Eva Galperin is one of my colleagues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, running our Threat Lab project, where she has made it her personal mission to eradicate stalkerware: malicious software marketed to abusive spouses, overbearing parents, and creepy employers, which runs hidden on mobile devices and allows its owner to spy on everything his target is doing ("Full access to someone’s phone is essentially full access to someone’s mind" -Eva). Read the rest

Vonda N McIntyre, author of the Hugo/Nebula/Locus-winning 1979 novel Dreamsnake, founder of the Clarion West Workshop, and icon of science fiction, has died of pancreatic cancer. She was 70. Vonda and I never really met, but we were on BBSes together in the 1980s and I later taught the Clarion West workshop she founded, and she has always been a significant presence in the field. Read the rest

Zuzana Caputova has just been elected to the presidency of Slovakia with 58% of the vote; the political novice rose to prominence with her campaign against a toxic waste dump in her hometown of Pezinok, which earned her the nickname "Slovakia's Erin Brockovoch." Read the rest

On Tuesday, the Oklahoma House Judiciary Committee approved Senate Bill 614, which forces doctors to counsel patients seeking medical abortions with false statements claiming the procedure is reversible; doctors who refuse to lie to their patients would be guilty of a jailable felony. Read the rest

Some 1,600 people were secretly livestreamed while staying in South Korean motel rooms where cameras had been hidden by criminals who operated a 4,000-user service for voyeurs, where a $45/month upcharge bought subscribers the right to access replays and other extra services. Read the rest

Prince was self-conscious about his height -- 5'3" -- and wore high-heeled boots (either 4" or 3 1/3") whenever he went out in public, and moreover, he did not like to be seen wearing the same pair of boots at two different appearances on the same day. Read the rest

Security researcher Victor Gevers has discovered an insecure Chinese database of 1.8 million women, aged 15-39, along with phone numbers, GPS coordinates, photo URLs, ID card numbers, marital status, political affiliations, educational attainment, and whether the women are "BreedReady." 89% of the records are for women in Beijing. Another field, "HasVideo," may indicate whether they are under video surveillance, or whether a video of them is accessible. After Gevers tweeted redacted screenshots from the database, it was taken offline. (via Bleeping Computer) Read the rest

When volunteers for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America appeared before the New Hampshire state legislature, they were met by GOP lawmakers wearing prominent pearl necklaces as a symbol of casual, sexist dismissal of the women's experience with gun violence as "pearl clutching." Read the rest

Man-Eaters Volume 1 collects the first four issues of the Image comic by Chelsea Cain and Kate Niemczyk (and friends) and it's insanely great: the premise is that America's patriarchy has been given a huge boost by a mutant strait of toxoplasmosis that is benign for most carriers, but turns adolescent girls into unstoppable were-panthers that crave human flesh when they get their first periods. Read the rest

Sandy Allen on how Marie Kondo helped them shed feminine things.

I donated it all. I hung and folded the items that remained: flannel shirts, baggy jeans, t-shirts. I had kept a few dresses and heels and feminine winter coats, ones that had seemed really special when I’d bought them. I knew Marie Kondo wouldn’t have approved of my choice to keep them. Each day I passed them and they stared right back at me.

During the months that followed, I steadily shed feminine things. One day, all my makeup: gone. Another day, all my earrings: gone. (My ears had been pierced when I was two!) I tried to do as Marie Kondo said and thanked these items for what they’d given me. I guiltily threw them out, and then felt wonderful.

Riley's Farm is a staple of Los Angeles overnight school trips (my daughter visited last year with her elementary school); it's an apple farm with a pick-your-own apples sideline that branched out into civil war re-enactments, with some students staying overnight in tents. Read the rest

Senator Ron Wyden has publicly denounced both Apple and Google for hosting mobile apps that connect to Absher, a Saudi government service designed to allow Saudi men to track their spouses and employees' whereabouts at all times. Read the rest

Malawi's "barefoot engineers" are a group of eight local women who received solar engineering training in the Barefoot College in Rajasthan, India and returned home to install solar systems for poor and/or rural women. Read the rest

During the 1930s, the WPA sponsored horseback librarians -- all women -- to visit rural Americans, bringing them books; the librarians were only allowed to make deliveries in counties that had existing libraries, so schools and other institutions donated materials to establish libraries that would make their counties eligible. Read the rest

Author Carol Emshwiller has died at the age of 97, after a long and distinguished career in science fiction, fantasy and other genres. Read the rest

Science fiction scholar Lisa Yaszek's recent book The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, is a secret history of women in science fiction, reframing the story of exclusion ("women weren't welcome in early sf writing circles") as one of erasure ("women made vital contributions to early science fiction, and these were systematically expunged from the record when the first wave of historical sf anthologies were published, as part of a backlash against first-wave feminism"). Read the rest

Anti-abortion extremists are among the most violent domestic terrorists in America, having murdered and attempted to murder dozens of people using firearms, firebombs and traditional explosives. Read the rest