The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Carolina Rossini has a very good editorial explaining what's wrong with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secret trade treaty with punishing copyright provisions that's being negotiated by the USA, repeating the worst sins of ACTA and magnifying them (among other thing, TPP will make implementing the notorious SOPA into a trade obligation for the US). — Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Maira Sutton has a long, engrossing account of the popular protest at the Dallas session of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secretive treaty negotiation that includes a set of copyright rules that leave SOPA and ACTA in the dust. — Read the rest

US Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk was in Dallas to kick off a corporate power-event to drum up support for the foundering, secretive Transpacific Partnership, a secret treaty that builds on the work of ACTA to establishing punishing copyright laws that include mandatory surveillance and censorship. — Read the rest

On TechDirt, Glyn Moody covers the highlights of a new report by Carrie Ellen Sager of infojustice.org that compares the provisions in ACTA, the secretly negotiated copyright treaty currently up for adoption in Europe, the USA and other countries; and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a more extreme, more secretive version of ACTA being negotiated by various Pacific Rim countries. — Read the rest

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson takes a good look at the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the secret copyright treaty whose latest negotiation round just took place in Hollywood (see last night's post about the scandalous abuse of authority by the US Trade Rep in bullying the hotel to keep out civil society groups). — Read the rest

Blake Pfeil's abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast is an award-winning audio series that takes a stunningly immersive approach to the trend of urban exploration. Here's the blurb:

​abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast guides listeners through immersive audio fantasies, recreating host Blake Pfeil's experiences exploring abandoned spaces across the United States.

Now that Summer 2024 is almost upon us, you've just about run out of time to snatch up this gem from Balenciaga's Spring 2024 collection. It's a mere $925 and will make you look like you're fresh out of the….shower. Yes, you read that right, the shower. — Read the rest

Twitter recently imposed blue checkmarks, previously assigned only to people paying to use the site, on all users meeting a certain threshold of paid followers. And soon users assigned blue checkmarks will no longer be able to hide them.

The blue checkmark, originally a form of verification and implicit status, was turned into a paid feature after Elon Musk's takeover of the site. — Read the rest

Iain S. Forrest, 29, is an electric cellist and a doctor who was attacked last week while performing in a New York subway station. He stated, "At 5:50 pm on February 14th, while performing at 34th St Herald Square station, a woman wearing a mustard jacket, red scarf, and gloves assaulted me by smashing the back of my head with my metal water bottle. — Read the rest

A technology watchdog group says Twitter is violating U.S. sanctions by selling checkmark subscriptions to known terrorist leaders, including Hezbollah leaders and Houthi groups, reports The New York Times.

"We were surprised to find that X was providing premium services to a wide range of groups the U.S. — Read the rest

A Florida nurse who allegedly poisoned two cats and a pregnant dog faces three counts of felony animal cruelty and one of depositing poison in a public area. Polk County Sheriff's Office announced Thursday that they arrested Tamesha Knighten, 51, after the three pets were killed. — Read the rest

In 2020, David linked to a site that promised to automatically self-destruct if ever it went 24 hours without someone adding a message to its guestbook. The creator, FemmeAndroid, posted last week that the time had come [twitter.com].

"Well, the website is down. — Read the rest

HP wants you to print things through its cloud service, wherein you pay a subscription fee for ink and your usage is routed through its servers. To encourage you to do this, it covers the USB port on one model with a sticker with a No Smoking-style "No USB" logo on it–lest you simply plug in your printer and start printing things with it before you've endured the hard sell via network setup. — Read the rest

These tiny knitted frogs (and other creatures, like badgers and bumblebees) by India Rose Crawford are so cute, I can hardly stand it. Crawford also makes tiny clothes and accessories for her creations, and then creates perfect little videos showing the frogs getting dressed—they're called "Get Ready with Frog"—and going about their days.  — Read the rest

Andrew Wodzianski is a DC-area artist whose work often riffs off of nerdy pop cultural touchstones and ephemera. His pieces make references to comic books, 8-bit video games, monster movies, and tabletop gaming.

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, September 28, 1987, he created pieces of meme-styled art that draw inspiration from the Star Trek coloring books and ship blueprints of his youth. — Read the rest

To go on the shelf with all the others.

Bonus back issue set:

Heritage Auctions is selling a slew of space artifacts that once belonged to Michael Collins, the heroic astronaut who in July 1969 piloted the command module above the Moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin leapt around on the lunar surface. — Read the rest

Ted Cruz, the sniveling, sanctimonious gasbag who gets caught on a regular basis telling laughable lies to cover up his unctuous behavior, recently talked about the possibility of Texas seceding from the union. He said a breakaway Texas would take NASA, the military, and the oil with it. — Read the rest

Typogram's Coding Font has you find your favorite monospace typeface by picking winners, round-by-round, in a tournament-style matchup.

As software engineers, we spend a lot of time skimming, reading, making changes to code. The coding font that we spend 8 hours a day staring at has a lot to do with our productivity and comfort.

I've been using a reMarkable Tablet, for years now. It's great for taking notes at my day job. I waste no paper when I jot down meeting minutes, annotate stories and starting off new pieces of writing in long hand. I dig how easy it is to organize my notes on the tablet and that I can back them up to the cloud—including, recently, to Dropbox and Google Drive. — Read the rest