Well, there it is at last, the silver lining to climate change. Turns out it's so hot in Australia, you can totally roast a delicious hunk of meat on top of your car.

In Australia, a guy roasted some tasty pork on the roof of his Datsun on a scorching hot day. The not funny part about this is: climate change has led to catastrophic wildfires throughout Australia, and one could argue all sorts of things about factory farm meat production and anthropogenic -- oh ffs nevermind here's how he cooked the pork roast.

Exerpt from Reuters:

Stu Pengelly placed the slab of pork in a baking tin on the car seat of his red Datsun Sunny in Perth, Western Australia, for around 10 hours.

“It worked a treat!” he said in a Facebook post with pictures of the cooked meat cut into slices to demonstrate its doneness.

Pengelly also gave the temperature as it increased throughout the day, culminating in a “staggering 81 degrees Celsius inside temperature” (177.8 degrees Fahrenheit) at 1 p.m.

What's next?

Pengelly told a reporter he wants to try cooking roast beef in his Datsun.

“A quiche would cook in 2 hours, I reckon,” he said.

Read the full story at Reuters: Done in a Datsun: Man cooks roast pork in car during Australian heatwave

[GIFs courtesy of Fox's “The Simpsons”] Read the rest

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Dten is a "certified hardware provider" for Zoom, making smart screens and whiteboards for videoconferencing; a Forescout Research report reveals that Dten committed a string of idiotic security blunders in designing its products, exposing its customers to video and audio surveillance, as well as theft of presentations and whiteboard data.

Among the mistakes Forescout identified:

* Storing customer data in unsecured Amazon web buckets; all you needed to do to spy on a customer's stored data was to change the customer ID in the standard URL provided to each customer;

* Not using SSL to encrypt data in transit, making it trivial to eavesdrop on conferences

Forescout identified five bugs in July. As of today, Dten has fixed three of them.

Dten told Wired: "We take customer privacy and security very seriously."

The researchers also discovered two ways that an attacker on the same network as DTEN devices could manipulate the video conferencing units to monitor all video and audio feeds and, in one case, to take full control. DTEN hardware runs Android primarily, but uses Microsoft Windows for Zoom. The researchers found that they can access a development tool known as "Android Debug Bridge," either wirelessly or through USB ports or ethernet, to take over a unit. The other bug also relates to exposed Android factory settings. The researchers note that attempting to implement both operating systems creates more opportunities for misconfigurations and exposure. DTEN says that it will push patches for both bugs by the end of the year.

Read the rest

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He was only dreaming of a green Christmas, you guys. In Nashville, Tennessee, an unfortunate gentleman is in jail after authorities, and their K-9 drug sniffing dogs to be precise, smelled some odiferous weed in the dude's luggage.

We're talking 80 pounds of dank, says the indictment.

Court documents say Tennessee state police caught Somphone Temmeraj, 57, with a quantity of cannabis that measured over 80 pounds (36 kilograms), wrapped up to look like Christmas gifts. The pot bust happened when Temmeraj transited Nashville International Airport on Monday, as AP and others have reported.

The officers said they saw Temmeraj pick up the bags and load them onto a cart. Temmeraj allowed officers to search the bags, which were filled with what appeared to be wrapped Christmas gifts. The items were actually filled with vacuum-sealed bags of marijuana weighing 84 pounds (38 kilograms), authorities said.

Temmeraj had flown to Nashville from Seattle, the documents state. He was booked into jail and bonded out Tuesday morning, according to online records. It’s unclear whether he had an attorney who could comment on his behalf.

Police: Marijuana Christmas gifts sniffed out at airport [apnews.com] Read the rest

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Bernie Sanders' record-setting fundraising isn't just notable for how much he raised, it's also notable for how he raised it -- Sanders is the only leading candidate in the Democratic leadership race for 2020 who hasn't taken any money from billionaires.

Billionaires have incredible class solidarity and they when they back a politician, it's generally a sign that they perceive a solid return on their investment.

I am a donor to both Bernie Sanders's and Elizabeth Warren's campaigns.

Sanders, a fierce critic of 2010 Supreme Court "Citizens United v. FEC" decision that allowed for individuals and corporations to give more freely to political campaigns, believes candidates who rely on big-dollar fundraisers are beholden to the interests of wealthy backers.

"Why would many, many billionaires be contributing to candidates if they didn't think they were getting something out of it? They're not doing it through the goodness of their hearts," he said.

A recent Forbes list found that Sanders was the only candidate among the fields' top tier, which also includes Biden, Buttigieg, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, to not have a single billionaire donor. According to Sanders and his campaign, this means that the senator is the true champion of the working class, relying almost exclusively on small donors while his opponents show open hands to the open wallets of the ultra-wealthy.

Bernie Sanders knocks rivals for taking donations from billionaires [Cara Korte/CBS]

(Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA, modified) Read the rest

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Scott Budnick (producer of the "Hangover" movies) is embroiled in a complicated feud with an LA homicide cop named Sgt. Richard Biddle; Biddle has pursued his investigation against Budnick by securing an incredibly broad search-warrant to seize his Google data.

The warrant seeks:

1. All of Budnick's account data (email addresses, connected applications and sites, etc)

2. Android info (phone make/model and IMEI, IMSI and phone number)

3. All stored "accounts, email accounts, passwords, PIN codes, account names, user names, screen names, remote data storage accounts, credit card/payment data, contact lists, calendar entries, text messages, voice mail messages, pictures, videos, telephone numbers, mobile devices, physical addresses, historical GPS locations, two-step verification information"

4. All calendars, including shared calendars (and whom they are shared with)

5. All stored contacts

6. "All user documents stored by Google"

7. Any records of securities, funds, etc

8. All Gmail messages, including metadata like read/unread

9. All Google Photo images

10. All stored location data

11. All Play Store purchases and downloads

12. All search history

13. All call records, voicemail messages, SMSes

14. All Google Wallet/Checkout data

It is a spectacularly broad warrant -- and also a chilling reminder of how much data Google holds on us.

Eye-opening to see what a search warrant for a Google Account actually covers: all your location data, photos, searches, contacts, emails... https://t.co/m7EWpqUS5Y pic.twitter.com/5vtUDV6AlT

 Aaron Mendelson (@a_mendelson) December 16, 2019

(Image: Cryteria, CC-BY, modified)

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/86EXLieyEDc/organize-the-worlds-informatio-2.html

Activists from Fight for the Future prowled the halls of Congress in "jumpsuits with phone strapped to their heads conducting live facial recognition surveillance" to "show why this tech should be banned."

They worked their way through the Rayburn building (which houses offices for the House of Reps), livestreaming thousands of face scans to Scancongress.com. You can send Scancongress an image of your face and it will tell you if you're among those whose faces were captured.

Eventually they were ordered to leave on pain of arrest -- for blocking the hallways, not for scanning faces, which remains legal.

We did this to prove a point and to pressure Congress to pass laws to ban facial recognition surveillance, so we’re going to delete all the footage and all the biometric data when we’re done. We also chose our location carefully: inside the capitol where everyone is already under video surveillance. But anyone else could easily do what we did, and right now it’s perfectly legal. A government agency can do this to monitor a marginalized population. A corporation can do it to harvest our biometric data and sell it for profit. A creepy stalker could do it to find their target in a crowd of people.

We scanned thousands of faces in DC today to show why facial recognition surveillance should be banned [Fight for the Future]

(via Beyond the Beyond)

Read the rest

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AI Dungeon, a vastly open text adventure that used artificial intelligence to generate responses to your commands, is now available as an easy-to-use smartphone app (the web version was clunky). The Verge has more:

We tested the iOS version briefly, and although there were a few game-breaking errors, it’s generally as easy to use as you’d want. Responses to each input still take a few seconds to process, which rather slows the experience, but it’s definitely quicker than the web version was, and each interaction with the AI is as surprising (and frequently delightful) as before.

There are also helpful tips for newcomers, reminding you to start each of your text commands with a verb, or use quotation marks to indicate when someone is speaking.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/RrtNwTtrZqU/ai-dungeon-the-infinite-t.html

When Donald Trump and then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced a plan to give billions of dollars to the notorious Taiwanese sweatshop operator Foxconn to build a super-factory in Wisconsin, knowledgeable people were alarmed.

That's because Foxconn has a long history of defrauding governments by promising to build big ambitious factories in their territories, absorbing massive subsidies, then abandoning the project, leaving behind a modest facility, or nothing at all.

Despite these misgivings, Walker and his GOP state legislators set about bulldozing Wisconsinites' family homes to make way for the Foxconn factory, guaranteeing ever-larger subsidies even as Foxconn quietly began to scale back its plans and the number of jobs it would create. The total bill rose to $4.1b, even as Foxconn canceled the factory altogether and proposed replacing it with a modest R&D facility primarily staffed by out-of-state researchers, rather than the locals who were footing the bill for Foxconn's massive subsidies.

The company went back and forth on its plans for months, putting on a bizarre show to keep alive a plausible claim that Wisconsin would get something in exchange for its generosity. But as the deal attracted more and more scrutiny, it became increasingly obvious that Wisconsin had been foxconned.

Now, Foxconn and Tony Evers (the new, Democratic governor of Wisconsin) are renegotiating the deal. Foxconn asked the state to release it from its obligations, without removing the (now $4.5b -- that's $172k/job, assuming Foxconn builds the factory it originally proposed!) guarantee of subsidies, including cash payouts if the company never does enough business in Wisconsin to use the tax-credits it's been promised. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/ULX8DZAQ1w4/cheesed-off.html

A customer who chose the no-payment option for a store item was pursued out the door by a relentless employee who apparently holds the quaint notion that transactions involving the exchange of goods should be beneficial to both parties. The ideologically rigid employee got his way this time, but I'm sure the gentleman with the big pickup will be back again before Christmas.

UPDATE: It looks like the employee was fired for not letting the  thief get away with it. (Thanks WCityMike in comments)

A terrible attempt at stealing from r/funny

Read the rest

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The whistleblowers who brought us The Paradise Papers and The Panama Papers risked their freedom and even their lives (Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated for reporting on the stories). Years later, financial secrecy havens are still on the rise, and it's easy to think that all that blood and treasure thrown at ending money laundering and corruption was wasted.

But real change is accretive. The shifts in public opinion engendered by the big financial leaks were important, but not enough...Not yet. Still, as new stories about oligarchs and kleptocrats working with enablers in "civilized countries" to spirit out their cash, and that cash going to work to render our cities unlivable by transforming housing stock into "safe deposit boxes in the sky," or to undermine our democracies by creating vast dark-money pools used to influence elections and politics, the big leaks keep gaining salience in the public imagination, becoming more important over time (not less).

Elizabeth Warren has just introduced "a plan to fight global financial corruption" that is characteristically comprehensive it its scope:

* Require disclosure of beneficial owners of assets, piercing shell companies to get at the natural humans who benefit from them.

* Collect data on cross-border financial flows by mandating fine-grained reporting by financial institutions.

* Stiffen anti-bribery law, which currently punishes US companies that offer bribes, by banning US financial institutions from handling, accepting, or passing on funds derived from bribery, whether or not the briber or the bribee have a US nexus. Read the rest

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Over at Cool Tools (a site I co-operate) Rusty Blazenhoff talks to Donald Bell about her favorite ice cream scoop: the Thrifty “square” ice cream scoop. Read the rest

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Go full screen for this 4K video of an Airbus A380 landing at night at the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport. The YouTube channel, High Pressure Aviation Films, offers dozens of POV flight videos, from landings in Tahiti and Tokyo to the clip below of the Northern Lights seen from inside a Boeing 777 on its way from Los Angeles to Paris.

Read the rest

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This episode of TED-Ed is about Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel, Dune, and why you should read it.

A mother and son trek across an endless desert. Wearing special suits to dissipate heat and recycle moisture, the travelers aren’t worried about dying of thirst. Their fears are much greater. Soon, the sound of the desert is drowned out by a hissing: a mound of sand 400 meters long bursts from the desert floor and races towards them. This is the world of “Dune.” Dan Kwartler dives into the epic story.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

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I'm like, eighty percent certain that this kitty's going to kill whoever it is holding the camera, just as soon as it figures out that it can survive crossing a hallway filled with aluminum foil. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/nI0NRv1gkfg/someone-will-be-sent-to-the-ho.html

“I really hope this shows people that there’s power in community and all it takes is a group of friends to come together and change someone else’s life.”

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Mi1zu7PkWto/new-jersey-waitress-surprised.html

Let me give it to you straight: Photoshop for iPad isn't great. Over the past year, creatives who rely on their iPadOS tablet to take care of photographic business have been promised the moon by Adobe. Instead, we got handfuls of green cheese. It was supposed to have the all of the power and capabilities of the desktop version of the app at launch. Nope: I, along with what I am sure are many others, was disappointed to find that the company that pretty much wrote the book on computer-aided image editing had released an app that was easily outclassed by apps like Affinity Photo and Pixelmator, the latter of which has been around since 2014. Happily, Adobe took a baby step towards climbing to the top of the mobile photo editing dog pile by adding a feature to Photoshop for iPad that should have been there since day one: the Subject Select tool.

From The Verge:

This addition marks the first real improvement to Photoshop for iPad since it was released last month to disappointing reviews. The tool should go a long way toward quelling one of the biggest criticisms of the v1 version of the app, which was the lack of a Magic Wand tool.

Aside from Select Subject, Photoshop for iPad is also getting some UI improvements and speed improvements for its Cloud documents. Cloud PSDs, which were introduced with the app and allow users to access their Photoshop files from any device, will now upload and download up to 90 percent faster.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/bapJvGaC1-Y/adobe-is-starting-to-sort-out.html

What data does your car gather about you? Where does it go? Who has access to it?

Quite the story today from Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler [@geoffreyfowler], and quite the viral quote: “Cars now run on the new oil: your data.”

Most cars sold in America in 2020 will ship to consumers with built-in and always-on Internet connections, and multiple on-board computers. Where does all that data go?

“We’re at a turning point for driving surveillance — and it’s time for car makers to come clean,” Fowler writes. Make sure to read the whole piece in the Washington Post, in addition to the insightful extras in his Twitter thread.

And -- Get a load of the forensics experiment he did with the help of a computer security professional. It's not easy getting them out of the vehicle's hardware, for starters!

What does your car know about you?

In my latest @washingtonpost privacy experiment, I tried to find out from a Chevy.

The dashboard didn’t say. It wasn’t in the manual or GM’s obtuse privacy policy.

To glimpse my car data, we had to hack our way in: https://t.co/I4oBBjyrkb pic.twitter.com/HTDqIuSGaQ

 Geoffrey A. Fowler (@geoffreyfowler) December 17, 2019

I had help doing a car privacy autopsy from Jim Mason, a forensic engineer.

That involved cracking open the dashboard to access just one of the car's many computers.

Don’t try this at home — we had to take the computer into the shop to get repaired.https://t.co/9vRRwZgD3V pic.twitter.com/zaCNGRdVCd

 Geoffrey A.

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McChristian says, "Rather than send/give out Holiday Cards this year, I decided to make punch and assemble Holiday 'kits.' The sleigh and reindeer were models found on Thingiverse, and I designed/printed the evergreen tree and the label." Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/hE-hPETilqA/evergreen-gift.html

Abbey Winters, the wife of Chattooga County, Georgia's sole county commissioner, was arrested Friday and charged with battery after pouring a drink on a reporter. The reporter had apparently asked her husband, Jason Winters, a difficult question about a trip to France. The drink was named as "soda", but the brand and flavor were not disclosed.

The wife of Chattooga County's sole commissioner poured a soda on a reporter's head this morning. The Summerville PD is charging Abbey Winters with simple battery and disorderly conduct. The reporter is Casie Bryant of All On Georgia. Photos courtesy of the Summerville News pic.twitter.com/V3pz6UbWY8

 Patrick Filbin (@PatrickFilbin) December 13, 2019

Below is embedded video of the public-meeting mayhem, posted by AllOnGeorgia. The victim, AllOnGeorgia reporter Casie Bryant, is out of shot, as is Abbey Winters, but you get the NSFW dialog and the hapless excuses about how she had it coming.

"I'm sick of it." "She brought it on herself." "She brought it on herself." "Nobody brings that on themself." "By saying he went to France?" "Oh, yes, bitch"

MUGSHOT RELEASED: NewChannel 9 was provided the mugshot of Abbey Winters. Winters is a Chattooga County Commissioners wife accused of spilling a drink on a reporters head during a budget meeting.MORE HERE: https://t.co/mr1VG1sHsQ pic.twitter.com/0EVQsavmbF

 WTVC NewsChannel 9 (@newschannelnine) December 14, 2019

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/UFuTG-EzQKY/beaming-mugshot-of-politician.html

Propublica's meticulously researched and reported story about McKinsey's roles in designing ICE's detention centers, advising ICE to skimp on supervision, food and medical care, is as unimpeachable as all of Propublica's work.

Nevertheless, McKinsey released an 800-word statement falsely claiming that Propublica had "mislead readers" with an article that "ignores many of the factual points that we presented." The rebuttal contains many verifiable falsehoods (for example, it repeatedly accuses Propublica of publishing things it did not publish), and several misleading claims.

McKinsey is paying to make this article the top Google result for "McKinsey ICE," ensuring that its misleading and false spin is above the factual reporting on its conduct.

Propublica has published a detailed, point-by-point rebuttal to McKinsey's spin.

Claim:

“We did not recommend a reduction in the quality of food or healthcare for detainees.”

Response:

ProPublica did not report that McKinsey recommended a reduction in the quality of food and medical care. The article reported that McKinsey recommended reducing the amount of money spent on food and medical care. (As noted, the text of the story used the phrase “proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care.”)

McKinsey did not dispute that prior to publication and does not dispute it now. Neither did Cox, the ICE spokesman.

McKinsey Called Our Story About Its ICE Contract False. It’s Not. [Ian McDougall/Propublica] Read the rest

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