This is Chibi Maru, a Japanese cat with a demonic cry! His human companion LLR伊藤智博 recently posted this video of Chibi Maru vocalizing in a most unusual way. He seems to say, "Ololiloliloliloliloliiiloli," reports SoraNews24. Is the cat angry? Defensive? Summoning the devil? Something ain't right with its ears folded down like that.ちょび丸が、またなにか喋り出した…怖い… pic.twitter.com/HAixAFQNg8— LLR伊藤 (@llritotomohiro) November 11, 2018“Chobimaru is talking again…Scary…” tweeted @llritotomohiro, who says this is the second time the kitty has emitted this guttural, rhythmical series of sounds...A few other cat owners even chimed in to say they’d had similar experiences with their own animals, often as portents of trouble soon to come.“Did Chobimaru throw up after this? When my cat sounds like he’s casting an incantation, I always run to grab some newspapers and tissues.”“My cat does the same thing! After he makes this kind of noise, he throws up. It’s nice of him to always give me an advance warning.”However, @llritotomohiro, while thanking everyone for their concern, was happy to report that Chobimaru was in fine spirits. After his minute or so of chanting, he returned to normal, eating dinner as he always does and playing energetically in the house.The internet did its thing and put his scary vocals to a dance beat:衝動を抑えられずTrapにしてしまいました。ご気分害されたなら速やかに削除します。 pic.twitter.com/VPj93r4d9O— 左手@アルバム出しました。 (@lefthand_for_it) November 13, 2018 Read the rest

There are two times you never want to just "eyeball" it: Conducting brain surgery and matching shades of paint for your walls. Whether you're painting or repainting, make sure you're never just "close enough" to the color you want. Not when the Nix Mini Color Sensor can scan and match any color perfectly.Small enough for your keychain, this innovative color-matching tool can scan any surface from fabric to walls using high CRI white LEDs. It then matches the exact hue of the surface to RGB, HEX, CMYK and LAB colors or one of 31,000 paint colors from brand names like Sherwin Williams, Benjamin Moore or Dulux. You can even save the colors to the Nix app (free lifetime access included with purchase), or share them via social media or email for quick design collaboration.Sturdy and reliable, the Nix Mini Color Sensor is an armchair designer's new best friend - and it's currently on sale for 30% off. Pick one up for $69. Read the rest

An open letter to Post Consumer Brands: In regards to your new Sour Patch Kids cereal, I quote Dr. Ian Malcom (and if there was EVER a time to pull out this quote, it's now):"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."And, they really shouldn't have.Sincerely, Rusty.P.S. Are you marketing these to kids or stoners? ---Folks, it's not April 1st and this doesn't appear to be a joke. The new Sour Patch Kids cereal will be available at Walmart on December 26. Come next June, it will be available in a grocery store near you. Candy cereal, yup.image via Facebook Read the rest

Berlin-based security researcher Sébastien Kaul discovered that Voxox (formerly Telcentris) -- a giant, San Diego-based SMS gateway company -- had left millions of SMSes exposed on an Amazon cloud server, with an easily queried search front end that would allow attackers to watch as SMSes with one-time login codes streamed through the service.It's a timely reminder that SMS sucks. It is not secure, and should not be used for two-factor authentication messages (2FA). Weak 2FA is behind an epidemic of number-porting scams that are bootstrapped to steal your online accounts, your cryptocurrency, and your email.Authenticator apps are much more secure (which is not to say they are perfect -- and security economics predicts that as they are used to defend more and more, they will be subject to ever-better-resourced attacks, so watch this space).Each record was meticulously tagged and detailed, including the recipient’s cell phone number, the message, the Voxox customer who sent the message and the shortcode they used.Among our findings from a cursory review of the data:* We found a password sent in plaintext to a Los Angeles phone number by dating app Badoo;* Several Booking.com partners were sent their six-digit two-factor codes to log in to the company’s extranet corporate network;* Fidelity Investments also sent six-digit security codes to one Chicago Loop area code;* Many messages included two-factor verification codes for Google accounts in Latin America;* A Mountain View, Calif.-based credit union, the First Tech Federal Credit Union, also sent a temporary banking password in plaintext to a Nebraska number;* We found a shipping notification text sent by Amazon with a link, which opened up Amazon’s delivery tracking page, including the UPS tracking number, en route to its destination in Florida;* Messenger apps KakaoTalk and Viber, and quiz app HQ Trivia use the service to verify user phone numbers;* We also found messages that contained Microsoft’s account password reset codes and Huawei ID verification codes;* Yahoo also used the service to send some account keys by text message;* And, several small to mid-size hospitals and medical facilities sent reminders to patients about their upcoming appointments, and in some cases, billing inquiries. Read the rest

China's increasing inequality and rocky transition to market capitalism has created a rising tide of wildcat strikes from independent trade unions, who have found powerful allies in national student communist movements whose members were made to study Marxism in an effort to purge the country's intelligentsia of "bourgeois" ideologies of liberalism and democracy.The students -- who call themselves "Marxists" and "Maoists" -- took the message to heart and mobilized in solidarity with the striking workers, in defiance of the Chinese state.Now the state has struck back: Chinese communist student activists and leaders have gone missing, often after public kidnappings at the hands of presumed state enforcers who drive up in black, unmarked cars and force the students inside. Some of these students have not been heard from since.The disappearances have created a wave of terror among the activists and their friends, who say that the retaliation is arbitrary and untargeted, sometimes aimed at prominent leaders and sometimes at young people who were essentially just bystanders during meetings and strikes.But as public attention grew, the government quickly tightened the net around the young protesters. On August 11, one of the main organizers, Shen Mengyu, a graduate of Sun Yat-sen University, another elite school in southern China, was detained by a group of unidentified men.Yue disappeared on August 24, along with a number of her fellow students. No official arrest reports have been announced yet by police and neither Shen or Yue have been seen since.Following their disappearance, a group of alumni and students at Peking University set up the "Finding Yue Movement" to lobby for the graduates' release. Read the rest

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been charged with crime in the U.S., according to one court document, while anonymous sources tell the Wall Street Journal the Department of Justice is planning to prosecute him. The supposed charge was revealed by a reference to it in an unrelated case against someone named Seitu Sulayman Kokayi: “Due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged,” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer.It's not clear what the charge is and a spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia U.S. attorney’s office told Huffington Post it was "not the intended name for this filing," leaving open the question of whether he has in fact been charged.However, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that U.S. authorities are "optimistic" about pressing charges. “I have no idea if he has actually been charged or for what, but the notion that the federal criminal charges could be brought based on the publication of truthful information is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set,” said Barry J. Pollack, one of Assange’s attorneys, in reaction to the news.Assange remains holed up at the Ecuadorean embassy in London after skipping bail on his extradition to Sweden, where he was accused of rape. Though the Swedish prosecution was eventually dropped, Assange still faces arrest on the bail issue if he leaves the embassy, and fears this will be used to engineer his extradition to the United States. Read the rest

Amazon's best selling wholesales have long accused the company of mining their sales data to discover which products are most profitable; then Amazon clones the product and offers it for sale at a lower price than the wholesales can afford (because Amazon doesn't have to worry about a wholesale-retail markup when it's both wholesaler and retailer at once) and tweaks its search and recommendation system to drive sales to its private-label versions of its partners' products.This is the kind of thing that US antitrust regulators have turned a blind eye to for 40+ years, since University of Chicago economists dripped poison in Ronald Reagan's ear, shifting antitrust enforcement to the "public harm" standard, in which companies are only punished for monopolistic activities that raise prices, not those that limit competition.But the EU is emerging from this "public harm" standard to a more robust antitrust framework, driven by the crusading trustbuster Margrethe Vestager, who has capitalized on the EU's delight at a covert trade war with the US to visit stonking great fines upon US Big Tech.Now the European Commission has announced that it will subject Amazon's predatory private-label practices (say that six times fast!) to antitrust investigations, relying in part on insider/whistleblower confirmation that the Amazon's suppliers' theories are correct.Given the multibillion-dollar fines the Commission has smacked other US companies with, this is a pretty significant announcement.This antitrust announcement pairs very well with Stacy Mitchell's analysis of how Amazon's #HQ2 search process resulted in the company amassing mountains of useful market intelligence on the plans cities have made for their futures, which the company can use to outmaneuver its competitors, even in cities where it isn't going to build a new headquarters. Read the rest

Illumipaper is a well-developed prototype from Interactive Media Lab Dresden; the researchers behind it used a variety of techniques to create regular-seeming paper with all the traditional characteristics (it can be crumpled, folded, written on with pen and ink, etc); but a wireless controller allows it to be selectively illuminated to provide interactivity (e.g. to provide tips on homework problems).It's a fascinating project that really feels futuristic -- like something that is yet to come, brought to life now.Due to their simplicity and flexibility, digital pen-and-paper solutions have a promising potential to become a part of our daily work. Unfortunately, they lack dynamic visual feedback and thereby restrain advanced digital functionalities. In this paper, we investigate new forms of paper-integrated feedback, which build on emerging paper-based electronics and novel thin-film display technologies. Our approach focuses on illuminated elements, which are seamlessly integrated into standard paper. For that, we introduce an extended design space for paper-integrated illuminations. As a major contribution, we present a systematic feedback repertoire for real-world applications including feedback components for innovative paper interaction tasks in five categories. Furthermore, we contribute a fully-functional research platform including a paper-controller, digital pen and illuminated, digitally controlled papers that demonstrate the feasibility of our techniques. Finally, we report on six interviews, where experts rated our approach as intuitive and very usable for various applications, in particular educational ones.IllumiPaper: Illuminated Interactive Paper [Dipl.-Medieninf. Konstantin Klamka and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Raimund Dachselt/Interactive Media Lab Dresden](via Four Short Links) Read the rest

The secret word of the day is: Marathon.As in, IFC is hosting an 24-hour marathon of Pee-wee's Playhouse on Thanksgiving. Aaaarggghhhhh! (That was me screaming real loud.)Starting at 6 AM, you'll be able to watch every single episode of this quirky TV cult classic, from "Ice Cream Soup" to "Accidental Playhouse." Do note that THE best Christmas special in the whole wide world -- Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas Special, of course -- begins at 6:12 PM sharp on Thanksgiving Day evening. Save room for Pee-wee. #PeeweesPlayhouse marathon Thanksgiving day on @IFC. pic.twitter.com/lWmxvPOgzV— IFC (@IFC) November 13, 2018Plus, you'll get a chance to watch them again when IFC starts running the episodes (sans the Christmas special) on every Saturday morning this December. [Psst... take a look at Pee-wee Herman's Instagram. It's full of weird gifs and images, just as you would hope and expect.](Peewee.com) Read the rest

70 year old Taipei fengshui master Chen San-yuan is known locally as "Pokemon Grandpa," and is a viral sensation thanks to the 15 phones he's mounted on his handlebars to help him play the 2016 augmented reality game Pokemon Go; his rig cost about $4,000 and he spends another $300/month on virtual currency to help him level up in the game. He says that playing the game keeps him socially connected and delays the onset of Alzheimer's. (Image: Reuters) (via Kottke) Read the rest

Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner continues her unbroken streak of excellent and incisive architectural criticism with a new piece that riffs on Stewart Brand's classic "How Buildings Learn" to discuss how McMansions have gone awry: they represent a break from the tradition of designing stuff to fit in spaces, and instead, they are spaces designed for status-displaying stuff.Ironically, these design priorities make spaces less flexible (what the fuck do you do with a three-storey "great room" when you want to change up its use?) and less suitable for human habitation.Of course, the premier example of a house designed for stuff is the McMansion, which, as I have argued at length elsewhere, is designed from the inside out. The reason it looks the way it does is because of the increasingly long laundry list of amenities (movie theaters, game rooms) needed to accumulate the highest selling value and an over-preparedness for the maximum possible accumulation of both people (grand parties) and stuff (grand pianos). This comes at the expense of structure, skin, and services. The structure becomes wildly convoluted, having to accommodate both ceilings of towering heights and others half that size, often within the same volume. Because of this, the rooflines are particularly complex, featuring several different pitches and shapes, and the walls are peppered with large great-room windows (a selling feature!), and other windows on any given elevation consist of many different sizes and shapes.The skin—which often features many different types of cladding—and the roof are, due to their complexity, more prone to vulnerabilities, such as leaks. Read the rest

There's scientific truth to the saying that you never forget how to ride a bike. Even if you can't remember phone numbers, birthdays, or where the hell you parked your car, it's likely that even if you haven't been on a bicycle in decades, you can climb on and ride away just fine. Why? Neuropsychologist Boris Suchan of Germany's Ruhr University Bochum lays it out as best we know in Scientific American: As it turns out, different types of memories are stored in distinct regions of our brains. Long-term memory is divided into two types: declarative and procedural.There are two types of declarative memory: Recollections of experiences such as the day we started school and our first kiss are called episodic memory. This type of recall is our interpretation of an episode or event that occurred. Factual knowledge, on the other hand, such as the capital of France, is part of semantic memory. These two types of declarative memory content have one thing in common—you are aware of the knowledge and can communicate the memories to others.Skills such as playing an instrument or riding a bicycle are, however, anchored in a separate system, called procedural memory. As its name implies, this type of memory is responsible for performance...According to one idea, in the regions where movement patterns are anchored fewer new nerve cells may be formed in adults. Without this neurogenesis, or continuous remodeling in those regions, it’s less likely for those memories to get erased."Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike? Read the rest

Japanese specialist paper manufacturer Hidaka Washi Ltd makes the world's thinnest paper using 1,000-year-old methods. The paper is then sent to museums and libraries around the world—including the British Museum and the Library of Congress—and is used to restore and protect books and works of art.(Great Big Story) Read the rest

Bernie Sanders's latest legislative proposal is the Stop Walmart Act; Sanders describes Walmart as the "poster child for corporate greed" and uses that as a launching point to propose a ban on stock buybacks from companies unless they pay their lowest-waged employees $15/hour.It's a followup to his Stop Bezos Act, a proposal that ultimately shamed Amazon to raising its minimum wage to $15.In a call with reporters, the independent senator from Vermont reiterated his praise of Amazon, saying that he believes every worker impacted by the change saw their overall compensation rise, with some employees seeing huge pay increases of up to 50%.Sanders has also called out other profitable companies, including American Airlines and McDonald's, for paying low wages. Bernie Sanders unveils Stop Walmart Act [Tami Luhby/CNN Business] Read the rest

Do you believe that we're living in a simulation? Has that belief affected your life? My old pal Rodney Ascher, director of fantastically freaky documentaries like Room 237, about weird theories surrounding The Shining, and The Nightmare, a study on sleep paralysis, is starting on a new far-out film about people who are convinced that our world is a digital creation. If you're one of those people, Rodney would love to hear from you. "The approach, like my other films, is to focus almost entirely on first-person accounts and present them as accurately as possible - closer to a non-fiction Twilight Zone than an episode of Cosmos," Rodney says."A Glitch in the Matrix" (Facebook) Read the rest

Nearly every Sunday for 25 years, Garry Shandling held a secret pickup basketball game for his friends, including celebrities like Sarah Silverman, David Duchovny, Sacha Baron Cohen, Will Ferrell, Kevin Nealon, and Judd Apatow. ESPN writes, "Those Sundays yielded friendships that are responsible for some of the best television and film of the past 20 years. As director Alex Richanbach says, 'This group of people found a little family in Los Angeles because we all have the same comedy dad.'"Shandling passed away in 2016 but the stories of what the scene was like are coming out now. There are way too many to include here and they build on each other, so head to ESPN to read the game's oral history by the people who were there: 'Fight Club' with better jokes: Inside Garry Shandling's secret pickup gameOne last thing: As a tribute to Shandling, his friends gathered to play one last game of basketball at his house just three days after his death. Read the rest

Two days of waiting in Casper, Wyoming, $1,200 and two new tires later, we were back on the road. Casper is a small city. It is one of Wyoming's most populated cities. It is a city flanked by mountains and, while we were being held captive by a blown out tire on a holiday weekend, a miserably cold, humid city. It was a city we were happy to leave.The man who taught me how to fight once told me that the only thing worse than getting punched is waiting to get punched. This holds true for many things in life. As my wife wheeled us back onto the Interstate, headed south, there was a tension in the air between us. We did not speak. We did little else but listen. Would the rest of our tires prove sound? Was there any indication that they might blow like one of our outer duelies had? When the next blow-out happens would it be one of our steer-tires? How fucked or dead would we be? The answer to this last question: pretty fucked and, depending on the speed we'd be traveling at when the blow-out hit, pretty dead. Both of us were wondering these things. Neither of us talked about it until after we had stopped for the night. Long distance trips can be full of new foods and interesting people that make for fond memories. More often, you're left to contend with hours of a ribbon of road cut through the plains mountains and dead towns that lost their vibrance years before you were born. Read the rest

Researchers at NYU and U Michigan have published a paper explaining how they used a pair of machine-learning systems to develop a "universal fingerprint" that can fool the lowest-security fingerprint sensors 76% of the time (it is less effective against higher-security sensors).The researchers used "generative adversarial networks" (GAN) to develop their attack: this technique uses a pair of machine learning systems, a "generator" which tries to fool a "discriminator," to produce a kind of dialectical back-and-forth in that creates fakes that are harder and harder to detect.The output was a fake fingerprint designed to attack the capacitive sensors in smartphones and other devices; these sensors work from partial prints that can be rotated out of their original orientation and still unlock the device, and are thus the easiest to fool.Smartphones generally operate at the second tier of security, in which they are expected to generate false positives 0.1% of the time; and at this level, the researchers were able to spoof the sensors 22% of the time. Recent research has demonstrated the vulnerability of fingerprint recognition systems to dictionary attacks based on MasterPrints. MasterPrints are real or synthetic fingerprints that can fortuitously match with a large number of fingerprints thereby undermining the security afforded by fingerprint systems. Previous work by Roy et al. generated synthetic MasterPrints at the feature-level. In this work we generate complete image-level MasterPrints known as DeepMasterPrints, whose attack accuracy is found to be much superior than that of previous methods. The proposed method, referred to as Latent Variable Evolution, is based on training a Generative Adversarial Network on a set of real fingerprint images. Read the rest

In Milton, West Virginia, concerned citizens called police to report rabid raccoons but it turns out that the animals (the raccoons that is) were more likely just drunk. “We have had calls [of] suspected rabid raccoons twice over the last two days,” the Milton Police Department wrote in a short Facebook post. “Turns out they appear to be drunk on crab apples.” From Newsweek:It wouldn’t be the first time an animal has made the headlines for public intoxication. In 2015, footage of a squirrel seemingly drunk on fermented crab apples hit YouTube—and attracted millions of views. National Geographic has previously captured footage of drunken monkeys.National Geographic said in its own 2015 article that research found that animals definitely did get drunk, and listed such examples as butterflies, moths and moose. Don Moore, associate director of the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., told National Geographic that deer that had eaten fermented apples in orchards were known to get “pretty sleepy, even stumbly.”Those who commented on the Milton Police Department’s post seemed to appreciate the update. One person joked, “Public intoxication, pretty serious. Thanks for putting him back in the woods.” Another Facebook user said, “I have one on my porch right now you can have.” Read the rest

In anticipation of the brand new Tales of the City series (!!), Netflix is now playing the documentary about its creator, The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin.THE UNTOLD TALES OF ARMISTEAD MAUPIN examines the life and work of one of the world's most beloved storytellers, following his evolution from a conservative son of the Old South into a gay rights pioneer whose novels have inspired millions to claim their own truth. Jennifer Kroot's documentary about the creator of TALES OF THE CITY moves nimbly between playful and poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. With help from his friends (including Neil Gaiman, Laura Linney, Olympia Dukakis, Sir Ian McKellen and Amy Tan) Maupin offers a disarmingly frank look at the journey that took him from the jungles of Vietnam to the bathhouses of 70's San Francisco to the front line of the American culture war.On Netflix: The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin Read the rest

You can own this DIY hovercraft Delorean for $45,000 "or best offer." After all, where you're going, you don't need roads. The seller is donating 10% of the sale to The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinsons Research. Video of the vehicle below. From eBay:What you get:1. Hand-built Hovercraft sculpted to look exactly like a Delorean. This is a functional work of art, it is not a Delorean bolted onto a hovercraft. There's only one in the world!2. Custom flatbed tilting trailer built specifically for this hovercraft3. Miscellaneous spare parts and supplies including spare engine parts, fans and propellers, nuts and bolts.4. Free phone consultations with me for any technical questions you might have...The Hovercraft is based on the blueprints for the Universal Hovercraft UH-13PT. The basic shape of the hull, skirt, and fan ducts come from those blueprints, but pretty much everything else is customized. The Delorean body is made out of styrofoam wrapped in fiberglass and painted with metallic paint. The 36” thrust fan is powered by a 23hp Briggs & Stratton Vanguard riding lawnmower-style engine. The 24” lift fan is powered by a B&S 875 Professional series push mower engine. The hull of the craft hovers about 6-8 inches over the surface, and can hover over anything relatively flat: land, water, ice, snow, sand, asphalt, etc. The top speed with the current thrust configuration is 31 mph on the water in good conditions. Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Muckrock teamed up to use the Freedom of Information Act to extract the details of 200 US cities' Automated License Plate Recognition camera programs (ALPR), and today they've released a dataset containing all the heretofore secret data on how these programs are administered and what is done with the data they collect.All told, these programs account for 2.5 billion license plate scans, in which 95% of the vehicles scanned were not under suspicion of any wrongdoing. The data collected in each program was shared with an average of 160 other agencies.Urban law-enforcement surveillance programs are shrouded in secrecy. EFF has successfully assisted community activists in Oakland in the passage of the best-in-class transparency rules for new surveillance programs, and where cities do not voluntarily disclose their street-level surveillance, EFF is working to force them to do so.Today we are releasing records obtained from 200 agencies, accounting for more than 2.5-billion license plate scans in 2016 and 2017. This data is collected regardless of whether the vehicle or its owner or driver are suspected of being involved in a crime. In fact, the information shows that 99.5% of the license plates scanned were not under suspicion at the time the vehicles’ plates were collected.On average, agencies are sharing data with a minimum of 160 other agencies through Vigilant Solutions’ LEARN system, though many agencies are sharing data with over 800 separate entities.Click below to explore EFF and MuckRock’s dataset and learn how much data these agencies are collecting and how they are sharing it. Read the rest

A homeless man, Johnny Bobbitt Jr., was famously seen to give his last $20 to a young woman, Kate McClure, who had run out of gas. Then McClure and her husband, Mark D'Amico, raised $400,000 on GoFundMe by way of thanks, only to end up publicly shamed after only gaving a small portion of the funds to Bobbitt. Authorities now say, though, that it was all a wheeze, the three of them working together from the outset.In the latest bombshell development, according to a new report authorities believe the entire tale was a ruse conceived by McClure, D'Amico and Bobbitt in a scheme to cash in.All three are reportedly expected to be charged with conspiracy and theft by deception for working together to concoct the story.The précis as alleged: they all scammed the media and the public, then the couple scammed Bobbitt, presumably believing he wouldn't go to the authorities because then everyone gets busted. But he did, and everyone got busted. Read the rest

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's $50,000,000 Calabasas, California mansion was spared from last week's wildfires thanks to the actions of private firefighters working on behalf of insurers who've written policies on about 1,000 of California's priciest homes.Public firefighting has been part of America since its inception, a repudiation of the English custom of firefighting services provided on the basis of wealth, usually by insurance companies.But since Reagan's first wave of cuts and privatizations, America has grown to rely ever more on private firefighting contractors, both for public lands (an industry association claims to be responsible for protecting 40% of America's wild lands) and private homes.The project of privatizing firefighting is a libertarian darling, much-loved by think-tankers, who see firefighting as the most emblematic of public services, and thus any evidence of the efficacy of private firefighting can be held up to prove that the state is unnecessary and can be replaced by markets.Climate change is increasing the rate and severity of wildfires, even as neoliberal policies and inequality are reducing the budgets for public fire-suppression and increasing the use of private firefighting by the wealthy.Carp, the Brooklyn College CUNY historian, expanded on the collectivist case, drawing in other prominent examples of areas of life that have undergone or could undergo privatization. “If we allow schools, libraries, policing, and firefighting to become a two-tiered system (with one tier for the elite and another tier for everyone else),” Carp said, “then that threatens the democratic-republican ideal of everyone contributing their fair share for the greater needs of the commonwealth.”Even in the early days of the American city, when volunteer and private fire companies were dominant, in the case of an emergency, every citizen capable of helping was expected to do so. Read the rest

A year ago, the Norwegian Consumer Council commissioned a study into kids' smart watches, finding that they were incredibly negligent when it came to security and incredible greedy when it came to surveillance: a deadly combination that meant that these devices were sucking up tons of sensitive data on kids' lives and then leaving it lying around for anyone to take.At the time, the manufacturers involved both denied any wrongdoing and simultaneously promised to improve anyway. A year later, no such improvements have arrived. A new investigation by Pen Test Partners found that MiSafes's smart watches, aimed at kids 3-12 years old, could be used to track kids' locations, to covertly listen in on their conversations, and to fool kids by initiating calls that appeared to come from their parents.The researchers found about 14,000 available MiSafe watches using internet search tools.They found it was possible to:* trigger the remote listening facility of someone else's watch, with the only warning being that a brief "busy" message appeared before its screen returned to blank* track the wearer's current and past locations* alter the safe zone facility so that alerts were triggered by a child's approach rather than their departurePen Test Partners also learned it was possible to bypass a feature supposed to limit the watch to accepting calls from only authorised parties.The researchers did this by using a online "prank call" service that fools receiving devices into showing another person's caller ID number.Consumer Advice: Kids GPS tracker watch security [Pen Test Partners]MiSafes' child-tracking smartwatches are 'easy to hack' [Leo Kelion/BBC] Read the rest

The Bolton News, covering Bolton and other communities in the hinterlands of northwest Greater Manchester, England, between Wigan and Bury, reports that a poo was "discovered in Poundland" Wednesday.Neil Brandwood reports:HORRIFIED shoppers were aghast when excrement was found in a town centre store. Faeces was discovered on the exit mat at Poundland in Victoria Square shortly before 11am this morning.One shopper, who asked not to be named, said: "I was appalled. It's not what you expect." It was not confirmed by press time whether the excrement was human.Photo: Google Street Poo. Read the rest

Mark Zuckerberg has told the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, Argentina, Australia and Ireland that he is "not available" for a planned hearing on political disinformation and Facebook.In his letter to the intergovernmental group, Mr Zuckerberg declined to elaborate on why he was "not available."In a letter to the UK's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the company declined to say why Zuckerberg couldn't attend, but said it remains "happy to cooperate" with the inquiry. The letter also laid out some of the efforts Facebook has made over the last year in areas like fighting fake news and striving for transparency in political ads.Damian Collins, chair of the committee, is leading the charge and noted that the social network's response is "hugely disappointing.""The fact that he has continually declined to give evidence, not just to my committee, but now to an unprecedented international grand committee, makes him look like he's got something to hide," he said in an emailed statement."Mark Zuckerberg 'not able' to attend international disinformation hearing [Laura K. Cucullu/Cnet](via /.)(Image: The World Flag, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest

Amid a growing number of lethal anti-Jewish hate attacks, including a gun massacre at a synagogue that left 13 dead, a man shouts “Heil Trump” in a crowded theater. Audience members told a reporter they believed they were about to die in a mass shooting.On Wednesday night during a performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre, an unidentified man stood up and shouted pro-Nazi and pro-Trump salutes. The classic play is about Jewish themes. The man's outburst made some people in the theater believe they were witnessing the beginning of another deadly attack.In the video below taken by a theater audience member, the audience reacts after the unidentified man interrupts the "Fiddler on the Roof" performance at the Hippodrome Theatre.Sick, sad world. A man stands at intermission of tonight’s performance of Fiddler in Baltimore and yells, “Heil Hitler,” along with pro-Trump references. pic.twitter.com/slDcPwF7re— Rich Scherr (@writerguyRich) November 15, 2018[ Video by Rich Scherr.]From the Baltimore Sun:Audience member Rich Scherr said the outburst happened during intermission. The man, who had been seated in the balcony, began shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.” Immediately after that, “People started running,” Scherr said. “I’ll be honest, I was waiting to hear a gunshot. I thought, ‘Here we go.’ ”The man was escorted out a few minutes later and the show continued. But Scherr, 49, said it was hard to focus on the play after that. “My heart was just racing. I didn’t even really pay attention to the second act.”“Fiddler” tells the story of a Jewish family as it faces persecution in tsarist Russia. Read the rest

Amazon's new headquarters will be split between northern Virginia and parts of Queens, New York, and will net the company billions in corporate welfare, branded as "incentives."In New York alone, the company -- among the richest in the world -- will receive $1.5 billion in subsidies.Amazon attained these stonking payouts by playing cities off against each other, luring their municipal leaders into degrading and debasing stunts designed to tempt the company. Much of this bidding took place in secret, with Amazon requiring cities to give up vital demographic, planning and economic data that it can now use to attain a competitive edge in its logistics and other business activities.But the billions in subsidies and the strong-arm tactics are backfiring. They've provided rhetorical weapons for the likes the newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders (who has already found political glory in using Amazon as a stand-in for everything wrong with late-stage American capitalism). New Yorkers rallied in the streets to object to the giveaway and to voice their concern that Amazon's new HQ2 will displace working families and local businesses, raising rents and creating jobs that will go to newcomers who will be able to outbid locals on rents.It's not just the left who object, either: Koch-affiliated think-tanks publicly denounced the move as "wasteful corporate welfare" that was detrimental to the "public good."The protests have gone viral, and some have called it the beginning of the end for this kind of handout, as public moods shift. Read the rest

Yoshitaka Sakurada might not be Japan's best pick for the cybersecurity portfolio: confused by a USB drive, he was forced to admit he'd never even used a computer.In parliament on Wednesday however, he admitted he doesn’t use computers. “Since the age of 25, I have instructed my employees and secretaries, so I don’t use computers myself,” he said in a response to an opposition question in a lower house session, local media reported. ... “It’s unbelievable that someone who has not touched computers is responsible for cybersecurity policies,” said opposition lawmaker Masato Imai. And his comments provoked a firestorm online. “Doesn’t he feel ashamed?” wrote one Twitter user.Ah, but see? Can't get hacked if you don't have a computer!See also how Sega game designer Yu Suzuki picked the wild color pallette for 1985 arcade hit Space Harrier. He rigged his development console to scramble the game's colors whenever the company president walked by. Such was the technical cluelessness of Sega's brass that this was an effective way of making the game appear incomplete, buying him time to add spit and polish before they insisted upon its release. One such random scrambling was so pleasing he decided to keep it in the game.Photo: ameblo.jp Read the rest

Data breaches keep happening, they keep getting worse, and yet companies keep collecting our data in ever-more-invasive ways, subjecting it to ever-longer retention, and systematically underinvesting in security.Why does this keep happening? Because it's affordable. In 2014, Home Depot breached more than 50,000,000 credit-cards; in 2016, they paid less than $0.34/customer in restitution.There are longer-term reputational costs associated with breaches, but these are not generally factored into the quarterly-earnings-focused mindsets of corporate execs and strategists. An awful lot of change could be made simply by adjusting the law, and it needn't even be something as far reaching as the European General Data Protection Regulation: even establishing a set of statutory damages that people caught in breaches were entitled to collect, and banning the use of binding arbitration clauses to escape these liabilities would go a long way.The statutory damages should reflect the cumulative nature of breaches: how a breached dataset can be combined with other breached datasets to build up devastatingly effective attacks -- the kind of thing that can cost you your whole house, even.If companies were paying out damages commensurate with the social costs their data recklessness imposes on the rest of us, it would have a very clarifying effect on their behavior -- insurers would get involved, refusing to write E&O policies for board members without massive premium hikes, etc. A little would go a long way, here.If you live in the United States, there's almost a 50 percent chance your personal data was lost in the giant Equifax data breach a year ago of 143 million records. Read the rest

"30 Years of American Anxieties" is a report on what 20,000 letters to Dear Abby reveal about the alarming things in life— and a great data presentation.Spend a few minutes reading the the questions that Abby’s readers write in, and you’ll quickly note that they’re invariably social in nature. Without friends and lovers, family and coworkers, there would be no Dear Abby column. We decided to explore how our anxieties vary based the people we worry about. To do so, we examined each letter’s most characteristic terms (comparing each letter’s words to the words used among all letters). Using a data science technique called t-SNE, we grouped the questions to derive constellations of concerns.The study doesn't bother itself with Dear Abby's sometimes dreadful advice, but it also doesn't explain the dataset. Unless Dear Abby only gets two letters a day, this set is surely a set of published letters rather than letters received. So it's really just an analysis of Dear Abby's anxieties, isn't it? Read the rest

Bon Appétit pastry chef Claire Saffitz is at it again. You probably remember that she's tried her hand at making all kinds of popular junk food from scratch -- Oreos, Lucky Charms, Skittles, Kit Kats and more. Her latest from-scratch creation is a gourmet version of those squishy, marshmallow-filled, shredded-coconut-covered Hostess snack cakes known as Sno Balls. If I've learned anything from her videos, it's that making gourmet junk food ain't easy.Just for fun, here's the Unwrapped footage (featured in the Bon Appétit video) that shows how Sno Balls are made in Hostess' St. Louis factory, not from scratch: Read the rest

What would you make with over 1500 Netflix DVD envelopes? Joanna Wilson of Akron, Ohio dreamed of making a dress and, as part of their 20th anniversary, the company made that happen.Since 2005, Wilson has been saving the red water-resistant envelopes because she was "originally intrigued" by their "unique texture," according to Netflix's DVD.com. By this spring, some 13 years later, she had amassed over 1556 of them. Well, Netflix celebrated their 20th anniversary this year and she shared her collection by using their #DVD20 hashtag on Instagram. The company was impressed and immediately contacted her to learn more. She told them she was hoping to turn her collection into a dress and they jumped on the chance to sponsor its creation. So, Joanna started looking for a dress designer and found 19-year-old Alyssa Hertz, a Kent State University fashion design student who had already created dresses out of newspaper and styrofoam. To come up the inspiration for the dress, Joanna (who is a historian of Christmas entertainment) looked to Rosemary Clooney's long red gown in the 1954 movie White Christmas. Alyssa told DVD.com: We had a meeting to discuss how we could take inspiration from this famous gown and decided on replacing the fur on the dress with white roses made from envelopes that I painted white, making slight changes to the neckline and sleeves, and adding a dramatic train to finish off this grand dress. We had two fittings while I worked on the project, and a final fitting after it was complete, which I couldn’t have been happier with. Read the rest

The Moroccan Euphorbia resinifera plant produces a resin so spicy that it attains a whopping 16,000,000,000 on the Scoville scale, 10,000x hotter than a Carolina reaper chili.The active ingredient in this resin is resiniferatoxin, AKA RTX, which has proven incredible promising in early animal trials for treating chronic pain. Dogs with joint pain are anesthetized and injected with RTX, which destroys their nerve endings and makes them incapable of sensing pain until the nerves regenerate, about 5 months later.The NIH is experimenting with using RTX to relieve pain in people with bone cancer, under FDA guidance allowing for RTX experimentation on terminally ill people who don't have to fear secondary harms from losing their ability to sense pain, heat, etc.I suffer from largely untreatable chronic pain and I absolutely dote on capcasin-based muscle rubs (Tiger Balm, etc), but I find that I quickly become inured to their effects and have to constantly up my dose. More than once, I've given myself serious chemical burns from too much hot muscle rub. RTX sounds weirdly tempting to me.RTX’s promise lies in its specificity. Think of it like a sniper rifle for pain, whereas opioids are more like hand grenades. Opioids target receptors all over the body, not a specific kind of sensory neuron. “That's why when you give it to somebody, you get problems with constipation, sedation, they can have respiratory depression,” says Mannes.That and you have to take opioids constantly, but not so with RTX. “You give it once and it should last for an extended period of time because it is destroying the fibers,” says Mannes. Read the rest

Remember when they caught the Golden State Killer by comparing DNA crime-scene evidence to big commercial genomic databases (like those maintained by Ancestry.com, 23 and Me, etc) to find his family members and then track him down?It's not just him.If you're an American of US descent, there's a 60% chance that you can be identified from genomic database searches, because even if you've never signed up for one of these junk science services, your stupid cousins have.That's the conclusion of a group of computer science, computational biology, genomics, and public health researchers from Columbia, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who published their findings in the journal Science: Identity inference of genomic data using long-range familial searches (Sci-Hub mirror).They also predict that in the "near future," "nearly any US individual of European descent" will be identifiable from commercial genomic databases.The researchers propose a mitigation technique for avoiding nonconsensual genetic profiling: "DTC providers should cryptographically sign the text file containing the raw data available to customers (fig. S6). Third-party services will be able to authenticate that a raw genotyping file was created by a valid DTC provider and not further modified. If adopted, our approach has the potential to prevent the exploitation of long-range familial searches to identify research subjects from genomic data. Moreover, it will complicate the ability to conduct unilaterally long-range familial searches from DNA evidence.Consumer genomics databases have reached the scale of millions of individuals. Recently, law enforcement authorities have exploited some of these databases to identify suspects via distant familial relatives. Read the rest

This past year at Burning Man, 600 drones light up the sky -- accompanied by live piano music -- one evening in a beautiful "flying sculpture" called "Franchise Freedom." This is the recently-released film of the piece made by its artists at Studio Drift.As dusk fell over Black Rock City, 600 luminous drones rose into a hypnotic display of technological choreography, accompanied by the poignant keys of Joep Beving. The drones were guided by a specially made algorithm that simultaneously allows both individual choice and movement as a group. The innovative technology made it possible to create a 3d image in the sky that could be viewed from multiple angles.Thanks, Cheryl! Read the rest

Sense About Science (previously) is a UK group that advocates for evidence-based policy; as part of that mission they give out the annual Maddox Prizes for people who brave political and social retaliation to infuse difficult public policy debates with factual evidence.There were two Maddox winners this year.The first is Professor Terry Hughes, whose work on the intensification of coral bleaching was the subject of a smear campaign orchestrated by Australian politicians, tourist industry lobbyists, and public figures, all of whom insist (despite the evidence) that pollution, industrialization, and climate change will not have a devastating effect on the Great Barrier Reef.The second is Britt Hermes who trained as a naturopath and then, after investigating the science behind naturopathy, began to aggressively expose the lack of evidence behind naturopathy's many claims, attracting person attacks and even an ongoing libel suit brought by an American naturopath (here's her defense fund).Britt Hermes: “I was a naturopath, until I looked at the evidence and decided to speak up about the dangerous therapies used in naturopathy, especially those to treat cancer. Walking away cost me my friends. I am harassed and being sued for defamation. I am honoured to be recognised by the scientific community for changing my mind.” Professor Terry Hughes: “It is a privilege to receive this prize and to express my gratitude – not just for me, but more importantly for future generations, who have the most to lose if we fail to act on anthropogenic climate change.” Maddox Prize 2018 [Sense About Science] Read the rest

Big library systems struggling with the task of sorting interbranch requests for distribution on the library's delivery vehicles can buy a $2 million Lyngsoe Systems Compact Cross Belt Sorter, whose conveyor takes precisely hand-placed materials down a line of bins, scanning each item and tipping it into a bin destined for the right branch.Washington State's King County pioneered the Lyngsoe system in America, and their example prompted a consortium of the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries to buy their own, to excellent effect.Using the Lyngsoe is a physical art: the belt passes at 1.5m/s and each item has to be precisely aligned for scanning and deposit into the correct bin; human sorters have to quickly and carefully handle a very heterogenuous set of materials: DVDs, oversized hardcovers, floppy manga collections, etc. In a first-of-its-kind competition, the King County and NY library workers faced off against each other in a head-to-head match to see who could sort the most materials, a race that sounds like a cross between gymnastics and juggling.Matthew Taub's Atlas Obscura writeup of the sorting competition makes for a fascinating counterpoint to the insider horror stories from Amazon's warehouses, the biggest difference being whether the automation has been procured to help workers make a difficult task easier (the libraries) or to work them right up to the point of physical impossibility to wring every last penny of value out of their labor (Amazon).Then, as sudden as the “thwack” of a perfectly placed book, the machine halts. Read the rest

The European Union's new Copyright Directive contains two hugely controversial, poorly drafted and dangerous clauses: Article 11, which limits who can link to news articles and under which circumstances (and also bans Creative Commons licenses); and Article 13, which mandates that all platforms for public communications surveil all user posts and censor anything that matches (or partially matches) a crowdsourced, unaccountable database of allegedly copyrighted works.The Don't Wreck the Net coalition of online platforms and civil society groups has published a laundry-list of the minimum set of technical fixes that Articles 11 and 13 need to actually be fit for purpose, including some really basic things like defining what a "news story" and "link" are in Article 11's ban on linking to news stories without payment.The lists of fixes for both clauses are long and detailed, a mark of just how poorly specified and poorly drafted Articles 11 and 13 are (unsurprisingly, as both were rejected by the EU's experts, and left out of the drafting of the Copyright Directive, and were quietly inserted by a single MEP on the day the GDPR came into effect, while attention was focused elsewhere).But what's even more striking is how different this list is from the actual proposed drafting revisions that have just leaked from the EU, which barely overlap with Save the Net's commonsense list.As MEP Julia Reda notes, some of the proposed changes actually making Articles 11 and 13 worse:Council fails to clearly exclude hyperlinks – even those that aren’t accompanied by snippets from the article. Read the rest

Is a wooden lock as tough as one made out of metal? Nope. Is buying a lock easier than building one? Absolutely. Is a lock you made with your own two hands significantly more badass than anything you can purchase, ready-to-use? Without a shadow of a doubt.If you're looking for an unusual woodworking project to undertake, Matthias Wandel has you covered. You can buy the plans for his wooden mechanical lock, here. Once you do, you'll also get access to the plans for a laser cut iteration of the project. While it might not provide the level of security that you'd want for keeping your valuables safe, the level of whimsy that this project could bring to a woodworker's life looks like it would be hard to beat. Read the rest

It's been driving me crazy. I knew acting Attorney General slash Cult45 tool, Matthew Whitaker, reminded me of someone. Someone awful. My first thought was Lex Luthor. But yesterday, I figured it out. It's Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, from Daredevil. Played by Vincent D'Onofrio in the Netflix series, Kingpin is a scary, hot-headed, New York City crime lord. I did a search on Whitaker and Kingpin and found this pic on Imgur. Whitaker could be Kingpin's double. Read the rest

If you were living in Massachusetts a few years back, you might remember that Comcast was offering what seemed to be a screaming deal: a $99 lock-in rate plan. I say "seemed to be," because Comcast's advertised $99 price didn't include the cost of renting equipment and the fact that, as we're talking about Comcast here, there were a number of additional fees that could (and often did) appear on a subscriber's bill at the end of the month, for reasons only Comcast understood. Did I mention that escaping the rate plan set folks back $240 for killing their contract with the company early? No? Well, it totally did. The state's Attorney General, Maura Healey, felt that this was bullshit of the first order. Her office did something about it.From Gizmodo:Comcast will cancel the debts of more than 20,000 customers and pay back $700,000 in Massachusetts as part of a settlement with the state’s Attorney General over deceptive advertising. Back in 2015 and early 2016, the cable giant advertised a $99 lock-in rate for plans that didn’t include equipment costs and had additional fees that could be jacked up at any time.As part of Comcast's settlement with the state, they'll be forced to fork over refunds to anyone who paid the $240 early termination fee. They'll also be forced to forgive all outstanding unpaid early termination fees and related late fees that Massachusetts consumers incurred between January 2015 and March 2016. Comcast fully cooperated with the AG’s investigation. Read the rest

In Montana today, a federal judge said the First Amendment doesn't protect a pro-Nazi internet publisher from being sued for instructing his readers to unleash a "troll storm" that materialized in a barrage of anti-Semitic threats against a Jewish woman and her family in Whitefish.U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen ruled today that Tanya Gersh's lawsuit against Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer can proceed. From Montana Public Radio:Gersh says hundreds of people harassed and threatened her family online and by phone and mail after Anglin accused her of trying to force the mother of white nationalist Richard Spencer out of the Montana town of Whitefish in 2016.Anglin argued that the First Amendment protects his speech and that he can't be held liable for his followers' actions.John Morrison, an attorney for Tanya Gersh says the judge’s ruling upholds the argument Gersh has been making since she filed her lawsuit against Anglin."Online campaigns of hate, threats and intimidation have no place in a civil society, and do not enjoy protection under our constitution," Morrison says. Christensen upheld a magistrate judge's recommendation to reject Anglin's request to dismiss the lawsuit. Read the rest

"Big news Wednesday... Hillary's campaign will die this week," Randy Credico texted Trump ally Roger Stone, just 6 days before the WikiLeaks email dump.These text messages obtained by NBC News show that Donald Trump's longtime political “dirty trickster” consigliere Roger Stone was boasting of dirt to come from Wikileaks. Stone has previously denied any foreknowledge of the late-2016 Wikileaks dumps, as he attempts to squirm away from the Special Counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller. This latest news won't help him accomplish that.Six days before WikiLeaks began releasing those emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, Roger Stone was texting his pal Randy Credico about WikiLeaks, according to copies of phone records provided to NBC News.“Big news Wednesday,” Stone's friend, radio host Randy Credico, wrote on Oct. 1, 2016, according to the text messages provided by Stone. “Now pretend u don’t know me.”“U died 5 years ago,” Stone replies.“Great,” Credico writes back. “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.”From NBC:Credico turned out to be wrong on one count — nothing incriminating about Clinton came out that Wednesday. But two days later, on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released its first dump of emails stolen from Podesta, altering the trajectory of the 2016 presidential election.Stone, a confidante of then-candidate Donald Trump and notorious political trickster, has denied any collusion with WikiLeaks.But the text messages provided by Stone to NBC News show that Credico appeared to be providing regular updates to Stone on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans in the days before the hacked emails were released. Read the rest

Carbo pareidolia. Artist: Sabine Timm, “artist, creator, beach-trash collector, flea-market lover and photographer.” She's on Instagram as @virgin_honey. View this post on Instagram topless versionA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Apr 30, 2018 at 5:17am PDT View this post on Instagram barking breadA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Sep 22, 2018 at 2:57am PDT View this post on Instagram cat loves tigerA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Sep 29, 2018 at 2:45am PDT View this post on Instagram Bobtail breadA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Oct 3, 2018 at 2:06am PDT View this post on Instagram ...party is overA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Nov 1, 2018 at 6:12am PDT View this post on Instagram ...endless varieties of dog breadsA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Oct 13, 2018 at 2:22am PDT View this post on Instagram bread creationsA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Sep 19, 2018 at 2:06pm PDT View this post on Instagram back homeA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Sep 15, 2018 at 1:53pm PDT View this post on Instagram Have a nice sunday!A post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Aug 12, 2018 at 2:32am PDT View this post on InstagramA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on May 21, 2018 at 6:41am PDT View this post on Instagram arrghA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Apr 27, 2018 at 11:34am PDT View this post on Instagram breakfast buddyA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Apr 20, 2018 at 3:25am PDT [via Laughing Squid] Read the rest

Donald Trump fired Jeff Sessions and replaced him with Matthew Whitaker, a giant tool who thinks Biblical law should prevail in America's courtrooms.He's also a scammer.Back in 2014, Whitaker joined the advisory board of a Miami Beach scam company called World Patent Marketing (they were later shut down and fined $26,000,000 by the FTC) (the company is under investigation by the FBI). World Patent Marketing charged inventors to help them bring their products to market, accepting bizarre patents for unworkable products that were never actually manufactured, bilking their customers out of thousands of dollars each.Whitaker actively defended World Patent Marketing against its critics, citing his credentials as a former US Attorney as a reason to trust that World Patent Marketing was on the up-and-up (Whitaker denies any knowledge of the company's wrongdoing). Among the products that World Patent Marketing marketed were: a "masculine toilet" for guys with giant dicks, designed to keep their fantastic members from coming into contact with the porcelain; a time-traveling Bitcoin-based commodity ("Time Travel X"); and sasquatch dolls whose marketing campaign included an assertion that "DNA evidence collected in 2013 proves that Bigfoot does exist."Whitaker served on World Patent Marketing's advisory board alongside a mixed-martial artist, a failed Central African Republic politician, and other motley characters.Whitaker used his status as a former US Attorney to intimidate the company's critics, sending them threatening letters promising legal retribution if they continued to speak out against the company's fraudulent business-practices.Key Democrats in the incoming House of Representatives have announced their intention to investigate Whitaker. Read the rest

Florida.Andrew Appel takes us on a tour of the selectively bizarre design decisions that have plagued Florida voters since 2000, when the infamous butterfly ballots allowed GW Bush to steal the presidency from Al Gore, all the way up to this month's election, when Broward County's standards-noncompliant ballots caused 26,000 voters to fail to cast a ballot for a contested Senate race where the current margin of victory is 12,562 votes.Amazingly, though Florida's ballots are consistently terrible design catastrophes, they are also consistently design catastrophes that penalize Democratic candidates, which is the most amazing coincidence, ever.By the way, if you’re not sure which party those 26,000 voters might have intended to vote for in the Senate race, look again at Broward ballot. In the race right below the Senate race, one party didn’t even nominate a candidate to run in that Congressional district.Florida is the Florida of ballot-design mistakes [Andrew Appel/Freedom to Tinker] Read the rest

Coming back from the dead is a tabloid staple – just ask Elvis, Michael Jackson and Princess Diana, all still alive and well, hiding in plain sight, according to the rags. But this week sees the most exciting return from beyond the grave: tabloid title The Sun reappears on American newsstands with such sensational tales as UFOs invading the Arctic, a baby born with its grandfather’s forearm tattoo, and a brown bear that can read books “at third-grade level.”Part of American Media Inc’s tabloid stable along with the National Enquirer and the Globe, The Sun, last published in 2012, shuttered as the public’s appetite for outrageously improbable “news" faded. Perhaps we can credit President Donald Trump’s passion for fake news with the revival of The Sun, which breathlessly tells us that John the Baptist’s sandals have been found, curing blindness – and baldness! And of course, there’s the inevitable story that’s crazy-but-true: “Worms from Hell!” have been discovered two miles beneath the earth’s surface. Okay, so they were discovered by scientists in 2011 living in cracks between the earth’s crust (the worms living in the cracks, not the scientists), but for tabloids that often recount decades-old yarns, this counts as fresh news.The Sun, which beneath its title carries the words “God Bless America,” devotes its cover to the exclusive: “U.S. Scientists Transplant Monkey Head – And It Can Be Done on Humans Now.” Yes, it’s another ancient story: American neurosurgeon Robert J. White transplanted heads on four monkeys back in 1970. Read the rest

GenX kids had better toys.I once shot my friend's mother in the eye with a web-slung Spiderman wrist dart. It had to be an accident because you couldn't aim these wrist mounted, weakly sprung dart pushers for anything. No one took the wrist launchers away.An acceptable-by-current-parenting-standards version is nothing but a Silly-string can under your child's wrist.I am so glad I lived through the 1970s and 1980s.Image of the OG toy via Hake's Auctions, who sold one for over $400. I will stick with my Lone Ranger ring for now. Read the rest