Billy McFarland, the 26 year old con-artist who organized a disastrous Bahamas music festival in 2017 was sentenced to six years in federal prison on multiple counts of fraud. Ticket buyers who paid $12,000 had been promised a "first class" experience on a private island with yacht rides, gourmet meals, supermodels, and luxury villas but instead received school bus shuttles, cheese slices on bread, feral dogs, disaster relief tents and no musical performances.From the New York Times:Prosecutors said that the music festival, which was to have taken place in 2017, was the product of an elaborate scheme. The festival’s website identified its location as Fyre Cay, a fictional place that was described as a private island that had once belonged to the drug lord Pablo Escobar.Actually, Mr. McFarland secured some land on Great Exuma just weeks before the festival and hired workers who scrambled to prepare for the event. But as ticket holders arrived, Mr. McFarland’s plans unraveled and the festival was canceled. His celebrity business partner in Fyre Media, the rapper Ja Rule, posted on social media that he was “heartbroken” about the chaos.From late 2017 until early 2018, Mr. McFarland ran a company called NYC VIP Access that sold bogus tickets to events like the Met Gala, Coachella, Burning Man and the Super Bowl. In one case, prosecutors said, two customers flew from Florida to New York for the Grammy Awards, only to be turned away at the door.In a sentencing memorandum, prosecutors called Mr. Read the rest

Well this is fun: The United States Government Accountability Office released a report today that explains, in no uncertain terms, that the majority of the nation's new-fangled, high-tech weapons systems are hilariously vulnerable to cyber attacks. From the Washington Post:The report by the Government Accountability Office concluded that many of the weapons, or the systems that control them, could be neutralized within hours. In many cases, the military teams developing or testing the systems were oblivious to the hacking.A public version of the study, published on Tuesday, deleted all names and descriptions of which systems were attacked so the report could be published without tipping off American adversaries about the vulnerabilities. Congress is receiving the classified version of the report, which specifies which among the $1.6 trillion in weapons systems that the Pentagon is acquiring from defense contractors were affected.The Government Accountability Office used a team of hackers to see what sort of shenanigans could be caused with a little bit of access and a whole lot of digital kung-fu. The results aren't a good look for America's military. In one instance, the red team that the GOA used was pitted against Pentagon personnel tasked with holding the line against cyberintrusions. The security checks that the Pentagon were easily bypassed, thanks to the use of easy-to-crack passwords and "insiders" who were familiar with the program acting as meatspace backdoors to what would normally be secure systems. It gets worse: hackers working for the GAO reported being able to watch, in real time, a system operator's every move. Read the rest

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were forced to make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan this morning during their attempted trip to the International Space Station. The duo were on board a Russian-built Soyuz rocket, launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan when, according to early reports from NASA, the rocket's booster failed minutes after liftoff. NASA reported in a tweet that the “...Soyuz capsule is returning to Earth via a ballistic descent, which is a sharper angle of landing compared to normal.” A search and rescue team was deployed to pick up the astronaut and cosmonaut from the capsule's landing site, approximately 12 miles east of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan.Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, will be conducting a formal investigation into what went wrong with their rocket. Scary shit. Read the rest

Reginald Andrade is the consumer manager of disability services at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. On September 14 he was walking across campus to work. This scared a bystander who called the police. Andrade says the police were waiting for him by the time he arrived at work.From the ACLU:But on September 14, campus police were waiting for me when I arrived at the reception desk at Whitmore. I had no idea why, but I knew it couldn’t be good. My heart started pounding.Two university detectives sat me down me in an office and closed the door. Bewildered, I asked what was happening. They refused to answer as they peppered me with questions.“What time did you wake up?” “What were you doing at the campus recreation center?” “Did you come into the building agitated?” I felt confused, powerless, and scared, but I made sure to maintain my composure. I remembered that even unarmed Black people disproportionately get killed during police encounters, and it was incumbent on me as an innocent Black man to show that I wasn’t a threat.It wasn’t until the end of their interrogation that they revealed why I was being questioned. Someone had called the university’s anonymous tip line, reporting that they had seen an “agitated Black male” who was carrying “a heavy backpack that is almost hitting the ground” as he approached the Whitmore Administration Building. I — the “agitated Black male” — apparently posed such a threat that police put the entire building on lockdown for half an hour. Read the rest

Some parts of machine learning are incredibly esoteric and hard to grasp, surprising even seasoned computer science pros; other parts of it are just the same problems that programmers have contended with since the earliest days of computation. The problem Amazon had with its machine-learning-based system for screening job applicants was the latter.Amazon understood that it had a discriminatory hiring process: the unconscious biases of its technical leads resulted in the company passing on qualified woman applicants. This isn't just unfair, it's also a major business risk, because qualified developers are the most scarce element of modern businesses.So they trained a machine-learning system to evaluate incoming resumes, hoping it would overcome the biases of the existing hiring system.Of course, they trained it with the resumes of Amazon's existing stable of successful job applicants -- that is, the predominantly male workforce that had been hired under the discriminatory system they hoped to correct.The computer science aphorism to explain this is "garbage in, garbage out," or GIGO. It is pretty self-explanatory, but just in case, GIGO is the phenomenon in which bad data put through a good system produces bad conclusions. Amazon built the system in 2014 and scrapped it in 2017, after concluding that it was unsalvagable -- sources told Reuters that it rejected applicants from all-woman colleges, and downranked resume's that included the word "women's" as in "women's chess club captain." Amazon says it never relied on the system. There is a "machine learning is hard" angle to this: while the flawed outcomes from the flawed training data was totally predictable, the system's self-generated discriminatory criteria were surprising and unpredictable. Read the rest

A man in Peru was recently using Google maps to figure out how to get to a bridge in Lima. He moved the camera around the city's streets, when suddenly he noticed a woman sitting on a bench who reminded him of his wife. She even wore the same type of clothes – white open blouse, jeans, black boots with heels. He then zoomed in, and lo and behold, it WAS his wife, with a man's head on her lap. He confronted her, and yes, it was what it looked like – she had been having an affair with the man. The couple is now divorced. Ironically, Google had taken the photo of the woman and her fellow on the Bridge of Sighs.Via TechSpot Image: Google Maps Read the rest

Joshua Browder launched DoNotPay when he started his computer science degree at Stanford; at first the app automated the process of fighting traffic tickets, then it expanded to helping homeless people claim benefits, then he automated suing Equifax for leaking all your financial data, then navigating the airlines' deliberately confusing process for getting refunds on plane tickets whose prices drop after you buy them.The latest iteration of DoNotPay includes pushbutton lawsuits in small claims court: it uses IBM Watson to automatically format lawsuits claiming up to $25,000 in damages, based on a quick series of simple questions. The idea is to give equal justice to individuals who have been wronged by big corporations whose legal muscle makes them too intimidating to sue through regular channels. The app also creates a script for you to read aloud in court.Browder -- now 21 -- accepts donations and has received $1.1m in seed funding; he's contemplating charging down the line for more customized legal advice and services. His Equifax-suing tool racked up multiple victories for victims of Equifax's negligence, even when Equifax sent corporate attorneys to fight the suits.The app works by having a bot ask the user a few basic questions about their legal issue. The bot then uses the answers to classify the case into one of 15 different legal areas, such as breach of contract or negligence. After that, Do Not Pay draws up documents specific to that legal area, and fills in the specific details. Read the rest

Japanese artist Miyu Kojima's dayjob is cleaning up apartments whose occupants have died "lonely deaths" (kodokushi/孤独死), where someone socially isolated declines unnoticed for months or years; the scenes of their death are both sad and grisly, as often they lie dead behind closed doors for a long time before they are missed.As a kind of therapy, Kojima sculpts incredibly intricate miniature dioramas of the apartments she cleans, working from the photos she takes to provide documentation to the relatives of the deceased. She works from a mix of off-the-shelf dollhouse miniatures and items she sculpts herself, spending a month on each room she recreates.Kojima's estranged father died a "lonely death." Her visits with him while he was in his final coma made her regret the estrangement; the sculptures she creates are meant to serve both as a kind of public service warning to others and partly as her own attempt to reconcile her emotions.Kojima originally started working for the clean-up company after her father experienced a similar fate. When she was in high school her parents separated and her father was living alone. One day her mother went to visit him to discuss divorce proceedings when she discovered him collapsed after suffering a heart attack. He was rushed to the hospital and was sustained, but drifted into a coma. While unconscious, the doctors told Kojima that there was a good chance her father could hear her. And so, together with her mother, they spoke to him. The father never awoke from his coma but before passing away, tears rolled down his face. Read the rest

When Obamacare came into effect, Notre Dame and other religious institutions forced the administration into a baroque arrangement whereby the US government would insure birth control prescriptions for women otherwise covered by the institution, so that the institution could hew to a religious doctrine that abhors the idea of women controlling their own fertility.The arrangement was semi-stable, barring some wobbles when Trump began to erode the Affordable Care Act, but then Notre Dame -- and 73 other institutions -- secretly entered into an arrangement with Notre Dame to deny women coverage for their birth control.Notre Dame pitches itself to students and faculty as an "inclusive" institution and many women who attend and work there made that choice on the basis of their understanding that their health and fertility would not be trumped by religious bigotry and superstition.They were wrong.Michelle Banker, a lawyer with the National Women’s Law Center, said a clue was found in Jenkins’s February statement. In announcing the change, Jenkins mentioned in passing that the university’s long-standing legal challenge to the mandate had been “settled favorably.” Considering that the Trump rules had been blocked and negotiations over a new workaround had broken down, Banker wanted to know exactly what that meant. The NWLC filed a Freedom of Information Act request and received a copy of a 10-page settlement between several federal agencies and 74 religiously affiliated institutions, negotiated by the Department of Justice and signed on October 13, 2017.The settlement adopted language from the Trump rules — claiming that the contraceptive mandate impinged on the organizations’ religious freedoms and promising that they would never have to comply with it, at present or in the future. Read the rest

Amnesty International's new report on family separations reveals that the Trump administration stole at least 4,000 more children from their parents than the previous total of 2,500-3,000.The exact total can't be calculated because Customs and Border Protection is stonewalling on its official statistics, but we know that CBP separated about 8,000 "family units" (CBP won't say how many of those "family units" include children, but they say that Amnesty's report is "deeply flawed" -- though they will not provide any clarification).The Amnesty report describes an orchestrated campaign by the administration to seek “the full dismantling of the U.S. asylum system”: discouraging asylum-seekers with the threat of family separation, detaining asylum-seekers while their claims are heard in substandard conditions where they are incentivized to give up and agree to leave – and seeking to rewrite longstanding policy to make it harder for people to request asylum directly at the border.“These are not isolated aberrations. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has implemented these interrelated policies in unison,” the report says. “The Trump administration is waging a deliberate campaign of human rights violations against asylum-seekers, in order to broadcast globally that the United States no longer welcomes refugees.”The report also provides new firsthand accounts of how U.S. border officials have prevented asylum-seekers from crossing legally at ports of entry in order to make their claims, forcing them back into dangerous cities in Mexico. Mexican immigration officials described how the U.S. has enlisted Mexican authorities in that effort — encouraging them to check the status, detain, and possibly deport asylum-seekers that the Border Patrol had turned away from U.S. Read the rest

Michael Avenatti, lawyer for Stormy Daniels and Julie Swetnick, one of the three Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault accusers, predicts with his usual confidence that Donny Trump Jr. will be indicted by the end of the year."Donald Trump Jr. will be indicted before his birthday on 12-31-18. If you doubt my prediction, please check my record over the last 7 months. #Winning"Donald Trump Jr. will be indicted before his birthday on 12-31-18. If you doubt my prediction, please check my record over the last 7 months. #Winning— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) October 11, 2018Of course, if Avenatti's prediction comes true, in the end it won't matter much. Papa Trump will fix it and make it all better for his mini-me. Image: by Luke Harold/Flickr Read the rest

Gone, obviously. Tom Scocca:Using our advanced technology, it is possible to look up the beaches in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sea Level Rise Viewer, and to imagine what will happen if we visit them, or try to visit them, in the future—when the sea levels have risen three feet, or six feet, or more, if you want. You can use your pocket phone-computer to watch them move ahead through time below. Read the rest

If you're worried that your Airbnb host has hidden a camera in the place you've rented, because that is a thing that garbage people do, you can use these handy tips to spot it.Mostly they boil down to "look hard" but the top tip is to turn off the lights and use a flashlight to spot glimmering lenses.If you are really hell bent on preventing hidden devices from invading your privacy, you can invest in a hidden device detector. Cameras that use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to send or receive data will emit an RF signal. You can purchase an RF signal detector to pick up those signals and then locate a hidden camera. This RF signal detector, for instance, costs about $25 on Amazon and has five modes to help locate hidden surveillance devices: Laser detection, vibration (mute) detection, beep detection, LED display detection, and headset mode.You can buy other detectors for anywhere between $20 and upwards of $300. It just depends on the features and quality you’re looking for in a device scanner. No RF device is going to find hidden cameras 100 percent of the time though. If a camera is recording but not sending the data out, an RF detector will not pick up on the camera.You can also install certain apps on your phone that can scan for hidden cameras. These apps, like Hidden Camera Detector, may not be as accurate as an RF scanner, but for under $5 you can give them a try. Read the rest

I'm a sucker for a good horror movie, and even this trailer gives me goosebumps. This remake of Stephen King's Pet Sematary comes out in April 2019. From Esquire:The concept was so spooky King himself hesitated to publish his book in the first place. “I found the result so startling and gruesome that I put the book in a drawer, thinking it would never be published. Not in my lifetime, anyway.” he wrote in a 2000 introduction for the paperback, according to Entertainment Weekly.“I’m particularly uneasy about the book’s most resonant line… ‘Sometimes, dead is better,’” King wrote. “I hope with all my heart that that is not true, but in the nightmarish context of Pet Sematary, it seems to be. And it may be okay. Perhaps ‘sometimes dead is better’ is grief’s last lesson.” Read the rest

Although properly breaking open eggs isn't as hard as they show in the video, people with certain disabilities might find value in The Q's "DIY Simple Egg Opener" (or this one which is already on the market). This amazing kitchen gadget allows you to open any chicken egg in seconds! No more eggshell in your dish!All you need are plywood, popsicle sticks, 3 springs and small piece of sponge! Don't wait, build your own egg opener and make your morning easier :)(The Awesomer) Read the rest

Jennifer Howard, a professional writer and editor, found herself unable to re-read a Hermann Hesse novel she loved: the "grafted, spasmodic, online style" of reading has forced itself onto all of her reading, making immersion difficult and the text unsatisfying. So she knuckled down to review Maryanne Wolf's Reader, Come Home, a book about what's happening to our "reading brains."...the average person “consumes about 34 gigabytes across varied devices each day” — some 100,000 words’ worth of information. “Neither deep reading nor deep thinking can be enhanced by the aptly named ‘chopblock’ of time we are all experiencing, or by 34 gigabytes of anything per day,” Wolf arguesAnd...Even as it keeps one eye on the future, “Reader, Come Home” embodies some old-fashioned reading pleasures, with quotes from Italo Calvino, John Dunne, Toni Morrison, Marcel Proust, Elie Wiesel and other illustrious word-workers. It unfolds as a series of letters addressed to “Dear Reader” from “Your Author,” a call to remember that books come alive as exchanges between writers and readers.That structure can make “Reader, Come Home” feel — in a corny but charming way — like a throwback to an era already gone, if it ever existed. Wolf offers a persuasive catalog of the cognitive and social good created by deep reading, but does not really acknowledge that the ability to read well has never been universal.Make reading great again.Photo: Johnnydeezwax, CC-BY-SA Read the rest

Sandsifter throws random machine code instructions at microprocessors, just to see what happens. The sandsifter audits x86 processors for hidden instructions and hardware bugs, by systematically generating machine code to search through a processor's instruction set, and monitoring execution for anomalies. Sandsifter has uncovered secret processor instructions from every major vendor; ubiquitous software bugs in disassemblers, assemblers, and emulators; flaws in enterprise hypervisors; and both benign and security-critical hardware bugs in x86 chips.With the multitude of x86 processors in existence, the goal of the tool is to enable users to check their own systems for hidden instructions and bugs.I demand to see this scene in technothrillers pronto. Read the rest

Some strange things happened to papa-to-be Todd Cameron and his pregnant partner during their maternity photo shoot. It started off harmless enough, a nice couple in a field of pumpkins showing off that baby bump. But then it got weird... fast: Looks like "baby" isn't going to wait for the delivery roomOh dearBaby come back...!This wasn't the end. See what happens next by checking out their Facebook photo album with all the photos from the shoot. photos by Li Carter, used with permission Read the rest

What's got 100 BPM and can save lives? All the songs on New York Presbyterian Hospital's "Songs to do CPR to," of course.Their fact sheet explains how music can save lives: Song examples include “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé featuring Jay-Z, “Hips Don’t Lie” by Shakira” or “Walk the Line” by Johnny Cash. People feel more confident performing Hands-Only CPR and are more likely to remember the correct rate when trained to the beat of a familiar song.When performing CPR, you should push on the chest at a rate of 100 to 120 compressions per minute, which corresponds to the beat of the song examples above.The most apropos song on the list? Probably The Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive":(Kottke, @juliareinstein)photo by No Barriers USA Read the rest

Police in the small English town of Burnham publicized bodycam video of an arrest they made earlier this year. Owen Pellow, 42, had called emergency services to report that his ex-partner, Lisa Marie Thornton, hurt herself. But they knew from Pellow's weird, shocked demeanor that he had hurt her and arrested him immediately. It's very creepy and unsettling. I can't quite place why it doesn't trigger apprehensions of intoxication, grief and other things you'd normally presume and I figure that's why it's so disturbing. A human wall of fear, regret, evasion and subsided rage that announces what happened as soon as the door opens.As PC Ryan Dinham informed Pellow that he was arresting him, Pellow repeatedly asked: 'Can we save her life, can we save her life, can we save her life?'He asked the officer: 'Is she still alive, can we go up? It is not good.'And PC Dinham replied: 'It is not good, mate.'Thorton died from 39 stab wounds. Pellow was convicted of murder in May. Read the rest

Burning Man has announced its theme for the 2019 event in the Black Rock Desert: Metamorphoses:Burning Man is routinely described as transformative. At the personal level, a transformative experience. At the group level, a transformative event or culture. What does that really mean?From “It changed my life” to “it’s changing the world,” Burning Man is a million stories, and the through-line across them all is change. Mutability. A tempering or annealing, like metal in a forge or glass in a kiln. Shedding the dross, revealing the true nature within. A crucible of souls...This year’s theme is a celebration of change, and an exploration of uncertainty. As such it invites a consideration of time; not its circular nature, or its attendant ritual, but in this case the relentless flight of time’s arrow, and an embrace of the elusive now. Memory is fickle, and the future is uncertain. None of us knows what they will become, but we can seek to understand where we are at this point in our transformative trajectory, this fleeting chord on the strings of existence.Transformation happens whether we believe in it or not; but if we have learned anything in our Burning Man experience it is that we do have a say in our own futures, that agency is ours if we choose to pursue it. While we may never know the ultimate outcome, there is a shared belief that our dreams matter, and that together and as individuals we have the power to shape our own stories and transform ourselves in positive ways. Read the rest

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered an operation to lure Washington Post contributing journalist Jamal Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia where he was to be detained, U.S. intercepts show. The whole torture, dismemberment, and death inside the Saudi embassy thing that apparently happened was a rendition gone bad, according to this report.From Shane Harris at the Washington Post, whose reporting is based on descriptions of U.S. intelligence intercepts of Saudi officials discussing the plan:The intelligence pointing to a plan to detain Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia has fueled speculation by officials and analysts in multiple countries that what transpired at the consulate was a backup plan to capture Khashoggi that may have gone wrong.A former U.S. intelligence official — who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter — noted that the details of the operation, which involved sending two teams totaling 15 men, in two private aircraft arriving and departing Turkey at different times, bore the hallmarks of a “rendition,” in which someone is extralegally removed from one country and deposited for interrogation in another.But Turkish officials have concluded that whatever the intent of the operation, Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate. Investigators have not found his body, but Turkish officials have released video surveillance footage of Khashoggi entering the consulate on the afternoon of Oct. 2. There is no footage that shows him leaving, they said.The intelligence about Saudi Arabia’s earlier plans to detain Khashoggi have raised questions about whether the Trump administration should have warned the journalist that he might be in danger. Read the rest

You will definitely want to unmute this one. And be prepared to freak out your dogs.“I’m getting bigger and finding my voice,” says @penelopefauxfrenchie. She's a French Bulldog, or a Frenchie. OK, sound on! Listen: View this post on Instagram I’m getting bigger and finding my voice. . . . . . . . #dogsofinstagram #fauxfrenchie #frechie #puppy #frenchbulldog #frenchie #frenchbullies #frenchbulldogpuppy #frenchiefan #frenchiesofinstagram #frenchton #frenchtonsofinstagram #frenchtonpuppy #puppiesofinstagram #puppies @frenchie.fans @frenchie_bulldog @frenchie.world @frenchbulldog.love #french_bulldogs #frenchievids @frenchievids @frenchietalk @thedodo #thedodoA post shared by Penelope Faux Frenchie (@penelopefauxfrenchie) on Sep 27, 2018 at 10:58am PDT Her humans are the Neistadt family of Pendleton, OR. View this post on Instagram SOUND ON! I met my forever Mommy last week and I tried to tell her all about my first three weeks. . . . . . . #dogsofinstagram #fauxfrenchie #frechie #puppy #frenchbulldog #frenchie #frenchbullies #frenchbulldogpuppy #frenchiefan #frenchiesofinstagram #frenchton #frenchtonsofinstagram #frenchtonpuppy #puppiesofinstagram #puppies @frenchie.fans @frenchie_bulldog @frenchie.world @frenchbulldog.love #french_bulldogs #frenchieweekend #easternoregon #oregon #dogsoforegon #puppiesoforegon #traveldog #dogtravelA post shared by Penelope Faux Frenchie (@penelopefauxfrenchie) on Sep 30, 2018 at 2:54pm PDT Below, a video of Penelope's first three weeks. View this post on Instagram Good Morning! I hope everyone has a great weekend. I know I will. I have 27 naps scheduled. . . . . #dogsofinstagram #fauxfrenchie #frechie #puppy #frenchbulldog #frenchie #frenchbullies #frenchbulldogpuppy #frenchiefan #frenchiesofinstagram #frenchton #frenchtonsofinstagram #frenchtonpuppy #puppiesofinstagram #puppies @frenchie.fans @frenchie_bulldog @frenchie.world @frenchbulldog.love #french_bulldogs #frenchieweekend #puppiesA post shared by Penelope Faux Frenchie (@penelopefauxfrenchie) on Oct 6, 2018 at 8:41am PDT View this post on Instagram Coming at the weekend like...I need a nap. Read the rest

Do not judge me when I am feeling the music.all the drugs[via, no identities or photographer credit provided] Read the rest

I maintain emergency kits for my home and jeep. There are a number of bug out essentials in the pack I carry with me anytime I leave the RV. I've written a lot about emergency preparedness gear for several outlets over the years. Keeping folks safe during an emergency was a big part of my old life. Despite all of this, I have a hell of a time finding a flashlight that doesn't cost a mint that I feel comfortable recommending to folks for their emergency preparedness kits. I hate hand-cranked flashlights, despite loving the idea of objects capable of providing their own power. Not a single hand-cranked torch that I've tested over the years has lasted me more than a few hours of use before showing signs of impending mechanical failure. In an emergency, solar powered gear is great to have... provided there's enough light to provide an adequate charge to the battery that you've got connected to your panels. Depending on where you live or what sort of disaster has knocked out your home's lights (there's not a of a lot of sunlight during a hurricane), it might not be a great solution for many people. Happily, it looks like Panasonic has developed a flashlight for their Japanese customers that can use damn near any battery you might run across during an emergency. Panasonic's Any-Battery LED Flashlight BF-BM10-W, as its name suggests, can make use of any number of different batteries to provide you and your family with enough illumination stay safe and provide some much-needed comfort during an emergency where the power grid goes down. Read the rest

Last month, the Canadian Armed Forces announced its strict but reasonable policy surrounding the use of cannabis by service personnel. With Canada's decriminalization of cannabis nearly upon us, a lot of companies and organizations that deal with dangerous tasks or complicated hardware are following suit. Earlier this week, one of Canada's most popular air carriers, WestJet released its policy for when their employees will be allowed to use cannabis. The short version of the rules: If you're a WestJet employee doing anything other than riding a phone for the company's customer service line or working at an airport check-in counter, chances are that you won't be allowed near the stuff.From the CBC:Spokesperson Morgan Bell said employees were notified of the changes on Tuesday morning.She said cannabis is being treated differently than alcohol, which is banned for certain staff members within 12 hours of coming on duty.Bell said WestJet's list of affected positions would be similar to Air Canada's, which includes flight and cabin crew members, flight dispatchers, aircraft maintenance engineers and station attendants.The new WestJet policy also includes a prohibition on possession or distribution of cannabis on company property while on duty or attending a company social function. Air Canada, Canada's flag carrier, has pretty much the same policy on dope, which makes me happy. In almost all instances, 12 hours is long enough for the blood alcohol level of most drinkers to dip back down to safe levels. Despite all the criminal bullshit that we've laden cannabis down with over the years, we still know comparatively little about what it does to a user's reflexes or how long it may continue to have an effect on judgement. Read the rest

The world has long celebrated the "critical hit" D20 face, the elusive 20 that doubles the damage and sets the players around the table baying with elation; but consider its opposite face, the lowly 1, the "critical failure" that lets a sadistic DM dream up all kinds of pratfalls and own-goals to punish the luckless player with.Consider no more: Los Angeles's Mars Dice sells 25mm Critical Failure dice in silver and gold.(via Geeks Are Sexy) Read the rest

President Donald Trump wrote an op-ed for USA Today about healthcare, attacking Democrats and touting his own vague plans. At the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler points out that most of it is misleading and false, going through each and every sentence.Here, omitting not just outright lies but sentences that mix fact and falsehood, I present the entirety of Trump's 820-word column that remains truthful.As a candidate, I promised that we would protect coverage for patients with pre-existing conditions and create new health care insurance options that would lower premiums.123 Democrats in the House of Representatives — 64 percent of House Democrats — as well as 15 Democrats in the Senate have already formally co-sponsored [Democratic] legislation.The truth is that the centrist Democratic Party is dead. Read the rest

The EU's catastrophic new Copyright Directive is steamrollering towards completion, and that should worry every internet user, not just those in the EU.Article 13 of the Copyright Directive requires online services to crowdsource a database of "copyrighted works" (anyone can add anything to these databases, with no penalties for falsely claiming copyright over public domain works, or works that don't belong to you).If a user tries to post something that appears to match an item in the blacklist database, the service has to censor that user's post.The problem is that the online platforms don't have "European services" and "non-European services," they just have services, and users from the EU and outside of the EU freely mix there, posting material and commenting on it. So if you're Twitter and one of your US users posts something that has to be censored in Europe, you can either censor that just for EU users, or for the whole world. If you do decide to just censor the post in the EU, then you have users in (say) Canada replying to that US post, and now you're showing your EU users the replies to the post, but not the post itself. Indeed, you might get Europeans posting things that can't be displayed in Europe, but which the rest of the world is allowed to see -- do you censor those posts in the EU (including from the people who made them) or in the whole world?To make this all the scarier, the EU rules provide for massive damages if a platform lets a copyrighted work slip through the cracks -- so in the event that a platform isn't sure if a work is going to be shown to a European user, they'd be nuts to take a chance on it. Read the rest

IT'S PERFECT.Full image below, click for large size. Christine McConnell wins cake porn internet with this incredible creation: A Freddie Mercury chocolate cake, to honor the singer of 'Queen'.Here's Christine on Reddit.Via REDDIT/IMGUR. Read the rest

There's something about the detail and dimensionality of this animation that really sends a shiver down my spine. [Via Hurricane Tracker App]The BBC reports on the strongest hurricane to hit the panhandle in a long, long time:According to the National Hurricane Center, the eye of the storm touched land near Mexico Beach, Florida on Tuesday afternoon. Hundreds of thousands were told to evacuate but many have not fled.Florida Governor Rick Scott warned of "unimaginable devastation", saying it would be the worst storm in 100 years. At least 13 people reportedly died in Central America over the weekend as a result of storm rains and floods. Read the rest

San Francisco's giant fleet of semi-illegal electric scooters have come to symbolize the tech industry's worst excesses, inspiring all kinds of creative resistanceSan Francisco's fleet of semi-derilict e-scooters shares sidewalk space with San Francisco's army of homeless people, who live in naked squalor alongside the some of the world's greatest displays of wealth.It's a heady cocktail, and what's emerged from it is a homeless folk-hacking practice that has homeless people removing scooters' main computer (along with its GPS tracker), stripping off the logos, and hotwiring it, turning it into an untraceable personal transportation system."Every homeless person has like three scooters now," Ghadieh said. "They take the brains out, the logos off and they literally hotwire it."I've seen scooters stashed at tent cities around San Francisco. Photos of people extracting the batteries have been posted on Twitter and Reddit. Rumor has it the batteries have a resale price of about $50 on the street, but there doesn't appear to be a huge market for them on eBay or Craigslist, according to my quick survey. The mad, twisted tale of the electric scooter craze [Dara Kerr/Cnet](Image: Daniel J. McKeown, CC-BY)(via Kottke) Read the rest

If you weren't a kid or a nerd in the '90s, these video game advertisements might look strange. If you're old enough, they will remind you of the excitement of first discovering old-school games.[via] Read the rest

There is no better proof of superstring theory positing up to 26 dimensions than this week’s tabloids, in which the headlines and the stories beneath them clearly live in entirely different universes. The British Royals fall headlong into this space-time discontinuum, led by Britain’s Prince Harry in the National Enquirer under the headline: "Harry Trapped in Hooker & Drug Scandal!”How exactly is Harry trapped with drugs and prostitutes? He isn’t, at least not in any dimension known to humanity.His father-in-law, Thomas Markle Sr, aged 74, reportedly tells the Enquirer that in the 1970s and ‘80s he occasionally sampled cocaine – an admission he first made months ago – and that while in the Philippines, “I never paid for sex.” No mention of prostitutes, and no “hooker scandal.”How do Markle’s drug admission and hooker denial “trap” Harry? The Enquirer claims that Markle’s “repugnant antics could end his gorgeous daughter’s fairytale marriage to Prince Harry!” That’s the sort of stretch you expect to see when being pulled apart at a molecular level after passing a singularity and falling into a black hole, which may well be where this week’s tabloids belong.“Royal Blood Feud Explodes!” claims the Globe, with its cover headline: “Royals at War! Kate & Meghan’s Vicious Catfight With Fergie’s Girls!” Have the Royal women been pulling each others' hair and scratching their eyes out? Far worse, according to the Globe. Princess Eugenie (Prince Andrew’s daughter by ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, for those who don’t religiously follow every episode of the Royal soap opera) invited more guests to her wedding on October 12 than Meghan Markle did at the same venue – supposedly an insult designed to “upstage” Duchess Meghan. Read the rest

When Google employees discovered last August to their horror that the company had been secretly working on a censored search engine ("Project Dragonfly) for use in China, the company assured them that this was only an early-stage prototype and nowhere near launching.But now a leaked transcript of a July 18 presentation by search chief Ben Gomes has the executive congratulating the Project Dragonfly team and predicting launch in six to nine months, and holding out the possibility of a launch in as little as three months.On September 23, Gomes lied to a BBC reporter and said that Dragonfly was just a plan on the drawing board, saying "all we’ve done is some exploration" and "we don’t have any plans to launch something."This lie apparently prompted angry googlers to leak the transcript of Gomes's remarks to The Intercept. Gomes refused to comment to the Intercept and when they called him, he twice claimed that the connection was so bad that he couldn't understand their questions.This week, Google announced that it was taking itself out of the running for a $10B Pentagon IT project after an uprising by its engineering staff.Project Dragonfly has also cost Google key engineers and has been the source of mass discontent inside the company, especially when news broke that the censored tool was designed to personally identify searchers who looked up banned topics like "student protests" and "democracy" and to deliver these identities to China's security establishment. And so the opportunity there is — all of you will know this, but — it’s clearly the biggest opportunity to serve more people that we have. Read the rest

“I got to work early today just to record this,” says IMGURian ZeusWaffle.“This is the side of the tape that gets torn off by our tape dispensers at work.” Ahhhhhh.I got to work early today just to record this.[via] Read the rest

Perpetual Guardian is a 250-person New Zealand investment company specialized in trusts, wills and estate planning; this March and April, the company experimented with a four-day work-week, and based on independent academic assessment of the program, they've decided to make it permanent.The trial was prompted by the company founder's observation that workers were struggling to balance work and family commitments; this was borne out by academic assessment prior to the experiment, which found that only 54% of the staff felt they were managing to balance work and family. After the experiment, the figure was 78% (job satisfaction also rose).The company reported no drop in productivity and has moved to make the program permanent, but not mandatory. Employees who opt for a five-day work-week will be able to work flexible, traffic-beating hours that will also accommodate childcare logistics.Data was collected by two New Zealand academics before and after the trial period. In November last year just over half of staff (54%) felt they could balance their work and home commitments, while after the trial this number jumped to 78%.Staff stress levels decreased by seven percentage points across the board as a result of the trial, while stimulation, commitment and a sense of empowerment at work all improved significantly, with overall life satisfaction increasing by five percentage points.'No downside': New Zealand firm adopts four-day week after successful trial [Eleanor Ainge Roy/The Guardian](Thanks, Fipi Lele!)(Image: A Wiseman, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest

From Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends, by Jan Harold BrunvandA final exam had just one question: "Write the best possible final exam question for this course, then answer it."One student immediately wrote, "The best possible final exam question for this course is 'Write the best possible final exam question for this course, then answer it.'"The student also could have simply written "the best possible final exam question for this course, then answer it."[via Futility Closet]Image: Photographee.eu/Shutterstock Read the rest

Bernie Sanders -- who seems to have kicked off a 2020 presidential bid -- writes about the terrifying global parallels to Trumpism, from Japan to the Philippines to Hungary to Turkey and beyond, and talks about how an international solidarity movement has to advance a positive agenda of how the world can be taken back from looters and environmental crisis as a global tonic to these dictators-in-waiting.Sanders takes aim at the business-as-usual crowd who want to reverse Trumpism and restore the post-WWII order that creates the inequality, humanitarian crises and climate crisis that threatens us all and challenges us to envision a way forward, not a retreat. In closing, let me simply that in order to effectively combat the forces of global oligarchy and authoritarianism, we need an international movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power.Such a movement must be willing to think creatively and boldly about the world that we would like to see. While the authoritarian axis is committed to tearing down a post-World War II global order that they see as limiting their access to power and wealth, it is not enough for us to simply defend that order as it exists.We must look honestly at how that order has failed to deliver on many of its promises, and how authoritarians have adeptly exploited those failures in order to build support for their agenda. Read the rest

Keep your eyes on the green SUV in front of the small red car. The driver of the SUV allegedly ran into the car being driven by the man recording the video. The driver of the SUV seemed to think it was a good idea to drive without being able to see in front of them, but that assumption proved to be false, as you'll witness in the thrilling conclusion to this video. "Damn! You see what I'm saying?"Image: YouTube Read the rest

The Red Delicious—picture-perfect on the outside but mealy, clammy, fleshy yet flavorless within—is no longer America's favorite apple. The Gala overtook it, and hopefully the noble Granny Smith will further dethrone it soon.Red Delicious’ slippage will be mourned by few. As Sarah Yager wrote in the Atlantic in a history of the variety a few years ago, the Red Delicious is a “paradox”: “alluring yet undesirable, the most produced and arguably the least popular apple in the United States.” They’re gorgeous to look at, like a cartoon apple landed in your real-life fruit bowl. It has a deep-red color and perfectly unblemished skins; its bodies always taper to a perfect little five-pointed bottom. But its flesh tastes—as the two enthusiasts who run the apple fan website Orange Pippin write—too sweet, “like a slightly over-ripe melon”; also, “the skin can be quite tough.” In understated tones, Orange Pippin’s expert apple-tasters add: “Overall Red Delicious can be quite a refreshing apple to eat, but its chief characteristic is that it has almost no flavor at all.” The Red Delicious is the perfect symbol of American culture. Its attractive surface doesn't just hide the rot beneath, it tells you up front how great it tastes.Previously in the disgusting Red Delicious apple:• How the worst apple took over the United States, and continues to spread• Why the disgusting Red Delicious apple rules American grocery stores• Why the most horrible apple in the world is also the most grown\Photo: Zajac (CC) Read the rest

The Pyua is designer Love Hultén's homage to the NES gaming console of 1985. Cartridges are illuminated under a transparent glass dome. It uses an NT mini to run the games and the wireless controllers are from 8Bitdo.Hultén's other designs are equally delicious:[via Core77] Read the rest

Jenn D'Eugenio is a badass record collector, indie label maven, and vinyl industry veteran who now works at the esteemed Furnace Record Pressing company in Virginia. Recently, Jenn started interviewing her peers in the record scene "to empower and highlight the women that are working in the vinyl / music industry to create, preserve, improve and enhance the art of music on vinyl." Check out Women In Vinyl for interviews with the likes of Katy Clove of Merge Records, Italians Do It Better label president Megan Louise Doyle, audio archivist Amanda McCabe, and designer Kate Koeppel who makes fantastic products for vinyl collectors."Not enough of the female + vinyl focus is on the women behind the record stores, labels, manufacturers, vinyl accessories, etc. and I hope to change that with interviews and stories about these women," Jenn says. Read the rest

I thought everyone sneezed when they walked out of a building into the bright sun. But it turns out only one in ten people have the genetic condition called "photic sneeze reflex." In this video, we learn more about photic sneeze reflex and why some of us sneeze in the sun. The current hypothesis is that the brain of people who have photic sneeze reflex misinterprets bright light as an irritant in the nose, which triggers a sneeze. Read the rest

Since the Thatcher years, the UK has built itself into a powerhouse money-launderer, selling financial secrecy to the world's most corrupt and vicious looters; but with a Labour victory looking more likely with each passing day, the super-rich of Britain are starting to panic.Managers of private trusts -- the preferred financial secrecy vehicle for tax-free intergenerational wealth-transfers (notoriously used by the Duke of Wellington to transfer £9 billion tax-free to his son) -- are moving those trusts offshore.But that capital flight isn't easy. The British Overseas Territories in the English Channel, the Caribbean and the Spanish coast are a natural choice, because they enjoy the stability of the strong British state without collecting the taxes that are needed to keep the state powerful enough to protect the money hidden there.But a Corbyn/Labour majority in Parliament could very well see those British Overseas Territories brought to heel and forced to disclose the beneficial owners of all the money they're hiding -- not just in service to British justice, but also to reveal the hidden assets looted by corrupt foreign oligarchs and dictators to the people they stole it from.So that leaves British oligarchy with a conundrum: other tax havens are weak, corrupt and unstable -- the kinds of state you get when you starve the tax-coffers, in other words -- and hiding your money there is a bet on the local dictator not converting all your assets to a hyperinflationary currency, pocketing your money, and daring you to sue him in the courts he owns. Read the rest

This NPR story on the use of discarded restaurant oyster shells to build a series of thriving oyster reefs in New York's harbor is awesome.San Francisco has been seeding oysters around the bay, and everywhere they do water quality increases markedly. The Oysters pull all sorts of heavy metals and crap that worked its way into the SF Bay from all of California's lovely gold mining.New Yawk using the oyster reefs as breakwaters to slow inbound hurricane-style waves seems very smart.Via NPR:The idea came from neither restaurants nor Rosenthal, but from students at one of Billion Oyster Project's partner schools, West End Secondary on the Upper West Side. Rosenthal championed their idea, building support for the bill and bringing the students to Albany to learn about lawmaking and to participate in a press conference.Education of the next generation of environmental stewards has been at the heart of Billion Oyster Project since its inception in 2008, when Malinowski was teaching aquaculture at the Harbor School. With the support of the school's founder, Murray Fisher, Malinowski devised a project to enable students to apply their learned skills to a problem in their own back yard — the degradation of the New York Harbor.In 2010, when the school moved from Brooklyn to Governors Island, Malinowski grew his curriculum into a formal three-year vocational program in which students grow oysters; design, build and monitor reefs; and operate boats and perform marine biology research. "It became a way for all of our students to work together," he says. Read the rest

Over 20,000 reported cases of crap on the streets of San Francisco wins it a funny smelling crown.Via KRON4:San Francisco has been named the 'doo-doo' capital of the United States with 20,899 poop complaints reported in 2017, according to RealtyHop. RealtyHop did a comparison of 311 poop complaints in Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco.This study includes dog and human poop sightings.While 2017 was the worst year on record in San Francisco, research shows that 2018 is on track to beat that. The 'Doo-Doo Map' from RealtyHop shows the which neighborhoods have the most poop complaints in the city.Don't blame the dogs, tho:San Francisco Department of Animal says that the city has 120,000 dogs, but the real issue is the number of homeless people without shelter.The research conducted says there is no correlation between a neighborhoods home value and poop complaints.According to the study, the poop crisis in San Francisco reflects a social crisis and the problem has continued to increase since 2011. Read the rest

Today, the EU held a routine vote on regulations for self-driving cars, when something decidedly out of the ordinary happened...The autonomous vehicle rules contained a clause that affirmed that "data generated by autonomous transport are automatically generated and are by nature not creative, thus making copyright protection or the right on databases inapplicable."This is pretty inoffensive stuff. Copyright protects creative work, not factual data, and the telemetry generated by your car -- self-driving or not -- is not copyrighted.But just before the vote, members of the European Peoples' Party (the same bloc that pushed through the catastrophic new Copyright Directive) stopped the proceedings with a rare "roll call" and voted down the clause.In other words, they've snuck in a space for the telemetry generated by autonomous vehicles to become someone's property. This is data that we will need to evaluate the safety of autonomous vehicles, to fine-tune their performance, to ensure that they are working as the manufacturer claims -- data that will not be public domain (as copyright law dictates), but will instead be someone's exclusive purview, to release or withhold as they see fit.Who will own this data? It's unlikely that it will be the owners of the vehicles. Just look at the data generated by farmers who own John Deere tractors. These tractors create a wealth of soil data, thanks to humidity sensors, location sensors and torque sensors -- a centimeter-accurate grid of soil conditions in the farmer's own field.But all of that data is confiscated by John Deere, locked up behind the company's notorious DRM and only made available in fragmentary form to the farmer who generated it (it comes bundled with the app that you get if you buy Monsanto seed) -- meanwhile, the John Deere company aggregates the data for sale into the crop futures market. Read the rest

British grocer Iceland (yes, that's really its name) is not messing around with "autumn" and "pumpkin spice." How pedestrian! They're headed straight for the taste of December 25th with their "Luxury Christmas Tree Flavour Salted Hand-Cooked Crisps." Yup, they've made potato chips that taste like pine trees. What gives the chips, sorry crisps, that distinctive Christmas tree flavor? Pine salt and pine oil, according to the ingredients. A bag costs just £1 (approx. $1.30) but it's only available in the UK (for now).(Extra Crispy)Thanks, Kent! Read the rest

Wang Xiaolong has set the new Guinness World Record for the "highest vocal note by a male." His E in the eighth octave is a half step higher than Adam Lopez Costa's record set in 2008. Read the rest