Boing Boing

I heard former CIA 'clandestine serviceman' Jon Sipher on Renato Mariotti's fantastic podcast On Topic.Sipher describes how Trump and Putin's colliding interests are far more threatening to the future of democracy than answering the question "was there collusion?" The entire story was published by The Atlantic here.Two Donald Trump supporters were recently photographed at a rally wearing shirts emblazoned with the phrase i’d rather be russian than a democrat. To some supporters of President Trump, praising Russia and denigrating Democrats is simply a means of expressing tribal loyalties, or of goading liberals. However, as heated political rhetoric becomes part of the media landscape, such fringe views are becoming more mainstream, displaying an increasing convergence of interests between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the views of Trump supporters.While many Americans are concerned that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, Trump’s outright convergence of interests with Putin’s Russia may well prove far more damaging for U.S. interests in the long run. Convergence can be defined as distinct groups doing the same things for different reasons, or as a unity of interests evolving from separate starting points. Both Putin and Trump seek to inject chaos into the U.S. political system. They support an assault on U.S. foreign-policy elites, encourage fringe and radical groups, and envision a United States untethered from traditional allies. They also share a willingness to utilize informal and semi-legal means to achieve their goals. The common interest shown by Russia and the alt-right in exploiting fears surrounding the routine Jade Helm military exercise in Texas in 2015? Read the rest

Ben Beck has relaunched his 30+ year-old AnarchySF site, with new contributions from Eden Kupermintz and Yanai Sened; it's billed as "an open-source repository of anarchist or anarchy-adjacent science fiction" and the relaunch incorporates "modern content management frameworks to allow a community to form around the archive and help maintain it." My cursory examination confirms that the site is an excellent resource already, but still really use work, especially on non-English sources. Read the rest

On April 29, 1961, Dr. Leonid Rogozov was in Antarctica in a blizzard when his stomach began to hurt. Badly. The only physician on the Soviet Antarctic Expedition, Rogozov realized his appendix needed to come out before it burst and killed him. Rogozov's only choice was to take the matter into his hands. He roped in a meteorologist and a driver to assist. From MDLinx:Dr. Rogozov assumed a semi-reclined position designed to allow him to perform the operation with minimal use of a mirror...“It was frequently necessary to raise my head in order to see better, and sometimes I had to work entirely by feel,” Dr. Rogozov wrote. “General weakness became severe after 30 to 40 minutes, and vertigo developed, so that short pauses for rest were necessary.”Toward the end of the operation, Dr. Rogozov nearly lost consciousness and he feared he would not survive....After resection of the severely diseased vermiform appendix (including a 2 × 2 cm perforation at the base), antibiotics were introduced into the peritoneal cavity, and he closed the wound... Understandably, he described his postoperative condition as “moderately poor,” although signs of peritonitis resolved during the next 4 days. At 5 days post-surgery, his fever diminished, and the sutures were removed by day 7. After 2 weeks, he was back to work.(via Historic) Read the rest

Like Facebook, Livejournal was built in a bright student's dormroom; but unlike Facebook, LJ wasn't built "for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of stolen photos of undergrads," but rather as a community-minded platform for self-expression and connection-forging.Today, LJ is Russian-owned and Russian-hosted, and while it remains hugely influential in Russia, it is also viewed with great sorrow by its non-Russian exiles, who left, or were forced to leave, by a series of minor and major catastrophes that are a kind of microcosm of the ways that online communities can both excel and fail.Steven T Wright's potted history of LJ on Ars Technica is a fascinating read on the subject, tracing LJ's history from a nonprofit, volunteer-run project that used borrowed space in a small ISP (literally a closet) to host itself, to a small, struggling business that tried to balance a commitment to its users with the need to keep the lights on, to a division of Six to Start, where the new managers struggled to rebalance that commitment, sometimes getting it wrong and sometimes being needlessly tormented by both trolls and users who refused all change, to the site's sad situation today.The most interesting part of Wright's history is that difficult balancing act between the commercial needs of the service and the ethos of prioritizing users' comfort. Sometimes, this made the service too timid, and other times it was far too bold. It's important to remember that in this day of giant services that are almost totally unresponsive to users' needs (from Facebook to Tumblr), there's also nothing about "listening to users" that automatically guarantees that you'll produce something they like (or that you can financially sustain). Read the rest

A Scoot Airlines plane flying from the Gold Coast in Australia to Singapore had to cut the flight short, landing in Sydney, when a gentleman became "unruly." About 20 minutes after the plane took off, the man went into attack mode, screaming and finally punching another passenger before people were able to restrain him.A few minutes of the scene was captured on video and posted to Facebook by passenger Rico David Garilli, who starts his post with, "EDIT: watch until the end. He strips and goes for a run before being tackled down." Garilli explains that the man had been "drinking heavy" before the plane took off.After being dumped in Sydney, passengers scrambled to find other flights, some having to wait for more than seven hours before boarding another plane. Via USA Today Read the rest

Made in 1985 to share the hardships of growing up a werewolf, Rollin Augusts "Rod" Daniel's Teen Wolf serves as a most excellent time capsule.From the graffiti in Michael J. Fox's locker to Michael J. Fox himself, this movie screams the '80s far more than Stranger Things ever can. Read the rest

Denver is a huge airport, and I hate connecting there, but the Illuminati probably have a cooler hideout.How could there be a Harley dealer inside the Illuminati HQ? Read the rest

Matt Taibbi (previously) is in characteristically fine form here: the average Congressjerk is mythologized as a "brilliant 4-D chess player" but "would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla": they are only in office because "someone with money sent them there, often to vote yes on a key appropriation bill or two. On the other 364 days of the year, their job is to shut their yaps and approximate gravitas anytime they’re in range of C-SPAN cameras."Meanwhile AOC "won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them" and while "that doesn’t make anything she says inherently more or less correct" it does give her a different job from the average Congress-sponge: her backers sent her there to make noise, not to keep her mouth shut.This is why the "thinkfluencers," and other establishment figures are so bent on giving her unsought advice to shut up and decide whether "to be an effective legislator or just continue being a Twitter star." The shut-up-and-play-nice camp likes to draw comparisons between AOC and Trump, on the grounds that their grassroots followings let them escape the gravity of their party's machines and the power-brokers that stoke them, but the real comparison is that both were elected by people who were rejecting DC establishment politics (which has refused to bring forward insanely popular policies). That means that, as with Trump, every time a despicable establishment figure denounces AOC, it increases her influence and power (possibly the nicest thing you could say about Trump is that he is hated by the looter Mitt Romney and the war criminal George Bush, and every time either one of those weasels talks Trump down, I'm tempted to reconsider my strict I-wouldn't-piss-on-him-if-he-was-on-fire policy). Read the rest

Teen Vogue continues its excellent tradition of radical reporting with Lucy Diavolo's explainer on the definitions and relative merits and demerits of "resistance," "rebellion" and "revolution."Diavolo cites George Ciccariello-Maher (visiting scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics) and Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor (African-American Studies professor at Princeton University).Resistance: "Something that we do or can do every day, that we can do in a multiplicity of ways...not babbling about Russian interference on MSNBC every single day of the f*cking week." (George Ciccariello-Maher)Rebellion: "A more explosive, momentary instance, in which resistance takes a more concrete, combative form in the streets, in popular protests — crucially, I think historically, in riots, whether it's Ferguson and Baltimore or the many riots that have put into motion political transformation historically...The moments that really crystallize something that needs to be changed, and transform consciences of millions of people in a relatively quick period of time," (George Ciccariello-Maher)Revolution: "A wholly different plane [from resistance and rebellion]: When you're talking about revolution, you're talking about the complete and utter transformation of society and the way that it functions. And we haven't witnessed that... I do think it is possible, and we don't have a choice. We don't have forever to try to figure this out" (Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor)Resistance, Rebellion, Revolution: What They Are and How They Intersect [Lucy Diavolo/Teen Vogue](via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today allowed the enforcement of President Trump's ban on transgender people from the military. The Trump administration was earlier blocked from implementing the policy by lower courts; today's ruling lifts those injunctions while the legal battle continues.The split was partisan: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh pemitted the restrictions to go into effect, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in the minority.Under the ban, transgender people are permitted to serve only if they do not seek to transition and do not suffer from gender dysphoria. Some post-transition trans people may continue to serve, a distinction that the conservative justices highlighted in asserting the prohibition was not a "blanket ban." Read the rest

There are an estimated 140,000 miles of footpaths in England and Wales, public rights of way that cut across all manner of private land, and due to various quirks of history they have never been fully mapped.It's been 19 years since an Act in Parliament set a deadline of Jan 1, 2026 to map every footpath, and after that, footpaths that are not mapped can be reabsorbed into the private lands they cross, ending ancient rights of way.The Ramblers, a hiking society with radical roots that fomented the creation of the nation's national parks, are leading the charge to complete the maps, through the Don't Lose Your Way campaign.While many of the footpaths they're struggling to save have simply been forgotten, others have been deliberately obscured, often by farmers who want to keep strangers from crossing their fields, and resort to trickery like misleading signs and barbed wire to obfuscate the footpaths.I've spent many happy hours rambling, mostly in Norfolk, where all the paths we took were well-marked, well-loved and well-maintained. The footpaths are a visible remnant of the ancient compact between private landowners and the common people, embodied in such documents as the Charter of the Forest, a much more important and radical document than the Magna Carta.Until last year, when Fraser applied for the path to be recorded, the owner of a nearby house had a gate across it, which was now gone. When you attempt to open an old path, you have to inform landowners who might be affected. Read the rest

Bruce Sterling cataloged all the onscreen booze in Casablanca, producing a surprisingly long list (Sterling: "ranted, they’ve all got plenty to drink about, but gee whiz.") A French 75 sounds a little sweet for my taste, but I might just have to try one the next time we've opened a bottle of bubbly without managing to finish it.Wine – English couple in the opening scene are drinking wine at the outside cafe when robbed by a sly pickpocket.Cocktail – A desperado is waiting, waiting, waiting and drinks while lamenting that he will never get out of Casablanca.Cocktail – Man tries to negotiate a passage out of Casablanca.Wine – Man buys passage on a fishing vesselWine – Women trying to get more money for her jewelsCocktail – Englishmen are served by Sascha in Rick’s bar, and toasting cheerio.Wine – Women gambling at Rick’s while drinkingChampagne glass (already empty) – In front of Rick as he is toying with a chess problemWine – Ugarte drinks while bargaining with Rick.Brandy (Boss’s Private Stock) – Sacha serves the good stuff to the spurned Yvonne, because Yvonne is Rick’s private stockBrandy – Captain Louis Renault drinks at Ricks. He’s a steady customer, since the bar also has loose women.Brandy – the Italian Fascist Captain Tonelli drinks while harassed by Lieutenant Casselle in Rick’s.Brandy – Rick gives some free brandy to Renault in Rick’s office.Veuve Cliquot 1926 – The top French champagne that Renault recommends to Strasser as the Nazi crassly gobbles caviar. Read the rest

Fifty years ago, San Francisco's DeYoung Museum exhibited Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones's striking photo essay depicting Oakland's Black Panther Party at the peak of their community activism and political activity. Starting this week, those powerful images will be displayed again as part of the Vanguard Revisited: Poetic Politics & Black Futures exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute. The work is still pertinent today and will serve as a platform to discuss issues of documentary photography, social activism, and how the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s in many ways manifests itself in the social context of today...Black Futures is not delivered with a passive voice, but a voice steeped in deft poetics and sharp politics that continue to accumulate power from its own rich history.See more of the images at Juxtapoz.To learn about the Black Panthers's inspiring, polarizing, and ultimately tragic history, I recommend the fantastic documentary "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution." Read the rest

The video begins in medias res during the annual "Wheels Up, Guns Down" bicycle ride, with a group of teens and an older woman engaged in a heated dispute over the riders' blocking of traffic. As the woman and one boy face off, another teen rides up to them on his bicycle and she accuses him of running over her foot (apparently falsely, though perhaps it happened before the video begins). A man, who may well be the human incarnation of whatever ancient stupid god looks over Miami, barrels up waving a handgun and gets started with the racial slurs. The woman complains about "thugs" and begins filming, but this is not her video. One of the boys tells them they're going to be "on the news". A taut self-awareness flashes over the woman's face as she finally looks into the camera. "That's fine," she says. Then she and the man quickly depart.And now they are on the news.A man was arrested Monday after he was caught on camera threatening a group of black teenagers with a gun in Miami's Brickell neighborhood.Police did not identify the man late Monday. ... Keon Hardemon, a Miami commissioner, suggested the man should be charged with a hate crime."Assault with a deadly weapon and calling them n-----s sounds like a hate crime to me. ... He is not a hero. He will kill someone next time if he isn’t arrested," Hardemon said on Instagram. UPDATE: Video shot by another driver shows the same pink-shirted man yelling racial slurs at the teenage bicycle protestors, apparently prior to the other confrontation. Read the rest

The New Orleans Saints lost the NFC Championship on Sunday to the Los Angeles Rams in overtime. The Saints were the victims of one of the worst blown pass interference calls in recent memory and ended up losing 26-23 after a 57-yard field goal by the Rams' Greg Zuerlein. A clearly disappointed Saints fan expressed his displeasure by obliterating his flat screen TV with a single punch.Some fans are handling the Saints loss perfectly fine. pic.twitter.com/kp7mfZLHQy— Ryan (@Haggs_88) January 21, 2019Ouch.The Rams will play Tom Brady (🐐) and the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl on February 3rd in Atlanta.(Photo: Douglas Peale/Wikimedia Commons) Read the rest

When Latvia attained independence in 1991, the retreating KGB left behind two sacks and two briefcases containing indexed records of the secret informants who had been paid to turn in their neighbors for offenses including anti-Kremlin activism and watching pornography.After decades of deliberation, the Latvian Parliament voted to release the contents of the bags, naming 4,141 KGB informants, many of whom are still alive, and vigorously deny any involvement with the KGB; also named in the release is at least one journalist who was killed by Soviet forces while sympathetically covering the pro-independence movement.The people who say they were falsely accused offer different theories to explain how their names came to be in the files: some say that they were added to KGB operatives' rosters of informants as part of the operatives' campaigns to impress their bosses and/or line their pockets with payouts for informants who were not, in fact, working for them. Others say it was a false flag planted by the KGB as they left Latvia, a way to slowly poison the independent state by sowing internal discord.“It is impossible that the K.G.B. would leave behind a real list of agents in what it considered enemy territory,” Mr. Tjarve said. The files, he said, must have been doctored and deliberately left as a “special gift” to Latvia, now a member of NATO, as part of a “disinformation operation” by retreating Soviet officers.Latvians found “in the bags,” the term of art for people who have turned up in the files, include a two-time former prime minister, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, a onetime foreign minister, leaders of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, three post-independence rectors of the University of Latvia, celebrated filmmakers and assorted television stars and writers. Read the rest

A sequel to the first two Ghostbusters movies is in the works. Leslie Jones, who played Ghostbuster Patty Toland in the latest Ghostbusters film, a reinvention of the entire franchise, is unhappy with the apparent decision to abandon the new cast.Without Harold Ramis' Egon Spengler, why even bother trying to reunite the OG cast? The Wiig/Jones/McCarthy/McKinnon film was genius! Bring them all together! Read the rest

Ever since academic Shoshana Zuboff coined the term "Surveillance Capitalism" in 2015, it's become a touchstone for the debate over commercial surveillance (we've cited it hundreds of times). This week, Zuboff published her (very thick) book on the subject, to excellent early notices; I haven't read it yet, but it's next on my list.Though I'm familiar with the general shape of Zuboff's argument, I'm really eager to get to grips with the specifics, and to see how it's evolved over the last three-and-some years.Here's a head-start: in this weekend's Observer, John Naughton (previously) interviewed Zuboff at length about her book, and what she said bodes well for the book.That said, I want to mark out an area of caution that I have with what I've seen so far of her argument -- a problem that I've had with other critical books about the rise of Big Tech: locating the original sin of Big Tech in advertising and surveillance, rather than concentration and monopoly.Derek Powazek's memorable phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is true, but incomplete. It's true that companies that use surveillance and data to pay their bills view their "customers" as the advertisers, rather than the users."You're the product" is true in advertising models, but it's also true in for-pay models. Whether it's Apple sustaining itself by blocking third-party repairs, extracting rents from app vendors, and sneakily degrading the performance of its products over time; or John Deere ripping off farmers for repairs to six-figure purchases, or GM locking out independent repair and third-party spares. Read the rest

This fine sign from Stephen Zunes facebook page. Read the rest

An EVA airlines flight attendant, supported by her union, complains the airline has failed to curb a routine problem flyer. Her recent experience sounds absolutely dreadful.Folks need different types of assistance on a plane. I can absolutely understand the hardship of using an awful airplane restroom that is barely designed to work for the base human model. No one should feel shame for asking for legitimately needed assistance. The more you read this story, however, the more it seems that this passenger was not just asking for help.Focus Taiwan:Accompanied by representatives from the Taoyuan Flight Attendants Union, the flight attendant, who declined to give her name, said an overweight man confined to a wheelchair informed her he required assistance going to the bathroom about two hours into the flight.The man asked the flight attendant making the complaint and two other female members of staff to help him remove his underwear, indicating he was unable to do so himself."I felt that as a flight attendant, removing a passenger's underwear was beyond the scope of my responsibilities," said the deputy cabin service head.Despite their reluctance, three female members of the flight crew, EVA has no male flight attendants, tried to cover the passenger's genitals with a blanket while taking off his underwear.The flight attendant said it was then that the passenger slapped her hand causing her to drop the blanket and exposing himself. He also demanded that the lavatory door be kept open, otherwise "he couldn't breathe."The crew managed to keep the door closed, but when the man was finished, he refused to leave the bathroom unless they help him wipe his bottom. Read the rest

THIS. IS. GOLD.There's a lot of MLK interviews out there but this is my best.Seriously deep.pic.twitter.com/NcETBCv6bU#MLKDay#MartinLutherKingJrDay— The Hummingbird 🐦 (@SaysHummingbird) January 21, 2019This interview is amazing. Read the rest

The red MAGA hat is the new white hood. Without white boys being able to empathize with other people, humanity will continue to destroy itself. #FirstThoughtsWhenIWakeUp— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) January 20, 2019Alyssa Milano tells it like it is. Read the rest

Margrethe Vestager (previously) has been the EU antitrust commissioner for five years, and now she is getting ready to step down (her party is unlikely to prevail next year, so she will likely be replaced), having presided over an unprecedented era of antitrust enforcement that has seen billions of euros extracted in penalties from Google, Apple and Facebook, with Amazon now under her microscope.Vestager formerly served as the Danish deputy PM and economy minister, as part of a centre-left, market-oriented party founded by her great-grandfather. Her record in Danish politics is something of a mixed bag (among other things, she presided over swingeing welfare cuts).She's got a much better record as antitrust commissioner. Her enforcement hasn't been limited to the tech sector: she's also gone after Starbucks, McDonald's, Nike, Fiat and Gazprom, taking on both anticompetitive behaviour and tax dodging (she's also done much to end competition among EU governments to create tax-havens that lure in multinationals to create headquarters-of-convenience).That said, her vision for the next steps of antitrust enforcement are a little...weird. For example, she wants to build on the GDPR's requirements to disclose how personal information is used by encouraging the creation of "Independent digital assistants that will make sure that your privacy settings are maintained no matter where you go."The upcoming EU elections are going to be game-changing in more ways than one. The insurgent parties are ascendant, and some are left wing, and others are far-right xenophobes, suggesting a kind of scaled-up version of the current state of Italian politics, which is to say: a mess. Read the rest

Nineteen years ago today, Mark decided to do some research on the new Blogger service for an article in The Industry Standard, and so he created a blog and started posting to it (the Standard spiked the story, on the basis that blogging was probably a passing fad).Less than a year later, I started a stint as a guestblogger that is still going, more than 18 years later.David came on board a couple months after me, and Xeni's guestblogging stint started late the next year and, like mine, never ended; Rob kicked off in 2005, and Jason's first post was in 2010, tho he joined us in 2006.And now we are 19, and old, and still weird, but the internet is less weird in some important ways ("a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four"). Read the rest

"I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems, it falls victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.""As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. …"“I started thinking about the fact that right here in our country we spend millions of dollars every day to store surplus food. And I said to myself: ‘I know where we can store that food free of charge — in the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God’s children in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even in our own nation, who go to bed hungry at night.’" Dr King: "... Read the rest

From 1989, Fingers Inc.'s beautiful mix of "Can You Feel It" with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech: Read the rest

The nonprofit organization to which I belong recently put the personal data of around 410,000 people on the internet, connected to interactive street maps of where they lived. The data includes their full names, date and place of birth, known residential address, and often includes their professions and arrest records, sometimes even information about mental or physical handicaps. It also lists whether any of their grandparents were Jewish. How would you feel if somebody published your personal data on the internet along the same lines? The website described above is based on the personal data of victims of Nazi persecution and is part of a memorialization project. But given that much of personal data is probably available on a number of corporate servers to which the government could have unrestricted access, what is to stop this data from being misused? Even if the information was never made public, how would your personal data be exploited if a right-wing Christian extremist government were to take power in the United States? Is it so far-fetched to imagine such personal data exploitation in a Handmaid’s Tale future?The Nazi German government conducted a census on 17 May 1939 in which a special “supplementary card” was included, where every person had to list if each of their four grandparents was Jewish or not. In the 1980s, a census was conducted in West Germany that led to a lot of resistance from the left, including massive street demonstrations. Several academic works about the planned 1980s census were published at the time, in which the thesis was put forth that the Nazis misused the 1939 census data to create the deportation lists to send the Jews to concentration camps and their subsequent deaths. Read the rest

"Horrific" CCTV footage shows a group of Aussie cops savagely beating a teen with autism, and the resulting outrage is drawing attention to the country's worsening reputation for police brutality. In another case, Victoria police beat up a teenager who had ridden his scooter in front a police car, claiming that the baby-faced kid was the middle-aged, bearded car thief they were unable to find.Tommy Lovett was riding by a police car on his scooter when he was wrongly arrested. ... Documents obtained by The Age reportedly support Mr Lovett’s claim that he was hurled into a fence, assaulted while handcuffed and capsicum sprayed — leaving his body bruised, grazed and bleeding. Victoria Police vehemently denied the claims and an internal investigation found nothing wrong with Mr Lovett’s arrest. However, a human rights lawyer who spoke to 7.30 said the cases — including one where a Melbourne doctor claims police threw her to the ground and punched her in the head — outlined in the investigation are alarming.“These cases keep going on,” he said. “There’s clearly cultural systemic issues at work."More footage shows another Aussie cop attacking a disabled senior.WARNING: This video contains footage some viewers may find distressing. CCTV footage shows a disability pensioner being assaulted by a police officer at a police station. More tonight on #abc730. @Chris_Gillett_ @Ageinvestigates pic.twitter.com/zxNP4KFRP2— abc730 (@abc730) January 20, 2019A Victorian policeman retained his job and rank despite being caught on CCTV assaulting a drunk disability pensioner at Geelong Police Station. Read the rest

Too bad, conservatives! Fox & Friends apologized on Monday after briefly airing a graphic suggesting that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead.As the show came back from commercials, they briefly showed a graphic of Ginsburg with the caption 1933-2019.It's established journalistic practice to have pre-written graphics and obits and whatnot ready to roll for famous people. But having them floating around in production databases and content management systems, one click of a "Publish" button from disaster, is a common mistake. Read the rest

California Senator and former attorney general Kamala Harris is running for President.Kamala Harris announced Monday that she is running for president in 2020, arguing that the time has come to fight against what she views as the injustices of the past two years of the Trump presidency. In a brief video from her campaign that was released on social media Monday morning at the same time she appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America," Harris called on her supporters to join with her to "claim our future.""Justice. Decency. Equality. Freedom. Democracy. These aren't just words. They're the values we as Americans cherish. And they're all on the line now," Harris said in the video, teasing her official kickoff in her birthplace of Oakland next Sunday.Harris offers a progressive platform, but she is also a dyed-in-the-wool authoritarian who fought relentlessly to shield bad cops, prosecutorial misconduct and reactionary policies while in office — and who found it hard to explain why its decisions sometimes shielded well-connected men suspected of serious corporate crimes. It's rare you find someone whose professional hostility to constitutional rights is so throroughly described in public record that her launch literature centers entirely on recasting her career.Photo: Public Domain, uncredited Read the rest

Jit Ray Chowdhury attended CES in his capacity as an autonomous vehicle engineer, and while there, snapped a picture of a self-driving car equipped with a LIDAR system from Aeye; he says the LIDAR's laser lanced through his camera's aperture and zapped its optical sensor, burning a permanent spot into it and ruining the camera (Aeye has offered to replace it).LIDAR systems need to comply with rigorous safety rules to ensure that they don't blind human eyes, but camera eyes are much more sensitive (this is the basis for IR-reflective materials that confuse CCTVs).Self-driving cars use both conventional cameras and LIDAR to guide themselves so any camera-blinding potential in LIDAR systems on autonomous vehicles could wreak havoc with other nearby cars. AEye uses 1550nm lasers. And unfortunately for Chowdhury, cameras are not filled with fluid like human eyes are. That means that high-power 1550nm lasers can easily cause damage to camera sensors even if they don't pose a threat to human eyes.AEye is known for claiming that its lidar units have much longer range than those of competitors. While most lidar makers say their high-end lidars can see 200 or 300 meters, AEye says that its lidar has a range of 1,000 meters. When I talked to AEye CEO Luis Dussan about this claim last month, he said that one factor in AEye's long range is the use of a powerful fiber laser."One of the most important things about fiber lasers is that they can be amplified," Dassan said. Read the rest

Slip of the tongue! We just can't help ourselves! Kevin Steincross, a veteran morning anchor on Fox2 St. Louis, was discussing an upcoming tribute to the civil rights leader when he pronounced Dr. King’s last name as an anti-black slur during the 5 a.m. broadcast.Hours later, during the 9 a.m. show, Mr. Steincross said the station had heard from a viewer that he had mispronounced the name.“Please know I have total respect for Dr. King, what he meant and continues to mean to our country,” Mr. Steincross said. “This was not intentional in any way, and I sincerely apologize.” Read the rest

2019 started off with a rather interesting tweet from Elon Musk. He was showing off the "Starship test flight rocket" from SpaceX. This thing evokes a strong bit of imagery that has been so deeply integrated into our culture through science fiction for so many years that it just feels... right.Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This is an actual picture, not a rendering. pic.twitter.com/k1HkueoXaz— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2019Just look at that thing! Well, as you can imagine, seeing that beautiful piece of work inspired me to yank out some retro science fiction and look at the old illustrations. There are so many examples that you could just swap the test rocket into and they'd seem nearly untouched. The issue I've chosen for today's Sci-Fi Sunday is one of these.Publication: Analog Science Fact - Science FictionIssue: December 1962, Vol: LXXX, No. 4Cover Art: Schoenherr for Blind Man's LanternWhen I scan one of these, I'm always curious what the public was thinking and seeing about space. NASA has a convenient website where you can go and see details on major events. In December of 1962, the public was hearing about how Mariner 2 had flown by Venus, which was a pretty huge deal considering this was the very first time we had "conducted a planetary encounter". Just picture that for a second. When someone was relaxing and reading this issue, we had not yet put a human on the moon. Read the rest

These days, there isn't much our iPhone camera can't do - except feel like an actual phone. Despite years of steadily increasing resolution and image sensing technology, we're still taking shots awkwardly with two hands, fumbling for the shutter button. Leave it to an avid photographer to design Shuttercase, a versatile iPhone case that solves that problem and more.Most significantly for photographers of any experience, the Shuttercase moves the shutter button to the side - just like the classic 135 point-and-shoots. It further replicates that feel with the case itself, which supplies enough heft that you can grip it and shoot with one hand. It also packs an embedded stand, and - because long photo sessions can drain your phone like nothing else - a 3,000 mAh battery that will charge as you go. Now you're set to unlock the full potential of your camera, whether that's panoramic vacation shots or perfectly composed family photos.Originally $79.99, the Shuttercase for iPhone is now 37% off at $49.99. Read the rest

Burbank's amazing quarter-century institution Dark Delicacies is a horror book-, memoribilia- and clothing-store that is a community hub for genre creators, hosting a wonderful stream of events, signings, and even an annual chance to get your photo took with Krampus at a Christmas open-house.It's also a potential casualty of the skyrocketing rents in Magnolia Park, where greedy landlords are throwing out the neighborhood's unique indie tenants as fast as they can in the hopes of luring in multinational corporations to open stores that can already be found in every mall and that will destroy any reason for people to come to the neighborhood in the first place.I live a five-minute walk from Dark Delicacies and they've hosted events and fulfilled signed-book orders for me in the past. They're great, community-minded people, and due to a rent-hike, they're moving to a space around the corner (it could be worse -- until they found the new space, they were going to shut down altogether). But having run a shoestring, passion business for so many years, they lack the funds to pay for the move, so they're hoping their supporters in the neighborhood will kick in for a GoFundMe where they're hoping to raise $20,000. They're at $3,400 right now and I just kicked in $100.One of our greatest joys has been giving back, by sponsoring and hosting numerous charity events for both our two and four-legged friends. We are very proud of the “people of horror,” whose support and generosity have helped so many. Read the rest

UPDATE 1-20-19: This story appears to be more complex than what was seen in the video above and from news reports in the Washington Post, CNN, New York Times, and other major news media. After watching a much longer video that shows the lead-up and aftermath of the incident, it doesn't look like the high school students were harassing the Native Americans as was reported yesterday.James Martin, a Jesuit priest, an editor at large America Magazine has excellent insight into the complexities of this still-unfolding story, which he wrote in the form of a Twitter thread:Thread by @JamesMartinSJ: "Re : I will be happy to apologize for condemning the actions of the students if it turns out that they were somehow acti […]" #CovingtonHighSchoolAnd I don't agree with Reason all the time (I agree with their stance on civil liberties and disagree with their stance on unfettered free markets) but the Reason essay the Jake Tapper retweeted is worth reading if you are interested in this story:.@reason: “Video footage strongly contradicts Native American veteran Nathan Phillips' claim that Covington Catholic High School boys harassed him. The media got this one completely wrong,” writes @robbysoave https://t.co/9Ki4iiTkQ9— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 20, 2019I'll continue to update this post as new information emerges.Kentucky's Covington Catholic High School's Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts are on lockdown this morning after a video was posted that shows a mob of students intimidating a Native American elder in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Read the rest

Neil Gaiman says Edgar Allan Poe should be read aloud, and he's right: he recorded this video of him reading "The Raven" in 2016 as part of Pat Rothfuss's Worldbuilders charity drive. It's Poe's birthday today, and I can think of no better way to celebrate it than to listen to it again.Other ways to celebrate this magnificent torch:* The spectacular pop-up edition* The 50s hipster argot edition* The 1969 rock-and-roll version* Vincent Price and Boris Karloff's Raven-inspired magic duel(Reposted from last year) Read the rest

This Monday, the final "trilogue" (a meeting between the European Parliament, the European Presidency, and the EU member-states) was supposed to convene to wrap up the negotiations on the first update to the Copyright Directive since 2001, including the controversial Article 13 (mandatory copyright filters for online services) and Article 11 (letting news sites decide who can link to them and charging for the privilege). But that meeting has been cancelled and now the whole thing is on life-support. If the Trilogue can be reconvened in a matter of days, then it's just possible that it could finish it work and send a final draft to the Parliament to be voted on, but that's getting less likely by the second, and a delay of more than a day or two will mean that this is off the table until after the next EU Parliamentary elections in the spring -- which is also after Brexit -- and which will likely result in a very different landscape for this kind of legislative gift to corporate lobbyists (between the rise of insurgent parties in the EU, and Brexit eliminating the UK MEPs most likely to carry water for companies like EMI and Sky).Here's a very short version of how the Trilogue got cancelled and the Directive got put on life-support: back in the spring, Axel Voss, a German MEP, took over the drafting of the Directive, and revived the no-compromise versions of Articles 11 and 13, throwing out years of negotiations in order to give the record industry and aristocratic German newspaper families a huge legislative favour. Read the rest

It's been three days since C-SPAN posted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's amazing, stirring freshman speech from the floor of Congress, and it has smashed all Congressional C-SPAN records with 3.1m views (as of the time of writing); at this rate, it may catch up with C-SPAN's most popular Senate video, the Kamala Harris/Brett Kavanaugh video, with 7.14m views.First House Floor speech from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC): “The truth of this shutdown is that it's actually not about a wall...The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms." pic.twitter.com/r8tmsGSNtT— CSPAN (@cspan) January 17, 2019In just over 12 hours C-SPAN tweet of @RepAOC floor remarks last nite have become most-viewed twitter video by @cspan of any remarks by a member of House either party. 1.16M https://t.co/lkd0vK33cjMost viewed tweet video of a Sen? @KamalaHarris questioning Kavanaugh (7.14M views pic.twitter.com/2ulf1fNddc— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) January 17, 2019Complete exchange between @senkamalaharris and Judge Kavanaugh on Mueller Investigation. pic.twitter.com/FXhW3XmV19— CSPAN (@cspan) September 6, 2018 Read the rest

After marketing executive Clementine Crawford published an essay about being banned from eating at the bar at her favorite New York restaurant, Nello, because the owner (already notorious for labor abuses) was "cracking down on escorts" and had decreed that only men would be permitted to dine at the bar, The Cut tried to get a comment on it from Balan, whose employees repeatedly hung up on them.According to Crawford, when she told the owner that his policy was unfair and discriminatory and reminded him that she was a regular who'd spent a small fortune eating at his bar, the owner said "he could run his business as he pleased, and that I was no longer welcome to eat at the bar, only at a table."I travel a lot and one of my favorite things to do when I'm out of town is "take myself out on a date." Often I've been in intensely social situations all day, speaking to a crowd, or being in close company with a group of colleagues, and -- hermit that I am -- I'm ready for some solo time.So I'll go to a nice restaurant, the kind of place you usually need a reservation for, and just get a seat at the bar, where I can eyeball the whisky selection and find a really nice one to sample, and then I order stinky things that I normally avoid because my wife won't kiss me after I've eaten them (she's allergic to shellfish, so this is my chance to eat a lot of oysters). Read the rest

Unicorn poop [Amazon] appears to be pastel-colored gourmet marshmallow chunks flavored with strawberry, lime, lemon and orange, guaranteed to be gluten- and nut-free. But don't let that put you off: I'm sure they're delicious.Proudly ★ MADE IN THE USA ★ – Guaranteed to be the safest, tastiest, freshest, fluffiest Poop in town! Beware! ..other brands may come from China. Other brands? Just how many brands of unicorn poop can the market support? Read the rest

Still determined to keep those New Year's health resolutions? If you're going to stick with the exercise plan, it's enough of a challenge to budget your time. No need for your financial budget to take a hit, too. Here's a more convenient - and cheaper - alternative to a gym membership or Peloton bike: Two of our favorite virtual fitness clubs, tailor-made for any schedule and any income.Live Streaming FitnessThe wealth of content on this streaming service should be enough to keep you sweating well into your fitness goals and beyond. Along with daily exercise challenges, there's 24 /7 access to on-demand workouts in yoga cardio, strength training and more. And because it takes more than sweat, this service offers peer support through their Live Streaming Fitness community, plus meal plans, cooking shows and recipes made by certified nutritionists.A lifetime subscription to all of this through Live Streaming Fitness is now $99.99.Fitterclub Personal TrainingFor a more traditional touch, Fitterclub replicates the personal trainer experience with all the convenience of streaming. Answer a simple questionnaire, and the service builds you a workout regimen and nutrition program suited to your goals and body type. From there, it's on you: Access your daily, curated workouts and enjoy the flexible, tailored meal plan. Fitterclub tracks your progress and adjusts your plan every month using complex data analytics, so things never get too hard or easy.Fitterclub Personal Training is a full 91% off for the new year - that's $49 for a five-year membership. Read the rest

Two high school students from Minnetonka, Minnesota, photographed themselves performing Nazi salutes and holding a dance invitation full of Hitler-themed puns. “While I do not know whether it was an intentionally hateful message or was created out of ignorance, be assured the students will be disciplined for their actions,” Superintendent Dennis Peterson wrote in an e-mail Friday denouncing the post.“The larger issue is that we, as a community, must do an even better job of educating students about Hitler and the Holocaust,” he wrote. “While we do units on this in middle school, and we have had several Holocaust survivors speak at MHS, it has apparently not been enough to prevent yesterday’s incident.”I don't think it's the school's place to discipline students for political speech but it's good that they've recognized this sort of "j/k but yeah" giggling Nazism for what it is. In November, the "comedy" Nazi salutes of a high school class in Baraboo, Wi., three hours up the road, were initiallly laughed off as dumb teens not knowing what they were doing, but quickly exposed a school culture tolerant of racism and sexism where students shouted white power slogans in the halls.1. Instead, school administrators should explain why they never teach children anything about the holocaust or fascism, and start doing it, and then lets see who complains about that. Read the rest

Chinese TV is blurring out the ears of men wearing earrings. From CNN:It's unclear if Chinese regulators have issued a specific directive barring men from being shown wearing earrings, or whether TV stations are reacting to a shift in what is considered culturally appropriate.Last year, China's media regulator banned TV stations from featuring actors with tattoos. Depictions of "hip hop culture, sub-culture and immoral culture," were also banned according to Chinese state media...When it comes to television, the country's regulations previously barred programs from airing content that expresses "overt admiration for Western lifestyles," jokes about Chinese traditions or defiles "classic materials..."The country's censors have also been quick to black out content on LGBT issues. Guidelines released in China in 2016 characterized homosexuality as an "abnormal sexual behavior" unfit for Chinese television, alongside incest, sexual abuse and "perversion." Read the rest

Malware authors have a problem: they want their software to run aggressively when no one is looking at it, but to shut down entirely if the device it's running on is actually in some malware researcher's lab. So malware authors have a whole host of tricks they use to determine whether they're running on a device in the field, or inside a researcher's emulator where all of their secrets are laid bare. For example, the creator(s) of the Wannacry malware had the program try to reach a nonexistent website (iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com). Malware researchers' emulators usually answer any attempt to research an outside website in the hopes of gaining insight about how the software interacts with its command and control server, so by checking whether the nonexistent website existed, each copy of Wannacry was able to decide whether it was living in reality or trapped in the Matrix. That's why when a security researcher registered Wannacry's nonexistent domain and stood a webserver up at that address, every copy of Wannacry in the world shut down.A new Matrix-detecting tool in malware has been discovered: strains of Android malware distributed through the Google Play store were found to be using calls to the phone's motion-detector to determine whether it was running on a real phone or inside an emulator. Mobile emulators don't bother to fake data from emulated motion-sensors, so from the malware's perspective, emulators have an unnatural stillness that tips it off to stay hidden.As with the Wannacry killswitch, this technique won't be hard to overcome, since spoofing plausible data from an emulated motion-sensor is pretty basic stuff. Read the rest

Watch live video from TwitchPresents on www.twitch.tvI stopped watching Doctor Who after the War Doctor episode. I've never watched again, and I wasn't going to -- I completely lost interest. I just happened across Twitch Presents streaming some old Tom Baker and it is too good to pass up.K9! Don't overstrain your databanks!An encore presentation of the Classic Doctor Who Marathon on Twitch begins January 5th at 10AM PT / 6PM GMT!Event runs from January 5th to January 25th. We'll be broadcasting 11 to 12 hours of new episodes per day (~27 episodes), repeating once so you can catch Doctor Who nearly 24 hours a day, every day with the global Twitch community. Read the rest

I've written about ball-end hex keys before. They are much easier to use when clearance is an issue. They fit into sockets at an angle. Tacklife has a great deal on this dual set of metric and US hex keys'. Use code P6GBSRIX for a big discount. Read the rest

Stop by and charge your phones @shmoocon! Courtesy of @NSAGov pic.twitter.com/yxIL8mohvi— Rob Joyce (@RGB_Lights) January 18, 2019Let me think about that... nope.(h/t Bob Lord) Read the rest