In 2016, an Internet of Things worm called Mirai tore through the internet, building botnets of millions of badly designed CCTVs, PVRs, routers and other gadgets, sending unstoppable floods of… Read the rest of the article: A new IoT botnet called Reaper could be far more virulent than Mirai
In 2008 and 2012, Wisconsin ranked second in the USA for voter turnout; in 2016, following the enactment of a series of racist voter-suppression tactics, the voter turnout was the… Read the rest of the article: Detailed anatomy of Wisconsin's election-rigging, racist voter suppression
Such a Great Speech: Applaud Xi Jinping has been played 860 million times; players score points by button-mashing an "applause" button while watching outtakes from President Xi Jinping's 3.5 hour… Read the rest of the article: Viral Chinese mobile game requires players to "applaud" a speech by President Xi Jinping
Video slot machines pull a lot of tricks to make it hard to tell how fair the game is; one of them is to ring up "wins" that are actually… Read the rest of the article: New gamblers who see a short video about slot-machine psychology don't get tricked
Cat Whitney's thread of her favorite spooky plants includes some of the plant kingdom's most horrifying denizens: Aristolochia Salvadorensis…"looks like a flayed skull, and reminds some of Darth Vader"; Hydnellum… Read the rest of the article: Plants are monsters
Ever since I read Michael Pollan's advice to avoid any food whose packaging makes any nutritional claims, I've been a happy man — but never so much so as I… Read the rest of the article: Quaker Apples & Cinnamon has "35% less sugar" because they've cut the portion size by 35%, while the price remains 100%
Argentinian motion graphics designer Esteban Diacono produces the most amazing, surreal little animations for his social media, especially the weird, motion-deforming humaniform figures.
1960s/70s Italian industrial design was led by Olivetti, featuring products with "touches of joy that enliven everyday tasks" featuring bright color and playful forms, very different from the Braun look… Read the rest of the article: Apple brought back Braun design, but Google is bringing back Olivetti
A leaked recording of Facebook security chief Alex Stamos (who refused to help with an illegal NSA spying program when he was CSO for Yahoo) has him describing the company's… Read the rest of the article: Facebook's security is like a "college campus," but they face threats like a "defense contractor"
The Canadian Communications Security Establishment — the most secretive of Canada's spy agencies — has released the sourcecode for Assemblyline, a "Swiss Army Knife for malware analysis" that rolls up… Read the rest of the article: Canadian spy agency releases its top anti-malware tool as free software.
In the early 2010s, Quinn Norton (previously) was sexually assaulted by Robert Scoble (previously), a well-known technology exec and anti-privacy advocate while attending O'Reilly Media's FOO Camp, a private tech… Read the rest of the article: Quinn Norton on sexual assault, community response, and restorative justice
The Intelligence Community Inspector General office is the place where spies and spook contractors who discover wrongdoing are supposed to be able to confidentially report their suspicions and know that… Read the rest of the article: Trump's war on leakers has neutered the intelligence community's whistleblower program, which diverts leakers
Denuvo is billed as the video game industry's "best in class" DRM, charging games publishers a premium to prevent people from playing their games without paying for them. In years… Read the rest of the article: The video game industry's best-of-class DRM is routinely cracked in less than 24 hours
12-term Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen [R-NJ] raised $157k last quarter, while two of the Democrats who're challenging him in 2018, former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill and family advocate Tamara Harris both… Read the rest of the article: 16 Democratic Congressional hopefuls have outraised the incumbent Republicans they're challenging
Ernie Smith's Motherboard article on the early years of DRM gets into some fascinating stories about things like IBM's Cryptolope and Xerox PARC's Contentguard (which became a patent troll), Intertrust's… Read the rest of the article: A curiously incomplete history of the early years of DRM
Martin Kirkholt Melhus's workplace bans connecting his development computer to the internet, so he hacked together a modem using HTML5: by plugging over-the-ear headphones into his laptop's 3.5mm audio jack… Read the rest of the article: A working modem using HTML5 sound
CNet has started a new book-club podcast, and they honored me by picking my novel Walkaway as their second-ever title.
The American prison system is home to one of the greatest market-failures in the history of telephony (which is saying something): a monopolistic system in which sole-supplier, hedge-fund owned telcoms… Read the rest of the article: Trump's "free market" FCC loves monopolies, especially when they rip off prisoners' families
My latest Twitter follow is @jakelikesonions, whose bi-weekly cartoon of the same name has been going since 2015, and represents a very deep set of funny stuff to lose yourself… Read the rest of the article: Jake Likes Onions: damned funny webcomics
In High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities, a group of academic and industry neuroscientists survey a self-selected group of 3,715 MENSA members about their mental health… Read the rest of the article: Some thoughts on whether intelligence is linked to anxiety and depression
