Feed: Boing Boing - AggScore: 66.4

DRM gives companies security -- from competition

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Last night, Rob posted a very good piece on Apple's new "Gatekeeper" technology, which defaults to warning users of Apple's new Mountain Lion OS that software from companies that haven't been officially recognized by Apple should not be installed (though users can still choose to override it, or turn it off). But I have one [...]

Fallout shelter ads

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On the always-excellent How to Be a Retronaut site, a great collection of 1960s fallout shelter ads, a perfect capsule of upbeat, cheerful fear-selling. Fallout Shelter Ads, 1960s

Newspaper claims Vikileaks Twitter account traced back to House of Commons

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The @Vikileaks30 account on Twitter has been publishing embarrassing personal information about Canada's Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who is pushing for a domestic spying law that would require ISPs to gather and retain your personal information and turn it over to police without a warrant. The Vikileaks account kicked off with excerpts from the [...]

WSJ: Google caught circumventing iPhone security, tracking users who opted out of third-party cookies

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Google has been caught circumventing iOS's built-in anti-ad-tracking features in order to add Google Plus functionality within iPhone's Safari browser. The WSJ reports that Google overrode users' privacy settings in order to allow messages like "your friend Suzy +1'ed this ad about candy" to be relayed between Google's different domains, including google.com and doubleclick.net. This [...]

Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers: how do you trust in a networked world?

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John Scalzi's Big Idea introduces Bruce Schneier's excellent new book Liars and Outliers, and interviews Schneier on the work that went into it. I read an early draft of the book and supplied a quote: "Brilliantly dissects, classifies, and orders the social dimension of security-a spectacularly palatable tonic against today's incoherent and dangerous flailing in [...]

Minecraft creators building a fan-specified game live and on camera this weekend with Humble Bundle, with proceeds to charities

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The Humble Indie Bundle people are gearing up for their next event, the Humble Bundle Mojam, and this one's pure charity. Humble fans voted on which game they wanted to see the folks at Mojang (creators of Minecraft) make, and over the weekend, Mojang is going to build it, live and on camera, in 60 [...]

Gatekeeper: Cancel or Allow?

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The new OS X Gatekeeper encourages desktop apps to be registered with Apple, with users warned against installing unsigned software unless they disable the prompts. The benefits—and the potential pitfalls—are obvious. It's intended as as an anti-malware system (with a whitelist rather than a blacklist), and the registration process will be simple and inexpensive. It'll [...]

White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" performed on things found in a laboratory

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The Blast Lab at Imperial College, London, is a place where scientists study how explosions affect the human skeleton, and try to find ways to mitigate some of those effects. As you can imagine, this involves blowing stuff up fairly regularly and The Blast Lab is a pretty loud place. But the team of students [...]

Tiny, adorable lizard is tiny, adorable

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Meet Brookesia micra, one of four newly identified species of ultra-small chameleons that live in Madagascar. Never let it be said that reptiles can't be totally cute. Submitterated by Dr. Sideshow and lecti.

"Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure" - Maggie speaking in Vancouver

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I'm going to be speaking on Monday, February 20th, at the meeting of the British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association, starting at 7:00 pm. My presentation will focus on the North American electric grid—where it came from, how it works today, and how it affects what we can and can't do in the future. I'll be [...]

Privacy plugin keeps Facebook from reading your updates

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"Encrypt Facebook is a Chrome extension that would prevent snooping on the discussions,status updates in Facebook groups by storing it them in an encrypted format on Facebook's database instead of normal text and also it would convert encrypted format back into normal text whenever that particular group's url is accessed in Chrome." (Thanks, Joly!)

On writing fiction with voice-recognition software

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Justine Larbalestier, a very good novelist with very bad RSI, has written a great post called "Why I Cannot Write a Novel With Voice Recognition Software." In it, she explains why machine-based speech-to-text software isn't sufficient for fiction. I think that if I absolutely lost the use of my hands and had no other choice, [...]

DIY electric street racing benefits school in SF, March 18, 2012

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Gever Tulley, co-founder of the Brightworks K-12 school, says: The whine and growl of high-performance electric motors, the smell of ionized air, the squeal of rubber on pavement, the roar of the crowd and the thrill of the checkered flag -- this is the inaugural Grand Prix de la Mayonnaise! Imagine a shipping crate: smaller [...]

Canadian tweeps bare all for spying MP

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Canadian MP Vic Toews is pushing bill C-30, a domestic spying bill that requires ISPs to log your online activity and give it to police without a warrant. He says that if you don't support this, you "stand with child pornographers." Canadians are giving MP Toews what he wants: on Twitter, Canadians are flooding his [...]

Colorblind painter's wearable "synesthesia camera" reportedly broken by police

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Back in 2008, I posted about Neil Harbisson, an artist with complete color blindness who makes paintings like those above using a camera/computer system that translates colors into sounds. In an editorial he's just written for the BBC News, he mentions that last year he "was attacked by three policemen at a demonstration who thought [...]