Staff at the freenode IRC network have resigned en-masse after control of it passed to what one described as a “narcissistic Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire.” Resig… | Continue reading
Following in the steps of Donald Trump and his conspiracy-fueled “enemy of the people” war against the press, Senator Tom Cotton (Q-AR) insinuates that the “intrepid” Associ… | Continue reading
Wormhole is a file-sending site with end-to-end encryption: drop the file and off it goes, with a link you can share. It’s the work of Stanford lecturer Feross Aboukhadijeh, who wanted to rep… | Continue reading
Citizen Kane, the Orson Welles classic often hailed as the greatest movie of all time, slipped from 100% to 99% on Rotten Tomatoes’ “Tomatometer” sometime between Feb 25 and April… | Continue reading
A great post on Metafilter turned me on to “Twenty Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement,” a classic 1995 speech by Charlie Munger | Continue reading
It’s not uncommon to hear people talk about their brains in computer terms. “I’m crashing.” “I need to reboot.” “I’m processing.” “That&#… | Continue reading
Visit the post for more. | Continue reading
Hapodi, the French agency that’s in charge of the country’s new anti-piracy scheme (if someone you live with is accused of three acts of infringement, your whole household is taken offl… | Continue reading
Neuroscientists at Boston University saw long-term positive results from stimulating the brains of people who exhibit OCD-like behavior. From Scientific American: The researchers carried out a simi… | Continue reading
Blob Opera is a new Google AI experiment that uses machine learning to help you compose what’s essentially a Barbershop Quartet of pseudo Minion-like cartoons. You don’t need any musica… | Continue reading
Could it be? Maybe. But it sounds like the resulting Disney-fied complete reboot could be a very different animal from the show we Browncoats knew and loved. My source tells me that Disney is in ea… | Continue reading
It’s the uplifting “Where are they now?” file we all need to hear right now. Back in 2012, a Japanese macaque monkey named Darwin entered pop culture history, and all of our heart… | Continue reading
Twitter user @Pandamoanimum put together an Advent calendar to spread joy and laughter for the holidays. Or despair, who knows, your mileage may vary. Each day she posts a new video to the thread s… | Continue reading
TT2020 is “an advanced, open source, hyperrealistic, multilingual typewriter font for a new decade!” As there already are so many, why another? Creator Fredrick Brennan (previously) poi… | Continue reading
Since last June, I’ve been podcasting a weekly reading from Bruce Sterling’s 1992 classic journalistic history of the founding of the online civil liberties movement, The Hacker Crackdo… | Continue reading
This is the creation of avant-garde fashion designer Arnold Putra, claimed to be made with an ethically-sourced human child spine and alligator tongue leather. Unfortunately, it’s been memory… | Continue reading
In 1981, Harvard law professor Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, published a thought experiment in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: what if the codes to launch nuclear wa… | Continue reading
Even if we win the right to own and control our computers, a dilemma remains: what rights do owners owe users? | Continue reading
When you search for “Palantir” on Google, the search engine prompts with a few people related search options. The Top 2 being: “What does Palantir do?” and “Why is Pal… | Continue reading
The verification requirements on the neighborhood app Nextdoor effectively make the app an unwelcome place for homeless people. | Continue reading
Just like the Twitter experiment, and to nobody’s surprise — a Facebook account that copies and re-posts President Donald Trump’s posts word-for-word is immediately flagged for in… | Continue reading
Just like the Twitter experiment, and to nobody’s surprise — a Facebook account that copies and re-posts President Donald Trump’s posts word-for-word is immediately flagged for in… | Continue reading
Okay, so what’s the mystery filling? | Continue reading
Every day, people from all over New York travel to the ATM at the East 22nd Street branch of KeyBank in Manhattan and wait more than two hours for their chance at the machine. Why? One reason is to… | Continue reading
There have been modern designs for portable Commodore 64s, and the official portable Commodore 64 you perhaps didn’t even know about, but none of them are as handsome as Cem Tezcan’s.Th… | Continue reading
iRaspian is a Linux OS for the Raspberry Pi that looks a lot like the Mac OS X operating system. It also comes with Mac OS 9.2 and Windows 95 emulators. | Continue reading
• Facebook is one of the big-tech entities behind American Edge, a new lobbying group in DC to fight antitrust regulators and push back against lawmakers trying to rein in Big Tech. “Facebook is wo… | Continue reading
As noted in Cory’s review, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora makes an undeniable case for ecological stewardship through a rigorous, gripping technological speculation about climate science… | Continue reading
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora is the best book I read in 2015, and by “best” I mean, “most poetic” and “most thought provoking” and “most scientific,… | Continue reading
Alfred Twu is maintaining a public-domain map of the various efforts underway between states to coordinate their pandemic response. It’s a detailed at-a-glance guide to who is doing what with… | Continue reading
In Rob Walker’s fantastic newsletter, The Art of Noticing, he recommends an activity called “Narrate A Piece of Quotidian Footage” which is from his book: Basically, find or make … | Continue reading
This footage appears to be a telescopic shot of the moon in daylight. The camera zooms in on the sharply-lit crescent horizon. This reveals several objects apparently flying close to its surface, c… | Continue reading
Mastermind, a codebreaking game invented by an Israeli telephone technician in 1970, is a tabletop game for two people. You probably already know how to play it, since tens of millions have been so… | Continue reading
“Russia has sent intelligence agents to Ireland to map the precise location of the fibre-optic, ocean-bed cables that connect Europe to America,” Ireland’s security agency suspects, according… | Continue reading
Supposedly driven by the virus crisis, On-nomi (オン飲み, “Drinking on[line]”) is the practice of getting together with friends on the internet and having a drink together. It’s the t… | Continue reading
The number of people around the world who are infected with the new coronavirus is close to 100,000 as of Friday, according to global health officials. In the United States, the number of confirmed… | Continue reading
When a plane is in trouble, the pilots dump all its its fuel before making an emergency landing. This is controversial; though fuel usually dissipates before reaching ground, it’s a dangerous… | Continue reading
The great Katherine Johnson, one of the legendary African-American mathematicians who were essential to the Apollo 11 moon landing, has died at age 101. You’ll recall that Johnson, who worked… | Continue reading
Bertolt Meyer wears a myoelectric prosthetic arm and hand controlled by electrodes attached to his residual limb that pick up impulses generated when he consciously contracts that muscle. Those imp… | Continue reading
The fine folks at Boston Dynamics, busy building our future robotic overlords, have loaned Adam Savage a Spot robot for the Tested team to play with. For his first project, Adam built a gorgeous st… | Continue reading
Facebook is designed to make you anxious, depressed and dissatisfied, three states of mind that make you more vulnerable to advertising and other forms of behavioral manipulation. Small wonder, the… | Continue reading
For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. That company was secretly run by the … | Continue reading
A fellow identified as Alec in this Verge story bought a Tesla at an auction, which was advertised as having “Enhanced Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving Mode.” Soon after Alec started driving the c… | Continue reading
Last spring, a Baltimore underwent a grinding, long-term government shutdown after the city’s systems were hijacked by ransomware. This was exacerbated by massive administrative incompetence:… | Continue reading
[My EFF colleague Bill Budington has a fantastic report on all the ways that Ring surveils its own customers. Caveat emptor, indeed. -Cory] Ring isn’t just a product that allows users to surv… | Continue reading
Ten years ago, Apple released the Ipad. I was in a hotel room in Seattle, jetlagged and awake at 4AM while my wife and daughter slept. | Continue reading
From BBC Earth’s “Spy in the Wild” series. Take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty robot! | Continue reading