On Strange Horizons, Rachel Cordasco reviews the latest Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, the third such volume, and makes a compelling case for exploring the amazing world of Tamil… Read the rest of the article: Tamil pulp fiction is basically totally amazing
40% of Detroiters have no internet access. The Detroit Community Technology Project and similar projects across the city are skipping over the telcos altogether and wiring up their own mesh… Read the rest of the article: Poor Detroit neighborhoods, abandoned by telcos and the FCC, are rolling out homebrew, community mesh broadband
Trump's FCC is gutting the Lifeline service, which gives poor families a $9.25/month subsidy for fixed or mobile broadband; under the new rules, poor people will have to buy their… Read the rest of the article: 70% of poor people on broadband subsidy will lose their connections thanks to Trump's FCC
The Republican tax plan will exempt the 0.2% of Americans who pass on estates of $5.49 million (each) to their heirs, a tiny elite that includes most of the Trump… Read the rest of the article: The 0.2% of Americans exempted by the GOP estate-tax plan (including the Trump cabinet) have never paid tax on their millions and never will
The Trump administration will reverse the Obama-era prohibition on importing taxidermied elephant heads and tusks from endangered wild African elephants from Zimbabwe and Zambia.
In 1942, Hitler paid a secret visit to Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, Marshal of Finland and Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish Defence Forces in honor of Mannerheim's 75th birthday.
In this unsourced video that hit Reddit's front page this morning, a man who appears to be Chinese funnels a handful of wrigglers (minnows? eels? loaches?) into a bottle of… Read the rest of the article: Man chugs beer seasoned with live wrigglers, cigarette smoke and flaming hooch
The "replay sessions" captured by surveillance-oriented "analytics" companies like Fullstory allow their customers — "Walgreens, Zocdoc, Shopify, CareerBuilder, SeatGeek, Wix.com, Digital Ocean, DonorsChoose.org, and more" — to watch everything you… Read the rest of the article: Web analytics companies offer "replay sessions" that let corporations watch every click and keystroke for individual users
Gary Cohn is Donald Trump's top economic advisor; while on stage this week at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council meeting, he called for a show of hands from CEOs… Read the rest of the article: Trump's top economic advisor asks CEOs to raise hands if they're going to use tax cuts to invest, boggled by no one raising hands
My grandmother's longtime partner Rusty was a former weightlifter with the sunniest, most reslient disposition of anyone I've known, and the only time I ever saw him reduced to tears… Read the rest of the article: Go and get the new shingles vaccine: it works
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, London Business School organizational behavior scholars Niro Sivanathan and Hemant Kakkar used empirical methods to find the… Read the rest of the article: Study finds that people vote for strongman "dominance" leaders when they they feel out of control of their lives
A survey of 1,500 Zurich canton doctors reported in the Swiss Medical Weekly found that out of the respondents, 23% had prescribed homeopathic "remedies" but only 42% actually believe in… Read the rest of the article: Survey: 23 percent of Zurich doctors prescribe homeopathy, but many of them believe it to be a placebo
Security researchers from Rhino Security Labs have shown that it is trivial to disable the Amazon Cloud Cam that is a crucial component of the Amazon Key product — a… Read the rest of the article: Hackers can freeze the camera that lets you know whether your "Amazon Key" equipped door is locked and who is using it
In Deloitte's new 2017 Global Mobile Consumer Survey, the company notes that "connected home systems—a category that includes home security, thermostats, and lighting—continue to lag behind other connected devices such… Read the rest of the article: The Internet of Shit is so manifestly insecure that people are staying away from it in droves
In a pair of open letters to Letter to The Honorable Elaine C. Duke, Acting Secretary of Homeland, a coalition of more than 100 tech liberties groups and leading technology… Read the rest of the article: Coalition of 100+ tech groups and leaders warn the DHS that "extreme vetting" software will be a worse-than-useless, discriminatory nightmare
Dr Ben Maruthappu, a senior public health researcher from University College London is the lead author on a forthcoming peer-reviewed paper in the BMJ Open which attempts to quantify additional… Read the rest of the article: "Economic murder": Senior UK public health researchers say 120,000 people died under Tory austerity
What does it mean to be a Republican "values voter?" Well, for sure, it means hating abortion and coming up with grotesque, rapey, lethal, cruel, absurd, unconstitutional (very, very unconstitutional),… Read the rest of the article: Congress's spending proves the GOP believes life begins at conception and ends at birth
San Diego Etsy seller Cutting Boredom makes retrogame-inspired cutting boards shaped like old NES cartridges ("the grooves are able to serve as functional juice grooves"); they're made to order and… Read the rest of the article: Custom cutting boards shaped like vintage Nintendo cartridges
The Motherboard Guide To Not Getting Hacked is an excellent adjunct to existing guides (I like EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense and The Cryptoparty Handbook) to defending yourself against criminals, stalkers, cops,… Read the rest of the article: Motherboard's excellent, accessible guide to internet security
I remember the first time a blind friend let me listen in on her screen-reader's text-to-speech narration, a high-speed chipmunk squeal that she had trained herself to decode; I was… Read the rest of the article: Podfasters: people who listen to podcasts at speeds up to 300% of normal
