Holmes from Fight for the Future writes, "Fight for the Future, notable for helping beat SOPA & PIPA and win net neutrality rules in the US, is now offering seed funding for new creative, online/offline activism teams (what we're calling 'A-'eams"). — Read the rest
"Peace through strength," Donald Trump said to reporters today in a rambling, aggressive, monologue news conference that lasted 77 minutes. Trump rattled on in circular patterns about plans to "build and rebuild" the "great" military and law enforcement. He dodged questions on Flynn, Obamacare, leaked reports of turmoil within the administration, and expressed outrage at being questioned repeatedly about "this whole Russia scam that you guys are building so that you don't talk about the real subject which is illegal leaks." — Read the rest
This is so much bigger than Watergate. America has not seen a political crisis of this magnitude for generations. The other shoe drops on #Flynngate tonight. Trump, Manafort, and Flynn's activities "raise a red flag." The U.S. government is in "unbelievable turmoil." — Read the rest
He's out. Trump national security adviser Michael T. Flynn resigned Monday night after revelations he misled VP Mike Pence and other senior White House officials about his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the United States. — Read the rest
When Donald Trump killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a "trade deal" that had been negotiated by representatives of multinational corporations and government bureaucrats in utmost secrecy in order to give corporations the power to decide which labor, environmental and safety laws they'd obey, I started to hear from "progressives" who had suddenly discovered the deal, and decided that if Trump was against it, they should be for it.
Glenn Greenwald frames what I've been trying to articulate: as neoliberalism and its handmaiden, corruption, have swept the globe, making the rich richer, the poor poorer, and everyone in the middle more precarious; as elites demonized and dismissed the left-behinds who said something was wrong; as the social instability of inequality has been countered with increasingly invasive domestic "war on terror" policing, millions of people are ready to revolt, and will support anyone who promises no more business as usual.
A number of climate change and indigenous land rights activists were arrested today following an attempt to shut off five major oil pipelines from Canada. — Read the rest
DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the establishment candidate's establishment candidate: she co-sponsored SOPA, blocked reform of loan-sharking payday lenders, voted against marijuana law reform, called for the prosecution of SOPA, and chaired Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign. She's served six terms in office and never had to face a primary challenger, until now.
It only took a few hours for the latest Trump inconsistency to emerge: saying in one interview that trans people should be able to use whichever bathrooms they like, he said in another that state governments should decide, backing discriminatory laws passed recently in North Carolina and Mississippi. — Read the rest
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It's been 21 years since the Republican Congress zeroed out the $20M budget of the Office of Technology Assessment, a casualty of Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" that deprived Congress of its principal source of technological expertise.
Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "Hey Internet! Ever since SOPA we've all known that copyright laws have a huge impact on the Internet, free speech, innovation, creativity."
Amos Dudley, a broke undergrad, casted a mold of his teeth using "cheap alginate powder, Permastone, and a 3d printed impression tray," then 3D printed and vacuformed a series of alingment trays for a fraction of what it would have cost to get name-brand invisaligns.
Hello and welcome to newest addition to the Boing Boing podcast family! Flash Forward is a podcast produced and hosted by me, Rose Eveleth. Every week we really overthink what the future has in store for us. Every episode we tackle one possible (or, not so possible) future scenario — everything from a sudden ice age, to the end of antibiotic effectiveness, to a world in which contact sports are banned due to head injury — and try to work out how that future would really go down. — Read the rest
Facebook is desperate to ensure that the Internet never takes hold in developing nations — they want a walled garden that they get to own and operate.
Ali Kashani, a data-scientist, has run the numbers on Canada's electoral constituencies (called "ridings") and concluded that if the candidates from the NDP and Liberal parties in sixteen of those ridings agreed to one or the other withdrawing, the Conservative Party could not form the next government.
The movie studios continue to demand Lord High Internet Executioner status because "piracy is destroying the film industry," even as box office records are smashed anew: Straight Outta Compton put its studio over the $2B mark in record time.
Abel Gonzales Jr was raised by Tex-Mex restaurateurs, and began his career as God of the deep fryer out of necessity, when he was desperate to come up with a dish for the Texas State Fair's Big Tex Choice Award, and all he had was a fryer.
"It doesn't matter if I know the person: I've walked right past my husband, my own mother, my daughter, my son, without being able to recognize them." — 47-year-old consultant, writer, and part-time EMT, with developmental prosopagnosia. Alexa Tsoulis-Reay interviewed her for Science of Us. — Read the rest
It's been a quarter-century since the Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, and Mitch Kapor, and we're celebrating!
With the sunsetting of Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the passage of the USA Freedom Act, Congress has, for the first time since the 1970s, put limits on the surveillance powers of America's spooks.
