French president Emmanuel Macron and impeached but not yet removed U.S. President Donald Trump declare a truce in digital tax dispute, and digital services firms get to breathe a sigh of relief. On Monday, Macron said he and Trump had a “great discussion” over a digital tax planned by Paris, that the two leaders agreed to work together to avoid a rise in tariffs.

They're expected to continue negotiations at the OECD on the digital tax in the coming months, reports Reuters,

“They agreed to give a chance to negotiations until the end of the year,” a source told the news organization. “During that time period, there won’t be successive tariffs.”

Excerpt:

France decided in July to apply a 3% levy on revenue from digital services earned in France by firms with revenues of more than 25 million euros ($28 million) in France and 750 million euros worldwide. Washington has threatened to impose taxes on French products in response.

French authorities have repeatedly said that any international agreement on digital taxation reached within the OECD would immediately supersede the French tax.

Macron and Trump declare a truce in digital tax dispute [reuters.com] Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/KfmotAoAT20/no-us-france-digital-tax-war-f.html

Bruce Schneier writes in the New York Times that banning facial recognition (as cities like San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland, Brookline and Somerville have done) is not enough: there are plenty of other ways to automatically recognize people (gait detection, high-resolution photos of hands that reveal fingerprints, voiceprints, etc), and these will all be used for the same purpose that makes facial recognition bad for our world: to sort us into different categories and treat us different based on those categories.

Some of these distinctions are easy to imagine: showing different ads on billboards based on who's looking at them, for example. Others are more sinister: targeting us for police interventions, raising the prices, or denying us entry to a place of business.

Schneier says that we need to regulate more than facial recognition, we need to regulate recognition itself -- and the data-brokers whose data-sets are used to map recognition data to peoples' identities.

Regulating this system means addressing all three steps of the process. A ban on facial recognition won’t make any difference if, in response, surveillance systems switch to identifying people by smartphone MAC addresses. The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible.

Similarly, we need rules about how our data can be combined with other data, and then bought and sold without our knowledge or consent. The data broker industry is almost entirely unregulated; there’s only one law — passed in Vermont in 2018 — that requires data brokers to register and explain in broad terms what kind of data they collect.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/tYoOvRezQYk/shadowy-data-brokers.html

Petition demands recall of 500,000+ cars over alleged defect

Electric car maker Tesla said on Monday there was no unintended acceleration in its vehicles, as petition signature-gatherers demanding a federal safety investigation have claimed.

From Reuters:

On Friday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it would review the petition and released a redacted version that said “Tesla vehicles experience unintended acceleration at rates far exceeding other cars on the roads.”

The petition urged the agency to recall all Tesla vehicles, the Model S, Model X and Model 3, produced beginning in 2013. It cited media reports of crashes attributed to unintended acceleration and complaints filed with NHTSA.

More at Reuters: Tesla rebuffs U.S. safety recall petition, says no unintended acceleration in vehicles Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/DT32cTcTrfM/elon-musks-tesla-denies-clai.html

Sweary historian Eleanor Janega writes on her Going Medieval blog (previously) that there was never a time in medieval Europe when bestiality was socially acceptable, and brings the receipts in the form of eyewatering details on the punishments for having sex with animals.

Janega mentions that, of course, any non-procreative sex was doctrinally suspect in the Christian tradition of the day, because sex was what got humankind kicked out of Eden, so the only time you should be getting it on is to make babies, otherwise, you're just celebrating the stuff that makes God angriest.

But sex with animals was especially bad for medieval theological authorities, because it was "against nature" in that it "humans are blurring the clear line between themselves, as beings with a consciousness, and animals who are a separate category without the faculties to reason."

But here is the kicker – one of the reasons that bestiality is considered so terrible is because animals cannot reason and therefore cannot consent to it. Animals, famously, were not cursed by God for eating forbidden fruit. They are still therefore running around most nakedly. Because of their innocence, they also mostly just have sex for the purposes of procreation. Now, there are some notable exceptions to the whole sex for procreation thing in the animal kingdom, most notably our good friends and group sex enthusiasts the bonobos, but also dolphins and orcas, and all the gay animals, just off the top of my head. Everyone else though? Mostly having sex in order to have babies and not thinking about it at all.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/2qx6AR-bgp8/blurred-lines.html

An unsecured facial recognition database that contained info on thousands of children from 20 schools in China, half of which are located in historically ethnic Tibetan areas, has been found online.

This latest facial-recognition database leak raises new questions about ethnically targeted school surveillance and cybersecurity in China, writes Liza Lin in the Wall Street Journal:

The cache was connected to a surveillance system labeled “Safe School Shield” and contained facial-identification and location data, according to Victor Gevers, a researcher at the Dutch nonprofit GDI Foundation, which scans the internet for vulnerabilities and flags them to owners for fixing.

Found in the database were these frontal pictures of children in the schools, used to train algorithms to spot them as they passed the #surveillance cameras. pic.twitter.com/HoW2lSCG1H

 Liza Lin (@Liz_in_Shanghai) January 20, 2020

While gov­ern­ment surveillance is broadly ac­cepted, the use of fa­cial recog­ni­tion and other types of track­ing tech­nolo­gies in schools has proven a flashpoint. https://t.co/Vg5otN0U79

 Paul D. Shinkman (@PDShinkman) January 19, 2020

That thing where surveillance is invasive and also incompetent. https://t.co/9EuvRWXphZ

 Eva (@evacide) January 17, 2020

[Paywalled link]

Thousands of Chinese Students’ Data Exposed on Internet

[via techmeme] Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/cyShC-oaiZQ/china-unsecured-facial-recogn.html

Frontier is the bottom-rung of the top-tier of US ISPs, serving customers in 29 states. Despite enjoying monopoly control over its customers' online lives, and despite massive government handouts and a lackadaisical approach to maintenance, and despite out-and-out theft from customers, the company is filing for bankruptcy, having accumulated $16.3b in debt through mismanagement.

Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin plausible blames this situation on the increasing irrelevance of Frontier's copper-line infrastructure, massive underinvestment in fiber, and bottom-of-the-barrel customer service.

Ideally, the cities whom Frontier will leave in the lurch will replace the company with municipal broadband, the best broadband in America.

Frontier Communications failed to properly maintain its telecom network in Minnesota, leading to "frequent and lengthy" phone and Internet outages, an investigation by the state Commerce Department found in January 2019. The investigation led to a settlement. New York state officials are also investigating Frontier over its repeated outages and long repair times.

Many Frontier customers in different states have been hit with giant overcharges and cancellation fees, or draconian policies like one requiring customers to pay for router rentals even when they have purchased their own router. (A new US law scheduled to take effect in June 2020 would ban that practice.)

Windstream, a telco that offers service in 18 states, filed for bankruptcy in February 2019. Windstream in November 2019 said its latest quarterly revenue was "$1.27 billion compared to $1.38 billion in the same period a year ago."

Frontier, an ISP in 29 states, plans to file for bankruptcy [Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica]

(Image: Evelyn Simak, CC BY-SA, modified) Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/9OvLffK5uKw/schadentelco.html

An Alaska family's home surveillance camera recorded a most remarkable video of a moose trapping a man inside the family shed.

Curtis Phelps was just trying to take the garbage out, when -- as this video from his Ring home surveillance camera demonstrates -- he got trapped inside the shed by a moose who managed to push his way inside with one antler.

“The moose eventually moved on and Phelps escaped after calling his wife, Amy, with his cellphone,” AP reports.

“He’s like, let me know when I can get out of the shed,” Amy told a reporter. “I’m stuck in the shed.”

She had placed a garbage sack on the front porch and Curtis decided to take it to their locked shed.

“He said he walked out and he looked both ways as we always do and nothing was there,” she said. “All he wore was his hat. He had his cellphone, though.”

Curtis unlocked the shed, deposited the garbage sack, stepped outside and spotted the moose moving his way — and picking up its pace. He ducked inside and the moose walked up to the door and gently pushed it.

The rest of the story is actually super funny, go read the whole thing here: Bull-noser: Camera records moose trapping Alaska man in shed Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/IAHO_1tCvZ0/moose-traps-man-in-shed-home.html

Bees are big business. Almonds are in big demand as a cash crop in California, ever the more so as the almond milk trend grows. Growers use bees to pollinate the trees. The bees are already challenged enough as it is -- now there are bee stealing criminals who drive around stealing them. One such theft happened in Northern California on Friday, the Oregon-based beekeeper whose bees were stolen says.

“It’s hard enough keeping the bees alive without someone stealing them. It’s frustrating,” Potts told KCRA-TV.

From KCRA-TV's video interview with the beekeeper, who says the theft represents about a third of the bees in his operation:

In his 15 years of business, this is the first time someone has swiped his hives. Potts estimates the theft will cost him about $44,000 in lost revenue.

“I would like to catch them, and I think a lot of the beekeepers out here, they’re looking for them too,” he said.

Potts said the theft impacts more than just him. “This affects the farmer, too, because there’s going to be a shortage of bees,” he said. “Luckily, I have enough to cover what I did, or what we lost. But it affects the farmer, and it affects the farmers all the way in Oregon and Washington because of the loss of the bees.”

[via AP] Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/tdDT3ZtSPL8/bee-thief-nabs-92-hives-from-c.html

If you were in Idaho and wondering where to score some weed the answer is Oregon.

KTVB7:

It's no hidden secret that Oregon is seeing higher marijuana sales in counties along their borders with Idaho, but a new report from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis found exactly how much more those counties are selling compared to the statewide average.

Oregon counties along the Idaho border have a sales per adult that are 420% above the statewide average, which the report said was something "you cannot make up."

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/3XXFIw8HaLU/oregons-weed-sales-420-high.html

Show'em what you got. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/41U3J4NaVVQ/public-enemys-by-the-time.html

Never out of my rotation, I love The Wild Tchoupitoulas.

This video also serves as a fantastic guide to fashion. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/VvGGpfzvrrw/watch-the-wild-tchoupitoulas.html

On Friday, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Michael Wolverton convicted dentist Seth Lookhart of 46 felonies and misdemeanors. You may recall that Lookhart infamously "performed a dental extraction procedure on a sedated patient while riding a hoverboard" and sent the video to his pals. In 2017, the state filed a suit charging Lookhart with "unlawful dental acts." His sentencing is in April. From CNN:

In at least one conversation, Lookhart joked that performing oral surgery on a hoverboard was a "new standard of care," the lawsuit said, citing phone records.

Lookhart was also charged with medical assistance fraud for billing Medicaid for procedures that were either unnecessary or not properly justified and theft of $25,000 or more by diverting funds from Alaska Dental Arts, among dozens of others.

The evidence indicated Lookhart "believed that he could get away with his fraud indefinitely, and that he believed his scheme was foolproof," Judge Wolverton said, according to the Department of Law's news release. That evidence "was often supported, and often in excruciating detail, by Lookhart's own texts, photos and videos."

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/PEPn_7JdiUM/dentist-who-pulled-tooth-while.html

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/W4jV4JEyuQA/wild-elephant-found-gingerly-w.html

Bickmore Gard-More is a spray-on waterproofing and stain-resistant treatment for hats, leather and suede.

I am bald and wear a lot of hats. Hats are even better than glasses for instantly transforming one's look. I have stacks of flat caps, newsboys, and fedoras. Wool, cotton, linen, and suede are all current materials in the line-up. Bickmore Gard-More is the protectant I use on them all.

I recently found a beautiful rust-colored suede newsboy at a Goorin Bros sale. I knew that a cap like this could, over the years, become amazing if treated right. The suede protector of choice, in my household, is Bickmore Gard-More. It sprays on very evenly and dries very fast. I have used it on a suede jacket for almost 10 years.

Above image shows the suede immediately after drying.

After treating the hat I let it dry, and then put it on. You can not smell or see any trace of the Gard-More, however, having been caught in some light rainstorms in the suede jacket, I have no fear this hat will be just fine.

I have also used the Gard-More on wool hats, and my leather carry-on duffle bag. Gard-More doesn't change the color of the item, once dried, and simply adds a layer of water and stain resistance.

HATS!

Bickmore Gard-More Water & Stain Repellent 5.5oz- Leather Protector and Suede Protector Waterproofing Spray Guard for Boots, Shoes, Clothing, Hats, Jackets & More via Amazon Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/7CphLdkqHFE/bickmore-gard-more-takes-wonde.html

Researchers have determined that the above self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, long thought to have been a fake, was indeed painted by the artist in 1889 while he was suffering from psychosis in a French mental institution. The painting belongs to Norway’s National Museum but is currently on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. From The Art Newspaper:

The painting is now linked to a letter in which Van Gogh wrote that he had made a self-portrait which was “an attempt from when I was ill”. The artist had suffered a severe mental attack at the asylum in mid July 1889, when he tried to swallow paints, but by 22 August he had recovered sufficiently to write to his brother Theo, asking that he be allowed access to his painting materials. (Researcher Louis) van Tilborgh argues that the artist made the self-portrait a few days later, before he suffered a minor setback and was ill for a short period at the beginning of September...

Eight months earlier Van Gogh had severely mutilated his left ear, which at first glance appears to be the one in the painting. But while working on the self-portrait he would actually (have been) looking at his features in a mirror, in reverse, thereby seeing his intact right ear.

However, Van Gogh must surely have realised that those outside the art world would assume that he was depicting his left ear, which had been mutilated. He could have tried to avoid the problem by disguising some of the ear with hair, but he has deliberately and unflinchingly allowed the upper part to remain highly visible, with lighter-coloured paint.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/k5MEmt4abdQ/self-portrait-of-van-gogh-duri.html

Blokus Duo is a fun strategy game for two people. Players take turns placing their tiles on a grid, making sure the tile touches another of the same color on a corner only. When no more tiles can be placed, the player with the fewest remaining pieces wins. Amazon has the game on sale now for Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Sn7dJ4xdoRc/good-deal-on-blokus-duo-strate.html

If you have a Macintosh, you can enter the Unix terminal by opening Terminal.app. (There's a way to do it in Windows, too, but I don't know how.) From there, you have command-line control of your computer. If you are a Raspberry Pi aficionado, you probably know about the Linux command line. This episode of Explaining Computers has a great introduction to the Linux terminal, and shows you some of the useful things you can do in it.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/IqiIakYCFYg/a-nice-video-introduction-to-t.html

You can buy a little anti-theft device that locks to the valve stem of a car tire. If the car is driven faster than 17 miles an hour, the air leaks out of the tire. The device is made of bright green plastic so that a would-be thief will spot it and be discouraged from stealing the car. It's a neat idea, but the LockPickingLawyer was able to pick the lock in a jiffy using a "low-skill raking attack." And that means professional car thieves already know how to pick the locks on these things, too.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/GYtXW_IcU7M/picking-the-lock-on-a-weird-ti.html

Forest Casey asks, "Still thinking about this absolutely bonkers decal I saw on both sides of this Jeep in LA. What could it mean?"

Still thinking about this absolutely bonkers decal I saw on both sides of this Jeep in LA. What could it mean? pic.twitter.com/3KbGuQP13F

 Forest Casey (@forestcasey) January 19, 2020

Can’t forget to mention the airbrushed wolf spare cover + Yosemite Sam “Back Off” decal. Classic combo. pic.twitter.com/WebutkQgEP

 Forest Casey (@forestcasey) January 19, 2020

Best guess so far:

A mod on a third-tier men’s rights subreddit for sure

 Tom Shea (@tomshea) January 19, 2020

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/vePNRs744Qc/what-is-the-meaning-of-this-un.html

The latest iPhone cameras are undeniably impressive, but they’re still no match for a professional camera when it comes to taking clear, wide-angle shots. These six accessories will transform your iPhone into a pro-level camera in seconds, thanks to powerful and easy-to-attach lenses.

1. Lemuro 18MM iPhone Wide Lens

MSRP: $100 | Sale Price: $80 (20% off)

Take truly majestic photos with this pocket-sized attachment lens that boasts an 18mm focal length along with a 110-degree field of view. In layman's terms, it helps you shoot better landscapes, portraits, and more.

2. Lemuro 60MM Tele Portrait Lens for iPhone

MSRP: $104 | Sale Price: $84 (20% off)

Ideal for capturing flawless portrait shots, this lens features a 60mm focal length, 2x optical zoom, and cutting-edge optical technology that delivers unparalleled clarity, so your portraits will be worthy of posting to the 'gram.

3. Lemuro 8MM iPhone Fisheye Lens

MSRP: $99 | Sale Price: $80 (20% off)

You'll be happy to have this lens the next time you're standing before a stunning sunset or panorama. With an 8mm focal length and a 238-degree ultra-wide-angle lens, this fisheye attachment allows you to take shots that are 5x wider than what your iPhone can do on its own.

4. Lemuro 25MM iPhone Macro Lens

MSRP: $95 | Sale Price: $76 (20% off)

Transform your iPhone into a pocket-sized digital microscope with this incredibly powerful and portable lens that delivers a 22mm focal length and 10x magnification ratio in any environment.

5. Lemuro iPhone Photo Case

MSRP: $44 | Sale Price: $35 (20% off)

Designed for seamless compatibility with Lemuro lenses, this aluminum case will also protect your iPhone from drops and bumps, and it even supports wireless charging. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/EVlaGWJ5t4E/enhance-your-on-the-go-photogr.html