Articles by BoingBoing from December 2015

https://youtu.be/_aFo_BV-UzINerdwriter broke down the words Donald Trump uses when he answers questions. Trump's answers consist mainly of one-syllable words, and are at a forth grade reading level. H...

Ministers are lobbying to make it a criminal offense for a tech company to inform a user that the UK government is spying on them. (more…)...

Today, the City Pages newspaper of Minneapolis published an article by Jay Boller looking into why Maureen Herman had been fired from Babes in Toyland, the iconic punk band she'd been a member of sinc...

Today, the City Pages newspaper of Minneapolis published an article by Jay Boller looking into why Maureen Herman had been fired from Babes in Toyland, the iconic punk band she'd been a member of sinc...

Rep Pete Hoekstra [R-MI] calls spying "a matter of fact," he attacked a bill that would impose oversight on the NSA, and he "laughs at foreign governments who are shocked theyve been spied on because ...

https://youtu.be/1RDGsX5nBmYI don't know if things have changed much in 20 years, but this behind-the-scenes glimpse of the guy in charge of live editing the Oscars in 1996 is fascinating. I'd rather ...

In 1976, an 11 year old Bjrk, participated in a christmas special for Icelandic TV station RV in which she read the nativity story while accompanied by music played by fellow students from the Reykj...

https://youtu.be/dP7k08Ytdq4This street corner in Chilliwack, British Columbia is a real hotspot for petty crime. In this video you can what was captured by a home security camera system in 2015: cars...

Stephen Roseman posted this photo of his dog with a slice of ham on its face to Facebook on December 23, with the comment:This poor dog was badly burned and disfigured trying to save his family from a...

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Before reading this massive comic book biography about Pablo Picasso (18811973), I knew almost nothing about him. I thought hed spent most of his life in Spain,...

Despite being in Mexico on expired tourist visas, fugitives Ethan Couch and his mother have been granted a delay against deportation from Mexico. Both are wanted in the US on a number of charges.From ...

One out of seven men will get prostate cancer. Unfortunately, most of the risk factors have to do with age, race, and family history, so they are not modifiable. But new research suggests that daily o...

A couple of weeks ago my teenage daughter took my beloved Grain bluetooth speaker into her room and I haven't seen it since. I bought the AmazonBasics Ultra-Portable Micro Bluetooth Speaker ($20) as a...

My friend Josh Glenn compiles terrific lists of genre novels from the mid-20th century. His latest is a list of the ten best adventure novels of 1966. Josh also includes the cover art of early edition...

[My friend Peter Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for British national newspapers. He has covered revolutions, civil wars, riots, wildfires, and Hollywood celebrity misdeeds for longer th...

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more. And/or buy Ruben Bollings new book series for k...

Break out the puddin' pops, he's going to jail.Famed comedian Bill Cosby was charged with alleged aggravated indecent assault today, authorities said. The Montgomery County District Attorney's Office ...

It should suffice to point out that, like the other terrorists, 25-year-old Mohammed Rehman's plotting was not encrypted. Remarkably, Rehman took to Twitter to ask for advice on which of those two tar...

The Caruso Gramophone is possibly the most precious piece of audio equipment one could spend $3000 on: a 21st-century wireless speaker with a 19th century gramophone horn, designed to resemble 1950s f...

Jamal is serving a life-sentence for a widely deplored conviction for killing a police officer. Prison Radio recorded this insightful interview with him about the role that Star Wars and Star Trek b...

The richest people in America funnel billions into the creation and maintenance of a secret and shadowy tax-system that uses a combination of lobbying by front groups, high-priced tax lawyers, and off...

MVP -- Patrick Miller's "game dev short story" -- is a cleverly told piece of science fiction about a game dev team that hits on a weirdly compelling, unlikely and eerily plausible commercial strateg...

EFF has awarded its coveted Stupid Patent of the Month prize to Microsoft for D554,140, a design patent on a slider widget for a UI. (more…)...

When India's independent telcoms regulator opened up a consultation on whether to allow Facebook to continue bribing some ISPs to charge extra for access to URLs that Facebook hadn't approved, they we...

This week, media outlets around the world have been trumpeting the French government's decision to make the records of the Vichy regime "open access" and available to researchers. (more…)...

Your messages dont stop when it snows. Thats why you need these texting gloves to stay warm while you stay in touch. Theyre comfortable and cozy and one size fits every hand. Theyll work with every ki...

With this essential IT bundle, youll work towards earning your Cisco network engineering, CCNPtroubleshooting, CompTIA Network+, and Red Hat credentials. These stamps of approval will help qualify you...

Frogdesign presents 15 tech trends that have the potential to "radically transform businesses in 2016." This year, the trends identified by the design firm include the blockchain, data driven design, ...

[via]...

Radiohead says, "Last year we were asked to write a theme tune for the Bond movie Spectre.Yes we were. It didn't work out, but became something of our own, which we love very much.As the year closes w...

See sample pages from this book at Wink.If Walt Disney gave us the definitive picture of German fairy tales such as Cinderella and Snow White, first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kay N...

This is James Smart's breathtaking photo of an anti-cyclonic tornado touching down near Simla, Colorado. The image is the grand prize winner of the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest. Below, two o...

Disney Research Zurich and ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) developed VertiGo, a mobile robot that can roll up walls. It uses two tiltable propellers that keep it rolling and also ...

In 2013, 16-year-old Ethan Couch was found guilty of drunkenly plowing into a group of people helping a stranded motorist, killing four of them and maiming two others. A psychologist hired by Couch'...

How do you hope it ends? Be honest......

A majestic giant squid (Architeuthis) made the scene at Toyama Bay in central Japan. At an estimated 3.7 meters (12.1 feet), researchers think this was a juvenile."My curiosity was way bigger than f...

Inimitable singer and bassist Lemmy Kilmister of Motrhead and Hawkwind, died yesterday. He was 70. "If you didn't do anything that wasn't good for you it would be a very dull life," he once said. "W...

Chris from the National Coalition Against Censorship writes, "Free speech zones. Facebook's nudity nonsense. Panic over 'Islamic indoctrination.' Threatening to sue a school for reading an LGBT book. ...

71 year old Thomas Podgoretsky has resided in the UK for 48 years on a permanent leave to remain visa. He has four British children and six British grandchildren, as well as three British ex-wives. Th...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics! (more…)...

When Congress passed the 2005 Real ID act -- mandating easy sharing (and intrinsic insecurity) -- of driver's license data, they insisted compliance by states with the rules would be voluntary. (more&...

More overtly political than security events like Vegas's Defcon, more regular than New York's HOPE, CCC events in Hamburg are an annual gathering of the hacktivist tribes. (more…)...

In Shopshifting: The potential for payment system abuse, Karsten Nohl and Fabian Brunlein showed attendees at Hamburg's Chaos Communications Congress just how poor the security in payment terminals is...

There's no way to turn off the "recovery" feature that sends your disk encryption keys to Microsoft by default, without notice -- though you can (and should) ask Microsoft to forget the keys later. (m...

Legendary poet and high priestess of punk Patti Smith posted photos and details of what she packed for a recent tour. Smith is on tour right now, playing her iconic album Horses in its entirety (and t...

I loved this documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky's quixotic quest to make a movie based on Frank Herbert's Dune in the mid-70s. In this 2104 film, we get to see and hear Jodorowsky, an energetic ...

See sample pages from this book at Wink.On October 2, 1950 a boy named Charlie Brown first appeared in American newspapers. Peanuts popularity grew steadily and on January 6, 1952, the strips first Su...

These are not the groceries you are looking for, pup....

Christopher Ulman is the four-time national and international whistling champion. Among other tricks, he does not kiss anyone 24 hours before a performance because kissing "makes your lips mushy. We...

Boleskine House, the infamous Loch Ness estate previously owned by occultist Aleister Crowley and later Led Zeppelin guitarist (and Crowley enthusiast) Jimmy Page, was mostly destroyed in a fire last ...

Surfing the Web on a public Wi-Fi connection can be dangerous business. Steer clear of hackers with protection from ZenVPN. Youll be free to access any of their servers located in 32 locations around ...

Forget 8-bit videogames, the vinyl revival, and the resurgence of cassette tapes. Hundreds of households in Scotland are watching black and white television. The data comes from the organization that ...

I stumbled across Jody DeLucco's Pinterest board of graveyard and cemetery art. It's filled with surprising, funny, sad, and just plain weird gravestones and cemetery markers....

This is the back of Elijah Jefferson Bond's gravestone. Bond patented the Ouija board in 1891. In 1907, Bond trademarked another oracle game called "Nirvana the Magic Swastika Talking Board," which is...

Artist Robby Kraft feed a bunch of Instagram photos of objects tagged with #FacesInThings into a face detection algorithm and averaged them into a composite image that looks a lot like a creepy human ...

Methane gas has been leaking from a storage facility in Californias Aliso Canyon since October 2015 at a rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. You can see the plume in this infrared video shot on Decembe...

"I can't tell you how wrong you've always been," says the Cigarette Smoking Man.Mulder and Scully (and yes, apparently CSM too) return on January 24. ...

The world's most famous basketball prankster, George "Meadowlark" Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters, has died at age 83. I was fortunate to see Meadowlark perform with the Globetrotters several time...

Is this cat going up the stairs or down the stairs? And what is in the woman's drinking glass below? Here are the top 7 optical illusions of 2015.To me to you. pic.twitter.com/2guLlvYKma— Solita...

Volvo's pitching LifePaint, a supposedly easily-washed off reflective spray paint for cyclists and other at-risk road users to cover themselves in at night.LifePaint is a unique water based reflective...

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Search your feelings. You know it to be true....

Neodymium magnets can be so powerful as to be dangerous: you don't want two of them "spotting" one another when a fleshy fingertip is in the way of true love. So how do you ship a 6" one safely?"So,...

In Cary Huang's evolution simulator, one first generates 1000 random geometrical beasties. Then one watches them iterate until equilibrium prevails, commanding the most successful to reproduce and dec...

https://vimeo.com/89628853Johannes writes, "'Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl' -- our award-winning feature-length post-apocalyptic agitprop nerd comedy extravaganza -- is finally online o...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_9QOgg0GREFlorian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess downloaded the sourcecode for Red Star OS, North Korea's homegrown, paranoid fork of Red Hat's Fedora, a flavor of GNU/L...

The death of the bookselling as a big-box business has a positive side-effect: the return of smaller, more specialized retailers. They operate more efficiently than doomed out-out-town B&Ns and offer ...

UK Home Secretary Theresa May has introduced the Snoopers Charter, through which your ISP will be required to retain a record of everything you do on the Internet and make it available to government a...

Six years ago, I wrote a column comparing IT managers' prohibitions on using your own devices and applications to abstinence-only sex ed: a high-handed approach that leaves its audience ignorant and r...

How quickly Star Wars Episode VII is achieving escape velocity is the obvious thing, but look how fast most of these movies made their money then plateaued....

Passport to Dreams Old in New is the absolute king-hell best Disney design criticism blog, written by Foxxfur, a former cast member who is thoughtful, encyclopedic, and razor-sharp in her observations...

The long-dreaded death of Terry Pratchett finally arrived in 2015, years after his inital prognosis predicted it would come. Pratchett spent his last years on Earth working his guts out, leaving behin...

Bruce Schneier explains the short, terrible history of the Internet of Things, in which companies were lured to create proprietary lock-ins for their products because the DMCA, a stupid 1998 copyright...

When youre in battle, you need the right weapons. This expandable, portable controller has everything your video games offer at home: shoulder buttons, a joystick, and all the action buttons to make y...

Facebook is desperate to ensure that the Internet never takes hold in developing nations -- they want a walled garden that they get to own and operate. (more…)...

In America, your belongings can be confiscated by the police without warrant or evidence as proceeds of a crime, and then the government sues your possessions (not you), in lawsuits like "Township of...

Writing in the Globe and Mail, University of Toronto Munk Chair of Innovation Studies Dan Breznitz explains how the TPP -- negotiated in secret without any oversight or accountability -- will enrich a...

No need to struggle with remembering long and complicated passwords, Sticky Password is your password management and form filler solution, available for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. This lifetime S...

"Cybersecurity": it's the new "terrorism," a word to conjure with, a source of bottomless no-bid procurements for the military-industrial complex, full employment for snake-oil salesmen. (more…...

Archconservative David Frum delivers a brutal, unflinching look at the contradictions between the Republican party's elites and kingmakers -- who favor redistributive policies that suck money out of t...

The Pope's message, contained in an open letter, is more directed to the faithful than the nonbelievers, and is a repudiation of millennias' worth of Church doctrine that equates heresy with sin. (mor...

Every designer, from amateur to pro, would benefit from creating every pixel from scratch. But who has the time? That's why we've gathered the year's best assets to both inspire and enhance each and e...

I've know John for a dozen years, and he's a cool customer. When he's targeted by insulting jerks, he never loses his cool. (more…)...

We should all be this happy on Christmas Day....

Its been a year since I sat down at the mic, but its Christmas and we have a tradition to uphold. Now were settling in here in Burbank and Ive got a new computer, Im hoping to get everything running a...

Remember when Internet Person JWZ began to append sarcastic messages to the "This building monitored by CCTV" sign that appeared without warning in his lobby ("FEAR THE UNKNOWN - MONSTERS ARE REAL" "D...

Become a Cloud guru with this AWS Associate Certification Bundle. These three courses, all brimming with mini lectures that are just five to 20 minutes long, take you from newbie to pro as efficiently...

I've read a bunch of new indie zombie novels, via Kindle Unlimited, this week! Here are two very funny, fasted paced stories that will help pass the time, as you wait in ambush for an overweight, red ...

The Come Back With a Warrant" doormat is an American classic (I prefer my suburban take on the motif). (more…)...

Last week, security researcher Chris Vickery discovered a database containing 3.3 million accounts from Sanriotown, a commercial Hello Kitty fansite operated by Sanrio, Hello Kitty's corporate owners....

Online communities like Ravelry's "Knot a Problem" invite knitters to ship them their most tangled yarn, which they patiently unravel and wind into usable skeins, as a kind of knitting-adjacent hobby,...

Ever since the TSA broke the law and abused him, Sai has been suing them over their illegal conduct, forcing them into court and then demonstrating to the court that the agency refuses to play by any ...

South African photographer Paul Shiakallis produced a series of photos, "Leathered Skins, Unchained Hearts," of the "queens" of Botswana's heavy metal "Marok" scene, mostly in their homes. (more&helli...

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more. And/or buy Ruben Bollings new book series for k...

What Is EFF Reading? Books, Movies, and TV Shows of 2015: a media diet for Internet freedom activists....

Escape rooms are popular. I'm not surprised. I've been to three of them with my wife and kids, and have enjoyed them all. The latest one we participated in was called The Alchemist, at Escape Room L.A...

Dr. Linda Salvin is a "spiritual doctor, famous psychic, healer, medium" who sells Wicks of Wisdom, $90 candle sets alleged to have special powers. The Rebound Power candle "reverses negativity to t...

The Bowman family shot this excellent home movie of the odometer on their family van reaching 100,000 miles. Can anyone who isn't car-blind like me figure out exact year this was made?[via]...

The Bowman family shot this excellent home movie of the odometer on their family van reaching 100,000 miles. Can anyone who isn't car-blind like me figure out exact year this was made?[via]...

As a kid Id watch my dad as hed throw (his unit of measurement) some olive oil, onions, garlic, lemon, and olives into a pan to make a quick pasta. Its learning to cook this way that gave me a love an...

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Henry Cole invented the Christmas Card in 1843 as a way to escape the drudgery of hand-writing a bunch of letters to his friends. In this article, Hunter Oatman-Stafford of Collectors Weekly presents ...

Researchers at the ETH Game Technology Center of the Swiss national technical institute in Zrich, have applied their considerable talents to the critical problem of immersionin 2D side-scrolling, 8-...

Matt Haughey says: "What follows are gun emoji shown at about 28pt using Apples emoji font in Textedit screencaptured. Every single one represents a person that died by gunshot in the US in 2013."...

In my latest Guardian column, The problem with self-driving cars: who controls the code?, I take issue with the "Trolley Problem" as applied to autonomous vehicles, which asks, if your car has to choo...

The Salvation Army has struggled to distance itself from its reputation for homophobia, but a 2014 memo on "LGBT issues" by midwest Commissioner Paul Seiler spells out a number of ways in which the or...

Google's lawyers fought strenuously against the DoJ's demands for access to the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum, a journalist, activist and volunteer with the Wikileaks project; they fought even hard...

A film by Jake Rasmussen...

Phil Demers worked as an animal trainer at Niagara Falls, Ontario's Marineland for 12 years before resigning because he believed that the animals in his care were being mistreated and he did not belie...

[My friend Peter Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for British national newspapers. He has covered revolutions, civil wars, riots, wildfires, and Hollywood celebrity misdeeds for longer th...

Here is New Jersey governor Chris Christie's explanation why trans children shouldn't be given the right to use the school restroom they feel most comfortable in:Life is confusing enough right now for...

Redditor MymlanOhlin shares their method for making a glowing bottle Nuka Cola Quantum from Fallout 4, a fiendishly difficult videogame whose brilliant storytelling and gorgeous, explorable landscapes...

Sylvia Allen, the GOP state Senator from Snowflake, AZ, believes the Earth is 6,000 years old. She will run the state Senate's committee to oversee educational legislation. (more…)...

iSafe Drive Lite is the first MFI-certified, ultra-high-speed drive to safely store 32GB of data and employ the same encryption used by the US federal government. Its the fastest and easiest way to tr...

The Washington Post takes a fond look back at 15 people who became briefly infamous for one reason or another. Some of these villains are new to me, like prankster Sam Pepper, who pretended to execute...

Many have remarked upon the parallels between Santa's naughty list and mass surveillance, but the idea that a supernatural being is watching your every move and judging you for it is a lot more pervas...

Whether you think you might win over the crowd who're watching from the sidelines or change a denialist's mind, John Timmer's flowchart presents tried-and-true tactics for using science, reason, and f...

The UK police and security services have frequently touted the necessity of "equipment interference" techniques -- cyberweapons used to infect suspects' computers -- in their investigations, but they ...

The Mast Brothers, a pair of bearded chocolatiers in Brooklyn, have built an empire on beautifully packaged "artisanal" chocolates that run $10/bar, billed as "bean to bar" confections. (more…)...

Greg Maletic scanned the 1977 Sears Christmas Wishbook, "Amazon, printed out." He presents a guided tour of its highlights, starting with the nascent console game and handheld electronic game industry...

The latest installment of the Long Forgotten blog's series on the lost designs for the Haunted Mansion's corridor of changing portraits (previously) hits on one of the most significant elements of the...

What can game developers do to better represent black women in games? They need to get some fucking empathy, says Tanya dePass, a campaigner for better representation inside game worlds and among thos...

[My friend Peter Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for British national newspapers. He has covered revolutions, civil wars, riots, wildfires, and Hollywood celebrity misdeeds for longer th...

A British Muslim family was denied boarding at Gatwick Airport after the US government informed the airline that they would not be admitted to the USA. They were on their way to Disneyland. (more&hell...

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The record industry insists that all unauthorized copies represent lost sales. So Peter "brokep" Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has built a machine that makes 100 copies per second of Gnarls B...

At their sole discretion, and without any public guidelines, TSA agents can now opt you back into the full-body scanner, even if you opt out. (more…)...

https://youtu.be/pi7jVFcVt8UIn episode three of Lyssue Paper, Lyss shows us how to make happy holiday sweaters out of tissue paper and pipe cleaners....

Pythagoras' Theorem, x2+y2=z2, is true when x=3, y=4, and z=5. In fact, there are an infinite number of whole number solutions for Pythagoras' Theorem.But there are no known solutions for xn+yn=zn, ...

He felt his presents.(via r/jokes)...

Port St. Lucie, Florida police arrested Dawn Meikle after she allegedly attacked her husband, Donald Fitzroy Meikle, for farting too much in bed. When he broke wind, she apparently elbowed him and the...

See sample pages from this book at Wink.A delightfully funny and punny read, The Art of Eating through the Zombie Apocalypse: A Cookbook & Culinary Survival Guide isnt merely humor, it actually pr...

Thirty percent of adult Americans are teetotalers. Ten percent consume an average of 0.02 drinks a week. Another ten percent have 0.14 drinks per week (I'm in this category, as I will have a taste of ...

In 2012, a sharp-eyed police officer in Kansas spotted Robert Harte leaving a hydroponics store with a bag of supplies. Soon after, the police fished through Harte's garbage and found some wet leaves,...

Forrest Mims is the author of the famous book, Getting Started in Electronics, published by RadioShack for many years. I bought the book in the 1980s, and had a blast making the projects in it. When I...

In 2007 Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio got into a bidding war for a 67-million-year-old tyrannosaurus bataar skull. Cage won, but later found out the skull had been illegally smuggled into the Un...

Organizers of a demonstration in protest of the police shooting of Jamar Clark by Minneapolis police have been hit with a lawsuit by the Mall of America, which is seeking a court order requiring them ...

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"You know it's all right, it's ok, I'll live to see another day." (The Tonight Show)...

Numerous research studies have correlated higher IQs with longer lifespans. Why? One reason could be that smarter people apparently don't do as many dumb things that could kill them early. In Scientif...

In a clever marketing stunt, German book publisher Bastei Lbbe and bookshop Hugendubel built a vending machine that accepts unwanted Christmas presents as payment for new books. According to TheBooks...

https://vimeo.com/148548977The Cards Against Humanity 8 Sensible Gifts for Hannukah collected $15 from 150,000 people and converted the dough to a series of gifts, including customer CAH cards, sock...

Despite unprecedented copyright enforcement measures from Disney, at least one cammed version of the new Star Wars movie has circulated online, less than a week after the film's release. (more…...

Business Insider's Jim Edwards got a letter from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch informing him that they'd instructed Twitter to remove two of his tweets on the grounds that they violated B of A's copyr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKRQD04dviUHere's the joke: Stoner Sloth is a disastrous, tin-eared anti-marijuana ad campaign from the New South Wales Department of Premier and Cabinet. (more&helli...

The 82-year-old caller to Brown Deer, Wisconsin police said that she could hear someone in the throes of sexual ecstasy chanting "ISIS is good, ISIS is great" on the 4400 block of Dean Road. (more&he...

In a new paper in Science (paywalled), Nicholas J. Matzke from the National University of Australia demonstrates the evolutionary connection between anti-evolution bills introduced into US state legis...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics! (more…)...

From 1966, Ren Jodoin's beautiful minimalist animation of a geometric ballet, "Notes on a Triangle." Jodoin, who died earlier this year, was founder of the National Film Board of Canada's animation ...

"Test conducted in 1946 where a human subject was exposed to blasts of air. The test was performed at NASA Langley Research Center's 8 ft High Speed Tunnel."(from the Library of Congress Prelinger A...

Another day, another round of E. coli outbreaks at Chipotle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating E. coli outbreaks in three states. "Give ill people have been identified in...

I didn't know much about Steve Harvey until I saw how he messed up announcing the Miss Universe winner. In this video, he offers his views on a variety of subjects, including evolution, which he kno...

Thanks to the nationwide switch from analog to digital TV, great-quality HD television can be accessed without committing to a lengthy cable or satellite contract. Connect up to 35 miles away from you...

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Picturepedia is a highly visual, engaging reference book for kids. Broken up into six sections (Science and technology, Nature, Geography, Culture, Sports and h...

You can buy a 1980s era Roland TR-909 drum machine on eBay for about $4,000. Or you can just go here.https://youtu.be/sEFEivTgNVI...

Austin Kleon has assembled a bunch of "no thank you" form letters from writers and publishers. I've seen a few of these before. My favorite is Edmund Wilson's postcard, where he says, "it is impossibl...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sv4nb5VbAYThis 2010 video explains the preparation of "prison spread," a kind of hybrid top ramen mixed with other jailhouse ingredients, highly customizable based o...

Brian Kelly (aka The Points Guy) reviewed what it was like to fly Etihad's Residence suite from New York JFK to Abu Dhabi. His "seat" was a three-cabin suite. Etihad forgot to load his baggage on th...

Brian Kelly (aka The Points Guy) reviewed what it was like to fly Etihad's Residence suite from New York JFK to Abu Dhabi. His "seat" was a three-cabin suite. Etihad forgot to load his baggage on th...

https://youtu.be/KTrgRYa2wbIIn 2007, 17-year-old George Hotz became the first person to carrier-unlock an iPhone. Two years later, he was the first person to break the security on the Sony Playstation...

A short film by Peter Serafinowicz. "What if Donald Trump had elocution lessons? All words verbatim." It would be interesting to see the opposite: give Cameron a New York accent.Here's another:https...

Ah, the power of music. Original trailer below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhInIOKwGXU...

YourSassyGrandma on Etsy is selling the Sexy Ugly Christmas Sweater for $50....

https://vimeo.com/42372767With New Year's Resolution season on the doorstep, it's time for end-of-year articles about self-improvement, and despite the cliche and improbability of that species of en...

The 451 HTTP error code, first proposed in 2012 as a tribute to Ray Bradbury's classic novel is now an IETF standard and is the preferred error message for a server to send to a browser when content i...

Seven years ago, Alex Steffen and I proposed that rather than preparing "bug out bags" you can grab and go with after the apocalypse, we should all have "bug-in bags" full of things we'll use to help ...

The Interapp from Tel Aviv's Rayzone Group is an intrusion appliance that uses a cache of zero-day exploits against common mobile phone OSes and is marketed as having the capability to infect and take...

Martin Shkreli, the notorious, most-hated-man-on-the-Internet pharma douchebro who was arrested last week for securities fraud, told the FBI that the only reason they bothered busting him for financia...

"Bro network" an (unfortunately named) open/free IDS that turns all your network traffic into events that can trigger scripts you write. As Nat writes, "Good pedigree (Vern Paxson, a TCP/IP elder god)...

John and Julie Gottman are a husband and wife psychologist team who run a hugely successful couples therapy practice that encompasses books, seminars, research, and one-on-one sessions. In a massive, ...

To enter Nanogenmo, you have to write a program that generates a novel, then post it, along with the novel and the training data used to produce it. 500 teams' entries have been posted to Github. (mor...

Juniper Networks makes a popular line of enterprise firewalls whose operating system is called Screen OS. The company raised alarm bells with a late-day-on-a-Friday advisory announcing that they'd dis...

Hilariously corrupt soccer governing body FIFA has finally made a scapegoat of suspended president Sepp Blatter, banning him from the organization for 8 years. He is defiant, reports CNN, demanding to...

The plaintiff-friendly East Texas district has long been patent trolls' favorite place to file lawsuits, but one was so egregious that even their favorite judge has not only shut it down, but awarded ...

It has only nine pieces, but each is a sprawling, intersecting fractal nightmare: "you can provide people with the solution and they still can't solve it."The creations of Oscar van Deventer (check ...

Steve Harvey announced Miss Colombia as the winner of the 2015 Miss Universe pageant. But Miss Colombia was not the winner of the 2015 Miss Universe pageant. Miss Philippines was. (more…)...

My Canon 9000 died last year after many years of infrequent but dutiful service. The Epson SureColor P600 isn't just an upgrade on cheaper wide-format photo printers; the prints are significantly bett...

The Omnibus Budget bill that Paul Ryan crammed through Congress last week didn't just harbor a domestic mass surveillance law and a bunch of nonsensical dog-whistles about ACORN and pornography, it wa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM71NPrb5iMHere's your chance to give back to the Internet's library of everything, home of the Wayback Machine, and friend to all Internet people, everywhere. They'r...

The City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit's breathless press-release about their raid on a "gang suspected of uploading and distributing tens of thousands of karaoke tracks online" ...

If youre a tech professionalor looking to become onethis is the bundle for you. Earn up to 93 certificates in project management, finance, IT, agile and scrum, data and analytics, quality management, ...

Martin Howard from Toronto's Howard Collection writes, "The Salter is one of Englands first typewriters and is a stunning example of a piece of Victorian engineering. It was made by The Geo. Salter & ...

Dallas cops put Armaan Singh Sarai in jail for three days because someone mistook the solar panel on his phone-charging backpack for a bomb. (more…)...

By imgur user MayokoppHurr durr....

The Omnibus Budget Bill passed this week, and Paul Ryan managed to cram the domestic mass surveillance law CISA into it, but that's just the appetizer in a banquet of corrupt DC horsetrading embodied ...

No one knew who the mystery buyer of the Las Vegas Review-Journal was, just that $140m had changed hands under mysterious circumstances. But every reporter on the paper was ordered to drop everything ...

When you get arrested, what happens next depends on the law and the Constitution, but when a cop arrests their co-worker, what happens next is determined by a cushy contract between the police union a...

I've never seen any of these Beatles videos before! The color and clarity are fantastic. They are included in The Beatles 1 Video Collection.https://youtu.be/NCtzkaL2t_Yhttps://youtu.be/A_MjCqQoLLAhtt...

Don't ever let the facts get in the way of a crowd-pleasing massacre.From The Guardian:More than 530 Republican primary voters were polled this week on their support for Republican candidates and fore...

Don't ever let the facts get in the way of a crowd-pleasing massacre.From The Guardian:More than 530 Republican primary voters were polled this week on their support for Republican candidates and fore...

It's even a little Santa-y, with Christmasy colors of red and green. (more…)...

Princess Fea. (more…)...

One man takes on all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad in one 3-day marathon. This is what happened. (more…)...

The US government has tried to apply its arms export control rules to 3D model files that describe firearms, and declare that publishing those files is the same thing as exporting guns, and is therefo...

Analysts are predicting that 2015 will be the drone-givingest holiday retail season ever, and you can even buy drones in our Boing Boing store. (more…)...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca6mWRkcSd0Yasuo Amano, webmaster of the Hey Presto blog often creates specialized versions of magic tricks devised by the Tenyo company of Japan based on the seasons o...

In 1968, I think, my grandmother offered to take me to the movies. I would have been 10 at the time, and my grandmother was cool: she took me to see Planet of the Apes and The Poseidon Adventure when ...

President Barack Obama today announced hehas commuted the sentences of 95 federal prisoners, and granted two prisoners pardons. Most of them are nonviolent drug offenders. This is the most he has done...

See sample photos at Wink.Here in Japan, tis the season to make nengajo. Nengajo are specialized New Years postcards sent to friends, relatives, acquaintances, former classmates, current classmates, c...

Needle-in-a-haystack stories are the caffeine of collecting. As the editor of Fine Books & Collections, Rebecca Rego Barry knows this better than most; her new book, Rare Books Uncovered, is filled wi...

A while back, I realized that something was amiss in my relationship with my telephone. Notifications, email, Facebook, Twitter it all became a constant drain on on my attention, the internet followi...

The Food and Drug Administration today proposed banning the use of indoor tanning beds by minors under 18 years old, to try and reduce the risk of skin cancer. (more…)...

These are the "walking palm trees" of Ecuador. Each year, they could walk as much as 20 meters. Slower than the Ents from Lord of the Rings but, well, real.As the soil erodes, the tree grows new, long...

The welded scrap-metal bugs of Green Hand Sculpture are gorgeous, intricate, labor-intensive, and therefore expensive, but surely worth ever cent: Preying Mantis, Holly Blue Butterfly, Woodlouse, Peac...

https://youtu.be/KPG7P6jvb6QRemember the cretins who shut down a busy freeway in Los Angeles several years back, forcing stalled drivers to listen to their musical performance? Or the marriage propos...

In this Japanese TV commercial we learn that anyone who tries to prevent college students from enjoying any beverage other than water will face the wrath of a giant inflatable duck. (more…)...

Every other week, it seems, an exciting new discovery crops up in a distant star system. The latest is Wolf 1061c, the closest Earth-like world yet found, barely a probe's throw away at 14 light years...

The Star Wars fever is alive and well, and its time you joined in on the fun. These extremely high-quality posters will elevate any room in your house to a true fandom tribute. The materials are archi...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMU5nhpb4LETwo of our happy mutants: the science writer Stephen Johnson and the oblique strategist Brian Eno on the nature of art, literature, and science. (more&hel...

DJ BC wrote us with the news that he's not doing another Santastic Christmas mashup album this year, but: "While we have no NEW collection this year- we do have ten years of holiday mashups and remi...

Since 2013, I've been reading in the Times of India's RSS feed about the Vyapam scandal that has shaken the state of Madhya Pradesh to the very highest levels, but I never understood exactly how insan...

Rebecca Solnit's brilliant, scathing critique of Esquire's "The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read" (a list with 79 male authors in it) earned her a mailbag full of mansplaining letters in which dude...

Lifelock, the tragicomically awful identity-theft protection service, has settled the FTC's suit against it, agreeing to pay a $100M fine for violating its 2010 promise to end its deceptive advertisin...

No painful dialogue. No stiff acting. No virgin births or midi-chlorians. No racist stereotypes. No bloated plotlines or boring politics. No weightless CGI environments. And I say that as someone who'...

Ben Rose was in the middle of a game of Fallout 4 when an uninsured driver in the parking lot outside his Irving, TX apartment building hit the accelerator instead of the breaks and crashed straight t...

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Elliot likes to tear up cardboard boxes. (more…)...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba1J7OIYHWY&feature=youtu.be&t=24m56sSay my name. (more…)...

A man from El Salvador who survived over an entire year lost at sea is reportedly being sued for $1 million over accusations he ate the other occupant of his boat. The grieving family of his shipmate,...

[My friend Maureen Herman, former bassist of Babes in Toyland is currently writing her first book, It's a Memoir, Motherfucker, due out 2017. Maureen posted this to Facebook, and she kindly gave me pe...

Brian Knappenberger, the documentarian who created The Internet's Own Boy, a beautiful documentary about Aaron Swartz, has announced a new ten-part documentary series called "Truth and Power," which...

Andrew Wiseman wins the day with this hilarious Freedom of Information Act Request. (more…)...

Early this morning, FBI agents arrested pharma-hedge-douche Martin Shkreli for securities fraud at his apartment in NYC; Reuters photographers were on-hand at the arrest to photograph his "perp-walk" ...

Jazz pioneer Charles Mingus (1922-1979) had a secret recipe for eggnog that by all accounts was delicious, and incredibly potent. He shared the recipe with biographer Janet Coleman who published it in...

"Why should we base the validity of all of our life's beliefs on a theory?" I'm not even sure what that question means, but the UC Berkeley student who asked it to Dr. White didn't look pleased by h...

A group of skaters and street artists in Llanera, Asturias, Spain transformed an abandoned church built in 1912 into a beautiful indoor skate park featuring murals by artist Okuda San Miguel. Photos a...

"We know of no case where such an addition of exceptional access capabilities has not resulted in weakened security." (more…)...

Rudy Rucker is one of my favorite authors of all time. So it's no surprise that the books he read in 2015 and recommend on his blog sound interesting to me: Purity by Jonathan Franzen, Roadside Picnic...

Peter from Shelfie writes, "Shelfie has announced a partnership with Findaway to add 20,000 audiobooks to its print to digital bundling service. This news comes on top of the recent announcement that ...

Wendy (then Walter) Carlos's 1971 Moog synthesizer re-imagination of Ludwig Van Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," from the final movement of his Ninth Symphony. Of course, Carlos's music was used in Stanley...

BMG hired Rightscorp, a publicly traded blackmail company, to send threatening letters to Cox Cable subscribers it accused of infringing its copyrights, demanding cash payments to stay out of court. (...

It turns out theres a way to actually make fire work better. This gas-less, flameless lighter can ignite anything you need without that whole pesky elemental process. It juices up with a super conveni...

Rob beat me to the blog this morning with a post about Star Wars Minus Star Wars, a stupendous video in which Kyle Kallgren retells the entire story of the first Star Wars movie with footage that eith...

"Star Wars: A Bad Lip Reading"...

In honor of Ludwig van Beethoven's 245th birthday today, here is Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" (1976). Can you dig it? I knew that you could....

In honor of Ludwig van Beethoven's 245th birthday today, here is Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" (1976). Can you dig it? I knew that you could....

See sample pages of https://winkbooks.net/post/135373865141/collecting-childrens-books-a-guide-for-the-book at Wink.Collecting Childrens Books is as much a guide for the book collector as it is a trip...

The @internetofshit account posts sardonic observations about the Internet of Things, which is filled with the most depressing array of useless, dangerously insecure, exploitative junk imaginable. (mo...

The Intercept has obtained a secret government catalog that law enforcement agencies use to source even-more-secret cellular spying devices, mostly variants on the ...

About 16 percent of Americans identify Bernie Sanders as their top choice for the next president; Trump is preferred by about 11 percent of the population -- Sanders is nearly 50% more popular than Tr...

The Effects of a Year in Ketosis by James McCarter from Quantified Self on Vimeo.At the most recent Quantified Self conference, geneticist Jim McCarter t talked about the effects of going on a keto...

Ole Vlad's figured out how to troll the west: celebrate corrupt, populist strongmen who brazenly lie while fronting for the rich and powerful. (more…)...

Scarfolk (previously) is the English country town that is caught in a perpetual ten-year loop from 1970-1980; in 1977, while the rest of the world was getting Kenner Star Wars toys, Scarfolk's childre...

When someone complains on Facebook about an unsatisfactory experience at particular business establishment, there's a chance that Ben Palmer and Nick Price will respond as if they were representatives...

This is my favorite letter from a collection of unusual landlord notices....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sIThe Extra Credits video series has a great segment on Sesame Credit, the Chinese government's public-private "reputation economy" that uses your social med...

https://youtu.be/2GHx8s837O8The AP description says, "Surveillance video shows a man allegedly driving his pickup truck into the lobby of an Oklahoma hotel." And the employees in the lobby allegedly d...

America's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it easy to censor the Internet: under the statute, you can make virtually anything disappear by claiming, without evidence, that it infringes your ...

Zachary M. Seward picks the best Twitter bots of 2015 for Quartz. My favorite is Derek Arnold's @FFD8FFDB, which tweets random screengrabs from insecure, internet-connected security cameras around the...

After this month's killings, there was widespread reporting (fueled by comments by FBI director James Comey) that Syed Rizwan Farook and Tafsheen Malik had declared their commitment to jihad on Facebo...

https://youtu.be/jd76dTFXocMDamanhur is a massive, elaborately system of underground temples near Turin Italy. They were built in 1975 by a new age guru, Oberto Airaudi, and his followers. Airaudi pas...

There's a widespread understanding that the vaccine-autism link and climate denial are bullshit, but there are plenty of widespread science myths that are repeated by people who should know better, fr...

Kyle Kallgren's Star Wars Minus Star Wars is an amazing remix of dozens of media snippets from other soundtracks, shows and movies. The result is an unambiguous patchwork that adds up to the origina...

Facewatch is a private-public system that shopkeepers and the police use to keep track of "persons of interest," a list that includes anyone a shopkeeper doesn't like and registers with the system. (m...

A cop who convinced a judge to let him take photos of a 17-year-old boy's erect penis has killed himself after being accused of having an "inappropriate relationship" with another underage teen.David ...

Evan writes, "Today is WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning's 28th birthday. She's been imprisoned since she was 22, and is serving a 35 year sentence for exposing some of the U.S. government's wor...

Or you can just buy one from dandelionpaperweights.com or Amazon for $80. The dandelion bloom, with parachute-like seeds, that are about to disperse, was captured in a crystal clear dandelion paperw...

Drug entrepreneur Martin Shkreli, 32, made himself infamous by hiking the price of life-saving generic pill from from $13.50 to $750. If you suspected that such a sterling human being might have finge...

(more…)...

[My friend Peter Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for British national newspapers. He has covered revolutions, civil wars, riots, wildfires, and Hollywood celebrity misdeeds for longer th...

On the science of alcohol and alcholism, from 1949, Encyclopedia Brittanica films. Booze: a potential menace to community safety as well as personal health. (more…)...

Naturally Apple's choice of optical audio-out cable is going to be a pain. Obviously, its not going to be one I'd just have around, that is not the Apple way! Rather than pay $30 plus at an Apple stor...

Youre rushing out the front door, but cant find your keys or wallet. Happens to all of us. What if you could push a button, and find them in an instant? You can. Just attach the iHere 3.0 Tracking Dev...

A Baltimore judge declared a mistrial Wednesday after jurors were unable to reach a verdict in the case of Freddie Gray, who died after suffering severe injuries while in police custody.After three da...

For women, so commonly invisible in their daily lives, the path to fame is, as a rule, transgressing rules. Whenever visible, they are mostly notorious. In reading history we can scarcely see what...

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more. And/or buy Ruben Bollings new book series for k...

Today, EFF published Pwning Tomorrow, a science fiction anthology featuring stories by 21 celebrated authors, including Bruce Sterling, Neil Gaiman, Lauren Beukes, Pat Cadigan, Madeline Ashby and Char...

The LAPD received 1,356 complaints of "biased policing" (AKA racial profiling) from 2012-2014, but after investigating them, the investigating officials decided that their co-workers had done nothing ...

As Chicago's mayor/kingmaker/kingpin Rahm Emanuel grins at the chorus demanding his resignation for his role in covering up video showing that Chicago PD officers shot a man 16 times, lied about it, a...

It's hard to make sense of the politics of Star Wars (a Senate whose electees include senators that represent government agencies; an elected princess who calls a no-confidence vote, etc), but the mor...

There have been plenty of lawsuits challenging America's prisons' use of solitary confinement as a form of torture; but the situation is no better in the jails where prisoners await arraignment, trial...

A last-minute change to pending EU data-protection rules will ban under-16s from using social media without explicit parental consent -- the rules are up for a vote on Tuesday. (more…)...

The Fireeye "threat prevention device" is designed to scan all the emails, attachments, and other files coming in and out of your network, but a bug in the device allowed hackers to embed malware in a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=637&v=MCI4bUk4vuMIf the only answer to "a bad guy with a gun" is "a good guy with a gun," we are totally screwed. (more…)...

Homelessness in America dwindled away after WWII, when the GI Bill and generous social programs seemed to finally get on top of a problem that had been with the country since its inception; but starti...

Thom from the Shadowbinders podcast writes, "Journalist Brady Dale from the New York Observer joins us this episode (MP3) as we talk about the changing business model of webcomics. Are webcomics 'dead...

Thom from the Shadowbinders podcast writes, "Journalist Brady Dale from the New York Observer joins us this episode (MP3) as we talk about the changing business model of webcomics. Are webcomics 'dead...

Detective David Edward Abbott, a member of the Virginia-Washington DC Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force became Internet famous when he obtained a warrant to inject a child with an erection-c...

Sara from Sweden used the website Twin Strangers to find her doppelgnger, Shannon from Ireland. In this video, they meet for the fist time.[via]...

Ehsan Abdulaziz, a married, 46 year old, rich Saudi property developer, says he invited an 18 year old woman to sleep on his couch, and later tripped and fell on her as she lay asleep, accidentally pe...

Neighbors of the Daybreak community, in South Jordan, Utah have been putting Amazon and UPS packages filled with rocks and other junk on their porches. The idea is that thieves will steal them, take t...

Some Safeway customers in California and Colorado who used debit/credit cards have had their card numbers and PINs slurped up by criminals who then took the cards out for spending sprees. (more&hel...

People who bought Cards Against Humanity's Eight Sensible Gifts for Hannukah subscription were invited to take a survey at the end of the purchase, one that asked all kinds of weird, invasive question...

https://vimeo.com/67102223Canadians' data requests overwhelming flow through US cables, even when the communications are within Canada. Since the NSA takes the view that it is legally entitled to co...

It took less than 48 hours for public outrage to convince Philips that updating its lamps to reject third-party lightbulbs was a stupid idea. (more…)...

Boing Boing proudly welcomes Mando as a sponsor!Anyone who commutes to work in a major metropolitan center like New York, London, Paris or Berlin knows all too well about the challenges of getting fro...

Troy Little, creator of the graphic novel adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has been keeping a diary of his book signing tour. This week: Hollywood, complete with unex...

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is trying to use a Congressional loophole to push through two attacks on our Internet freedom in the 'omnibus' must-pass budget b...

If you visit the Bournemouth, England bus station after midnight, you'll be treated to the fine squeaky sounds of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Why? According to the BBC, the music is part of a Bournemouth...

https://youtu.be/EQITm3cS8ZkIn 1968, I eagerly waited for this gasoline commercial to air. It featured people magically scooting around the street on their butts. It was likely the best thing on TV th...

Last month, Frances Dinkelspiel's new book, Tangled Vines, cracked the New York Times' Best Seller list. It's a great read, since it mostly follows the events leading up to an arson-caused wine-wareho...

Taking psychedelic mushrooms just once can change your personality for the rest of your life, according to Katherine MacLean, a postdoctoral researcher at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medici...

Five hours of simmering Sith. (BenjaminApple, thanks Jordan Kurland!)...

It looks like the "credible" terror threats that led LA to shut down its entire school system came in a rather incredible form: anonymous email sent via internet "meme sewer" cock.li. (more…)...

Freedom of the Press Foundation has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Justice Department for all correspondence the agency has had with Congress over proposed FOIA reform b...

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology reports that conservatives are more likely to be strict about classify geometric shapes than liberals are.From Mental Floss:In three different experime...

In the 1860s Chicago underwent an amazing transformation in which dozens of buildings were moved around the city and gangs of men raised giant hotels and banks on jackscrews. In this week's episode of...

Cables fray, and chargers disappear into thin air. Even if you dont need a replacement, snag a backup to store in your bag while youre on-the-go. This MagSafe 2 Power Adapter for MacBook Air is so sma...

See sample pages of https://winkbooks.net/post/134912574252/the-field-guide-to-typography-typefaces-in-the at Wink.Typography is a rich, thought-provoking study with a deep, storied history. And yet, ...

We're in the midst of the rainy season in Portland, Oregon when a thick, soporific sheet of gray wraps itself around the city like a wet wool blanket and doesn't let go till Spring. The moment I step ...

Leeds's Lou Lou P's Delights made these Ring-themed J-horror doughnuts in honor of National Donut Day. (via Seanan)...

@LASchools closed today regarding unspecified threat. #LASD #LAPD and #LASPD Investigating.— LA County Sheriff's (@LASDHQ) December 15, 2015Wouldn't be a Tuesday in America without an incide...

@LASchools closed today regarding unspecified threat. #LASD #LAPD and #LASPD Investigating.— LA County Sheriff's (@LASDHQ) December 15, 2015UPDATE, 1034am PT: NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VYnFhBKcYIf you've read Darell Huff's seminal 1954 book How to Lie With Statistics, you've learned an important rule of thumb: any chart whose Y-axis doesn't start at...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR3lXEH80NwThe short movie Uncanny Valley is a beautifully made, effects-heavy science fiction film about virtual reality "addicts." It starts a little slowly, but j...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR3lXEH80NwThe short movie Uncanny Valley is a beautifully made, effects-heavy science fiction film about virtual reality "addicts." It starts a little slowly, but j...

For years, the DEA relied on a Riverside, California magistrate judge, Helios Hernandez, to write illegal wiretap warrants, making Hernandez the national champion of wiretapping warrants, signing off ...

The successful Kickstarter raised enough money to put Volume One of the anthology in print, featuring 21 Hugo-award-nominated stories....

Suzanna Quintan's ex-husband bought a Lifelock account in her name, which let him monitor virtually everything she did in realtime, and then the company stonewalled and refused to help her shut down h...

The billionaires who bankrolled Mitt Romney and other Republican establishment candidates are becoming disillusioned with the political classes, who give them the mushroom treatment: keep 'em in the d...

I love Guillermo del Toro: hes a Renaissance man who makes deeply artful and emotional horror films and revels in his work. Whats not to like? His soul is bottomless as a well and seems to replenish i...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics! (more…)...

Voight-Kampff Empathy Test, 2015 edition. [NBM Online via Waxy] (more…)...

Old Book Illustrations is a search engine and browseable library ofyou've guessed it!the engraved illustrations and litho prints found in old books.Choose the type of illustrations you want to see: an...

Itch lets you download and play indie games on Windows, Mac and Linux. Although the itch.io website is great for finding games, supporting creators, participating in communities, creating game jams, a...

John Edward Parsley, 62, of Gonzalez, Texas, was charged with assault and battery Monday after ramming a hotel lobby with his truck. Taking aim at two women staff at the Alva Comfort Inn in Oklahoma...

Last year's New York Public Library podcast featured this wonderful reading (MP3) of A Christmas Carol by Neil Gaiman, reading from the last surviving copy of Dickens own annotated "prompt" text, whic...

The EFF has just settled a case against the Drug Enforcement Agency on behalf of its client, Human Rights Watch, which sued the Agency over its decades-long program of illegal mass surveillance. (mor...

Ever get into an online argument about someone with brown skin who'd been senselessly slaughtered by state-appointed law officers and start to feel like you're talking with someone who's not quite in ...

Researchers examining a possible link between antidepressants and autism found that women who took the psychiatric medications while pregnant were far more likely to have autistic kids. Women in the ...

Jurors in Baltimore, Maryland are now deliberating whether a police officer is guilty of manslaughter and assault in the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died from a spinal cord injury that took...

Widespread human trafficking is a big part of why Thailand is now one the worlds biggest shrimp providers,an Associated Press investigative series details. (more…)...

Congressional auditors say The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in covert propaganda, a violation of federal law, when it launched a massive social media campaign urging Americans to support th...

A new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that a whopping 71% of Americans surveyed believe the many shootings and other acts of mass violence in we've seen in 2015 are now a permanent p...

In 2008, the Red Cross was a dysfunctional mess, so it hired on Gail McGovern, an AT&T exec and Harvard Business School prof, who parachuted in a group of other AT&T alums to oversee a program of rigi...

DJ Riko is back with another year's worth of holiday mashups: Merry Mixmas 2015 (MP3). (more…)...

La Fabrique DIY says, "I wanted to view the Eiffel Tower from my bed so I made a giant periscope with 2 mirrors in order to shift the view from my window."This only works if you live in Paris....

Philips makes a line of "smart" LED lightbulbs and controllers called Hue, that run the Zigbee networking protocol, allowing third-party devices to control their brightness and color. (more…)...

Gaby Dunn, co-star of the YouTube channel Just Between Us, explains the dismal economics of being a mid-list YouTube star.Im 27 years old and have been building an online following for 10 years, begin...

Newitz, who co-founded IO9 and recently moved to Ars Technica has already published marvellous, book-length science non-fiction, but now she's publishing her first sf novel! (more…)...

In The Guardian, psychologist Tom "Mind Hacks" Stafford outlines five classic scientific studies that underpin much of today's thinking about how we learn things. One of Stafford's favorites is BF Ski...

Gaffer is a graph database "optimised for retrieving data on nodes of interest" developed by the notorious UK spy agency GCHQ, and now you can download, run and improve it because they've posted it to...

Stephen Bassett is the only lobbyist of his kind in Washington DC. He's working to get the government to admit that it has proof of extraterrestrials visiting our planet. I want to see disclosure by t...

(more…)...

Police swarmed a Paris kindergarten today after a teacher claimed that a man wearing a balaclava stabbed him in the throat while yelling that the attack "was for Daesh." But the Paris prosecutor's off...

Special bonus: Trailer soundtrack by the Beastie Boys. ...

Efficiency, productivity, and agility are increasingly valued career skills. Cultivate your own with this e-learning bundle from the expert instructors at eduCBA. (more…)...

Because its the holiday season, Lady Parts Justice League is giving back by reminding folks about the anti-choice forces responsible for creating these terrorists with a reinterpretation of a scene ...

Adventure Machine is an online music-remixing widget by Madeon, whose album Adventure came out earlier this year. Similar to Novation's Launchpad gadget, you click different buttons in the grid to tur...

Angie Drobnic Holan, of the respected, nonpartisan factchecking org Politifact has an editorial in the New York Times about the record levels of falsehood in the GOP race, an outlier in a general incr...

Lenny Pozner's young son died in the Sandy Hook mass killing. Conspiracy theorists believe the killing was staged. Pozner's efforts to educate them, to prove that his son died, only resulted in relent...

Matt Haughey (of Metafilter fame), explains his latest project: Why I cant stop putting dildos into the hands of powerful conservatives.Its been hilarious to see what I originally thought might be a t...

There are a lot of secure messaging apps out there, and more every day. They're vital and the sector is vibrant, but if you want to help groups and individuals keep their work private from repressive ...

Stephen Wolfram set out to find the truth about Ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician hailed as the first computer programmer, and who died young. In "untangling the tale," he found a mystery m...

Blocking the dividing line with a pencil or your finger will help....

This tiny drone is a mighty flyer. (more…)...

MRA Dilbert takes the comic strips of Scott Adams and puts actual Scott Adams quotes in as dialogue. Grimly amusing, if you're familiar with Adams' online persona; startlingly unpleasant if not. [via ...

A town meeting in Woodland, North Carolina heard public comments on a proposed solar farm in which citizens, including a retired science teacher called Jane Mann spoke out against the proposal. (more...

Silent movies were preceded by stern/comic etiquette messages reminding viewers to take off their hats before the show, lest they interfere with other viewers' enjoyment. (more…)...

Redditor Two Plus Two is Fore thinks it was made by stacking and frosting different-colored sheet cakes, cut into rings and combined to make the pattern. (more…)...

Redditor Two Plus Two is Fore thinks it was made by stacking and frosting different-colored sheet cakes, cut into rings and combined to make the pattern. (more…)...

You may have noticed that Scott "Dilbert" Adams is a colossal asshole. (more…)...

A new report from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that America's cities are unaffordable even for renters with incomes of $45,000, making 2014 the record-breaking year for "cost-burde...

When you choose Limefuels Blast for portable power, you choose a battery that charges twice as fast as the competition. (more…)...

The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 is set to kick in, and with it will come an extended term of copyright for designer objects, such as furniture, which will endure for 70 years after the c...

https://youtu.be/kIncwvQlSdoCrank it up and freak out your dogs, people! (more…)...

A man in the Washington, DC area caught some housecleaners he'd hired through Handy.com photographing documents and rifling through his papers, presumably to commit identity theft. Or, who knows, mayb...

Im guessing there arent many of us who are terribly concerned that Skynet will unleash its army of Terminator robots on us. But to hear tech visionaries like Bill Gates and Elon Musk tell it, theres p...

Cambridge Analytica is an obscure data-mining company funded by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer (Cruz's main financial backer). Cambridge Analytica created "psychographic profiles" of millions of...

Shari Steele, who served as the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 15 years and built the organization from a six-person shoestring operation that didn't even have an office ...

In my latest Guardian column, I tell the story of my recent lecture at West Point's Cyber Institute, where a young cadet took me aside as asked what I thought of their plans for joining the NSA. (more...

Justin Kozisek, a staffer for the Star Wars Action News podcast, bought a $6.94 Rey toy at Walmart and posted a photo of it to Facebook, and he and his SWAN colleagues were surprised to get a DMCA not...

Sophie's parents tapped their friend, Megan, to turn a Chewbacca doll into a Princess Chewbacca birthday cake, using the "Barbie cake" method, and making Sophie's third birthday just the bestest. (mor...

A new stencil/pasteup in the notorious "Jungle" refugee camp in Calais, France depicts Steve Jobs with a satchel and a classic Macintosh. (more…)...

https://youtu.be/R0yLYCvPSgUI've seen this kind of jittery-but-effective 3D effect before. In fact, you can take old stereoscope cards and make looping Gifs with the two images. A new iPhone app calle...

Model railroader John Ott has devoted years to creating a fantastically detailed, HO-scale recreation of Arkham, the site of HP Lovecraft's horror stories, complete with model railroad engines and his...

No one's sure how the story of suicides increasing during holiday season got started (some researchers think it may have come from It's a Wonderful Life!), but it's not true. (more…)...

Harvard Business School's Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky created 20 identical Airbnb profiles, ten of which had names meant to sound African-American, ten of which were meant to sound...

The inimitable Charles Barkley goes to town on Donald Trump. "Your life sucks because of you, not because of Hispanics.(TNT's "Inside the NBA," thanks UPSO!)...

https://youtu.be/QNmhiTFeyiYRecord producer and DJ Boogie Belgique assembled this crisp black-and-white footage of post-WWII Tokyo. The clips "take us for a ride down a shopping street in the Shinbash...

Keep fucking that chicken....

In 2007, 19-year-old MIT Media Lab student named Star Simpson went to Boston's Logan Airport to meet a friend wearing a sweater she'd decorated with LEDs in the shape of a star; the Logan police respo...

In 2014, US doctors wrote ~20,000 prescriptions for risperidone, quetiapine and other antipsychotics for children under the age of two; a cohort on whom these drugs have never been tested and for whom...

September's court ruling that Warner Chapell Music didn't hold the copyright to "Happy Birthday" was swiftly followed by a claim from the Association for Childhood Education International, a nonprofit...

25 years into creating my comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug, Ive just embarked on another venture: writing books for kids. My series of books, The EMU Club Adventures, began in April with Alien Invasio...

After a Kickstarter campaign raised $3.5m to make drones only to fly away into the void, it brought the shortcomings of crowdfunding into sharp relief. But Kickstarter itself is hiring an investigator...

Its mid-December folks. Like a bullet train. White knuckle time. With parties in motion and merry children abound, its time to jump on the fast track with those holiday gifts. And Winks gift guide is ...

Theres a new Genius Bar in town, and its serving up the good stuff. (more…)...

Prynt is a $140 printer that's also a (bulky, impractical) phone case. It looks cute and brings instant-print nostalgia to the cellphone you already have and to your very large cargo-pants pocket.Wire...

In 1981, Harvard law professor Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, published a thought experiment in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: what if the codes to launch nuclear war w...

The Obama administration, which has staffed up on savvy pro-privacy technologists, even as its law enforcement arm has called for a "magic pony" that would let Internet users attain technological secu...

The Obama administration, which has staffed up on savvy pro-privacy technologists, even as its law enforcement arm has called for a "magic pony" that would let Internet users attain technological secu...

This week's Radio Motherboard podcast (MP3) talks with Matthew Mitchell, a former data journalist who organizes Harlem Cryptoparty, a regular training meeting for black activists who want to learn to ...

Backslash -- an "art/design" project from NYU Interactive Technology Program researchers Xuedi Chen and Pedro G. C. Oliveira -- is a set of high-tech tools for protesters facing down a "hyper-militar...

From a very young age, the illusion of motion has fascinated me.I would spend hours and hours destroying the books in my parents library by creating crude, hand drawn flipbooks in the margins. Below i...

Late on Thursday, a jury found a former Oklahoma City cop accused of sexually assaulting and raping 13 women guilty of rape and sexual battery.Daniel Holtzclaw, who turned 29 on Thursday, cried as the...

https://youtu.be/wZYa9ZKZeDkYou can now view NASA rocket launch videos in 4K high-definition glory, online. (more…)...

Redditor ShayGoes2Work posted this amazing shot of Zane, 10 year old rescue dog, wishing you a Merry Christmas....

https://youtu.be/LoWCMzHWlRkActor, Comedian, and balding redhead dude Bill Burr, who you may remember as a thug for hire on Breaking Bad, teaches you how to make a wonderful homemade pie crust. (more&...

https://youtu.be/FgFeVlw2YwgI do love my citrus-squeezer and spiralizer, but I'll agree that the badly-designed shitgadgets that author/chef Alton Brown highlights in this Daily Dot viral video are ...

Just before the 2015 holidays hit, America's 3 largest airlines are banning hoverboards. Why? In-flight fire danger from the lithium-ion batteries that power them. (more…)...

In the same way that anything longer than it is wide can be a phallic symbol, Frank Wu demonstrates that all isosceles triangles are potential Star Destroyers....

https://youtu.be/AFnn61eXKw0Walt Kelly's Fairy Tales is a 300-page anthology of Golden Age comic book stories by the great Walk Kelly. It's edited by comic book historian Craig Yoe.Walt Kelly, Disney ...

Walt Kelly's Fairy Tales is a 300-page anthology of Golden Age comic book stories by the great Walk Kelly. It's edited by comic book historian Craig Yoe. (more…)...

Penguin Magic printed just 500 decks of these Christmas themed playing cards. They are perfect for a holiday dinner performance of the tricks you will learn from the Penguin Magic Starter Pack video c...

Penguin Magic printed just 500 decks of these Christmas themed playing cards. (more…)...

From the Cincinnati Zoo's wonderful Instagram feed:Bonobo smiles can mean different things like fear or playfulness. They also have large grins when they are wrestling with other bonobos and laughing....

Practice the digital dark arts for the good guys, and make more than an honest living as a White Hat Hacker. Information Security and related I.T. career fields can pay upwards of six figures within t...

The blockbuster podcast Serial starts a long-awaited second season today, looking at a different case, but if you are still interested in the story of Adnan Syed, there's "Undisclosed." (more…...

Thao & The Get Down Stay Down continue their post-punk alt.country folk jamboree with a new track! "Nobody Dies" is the first single from their new album, A Man Alive, coming out in March. I wa...

See more photos at Wink Fun.King Ludwig II of Bavaria, having built Neuschwanstein, has tasked players in their role as builders to build him the most extravagant and amazing castle ever. You'll have ...

Despite the French Ministry of Interior's demands to crack down on Internet anonymity, Prime Minister Manual Valls has gone on record saying he won't allow such a thing to pass: (more…)...

Beard + Plant = Santa Claus Venus Fly Trap. https://t.co/So5vV1qcST pic.twitter.com/Oxlsg5Flwj— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) November 14, 2015[via]...

Beard + Plant = Santa Claus Venus Fly Trap. https://t.co/So5vV1qcST pic.twitter.com/Oxlsg5Flwj— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) November 14, 2015[via]...

https://youtu.be/MTY1Kje0yLgAP physics teacher Dan Burns gave a fun demonstration about spacetime curvature in 2012 at Los Gatos High School. Here's the 10 minute video.Here's another good one from Bu...

Liabru's Fractal Gears is a beautiful webtoy that draws randomly meshed gears of descending ratios, with a set of sliders you can use to tweak their parameters. (via Kottke)...

Whatever you think of guns control, Obama's assertion that "Closing the No-Fly List loophole is a no-brainer" is pretty brainless. (more…)...

A new Pew report analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors finds that America's middle class has shrunk to the smallest share of the US population for the ...

"Chakra the Invincible" is the third installment in a series from the UNICEF-backed Comics Uniting Nations. It's aimed at kids and young people, and presents a diverse global perspective on the causes...

After years of technology training seminars in which Miriam Posner ran through a lecture or tutorial and watched as some students got it and others didn't, but were too embarrassed about breaking up t...

Coffee enemas have been around since the 19th century (when medical science was a mess) and they persist today (when woo advocates like to hold up the fact that medical practices have persisted since ...

"This was a very unfortunate incident and I'm deeply sorry that this happened, but the procedures we're putting in place today are so above industry norms that we are going to be the safest place to e...

Chubb's new troll rider on its elite personal insurance package for its wealthiest customers now offers up to £50,000 to cover the cost of counselling, lost income, and professional anti-troll s...

https://youtu.be/fFzKi-o4rHwInstagram husband is related to Instagram parent of a teenage daughter....

Serial, the most talked-about show in the history of podcasting, has launched its second season. This time, producer Sarah Koenig worked with filmmaker Mark Boal to tell the story of U.S. soldier Bowe...

Matt Taibbi is on fire as ever in Rolling Stone, analyzing the weird relationship between Donald Trump and the media: he does politics in just the way that cable news reports on it: disjointedly, with...

Michael C. Ford has pleaded guilty to accusations that he spent at least two years coercing at least 75 women into sending him naked photos of themselves and other women he demanded that they covertly...

Helen Briggs reports that a litter of beagle and beagle-spaniel puppies are the first born through in-vitro fertilization after decades of attempts to use the fertility treatment in dogs.The puppiesIv...

After U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump demanded a ban on Muslims entering the country, a parliamentary petitioner set out to ban him from entering the U.Kand soon earned enough votes to mandat...

https://imgur.com/ISf6IExnatsdorf via r/aww..video-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 100%;}.featuredimage {display:none;}...

In 1974, the US National Institute on Drug Abuse commissioned sf giant Robert Silverberg to research and write Drug Themes in Science Fiction," a survey of 75 sf stories and novels that included ficti...

Boing Boing is thrilled to welcome 3D Robotics as a sponsor! Want a truly unique gift for someone special (even if that someone is you)? Then check out the 3DR Solo, the first smart drone. Designed li...

The Bug Racer is Mattel's $50 electronic "science" car toy that requires that you fill a sensor cavity with up to six crickets; the toy measures the crickets' movement in the cavity and uses them to g...

Slap Kirk allows you to refresh the captain of the Starship Enterprise until the man comes to his goddamn senses. Warning: loud noises....

Lewisham Police's grim, barrier-squished Christmas tree has been judged the most depressing one in the UK, writes Hannah Al-Othman.Draped with a single string of bland white lights, the tree leans at ...

The European Commission is considering new Internet regulations that would make online services legally liable for their users' bad actions, meaning that services like Youtube, Facebook, and the comme...

A woman who works for California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (they handle prisons and parole and stuff) is under investigation after she was filmed mocking a Muslim man who was pra...

https://vimeo.com/148374388Despite zero indication the people responsible for recent terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino used encryption, the FBI is launching an all-out PR war on crypto. No...

A mother in northeast France received a text from a phone traced to Syria: Your son died as a martyr Nov. 13. (more…)...

Facebook CEO Executive Mark Zuckerberg said today that he supports Muslims in America, and around the world. (more…)...

Whenever a clueless authority figure who apparently knows nothing about security (like, apparently, FBI director James Comey) calls for a ban on crypto, here's the article you should show them. (more&...

Oh, my heart! An amazing human/primate interaction, caught on video. (more…)...

Today Freedom of the Press Foundation is proud to announce a new crowd-funding campaign that will fund local journalists around the United States to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=166&v=78VDqoQdavYThe Ovo-Tech Rz-1 breaks eggs like nobody's business. (more…)...

Marina Gorbis, executive director at Institute for the Future where I'm a researcher, is in Washington DC at a U.S. Department of Labor Symposium where they're talking about the on-demand economy and ...

Josh Rosenthal is the cratedigger and DIY musicologist behind such fantastic collections as the Grammy-nominated "He Is My Story: The Sanctified Soul of Arizona Dranes," "Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Ha...

From the fundamentals - like learning the MySQL language- to utilizing today's top technologies like MongoDB, this bundle is the best thing you can do for your career. Big data is an extremely hot top...

Phillip Rogaway, an eminent computer scientist and cryptographer at UC Davis, has made a stir in information security circles with a long, thoughtful paper called The Moral Character of Cryptographic ...

[My friend Peter Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for British national newspapers. He has covered revolutions, civil wars, riots, wildfires, and Hollywood celebrity misdeeds for longer th...

Is this symbolic for something?If only there was one perfect gif to demonstrate how America should react to Trump... pic.twitter.com/6B99P9FrbV— Tom Taylor (@TomTaylorMade) December 9, 2015[Than...

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Born in Australia, Ebony Bizys made the move to Tokyo five years ago and hasnt looked back since. As the founder of the popular blog Hello Sandwich, Ebony has a...

Jared Sinclair fixed the "fearful symmetry" of his Apple remote with an asparagus band.My new killer Apple accessory: I put an asparagus band around the bottom half so we know which end to pick up: pi...

Liquid ASS is described as smelling like a fine combination of "butt crack, kind of a sewer smell with a hint of dead animal." It is arguably the worst smell in the world. High school prankster Allen ...

Back in July, a hacker dumped the emails and other files from Hacking Team, Italy's notorious cyber-arms dealer. Coincidentally, Vice had recently filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the F...

Emptystate.es celebrates "Empty States," those moments in a user's app experience where there's no data to display yet, or an error has occurred. Empty States are actually a great moment to delight or...

https://youtu.be/KU_Jdts5rL0Auralnaut's "Darth Trump" used "100% all natural Trump sound bites" to make this excellent short film....

Here are the New York Times' 50 most interesting stories, measured by the total combined time readers have spent looking at them. I haven't read most of these, so I'm going to bookmark this page.Its a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc3jVX6cU2MThe $120 Digital Wizard hoodie started out as a 2012 April Fool's prank, but as with other Thinkgeek April Fools products, it proved so popular that they w...

NASA just released this beautiful composite infrared view of Saturn's moon Titan. The Cassini spacecraft captured the image last month during its flyby about 6,200 miles above the moon's surface. From...

Because Music's Recollection is a click-happy guide to music from the last 10 years. It made me miss the early days of CD-ROM experiments, like Jim Ludtke's work for The Residents....

Meghan writes, "You've probably never been kept awake at night worrying about a European Commission communication. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be. Today the Commission published its roadm...

Setsuko Hara. Its unlikely youve heard her name or seen any of her numerous films, yet she was the muse of one of the worlds greatest filmmakers: Japans Yasujiro Ozu. And you may well not have heard o...

From Coachella 2008. When fans over the years previously posted this video from Coachella 2008, Prince sent DMCA takedown notices. But when Radiohead's Thom Yorke was asked about the matter, he resp...

Japanese ingenuity, particularly when it comes to creating delicious snacks and about five million ways to eat chocolate, never fails to amaze me. Yet I am amazed anew by this latest release from the ...

When Hunter Oatman-Stanford began working on an article about Neil Kaplan's collection of old passports, we had no idea his story would be so timely. Alas, the acts of terrorism in Paris, followed by ...

Illustrator Doogie Horner has a new book out called Some Very Interesting Cats Perhaps You Werent Aware Of. He says its a c"ollection of illustrated short stories about 100 impossible cat characters. ...

Today's internet bubble wrap is Koalas to the Max. Mouseover or tap colored circles to make them subdivide into four more colored circles, and keep going until the koala is visible. Then start over!It...

A smile can speak a thousand words but those words may remain in the wilderness if the recipient doesnt speak human. Of course animals have many ways in which to interpret our emotions and intentions....

Get "a present, or two, or ten" for yourself this Christmas with the Boing Boing Gift Guide....

Yahoo sport columnist Dan Wetzel checked into a Marriott, something he does a lot, and was bewildered to discover that his room didn't have a desk. When he called down to the reception, he discovered ...

In the wake of heavy criticism from his party over remarks about Muslims, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump warned them he would be more than happy to run as an independent candidate.A...

Lu Wei is chief of China's State Internet Information Office, a man they call "the gatekeeper of the Chinese internet." According to him, the world's most notorious and ambitious system of Internet ce...

Koaning.io used Markov chains, a kind of stochastic modeling more famously used to generate pseudo-meaningful written text, to show that the board game Monopoly is heavily imbalanced by the "go to jai...

Cops covertly buy stolen cards from underground sites to figure out where they came from, and so these sites implement security measures that try to figure out whether a purchaser is an undercover cop...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYrxzSe3DUWarning signs that your kid is involved in cybercrime: "Are they interested in coding? Do they have independent learning material on computing?" (more&hell...

For more than a century, the US judiciary has been handing down rulings that affirm that non-US citizens, including those seeking entry into the USA, have no rights under the US Constitution -- ruling...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqGS8yDD5ZAFor two successive Parliaments, the UK Tory party has been trying to pass the most extensive mass-spying bill in the western world. It's called the Snooper...

All over the world, laws promulgated by the US Trade Representative ban breaking digital locks -- the "Digital Rights Management" technologies that lock up our TVs, tablets, phones, games consoles, ca...

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more. And/or buy Ruben Bollings new book series for k...

Growing up, I used to fill my shelves with things I collected in my travels and since my radius of movement was only about 5 miles, what I amassed was pretty lame. Now, with Amazon and eBay I never ha...

Growing up, I used to fill my shelves with things I collected in my travels. As my radius of movement was only about 5 miles, though, what I amassed was pretty lame. Nowadays, thanks to Internet retai...

Return to Boing BoingHere's a guide to the charities the Boingers support in our own annual giving. As always, please add the causes and charities you give to in the forums!Planned ParenthoodBecause d...

On December 19th, the Internet Archive is hosting a telethon for 24 straight hours, an old-fashioned variety show kind of thing with performances and live acts, and you can attend, if you're in San Fr...

The scale and virulence of internet harassment often lingers in the news, but three women who have faced down the bullies are sharing their guide to staying safe online. The advice is eminently sensib...

Jane from CC writes, "Creative Commons, the global nonprofit that makes it easier for creators to share their work under simple copyright terms, announced a major milestone in the release of its 2015 ...

This Russian video shows a high-tech, terrifying in-mouth CNC mill that uses built-in cameras and a machine controlled drill to precisely mill out rotten parts of teeth while you clench the machine'...

The environmental activism group Greenpeace today disclosed that it led an undercover investigation to expose how easy it is for big oil, gas, or coal companies to pay academics at leading U.S. univer...

The environmental activism group Greenpeace today disclosed that it led an undercover investigation to expose how easy it is for big oil, gas, or coal companies to pay academics at leading U.S. univer...

A local CBS affiliate in Philadelphia reports that city police are investigating a pigs head dumped outside an Islamic Center in North Philadelphia.Islam's holy book, the Quran, forbids Muslims from e...

Michael from Muckrock writes, "While patiently noting that their anonymous tipsters thought Lennon was not a 'true revolutionist' because he used drugs, the FBI worked with INS over several years to b...

To a beautiful friendPlease do not break thisSend it to a minimum of 3 people... But Not before you read below...There comes a point in your life when you realize:Who matters, Who never did, Who won't...

To a beautiful friendPlease do not break thisSend it to a minimum of 3 people... But Not before you read below... (more…)...

The Trans Pacific Partnership: it's thousands of pages' worth of dense bureaucratic language setting out the give-and-take of years' worth of secret negotiations. Figuring out what it means for you is...

YouTube stars employ a watered-down, carnival-barker style of annunciation to keep viewers interested, says Julie Beck of The Atlantic, who asked to Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at Americ...

In a major policy change that sounds like a Very Good Idea, the U.S. Army announced today that dog tags will no longer include the Social Security numbers of the soldier wearing them. SSNs have been p...

Crafty and eccentric YouTube musician Andrew Huang enjoys performing classical compositions on weird objects. (more…)...

https://youtu.be/XSaaa_OBkzwLove these Heavy Metal Parking Lot style man-on-the-street supercuts from late 20th century local TV news. Literally can't get enough of them. This compilation shows how mu...

See sample pages from this book at Wink.What many Americans may not be aware of is that, from the introduction of the U.S. Patent system, in 1790, up until 1880, every submitted patent document requir...

https://vimeo.com/148182185Dan Ashwood writes, "I wrote and animated a new holy days carol to memorize and perform at neighbors and homeowners. Take a look!"...

#DonaldTrump advocates closing up the Internet 2 stop the process of thought/free speech. So Communist China-like. pic.twitter.com/hRab3xpVcK— NotBuffytheVMPslayer (@NotBUFFY_VS) December 8, 201...

Lisa Rein writes, "When Jacob Appelbaum called for transparency in Aaron Swartz's FOIA case, he was talking about Kevin Poulsen's ongoing case against the Department of Homeland Security, a case that ...

If a burglar got their hands on this book safe ($11 on Amazon) disguised as a dictionary, they would have no trouble breaking it open on the spot. More likely, they'd just take it home and open it the...

Penguin Magic is a great way to get into magic tricks, and master the art in no time. (more…)...

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https://vimeo.com/77047228If you love, or fear the ocean, Worse Things Happen At Sea is the art book for you! This doubled sided panorama illustrates man locked in battle with the terrors of the deep....

A new book, Material Innovation: Packaging Design, written by a material science consultant and a design consultant, explores the ways that packaging is being changed by innovations in retail, materia...

Denmark's Antipiratgruppen was formed in the early 2000s to fight the Internet over copyright infringement, with members including the MPA and umbrella groups representing record labels, publishers an...

Last week a small company in Dublin called Steorn started taking orders for their USB phone charger. It's on the large side, and is only good for two or three smartphone charges per day, or one tablet...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ3fpZFWHDMBoing Boing is thrilled to welcome SparkFun as a sponsor this holiday season! Check out their fantastic gift guide!Back in 2003, the world was still celebrat...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6r-dw2yMVQAlisha writes, "Ever wonder what happens to the intel Santa Claus collects when deciding if you've been good or bad? Who has access to all your secrets? Al...

Jeff VanderMeer sends us the latest Storybundle, which has "the DEBUT of Ann VanderMeer's BESTIARY, which features original fiction from China Mieville, Catherynne M. Valente, and many others--not ava...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics! (more…)...

Yesterday, presidential candidate Donald Trump declared that he would block the entry of muslims into the U.S. His rivals immediately condemned him, but what about the international leaders that Trump...

For only $6, you can congratulate your friends and family on their basic human competence an functioning with these elegant Adult Award Ribbons from TheHeirloomTomatos.Both ribbons are 2x8 satin point...

One of the wonders of the world may be a "second-hand monument" originally built in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and only later moved to Salisbury. It has long been known that the bluestones that form Stoneh...

I think were all pretty spoiled these days when it comes to bluetooth streaming technology. I can remember waiting in line for one of the first portable, wireless speakers and being disappointed when ...

They're from Middle of Beyond (who make the bigfoot and Krampus sweaters). $20 each, 8" tall: Krampus, Cthulhu, or Baphomet. (via Christian Nightmares)...

Keurig had the bright idea of trying to make it impossible to brew coffee with its machines unless the pods were officially-approved by them. The result was a well-deserved failure in the marketplace,...

Lyonya Shilovsky, a 3-year-old drummer from Russia, leads an orchestra of grown-ups in this cute 2014 video re-making the viral rounds. (more…)...

Dogs are amazing, intelligent creatures, and are capable of such complex communication and behavioral intelligence. (more…)...

The Washington Post reports that the U.S. Army is recommending retired general David H. Petraeus not face further punishment for screwing his biographer and leaking top-secret materials to her. (more&...

Donald Trump, a Republican candidate for Fhrer of the United Fascist States of America, said today there should be a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, including Muslim...

CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, encourages companies to spy on their customers and hand the data to the government, in secret, with full immunity (including immunity for launching cyb...

The 2016 GOP candidates have had a slew of embarrassing domain name losses, but the sudden redirect of JebBush.com to DonaldJTrump.com today is pretty epic. (more…)...

Peter from Shelfie writes, "In a press release on Digital Book World, Springer Nature has announced a partnership with Vancouver start-up Shelfie (BitLit) to offer digital bundles on over 100,000 titl...

User experience design is a holistic field that touches on every aspect of the experience the user has with your product, all the way down to opening the box. As a book editor, I've found it useful to...

Retired US Army lieutenant colonel and Fox News commentator Ralph Peters's comment on live TV after President Obama's Oval Office address yesterday about ISIS:"Were angry. Were pissed off. Were furi...

In 1988, Leonso Canales of Kingsville, Texas, began his righteous, decades-long campaign to replace the greeting "hello" with "heaven-o." He even took out newspapers and even convinced the Kleberg Cou...

Idaho State University anthropology/anatomy professor Jeffrey Meldrum 3D printed a scale model of a speculative bigfoot skeleton. (more…)...

Our friend Joshua Foer, memory champion and author of the fantastic book "Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything," shows how he stores incredible amounts of useful ...

Matt "Metafilter" Haughey's got a new election-season pass-time: he's taking photos that GOP politicians post of themselves holding guns and replacing the BFGs with massive sex-toys, exposing a deep a...

On Saturday, I stopped in at the incredible Comc Arts LA indie comics fest and came away with a staggering double-load of amazing funnybooks, and the standout from that wonderful haul is Hope Larson's...

https://youtu.be/mI96Ph-yHcAOur friend, filmmaker Joe Sabia, made this video with Joshua Foer, the ex-US memory champ, on how to memorize the first 100 digits of Pi. "A while back, said Joe," "I reach...

David Vetter (1971-1984) suffered from severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), a disease that required him to live inside a sterile environment, a plastic "bubble." Eventually, he tested a special ...

While large wallets can cause awkward pocket bulges, slim versions that only fit 2-3 cards can be pretty useless. Meet Hover: a thin wallet that both looks good and works like a dream. Easily store at...

Trina Merry (previously) has created "Lost in Wonder," a series of trompe l'oeil photos in which painted models are posed against many of the world's great wonders, vanishing into the background. (mor...

Last spring, we went to Venice to celebrate my wife's birthday and took a boat to the Biennale, which was pretty disappointing, with one notable exception: 'The Key in the Hand,' Chiharu Shiota's in...

Last spring, we went to Venice to celebrate my wife's birthday and took a boat to the Biennale, which was pretty disappointing, with one notable exception: 'The Key in the Hand,' Chiharu Shiota's in...

https://youtu.be/V5RLTZSrr4AAyun Halliday of Open Culture posted a 1965 film of Marcel Marceau's performance of Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death.The film above documents a 1965 performance of his m...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=21&v=wu_Lct-uVW8The two creepy head-characters rode the Northern Line, pushed an empty pram down the platforms, and sat down to play trains at Hamley's to...

Put round magnets on either end of a AA battery and set it down on a sheet of tinfoil and watch it spin! It's a homopolar motor, a simple electric motor that relies on the Lorentz effect to set it i...

The Crooked Timber folks have assembled a distinguished panel to discuss Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century, a must-read economics book (don't be scared by its brick-like appearance!). (mo...

Polyhai's tutorial for creating a tiki-mug menorah is all the sholem aloha you need for eight nights of candlelit grog-swilling. (more…)...

See sample pages from this book at Wink.My own initiation into Freemasonry was one of the highlights of my adult life. The marvelous rituals and the delightful imparting of secrets are sublime, but th...

A special holiday thank you to our long time sponsor Shanalogic! Shanalogic is a curated shop of handmade and independently produced gifts, many of which we own and love! Check out this fantastic Half...

From KSL.com:"I ran to her room, banged on her door and was like, 'Where did you get this can?'" Netzler said.She insisted she bought the drink at Wal-Mart. Netzler decided to call police.Police thi...

https://youtu.be/NxOPnxoGQhsFor the last two years, Jasen Dixon of Sycamore Township, Ohio has displayed a front yard nativity scene with zombified versions of Baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the three m...

In Toxic Workers , a new Harvard Business School working paper, Michael Housman and Dylan Minor look at the paradox of "superstar" workers who outperform their colleagues by 2:1 or more, but who are "...

The history of American prison visitations are a mix of racism ("black men, denied sex, will riot in jail") and compassion -- especially the late 1960s' ground-breaking, multi-day family visitation pr...

Robinson's "Oral Argument" is a fascinating courtroom drama about patents, biotech, and photosynthetic tattooed humans that turns on the Bilski Supreme Court decision about the patentability of busine...

A leaked memo from the Ministry sets out new bills it would like to see introduced into the French Parliament as early as next month, setting out an ambitious plan to block privacy tools, something on...

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5minutemeditation is a minimalist, one-shot guided meditation routine on the web. The clean layout and total silence beat the clutter and chaos of youtube, and you can set breathing rate and color sch...

The weather on Sol-d is simply too strange and unpredictable, pretty as it sometimes may be. We recommend colonizing Sol-e instead. Cold but serviceable.Stormscapes 3 is for those that enjoy the vis...

Oldweb.today lets you view archived snapshots of the web (from the Wayback Machine) in old browsers. It has all of the important ones, from NCSA Mosaic through the Netscapes and Mac IE to the present ...

I buy an awful lot of toys under the guise of sharing them with my niece and nephew. The truth is, of course, that Id get them even if I werent an uncle. In particular, I love modular puzzle games tha...

Ron Amadeo has Walmart's $10 smartphone, the LG Sunrise. It's shit. And yetThe specs look like something out of 2007: a 3.8-inch 480320 display, a dual core, 1.2GHz Snapdragon 200, 512MB of RAM, 4GB o...

CompTIA IT certification exams are available in many specialties, leaving you wondering which to take first. We've curated a bundle of courses that will prepare you to ace exams in the most in-demand,...

Each and every item in the Boing Boing Dry Goods store had been blessed by a Discordian Monk, imbuing it with extra entropy. If enough people by these items, our ancestors will look back on 2016 and s...

The 12" retina MacBook, 6 months in. Almost ready to review it....

Having failed to wrest control of the San Francisco bay area by reducing technology reliant humans access to electrical power, wild life freedom fighters have resorted to direct attacks on individuals...

Thinkgeek has extended its solar system drinking glasses with a new link of six 10oz Star Wars glasses that symbolize six of the Lucas mythos's most important celestial bodies: Alderaan, Dagobah, Hoth...

In Iceland, tax-authorities collect "parish fees" from all residents and remit them to churches based on the stated religious affinities of those residents. If you're an atheist, your fees are collect...

Martin Shkreli, the most hated man on the Internet, regrets that he jacked up the price of the off-patent drug Daraprim, taken mainly by people with AIDS and cancer, by a mere 5,000%. (more…)...

I've been collecting playing cards since I was a kid and after amassing enough to choke Godzilla, I have a thing or two to say about the ones that stand out to me.When I used to open a pack of cards, ...

I've been collecting playing cards since I was a kid. After amassing enough to choke Godzilla, I have a thing or two to say about the ones that stand out to me.When I used to open a pack of cards, the...

Cloud storage can get pricey no matter how good the bargain. Thats why Zoolz offers a smarter way to purchase cloud backup based on tiered solutions meant to suit your particular needs. (more…)...

The latest Humble Ebook Bundle features 15 DRM-free ebooks, with works by Fritz Leiber, Kelly Link, Mary Robinette Kowal, Neil Gaiman, Peter Beagle, Madeline L'Engle and many others -- name your price...

Now that Lindsey Graham is totally unelectable, he's decided to drop out of the "say the craziest thing I can think of" race and started a new one: the race to say things that are obviously true to ev...

The Intercept reviewed the earnings calls for gun manufacturers, retailers and distributors from the past several years' worth of investor filings, and found a sad and predictable pattern: every mass ...

After some trial and error, Chris-Rachael Oseland has perfected a recipe for spice-filled sandworm bread, just in time for Kitchen Overlord's Dune Week. (more…)...

https://vimeo.com/147159504Screen Novelties' Witch Doctor kickstarter is looking to raise $60,000 to finish a gorgeous-looking, tiki-themed stop-motion black-light movie inspired by classic dark rid...

I had to hear it from Wil Wheaton.Talking to the creators of open-world hit game Uncharted on his show, Conversations with Creators, the geek legend praised a feature that helps you guide protagonist ...

Lumino City is a charming, hand-crafted point-and-click adventure thatll make you smile. Its a cozy world of clever puzzles and light storyline where you hunt for your kidnapped Grandpa while repairin...

"We regret that we briefly showed images of photographs and identification cards that should not have been aired without review," said MSNBC after doing precisely that earlier today in San Bernardino....

Just when you thought the surreal San Bernardino mass shooting or is it terrorism or is it a BHO false flag to take our guns couldn't get any weirder, it gets weirder. (more…)...

https://youtu.be/46HqvYOEcgcA truly great DJ, just for a moment, can make a whole room fall in love, because DJ'ing is not about playing a few tunes. It is about generating shared moods; it's about un...

Already into our first week of December, the holiday month flies by about as fast as the bills spill out of our wallets. But fear not! Wink Books and Wink Fun have some extraordinary gift ideas ($3-$1...

Our friends at Bigshot Toyworks are kickstarting a new line of dolls called Dream BIG Friends. I saw the prototypes at DCon in Pasadena a couple of weeks and they are beautiful.After watching their ...

Boing Boing is honored to have Last Gasp as a sponsor.In European folklore, the Krampus is St. Nikolaus's dark servanta hairy, horned, supernatural beast whose pointed ears and long, slithering tongue...

The Associated Press reports today that GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump asked a man who was once involved in a major Mafia-linked stock fraud scheme to be a senior business adviser to the Trump ...

In a now-viral police killing video captured in San Francisco, a 26-year-old man stands up against a wall as a group of police officers aim their guns at him. Mario Woods, 26, was then shot to death, ...

In German-speaking Alpine lands, as Americans are increasingly aware, St. Nicholas is accompanied on his gift-giving rounds by the devilish Krampus, whos said to punish naughty children with stinging ...

The brother of pop entertainer Nicki Minaj has been charged with raping a child, reports local Long Island/NYC paper Newsday. (more…)...

Beautiful work from Redditor navidj.Pluto uses 35 colors, Neptune uses 24, and Jupiter 20. The materials are very affordable. Each thread costs around 40 cents or so. The black Aida cloth is about $5 ...

The New York Times' alarming headline "How to skin a cat" turns out to be a short, intriguing item about being a taxidermist in the 21st centuryPut any creature you want preserved in the freezer withi...

Hunter Moore, the loathsome operator of defunct revenge porn site IsAnybodyUp.com, will be spending more time indoors.He was sent down for 30 months at his sentencing on charges of identity theft and ...

An Arkansas judge has struck a law from the books that allowed the state to keep secret where it gets execution drugs from. The change means pharmaceutical companies who sold life-ending drugs to exec...

Break into the tech industry as a project manager with this comprehensive training on all things project management. With 68 courses on Project Management, 22 on Quality Management, and 17 on Agile an...

On June 30, 2001, a woman brought a strange sculpture onto the Antiques Roadshow for appraisal called The Kangaroo Bird. She paid $60.00 for it and wasnt she excited to find out it was an original Dr....

 If theres one thing I just love, its tiny objects that do amazing things. Ohand I also love great big objects that do amazing things. What Im about to share with you is a perfect combination of ...

This Wired video interview with former director Nicholas Negroponte and current director Joi Ito is a mind-blowing tour through the Media Lab's storied history: from e-ink to touchscreens to multitouc...

Gus writes, "Remember carbon paper? Youre probably of a certain age if you can recall typing on a sandwich of two sheets of paper with a thin, grimy, black sheet between them to make copies." (more&...

The secretly negotiated Trans Pacific Partnership is 2,000 pages' worth of regulatory favors for various industries, but one that stands out as particularly egregious is the ban on rules requiring sou...

JK Brickworks's Sisyphus automata was inspired by Disney Research's work on the "Computational Design of Mechanical Characters". (more…)...

Climatebrad writes, "The MIT grad students occupying the hallway outside President Reif's office until MIT divests from fossil fuels have hit the 10000000000-hour mark (base 2 - in base 10, that's a s...

Behold! Millenials are a fucking joke. over-used counseling centers, and hand-holding-coddling-BS.There used to be a time where two people could have different opinions and have an intelligent, educat...

The anti-Uber global alliance of ride-hailing companies has now officially taken shape, writes Mike Isaac at the New York Times. (more…)...

Mark Zuckerberg did not just donate $45 billion of his Facebook stock to charity. Perhaps you read this on the internets. It is not true. (more…)...

The attackers who shot to death some 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino had enough ammunition and explosive devices to kill hundreds more people, investigators said today. The FBI is now l...

There's a wonderful new episode out from Food Warriors, the delightful NYC street eats web series starring Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam, and directed by Casimir Nozkowski. (more…)...

https://youtu.be/M1pZc7CTQOo"Meet Lyss, a chipper tissue paper enthusiast, as she guides you step-by-step in how to make essential items out of the world's most versatile material: tissue paper!"...

At Tynemouth Software's Etsy store, you can buy a ready-to-use Raspberry Pi housed within any of number of classic computer cases. The keyboards are properly hooked up, modern outputs are discretely a...

Let's Encrypt is a joint project from EFF, Mozilla and others that allows anyone to create a free HTTPS certificate in minutes, this being a critical piece of infrastructure, necessary for making conn...

You're probably familiar with Scratch, the introductory programming language that allows kids (and adults) to create interactive stories, games, and animations. Scratch doesn't require lines of code t...

A hacker broke into the United Arab Emirates's Invest Bank., stole its customer data and started dribbling it out over Twitter, one account at a time, demanding $3 million to stop. The bank didn't pay...

In Illinois, the prison authorities use a combination of mandatory financial disclosures and intelligence gleaned from opening prisoners' mail and sue anyone who might have any money for rent on their...

The incredible Zach Mueller up to his old (and new) tricks again! See more at Mueller's cardistry company site Fontaine Cards.Previously: "Watch this mesmerizing floating cards magic"...

Mexican artist Renato Garza Cervera sculpts freakish rugs in the form of skinned gang members."Years ago I was watching TV at the house of an ex-girlfriend," he told The Creators Project. "We were wat...

Pssssh... Animal all day. Below, Grohl and Electric Mayhem perform the Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x2WL_9bVyw...

See sample pages from this book at Wink.I began reading Amar Bari, Tomar Bari, Naxalbari whilst waiting for my connecting flight at Bengaluru airport and was inclined to continue reading it as turbule...

Continuing my learning journey through the history of avant-garde and spiritual jazz, I now have jazz DJ/musicologist Gilles Peterson's sublime mix "Black Jazz Radio" on repeat. Black Jazz Records was...

Emily Trunko, 15, lives in Copley, Ohio. She is the creator of The Last Message Received, a Tumblr that posts screenshots of final text messages from people. She receives the messages anonymously. Som...

Officer Jenchesky Santiago, of the Prince George's County, Maryland, police force was convicted of first-degree assault and misconduct in office. Santiago threatened a man, while holding a gun to his ...

Wonderful. I made a GIF, below, of Infinite Nick Offerman Never Sipping Whisky....

"Hey babe do you like the Porsche I am driving right now? Uh, you like that Porsche? Keys... obviously I'm the driver. Look..." Jamie Lee Sharp, 25, filmed himself stealing a Porsche "Boxer" in Glou...

The Associated Press is reporting today that U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter will soon announce a historic change: The military will open all combat jobs to women. (more…)...

No simpleminded origami project, when your kid is done folding this cardboard they'll have an Imperial trooper at their beck and call. My daughter has a blast making hers.Instructions are simple, and ...

If the sticker is missing, so is the phone number to report that the sticker is missing. Someone working for the state of Florida is a closet Situationist. How else can you explain this self-referenti...

@deepForger is a Twitterbot that creates paintings in the distinctive style of famous artists. Its work wouldn't fool an art expert (and is highly dependent on the appropriateness of the images given ...

To beat a Dec. 1 change in rules that limit their shenanigans, patent trolls filed more than 200 cases in a single day. (more…)...

A study conducted at the University of Newcastle in England found that For people with Type 2 diabetes, losing weight allows them to drain excess fat out of the pancreas and allows function to return ...

This little gadget truly works double duty. It charges any device on-the-go using an ultra-fast USB that juices batteries at two-times normal speed. Then, using its smartphone app, Zus acts as a honin...

Paying a little more for a premium microSD card is "one of the highest-impact upgrades you can perform to increase Raspberry Pi performance," writes Jeff Geerling. It's a few dollars' differenceand si...

Did Ridley Scott plan the most brutally delicious revenge against JPL or am I just making this stuff up?It's too soon to know for sure but lets go over what I think I know -Every year JPL has an open ...

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Simply Secure, a nonprofit I volunteer for, is launching a new series of usability programs for organizations, companies and individuals who are making cryptographic/privacy/security tools. (more&hell...

The data from Mass Shooting Tracker tell the tale: America averages more than one mass shooting every single day. 2015 is on track to be the deadliest year in American history, having already beat 201...

The data from Mass Shooting Tracker tell the tale: America averages more than one mass shooting every single day. In the first 334 days of 2015, America has seen 351 mass shootings, and counting.2015 ...

After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in which BP killed 12 people, millions of marine and land animals, and one ecosystem, two scapegoats were located to fit up for criminal manslaughter charges:...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=OV5J6BfToSwIn his latest book, The Sense of Style, Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker sets out to create a new English stylebook that celebrates the ...

In his latest book, The Sense of Style, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker sets out to create a new English stylebook that celebrates the language's fluidity while still striving for clarity -- an a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z38sj4zPIA#t=111Ifixit produce open repair guides for everything imaginable, in a variety of languages, and help sustain a global community of independent repairers ...

After we realized that Merlin Mann had tricked us into adopting Getting Things Done as Boing Boing's operating manual, we started using the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) and are getting mo...

Within hours or days, the UK plans to begin bombing Syria.After an extensive debate, UK lawmakers have voted 397-223 to join France in the US-led international military campaign against the Islamic St...

In San Bernadino, CA, some 20 people are reportedly involved in a mass shooting. The San Bernardino Fire Department said on Twitter victims were in the 1300 block of Waterman Avenue. (more…)...

[caption id="attachment_437913" align="alignnone" width="800"] A father received this text from his daughter as shooting began. Image: @CBSLA[/caption]In San Bernardino, CA, there are reports that 20...

UPDATE:5:30 p.m. The New York Times reports that one of the three attackers "had worked at the facility and recently had a dispute with fellow employees, according to law enforcement officials. A witn...

UPDATE:5 a.m., Thursday : Investigators now believe that there were two assailants, not three, and that both were killed in the SUV shootout. They were named as Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Ma...

A 44-year-old Utah woman has been charged with the class A misdemeanor of causing a catastrophe. Police said the woman, 44, drove her daughter and other kids around Ogden, South Ogden, Riverdale, and ...

The nonprofit foundation that oversees development on Tor, the anonymity and privacy tool, has launched its first ever major cash fundraiser, seeking support for its crucial work. (more…)...

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, "Like many of my fellow nonprofit executives, the holidays are a mixed bag for me. Public Resource has enough money in the bank to get us through January. Like oth...

https://youtu.be/9eWihRJDbmEhttps://youtu.be/ni-CpMXkfCsRudy Rucker sends us, "videos by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling discussing their new anthology TRANSREAL CYBERPUNK: it's a thirty-year mind-wa...

I'm in Berlin to speak at OEB, a conference on technology and education. It costs a hefty sum to attend the whole event, but my talk tomorrow at 1200h, "No Matter who's Winning the War on General Purp...

Ryaa Walker's CHRONOS files are some of my favorite time travel novels! I have been eagerly awaiting Time's Divide, a new installment in her fantastic series!In prior installments, Kate learned the se...

Researchers at Newcastle University handed out two different leaflets to pedestrians on a university campus. One leaflet had a photo of watching eyes. The other did not. They observed that "4.7% of pe...

It's a hoax!This isn't the first time that a remix of the silent track's been targeted for copyright enforcement, but it never gets old. (more…)...

The corruption in this story is so vile it's hard to know where to begin. The Alabama Justice Project reported that it has documents revealing that a district attorney in Alabama covered up a Dothan p...

[See update below] The corruption reported in this news release is so vile it's hard to know where to begin. The Alabama Justice Project reported that it has documents revealing that a district attorn...

The "child safeguarding" office of the London Borough of Camden sent parents a brochure listing warning-signs for "radicalisation" (code for "incipient terrorist recruit"). Some signs: your kid object...

https://vimeo.com/147111732/Johannes writes, "Artist and life-long nerd Johannes Grenzfurthner is taking us on a personal road trip from the West Coast to the East Coast of the USA, to introduce us ...

See more photos at Wink Fun.Rush Hour Shift is an entertaining twist on the classic get-the-car-unstuck logic game. Instead of a single player working through pre-designed puzzles, now there are two p...

A Turkish doctor is on trial for sharing a meme with side-by-side photos of the president of Turkey and Gollum. He is accused on insulting the president. The court has assembled a team of experts to d...

A Massachusetts woman learned that her 62-year-old husband had been having sex with prostitutes for the past eight years. The man decided he was a sex addict and sought treatment from a psychiatrist, ...

[My friend Peter Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for British national newspapers. He has covered revolutions, civil wars, riots, wildfires, and Hollywood celebrity misdeeds for longer th...

Beat the average price to take home the complete learn to code bundle, covering all major programming languages and frameworks. Plus part of what you pay will go to Project HOPE, promoting wellness an...

All Hail Lumio!If you want a stylish lamp that turns on in a cool way, that you can carry around in your backpack and disguises itself as a book when not in use, then look no further.Youll fall in lov...

L.A.s infamous Chateau Marmont was the brainchild of famed attorney Fred Horowitz, who built it after returning from a vacation in Europe, where hed been photographing the gothic castles and chateaus ...

Morrissey is this year's winner of the Bad Sex in Writing award.The famously unpleasant singer-songwriter, whose autobiography was published by Penguin Classics in an act of enragingly ironic-self reg...

We all know about the 10,000-hour rule, whereby that amount of practice (or thereabouts) is held to be necessary to fully master a given skill. And not long ago I proposed the 5-hour rule, which is wh...

Swett is a beautifully-named town in South Dakota, and all of it is yours for $250,000. The community is completely abandoned, according to Fortune, and comes complete with a bar, a museum, and a haun...

I once built and housed a full-size MAME cabinet, but soon came to resent its enormous presence in my house and got rid of it. Since then, I've dreamed of having something with the right controls and ...

Lisa Rein writes, "On November 12th, The Intercept published a story about one of its SecureDrop uploads: 70 million records of prisoner phone data. The hack exposed that at least 14,000 phone calls b...

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I have an editorial in the current issue of Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery, a scholarly journal for computer scientists, in which I describe the way that laws that protect di...

Funny or Die scoured the Web for ten genuinely awful toys that were discovered in the wild -- toys that transcend mere poor quality assurance and enter the realm of non-Euclidean ghastliness that defi...

https://vimeo.com/145335290The Ford Foundation's Michael Brennan discusses the many studies showing how algorithms can magnify bias -- like the prevalence of police background check ads shown against ...

Katherine W was seven when her third-grade teacher issued Chromebooks to her class. Her dad, Jeff, is a serious techie, but the school's tech choices didn't sit well with him. He was able to get Kathe...

The predominantly white police of predominantly black and Latino, Tea-Party-governed Kern County, California kill more people per capita than any other force in America. The Guardian's Jon Swaine, Oli...

Taser inventor Jack Cover named his gadget after a zapper from Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, a 1911 YA science fiction novel by Victor Appleton that tells the story of a hero who travels to Africa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug58yeMqNCo&feature=youtu.beIf you have to travel with a suit and don't fancy ironing it when you arrive, you can use one of two methods (depending on the size of you...

NAACP founder WEB Du Bois wasn't just a committed, effective activist for the rights of black people in America: he was also a prolific author of early 20th century science fiction and fantasy stories...

The Trans Pacific Partnership is the largest "trade deal" in history, negotiated in secret and encompassing many issues unrelated to trade, including rules that make the Internet less secure, easier t...

A Wikipedia editors has been suspended after he organized a meeting with the Russian Federal Drug Control Service (as well as Rospotrebnadzor, a consumer rights watchdog, and Roskomnadzor, a media wat...

The Hong Kong-based toymaker/crapgadget purveyor didn't even know it had been breached until journalists from Vice asked why data from its millions of customers and their families were in the hands of...

Scott Smith and his family moved from the USA to the Netherlands and discovered that despite living in the most heavily surveilled moment in human history, neither his old country nor his new one can ...

The Mozilla Foundation stopped active development of the Thunderbird stand-alone email client in 2012, a year before Edward Snowden's revelations about mass email interception by spy agencies sparked ...

Jeanne Theoharis, an academic who wrote the biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, reminds us that the historical account of Rosa Parks as an apolitical seamstress who was too tired and exa...

[Editor's note: science fiction novelist Spider Robinson forever influenced my liquor consumption habits with the rhapsodic praises for Bushmill's 1608 Irish whiskey that feature in so many of his boo...

https://youtu.be/W4BzJm4-Wo0Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name lyrics "and now you do what they told ya" sounds like 'break the chicken nuggets, daddy' in Japanese, says Redditor seasalty_...

How to calm a crying baby? Just let the little guy watch this video. (more…)...

I'm pretty bad at keeping up with new cartoonists. I'm stuck in the world of artists who emerged in the 80s and 90s: Daniel Clowes, Mary Fleener, Julie Doucet, Carol Tyler, Lynda Barry, Los Bros Herna...

Kai Xu was arrested attempting to cross into Canada from Detroit, Michigan with 51 live turtles down his pants, mostly strapped to his legs. He was apparently smuggling the turtles he had bought to re...

For 50 years, the Pirelli Calendar has featured mostly naked models captured by famed photographers in exotic locales. Not this year. (more…)...

See sample pages from this book at Wink.You must have some trepidation when you set out to illustrate a story as iconic as Alice in Wonderland. What effect can you offer that isnt already achieved by ...

The high priestess of soul in an interview with Lilian Terry from July 1968. (more…)...

Black Friday shoppers were treated to a spectacle of violent struggles over the possession of flat screen TVs, tablet computers, toaster ovens, and other highly prized items....

Samurai White handcrafts custom rock and roll nutcrackers. (more…)...

The Cigar Connoisseur from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.Philip Bloom is a filmmaker who teaches 3-day documentary making workshops. He went to a cigar shop in New York and shot this short profile of one of ...

It is legal to drive while texting in Montana and Arizona. It is legal to drive while drinking alcohol in Mississippi. It is illegal to drive with a dog in your lap in New Jersey and Hawaii. It is leg...

Andrei Sen-Senkov's Anatomical Theater is a fascinating, bizarre look into the day to day observations of a gynecologist and well known Russian contemporary poet. It also has amazing cover art by Svet...

Anita Krajnc, of Toronto, was charged with criminal mischief when she gave drinking water to pigs being transported to a slaughterhouse on a hot day.From The Guardian:A video of the incident shows t...

Harry Houdini thought he was a superstar, but there was one medium he was unable to conquer: movies. He made a number of silent films, yet only The Grim Game is even tolerable. But there is one memora...

"My heart cries out, more baby."...

I am amazed at how well this simple, silly tube of silicone works. Simply crack the outer layers of skin on a clove of garlic, pop it into the cylinder of silicone and roll. The skin comes right off. ...

The Kepler telescope has found 685 systems with 1705 exoplanets, and you can watch them whirr around together in this mesmerizing animation by astrocubs.The data is from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. ...

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more. Last chance to get both EMU Club Adventures boo...

https://youtu.be/s9Pn16dCWIgImportant reminder, happy mutants! The Elf on the Shelf, the cherubic, round-eyed toy with a faux-traditional backstory, is yet another manifestation of the surveillance st...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics! (more…)...

For nigh on a week, the internet hollered at Reader's Digest to remove malware from its website, to no apparent response.The attack consists of a malicious script injected within compromised WordPress...

The Micro Drone 2.0+ is truly in a league of its own, offering a new perspective on aerial photography, and a world of technological capabilities that make flying ridiculously fun. Simply throw it in ...

Thousands of National Security Letters are sent annually, don't need a judge's signoff, and it's illegal to tell anyone you got one. What do they demand? Web browsing history, the IP addresses of ever...

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All Hail Lumio!If you want a stylish lamp that turns on in a cool way, that you can carry around in your backpack and disguises itself as a book when not in use, then look no further.Youll fall in lov...

This week, the scholarly publishing giant Elsevier filed suit against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, two sites where academics and researchers practiced civil disobedience by sharing the academic papers...

A classic Mallory Ortberg humor column sets out a day in the life of an "empowered female heroine," a fictional staple on whom society (and literature) project a huge amount of aspirational demands. (...

There are lots of transactions that we're either prohibited from making (selling kidneys), or that are strictly regulated by statute (parental surrogacy). Naturally, these rules are hotly debated, esp...

Sarah Jeong had me standing up and cheering with her comparison of kudurrus -- the ancient Mesopotamian boundary stones used to mark out territorial land-grants -- and the way that laws like the US DM...

Matt Taibbi, in typical blazing form in the Rolling Stone, asks how it can be that millions of Americans believe Donald Trump's fairy-tale about Muslims cheering after 9/11 when it just didn't happen....

Mlanie Joly is the newly appointed Canadian Heritage Minister, and she's been given a briefing book by her ministerial staffers laying out the ministry's view of what's going on in the Heritage brief....

This week, our partnership with Critical Distance brings us reading on parenting via Tomb Raider, the utility of the word 'gameplay', and experiences from Nintendo 'play counselors' from the 1980s and...

Playing a Porpentine game often feels like stepping into a poem, or sitting downstream in a river as strange images float by like beautiful, twisted debris. She's primarily known for her Twine games a...

https://youtu.be/bOWPlH63MlIOn Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd asked Trump to back up his claim that there was news footage of Muslims cheering the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Trump says it really happene...

Over at Wink (the books and fun stuff reviews site my wife Carla edits) our friend Gareth Branwyn has selected a number of cool things he recommends as holiday gifts. There are games, mind expanders,...

https://media4.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2015_48/1319161/cards_ea78471a9203889bf04ad6bd3d865ebe.nbcnews-ux-600-480.jpgOn Black Friday, Cards Against Humanity sold the "experience of buying nothing" for ...

This 115-year-old smokestack in Pell City, Alabama didn't go down without a fight. The 158-foot chimney survived two attempts to demolish it with explosives. That's when Tim Phifer was brought in to...

This 115-year-old smokestack in Pell City, Alabama didn't go down without a fight. The 158-foot chimney survived two attempts to demolish it with explosives. That's when Tim Phifer was brought in to...

Ringo Starr's personal copy of The White Album, the first pressing of the album, numbered 0000001, is up for auction. The current high bid is $55,000. From Julien's Auctions:It has been widely known a...

A Caique Phoenix enjoying the thrill of seeing oneself in a mirror.[via]...

The mechanism shown here is a computer animation, but does something like it exist in the real world? The sliding arc-shaped gear looks like it could come off the glass track pretty easily, but it is ...

Five years ago, Poor Wu Chen, 67, a fisher in Deyang, China, buried his life savings, about US$5,500. When he recently dug it up, he discovered that the plastic bag had deteriorated and worms and inse...

https://youtu.be/RBjUxKoNTJkJohanKaos and his girlfriend took a trip through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia and created an entertaining video. Where is t...

"Rappin' on MasterLock" (Lock Lab)...

Q: Why is it so hard to remember the name of someone you've just met? A: Because our memories evolved to be associative, and the name of a person doesn't have much of an association with who they are....

Can you dig it? I knew that you could. (YouTube)...

For several months in 1986-87, Network 21 was a pirate television station in the UK that broadcasted coverage of avant-garde art and fringe culture for 30 minutes every Friday evening. The fantastic...

Watch the U.S. Civil War unfold a day at a time in this animated map. The creator, EmperorTigerstar, attempted to represent every single day's movements in the front lines, resulting in a fascinatin...

Every time the wind picks up in Manchester, England, Beetham Tower automatically generates another Architectural Moancore Drone epic. I hereby confer upon the building our inaugural award for excell...

A special holiday thank you to our long time sponsor Shanalogic! Shanalogic is a curated shop of handmade and independently produced gifts, many of which we own and love! Check out this fantastic Day ...

Centralia, PA, has a tourist problem thanks to its long-burning underground coal fire and ghost town status. The locals that remain are tired of being told their beloved, doomed home is the "real-life...

Now you can Yelp freely, secure in the knowledge that there are no shenanigans going on at the restaurant review siteor, at least, none that can be proven. So sayeth the judge."[M]any of the customer ...

Burgundy.io generates new words, but no banal syllable-musher is this. It uses a recurrent neural network to find uncannily English-sounding terms. The results are quite periper, with a burledish sens...

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Celebrate Cyber Monday with some brain food. Save on any eLearning deal in the Boing Boing Store today using coupon code: CYBERMONDAY25. Below are a couple of our favorite eLearning offers:eduCBA Tech...