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Weird Al Yankovic finally received his engraved 2015 Grammy Award, so he took the opportunity to parody all those unboxing videos while he opened it. This is actually Weird Al’s fourth Grammy: he won one each in 1984, 1988, and 2004, too. -via Viral Viral Videos

Not known for its rigorous enforcement of intellectual property rules, Russia is beefing up its efforts to tackle "internet piracy."

A law, first introduced in 2013 to target pirated movies and shows, is now being extended to "cover sites that share links to pirated music, books and software," reports the BBC.

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This fantastically executed supercut illustrates the verse-verse-chorus formality of movie trailers (especially action movies), which all appear to be describing the same movie. (via Kottke)

KATSU demonstrates his Graffiti Drone on NYC's East Houston Street. (more…)

The USPTO granted a notorious patent troll a patent on allowing customers to change quantities after they place their initial order. Read the rest

April 29, 2015 - 7:00pm

Patent troll extraordinaire Nathan Myhrvold is a poor choice for a commencement speaker, writes Ara Shirinian for the Daily Bruin.

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My friend and colleague Pilot Viruet published a wonderful essay on Medium called “Black Exhaustion”. Read the rest

Twitter's stock dropped $8bn in a single day, all thanks to a tweet.

Investors were rattled by the early disclosure of unexpectedly low revenues, exposed before the close of trading by Selerity, a service that scours the web looking for investment information.

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Todrick Hall and Shoshana Bean prove ‘90s hip-hop and ‘90s Disney films pair perfectly together in this fabulous mash-up video.

The works of Mason Lindroth have a distinctive look and texture—clay-like blobs and gradients, cranked through a 1990s Macintosh computer screen. The play-doh colors, visual flecks and alien sounds of his latest work, Melter, will take you straight back to the days of Liquid Television on MTV. Read the rest

The FBI wants backdoors in all your crypto, and UK Prime Minister David Cameron made backdoors an election promise, but as Stanford lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer writes, there's no way to effectively backdoor modern platforms without abolishing the whole idea of computers as we know them, replacing them with an imaginary and totalitarian computing ecosystem that does not exist and probably never will. Read the rest

David Cameron tweeted it and the Telegraph published the letter on the front page, listing 5,000 businesses who endorsed the Conservative Party in the General Election, many of which weren't businesses, weren't supporting the Tories, were repeat entries, or were individual employees of businesses who were incorrectly presumed to speak for their employers. Read the rest

You can do a lot of things in Photoshop, but rarely do you use its tools to defeat flaming skulls in an alternate dimension. Read the rest

Most of us feel like we’re getting more done when we’re doing something, even if that action is counterproductive. This is called “action bias.” To get past it, take a moment to pause and consider your strategy before getting started.

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Legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki is the creative force behind fantastic animated films like My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Howl's Moving Castle. (more…)

Senators Mark Kirk [R-IL] and Kirsten Gillibrand [D-NY] announced a bill that increases the maximum jail time for "obtaining information from a protected computer without authorization" -- which covers anything you do that violates the BS Terms of Service we all break all day long. Read the rest

Rob James-Collier is the actor who plays Thomas Barrow on Downton Abbey. James-Collier plays an evil butler, but he's a nice guy. He's raising money for children with multiple sclerosis. To encourage donations, he and other actors from the show are making a fan film series that brings their show into the Star Wars universe.

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Skip to the 1:29 mark in the video to see beginning of the film. The actors who play John Bates, Anna Bates, and Charles Carson make appearances. They shot all of the scenes between takes while filming Downton Abbey and used only smartphones to record video.

This episode is free. James-Collier is charging money for future episodes. You can donate at his website, which is appropriately named Evil Butler.

-via The Mary Sue

Why would a CEO be so tone-deaf as to call a mass-firing a "remix?" Because the only audience that matters today are shareholders, not the public. Read the rest

Michael Geist writes, "Randy Bachman found himself embroiled in a public fight with Prime Minister Stephen Harper last year when Harper used his song 'Takin' Care of Business' as a theme song for a major speech. Bachman said he probably would not have granted permission to use the song, since 'I don't think he's taking care of business for the right people or the right reasons.'" Read the rest

♬ Nailed it ♬ (via Techdirt)

Messages identified as abusive will not appear on notification timelines, thanks to a new filtering system designed to prevent harassment from being seen by its targets. Read the rest

Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR] and Rep. Jared Polis [D-CO] have introduced legislation in the US Senate and House to fix one of the worst computer laws on the US statute books: section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forbids breaking digital locks, even for lawful purposes. Read the rest

Pirated copies of two O'Reilly books on hacking, Hacking: The Next Generation and Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld were hosted on Sony's internal servers. Read the rest

Neither the 1992 live action musical Newsies (starring a young Christian Bale!), nor the 1988 animated feature Oliver & Company Disney classics. Read the rest

Glen Chiacchieri's produced a heavily annotated version of Eyes on the Prize, the brilliant video documentary series on the history of the Civil Rights movement that was rescued from copyright oblivion by a civil disobedience campaign. Read the rest

April 14, 2015 - 3:30pm

Facebook's growing monopolistic power over news organizations' traffic + their censorship policies + their new plan to get news orgs to publish directly on the site all adds up to a major threat to press freedom. Read the rest

Revenge porn—sharing intimate photos of people without their permission—is now a criminal offense in the UK. The maximum sentence is 2 years inside.