First time accepted submitter elysiuan writes "The founder of Freedom Hosting has been arrested in Ireland and is awaiting extradition to USA. In a crackdown the FBI claims to be about hunting down pedophiles, half of the onion sites in the TOR network have been compromised, including the e-mail counterpart of TOR deep web, TORmail. The FBI has also embedded a 0-day Javascript attack against Firefox 17 on Freedom Hosting's server. It appears to install a tracking cookie and a payload that phones home to the FBI when the victim resumes non-TOR browsing. Interesting implications for The Silk Road and the value of Bitcoin stemming from this. The attack relies on two extremely unsafe practices when using TOR: Enabled Javascript, and using the same browser for TOR and non-TOR browsing. Any users accessing a Freedom Hosting hosted site since 8/2 with javascript enabled are potentially compromised."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are lots of interactions and fields around us all the time that we can't see. Like gravity. We can always count on gravity to be there when we trip and face plant. And we interact with all different frequencies on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation every day, which is usually fine and sometimes deadly. And you might be feeling good about all this physical awareness, but don't. People have known about this stuff for a long time and they've been making unbelievably detailed infographics about it for at least 70 years.

Read more...

On Friday, a baffled hacker community got a firsthand lesson in just how bizarre sexism in the tech industry can be. LinkedIn and Toptal, a small developer networking platform, essentially played a round of credibility chicken over Toptal's advertising on the site.

brilliantfantasticgeronimo:

# i don’t understand how people hate the daleks # when scenes like this happen  ·

Minority audiences turned out in force, with Hispanics making up 14 percent of the crowd and African-Americans a whopping 28 percent. "That's Denzel," Rocco said.

The Doctor is in

Somerville 38.67% /// Cambridge 33.01% /// Amherst 12.24% /// Boston 8.56% /// Brookline 5.34% /// Newton 2%

A salad mix linked to a severe stomach virus that sickened more than 200 people in Iowa and Nebraska has not been served at Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants there for about a month, a spokesman for the restaurants said on Saturday.

Now Zoe Ball is explaining that the Doctor has the ability to regenerate, which apparently means that he changes in appearance. I don't know about anyone else, but I had no idea about this. I hope she explains what that funny blue box that he flies around is next, or what Doctor Who is. Or what a television is.

On Friday, Eric Eoin Marques, a 28 year-old Dublin resident, was arrested on a warrant from the US on charges that he is, in the words of a FBI agent to an Irish court, "the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet."

Both Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1 were launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, located in desert of Kazakhstan. It has since served as a launch pad for generations upon generations of spacecraft, including the International Space Station. Take a tour of Baikonour as it looks today.

Read more...

New York Daily News

Cops shoot and kill 14-year-old gunman in the Bronx New York Daily News A rookie cop shot and killed a 14-year-old gunslinger on a Bronx street early Sunday — just days after Mayor Bloomberg railed against a flood of firearms falling into the wrong hands. Shaaliver Douse was shot to death just after 3 a.m. in Melrose when he kept ... NYPD officers shoot, kill armed teenNewsday NYPD: Officer fatally shoots teen who fired gun at fleeing personCNN Police kill armed 14-year-old boy on NYC street; authorities say he refused to ...Washington Post USA TODAY -CBS Local -WNYC all 88 news articles »

omgthatdress:

Gloves

1680-1690

Manchester City Gallery

bjornstar:

octo—-


pie

It Gets Better: We Think He Might Be A Boy:

itgetsbetterproject:

by Su Penn on July 31, 2013

Tiny Tornado after a recent trip to the barbershop.

I am at the dining room table, and my five-year-old is in the bathroom. After a bit, I realize that the water has been running for much longer than it takes for him to wash his hands. I hear cupboard doors opening and closing; I hear the rattle of things being taken down from shelves; he’s probably had to put a stool on top of a chair to reach.

“What are you doing in there?” I call.

There is a long pause. He’s definitely up to something.

Finally, he answers: “I am doing,” he says, “what I want to do.”

Let me introduce you to our son. We call him the Tiny Tornado.

He is not yet two and we still think he’s a girl. One day, he refuses every t-shirt in his drawer that has pink anywhere on it, or cap sleeves, or flowers. He puts on jeans and a plain white t-shirt. Later in the day, I’m cleaning out his older brother’s closet, bagging things for Goodwill, and he pounces on a worn-out Spiderman t-shirt that is much too big for him. He wears it all summer. I get it off him every five days or so to wash it, and he puts it back on as soon as it comes out of the dryer. I put his older brother’s outgrown clothes in the basement, and, with a pang, take most of the hand-me-downs from the twin girls down the street to Goodwill instead.

He is two. His brothers are three and six years older than him. We still think he’s a girl. We are at our homeschool group’s Christmas party and my friend Ann says to me, “I find it amusing that the Tiny Tornado is the most boyish of your children.”

He is not quite three. He gets tired of waiting for me to toilet train him, so one day he takes off his diaper and pees in the toilet, and that’s that. He always knows exactly what he wants, but I hesitate when he tells me he wants his hair cut short. I’ve been told so many times that white moms simply can’t cut a black girl’s hair. But he is determined, so, a few days before his third birthday, my partner David gets out the clippers and gives him a mohawk. He runs around with an enormous grin, showing it off. I look at pictures of him with his braids. I think of what hard work it was oiling and combing and parting his hair, how satisfying it was. How beautiful he looked.

He is three. Sometimes he says he’s a boy. We’re not sure. I am looking at a catalog, pining over a red skirt in his size and wishing I had someone to buy it for. He looks over my shoulder. “Ewww,” he says. I turn the page, and there’s a picture of a boy wearing an oxford shirt, khakis, a v-neck sweater vest, a blazer. “Ooohhh,” he sighs, gazing at it yearningly. He learns, from somewhere, about suits with ties, and I buy him one. He is dazzlingly happy, shiningly handsome.

At the end of the year, his preschool puts on a concert. The girls are brilliant in tulle and glitter and sequined barrettes. He is wearing a polo shirt and cargo shorts. I point to where the girls are showing off their dresses to each other, twirling their skirts. I would have loved those dresses at three. I would have loved to buy them for my daughter. I say, “Do you think you would ever want a dress like that?”

“No,” he says. “And I don’t want you to ask me that ever again.”

So I don’t.

He is four. We think he might be a boy. We think probably he is a boy. He holds out the chest of his t-shirt and says to David, “I don’t want to get puffy, like Mama.”

David says, “You mean like breasts?”

“Yeah,” says the Tiny Tornado. He pulls up his t-shirt to show his chest. “I want to be like this, with nipples, but not puffy.”

He’s almost five, and the whole family goes to a conference for trans people, their allies and families, and people in the helping professions. The first morning, at childcare, a volunteer is helping him make his name tag and asks, “Do you want me to write that you like to be called he, like a boy, or she, like a girl?”

Nobody has ever asked him that before, but he answers without hesitation, and the volunteer writes “He” on the Tiny Tornado’s name tag.

The next night, we’re getting ready to go to the family pool party, to join a big happy splashing crowd of trans kids and adults and their families. As we’re changing, I tell him, “I think your blue shorts look enough like a swimsuit that you could wear them to the pool instead of your tankini.” He skips bare-chested down the hallway and spins through the hotel lobby, whirling in little celebratory dances.

He’s five, and he’s a boy.

The week before he starts school, he changes his name to one that sounds more male. The principal and his teachers know his gender status, but to everyone else he’s just one of two hundred little boys showing off to each other on the playground. He worries about his body betraying him, turning him into a woman against his will, and we tell him that doctors can help him with that, if it’s still what he wants when the time comes.

He freezes when his music teacher divides the class into boys and girls, not sure he’s allowed to go with the boys until she reassures him. He asks me to take down a picture of him as a one-year-old. “I have a ribbon in my hair,” he says with distaste. He excels in his swimming lessons, loves his basketball class, learns to skateboard and roller skate. He wants to sign up for t-ball, soccer, karate, hockey, and—now that he knows he won’t be forced to wear tights—a dance class. He trains his dog to jump over jumps and run along balance beams. He can sound out three-letter words and count past twenty. He loves to go to the black barbershop and get a really sharp cut; he admires himself in the rearview mirror all the way home and says with satisfaction, “Lookin’ good. Lookin’ handsome.”

He’s so independent that some mornings he has already packed his snack and lunch for school before I wake up. “Five more minutes, Mom,” he tells me, “and then you really have to get up or we’ll be late.” He tries to pee standing up, and manages surprisingly well, but usually decides to sit down. “He splatters more when he stands up,” I tell his principal. “Well, that certainly sets him apart from the rest of the boys,” she jokes.

I find a doctor’s office that has “male/female/other” on its patient history forms, where he is not their first transgender patient even if he is their first transgender child. I save the information that a new children’s gender clinic has opened in Chicago, just four hours away from us. My father tells me, “I don’t want to have anything to do with you as long as you keep treating her like a boy,” and we are careful about what we tell the Tiny Tornado, because we do not want him ever to think that it’s his fault.

We count our blessings that his school is so supportive, and try not to worry about other schools, and other years. I’m 47 and I’ve never had a career, never made more than $21,000 a year, but I go back to school in speech language pathology. I do this for many reasons, including my excruciatingly banal mid-life crisis. But I do it, too, because puberty blockers can cost over a thousand dollars a month and insurance will almost never pay for them, and whatever choice he makes at 12, at 15, at 18, we need for it not to be about money.

When I was pregnant with our first child, Friends who knew our intimate connections to trans people asked if we were going to try to raise a Baby X, not assign a gender, and avoid pronouns. David would say, “No, we’re just going to go with the apparent biological sex. We figure if we’re wrong, the baby will let us know soon enough.” But we didn’t think that would really happen.

The Tiny Tornado will have a lot to figure out as he gets older: whether to go through puberty as a boy or a girl; how out to be about his trans status; when and how to disclose to potential romantic partners; whether and when to take hormones or pursue surgery. He knows as much of that as it’s appropriate for a five-year-old to know. Which is to say, he doesn’t know much. He trusts us, though, when we say that he is the person who best knows whether he is a boy. He trusts us when we say we can help him with this, that he can grow up to be a man if he wants to, that he can grow up to be any kind of man he wants to be. That he can grow up to be a good man. That we think he will grow up to be the very best kind of man.

Author’s Note: It is customary in my experience to use a person’s chosen pronoun even when referring to their life before gender transition. In addition, I have chosen to respect the Tiny Tornado’s preference not to be referred to with female pronouns.

Source: http://www.friendsjournal.org/we-think-he-might-be-a-boy/

bakerstreetbabes:

Helping to save Undershaw.  (Photo: Jamie Rothwell Photography)

Stained glass ceiling, The Bank pub, Dublin city center, Ireland on Flickr.

tonidorsay:

ladyw1nter:

obstinatecondolement:

knitmeapony:

mimejuice:

dduane:

spodiddly:

tinuelena:

Whose intervention ensured Star Trek saw the light of day?

Answer: Lucille Ball

Most people recognize and remember Lucille Ball as the lovable and silly star of one of America’s earliest and most loved sitcoms, I Love Lucy. What most people don’t know is that Lucille was a savvy business woman and that she and her husband Desi Arnaz had amassed a small fortune and owned their own studio, Desilu.

It was at Desilu that acclaimed Sci-Fi screenwriter and visionary Gene Roddenberry got his big break. Roddenberry pitched the Star Trek pilot to the studio as a sort of Western-inspired space adventure. While many within the studio balked at the idea, Lucille liked the idea and the first pilot was approved and filmed. The pilot was pitched to NBC and was promptly rejected on the grounds that it was too intellectual, not enough like the space-western they had been lead to believe it would be, and audiences wouldn’t relate to it. Lucille, a fan of Roddenberry’s work, pushed back against NBC and insisted they order a second pilot. Ordering a second pilot was a practice almost entirely unheard of and save for Lucille’s charisma and clout with the network it would never have happened.

Roddenberry shot the second pilot, NBC accepted it, and Star Trek premiered in 1966, thus beginning a new era in the Sci-Fi genre and laying the foundation for half a century of Star Trek fandom–an era that would have never come to pass without the intervention and insistence of Lucille Ball.

Bonus Trivia: After her divorce from Arnaz, Lucille bought out his share of their studio. As a result she became the first woman to both head and own a major studio. (*)

Now I love Lucy.

So few people know about this! Too few. Glad to see this turning up here. Also: it was through Lucille Ball’s influence that the concept of the rerun (previously unknown and thought to be worthless by studios to whom it was pitched) finally took hold. Desilu essentially pioneered the concept of syndication, and of the “syndication package” — the minimum number of episodes (initially 65, now sometimes more) necessary for a series to become commercially viable, via onward sales, for longer than its initial live run.

We have a lot to thank Lucy for besides that beautiful rubbery face.  :)

whoa.

This is just another way that we can remember that as women We. Created. Scifi.

Never let anyone tell you that women are a recent addition to fandom.  From Mary Shelley on, horror, sci fi and fantasy have been a women’s realm since the beginning.

Always reblog.

fuck. I never knew this. A NEW FOREVER REBLOG.

There is much, much more to know about Lucille Ball and her contributions to pop culture, but even more to know about her and her contributions to feminism.

Without Lucille Ball, there would never have been a Mary Tyler Moore.

The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, Mannix, the Andy Griffith Show, Dick Van Dyke, My Three Sons, I SPy and That Girl were all part of what she, specifically, realized were going to be popular, often despite everyone else saying she was wrong.

Desilu bought RKO, though later sold many of the rights to films from that incredible collection.

As a company,they developed the standard multiple camera format that is used on all sitcoms today.

Today, what was once Desilu, is known as CBS Televisions Studios.

She was an older woman who married a younger man — a Cuban, which in those days was an interracial marriage — through elopement.  It was, for the times, scandalous.

So scandalous, that the radio show that ultimately became I Love Lucy was sidelined because Executives didn’t think the public would go for it.

A Cuban headlining a major hit was and is a major win, that is often overlooked these days because of the stereotypes that came from such a popular show.

Together, her and Desi were incredibly shrewd.  When the sponsor, Phillip Morris, wouldn’t pay for the expense of filming the show, they said they would take a cut in pay in exchange for the rights to the film, and ended up owning I Love Lucy.  It would be two decades and change before CBS got it back, and then under some terms that were favorable to Lucille and Desi’s children, ultimately. Both of whom were born when she was in her 40’s.

She registered as  communist in the 1930’s, and as a result, was brought up before the damnable McCarthy HCUAA.   She supported Roosevelt for President, and then later voted for Eisenhower — showing that she was more interested in doing what’s right, over doing it for personal gain.

She was one of the greatest women of the last century, a “B movie queen" who changed the world in ways that are, as is often typical, consistently overlooked.

She was the prototype that pushed women to question the status quo, the icon that many struggled with and against, an example that reverberated with people old and young when marching and shouting and arguing about a woman’s right to be her own person and have control over her own life.

She not only inspired it, she lived it.

Shooting fish in a barrel is an idiom, describing an effortless or simple action, with guaranteed success.

The Mythbusters team tested and proved the accuracy of their interpretation of the idiom. If the fish does not die from the shot, it is quite likely to die from the shockwave.

Before the days of refrigeration, fish were packed and stored alive in large barrels. The barrels were packed to the rim full of fish. Any shot that entered the barrel would hit at least one of them. Thus nothing can be easier than shooting fish in a barrel.

Link (Thanks, Chris)

llordalfred:

Five Stages of Grief

1) Denial
2) Anger
3) Bargaining
4) Depression
5) Moustache

Trailrunner7 writes "Security researchers have been warning about the weaknesses and issues with JavaScript and iframes for years now, but the problem goes far deeper than even many of them thought. A researcher in the U.K. has developed a new technique that uses a combination of JavaScript-based timing attacks and other tactics to read any information he wants from a targeted user's browser and sites the victim is logged into. The attack works on all of the major browsers and researchers say there's no simple fix to prevent it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this summer, I started reading about On Tap Liquid Beer Enhancer on booze nerd sites like Beer Advocate, at which point I pretty much knew we had to Taste Test it. After all, what are Taste Tests if not an excuse to drink weird liquor? The fine people at On Tap were kind enough to send us versions of both their Pale Ale and American Ale products, and on we went, doctoring the cheapest, shittiest beer we could find with On Tap, which as a “liquid flavor enhancer” promised to help us “enjoy a craft brew taste at a fraction of the cost.” The results weren’t great, as you can see above, but in On Tap’s defense, we may have squeezed just a little too much of the “revolutionary” product into the cheap beers we were drinking. Or maybe On Tap’s just not great. Don’t ...

Read more

We've often written about horrendous Chinese tattoo blunders on Language Log (with a general survey here), there is a whole website dedicated to them, and now BuzzFeed offers a generous assortment of "34 Ridiculous Chinese Character Tattoos Translated". All of the photographs are great, and many of the translations are serviceable, some even inspired, but several of them are wrong or could be improved. I won't go through all 34, and indeed, I've already covered at least one of them on Language Log, but will concentrate on a few that are particularly interesting.

N.B.: for each item, I give Hanyu Pinyin romanization | Chinese characters | BuzzFeed English translation | notes and / or revised translation in parentheses.

zhūròu yóu jiān de mǐ 豬肉油煎的米 "rice fried by pork fat" (unidiomatic Chinese translation for "pork fried rice", which should be zhūròu chǎofàn 猪肉炒饭, ròusī chǎofàn 肉丝炒饭, etc.)

xiōng'è fàn shīrén 凶恶犯詩人 "meanie crime poet" (the xiōng'è fàn 凶恶犯 ["vicious criminal"] seems to be written over a preexisting shīrén 詩人["poet"])

fushǒu 夫手 "husband hands" (on the biceps of a soccer player; the English is taken straight from Google Translate, but I think that the intention may have been to write a short form of gōngfu shǒu 功夫手 ["Kung Fu skill / hand / adept"])

kěyǐ 可以 "can do / okay" (on the arm of a basketball player; a more idiomatic Chinese rendering of "can do" would be bàn dédào 辦得到 or kěyǐ zuò 可以做)

hóu 猴 "monkey" (on the arm of a ripped tennis player, but there's probably nothing wrong with this since it might be considered his zodiacal sign; Marat Safin was born on January 20, 1980, which loosely may be thought of as belonging to a monkey year, though technically, according to the Chinese lunar calendar, the monkey year of that year ran from 16 February 1980 – 4 February 1981 and January 20, 1980 belonged to a goat year)

shén xìnyòng 神信用 "god credit" (the English is taken straight from Google Translate, but I think that the intention may have been to give a Chinese version of "in God we trust", which would be better translated as wǒmen xìnyǎng / xìnfèng / xiāngxìn shàngdì 我们信仰/相信/信奉上帝)

Lesson to be learned: never get a Chinese tattoo unless you first consult a licensed Sinologist to determine that what is about to be permanently ingrained on your hide will not make you a laughingstock for the rest of your life.

[hat tip to Jamie Fisher]

Offering a tempting mixture of pony rides, barbecue, puppy love, and booze, Northeast's neighborhood favorite Firehouse Restaurant will celebrate the 100th birthday of their building and the 5th anniversary of their own opening. Asking a small cash donation to benefit the Pixie Project (an incredible pet shelter and adoption agency in Northeast Portland) and the Sauvie Island Center (a program based Howell Territorial Park that promotes the area through educational field trips), this party is promising: festivities start this Sunday, Aug 4th at 2 pm, with a chili cookoff involving talent from Grain & Gristle, Old Salt Marketplace, Aviary, and Fireside Restaurant, as well as a beer garden for the grown-ups, a silent auction, and live music all day. Not a bad place to spend a Sunday afternoon or to fall in love with the Woodlawn neighborhood spirit, a quietly blooming presence in Northeast Portland.

Firehouse Restaurant is located at 711 NE Dekum.

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A "hump of assumptions" can stand in the way of creating and including lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender characters in video games today, said David Gaider, lead writer for the Dragon Age series at BioWare. Speaking on an EA-populated panel at GaymerX in San Francisco today, Gaider and colleagues addressed the importance of heeding the demand for diversity and, more plainly, "reflecting humanity" in modern games.

Hesitation over tackling LGBT issues, Gaider said, can come from pessimistic assumptions made - both by creators and marketers - about how the audience will react. One of BioWare's earliest gay characters, Juhani in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, was practically snuck into the game. "I think for a long time it was just assumed that nobody would accept it," he said. "That's what the mentality was. It's not like we went and tried to ask permission or anything - we kind of hid it. She never says, 'She was my lover.' She just says, 'We are very close.'"

Not explicitly addressing the topic, however, "seemed like a very obvious exclusion" to Gaider. BioWare's next role-playing game, Jade Empire, was less subtle in its depiction of a same-sex relationship, and it faced far less resistance than the team had assumed. There was no long conversation after the team asked, "Why don't we just make the romances available to both genders?" According to Gaider, "that was the whole conversation."

Continue reading Clearing the 'hump of assumptions' in making LGBT inclusive games

Clearing the 'hump of assumptions' in making LGBT inclusive games originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 04 Aug 2013 00:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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San Francisco Chronicle

Snowboarder buried in ice tunnel collapse at Oregon's Mt. Hood Fortune (CNN) -- Search teams found the body of a 25-year-old snowboarder Sunday under more than 8 feet of ice on Oregon's Mt. Hood. Collin Backowski was killed after a tunnel he was snowboarding through collapsed, burying him under snow and ice, said Hood ... Snowboarder's body recovered after ice cave collapse in OregonNew York Daily News Police: Shots fired in AlbuquerqueKOAT Albuquerque Searchers recover body of Mt. Hood snowboarderUSA TODAY OregonLive.com -Fox News -KPTV.com all 104 news articles »