Binaryjesus

The Devil’s in the details, Hieronymus Bosch

An anonymous reader writes: The Maryland Court of Special Appeals on Wednesday upheld a historic decision by a state trial court that the warrantless use of cell-site simulators, or Stingrays, violates the Fourth Amendment. The trial had suppressed evidence obtained by the warrantless use of a Stingray -- the first time any court in the nation had done so. Last April, a Baltimore police detective testified that the department has used Stingrays 4,300 times since 2007, usually without notifying judges or defendants. Stingrays mimic cellphone towers, tricking nearby phones into connecting and revealing users' locations. Stingrays sweep up data on every phone nearby -- collecting information on dozens or potentially hundreds of people. The ruling has the potential to set a strong precedent about warrantless location tracking.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

itwbennett writes: You need look no further than the FREAK and Logjam attacks in 2015 and the DROWN attack announced just this week to get a sense of 'the dangers of deliberately weakening security protocols by introducing backdoors or other access mechanisms like those that law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community are calling for today,' writes Lucian Constantin. But this isn't a new problem. 'One approach [the government] used throughout the 1990s [to keep encryption under its control] was to enforce export controls on products that used encryption by limiting the key lengths, allowing the National Security Agency to easily decrypt foreign communications,' says Constantin. 'This gave birth to so-called 'export-grade' encryption algorithms that have been integrated into cryptographic libraries and have survived to this day.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fakescience:

“The History of Magic in North America” is a new series of four original stories about the Wizarding United States which will premiere tomorrow on Pottermore at 9:00 AM.

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Buying a Sodastream helped our family save big on soda water, reduce our plastic waste-stream, and resulted in us providing a steady revenue stream to a sleazy company that used to run a factory in the Occupied Territories whose business model relies on patent abuse in order to sell you compressed CO2 at a markup of several thousand percent.

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The pot smoking scene from “Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story” never stops being funny. 'Specially after smoking pot.

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Welcome to what may well be our future, America.

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Cheap Internet of Things devices like Foscam's home CCTVs are designed to covertly tunnel out of your home network, bypassing your firewall, so they can join a huge P2P network of 7 million other devices that is maintained and surveilled by their Chinese manufacturer. (more…)

Sure, Doctor Who might not be on TV an awful lot this year, but if you’re itching for a fix of new Doctor Who, Big Finish’s audio drama series is here to help. And thanks to them, now you can hear the triumphant return of the best Doctor/Companion duo of the modern era.

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You’ve seen the movies. James Bond’s 007 and Mission Impossible’s Ethan Hunt always have one of those super smart, OK, scary smart, tech guys who can seemingly run the world from their phone or laptop, and even blow things up at a moment’s notice without leaving a single trace. Well, now you’re that guy. For 89% off right now you can get a premium subscription to proXPN VPN.

So now you can surf the internet superhighway without a care in the world. First of all, your connection will be bananas fast so you won’t be waiting for sites to load or for data to come through. It’s all there at your fingertips the instant you need it. Next, your IP address is masked, even on public networks, so you’re completely anonymous. Your browsing is encrypted using PPTP or OpenVPN with a 512-bit tunnel and 2048-bit encryption key. It also unlocks geo-blocked content so you can check out whatever you want online, no matter where your travels take you around the world.

It’s incredibly easy to both setup and use and you’ll never worry again about connecting safely and staying secure. It’s 89% off and even includes VPNguard which automatically shuts down any program you choose if your proXPN connection drops. All of this comes with unlimited technical bandwidth, to boot. The technical support is world-class, should you have any concerns or questions at all. Check out the link below for more details.

Take 89% Off a Premium Subscription to proXPN VPN in the Boing Boing Store.

https://youtu.be/qsd7ogqfSHY

Do you need a phone that's difficult to track and trace? Brian Brushwood and Jason Murphy (host and producer of NatGeo's Hacking the System) show you how to get an $8 dumb phone and load it with minutes using cash.

Here’s an idea: let’s rip a 4.7-liter Maserati V8 out of a Maserati and stick it into a motorcycle. Wouldn’t that be excellent?

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The Morgan Motor Company, known for its vintage-looking wooden roadsters and 3-wheelers seeming like something straight out the First World War, has unveiled its all-electric EV3. The ultimate representation of the last century of motoring is finally here.

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New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtHOmforqxk

Cardinal George Pell presided over decades of horrific abuse of Australian children by his clergy; now the active, vigorous crime-boss says he's too weak to return to Australia from the Vatican to attend a commission on the crimes, meaning that he won't have to confront the survivors of the abuse he abetted. (more…)

As You Have Forsaken Jeb, So You Have Forsaken Me: My Curse Shall Lie Upon This Nation for Seven Times Seven Generations by Barbara Bush

A standard men's suit is designed to look best while standing. It gets a bit baggy while seated. That's a problem for people who are usually seated, specifically, in a wheelchair.

In 2004, a journalist who uses a wheelchair approached fashion designer Izzy Camilleri and asked her to produce fashionable clothing that fit a wearer well while using a wheelchair. Camilleri went on to found IZ Adaptive, a company that produces just that. It has a wide range of fashionable clothes for men and women.

For example, this suit jacket comes in two pieces. The user puts it on one at a time, then zips up the back. The arch cut in the back prevents bunching-up while in a chair.

-via Marginal Revolution

What if a car could be controlled from a computer halfway around the world? Computer security researcher and hacker Troy Hunt has managed to do just that, via a web browser and an Internet connection, with an unmodified Nissan Leaf in another country. While so far the control was limited to the HVAC system, it’s a revealing demonstration of what’s possible.

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Through a series of button inputs, a player has found previously undiscovered menus that lay dormant in the arcade versions of Mortal Kombat 1, 2 and 3. How did they last so long without being discovered?

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Matthew Garrett "bought some awful light bulbs so you don't have to." And you really, really shouldn't buy the iRainbow light bulb set: the controller box runs all sorts of insecure services, including an open WiFi hotspot that lets anyone into your home network. (more…)

If there's any truth to My Fair Lady then English tutors who taught people proper pronunciation liked to use clever poems as training tools, which would make the poem "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenite the ultimate tongue trainer:

Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer...

Miss C first posted about "The Chaos" back in 2010, a poem which was written in 1922 to demonstrate how ridiculously difficult proper English language pronunciation can be.

And now we have a video example to help guide us through the over 100 lines of pronunciatin' pain.

(YouTube Link)

Read "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenite in its entirety here

-Via The Poke

https://vimeo.com/148156899

Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles, an Iraqi/German artistic duo, covertly scanned a famous looted Egyptian treasure, the Bust of Queen Nefertiti, from its contested perch in Berlin's Neues Museum. (more…)

Today Sean MacDonald bared his mancrush on Ryan Reynolds ; the actor who plays Deadpool in, uh, Deadpool, and apparently loves motorcycles, which he talks about in this neat video. Reynolds has other fans and haters too, who mixed it up together in our comments section today.

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The Mercedes-Benz Vario Research Car was introduced at the 1995 Geneva Motor Show, with four different bodies that could be exchanged within 15 minutes, apparently by just three women.

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The post-antibiotic future sounds terrifying, but here’s one upside you didn’t imagine: swilling Viking crunk juice to stay alive. New research suggests that mead, the vitality drink of gods and berserkers alike, was a potent medicine in ancient times. And with science, we can make it even better.

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Bill Watterson has been notoriously reluctant to license his famous comic, Calvin and Hobbes. So when an artist began mashing up the comic and Frank Herbert’s Dune, the lawyers came out. What happened next might surprise you.

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