Boing Boing

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

Sources "familiar with Ring's practices" have told The Intercept that the company -- a division of Amazon that makes streaming cameras designed to be mounted inside and outside your home -- stores the video feeds from its customers' homes in unencrypted format and allows staff around the world to have essentially unfettered access to these videos.Of particular note is a team of Ukrainian researchers who are charged with improving the product's facial recognition tools as part of the company's push to turn Ring doorbells into a private surveillance grid that conducts continuous streetwide surveillance and alerts homeowners of undesirable strangers near their homes (Ring's description of this program omits any mention of facial recognition, but leaked internal images clearly show facial recognition in action).Since 2016, this team has had "virtually unfettered" access to every Ring customers' camera videos, which are stored in Amazon's S3 cloud without encryption.In the USA, a broad group of engineers and executives are able to call up any customer's videos with no access controls, merely by searching on the customer's email address. The Intercept's source claims that Ring employees used this to spy on each others' romantic evenings, teasing each other about the people they'd brought home and exposed to a Ring camera.Storing data in the clear means that a single unethical employee -- or security failure -- could expose every Ring customer in the world to privacy breaches. Granting broad internal access to this video significantly increases the likelihood of a breach. Read the rest

I have a few different LED headlamps, but after reading the reviews for this one, I decided to add it to my collection. It features a band of LEDs that throw light in a wide area in front of you. It uses 3 AAA batteries and has an easy on-off touch sensor switch. It's on sale today at a good discount. Read the rest

A golden age of blackmail began in 1996, when the US Patent and Trademark Office created extremely generous criteria for when software could be patented, allowing every shitty grifter to register a patent for $SOMETHING_OBVIOUS (with a computer) -- thanks to the USPTO's laid-back approach to searching prior art, several people could patent the same obvious thing.That was the first shoe dropping: big corporations, patenting everything under the sun. The other shoe dropped when grifters and scumbags started amassing huge portfolios of with-a-computer patents, then began to shake down every kind of American enterprise -- from municipal bus services to streaming college lecturers to fax-machine-users to podcasters and beyond -- for violating these garbage patents. Billions of dollars were sucked out of the productive economy and funneled into secret, numbered, offshore accounts whose owners were often never disclosed.Then along came Alice: the 2014 Supreme Court ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank, which gutted "with-a-computer" patents and threatened to euthanize every software patent troll at the stroke of a pen.There was only one snag: the judges of the Federal Circuit -- who, for reasons best understood by them, love patent trolls -- kept ignoring Alice, forcing the victims of patent trolls to repeatedly go to the Supreme Court to get the Federal Circuit judge to uphold the law.Now, Trump's Patent Office is issuing new guidance that all but undoes Alice and reasserts the Federal Circuit's troll-friendly doctrine, taking patent trolls off life-support and teeing them up to once again begin draining $29 billion/year from actual business, making actual things that actual people need. Read the rest

Kent C. Dodds, who works to makes software development more accessible, tweeted: "You 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 it's 𝒸𝓊𝓉ℯ to 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 your tweets and usernames 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖜𝖆𝖞. But have you 𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙 to what it 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 with assistive technologies like 𝓥𝓸𝓲𝓬𝓮𝓞𝓿𝓮𝓻?"Listen to what that sounds like with text-to-speech software:You 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 it's 𝒸𝓊𝓉ℯ to 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 your tweets and usernames 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖜𝖆𝖞. But have you 𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙 to what it 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 with assistive technologies like 𝓥𝓸𝓲𝓬𝓮𝓞𝓿𝓮𝓻? pic.twitter.com/CywCf1b3Lm— Kent C. Dodds (@kentcdodds) January 9, 2019 Read the rest

Kevin McMahon of Longmont, Colorado received a year's probation for harassing and threatening a Hispanic family swimming in a pool in their apartment complex, where McMahon also resided. McMahon called the family wetbacks and told them, “When Trump builds the wall, they are gonna need to know how to swim back home.” Police say McMahon also told the family he was going back to his apartment to get a gun, and he returned with something wrapped in a towel that looked like a gun.In an affidavit, McMahon insisted he never said "gun."From New York Post:McMahon — who was swimming with his granddaughter at the time — also claimed that the family misheard him, claiming that he said he was headed back to his apartment to get more rum rather than a gun.“And rum sounds like gun, so I could see how they might think that,” McMahon told police, according to the affidavit. Read the rest

If you attended the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose last year, or if you're signed up to attend or support the next Worldcon in Dublin, Ireland, you're eligible to nominate for the Hugo Award; you should have received an email this week about it with a link to follow. Read the rest

Rev. C. John McCloskey III is a famous, beloved Opus Dei priest who is cozy with Washington power players like Newt Gingrich and Sam Brownback, both of whom he converted to Catholicism. In 2002 Rev. McCloskey was accused of groping a woman who sought his counsel, and in 2005 Opus Dei settled the complaint by paying the woman $977,000 (which was given to Opus Dei by an anonymous donor). Opus Dei promised the woman that Rev. McCloskey would be banned from pastoral work, but The Washington Post reported that he was "never officially restricted from ministry" and that Opus Dei covered up the incident, as well as Rev. McCloskey's “severe problem with alcohol.”In the 2005 letter released by the archdiocese on Wednesday, [Rev. Peter Armenio, assistant regional head of Opus Dei for the Midwest] recommended McCloskey for faculties in Chicago, saying he was a priest “in good standing,” “of good character and reputation.” He made two specific claims in the letter endorsing the priest: “I have no knowledge that Fr. Charles John McCloskey has a current, untreated alcohol or substance abuse problem,” and “I am unaware of anything in his background which would render him unsuitable to work with minor children.”But in a brief interview on Tuesday night, Armenio said he knew in 2005 that there was a sexual misconduct allegation against McCloskey and that he had a “severe problem with alcohol.” He said he told George personally about both issues.Armenio did not return a phone call from a Post reporter on Wednesday night asking about the discrepancy between what he said he told George and what he wrote in his letter at the time. Read the rest

On May 8, 1958, art imitated life in 2018. In an episode of a TV show called Trackdown, there was a conman named Trump, who tried to scare the bejeezus out of a town by preaching, "at midnight tonight, without my help and knowledge, every one of you will be dead.” The only way he could save them is by building a wall.One sane man tries to talk some sense into the sheriff, with Trump in their presence. "How long are you going to put up with this?" he asks. But the brainwashed sheriff replies with a dumb, "What do you mean?"How long are you going to let this conman walk around town?" the man persists. Then Trump speaks his signature line: "Be careful son, I can sue you."I Googled Trackdown and yes, this show was real. Also from Snopes, "A representative for MeTV, a Chicago network that airs reruns of Trackdown, confirmed that the episode was real." Hopefully the title of the episode, "The End of the World," isn't as prophetic.Here is the full episode:Via The Wrap Read the rest

Donnie Romero, founder of the Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth and fan of the gunman who killed dozens at the Pulse nightclub in Florida, is stepping down. Gambling, drugs, prostitution, the lot. His weepy, self-obsessed resignation speech is embedded above. Mr. Romero and Mr. Anderson were among a small group of extreme Christian conservatives who were widely criticized in 2016 for praising Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed 49 people that year at Pulse nightclub, a center of gay night life in Orlando. Mr. Mateen said at the time that he was acting in the name of the Islamic State.More than 50 additional people were injured in the attack. In a sermon shortly after the shooting, Mr. Romero said he hoped they would die, too.Baptism: mass-murdering gays is fine, but the best Fort Worth has to offer is absolutely out of the question. Read the rest

A peer-reviewed study conducted by a trio of Princeton and NYU political scientists and published in Science Advances systematically examined the proliferation of fake news in the 2016 election cycle and found that, contrary to earlier reports, disinformation did not get shared very widely, and that most of it was right-wing, and that the people who shared disinformation of all political orientation were over 65.Users over 65 were seven times more likely to share hoaxes than users aged 18-29, but the vast majority of users never shared hoaxes, and not because they weren't sharing anything -- they simply did not share disinformation.Within this cohort, lower levels of digital literacy could be compounded by the tendency to use social endorsements as credibility cues (19). If true, this would imply a growing impact as more Americans from older age groups join online social communities. A second possibility, drawn from cognitive and social psychology, suggests a general effect of aging on memory. Under this account, memory deteriorates with age in a way that particularly undermines resistance to “illusions of truth” and other effects related to belief persistence and the availability heuristic, especially in relation to source cues (20–22). The severity of these effects would theoretically increase with the complexity of the information environment and the prevalence of misinformation.We cannot definitively rule out the possibility that there is an omitted variable biasing our estimates, although we have included controls for many individual-level characteristics theoretically related to acceptance of misinformation and willingness to share content online. Read the rest

Here's something to remember come the next Sysadmin Appreciation Day: Mexican drug lord El Chapo was only caught because his systems administrator flipped and started working for the feds, backdooring El Chapo's comms infrastructure and providing the cops with the decryption keys needed to eavesdrop on El Chapo's operations.Former narcomorlock Jorge Cifuentes never really seemed to have his heart in the job: at one point, he failed to renew a license for some critical piece of secure communications software (I'm betting it's some kind of SIPP/VoIP server), forcing the narcos to use cleartext, unsecured voice channels (we know this because the feds made recordings of El Chapo screaming furious, terrifying abuse at Cifuentes over one of those insecure channels).But it wasn't absentmindedness that brought down El Chapo, it was collusion, which started after the FBI tricked Cifuentes into meeting with them in 2010, flipped him and gained access to about 1500 phone calls. These recordings are now being played in court, and they're pretty chilling and extremely damning.Other parts of the calls Times reporter Alan Feuer detailed on Twitter included recordings of Guzmán discussing how a subordinate could avoid murdering “innocent people,” ordering around an allegedly bribed Federal Ministerial Police commander, and referring to other government officials under his influence including an unknown “governor.” (Feuer added that Rodriguez is expected to testify at the trial, with court docs describing a witness matching his description who suffered “a nervous breakdown” from stress.)The Feds Cracked El Chapo's Encrypted Comms Network by Flipping His System Admin [Tom McKay/Gizmodo] Read the rest

There was something special about the perfectly-dimensioned, shrinkwrapped new VHS tape. Overlarge yet empty, a blank canvas in a new age of copying video. And now, a decade or three later, a perfect mote of nostalgia.Previously: VHS Camcorder app makes iPhone video look like 1980s tape Read the rest

Les images de l'explosion d'un drone pendant une parade militaire dans une base loyaliste du sud du #Yémen. Six militaires ont été tués et 12 autres personnes, dont des officiers et des responsables locaux, blessées, selon un hôpital local #AFP pic.twitter.com/qn4kEcVYrD— Agence France-Presse (@afpfr) January 10, 2019Video footage captures the moment when an explosive drone, piloted by Houthi rebels, exploded over a military parade in Yemen. It killed six soldiers and injured at least 20 more, including the army's chief of staff.Tobias Schneider, a Research Fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute, identifies it as a Qasef-1 loaded with shrapnel."Very effective attack. Houthi drone tactics are fascinating. Commonly used to blind Saudi/Coalition radars to cover missile launches (tactic pioneered by Hezbollah vs Isreal), sometimes as impromptu cruise missile itself."Indeed, the military death toll of 6 equals that of the 2018 cruise missile campaign launched by Trump against Syria. Read the rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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