AT&T, which has successfully lobbied state governments and the FCC to ban any broadband competition in the markets where it operates, says that its forced arbitration "agreements" aren't really forced,… Read the rest of the article: AT&T: it's not "forced arbitration" because no one forced you to have broadband
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Cory Doctorow Florida Governor Rick Scott [R] has signed CS/CS/HB 989: Instructional Materials, sponsored by Rep Byron Donalds [R-Naples, @ByronDonalds, (239) 417-6270], and that means that anyone in Florida, regardless of whether… Read the rest of the article: Now any Floridian can ask to have public schools' science and literary curriculum censored
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Cory Doctorow Technology Will Save Us (previously) have fully funded their Dough Universe Kickstarter, maker kits for kids that combine conductive play-doh ("electro-dough") with simple components like motors and switches with apps… Read the rest of the article: Kickstarting maker-kits for kids based on conductive play-doh
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Cory Doctorow …But California keeps green-lighting more natural gas plants, thanks to hydrocarbon industry pressure on state regulators, who operate at cross-purposes to the legislature and its targets for renewables.
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Cory Doctorow British geneticist Adam Rutherford is one of the country's great science communicators, an alumnus of Nature whose work we've celebrated here for many years; with his second book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Rutherford reveals how the century's astounding advances in genetic science reveal just how little we understand about our genes — and how our ideas about race and heredity are antiquated superstitions that reflect our biases more than our DNA. (See the bottom of this post for an important update about the upcoming US edition!)
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Cory Doctorow The Monster Scouts are a wonderful thing: monster-obsessed makers who have created a collaborative, detailed, LARP-ish world in which monsters are real and an imaginary scouting organization called the Crow… Read the rest of the article: Monster Scouts: go camping with an imaginary cryptid scout troop from the 1910s!
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Cory Doctorow In 1984, the Stasi — East Germany's notorious secret police — searched the flat of an auditor to determine if he'd leaked files that put the country in a bad… Read the rest of the article: How to covertly toss an apartment, Stasi style
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Cory Doctorow The US Department of Defense's 1033 program sends "surplus" military equipment to US police forces ("surplus" in quotes because military contractors lobby for the US military to buy more weapons… Read the rest of the article: Quantifying the additional killings commited by cops when they get military weapons
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Cory Doctorow The Supreme Court of Canada just handed down a controversial ruling in which it ordered Google to block links to a page that was deemed illegal in Canada for every… Read the rest of the article: Canadian entertainment industry begs Chinese courts to censor its movies
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Cory Doctorow Kevan Davis's Wikitext is an incredibly clever mashup of Wikipedia and Infocom-style text adventure games: starting with a random Wikipedia entry, it gives you the article summary, an 8-bit-ified version… Read the rest of the article: Wikipedia as a Zork-style text-adventure
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Cory Doctorow Brian K Vaughan and artists Marcos Martin and Muntsa Vicente started syndicating The Private Eye just before the first Snowden revelations hit, which was a fortuitous bit of timing for them, since their surreal science fictional tale was set in a future where the rupture of all internet security had provoked humanity into banning the internet altogether, replacing it with a world where cable news was so dominant that the police had been replaced by reporters.
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Cory Doctorow Molly Sauter (previously) describes in gorgeous, evocative terms how the algorithms in our life try to funnel us into acting the way we always have, or, failing that, like everyone… Read the rest of the article: Algorithms try to channel us into repeating our lives
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Cory Doctorow Data scientist Hillary Mason (previously) talks through her astoundingly useful collection of small shell scripts that automate all the choresome parts of her daily communications: processes that remind people when… Read the rest of the article: How to replace yourself with a very small shell script
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Cory Doctorow Heritage Auctions is selling off a super-rare original 1957 prospectus for the Haunted Mansion, prepared by Ken Anderson as a first approximation of what Disneyland's "spook house" might be.
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Cory Doctorow Update: Zillow has dropped all its absurd copyright claims after hearing from EFF and McMansion Hell is coming back! The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published its letter to Zillow, explaining… Read the rest of the article: EFF trounces Zillow, McMansion Hell will return from copyfraud purgatory
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Cory Doctorow I just checked in for my o-dark-hundred flight to Denver tomorrow morning for this weekend's Denver Comic-Con, where I'm appearing for several hours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, including panels… Read the rest of the article: I'll see you this weekend at Denver Comic-Con!
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Cory Doctorow Mail Me to the GOP is a new service that will ship your cremains to the GOP lawmaker of your choice after Trumpcare kills you.
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Cory Doctorow According to Kaspersky, the Petya ransomware that raced around the world this week wasn't ransomware at all, and there is no way to get back your files after it does… Read the rest of the article: That "ransomware" attack was really a cyberattack on Ukraine
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Cory Doctorow This month's US Copyright Office study on Section 1201 of the DMCA identified many problems with America's DRM laws, which ban bypassing DRM even when no copyright infringement takes place.
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Cory Doctorow The Park Playground Tumblr features Kito Fujio's gorgeous, dramatically lit photos of Japan's whimsical playground equipment: climbers, slides and other fun stuff styled to look like animals, abstract modernist forms,… Read the rest of the article: Gorgeous,dramatic photos of Japanese playground equipment by night