Bewarethewumpus

Gou Miyagi does not skateboard how most people skateboard. previously

(+70): I have bad memories with every alcohol but we manage to work through the problems for the good of the relationship.

On Christmas day, former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden appeared in a televised Christmas message on Britain’s Channel 4 in which he urged the people of the world to demand governments put an end to mass surveillance.

Geeks! A friend of mine is working on a project that involves parasitic brain control. She's raising funds for an experiment. Please give it a look if you have a moment. Thanks!

I woke up this morning keenly aware that I was in no state to resume the actual game session coherently, so instead of driving myself nuts I’m gonna embrace the spirit of the holidays and figuratively loaf on the figurative couch and reheat some figurative leftover smoked turkey.

So, from my running notes on the strip: this was gonna be a throwaway joke around the end of the first session, but it didn’t end up fitting in the flow of things right and so I had to let it drop. Was too late to really go back for in any good way since Riker and Bev have ended up a bit at odds in terms of character and character-as-proxy-for-player interactions and I’ve made at least one joke as a result that contradicts the idea of this happening even aside from the silliness of this idea itself, and so blah blah blah no way to incorporate it naturally.

But, figurative smoked turkey. I labeled this #1, there might be a #2 and so on depending on where my head is next week. Hope y’all are having a good holiday-ish time of the year.

Benjamin Franklin was a leaker of government secrets, who circulated intercepted letters from the colonial lieutenant governor of Massachusetts Bay to the British government. The letters detailed a scheme to take away colonists' legally guaranteed freedoms "by degrees" and called for more troops to keep order during the process. After the letters were published, Franklin admitted to leaking them, but refused to give up his source. The crown called it "thievery and dishonor" and he was fired from his postmaster general gig (thankfully, there was no Espionage Act on the books at the time). (via Techdirt)

The ACLU has spent years in court trying to get a look at a top-secret FBI interrogation manual that referred to the CIA's notorious KUBARK torture manual. The FBI released a heavily redacted version at one point -- so redacted as to be useless for determining whether its recommendations were constitutional.

However, it turns out that the FBI agent who wrote the manual sent a copy to the Library of Congress in order to register a copyright in it -- in his name! (Government documents are not copyrightable, but even if they were, the copyright would vest with the agent's employer, not the agent himself). A Mother Jones reporter discovered the unredacted manual at the Library of Congress last week, and tipped off the ACLU about it.

Anyone can inspect the manual on request. Go see for yourself!

The 70-plus-page manual ended up in the Library of Congress, thanks to its author, an FBI official who made an unexplainable mistake. This FBI supervisory special agent, who once worked as a unit chief in the FBI's counterterrorism division, registered a copyright for the manual in 2010 and deposited a copy with the US Copyright Office, where members of the public can inspect it upon request. What's particularly strange about this episode is that government documents cannot be copyrighted.

"A document that has not been released does not even need a copyright," says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. "Who is going to plagiarize from it? Even if you wanted to, you couldn't violate the copyright because you don't have the document. It isn't available."

"The whole thing is a comedy of errors," he adds. "It sounds like gross incompetence and ignorance."

Julian Sanchez, a fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute who has studied copyright policy, was harsher: "Do they not cover this in orientation? [Sensitive] documents should not be placed in public repositories—and, by the way, aren't copyrightable. How do you even get a clearance without knowing this stuff?"

You'll Never Guess Where This FBI Agent Left a Secret Interrogation Manual [Nick Baumann/Mother Jones]

(via Techdirt)

(Image: FBI, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 10542402@N06's photostream)

"As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry," reports Joseph Menn at Reuters in an exclusive today:

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.

"Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer" [Reuters.com]

@Veronica @warrenellis @scalzi @jjsaul @swordandlaser @StephenBrust @doctorow @neilhimself Assaulted BitCoin & invaded Libertopia, SAME DAY.

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) December 18, 2013

Charlie Stross's Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire presents a set of scorching denunciations of Bitcoin based on its technical, political, and economic demerits. On the way, Stross takes some vicious shots at libertarianism. It's one of those Christmas-season hornet's-nest kickings that are fun to watch -- at a great distance.

Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell (as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars). This essay has some questionable numbers, but the underlying principle is sound.

Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else's computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware.

Bitcoin violates Gresham's law: Stolen electricity will drive out honest mining. (So the greatest benefits accrue to the most ruthless criminals.)

Bitcoin's utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge, in commodities like assassination (and drugs and child pornography).

It's also inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society. You think our wonderful investment bankers aren't paying their fair share of taxes? Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion. Moreover, The Gini coefficient of the Bitcoin economy is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia, and the "if this goes on" linear extrapolations imply that BtC will badly damage stable governance, not to mention redistributive taxation systems and social security/pension nets if its value continues to soar (as it seems designed to do due to its deflationary properties).

Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire

Alan sez, "Amnesty International have a petition up that asks for the release of Manning. The petition argues that both on humanitarian grounds and on account of the pre-trial treatment, Manning is deserving of a clemency release."

We, the undersigned, support Amnesty International’s letter calling for clemency for Chelsea Manning.

- Private Manning has accepted responsibility for her actions and claims she was acting in the public interest.

- The materials leaked by Manning reveal potential human rights violations and breaches of international humanitarian law by US troops, Iraqi and Afghan forces operating alongside US forces, military contractors, and the CIA.

- The severity of the sentence imposed on Private Manning is more harsh than that imposed on some members of the military who have been convicted of serious crimes, including murder, rape and war crimes.

- Private Manning has already served more than three years in pre-trial detention, including 11 months in conditions acknowledged as breaching military standards, and condemned as cruel and inhumane by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

Support the Release of Chelsea Manning (Thanks, Alan!)

submitted by JuicyFarts [link] [440 comments]

Comics creator Paul Dini did a guest appearance on Kevin Smith's podcast "Fatman on Batman" podcast, and talked, in part, about the gender considerations of execs in new animation/superhero kids' show design, Vi transcribed the relevant piece, in which Dini recounts conversations he's had with execs who insist that they don't want any girl fans of their shows, because girls don't buy toys. And to keep girls from watching the shows, they make sure that girls are always presented as sidekicks, "one step behind the boys." It's absolutely infuriating.

DINI: "They're all for boys 'we do not want the girls', I mean, I've heard executives say this, you know, not Ryan(?) but at other places, saying like, 'We do not want girls watching this show."

SMITH: "WHY? That's 51% of the population."

DINI: "They. Do. Not. Buy. Toys. The girls buy different toys. The girls may watch the show -- "

SMITH: "So you can sell them T-shirts if they don't-- I disagree, A, I think girls buy toys as well, I mean not as many as f***ing boys do, but, B, sell them something else, man! Don't be lazy and be like, 'well I can't sell a girl a toy.' Sell 'em a T-shirt, man, sell them f***ing umbrella with the f***ing character on it, something like that. But if it's not a toy, there's something else you could sell 'em! Like, just because you can't figure out your job, don't kill chances of, like, something that's gonna reach an audi -- that's just so self-defeating, when people go, like… these are the same fuckers who go, like, 'Oh, girls don't read comics, girls aren't into comics.' It's all self-fulfilling prophecies. They just make it that way, by going like, 'I can't sell 'em a toy, what's the point?'

DINI: "That's the thing, you know I hate being Mr. Sour Grapes here, but I'll just lay it on the line: that's the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, like, 'we need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys' -- this is the network talking -- 'one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as the boys, but right there.' And then we began writing stories that got into the two girls' back stories, and they were really interesting. And suddenly we had families and girls watching, and girls really became a big part of our audience, in sort of like they picked up that Harry Potter type of serialized way, which is what The Batman and [indistinct]'s really gonna kill. But, the Cartoon Network was saying, 'F***, no, we want the boys' action, it's boys' action, this goofy boy humor we've gotta get that in there. And we can't -- ' and I'd say, but look at the numbers, we've got parents watching, with the families, and then when you break it down -- 'Yeah, but the -- so many -- we've got too many girls. We need more boys.'"

SMITH: "That's heart-breaking."

DINI: "And then that's why they cancelled us, and they put on a show called Level Up, which is, you know, goofy nerds fighting CG monsters. It's like, 'We don't want the girls because the girls won't buy toys.' We had a whole… we had a whole, a merchandise line for Tower Prep that they s***canned before it ever got off the launching pad, because it's like, 'Boys, boys, boys. Boys buy the little spinny tops, they but the action figures, girls buy princesses, we're not selling princesses.'"

Fatman on Batman 52: 'Beware the Batman' talk (via IO9)

NES Remix is a new game collection from Nintendo for the Wii U that takes 16 classic Nintendo games -- from Super Mario Bros. to The Legend of Zelda -- and picks specific pieces of them for remixing. For instance, an Excitebike level is shown as if ...

Submitted by Brad R.

scorpiondagger:

- here’s my ‘life of christ’ in 10 gifs - 

[anotherwebcomic]

via http://thisisnthappiness.com/

Last day for Christmas shipping. Thanks for another wonderful year entertaining all you geeks.

David McRaney, host of Boing Boing's most popular podcast, You Are Not So Smart, just posted this fun video about "The Post Hoc Fallacy" ("just because B follows A doesn't mean that A causes B") to promote his new book, You Are Now Less Dumb.