When Vancouver tech retailer NCIX went bankrupt, it stopped paying its bills, including the bills for the storage where its servers were being kept; that led to the servers being… Read the rest of the article: Report: someone is already selling user data from defunct Canadian retailer's auctioned-off servers

In their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper From Revolving Doors to Regulatory Capture? Evidence from Patent Examiners (Sci-Hub Mirror), Business School profs Haris Tabakovic (Harvard) and Thomas Wollmann… Read the rest of the article: Research shows that patent examiners are more likely to grant patents to companies they later work for

John Hudgens writes, "My documentary feature BACKYARD BLOCKBUSTERS (which Boing Boing had run two prior articles on) is finally available, streaming on Amazon's Prime Now service. Free if you have… Read the rest of the article: Backyard Blockbusters: a documentary about the amazing genre of fanfilms

The Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy [ARPA-E] was set up by bipartisan action in 2007, funded by Obama in 2009; expanded by Congress in 2009; and survived attempts… Read the rest of the article: ARPA-E, a sustainable energy moonshot agency of the US government, is absolutely kicking ass

Hurricanes Irma and Maria left Puerto Rico in tatters, but it would be a mistake to blame the weather for Puerto Rico's suffering; Puerto Rico was put in harm's way… Read the rest of the article: Puerto Rico didn't suffer a "natural disaster": it was looted and starved long before the hurricanes

Buried in the new Apple Iphone and Apple TV privacy policy is an unannounced program that uses "information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone… Read the rest of the article: Apple's fine-print reveals a secret program to spy on Iphone users and generate "trust scores"

Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's Capernaum won this year's Cannes Jury Prize; it premiered in Lebanon this week and will be in North American cinemas starting December 14; It's a "neorealist… Read the rest of the article: Trailer for Capernaum, a "neorealist movie" about street kids, slum life, modern slavery and migration

Even in this era, dominated by vertically and horizontally dominant monopolists, few companies are as chronically dirty and corrupt as Ticketmaster (previously), whose parent company, Livenation, is the world's largest… Read the rest of the article: Ticketmaster stung by undercover journalists, who reveal that the company deliberately enables scalpers and rips off artists

Jesse writes, "Vancouver tech retailer NCIX was driven into the ground last year (much to the morbid fascination of local techies). Now their fetid corpse is in the news again,… Read the rest of the article: Defunct Vancouver tech retailer's servers sold off, containing credit cards and other customer details

As I wrote last week, the California Farm Bureau (which lobbies for the state's farmers) struck a deal to gut the state's Right to Repair legislation, a move that will… Read the rest of the article: California farm lobby's sellout to John Deere will cost its members their right to repair

In 2013, Deputy Luis Ortiz was the "school resource officer" at Etiwanda Intermediate in San Bernardino County, California, when he arrested a group of 12- and 13-year-old girls, cuffing them… Read the rest of the article: Middle school cop who arrested seventh graders "to prove a point" may yet face consequences

Since the US conquered Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American war, it has treated the island as a playground for the rich, with all kinds of sweetheart tax-deals and regulatory exemptions… Read the rest of the article: Puerto Rico is a tax-haven for rich mainlanders and is also too broke to survive hurricanes: are these facts possibly related, somehow?

Every year, the FCC checks in with the industry it nominally regulates to see whether broadband deployment is going well; if it determines that Americans are getting the internet they… Read the rest of the article: Carriers to FCC: Americans would totally be happy with throttled, capped wireless at home instead of home fiber

Myrmecophiles are parasitic beetles that use chemical cues to fool ants into bringing them into their nests and regurgitating food into their mouths, diverting the colony's bounty of semi-digested ant-chow… Read the rest of the article: Nature's greatest con-artists: the parasitic beetles that trick ants into barfing into their mouths

A procedural ruling by the Supreme Court this week will mean that the Federal Election Commission will be required to regulate "dark money" ads, forcing disclosure of the source of… Read the rest of the article: Supreme Court decision will rip away Dark Money's veil of secrecy

Last June, U of Ottawa law professor/biomedical scientist Amir Attaran floated the idea of invalidating US pharma patents as a way for Canada to retaliate against trade attacks by the… Read the rest of the article: As Canada-US trade-war draws nigh, so does the threat to nationalise US pharma patents

Last week's catastrophic EU vote to censor and surveil the whole internet to catch copyright infringers isn't a local affair; the same corporations who were willing to sacrifice the internet… Read the rest of the article: Europe's copyright catastrophe is a harbinger of bad times for Canadians

Avi Solomon writes, "Author Ted Chiang (previously) discusses the making of The Great Silence as well as other works addressing interspecies communication, including 'Story of Your Life,' the novella which… Read the rest of the article: Ted Chiang lecture on interspecies communications

Northeastern University assistant computer science prof Dave Choffnes built an app called Wehe that monitors network usage and throttling; it has users in 161 countries and has been used to… Read the rest of the article: Your wireless carrier is definitely throttling video, but not because of network congestion (Verizon's the worst)

Back in August, I gave the closing keynote at the second Decentralized Web Summit, entitled "Big Tech's problem is Big, not Tech; the Internet Archive released video right afterwards, but… Read the rest of the article: My closing Decentralized Web Summit keynote: "Big Tech's problem is Big, not Tech"