Boing Boing

Diane Greene was the CEO of Google's cloud business, and it was she who tried to convince Googlers to back her bid to sell AI services to the Pentagon's drone program, as a warmup for bidding on JEDI, the $10B Pentagon infrastructure project.An uprising of Googlers that led the company to cancel its drone/AI project and renounce any intention to bid on JEDI, thwarting Greene's ambition. Then, Greene dragged her heels in pulling out of "Davos in the Desert," the credential-burnishing investor conference in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that became reputational poison after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had a critical journalist named Jamal Khashoggi kidnapped, murdered and dismembered with a bone-saw (Greene had hoped to land a big cloud services sale to the Saudis).Greene now has resigned from Google. Greene was co-founder and former CEO of VMWare, before founding Bebop, which Google bought for $380m in 2015. She has spun her resignation by saying that she'd only intended to stay on as cloud CEO for two years, and, after three, felt it was time to move on. She says she will now focus on helping female tech founders with investment and mentorship.When reports of the company’s involvement in Project Maven spread internally, more than 4,000 employees signed a letter protesting the decision. In March, Ms. Greene defended the decision, saying that it was a small contract worth “only” $9 million and that the technology would be used for nonlethal purposes.When that response failed to calm the furor among some employees, Google announced in June that it would not renew that contract with the Pentagon for artificial intelligence work when the current deal expired in 2019. Read the rest

At times this week, wildfires made San Francisco's air the worst in the world, and the city's stores have largely sold out of the N95 filter masks that make the air barely breathable, leading to at least one enterprising Uber driver selling the masks out of his car (at a substantial markup: $5 each, compared with $1.30 each on Amazon in ten-packs); other drivers are giving the masks away for free. (via /.) Read the rest

Collins Dictionary named "single-use" as their 2018 word of the year and now Oxford Dictionaries' has dubbed "toxic" as theirs. They report that the word was looked up 45% more times on their site over the last year, having "been used in an array of contexts, both in its literal and more metaphorical senses." Drawn from our corpus, the top 10 toxic collocates for the year – that is, words habitually used alongside toxic – are indicative of this.Top 10 ‘toxic’ collocates in 2018by absolute frequencyChemicalMasculinitySubstanceGasEnvironmentRelationshipCultureWasteAlgaeAir"Toxic" beat out the Oxford's shortlist of "Big Dick Energy (BDE)," "Cakeism," "Gammon," "Gaslighting," "Incel," "Orbiting," "Overtourism," and "Techlash."photos by Shalaco ("clear San Francisco" was taken last week and "toxic San Francisco" was taken this week -- Ouch!)(NPR) Read the rest

My 14-year-old pointed me to the cool work of artist Christian Faur. I see Mark featured his crayon portrait pieces on Boing Boing in the past but not pieces using his more recent medium of soda crackers!Prior to the midterm elections, he laser-etched all the (then-current) U.S. senators on crackers (Is the medium the message?):Thanks, SJ! Read the rest

Anyone can learn piano, but don't tell that to the bored kids who had to endure hours of "Chopsticks" and similar drills in their music lessons. Today, there's a better way. Pianoforall lets you jump right in to discover what makes music fun, leaving you eager to learn more.In a simple but innovative approach, Pianoforall starts off by teaching you to play hits by the likes of Billy Joel and Norah Jones, but it doesn't skimp on the fundamentals. Piano guru Robin Hall shows how these songs express the music theory fundamentals you'll need to tackle more complex arrangements. In no time, you'll be playing rock, blues, jazz, and classics, learning advanced techniques like arpeggios and chromatic scales along the way. You'll also be able to read music and play by ear, all essential components that will allow you to compose your own songs.It's all contained in 10 hours of online courses and eBooks, accessible on a lifetime basis. Pick up Pianoforall: The New Way To Learn Piano & Keyboard for a discount price of $10.99 today. Read the rest

OK, it's not quite Dr. Crusher's dermal regenerator (seen above), but Arizona State University researchers have demonstrated a laser system for sealing wounds. The system involves a sealing paste -- made from silk protein mixed with gold nanorods -- that bonds with skin when heated with a laser. From IEEE Spectrum: To use a laser to seal skin, one must focus the heat of the light using some sort of photoconverter. (Chemical engineer Caushal) Rege’s lab opted for gold nanorods and embedded them in a silk protein matrix purified from silkworm cocoons. A silk protein called fibroin binds to collagen, the structural protein that holds together human skin cells. When near-infrared light hits the gold nanorods, they produce heat and activate the silk and skin to create bonds, forming a sturdy seal...They are currently watching how the laser-activated seals hold up in living rats. If that goes well, they’ll move to pigs, and perhaps eventually, humans. Read the rest

This is the new version of Affetto, the robot child head that's a testbed for synthetic facial expressions. According to the Osaka University researchers who birthed Affeto, their goal is to "offer a path for androids to express greater ranges of emotion, and ultimately have deeper interaction with humans." From Osaka University:The researchers investigated 116 different facial points on Affetto to measure its three-dimensional movement. Facial points were underpinned by so-called deformation units. Each unit comprises a set of mechanisms that create a distinctive facial contortion, such as lowering or raising of part of a lip or eyelid. Measurements from these were then subjected to a mathematical model to quantify their surface motion patterns.While the researchers encountered challenges in balancing the applied force and in adjusting the synthetic skin, they were able to employ their system to adjust the deformation units for precise control of Affetto’s facial surface motions.“Android robot faces have persisted in being a black box problem: they have been implemented but have only been judged in vague and general terms,” study first author Hisashi Ishihara says. “Our precise findings will let us effectively control android facial movements to introduce more nuanced expressions, such as smiling and frowning.” Read the rest

In 1994, pop artist, songwriter, and filmmaker Martin Sharp produced a covers album for legendary singer/ukulele maestro Tiny Tim. The album, "Tiny Tim's Pop Album," was never officially released but it's really quite something. Below, from those recording sessions, is Tim's take on the traditional folk tune "The House of the Rising Sun.""Tim's appropriation of song is very much like my appropriation of images," Sharp said. "We are both collagists taking the elements of different epochs and mixing them to discover new relationships."(via /r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

The right-wing disinfotainment machine is making a big push to shame New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for not dressing in rags as befits a person of modest means. The purpose of the smear campaign is to take attention away from the issues Ocasio-Cortez is dedicated to: Medicare for everyone, ending the student debt catastrophe, justice reform, ending global warming. By relentlessly pumping out tweets and stories about what she wears, the coordinated propagandists get to control the topic of the conversation so that even the people who know it's bullshit get sucked in and join the debate. (Yes, I know I'm guilty just by writing this post.) I’m reading Scott Adams’ new book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter, and he goes into detail how Trump and his friends at Fox and Breitbart use the same trick all the time. “Master Persuaders,” he writes, "move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason."Fortunately, Ocasio-Cortez's comebacks on Twitter are awesome, and seemed to have shut up some of the propagandists. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.Image: By Corey Torpie, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link Read the rest

Akihabara got its reputation for being Tokyo's "Electric City" -- both for its consumer electronics as well as for its electronics components stalls. In more recent years, it's become more well-known for anime, manga, claw machines, game arcades, capsule toy shops, maid cafes, unusual vending machines, and vintage video game gear stores. Scotty of Strange Parts took a tour of Akihabara with Only in Japan's John Daub. My daughter and I love Akihabara. Here's a few photos and a video from our last visit: Read the rest

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a new model in its line of very inexpensive Linux computers: the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+. It has many of the same features as the top-of-the-line 3B+ (including a 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, dual-band wireless LAN, and Bluetooth 4.2/BLE), the main exceptions being 512MB of RAM instead of 1GB, and one USB port as opposed to four. At $25, it looks like a very cool single board computer. ETA Prime has a good informational video about it. Read the rest

The new iPad Pro looks pretty cool (I'd buy one if it also ran OS X). But how durable is it? Jerry of Jerry Rig everything puts it (and the Apple Pencil) to his classic durability test by scratching, burning, and bending the gear. The iPad Pro fails the bend test. Jerry said it "folds like a piece of paper."Most of the fun of Jerry's durability tests is seeing new Apple products pulled from the box and systematically destroyed, like a scene from a J.G. Ballard story. Read the rest

After you've ordered your Trumpy Bear, be sure to pick up the Build the Wall set of MAGA Blocks. This 101-piece block set will have your kids turning away desperate refugees in no time. Comes with a President Trump mini-figure wearing a MAGA hard hat! This fun for the whole family comes from the folks at KeepAndBear.com, which offers a staggering array of unlicensed Trump garbage including CNN toilet paper and Trump Sends Hillary to Prison action figures. Sigh.(via KeepandBear) Read the rest

The Welcome To The Internet tracksuit [Getonfleek.com] features a classic image so thoroughly buried in sedimentary layers of meme and merch that it's no longer easy to locate the original through the usual means: the cover of a Scholastic book from 1999 [Amazon]. The illustrator is Donald Grant, whose page on Behance has contact info if you're looking to commission a sequel. Read the rest

Instagram influencers are easy marks for phishers: they are unlikely to be security-savvy, are easily taken-in by marketing patter, have huge easily-grifted audiences, and Instagram won't even give them their accounts back afterward. Taylor Lorenz: For young influencers with no direct contacts at Instagram or Facebook, it can be nearly impossible to retrieve a stolen account. Hackers will change the contact email address and phone number and reset the username so the account is impossible to find. Then, they’ll run ads on it until they can sell the whole page off for a large price, sometimes more than a hundred thousand dollars.Faisal Shafique, a college student who Instagrams under the handle @Fact, said that he earns roughly $300,000 a year from posting sponsored content for brands like TikTok and Fashion Nova. When Brooks seized control of his account several weeks ago, it put those brand deals in jeopardy, potentially costing him his livelihood. Shafique was able to retrieve his account back before it was sold off, but he estimates he would have lost a half-a-million-dollar property if he hadn’t.See also The Rise of the Nanoinfluencer -- people with smaller but still exploitable social media followings who get paid in care packages of the (sometimes expensive) stuff they post about. Read the rest

I'm tempted by the finally-upgraded Mac Mini (pictured above with the new 13" iPad Pro configured as its display), long the black sheep of the Mac lineup but loved for the promise of compact power it (again) justifies. Rather than make the new model smaller, as some expected, they kept the same box and filled it with powerful modern parts like i7 CPUs. Nick Statt:The Mac mini was simple, it was cheap, and it did its job well. So well, in fact, that it took on a second life for many owners as a home media PC, a NAS server, and even as part of a compute cluster.But the 2018 Mac mini is a different beast. It is much more powerful — it is, without hyperbole, a miniature Mac Pro — and as a result, it is no longer all that cheap. In fact, Apple’s cheapest Mac has moved from a sub-$500 purchase to a $799 one, and much more if you want a larger solid state drive, a faster processor, or more memory. You can spec out a lowly Mac mini all the way up to $4,199 if you really desire. (This time around the RAM is user replaceable, while the SSD is not.)With other models a generation behind, the i7 model benchmarks faster than everything in the lineup short of the iMac Pro.The big drag, however, is the integrated graphics. At the price, there should be something more. That said, it is still much smaller than even the smallest MXM-slot game/workstation-class PCs, and it hopefully won't be long before there are external GPUs in the Mac Mini form factor (similar to the Sonnet Puck) to stack atop it. Read the rest

Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has followed up his scorching condemnation of US poverty with an even more damning report on poverty in the UK, which he calls a "political choice" brought on by a decade of austerity at the hands of the Conservative Party.Alston characterised the findings from his two-week fact-finding tour as "a disgrace...a social calamity and an economic disaster." He described the country's policies as so bad for women that "if you got a group of misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that are not already in place."He predicted further declines in the lives of middle class people, who will "find themselves living in an increasingly hostile and unwelcoming society because community roots are being broken."He condemned homelessness, child poverty, the rise of food banks, the sell-off of public assets, the closure of youth centres, the rise of sex-work and gang affiliation among the most vulnerable people, and said that the sole bright spot -- communities pitching in to help their neighbours -- "resembled the sort of activity you might expect for a natural disaster or health epidemic."Conservative politicians insisted that Alston didn't understand how austerity worked and that everyone was much better off due to a decade of cuts.After visiting towns and cities including London, Oxford, Cardiff, Newcastle, Glasgow and Belfast, Alston said that “obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see the immense growth in food banks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep despair that leads even the government to appoint a minister for suicide prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard-of levels of loneliness and isolation.”He called for the elimination of the five-week delay in receiving benefits under the universal credit system, which has plunged many into destitution. Read the rest

As a graduate of the "rubbery mutilated omelet" school of scrambled egg preparation, I am mocked by this chef's obvious yet perfectly successful method. The secret ingredient: staying with the eggs from pour to presentation so they never congeal. Read the rest

He calls it "The Beast", which is, all things considered, about right. [via] Read the rest

Stingrays were once the most secretive of surveillance technology: devices whose existence was so sensitive that the feds actually raided local cops and stole their crime files to stop them from being introduced in court and revealing the capability to spy on cellular phones.The cat inevitably escaped the bag, and subsequent disclosures revealed just how widespread the surveillance of cellphones had become.One upshot of the law enforcement reliance on cellular mass surveillance is that it has created a perverse incentive to maintain the insecurity of our mobile devices; this insecurity, combined with the inevitable decline in price for electronic components, means that more and more people are able to spy on your phones (sometimes it's criminals, sometimes it's foreign spies, sometimes it's a mystery).If you want to get in on the action, you can order $20 worth of parts from Amazon, plug them into your laptop, paste a few commands into your terminal and you can start spying on your friends and neighbors.Let's fix phones, OK?As the name implies, a software defined radio, or SDR, is simply a radio that instead of having its feature baked in at a hardware level, can be controlled by a computer program. We bought the ‘NooElec NESDR Mini’ from Amazon for around $20 and received it a few days later.To get the SDR to talk to phones, I needed to give it some instructions. Fortunately, I didn’t need to write my own, but just take some code from GitHub. Read the rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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