If you want an example of how big of a problem Chinese espionage is, you needn't look any further than the warnings that Canada and the United States have been throwing at corporations and governmental organizations about the use of gear built by tech companies with ties to the Chinese government. Apparently, the issue extends beyond the use of smartphones and cellular networking hardware built by Huawei and ZTE: the US Government is thinking about conducting deep background checks on Chinese nationals coming to the United States in pursuit of their education. Spies! They're everywhere!From IntelNews.Org:...the Trump administration is reportedly considering the possibility of imposing deeper background checks and additional vetting on all Chinese nationals wishing to study in the US. Citing “a US official and three congressional and university sources”, Reuters said on Thursday that the measures would apply to all Chinese students wishing to register in undergraduate and graduate academic programs in the US. The news agency quoted a “senior US official” as saying that “no Chinese student who’s coming [to the US] is untethered from the state […. They all have] to go through a party and government approval process”. Reuters reported that the proposed plan includes a comprehensive examination of the applicants’ phone records and their presence on social media platforms. The goal would be to verify that the applicants are not connected with Chinese government agencies. As part of the proposed plan, US law enforcement and intelligence agencies would provide counterintelligence training to university officials. Read the rest

Countries surrounding the North Sea imposed an outsize impact on world affairs. But the sea itself was once land, and might have stayed that way had world temperatures been a degree or two different. Lee Rimmer wonders: What if Doggerland had survived?The cultural impact of changing the movement of tribal groupings within northwestern Europe would be immediately evident in terms of language. ...The languages spoken in modern Doggerland and its neighbouring states may sound vaguely familiar to us, but we wouldn’t understand them....Doggerland’s more sheltered, lower-lying peninsula may have been a more agreeable farming region than the windswept highlands of the British Isles, leaving them with a much lower population distribution. Stonehenge, or something like it, may have been built on the plains of Doggerland rather than Salisbury Plain.Wild, impossible counterfactuals. My favored parallel-world Doggerland is one that remained as a small island (even now its uplands lie barely feet under the waves). A strange spooky pinewood backwater where the signs are in three languages and the kids speak them all, and where the rain washes the blood leaching from the deep earth.The (real) Dogger is to serve as the foundations of a vast offshore wind farm, which will provide 4.8GW of sustainable power. Read the rest

There's a lot of controversy surrounding the use of police body cameras. Some privacy advocates argue that the video captured by the always-on cameras has little effect on the behavior of police officers : the statistics surrounding use of force and citizen complaints barely budged before and after the tech was introduced. The police don't much care for them either. The NYPD's police union, for example, says that the footage captured by a body cam shouldn't be able to be used in open court as it could be considered to be part of a police officer's personnel record, which is protected from public disclosure. Then there's the middle ground: by having cops wear body cams while on duty, provided they're not covering them or turning them off during an incident, they're being held accountable for every action they take. No matter where you sit on this spectrum, it's likely safe to say that using the tech to capture video of someone's ass and balls is likely not a great idea.From The New York Daily News:An NYPD detective has been suspended for using another cop’s body camera to shoot an X-rated video of his privates, the Daily News has learned.Detective Specialist Raymond Williams, a neighborhood coordination officer at the 79th Precinct, was suspended Thursday, law enforcement sources said.Williams waited until unsuspecting cop Michael Devonish — another neighborhood coordination officer — went to the men’s room in their Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, stationhouse before he snatched Devonish’s body camera and put it to anatomical abuse. Read the rest

The Republican election of Scott Walker and his band of Ayn Rand cosplayers was a triumph of massive corporate spending, voter suppression and gerrymandering that meant that the votes of the majority of Wisconsinites would no longer count; despite that, last month's midterm elections saw the governorship and Attorney General flip to progressive Democrats with wildly popular platforms.As Wisconsin's Republican legislature sits for its lame-duck session, they have unveiled a plan to steal the state again: a sweeping set of unprecedented (and even unconstitutional) legal changes that would neuter the governorship and the A-G: a ban on early voting (previously struck down by the courts); a logistically impossible shift to the next state Supreme Court election calculated to hand the seat to a far-right extremist who says that affirmative action is literally indistinguishable from slavery, defended gerrymandering, and says same-sex marriage "will eventually rob the institution of marriage of any discernible meaning"; to strip the A-G of the power to back Wisconsin out of its petty lawsuit to kill Obamacare; to strip the governor of the power to overturn the previous Governor's attempt to gut Medicare; to force the state capital to allow private persons to carry firearms on its premises.Moveon Washington director Ben Wikler says the changes are "chillingly cold-blooded":"They gerrymander the legislature to end majority rule. They move powers from democratically elected offices to the undem legislature. They entrench by suppressing votes & protecting partisan Sup Ct justices."Wisconsin was always pitched as a living laboratory for oligarch control by the Koch brothers and their thinktankie allies: if a progressive, egalitarian state could be turned into a massively unequal state where the will of the people could be ignored within a structure that retained the trappings of "democracy," then the whole country could follow. Read the rest

Right-wing persona Milo Yiannopoulous was supposed to tour Australia with an ever-shifting lineup of alt-right numpties. But it's all fallen apart, and the tour organizers have taken revenge by dumping his dox as part of an apparently-pending lawsuit. Revealed are staggering debts: unpaid contributors to his website galore, $56k in wedding expenses, $76k owed to the ghostwriter of his (famously bad) book. There's even a $16k debt to a clothing company, suggesting that the number of people who want to walk around with Augusto Pinochet tees was radically overestimated.The documents show Yiannopoulos demanding money from the promoters for his living expenses, medical bills for himself and his husband, and payment for his employees, on top of sums that the promoters claim they had already transferred to him.At one point, as he attempts to negotiate the transfer of more funds from the Spillers, Yiannopoulos remarks in a message that “I am less financially secure, more panicked and stressed, and more miserable than when we started”, and then says he returned his wedding ring to Cartier to wipe out the debt he had with them.The Mercers want $400k back from him! What a hoot.Americans, especially when in New York, are easily fooled by superficial indicia of wealth, is all I have to say. Read the rest

Cephalopod intelligence is widely known, but scientists struggle to understand why it evolved. The New York Times' Carl Zimmer reports on one of zoology's most fascinating questions.About 275 million years ago, the ancestor of today’s cephalopods lost the external shell. It’s not clear why, but it must have been liberating. Now the animals could start exploring places that had been off-limits to their shelled ancestors. Octopuses could slip into rocky crevices, for example, to hunt for prey. On the other hand, losing their shells left cephalopods quite vulnerable to hungry predators. This threat may have driven cephalopods to become masters of disguise and escape. They did so by evolving big brains, the ability to solve new problems, and perhaps look into the future — knowing that coconut or clam shells may come in handy, for example.Yet intelligence is not the perfect solution for cephalopods, Mr. Amodio suggested. Sooner or later, they get eaten. Natural selection has turned them into a paradox: a short-lived, intelligent animal.They also like MDMA. Read the rest

Thirty years after its mostly-European heydey, the Commodore Amiga remains a cult favorite with a huge library of excellent and often weird games to discover. But what if emulation isn't your idea of fun? This guy went out and bought a real one.The Amiga still has an active and faithful community, and it's thanks to them that it's possible to pick up an Amiga and get it upgraded and running all these years later. I also think it's a testament to how important the machine was in the UK and around Europe.If you're looking to learn more about the booming home-brew game scene during 80's Britain then I can highly recommend "From Bedroom to Billions", it's a little low budget but seems to capture the time perfectly.The follow-up documentary, "From Bedroom to Billions: the Amiga Years" is also a must watch if you have fond memories of the Amiga.Interesting how buying a later, more powerful model, obliged him to further upgrade it before games were playable. The low-end 512Kb Amigas were invariably put to use as game consoles, booting right into games, the code given bare-metal access. But it seems fancier models more or less obliged users to launch games from the operating system's GUI, Workbench. And there even 2Mb wasn't enough.If you like Workbench, though, there's a new simulation of it online. Just for fun! "OS 1.3" is the right one for the legendary A500 era. Read the rest

I haven't played Bloody Rally, an old-school top-down racing game echoing Super Sprint and Carmageddon, but I like the look of its procedurally-generated tracks. Read the rest

After pulling over a woman he claims to have seen drinking beer at the wheel, Sanford, Fla., police officer Michael Wagner filed a citation saying she'd been breathalyzed over the legal alcohol limit, and her license was suspended. At trial, though, Wagner testified that no breath-alcohol test was conducted and that all he did was book her into jail.This video shows district court judge Fred Schott yelling at the prosecutor over Wagner's shenanigans and throwing the driver's guitly verdict out. The Orlando Sentinel reports that the judge has been asked to only do civil cases for a while. He sticks by his decision but admits he shouldn't have gotten mad at the prosecutor—or granted a nonexistent motion for a new trial after apparently aquitting the driver."I was angry," he said. "I probably got more emotional than I should have, but I really feel this woman was treated unfairly." ... Schott accused Wagner of falsifying a sworn document by checking the box that indicated Gonzalez had failed a blood or breath test."I want you to take him up for perjury," the judge said. 'He lied. He lied on a sworn citation. … He broke the law.Even if it was an honest mistake, note that it's incomprehensible to police or the presecutor that they be held responsible for the mistake. Even when the only thing at stake is one iffy DUI case. Read the rest

Australia just passed into law one of the world's most censoring copyright law, which allows the country's media giants like Village Roadshow to use one-sided administrative process to get court orders to censor any website whose "primary effect" is infringement, then use those orders to force search engines to delist any site so blocked, and then recycle those orders to block for any site or service that "provides access" to a blocked site or service.In other words, Village Roadshow can now censor any site it doesn't like, without the site's operators being present to argue their side, and then block search engines from displaying that site's contents, making it virtually impossible for everyday Australians to learn that the site has been blocked -- and they get to block tools like VPNs that might allow people to get outside this censoring national firewall that they get to run.The pricetag for this is a secret: thought Village Roadshow gave AUD1.2 million to pass the precursor to this bill, Village Roadshow refuses to say how much it spent in this cycle, and Australia's backwards election-spending transparency rules mean we won't find out for months, after this has faded from the news cycle (prior to this bill, Village Roadshow's all-time lobbying spend topped AUD6.7 million).Village, one of the bill’s key backers, refused to tell Guardian Australia how much it donated to the parties in the months leading up to debate. Australia’s weak and sluggish donation disclosure requirements mean their contributions for 2017-18 will remain secret until at least February. Read the rest

Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner (previously) has put out a call for "the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMansion Hell!" (no styrofoam or support materials allowed) with prizes starting at $200 and a t-shirt and 3 pins from the McMansion Hell store. Read the rest

Creepbay is a beautifully selected catalog of online "creepy and cool" merch, skewed heavily to Etsy, though not limited to it: it's full of stuff that will probably end up in my house, eventually (this planter will look great in the tiki bar we're building; this is next Christmas's door-candy; and someone in my life surely needs this) -- better yet, there's RSS, so expect more from this feed to show up here in the fullness of time. (via Metafilter) Read the rest

The Girlfriend Zone is the place that women find themselves repeatedly and insufferably placed into by their male platonic friends, who can't or won't understand that the relationship is and will remain platonic: Ann: "So are you hanging out with Ben after class today?" Leslie: "No, he girlfriend zoned me hard. Hes a cool guy, but I can't hang out with him for more than 10 minutes without him making a pass at me." (via Seanan McGuire) Read the rest

Every time Trump reminds you that the stock market has experienced a feverish, tubercular bloom under his presidency, just recall that 84% of stocks are held by 10% of Americans.The wealth of middle class people is primarily in the form of their personal residences, whose value has driven to incredible peaks by rich people (often represented by hedge funds) diversifying their portfolios by speculating in the property markets.That is why any politician who proposes to do something about the housing crisis without addressing the underlying factors of inequality will end up infuriating the middle class, because that fix will wipe out their net worth.“Despite the fact that almost half of all households owned stock shares either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, trusts, or various pension accounts, the richest 10% of households controlled 84% of the total value of these stocks in 2016,” Wolff writes.That number—which accounts for individual shares as well as stocks held via mutual funds—represents a big change from 2001, when the top 10% owned just 77% of all stocks.Furthermore, while virtually all (94%) of the very rich reported having significant stock holdings—as defined as $10,000 or more in shares—only 27% of the middle class did. (The study framed that middle class as the group between the poorest 20% and the richest 20% of Americans.)The Richest 10% of Americans Now Own 84% of All Stocks [Rob Wile/Time](via Late Stage Capitalism) Read the rest

Each year, Baby Center polls parents to find out what they named their newborn. In 2018, more than 742,000 parents answered. Based on that data, here are the top baby names for 2018.Girls:1. Sophia2. Olivia3. Emma4. Ava5. Isabella6. Aria7. Riley8. Amelia9. Mia10. LaylaBoys:1. Jackson2. Liam3. Noah4. Aiden5. Caden6. Grayson7. Lucas8. Mason9. Oliver10. ElijahSophia celebrates her ninth consecutive year as the top choice for girls, while Jackson remains the most popular name for boys for six years running. Oliver and Layla both jumped into the top 10, pushing out Logan and Zoe. The fastest climbers of 2018 include Everly, Isla, Leo, and Carson.These are the top ten, head to Baby Center to see all 100 top baby names for 2018. If you click on a name, you can discover its popularity over the years (data FTW!). Baby Center also offers predictions of future trends in baby names (inc. sneakers, gender-swaps, and Southern states), as well as alternatives to popular names. Previously: Heather used to be a popular baby name(Neatorama)image via Classic Film Read the rest

Over 200 hardcore Shrek fans contributed to the crowdsourced Shrek-Retold, a full-length, deeply-artistic scene-by-scene remake of Dreamworks' original 2001 animated film. The 90-minute adaptation is a project headed by 3GI Industries, the Shrek superfans behind Shrekfest (their hyper-busy retro website is a must-see). Now, I've admittedly only skimmed the video but it's probably the most "internet-y" thing -- with its surreal mix of live-action, cosplay, and animation -- I've seen in a good long while.(Digg) Read the rest

Ok, I'm not just sharing these "Cutetitos" for the sake of sharing them. I'm sharing them because I've just learned that toy makers have figured out that young kids really like unboxing videos and they have now found a way to replicate that experience with "mystery toys" (like these plushies wrapped up a burrito). The Atlantic [emphasis and some links mine]:"Enter the L.O.L. Surprise! doll, a sphere the size of a bocce ball that consists of seven layers of packaging. Kids peel away the layers of crinkly plastic, which contain stickers and messages and tiny accessories that are surely crunched under many a parental foot, and find a small, nearly naked plastic doll with giant Bette Davis eyes who measures just a few inches tall.More than 800 million L.O.L. Surprise! toys have been sold since their debut in late 2016, and they were one of the top products sold on Cyber Monday this year... Parents can now buy eggs, pods of foam, cake pops, burritos, and balls of many shapes and sizes containing mystery animals and figurines. (“Unrolling is the new unboxing,” said Ashley Mady, the head of brand development at the company that launched the burritos, called Cutetitos, in October.)"...There are biological reasons young children like watching unboxing videos, and it’s the same reason they’re drawn to surprise toys. Kids don’t really get good at understanding and anticipating the future until they’re about 4 or 5, Rachel Barr, the director of the Early Learning Project at Georgetown University, told me...Unboxing videos and surprise toys allow kids to enjoy the anticipation without being too afraid...because they know roughly what will be in the package, just not the exact details. Read the rest

Talking Heads frontman and all-round musical/art-theory/bicycle genius David Byrne has published a playlist of "Eclectic Music For the Holidays," recommended by the musicians in his orbit: a fine way to start Christmas month! (stream it here) Read the rest

Aella was a top-earning, top-ranked camgirl who performed sex shows over the internet for money, using the popular Myfreecams platform; she quit a year ago, and has written an incredibly detailed, soup-to-nuts primer on getting started camgirling, though she warns that some of her advice is out of date.There's remarkably little here about production values (though she does have intriguing advice on decor and lighting), an not a ton about the way the platforms work.Instead, the meat of Aella's advice sits at the intersection of publicity tips, retail psychology (for example, how to use the Street Performer Protocol to entice spending); gender theory (men who patronize camgirls want to win competitions for women's attention, harbor a perverse antagonism to the women they patronize, and pay more when the camgirl fronts a kind of displeased persona that they have to crack with tips and flattery); and then a whole whack of material on emotional labor and dealing with the price that labor extracts from the performer, which is exacerbated by features of the platform, like ranking systems that punish performers who have a bad day, reducing their visibility to men in the future, making future days worse, in a death-spiral that quickly erodes the performer's earnings.Aella's piece is a real snapshot of this moment: she talks at length about the "whales" -- rich men who pay orders of magnitude more than typical customers -- and how getting a couple of these into your customer base can be game-changing, and how some women text and call these whales when they're off-camera, just to keep them happy. Read the rest

Jack Poulson is the former Google Senior Research Scientist who quit the company's machine learning division over Project Dragonfly, the company's secret plan to build a censoring Chinese search engine designed to help the country's spies surveil dissident search activity.In an editorial on The Intercept, Poulson describes the series of events that led up to his resignation: a chain of execs who, in private meetings and public statements, engaged in hypocritical deflection and spin rather than giving the straight answer about why they were going to go into China and what the result of that would be (answers: "To make money," and "complicity in human rights abuses").Poulson is emerging as a kind of Robert Oppenheimer of AI, one of the first top machine learning scientists to stage a high-profile resignation over the humanitarian consequences of the abuse of the technology he helped build.My final two weeks at Google were spent balancing between handing off my projects to other engineers and meeting with increasingly senior management about my letter; my penultimate evening was spent in a disappointing direct meeting with Jeff Dean, the head of artificial intelligence research and my interface to Google’s CEO. Dean argued that only a small number of queries would be censored and that China’s surveillance is analogous to the U.S.’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, secret warrants purportedly issued for the purpose of rooting out foreign spies. The next day, I worked late to finish my last project handoff and anticlimactically turned in my company badge and laptop to an empty office. Read the rest

On November 28, Conservative MPs removed references to assault rifles from the Offensive Weapons Bill in order to win support for Theresa May's Brexit bill from the European Research Group -- the hardline, pro-Brexit wing of her party -- who are also pro-assault-rifle. The vote was supported by every sitting Conservative MP. Britons overwhelmingly support gun control. The police had asked for the assault-weapons ban. The ban was bipartisan.The pro-Brexit wing of the Tories are a tiny minority of Parliament with fringe views well outside the norms of the popular British political consensus, but they call all the shots (literally), because they control the balance of power. Next time there is a British mass-shooting, remember that it was enabled by cowardly Tories who have been completely captured by extremists from their own party. The Tories are the party of assault rifles. But – and here’s the really striking thing – as well as securing the support of the ERG, every Conservative MP went along with the vote. Of course, every Tory MP I have spoken to privately is mystified by the decision, but for the most part, the politics makes short-term sense: they are in safe seats where the issue is not going to cause immediate harm. That said, one can easily imagine how at some future election, any of James Cleverly, Penny Mordaunt or Nigel Huddlestone, either as a boxfresh opposition leader or as Prime Minister, will wake up to discover that a Momentum video on their opposition to banning assault rifles (pegged perhaps to some hypothetical future shooting) has gone viral on Facebook overnight. Read the rest

RIP George H. W. Bush, 1924–2018. Read the rest

After St Louis police officer Jason Stockley, killed an unarmed black man named Anthony Lamar Smith with an unauthorized AK-47, planted a pistol on his body, and was then acquitted on murder charges in 2017, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Officer Dustin Boone sent several texts in which he relished the prospect of beating up the protesters he anticipated following the verdict: phrases like "It’s still a blast beating people" and It’s gonna get IGNORANT tonight!!” and “It’s gonna be a lot of fun beating the hell out of these s---heads once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart!!!!” These weren't idle musings: Boone and two fellow officers Randy Hays (who later texted "going rogue does feel good"), and Christopher Myers grabbed a black protester that night, threw him to the ground, and kicked and clubbed him, while the protester peacefully complied with their barked orders.That black man was actually a cop, with 22 years on the force. Following the beating, he was hospitalized, couldn't eat, and ultimately lost 20 pounds; he's since had surgery for his injuries and remains too disabled to return to work.All three officers (as well as another cop, Bailey Colletta) have been indicted by a Grand Jury. The indictment alleges that the officers destroyed evidence and lied to investigators. The local police union says that we shouldn't rush to justice on these three white cops who beat up a black cop, because that would be convicting them before "their day in court."In fact, texts from Boone, Hays and Myers suggest those officers were explicitly looking forward to violently attacking protesters. Read the rest

Trump's about to make a bunch of whales, turtles, and dolphins go deaf.The Trump administration is about to take a preliminary step toward oil and natural gas drilling off the Atlantic shore, by approving requests from energy companies to conduct “deafening seismic tests that could harm tens of thousands of dolphins, whales and other marine animals,” reports the Los Angeles Times.The information was revealed in a NOAA call with reporters.“The Trump administration is ignoring threats to whales, dolphins and other marine life to further its ongoing quest for energy dominance,” says the National Parks Conservation Association:The Trump Administration today advanced plans related to offshore drilling exploration in the Atlantic Ocean, threatening whales, turtles, fish and marine life near 33 coastal national parks. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Marine Fisheries Service issued Incidental Harassment Authorizations, allowing companies to disturb federally protected marine mammals through seismic airgun testing. Such testing would take place along the coast from Delaware to central Florida, with far-reaching threats to marine life up and down the eastern seaboard.Five companies applied last year to search for oil and gas deposits beneath the Atlantic seafloor using seismic airgun technology. The technology involves shooting loud blasts of compressed air down into the seafloor to locate underground deposits of fossil fuels. Today’s approval serves as a final procedural step before approving permits for five companies.Scientists have warned that this practice threatens whales, dolphins, sea turtles and other marine life, and may force these animals from their feeding, breeding or calving habitats. Read the rest

Art Donovan (previously) writes, "Delivered. A very special design commission for the Project Director of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. A 'white glove' delivery, in fact. The first lamp in 28 years that I simply could not trust to survive theravages of FedEx." It took a while to complete, as it grew more ambitious by the week. I went,"O.G" for the design- "Original Galileo", using his telescopes first threeastronomical targets as visual influence: The Moon, Jupiter and Saturn. Atthe outset, the Director suggested I use the newly discovered 'Trappist-1System of Exoplanets' as inspiration. But there was no visual imageavailable that I could use to base the overall design upon...So Vintage Astronomy I went. "Astronomea" has two optional domes: One in white for ambient light at hisdesk at Goddard/NASA and one with a rear-pained "Jupiter" for when he's inan "astronomical" mood. The tapered maple base reflects the shape of theHarvard "Great Refractor" Telescope commissioned in 1847-the very firsttelescope commisioned by the U.S. government.. The task lamp has a diffuserinspired by the barn doors on observatory domes. The arc with brass markersreminiscent of navigational sextants. Hand painted Jupiter, Moon and Saturnrings with custom brass dimmer knobs. All in, the lamp has the look of asmall scale astronomical device from the 19th century. "Astronomea" The first of 5 new illuminated designs with a vintage, science-y influence. [Art Donovan] Read the rest

Amber Guyger, the Dallas cop who killed an unarmed neighbor in his own apartment then claimed she had thought she was in her apartment, was charged today with murder.Guyger, who was arrested and fired from her job as a Dallas police officer after the September shooting, initially faced a charge of manslaughter. But Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson had said a grand jury could issue a stiffer charge. Botham Jean's family has wanted Guyger to be indicted for murder, their attorney Daryl Washington told CNN. Guyger, who is white, was off-duty when she encountered Jean, an 26-year-old unarmed black man, in his apartment on September 6, police said. Still in her uniform, Guyger parked her car in the complex and walked to what she believed was her apartment, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. Local authorities slow-walked both Guyger's original arrest and the investigation into her killing of Botham Shem Jean, giving her days to plan her story and months to prepare her defense. Read the rest

At the age of 15, Tavi Gevinson was the prodigy founder of Rookie, a latter-day second-coming of Sassy Magazine -- a smart, funny, critical teen magazine that presaged the odd world we live in now, when magazines like Teen Vogue have become highly politicized.Rookie is must-read material, and its annual collections were some of the best books in print, year after year.Seven years later, Gevinson has a burgeoning acting career (she's very good), and a heavy heart about her online creation. Rookie has been a victim of the mediapocalypse, in which the majority of advertising money has been creamed off by the social media platforms, who control access to audiences and bat small, cash-strapped media business around like cat toys, demanding that they "pivot to video" or some other bullshit.As her business became more fraught, Gevinson resigned herself to raising investment capital, only to discover that the process presaged a future where she would hate her life and her publication: relentless pressure to grow; endless meddling from investors with conflicting, uninformed advice; high stakes and with them, pressure to compromise on matters of principle.What's more, Gevinson's been doing Rookie since she was 15 and now she's 22. Realizing your girlhood dream is cool: being trapped in it once you're a woman is a little chafing.The upshot of all of this is that Gevinson is folding up her publication. I'm heartbroken, though I completely sympathize. Though I didn't start work on Boing Boing as a teenage, I have been working on this project for nearly 18 years now, which is a fuck of a long time. Read the rest

A 7.0 earthquake hit eight miles north of Anchorage, AK this morning, followed by a 5.8 earthquake. The earthquakes caused buildings to crack and roads to buckle, along with "major infrastructure damage," according to the Anchorage Police Department. A tsunami warning was briefly issued, but later canceled.Via NBC:Gov. Bill Walker said he issued a major declaration of disaster after the "major earthquake" and is in communication with the White House."There is major infrastructure damage across Anchorage," according to a statement from the Anchorage Police Department. "Many homes and buildings are damaged. Many roads and bridges are closed. Stay off the roads if you don’t need to drive. Seek a safe shelter. Check on your surroundings and loved ones."And via Anchorage Daily News:All Alaska Railroad operations are shut down due to severe damage at the railroad’s Anchorage Operations Center on Ship Creek, including the dispatch center, according to spokesman Tim Sullivan. The center is closed by flooding from burst pipes and the power is out.No trains were running when the quake hit, but service can’t resume until crews assess damage, Sullivan said. It will be a day or two before that happens.So far there are no reports of people being injured. 7.2 earthquake here in Anchorage, Alaska. This is a video my dad took from the Minnesota exit ramp from international. 😰😰 pic.twitter.com/1yOGj3yz9q— sarah m (@sarahh_mars) November 30, 2018KTVA’s newsroom felt the blow of the earthquake this morning. #anchorage #alaska #earthquake #weather pic.twitter.com/d1SaxriGw9— Cassie Schirm (@cassieschirmtv) November 30, 2018I’m guessing that houses all across Anchorage have rooms that look like this or much worse right now. Read the rest

It's becoming more difficult by the day to recognize the nations we live in as the same ones we grew up in. Men and women, terrified of their lot in life becoming smaller than it is, fueled by the hateful rhetoric of opportunistic shit-heel politicians, look to minorities and the less fortunate to blame for problems that we as a society have all had a hand in. Skapegoating and the hate that comes with it has reemerged with a startling momentum. Even nations once known for their tolerance have proven susceptible to it its vile, slobbering charms.From The CBC:The number of police-reported hate crimes reached an all-time high in 2017, largely driven by incidents targeting Muslim, Jewish and black people, according to Statistics Canada data released Thursday.The federal agency said hate crimes have been steadily climbing since 2014, but shot up by some 47 per cent 2017, the last year for which data was collected. In total, Canadian police forces reported 2,073 hate crimes – the most since 2009, when data became available.The largest number of hate crimes on record, since Canadians started to keep records of it. Graffiti on the walls of places of worship. Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia haunting our children's schools and out places of business. People are dying for fear of the other. The CBC is quick to point out that such crimes "...account for 0.1 per cent of the more than 1.9 million non-traffic crimes reported by Canadian police services in 2017." They want you to know that Statistics Canada thinks that the increase in hate crimes might be because more people are reporting them. Read the rest

There are few things more satisfying in life than watching someone who attempted to do something awful being handed their ass by their would-be victim. It's a good thing the scumbag was wearing a helmet. Read the rest

There's been quite a bit of bad ink surrounding Tesla electric vehicles this year: delays in production, growing rumors about subpar customer service, former employees blowing the whistle on dangerous, indifferent working conditions in Tesla assembly plants and logistical woes to name a few. According to The Washington Post, Tesla owners in China can add in-car state surveillance to the list. Apparently, the Chinese government has demanded that Tesla vehicles purchased in China send a steady stream of information concerning the vehicle's whereabouts and who knows what else to the Chinese government, in real-time. It's some greasy, invasive bullshit that comes at a time when China, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, has been cracking down on dissent, privacy and freedoms in the country. At the very least, Tesla isn't alone: other makers of electric vehicles are being forced to make their customers' information available to the Chinese government as well.From The Washington Post:More than 200 manufacturers, including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and U.S.-listed electric vehicle start-up NIO, transmit position information and dozens of other data points to government-backed monitoring centers, The Associated Press has found. Generally, it happens without car owners’ knowledge.The automakers say they are merely complying with local laws, which apply only to alternative energy vehicles. Chinese officials say the data is used for analytics to improve public safety, facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programs.But other countries that are major markets for electronic vehicles — the United States, Japan, across Europe — do not collect this kind of real-time data. Read the rest

Watch. So chilling.Find someone who is as happy to see you as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince bin Salman, who high-five each other and dive in for a bro hug, laughing like only two murderers can, at the G20 in Argentina.Check out Trump glowering silently in the background. Did his handlers tell him to cool off the man-crush and stay low key? Or does Donald haz a sad, realizing he'll never really belong in their Big Bad Murder club?Russian President Putin and Saudi Crown Prince bin Salman embrace and laugh at the G20 in Argentina. pic.twitter.com/DtyNK6RwhI— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 30, 2018Saudi crown prince and Putin greet each other at #G20 summit pic.twitter.com/INGKBd2EjF— Ahmed Al Omran (@ahmed) November 30, 2018Russian President Vladimir Putin greeted Saudi Arabia’s crown prince with a huge grin and a high-five. https://t.co/9XS2RVvL6r— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) November 30, 2018As most world leaders debate how to handle seeing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia at the G20 summit in light of Jamal Khashoggi's murder, Vladimir Putin is all smiles and handshakes. pic.twitter.com/csiOEdtoUM— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) November 30, 2018Saudi Crown Prince MBS Still Popular at G20; Gets High Five from Putin, Private Moment with Mnuchin, Trump https://t.co/hKcQowDtLZ pic.twitter.com/FnnB2IQROK— Mediaite (@Mediaite) November 30, 2018More images of Saudi crown prince and Russian president Putin during the #G20 summit (via AFP, Getty) pic.twitter.com/TEZzd17U66— Ahmed Al Omran (@ahmed) November 30, 2018Russian President Vladimir Putin and Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia greeted each other warmly at the G-20 Summit in Argentina, with handshakes and laughs as other world leaders arrived. Read the rest

After Trent Reznor dissed Ted Cruz at his Nine Inch Nails concert a few days ago, telling his audience that the "pain-in-the-ass" senator "was bugging to get on the guest list, and I told him to fuck off,” the delicate Texas senator went on the defensive."To all the gullible reporters who are “reporting” that I asked to be on the guest list at a Nine Inch Nails concert: uh, no, NIN is not my music taste. He was clearly joking. And for the record, I also didn’t “drink all his beer” the last time...but I would have! #FakeNews To all the gullible reporters who are “reporting” that I asked to be on the guest list at a Nine Inch Nails concert: uh, no, NIN is not my music taste. He was clearly joking. And for the record, I also didn’t “drink all his beer” the last time...but I would have! #FakeNews https://t.co/ZNr292SCVl— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 29, 2018When Spin wrote about Reznor's comments yesterday, they had tried to reach out to Cruz for comments, but he ignored them. If Cruz isn't going to take the opportunity to comment on a story about himself, he should stop whining about "fake news" and "gullible" reporters who are reporting with a video to back them up. If Cruz would think for himself rather than parrot Trump all the time, he'd realize that, whether or not what Reznor said was true, reporting on what the rock star said is not fake news. Read the rest

On Sunday, Pastor Bartholomew Orr of Southaven, Mississippi's Brown Baptist Church flew down from the rafters to deliver a sermon about the unexpected second coming of Jesus Christ. Gotta spend money to make money, I guess.(UPI) Read the rest

On Making Light, Avram Grumer is compiling a list of real songs about fictional songs, like "The Time Warp," "Jailhouse Rock," "The Monster Mash," "Crocodile Rock," "Waltzing Matilda," "The Tennessee Waltz," and "The Masochism Tango" (not to be confused with songs that are about themselves, like "Let's Do The Twist"). Can you think of more? Read the rest

As part of their research on the future of play, RMIT University's Exertion Games Lab demonstrated a game based around an ingestible sensor pill that measures internal body temperature and transmits the data in real-time to your smartphone as the sensors travels through your gut. You can guess what marks the end of the game. (This is the same group that explored the use of chest-mounted robot arms for "playful eating.") From their research paper (PDF): In the Guts Game, a chocolate bar is given to each player initially. Then the researchers, who dress up like medical doctors, tell the players that they have been infected by a parasite, which is sensitive to its environment’s temperature, i.e. the body temperature of the player as measured by the sensor. If the environment’s temperature reaches a certain value, the parasite will be hurt. The crafty parasite may adapt to the environment so the target temperature might change once reached. The more often the player reaches the target temperature, the bigger possibility he/she will survive. To aid the treatment, the “doctors” developed an application called the Guts Game. Players need to swallow the sensor to measure their body temperature and the application will guide players. Players need to come back to the “doctors” after the game ends to check if the parasite is still there.The Guts Game ends when one of the players excretes the sensor. The Guts Game (Exertion Games Lab) Read the rest

Procedural generation isn't just for video game landscapes and galaxies. The technique for creating vast amounts of realistic but uncannily superficial content goes back a long way. Pfizer used it to generate drug names in 1956, feeding code to an IBM mainframe and getting potential products in return.James Ryan (@xfoml) posted excerpts from news article from the time (above), and it's fascinating to read how it's described for a mid-1950s lay audience to whom computers and their ways were utterly alien.Based on the newspaper's description, Hugo (@hugovk) reimplemented the 60-year-old generator, and now you too can generate thousands of realistic but uncannily superficial drug names.Some picks:NEW DRUG NAMESscudylwhirringomreenefentreeicsuffuseetaduplexunenickelanraunchyatahandbillalgammonasapluckerelslawax...IMPROPER FOR A FAMILY MEDICINE CHESTloralivacrumpledolmoraluraburnishitesmuttyevosucklingifyhagfishatcockpitedmoraluxballcockoseshittyulecocklesexFrom the full output list I like "coughedore" -- like a stevedore, but for unloading mucus.I wonder how long it took Pfizer to realize that procgen is useless. Read the rest

New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood has concluded that seven New York hospitals illegally billed rape survivors for their rape kits, at least 200 times, for sums ranging from $46 to $3,000, and then sent collections agents after survivors who could not pay.New York law requires hospitals to bill the state's Office of Victim Services for rape kits; in addition to ensuring that rape kits are available regardless of ability to pay, the rule clears an impediment to reporting rape: women who bill their insurance for rape kits may fear stigma from their employers or families. The seven hospitals did not comply with the law, nor did they inform the survivors of their rights -- another legal obligation.The hospitals involved are Brookdale University Hospital Medical Center, Columbia University, Montefiore Nyack Hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, New York-Presbyterian Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Richmond University Medical Center, and St. Barnabas Hospital. The hospitals have not admitted culpability, but have agreed to refund the rape survivors and establish policies to ensure future compliance.In case you were wondering, there is another way to address this: universal, free health care, AKA Medicare for All. Because hospitals you don't have to pay to use don't have billing departments, don't contract with debt collectors, and don't have to deal with private insurers.Underwood is the first woman to serve as New York attorney general. She took over the state's top law enforcement job on an interim basis earlier this year after Eric Schneiderman resigned amid a flurry of accusations of abusing women, which he publicly contested. Read the rest

Astronauts on board the International Space Station have switched on CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile CompanioN), a new AI companion robot built by German space agency DLR, Airbus, and IBM. CIMON is an interface for IBM's WATSON AI system. From Space.com:Marco Trovatello, a spokesman of the European Space Agency's Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, told Space.com that CIMON could respond within a couple of seconds after a question was asked, no slower than in ground-based tests. A data link connects CIMON with the Columbus control center in Germany; from there, the signal travels first to the Biotechnology Space Support Center at the Lucerne University in Switzerland, where CIMON's control team is based. Then, the connection is made over the internet to the IBM Cloud in Frankfurt, Germany, Bernd Rattenbacher, the team leader at the ground control centre at Lucerne University, said in the statement..."CIMON is a technology demonstration of what a future AI-based assistant on the International Space Station or on a future, longer-term exploration mission would look like," Trovatello said. "In the future, an astronaut could ask CIMON to show a procedure for a certain experiment, and CIMON would do that." Read the rest

Blue light special in his pants.Newsweek:The local police department tweeted on Tuesday officers were working what appeared to be a “self-inflicted accidental shooting” inside the Watson and Yuma Walmart.Buckeye PD later confirmed in an update: “Adult male accidentally shot himself in the groin area inside the Walmart Watson & Yuma. Being transported to hospital. No other injuries.”The Arizona Republic newspaper reported the incident occurred at around 6:30 p.m. after a semiautomatic handgun that was being held in the man’s waistband began to slip. The gun, which was not in a holster, discharged as he attempted to reposition it, the man told cops.The Arizona Republic reported when police officers responded to the gun shot the man was found in the meat section of the Walmart store with “survivable injuries.” Officers said they filed a report for the unlawful discharge of a firearm but it was believed to be accidental.It was not immediately clear if the man would be charged by the local police department. The man’s identity and condition at the hospital was not made public by law enforcement. Read the rest

More than 200 runners in last weekend's big Shenzhen Half Marathon were caught cheating by traffic cameras as they snuck through trees, cutting out up to three kilometers from the course. (I did similar things in high school gym class although my motivation was not the competitive spirit but rather laziness.) Other cheaters in Shenzhen wore fake number bibs or ran under others' names. From The Guardian:Xinhua (news agency) quoted organisers as saying: “We deeply regret the violations that occurred during the event. Marathon running is not simply exercise, it is a metaphor for life, and every runner is responsible for him or herself.”ther marathon events in China are reported to have started using facial recognition technology to track runners.Competitors in other marathons are now kitted out with electronic chips that register runners’ progress as they pass over timing mats installed around the course. This provides more accurate times – but it also gives organisers, and anyone who cares to look, a wealth of data to examine for suspicious results. Read the rest

Even though now I know how it's done, that food still looks so damned delicious. (via Kottke) Read the rest

Five years ago, I coined the term "peak indifference" to describe a moment when a public health problem -- like climate change, tobacco use, surveillance capitalism, or monopolism -- reaches a tipping point: the moment when the consequences of actions taken a long time ago and very far away start to be felt so widely that the number of people who believe there is a problem starts to grow of its own accord. It's not the moment when a majority of people agree that the problem is real, but it is the moment at which the denial of the realness of the problem reaches its peak, and begins a long, inevitable decline.Peak indifference is the theory that says if you have a real problem that you falsely deny, the consequences of that problem will grow and grow, until you can't deny it any longer.But peak indifference doesn't necessarily mean action. It can mean nihilism. It's easy for recognition to be accompanied by despair: "OK, yeah, I finally admit that you were right all along and smoking was gonna give me cancer, but fuck it, it's too late now, might as well enjoy this cigarette while I can." (See also: "If the rhinos are doomed, why not kill this one?" and "If all my data is gonna leak some day, why not enjoy Facebook while I can?")Now, a new poll reveals that the majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans (including a majority of old white male Republicans) believe in climate change. Read the rest

How bad is the Marriott/Starwood breach disclosed today? "Unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014 … For approximately 327M of these guests, the info includes some combination of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number.” Marriott says information from as many as 500 million people has been compromised, and credit card numbers and expiration dates of some guests may have been taken. The Marriott hack is one of the largest known data breaches ever disclosed, as measured by the number of individual people potentially affected. The only larger one known is the 2013 Yahoo breach that affected three billion people.Marriott said it has uncovered unauthorized access that has been taking place within its Starwood network since 2014. If you thought the IT side of the Marriott-Starwood merger was going to be a fustercluck of United-Continental magnitude, well, you were right. https://t.co/jNlR1hPmCu— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) November 30, 2018From the New York Times:The Marriott International hotel chain said on Friday that the database of its Starwood reservation system had been hacked and that the personal details of up to 500 million guests going as far back as 2014 has been compromised.The hotel group, which runs more than 6,700 properties around the world, was informed in September about an attempt to access the database, and an investigation this month revealed that unauthorized access had been made on or before Sept. 10, Marriott said in a statement.The investigation also found that an “unauthorized party had copied and encrypted information, and took steps toward removing it,” the statement said. Read the rest

It's on? After important legal news in the Trump-Russia investigation broke on Thursday, Donald Trump canceled a planned one-on-one meetup with Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit on Saturday in Buenos Aires. Today, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov tells Russian news agency RIA the two leaders will meet for a brief, impromptu get-together. Reuters:MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin will have a brief impromptu meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Argentina just as he will with other leaders at the G20 summit, RIA news agency cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying on Friday.Trump on Thursday abruptly cancelled a planned meeting with Putin in Argentina after Russia captured three Ukrainian navy vessels and their crews off the coast of Crimea. Read the rest

Monopoly for Millennials, an edition of the game noted for its surprisingly contemptuous mockery of younger generations, was perfectly-designed to go viral. It's $55 at Amazon, but WalMart had it for just $20 (sold out, I'm afraid). The Bearded Picker went from store to store buying every box and selling them online. All he had to do was iterate the "available" count on his third-party seller listing at Amazon, raking in $2500 for a single (admittedly long and arduous) day's work.Other sellers report that Amazon prevents them selling these as "New". One explanation is that they're may be setting the price too high, tipping the algorithm off that they're gouging customers. But The Bearded Picker also points out that he's an approved seller of the brand at Amazon:Certain brands require approval before you can sell them. It helps AZ fight counterfeits or the brand has requested it by entering the brand registry.Amazon-approved arbitrage! Read the rest

Some drafts of Article 13 of the pending EU Copyright Directive no longer contain the word "filters" -- because the world's leading technical, legal and human rights experts all say these will lead to widespread censorship of legitimate, noninfringing materials.But it doesn't take a lot of work to understand that the Directive still mandates filters. In a nutshell, if you demand that, say, Youtube must vet all of the 300 hours of new video it receives every minute to ensure it doesn't infringe copyright, with massive penalties for letting even a single frame of infringing material through, there just isn't any other conceivable way to even approximate that, apart from filters.And of course, the proposal has been about filters from the start. The fact that the word "filter" has been removed from MEP Axel Voss's latest text doesn't change that -- nor do unconvincing phrases about avoiding filters or not clobbering legitimate materials. The entertainment corporations (and not regular users) have all the power in this system, and if platforms have to choose between risking the wrath of a kid whose school project was unfairly censored, or Universal or Disney, the kid is going to be out of luck.After many Twitter debates with apologists for Article 13, I've summarised and rebutted all their arguments in a post for EFF's Deeplinks: "Yes, the EU's New #CopyrightDirective is All About Filters." 7. The Directive does not adequately protect fair dealing and due process Some drafts of the Directive do say that EU nations should have "effective and expeditious complaints and redress mechanisms that are available to users" for "unjustified removals of their content. Read the rest

Want to skip Amazon and support independent artists this holiday season? Head to the online market put together by the good folks of the XOXO festival. They've curated some really cool stuff made by enterprising members of their community.These are just some of the things I have my eyes on:https://xoxoholidaymarket.tumblr.com/post/180562582041/cross-stitched-emoji-artwork-by-steph-parrotthttps://xoxoholidaymarket.tumblr.com/post/180557361706/you-think-you-know-me-a-conversational-card-gamehttps://xoxoholidaymarket.tumblr.com/post/180595957966/intricate-pop-up-cards-from-the-pop-up-cardhttps://xoxoholidaymarket.tumblr.com/post/180561425521/musical-delights-by-molly-lewis-bandcamphttps://xoxoholidaymarket.tumblr.com/post/180560075296/colorful-optimistic-zines-postcards-and-postersPreviously: Videos from this year's XOXO festival Read the rest

Stayed at a Starwood hotel in the last five years or so? Every one of you and more—as many as 500 million people, says owner Marriott—are implicated in what would be the second-largest hack of all time. The company said Friday that credit card numbers and expirations dates of some guests may have been taken. For about 327 million people, the information exposed includes some combination of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date and communication preferences. For some guests, the information was limited to name and sometimes other data such as mailing address, email address or other information.Yahoo holds the record, with 3bn accounts breached. The only other breach in the same league as these would be the 412m accounts dumped from Adult Friend Finder. Marriott and Starwood merged two years ago, but open season at Starwood's servers apparently continued until September this year. Read the rest

These porcelain druggist jars by Jonathan Adler are certainly conversation starters but do you really want to label your drug stash so obviously? Expand your horizons with our Druggist Canisters. Dreamy third-eye mindscapes rendered in Delft-inspired blues and accented with real sparkly gold. High-fired porcelain elevates the experience. Stash your secrets in a single trippy vista, or cluster all four to create your own surreal apothecary.Prices range from $228 to $298 per jar. Read the rest