A notorious group of hackers blamed for recent breaches on major casino companies is also suspected of being behind a recent cyberattack against Clorox that has led to a nationwide shortage of its cleaning products. Bloomberg News: Officials suspect that "Scattered Spider" is responsible for a breach that Clorox first disclosed in August, according to four people familiar with the situation, who asked not to be identified because the information isn't public. The same group, known for its so-called social engineering tactics, was tied to attacks on Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts International in recent weeks, Bloomberg News previously reported.
Scattered Spider hackers specialize in targeting call centers and IT help desks, impersonating employees to trick support staff into coughing up information to gain access to accounts. The fallout from their recent attacks has been profound. At MGM properties, guests couldn't charge purchases to their rooms, slot machines were shut down and reservation websites weren't working. The impact on Clorox was arguably much worse. The company didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. On Friday, Clorox indicated that it was still working to recover from the disruption. "We are ramping up production and working to restock trade inventories," the company said in a statement. "We are focusing on maximizing shipments and restocking trade inventories."
EFFIE BATEMAN | Lifestyle | Contact Staring in horror at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, local woman Anna Gresham [25] can’t for the life of her figure out why her skin looks so dreadful. Sure, it is winter, but with her militant five step skincare regime and daily fish oil tablets, she’d been positive she’d stave off the […]
In December 1975, Talking Heads took the stage at CBGB and played a stunning half-hour set including their first performance of "Psycho Killer." (David Byrne and Chris Frantz had played an earlier version the year before when they were still called the Artistics.) — Read the rest
Oh, to be one of Marissa Monteleone's dogs—they are treated like royalty, as all animals should be! Marissa runs an Instagram called "MyDogsDope," highlighting her two dogs—Pluto, who is an American Bully, and Astro, who is a German Shepherd—and the amazing raw whole foods she serves them. — Read the rest
Demodex mites live at the warm, greasy bases of your hair follicles. A family on every eyelash. They're implicated in rosacea and other skin conditions, but are extremely difficult to kill despite their tiny size. Antibiotics and tea tree oil are among the overbearing weapons required to tame the crowd. — Read the rest
Karol Józef Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, the subject of unlimited fawning praise and glorification, covered up child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as a cardinal in Poland–a fact long-suspected and finally demonstrated through newly-released Communist-era police records and leaked Church documents. — Read the rest
Just steps from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a Taco Bell Cantina has opened, the first one in Los Angeles County. Located on touristy Hollywood Boulevard in a historic 1920's Churrigueresque-style building (which once housed the Pickwick Book Shop), the Hollywood Cantina is styled to lean into its more glorious past. — Read the rest
This story goes out to a kind soul on the Boing Boing discussion boards who pointed out our very clear lack of tapir content. I'm here to try to remedy that by sharing some tapir news. First, though, I want to apologize for neglecting the very fine beast that is the tapir in my Boing Boing posts. — Read the rest
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Getting in shape at the gym is so 2019. Since then, we've learned how to workout on our own at home, ditched the gym rat crazies, and have become better for the experience. — Read the rest
South Carolina state Sen. Tom Davis was arrested over the weekend for public intoxication after police found him slumped over the steering wheel of his car. An incident report described the Republican gentleman as having "extremely slurred speech and an odor of alcoholic beverage emanating from his person," according to Yahoo! — Read the rest
AMD looks to be on the cusp of releasing a competitor to RTX Voice, a feature for Nvidia graphics cards that cancels out background noise when you're on a call or otherwise using your mic. From a report: That's according to a trailer that AMD posted to its YouTube channel (apparently in error), Tom's Hardware reports. Thankfully, a copy of the trailer was downloaded before it was deleted by Reddit user u/zenobian and uploaded to the AMD subreddit. The leaked trailer suggests that AMD's Noise Suppression feature will work very similarly to Nvidia's RTX Voice (which has subsequently been rolled into Nvidia's Broadcast app). It uses "a real-time deep learning algorithm" to offer "two-way noise-reduction" that filters background noise out of both outgoing and incoming microphone audio, and is apparently built into AMD's existing Adrenalin software.
A magazine salesman visited our Los Gatos, California house when I was in 6th grade. My dad told the salesman he subscribed to Scientific American and didn’t want any other magazines. But the salesman was persistent, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and my dad was too polite to shut the door in his face. My dad finally agreed to purchase a subscription.
“What is the least expensive subscription?” my dad asked.
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“That would be Fate,” said the man. “It’s $10 for a year.”
My dad wrote him a check and the man left.
“What’s Fate?” I asked my dad.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just wanted to get rid of him.”
A month later a copy of Fate arrived. It was digest size and printed on cheap pulp stock. It had a bunch of ads for occult sects and secret societies, like the Rosicrucians, Astara, Eckankar, and Cosolargy. It advertised ESP workshops, witchcraft courses, lessons on “instant evolution,” and biofeedback devices to “control your mind and body.” I was fascinated. The back pages had hundreds of classified ads for numerological handwriting analysis, psychic readings by mail, secrets to winning sweepstakes and picking racehorses, homemade insecticide recipes, flying saucer photos, and “70 Priceless Secrets!!” (for $9.95).
The articles were equally intriguing: Air Force Telepathy Test. In Brazil It Rains Beans. Mystery Airships of the 1800s. UFOs in the Florida Swamp. The Jealous Tenant Cursed Our Home. Baffling Bird Deaths. UFO Damages Iowa Soybeans.
A regular section called “True Mystic Experiences” ran reader-submitted accounts of unexplainable experiences. They were like Reddit stories from 50 years ago.
Fate became my favorite magazine. I thanked my dad for getting it. “Don’t tell anyone I subscribed to it,” he said.
As fate would have it, we continued to receive issues of Fate in the mail for a few years after the subscription expired. I saved every copy, but I don’t know what happened to them. Someone probably threw them out when I went away to college. Fortunately, the Internet Archive has many scanned copies.
This week, while I was looking at the classified ads in the June 1973 issue of Fate, I came across one for something called FONIK RIETEENG, which at first glance appeared to be in a language other than English:
Classified ad for FONIK RIETEENG in the Jun 1973 issue of Fate.
I also searched Google for “1515 Pusifik.” The only hits were for the June 1973 issue of Fate and for a PDF scan of a November 1972 zine called Vonulinkpublished by “Mike Freeman” of Cave Junction, Oregon. The text is hard to read:
Here’s what I think it translates to:
Constitution, because Frisco brought tits out in the open, then LA brought asses along with tits, a few years later. So somehow, social nudism ought to be a way of life wherever people desire it so. I work for my room and have been wanting to get phonics ukr(?) across for the past two years. Joesif Bednash, 1515 Pusifik Av. 306, Venus, Kalif. 90291.
The entry follows with a comment from a Vonulink staffer:
To joesif bednash, rayo, paul doerr and other proponents of reformed spelling. I will write phonetically (what I write for vonulink at least) if you will all agree on one phonetic system (and if it’s a system I can type easy). How about it? Lan
I became more interested in Vonu than Bednash’s idiosyncratic spelling style. After poking around online, I found Monograph Bookwerks’ auction catalog that was selling issues of Vonu Life in 2014 and which had a definition of vonuism.
Issues of Vonu Life from Monograph Bookwerks’ auction catalog from 2014
The catalog copy said:
VONU LIFE #1-9 / VONU LIFE ’73 / PACSCRIPT #1 Grants Pass/Cave Junction OR & Berkeley CA 1971-1973. Newsletters. 8.5 x 11” (21.6 x 28 cm), varies 8-32 pages, staple bound. Very good, some toning and light soiling to pages and covers. SOLD
Vonu Life was a bimonthly hippie/libertarian newsletter that fostered communication “among nomads, troglodytes and other invulnerables” later changed to “and other freedom-achievers” and finally to be a “handbook and directory for freedom and survival achievers.” Attributed to Mike Freeman, a pseudonym for Tom Marshall, “vonu” was an invented word and philosophy of live and let live while avoiding institutional and governmental coercion. Vonu Life ’73 is an 80,000-word booklet summarizing the information and teaching of vonu, including articles on hand-built shelter, wild plants, super hobos, secret radio networks, troglodyte community and more. Sometime after 1973, Marshall disappeared into the forests of Western Oregon and was never heard from again. A rare and obscure set of documents from the back-to-nature/libertarian movement of the 1970s.
An introduction to a Vonu paperback defines Vonu as
a contraction of Voluntary and Not vUlnerable. “Vonu” is somewhat like “freedom” or “security.” But those words mean many different things to different people. Rather than argue about what those words ought to mean, I speak of “vonu.”
Vonu founder Mike Freeman/Tom Marshall also went by the pseudonym Rayo. In 2019 the publisher of the Vonu podcast interviewed Jim Stumm, who edited Freeman/Marshall/Rayo’s book (under the pen name Jon Fisher) Vonu: The Search for Personal Freedom. At the time of the interview, Stumm described himself as a 75-year-old retired janitor. Stumm remembered Rayo as:
…serious, calm, friendly, but not effusive, introverted, and a logical thinker. He was somewhat suspicious of someone like me who he was meeting for the first time. For more, see LOTM page 12.
Rayo was nothing like a Woodstock hippie. He was older, about 40, and his hair was not long. I saw no hint that he had any interest in rock music or protest songs. Rather than a hippie, Rayo was more like the Star Trek character, Data.
For a second opinion, I’ll quote Ben Best who visited Rayo at his house in LA in 1967 and again at his camp in the Oregon woods in 1972. He wrote about his impressions in an article in LIBERTY MAGAZINE, vol. 1, no. 1, Aug. 1987. Ben says:
“I first met Tom in LA in 1967. He was a tall, slender, bespectacled electrical engineer, a nerd, inhibited and at a loss for ‘small talk’…He was much more at ease exchanging information or making plans for action…
“In the spring of 1972, I visited Tom again, attending his Vonu Week program in Oregon…
“Tom was an acutely fear-filled individual who lived in constant expectation of nuclear war, economic collapse, social chaos, and a totalitarian state. He was also an intensely conscientious and trustworthy person. By his own admission, he had little interest in – or understanding of – humor.
“I’m sure there was some relation between Tom’s political paranoia and his inhibitions in social situations…He seemed to find the ‘status symbols’ of ‘that society’ intolerable and was unable to relate to most people very fruitfully…Tom’s intense rationality and integrity are what inspired those who knew him.”
Vonuism reminds me of a combination of Ayn Rand individualism, the Loompanics catalog, The Whole Earth Catalog, and the Sovereign Citizen Movement. I’m not going to pass judgment on vonuism because I’ve only touched the surface of it. I do wonder what happened to Rayo/Freeman/Marshall. If he’s still alive, he’d be in his 90s. I hope he succeeded in his dream of disappearing from society.
And so ends this breadcrumb trail of a story from FATE to VONU. I hope you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading and your support!
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Child soldier. Civil War hero. Tramp. Ladies’ man. Drunkard. And now, published author. Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America tells the story of an American hobo entirely in his own words.
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I had to make peace with a troubling fact, friends. I am an oldhead. In the world of Hip-hop, I'm a dinosaur that fondly remembers Lil Wayne as the most junior member of the Hot Boyz. Where once my opinions of the genre were seen as unassailable, they have currently become the rantings of an out-of-touch "boomer" that is — to use the modern parlance — lame as hell. — Read the rest
Several artists have added their distinctive visual and narrative threads to Spider-Man's web of stories over the years. Depending on the era you started reading the webhead, Todd Mcfarlane, Mark Bagley, or John Romita Jr might have been the artist that visually defined your version of Spidey. — Read the rest
The National Security Agency has awarded a cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion to Amazon, Nextgov reported Tuesday. The Hill reports: The contract, named "WildandStormy" according to protest filings obtained by the outlet, appears to be part of the NSA's attempts to modernize its repository for classified data. The award is being challenged by Microsoft, according to Government Accountability Office records. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that it is filing the protest "based on the decision." "We are exercising our legal rights and will do so carefully and responsibly," they added.
MakeCode Arcade is a Scratch-like programming language for writing retro-style games. In this video, John Park shows how to make arpeggio music using MakeCode arcade. In the early days of video games, the existing technology didn't allow for chords, so arpeggios were a way to get the feel for a chord by playing all the individual notes in a chord as quickly as possible.
Just shy of three months ago, Amber Guyger, then a Dallas police officer, burst into her 26-year-old neighbor's home and shot him.
Botham Shem Jean was murdered in his home, unarmed--a threat to no one. Guyger's bullshit excuse: she was confused and thought that the apartment that she'd broken into was her own and that Jean was an intruder.
Cool, cool, cool. Who hasn't broken into their own home, found it to be decorated completely differently and contained their neighbor? That crap could happen to anyone.
At the time of the murder, Dallas District Attorney Faith Johnson was accused of giving Guyger, who has since been shit-canned by the Dallas Police, preferential treatment. Guyger was let off without a murder charge against her. But here's the thing: Johnson's no longer Dallas' DA. In January of 2019, she'll be replaced by Dallas' freshly-minted District Attorney John Creuzot. For Guyger, the worm could be about to turn so fast that it breaks its own frigging neck.
Creuzot, a former judge who retired from the bench in 2012, told NBC that anything less than a murder charge for Guyger deviates from Dallas County precedent.
“I don’t know any police reports. I don’t know any forensic reports, but based on what I have seen, manslaughter is an inappropriate charge, based on the circumstances as I understand them,” he said. “Once I get in there and I get everything in front of me and it appears the most appropriate charge is murder, then that’s the charge we will go forward with.
“I think I’m going to join everybody else in praying that we don’t have any more police shootings. That’s the first step. That’s not on us. That’s on the police,” he added.
In addition to sorting out the wrong committed by his predecessor in the charging of Guyger, Creuzot has also said that he's very interested in exploring Dallas County's bail system in an effort to bring equality to it: being released from jail shouldn't be the sole providence of the rich. Nor should the poor feel forced to accept a guilty plea in order to land a shorter sentence, even when, in truth, they committed no crime. Sorting this out will level the playing field for those accused of crimes by the police and, as a consequence, could lead to smaller prison populations.
More of this sort of thing, please.
Image via Kaufman County Sheriff Office, for editorial use only
"If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!" he wrote at his page on the popular microblogging service "Twitter".
This is a trivialize everything as kayfabe trategy and it is the best one he's got.
I was in New York City this past weekend—a place where no one uses the word “Manhattan”—and spent some time fighting the other pedestrians in order to walk down the street, and fighting the cars to cross from Third Avenue to Second Avenue.
New York is always insanely busy. I lived there until 31 years of age and couldn’t wait to get out. I had assumed, perhaps naively, that it was a more peaceful place almost a century ago. Apparently not!
What is surprising about the two videos below, which were apparently filmed with a camera on the back of a flatbed truck while driving around, is how crowded the city was even in 1929. The sounds of streetcars and people are omnipresent. The city looks more interesting, and more appealing, in black and white. Color often makes it seem garish or dirty ... at least to me.
