who have visited multiple national parks in recent weeks, and encountered trash piling up, restrooms not being serviced, and parking rules being violated. Read the rest

As Donald Trump prepares for his 8-minute “The Wall” remarks, which will be televised live by all major U.S. networks, read Nicholas Rasmussen's take in Just Security on the so-called terrorism crisis at the southern border. Spoiler. There is none. “Bottom line,” says Rasmussen, a career defense professional who was the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2014 to 2017: “There is no crisis, and anyone who says there is probably trying to mislead or scare the American people.”Snip:Taken at face value, rhetoric from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would lead Americans to believe that the United States is facing a terrorism crisis at our southern border. The picture being painted is one in which thousands of terrorists have been stopped crossing our southern border to infiltrate the Homeland. If that were true, that would indeed be a crisis.In reality, no such crisis exists.Our federal courthouses and prisons are not filled with terrorists we’ve captured at the border. There is no wave of terrorist operatives waiting to cross overland into the United States. It simply isn’t true. Anyone in authority using this argument to bolster support for building the wall or any other physical barrier along the southern border is most likely guilty of fear mongering and willfully misleading the American people.Why do I know this? As Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) from December 2014 until December 2017, it was my job to lead the government’s efforts to collect and analyze all available information about terrorist threats to the Homeland. Read the rest

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort provided an individual identified as a Kremlin agent with internal campaign polling data, while Russia's military was executing a political attack on the United States presidential elections of 2016. Things we learned today from Manafort's lawyers' redaction errors: Manafort is alleged to have met in Madrid w/Kilimnik; shared polling data with him; and discussed a Ukraine peace plan w/him more than once. Is that the same peace plan that Cohen delivered to Flynn in Jan 2017?— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) January 8, 2019That court filing says that Manafort shared the Trump campaign's polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the FBI maintains is linked to Russian intelligence.The filing appears to reveal details that were intended to have been redacted before going public. It explains how Russia probably gained access to Trump campaign data.These failed redactions show Manafort had a meeting with Kilimnik in Madrid, gave him campaign polling data, and discussed a Ukrainian peace plan with him - then lied about all of it. Very normal contacts between a US presidential campaign manager & a Russian intelligence asset. https://t.co/9tt5sjdVVb— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) January 8, 2019From the Washington Post:The former Trump campaign chairman on Tuesday denied in a filing from his defense team that he broke his plea deal by lying repeatedly to prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about that and other issues.In his rebuttal to the special counsel’s claims of dishonesty, Manafort exposed details of the dispute, much of which centers on his relationship with Kilimnik. Read the rest

The same year that Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai killed broadband privacy and cheated Network Neutrality to death, the Trump tax plan delivered a $20B windfall to AT&T -- both Trump and Pai claimed that the measures would stimulate the economy and trickle down to the rest of us.Now, AT&T is saying thank you to America by prepping mass layoffs in ten of its operational hubs in New York, California, Texas, New Jersey, Washington State, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, and Washington, DC. They've also cut investment in broadband rollout.Despite some saber-rattling, Trump also let AT&T merge with Time-Warner.The billions Trump gave to AT&T are being used for stock-buybacks, executive compensation, and paying off debts from previous ill-advised mergers.Last month, Verizon killed 10,000 jobs after pocketing billions in tax-breaks. In a memo of talking points advising managers on how to address employee concerns obtained by Motherboard, AT&T attempts to explain away the disconnect between the company’s words and its actions.“What we’ve said was that AT&T planned to invest an additional $1 billion in the United States this year as a result of tax reform, and that research shows that every $1 billion in capital invested in the telecom industry creates about 7,000 good-paying jobs for American workers, across the broader economy,” the memo states.But wireless sector investment actually declined last year, with most of the savings from regulatory favors and tax breaks going instead toward stock buybacks, executive compensation, or to pay off the mammoth debt accumulated by a series of AT&T megamergers many consumers and employees didn’t want in the first place, critics charge. Read the rest

News alert from Promobot: "A self-driving Tesla Model S hit and destroyed an autonomous Promobot the robot model v4 in Las Vegas in a car accident. The incident took place at 3000 Paradise Rd, Las Vegas." Read the rest

What an excellent choice! Dr William Gibson, Grand Master of Science Fiction has such a nice ring to it. Go Bill! You can watch him get his award at the next Nebula Awards weekend, May 16-19, at the Warner Center Marriott Woodland Hills in southern California. I have been to a Nebula weekend in at least a decade, but I'm putting this one in my calendar. (Image: Frederic Poirot, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest

A gentleman thought he could threaten a woman waiting for an Uber outside of her home in Rio de Janiero by demanding that she hand over her phone and that he was armed. What he didn't know is that the 26-year-old woman, Polyana Viana, is a UFC fighter. Within minutes he was beaten with punches, a kick, and a "rear-naked choke," according to CNN, and Viana kept the bloody man subdued until police showed up. The man's concealed "gun" – which he patted when he threatened her – turned out to be a cardboard cutout.An ambulance took the beaten man to the hospital for his injuries before heading to the police station, where Viana filed charges. View this post on Instagram On the left is @polyanaviana, one of our @UFC fighters and on the right is the guy who tried to rob her #badfuckingideaA post shared by Dana White (@danawhite) on Jan 6, 2019 at 7:01pm PST Read the rest

If you want to follow someone in realtime, you don't need to shell out to shady data-brokers like Securus (which use a marketing company that exploits a privacy law loophole to obtain phone location data); there are a whole constellation of location data resellers who will do business with anyone, regardless of the notional privacy protections they promise the carriers they'll put in place.Notably, these resellers do business with bail bondsmen and bounty hunters, who can, for a few dollars, locate any phone on the major carriers' networks.The carriers were mired in scandal over the Securus affair last year, and pledged to clean up their act (T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted "I’ve personally evaluated this issue & have pledged that @tmobile will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen"). They have not.Carriers contacted about this story said virtually the same thing they said last time. Microbilt buys access to location data from an aggregator called Zumigo and then sells it to a dizzying number of sectors, including landlords to scope out potential renters; motor vehicle salesmen, and others who are conducting credit checks. Armed with just a phone number, Microbilt’s “Mobile Device Verify” product can return a target’s full name and address, geolocate a phone in an individual instance, or operate as a continuous tracking service.“You can set up monitoring with control over the weeks, days and even hours that location on a device is checked as well as the start and end dates of monitoring,” a company brochure Motherboard found online reads. Read the rest

After 126 years in business, reports CNBC, Sears is shutting shop.Sears Holdings has rejected Chairman Eddie Lampert’s bid to save the 126-year-old company, setting the storied retailer with more than 50,000 employees on a path to liquidation, people familiar with the situation told CNBC on Tuesday. Sears, which also owns Kmart, planned to announce its liquidation plans Tuesday morning, the people said.In charge of the company for many years and the man responsible for merging it with Kmart, his $4.4bn bid didn't cover the bills. Lampert was "once deemed the next Warren Buffett" but isn't, obviously.Previously: RIP Sears. Photo: Richard Eriksson Read the rest