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Last month, an Australian Fortnite player who streamed himself attacking his wife off-screen while his screaming children watched was charged with assault and banned from Amazon-owned Twitch. But after only two weeks, the service has restored Luke Munday's account and is profiting from his newfound notoriety.Twitch and Munday and Munday’s attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast. Munday, who goes by “MrDeadMoth” on Twitch, was a small-time streamer until the night of Dec. 9. That’s when his pregnant girlfriend, unhappy that he had missed dinner with his family, asked him to stop playing Fortnite and chatting with his Twitch fans.Angered, Munday went off-screen, but kept the camera running. After Munday left the stream, a slapping sound could be heard on the video, while his girlfriend cried and their two children, both toddlers, were heard screaming.There are three stages to how tech platforms keep their racist, sexist, criminal celebrities afloat in the face of criticism.1. Smiling and promising to do better.2. Smiling, teeth clenched, silently, like the creepy Fassbender robot from the new Alien movies.3. Mask-off distinterest in criticism, trending toward open hostility.Welcome to 2, Twitch! (YouTube's been at 3 since the Pewd N-bomb.)UPDATE: He's been rebanned, reports The Verge. Read the rest

In the year 1987, at the John F. Kennedy Space Center, NASA launched the last of America's deep space probes. The payload, perched on the nose cone of the massive rocket, was a one-man exploration vessel - Ranger 3. Aboard this compact starship, a lone astronaut - Captain William "Buck" Rogers - was to experience cosmic forces beyond all comprehension. An awesome brush with death: in the blink of an eye, his life support systems were frozen by temperatures beyond imagination. Ranger 3 was blown out of its planned trajectory into an orbit a thousand times more vast, an orbit which was to return the ship full circle to his point of origin - its mother Earth - not in 5 months, but in 500 years.I highly recommend you read Philip Francis Nolan's Armageddon 2419 A.D. Read the rest

Blessed with an abundance of National Park attractions right in the midst of their metropolis, San Francisco leaders have decided not to let garbage pile up.SF Examiner shares:Trash has been piling up at San Francisco landmarks run by the National Park Service during the federal government shutdown, but city officials are now stepping in to pick up some of the slack.Public Works started trash collection Wednesday at Lands End, which is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, picking up piles of refuse that had built up near garbage cans since the shutdown started Dec. 22.Now, Public Works officials told the San Francisco Examiner, they’ll also pick up trash at Aquatic Park.The focus will be on servicing public garbage cans and the areas immediately around them “that we can immediately access,” said Rachel Gordon, a spokesperson for Public Works.That means city staff won’t be making any long hikes through Lands End for pickups any time soon, but the department is asking people to remember to “pack it in, and pack it out,” to help play a part in keeping the parks safe and clean.“We’re stepping in because it’s still part of San Francisco,” Gordon said. “We want a good experience for our visitors and residents there.”Pictured is Muir Beach, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Volunteers have been picking up garbage in the GGNRA, but traffic in and out becomes a nightmare due to the lack of signage, narrow roads, locked parking lots, and lack of space for the many, many disappointed visitors to turn around. Read the rest

The Marriott hotel chain today said that a smaller number of customers were affected by a recent hack than initially estimated, but admitted that the hackers got customer passport numbers. The hotel chain said in a statement early Friday that the number of guests involved in the data breach is lower than the original estimate of 500 million, but declined to say how many were in fact affected.Security analysts are warning those affected that the passport data could be used to perpetrate more sophisticated forms of attack, including foreign intelligence surveillance, and could enable perpetrators to mine deeper information about each of the breach victims. From the Wall Street Journal: Marriott International Inc. said fewer customers were affected in a massive data breach than initially feared but confirmed that hackers had compromised the passport numbers of millions of people in what security analysts have described as a potential foreign-intelligence gold mine.Marriott, the world’s largest hotel company, disclosed in November that a hack in the reservation database for its Starwood properties may have exposed the personal information of up to 500 million guests.Marriott said a total of about 383 million records was “the upper limit” for the number potentially compromised in the incident. That figure includes passport numbers, email addresses and payment-card data of some guests, the company said. Marriott said that in many instances, there appear to be multiple records for the same guest, meaning that it is unlikely 383 million people were affected.PHOTO: courtesy MARRIOTT HOTELS. Read the rest

Hackers have published a big dump of private data related to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and hundreds of other of the country's politicians, in what is said to be the biggest data dump of its kind ever in Germany. Only politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany were spared.First German MPs receive Twitter messages, asking them to admit their real sexual preferences.The hackers obtained pornographic material of them ...#BTleaks— Julian Röpcke (@JulianRoepcke) January 4, 2019The news was first reported by German broadcaster RBB (translated here, by Politico Europe) later confirmed by the BBC.The stolen private information leaked online includes credit card info, scans of official identification cards, email addresses, mobile phone numbers, physical addresses, banking transactions, and chat transcripts. The hackers even “very personal data” such as conversations with family members, RBB reported.The leak happened over the course of the last few weeks via an account on Twitter that identiies itself as based in Hamburg, and describes itself with the words “security researching,” “artist” and “satire & irony.”The news was first reported by German broadcaster RBB (translated here, by Politico Europe) later confirmed by the BBC.Said German Justice Minister Katarina Barley to BBC News, “The people behind this want to damage confidence in our democracy and institutions.”From Bloomberg:It looks like the hackers got the passwords to Facebook accounts and Twitter profiles and worked their way up from there, said Simon Hegelich, a political scientist at Munich’s Technical University who has studied the manipulation of social networks. Read the rest

NBC News reports that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and other top executives are super pissed at the New York Times over what they say are weeks of antagonistic coverage and an anti-Facebook bias. Dylan Byers reports that NYT ed-in-chief Dean Baquet's response is that Facebook is "a big company with unusual power.” Facebook can handle it. And Facebook deserves it.From NBC News:• The frustration was rekindled this week after the Times bought a sponsored post on Facebook to promote "a step-by-step guide to breaking up with" Facebook and Instagram — a move sources likened to Facebook taking out an ad in the Times encouraging readers to cancel their subscriptions.• The sponsored ad came after weeks of Times articles that cast Facebook as a reckless, data-hungry behemoth with little regard for user privacy or the integrity of American politics. These articles were aggressively promoted across the Times' social media accounts and in push notifications.• Facebook sources believe some of the paper's reporters willfully ignored nuances about how the internet works in order to cast Facebook in the worst-possible light, either because the paper is hell-bent on crippling the social media network or because it is gunning for a Pulitzer Prize.• Facebook spokesperson: "No comment."The View from the Times: Asked to respond to the criticism, Times executive editor Dean Baquet told me Facebook was "a big company with unusual power that finds itself in the middle of some of the largest issues of the day — privacy and political meddling."• As for the sponsored ad, Baquet said: "There is no connection between our coverage of Facebook and the company's business dealings with Facebook." Read the rest

Below is New Year's Eve video of Michael Minnillo, general manager of Yountville, California's legendary French Laundry restaurant attempting a dramatic saber opening of a $2,000 bottle of Billecart-Salmon brut. French Laundry disinfecting their kitchen floors for the new year with some questionable technique from r/wine(r/wine) Read the rest

This deck of 56 'Rider Back' Bicycle playing cards has blank faces.These come in handy for a number of magic tricks. The cards are printed on US Playing Card stock, and excepting the missing printed faces are identical to your regular deck of Bicycle 808 cards.Magic Makers Bicycle Blank Face Red Back Card Deck via Amazon Read the rest

I don't drink wine, but living in Northern California I still end up visiting wineries in Napa and Sonoma with friends and visitors. Next time we're headed on a wine tasting trip, I'm going to suggest we hit the spooky spots described in this Mysterious Universe guide to haunted California wineries, starting with this one:Sitting within the wine country of Sonoma, California is a winery called Bartholomew Park Winery, and it is imbued with quite a colorful past that perhaps makes it unsurprising that it should be haunted. In its days before putting out fine wines, Bartholomew Park Winery underwent several metamorphoses, being used at one time or another as a women’s prison, a hospital, and a morgue, before becoming a vineyard and winery in the 1830s, after which it was acquired by European immigrant Agoston Haraszthy, who also happens to have been the owner of the equally haunted Buena Vista Winery, which we’ll get to later. It then became the Hacienda Cellars winery, with the wine cellars being right there in the old hospital, going on to become the Sonoma Valley Wine Museum and then the Bartholomew Park Winery in 1992...This rather grim past came back to haunt the winery in the 1970s, perhaps literally, when the body of a former prisoner at the old prison was supposedly found buried within one of the walls of the establishment, and the main building and its basement are situated right atop what was once the morgue. Since the beginnings of the winery there have been tales of employees hearing disembodied voices singing or whispering, as well as moving objects, roving cold spots, footsteps when no one else is around, and the eerie sound of a piano playing. Read the rest

Released in 1998 by Tiger Electronics, more than 40 million Furbies were sold in its first three years of life. What made this bizarre animatronic toy so damn popular? At IEEE Spectrum, Allison Marsh looks at the engineering behind this pioneering social robot:The Furby’s source code was written by David Hampton and Wayne Schulz to run on a variation of the 6502 microprocessor, the 8-bit chip that powered the Apple II, Commodore 64, and BBC Micro. The source code is well documented, making it easy to follow regardless of your knowledge of assembly. After a computer programmer posted the source code online last August, one commenter on Hacker News praised it for being “surprisingly sophisticated.”But reading lines of code doesn’t equal the lived experience. In Hampton and Schulz’s comments on how the Furby’s voice pitch was controlled, for instance, they noted that the maximum range was “very squeeeeeke....”Fresh out of the box, a Furby speaks its native tongue of Furbish, an invented language that incorporates aspects of Thai, Mandarin, and Hebrew. It might say “Dah-ay-loh u-tye,” when it wakes up, which literally translates as “big light up,” but it is simply saying good morning. The vocabulary of the early Furbys included 42 words. Over time, as children played with their toy, its language ability seemingly evolved. In time, the Furby might start speaking English or 23 other languages, but this function was preprogrammed."Coded for Cuteness: How the Furby Conquered Hearts and Minds"Photo: Mark Richards/Computer History Museum Read the rest

This is only missing Max, the Bionic dog. Read the rest

The Washington Post reports that without legislation to continue a pay-cap it appears senior Trump officials including Vice-President Pence will receive pay raises.The raises appear to be an intended consequence of the shutdown: When lawmakers failed to pass bills on Dec. 21 to fund multiple federal agencies, they allowed an existing pay freeze to lapse. Congress enacted a law capping pay for top federal executives in 2013 and renewed it each year. The raises will occur because that cap will expire without legislative action by Saturday, allowing raises that have accumulated over those years but never took effect to kick in, starting with paychecks that will be issued next week.Cabinet secretaries, for example, would be entitled to a jump in annual salary from $199,700 to $210,700. Deputy secretaries would be entitled to a raise from $179,700 to $189,600. Others affected are under secretaries, deputy directors and other top administrators.The pay of Pence is scheduled to rise from $230,700 to $243,500.There was no immediate comment Friday by the White House. A spokesperson for Pence also did not immediately provide comment. Read the rest

A gentleman in Charlotte, North Carolina tried to push a woman into his car, but she got away and ran into a nearby karate studio. The would-be kidnapper chased her inside the dojo, and that's where he met his match. Or, rather, got his ass kicked.The head sensei, Randall Ephraim, said he was cleaning up at 9pm Thursday night when a woman rushed in, begging for help.He told CNN: "There were still some kids in the dojo being picked up by parents and a couple of adult students cleaning up when a young lady came through our doors and stated that someone was trying to harm her. Shortly afterward, a big male entered the building. Not knowing what he wanted, I assumed he was inquiring about classes. I asked how I could assist him and he stated that he was there for the lady. She insisted that she did not know him and tried to kidnap her."That's when Sensei Ephraim asked the man to leave. When the man became more aggressive, Ephraim did what head senseis do best – he made some moves and got the guy outside. "Once outside he attempted to attack again and was dealt with accordingly," Ephraim told CNN.The man was arrested and taken away on a stretcher to a hospital for injuries. View this post on Instagram #bushikenwarriors #thanksgivingclapback 2018A post shared by Sensei (@ephraimdojo_charlottenc) on Nov 24, 2018 at 10:39am PST Image: by Jjskarate. - Own work; Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.., CC BY-SA 3.0, Link Read the rest

I bought a six=pack of Gildan crew T-shirts to replace my ratty old ones. They're very inexpensive and comfortable. They're on sale right now, so I bought another six-pack of whites and a six-pack of blacks. Read the rest

The unrepeatability of the Fleischmann–Pons experiment in the 1980s soured the world on cold fusion as a possible energy source for decades, but recent fusion reactor breakthroughs seem to indicate that the world will soon have an abundant supply of cheap, clean energy.From Brian Bergstein's article on Medium Science:An Italian oil company and private investors — including a firm funded by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos — put at least $75 million into the company, known as Commonwealth Fusion Systems [CFS]. The startup intends to demonstrate the workings of fusion power by 2025.Real, live, economically viable power plants could then follow in the 2030s. No joke. When I ask Whyte, who is 54, to compare his level of optimism now to any other point in his career, he says, simply: “It is at the maximum.”But it’s not just MIT. At least 10 other startups also are trying new approaches to fusion power. All of them contend that it’s no longer a tantalizingly tricky science experiment, and is becoming a matter of engineering. If even just one of these ventures can pull it off, the energy source of the future is closer than it seems.“It’s remarkable,” says David Kingham, executive vice chairman of Tokamak Energy, a British company whose goal is to put fusion power on the grid by 2030. “The world has been waiting for fusion for a long time.”Image: By Robert Mumgaard - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link Read the rest

Neil Green made a useful chart of the 42 types of difficult people you are likely to encounter on a software development team. Each type is represented by an animal, and by clicking on the animal you can learn more about that type of person and how to deal with them. The Professor: A Designer so committed to the science and theory of user interface design, that they ignore the UI requirements coming from the stakeholders.The Hostage Taker: A Developer who has written a piece of mission-critical software, and refuses to let any other developer work on it so that they may remain indispensable.The Alarmist: A QA who has declared that the entire product is of an unacceptable level of quality based only on their first impressions.I think you can find many of these people on projects that don't involve software.[via Evil Mad Scientist] Read the rest

A graph from Credit Suisse/Forbes reveals that 0.7% of people on the planet own 46% of the world's wealth. That tiny percentage controls $128.7 trillion and they've done a good job convincing the 70% who own less than $10,000 that rich people deserve tax cuts.[via Visual Capitalist] Read the rest

Italian knife dealer Giacomo Giovannitti shows his skills using a Japanese chef's knife to cut transparent slices of tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, apples, and radishes.Image: YouTube Read the rest

Forbes publishes 300 stories a day, and is developing AI software that writes first drafts of articles. From Digiday:With Bertie, a contributor who writes regularly about the automobile industry might open up the tool to find the makings of an article about Tesla, complete with links to relevant, related articles published both on Forbes and elsewhere. The tool will surface images that might improve the story as well....Bertie adds Forbes to the list of publishers using artificial intelligence products to help drive editorial output. The Washington Post’s Heliograf tool, which generates short stories based on structured data about things like election results or Olympics events, has generated thousands of stories since it was introduced two years ago; Reuters’ Lynx Insights tool has been helping the business publisher crank out stories since March 2018, and the Associated Press is years into using AI to write stories on topics including company earnings and minor league sports.Hopefully Forbes will also develop AI to read these stories and click on the tooth implant adverts that accompany them. Read the rest

St. Petersburg, Florida. Facebook user TJ Biandudi posted a video he says was filmed by his mother and sister when they patronized a McDonald’s in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Monday. The footage shows a white man, whom the St. Petersburg Police Department identified as 40-year-old Daniel Willis Taylor, allegedly upset because he wanted a straw, grabbing a young black woman named Yasmine James, yanking her over the counter that separated the two, according to the police report obtained by The Root.If you want an idea of how these men think, note that the attacker thinks that she is going to get arrested: “I couldn’t control you,” he says. He was charged on two counts of battery, having also lashed out at another worker while leaving the restaurant. Read the rest

The threats to established networks are coming from all directions these days, which means any big company that can't invest in security isn't going stay that way long. Know a thing or two about covert code? Looking to put those skills to good use - both ethically and financially? The 2019 Ethical Hacker Master Class Bundle is a comprehensive course in cybersecurity.With over 180 hours of instruction and resources, this is a training program geared to get you on the staff of any network's defensive team. You'll get all you need for certification in CompTIA's A+ and Network+ programs, but the bundle goes beyond those IT infrastructure basics. You'll learn to analyze security threats both long and short-term, and if hackers do get in, you'll have the cyber-sleuthing tools you need to determine the source of the threat. From the attack and defense possibilities of Python to carrying out "white hat" test hacks, you'll be armed for the front lines of cyber-warfare in no time.The 2019 Ethical Hacker Master Class Bundle is now available for $39, a deep discount off the cost of the individual courses. Read the rest

I regret to inform you that Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is back on his inappropriate for a CEO tweets again.The two weird tweets were sandwiched between two other seemingly normal tweets about favorable coverage of Tesla, the electric car maker under earnings scrutiny in the new year.Why.Why, Elon.Here's what Elon's Thursday afternoon on Twitter looked like.• 2:31 PM - 3 Jan 2019: “Model 3 mid-range EPA rating is actually 264 miles, slightly higher than prior estimate of 260.”• 3:04 PM - 3 Jan 2019: “There are no coincidences.” Attached, a conspiracy meme about Neil Armstrong and aliens.• 3:06 PM - 3 Jan 2019: “Evian, the first bottled water, is naive spelled backwards.”• 3:23 PM - 3 Jan 2019: This day-old Forbes article, titled “Tesla Is Now America's Number One Premium Automotive Company, Outsells BMW, Lexus In Q4.”DO NOT BLAME WEED FOR ELON. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 4, 2019 Read the rest

Is 911 service down in your area? Got a complaint about your mobile provider? Just invented a new iphone-killer, and need safety approval before your product goes to market? Well, too bad, you'll have to wait. The Federal Communications Commission just went dark. All but the agency's most essential operations abruptly halted late Thursday because of Trump's government shutdown.Also today, Ajit Pai canceled his trip to CES, as Politico first reported. This will be the second year in a row FCC Chairman Pai hasn't appeared at the annual electronics event in Las Vegas.FCC posted advance warning about the pending closure. Most of the agency's activities will stop, and most staff furloughed, a notice on FCC.gov Wednesday explained.Also shut down for now: The FCC's review of that T-Mobile/Sprint merger, device testing (this affects startups and tech companies developing new tech gadgets), and FCC enforcement of consumer protection law. Consumer complaint/safety lines will also be down. From Wired's recap:The FCC will continue to auction off rights to use the wireless spectrum during the shutdown because those auctions are funded by the auctions themselves. That's good news for carriers eager to license new chunks of spectrum for 5G. But, depending on how long the shutdown lasts, mergers could be significantly delayed.A few extra days off won't meaningfully delay the agency's major decisions, says former FCC lawyer Gigi Sohn. But if the shutdown stretches into weeks, it will likely disrupt much of the agency’s work. FCC staff won't be allowed to read email or take meetings unless they're related to continuing activities like spectrum auctions, so staff will have a lot of catching up to do when they return to work. Read the rest

The censorship industry in China is big business.“My office is next to the big training room,” Mr. Yang said. “I often hear the surprised sounds of ‘Ah, ah, ah.’” China's censorship machine is so well oiled that young censors have to be taught what they were missing.This incredible New York Times feature by reporter Li Yuan offers an intimate peek inside a Chinese censorship factory, and shows how they train their young human censors -- and how technology supports their work.Snip:China has built the world’s most extensive and sophisticated online censorship system. It grew even stronger under President Xi Jinping, who wants the internet to play a greater role in strengthening the Communist Party’s hold on society. More content is considered sensitive. Punishments are getting more severe.Once circumspect about its controls, China now preaches a vision of a government-supervised internet that has surprising resonance in other countries. Even traditional bastions of free expression like Western Europe and the United States are considering their own digital limits. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube have said that they would hire thousands more people to better keep a handle on their content.Workers like Mr. Li show the extremes of that approach — one that controls what more than 800 million internet users in China see every day. Beyondsoft employs over 4,000 workers like Mr. Li at its content reviewing factories. That is up from about 200 in 2016. They review and censor content day and night.“We’re the Foxconn in the data industry,” said Mr. Read the rest

On Saturday night, Casper the Friendly Ghost attempted to rob a Ramada Inn in Wayne, New Jersey. According to police, the ghost jumped over the reception desk, pried open the cash drawer, and ran off with the dough. Eventually though, police determined that the ghost was not actually Casper, and not even a real specter, but rather a 59-year-old gentleman named Joseph Elder who was a guest staying at the hotel. ""... [Elder] attempted to conceal his identity with a Casper the ghost style bed sheet with holes cut out," the police said.(NBC New York) Read the rest

Directing airplanes to their gates could be a monotonous job, but not for this marshall at the Toronto Airport, who simultaneously motions to the taxiing plane while busting out the moves. Similar to sign spinners who have mastered their craft with elaborate spins and twirls, this marshall is definitely having fun with his job – as well as the giggling passengers who are watching the show. Read the rest

When on a picnic, I've been known to toss an apple core or banana peel into the woods. Turns out, even "organic litter" is a bad idea. From Mother Nature Network:...An apple core can take two months to decompose and a banana peel can take up to two years, by some reports. Although that's a mere blip compared to the estimated decomposition time for plastics — 20 years for a plastic bag, 200 years for a straw or 450 years for a plastic bottle — it's not like these food items will disintegrate quickly.After watching hikers toss a sandwich on a trail, Marjorie "Slim" Woodruff, who hikes and works in the Grand Canyon, set up a small experiment. She put an apple core, a banana peel, orange peels, chewing gum and tissue paper in a cage of chicken wire, wide enough to allow small animals to go in and out. After six months, the orange peels had dried out, the banana peel had turned black, the chewing gum was the same and the tissue had become a blob. Nothing had been eaten or had rotted.She buried the same items in sand and soil and six months later everything was still recognizable.Also, if animals do munch on your edible trash, that can interfere with their own natural foraging while also attracting them to potentially dangerous areas frequented by humans. Read the rest

Last week, private equity investor and adventurer Victor Vescovo became the first person to touch the deepest spot in the Atlantic Ocean, 27,480 feet down to the floor of the Puerto Rico Trench, in his custom $35 million Triton submersible, named the Limiting Factor. From Smithsonian:Vescovo has previously trekked to both the North and South Poles and climbed the highest mountain on each continent, including Mount Everest, a combo known as the “Explorer’s Grand Slam.” But that club is—relatively speaking—a little crowded, with more than 60 people having completed the feat. That’s one reason Vescovo decided to take to the water. The Puerto Rico Trench dive is the first leg of his latest challenge: to reach the lowest spot in each of the world's five oceans. He’s dubbed the feat, inaccessible to anyone without millions of dollars of resources, the “Five Deeps Expedition...."Through one lens, the trip can be seen as a vanity project for a rich explorer. However, as Ann Vanreusel, head of the research group Marine Biology of Ghent University, tells Erik Stokstad at Science, whatever the motive behind the expedition, it has true scientific value. “[T]here is not any funding agency that would be willing to spend so much money to visit all those areas,” she says.Indeed, Five Deeps is poised to produce some of the most accurate maps ever of the ocean’s deepest spots and unseen habitats and creatures, aided by the fact that Alan Jamieson, a marine ecologist at Newcastle University and one of the world’s leading experts on the ocean’s depths, is the science leader of the expedition. Read the rest

There is no better way to teach kids the improtance of saving than by having them stick fake $100 bills into a piggy bank. Read the rest

Wow, never saw that one coming. The print your own guns proponent is a creep.In Texas, '3D gun' guy Cody Wilson has been indicted on multiple counts of sexual assault against a minor.Wilson rose to national attention as a self-styled advocate of 3D-printed guns, with the entities "Ghost Gunner Inc" and "Defense Distributed." He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted, plus fines.The charges involve a female "child younger than 17 years of age" whom he is said to have solicited through the website SugarDaddyMeet.com.From reporting by Nathan Matisse at Ars Technica, who has been following the case in Austin, Texas:More than three months have passed since a warrant (PDF) initially went out for Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson's arrest. That document detailed Wilson's alleged sexual assault against a female "child younger than 17 years of age" whom he reportedly solicited through the website SugarDaddyMeet.com. Last Friday, December 28, the State of Texas finally formally indicted (PDF) Wilson. The 3D printed gun advocate now faces multiple charges: four counts of sexual assault of a child, two charges of indecency with a child by contact, and two charges of indecency with a child by exposure.These charges are all second-degree felonies punishable by up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $10,000.Wilson's two previously scheduled initial court appearances in November and December had each been pushed back, as often happens in cases still waiting on a formal indictment. This recent filing may make it more likely that the newest tentative date (scheduled for early February) will occur, meaning Wilson's team would need to finally appear at the Travis County Courthouse. Read the rest

The David Rumsey Map Collection shares an amazing collection of photographs and the history of this 42 by 38 foot WPA built wooden map of San Francisco. Visit their site for high quality images.I will be lost in these images for hours.Full collection here.For the first time since 1942, the entire immense 42 by 38 foot WPA built San Francisco Model can be seen assembled virtually. Digitally knitting together all 158 separate pieces with over 6,000 blocks gives the viewer a sense of the extraordinary accomplishment the model represents. Recently recovered after decades of dusty storage, the model has been cleaned and photographed by a dedicated team of individuals as part of the SFMOMA and San Francisco Public Library project called Public Knowledge: Take Part. The model pieces were expertly photographed by Beth LaBerge. David Rumsey created the large Composite image below of the 158 pieces, as well as the image and metadata database of all the images, which he hosts. Rumsey also georeferenced the large Composite image and placed it in Google Earth.Some details of the model's history: it is a 42 by 38 foot wooden replica of the city of San Francisco as it was in 1940 in 158 pieces at a scale of 1 inch to 100 feet. The pieces contain about 6,000 removable city blocks. The model was built by The Works Progress Administration in the late 1930's, under the New Deal. It was first displayed in sections in the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay in 1939. Read the rest

Rostislav Blaha created gridzzly, a simple single-page website where you pick the type of grid you want (lines, square, triangle, hex, dotted), set the size of the grid units and the weight of the line, then hit print. Voila! Custom gridded paper. Here's what I got:Good enough for government work. Read the rest

For decades, the WELL has rung in the new year with a weeks-long public discussion led by Jon Lebkowsky and Bruce Sterling (2018, 2017, 2016, 2014, 2012, 2010, 2007, 2005, etc).This year's contributors include Tiffany Lee Brown and James "New Aesthetic" Bridle (previously).As you might expect from such an august panel, they're off to quite a start. Sterling has continued his tradition of declaring different countries to epitomize the year: this year, it's Ukraine, in "the EU-Russia shatterbelt where the elderly village grannies, the last ones too poor to flee, are harvesting their turnips while getting randomly pounded by mortar fire" ... it's "typical of our times. It's the patient zero for the actual trouble. The prospects for real peace there are very slim. The prospects of that kind of offshored Violence Lite appearing elsewhere, those are high."Bridle, meanwhile, thinks the boasts of an upcoming "dark enlightenment" (or any other kind of enlightenment) are overblown, briefing instead for an upcoming entanglement: "weird, niche communities - antisocial media, distributed and federated services, truly decentralised ones as well as real urban anarchists - and they feel like different places totalk about power and agency, and formulate strategy." I do have one self-set task for the SoTW this year. What isthe forthcoming shape of the 2020sMoore's Law is dead, there'sno Singularity, the fix is in tech oligarchs of (take a breath) Google Apple Facebook Amazon Microsoft Baidu Alibaba Tencent NetflixSamsung. Read the rest

I'm an avid reader of Fred Wilson's email newsletter, A VC. Wilson is a VC who invested in Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, and Kickstarter. In one of his recent issues Wilson predicted a very likely scenario -- Trump making a deal to resign in exchange for a friends and family pardon, and Pence will be president:I believe that we will have a different President of the United States by the end of 2019. The catalyst for this change will be a devastating report issued by Robert Mueller that outlines a history of illegal activities by our President going back decades, including in his campaign for President.The House will react to Mueller’s report by voting to impeach the President. Which will set up a trial in the Senate. That trial will go so badly for the President that he will, like Nixon before him, negotiate a resignation that will lead to him and those close to him being pardoned for all actions, and Mike Pence will become the President of the United States sometime in 2019.I believe this drama will play out through most of 2019. I expect the Mueller report to be issued sometime in the late winter/early spring and I expect an impeachment vote by the House before the summer, leading to a trial in the Senate in the second half of the year.The drama in Washington will have serious impacts to the economy in the United States starting with our capital markets.Image: Gage Skidmore Read the rest

Mookkie is a pet bowl with built-in AI and a fisheye lens that keeps a close watch on your pets' dietary habits, and will generate detailed reports on how much food they are eating. It will close up if pet is eating too much or if a wild animal tries to eat the food.Via VentureBeat:Mookkie connects to a local network over Wi-Fi, and communicates with a smartphone companion app to notify you (or send a short video) when doggo’s about to munch. And like so many other “smart” products on the market these days, the AI-driven pet bowl works with voice assistants like the Google Assistant and Alexa. A series of simple commands is all you need to control the feed bowl’s latch, get the skinny on served meals, and order food when it’s running low.CEO Silvio Revelli says that Volta is targeting a $189 price point, and expects the AI-powered pet bowl to go on sale by the end of 2019 on the official Mookkie website. The plan is to let owners customize the colors and engrave their pet’s name. Read the rest

Latif Nasser is Director of Research for WNYC's Radiolab. He wrote a piece for Transom about how he comes up with story ideas for the show. He has an interesting "bag of tricks" to find stories and have lots on hand so that he doesn't panic under a deadline. The tricks include setting up dozens of Google Alerts on the names of interesting people, "juicy phrases" (such as “the human equivalent of”), and topics he finds fascinating (such as the "alford plea"). He signs up for lots of newsletters -- "The more obscure the field the better." (He recommends creating a separate email account for newsletters). He searches for oral histories on ArchiveGrid. He also talks to strangers -- on planes, in lines, "even wrong numbers." The piece includes many other tricks I didn't include here. Highly recommended!Image: Transom.org Read the rest

New York Times columnist and all-around unclassifiably interesting person Rob Walker has a book coming out in May called The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday. Rob also has an excellent newsletter also called The Art of Noticing Newsletter, and in the latest edition he writes about The Urban Weed Awards:Celebrate the Tallest Weed. I’m a big fan of artist Michael Pederson, who does all sorts of super-clever street/public interventions in Australia, under the name Miguel Marquez Outside. I really dig the latest project he’s posted: The Urban Weed Awards.As you can see: Here is an award plaque/ribbon for the “tallest weed” in some particular local.There’s a bit in The Art of Noticing about “annotating the world,” and this is a really charming variation on that idea. Pick something that’s generally regarded as residing somewhere between “not exciting” and “a nuisance.” The weed is a perfect example, but maybe cracked sidewalks or potholes or power lines or whatever you can come up with. Now look for superlatives: The deepest pothole; the most picturesque sidewalk crack, the most rococo power line arrangement.Come up with variations for suburban drives, office environments, or anywhere else. Dream up the criteria that makes it fun to identify the most notable examples of ordinary things. Find the tallest weed.Image: Miguel Marquez Outside Read the rest

Brazil's new president Jair Bolsonaro rode to power on a platform of racist and gendered discrimination, genocide for indigenous people, homophobia, torture apology, and the abolition of human rights; he owes his victory to political spamming and conspiracy theories spread on Facebook at Whatsapp.When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. On Bolsonaro's first day in office he unveiled a suite of legal attacks against racial, gender and gender-identity minorities that threaten to roll back the country to the days of the brutal military junta he once served.In case you have any doubt about whether Bolsonaro really owes his election to Facebook and Whatsapp, allow his hardcore supporters to remove that doubt: at his inauguration, Brazil's bootlickers and useful idiots gathered to chant "Facebook!" and "Whatsapp!".Um canto inédito em qualquer #PossePresidencial no Brasil: "WhatsApp, WhatsApp! Facebook, Facebook!" pic.twitter.com/m0C2fOdEze— JOTA (@JotaInfo) January 1, 2019Bruce Sterling: "It's gray, it's becalmed. It's not a fatal gloom, but it is a kind of learned-helplessness, a malaise and bewilderment. It's very much the attitude of people who sign onto Facebook 'cause they can't yet figure out any other way to live. They do that, because they must conform to the apparent need, despite their vague oxlike awareness that they're being spied on, tricked, and defrauded." Read the rest

In 2015, Mozilla announced that it would turn Thunderbird -- one of the last freestanding, cross-platform email clients -- into a freestanding, independent project, and in 2017, Thunderbird became a community-overseen project with institutional backing from Moz.It was an odd move at the time: the Snowden revelations and the news that Yahoo had provided the NSA with free access to user emails, along with the sputtering out of promising alternatives like Mailpile meant that there was huge, unmet demand for the stable, high-powered email clients that disappeared when Gmail and other webmails started to kill off the Eudoras of the world.Since then, the Thunderbird team has made real, if incremental progress in stabilizing the old Thunderbird code. I'm a hardcore, daily Thunderbird user, someone who lives in email (if you're thinking of sending me an IM of any kind in the hopes that I'll respond to it, think again: send me an email instead -- realtime communications are productivity killers for me), and I've been very glad of this progress (I just donated another $100 to the project).Now, Thunderbird has laid out its 2019 roadmap, and they're promising more of the same, and better, which is exactly what I was hoping for: more changes to increase the responsiveness of the UI (which has made real progress but has a lot of room for improvement), a UI/UX overhaul, and guidelines to make it easier for lots of people to contribute -- Thunderbird's eight full-time, paid contributors will grow to 14 in 2019, with volunteers and other free/open source contributions coming from the wider world. Read the rest

Get ghosted by Santa this year? Here's a tip: Once Christmas is over, it's ok to do a little materialistic self-care. To that end, here's one last sleigh ride through Boing Boing's best deals of 2018. We've got everything from pipes to tech to learning bundles, all at an extra discount for the new year. Just enter the code NEWYEAR2019 for an additional 19% off the final price for all this gear, sitewide.uTalk Language Education: Lifetime Subscription"Learn a new language" isn't as popular a new year's resolution as it should be. If only people knew it was this easy: uTalk boasts feedback from native-speaking voice artists and an interface that game-ifies the learning process with challenges and a progress tracker. A lifetime subscription to uTalk is on sale for $29.99 and lets you choose any six from over 130 languages on the app.UltraBright 500-Lumen Tactical Military Flashlight: 2-PackA true lifesaving piece of tech, these sturdy but lightweight torches illuminate out to 800 meters. With an adjustable zoom and three modes including an "SOS" flash setting, they're perfect for roadside emergencies or long outdoor treks. With storage case included, the UltraBright 500-Lumen Tactical Military Flashlight: 2-Pack comes in at $19.99 - an 80% discount.Ultimate Cisco Certification Super BundleConsidering a new career for the new year? This online bundle paves the way to certification in Cisco's networking systems, providing a firm foundation as part of any IT team. You'll learn to do much more than troubleshoot the big stacks - you'll be able to set up, maintain and handle security for the infrastructure that major companies depend on. Read the rest

This 8 year old is a lot more patient and creative than most adults I know. What a cool little kid-made short film.“My 8 year old daughter made a Stop-motion Lego movie hoping to post it on Legolife, but they don't post videos yet,” said IMGURian @dadwithtowel, who posted it on IMGUR with her enthusiastic permission instead. The entire short is below.My 8 year old daughter played with her lego Read the rest

Adam Savage keeps mining deeper and deeper strata of nerdly obsessions, with recent Tested projects including collaborating with other prop makers to create a spot-on ACES NASA astronaut suit for cosplay, building a 3D-printed hand cannon from Mortal Engines, and another pilgrimage to Middle Earth, aka Weta Workshop in New Zealand. And then there's this model-making masterpiece Adam has just revealed, a 1/2-scale build of the prop blimp used in Ridley Scott's 1982 flim, Blade Runner. Built by model maker Kayte Sabicer and Adam Savage (but mainly Kayte), the project took months to complete and an ungodly amount of fiddly labor. The results could not be more impressive. Read the rest

Welcome back to The Bureau. It’s the tenth installment, with two remaining installments until your day is complete. You've found your way to a bar, and it's a comfortable view of the train. You may have just died.

If you make your own espresso and want to pull shots that are always the same strength, this set of 2 shot glasses with markings for ounces, milliliters, teaspoons, and tablespoons might be what you're looking for. You can also use them to dose medication or mix cocktails. Read the rest

It isn't a dog movie! 1974's Benji is still a tear jerker.The theme song, "I Feel Love" was nominated for an Academy Award.The whole movie is on YouTube here. Read the rest

Over at EDGE.org, the must-read hub of intellectual inquiry and head-spinning science, Boing Boing pal and legendary book agent John Brockman is launching a new series of essays "from important third culture thinkers to address the empirically-driven and science related hot-button cultural issues of our time." First up is author George Dyson's "Childhood's End," a provocative riff on how the digital revolution has stripped much of our individual agency and that "to those seeking true intelligence, autonomy, and control among machines, the domain of analog computing, not digital computing, is the place to look." From EDGE:The spectacular success of digital computers in modeling real-world phenomena, encoded as algorithms with the results used as output to control something in the real world, has outshadowed very different ways that digital computers, and networks of digital computers, can be used. Algorithms and digital simulations have become so embedded in our culture and world view that we find it almost impossible to recognize that other forms of computation, without algorithms or digital models, effectively control much of the world.We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company (or maybe it’s the same company) builds a model of road traffic and allows us to access that model, or that yet another company builds a model of the social graph and allows us to join that model — for a price we are not quite told. Read the rest

In southern Italy today, a brazen highway robbery in which thieves used bulldozers to pry open an armored van on the road. Police say the thieves blocked the money-mobile off with two big vehicles on both sides, then ripped the doors off with the machine's giant digging jaws, then made off with at least 2 million euros, or $2.3 million in US dollars, in cash.Ammonta a più di due milioni il bottino di una #rapina a un #portavalori a #Bari ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/d42YaAUBc5— Sky tg24 (@SkyTG24) January 2, 2019From Reuters:The blue security van had left the city of Bari and was carrying pensions to be distributed in post offices in nearby Matera when it was blocked on the road by two lorries.Two diggers then tore open the vehicle, using their mechanical arms like can openers to gain access to the cash.The lorries were then set ablaze as the hooded thieves escaped with their loot in a waiting car. The three guards in the van were unharmed.Images and video below.Very well-planned armored car to heist. Armored cars can be a tough nut to crack -- unless you have a big enough hammer.https://t.co/lL3Hi6eb4L— Scott Stewart (@stick631) January 2, 2019Bari, assaltato con le ruspe: portavalori aperto come una scatoletta di tonno https://t.co/iYxDo8OKz6— Gazzetta di Modena (@gazzettamodena) January 2, 2019#Bari, spettacolare rapina ad un furgone portavalori sulla statale 96 barese. La banda ha bloccato la strada con 2 camion dati alle fiamme e poi ha sventrato il mezzo con una ruspa. Read the rest

A gentleman stylishly dressed from head to toe in identity-concealing attire found a bicycle parked at a police station. The bicycle did not belong to him, and it was locked, but the man wished to take the bike for himself so he went to work on the lock with a bolt cutter. A few seconds later, a police officer emerged from the station and arrested the chagrined lad. Read the rest

Reminiscent of Trump's infamous remark that undocumented Mexicans coming into the United States were rapists and criminals, conservative writer Star Parker told hosts on Fox and Friends that people needing government assistance are watching porn. “These guys are not working, they’re watching. They’re watching porn, they’re watching TV, they’re watching women, they’re watching everything.”And it's because these people are "watchers," as she refers to them, that she agrees with Trump's plan on stricter "SNAP" rules, which would make it more difficult for struggling Americans to receive food stamps.Fox host Ainsley Earhardt understands completely. “It’s not to hurt them. It’s to actually make them self-sufficient, so they can contribute to society and actually help themselves,” she says, as if talking about a child or dog that needs training. “As we make benefits available to those who truly need them, we must also encourage participants to take proactive steps toward self-sufficiency. Moving people to work is common-sense policy, particularly at a time when the unemployment rate is at a generational low.” Read the rest