YouGov surveyed Britons to learn how positively or negatively they responded to 24 different words used to indicate levels of goodness or badness. "Fantastic," "superb," "brilliant," and "incredible" topped the list of positive terms, while "terrible," "awful," and "abysmal" were the most negative. "Awesome" does not appear on the list, which makes me think UK people don't use it in the same way US people do.[via Bruce Sterling] Read the rest

OK fine, maybe it's a napkin. Still, somebody could have told the man. But they didn't. They didn't. Video evidence below.(Washington Post) Read the rest

It almost seems alive.An Extremely Realistic 3D Painting of a Cat Read the rest

Last year, the FCC was only able to ram through a repeal of Net Neutrality by refusing to reject the millions of comments sent by bots that used the stolen identities of regular internet users, dead people, and even sitting US Members of Congress.It turns out the FCC isn't the only agency being flooded by bots during requests for comment -- and it's also not the only agency that doesn't seem to give a shit about being astroturfed by bots using stolen identities to influence government policy in favor of corporate agencies.Back in 2014, the FCC was attacked by bots that tried to get it to take a position favorable to massive corporate sports leagues on the subject of "blackouts" during major-league games.The Labor Board has been flooded by bots who wanted it to end the practice of imposing conflict-of-interest rules on retirement investment advisors (the Board weakened the requirements, allowing advisors to steer their clients towards investments decisions that they will personally benefit from). In 2015, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency was botted, flooded with stolen-identity comments supporting the merger between Onewest and CIT banks. All this implies that someone -- some consultancy, PR company or other "service provider" -- has developed a product that they're shopping in corporate board-rooms, offering to destroy US government agencies' public comment systems with stolen identities who support the clients' most profitable initiative. There are way too many people involved in a scam like this for it to remain a secret. Read the rest

A kindergarten and first grade football time in Morrow, Ohio is holding a gun raffle to raise travel money for tournaments. They've already sold 500 tickets. The winners, 21 years or older, will receive either a handgun or HM Guardian F5 Elite. Apparently, gun raffles to support kids sports and schools isn't uncommon. From WLWT:Gina Pennycuff is a mother and a substitute teacher. She happened to be working when she got a Facebook message about the gun raffle."It was disturbing to me because gun raffles for a youth organization just doesn't mix," she said.She shared the flyer on Facebook and the comment section took off, some in favor and some opposed..."I can't imagine being a parent of a kindergartener and them worrying and doing lockdown drills, but them also knowing they're raffling off guns," she said."Youth football team gun raffle sparks debate" (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!) Read the rest

Just in time for Halloween, this cosplay-adjacent dress inspired by the Haunted Mansion's Tightrope Girl (AKA "Ballerina and Alligator, AKA Parasol Girl, AKA Ally Gal, Sally Slater, Daisy De La Cruz, Lillian O'Malley), sold with matching cape and ribbon. It's part of the fabulous renaissance in Haunted Mansion merch, including this Haunted Mansion Ballroom dress. (via Welcome Foolish Mortals) Read the rest

A (somewhat dubious) survey of 850 business executives for firms of 500 or more employees "with involvement in the decision making process regarding customer experience in their organization" and 4,500 consumers "who have contacted a brand during the last six months with an enquiry or issue to be resolved" found a vast gap between how satisfied the executives believed their customers were and how the customers felt about their interactions.The study should be taken as guideline more than gospel: it was commissioned by a company that provides chatbot technology (and whose report predicts that the customer satisfaction gap could be bridged with chatbots -- something I am personally dubious about) and the sampling methodology is murky and thinly described. That said, the gap is vast. 80 percent of execs believe their customers are satisfied with the service they get; while 83% of the customers surveyed gave their satisfaction as "average" or "poor."Both business and consumer respondents agree that telephone and email are among the most common channels used to conduct business. However, they also tend to produce the slowest time to resolution.The average time to resolution was 11 hours -- almost three times higher than the wait time cited as being acceptable. Telephone interactions tend to be resolved in 7 hours, and email is 18 hours.Only one in three (32 percent) of consumers believe they get the best results when interacting with a brand when an AI-powered chatbot is involved in some capacity. Average time to resolve problems is three times higher than customers want [Eileen Brown/Zdnet](via /. Read the rest

Telltale Games wasn't just a hit developer, producing the hugely popular The Walking Dead game series. It reinvented the adventure game, producing quality interactive narratives while escaping the genre's retro conventions. Despite its apparent success, the company suddenly imploded last month, laying off most of its staff. Megan Farokhmanesh reports on the tragic end of Telltale Games.The woes of Telltale Games have deep roots. Earlier this year, The Verge published a report detailing years of nonstop crunch culture, toxic management, and frustration from developers who believed the company’s refusal to diversify gameplay had led to creative stagnation. ...These sources, who were granted anonymity in order to speak freely and without fear of retribution, paint a consistent picture of a company desperately struggling to keep its head above water. Despite what they see as the best of intentions on behalf of those running Telltale, hundreds still tumbled into unemployment with no safety net from their company.The "cinematic adventure games for top franchises" business was more marginal than it looked at the scale Telltale grew to, dedicated workers were constantly exploited by crunch-development cycles, management was blindly optimistic, and potential new partners figured out all of the above and put away their checkbooks. Read the rest

Yesterday, Bloomberg published a blockbuster story accusing the Chinese military of sneaking spy-chips "the size of a grain of rice" onto the motherboards of servers sold by Supermicro and/or Elemental for use in data-centers operated by the biggest US corporations (Apple and Amazon, among others), as well as US warships and military data-centers, and the servers used by Congress and the Senate.Several of the involved parties issues detailed, emphatic denials, producing aa kind of he-said/she-said situation where it's hard to know who to believe (it doesn't help that Bloomberg's article relied exclusively on anonymous sources, albeit multiple sources for each claim).If you -- like me -- are struggling to make sense of the situation, here is some further reading. First is a pair of twitter threads by Joe Fitz, owner of Securinghardware.com: the first is largely nontechnical and talks about some of the logistical challenges involved; the second is more technical and gets into some very chewy details.At one point in time I had a conversation about how I would put a hardware implant into a system. I'm delighted to see @qrs had a very similar assessment: https://t.co/RJS6b92XUu— Joe Fitz (@securelyfitz) October 4, 2018There’s recent news about some really interesting hardware implants. I wanted to take a bit to share more technical thoughts and details that can’t be reduced to a mainstream article on the topic.threaded: https://t.co/7VdmaDaQNr— Joe Fitz (@securelyfitz) October 4, 2018Next is an excellent roundup from The Grugq (previously) who takes a skeptical look at Bloomberg's claims, points to the best parts of the worldwide debate, and tries to subject the story to some a priori analysis of what we know is possible and what we believe to be impossible. Read the rest

In 2008, the Bush and Obama administrations both argued that they had a duty to transfer more than $700,000,000,000 of American taxpayers' money to the largest banks in the country, because these banks were "too big to fail" and allowing them to collapse would do much more harm than a mere $0.7 trillion subsidy.But of course, that wasn't their only option. As Matt Taibbi argued persuasively in his brilliant history of the crisis and its aftermath, The Divide, a bank that is on the verge of collapse, come begging to the US government for hundreds of billions to stay afloat, is a bank that is intrinsically regulable.If the bank needs government aid to survive, it will accept any terms that the government offers. It is over a barrel. And a perfectly obvious, legitimate demand that governments can make of banks that are "too big to fail" and that need hundreds of billions to keep them from tanking the real economy is that they get smaller. As in, "Here are the billions you need, and you'll get them just as soon as you make a binding promise to divest yourself of all those competitors you gobbled up, breaking up the giant bank that poses a systemic risk to the nation into a bunch of smaller banks whose mismanagement will not destroy the country."Bernie Sanders has spent his whole political career warning that relaxation of financial rules would make banks too big to fail: in 1994, Sanders was the only No vote on the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act, which fired the starter pistol on financial mergers and acquisitions. Read the rest

Big or small, all companies need a web presence. And we're talking more than a landing page and a couple of links to social media. Format is the go-to tool that gives business leaders full control of their digital storefront, and if you want proof, you're in luck: A 1-year subscription to Format Pro is 65% off at $49.99.You'll dive in quickly with a drag-and-drop interface and a full library of flexible layouts that are fully compatible for web or mobile. Once you're up, Format Pro makes things easy to maintain with the ability to sell products directly through the site, a proofing tool, and a free Format Galleries app for managing images. Unlimited bandwidth, Google Analytics support, Adobe Lightroom integration - this platform has all the tools you need to launch and keep rising.Get Format Pro's 1-Year Subscription now for $49.99 and give your work the virtual showcase it deserves. Read the rest

If you seee a brand on Amazon and you've never heard of it, there's a chance that it's just Amazon. The company operates a growing number of labels with names like "Arabella", "Lark & Ro" amd "NuPro" to market its own products—and they'll soon be augmented by a more brands "exclusive to Amazon, but not owned by it", absorbed into its Private Brand program. Quartz reports:Amazon’s push into private labels could threaten the third-party sellers who do business on its website, and are important to the company’s own bottom line. Amazon generated $9.7 billion in revenue from commissions and services it provided to third-party sellers (e.g., fulfillment and shipping fees) in the latest quarter, ended July 26. Earlier this week, eBay sent Amazon a cease-and-desist accusing it of a shady, multiyear campaign to lure eBay sellers over to the Amazon marketplace.It's posed here as a solution to problems caused by Amazon's current third-party seller platform, which it won't adequately police but also understands is rotting customers' trust in the site. Savvy shoppers already know not to buy certain types of product from Amazon because of couterfeits. As CNBC reports, though, Amazon is unable to avoid the temptation of promoting its own products in competitors' first-party listings too.Another problem: what Amazon is doing here closely resembles the marketing habits of Chinese exporters who have flooded Amazon with legitimate but low-quality gear. If you search for headphones there, for example, you get some name brands, but most of the first page of results is for brands like "Mpow", "Alihen", "Redess", "Arrela." Which of these are real? Read the rest

The MacArthur Foundation has announced its 2018 Fellows (AKA the "MacArthur Genius Prize winners"), a list of 25 remarkable people from all disciplines, including the incomparable Kelly Link (previously), who joins other science fiction writers who won the prize, including Octavia Butler and Jonathan Lethem. Congrats, Kelly! Read the rest

LOooOooook! This baby rhino learned how to jump and skip from it's lamb buddy. I needed this today. I think this video would be a great way to illustrate why multiculturalism is so awesome: when we're exposed to thoughts, food and cultures other than our own, our horizons are broadened. Our lives are enriched. It gives us new, joyful ways to frolic. Read the rest

I've been playing Civilization, in one form or another, since the mid-1990s. I love the depth of the game and the multitude of ways that it can be played. I take comfort in the knowledge that no matter what I do, or how good our in-game relationship might be, sooner or later Gandhi will try to slit my throat. When Civ VI popped a few years ago, I bought it as soon as I was able to scrape enough money together. I play it on my Mac. I play it on Windows. That wasn't enough. Soon, I found myself playing it on my iPad Pro as well. Civilization is everywhere in my life. It's like an old friend that you allowed to crash on your couch for a few days who now refuses to leave. Today, that old friend went ahead and helped itself to more of my life: Civilization VI has been ported to work on my iPhone.This is a productivity nightmare. On the other hand, much joy will be brought to the time that I spend in the bathroom. I downloaded the game to my iPhone 7 Plus this morning and took it for a quick spin. It's great! At least on an iPhone with a display the size of mine. It'll run on handsets as old as an iPhone 7. But I wouldn't want to attempt to play it on something that small. On the 7 Plus, the display, thanks to a number of tweaks that have been made to the game's UI is still completely usable, provided you don't have fingers the size of Snickers bars. Read the rest

I own a DJI Spark. It's not the most expense drone out there, but it's a good one. I love its ability to take video and photos from angles that I could never manage from the ground. I do not, however, love the fact that law enforcement officials in the United States will soon be able to shoot it down.According to TechCrunch, the Senate passed the FAA Reauthorization Act earlier this week. It's a bill that does a lot of good stuff like allowing for the continued funding of the FAA and ensuring that passengers on commercial flights aren't treated any more like cattle than we already are. However, there's also some bits in pieces in the bill that provide law enforcement officials with permission to screw with privately-owned drones.From TechCrunch:...critics say the new authority that gives the government the right to “disrupt,” “exercise control,” or “seize or otherwise confiscate” drones that’s deemed a “credible threat” is dangerous and doesn’t include enough safeguards.Federal authorities would not need to first obtain a warrant, which rights groups say that authority could be easily abused, making it possible for Homeland Security and the Justice Department and its various law enforcement and immigration agencies to shoot down anyone’s drone for any justifiable reason.Should federal and municipal authorities be able to take out drones that threaten human life or national security by flying into airspace that's reserved for air travel or zipping through the sky over a nuclear power plant? Read the rest

Last year, Apple outraged independent technicians when they updated the Iphone design to prevent third party repair, adding a "feature" that allowed handsets to detect when their screens had been swapped (even when they'd been swapped for an original, Apple-manufactured screen) and refuse to function until they got an official Apple unlock code.Now, this system has come to the MacBook Pros and Imac Pros, thanks to the "T2 security chip" which will render systems nonfunctional after replacing the keyboard, screen, case, or other components, until the a proprietary Apple "configuration tool" is used to unlock the system.Apple does not tell its customers that the computers it sells are designed to punish them for opting to get their property repaired by independent technicians; the details of the T2 came from a leaked service manual. “There’s two possible explanations: This is a continued campaign of obsolescence and they want to control the ecosystem and bring all repair into the network they control,” Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, told me on the phone. “Another is security, but I don’t see a security model that doesn’t trust the owner of the device making much sense.”Apple's New Proprietary Software Locks Kill Independent Repair on New MacBook Pros [Jason Koebler/Motherboard] Read the rest

Hope they made her queen instantly. ALL HAIL OUR NEW MATRIARCH.In Sweden, 8-year-old Saga Vanecek discovered a pre-Viking-era sword while she was swimming in a lake one summer's day. The discovery site, Vidöstern lake, is near Saga's family's holiday home in Sweden's Jönköping County.Experts say the sword may be 1,500 years old, and was very well preserved.From BBC NEWS:The sword was initially reported to be 1,000 years old, but experts at the local museum now believe it may date to around 1,500 years ago."It's not every day that you step on a sword in the lake!" Mikael Nordström from the museum said.The level of the water was extremely low at the time, owing to a drought, which is probably why Saga uncovered the ancient weapon."I felt something in the water and lifted it up. Then there was a handle and I went to tell my dad that it looked like a sword," Saga told the Sveriges Radio broadcaster.Her dad, Andy Vanecek, told English-language website The Local he thought it was a stick or something, but asked a friend to take a look. They figured out soon they'd found had something precious.After young Saga's discovery, some adults carried out further excavations at the lake and found more ancient relics, including a brooch from the 3rd Century. Read the rest

The value of Elon Musk's Tesla Motors dropped about $1.1 billion after the close today. When will he, and the adults around him, learn? Welp. Friday at Tesla and at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission should be interesting. Have fun with that, Board of Directors and SEC officers. On Thursday afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that Elon Musk is at it again with the crazy tweets.Just four minutes later, it would have gone out at the marijuana-associated time of 4:20 on the East Coast. Musk, the world's least chill potential stoner, got himself and Tesla in $20 million dollars of trouble for his last 420 joke.He tweeted this lulzy dig at the SEC right after the markets closed for Thursday, October 4, 2018. Followed by this gem.From Bloomberg's Liam Denning:The value of his company dropped about $1.1 billion after the close anyway. As well it might. Because, while this isn’t the first tweet of questionable wisdom issued by Musk (see “pedo guy,” for example), he really picked his target this time (assuming his account wasn’t hacked).While it’s obviously getting hard to keep up, you may recall Musk just settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was suing him for misleading shareholders with that whole funding-secured thing. In its complaint, the SEC documented Musk’s extensive complaints about short sellers having it in for Tesla. Having first called the SEC’s action unjustified, Musk quickly settled for a $20 million fine and giving up the chairmanship for three years, while retaining the position of CEO (the stock had dropped 14 percent in the intervening day or so). Read the rest

During the Senate hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's supreme court nominee, a number of observers on Twitter noticed a weird detail.Why was Joel Kaplan, an executive from Facebook's Washington, D.C. office and de facto lobbying and government affairs headquarters, sitting right behind Brett Kavanaugh during the bizarre Senate hearing?Mr. Kaplan is a close friend of Kavanaugh.But why was he there? Does Facebook support Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump? WTAF?“Hundreds of Facebook employees have expressed outrage about a top global policy executive’s decision to support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by appearing at his hearing last week,” reads a Wall Street Journal article today. The WSJ says Facebook is “planning to hold a town hall meeting with senior executives, including Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg,” basically to get beat up by employees over the matter on Friday. I hope the staff of Facebook give them hell.Excerpt:Employees raised the question directly to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg as part of his weekly question-and-answer session last Friday, the people said. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg also weighed in on the controversy in an internal discussion thread that has so far drawn hundreds of comments.Mr. Zuckerberg said Friday that he wouldn’t have made the same decision but the appearance didn’t violate Facebook policies.Employees began expressing anger, confusion and frustration after an image of Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s head of global policy, surfaced in the middle of Judge Kavanaugh’s lengthy hearing last Thursday. Over the last week, the topic has drawn hundreds of comments in internal threads, the people familiar with the discussion said. Read the rest

Google sister company Sidewalk Labs is building a creepy, heavily surveilled "smart city" in the midst of Toronto.Critics have pointed out that letting a foreign corporation gather continuous surveillance data on residents of a city as they go about their daily round is a bit, you know, dystopian.Sidewalk Labs says it's not creepy, and to prove it, they've recruited an independent advisory board to keep them honest.A key member of that board just resigned: Saadia Muzaffar is an entrepreneur and tech activist. In her scathing resignation letter, she describes an unholy confluence of Sidewalk Labs's greed for data-collection and the City of Toronto's indifference, expressed by the lackadaisical approach taken by Waterfront Toronto. In her resignation letter, Muzaffar—who founded the nonprofit group TechGirls Canada—also criticized a lack of transparency on Waterfront Toronto’s part in communicating the plan to the public. Even more importantly, she drew attention to the risk of entrenching ill-considered surveillance technology in city infrastructure.“Broad licensing that does not prioritize digital rights of the public can mean that surveillance infrastructure and valuable public data can lay latent for long periods of time, and avoid scrutiny easily, tucked in a foreign-owned company’s proprietary vault,” she wrote. Advisor to Google's Smart City in Toronto Resigns Over Data Concerns [Jordan Pearson/Motherboard] Read the rest

Ada Palmer is a University of Chicago Renaissance historian (and so much more: librettist, science fiction novelist, and all-round polymath); she has convened a series of seminars at the University in collaboration with science and piracy historian Adrian Johns, and me!We're exploring the parallels between the censorship systems that sprang up at the advent of the printing press and the information control battles we've seen since the dawn of the internet. The first session ("Introduction, Censorship & Information Control During Information Revolutions") is tomorrow, hosted by the three of us. It runs from 1:20CST to 4:20CST. You can attend in person for free on nthe University of Chicago Campus, in Kent Chemical Laboratory (1020-24 East 58th Street, 60637) room 107. It's being recorded and there will be high-quality, accessible video recordings (courtesy of the Kickstarter backers) up shortly after the session.October 5th: Introduction, Censorship & Information Control During Information RevolutionsThis week our three co-organizers will introduce the questions of the series. Are there patterns in how revolutions in information technology stimulate new forms of information control? What can earlier information revolutions teach us about the digital revolution? How do real historical cases of censorship tend to differ from the centralized, well-planned censorship that Orwell’s 1984 teaches us to expect? How can forms of information control which were not intended as censorship have similar consequences to censorship, with or without human agency?* Adrian Johns (printing history, history of copyright, radio, piracy) * Ada Palmer (Inquisition, pre-modern European censorship, censorship of comic books) * Cory Doctorow (digital information policy) will join this week by teleconference. Read the rest

Sans Forgetica is a free-to-download font that supposedly helps you "remember your study notes", designed by typographer Stephen Banham and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's Behavioural Business Lab. It's a remakably hostile mindhack: the letterforms are designed to be difficult to read without losing their legibility, thereby "prompting your brain to engage in deeper processing" and "question the gestalt understanding of type". I'd like it more if it were a deliberate prank, a typographical equivalent of the Jimmy Kimmel skit where he tricked Fashion Week attendees into praising a model wearing a watermelon on his head. It's called semiographic closure, honey, look it up. Read the rest

Lil' Cake Toppers makes beautiful, custom wooden figurines for placing atop cakes, but they're so versatile that they'd work for any occasion or simply as decorations. Discounts are available for sets.Every (wooden) person is different and unique. So before you get started, ask yourself: what makes this person SO them? Design is in the details and small things like hairline, ear shape and eye placement make a big difference in ensuring your cake toppers are two-of-a-kind. After all, wedding toppers donʼt have to be a gown and tux, thereʼs a whole world of outfits, accessories and expressions to choose from!Creator Esther Mun, co-founder of a NYC design studio, describes her inspiration:I’d had enough of gifting pots & pans or donating cash to friends through impersonal wedding registries. So, I started customizing wooden cake toppers I discovered at a designersʼ fair and gifting them instead. People loved them, and the more I made, the more I experimented with different topper designs, looks, accessories and occasions.There's an inexpensive DIY Topper Kit too for people who think they're crafty. Read the rest

The FCC has ordered American cities to hand discounted access to public resources for 5G access, and to operate a bureaucracy that rubberstamps applications to use city resources without delay. The FCC prices this subsidy at $2 billion.In response, US cities and small towns have announced that they will jointly sue the FCC.The FCC order also forces cities and towns to act on carrier applications within 60 or 90 days, and it limits the kinds of aesthetic requirements cities and towns can impose on carrier deployments."The scope of this overreach is significant," Durkan and Holmes said. "It impedes local authority to serve as trustees of public property and to fulfill cities' public health and safety responsibilities while establishing unworkable standards. This will increase costs and impose an unreasonable burden on local governments."The Seattle officials said they "are particularly concerned about how the Order will compromise the safety, security, and reliability of critical electrical infrastructure, City Light's utility poles."Cities will sue FCC to stop $2 billion giveaway to wireless carriers [Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica] Read the rest

Charles Wallace writes, "In 1891 the Royal Albert Hall hosted what may be the first sci-fi convention, centered on the book 'The Coming Race' by our old friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The video linked above features a trip to the archives of the Royal Albert Hall by host Brady Haran. Good proto new-age weirdness with through-threads to current neo-nazis. Fun for all!" Read the rest

Competition scholar Tim Wu has described how industries over time become more concentrated and less competitive, as executives move sideways from one giant company to another, creating a web of backchannels that lets the companies unite to pursue their industry-wide goals rather than competing with each other to deliver better service at better prices to their customers.You couldn't ask for a better example of this than the lawsuit just filed against the State of California by the CTIA, NCTA, USTelecom, and the American Cable Association -- a hive of scum and villainy that collectively represent virtually every telcoms company in America.The telcoms want to see California's best-in-America Net Neutrality law struck down, arguing that the states do not have the right to overturn national telcoms policy set by the FCC (a few years ago, the same companies sued the FCC and argued that the states could overturn its policies and make state-level laws banning cities from providing publicly funded internet service).ISPs say the California law impermissibly regulates interstate commerce. "[I]t is impossible or impracticable for an Internet service provider offering [broadband] to distinguish traffic that moves only within California from traffic that crosses state borders," the lobby groups' complaint said.The groups asked the court to declare that the state law "is preempted and unconstitutional, and should permanently enjoin [California] from enforcing or giving effect to it."California now faces two major lawsuits challenging the net neutrality law signed by Governor Jerry Brown on Sunday. The Trump administration's Department of Justice also sued California and is seeking a preliminary injunction that would stop the law from being implemented. Read the rest

Two women were speaking Spanish to each other in a Rifle, Colorado grocery store when they were interrupted by racist Linda Dwire. “You’re in America. You’re in my country. You can’t speak Spanish here. You need to speak English if you’re going to be in America.” That's when another shopper, Kamira Trent, came to their defense. "I’m calling the cops. You leave these women alone! Get out!” she yelled. She then followed the trumpian creep down the market aisle to set her straight.The exchange was posted by Faby VelSa on Facebook: According to Raw Story, she did call the cops, and the ignorant Dwire was arrested "on two counts of bias-motivated harassment." Yes! This country needs more Kamira Trents. Read the rest

Robin Ince, co-host of the Book Shambles podcast, says he has at least 20 times more books than he can possibly read in his lifetime. Yet he keeps buying more books. All his shelves are full and he has piles on the floor. In this video, watch Ince as he goes through some of the 1000 books he wants to get rid of (he has 20,000). He loves all the books he is getting rid of, and he ends up keeping some of them. I have the same problem as Ince. Way too many books and I don't want to part with any of them. In fact, I want to buy a lot of the books he shows us. Read the rest

Susan Schorn writes, "The Political Action Committee 'Cowboys for Liberty' has released some funny, horrifying videos about the three worst GOP office-holders up for re-election at the state level in Texas: Sid Miller, Ken Paxton, and Dan Patrick (the rodeo clown, indicted fraudster, and former talk show host, respectively)." Read the rest

People who live in the LGBT-identified Sydney neighborhood of Darlinghurst are getting letters through their door signed by "Jesus" that blame queer people for extreme weather (drought, hail); "Jesus" also takes credit for felling the (admittedly horrible) former PM Malcolm Turnbull.Among other things, “Jesus” takes credit for the removal of the “wicked” former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, warns that Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore should “humble [herself]”, and blames the drought on Australia’s decision to vote Yes in last year’s marriage equality postal survey.The message takes issue with homosexuality, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, sodomy, pornography, and general fucking — which hardly leaves any fun stuff for us to enjoy if “Jesus” gets his way.“Jesus” Is Posting Homophobic Letters In The Heart Of Sydney’s Gay District [Rob Stott/Junkee] Read the rest

After the city of Bismark, ND voted to spend $25,000 to equip school "resource officers" (a euphemism for "uniformed, armed police officers") with AR-15s, an Iowa gun distributor called Brownells decided to donate the assault weapons to the school district. School resource officers are frequently cited as the linchpin of the school-to-prison pipeline, are notoriously high-handed and violent, and operate with little or no accountability."We certainly think that schools should have increased security, so if that is something we can do to help, then we are happy to do it," Brownells Director of Communications Ryan Repp said.Iowa company donates AR-15s to be placed in Bismarck schools [Chad Mira/Myndnow](via Naked Capitalism)(Image: Bismark High School) Read the rest

When workers at an Ikea in Stoughton, Massachusetts expressed interest in forming a union, the company responded with an illegal anti-union crackdown that culminated in locking workers into a conference room and forcing them to watch anti-union slideshows that workers described as "scaremongering".An international union group filed a complaint against Ikea with the Dutch Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, citing similar incidents in Dublin, Ireland and Lisbon, Portugal.The lock-in meetings were mandatory on pain of termination and lasted for hours every day in the runup to a union vote; an employee who tried to photograph one of the slides was kicked out of the hall. The UFCW alleged in the OECD complaint that the failed vote in Stoughton was the culmination of IKEA's attempt to discourage workers against unionizing with so-called "captive-audience" meetings, or mandatory gatherings that employees could be terminated for skipping.The OECD complaint alleged that IKEA's captive-audience meetings would last for one to two hours every day in the run-up to the vote. During the meetings, the UFCW alleged, management disparaged collective bargaining, indicating that the union would likely fail to help workers "obtain a net gain in wages and benefits," and told employees that they were "personally offended" by the push to unionize."It was a lot of pressure and people were getting scared," Morrison said. He described the meetings as "grinding," and added that management began doing favors for certain employees, like not assigning Saturday shifts.According to the complaint, management also showed employees a PowerPoint comparing the election to selecting a getaway destination. Read the rest

When a disagreement between two roosters escalated to violence, a pit bull intervened by running in between the sparring foul, quickly ending the fight.Good boy does not allow violence on his watch Read the rest

This man, spotted in a convenience store, bears a striking resemblance to former reality show star Donald Trump.Wow, @realDonaldTrump's doppelganger😮 pic.twitter.com/fsuTcNdD58— PolishPatriot🇵🇱👌 (@RealPolPatriot) October 2, 2018If you don't remember Trump -- whose show was canceled years ago -- here's a recent photo of the fallen celebrity tending to potatoes in Spain:In case you’re wondering, Donald Trump’s doppelganger is a Spanish potato farmer. (photo: Paula Vazquez) pic.twitter.com/912hd0AldB— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) April 25, 2018 Read the rest

Automotive engineer Spencer Rezkalla spent three years building this astounding 19 square foot LEGO model of the just-opened Apple Park. The 1/650th scale model contains roughly 85,000 pieces, including 1647 trees. From Rezkalla's project gallery on Flickr:I've always wanted to build a horizontal skyscraper. These are sometimes also called "groundscrapers". In 2014 I came across some drone footage of an enormous circular excavation being dug into the California earth. When I discovered this was the start of the foundation for a new low-rise Apple "spaceship" campus, I knew I had found an interesting and suitable candidate. Read the rest

Mitchell Langbert, a business professor at Brooklyn College who looks like a cross between Ray Liotta and an angry fermented potato, writes that "If someone did not commit sexual assault in high school, then he is not a member of the male sex." The blog post was reposted in a private group for some 5,000 students and alumni.Some students were outraged. Corrinne Greene said her campus group, Young Progressives of America, wants Langbert fired."To have someone in a position of power espousing sexual assault is not a joke. It's something that needs to be taken seriously," she said.Brooklyn College Provost Anne Lopes called the comments in the post abhorrent and counter to the values of the school community."However, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects even speech that many experience as offensive, such as the faculty member's post," she said. Lopes added that officials will plan a forum to discuss the issue. I've reproduced his original post verbatim below, as failing to provide the full context would otherwise invite accusations of context-shifting or (as the case may be) of failing to understand that it is supposed to be "satire."KavanaughIf someone did not commit sexual assault in high school, then he is not a member of the male sex. The Democrats have discovered that 15-year- olds play spin-the-bottle, and they have jumped on a series of supposed spin-the-bottle crimes during Kavanaugh's minority, which they characterize as rape, although no one complained or reported any crime for 40 years. Read the rest

With Evernote's business on the rocks, a lot of people are waking up to the fact that commercial, proprietary cloud systems work great (easy, well-supported) but fail badly (lock-in, sudden bankruptcy, loss of years' worth of important data).If you're just learning that lesson, try Standard Notes, a free, open, encrypted, cross-platform cloud-based note-taking app that is designed to be private, auditable, and eternal.The encrypted part means you can store data in the cloud and not worry about it being read by the people who run the servers you're using; the open code means that you (or someone you trust) can audit the encryption to make sure that it's performing as advertised; the free (as in freedom) part means you can always pull your data and anyone can set up rival cloud services for synchronizing between devices; and that means that the data is eternal: yours and yours alone, forever and ever.Standard Notes is available for Mac/Win/Lin, Android and Ios, and runs in a web browser as well.The project funds itself by offering a premium tier of services (encrypted attachments stored in your Dropbox/Gdrive, access to extensions/themes, 100 years' worth of version history for all docs, automated backup to a cloud drive and/or email, and two-factor auth for more encryption). They charge a mere $2.48/month for all that. We believe in building software that lasts. To us, it is sad to consider that in the Information Age, the chances are that all information will probably not be there tomorrow. Read the rest

Krispy Kreme opened a 24-hour drive-thru in Dublin, and the Irish city couldn't contain itself. Long lines of endless cars waited to order their donuts, sometimes honking in excitement at each other in the middle of the night. After just one week, the donut shop had to shut down their drive-thru at 11:30 PM. Take a look at (or, rather, listen to) the festive honkers that surely kept the city awake at all hours of the night.i come home to ireland for the first time in months and the whole country is at a standstill over a krispy kreme— The Chronic Project (@TheNapKween) October 3, 2018So Ireland gets a Krispy Kreme and the country loses its shit, resulting in the 24-hour drive-thru having to be closed? Sounds about right.— Gianni (@giancarlomag) October 3, 2018The entire Krispy Kreme situation really highlights why Ireland can’t have nice things— Claire 💬 (@Claire_Crowley_) October 3, 2018One of my favorite things about Ireland right now is how horny Dubs are for Krispy Kreme https://t.co/ZEzvbU20QI— Michael (@roadworst) October 3, 2018Via Mashable Read the rest

Yesterday, the Internet Archive published the 1983 edition of Cupola, the yearbook of Georgetown Prep, the elite academy and hive of rape-culture where would-be Supreme Court Justice drank his way through four years of tutelage.Despite the judge's absurd perjury about his life during those years, we actually have a pretty good look into the routine debauchery and assaults committed by Kavanaugh and his social circle, thanks to the contents of Wasted, the memoir written by Mark Judge, a classmate of Kavanaugh who has been identified as a co-assailant in the attempted rape of Dr Christine Blasey Ford. Unfortunately, it's practically impossible to get a copy.The Internet Archive has placed a scanned copy of Wasted online so that the American public can better inform itself about the character of the man whom Senate Republicans are prepared to hand a lifetime Supreme Court appointment to.By the way, here is the yearbook entry for Merrick Garland, whom Senate Republicans refused to consider for a seat on the court during the last months of the Obama presidency.(Thanks, Mark!) Read the rest

I’m no stranger to eating bones. As a child I was like a cat hearing the lid being peeled off a can and flying into the kitchen to see what’s for dinner. Every time my mother opened some canned salmon, there I’d be, standing by her side waiting for her to drop some of those soft, greasy, salty fish bones into my hands. But I haven’t done that in years.Fast forward to the other day, when I came across a bag of similar-looking bones in my local supermarket here in Japan. A quick look and I noticed they weren’t salmon bones, nor were they soft or greasy. They were eel bones. Dry roasted eel bones, in fact. The package tells me they are chock full of calcium, vitamins A, B2, D, and E. Who needs potato chips when for 200 yen you can get 26 grams of eel bones to nosh on? Not only that, but Kyomaru makes several different flavors, too: spicy, salt, soy sauce, wasabi, and sweet sesame seed flavored. Photos by: Thersa Matsuura Read the rest

According to an explosive report in Bloomberg, US spies and large corporate IT departments have had an open secret for years: the servers supplied by US hardware giant Supermicro for Elemental, Inc were sometimes infected with tiny hardware backdoors by Chinese spies during their manufacture; these superminiature chips were wired into the systems' baseboard management system and were able to accept covert software patches that would allow Chinese spies to utterly compromise both the servers and the networks they were connected to.Elemental had a formal partnership with In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm, which gave it an air of trustworthiness that allowed it to sell billions of dollars' worth of hardware to US entities. The list of compromised entities is terrifying: Apple, Amazon, the Pentagon, DoD drone operations, Navy battleships, NASA, Congress and the Senate, even Bloomberg itself. All of these entities officially deny that they were ever compromised by the attack and claim that they have no knowledge of these hardware backdoors -- but Bloomberg's Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley cite multiple anonymous insiders and former insiders who say that the attack came to light in 2015 when Apple first discovered unusual traffic on its network and that in the years since, there have been mass teardowns of data-centers and divestments from Supermicro and Elemental.The exception is Amazon, who actually acquired Elemental after they were made aware of the hack.According to anonymous US spies interviewed by the Bloomberg writers, US intelligence operatives were able to identify the two Supermicro subcontractors in China where the motherboards were doctored, and learned that the managers in these factories with bribed, and then threatened, by the People's Liberation Army. Read the rest

A man who returned a lost cellphone was charged with theft by cops. The rationale: because he took it home first rather than instantly handing it in, he had stolen it. They got him because he returned it, in person, a day later, providing his name, just like criminals do.Two weeks ago, Conkling went to the Subway near 135th Street and Metcalf Avenue to get a sandwich during his lunch break. As he got out of the car, he told 41 Action News he found a cracked iPhone lying on the ground. "It was beat up and destroyed," he said. "I didn’t think it would work. I thought I would take a look at it when I got off work to see who it belonged to." ...There is no law requiring a person to return a found item within a certain amount of time. However, Overland Park police told 41 Action News Conkling should have brought it into the Subway immediately after finding the phone. The case was dropped, but only after the local TV station made a fuss.The problem with turning in lost property is that it's not only talking to the cops, you're bringing them evidence against you. Just find out who it belongs to and get it back to them anonymously. Or maybe just throw their $1000 anxiety box in a trashcan and not have to deal with any of this nonsense at all. Read the rest

As Halloween approacheth, perhaps it's time to tour the world's most troubling and terrifying toilets, courtesy of Phil from Toilets With Threatening Auras.pic.twitter.com/zRhvqkDI3R— Toilets With Threatening Auras (@scarytoilet) September 30, 2018pic.twitter.com/bNclufjfUL— Toilets With Threatening Auras (@scarytoilet) September 27, 2018@scarytoilet the emo toilet pic.twitter.com/oF7Y5aSSAi— pez betta 💖 (@arantzalimon) September 24, 2018Phil is also on Instagram:• Toilets With Threatening AurasImage: chachastephane Read the rest

The Breeders have been out and about this year supporting their first studio album in ten years, and they just released a video for the single Spacewoman.Here's a live performance of All Nerve, the album's title track:Check out the rest of the tracks here:• The Breeders - Spacewoman (YouTube / 4AD) Read the rest

Many exoplanets are observed or inferred around distant stars, but astronomers report finding the first exomoon, a smaller body orbiting an exoplanet. It is, mind you, an enormous moon.We present new observations of a candidate exomoon associated with Kepler-1625b using the Hubble Space Telescope to validate or refute the moon’s presence. We find evidence in favor of the moon hypothesis, based on timing deviations and a flux decrement from the star consistent with a large transiting exomoon. Self-consistent photodynamical modeling suggests that the planet is likely several Jupiter masses, while the exomoon has a mass and radius similar to Neptune. Since our inference is dominated by a single but highly precise Hubble epoch, we advocate for future monitoring of the system to check model predictions and confirm repetition of the moon-like signal.The BBC warns that the authors remain tentative about the exomoon's status. This isn't the first exomoon to be reported, only to be exposed as a boring old exoplanet upon closer inspection."We've tried our best to rule out other possibilities such as spacecraft anomalies, other planets in the system or stellar activity, but we're unable to find any other single hypothesis which can explain all of the data we have," said Dr Kipping, from Columbia University in New York.Sadly, it's unlikely that the exomoon would have an exomoonmoon.Illo: Beschizza / NASA shots of Jupiter and Neptune Read the rest

A couple of years ago, PBS NewsHour interviewed Flossie Lewis, a delightful and sharp 91-year-old teacher/writer who, in her words, still thinks she's 15 (Don't we all?). In the video, she spoke frankly about growing old. Over 7 million people saw her video, including many of her former students. All of them, including Lemony Snicket writer Daniel Handler, had words of praise for her.Flossie is now 94 and documentarian Steve Goldbloom decided to visit with her again. This time, he took her to her old classroom in San Francisco and asked a few of her former students to come along. Watch. World Teachers' Day is Friday. This one goes out to Flossie! Now, can someone PLEASE get this woman a ride on Ocean Ave.? Read the rest

Justin Rohrlich warns that those mobile trailer-mounted signs displaying your MPH are also recording number plates and taking photos of the driver and passengers. The cameras are being retrofitted to existing models.According to recently released US federal contracting data, the Drug Enforcement Administration will be expanding the footprint of its nationwide surveillance network with the purchase of “multiple” trailer-mounted speed displays “to be retrofitted as mobile LPR [License Plate Reader] platforms.” The DEA is buying them from RU2 Systems Inc., a private Mesa, Arizona company. How much it’s spending on the signs has been redacted.Two other, apparently related contracts, show that the DEA has hired a small machine shop in California, and another in Virginia, to conceal the readers within the signsBe under no illusions about the extent of what the cameras are recording.Some LPR cameras can capture “contextual photos,” which include shots of the driver and passengers. Companies like Palantir Technologies, which was co-founded by controversial venture capitalist Peter Thiel in 2003, are incorporating facial recognition technology into license plate reader software; officers can access Vigilant’s “Intelligence-Led Policing Package” on their mobile phones.Photo: Paul Velgos / Shutterstock. Read the rest

The Metamorphosis Machine generates tessellating art in the style of M.C. Escher. It's a companion to an online documentary about his life and work built around an interactive, high-resolution image of Metamorphosis II, the print that established his fame.Here's mine, metamorphosing a five-pointed star into the Cool S. Read the rest

Watch an ordinary winged corkscrew take the rollercoaster ride of its life in this video by writer and comedian Sam Fletcher. Read the rest