Franklin Heath, a UK security consultancy, offers plans for printing and assembling your own papercraft Enigma machine, approximately like the ones that Alan Turing and the Polish cryptographers and co… Read the rest of the article: HOWTO make a papercraft Enigma machine

James from the New America Foundation sez, "I wanted to share this blog post on why civil society voice is essential in Internet governance and some efforts shift control to… Read the rest of the article: Internet governance shifting from civil society to government, and getting less free

The Goodness lavishly photo-documents a Minecraft-themed wedding: Matt and Asia are simply the most perfect couple ever. They met through their church (Matt said he fell for her watching her… Read the rest of the article: Minecraft-themed wedding

I liked Chris Sumers's "Bottle Cap Blues," a well-edited and nicely shot comic short featuring all the different (and often dangerous) ways by which one might open a stubbourn beer… Read the rest of the article: Bottle-Cap Blues: HOWTO open a beer with pretty much anything

Florida governor Rick Scott has ordered a high-velocity purge of the state's voter-rolls, using secret criteria to target 180,000 Floridians and requiring them to prove their citizenship in 30 days… Read the rest of the article: Florida voter-suppression campaign means WWII vet has to prove he is American or lose his vote

In the New York Times, Lizette Alvarez reports on a "tsumani of fraud" in the form of tax-refund identity theft. Using only a very little information, crooks file tax returns… Read the rest of the article: Tax-refund fraud: filing someone else's return to rip them off

Russian photographer Andrey Pavlov builds miniature fantasy settings, designed to coax the ants he sets loose upon them to follow certain paths, bringing the scenes to life. Антрей (Thanks, Derryl!)

Michael Geist has more detail on the fortunes of ACTA, the secretive copyright treaty that seems to be crash-landing in Europe, about which Rob posted earlier: Earlier today, three European… Read the rest of the article: ACTA crash-landing in the EU

Dug North sez, "The upcoming auction at Skinner features a macabre coin-operated mortuary scene automaton. When a coin is inserted, the doors open revealing four morticians and four poor souls… Read the rest of the article: Macabre coin-op automaton depicts a mortuary scene

Arrêtez-moi quelqu'un! ("Someone stop me!") is a site where Quebeckers and their supporters around the world can post photos of themselves holding signs in which they state their intention to… Read the rest of the article: Arrêtez-moi quelqu'un! Vowing to violate Quebec's anti-protest law

The caption writer on the Globe and Mail's "Celebrity Photos of the Week" department has some trenchant political fun with the feature. Opening with a picture of the mass demonstrations… Read the rest of the article: Globe and Mail turns celebrity photos slideshow into commentary on Quebec protests

The judge presiding over the Google/Oracle suit has ruled that Google didn't infringe copyright by using the Java APIs, though he didn't rule on whether APIs themselves can be copyrighted.

3bute's comic has adapted Chris Kirkley's blog post about an MP3 street-market in Nouakchott, Mauritania. It's a fascinating look at the intersection of traditional developing-world counterfeit/bootleg markets and the digital… Read the rest of the article: African bootleg MP3 street-market

A quiet announcement from the Fedora Linux community signals a titanic shift in the way that the computer market will work from now on, and a major threat to free/open… Read the rest of the article: Lockdown: free/open OS maker pays Microsoft ransom for the right to boot on users' computers

Zak from Fight for the Future/Privacy is Awesome sez,: It's only days before the Senate votes on its version of CISPA, and the SECURE IT Act. The bill would open… Read the rest of the article: CISPA—time to kill this sucker

In the Vintage Ads group, Man Writing Slash has posted a set of three Otis Elevator ads that were themed to tie in with the 1964 New York World's Fair.… Read the rest of the article: Otis Elevator's ads for the 1964 NYC World's Fair

On Something Awful, Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka's seven-year-old daughter Lauren has a guide to Minecraft for budding players and pros alike: A Seven-Year Old's Guide to Minecraft (Mindcraft 3?)

The Clarion Foundation has announced its annual write-a-thon, which is a sort of "home-game" edition of the famous Clarion science fiction and fantasy writing workshop, a boot-camp for budding writers… Read the rest of the article: Clarion Write-a-Thon: the home-game edition of the Clarion writing workshop

Henry sez, "Jacobin editor and In These Times correspondent Bhaskar Sunkara got a going over from Canadian border cops who accused him of being 'political' for knowing about health insurance,… Read the rest of the article: Canadian border guards demand inbound journalist's mobile phone contacts, prohibit writing while in-country

Click's latest watches are the "Wall Switches." As the name implies, they look like wide, flat, blank wall-switches, but have a hidden illuminated time-display that lights up when the switch… Read the rest of the article: Click watches look like light-switches