The latest Humble Bundle features the books of the most excellent Tachyon Press, with a who's who of my favorite SF writers and collections, from Ellen Klages and Jeff Vandermeer,… Read the rest of the article: Humble Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Bundle: more than 20 DRM-free ebooks, Vandermeer, Bruce Sterling, Peter Beagle, Joe Lansdale, Alistair Reynolds, Nancy Kress and more!
Epic Games makes the wildly successful multiplayer free-to-play game Fortnite, which is the locus of a pitched battle between players and publisher over game-mods, especially cheat-hacks that give unfair advantage… Read the rest of the article: Epic Games is suing a 14 year old for making a cheat tutorial and his brilliant mother is PISSED
A group of investors led by Softbank have put in a bid to buy $6B worth of Uber stock — at a valuation of $48B, 30% lower than the company's… Read the rest of the article: Major investors offer to buy a big stake in Uber — at a 30% discount
Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth is a 2015 paper written by University of Chicago and UC Berkeley economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, which purports to… Read the rest of the article: How an influential economics paper used imaginary environmental overregulation to spur low-density luxury housing
Wells Fargo didn't limit its fraud to robbing 2,000,000 ordinary depositors, struggling mortgage borrowers, 800,000 car loan borrowers, mom and pop businesses, and home owners — the bank's top foreign-exchange… Read the rest of the article: Wells Fargo execs sealed their bonuses by gouging the bank's business customers
The Casa Jasmina project (previously) is an automated smart house designed to be made of open source hardware, with the needs of the people who live there — not the… Read the rest of the article: Talking Casa Jasmina, a house of the future designed for people, not corporations, with Jasmina Tesanovic and Bruce Sterling
I was honoured to be invited to address the University of Waterloo on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Cheriton School of Computer Science; my father is a… Read the rest of the article: Hey, Kitchener-Waterloo, I'm headed your way next Monday!
Back in July, I blogged the Kickstarter campaign for Technology Will Save Us's Dough Universe kits: kits for 4-7 year olds that use conductive dough to make squishy circuits that… Read the rest of the article: Celebrate Xmas with your little makers with conductive play-doh kits from Technology Will Save Us
EFF's long, hard-fought campaign at the World Wide Web Consortium over its plan to standardize a universal DRM for the web was always a longshot, but we got farther than… Read the rest of the article: One of the net's most important freedom canaries died the day the W3C greenlit web-wide DRM; what can we learn from the fight?
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a rare gem in the US financial regulatory apparatus, a regulator that actually tackles fraud and criminality by monied, powerful financial institutions, exacts meaningful… Read the rest of the article: Trump appointed a loan-shark fixer as an assistant Attorney General, who then wrote a controversial memo justifying the neutering of the consumer finance watchdog
"Crisis Pregnancy Centers" are fake abortion clinics run by religious fanatics who use online fraud to get them to the top of the search results in order to lure women… Read the rest of the article: Religious fanatics go to the Supreme Court for the First Amendment right to trick women into bearing unwanted children
Back in 2014, Comcast was desperately trying to stop the FCC from bringing meaningful Net Neutrality regulation to the web, and they laid out a suite of promises about their… Read the rest of the article: Comcast spams social media with Net Neutrality promises, hopes you won't notice that they used to promise a LOT more
Australia is one of the world leaders in internet adoption and usage, and it's also been one of the worst offenders in bad internet policy, with a track record to… Read the rest of the article: Australia is a world leader in internet usage and bad internet policies, so Australians want better policies
When Context Labs teamed up with UK consumer group Which? to produce an outstanding report on the surveillance, privacy and security risks of kids' "connected toys," it undertook the reverse-engineering… Read the rest of the article: Reverse-engineering a connected Furby toy, revealing its disturbing security defects
Rightscorp (previously) is the extortion outfit that terrifies people into paying it money for unproven accusations of copyright violations, enlisting ISPs to cut off subscribers who won't cough up.
If Trump FCC chairman Ajit Pai had confined his attack on Net Neutrality to merely rolling back the 2015 Title II rules, he might have gotten away with it; but… Read the rest of the article: Arrogant overreach: Ajit Pai's plan to totally destroy net neutrality may doom him in court
In 1973, the US government helped the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet overthrow Salvador Allende, Chile's democratically elected socialist president, and then leading libertarians like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek flew… Read the rest of the article: A generation after American "libertarians" helped with mass disappearances, torture and murder of left-wing activists, Frente Amplio surge in Chilean elections
An investigation by the (generally terrible) Daily Mail claims that the Russell Group, which includes top UK universities like Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, the LSE, and 20 other universities, hired "wealth… Read the rest of the article: Investigators claim that Oxbridge and other top UK universities are operating a massive, illegal surveillance dragnet aimed at students/alumni and their friends and families
After losing their 19-year court battle with the US Department of Justice, tobacco giants Altria, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard and Philip Morris USA are now beginning to run their court-ordered "corrective… Read the rest of the article: For the next year, TV, newspapers, and the web will run massive ads from tobacco companies admitting that their products kill people, that they were engineered to be addictive, and that they covered this up
The Indiana Jones Melting Toht Candle is $33.39 from Firebox, and while the listing doesn't give dimensions, it certainly gets good reviews! (via Bonnie Burton)
