Binaryjesus

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud is publishing the world's safety codes. Some governments disapprove. He writes, "Upon receipt of a Certified Letter of Takedown from the Special Assistant Attorney General of Mississippi, Public.Resource.Org prepared a 67-page response, enclosed a Trodart Professional-Grade Self-Inking Rubber Stamp inscribed with a revolutionary saying ('If it isn't public, it isn't a law.'), packed it all up with a Mississippi flag made of crinkle-pak, and dispatched the parcel back to the sender. "

tl;dr: "We respectfully decline."

We're trying to convince the state officials that the Internet is really there to help them. If they make their codes available, all sorts of innovation happens. They don't need to lock up their laws.

Boxing Day in Mississippi!

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Photo: Anna Gorbunova - via Sib.fm

A lot of what we know about genetics come from studies using lab mice, so scientists at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, came up with this tribute: a monument featuring a cute bespectacled mouse knitting a strand of DNA.

Prof. Nikolai Kolchanov of the institute said to Sib.fm, that the monument "symbolizes gratitude for the animal that humanity has used to study genetics, molecular and physical mechanisms of diseases, as well as for the development of new drugs."

The mouse was sculpted by local artist Andrew Kharkevich, who said, "It combines the image of the laboratory mouse and a scientists ... [The] mouse is captured in the moment of scientific discovery. If you look into her eyes, you can see that this little mouse has come up with something. But the whole symphony of scientific discovery, joy, "Eureka" have not yet been voiced"

What? You want to show that Disney princess movie to kids? Never! The stories that they're based on are far too grim for any child. Would You Bloom shows you the plot points that Disney tends to leave out from the centuries-old tales.

Just think: in two hundred years, people will make children's movies featuring watered down versions of Saw, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Exorcist. Only literary scholars and historians will know the origins of Jigsaw the singing puppet who wants to be a real boy. Little girls will dress as Princess Leatherface for Halloween.

-via Blame It on the Voices

Congress's private gym -- whose budget is a closely held secret for "security" reasons -- has remained open during the shutdown. It was deemed an essential service. By John Boehner himself. (Possibly because so many Tea Party Congressmen live in their lavish tax-funded/tax-free offices and use the fancy club as their personal showers, rather than renting DC lodgings)

The staffers' gym was closed, however.

A House aide confirmed to ThinkProgress that the House member’s gym is open. The House gym features a swimming pool, basketball courts, paddleball courts, a sauna, a steam room and flat screen TVs. While towel service is unavailable, taxpayers remain on the hook for cleaning and maintenance, which has been performed daily throughout the shutdown. There are also costs associated with the power required to heat the pools and keep the lights on.

According to the aide, the decision to keep the gym open — even while other critical government services were shelved — came directly from Speaker Boehner’s office. Meanwhile, the staff gym available to Congressional staff has been closed.

It appears that the members gym in the Senate remains open on similar terms. Yesterday, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) complained to a reporter from the Omaha World-Herald that the members gym was getting “rank.”

Exclusive Gyms For Members Of Congress Deemed ‘Essential,’ Remain Open During Shutdown [Judd Legum/ThinkProgress]

(Thanks, Sulka!)

Everyone is annoyed at the state of things in America as the government shutdown drags into its second week, whether you're one of 800,000 furloughed federal workers or just a D.C. tourist who wants to go to the goddamn Smithsonian. Now a group of truckers will take matters in their own hands with a plan that combines both traffic jams and vigilante justice.

Read more...

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia believes in a literal Devil, and is concerned that he’s getting wilier. This man makes decisions that affect 300 million people and nobody can ever fire him.

Is your country’s government falling apart? Is the infrastructure of your civilization in shambles? Why not take a break from your worries with our new SFAM and Goats ebooks!

Each one of these books contains comics at 300dpi, perfect for reading and admmiring on your favorite retina-style device or even on your plain old PC. Start your collection today!

Here’s a list of some old classics and some brand-new titles for you to peruse:

In a ruling that is likely to inflame the age-old debate rather than soothe it, one judge has declared that men are unequivocally better drivers than women.

Read more...

 

"Wonder Woman," a live action short by Rainfall Films. "It's a scant two and half minutes, but in the end, it's one hundred and fifty seconds of pure fantasy, where I get to consider the two sides of my favorite warrior: a crusader in man's world, and a paragon of virtue told through Greek mythology," says director Sam Balcomb.

The New York Daily News. [slow clap]

HAPPY OCTOBER

The team behind Stop Watching Us says:

"Since the Snowden leaks started, more than 569,000 people from all walks of life have signed the StopWatching.us petition telling the U.S. Congress that we want them to rein in the NSA. On October 26th, the 12th anniversary of the signing of the US Patriot Act, we're taking the next step and holding the largest rally yet against NSA surveillance. We’ll be handing the half-million petitions to Congress to remind them that they work for us -- and we won’t tolerate mass surveillance any longer."

You can donate to the organizational costs here.

Organizers are in a reddit AMA right now.

Meghan sez, "My coworker Rachel Moani created this awesome book display for the Lacey Timberland Library highlighting some of the insane reasons books have been banned over the years - including The Wizard of Oz for depicting women in strong leadership roles and The Diary of Anne Frank for being 'too depressing'."

Libraries: We’re With The BANNED

Chopping Block comic for Friday, September 27, 2013

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"Earlier this month, 'On the Media' producer Sarah Abdurrahman, her family, and her friends were detained for hours by US Customs and Border Protection on their way home from Canada. Everyone being held was a US citizen, and no one received an explanation. Sarah tells the story of their detainment, and her difficulty getting any answers from one of the least transparent agencies in the country."

Once, late on a strange Christmas and newly in San Franciso, Kozmo.com delivered me fresh fruit, flowers, a vase, a dvd copy of A Christmas Story, a DVD player, a bottle of wine, an opener and a glass. I later returned the DVD.

A wonderful service that brought all manner of stuff to your home, pretty much at all hours, Kozmo.com rose and fell with the dotcom boom and bust.

Lots of folks have far better Kozmo.com stories than I.

Welcome back, Kozmo. You are well remembered.

Even the elder gods need refreshment sometimes! CTHUL-AID is an artwork by BeastWreck for sale as a print from Society 6.

It's the Great Old Ones' favorite beverage, guaranteed to be maddeningly refreshing! Cthulhu himself enjoys kicking back after a hard day's work in R'lyeh and pouring himself a tall cold glass of Cthul-Aid, and so should you!

Link -via Boing Boing

In the episode "His Hero," Jake dropped a bit of wisdom on Finn. He said, "Dude, sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something."

Hannah Hughes embroidered these important words--words that we should all remember.

Link

Hugh sez, "EFF'r Parker Higgins tells me this sign was at a rally he spoke at in Berlin recently."

Grumpy Cat builds a GNU Internet [Frerk Meyer/CC BY-SA]

(Thanks, Hugh!)

After an NSA cryptographer took to ZDNet to defend his organization's lawless surveillance, EFF co-founder John Gilmore posted a long and thoughtful reply to the Cryptography mailing list (an absolute must-read, these days), in which he explains why the idea that spies should be able to spy on everyone, so long as they do so for the right reasons, is a bad idea. It's a high-level version of an argument a lot of us are having these days, so it's worth reading carefully. The tl;dr is "There will always be 'emergencies', always 'crises', always 'evildoers", always 'opportunities', that would be relieved 'if we could just do X that wasn't allowed until now'."

Having watched the Drug War over the last 50 years, NSA for 30 years, and TSA/DHS over the last decade, I have zero faith that NSA can collect intimite data about every person in America and on the planet, and then never use that data for any purpose that is counter to the interest of the people surveilled. There will always be "emergencies", always "crises", always "evildoers", always "opportunities", that would be relieved "if we could just do X that wasn't allowed until now". So what if general warrants are explicitly forbidden? And if searching people without cause is prohibited? We could catch two alleged terrorists -- or a few thousand people with sexual images -- or 750,000 pot smokers -- or 400,000 hard-working Mexican migrants -- every year, if we just use tricky legalisms to ignore those pesky rules. So the government does ignore them. Will you or your loved ones fall into the next witchhunt? Our largest city was just found guilty of forcibly stopping and physically searching hundreds of thousands of black and latino people without cause for a decade -- a racist program defended both before and after the verdict by the Mayor, the Police Commission, the City Council, and state legislators. NSA has secretly been doing warrantless, suspicionless, non-physical searches on every American with a phone for a decade, all using secret gerrymandered catch-22 loopholes in the published constitution and laws, defended before and after by the President, the Congress and all the courts. Make rules for NSA? We already have published rules for NSA and it doesn't follow them today!

So Mr Barkan moves on to why NSA would never work against the citizens. The US imprisons more people than any country on earth, and murders far more than most, but it's all OK because those poor, overworked, rule-bound government employees who are doing it are "defending freedom". Bullshit they are! Somehow scores of countries have found freedom without descending to this level of lawlessness and repression. NSA cannot operate outside of this context; rules that might work in a hypothetical honest and free government, will not work in the corrupt and lawless government that we have in the United States.

NSA employees are accountable for following the rules, Mr. Barkan? Don't make me laugh. There's a word for it: impunity. EFF has diligently pursued NSA in court for most of a decade, and has still gotten no court to even consider the question "is what NSA did legal?" Other agencies like DoJ and HHS regularly retain big powers and budgets by officially lying about whether marijuana has any medical uses, rather than following the statutes, despite millions of Americans who use it on the advice of their doctor. None of these officials lose their jobs. Find me a senior federal official anywhere who has ever lost their job over major malfeasance like wiretapping, torture, kidnapping, indefinite imprisonment, assassination, or malicious use of power -- let alone been prosecuted or imprisoned for it. Innocent citizens go to prison all the time, from neighborhood blacks to medical marijuana gardeners to Tommy Chong and Martha Stewart -- high officials never.

[Cryptography] Gilmore response to NSA mathematician's "make rules for NSA" appeal

The hoopy froods of Cyanogenmod -- a free/open replacement for Android, with lots of privacy- and security-oriented features -- have raised capital and are going commercial. They're going to productize Cyanogen with the motto "available on everything, to everyone." This is great news. Cyanogen isn't just a great OS -- it's also a huge force pushing Google into adding more features, even when the carriers hate them (for example, the addition of a tethering service to Android, which followed on from Cyanogen).

You have probably seen the pace of development pick up drastically over the past few months. More devices supported, bigger projects such as CM Account, Privacy Guard, Voice+, a new version of Superuser, and secure messaging. We vastly improved our infrastructure. We’re doing more bug fixes, creating more features, and improving our communication. We think that the time has come for your mobile device to truly be yours again, and we want to bring that idea to everybody.

Our goals today are straightforward:

* Organize, lead, and support our community
* Create amazing user experience centered around how YOU work
* Security solutions that really work
* Stay committed to building the features our users need
* No junk
* Constant updates
* Available on everything, to everyone

A New Chapter (via /.)

I've got a couple new shirt designs today. Warren and Ariana made Doctor Whisky, which I present to you with much glee:

And I've made an "Ask Me About My Radical Feminist Agenda" shirt by request. It's based on the sign in this comic.