Boing Boing

In October 2017, Syracuse cops arrested Torrence Jackson with a small amount of marijuana and accused him of hiding drugs in his rectum (the officers say they saw him shift in his seat and concluded that he'd put drugs up his butt). They took him to St Joseph's Hospital where he was nonconsensually X-rayed; when that revealed no drugs, officers told doctors to force sedation on Jackson and then put a tube and camera up his rectum.Two doctors refused to perform the procedure, but eventually Jackson was drugged unconscious and anally violated.No drugs were found.After Jackson was released, St Joseph's hospital billed him $4,595.12 for the procedures.Syracuse's mayor Ben Walsh, and police chief refused to comment on the incident. Syracuse City Court Judge Rory McMahon, who issued the warrant, also refused to comment, citing a seal on the case.Jackson says he will not pay the bill. St Joseph's has threatened to send collection agents against him. Keller, the lawyer, defended his client’s resistance to the procedure.“Good for him,” he said. “If somebody was going to do surgery on me without any evidence, I would be upset, too.”Jackson said he woke up, not sure what had happened. “I felt tampered with,” he said.Jackson was released from jail the following day. There was blood in his underwear, he said. He went to the emergency room at Community General Hospital.There, he said, an emergency room examined him and told him what happened: Someone had probed his colon. Read the rest

A couple of times a year, Apple plops out a report detailing all of the user data requests made by government and law enforcement agencies from around the world. In the latest bi-annual report, it looks like information requests have increased since the last reporting period.From Engadget:According to the report, which covers the first half of this year, Apple received 32,342 demands for user data from governments -- up 9 percent from the previous period -- spanning access to 163,823 devices. Germany made the most requests (42 percent), the majority of which were due to "stolen devices investigations," issuing 13,704 requests for data on 26,160 devices.The US was in second place with 4,570 requests for 14,911 devices. More than half of these requests (2,397) were for users' basic account information or content, revealed Apple. The US also asked for 918 financial identifiers -- which cover suspected fraudulent credit, debit, or gift card transactions -- attributing them to iTunes gift card fraud. It used to be that the report was only offered as a dense, boring PDF. But Apple, in an attempt to boost their corporate transparency, has made their report numbers available to peruse via an interactive website that can be searched by country and the month that the user data was requested.According to Engadget, Apple's report doesn't include the number of FISA requests made, as there is a legally binding six-month delay required on reportage of such requests.If you're an Apple hardware or services user, it's worth taking a quick jaunt over to the company's transparency website to see what kind of user information your government has been trying to get their hands on. Read the rest

Whether you like it or not, Christmas is a holiday that is nearly impossible to hide from. It's an in-your-face holiday for at least three months out of the year, with Christmas marketing, sales and decorations appearing in malls and other public spaces as early as October. But this wasn't always the case. Here's a fascinating short video explaining the 22-year ban on Christmas enacted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1659. Back then the Puritans despised Christmas, which was associated with debauchery, according to the video. Christmas encouraged people to drink "copious amounts of alcohol," riot in the streets, gorge on food (gasp!), and was the catalyst of rowdiness and sinful behavior. In other words, Christmas, back then, was not considered to be family friendly. "But in the end," the narrator states, "we can partially thank commercialization for sustaining the domestic brand of Christmas we have today." Yippee? Read the rest

Bryan Adams has followed up on his earlier advocacy for a new Canadian copyright deal that benefits artists with a submission to the Canadian Heritage Committee's copyright consultation that argues against longer copyright terms, saying that these enrich large "intermediaries" (entities that sit between artists and their audiences, like record labels and collecting societies) and not artists.Instead of longer terms (which just mean that intermediaries get to milk creators' works for longer periods), Adams favours shortening the reversion term: this is the term after which an artist can demand to have their copyrights restored to them, even if their contracts say that they have signed away the copyright forever. In the US, the reversion term is 35 years and it's proved a boon to artists, especially those who were defrauded of their copyrights -- I'm told that George Clinton just successfully used this to reclaim the rights to Atomic Dog.Here's Adams's submission; Michael Geist's commentary is also very good:Adams raises two key concerns. First, he notes that copyright term extension provides little or no benefit to creators, who will have died decades before the extended protection kicks in. Indeed, as I stated to the Industry committee during my appearance, there is no evidence that creators today drop creative activities due to a perceived lack of incentive that comes from protection that runs for 50 years after their death rather than 70 years.Second, Adams rightly distinguishes between creators and intermediaries, which presumably include music labels, publishers, distributors, and copyright collectives. Read the rest

Kano dropped the price on its Raspberry Pi based Kano Computer. At this price, it's cheaper than buying the components individually (A Raspberry Pi 3, case, speaker and amp, cables, microSD card, wireless keyboard/trackpad). The built-in Linux-based operating system and bundled software (which teaches kids how to code) is excellent. This would be a great last minute gift. Read the rest

Kamil Rocki was inspired by the 2016 paper from Google Deepmind researchers explaining how they used machine learning to develop a system that could play Breakout on the Atari 2600 with superhuman proficiency.But Rocki wanted to develop a more general approach to machine-learning game-playing, one that could play more sophisticated games than Breakout, with less preprocessing and other time-consuming steps.This led him on a quest to find a games platform with a lot of available games, that ran on simple enough processors that he could emulate a lot of them, very quickly, on modern computing hardware.And so the Gameboy Supercomputer was born, running at over a billion FPS. He's successfully used it to develop machine learning systems that can beat Pac-Man and Mario Land.Rocki finishes his writeup with a roadmap for further work from the Open AI community.This is an excellent example of the way that flexibility in copyright -- including the freedom to rip old games and play them in emulators -- will be key to producing better machine learning systems. In order to make learning more efficient, you could imagine trying to transfer some knowledge from simpler games. This is what remains unsolved right now and is a hot research topic. A recently published challenge by OpenAI tried to measure just that: 1. There is no obvious score 2. If no action is performed it takes 60 minutes to end the game (58 minutes left in the animation).Could you try the exact same approach as in the Atari 2600 paper? Read the rest

Navigating the topic of death with a young child can be a difficult, traumatic experience for parents, especially if the topic is broached by the sudden loss of a loved one. Trying to explain death to a kid because they watched Santa Claus pass away right before their eyes? That's a higher level of awful.According to The Moscow Times, a group of kindergarteners from Siberia were celebrating the season with a Christmas party, attended by Santa or rather, one of the jolly old fellow's Eastern European iterations, Ded Moroz. A bit of background: Ded Moroz, which translates as Father Frost, was originally celebrated/feared in pre-slavic lore as a wizard or a snow demon, and over the centuries became a central figure in the region's celebrations of the New Year and Christmas. Anyway, back to the awful.As part of a school play, Ded Moroz, played by 67-year-old Valery Titenko, danced his way across the stage, until he didn't. Dressed in Ded Moroz's long red, fur-fringed coat, Titenko suffered a heart attack and fell to the ground. From the Moscow Times:The group of kids apparently thought that Titenko’s fatal collapse was part of his skit and began giggling. A woman dressed as a clown who was also part of the skit noticed Titenko’s fall and rushed to help him.Titenko was rushed to the hospital but died before he could get there.According to The Moscow Times, Titenko was aware of his poor health and had been feeling dreadful earlier in the day. Read the rest

Musician Isaac Schankler performed Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata by delaying the bass for one bar, and playing the melody one bar earlier than usual.[via Open Culture]Image source: By W.J. Baker (held the expired copyright on the photograph) - Library of Congress[1]Contrairement à une erreur fréquemment répandue le buste a été réalisé par Hugo Hagen, non pas à partir du masque mortuaire mais, comme de nombreux autres, d'après le masque réalisé en 1812 par Franz Klein pour un buste qu'il devait réaliser ensuite., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4698895 Read the rest

Cory published a writeup of my research showing Google offshoot Sidewalk Labs’ plan to build a surveilling city in Toronto involves a much, much larger chunk of land than publicly disclosed (in fact about 2,600 acres of prime Toronto waterfront!). It flushed out a response from the high-priced US PR firm Berlin Rosen, apparently acting on behalf of Sidewalk Labs:Hi there –I am reaching out about the above mentioned article. The image that accompanies the article is a picture of designated waterfront area with Quayside, specifically, highlighted. Sidewalk Toronto’s MIDP [Master Innovation Development Plan] will address Quayside only, it does not expand across the entire waterfront designated area as the article states.Can you please correct this within the article?Thanks so much in advance!MollyTo support her assertion that my findings are incorrect, Berlin Rosen's Molly Henderson sent along a misleading FAQ prepared by Waterfront Toronto to diffuse mounting concerns over the City of Toronto's Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP).To understand how the FAQ obscures the nature of the project, consider this sentence: "The only commitment at this time is to a process to create a plan for Quayside that will meet the objectives set out in the RFP [Request for Proposals]." On a first reading, this seems to imply that private city-within-a-city will be limited to Quayside, the 12-acre site that everyone has been talking about to date.But then, later, the FAQ leaves wiggle room regarding the true size of the slated area to be "developed": "Any ideas proposed more broadly than Quayside must be in service of achieving the shared goals of the project and be supported by a business case demonstrating the need for scale to achieve the objectives."Now, if you look at the map on page 42 of the Plan Development Agreement (PDA) struck between Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto, which is the focus of Cory’s Dec. Read the rest

Isao Machii is a Iaido master from Kawanishi, Hyōgo, Japan. His skills as a master swordsman have landed him a number of Guinness World Records: fastest tennis ball (820 km/h) cut by sword and "fastest 1,000 martial arts sword cuts" to name just two. His speed and accuracy with a katana is a thing of wonder. Put on display once again in this video, after watching two speeding baseballs whiz past him, he non-nonchalantly cuts a third ball in half, fired at him at 161 kilometers per hour. Amazing. Read the rest

This guy likes to make ants bite him and wasps sting him so he can post his reactions on YouTube. In his latest video, he makes a Costa Rican Executioner Wasp sting him on his forearm. It's hard to know for sure how much he is hamming it up for the camera, but he makes quite a show of the pain. He says it hurt as much as the Tarantula Hawk's sting and the Bullet Ant's bite.Image: YouTube Read the rest

WARNING: This video is not for the squeamish. Do not watch if blood and cyst guts make you woozy.But for the rest of you who get a kick out of pimple popping videos, this one is the motherlode. The cyst had nestled itself in this patient's neck for 20 years, and apparently, no one else wanted to touch the golf-ball sized nugget. But Dr. Mudgil, a dermatologist in New York, came to the rescue. Eureka! Read the rest

A gentleman wanted beer, but didn't feel he should have to pay for it, so he climbed over a tall fence to get it. Imagine his outrage when his pants got stuck on the fence, leaving him hanging upside down.Image: Youtube Read the rest

When French President (and ex-investment banker) Macron decided to cut taxes for the super-rich and make up the shortfall by taxing diesel fuel (widespread in poor rural areas) but not private jet fuel, he put the already-precarious French treasury into an even more precarious state.Thanks to those choices, the streets of France have erupted into sustained, relentless "gilets jaunes" protests, and French cops have accumulated 23,000,000 hours of overtime policing the protests, but have not been paid for any of it (see above, re: starved treasury).Activists within police unions are now threatening to go out on strike, joining the yellow vest protesters; others are calling for work-to-rule slowdown actions. They are particularly incensed that Macron has proposed to balance his budget by cutting $70.8m from the national police budget.The government is offering a one-off bonus of around $342 to each officer deployed to face the gilets jaunes protests, totaling around $37.7 million. But this may not be enough to placate a force that claims to have been overworked and underpaid for years—unpaid overtime, for example, totals around $313 million nationwide, Le Monde reported.Secretary of State Laurent Nuñez told the RMC radio station Wednesday he would work on a payment schedule to address the government’s debts, though he warned that the exact details remain under discussion with the unions.France Protests: Police Threaten to Join Protesters, Demand Better Pay and Conditions [David Brennan/Newsweek](Image: Rog01) Read the rest

Fox and Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade had it out with Sarah Huckabee Sanders this morning after Sanders defended Trump's decision to pull the US out of Syria. Agreeing with co-host Steve Doocy, Sanders said that pulling out of Syria was always Trump's plan. “Anybody that says they’re surprised by this has simply been living under a rock.” "Sarah, he is giving Russia a big win," Kilmeade argued. "Vladimir Putin praised him. He also is doing exactly what he criticized President Obama for doing. He said President Obama is the founder of ISIS. He just refounded ISIS because they got 30,000 men there and they are already striking back with our would-be evacuation. The president is really on the griddle with this."Although it looked like Kilmeade, clearly agitated, had more to say on the matter, his co-hosts shut it down real fast with a "Alright Sarah, we wish you a very merry Christmas!" Read the rest

China does not pay for Trump's tariffs. US companies that import goods from China pay them. To make matters worse, US taxpayers are now having to pay angry US farmers more money than the tariffs are supposedly taking in. The Council on Foreign Relations concludes, "By launching a trade war with China, therefore, the president has simultaneously raised taxes on U.S. companies and lost the government money.Image: Council on Foreign Relations Read the rest

This list of terrible things Facebook did in 2018 (not including the terrible things it did without getting caught) makes it clear that Facebook is a garbage company.March 29BuzzFeed News published an internal memo from Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth in which one of Zuckerberg’s most trusted lieutenants calls any effort to connect the world a “de facto good.” “Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies,” he wrote in June 2016. “Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools... And still we connect people.” The note caused a backlash externally in light of troubling events, including Facebook’s role in abetting genocide in Myanmar and its role in broadcasting a spate of suicides and murders on its livestreaming tool. In a statement, Zuckerberg disputed the idea that Bosworth was speaking for the company and said, “We've never believed the ends justify the means.” In response to the story, Bosworth tweeted (and later deleted), “I don’t agree with the post today and I didn’t agree with it even when I wrote it.”Lol Mark, remember Cambridge Analytica and when 2 million people left Facebook. What a year it's been. pic.twitter.com/g7yXy0P4dp— The Guardian (@guardian) December 19, 2018Image collage created from photos by JD Lasica (Attribution 2.0 Generic, CC BY 2.0) and Shutterstock/Mr.anaked Read the rest

I wish I could wear running shoes, but I shouldn't. When I was a teenager, I tore all of the ligaments in my right ankle. Six weeks of physiotherapy and now, close to 20 years later, I'm still walking around on wobbly scar tissue. My ankle loves to roll out from under me, for any excuse at all. So, for extra support while I'm out strutting around, I wear combat boots. They tend to last longer than comparably priced hiking books and, depending on the boot, can be gussied up for special occasions. The downside to wearing combat boots is that even the lightest among them can still be pretty heavy. Enter GORUCK's MACV-1. They call it a "Jungle Rucking Boot," but it's not at all dissimilar to the lightweight duty boots from companies like Magnum or 511 Tactical that I used to wear to work. Available in black or coyote brown, they ride just above the ankle and, at 14 ounces each, are one of the lightest pairs of boots I've ever lashed to my footies. Despite their light weight, they seem, so far, to be well made. The majority of the boot is made using full grain leather, which comes out of the box already holding a shine. It didn't take me long to wear the shine down to nothing, but it's the thought that counts. The rest of the MACV-1 is comprised of 1000D Cordura and, for extra ankle support, a strip of 2" nylon webbing that runs down the back and side of each boot. Read the rest

The Green New Deal -- championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive Dems -- is one of the most popular Democratic policies in living memory, supported by 81% of registered voters (including 64% of Republicans and 57% of "conservative Republicans"), so of course the Democratic establishment is trying to kill it.Instead of striking the proposed Green New Deal Select Committee in the House, they will reconvene the Select Committee on Climate Change instead, chaired by six-termer Kathy Castor (D-FL), who has said that she does not support the call for a "No Fossil Fuel Money pledge," which would bar participation by elected officials who took fossil fuel industry money in climate change work.Castor said she believed that a bar on participation from Reps who had been funded by oil and coal companies could violate the First Amendment (she later said her response had been "inartful"). Castor said she didn't think she'd received oil and coal money but wasn't sure. She has received $73,000 from coal and oil companies and their PACs. She said she "wasn't sure" if she herself would take the pledge.When asked whether her climate committee would tackle on the kind of large-scale economic reforms that the IPCC has warned are necessary for the survival of our species, Castor said that was "not going to be our sole focus."It's not clear whether Ocasio-Cortez will be tapped to serve on the climate committee. Neither she nor the other freshman Dems who ran insurgent campaigns calling for a Green New Deal were contacted by House Dem leaders in advance of this announcement. Read the rest

Long the province of manly mens' colognes and deodorants, the fashion for smokey, woodsy scents has come to the perfume aisle.Log Cabin Perfumes, as I have taken to calling the growing category of scents that evoke a cold snap all year round, are fairly new to the market. A decade ago, only a few niche fragrances prominently featured notes like Scotch pine, birch tar, gunpowder, palo santo and wood smoke. In 2009, Serge Lutens released Fille en Aiguilles, a cult hit that smells like a Christmas tree farm, and slowly the hibernal trend began to trickle through the indie perfume world. Now, the demand for wearable wintry mixes has exploded.All these fancy Eaus with their camphor notes and sage fundamentals, yet no mention of the Demeter Fragrance Library's Bonfire Cologne.Photo: California National Guard Read the rest

Police in Opp, Alabama, blame Satan for a recent spate of killings in the rural area. The Associated Press quotes a statement posted to the department's facebook page:THIS PAST SUNDAY, A YOUNG MAN WAS SHOT AND KILLED IN KINSTON. MONDAY NIGHT, A MOTHER WAS SHOT AND KILLED IN NORTHERN COVINGTON COUNTY. THERE HAVE BEEN FIVE MURDERS IN COVINGTON COUNTY IN 2018. THESE MURDERS HAVE BEEN DONE BY OUR YOUNG PEOPLE. THIS IS HAPPENING BECAUSE WE HAVE TURNED AWAY FROM GOD AND EMBRACED SATAN. WE MAY HAVE NOT MEANT TO DO SO BUT, WE HAVE. IT IS TIME TO ASK FOR GOD’S HELP TO STOP THIS. IT IS TIME TO BE PARENTS AND RAISE OUR CHILDREN, NOT HAVE THEM RAISE US. IT IS TIME TO FULLY SUPPORT LAW ENFORCEMENT AND STAND BY THE OFFICERS AND DEPUTIES THAT ARE FAR TOO OFTEN HAVING TO WALK INTO THESE DANGEROUS SITUATIONS AND CLEAN UP THE MESS. FRIENDS, IT IS TIME TO STAND UP AND BE RESPONSIBLE, GROWN UP LEADERS IN OUR COMMUNITY. BOTTOM LINE, THERE ARE SHEEP; THERE ARE WOLVES AND THERE ARE SHEEP DOGS. WHICH GROUP DO YOU BELONG TO ?Wolves, sheepdogs and the separation of church and state. Read the rest

Nope, ankle scarves are not the latest thing to come out of Italy or Germany or wherever. I was skeptical when I came across this Country Living article that declared them a "trend," as the image is clearly Photoshopped. So, I started digging. First I went to its source, an Italian website called Lercio. Then I clicked to Lercio's source, a German site called Der Postillon and that's when I knew my suspicions were true. Ankle scarves are fake news parading around on English sites as a real trend. And that's when I came across this article on Lifehacker. Its author, Nick Douglas, breaks it down for us:That’s because there is no ankle scarf trend. I’m not saying that there’s really only one person who once wore tiny scarves on their ankles. I’m saying that the photo comes from this joke article on the German satire site Der Postillon.See, Der Postillon published a joke article that teens in Berlin are wearing scarves around their ankles, to stay warm while wearing fashionably short pants. Then the Italian satire site Lercio syndicated that article. Lercio isn’t pretending to be real any more than Der Postillon is; the front page includes stories about a hermit hiding inside his mailbox, and the pope fighting over parking spots for the Popemobile.When a blogger for the American site BestProducts.com—not a satire site—picked up the ankle scarf story, she either failed to notice that it was satire, or decided that it would make a better story if she didn’t mention that part. Read the rest

The mad dog's sick of being chained out in the yard. He'll be leaving officially early next year, but the announcement comes a day after Trump personally decided, on an apparent whim, to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria.Mr Trump tweeted that General Mattis "was a great help to me in getting allies and other countries to pay their share of military obligations". He did not name a successor, but said one would be appointed shortly. Read the rest

After watching a CCC presentation that claimed that the MQA audiophile format has "stealth DRM," I decided to investigate, and I'm pretty sure MQA is not DRM.But MQA is proprietary in several important ways that audiophiles should consider before they invest in the tech. Its overlapping patents, combined with extreme secrecy about the terms on which the format is licensed, mean that you have to trust in the long-term good decisions of the manufacturer in order to ensure that you'll always be able to buy a device that can play back the music you're buying -- and because the spec and the contracts for implementing it are a secret, it's hard to get good data to evaluate whether your trust is well-placed.The MQA story is a good lesson in the toxic rainbow of locked technology: the way that overlapping patents, trademarks, license agreements, copyrights, trade secrets, and DRM can make it legally precarious to exercise the freedoms that good software should come with: the freedom to run programs, to study them, to improve them, and to share your improvements.So the upshot is that MQA is patented, involves copyrighted code, terms of service, and trade secrets, but (probably) not DRM. That means that your ability to enjoy the MQA music you buy is completely at the mercy of the company, which could change the format at some later date and enjoin manufacturers from continuing to support the music you've purchased.Your decision to trust the company can't be informed by transparency in its licensing terms, either: maybe the company has promised its licensors that it would never force them to orphan your music -- and maybe it hasn't. Read the rest

Presently hovering between Halloween and Christmas, after watching It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and on the way to A Charlie Brown Christmas. I was seven years old when Charlie Brown’s sad tree was first shown on TV in 1965 — the same year my parents divorced. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, my memory of that period has vanished. I do recall watching Abbott and Costello in Jack and the Beanstalk one evening, and then being told after it ended that they were getting divorced. No recollection of anything after that for at least a year. Perhaps more.But, despite the neuron wipe, these two cartoons have remained firmly rooted in memory. They are a comfortable pillow, a respite (at this point in life) from late middle age and an instant connection to simple happiness.Everyone watches Great Pumpkin and Charlie Brown Christmas. And everyone loves them. It’s not just the happiness they bring, but the melancholy undercurrent that invites remembrance. Every one of us can relate in some way to one of the animated children in those shows. Or to Snoopy. And he’s a dog.Something I recently read, the source of which has been forgotten only days later, put me on the track of other Peanuts TV shows from the 1960s. What? What? (Channeling Linus now.) Yes, my animated Peanuts began and ended with Pumpkin and Christmas (though I had been reading the comic strip since I could, well, read). There has been an enormous gaping hole in my existence — there were four more Peanuts specials on TV in the 1960s that I never saw. Read the rest

"Every child must be made aware."Directed by Flaming Lips madman mastermind Wayne Coyne and longtime Lips visual art/video collaborator George Salisbury. Read the rest

Scientists discovered and now described a previously unknown species of snake. Oddly though, they didn't collect this snake in the wild but rather found it inside the belly of another snake. The University of Texas at Arlington biologists have given the snack snake the official name of Cenaspis aenigma ("mysterious dinner snake.") From National Geographic:This species has unique features that separate it from its relatives, including the shape of the its skull, the covering of its hemipenis—its reproductive structure—and the scales under its tail.In 1976, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, palm-harvesters working deep in one of the region’s forests found a Central American coral snake—a vibrantly-colored species with neurotoxic venom. When researchers obtained it, they found that its last meal was another smaller serpent.This ten inch-long, male snake was something special, as it didn’t match any known species, so the specimen was preserved in a museum collection. The research team returned to the area at least a dozen more times over several decades, but never found a living representative of the odd snake species.More in the scientific paper: "Caudals and Calyces: The Curious Case of a Consumed Chiapan Colubroid" (Journal of Herpetology)(image: rendering of Cenaspis aenigma by Gabriel Ugueto) Read the rest

Any director would be hard pressed to top the magic of the original Men in Black movie. Surpassing its two sequels? That's very doable. If this first trailer for Men in Black: International is any indication, Director F. Gary Gray is off to a great start. Staring Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth, the film is due for release in June, 2019. Read the rest

Watch these poor jewelry shop clerks come close to a heart attack as they leap over counters chasing down customers who are running off with jewelry – except they aren't. A viral prank in China, jewelry store "customers" try on expensive merch, then sprint towards the exit door. As the store employee chases after them, the prankster then casually stops in front of a display near the front door, as if that had always been their intention. Although not so nice, it's hard not to chuckle at how well the frantic employee transitions into an about face and casually walks away.How did this prank start? According to Oddity Central: The jewelry-stealing prank craze is believed to have been inspired by an Indonesian influencer’s shoplifting prank, which went viral in Asia last month. Harvinth Skin posted a video of himself trying out a pair of expensive sneakers at a sporting goods store and then pretending to run out wearing them, only to then sprint back, making it look like he was just trying them out. The shop assistant can be seen running after Skin, and then breathing a sigh of relief after realizing he never meant to make a run for it. Chinese pranksters just upped the stakes by essentially pulling off the same prank at jewelry stores.You can see the Indonesian shoplifting prank at the end of this video. Read the rest

On the latest Copy This podcast (MP3) (previously), the amazing Kirby "Everything is a Remix" Ferguson talks to Paul Keller about the new EU Copyright Directive, which will impose mandatory copyright filters on all online platforms, opening the door to rampant censorship and ensuring that only the biggest (American) tech companies will be able to afford to operate in the EU.Ferguson and Keller dig into the ways that this will especially hurt small and independent creators, including those outside of the EU (including Americans).While the battle over internet freedom is taking place in the EU, its sheer scale will have a real and harmful impact on creators here in the U.S who represent an increasingly important sector of our economy. Re:Create’s own research shows that the economic value of America’s New Creative Economy is a baseline of $6 billion, with nearly 15 million independent American creators earning revenue across every state – and that is a conservative estimate.Described as a “clear descendent” of the SOPA/PIPA censorship bills that went down in flames in the U.S. in 2012, the Copyright Directive will cause major new market barriers for American creators (see Patreon’s many concerns on behalf of creators here), depriving them of revenues and access to consumers, and will be especially harmful for small creators.Tune in to learn more about why creators in the U.S. should speak out to protect the free flow of information, creativity, speech and innovation between the continents. Read the rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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