U.S. attorney’s office to seek 11-year prison sentence for Jones, 26, on Friday May 3.

Tom Scocca discovered that a blog post he'd written had been turned into a weird video in which the text of the post was superimposed "meme style" on a set of five rotating static graphics, set to music ("wordless vocals and a sort of jazzy guitar and beat"). Read the rest

[I've been in love with Negativland since their legendary copyright battle with U2 and they've been a part of Boing Boing since 2001; it's a pleasure beyond words to be able to debut More Data, their characteristically trenchant video about data privacy and surveillance; see below for notes from Negativland. -Cory] Read the rest

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada funded Screening Surveillance project: a trio of Creative Commons licensed short science fiction films about "everyday issues around big data and surveillance." The movies run about 10 minutes each, and come with classroom materials. Read the rest

Time 4 Machine is a Ukrainian design shop led by Denis Okhrimenko; their latest project is "The most beautiful construction set in the world", a set of thin steel parts that you bend together to make (yes) beautiful mechanical models: a business-card case, a tractor, a working clockwork timer, a vintage sportscar, a springpowered cabriolet, a sedan, a Hercules eight-motor aircraft and a dieselpunk steamliner engine. Read the rest

The epic battle inside YouTube over content moderation and recommendation algorithms is detailed brilliantly in a damning new report from Mark Bergen at Bloomberg News. Read the rest

Last week's NYC book launch for Radicalized took the form of a fantastic conversation with the journalist Julia Angwin; the Strand folks were kind enough to video it and they've posted it to Youtube. Julia is incredibly smart and a wonderful interviewer, and we had some great Q&A as well. Read the rest

Filmmaker Benjamin Lancaster spent four years secretly shooting a science fiction movie called "The Further Adventures of Walt's Frozen Head," working with actors Daniel Cooksley and Ron Schneider to make a movie about a WDW cast-member who discovers the (urban)-legendary frozen head of Walt Disney, kicking off a series of adventures around the park. The movie premieres online later today. This is (at least) the second time someone has secretly shot a movie at Walt Disney World. (Thanks, Hugh!) Read the rest

Months of student strikes have roiled the UK as pupils across the country have refused to go to class while demanding action on climate change, inspired by Swedish student Greta Thunberg's one-person strike at the Swedish Parliament. Read the rest

Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg are well known to readers of Boing Boing, as we had the honor of publishing Ed's epic comic history Hip Hop Family Tree and Jim's brilliant Street Angel. Now they've launched a YouTube channel, Cartoonist Kayfabe, which you should subscribe to right away.

Ed writes:

Jim Rugg and I created this channel as an avenue for us to add a little meaty and sincere comics talk out there on Youtube and it really seems to be catching on as each episode goes live. Lots of show-and-tell is peppered throughout the episodes too.

We've been doing a series of episodes using the 1990's speculator rag, Wizard Magazine, as a way to discuss the era that inspired us to become cartoonists in the first place.

...

More interviews are on the horizon as we get our skype recordings to work perfectly:

I enjoyed this deep-dive on Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo:

Cartoonist Kayfabe [YouTube] Read the rest

Frank Wu writes, "Today Brianna Wu, progressive Democrat and cybersecurity expert, is launching her 2020 bid for US Congress in MA-8! She has a brand new video, in which she introduces herself, and talks about being disowned by her family when she came out as queer. She also talks about the alt-right hate group Gamergate, founding her software development firm, and progressive policies she supports. Simultaneously, Brianna has re-designed her website, which outlines her platform, accepts donations, and allows supporters to volunteer. 'It’s time to be bold,' Brianna says." Read the rest

“YouTube is disabling all comments on videos featuring young children as it attempts to head off an organised ring of paedophiles who were using its site to trade clips of young girls in states of undress,” says the Guardian's Alex Hern. Read the rest

Goodwill Industries, purveyors of thrift-stores, are currently the second largest provider of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and on track to become the leader, through their GCF Global Online Portal, which provides free courses in English, Spanish and Portuguese with an emphasis on job skills: "reading, math and understanding money and personal finance to computer, email and Internet basics to digital skills and mastering widely-used tools such as Microsoft Office and QuickBooks," which then dovetail into a job-placement service the charity runs. (via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

Last October, Bloomberg published a blockbuster story claiming that some of the largest tech companies in the world, as well as sensitive US government and military systems, had been attacked through minute hardware implants that had been inserted at a subcontractor facility during the manufacture of servers from the world's leading server company, Supermicro. Read the rest

[TW: Suicide]

A griefer has been reportedly splicing video of himself giving explicit instructions for committing suicide into animated videos on Youtube Kids; he lets the video run for several minutes before breaking in to say "Kids, remember, cut this way for attention, and this way for results"; despite "hundreds of reports" of this in the comments for the videos, they stayed online for several months until members of the Pedimom community (run by pediatrician/mother Free N Hess) made a concerted effort to report the videos. Read the rest

"Until Google can protect our brand from offensive content of any kind, we are removing all advertising from YouTube," an AT&T spokesperson told CNBC.

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "It seems like every day we learn more about the creepy things big tech companies are doing with our personal data. But so much is still shrouded in secrecy. That's why we're launching a new campaign calling on employees of Silicon Valley companies to blow the whistle on unethical uses of technology. And poetically, we're crowdfunding and using Facebook's own microtargeting system to target video ads directly at employees of the biggest tech companies. We need to show people who work in tech that we'll have their back if they stand up for what's right. Check out the video and please share! Read the rest