A man in Germany asked Amazon to send him the audio recordings of his Alexa activities, and Amazon complied with the request, giving him a bonus: a link to 1,700 recordings from a stranger. When he told Amazon about it, Amazon didn't reply, but deleted the files from the link. Too late - the man had already downloaded the audio files. He then shared the files with a German magazine. They listened to the audio recordings of the man and his female companion and were able to figure out who he was and they told him what had happened. After the magazine ran the story, Amazon suddenly became chatty:“This was an unfortunate case of human error and an isolated incident. We have resolved the issue with the two customers involved and have taken steps to further improve our processes. We were also in touch on a precautionary basis with the relevant regulatory authorities.”[via Washington Post]Image: Photocollege using Shutterstock/pianodiaphragm and Cryteria - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link Read the rest

Slack banned many ethnically Iranian users today, even those who don't live there and have no current connections with the country or its institutions. The Verge's Russell Brandom reports:“In order to comply with export control and economic sanctions laws…Slack prohibits unauthorized use of its products and services in certain sanctioned countries,” the notice from Slack read. “We’ve identified your team/account as originating from one of these countries and are closing the account effective immediately.” Users received no warning, and had no time to create archives or otherwise back up data.It appears Slack simply deactivated the accounts of people they decided were Iranian, with visits to the country (tracked by IP logins) among the suspected internal rationales. It's a very 2018 big-tech implementation of the regulations, and I hope Slack pays dearly for its blithely and incompetently racist interpretation of them.Many Iranian ex-pats see the company’s interpretation of sanctions as overly broad, going far beyond the actual restrictions put in place by the US government. “They are either incompetent at OFAC interpretation or racist,” said Oxford researcher Mahsa Alimardani, who specializes in communication tools in Iran. Read the rest

Yesterday, we learned that Facebook granted extraordinary user-data access to a handful of blue-chip companies, including Amazon.As a consequence, veteran Gizmodo reporter Kashmir Hill thinks that she may have finally solved a riddle that has nagged at her: why was Amazon wrongfully banning readers from reviewing books after falsely claiming that they knew the authors of the books they reviewed?Hill describes how, in 2015, a reader named Imy Santiago had a book review blocked because Amazon said she'd "violated its policies" because her "account activity indicates you know the author personally."But Santiago didn't know the author: the closest she'd come to meeting her was attending a party in New York that the author was present at, though even then, they'd never met. Hill thinks that Amazon might have been mining things like Facebook location check-ins and event attendance confirmations to blacklist reviewers. She asked Amazon about this and they were characteristically unhelpful.If Amazon was sucking up data from Facebook about who knew whom, it may explain why Santiago’s review was blocked. Because Santiago had followed the author on Facebook, Amazon or its algorithms would see her name and contact information as being connected to the author there, according to the Times. Facebook reportedly didn’t let users know this data-sharing was happening nor get their consent, so Santiago, as well as the author presumably, wouldn’t have known this had happened.Amazon declined to tell the New York Times about its data-sharing deal with Facebook but “said it used the information appropriately.” I asked Amazon how it was using the data obtained from Facebook, and whether it used it to make connections like the one described by Santiago. Read the rest

Brian Kolfage is an Air Force veteran who lost both legs and an arm in Iraq in 2004. He is the most severely wounded Airman to survive any war and has spent the past several years as a motivational speaker and supporter of Cadet Bone Spurs aka Donald Trump. Yesterday, Kolfage launched a GoFundMe to pay for Trump's border wall. "We The People Will Fund The Wall" aims to raise one billion dollars. No, this is not The Onion.From GoFundMe: Like a majority of those American citizens who voted to elect President Donald J Trump, we voted for him to Make America Great Again. President Trump’s main campaign promise was to BUILD THE WALL. And as he’s followed through on just about every promise so far, this wall project needs to be completed still. As a veteran who has given so much, 3 limbs, I feel deeply invested to this nation to ensure future generations have everything we have today. Too many Americans have been murdered by illegal aliens and too many illegals are taking advantage of the United States taxpayers with no means of ever contributing to our society.I have grandparents who immigrated to America legally, they did it the correct way and it's time we uphold our laws and get this wall BUILT! It’s up to Americans to help out and pitch in to get this project rolling.Is there anything more 2018 than a veteran raising millions of dollars to fulfill the wet dream of a racist draft dodger? Read the rest

Fracking is grossly unprofitable: the fracking industry is losing hundreds of millions of dollars, but it claims to be profitable and august publications like the Wall Street Journal and Reuters repeat these claims as though they were true. How can this be?Partly, it's by cherry-picking which fracking sites the industry analyzes: some sites are designated as "low break-even," able to be quickly profitable because of their favorable locations and other factors. The industry likes to average out the expected returns from only getting gas from these "low break-evens," as though all their sites were ideal. But even low break-evens aren't profitable! The calculations on break-evens "exclude such key costs as land, overhead and even at times transportation."Partly, it's by pretending that oil costs a lot more than it does. Companies (and the press) describe their earnings in terms of what they'd make if crude hit a "benchmark price" like $70/barrel (it's $40 today). They're basically saying, "If our product was worth more, we'd be profitable, so we're calling ourselves profitable."Despite nine consecutive years of industry-wide unprofitability, the industry is increasing its output, thanks to loans from Wall Street, who are making a bet that they'll be able to make enough from fees, loan servicing payments and bankruptcy liquidations to make up for the fact that most of these loans will end in default.The explanation is pretty simple: Shale companies are not counting many of their operating expenses in the “break-even” calculations. Convenient for them, but highly misleading about the economics of fracking because factoring in the costs of running one of these companies often leads those so-called profits from the black and into the red. Read the rest

Airbnb has led to much of the rental housing stock in some of the world's most expensive cities being turned into unlicensed hotel rooms, driving up both rents and house prices even further.Opponents of regulatory approaches to fix this often say that Airbnb's contribution to inflation in housing costs and values is negligible, and/or that any benefits from curbs on Airbnb would be canceled by other forces that are driving up housing costs.But LA County provides a natural lab for evaluating this claim: some of the cities within the county have limited Airbnb and others haven't, allowing a group of researchers to publish a study that found that limits on Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms does exactly what proponents of the rules promise they will: lowers the cost of rentals, and also the cools down property price bubbles.What can we say about the distributional and welfare effects of Airbnb regulation? Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we show that regulating Airbnb has stark distributional implications. A regulation implies losses for homeowners, which are substantial for individuals who live in areas popular with tourists. The opposite holds for households who typically rent, who can only gain from such a regulation. Given the average housing price in HSO cities and given our assumptions, this therefore implies an annual welfare loss due to HSOs of about $680 per property. The intuition for such a substantial loss is that the investors’ willingness to pay is much higher than the willingness of the incumbent households being priced out of the market. Read the rest

Applied mathematics/computer science student Etienne Jacob makes mesmerizing black-and-white animated GIFs using Processing, "a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code within the context of the visual arts." You can see much more of Jacob's stunning work on his Necessary Disorder site and read Jacob's tutorials here on his blog.Far fucking out.(via Colossal) Read the rest

Josh Dzieza's deeply reported story on the dirty tricks used by Amazon's third-party sellers to beat their rivals is an outstanding read, and an important contribution to the debate about how automated systems that police user conduct fail at scale.For many years, Amazon has balanced on a knife-edge between encouraging more third-party sellers (allowing sellers to fulfill direct from China, allowing sellers to send inventory to Amazon's warehouses for direct shipping, etc) and policing those sellers to weed out counterfeits and scams.But every time Amazon creates a new zero-tolerance crime that can get sellers kicked off the platform, it also creates a weapon that other sellers can use to get rid of their rivals. Once, sellers rose in Amazon's search-ranking by paying people on Fiverr to write five-star reviews of their products. Today, sellers rise in the ranks by paying Fiverr jobbers to write five-star reviews of their rival's products, which gets the rivals booted off of Amazon.There are so many shenanigans that Amazon sellers use to hurt their rivals. One interesting maneuver involves defrauding the US Patent and Trademark Office: if you show Amazon that you own a trademark, they'll give you an expedited process to boot people off the platform who violate that mark. But the US Patent and Trademark Office (incredibly) does not require any authentication to change the email address associated with a trademark, so scammers simply steal the trademark, get the real sellers kicked off of Amazon, and then market their counterfeits in place of the legitimate goods. Read the rest

Cat furniture maker Jackson Cunningham was banned for life from Airbnb, and the company wouldn't tell him why. In his essay, he compares his experience to the nightmarish Black Mirror episode, White Christmas.Here's an email that Airbnb sent Jackson:Dear Jackson,We regret to inform you that we’ll be unable to support your account moving forward, and have exercised our discretion under our Terms of Service to disable your account(s). This decision is irreversible and will affect any duplicated or future accounts.Please understand that we are not obligated to provide an explanation for the action taken against your account. Furthermore, we are not liable to you in any way with respect to disabling or canceling your account. Airbnb reserves the right to make the final determination with respect to such matters, and this decision will not be reversed.Jackson followed up with Airbnb customer support and received the following reply:Hi Jackson,Please understand that we are not obligated to provide an explanation for the action taken against your account. Additionally, we consider this matter closed and will no longer reply to any inquiries regarding your account.Jackson decided to try to find out why he was banned. As far as he can tell, it was because he wrote a review of one of his stays on Google, and Airbnb only allows reviews on its own platform.His conclusion:The part that’s especially poetic to me is that AirBnB touts a firm brand message of community and connectedness with their “Belong Anywhere” campaigns but the frightening reality is that any individual user is completely disposable, without a shred of appeal to due process... Read the rest

Police are on the hunt for the owners of disruptive drones that have shut down London's Gatwick Airport for nearly 20 hours, preventing flights from taking off and landing. And these aren't your usual off-the-shelf drones, either. Police describe them as "industrial specification" drones, meaning they are "something bigger or more complex," according to CNN. This is Gatwick's busiest time, with over 100,000 passengers stranded until the drone operators are located. But locating them hasn't been easy. Via CNN:"Each time we believe we get close to the operator, the drone disappears; when we look to reopen the airfield, the drone reappears," Sussex Police Superintendent Justin Burtenshaw told the UK's Press Association...Aviation expert Jon Parker told CNN he'd "seen nothing on this scale before," in terms of deliberate disruption by a drone to a major UK airport.Usually, an airport shuts down for only half an hour when a drone disrupts an airport, but this case is different."The usual practice (when a drone is spotted) is to suspend flights for half-an-hour, which is the usual battery lifespan for drones," explained Parker, a former Royal Airforce fighter pilot and head of drone training company Flyby Technology.But in the case of Gatwick, "whoever is responsible for this has had several batteries and have brought their drones back to the ground to put new batteries on them," he said. Passengers describe the scene at Gatwick as "total chaos" and "utter shambles." Passengers stranded at Gatwick in the early hours of Thursday described "total chaos" inside the terminal, with flights suspended and little information from staff. Read the rest

This is "Woodstock Al #6," a strange and fascinating DIY cassette of covers by an unidentified artist. In 2000, a fellow named Jim Fletcher sent the cassette to legendary WFMU personality and music historian Irwin Chusid. From Mei Clover who posted the audio to YouTube for posterity:This is a tape filled with strange, distorded guitar noodling, barely audible vocals, out-of-rhythym drums, and songs just barely recognisable to what they're supposed to be. You've never heard something like this before. The identity of Woodstock Al is unknown, and the tapes Woodstock Al 1-5 are still lost. Because these tracks are just barely recognisable, here is the track list.1. Communication Breakdown2. Purple Haze3. Sunshine Of Your Love4. Light My Fire5. Manic Depression6. Hello, I Love You7. Cocaine8. One Way Out9. Every Day I Have The Blues10. I Don't Live Today11. You Got Me Floatin'12. Paranoid13. Sweet Child 'O Mine Read the rest

The latest explainer video from Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell examines what it would take to actually build a crazy cool idea conceived by Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson - a photovoltaic shell (or, less ambitiously, a satellite swarm of mirrors that focus the star's energy to a collector) that envelops a star in order to capture its energy. Read the rest

The debates about screen time and kids are really confused: the studies have contradictory findings, and the ones that find negative outcomes in kids who spend a lot of time on their screens struggle to figure out the cause-and-effect relationship (are depressed kids using screens more because that's how they get help, or do kids become depressed if they use their screen a lot?).It's obvious that not all screen time is created equal: games aren't social media, social media isn't Youtube. What's more, even within categories like "games," not all usage is equal: some people play group games with far-flung friends as a social, networked activity, integrating small talk about their troubles and supporting each other. Others just scream obscenities at strangers over team-speak while shooting at other strangers.So the screen-time debate should really focus not on "time" but on "time spent": what are you doing with your screen, and why? I once invited the eminent social scientist Mimi Ito (previously) to present on her work studying how young people use networked devices (she ran the MacArthur Digital Youth Project, the largest-ever study of young peoples' use of technology), and one of the audience members asked "What are Ipads doing to kids' brains?"Mimi's answer went something like this: "We probably won't know the answer to that until those kids are adults and we can study large groups of them. By that time, Ipads will be long gone, replaced by something else, that will have a different effect on kids' brains, so whatever we learn from those studies still won't tell us much that's useful for guiding kids' use of technology."Not that researchers can't or shouldn't do the hard work of untangling those associations. Read the rest

A group of academics from economics, business, and policy schools at Kenyon, MSU, Susquehanna and Tufts performed a series of ingenious experiments to determine how much typical Facebook users value the service, by getting experimental subjects to participate in sealed-bid auctions for payments in exchange for quitting the service.They found that "the average Facebook user would require more than $1000 to deactivate their account for one year." Multiply this by Facebook's user-base, and you get figures that vastly exceed Facebook's market capitalization -- the market has priced Facebook at about $250/user, giving the company a $542B market-cap.The authors conclude that this means that Facebook's users enjoy the majority of the value generated by Facebook: "This reinforces the idea that the vast majority of benefits of new inventions go not to the inventors but to the users [43]. Further, our results provide evidence that online services can provide tremendous value to society even if their contribution to GDP is minimal."But though their methodology looks good to me (they published it in PLOS One, a top-ranked journal), I think the conclusion is misguided.Facebook's value derives from the likelihood that a person you want to talk to is a FB user. When I deleted my FB account in 2006 or so, I was motivated by logging into the service after months of ignoring it and finding literally thousands of friend requests. I realized that for thousands of people, the fact that I was a FB user contributed to the amount of value they placed in FB. Read the rest

By Issie Lapowsky's count, Facebook had 21 major scandals in 2018. This feels low to me. Wasn't it more like 21,000,000? (2018 was a hell of a year).She's arranged her master list in chronological order, starting with February ("Special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of Russian trolls reveals the role Facebook played in Russia's plot—and so much more") and ending in December ("Another Times investigation finds Facebook shared lots of personal user data with large companies").Perhaps next year, Facebook will oblige us with 25 scandals in time for December 1 and we can make an advent calendar out 'em.December 2018: Facebook's internal communications go public through a lawsuit over a defunct bikini appIn 2015, the developer of an app that allowed people to find Facebook users' bathing suit photos sued Facebook in California for damages. The app, which was called Pikinis and was developed by a company called Six4Three, was forced to shut down because Facebook had changed its privacy settings, prohibiting app developers from hoovering up their users' friends data without their knowledge, and therefore making Pikinis inoperable. The lawsuit was going along quietly until Thanksgiving weekend, when lawmakers in the UK seized a trove of documents that had been ordered sealed in California from Pikinis' creator. In December, British parliamentarians published 250 pages worth of internal Facebook emails and other files, including personal emails from Zuckerberg himself. The emails appeared to show Facebook offering major advertisers special access to user data, deals some view as a contravention of Facebook's promise not to sell data. Read the rest

Blue Seat Studios' Tea Consent explains the idea of sexual consent through the act of offering someone a cup of tea: it's OK to offer someone a cup of tea, but if they don't want it, then don't try to give it to them. And if they change their mind after you make them a cup of tea? That's annoying, but still, don't try to make them drink it. And unconscious people? They don't need a cup of tea. (via Kottke) Read the rest

Enjoy this completely perfect keytar made from a Commodore 64. The pickups send sound via an FPGA to the original SID chip to allow a variety of chiptastic effects, applied using the computer's keyboard. Read the rest

Visitors to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, who thought they were on an NBC Studio Tour, got a big surprise when the elevator stopped on the wrong floor. Both Jimmy Fallon and Michelle Obama were waiting for the doors to open to play comedic bits on the unsuspecting tourists. Hot-cha! Read the rest

Did you know... Jeff Goldblum plays jazz with the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra weekly at an L.A. club called Rockwell (road trip!)? And that, at the age of 66, he has released his debut album? Well, both of those are true. And, during the week of Thanksgiving, that new album of his -- The Capitol Studios Sessions -- got 10 Goldblums out of a possible 10 Goldblums on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart. Rolling Stone: His weekly gig... is hardly a vanity project — “If I’m not out of town doing something, I’m there every week” — but the 66-year-old actor has taken the idea to its logical, if odd, conclusion: his debut album that recreates the Rockwell vibe in a studio with a live audience.Bolstered by guest vocalists Haley Reinhart, Imelda May and Sarah Silverman alongside trumpeter Till Bronner, Goldblum’s The Capitol Studios Sessions — which hit Number One on Billboard’s Jazz Albums chart — blends standards (Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island,” Charles Mingus’ “Nostalgia in Times Square”) with the actor’s goofy, whimsical crowd banter. Imagine if Tom Waits’ Nighthawks at the Diner swapped a rumpled shirt and newsboy cap for a tuxedo with tails for a start.Here's a taste:(I ask you: Could he be any cooler?)Rolling Stone's Jason Newman interviewed the silver fox about his 50-year musical journey and it's a great read.(RED) Read the rest

On Wednesday night, in a "deliberate act of disruption" (but not "a terror attack") someone flew a drone of "industrial specification" into the airspace of London Gatwick airport, the city's second-busiest, causing all flights in and out of the airport to be suspended; the disruption has affected 760 flights carrying 110,000 passengers (so far) and the ripple effect is expected to last for "several days."Gatwick was caught flat-footed, and was unable to provide comfortable accommodation for those stuck in the airport overnight; passengers reported sleeping on the floor in freezing terminals. Other passengers were held in planes on the tarmac for several hours, unable to debark. Passengers who tried to leave the airport reported that the coaches that were promised to take them never materialised.Citing the risk from stray shot, airport police chose not shoot down the drone.Gatwick chief operating officer Chris Woodroofe said: "The police are looking for the operator and that is the way to disable the drone."He said police had not wanted to shoot the devices down because of the risk from stray bullets.He said it remained unsafe to reopen the airport after the drone had been spotted too close to the runway.Mr Woodroofe said: "If we were to reopen today we will first repatriate passengers who are in the wrong place which could take several days."Gatwick Airport: Drones ground flights [BBC] Read the rest

Kevin McCallister (played by Macaulay Culkin, of course) is no longer a boy but has been left home alone again in the same house he was back in the early 1990s. The difference? This time the house is controlled by voice-activated devices so he's able to get stuff done without lifting a finger by talking to Google Assistant. It's a cute advertisement but remember, ya filthy animal, that EFF has put "creepy, surveillant" devices like the ones featured in the video on the don't-buy list. Personal side note: My awesome cousin James was the art director on this!Thanks, Andy! Read the rest

John Sylvan, the Keurig engineer who invented the K-Cup pod coffee system in the 1990s, regrets his mistake. It was intended for the corporate service market and the idea that people have these things in their homes leaves him "absolutely mystified."He says he doesn't begrudge the company for its success, or for wanting to make money, but he does question consumers' slavish devotion to the things. The company's latest product, the Keurig 2.0, which allows users to use pods to make larger cups and pots of coffee, is a great example of that."I stopped when I was walking in the grocery store aisle and I said, 'What is that?'" Sylvan recalls. "I picked it up and looked at it and said, 'You have to be kidding me.' Now they want you to make a pot of coffee with a Keurig machine."I switched to a Nespresso Essenza Mini [Amazon] a while back and it tastes much better. You can send in your pods to be recycled by Nespresso. It's "espresso", mind you, not "coffee". If you want coffee, just get an Aeropress, for Christ's sake.Previously: The worst K-Cup coffee Read the rest

Hacked EU cables released this week warn that Russia may already have nuclear weapons in Crimea. The private diplomatic messages describe annexed area of Ukraine as a ‘hot zone,’ and Donald Trump as a ‘bully.’You can read them here in PDF.“The cables include extensive reports by European diplomats of Russia’s moves to undermine Ukraine, including a warning on Feb. 8 that Crimea, which Moscow annexed four years ago, had been turned into a “hot zone where nuclear warheads might have already been deployed,” reports the NYT. U.S. officials say the haven't seen evidence.From the New York Times' original report:The techniques that the hackers deployed over a three-year period resembled those long used by an elite unit of China’s People’s Liberation Army. The cables were copied from the secure network and posted to an open internet site that the hackers set up in the course of their attack, according to Area 1, the firm that discovered the breach.Area 1 made more than 1,100 of the hacked European Union cables available to The New York Times. The White House National Security Council did not have an immediate comment on Tuesday.(...)Unlike WikiLeaks in 2010 or the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic Party leaders in 2016, the cyberattack on the European Union made no effort to publish the stolen material. Instead, it was a matter of pure espionage, said one former senior intelligence official familiar with the issue who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Read the rest

This New Year's Day, for the first time in 21 years, new works will enter the public domain in America: the Class of 2019 was all creating in 1923, and has been locked in copyright for 96 years.When Disney successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright by 20 years in 1998, it stopped the clock on the public domain. 20 years ago, everything from 1922 became public. The next year, and the year after, and every year until 2019, nothing else entered the public domain.As Glenn Fleishman writes in Smithsonian, the result is a weirdly skewed public perception of the 1920s. 1922 was the year "the world broke in two," in the words of Willa Cather. It was the year of Ulysses, The Wasteland and Harlem Shadows. Those works have been ours to use and change and copy and play with for 20 years. The works from the next year -- Robert Frost's "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening," Conan Doyle's "Our American Adventure," Willis Richardson's "The Chip Woman’s Fortune," have been locked away and languishing, waiting for Jan 1, 2019.If this pleases you as much as it does me, and you happen to be near San Francisco on January 25, please join me, Larry Lessig, Creative Commons and the Internet Archive for A Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain.Fleishman adds, "I wrote a parody of one of the 1923 works, Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," as a side project The bit about "fifty-one" refers to the fact that the poem's copyright may have been improperly renewed in 1951, thus leaving it in the public domain for the last 67 years — even as the Frost estate and publishers have rigorously defended it (as noted in the article), including in Eldred v. Read the rest

Welcome back to The Bureau.The Bureau is a complete soundtrack of a nine hour day at your job, beginning at 8:55am. Each music track is paired with a comic book panel. If new to story, a few highlights from the first seven installments:A Buzzing Supply Cabinet at 9:19An Introduction to Your Job Responsibilities at 10:32A Peaceful Napkin Dispenser at 11:26A Bold Clarinet Performance at 11:47Revelry at 12:38Rainfall at 1:27Psychic Brain Attack at 2:25Today: A Helicopter Ride at 3:42Here's today's playlist:View all Bureau installmentsTO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK (Wednesday, December 26, 4:08pm) Read the rest

This week’s tabloids have climbed into their DeLorean, sped up to 88 mph, and raced back to the future to report on scandals that won’t actually happen until next week.The British Royal Family doesn't gather at Sandringham Palace until Christmas Eve, yet days before this festive conclave, the Globe gleefully reports on a clash that almost kills the Queen on Christmas Day. “Queen, 92, Collapses – As Meghan Starts All-Out Family War!” screams the Globe cover.A battle reportedly erupted as Britain’s most famous real-life soap stars sat down to watch British TV’s most beloved soap opera EastEnders – an unlikely Royal tradition beloved by the Queen – which is set to air on Christmas Day at 9:15 p.m. “It was a recipe for disaster,” reports the Globe, whose crack squad of psychic reporters have been working overtime looking into the future.Meghan was so bored by the TV show (which, I’ll point out again, has not yet screened) that she began to walk out, when sister-in-law Kate whispered to her to remain. “Meghan went crazy!” reports the magazine, which redundantly tags its exclusive “Only in Globe!” She allegedly yelled: “Don’t tell me what to do!”The Queen rose from her armchair to intervene in the “bitter catfight” when Her Majesty “suddenly collapsed, falling backwards, dizzy and pale," say unnamed sources who clearly possess very powerful crystal balls, as told to journalists with balls made of even stronger stuff. Says an insider: “It’s Meghan’s fault!”How has the Globe psychic reporting squad seen so far into the future, with such accuracy that they can quote verbatim from the Royal argument set to take place in several days time? Read the rest

Amazon is offering the LEGO Star Wars Porg for $55, which usually sells for $70.I am not a Porg fan, but my nephew thinks they are the pretty hot. He also loves that yellow Pikachu, whom I find silly. I told nephew that I was making Porg for Thanksgiving, he was horrified.We do both love LEGO, tho. He is a real master, and I am sending him this Porg for the holidays. I don't have to like them.Porg are like Gen2 Ewoks without blatant "we eat humans."LEGO Star Wars Porg 75230 Building Kit via Amazon Read the rest

Ever since I accidentally bought a huge bag of dried nettle leaves on Amazon, I've been having nettle tea at least once a day for the last year. I have a lot of different tea steepers, but my favorite is this one from Bodum. The reason is simple - the mesh is made from nylon, and the leaves rinse right off. That's not true for stainless steel mesh strainers, and I no longer use them, because it is not easy to clean them. This one (which comes with a nice mug) is the one I always use, unless someone else in the house is already using it, which is often because people drink a lot of tea around here. Read the rest

This PopSocket has the image of a Viewmaster Reel on the back of it, so as not to scare the older folk.I have written about how my kid and her associates are all Coo-Coo-for-Cocoa-Puffs over their PopSockets. Every new case requires a new PopSocket.Strangely, I want this PopSocket. I am going to put it on my Trapper Keeper tablet case, however.Viewmaster Reel - PopSockets Grip and Stand for Phones and Tablets via Amazon Read the rest

It seems that we can't have nice, unhacked things. According to Gizmodo, someone has hacked NASA's personnel database to gain access to social security numbers and other personal information of the space agency's staff. News of the security breach was only disseminated via memo to NASA's employees on December 18th, despite the fact that the agency became aware of the hack back on October 23rd.From Gizmodo:According to the memo, NASA is working with federal investigators to determine the extent of the breach and who might be responsible. It said that servers were accessed that contained the personal information of employees that worked at the agency between July 2006 and October 2018. The message was sent to inform employees to take the necessary precautions to prevent possible identity theft. It seems that investigators still haven’t narrowed down the employees who may have been effected, however the agency promised to notify individuals as that information becomes available.When contacted for comment by Gizmodo, a NASA spokesperson could not say exactly how many employees’ information was potentially exposed, but they did confirm that the agency “does not believe that any agency missions were jeopardized by the intrusions.”If anyone knows who's responsible for the hack, they're keeping their mouths shut about it. Hacking's so hot right now -- the breach could have been pulled off by anyone from a code-savvy lone-acting lady at a coffee shop to a high-falootin' government sponsored collective in Eastern Europe. Also, China. It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, is done with information that was obtained during the hack. Read the rest

This guy made a video about his train ride using first class Amtrak service between Boston and Washington DC. It took seven hours. By way of comparison, the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto takes two hours and twenty minutes and the distance is about the same. The first class waiting lounge is "run down." There's no reserved seating and the seats are beat-up. The boarding process is "pretty chaotic." The food is not great either (Dunkin' Donuts coffee?). At one point cops came on the train with a sniffer dog."What an incredibly depressing example of the sad state of rail service in the United States," says Herman of Doobybrain. Read the rest

The first time Diana Rowland decorated her lawn with inflatable dragons, a gift from her husband, it was on Halloween. The holiday decor was a success. But this year, when she dressed them up in garland and Santa hats and set them out as Christmas dragons, the holiday decor was suddenly offensive. She got a letter from an anonymous neighbor who wondered if Rowland was in a demonic cult, and asked Rowland to please take them down.“YOUR DRAGON DISPLAY IS ONLY MARGINALLY ACCEPTABLE AT HALLOWEEN. IT IS TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE AT CHRISTMAS. IT MAKES YOUR NEIGHBORS WONDER IF YOU ARE INVOLVED IN A DEMONIC CULT. PLEASE CONSIDER REMOVING THE DRAGONS. MAY GOD BLESS YOU AND HELP YOU TO KNOW THE TRUE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS.”Our dragon holiday display got fan mail! (And apparently the "true meaning of Christmas" involves judgmental bullshit?) 😂 pic.twitter.com/7NLZKkEW2x— Diana Rowland (@dianarowland) December 15, 2018So, rather than get bullied by a judgmental neighbor who is too cowardly to state who they are, Rowland did what any happy mutant would do: she added more dragons to her holiday collection.An update to yesterday's tweet re the letter I received from an anonymous, judgy-mcjudgyface neighbor who disapproved of my dragon display and asked me to consider removing them: I have added more dragons. pic.twitter.com/OxsFQs5yQ1— Diana Rowland (@dianarowland) December 16, 2018According to The Washington Post:The story of Rowland’s decision — admirable defiance to some, pettiness to others — has apparently struck a nerve.The tweet was viewed millions of times, retweeted and commented on until it drew headlines as far away as countries like Germany, France, and Mexico. Read the rest

This ultra-high resolution panoramic photo was taken from a tower in Shanghai. You can zoom in and see details from far away areas. Incredible! Read the rest

Take one helmet; mount eye-facing UV LEDs in rim; insert UV-reacting contacts, voila!Caution: shining UV lights into your eyes for extended times will seriously injure you.The helmet is the work of Kiwi cosplayer Kyle Simpson, who warns: "If you wear this for an extended period of time—for example you go to a convention for three days and you have it pumping the whole time—you’re probably going to have problems. So just be responsible and stay safe."This Cosplayer Made a Helmet That Makes Your Eyes Glow Like Thor [Kaleigh Rogers/Motherboard] Read the rest

Cha is the Japanese word for tea, and kombu is a type of seaweed. Real kombucha is seaweed tea and this video takes you to Japan’s Rishiri Island, source of high quality kombu.From Great Big Story:Sorry to shatter the illusion, but that expensive, bottled kombucha iced tea you’ve been drinking isn’t anything close to the authentic stuff—and, believe us, you’re missing out. Come along as we travel to Japan’s Rishiri Island and meet Chiharu Hirakawa, a shop owner and master of creating the real-deal drink. Located off the coast of Hokkaido, the remote island is famous for its locally-harvested kombu seaweed. Hirakawa uses the kombu, after it has been dried and powdered, to create traditional kombucha tea. Read the rest

Why waste paper, tape and ribbons to wrap gifts when you can just use fabric, or furoshiki cloth? Furoshiki is the art of wrapping something in fabric, and it's also the word used for the cloth itself. In Japan you can buy "furoshiki cloth," but really you can use any square or rectangle piece of fabric you have lying around. From Lifehacker: The word furoshiki (風呂敷) refers to the craft in addition to the cloth itself, which is usually decorated with a colorful design. It roughly translates to “bath (furo) spread (shiki)” because the cloths were originally used to carry items to the public bath house and then used as a kind of bath mat. Nowadays, it’s just a clever way to wrap up and carry bottles, food, gifts, and other items.Here are more furoshiki 101 videos to check out: Read the rest

Champ, the lake monster that reportedly lives in Lake Champlain, may soon appear on Vermont license plates. Representative Dylan Giambatista (D-Essex Junction) introduced legislation to create the plate to raise money for the state's clean water fund and raise awareness about water conservation. From WCAX:"For me, it involves thinking out of the box about how are we gonna fund our challenges," (Giambista says). One way we could do it is to offer a license plate. I would call it a 'Be a Champ' water license plate..."The bill creates a conservation plate -- several styles already exist that feature deer and loon. But Giambatista says it could also be a special issue plate. like the Vermont Strong ones issued after Tropical Storm Irene that helped raise a million dollars for recovery efforts."We would want to put Champ on it because we want folks to be a water champ and to focus the conversation about water quality in this state. We gotta go to what people know, so let's start with a beloved figure like Champ. Let's get the conversation started and let's raise money for a good cause," Giambatista said. Read the rest

In 1994, Disney trademarked the use of the phrase "hakuna matata" on clothing, footwear, and headgear. The common Swahili phrase, meaning "no trouble," was the name of a song in Disney's movie The Lion King. Now, a petition for Disney to give up the copyright, has more than 50,000 signatures. (Zimbabwean activist Shelton) Mpala told CNN he started the petition "to draw attention to the appropriation of African culture and the importance of protecting our heritage, identity and culture from being exploited for financial gain by third parties. This plundered artwork serves to enrich or benefit these museums and corporations and not the creators or people it's derived from."(image: a selection of goods from Alibaba.com) Read the rest

When Tumblr announced its plan to purge "female-presenting nipples from its service, the volunteer Archive Team leapt into action, working furiously to preserve years of material before Tumblr tore a huge whole in the internet's historical record.This week, as parent company Verizon was massively writing down its value, Tumblr went through with its purge, relying on its notoriously terrible automated filters to wield the flamethrower.Throughout Archive Team's labors, they were hounded by Tumblr, who IP-blocked the team's members as they worked, with mass blocks taking place over the weekend during the final push. Still, archivists have been able to save at least some of Tumblr. According to a real-time tracker for Archive Team’s Tumblr Warrior project, archivists have preserved more than 320,000 Tumblrs from the site, totalling more than 46 terabytes of data.Though we don’t know for sure why Tumblr is banning archivists, some people Motherboard spoke to have theories: Ernie Smith, a technology journalist who ran his website ShortFormBlog on Tumblr for four years (and regularly contributes to Motherboard), told me that he suspects it’s a matter of tons of people taxing the Tumblr servers at once.“Archival activity functions not all that dissimilar to a DDOS attack, in that both involve a whole lot of server polling all at once,” he told me in a Twitter message. If this is the case, giving users two weeks’ notice to panic-download the data surely didn’t help the situation. Archivists Say Tumblr IP Banned Them For Trying to Preserve Adult Content [Samantha Cole/Motherboard] Read the rest

A man only identified as Peng, 37, from Zhangzhou, China, was admitted to the hospital with chest pains and coughing bouts. He eventually confessed to being a dirty sock sniffer. He reportedly jonesed for the stink of his own hosiery and the daily practice led to a fungal infection in his lungs. From Science Alert:...While it's difficult to prove his strange habit was the definite source of his chest infection, doctors concluded it was the most reasonable explanation – exacerbated by a lack of sleep that may have compromised his immunity."The infection could also be attributed to the patient's lack of rest at home as he had [been] looking after his child, leading to a weaker immune system," one of his doctors, Mai Zhuanying from Zhangzhou's 909 Hospital, explained to Pear Video.Once the infection was diagnosed, Peng was hospitalised and treated for the condition. Fortunately, the sock-sniffer is expected to make a full recovery.Asked by Live Science to comment on the case, Vanderbilt University infectious disease expert William Schaffner says the news report seems "dubious" but certainly not impossible. In any case, he says, it "reinforces the notion that one ought to launder ones socks frequently rather than trying to make a daily assessment as to whether you want to put them on again for the seventeeth time." Read the rest

Designed by Jon Gray and available for pre-order next week (ISBN: 9780441007462): Gibson loves it.Neuromancer is getting a new cover in North America. It’s by gray318 and I love it. pic.twitter.com/9xAZhiTJQd— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) December 18, 2018 Read the rest

Gmail's text-message two-factor authentication is not only insufficiently secure, but "bypassed at scale", reports Joseph Cox. A new Amnesty International report gives more insight into how some hackers break into Gmail and Yahoo accounts at scale, even those with two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled.They do this by automating the entire process, with a phishing page not only asking a victim for their password, but triggering a 2FA code that is sent to the target’s phone. That code is also phished, and then entered into the legitimate site so the hacker can login and steal the account.I use Authy. Read the rest

The intrepid and brilliant artist and journalist Molly Crabapple (previously) traveled to the immigration detention centers of the Rio Grande and interviewed and sketched the people she met there. Crabapple's report is wrenching, a vision of "daily cruelty and heartache" where children are no longer ripped from their parents, but instead, families are imprisoned in frigid, bare-concrete cells called "hieleras" (iceboxes), denied medical care (including care for ill children), and humiliated and abused.This alphabet soup of agencies does not make it easy for the media or anyone else to witness the detention centers and courtrooms that “process” the humans who cross the border. Officers withheld information from me about rules for visiting facilities, and presented elaborate, shifting requirements for access. On my first day reporting, I had permission to visit the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, where detainees work in the cafeteria and scrub toilets for $1 a day (a can of coke at the commissary costs $1.75). Port Isabel’s record of human rights complaints stretches back years; in 2010, inmates launched hunger strikes over medical neglect and the lack of legal aid, and a former guard wrote a memoir detailing the facility’s history of corruption and abuse, comparing it to Guantanamo Bay.When a friend drove me up the unpaved detour road and past the barbed wire fences to the gate at Port Isabel, the guard said my friend wasn’t even allowed to drop me off since her name wasn’t on the list. Nor could I walk. Read the rest

Photographer unknown. (via r/mildlyinteresting) Read the rest

Facebook is a model of offering incredible, nuanced privacy protections to its users, allowing them to configure exactly how much of their data they want to share and how they want it to be used -- Facebook offers these protections, it just doesn't deliver them. Every Facebook privacy setting seems to be an empty checkbox, not hooked up to anything that alters its data-collection.Aleksandra Korolova took several steps to tell Facebook not to track her location: she turned off Facebook's access to her Iphone's location data in the relevant Ios control panel, and cleared and switched off "Location History." She does not list her city in her Facebook profile and does not post photos. She turned off location access and declined to state a location for Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. She doesn't tag her location in Facebook posts and doesn't check in to locations when she gets there.But Korolova still sees ads for businesses near her home and work, and the places she travels to, which are labeled as being shown to her because she was "recently near their business."Korolova cares about this stuff in part because she's a researcher who published a paper that showed that stalkers can use Facebook's ad-location services to track people to areas as specific as a single house. Based on Facebook's marketing materials for advertisers, Korolova thinks they're deriving her location from her IP address, cell-site data, nearby wifi networks and Bluetooth spotting.The possible harms of not giving users meaningful controls about their location data are amplified by the tools Facebook provides to advertisers to target people based on their location. Read the rest

Instagrammers are posting things crafted to look like ads and sponsored posts, giving the impression they are paid-up influencers when they are not. A decade ago, shilling products to your fans may have been seen as selling out. Now it’s a sign of success. “People know how much influencers charge now, and that payday is nothing to shake a stick at,” said Alyssa Vingan Klein, the editor in chief of Fashionista, a fashion-news website. “If someone who is 20 years old watching YouTube or Instagram sees these people traveling with brands, promoting brands, I don’t see why they wouldn’t do everything they could to get in on that.”Of course, getting caught means instahumiliation. But even that has its own weird cred, these days.Not all just copy-and-paste from real campaigns. It's mesmerizing, the grasp some of them have on the precise visual and textual vocabulary of the "sponsored post", uncannily bridging authenticity and advertising in a way that fools no-one but would satisfy the client. A client who does not exist, in this case—and may even be cease-and-desisting the instagrammer to cut it out.This post brought to you by Pan Am, America's Airline To The World. Read the rest

On December 18, 1997, comedian Chris Farley died of a drug overdose. He was just 33. Some 21 years later, his buddy Adam Sandler has written and performed a sweet, though sad, tribute song in the late comedian's honor as part of his new Netflix special Adam Sandler: 100% Fresh.screenshot via SNL/YouTube Read the rest

Tommy Lee Jones does ads for Boss Coffee's Rainbow Mountain brand of iced coffee, most of which feature him as a fish-out-of-water immigrant observing and enjoying Japanese life, taking odd jobs (cab driver, train station guard, astronaut, etc) and occasionally using his magical powers. It's like a series of clips from an early-90s science fiction show set in a parralel universe. Which it is. Read the rest

A 90lb SentrySafe can be opened with a circular saw; you just saw it in half. While obviously not as bad as a safe that can be opened by stabbing a paperclip into it, the feat is accomplished quickly, with no skill whatsoever (a Skil is used, mind you) and demostrates that it's just a box made of very thin metal and some heat insulation. Read the rest