Susan Crawford (previously) identifies one of the great and deadly paradoxes of late-stage capitalism, where predatory oligarchs prowl for state assets that can be sold off to them on the cheap, and target vulnerable regulators that can be dismantled so that industry can run amok: the best-functioning, most vital, best-run state systems are invisible, because they do their jobs so well we never hear about them. (more…)

Don't let its appearance fool you. The SKEYE Mini Camera Drone is one of the most nimble drones out there. Engineered with adjustable gyro sensitivity and a 6-axis flight control system, this palm-sized drone is a dream for both novice and veteran pilots to fly, and it's available in the Boing Boing Store for $29.Despite its small stature, the SKEYE Nano 2 still has room for a built-in HD camera, which you can use to record footage in real-time. The drone can be operated via controller, making it friendly to pilots of all calibers. It can take off, land, and hover easily with built-in auto-functions, and the SKEYE Mini Nano Drone is even capable of nighttime flight thanks to its built-in LED lights.Whether you're looking to pick up a new hobby or just a new way to take more creative selfies, the SKEYE Nano 2 Camera Drone is a solid choice. It's on sale today for $59, 40% off its usual price.

When things start getting crazy globally, rich people start looking for backup plans. Bloomberg looks at the uptick in people with enough wealth to secure a second passport, or even multiple passports. (more…)

'The Try Guys' started as a jokey part of a clickbaity but harmless YouTube genre, but they've been slowly edging into much deeper topics involving masculine insecurities around their appearance, most notably Should The Try Guys Get Plastic Surgery? (more…)

Boing Boing fave Simone Giertz (of "Shitty Robots" fame) had brain surgery earlier this year, so it's great to see her back with an update. (more…)

Web Typography Resources is a list of apps, tools, plugins and other stuff that will help you make words look nice on the world-wide web. Highlights include Bram Stein's typography inspector, Monotype's new SkyFonts webfont management service, and Matej Latin's book Better Web Typography for a Better Web. [Amazon]Previously: Practical Typography [Matthew Butterick]

We often unconsciously mirror the behavior of people we interact with. This can include mirroring posture, gestures, and voice patterns. A recent paper in Current Biology reports that we can mirror a smile based on speech alone, and even do so without actually detecting the smile.The researchers applied a signal processing technique for altering recorded speech under a neutral mouth position to what it would have sounded like had the speaker been smiling. They played 60 such recordings (some manipulated, some not) to 35 subjects, and asked them to judge whether the speaker was smiling. The researchers also measured the responses of two subject muscle groups while listening, the zygomatic (smiling) muscles and the corrugator (frowning) muscles.When the subjects correctly reported neutral expression or smiling in the speech, both of their muscle groups accurately mirrored the speech while listening (e.g., for smiling speakers, zygomatic tensing and corrugator relaxing). Interestingly, even when the subjects were wrong, their zygomatic muscles still mirrored correctly. This was not true for the corrugators, which instead reflected the subjects' report.Our mirroring capabilities go well beyond what we see, or even perceive.

Amazon reviews are bought and paid for, and the company has a significant, algorithm-led effort to weed out sellers and scammers who abuse the system. But Amazon itself also rigs the UI to make it hard to leave negative reviews — at least when it comes to the "Amazon's Choice" picks Stephen Eggers didn't like.

Road diets (previously) have been proven to reduce fatalities and unsafe speed incidents. Here's how it works. (more…)

Children should conduct all interviews from this point forward because they get into it. They aren't afraid to ask the real questions.Case in point: The HiHo Kids all got 20 minutes to grill Macklemore on anything they wanted. It starts with a bang when a young girl asks, "Is it hard to be a rapper with your kind of skin tone?" Unfazed, the rap star answers with a smirk, "What are you trying to say?"Macklemore keeps it pretty real with the kids, except for maybe a couple times, like when he said that weird thing about the "sexiest animal hunters."Surprisingly, some of the kids didn't recognize Macklemore. But this one did and he's a big fan (as you'll see if you watch to the end):

Given that I started a keto diet last weekend, I couldn;t have stumbled across this video at a worse time (farewell, carbs. I knew thee well.) But just because I can only stare at this video longingly doesn't mean that you can't partake.

All dogs should come with their own GoPro camera. Every. Single. One.

Q: What is up in the air? A: Alex Trebek retiring from his sweet Jeopardy! host gig in 2020. On the latest episode of Fox News' OBJECTified, the Canadian-born game show host shared that he gave it a 50-50 chance that he'll renew his contract when it comes up in two yearsand that he already has a replacement in mind: sportscaster Alex Faust.While we wait a couple more years for his decision, let's go back to that time when the nerdcore community rapped this song after Trebek insulted a contestant who said she was into the genre, shall we?https://youtu.be/3WQk7YGpFZ4(The Source)

I've enjoyed all of Dan Brown's thrillers. Great literature they ain't but they always keep me reading past my bedtime. I happened to miss Origin when it first came out, but since it's on sale for $3, how could I pass it up?

Motherboard reviewed a "device that looks just like an iPhone but is actually an Android that has been reskinned from top-to-bottom to seem as close to an iPhone as is possible... the phone is also loaded with backdoors and malicious apps."

p>It's always a pleasure to watch Chris Notap make a new tool. One thing he likes to make is mousetraps. This time, he made an ingeniously simple trap that lures mice into a cylinder made from a soda tube and dumps them unceremoniously into a bucket.

The 1949 book, Prophets of Deceit, A Study in the Techniques of the American Agitator, by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, was written to explain how an aspiring dictator "molds already existing prejudices and tendencies into overt doctrines and ultimately into overt action." The authors intended to not "merely to describe prejudice but to explain it in order to help in its eradication." An admirable goal, but the book could also be used as a manual for indoctrinating members into a mass cult of hatred. Take a look at this list of four "grievances" that totalitarian dictators use to highjack the minds of the susceptible:

The theme of this year's Burning Man is I, Robot, which focuses "on the many forms of artificial intelligence that permeate our lives..." So, naturally, someone trained a neural network to come up with some camp names. It spit out believable names like Spankles, Astro Sparkin, and Space Rock Screamin Camp, as well as weirder names like Corn Viral Hammers, Wiq Renames Spaghette, and Hellball Lounge. Then it went with some truly bizarre ones like Cohnie Stacefur Ass Chaos, Sir Liberains the Wreck Middle, and Awes Orpoop.The woman behind the experiment, research scientist Janelle Shane, writes:

Part Four of SomeNews's series on Facism clearly shows how Trumpism is Facism.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) got this cool shot of Venus by using new adaptive optics that ignore earth's atmosphere while imaging celestial phenomena.Via Universe Today:

Jeff Whitman, driving a van emblazoned with a company logo and contact number, made it his business to follow another man home to let him "know how much of a N— you are."The victim, who was black, filmed the encounter. Whitman, who is white, is laying low. Theodore Decker with The Columbus Dispatch spoke to him on the phone:

After a month off, John Oliver is back and, where Facebook's bullshit apology for all of the greasy stuff they've been doing with their user's data is concerned, he's taking no prisoners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Y1WRUZLfQI'm headed to DC to sit down in studio with BookTV's "In Depth" on August 5; it'll air live on Aug 5 at 12PM Eastern/9AM Pacific and be repeated on August 6 at 12AM Eastern/(9PM Pacific on Aug 5) and on Aug 11 at 9AM Eastern/6AM Pacific. It's a phone-in!

Federal Air Marshals are furious that they have been tasked to follow thousands of Americans who are not on any watch-list and not suspected of any crime; they shadow these people (who are selected for surveillance on the basis of flimsy criteria like once having visited Turkey) and send minute-by-minute updates to the TSA, noting whether their targets are sleeping, using more than one phone, waiting until the last minute to board their planes, observing boarding areas from a distance, and other innocuous behaviors. (more…)

I needed more blue tape for my build plate. (more…)

Servicemembers willing to undergo dangerous test pilot duties are remarkably brave. The military is now conducting tests on different body sizes to ensure women serving as pilots get the same safety benefits. (more…)

Joi Ito (previously) is the Director of MIT's Media Lab, an appointment that raised a few eyebrows because Joi never got an undergrad degree, much less a doctorate. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaJaDx51iwArchprankster Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G, Borat, etc) has a new show called Who Is America? where he disguises himself sits down with US politicians and tries to get them to do something absurd, with some pretty remarkable (and even career-ending) results (though not everybody falls for it). (more…)

Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's credibility lacking PR stooge who is nominally an attorney, continues to spout any story he can to stir up the pot. Contradicting himself to the point of frustrating even Fox News, no one can possibly believe what this man says.Today's bullshit circles around 'collusion is not a crime' -- treason, however, is.I can not understand why lying blowhards like Giuliani and Conway, who are clearly just propaganda tools of the Orange Menance, are given air time.

In 2008, Universal Music fraudulently claimed that a short Youtube clip of a toddler dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" was a copyright infringement, leading to eight years of litigation and, eventually, a landmark ruling secured by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in which the court found that Universal had a duty to consider fair use before using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to censor other peoples' media. (more…)

Sharp-eyed ornithologists noticed that some specimens of Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise that they observed looked different enough that they may be a separate species. They captured video of the other kind for comparison. (more…)

Brett writes, "As a critique of the IoT buzz, I hacked a portable karaoke machine, stuffed a Raspberry Pi in it, connected it to the internet, and installed Docker on it." (tl;dr: he needed a portable CRT for an installation, found one embedded in a thrift-store karaoke machine, and got it wired up to the Raspi on the first try and discovered it made a perfect and delightful casemod).

The damage done by domestic violence doesn't stop when a victim finds the strength and support system needed to escape physical or emotional abuse at home. Breaking the cycle of abuse inflicted by the hands of someone you once trusted can send shock waves into every facet of your life: shared friends may turn against you, individuals you called family may disbelieve your claims of abuse and the time and energy it takes to break ties with an abuser can take a toll on your professional life. Happily, with a piece of policy that every nation on the planet should copy, New Zealand is taking steps to ensure that the latter won't be something that those looking to escape domestic violence will have to worry about any longer.According to The New York Times, members of New Zealand's parliament have voted to approve a bill which states that individuals feeling domestic violence in their country must be given a 10-day leave of absence from their jobs--time to care for children, seek out assistance in setting up a new life and find shelter--in addition to whatever paid vacation days the victim's job comes with. The Domestic Violence Victims’ Protection Bill will go into effect in 2019. From The New York Times:

Blackstone is the largest private equity fund in the world; when the 2008 crash hit and banks used the trillions in taxpayer bailouts to fund mass evictions of working people who'd been tricked into taking out predatory mortgages, Blackstone started bulk-buying them, creating rent-backed bonds (called Single-Family Rental Securities or SERS) that are the even-shittier successors to the mortgage-backed securities that detonated the world economy in 2008. (more…)

Earlier this month, the United Nations Relief and Works agency for Palestinian refugees in the near-east (UNRWA) warned that it’d have no choice but to make deep cuts to its programs, due to a funding freeze enacted by the United States Government. Last week, in light of a 217 million dollar funding shortfall, UNRWA lowered the boom: employees for a number of vital programs, including housing assistance, medical and mental health support, education and employment programs have either been given drastic pay cuts or told that they no longer have jobs. According to The Washington Post, UNRWA dismissed 154 of its employees, 125 of which are located in Gaza, and downgraded another 580 to contract workers. The head of UNRWA’s Palestinian employees union, Amir al-Miss’hal stated that in addition to this, UNRWA has also canceled an additional 1,000 jobs by ordering a hiring freeze of employees destined to fill in for UNRWA workers approaching retirement. Unsurprisingly, shit is now going down: hundreds of UNRWA declared a sit-in, this past Monday, with threats from the UNRWA employee’s union of a strike that could throw Gaza into chaos. One UNRWA was so unhinged by losing his to job that he attempted to set himself on fire, this past Wednesday. From The Washington Post:

Samsung's new QLED TV comes with configuration option: take a picture of the wall behind it before you hang it up and it will use it as a background wallpaper, drawing UI widgets (like weather display, etc) overtop of it, creating the hi-rez illusion that your TV has disappeared, leaving nothing behind but the bezel. Hard to get it aligned properly, and probably a config option on most TVs (but buried 11 menus deep and just advertised as "set wallpaper" rather than "make TV vanish"). (via Red Ferret)

Many of the world's most iconic movies have problematic themes or plots, but the romanticization of kidnapping and false imprisonment ranks among the worst. (more…)

Former Air Force spy Denver Riggleman is the GOP Congressional candidate for Virginia's 5th district, and he's caught flack for campaigning with the notorious white supremacist Isaac Smith, co-founder of Unity & Security for America. (more…)

What the hell, Scotland? Why would you ruin perfectly good ice cream by putting the devil's condiment -- mayonnaise -- into it?!Artisanal ice cream shop ICE Falkirk, the creators of Mayonnaise Ice Cream, have some 'splaining to do.https://www.facebook.com/LADbible/videos/4820513294662489/UzpfSTg0ODIzNDU0ODYxOTgyNDoxNTM4NzcyODk5NTY1OTgy/image via ICEFalkirk, used with permission(Delish)

The human brain is a funny thing. You can give it plenty of sleep, but when you're hours away from the weekend, it's virtually impossible to stay focused. Unfortunately, the world doesn't stop just because your brain has checked out, but you can still ensure you don't miss any important details thanks to the Uqique USB Recorder With Playback, available in the Boing Boing store for $21.99.Smaller than most flash drives, this pocket-sized recorder gives you the ability to capture important details at a moment's notice. Whether you're stuck in an afternoon lecture or a meeting at work, you can whip this device out, record what you need, and play it back when you're ready to focus. It's engineered with intelligent noise cut filtering and voice amplification to ensure you get a clear recording from any angle, and it's rated to last 10 hours on a single charge.Of course, there has to be more to this device for it to merit a spot in your pocket's shrinking real estate. In addition to capturing audio, the recorder doubles as an 8GB flash drive, so you can move important files in a pinch. Plus, it can even play music, letting you enjoy your favorite tunes without having to kill your phone's battery.The Uqique USB Recorder With Playback normally retails for $26.99, but you can get it in the Boing Boing store today for $21.99, saving nearly 20 percent off the usual price.

Small towns are the new (insert hip city neighborhood). It's all about "creatives" and money, isn't it? Sort of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbNv9MP27xEApparently Facebook is running TV ads apologizing for being a creepy stalker optimized for organizing Nazi hate-mobs and genocidal pogroms (also apparently: now that all the young people are leaving Facebook, TV is how you reach the company's core user-base). (more…)

Given the crushing strength of this machine and the way large chunks of concrete balance atop distressed rebar, this worker might want to consider goggles and not turning his back on the machine. (more…)

On July 24, off the coast of Indonesia, onlookers cheered as a boat rode (and eventually capsized to) some crazy waves. (It's ok to hit 'play,' the boat was unmanned.)Ryan “Chachi” Craig of Surfer.com reports:

I eagerly await our new AI masters' world of ultraoptimized, uncannily organic, evolving foorplans. Joel Simon:

Non-photorealistic Quake takes the classic game and applies particularly well-crafted filtering effect to give it the appearance of a hand-drawn pencil sketch. Or blueprints. Or ink. [via]

Jacobo Prisco at CNN returns to 1958, when a new symbol appeared at protests against nuclear weapons in the UK.

In the July 30 issue of The New Yorker, Joan Blake of Southern Pines, North Carolina shares the story of how Wednesday Addams got her name:

Deep below a mile of ice at the Martian south pole lies a lake of liquid water, according to a team of Italian scientists led by Roberto Orosei. (more…)

"Black & McDonald is an integrated, multi-trade prime contractor serving government, institutions, industry and commerce across Canada, the US and overseas." Also, our drivers are huge assholes. [UPDATE 7/29/2018 - Driver got fired.)