Boing Boing

On this 1966 LP, British actor Roddy McDowall -- later known for playing Dr. Cornelius and Caesar in the original Planet of the Apes films -- delivers a wonderful reading of HP Lovecraft's classic short story "The Outsider." First published in Weird Tales in 1926, this nightmarish gothic-inspired tale is arguably one of Lovecraft's finest pieces of psychological horror.The B-side is a reading of Lovecraft's "The Hound" (1922) featuring the very first mention of the infamous Necronomicon:(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

Maximum Rocknroll, the seminal punk print 'zine launched in 1982, is ceasing publication of its paper edition. This truly marks the end of an era in punk culture and underground media. According to today's announcement, MRR will continue its weekly radio show, post record reviews online, continue its archiving effort, and launch other new projects that will keep the unbreakable Maximum Rocknroll spirit alive. From MRR:Maximum Rocknroll began as a radio show in 1977. For the founders of Maximum Rocknroll, the driving impulse behind the radio show was simple: an unabashed, uncompromising love of punk rock. In 1982, buoyed by burgeoning DIY punk and hardcore scenes all over the world, the founders of the show — Tim Yohannan & the gang — launched Maximum Rocknroll as a print fanzine. That first issue drew a line in the sand between the so-called punks who mimicked society’s worst attributes — the “apolitical, anti-historical, and anti-intellectual,” the ignorant, racist, and violent — and MRR’s principled dedication to promoting a true alternative to the doldrums of the mainstream. That dedication included anti-corporate ideals, avowedly leftist politics, and relentless enthusiasm for DIY punk and hardcore bands and scenes from every inhabited continent of the globe. Over the next several decades, what started as a do-it-yourself labor of love among a handful of friends and fellow travelers has extended to include literally thousands of volunteers and hundreds of thousands of readers. Today, forty-two years after that first radio show, there have been well over 1600 episodes of MRR radio and 400 issues of Maximum Rocknroll fanzine — not to mention some show spaces, record stores, and distros started along the way — all capturing the mood and sound of international DIY punk rock: wild, ebullient, irreverent, and oppositional. Read the rest

Bob Einstein will be sorely missed. Read the rest

Hannu Rajaniemi is the Finnish-Scottish mathematician and science fiction writer whose debut, 2012's Quantum Thief was widely celebrated; now, in Summerland, Rajaniemi delivers new kind of supernatural historical spy procedural, set in a 1938 where the afterlife has been discovered, colonized and militarized.Rachel White is a spy who is trying to help the British Empire prevail in the global military/political chaos prompted by the Spanish Civil War and the rise of a Soviet Union led by The Presence, an uploaded group intelligence that has subsumed the nation's best thinkers to produce a transhuman mind capable of incredible leaps of reasoning. As a proxy war rages in Spain, both the British and the Soviets are roiled when the exiled Josef Stalin emerges to lead a new faction in the Civil War.White learns of this even as she is being internally exiled within her spy agency for blowing the whistle on a double-agent, whose protection goes all the way to the top.Formally, Summerland is really excellent: Rajaniemi has mastered the mechanics of spy-thrillers, with double-triple-crosses, tradecraft and skullduggery for days; the setting, too, is pitch-perfect, a noirish, grim late-thirties Europe filled with period touches and gracenotes.Add to this a marvelously imaginative, beautifully worked out supernatural element: Summerland -- the place where souls go when their bodies die -- has become a second front in every war and every political struggle, as the dead and the living haunt one another and as society slips into existential malaise at the thought of perpetual rule by the immortal souls of the elites who have gone on to the afterlife. Read the rest

Chinese internet users can't type the numbers "1984" into social media, but Chinese bookstores freely sell copies of Orwell's novels, including Nineteen Eighty-Four, as well as other books whose titles are banned on social media.In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the inner Party members are allowed to read the literature that is banned for consumption by proles and outer Party members, and the same is true in China: the Politburo treats books as the purview of intellectual elites, who are on the one hand able to circumvent these bans while traveling abroad, and, on the other hand, are more invested in the system and viewed as less likely to be subverted by Orwell's anti-authoritarian message.This kind of double-standard is shot through Chinese censorship policy (and, as Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom write in The Atlantic, through western society, too: think of how kids are banned from movies that depict nudity, but there are no age-limits on touring museums where the same nudity is on display). The Party understands that keeping elites in line requires a lighter touch, but they treat the masses as a kind of herd that is subject to epidemics of unrest. The inconsistencies in Chinese censorship aren't the result of incoherence so much as they are a form of class warfare, where internet-bases proles are strictly limited, while the elites enjoy much more freedom of access and thought.Western commentators often give the impression that Chinese censorship is more comprehensive than it really is due, in part, to a veritable obsession with the government’s handling of the so-called “three Ts” of Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen. Read the rest

As EFF's Eva Galperin notes, Nicole Kobie's story about resisting surveillance by taping over your webcam "proves that once more, the best and most straightforward tech reporting is being done by Teen Vogue."However, there are others who could be watching through your webcam, and the stories of compromised cameras are genuinely terrifying: hackers taunting people and spying on women at home, blackmailing teens into sharing nude photos, and schools even keeping watch on their students. "This is a pretty invasive, targeted form of malware, but the consequences can be super embarrassing," said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology.Such attacks require your computer to be tunneled into by hackers, creating a backdoor called a Remote Access Tool (RAT) — sort of like if someone added an unlocked window to your house that you didn't know was there. There are also cases that allege computer repair staff taking control of cameras when you get a device serviced.Don't panic; this type of attack remains rare, notes Wheeler. "One or two instances of RATs and teenagers being hacked for video through their webcams creates a lot of media clicks and hysteria, but the truth is that you should be much more concerned about your personal data than your webcam or your phone’s front-facing camera (which no one covers with a sticker)."Wave Goodbye to the FBI: Why You Should Cover Your Webcam [Nicole Kobie/Teen Vogue](via Eva Galperin) Read the rest

Professionalization isn't perfect: historically, professional societies "were structured around hierarchies of gender and race and laypeople were expected to obey expert judgment without even asking questions."But professionals were also organized around ethics of service and morals, with professional standards that required practitioners to use their expertise to further the public good.Decades of neoliberal marketization has flattened out these service-based ethics, turning every kind of professional into just another kind of business with customers who expect "customer service," and "value for money." When teachers have "students," they are meant to teach those students the truth. But once teachers have "customers," they are expected to teach the things that deliver "satisfaction" -- Young Earth Creationism, eugenics, Lost Cause historical revisionism, and so on. The same goes for doctors and patients (when customers satisfaction trumps health, doctors are tempted to overprescribe antibiotics and engage in other unsavory conduct), librarians and patrons, lawyers and clients, and all the other relationships that have historically been defined beyond mere market-based customer/vendor relationships.(For years, I've been dismayed by the rise of "CEOs" and other corporate titles in the nonprofit sector.)We live in a complex, technological society, where navigating the everyday (deciding what to eat, how to configure your devices, how to help your kids navigate social media, and what to do when you get sick, etc) requires that you seek out experts to guide you through. Even the smartest and most diligent among us cannot hope to master all these subjects.So we have to use rules of thumb to decide which experts we'll trust, even as we strive to be as well-informed as possible (if I got cancer, I'd certainly read up on my illness, but I'd ultimately have to take advice from an oncologist). Read the rest

In many ways, Richard Grenell was the perfect pick for Trump's ambassador to Germany: a longtime Fox News pundit and John Bolton protege whose vanity and narcissism cause him to lash out constantly (and undiplomatically) at the nation he's meant to be charming, and whose thin-skinned insecurity sends him into spirals of misery and approval-seeking a the first hint of criticism.Since arriving, Grenell has isolated himself from German politics, leaders and people, advocating regime change in Germany (and violating the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relationships in the process) and devoting his energies to getting face-time on Fox News (the only way to get out-of-sight, out-of-mind Trump to pay attention to you) rather than seeking to influence German politics to coincide with US interests.The only German political bloc that Grenell has time for (and vice-versa) are the neo-Nazi AfD (he's fond of posing for selfies with AfD leadership) and the xenophobic Christian Social Union. A deeply reported profile in Speigel paints a picture of an isolated, irrelevant figure who is only invited to functions when it would be impossible to exclude him, where he stands alone in a corner, looking awkward.They contrast Grenell with his predecessor, Obama pick Philip Murphy, who had to rent out the Olympic stadium for his farewell party, and who had immeasurable influence on German policy during his tenure.Grenell epitomizes Trumpian values: one part contempt for the reality-based community, one part naked racism, and two parts total administrative incompetence.Reading the profile, you get the impression of the kind of prepper who envisions himself riding out the end of the world while ruling over a kingdom of subservient concubines, toiling field-hands and stone-faced praetorian guards; but who actually ends up dying of lysteria in the first week after the disaster because he doesn't bother to wash his hands after taking a shit. Read the rest

Irene Posch and Ebru Kurbak's Embroidered Computer uses historic gold embroidery materials to create relays ("similar to early computers before the invention of semiconductors") that can do computational work according to simple programs; it's installed at the Angewandte Innovation Lab in Vienna. Read the rest

“The World’s Richest Man Caught Cheating!” screams a National Enquirer special edition devoting 11 lurid pages to Amazon chief Jeff Bezos and his alleged marriage-wrecking affair. You can loathe the tabloids for their flagrant disregard of facts, their rampant dishonesty, flights of fantasy and mean-spirited personal attacks, but one thing they undeniably do well is stalk celebrities.And while it’s highly debatable whether such intrusion into the deeply personal life of a private businessman is morally or journalistically acceptable, there is no denying that it was the impending publication of a special edition of the Enquirer revelations that prompted Bezos to issue a public statement confessing his marital split.“The cheating photos that ended his marriage,” promises the Enquirer cover. “Text sex and wild romps on his private jet! How he stole another mogul’s wife!” Just in case you’ve been living in a sensory depravation tank for the past week or been locked in a pitch-black bathroom for a month to win a $100,000 bet, Bezos and his novelist wife of 25 years MacKenzie have announced their separation after the Enquirer claimed that he has been cheating with TV reporter Lauren Sanchez, who happens to be married to one of Hollywood’s most powerful agents, Patrick Whitesell.The Enquirer boasts that it spent four months pursuing Bezos’s secret romantic trysts across America, traversing five states and 40,000 miles, and claims to have the photos to prove it. There’s Jeff and Lauren arriving in Los Angeles on October 18, 2018 after a “Miami getaway.” There they are boarding his private Gulfstream jet in Boston on October 29. Read the rest

(Neither Boing Boing nor I have received any compensation for this post: Libro.fm asked me to post this and I did so because I want to see them succeed -Cory)Libro.fm (previously) is an independent audiobook store that sells all the same audiobooks you can get on other platforms like Audible, Google Play, Apple, Downpour, etc, but unlike the industry leaders at Audible and Apple, they are DRM-free, and unlike all of their competition, they work with independent booksellers. When you sign up for a Libro.fm account, you can choose any one of 561 indie booksellers as your home bookstore -- the place where you go to get ideas about which books you want to listen to next (I chose Diesel, where I first encountered Libro.fm). Then, every time you buy an audiobook from Libro.fm, they give a commission to your home store, to reward them for being a showroom for the audiobooks you're listening to.Amazon doesn't just dominate the bookselling market, they also dominate audiobooks, through their DRM-mandatory Audible division, which controls some 90% of the market and engages in all kinds of sleazy tactics that squeeze performers, publishers and authors, while locking every customer into their proprietary ecosystem forever. Authors can't opt out of Amazon/Audible DRM, which is why none of my books are available there. This decision has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, but it's not a priciple I'm prepared to give in on (I will sacrifice short-term gain, even enough to pay off my house, to avoid the long-term pain of locking my audience into Amazon's ecosystem forever). Read the rest

In 2015, Stephen Harper's Tory government began enforcing a 1993 law that stripped expatriate citizens like me of our right to vote in Canada; last month, Justin Trudeau's Liberal government restored our voting rights.But it turns out that the Liberals' action was largely symbolic: yesterday, the Supreme Court of Canada broke with precedent and eroded Parliament's control over elections administration, ruling that the government had violated our constitutional rights by taking away our right to vote.The Let Canadians Vote site has a pretty good FAQ on the issue.Canada will hold federal elections this year and expats are eligible to register to vote right now, but Elections Canada has not yet updated its site and still refuses to register us. Writing for the 5-2 majority, Chief Justice Richard Wagner called the right to vote a "core tenet" of Canadian democracy. Any limit, he said, would have to have "compelling" justification -- something the government had failed to offer."The vague and unsubstantiated electoral fairness objective that is purportedly served by denying voting rights to non-resident citizens simply because they have crossed an arbitrary five-year threshold does not withstand scrutiny," Wagner said. "There is little to justify the choice of five years as a threshold, or to show how it is tailored to respond to a specific problem."The impugned provisions of the Canada Elections Act had been on the book for decades but it was only under the Conservatives of then-prime minister Stephen Harper that Elections Canada began active enforcement. Read the rest

A union that represents agents for the U.S. Border Patrol deleted a 2012 page from their website that said building walls or fences along the U.S./Mexico border to stop desperate migrants would be “wasting taxpayer money.”VICE's Motherboard reports that the deleted web page was originally posted in 2012. It carried an argument against walls like the one Trump's pushing today, and said border barriers don’t tackle migration's root causes, and may encourage more migrants to enter the U.S. through visa overstay.The Wayback Machine archives at archive.org show the page was deleted after the union's president supported building a border wall with Donald Trump in the White House Briefing Room on January 3, 2019. Video of that stunt above.From Motherboard:That statement came from the official website of the NBPC’s “Media FAQ” page which argued at length against the policy of building border walls. The page, originally published in October 2012, was deleted on or after January 4, according to archives obtained through the Wayback Machine. This was the day after the press briefing, and four days before President Trump gave a prime-time television address arguing for Congress to spend $5.7 billion in order to build a larger wall along the US-Mexico border.“Walls and fences are temporary solutions that focus on the symptom (illegal immigration) rather than the problem (employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens),” the now-deleted page says.The Media FAQ page has not been replaced, and a link to the Media FAQ page has also been removed from the NBPC website. Read the rest

“Officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests”

Elon Musk's SpaceX let go 10% of its 6,000 person staff today. In May of last year, the company stated that it has had "many years" of continuing profitability and in recent weeks raised $273 million so far in a planned $500 million funding round."To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company," SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell wrote in an email to employees. "Either of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations. This means we must part ways with some talented and hardworking members of our team..."From the Los Angeles Times:SpaceX makes most of its money from commercial and national security satellite launches, as well as two NASA contracts, one a multibillion-dollar deal to deliver cargo to the International Space Station and the other up to $2.6 billion to develop a capsule that will deliver astronauts to the space station. The first launch of that capsule, without a crew, is planned for February.The Elon Musk-led company has even more ambitious — and expensive — plans. Musk has said SpaceX will conduct a “hopper test” of its Mars spaceship prototype as early as next month...SpaceX is offering a minimum of eight weeks’ pay and other benefits to laid-off workers, according to Shotwell’s email. Read the rest

“With around 400,000 federal employees currently furloughed, more than 80 TLS certificates used by .gov websites have so far expired without being renewed.”

'Verizon Gaming' is coming soon to Android, and a beta is already running on the Nvidia Shield, per a report from Chris Welch at Verge.“The Verge can report that Verizon Gaming is already up and running on the Nvidia Shield set-top box and will, according to the company’s documentation, eventually make its way to Android smartphones,” Chris writes:The Verizon Gaming app comes pre-installed on the Shield device, and Verizon will also be distributing it to testers privately through Google Play later this month. This initial trial run is schedule to wrap up at the end of January, according to emails seen by The Verge.Screenshots of Verizon Gaming show titles including Fortnite, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Battlefield V, and Destiny 2. That would be an unbelievable collection of games if accurate — God of War is a PlayStation 4 exclusive and Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t yet have a PC port — but it’s likely that some or all of those shown are placeholders. Indeed, in response to a few complaints from testers over lag and a poor early experience, Verizon says that it’s currently focused on getting the fundamentals right before worrying about game selection. “This trial is primarily focused on performance,” the Verizon Gaming team recently wrote in an email to participants. “At a later date, when we advance the product, our library will consist of most or all of the top games you are familiar with — but at this early stage we’re working on the engine and its parts.” Read the rest

Siouxsie and the Banshees' "The Killing Jar" from Peepshow (1988) is easily one of the band's finest tracks from an incredible body of work that has aged with grace. I consider this isolated recording below of Siouxsie's soaring and hauntingly majestic vocals to be a gift from a time when I wore too much eyeliner and drove hundreds of miles with my best friend to see the Peepshow performance in a small Detroit theater. Yes, it was worth it.And here is the full recording of "The Killing Jar":(via Dangerous Minds) Read the rest

On Friday, GoFundMe said it plans to close Brian Kolfage Jr.'s campaign to pay for Donald Trump's border wall. More than $20,000,000 (sweet Jesus) had been raised by nearly 350,000 donors before GoFundMe announced the shut down due to Kolfage's change in strategy. Kolfage had intended to direct the money to the federal government, the legality of which was in question. But Kolfage changed his mind, creating a 501(c)(4) based in Florida that will allegedly build the wall on its own. That change in fund designation is a violation of GoFundMe rules, leading them to shut it down. A spokesperson for GoFundMe said all donations will be returned to donors unless they specify within 90 days that they want their donation to be redirected to the new non-profit. What a clusterfuck.And if things weren't already shady enough, serving on We Build the Wall's advisory board will be former Milwaukee Sheriff and collector of shiny badges David Clarke, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, former Congresscritter Tom Tancredo, and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. What a lineup.(Photo: GoFundMe screenshot) Read the rest

This screwdriver set comes in handy when you need to tighten or loosen a screw and a regular long handle screwdriver won't fit. The ratchet mechanism means you can quickly attach or remove a screw without having to lift and reset the driver into the screw head with every turn. Read the rest

Frazzled American nerves should be calmed by Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathleen L. Arberg's statement that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is cancer free. The beloved justice is recovering and will return to hear oral arguments next week.The Trump Administration was reportedly chomping at the bit to replace this well-loved member of the Supreme Court.NPR:Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has no remaining signs of cancer after her surgery last month, requires no additional treatment, but will miss oral arguments at the court next week to rest, the Supreme Court said Friday.While odds for a recovery from the surgery she had are good, they go way up if the subsequent pathology report shows no cancer in the lymph nodes. On Friday, the court released a written statement saying there is no additional evidence of cancer."Her recovery from surgery is on track," court spokeswoman Kathleen L. Arberg said of the 85-year-old justice. "Post-surgery evaluation indicates no evidence of remaining disease, and no further treatment is required." Read the rest

I wanted to make fudgy brownies.A week or so ago I posted a cry for help. There was so much conflicting information on how to make a fudgy brownie, I didn't know what to do.Tons of comments in our forum, as well as on Facebook and Twitter, only continued to show the massive body of conflicting information. Today, Carl Rigney shared this Epicurious video with me, and I am finally satisfied that I can control my brownie outcomes. Read the rest

In the wake of this week's Motherboard scoop that the major US carriers sell customers' location data to marketing companies that sell it on to bounty hunters and other unsavory characters, Google has disclosed that they have told the carriers that supply service for its Google Fi mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that they expect that Fi customers' data will not be sold this way.Google Fi hops from one major carrier's network to another as you move through space and ask the networks' congestion levels rise and fall.I have a Google Fi SIM I use for out-of-country roaming: while I'm not happy with the amount of data Google is likely to be gathering from me while I use the service, I'm also pretty sure that any of the other roaming services I use are just as bad or worse, and Google Fi offers the cheapest and best data-service for roaming US-based customers I've ever encountered. Also, by switching SIMs and numbers when I'm out of the country, I reduce the risk that someone in California will accidentally wake me up in the middle of the night on the opposite side of the world. “We have never sold Fi subscribers' location information,” a Google spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement late on Thursday. “Google Fi is an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) and not a carrier, but as soon as we heard about this practice, we required our network partners to shut it down as soon as possible.” Google did not say when it made this a requirement. Read the rest

Joe Lieberman (76) went on Fox Business News last night to let everyone know that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (29) "is not the future." I wonder how many Democratic Ocasio-Cortez supporters who watch Fox Business News heard this, smacked their head and said, "By gum, Joe is right! I'm going to subscribe to John Dingell (88) and Louise Slaughter's (88) Twitter feeds right now so I can be part of the future!" AOC was gentle with Granpa Joe:New party, who dis? https://t.co/2cznisv8tB— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 11, 2019She showed less patience for other old guard Democrats who are jealous of the attention AOC has received for sharing policy ideas that people actually like. She quoted the famous line that Rorschach of Watchmen uttered after pouring a pan of hot cooking grease on a fellow prisoner.To quote Alan Moore: “None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.” 🤣 https://t.co/8TCmKNJlkD— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 11, 2019Image: Fox Business News Read the rest

Today is the first day federal employees won't see their paycheck, thanks to Trump's government shutdown, and already we can see its effects. Miami International Airport has announced that they will be shutting down one of its terminals – Concourse G, which has 15 gates and includes United Airlines – on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, starting at 1pm each day. The concourse will be open in the mornings. With TSA screeners – many who live paycheck to paycheck – working without pay since December 22, a higher rate than usual are calling in sick. This isn't to take advantage, but, according to Business Insider, they're having "financial hardships" that, of course, make it difficult for them to work for free. Via Business Insider:An airport spokesman, Greg Chin, however, told the Miami Herald on Thursday that federal screeners were calling in sick at "double the normal rate for Miami" and that managers of the Transportation Security Administration, which runs the checkpoint security, weren't sure whether they'd be able to operate all of the airport's checkpoints at normal hours.The person added that the TSA experienced a 5.1% unscheduled call-out rate on Thursday, up from 3.3% on the same day in 2018.The TSA workers' union president, Hydrick Thomas, has said workers are calling out at higher rates because of financial hardship."TSA employees aren't calling out intentionally," Thomas told Business Insider last week. "They are calling out because they don't have the funds to make it work.""The loss of officers, while we're already shorthanded, will create a massive security risk for American travelers since we don't have enough trainees in the pipeline or the ability to process new hires," says Thomas. Read the rest

At CES, the Verge's Nilay Patel interviewed Vizio CTO Bill Baxter, who told her that when it comes to the surveillance features of his company's "smart" TVs, "it’s not just about data collection. It’s about post-purchase monetization of the TV...[When it comes to 'dumb' TVs,] we’d collect a little bit more margin at retail to offset it."The remarks come in the context of the low margins in the TV market, which Baxter gives as 6%, and how companies like his are driven to seek out other revenue streams for their products.But Baxter also implies that he doesn't believe there's a market for dumb TVs, even at a premium. This is certainly what I discovered last year when my family bought a house and went TV shopping: there were no panels large enough for my wife's satisfaction (she's a retired pro gamer and wanted a really big screen) unless we were willing to buy a set with several kinds of built-in networking and sensors that would put our home under surveillance.In theory, you can turn all that stuff off, but then you have to trust that the manufacturer is both honest and competent, both of which seem like needless risks to take, especially in an era when companies face virtually no liability for product defects, routinely cover them up, and threaten whistleblowers who disclose their sneaky data-collection and poor software quality.Q. One sort of Verge-nerd meme that I hear in our comments or on Twitter is “I just want a dumb TV. Read the rest

Last month, I published a post discussing the mountains of abandoned Bird Scooters piling up in city impound lots, and the rise of $30 Chinese conversion kits that let you buy a scooter at auction, swap out the motherboard, and turn it into a personal scooter, untethered from the Bird company.In response, Bird sent us a legal threat of such absurdity that we are publishing it in full, along with a scorching response from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as a kind of celebration of truly world-class legal foolishness.In Bird's legal threat, they imply that by linking to a forum in which the existence of conversion kits was under discussion, I had violated the anti-trafficking clauses of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that limits the dissemination of "circumvention tools" that bypass access controls for copyrighted works -- for example, tools that let you extract the video from an encrypted DVD.First of all, talking about a place where people are talking about circumvention isn't circumvention or illegal “trafficking” in circumvention technology. The US Copyright Office -- which oversees the DMCA -- publishes a report every three years in which they extensively discuss the existence of circumvention methods. It's just not illegal to talk about circumvention technology.But the hits keep on coming: the conversion kits that I wrote about aren't even circumvention devices. The DMCA prohibits bypassing technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works, and prohibits trafficking in those technologies or technologies that bypass technological measures that prevent infringement. Read the rest

I really enjoyed these two interviews on the D&D Beyond channel with actors Deborah Ann Woll (True Blood, Daredevil) and Joe Manganiello (True Blood, Justice League, Magic Mike), both D&D fanatics. In Deborah's interview, she talks about how she got started in the hobby, what kind of characters she likes to play (fighters, surprisingly enough), and her thoughts on the current D&D renaissance. One interesting observation she makes about RPGs as a unique form of acting/theater: When a party saves a character or survives an ordeal, or otherwise experiences a dramatic moment, there's often an intense, visceral response from the players that she says she doesn't experience in any other type of acting. As an actor, she longs to evoke this kind of response in people, so that's one of the things that draws her to D&D.In the Joe Manganiello video, we get a tour of his E. Gary Gygax Memorial Dungeon (think: MTV Cribs for nerds) and hear about how he got back into the hobby after a long hiatus and how he went about converting his basement wine cellar into this enviable game space. The large dragon, beholder, and mind flayer sculptures are very cool. Joe also talks about the impact that D&D had on him as a kid and how he learned foundational skills in storytelling, world-building, and acting that he later employed as a professional actor. D&D was his gateway drug.In mid-December of 2018, Geek & Sundry announced a new D&D-themed show, coming in February, starring Deborah Woll. Read the rest

Here's a tidbit I came across in the excellent Book Curious newsletter:The Lilly Library Twitter account had some excellent words for the New Yorker headline describing the recent publication of a new Sylvia Plath story as "lost." In subsequent tweets, the Lilly's own Rebecca Baumann deftly navigated the line between pointing out erasures of the labor involved in libraries and archives, while encouraging researchers to continue looking for real discoveries.We're not sure how we feel about this story being described as "lost" when it's here in our collections, described in a finding aid, and accessible to anyone who wants to come see it. But we're happy it's being published! https://t.co/dqvA6HHMgX— IU Lilly Library (@IULillyLibrary) January 8, 2019 Read the rest

One of the premises of Big Data is that it can be "theory free": rather than starting with a hypothesis ("men at buffets eat more when women are present," "more people will click this button if I move it here," etc) and then gathering data to validate your guess, you just gather a ton of data and look for patterns in it.The thing is, patterns emerge in every large dataset, without necessarily being representative of a wider statistical truth. Think of the celebrated rise and fall of Google Flu: researchers examined the 45 search terms that were most prevalent where the flu had spread and concluded that these were predictors of flu, but the predictive power turned out to be an illusion. Every place has 45 top search terms, all the time, and some of them will coincide with flu outbreaks, but without a causal theory that you can test, all you know for sure is that you've found an incident of correlation, and no way to know whether the correlation is coincidence or a newly discovered iron law.Writing in Wired, Pomona College economist Gary Smith -- author of books on statistical malpractice like Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics and The AI Delusion -- runs down several examples of how theory-free data-mining got its practitioners in to trouble (including a celebrated Cornell professor who was forced to resign after telling his grad student to "Work hard, squeeze some blood out of this rock" by looking for patterns in a data-set about buffet eaters. Read the rest

"Ag-gag" laws -- which ban the collection of evidence of wrongdoing on farms, from animal cruelty to food-safety violations -- are a sterling example of how monopolism perpetuates itself by taking over the political process.As American agribusiness has grown ever-more concentrated -- while antitrust regulators looked the other way, embracing the Reagan-era doctrine of only punishing monopolies for raising prices and permitting every other kind of monopolistic abuse -- it has been able to collude, joining industry groups like ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which drafts industry-favoring "model legislation" and then lobbies state legislatures to adopt it.ALEC's contribution to Big Ag is the nationwide epidemic of "ag-gag" laws, which felonize the collection and disclosure of true facts of intense public interest. Ag-gag laws are plainly unconstitutional, but that hasn't stopped state authorities from prosecuting and imprisoning animal rights activists and food safety whistleblowers.Invalidating ag-gag laws is an expensive, state-by-state process, and activists and impact litigators have already overturned the laws of Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, and fifteen other states, and now they've just scored a victory in Iowa, after a victory in a lawsuit filed by the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI), Bailing Out Benji, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and the Center for Food Safety struck down the state's 2012 law.The court took notice of the legislative history of the ag-gag law, which was passed after evidence of extreme animal cruelty was published by activists. Read the rest

Jake the police dog was screening passengers boarding the Norwegian Epic cruise ship for the Holy Ship! EDM festival on the ocean. Jake alerted his police officer companion that he smelled something suspicious and then became visibly sick. "(The dog) started having some problems with balance and had some type of seizure incident of some sort, was showing effects of having inhaled some substance," Tod Goodyear, a Sheriff's Office spokesman, told WFTV. "They administered the Narcan and got (the dog) to the vet as quick as they could."They gave him Narcan as a precaution as they didn't know what caused the illness.Meanwhile, police searched the passenger and found "a sedative and other prescription drugs, as well as an amphetamine and Ecstasy," according to WFLA. It isn't clear what Jake ingested, when, or how. Most importantly though, Jake is expected to make a full recovery. Read the rest

Last month, he amazing architecture-snark criticism site McMansion Hell (previously) announced gingerbread house contest to create "the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMansion Hell!" The winners are nothing short of amazing (and delicious): first prize went to Casa de McGingerHell by Beth and Tina C.: "Located centrally and literally dominating the entire living room, this McGingerMansion features over twenty handcrafted stained glass windows, a double sized garage, and three hand laid rock face walls! This gingermansion also has not one, but two incredible water features including a delightful frozen waterfall in the spacious backyard. Boasting several pre-decorated pine trees surrounding the property, this festive gingermansion showcases several dozen strands of lights and as well as a handful of charming wreaths."From the moat, dome skylight, and lawyer foyer, to the rice crispy treat retaining wall, and chocolate rocks, this house, in the words of Caroline, was “truly next level.” The judges were blown away by the incredible attention to detail and clever use of different materials, specially the pretzel railing on the bridge, the marshmallow penguins, and we all freaked over those sugar glass and water elements. From the several different types of windows, bizarre massing, and three car garage, this house encapsulates the deranged opulence of McMansions in the sweetest way possible. 2018 McGingerbread Hell Competition Winners Read the rest

A bus driver in Milwaukee noticed a small toddler, alone and barefoot, running on a freeway overpass. She stops the bus, runs across the street and rescues the child. A passenger offers up her coat to keep the child warm until help arrives. UPDATE (9:28am pst) – According to CNN: The video was shot December 22. "The child went missing after officials believe her mother had a mental health crisis, the transit system statement said." The 19-month-old child has since been returned to her father.Via AP Read the rest

Jonathan "Song A Day" Mann (previously) writes, "On 1/1/19 I hit ten full years of writing a song a day. Part of the idea behind my Song A Day project has always been to find the 'good' songs in that pile (10 years = 3,652 songs) and come back to them to rework until they're great. With that as my aim, I spent the last two years working on a new album, I Used To Love My Body which I just released. It deals with themes of: Adulthood, forgiveness and what it feels like to live in this moment of imminent societal collapse."I Used To Love My Body by Jonathan Mann Read the rest

Lisa Rein writes, "there is a big event going on tonight at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco on this Sixth Anniversary of Aaron’s tragic death; with a Q & A, followed by DJs, history and art till 2am." Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Sydney Li and Bennett Cyphers explain how to stop people tracking you through email. Read-receipt beacons and other trickery abounds....third-party email tracking technologies will try to share and correlate your email address across different emails that you open, and even across different websites that you visit, further shaping your invisible online profile. And since people often access their email from different devices, email address leaks allow trackers (and often network observers) to correlate your identity across devices.It doesn’t have to be that way.The nutshell: it's not enough to block remote images in the client anymore. But you're probably not even doing that. For many, many of you, here's the first step: Read the rest

The power is in the polygons. Read the rest

I was surprised to learn today that I've never posted the ad for Big Bill Hell's used cars in Baltimore. The omission is hereby rectified.Previously in Baltimore:Man shouts 'Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!' in Baltimore theater during 'Fiddler on the Roof'Previously in Cleveland: Read the rest

Known as a "living fossil," the coelacanth is an order of fish thought to have been extinct for 65 million years until one was caught in 1938 in a fisherman's net off the coast of South Africa and identified by museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. This wonderful paper animation tells the story of the curious creature and its rediscovery.(hhmi BioInteractive via The Kid Should See This) Read the rest

On Fox News tonight, unofficial Trump spokesperson and noted racist Lou Dobbs went full fascist. Lou Dobbs said on tonight's broadcast that President Donald Trump has to "declare a national emergency, and simply sweep aside the recalcitrant left in this country," because "They have obstructed, resisted and subverted for far too long."LOU DOBBS (HOST): In all seriousness here, you said that you would prefer -- you implied, at least, you would prefer he not declare a national emergency. I think it's the only way forward here. He is -- otherwise, there's not going to be a solution....But I really believe that the way forward here is for him to declare a national emergency, and simply sweep aside the recalcitrant left in this country. They have -- They have obstructed, resisted and subverted for far too long.“A solution.” Is that your FINAL solution, Lou Dobbs?Full segment video, via Media Matters for America (MMFA): Dobbs: Trump should "declare a national emergency, and simply sweep aside the recalcitrant left in this country" pic.twitter.com/7b548v2V8Q— Brendan Karet 🚮 (@bad_takes) January 11, 2019Trump says "the real collusion" is "the fake news" and Democrats both calling the situation at the border "a manufactured crisis" pic.twitter.com/afYLtqOgV7— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 11, 2019In single clip, Trump:1. Lies about "new" Dems saying "we can't win this battle with Trump"2. Threatens to declare nat'l emergency if he can't strike deal w/Congress3. Says: "You know what works? A wheel & a wall"3. Read the rest

Investors accuse Alphabet's board of directors of failing their duties.

Yes, it's a soulless, grotesque question. But it's all about money, and investors are wondering if Jeff Bezos getting divorced means they're gonna lose money.Shares in Amazon inc “seesawed” on Thursday as questions swirled around Jeff Bezos's impending divorce, and any potential effect on his control of Wall Street's most valuable company, which is expanding like crazy around the U.S.From Reuters:Bezos, whom Forbes lists as the world’s richest person, worth an estimated $136.2 billion, said via Twitter on Wednesday that he and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie, will divorce. Amazon shares were down 0.5 percent in afternoon trading on Thursday, after gaining earlier in the session.The split throws into question how the couple will split their fortune, which includes an approximately 16 percent ownership stake in Amazon’s roughly $811.4 billion market capitalization. Divorce laws in Washington state, where they live, hold that property acquired during a marriage is generally divided equally between spouses.Most analysts and fund managers are largely sanguine and say the divorce will not lead to any significant change in the company’s leadership or its growth prospects.Prominent short-seller Doug Kass, however, who runs hedge fund Seabreeze Partners, said he sold his stake in Amazon on news of the divorce. That was after initially buying a stake in late December and naming Amazon among his “best ideas list.”“Is it premature to ask what happens to Amazon when Jeff Bezos chooses to turn over the day-to-day running of the company he founded?” he said. Read the rest

At Jefferson K-8 School in Warren, Ohio, school police officer Adam Chinchik noticed that a car kept parking in the no-parking zone between two disabled spaces in front of the school. Turns out that it was the school principal's car. Chinchik apparently warned the principal and then finally issued a citation. "Within one hour (of the citation), the superintendent had ordered two administrators to go to Jefferson and escort the SRO off the property," Warren police union spokesperson Michael Stabile told WCMH-TV. (In defense of the principal), a school spokesperson said the district employee moved the vehicle when asked.Chinchik may be assigned as a resource officer at a different school."At this point, he doesn't want to go back to that school because of how the situation unfolded," Stabile said. Read the rest

More than a decade of foot-dragging on fiber rollout has left millions of Americans dependent on taxpayer-funded copper-line infrastructure for landlines and DSL, but it's not like the carriers are plowing their no-fiber savings into copper maintenance, instead, as a report released by Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson details, incumbent telcos are literally leaving their infrastructure to rot: wires are draped across customers' lawns (and over their propane tanks!), boxes containing key network gear are left smashed and rusting, and carriers' poles and other furniture are literally propped up with 2x4s, or have random logs placed against their wires to hold them in place.Swanson's investigation follows alarm-bells raised by the unionized telco maintenance staff and customers, who have filed more than 1,000 complaints against Frontier, Minnesota's incumbent carrier.The neglect is takes place in an environment of deregulation prompted by the rise of VoIP services, which gave the carriers and the FCC the excuse they needed to allow the telcos to self-regulate their copper-line infrastructure. One problem is that internet voice and VOIP services became more common in the early aughts, the nation’s phone companies used this surge in voice competition to convince both state and federal lawmakers meaningful oversight was no longer necessary. Now, for every state like Minnesota, there’s countless states that do little to nothing about this dysfunction.The result are companies that can’t even technically offer even the FCC’s base definition of “broadband” (25 Mbps), yet often charge the same or higher prices users in more developed areas pay for gigabit (1000 Mbps) broadband. Read the rest

Anna Abraham literally wrote the book on creativity and the brain. The Leeds Beckett University psychology professor is the author of a new textbook titled The Neuroscience of Creativity. From an interview with Abraham by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman in Scientific American:SBK: Why does the myth of the “creative right brain” still persist? Is there any truth at all to this myth?AA: Like most persistent myths, even if some seed of truth was associated with the initial development of the idea, the claim so stated amounts to a lazy generalization and is incorrect. The brain’s right hemisphere is not a separate organ whose workings can be regarded in isolation from that of the left hemisphere in most human beings. It is also incorrect to conclude that the left brain is uncreative. In fact even the earliest scholars who explored the brain lateralization in relation to creativity emphasized the importance of both hemispheres. Indeed this is what was held to be unique about creativity compared to other highly lateralized psychological functions. In an era which saw the uncovering of the dominant involvement of one hemisphere over the other for many functions, and the left hemisphere received preeminent status for its crucial role in complex functions like language, a push against the tide by emphasizing the need to also recognize the importance of the right hemisphere for complex functions like creativity somehow got translated over time into the only ‘creative right brain’ meme. It is the sort of thing that routinely happens when crafting accessible sound bites to convey scientific findings. Read the rest

Week Eleven for The Bureau has you returning back to the office. The HR Video Terminal has a few exit questions, as this will be your last day. While you're completing that, be sure to plug on a Brain Machine and get the Gysin DM spinning.

A cow born with just one eye and no real nose was recently born in Bardhaman, West Bengal, India. According to, er, The Sun, a local source said that "Ever since the calf was born, the people have crowded to see it. They are now considering it to be a miracle of God and have started worshipping it. The cow had been discarded by its mother and the women are feeding the cow. The people think that worshipping the cow is going to bring luck and prosperity to the family of whoever worships it."The animal appears to suffer from cyclopia, a rare "congenital disorder (birth defect) characterized by the failure of the embryonic prosencephalon to properly divide the orbits of the eye into two cavities. Its incidence is 1 in 16,000 in born animals and 1 in 250 in embryos," according to the Brain Catalogue. Read the rest

I had this Battleship game as a kid in the early 70s and remember thinking the cover illustration was weird. It showed Dad and Junior having the time of their lives playing the game as Mom and Lil Sis watch the action while scrubbing dishes and smiling approvingly at the menfolk's pleasure. Why did Milton Bradley feel the need to show the mother and daughter in the illustration? Eventually, the game company replaced the illo with a photo of a boy and girl playing the game.Over at HiLoBrow, Lynn Peril writes about this Battlefield cover, putting it into context with many other ads of the era that depicted "girls and women sitting on the sidelines while they watched boys and men doing things."Sometimes a girl watched her brother do things, like play the organ, shoot a pellet gun inside the house, or blow up an incredibly phallic balloon. Sometimes, as in a very odd ad that appeared in a 19__ issue of Boy’s Life, a girl watches a boy who watches birds while holding a typewriter on his lap. Something about her mild leer suggests he is not her brother....If girls and women played games and sports with boys and men, the consensus opinion of most dating experts was that nothing killed a budding relationship faster than performing better than one’s date (assuming, as always in the mid-twentieth century, that everyone either was a cis-gendered heterosexual or aspired to be). “This is definitely not the time to put on an exhibition or give him a lesson, no matter how good you are,” advised Datebook’s Complete Guide to Dating (1960) in a chapter on “Active Sports Dates. Read the rest

Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot was some important TV viewing for younger me.I woke up today with the theme music from Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot in my head. I could not find my set of DVDs, and YouTube was very little help. Luckily both Amazon and iTunes offer it, in the US anyways.I am now watching Johnny and Jerry escape from the Gargoyle Gang. Read the rest