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There's been a lot of news freakout over Defense Distributed (previously) and "3D printed guns" (a term that confusingly encompasses milled guns, 3D printed guns, and files that describe the shapes of guns). (more…)

New research suggests that a key cause of poverty is poor parents' lack of engagement with neonates and toddlers. Brazil is trying to change that by showing parents the importance of interacting meaningfully with young children through eye contact and activities. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oKym79Q2pwResearchers have harnessed popcorn to drive simple robotic actuators. Cornell University engineers Steve Ceron, Kirstin H. Petersen, and colleagues demonstrated mechanical devices that exert force or change shape when their internal kernels pop. From Cornell:

Know who loves Trump? Folks in Russia who make asbestos.Nearly a thing of the past, asbestos causes lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma. The Trump Administration is eager to bring asbestos back, because sanity had almost eliminated it. New EPA regulations are opening up opportunities for Russians to sell asbestos in the US.Via EWG.org:

Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame has become a honeypot for vandals, MAGA-hat cretins, and all sorts of shenanigans, so the West Hollywood City Council unanimously voted to remove it permanently. (more…)

HTGV (Home & Garden Television) bought the iconic Brady Bunch house at 11222 Dilling St. in North Hollywood, California. This is the home that was used for exterior shots on the TV show. (The interior was built in a Hollywood studio.) From CNN:

As part of its efforts to source its materials more responsibly, LEGO is launching a line of plant forms made from sustainable sugarcane plastics instead of petroleum-based plastic. (more…)

I'm on the latest episode of Torrentfreak's Steal This Show podcast (MP3), where I talk with host Jamie King about "Whether file-sharing & P2P communities have lost the battle to streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, and why the ‘copyfight’ is still important; how the European Copyright Directive eats at the fabric of the Web, making it even harder to compete with content giants; and why breaking up companies like Google and Facebook might be the only way to restore an internet — and a society — we can all live with."

The City of New York has declared that all from its city jails will henceforth be free; meaning the city will forego the $5,000,000 it took from prisoners and their families every year. (more…)

Mitochindrial replacement techniques, which produce "three-parent babies," promise to allow infertile couples to have babies, and even allow people with debilitating genetic disorders to have healthy babies. The largely unregulated tech is already producing babies despite the unknown long-term risks. (more…)

Pablo Defendini (previously) writes, "Fireside Magazine’s editor, Julia Rios, is part of The Mexicanx Initiative, a scholarship fund John Picacio put together for sending Mexicanx and Mexican-American sf/f authors to Worldcon. A few of the Mexicanx Initiative authors decided to create an anthology to commemorate the occasion, and had been planning on subsidizing the cost of printing and shipping themselves. When Fireside got word of this last week, we decided to pitch in, and we put together a Kickstarter campaign to raise the $1500 they needed."Well, we blew past our funding goal, and we decided that any money left over would be split evenly among all the participants (Fireside isn't making a cent off this). So now we're trying to reach a stretch goal of $7500 by the end of the campaign this Friday, so that we can not only cover their production costs, but pay every author, artist, designer, translator, and editor who donated their work a SFWA-qualifying pro rate."Mexicanx Initiative Anthology [Fireside/Kickstarter]

When Josh Black quit his job as Obama's director for U.N. and Multilateral Affairs after the 2016 election (citing "growing disillusionment"), he found a sweet job as Associate Vice President for International Advocacy at Phrma, the global lobbying group for the pharmaceutical industry, which meant that he still got to work at the UN, but now he'd be advocating for giant, rapacious corporations that hold peoples' lives hostage to their profits! (speaking as a former NGO observer at the World Intellectual Property Organization from the era of the Access to Medicines treaty, Phrma are effectively public health war criminals). (more…)

UK artist Lucy Sparrow is back with a new shopping opportunity for lovers of her fantastic felt products. Until August 31, at The Standard hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Sparrow is showing her most ambitious exhibit yet: the Sparrow Mart Supermarket. This is her fifth and largest all-felt installation (it features 31,000 handmade products) and her first West Coast one. She writes, "As a child, I was obsessed with the exotic, turbo-charged technicolour glow emanating from across the Atlantic. The source of this neon rainbow was Los Angeles – a seemingly mythical place to a child growing up in grey, post-recession Britain – and one that has hugely influenced my artistic practice. Thanks to the amazing team at The Standard, Downtown, the felt is finally coming home to the city of endless possibilities and colour.”The store is quite spectacular. There's aisles of handmade awesomeness, including a felt ATM, as you can see here:According to Sparrow (in this video), it took her and five assistants exactly one year to create all the items in the shop.https://youtu.be/EB3qR5WGjVUSpecial thanks to my friend Michael Fleming for the heads up on this! I hope I can get myself down to LA before the end of the month to check it out for myself. For those of you who don't know, I'm a Fluff superfan (long story). So, when Michael texted me from the store to see if I wanted one of Sparrow's felt Fluff jars, I was ecstatic. He delivered it today and it already as a special spot in the Fluff section of my trophy case.One funny thing: I was surprised to hear Sparrow chose Los Angeles to include Fluff, as it's an East Coast product and has been difficult to source on the West Coast for many years (pro-tip: Cost Plus usually has it). I'm not complaining though.photos by Michael Fleming, The Standard, Downtown LA, and Rusty Blazenhoff

https://youtu.be/vFHzrmk5Md0Qanon is a person or group behind an unhinged right-wing conspiracy theory that is really too stupid to elucidate (you can listen to this Reply All if you're really interested); it's a kind of trumpian Pizzagate successor that includes great, unhealthy lashings of secret Democratic pedophile rings (because far-right assholes are more worried about imaginary children in nonexistent pizzeria basements than they are actual children in ICE cages). (more…)

When the FCC announced its intention to kill Network Neutrality, it had to accept public comments, and what followed was bizarre even by Trump-era standards: first, millions of living, breathing Americans sent so many pro-Net Neutrality comments to the FCC that the website crashed; then bots spammed the FCC with millions of obviously fake anti-Neutrality comments, stealing the identities of real Americans (including two US Senators!) to do so; despite the overwhelming evidence that humans loved Net Neutrality and bots hated it, the FCC declared that it would give the bot comments equal weight with the human ones; and then it stopped accepting comments, claiming that its website had been hacked. (more…)

What used to take an artisan months can now be done with laser precision in minutes. Watch as this high speed laser array engraves an intricate pattern. (more…)

The UK Committees of Advertising Practice changed the rules for ISP advertising: where once the ISPs could advertise speeds of "Up to" some incredibly high number so long as 10% of customers ever achieved that speed, now ISPs can only advertise a speed promise if 51% of their customers attain that speed at all times. (more…)

Trump's economic statistics are all about stock growth and low unemployment numbers, but more than two thirds of the US economy is driven by consumer spending, so if you want to know where we're headed, you should be looking at the average American's ability to buy things. (more…)

Emails tend to fall through the cracks, especially when you're managing multiple accounts. Sometimes it's just spam, and other times it's a job offer or important reply that disappears down the inbox wormhole. For those of us looking to minimize vanishing emails, Mailbird Pro lets you manage all of your emails and contacts from multiple accounts easily in one unified inbox. Lifetime plans are available in the Boing Boing Store for $14.99.With Mailbird Pro, you don't have to hop back and forth between different email accounts, apps, or windows online. MailBird bakes them all into one streamlined application and lets you work through you emails even faster with intuitive shortcuts for archiving and forwarding, and it even boasts an integrated speed reader. What's more, MailBird can also integrate with built-in apps like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Dropbox for added versatility.Lifetime plans for MailBird Pro are available in the Boing Boing Store for $14.99.

From light to dark, affordable high-heeled shoes are available in a variety of skin tones from British retail brand Marks and Spencer (M&S). French shoe designer Christian Louboutin first brought "nude" shoes, in seven shades, to the market in 2017, but the collection was very pricey. https://www.instagram.com/p/BV5BJGkBCaE/Now, M&S is offering six "vegan friendly" (which is code for "not leather") shades of stilettos for approximately $33/pair.Not everyone is impressed, however:(TAXI)

The rich world has never been more unequal, and the poor world has never richer: in 2018, we're seeing record low levels of global "extreme poverty" (a measure that's admittedly a bit fuzzy) and record levels of inequality, which wealth concentrated into a declining number of hands. (more…)

Boaters in Comox, British Columbia were surprised to find an orca that had been acting strangely in the harbor began pulling a boat around like it was a toy. (more…)

For years, I maintained a Skype number that’d forward to whatever phone number I happened to be using at the time. It was the only way to make myself reachable on the phone, despite my switching to a new mobile number every time I moved to a different region. It worked well enough—until last year when Microsoft redesigned the iOS version of their app to make it damn near unusable as a phone forwarding service. I hated Skype’s mobile makeover so much that I decided not to renew my annual plan with the service. If you want to find me, these days, it has to happen via Twitter or email. It seems that users of Microsoft’s desktop version of the app have all sorts of loathing for its recent redesign as well. According to The Verge, the backlash against version 8.0 of the app has been so widespread that it’s put Microsoft back on its heels. From The Verge:

We’ve known for a while that military personnel using GPS-enabled health tracking apps and accessories in sensitive operational areas was kind of a problem, from an intelligence standpoint. Such appliances make it wicked easy for someone to check in on the wearer’s daily routine, whereabouts or, should enough people in an operational area use the same service like Strava, figure out where personnel congregate at certain times of the day, no satellite surveillance or human intelligence assets required. Well, it looks like the Department of Defense has finally decided to do something about it: As of right now, DoD employees are no longer allowed to wear or use a wide variety of health tracking hardware. From Gizmodo:

In Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, there's a protest scene where there's a 12-foot-tall "Steve Lift Fucking a Horse" sculpture. It's hard to miss! Well, come to find out, my badass friend Spy Emerson (whose Hook Up Truck made international news a few years back) is the artist who created it. And now I've learned, on Boots' request, she's made a mini version of the sculpture to sell.If you want to get on your hands it, you can find her on Instagram or Patreon. Or you can reach her through her website. https://www.instagram.com/p/BlRVRdCBMr6/?taken-by=spy.emersonSpy shared with me that she clocked in 130 hours during filming last summer, as both an artist and a performer, and appears in the movie as a member of the Left Eye girl gang (in the photo below, she's the one in the goggles). In one scene she said that she's wearing an old punk t-shirt of hers from high school that reads, "Stay Warm, Burn the Rich."https://twitter.com/BootsRiley/status/1025490819153686528

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Yosuke Kurosawa takes a tour of Nara Juvenile Prison, which was in use until 2017 and will soon be turned into hotels for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It's like a really clean Shawshank Prison. (more…)

The tweet has been removed and apologies made concerning this threatening message, depicting a Canadian airliner aimed at the CN Tower in Toronto, a response to Canadian criticism of Saudi Arabia's spectacularly grim human rights record.

Todd Kincannon was found "bloodied and covered in dog hair" by police officers after killing and mutilating his mother's 10-year-old beagle.

Another delight from Retro Pi Cases, albeit one you won't yet be stuffing a computer in. [Previously]

Rick Gates, on the witness stand today in the trial of Paul Manafort, says he committed crimes with Manafort, and embezzled “hundreds of thousands” of dollars from Manafort. (more…)

This handy wallwart lets me charge my phone and watch while I sleep, without a lot of extra chargers hanging around.After living in the same house for 10 years I am pretty sure I know where I want things. Moving USB chargers around gets tiresome, and the sheer convenience of just having a few USB ports on the wall behind my bed became too much to resist.I have also never had electronics damaged by a "surge." I am glad that so many of my home electronics are protected, as The Protectors have clearly done their job. HERE IS TO YOU SURGE PROTECTORS!I put this wallwart behind my bed, things are easier. It fits in a top outlet, leaving the bottom usable.AmazonBasics 3-Outlet Surge Protector with 2 USB Ports via Amazon

Facebook wants to "deepen user engagement" with Messenger, and to that end, it's been pitching America's giant banks on joint enterprises where Facebook will get to see all your financial info (especially info on where you're shopping and what you're buying) to help it suck you into using Messenger for longer. (more…)

Dance battles have come a long way from a bunch of kids breaking on a piece of cardboard. Watch as The Lab shows how it's done these days, replete with gymnastics, tight choreography, and the slick production values of a major network show. (more…)

Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner is carrying $42,000 in student debt; heiress Betsy "Marie Antoinette" DeVos is the anti-public-school advocate whom Donald Trump put in charge of the nation's public schools, and one of her first official acts was to end the rules limiting sleazy student debt-collection tactics, even as Trump was ending debt relief for students defrauded by diploma mills (like, say, Trump University). (more…)

Consumer Reports is arguably America's most trusted source of product reviews -- published by Consumers Union, a venerable nonprofit with a deserved reputation for scrupulous care and neutrality -- and for years it has been wrestling with how to address privacy and cybersecurity in modern products (disclosure: I have advised them some on this). (more…)

Let us start the week off cute.

The Alternative For Germany (AfD) is a xenophobic far-right party whose ranks include neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers; in a new tell-all book by "AfD dropout" Franziska Schreiber (once the head of the AfD's youth wing), we learn that party leader Frauke Petry worked closely with Hans-Georg Maaßen, the president of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (a domestic surveillance agency with 3,100 employees and an annual budget of €350m). (more…)

We've seen a lot of Sacha Baron Cohen's "mental Israeli colonel" persona lately, but it's his "narcissist European YouTuber" one that got former Sheriff Joe Arpaio to admit that he'd let Trump perform oral sex on him.

Rock that ball, kid.Thanks, Jay!

The Basic Engine is a tiny but intentionally limited computer platform designed to be like a late-1980s game console or home computer, but with some useful modern benefits. In effect, it's like Pico-8, but hardware instead of a set of abstract and arbitrary design limitations on software.

Whether or not you've ever chosen to eat insects, you've eaten insects, or parts of them, in the grains, legumes, fruits and nuts you've consumed (not to mention the occasional inhaled kamikaze mosquito). (more…)

The Ancient Earth Globe is an interactive 3D globe that depics the Earth at various points in geological history from 750m years ago until now. Here it is 300m years ago.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn loves cult movies and has been quietly restoring some of his faves. Now they are available to stream free on his byNWR site. (more…)

A group of high school students in Japan spent two years recreating the sounds and sights of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 in painstaking detail.

Apple has joined Facebook, Spotify and YouTube in tossing Alex Jones and InfoWars material from their platforms.

Archaeologists have determined from a butchered rhinoceros that the Philippine island of Luzon was inhabited by hominins hundreds of thousands of years before anatomically modern humans arrived. (more…)

Arthur Jones is a former Nazi, he insists, having not been a member of any official Nazi group since the 1980s. But he is still a holocaust denier, a proud racist, and the Republican Party candidate for Illinois' 3rd congressional district. The Chicago Tribune interviewed him and it went exactly as you would expect.