Neoclassical economics was built on the straw-man of "homo economicus," an inherently selfish utility-maximizing actor, and since the mid-1970s, we've been building systems and institutions that take this kind of… Read the rest of the article: The retreat of "scientific selfishness," a literature review
Jen "Klingon Pop Warrior" Usellis records covers of pop songs, translated into Klingon, the apex of which is surely her rendition of "Let it Go" ("yIbuSQo'") from Frozen. (via Borderlands)
Share (previously) is an annual festival held in Turin and Belgrade and curated by Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic; the 2020 Share Festival call for entries just went live, along… Read the rest of the article: Call for entries: Share Festival 2020, themed "RIOTS Here we are"
DMARC is an anti-email-spoofing tool that mail-server administrators can enable; it's designed to reject emails with forged return addresses.
The Lixada LED Handheld Flashlight is a $9 stocking-stuffer ($29 for 4): a six-LED/36 lumen flashlight that clips directly over the terminals of a 9V battery, forming an easy flashlight… Read the rest of the article: Sweet stocking-stuffer: an LED flashlight that clips onto a 9V battery
Well this is pretty great! Radicalized, my book of four novellas, is one of the CBC's picks for best Canadian fiction of 2019. It's in pretty outstanding company, too, including… Read the rest of the article: Radicalized is one of the CBC's best books of 2019!
The annual Germeval natural language processing event solicits German-language "shared tasks"; one of this year's proposed tasks from the University of Hamburg is Prediction of Intellectual Ability and Personality Traits… Read the rest of the article: German researchers with ties to for-profit "neuromarketing" company want to use AI to guess peoples' "intelligence" from their writing
Greennet (previously) is the oldest ISP in the UK, tracing its origins back to Fidonet, where it was a hub for radical progressive political movements, which has attracted retaliations (in… Read the rest of the article: UK's oldest ISP blames DoS attack on attempt to suppress human rights report about West Papua (read it now!)
McKinsey made more than $20m helping ICE design its gulags, advising them to skimp on medical care, food and supervision in a cost-savings measure. But if Uncle Sugar really wants… Read the rest of the article: McKinsey bills the US government $3m a year for anodyne advice from 23-year-old college grads
I grew up on RPGs, not tabletop strategy games, but the one exception was Car Wars, a dystopian science fiction game where you kit out vehicles with weapons and then… Read the rest of the article: Kickstarting a new edition of Steve Jackson Games's Car Wars
In 2006, Aaron Patzer founded Mint. Patzer had grown up in the city of Evansville, Indiana—a place he described as "small, without much economic opportunity"—but had created a successful business… Read the rest of the article: Mint: late-stage adversarial interoperability demonstrates what we had (and what we lost)
Tron: Evolution is a Disney video-game that comes with the notorious Securom DRM (previously). Thanks to unspecified DRM issues, anyone who bought the game but didn't activate it can no… Read the rest of the article: Owners of Tron: Evolution game can't play it because of DRM fuckery
"Activation Lock" is a tool that uses Apple's trusted computing hardware to render systems inoperable if you don't have a login/password; nominally, this is used for theft-deterrence, but when Apple… Read the rest of the article: Apple's extension of "Activation Locks" to laptops will turn refurbishable electronics into e-waste
Yesterday Bytedance, the company that acquired the tween-centric app Musica.ly and relaunched it as Tiktok, was been sued by a parents' group for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act… Read the rest of the article: Tiktok took less than a day to settle parents' lawsuit over spying on their kids
Last September, Jessica Lundquist passed through a body-scanner at Burbank airport and was told by a TSA screener that they wanted to conduct a "groin search" on her.
The far-right Duque administration in Colombia is only fifteen months old, but its polarizing policies have brought the country to its knees, with a third general strike in just two… Read the rest of the article: Colombians take to the streets in the third general strike in two weeks
Pam Cowburn from Article 19 writes, "Our new report shows that digital freedom of expression – defined as our ability to speak freely online – is at a ten year… Read the rest of the article: Online freedom of expression hits a ten-year low
America's telcoms sector is hugely concentrated and corrupt, and systematically underinvests in maintenance and infrastructure even as it gouges customers, which it can get away with thanks to its monopoly… Read the rest of the article: FCC Chairman Pai's former employer, Verizon, lied about coverage, and then Pai tried to bury the news
DC Fontana was a pioneering writer and editor for Star Trek who worked on shows like Babylon Five, the Six Million Dollar Man, He Man, and Buck Rogers, one of… Read the rest of the article: RIP, science fiction pioneer Dorothy "DC" Fontana
One of my favorite podcasts is Gravy, from the Southern Foodways Alliance, where highlight hidden and fascinating changes and progress in southern food — from disappearing "community canneries" to Mahalia… Read the rest of the article: The south's latest culinary trend: inadequate, rotting prison food, supplemented by cattle feed
