Ron Amadeo's review of the much-heralded Cloud FX phone, a $35 smartphone for the "rest of the world," paints a gloomy picture of a poorly thought through first outing.

Created by a team from Pittsburgh's Techshop makerspace, the Origami uses a novel, fold-out arm that lets you laser-etch and -cut much larger designs than you could get into a… Read the rest of the article: Kickstarting The Origami, a new kind of portable laser-cutter

Mark Tilbrook distributed fliers at three of Sally Morgan's stage-shows, urging the audience to view the alleged psychic's performance through a sceptical lens.

Laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act put security researchers at risk of felony prosecution for telling you about bugs in the computers… Read the rest of the article: Petition: make it safe to report security flaws in computers

The History Channel's created a bizarre secret history of a war against Martian invaders that's an allegory for WWI. The accompanying video has a spooky resonance and plausibility that is… Read the rest of the article: Rare footage of the 1914 Martian conflict

Peter Beagle's beloved novel is in development as a touring musical with Josh Duhamel and Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas.

The latest version of Adobe's Digital Editions, a DRM system widely used for ebooks, gathers enormous amounts of sensitive personal information about its users' reading habits and transmits them, in… Read the rest of the article: Adobe ebook DRM secretly builds and transmits a dossier of your reading habits

Nathan "Saipancakes" Shields has made some zombie pancakes: "I make a lot of pancakes for kids, but these I made for myself."

Molly Crabapple writes, "With the exception of Vice News, ISIS has permitted no foreign journalists to document life under their rule in Raqqa. Instead, they rely on their own propaganda.… Read the rest of the article: Paintings of life in Raqqa, the de facto Isis capital

Ape Lad writes, "I've got a shirt on woot featuring unspeakable horrors, phobias, and fears, from Hell to Nosferatu. I also threw in a few less traditional phobias like expired… Read the rest of the article: Periodic table of unspeakable horrors tee

The Add Oil project lets anyone in the world write a message of support to Hong Kong's protesters, which is then beamed in 16' tall letters on the sides of… Read the rest of the article: Umbrella Revolution's projector guerrillas splash huge messages on public buildings

The data were extracted from the excellent Hong Kong Transparency Report as well as transparency reports from various online service providers' global transparency reports from 2010 onward– its shows a… Read the rest of the article: Hong Kong Transparency Database: tracking HK gov't requests to ISPs

Hawk, the 14th book in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, is a moving, funny and tantalizing end-game glimpse of the assassin, reluctant revolutionary and epic wisecracker. Cory Doctorow explains why he's been reading this generation-spanning series of Hungarian mythology, revolutionary politics, and gastronomy for more than 30 years.

If you send your holiday photos to Google's Autoawesome processor, it will snip out the best smiles and poses and combine them to make pictures of scenes that never actually… Read the rest of the article: How AIs are rewriting photographic history

They're from the creator of "Brogamats," a line of yoga stuff for dudes, and intended to inspire veterans and people who like the military to try out a little yoga.

A reminder that I'm heading out on tour with In Real Life, the graphic novel I co-created with the wonderful Jen Wang, starting at New York Comic Con this coming… Read the rest of the article: Cory coming to NYC, LA, SF, SEA, AUS, MSP, ORD!

Reading Daniel Pinkwater's novels as a kid changed my life for the better, and I've never looked back, so this beautifully written profile by Josh Nathan-Kazis was a pure delight… Read the rest of the article: Profile of Daniel Pinkwater, "Pynchon for kids"

Steven Johnson blends the history of science with keen social observation to tell the story of how our modern world came about—and where it's headed. Cory Doctorow reviews How We Got to Now, also a six-part PBS/BBC series, which ties together a lifetime of work

James Zark's portrait of Alan Moore as the Joker from the classic 1988/2008 Killing Joke graphic novel is nothing short of inspired.

Ken writes, "We're a small hardware company based out of Akron, OH in the US in the US that make tiny electronics and have a popular platform called the TinyDuino… Read the rest of the article: Kickstarting Tinyscreen: thumbsized color screen from the Tinyduino people