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theodp writes "The e-mail that Defendant Swartz's supplemental memorandum (pdf) cites as paramount to his fifth motion to suppress [evidence against him] is relevant, but not nearly as important as he tries to make it out to be,' quipped United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz (pdf) in a court filing made on the same day Aaron Swartz committed suicide. In the 1-7-2011 e-mail Ortiz refers to, which was not produced for Swartz until Dec. 14th — almost two years after his 1-6-2011 arrest — a Secret Service agent reported to the Assistant U.S. Attorney that he was 'prepared to take custody anytime' of Swartz's laptop, although no one had yet sought a warrant to search the computer. In Prosecutor as Bully, Larry Lessig laments, 'They [JSTOR] declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the "criminal" who we who loved him knew as Aaron.' Swartz's family also had harsh words for MIT and prosecutors: 'Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron.' With MIT President Emeritus Charles M. Vest currently serving as a Trustee of JSTOR parent Ithaka as well as a Trustee of The MIT Corporation, one might have expected MIT to issue a statement similar to the let's-put-this-behind-us one JSTOR made on the Swartz case back in 2011."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Because of rain and mudslides, the line for Amtrak and Sound Transit trains has only been open two days for passenger trains since Dec. 17.

Amtrak this week announced plans to upgrade its on-train Wi-Fi backbone to 4G, claiming the improved infrastructure will offer faster speeds and a more reliable connection for travelers. The first half of that seems reasonable enough; LTE from Verizon and AT&T (Amtrak relies on both carriers to achieve nationwide Wi-Fi) will undoubtedly boost download speeds for those using smartphones, tablets, and laptops aboard the company's trains. But as The Atlantic points out, reliability remains another matter altogether — one that won't necessarily be solved by 4G.

The intermittent connection hiccups commuters regularly complain about are more likely the result of cell tower placement instead of any deficiency with the technologies Amtrak...

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I added some small grammatical errors in the opening paragraph.

Corki lost control of his tongue.

(For Part 1 of this interview, on moving to Portland, click here. For Part 3, on dealing with the media, click here.)
Antivirus software pioneer John McAfee, who says he is now making Portland his home after fleeing Belize, has some unusual ideas about money and sex—some of which he shared with WW earlier this week in a wide-ranging interview. (We posted a portion of the interview  Jan. 11, and we'll be running more excerpts over the next several days.)
The international fascination with McAfee is due in part to the fact the Silicon Valley legend has made and lost more money than most people. But it's intensified when Belize authorities named a "person of interest" in the November murder of his neighbor Gregory Faull—followed by his flight from that country, his arrest in Guatemala, his deportation to the U.S., and his bizarre allegations about spying and terrorism conspiracies back in Belize.
McAfee has now surfaced in Portland to work on a graphic novel with local illustrator Chad Essley (who appears and speaks in this video interview).   
In what seems to be a natural progression of this story, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news yesterday that Warner Brothers will be making a movie about McAfee and has secured the rights to a profile of him that appeared in Wired Magazine last year.

In this portion of our interview with McAfee, which took place in a coffee shop on the east side, he talks about about how most people have the wrong idea about money and his "open hole" theory of capitalism.  
Then he started talking about sex.


 

 

meme4u:

http://memeblock.com/

vondell-swain:

somebody thought of this character design style and then spent time working on it and then some entirely different person saw it and approved of it

Partizaning.org "Guerrilla" Moscow Metro Map


Placing the map in a Metro train carriage


New map in situ

Unofficial Map: Partizaning.org “Guerrilla” Moscow Metro Map

Last year, the Moscow Metro introduced a completely new official map, which featured 30-degree angles. Put simply, it went down like a lead balloon (link in Russian), forcing the authorities to hastily organise a competition for another brand new design.

However, some people decided they didn’t want to enter what’s essentially a no-spec design “contest” (there’s no payment for the winner, just thanks for a job well done) and set about designing their own map independently… and then covertly placing them on Metro carriages.

Reading the imperfect Google translation of their project website reveals their design goals: to bring the map back to a geographical grounding - showing the distance between stations better and how they relate to the physical landmarks of the city, especially the river. Connections to commuter rail are also shown, to better visualise usage of all transit in the greater Moscow area. All lines under construction have been excised from this map to bring greater clarity to the services currently offered.

Despite my own preference for diagrammatic system maps, I actually quite like this map. There’s some lovely work here, and the transparency effect applied to the route lines is quite beautiful. As seen by the last picture, it looks great in a real-world setting, and I’ve heard that the designers have enlarged the type size for better legibility since this first foray into the real world.

Our Rating: As much a political statement as it is a map, but undoubtedly good. Three-and-a-half-stars.

(Source: Partizaning.org via @dars_dm)

footox:

yeah we actually need to talk more about the new david bowie album cover

this is the real album cover

Joel Alioto, 44, an Iraq war veteran who lives in the area, said he recently sold an AR-15 rifle at a gun show for $1,700, more than three times what he had paid for it. “I think the shooting in Connecticut was a terrible thing,” said Mr. Alioto, who is unemployed. “But before the shooting the gun was worth 500 bucks. I don’t think I did anything wrong. I wanted to get my teeth done, get a computer and pay for my first year of Bible college.”

Nova Colliander with her 'intergender' partner Vio Szabo.

Sweden has taken a long-overdue step to end the requirement that transgender people who wish to update their sex identification on legal documents undergo sex reassignment surgeries that require them to sacrifice their ability to have children. This is thanks to a court judgment that now applies to the whole country circumventing the sterilization law, which is set to be rewritten and removed from the books by July 1, 2013. Sixteen other countries in the European Union require transgender citizens to undergo the surgery, which many trans people do not want or require.

Last year, liberal and moderate members of Sweden’s Parliament were prepared to change the law, but were initially blocked by conservative political groups led by the Christian Democrat Party. Nova Colliander, a trans woman opposed to the sterilization requirements, expresses the pain of sacrificing her reproductive ability and her bitterness that it’s taken so long to change the policy [edited via Google Translate]:

COLLIANDER: It was an assault, a rape. The state gave an ultimatum I had to accept. The alternative was to die, which I felt so strongly. I do not know how many wills I wrote as a child… I am terribly disappointed that it took so terribly long.

Being transgender is considered embarrassing and unimportant in society. They would rather hide us, it’s hard to even talk about us. Therefore, it has taken time… It’s lucky that I can feel joy for others. Otherwise I would have been driven to madness by the bitterness.

Sweden has an infamous history of eugenic sterilization that took place between 1934 and 1976, with over 21,000 forcibly sterilized and another 6,000 coerced into a “voluntary” sterilization. A governmental inquiry into the misdeeds of the past ended in 2000 that paid out damages to the victims. Sex identity changes remained the last form of forced sterilization in the nation, but it remains unclear if the government will consider a new set of reparations.

THEY’RE ‘FEETS BY DRE’ NOISE CANCELING SOCKS AND THE BASS RESPONSE IS INSANE.

I’M LISTENING TO CAT STEVENS AND IT SOUNDS LIKE DUBSTEP.

By monitoring people’s mobile devices, brick-and-mortar stores can get data on foot traffic much as websites follow clicks.

To get a sense of how much time customers spent in his shopping centers, John Smith, a 1960s pioneer of the modern mall, would walk around the parking lot and feel whether car hoods felt hot or cold.

(Anthropologie)

Here’s the thing, Anthropologie: If we’re going to shell out big bucks, say, $398 on an overpriced candlestick, we want it racism-free. The company recently had a bit of mud on its face for selling “one of a kind” candlesticks, one of which happened to feature not one, but two racially insensitive figurines.

Anthropologie was selling the Trinket & Treasure Candlestick for almost $400 with a picture that showed a candlestick with a bunch of figurines stacked on top of each other. Let’s see, there’s JFK, and a picture of an Alaska house and… a Mammy figurine? Followed by a stereotypical Asian. Oof.

That item is now being listed as no longer available online after the media got its teeth into Anthroplogie last night, and the company’s public relations director issued an explanation to Buzzfeed, saying:

“An independent artisan makes these one-of-a-kind candlesticks from vintage ceramics. Unfortunately two that we received included extremely inappropriate figurines, and we have removed them from our website.” She adds: “We sincerely regret the offense we have caused.”

It received not one but two? We can only imagine what the other one featured. Here’s a question — yes, there may have only been two that had the offensive figurines, but then to go ahead and use a photo of one to illustrate the product in your catalogue? Didn’t anyone stop and think, “Hey, that’s a really, awful, terrible idea”?

Perhaps we shouldn’t so surprised. After all, the brand is owned by Urban Outfitters, basically the king of controversial clothing — from maybe sorta kinda promoting underage drinking to trying to go for that Holocaust look. Sounds like someone could use some sensitivity training. Or like, a seminar called “Common Sense: How To Use It!”

Did Anthropologie Pull A Racist Candlestick From Its Website? [Buzzfeed]

How the Batcave got its Dinosaur

Coder and information activist Aaron Swartz took his life on Friday, and in the wake of his death the outpouring of grief from the tech community is palpable. While Swartz wrote publicly about depression, many have speculated that his legal troubles compounded the sense of hopelessness that drove him to take his own life. On Saturday afternoon, Swartz's family and his partner released a statement corroborating that idea:

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

The family said that Aaron's funeral will be held in Highland Park, IL, on Tuesday January 15.

Alex Stamos, the CTO of Artemis Internet and an expert witness who was working with Swartz's attorneys to testify in the the April US vs. Swartz trial, also wrote a long post detailing what he knew of the case. The Feds accused Swartz of logging on to MIT's network illegally and using that access “to download a major portion of JSTOR's archive onto his computers.” The Department of Justice officially accused him of wire fraud, computer fraud, and recklessly damaging a protected computer, among other charges.

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The world was given a great surprise last week when, after a decade of playing coy, David Bowie announced the release of a brand-new album called The Next Day, his first in ten years. Bowie's sudden comeback is made even more interesting when you wonder how, exactly, he kept the two-year-long project so tightly under wraps. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't easy. The Guardian reports that Bowie had to forgo all the grand entourage and infrastructure of, well, David Bowie. He had a New York staff of just one (as opposed to the 45 employees he had in the seventies.) When recording, the studio sent everyone home except a skeleton staff of two. And the recording label didn't insist on having a suit around — a deal "not normal for any star," pointed out Bowie's producer, Tony Visconti. In fact, Sony Music's president only heard of the album's existence a month ago, when he was invited to the studio to listen to several tracks.

The only people who were in on the album were Bowie (who apparently found all the spy-level secrecy hilarious), Visconti, a longtime personal assistant, guitarists Earl Slick and Jerry Leonard, and drummer Sterling Campbell.

But now that the word is out, we can all get thoroughly obsessed with what's to come. According to Visconti, Next Day makes use of medieval English history and a whole lot of other hardcore nonsense:

The album is eclectic, it's got five really blistering rock tracks. The rest is really mid-tempo, mysterious and evocative. He's been obsessed with medieval English history, which, believe it or not, makes great material for a rock song. And contemporary Russian history, which makes a great rock song. The subject matter he chose to write about is amazing. "The Next Day" is a song about a tyrant, let me leave it at that. One thing the album's got is a lot of substance. You're going to have to listen to it many times, because the lyrical content's going to take a long time to absorb.

And that's just the 17 tracks that made it onto the album. Bowie and Co. reportedly recorded 29, and many aren't done yet. "I know he wants to keep recording," Visconti told The Guardian. "I'm not sure when, but I think he'll be back in the studio later this year." We hope he's right.

Read more posts by Andre Tartar

Filed Under: david bowie ,music ,the next day ,new albums ,triumphant comebacks

Designed by Stranger & Stranger | Country: United Kingdom

“To celebrate the year we broke out of our alcohol comfort zone and designed premium olive oils, fine foods, luxury luggage, and just plain crazy new stuff, we teamed up with the amazing Dan & Dave to create this, our Ultimate Deck.”

Hey geeks! James and Marque's kickstarter cooking show has just 3 more days.



And here's a message from our beloved dictator, Lord Ashby:

"SUPERPALS! We've raised over $10,000 for Marque's new show HAND TO MOUTH! THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! But don't stop now! We have THREE DAYS LEFT to make the best possible version of Hand To Mouth we can! Come help us out and ask us questions during our LIVE BROADCASTS streaming from Marque, Jon, and James' new channel: BROKE EATS. We start at Noon PST this Saturday and have events planned all weekend! Cool kids are subscribing BEFORE there's new content to watch."

The Edwardian Ball is an “elegant and whimsical celebration of art, music, theatre, fashion, technology, circus, and the beloved creations of the late, great author Edward Gorey.” This two city event happens first in San Francisco on January 18 and 19, 2013 at The Regency Ballroom and on February 28, the event lands in Los Angeles at the historic Fonda Theatre. Admission tickets for both shows are available online.

photos by Marco Sanchez taken at the 12th annual Edwardian Ball 2012 in San Francisco

Keith Ratliff, whose gun enthusiast YouTube channel FPSRussia is among the most popular on the video site, was found dead on January 3rd — killed by a single shot to the head. Ratliff's body was discovered in the office where he stored many of the handguns and high-powered rifles that helped his videos starring friend Kyle Myers climb the YouTube charts. The clips on FPSRussia, which feature Myers enthusiastically discussing a gun before showcasing its firepower in dramatic fashion (often involving explosions), have been viewed millions of times.

Authorities say there were no signs of a struggle at the homicide scene, which has led his family to believe Ratliff may have been slain by an individual he knew. “For him not to pull out...

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What's it like founding, running, and vigorously defending one of the internet's most loved — and loathed — websites? Upcoming documentary TBP AFK looks at the day-to-day lives of the founders of popular torrent tracker The Pirate Bay as they defend their site from a never-ending sea of litigation. The project was part-funded by a Kickstarter campaign back in 2010 and, aptly given the subject matter, will be released for free via torrent sites this Spring.

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A new Trojan horse has been discovered that exploits a flaw found in Java, leaving computers running Windows, Mac OS, and Linux vulnerable to attack. Mal/JavaJar-B allows attackers to remotely trigger code once it infects a system, potentially leading to the installation of malware, or even ransomware. Oracle hasn’t yet patched the vulnerability, which targets even the latest version of Java.

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