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The megafight that the boxing world has been clamoring for between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. should be finalized in "the next couple days," Tom Rank promoter Bob Arum told the New York Post.

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"I can't dance, I can't sing/I'm just standing here selling."

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So what if the pregame story lines have been asinine and absurd? On Sunday, the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks will be among the most talented teams to take the field in the Super Bowl.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s NFL Elo ratings, this year’s Seahawks are the fifth-best team to participate in a Super Bowl since the AFC-NFC merger. And the Patriots aren’t far behind. The average Elo rating of the teams this year is the second-best in a Super Bowl since that merger, trailing only Super Bowl XIII when the Dallas Cowboys played the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Elo’s lofty ranking of the game might seem surprising given that the Seahawks and Patriots each went 12-4 in the regular season, excellent but hardly extraordinary records. Those records probably underestimates their strength, however. Both teams played relatively tough schedules, and both finished the season stronger than they started it — notwithstanding the Patriots’ throwaway loss in Week 17, when they rested their stars against the Buffalo Bills.

Furthermore, both teams have been at the top of the league for some time. That matters when assessing the historical strength of an NFL team: 16 regular-season games just isn’t all that large a sample, so Elo ratings predict performance better because they carry over some of a team’s rating from one season to the next. The Seahawks and Patriots entered this season ranked No. 1 and No. 3 in Elo, respectively, based on their ratings at the end of 2013. It’s not as though either of these teams backed into the Super Bowl — as, for instance, the 2003 Carolina Panthers did when reaching the title game with a 11-5 record. (Those same Panthers went 1-15 in 2001, 7-9 in 2002 and 7-9 in 2004.)

But it’s not only that the Seahawks and Patriots are strong teams: They’re just about evenly matched. The Vegas line opened as a pick ’em, and most sports books have the Patriots as mere one-point favorites. Elo, which loves the Seahawks, differs slightly here: It has Seattle as 2.5-point favorites. But that’s partly because the system, in its simplicity, punished the Patriots for their meaningless Week 17 loss against Buffalo. Without that game, the Patriots’ Elo rating would be 1756, which would make Seattle only one-point favorites and which would vault this matchup ahead of Super Bowl XIII into the top slot of all time.

We can place past Super Bowls into four quadrants, as we have in the chart below. The horizontal axis represents the average Elo rating of the two participants; the vertical axis represents the Elo-rating difference between the teams. (The years in the chart correspond to the year of the NFL regular season. For example, Super Bowl XX, played Jan. 26, 1986, is designated as 1985 because that’s the year most of us would associate with the 1985 Chicago Bears.)

The top-left quadrant represents games in which the teams were fairly evenly matched but not particularly great — like the Super Bowl we had two seasons ago between the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens. The bottom-right quadrant is for Super Bowls when the average Elo rating was high but because of one spectacular team, like when the undefeated 2007 Patriots played (and lost to) the New York Giants.

It’s the games in the top-right quadrant that had both things going for them, as this one does: great teams but also a reasonably even matchup.

But here’s the catch: Those great-seeming matchups didn’t translate into great Super Bowls.

Below, we’ve ranked the 48 prior Super Bowls based on a version of the Excitement Index, which measures the quality of a game based on how much win probability changes over the course of it. This season’s NFC Championship would, obviously, qualify as an extraordinarily exciting game — the Seahawks’ win probability shifted from near zero to very likely late in the fourth quarter, and then back to basically 50-50 after the Packers kicked a field goal to send the game to overtime, and then up to 100 percent once the Seahawks won in OT. By contrast, the AFC Championship — the Patriots were favored, pulled ahead early and never looked back — would have a low Excitement Index.

The Excitement Index is not perfect — compared with how we would rank the games intuitively, it seems to give too little credit to unlikely fourth-quarter comebacks, for instance. But it does a reasonable job of ranking the Super Bowls. The top Super Bowl of all time, according to the Excitement Index, was Super Bowl XXIII, played after the 1988 regular season between the 49ers and Cincinnati Bengals. Most of the other obvious candidates — like Wide Right and the Giants’ upset of the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII — also rank highly.

The win probability data we’re using is from Pro-Football-Reference.com, and accounts for the point spread, so a game that turns out to be lopsided between teams that looked evenly matched beforehand (like last year’s Super Bowl or Super Bowl XVIII) will get a bit of credit. A game in which a heavy favorite romps to victory (like Super Bowl XXIX, when the 49ers, as 19-point (!) favorites against the San Diego Chargers, were ahead 14-0 after four minutes of play) will get almost none.

But the hope is for a Super Bowl that stays tight from wire to wire with plenty of drama in between. And if you’re looking at those matchups that looked best on paper going in — those from the top-right quadrant of the chart — you won’t find many that turned into great games.

There’s one very encouraging precedent. The aforementioned Super Bowl XIII, played after the 1978 regular season, had a lot of parallels to this one. The Cowboys, like this year’s Seahawks, were a 12-4 team coming off a Super Bowl championship. The Steelers, like this year’s Patriots, were an aging dynasty hoping for one more ring. (As it turns out, they’d win two more.) The Steelers won 35-31, and the outcome might have different if not for a dropped touchdown catch by Cowboys tight end Jackie Smith. Super Bowl XIII ranks very well in the Excitement Index and even higher on subjective lists of the best Super Bowls, one of which has it as the best game ever.

But pretty much every other game in the top-right quadrant stunk:

• There’s last year’s Seahawks-Denver Broncos debacle.
• There’s Super Bowl XIX (played after the 1984 regular season). What was supposed to be a spectacular matchup between Joe Montana and Dan Marino turned into a rout as the 49ers clobbered the Miami Dolphins 38-16.
• There’s Super Bowl XII (1977), which never really became competitive; the Cowboys’ win probability was up to 95 percent by the middle of the second quarter and they coasted to a 27-10 win over the Broncos.
• There’s Super Bowl VIII (1973), one of several poor Super Bowls involving the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikings didn’t score until the fourth quarter and lost to the Dolphins 24-7.
• There’s another Vikings stinker from a few years later, Super Bowl XI, when they lost to the Oakland Raiders 32-14.
• There’s Super Bowl XXVI (1991), when the Bills were down 24-0 to the Washington Redskins before scoring a few “junk time” touchdowns and losing 37-24.
• There’s Super Bowl XXXIII (1998), won by John Elway’s Broncos over the Atlanta Falcons, which proved anti-climactic after the Falcons upset the 15-1 Vikings in the NFC Championship.

We wouldn’t say to expect a bad Super Bowl on Sunday. This is a noisy data set. It’s probably a fluke that the games that looked best on paper turned out to be among the worst on the field.

But that’s the point: Any one game won’t tell you all that much, and as we’ve pointed out before, an NFL matchup that looks just about even beforehand is only slightly more likely than average to result in a great game. This could be a super Super Bowl — but it could just as easily turn out to be a dud, in which case Deflate-gate and Katy Perry will burn an SEO-optimized hole into our collective memories.

The trial against Russ Ulbricht — the alleged mastermind of illegal online marketplace Silk Road — doesn't look awesome for the defense.

He's charged with money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to commit narcotics trafficking while running Silk Road under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts — a reference to the cult movie "The Princess Bride." Ulbricht is on trial in Manhattan.

Since the trial began on Jan.13, prosecutors have called four witnesses to testify against 30-year-old Ulbricht and even presented his alleged diary entries that detail what he referred to as a "criminal enterprise."

His defense, led by attorney Joshua Dratel, conceded in opening statements that Ulbricht had indeed founded Silk Road. But, the defense says, Ulbricht left the site for quite some time and only rejoined right before his arrest.

Dratel has been trying to convince the jury that Ulbricht is not the "real DPR." Somebody else took over the site he started and expanded it into the massive narcotics emporium it became, Dratel's argument goes. But Dratel has struggled to come up with alternative "DPRs" — especially as the journal entries and chat logs found on Ulbricht's laptop continue to incriminate him.

Ulbricht's lawyers have also filed paperwork suggesting he wouldn't be breaking the law even if he were the real Dread Pirate Roberts. Here are his main arguments.

Silk Road's operator is just a 'landlord'

In the defense's pre-trial motions, Dratel argues that his client should not be held responsible for the illegal conduct of Silk Road users since they're not alleging he bought drugs sold on the site or managed any of the users. The motion referred to Ulbricht as the alleged "landlord" of Silk Road.

"A landlord is not a co-conspirator of, and/or liable for, the criminal conduct of his tenants, regardless whether the landlord knows that the premises are being used for illegal purposes," the motion states. 

The motion continued: "Analogously, no landlord has been prosecuted under the federal controlled substances statutes for renting an apartment to a know drug seller. Nor has any internet service provider been prosecuted because users of the service engage in illegal transactions using the provider’s internet service."

The Communications Decency Act protects Silk Road's operator

The motion goes on to invoke the Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, in which Congress "manifested a support for a free-wheeling internet" where web hosts can operate without fear of civil liability for the content posted by others, according to Ulbricht's lawyer.

While Ulbricht's is a criminal case, and not a civil one, his lawyer's motion said that the law still "provides firm and indisputable support for limiting the application of criminal statutes in the internet context when the alleged illegal conduct itself is performed not by the defendant, but by others using his web site."

The act has been invoked in other cases, particularly in legal disputes involving revenge porn — sexually explicit media of an individual shared online without their consent, often as punishment for a breakup. Hunter Moore, the notorious operator of now-defunct revenge porn websites, has said Section 230 protected his work because he simply operated the websites and doesn't post pictures.

Bitcoin can't be 'laundered' like money

Dratel also argued that the money laundering charge must be dismissed because Silk Road's financial transactions did not involve real money. Bitcoins — the only form of payment accepted on Silk Road — do not qualify as monetary instruments and therefore can't be the focus of the monetary investigation, Dratel argued. 

Judge Katherine Forrest didn't buy it, however, deciding in July of last year that "Bitcoins carry value — that is their purpose and function — and act as a medium of exchange."

 

This is not the first time a judge has ruled that bitcoin is or acts as a proxy for money. In 2013, Magistrate Judge Amos Maazant of the Eastern District of Texas federal court ruled that bitcoins were enough like money to be treated as such. That same year, Canada became one of the first countries to treat bitcoins as money and regulate their usage. Germany has also passed legislation equating bitcoins with real currency. 

Ulbricht was arrested at the Glen Park Branch Library in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2013, where he was allegedly logged into Silk Road's servers and working under the username Dread Pirate Roberts. The pseudonym refers to a plotline in the movie "The Princess Bride," in which multiple characters assume the intimidating Dread Pirate Roberts persona.

In a development that was true to "The Princess Bride," a new Dread Pirate Roberts relaunched Silk Road 2.0 on Nov. 6, 2013. The new operator promised a "new and improved" version of the site, according to Forbes. When at least three of these employees were later arrested, the new DPR abruptly gave up control of the site and froze its activity, including its escrow system. 

Subsequently, a user calling himself "Defcon" took over Silk Road 2.0. He was later identified as Blake Benthall, a 26-year-old San Francisco programmer who was arrested in November 2014. 

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The Snowden revelations have made it clear that online privacy is certainly not a given.

Just a few days ago we learned that the Canadian Government tracked visitors of dozens of popular file-sharing sites.

As these stories make headlines around the world interest in anonymity services such as VPNs has increased, as even regular Internet users don’t like the idea of being spied on.

Unfortunately, even the best VPN services can’t guarantee to be 100% secure. This week a very concerning security flaw revealed that it’s easy to see the real IP-addresses of many VPN users through a WebRTC feature.

With a few lines of code websites can make requests to STUN servers and log users’ VPN IP-address and the “hidden” home IP-address, as well as local network addresses.

The vulnerability affects WebRTC-supporting browsers including Firefox and Chrome and appears to be limited to Windows machines.

A demo published on GitHub by developer Daniel Roesler allows people to check if they are affected by the security flaw.

IP-address leak

The demo claims that browser plugins can’t block the vulnerability, but luckily this isn’t entirely true. There are several easy fixes available to patch the security hole.

Chrome users can install the WebRTC block extension or ScriptSafe, which both reportedly block the vulnerability.

Firefox users should be able to block the request with the NoScript addon. Alternatively, they can type “about:config” in the address bar and set the “media.peerconnection.enabled” setting to false.

TF asked various VPN providers to share their thoughts and tips on the vulnerability. Private Internet Access told us that the are currently investigating the issue to see what they can do on their end to address it. (Update: PIA published an article on the issue today)

TorGuard informed us that they issued a warning in a blog post along with instructions on how to stop the browser leak. Ben Van Der Pelt, TorGuard’s CEO, further informed us that tunneling the VPN through a router is another fix.

“Perhaps the best way to be protected from WebRTC and similar vulnerabilities is to run the VPN tunnel directly on the router. This allows the user to be connected to a VPN directly via Wi-Fi, leaving no possibility of a rogue script bypassing a software VPN tunnel and finding one’s real IP,” Van der Pelt says.

“During our testing Windows users who were connected by way of a VPN router were not vulnerable to WebRTC IP leaks even without any browser fixes,” he adds.

While the fixes above are all reported to work, the leak is a reminder that anonymity should never be taken for granted.

As is often the case with these type of vulnerabilities, VPN and proxy users should regularly check if their connection is secure. This also includes testing against DNS leaks and proxy vulnerabilities.

Update: Freebsd also appears to be affected by the vulnerability.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.

The post Fuuny animals …For more humor animals and humor and hilarious animal pictures visit www.bestfunnyjoke… appeared first on ActingLikeAnimals.com.

The post Cats through the ages. via Buzzfeed, but credit goes to “cat versus human” comic. which is the best. appeared first on ActingLikeAnimals.com.

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A funky musical tribute to the internet’s golden age, the 1990s, by Youtuber melodysheep.

[melodysheep]

The post JUST SURF THE NET: A Funky Tribute to The Internet of the 1990s! appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

Former MI5 chief says new terror measures jeopardize free speech...


(Third column, 8th story, link)

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Related stories:

Canada gives spy agency new powers...

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Saudi Arabia Demands a Men-Only Olympics. Looks like San Francisco is back in the running.

Army Deletes ‘Chinks’ in Armor Tweet Because PC Crowd Too Stupid to Understand English. They better not use ‘niggardly’ or they’re really going to be in deep shit.

Judge: Men cannot be forced to squat to pee. Women’s libbers worldwide outraged.

In its latest effort porving that McDonald’s is going to cling to this Lovin’ thing and never, ever let it go, the fast-food chain has a new Super Bowl ad promising to reward touchy-feely customers with free food, in exchange for selfies, hugs, high fives and anything else the company deems to be in line with Lovin’.

While it’s unclear how many hugs McDonald’s had to pay for its 30-second $4.5 million spot, the company says it’ll be accepting hugs and photos of people in return for food, during pre-selected times between Feb. 2 and 14.

“From selfies, hugs to high fives – we have a bunch of fun ways to express your Lovin’,” McDonald’s says, showing people embracing each other in front of the cashier or calling

Customers will be chosen randomly by McDonald’s employees to “Pay with Lovin’,” a spokeswoman tells ABC News.

“We want to thank our customers for making our day and hopefully they will make someone else’s as well – that’s what Lovin’ is all about,” she said.

Not much lovin’ was reserved for Mickey D’s CEO Don Thompson, who announced this week he’s stepping down March 1 after three years on the job. CEO Steve Esterbook has moved into the role, but it’s unclear how many high fives he accepted in his salary package. Certainly more of those than selfies. Who wants a selfie anyway? No one but yourself, hence the name.

You can watch the ad below if you’re into that kind of thing. My favorite is the grumpy guy who’s all, “Why don’t you just tell me how much I owe you?”

Stopping the merger of two of the most disliked mega-corporations in America would be a great thing. Here's how it could happen.

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Because assembling Ikea furniture is so much fun (sarcasm), a new video game called "Home Improvisation" is letting you live that experience virtually.

They're calling it "the world's most fun and cooperative furniture assembly experience."

The game's furniture is assembled by clicking, dragging and rotating the pieces until they fit into their specific holes. Up to three friends can virtually join you in assembling the flat packs, or you can "labor alone and slowly descend into madness."

The game was created at this year's Global Game Jam competition in just 48 hours by a small developer team called The Stork Burnt Down.

It's available now for free on Mac and PC. Check out the full demo the video below.

SEE ALSO: The 20 Most Expensive Zip Codes In Silicon Valley

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It’s no secret that payday loan storefronts often pop up in lower-income communities where consumers are more likely to need a quick infusion of cash to get to the next paycheck. A new report from the Howard University Center on Race and Wealth shines a light on the frequency with which the small-dollar, high-cost loans are opened in susceptible communities in the southern United States.

The report [PDF], which studies payday loan practices in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, found that the most vulnerable communities in those states continue to fall prey to these practices, causing considerable damage to their already compromised financial stability.

Overall, the report found that 12 million Americans in these areas use payday loans annually, averaging about eight loans a year. On average those loans originally cost $375, and accumulated nearly $520 in interest charges.

Of the consumers who frequented the payday store fronts, most were women. People who were divorced or separated were 103% more likely to use the loans, while African-American’s were also 103% more likely to take out the often predatory loans.

“Based on the location of these lenders, it is clear they target minority and low-to-middle income groups, mostly in highly diverse populated areas,” the report states. “If this trend continues, these areas will no doubt be pushed into poverty.”

In Florida, payday loan storefronts were found to cluster in areas where income ranges from $20,000 to $60,000. Of the 1,277 stores located in Florida in 2014, more than 1,000 were located in communities where income was between $30,000 to $40,000.

The report found that approximately 1,200 of the stores were located in areas that were more than 30% African-American and up to 60% Hispanic.

As an example, the report shows that one Miami ZIP code, which has a population that is 83% African-American and 13% Hispanic, had 10 payday stores within its limits.

The findings in Alabama were similar to those in Florida. Of the 1,032 payday stores in the state, 976 were located in areas with a high minority population and an income between $20,000 and $60,000.

A ZIP code in Birmingham, was found to have 14 payday stores, or two stores per 1,000 people. The area also had a 79% minority population and a 14% unemployment rate.

In Louisiana, 960 of the 964 payday loan stores in operation as of March 2014 were situated in communities with a minority population of 20% or higher.

A ZIP code within Baton Rouge was found to have more than five payday stores per 1,000 residents. The area has a 85% minority population and a median household income of $49,609.

The report found that in many areas of Louisiana with a high concentration of payday stores, the poverty rate of the communities was above 20% and unemployment was as high as 19%.

Likewise in Mississippi, payday loan storefront locations appear to be determined by income, race and ethnicity of community populations, the report states.

Of the 898 stores in the state, 97% were situated in areas where the income is between $20,000 and $55,000, with a minority population of 20% or higher.

Laurel, MS, had 23 payday stores within its limits and a median household income of $32,061 and a 64% minority population. Additionally the area has an unemployment rate of 9.1% and 31.4% of the residents were living below the poverty line.

The report went on to investigate the potential effects payday stores have on the community’s economy.

As an example, the report points out that a customer who pays about $600 per year for short-term payday loans is also losing $600 worth of savings each year. If these funds were invested in a diversified portfolio over 30 years, it would create savings of $75,000.

Therefore, the report hypothesizes, a small community with 200 payday customers would lose about $15 million over 30 years.

Economic Impact of Payday Lending in Economically Vulnerable Communities [Howard University Center on Race and Wealth]