Boing Boing

Stanford folklorist and science historian Adrienne Mayor has a fascinating-sounding new book out, titled "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology." It's a survey of how ancient Greeks, Romans, Indian, and Chinese myths imagined and grappled with visions of synthetic life, artificial intelligence, and autonomous robots. From Mayor's interview at Princeton University Press:Who first imagined the concept of robots? Most historians of science trace the first automatons to the Middle Ages. But I wondered, was it possible that ideas about creating artificial life were thinkable long before technology made such enterprises possible? Remarkably, as early as the time of Homer, ancient Greek myths were envisioning how to imitate, augment, and surpass nature, by means of biotechne, “life through craft”—what we now call biotechnology. Beings described as fabricated, “made, not born,” appeared in myths about Jason and the Argonauts, the sorceress Medea, the bronze robot Talos, the ingenious craftsman Daedalus, the fire-bringer Prometheus, and Pandora, the female android created by Hephaestus, god of invention. These vivid stories were ancient thought experiments set in an alternate world where technology was marvelously advanced.Modern sci-fi movies pop up in several chapters. How do they relate to ancient myths?Some 2,500 years before movies were invented, ancient Greek vase painters illustrated popular stories of the bronze robot warrior Talos, the techno-wizard Medea, and the fembot Pandora dispatched to earth on an evil mission, in ways that seem very “cinematic...” Movies and myths about imagined technology are cultural dreams. Like contemporary science fiction tales, the myths show how the power of imagination allows humans to ponder how artificial life might be created—if only one possessed sublime technology and genius. Read the rest

Jackie Gartner-Schmidt is a speech-language pathologist at the University of Pittsburgh. She studied why people's voices tremble or even squeak when they get nervous. It's because our vocal cords close up as a protective response to stressful situations, so we don't accidentally inhale water. In the video above, filmed at a TEDx event, Gartner-Schmidt shows an exercise to open your vocal cords if you are nervous about having to speak in public.From TED:Hold up your index finger a few inches in front of your mouth. As you exhale steadily, make a “Wooooooo” noise (think: little kid pretending to be a ghost) for 5 to 10 seconds. Do this 5 to 10 times. (Watch her demonstrate it here.)“This … essentially relaxes the vocal folds,” says Gartner-Schmidt. “It establishes breath and air flow and voice stability, which is the cornerstone of any strong, clear voice.”Right before the next important occasion in which you have to speak — for work, for the toast you’re giving at a wedding, for a speech to a community board — take Gartner-Schmidt’s advice and “spend some time finding your best voice.” Read the rest

Extraweg (AKA Oliver Latta: Twitter, Youtube) is a superb and surreal animator whose computer rendered grotesques of human faces and forms writhing, merging, and doing the impossible are spellbindingly weird.(via JWZ) Read the rest

Why is airplane food so mediocre? The obvious but wrong answer: because it's cheap. Pringles and French fries and Snickers are cheap, and they are delicious. So what gives?According to Patrick Jones in this explainer video, it boils down to two scientific facts: 1) low humidity, which affects our ability to taste, and 2) loud noises, which also dulls our sense of taste (backed by a 2014 study).This video is fascinating not only for exploring the affects of traveling on our taste buds, but also because it gives us a brief history of flying and food, starting on October 11, 1919, when the first meal – a lunchbox – was served on a flight from London to Paris. In 1936, United Airlines launched its first onboard kitchen. And then there were the glory days of in-air dining, when, back in the 50s and 60s, they offered several courses that included entrees such as lobster, caviar, cornish game hens and ham, and took a leisurely two hours to serve. This had to taste better than such fare as United's microwaveable chorizo breakfast sandwiches, pepperoni pizzas, and cold croissant sandwiches (that are no longer complimentary by the bye). Is there a way to enhance the flavor of food on planes? Perhaps. Just pack your cinnamon and curry, or order a tomato juice – some of the spices and foods mentioned that give us more bang for your bite. Read the rest

Just as the purpose of a tobacco is not to pay for cancer treatment, the purpose of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's wildly popular proposal to tax income over $10m at 70% is to correct inequality and reduce the corrosive power of extreme wealth to distort political decisionmaking, not to fund programs.As Vanessa Williamson writes on Common Dreams, a 70% wealth tax "blunt[s] the incentives for wealthy people to overpay one another and exploit the less privileged."A hypothetical example explains the mechanism. Imagine if you are a CEO, already making enough to be in the top income tax bracket. If the marginal tax rate in that bracket is 70 percent, any increase you get in pay is going to cost your company a little over three times what you’ll actually take home. The rest will go to Uncle Sam. No wonder company boards become more discerning in approving executive pay increases. High tax rates make it a lot more costly for wealthy people to fling money at one another for no reason.This has an implication for public budgets; to the extent that individuals’ fortunes are reduced from the obscene to the merely very large, top marginal tax rates collect less revenue.MoAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 70 Percent Tax on the Rich Isn't About Revenue, It's About Decreasing Inequality [Vanessa Williamson/Common Dreams](via Late Stage Capitalism) Read the rest

Matt Baker, who designs and publishes the posters at UsefulCharts, created this beautiful poster that traces the evolution of the alphabet from 1750 BCE to today's modern Latin script. In some cases, the Phoenician characters (1000 BCE) look a lot like their modern counterparts.[via My Modern Met] Read the rest

Steganography is the art of hiding things in plain sight: for example, secretly encoding a message in an image by flipping the least-significant bit in each pixel to create a binary string that can be decoded as text.0xRick Owned Root's /.Steganography is an open, git-hosted catalog of useful resources aimed at Capture the Flag players who are trying to puzzle out steganographic clues.Stegsolve:Sometimes there is a message or a text hidden in the image itself and in order to view it you need to apply some color filters or play with the color levels. You can do it with GIMP or Photoshop or any other image editing software but stegsolve made it easier. it’s a small java tool that applies many color filters on images. Personally i find it very usefulSteganography - A list of useful tools and resources [0xRick Owned Root/Github](via Four Short Links)(Image: Hustvedt, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest

Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime.

Drumming along as Siri recites 1 trillion to the tenth power isn't new, but this particular variation below really reminds me of a minimalist composition by Laurie Anderson or Steve Reich. The toothbrush in the background also adds a bit of dada weirdness to the performance. Read the rest

Oh, sure, the Democratic leadership says it takes climate change seriously, but that same leadership has sidelined the Green New Deal and gutted the climate committee, replacing it with a lame-duck committee led and staffed by beneficiaries of big energy sector dollars.In a new Jacobin editorial Branko Marcetic continues his razor-edged critique of the Democratic establishment, whose words set them apart from the GOP, but whose deeds are incredibly similar to the Republic establishment's own legislative agenda.Marcetic likens climate change to an impending, planet-destroying comet-strike. The Republicans deny that the comet is coming, while the Democrats say that it is, and it's really urgent, and then do nothing, while privately rolling their eyes at comet activists.Sure, House speaker Nancy Pelosi will refer to climate change as “the existential threat of our time.” But even once activists pushed her to put it on the post-midterm agenda, Pelosi declined to establish a select committee with the kind of broad powers activists want, such as the authority to issue subpoenas (something the previous House select climate committee could do, when the crisis was less urgent) or even, flabbergastingly, to draft legislation.The politician tasked with heading this committee has some of her wealth invested in the fossil-fuel industry, and balked at the idea of barring politicians who have taken fossil-fuel donations from sitting on it, arguing it would violate the First Amendment. After New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez floated the idea of a 70 percent marginal tax rate on the rich to pay for climate policies (which, considering the scale of what must be done, is a moderate position), the House’s number two Democrat, Steny Hoyer, literally laughed at the idea before saying he didn’t support it. Read the rest

Siri provides the backing vocals for this catchy tune.Image: YouTube/World Viral Videos Read the rest

Ingo Dwelling designed a Braille D20 die and uploaded the model to Thingiverse. Here's a time-lapse of it being 3D printed by the folks at Adafruit. Read the rest

aeh5040's kinetic Lego sculpture is a gorgeous and hypnotic piece; you can build one yourself from the plans provided. (via Beyond the Beyond) Read the rest

After the last-minute collapse of negotiations over the new EU Copyright Directive, things have only gone from bad to worse for the beleaguered (but deadly and far-reaching) internet regulation.Under the proposal, online platforms would have to spend hundreds of millions of euros on algorithmic copyright filters that would compare everything users tried to post with a database of supposedly copyrighted works, which anyone could add anything to, and block any suspected matches. This would snuff out all the small EU competitors to America's Big Tech giants, and put all Europeans' communications under threat of arbitrary censorship by balky, unaccountable, easily abused algorithms.The proposal also lets newspapers decide who can link to their sites, and charge for the right to do so, in order to transfer some trifling sums from Big Tech to giant news conglomerates, while crushing smaller tech companies and marginalising smaller news providers.With EU elections looming, every day that passes without resumed negotiations puts the Directive further and further away from any hope of being voted on in this Parliament (and the next Parliament is likely to have a very different composition, making things even more uncertain). Already, it would take heroic measures to take any finalised agreement into legislation: just the deadlines for translation, expert review, etc, make it a near impossibility. Within a couple of weeks, there will be no conceivable way to get the Directive voted on before the elections.That's why it's so important that opposition is continuing to mount for the Directive, and it certainly is. Read the rest

Adam Becker was invited to write for Inference, a "quarterly review of the sciences" backed by billionaire Peter Thiel. Inference covers all sorts of interesting subjects, but has an alarming tendency to make no distinction between pseudoscience and the real thing: think Omni but with the dry imprimatur of academic style instead of cool paintings. So Becker went down the rabbithole (instead of getting paid by it) and wrote up a profile of the publication for Undark.A declaration in italics on their masthead gave me pause: “We have no ideological, political, or religious agendas whatsoever.” This struck me as unusual over-emphasis, so I did a little digging and came across a 2014 blog post by the computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit, where he muses on the first issue of this new “science” publication, adding: “the weirdness is strong — very strong — with this one.” It sounds like the kind of thing I'd love—indulgent longreads about weird science—but the reality of such things in 2019 is climate denial and creationism and Noam Chomsky not responding to press inquiries about why he's on its board.(Pictured above is, in the lack of Inference having any screenshottable visual character whatsoever, my own devising of what a Boing Boing Journal of Junk Science might look like -- perhaps it is time!) Read the rest

In 1860 a party of explorers set out to traverse the Australian continent, but bad management and a series of misfortunes sent it spiraling toward tragedy. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the Victorian Exploring Expedition and its dramatic climax at Cooper's Creek.We'll also try to validate Archimedes and puzzle over an unlucky thief.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

The Dude disappoints, watch this instead.Be disappointed. Read the rest

“We’re aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week.” — Apple.

“They are the pets of a friend of mine and he wanted to give them as a gift to someone who loved them but could not have their own budgies.”IMGURian pewdpie made these wonderful crocheted budgies and “improvised the faces with felting.” “These are the sweet little budgies I recreated” in crochet, Turnip and Poptart. Read the rest

The Beach Behemoth is a 12-foot beach ball. Perhaps you think that this is a mere toy, one of those ultimately trivial impulse buys of no permanence beyond momentary amusement. This is because you have not read the buyer reviews at Amazon. Reid Hamlin writes:We took this ball to the beach and after close to 2 hours to pump it up, we pushed it around for about 10 fun filled minutes. That was when the wind picked it up and sent it huddling down the beach at about 40 knots. It destroyed everything in its path. Children screamed in terror at the giant inflatable monster that crushed their sand castles. Grown men were knocked down trying to save their families. The faster we chased it, the faster it rolled. It was like it was mocking us. Eventually, we had to stop running after it because its path of injury and destruction was going to cost us a fortune in legal fees. Rumor has it that it can still be seen stalking innocent families on the Florida panhandle. We lost it in South Carolina, so there is something to be said about its durability.Troy Beaver:First of all, if you have your heart set on this, and want this GIGANTIC ball, there is technically nothing wrong with this product, but PLEASE take a minute to consider some things that I did not consider before imposing this monstrosity onto our son's graduation party. ...Once it was completely blown up, (about an hour and a half with a small air compressor), it bounced....EVERYWHERE....across people, picnic tables, horse fence, the neighbor's yard, and INTO A FOUR LANE HIGHWAY!!!!!!! Read the rest

“We have had several officers shot,” says Houston TX Police Chief Art Acevedo.“Please pray for officers on the way to the scene” Houston police union says 5 officers have been shot and have been transported to hospital. Houston mayor Sylvester Turner said via Twitter the suspect in the shooting is “down.” More tweets from the breaking news event follow.The latest from Houston Police Watch CommandA total of 3 suspects in a residence.One of them is dead. Two still inside.HPD was serving a warrant at the home.Five officers shot and transported to the hospital. pic.twitter.com/23QD1p0POX— KHOU 11 News Houston (@KHOU) January 28, 2019https://t.co/dCWJ4VxtBB— KHOU 11 News Houston (@KHOU) January 28, 2019Developing: @HoustonPolice Department now confirming 5 police officers were wounded and are being transported to the Texas Medical Center. Houston Mayor @SylvesterTurner indicates the suspect in the shooting is down. pic.twitter.com/fc6rkAvgIp— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) January 29, 2019Statement On Houston Police Shooting: https://t.co/PYc4qmVDeN pic.twitter.com/EC3jIrAxX3— Gov. Greg Abbott (@GovAbbott) January 29, 2019We have had several officers shot please pray for officers on the way to the scene now more information to follow.— Chief Art Acevedo (@ArtAcevedo) January 28, 2019#BREAKING: #Air11 over the scene in southeast Houston. Five @houstonpolice officers shot. @SylvesterTurner confirms suspect is down. #KHOU11 #HTownRush pic.twitter.com/pugMqKAqoR— Marcelino Benito (@MarcelinoKHOU) January 28, 2019Officers moving traffic outside of @memorialhermann awaiting arrival of ambulances carrying shot officers. #KHOU11 pic.twitter.com/L2PS81f0GU— Matt Dougherty (@MattKHOU) January 28, 2019Just been notified that three (3) of HPD officers have been shot. Read the rest

Trump's government shutdown fiasco that ended last week without a penny for his primitive wall seems to be taking quite a toll on president – he's now lashing out at his friends at Fox – a rarity indeed. Sunday night he tweeted an insult at Fox reporters John Roberts and Gillian Turner:Never thought I’d say this but I think @johnrobertsFox and @GillianHTurner @FoxNews have even less understanding of the Wall negotiations than the folks at FAKE NEWS CNN & NBC! Look to final results! Don’t know how my poll numbers are so good, especially up 19% with Hispanics?— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2019And almost as rare, another Fox reporter – Julie Banderas – hit back at Trump in a series of tweets that defends her colleagues and criticizes the president:@realDonaldTrump This is NOT right. I stand by my colleagues @johnrobertsFox and @GillianHTurner They don’t deserve this. No reporter does. They are doing their jobs and reporting the facts. They are not opinion journalists and deserve the respect from the @WhiteHouse they cover. https://t.co/ftRPauopjC— Julie Banderas (@JulieBanderas) January 28, 2019We can and do stand plenty of criticism every day which is fine coming from everyday viewers. Our jobs are not meant to please others. But the office of the @POTUS ought not to be the one lashing out. That’s not how this country works. That’s not how Freedom of the Press works. https://t.co/buakHRRwPO— Julie Banderas (@JulieBanderas) January 28, 2019By going on Twitter and insulting two of our journalists @realDonaldTrump is putting a target on their backs. Read the rest

Von Erickson Laboratories created this skull microphone, which the press release compares to the Shure 55. It's $375 and made in bright chrome, dark chrome, gunmetal, white and orange, but the chrome models are sold out. Read the rest

Knipex makes high-quality tools, and these 10-inch Universal Jaw-Locking Pliers are no exception. If you've never used jaw-locking pliers, they clamp on to things without you having to keep gripping the handles. I've used mine countless times to grip onto stubborn bolts, nuts, and pipes. The ones here are currently out-of-stock because they are on sale, but you can order them and they'll be shipped when more inventory arrives. Read the rest

The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida has reanimated Salvador Dalí as a deepfake video experience. The "Dalí Lives" video installation opens in April on screens throughout the galleries. As Dali once said, “[I] believe in general death but in the death of Dalí absolutely not. [I] believe in my death becoming almost impossible.”From a press release:The Museum began this immersive project by collecting and sharing hundreds of interviews, quotes, and existing archival footage from the prolific artist. GS&P used these extensive materials to train an AI algorithm to “learn” aspects of Dali’s face, then looked for an actor with the same general physical characteristics of Dali’s body. The AI then generates a version of Dali’s likeness to match the actor’s face and expressions. To educate visitors while engaging with “Dali Lives,” the Museum used authentic writings from Dali himself – coupled with dynamic present-day messages – reenacted by the actor. Read the rest

"It's like moving a refrigerator," says the woman to the man on the snow-covered roof of the Canyon General Store in Yellowstone National Park. He expertly divides the snow into 7-foot towers, weighing 700 pounds each, and nudges them down the roof's incline with two snow shovels. I'm guessing he has done this kind of work before.Image: Caters Clips/YouTube Read the rest

Last year saw a massive surge in the right to repair movement, which seeks to limit manufacturers' power to undermine repairs, by mandating certain design decisions to facilitate independent servicing of goods, as well as access to parts and manuals.More than a dozen states introduced right to repair legislation, which met with fierce opposition, led by Apple, whose recent shareholder disclosures revealed that the company views the longevity of its products as a serious threat to its profitability; in the EU, right to repair regulation took on epic proportions, with grassroots fighters taking on a massive, well-funded corporate lobby.The momentum for right to repair is only growing: independent repair is anti-oligarchic (allowing local businesses to benefit from fixing their neighbors' property), environmentally necessary, and it enables self-reliance and the ability to customize or modify your property to suit your needs.In an excellent roundup on Naked Capitalism, Jerri-Lynn Scofield enumerates the many Right to Repair fights being waged across the world, with notes on their progress.Moving farther eastward, the topic of the right to repair has emerged in Australia, as I discussed most extensively here.Last June, Apple was fined for failing to offer free fixes for iPhones and iPads previously serviced by non-Apple stores and that developed a glitch known as “Error 53.” As I noted (quoting from MarketWatch piece,Apple fined as Australian customers win right-to-repair court fight): Under Australian law, customers are entitled to a repair or replacement, and sometimes a refund, if a product is faulty, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which sued Apple. Read the rest

Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that a museum visitor walked out of Moscow's Tretyakov gallery with a painting worth $1 million tucked under his arm. As you can see in the video above, visitors in the crowded gallery watch the man as he removes the painting from the wall and walks out with it, but no one stops him. The suspect has since been apprehended and the painting, Ai Petri.Crimea by Arkhip Kuindzhi, recovered.Image: Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs/YouTube Read the rest

A woman in Manhattan got stuck in an elevator Friday evening – and wasn't rescued until Monday morning. According to HuffPost, the unidentified woman was cleaning a five-story townhouse in the Upper East Side of Manhattan when she became trapped in the elevator between the 2nd and 3rd floor. The homeowners were out of town for the entire weekend, the elevator didn't have a phone, and apparently she didn't have a cell phone on her. Finally, on Monday morning, one of the homeowners came home, realized what had happened and called 911. Firefighters broke into the elevator around 10am, rescued the woman, and sent her to the hospital. Miraculously, she's in good condition.Moral of the story for claustrophobic people like me: take the stairs. Read the rest

John Kapoor (75), the billionaire founder of Insys Therapeutics, ran a bribery scheme to get doctors to prescribe an addictive fentanyl spray, said Assistant U.S. Attorney David Lazarus in Boston federal court on the opening day of a trial against Kapoor and four other Insys executives.Reuters reports that Lazurus told jurors Insys set up sham conferences and paid doctors up to $275,000 to speak at the poorly-attend fora. Kapoor and his colleagues have pleaded not guilty to racketeering conspiracy.Image: Iris Hanking/Shutterstock Read the rest

The Safe Face Pledge launched last month as a "pledge to mitigate abuse of facial analysis technology," with four themes: "Show Value for Human Life, Dignity, and Rights;" "Address Harmful Bias"; "Facilitate Transparency"; and "Embed Commitments into Business Practices" (SAFE).The full pledge is inspirational and comprehensive, covering bias, secret and discriminatory state surveillance, risking human life, law enforcement abuse, auditing customer compliance, communicating the systems' workings, and making your legal documents (from vendor contracts to terms of service) reflective of your values.The pledge's announcement describes how the UK's notoriously inaccurate police facial recognition systems are more likely to falsely accuse black people of being a match for a criminal than people of different ethnic or racial backgrounds.That reminded me of something that EFF executive director Cindy Cohn described on a panel last month: Cindy pointed out that there's a danger in centering the critique of facial recognition in racial bias, because this bias is the result of the systems not being trained with enough images of racialized people. When a Chinese state facial recognition system ran into this problem, the Chinese government simply bought the driver's license database from an African client state and used it as training data, eliminating bias in the algorithm's false positive rate, by massively invading the privacy of millions of African people, and now the system is even better at tracking black people. Commitment One: Show Value for Human Life, Dignity, and RightsSignatories of the Safe Face Pledge agree to:1Do not contribute to applications that risk human lifeBy acknowledging that decisions that foreseeably increase the risk to human life are too dangerous for artificial intelligence, and by refraining from selling or providing facial analysis technologies to locate or identify targets in operations where lethal force may be used or is contemplated. Read the rest

Honest Guide is a YouTube channel for people planning to visit Prague (and sometimes other places in Europe). In this video, you are warned to stay away from Euronet ATMs. Apparently, they are located only in tourist areas. They can detect when a foreign card is inserted and offers terrible exchange rates (15% less than the going rate), plus they tack on a 4 USD fee. Read the rest

When Cambridge, UK resident Eve Paterson got married, she insisted that her dress and those of her bridesmaids would include pockets and belts; her friend Nell Gordon's tweets about it raced around the world as women everywhere celebrated the virtues of pockets and condemned the fashion industry for its deplorable, longstanding practice of denying women pockets.The fashion industry's unwillingness to supply women with adequate pockets is self parodying in its shittiness, and it remains one of the sterling examples of markets' real-world indifference to customer demands.Paterson's dress pockets were made from the fabric of her mother's wedding dress, fulfilling the "something old" part of the traditional wedding tackle ("something [old,new,borrowed,blue]"). Paterson sung the praises of pockets after the event: "Thinking about adding pockets ahead of time means there’s ample space for snacks for your new husband, notes for speeches, tissues for mum, and all the other things we know will help the day run smoothly."Bride added pockets into her wedding dress and bridesmaids’ dresses [Laura Abernethy/Metro](via Naked Capitalism)(Image: thumbnail from larger picture by Toby Mitchell/oakandblossom.com) Read the rest

At least six empty houses owned by the estates of Philadelphians ended up in the hands of William Ernest Johnson III, a violent felon currently on parole; the houses were then sold on to developers who renovated and flipped them.The houses were stolen by providing Philadelphia's city deeds office with forged deed transfers, either bearing the stamps of notaries who say they were tricked, or forged notary stamps (either from nonexistent notaries, or from notaries who say the stamps were forged -- including the wife of a former state senator).Pennsylvania does not require that notaries capture a thumbprint when notarizing a document.There have been other waves of house thefts in the past, but those were sophisticated identity-theft crimes that involved merging multiple data-sets from online breaches to impersonate the house's owner and secure a duplicate deed. However, in this case, it seems that a combination of poor checking at the Philadelphia city deeds office and lax standards for Pennsylvania notaries meant that even a dumdum could simply rip off houses wholesale.Johnson denies being that dumdum. However, at least one of the flipped houses was laundered through his wife, who was convincingly angry and surprised when the Philadelphia Inquirer asked her about it, implying that she'd been scammed by him. Then Johnson called the reporter and said, "I wanted to know if I could offer you something. What is it going to take for you not to mention my wife’s name?"The stolen houses had been owned by longtime residents who died without clear estates, or whose distant relations had not moved quickly to sell them on. Read the rest

Bruce Sterling's All Things Facebook is a massive linkdump of the latest-and-greatest reasons to delete Facebook (and possibly put Zuck and Sandberg on trial for crimes against humanity). This morning's post on Facebook's tracking of non-Facebook users on Android came from here.Some highlights:* Facebook is the new crapware [Natasha Lomas/Techcrunch]: "Crapware is named crapware for a reason. Having paid to own hardware, why should people be forever saddled with unwanted software, stub or otherwise?"* Technological Sovereignty, Vol. 2: " This book deals with its psychological, social, political, ecological and economic costs while it relates experiences to create Technological Sovereignty."* What 284 Days Without Facebook Feels Like (Pure. F*cking. Joy) [Jonathan Greene/Uncalendared] "What I Miss About Facebook? Nothing. Even on the rare occasion when I saw an update that made me happy, that joy was continually outweighed by the deluge of trash sent my way."* The fall of Facebook has only begun. [13D Research/Medium]: "The market is drastically underestimating the peril the company is in."* Walt Mossberg, Veteran Technology Journalist, Quits Facebook [Daniel Victor/New York Times] "I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here."There's so much more, though.All Things Facebook [Bruce Sterling/Tumblr] Read the rest

People stuck in a 75-car pileup about 20km east of Montreal decided to get creative in passing the time 🏒 pic.twitter.com/JInUxB9ed7— CBC (@CBC) January 28, 2019Oh, Canada! Thank you for the example you set. Just a few miles south of our mutual border, we have a Measles epidemic brewing! Read the rest

Facebook provides a suite of turnkey app-building tools for Android that are widely used among the most popular Google Play apps, with billions of combined installs; naturally, these tools create incredibly data-hungry defaults in the apps that incorporate them, so that even before you do anything with an app, it has already snaffled up a titanic amount of data, tied it into your Google Ad ID (which is recycled by Facebook to join up data from different sources) and sent it to Facebook.Needless to say, the GDPR made these practices radioactively illegal, but despite two years' warning that the GDPR was coming into effect last spring, Facebook dragged another six months out before updating its tools, and these updates still have propagated to all the apps in Google Play. The data harvested from phones -- including, for example, which Bible verses you read using a King James Bible app, and which searches you made on Kayak -- is added to your "shadow profile", and no one (outside of Facebook) knows for sure how that's used.You can practice a little self-defense, but it's cumbersome: root your phone and you can block all network traffic to *.facebook.com; you can also reset your Ad ID and disaggregate the data coming off your phone. I've had a poke around but can't find a tool that resets the Ad ID every 10 seconds -- please leave a comment if you know of one.Frederike Kaltheuner and Christopher Weatherhead from Privacy International gave an outstanding talk on the subject at the Chaos Communications Congress in Leipzig last month; an accompanying paper gives more detail, including methods. Read the rest

In this spectacular example of road rage, a Massachusetts senior clings to the hood of a vehicle as it accelerates to 70 MPH on the state turnpike.The man, Richard Kamrowski, and the driver of the SUV, 37-year-old Mark Fitzgerald, were involved in a minor sideswipe on Saturday and had pulled over to exchange information, Fox News reported. When the men got into an argument, Fitzgerald began to drive away. That’s when Kamrowski jumped on the hood of Fitzgerald’s SUV.Both driver and "passenger" were arrested and charged with being completely bonkers.BONUS ROAD RAGE VIDEO: In Anaheim, Calif., this weekend, a gentleman leapt onto the hood of a woman's car and punched her windshield with such force it cracked. He got arrested too. Read the rest

This video shows remote-controlled miniature diggers being used to escavate basement. It's taken quite a while, according to one source, though it seems more like a growing hobby than an explicit construction project.You'll be struck by how incredible the "toys" are. Find out more at rctruckandconstruction.com.On our forum you will find many gifted builders of both trucks and construction equip of all levels of skill and everyone is friendly, outgoing & enjoys helping out newcomers wanting to get involved with the hobby. There's a Vendor's Section of private hobbyists who are willing to put up their skills for hire at a fee that is driven moreso to help others in the hobby, rather than lining their pockets for maxium profit..don't get me wrong, they don't give away their time, but they are priced very reasonably and the quality of their work is carefully monitored by myself & others who are leaders of the forum.The detailed perfection of the custom-built mini-diggers makes screenshots and some of the videos disorienting, as if we had discovered and begun unearthing vast mysterious monuments that perfectly resembled dingy basements.Here's another: Read the rest

Stephen Hiltner trudges miles through beautiful moors and mountains to get to the next bothy [New York Times].But bothy culture, some longtime proponents fear, is imperiled by a generation unaccustomed to shrewdly guarded secrets. Map coordinates for the often hard-to-find dwellings, once dispersed only among hiking insiders, are now available openly on the internet. Popular hashtags have helped create something of a buzz on Instagram, where bothies are sometimes presented, misguidedly, as an alternative to Airbnb rentals. (The bothy code unequivocally prohibits the use of bothies for commercial purposes, and discourages their use by large groups.) A hugely popular and impressively researched guide, “The Scottish Bothy Bible,” published in 2017, lines shelves in stores throughout the U.K., the first of many bothy guides to achieve a kind of mainstream success. It, too, has increased foot traffic.Some you could walk right by without noticing. (Photo crop: Stephen Hiltner/The New York Times) Read the rest

Late-evening Twitter poetry from Tom Brokaw after blurting out his opinions concerning hispanic immigrants' "failure" to "assimilate". There's speculation that he's been hacked – "This cannot be real," writes Soledad O'Brien – but a look at his timeline suggests that Brokaw is just at the perihelion of boomer twitter. The light and heat of social media's burning sun blasts each generation's neurons a different way. Read the rest

There is an abandoned McDonnell Douglas MD87 jetliner parked on the tarmac of Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas airport in Spain. If this is your jetliner, the airport asks that you please move it immediately. Apparently, the plane has been illegally parked for some years. From CNN:Airport director Elena Mayoral submitted an official notice to the Boletín Oficial del Estado, the official gazette of the Kingdom of Spain, informing the nation of a plane in an "obvious state of abandonment" at the airport...Under Spanish law, authorities must publish official notices about the plane for three consecutive months and then wait a year to see if the owner comes forward to claim it.If they do not, the plane will be considered legally abandoned and will be sold off by the state at a public auction.From El País:In 1990, the airplane flew for the first time for Iberia, according to online magazine Preferente.com. Eighteen years later it was acquired by Pronair, a charter airline headquartered in Albacete in Castilla-La Mancha. But the airline, which at one point was flying regularly to China, closed down in just a year due to the increase in fuel prices and the 2008 financial crisis.Two years later, the plane was acquired by Saicus Air, a Spanish airline based in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. The airline operated two airplanes from Madrid and up until that point, had been dedicated to transporting cargo. The plane was meant to fly passengers between Spain and the Republic of Guinea Bissau in west Africa. Read the rest

A man using a magnet to fish for salvageable items in Ocala, Florida was surprised to reel in a hand grenade. So he tossed it into his trunk and made a run for the border. As one does. Upon arriving at the nearest Taco Bell, the fellow called the police who were quick to evacuate the restaurant. Fortunately, the bomb squad safely removed the explosive device. They later determined it to be an unexploded World War II grenade.(CNN)Taco Bell on E. Silver Springs Blvd. has been evacuated. A man found a hand grenade while magnet fishing in Ocklawaha, put it in his trunk, and drove to Taco Bell prior to calling 911. MCSO bomb squad is currently on scene to ensure everyone’s safety. pic.twitter.com/sgGmXDkAXB— Ocala Police Dept (@ocalapd) January 26, 2019 Read the rest

This weekend, thieves stole the Banksy mural painted on the emergency exit door of the Bataclan concert venue in Paris. The Bataclan is where on November 13, 2015 Islamic State militants launched a terrorist attack by killing 90 people during an Eagles of Death Metal concert before continuing with shootings and suicide bombings that resulted in 130 deaths total and more than 400 injuries. From the BBC News:The theft, which occurred overnight on Friday, involved "a group of hooded individuals armed with angle grinders", AFP news agency reports, citing a source close to the investigation.The suspects then reportedly drove away with the artwork in a truck."Banksy Mural Is Stolen From Bataclan, Site of Paris Attacks" (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)L’œuvre de @originaIbanksy hommage aux victimes du 13/11 a été volée. pic.twitter.com/FMHoobzRXm— Bataclan (@bataclan_) January 26, 2019 Read the rest

On Friday, hundreds of us gathered at the Internet Archive, at the invitation of Creative Commons, to celebrate the Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain, just weeks after the first works entered the American public domain in twenty years.I had the honor of delivering the closing keynote, after a roster of astounding speakers. It was a big challenge and I was pretty nervous, but on reviewing the saved livestream, I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.Proud enough that I've ripped the audio and posted it to my podcast feed; the video for the keynote is on the Archive and mirrored to Youtube.The whole event's livestream is also online, and boy do I recommend it. Read the rest

Scooter companies like Bird and Lime do not currently provide helmets for their riders. A recent UCLA study shows riders without helmets suffer the worst injuries.LAist:During a year of study, doctors identified 249 people who were admitted for scooter-related injuries. They did this by looking through medical records and identifying any that contained notes with the word "scooter," or that mentioned Bird or Lime — the top two operators in the market.The study found "helmet use was low and a significant subset of injuries" were documented in patients under 18, which is the legal age required by scooter operators to ride.Researchers also studied scooter riders' habits by observing a pair of "busy intersections" in Sept. 2018 — one in downtown Santa Monica, the other near UCLA's campus.The vast majority of riders (94 percent) didn't wear helmets, which were required under California law during the period of study, though they no longer are. Nearly 8 percent were riding with a passenger, which is a violation of the vehicles terms of use (and local law). More than a quarter of the observed riders were seen zipping along on the sidewalk, which is also prohibited. Read the rest

Deepmind presented an AI that could beat human champions at Starcraft II. It claimed the AI was limited to what human players can physically do, putting its achievement in the realm of strategic analysis rather than finger twitchery. But there's a problem: it was often tracked clicking with superhuman speed and efficiency. Aleksi Pietikäinen: 1. AlphaStar played with superhuman speed and precision.2. Deepmind claimed to have restricted the AI from performing actions that would be physically impossible to a human. They have not succeeded in this and most likely are aware of it.3. The reason why AlphaStar is performing at superhuman speeds is most likely due to it’s inability to unlearn the human players tendency to spam click. I suspect Deepmind wanted to restrict it to a more human like performance but they are simply not able to.Pietikäinen suggests that because Deepmind would have depended on recorded human games to train the AI, it picked up a peculiar human behavior: idle or unnecessary "spam clicking". As a result Deepmind would have been forced to lift the AI's clickspeed limits to escape this behavior, at which point it develops strategies that irreducibly depend on bursts of superhuman speed. In brief:"It is deeply unsatisfying to have prominent members of this research project make claims of human-like mechanical limitations when the agent is very obviously breaking them and winning it’s games specifically because it is demonstrating superhuman execution."It looks rather like Deepmind bungled an interesting AI's announcement by making claims about it that it didn't realize were wrong. Read the rest

No one but the pure at heart may find the Golden Grail.Oh, Flash! Read the rest

Mark Corbett has settled with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- founded by Elizabeth Warren and then gutted by Trump appointee and awful person Mick Mulvaney, now the White House Chief of Staff -- over the complaints that he ran an illegal loan-sharking operation that swindled veterans out of their pensions for a decade. He has been fined $1.Corbett was the agent for websites that offered to trade veterans' pensions and disability benefits for cash advances; veterans would redirect their pension direct-deposits to the companies' bank accounts and get a lump-sum in return. This is illegal. What's more, the companies insisted that they didn't have comply with the legal obligation on lenders to inform borrowers of the effective interest rates, because this wasn't a loan, "you are selling a product for a set price." This is also illegal. Not only that, but the companies often stiffed the veterans, not paying them, or not paying them on time, and still kept their pensions.Corbett claimed he couldn't afford to pay a fine, so the CFPB reduced his penalty to $1.In a darkly hilarious denouement, CFPB left in all the boilerplate language included with larger fines. So the consent order intones that $1 dollar must be paid within 10 days of the effective date, and thereafter distributed to the Civil Penalty Fund to compensate victims of financial crimes. Mark Corbett is prohibited from taking a fat tax deduction for paying out that 100-cent penalty, and “to preserve the deterrent effect of the civil money penalty,” he cannot use this greenback as an offset toward any future federal fines. Read the rest