James Losey from the New America Foundation sez, "I noticed a pattern of people getting arrested, detained, or sentenced following Internet Freedom conferences. The timing is coincidental, but its a… Read the rest of the article: Internet freedom activists arrested/detained after Internet freedom conferences

Caleb sez, "My kids really have to scream from the back of my VW bus for me to hear them while we're flying down the highway. With this little hack,… Read the rest of the article: Hacking a vintage phone into an old VW minibus to use as a kids/driver intercom

Michael Geist sez, The Canadian intellectual property's lead lobby group, the Canadian IP Council (which represent the music, movie, software and pharma industries) released a new policy document yesterday that… Read the rest of the article: Farcical wishlist from Canada's copyright/pharma lobby: warrantless search, Canadian SOPA, jail time for downloaders, public subsidy of copyright enforcement

In the event that you were wondering about the motives of the Dutch artist Bart Jansen, who attained notoriety by taxiderming his dead cat and retrofitting its corpse to serve… Read the rest of the article: Catcopter artist explains all

Share or Die is a new anthology from Shareable.net (whose mandate is to promote sharing in all its guises), written by 20-somethings struggling through austerity and econopocalypse, who find in… Read the rest of the article: Get a free copy of "Share or Die" – strategies for a shared, post-austerity world

This 1945 Royal Typewriter ad provides a glimpse into the horror of messing about with mechanical typewriters. Life, May 28, 1945

Bill C30, the sweeping Canadian warrantless Internet surveillance bill, is back from the dead. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews (who declared that opposition to his bill was tantamount to support… Read the rest of the article: Canada's warrantless surveillance bill is back, and bigger than ever, with surveillance powers for US gov't, too

Our Avram takes to Making Light to tell the remarkable story of a model who found herself sitting next to a lecherous married man on an airplane, and who crowdsourced… Read the rest of the article: Model crowdsources name-and-shame for lecherous airline seatmate

An anonymous reader sent me Ray Bradbury's 1977 concept script for Spaceship Earth at Epcot Center. It's a beautiful read, and led me to vivid recollections of the original script… Read the rest of the article: Ray Bradbury's original concept script for Epcot's Spaceship Earth

Neil Gaiman's remembrance of Ray Bradbury is very sweet and paints a picture of one of the field's great mensches: Last week, at dinner, a friend told me that when… Read the rest of the article: Neil Gaiman remembers Ray Bradbury

Update: [5 minutes later] OK, wait a second. It's a hoax. Wainwright and Shore, the "PR Agency" that sent out this email, has only had a domain for a month.… Read the rest of the article: Shellfail hoaxers send hoax legal threat. I fall for it.

Back in late March, I linked to YouTube's announcement that they were receiving an hour of video every second — 60 hours' worth of video per minute. Just 10 weeks… Read the rest of the article: YouTube video uploads hit 3 days/minute

In Russia, where there have been many outbreaks of protest since Vladimir Putin and his cronies stole won another election, the fine for protesting without a permit has been increased… Read the rest of the article: Russian unlicensed protest fines increased 15,000 percent

This 2010 video demonstrates the wonderful and intriguing behavior exhibited by water when it is dripped on paper that is coated with "superhydrophobic" aerogel powder. The water forms tiny marbles… Read the rest of the article: Water droplets + aerogel powder = superhydrophobic fun

As you've no doubt heard, a large tranche of hashed LinkedIn passwords has been leaked onto the net. There's no known way to turn the hash of a password back… Read the rest of the article: Preliminary analysis of LinkedIn user passwords

Daniel Wilson's latest novel is Amped, a post-apocalyptic high-tech apocalypse cast in the same mold as his spectacular debut novel, Robopocalypse. Wilson is a roboticist by trade, and he combines… Read the rest of the article: Amped: Daniel Wilson's followup to Robopocalypse is a wild ride through the Singularity's civil war

Juggling happy mutant Mat Ricardo is putting on another one of his glorious east London variety shows! He writes, Mat Ricardo's London Varieties is back – and we only have… Read the rest of the article: East London variety show returns Jun 14

FoxxFur at Passport to Dreams Old and New has created a PDF template for printing out your own MAPO stickers. MAPO (MAry POppins) is the Disney division responsible for fabricating… Read the rest of the article: Print your own MAPO stickers, declare your goods to be of bespoke Disney manufacture

From 2009, an unsourced, but delightful re-creation of MST3K's Crow T Robot and Tom Servo, executed in Lego. LEGO Crow and Tom Servo. (via Wil Wheaton) Update: Christopher Doyle is… Read the rest of the article: MST3K robots in Lego

I subscribe to Medgadget's RSS feed because it's a universe of gadgets I would never see otherwise, and these gadgets have names and functions that alternately mystify and send shivers… Read the rest of the article: This is what a colon-stapler looks like