Rick

letterboxd - Uses famous movie quotes as their Captcha during sign up.

/via designedinorangecounty

SmartSleep:

Sleep your Mac differently depending on the battery level.

…the new SmartSleep state lets your notebook just sleep while the battery has a high level.

If the battery level drops below a certain point… it will switch to sleep and hibernate. So you have the best of both worlds. Furthermore it will expand the lifetime of your SSD (if you have one) as your MacBook won’t write a hibernate file as often.

YouTube - If you navigate away from a video, then immediately return, the player continues where it was left off.

/via Aadaam

OS X - Searching in System Preferences highlights the relevant sections. The more relevant the section, the brighter the light will be.

Quick, which of the following are not real restaurants?

• The Tilted Kilt

• Mugs ‘N Jugs

• Canz

• High Beams

• Twin Peaks

Answer? Only High Beams is, for the moment, not a real eatery. The rest are so-called “breastaurants” (a portmanteau defined on Wikipedia as “a restaurant that has sexual undertones, most commonly in the form of large-breasted, skimpily dressed waitresses and barmaids”). ABC News has an article which discusses the oh-so-classy trend.

Asked to name the most famous of this restaurant genre, you’d probably think of Hooters. Apparently, however, they’d rather you didn’t. When asked to comment for the story, Hooters would only say:

“The restaurant model that others have dubbed ‘breastaurants’ is a moniker too shallow to define Hooters.”

When something is too shallow for Hooters, you know it’s bad.

∞ Permalink

Image: Screenshot, Brazil

My first job was in retail. As a wild and fun-lovin' deeply insecure teenager, I may or may not have let an acquaintance of mine, one that I evidently wanted to impress, talk me into giving him a heavy discount on a new video game. So I might have nervously and ruefully broke the law. If I was caught, my name would probably have been entered into a gigantic private database, and I would never have worked in retail ever again. I just might not have known why. 

The New York Times has a front-page investigation into this massive database, called Esteem. It is operated by the First Advantage Corporation, which tracks workers who have been accused of stealing from their employers. "Facing a wave of employee theft," the Times reports, "retailers across the country have helped amass vast databases of workers accused of stealing and are using that information to keep employees from working again in the industry."

Note that right there: "accused of." Not "convicted of." Not "charged with." Now carry on: "The repositories of information ... often contain scant details about suspected thefts and routinely do not involve criminal charges. Still, the information can be enough to scuttle a job candidate’s chances."

The story details the travails of 28 year-old Keesha Goode, who was accused—never charged or convicted—by her employer, the discount store Forman Mills, of failing to ring up a former employee's goods at the cash register she was operating. She says she did no such thing, but was coerced into signing an admission form by management under threat of legal action—she was fired, and her name went into the database. 

Now Goode can't get a job in retail because potential employers, who pay to access that database, see that she has been accused of theft. Or aiding theft. Or whatever the text in some tiny blinking box says she did that has rendered her permanently untrustworthy. Kyra Moore, who was also accused by her employer, CVS, of stealing, has the following description listed in the same database: “picked up socks left them at the checkout and never came back to buy them.” For this she was fired, and is now permanently deemed unemployable in retail thanks to a sprawling digital blacklist.

What I did as a seventeen year-old was way worse than either. I too should have been deemed a menace to the retail industry and ineligible for any future job. Maybe I still will be after this article is published. For me, a privileged, middle-class college-bound white kid, that wouldn't have been the end of the world. I could always find other summer jobs—I was a privileged white kid, after all. But millions of people depend on retail jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table. They don't have that luxury. And the fact that they can be blacklisted from a job by a dumb transgression when they were a teenager—or, as we've seen for doing nothing at all—is disturbing. 

For those like Moore and Goode, the whole thing must seem like a retail version of Brazil—an all-seeing, largely incompetent corporate bureaucracy run amok, where even a whiff of wrongdoing can ruin your life. And while it's easiest to sympathize with those who are guilty of nothing at all, we should also be wary of the fact that this kind of database has great potential to be seriously socially corrosive.

Because the vast majority of thefts aren't committed by jackasses like seventeen year-old me, or my dumb buddies who once or twice lifted DVDs and video games from Blockbuster—they're committed by people who live below the poverty line. Obviously, nobody should steal. But this is the kind of technology that ultimately serves to penalize the poor for being poor. What do you do, do you think, if you can no longer get a job in retail or the service sector, and you don't have an education or well-off parents? What do you do? And remember, databases don't care if you repent.

And if you're even the type of person an employer might suspect of stealing, you're still apt to find yourself locked out of an entire industry. Because your name found itself onto a giant private digital database, and just because your employer said so. Seriously, folks—we have plenty of fiction about this particular subject, and it all turns out the same way: Poorly. Just ask Harry Buttle; it's not a road we want to go down. 

A database can't determine guilt, it can't determine whether you've grown up since a long-ago foolish incident, or whether you're older and wiser now, whether you were stealing food for a hungry family, whether your employer was racist, whether you never actually did anything wrong at all and were in reality a stellar worker. After being fed highly arbitrary inputs, the database just produces a binary: Employable? Yes/No. 

I don't want to live in a world where the answer it spits out is increasingly no. Neither should you.

“With big-data analysis, however, this traceability will become much harder. The basis of an algorithm’s predictions may often be far too intricate for the average human to understand.”

- With Big Data, we are creating artificial intelligences that no human can understand – Quartz

Image via Nikki Loehr

Over the past couple of weeks, the controversy surrounding the case against Barrett Brown—the journalist charged with three crimes, including spreading stolen credit card information that was encrypted within leaked emails from the security company Stratfor—has been stirring.

Last week, as I noted in my interview with Barrett from prison, Barrett’s mother plead guilty to her charge of obstructing evidence: she hid his computers from the FBI. Late last night, the news broke through the “Free Barrett Brown” Twitter account that Brown’s Wiki, ProjectPM, which is described on the project’s Twitter page as being, “Dedicated to research of government corruption, sitting in bubble baths drinking wine,” was being subpoenaed by the Department of Justice.

ProjectPM is an online compendium where Barrett and his fellow researchers share information they've been gathering about the intelligence industry in the United States. The Department of Justice is suing the company’s hosting provider, CloudFlare. While ProjectPM appeared to have gone down on Wednesday, it seems the site is back up. This kind of spotty connection has been very common for the site over the past few months. Even Googling ProjectPM does not yield any results that point to the site.

 

Screenshot from Wednesday of ProjectPM error message

That said, certain articles on the site are available through Google Cache. One of the more disturbingly intriguing articles available is on Persona Management, the software developed by intelligence companies to develop phony online identities that can be used to manipulate others and disseminate propaganda. The article details a conversation—allegedly discovered through stolen internal emails, between Aaron Barr the former CEO of the security company HBGary and the former CEO of Mantech—where Aaron is demonstrating a primitive fake persona meant to “represent an intelligence contracting employee and USAF veteran, on Facebook and Twitter.” ProjectPM also claims that Aaron Barr and HBGary were out to “infiltrate Anonymous.”

Another article about Persona Development is even more concerning. The article details a PDF supposedly taken from a correspondence between Aaron Barr and Robert Frisbie that describes the tiers of fake personas and how believable they can actually become. It states that the “most detailed character[s]” also known as a “Level 3” are “required to conduct human-to-human direct contact likely in-person to satisfy some more advanced exercise requirements.

This character must look, smell, and feel 100 percent real at the most detailed level. This character will need to be associated with a real company, hold a real position with that company and have all the technical and business artifacts associated with the position and organization. The trick here is while the persona needs to be real, the actual person may not be working in this role 100 percent of the time. In these cases there are still tricks that can be used to more rapidly age or update accounts. One such trick is to build outward facing accounts such as twitter, YouTube, or blogs with generic names.”

If ProjectPM goes down, there is a similar site out there operated by the hacktivist group Telecomix. They run a Wiki called Bluecabinet that serves as a counterpart to Barrett’s own ProjectPM. I spoke to a volunteer for Bluecabinet, before the Department of Justice’s subpoena against ProjectPM, who described the differences between the two research projects to me: “Barrett Brown came to the Bluecabinet IRC mostly to discuss specific companies. He said that he liked Telecomix and Bluecabinet because we were more mature. But, both ProjectPM and Bluecabinet are concerned about the militarization of the internet and abuse of technology by governments that target the public, especially information activists.”

While Telecomix continues to do the same type of work as Barrett Brown, through their Bluecabinet Wiki, they do not seem discouraged by the punishment that Barrett is facing: “Barrett Brown was obviously targeted. He was outspoken and stood out as a journalist activist. The US government’s prosecution of information activists is so extreme, I'm concerned that they would create a honeypot or entrap me or other researchers. Obviously someone was monitoring Barrett in the IRC chatroom and documenting what links to data he posted. But his arrest has not slowed down the volunteer work of Bluecabinet at all. It has just made us more careful.”

ProjectPM’s lawyer, Jason Flores-Williams, has already launched a “Motion to Intervene and Quash Subpeona” and they have also published a press release online. In it, the Department of Justice’s subpoena is compared to the censorship in China: “The Department of Justice is abusing its subpoena power to invade lives, threaten freedoms and destroy people for simply exploring the truth about their government. Like China, they are trying to suppress and control the free flow of information and ideas.”

As reported yesterday in the Dallas News, the US Attorney’s office has requested that the motion is dismissed. According to the office, Flores-Williams is not “licensed to practice law in Texas and he failed to explain why it was not possible to confer with the government.” So far, there has been no response from the judge.

While this legal battle wages on, Barrett Brown will be sitting in jail for a full year before he even sees a judge. So far, ProjectPM has served as an online monument to Barrett’s work that has survived beyond his isolation from the real world, but if the Department of Justice succeeds in its case to take the Wiki down, that all may be lost.

Follow Patrick at @patrickmcguire.

Connections

'They Should Know That': A Chat With Barrett Brown

Does the U.S. Want to Lock Up Barrett Brown for a Century for Sharing a Link?

Image: YouTube screenshot

Exxon Mobil's Pegasus pipeline just ruptured and spewed toxic oily muck all over Arkansas. It ran like a river through the suburb of Mayflower, pop. 2,000. Now, Exxon has publicly decreed that it will clean up all of the oil it spilled. Which is kind of strange, because officially, according to Exxon, there was no oil spill. Technically, there was no oil in the pipeline in the first place. 

That's because if that pipeline was carrying oil, Exxon would have had to pay eight cents per barrel it pumped into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. The fund was set up by a 1980 law enacted to ensure there's enough cash on hand to cover the costs of cleanup when, say, a giant pipeline ruptures and spews crude oil all over people's houses. But, in a little legal slight-of-hand, tar sands oil, or bitumen, is not technically classified as oil. And that's the stuff that was flowing through Exxon's pipeline. 

Tar sands oil is heavier and thicker (and much dirtier) than typical crude oil, and it must be diluted with other fluids to allow it to move through pipelines, hence the term 'dilbit' oil. Otherwise, it'd just clog up the tube like toxic mud. Anywho, that 1980 law exempted bitumen from the oil spill trust fund, a little fact that oil companies have gleefully kept quiet ever since the tar sands turned into the world's biggest earth-obliterating gold mine. 

As such, on the books, there was no oil spill in Arkansas. But don't worry, Exxon is going to do everything it can to clean up its oil spill in Arkansas.

Now "Orwellian" is probably one of the more overused adjectives in internet-speak, but sometimes the term fits your blog post like an oily glove. Not only is Exxon exploiting this charming little bit of doublethink regarding the non-oil-oil-spill, but it turns out that it's put a nicely dystopian surveillance apparatus into effect, too.

There's apparently a no-fly zone instated directly over the spill, and it is reportedly being managed by a Exxon officials, with the cooperation of the FAA. Exxon and the FAA will tell you what you need to know about the spill, and also about the war with Eurasia, which we are winning, thank goodness.

News helicopters are not allowed over the spill, because, according to the FAA, “[Exxon is] using at least one helicopter to provide aerial support for the cleanup. For safety reasons, they asked us to protect the airspace 1,000 feet above the area to allow the aircraft to move as needed.”

It is a happy coincidence that news helicopters will also be unable to relay more embarrassing footage of Exxon's non-oil oil spill. The FAA says that after the spill is cleaned up, they will happily allow news helicopters to fly anywhere they'd like. Reportedly, the newscasters were initially upset about the restriction. But after they had a nice long chat with the officials managing the airspace, they were seen emerging from the air traffic control towers each with gin-soaked tears running down their faces, having won victory over themselves. They loved Big Oil.

Photo via Flickr / Editor B

Don't blame the Federal Aviation Administration for not trying to loop the general public into the domestic drone debate. There's the agency's drone-focused "request for comments" page, which allows the public to raise privacy concerns regarding the site selections of six drone proving grounds that'll soon dot the US interior. (You've got until April 23 to air your thoughts, by the way.) And on Wednesday, the agency played host to a virtual town hall on drone privacy.

It may not be much--and sure, it's all laughably last minute--but it's something. Yet given that as of this writing a whopping 55 comments have been submitted to the FAA's request for comment page (compare that with the Food and Drug Administration's flavored milk notice, which to date has pulled in a staggering 30,617 comments) I was curious to see how many folks would turn up at yesterday's two-hour forum.

Roughly 40 Americans, it turns out.

And here's the kicker: It's not like this was some sort of ultra-exclusive, tightly-vetted session à la Google+ chatting with President Obama. The floor was open to anyone here, so long as folks registered in advance. Still, 40 entrants? Really? With drones having recently gone mainstream--and with a good number of those spy (and kill!) toys set to come back home as the Afghanistan conflict draws down--to hear that not even a head for every state in the Union looged into this thing is somewhat surprising. I'll hazard the guess that there were more (or at the very least, just as many) people sitting on the back end than there were up front, spouting off concerns.  

Turnout aside, there's a telling takeaway from the drone town hall. What's resoundingly clear, according to the Washington Times, is that US citizens want the FAA to stay in the business of being the FAA. Which is to say, Americans--if we can at all generalize from the town hall--would rather see the FAA keeping a watchful eye over the safety of domestic airspace, not butting in to the privacy rights discussion. 

“We shouldn’t take the focus of the world’s finest aviation safety organization off of safety," retired Air Force Maj. Gen. James O. Poss told the Times. Poss, one of the 40-some citizens who entered Wednesday's online forum, said privacy is "a very important concern" when it comes to determining which candidate test sites should get the nod, but that privacy concerns are best left to other agencies. 

Maybe it was all a product of weak outreach. With a bit more hype, concerned citizens maybe would've turned out in droves to this sort of digital town hall. Who knows? But for now, if this town hall headcount, together with comment-page responses, are any indication, far more Americans are losing sleep over dairy flavoring than non-consensual surveillance from above. 

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson // @VICEdrone

Chrome is going to use "Blink" as a rendering engine now, a fork of WebKit. I imagine the Chromium team will stop committing back to WebKit, so that project will stagnate a bit. Safari is already rather slow to update, and iOS only allows WebKit on browsers, so that's a bit of a bummer. Overall it's probably a good move and keeps Chrome charging forward. No more vendor prefixes, they say.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Blink is a post from CSS-Tricks

best 2008 album, feed the animals by girl talk. In Step:
www.myspace.com/girltalkmusic

Great art installation by Red Paper Heart

Say hello to Quiver, the one hundred fifty dollar over-the-shoulder wine pouch from Gräf & Lantz:

“Bonjoooour”, you just know Quiver would say.

Oh, I can practically hear you now. “What a cockamamie contraption”, you scoff, “And so expensive too”. Alright, Ms. or Mr. Cocksure. How exactly do you suggest folks transport the bottle of wine they carry around town on a such a regular basis that a special contrivance seems practically de rigueur? In a bag? Under their arm? People don’t actually need to carry wine around that often? Don’t be ridiculous. As to the cost, you simply can’t put a price on convenience.

No, Quiver is clearly the optimal solution. For the spendthrift alcoholic on the go, it makes toting your wine both easy and classy. Maybe you’ve lost your driver’s license after one too many DUIs and now find yourself forced to ride a bike everywhere. Quiver to the rescue! Or perhaps you just wish to look like some kind of besotted Robin Hood. If so, order now.

In Quiver, a surplus of gray felt and a glut of belts come together in harmony to answer the question “Can’t anyone please find a way to make wine even more pretentious?”. For that, it must be applauded. Unfortunately, though it’s made to order (or perhaps because it is), Quiver is perpetually out of stock. Though the product is offered on their website, there’s at decent chance that Gräf & Lantz has never actually sold one of these amazing wine satchels. Why not be the first to purchase?

Answer: Because doing so would make you a Dave Morin-level douchebag.

homicidalbrunette:

first the Ring now the Throne