The best apps of 2019 could be the best deals of 2020. If you missed them last year, here are 10 of our Boing Boing reader favorites - all on sale. Take advantage of deep discounts on apps dedicated to language learning, gaming, graphic design and many more.

Degoo Premium: Lifetime 10TB Backup Plan

With this super-secure backup solution, you'll never have to worry about system crashes deleting all of your data. Degoo gives you more backup space than leading cloud systems by a mile, and you can set your files to automatically back up as you go.

MSRP: $3600

Sale Price: $99.99

Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm

Got a friend (or world leader) who needs a safe outlet for their megalomania? Gift them a copy of this expansion for the latest edition in the world-building, world-beating Civ series that adds in new world wonders and ecological disasters.

MSRP: $29.99

Sale Price: $19.99

Slideshop: Lifetime Subscription

Need your presentation to pop? Choose from and customize one of 6,000 template slides, all compatible with leading software like PowerPoint and Keynote.

MSRP: $2940

Sale Price: $19.99 (down from previous sale price of $39.99)

StockUnlimited Vector Plan: Lifetime Subscription

Graphic design just got a whole lot easier with access to this trove of more than 500,000 vector designs. Use them royalty-free for print or the web.

MSRP: $684

Sale Price: $34.99

Mondly: Lifetime Subscription (All Languages)

Short, entertaining lessons help you absorb words and state-of-the-art speech recognition makes sure you get them right in this acclaimed language learning app. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/eWoSXW8LqPE/get-new-years-savings-on-som.html

Last month I bought a pair of TaoTronics active noise cancelling bluetooth headphones for my two daughters to use on an 18-hour plane trip. They said they were excellent, and they also used them in the hotel to watch videos, play music, and play games. I tried them myself and was pleasantly surprised by how well they worked. You can use PSXIGLQM to get them at a good discount. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/s83hCKGPIck/these-cheap-noise-canceling-he.html

In my latest Locus column, Inaction is a Form of Action, I discuss how the US government's unwillingness to enforce its own anti-monopoly laws has resulted in the dominance of a handful of giant tech companies who get to decide what kind of speech is and isn't allowed -- that is, how the USG's complicity in the creation of monopolies allows for a kind of government censorship that somehow does not violate the First Amendment.

We're often told that "it's not censorship when a private actor tells you to shut up on their own private platform" -- but when the government decides not to create any public spaces (say, by declining to create publicly owned internet infrastructure) and then allows a handful of private companies to dominate the privately owned world of online communications, then those companies' decisions about who may speak and what they may say become a form of government speech regulation -- albeit one at arm's length.

I don't think that the solution to this is regulating the tech platforms so they have better speech rules -- I think it's breaking them up and forcing them to allow interoperability, so that their speech rules no longer dictate what kind of discourse we're allowed to have.

Imagine two different restaurants: one prohibits any discussion of any subject the management deems “political” and the other has no such restriction. It’s easy to see that we’d say that you have more right to freely express yourself in the Anything Goes Bistro than in the No Politics at the Table Diner across the street.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/tdIjO_OJtm4/monopoly-is-speech-policy.html

Last week, a redditor posted that "When I load the Xiaomi camera in my Google home hub I get stills from other people's homes!!" The post included video of the user's tablet showing stills of strangers in their homes, including some of strangers asleep in their bedrooms.

A few days later, a googler commented in the thread to say that Google was aware of the problem and had blocked all Xiaomi products from accessing Google Home or Google Assistant.

Xiaomi has since issued a statement saying that they had "has always prioritized our users' privacy and information security," and that a Dec 26 update had caused the problem, but only for users with "poor network conditions" (the bug came from a cacheing system). The company says the bug affected 1044 users, and that it has been resolved, but that Xiaomi devices will not get back their Google Assistant and Google Home tools until "the root cause has been completely solved, to ensure that such issues will not happen again."

Some analysts have suggested that adversarial interoperability -- where companies don't get to stop competitors from connecting to their systems -- cannot be reconciled with privacy concerns, because companies need to be able to control their systems to protect our privacy. But in this story -- as in so many others -- we see that allowing big companies like Google to decide who can plug into their systems and under what circumstances is no guarantee that they'll only choose wisely. Google and its competitors are completely capable of thoroughly vetting a partner and greenlighting its integration, even when that partner cannot be trusted.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/y2EZFOZ6JQw/dont-put-cctvs-in-yr-home.html

Thomas Hofeller was the mastermind behind REDMAP, the tool used by Republican dirty-tricksters to redraw state electoral maps after the 2010 census in order to deliver state and federal legislative seats to Republicans even when the majority of people voted Democrats.

Hofeller was a secretive sociopath and had long been estranged from his daughter, Stephanie, a self-described anarchist who only discovered her father had died in 2018 when she read the obit pages of the New York Times. When Stephanie recovered her father's possessions from his home, she came into possession of files detailing the REDMAP plans, files of the sort that he had long exhorted his co-conspirators not to create or retain.

Stephanie turned some of her father's files over to the government watchdog Common Cause for use in a lawsuit over North Carolina's redistricting; thanks to the frank admission of racially motivated voter suppression in Thomas's files, the court found that NC's redistricting was illegal.

Now, Stephanie has licensed all her father's files under an unspecified Creative Commons license and dumped them on Google Drive for anyone to use, exhorting others to "download and distribute this material, at will. It’s yours (be nice)."

Hofeller, for his part, is likely rolling over in his grave. He was secretive about his documents, and knew full well that they could undermine his work.

“Emails are the tool of the devil,” one of the training slides on in the trove of files reads. “Treat every statement and document as if it was going to appear on the FRONT PAGE of your local newspaper.”

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/LzCbx16PacM/gops-worst-nightmare.html

US Air Force research scientist Michael Hansen created Rhasspy as a privacy-oriented alternative to surveilling "voice assistant" products like Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri; the free/open project supports dozens of languages from German, French and English to Mandarin, Vietnamese and Russian, and is designed to run on Raspberry Pi-based devices.

It's licensed under the very permissive MIT license, and is presently intended for "advanced users that want to have a voice interface to Home Assistant, but value privacy and freedom above all else."

Rhasspy runs even when completely disconnected from the internet, and works well with Home Assistant, Hass.io, and Node-RED.

A typical voice assistant (Alexa, Google Home, etc.) solves a number of important problems:

1. Deciding when to record audio (wake word)

2. Listening for voice commands (command listener)

3. Transcribing command/question (speech to text)

4. Interpreting the speaker's intent from the text (intent recognition)

5. Fulfilling the speaker's intent (intent handling)

Rhasspy provides offline, private solutions to problems 1-4 using off-the-shelf tools

Rhasspy [Michael Hansen]

(via Four Short Links) Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/DxC2iqpQI6E/rhasspy-on-raspi.html

If emojis had sounds, David Lap nails them with his guitar. He "impersonates" all kinds of emojis, including a UFO, cruise ship, monkey, ping pong game, T-Rex, red heart, and many others.

Here's another one of his videos where he imitates musical instruments (e.g., flute, harmonica, bagpipes) with his violin. Amazing stuff!

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/0r-zriBZNo0/this-musician-plays-emoji-soun.html

Helen Sharman was the first British astronaut and in 1991 became the first woman to visit the Soviet Mir space station. In an interview published in The Guardian yesterday, she made a comment about extraterrestrials, the latter part of which is an eyebrow raiser:

"Aliens exist, there’s no two ways about it. There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life. Will they be like you and me, made up of carbon and nitrogen? Maybe not. It’s possible they’re here right now and we simply can’t see them."

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Mx1m-8u3Z08/astronaut-helen-sherman-extra.html

BREAKING: Harvey Weinstein has been charged in Los Angeles with NEW rape and sexual assault charges.

Disgraced movie mogul and accused serial sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein is having an extremely bad day.

Just hours after his trial for rape kicked off in New York, on the other side of the country LA Country District Attorney Jackie Lacey said Weinstein has been charged in Los Angeles with raping one woman and sexually assaulting another over a two-day period in 2013.

He has been charged with one count of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, sexual penetration by use of force, and sexual battery by restraint.

“We believe the evidence will show that the defendant used his power and influence to gain access to his victims and then commit violent crimes against them,” Lacey said. “I want to commend the victims who have come forward and bravely recounted what happened to them. It is my hope that all victims of sexual violence find strength and healing as they move forward.”

More from Pilar Melendez at Daily Beast.

Harvey Weinstein has been indicted on new sex crime charges in Los Angeles, just as his trial on separate rape and sexual assault charges in New York was poised to get underway, prosecutors announced Monday. https://t.co/i4CvAcMhZF

 Nicole Rodriguez (@NicRodriguez) January 6, 2020

Harvey Weinstein Hit With Rape & Sexual Battery Charges By L.A. D.A. As NYC Trial Starts https://t.co/A6EzNa5It6 pic.twitter.com/itFXHwxVlk

 Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) January 6, 2020

#HarveyWeinstein - WATCH LIVE: L.A. prosecutors announce new charges.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/vNGFDWuQPXY/harvey-weinstein-hit-by-los-an.html

Robotics is tough business. “If you think 2018 was a tough year for robotics companies, 2019 wasn’t any better,” writes Peter Singer.

“And that’s especially true for consumer robotics companies, which have the misfortune of dominating the following list.” Here's his well-researched list of a number of notable robotics companies that bit the metallic dust in 2019, and in one case, one company that may manage to reboot itself in 2020.

Go enjoy the full list from The Robot Report, but make sure to pour some top-shelf liquid laundry detergent out for dearly departed Laundroid (2015-2019):

Tokyo-based Seven Dreamers filed for bankruptcy in April. It was developing the Laundroid laundry-folding robot, which was a staple for several years at CES. However, its size and cost – estimated at $16,500 – were big barriers to adoption.

Chores such as folding laundry were supposed to be targets for automation, but many have proven to be too complex to cheaply solve. Seven Dreamers reportedly raised $89 million and had accumulated $20

Remembering robotics companies we lost in 2019 (The Robot Report)

Pour one out for Laundroid, the $16,000 laundry folding robot

A list of the robot companies we lost last year, and a illustration of what bodes for much at #CES2020 https://t.co/ChQVxafMtx pic.twitter.com/0aXlOiwMGn

 Peter W. Singer (@peterwsinger) January 6, 2020

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/LaPgKAy2iqo/remembering-laundroid-and-othe.html

When I was a juvie nerd, I lived for Estes (and Centuri) model rockets. I slept with my Estes catalog (sometimes literally). I would mow lawns, rake leaves, and save up my allowance to order from the catalog. I would have maybe ten dollars to spend and would agonize over each order, trying to squeeze out as many products as possible from my measly earnings.

I would finally place the order and wait with agonized impatience for it to arrive. I would always imagine a sizable box showing up in the mail. Every time, the box was disappointingly tiny. But I built what I received with whatever tools and supplies we had in the house, mainly Elmer's glue, scissors, Scotch tape, and (at least for my first rocket) house paint. I cut the balsa wood fins out with a razor blade. By the time I left my rocketry youth behind, I had built around 18 rockets and was Vice President of the Chester Virginia Rocketry Club (we had three members).

Several years ago, I unearthed my first rocket (the house-painted one) from the bowels of my basement. It is the only rocket from my childhood that survives. Here it is, in all of its fragile and funky glory:

The first time we launched it -- the launch controller connected to the battery in my dad's El Camino -- I had glued the launch lug (the small paper tube that holds the rocket to the launch rod) on crooked, so much so that the friction would not allow the rocket to freely travel up the rod. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/vc3DngGd3N0/model-rocket-pioneer-vern-est.html

Clay Per Day is a Dutch sculptor whose Etsy store features grotesque, "realistic" sculptures that mash up the heads of angry babies with spiders and knurled fingers, about the right size for posing on your desk at work. (via Creepbay)

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/FiRp5JftxEM/spiderbabies.html

In Richmond Heights, Missouri, a woman says she visited a mattress store to test out the beds, finding one so comfortable that she fell asleep. As she snoozed apparently unnoticed, the employees closed the shop for the night. Police were called in the morning. From the St Louis Post-Dispatch:

"That's honestly the best mattress endorsement we've ever heard," the police department posted on social media Friday.

The store did not want to press charges for trespassing so officers escorted the well-rested customer out of the business, which police declined to name.

image: "Shifman Mattress and Boxspring set" by Yahquinn (CC BY-SA 3.0) Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/EUkpmJz7XFw/woman-accidentally-spends.html

On Christmas Eve, Brian Kolb [R-Canandaigua] -- then minority leader in the New York State Assembly -- published an op-ed urging New Yorkers to drive sober during the holidays; on New Year's Eve, Kolb wrecked a state-owned official vehicle and then failed a roadside blood-alcohol test.

Drunk driving is a pet issue for Kolb, who tweeted "There is no excuse for driving impaired this holiday season" on Dec 26, having co-sponsored Leandra's Law, which makes it "an automatic felony on the first offense to drive drunk with a person age 15 or younger inside the vehicle."

Kolb later published a statement admitting to driving drunk: "Last night, I was charged with driving under the influence near my home. This was a terrible lapse in judgment, one I have urged others not to make, and I take full responsibility for it. I want to offer sincere apologies to my family, friends, colleagues, and the people of the 131st Assembly District. I fully recognize the severity of the situation and I am profoundly sorry. There is no excuse and no justification for what occurred Tuesday evening. I made the wrong decision, and it is one I deeply regret."

Kolb has since resigned as minority leader in the assembly.

After deputies came to the scene, Kolb failed a field sobriety test and was then taken into custody, Henderson said. While at the Ontario County Jail, Kolb was given a Breathalyzer test, which revealed his blood-alcohol content was over 0.08%, Henderson said. Kolb was taken to the Ontario County Jail to be processed.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/iWHoXyptTHU/leandras-law.html

Chevron said Monday it has evacuated all expatriate oil workers from Iraq, following last week's Trump airstrike in Baghdad that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

Chevron, which is the number 2 U.S. oil company, said in a statement that as a "precautionary measure" all non-Iraqi employees and contractors have departed the company's one and only site in the Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq "for the time being."

"The safety of our people and facilities is Chevron's top priority globally," a Chevron spokeswoman told CNN Business, which has more on the development.

As this 2017 article notes, Russian state-sponsored Rosneft has also been quite active in the Kurdistan Region in the last 4 or so years, and its investment in natural gas pipelines in the region continues.

When US companies leave, will Rosneft take over?

More about Chevron's history of operations in Iraq on the Chevron website. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/DxiOtEpDXcM/chevron-evacuates-all-iraq-sta.html

One way to determine whether distant worlds may be home to extraterrestrials is to seek out the presence of biosignatures, molecules that indicate the existence of past or present life, in the exoplanet's atmosphere. (The chemical composition of the atmosphere affects its color spectra, observable with telescopes.) According to new MIT research, one biosignature may be a stinky, poisonous gas found in swamps, bogs, and even some animals' bowels. From MIT:

MIT researchers have found that phosphine is produced by... anaerobic organisms, such as bacteria and microbes, that don’t require oxygen to thrive. The team found that phosphine cannot be produced in any other way except by these extreme, oxygen-averse organisms, making phosphine a pure biosignature — a sign of life (at least of a certain kind).

In a paper recently published in the journal Astrobiology, the researchers report that if phosphine were produced in quantities similar to methane on Earth, the gas would generate a signature pattern of light in a planet’s atmosphere. This pattern would be clear enough to detect from as far as 16 light years away by a telescope such as the planned James Webb Space Telescope. If phosphine is detected from a rocky planet, it would be an unmistakable sign of extraterrestrial life.

“Here on Earth, oxygen is a really impressive sign of life,” says lead author Clara Sousa-Silva, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “But other things besides life make oxygen too. It’s important to consider stranger molecules that might not be made as often, but if you do find them on another planet, there’s only one explanation.”

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/z1U1NSsXCbc/seeking-out-extraterrestrials.html

On Thursday, lucky Walmart shoppers in Edinboro, Pennsylvania were treated to live bedbugs, which were checking out their new home in the men's changing room. Some were roaming around freely while others were living in a pill bottle that someone had placed in a boy's jacket offered by the store.

According to CNN:

On Friday, health safety company Ecolab confirmed that the insects were bedbugs. An Ecolab employee also reported seeing bedbugs crawling around the men's changing rooms the same day, according to police.

A Walmart employee later found a second closed pill bottle containing dead bedbugs in the men's department, police said.

"A third-party pest management service has visited the store and we are working with them to assess next steps," the Walmart spokesperson said. "In the meantime, we have blocked off the impacted area.

State Police are investigating the matter and looking for the person or people responsible, they said."

Bedbugs are tenacious little critters, and don't always clear out after one fumigation (I know this because I had friends who had to move out of their apartment after two failed attempts to get rid of the blood suckers). So it might a while before Walmart sees the last of them.

Image: By CDC/ Harvard University, Dr. Gary Alpert; Dr. Harold Harlan; Richard Pollack. Photo Credit: Piotr Naskrecki - http://phil.cdc.gov/phil, Public Domain, Link Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/12YYy6_KbQA/free-bedbugs-at-walmart-in-pen.html

Whatever your resolution is for the new year, you'll be able to do it better with more sleep. Modern sleep masks are more than just blindfolds. They incorporate 3D contouring, ambient noise blocking and other features designed to help you shut out the world and slow down your busy, conscious mind. Here's 9 of our favorites, most all of which are on sale for 2020.

Dreamlight Ease: 100% Light Blocking Mask

At just 2.4 ounces, this mask is perfect for vacations, long plane rides or anywhere you need a little serenity. Its 3D facial mapping technology hugs the contours of any face, leaving the space around the eyes clear  - but surrounded in perfect darkness.

MSRP: $29

Sale Price: $17.99

Dreamlight Muse: 100% Light Blocking Cordless Music Mask

Need a soft soundtrack to get to bed? This augmented Dreamlight has the same gentle contouring with a wireless music player embedded around the ears.

MSRP: $89

Sale Price: $54.99

Dreamlight Pro: The World's Smartest Sleep Mask

If you're serious about your sleep, this Pro version of the Dreamlight is a portable lullaby. It comes equipped with sound therapy functionality through the headphones, relaxing, soft lighting on the interior and more, all controllable by a phone app and fully customizable.

MSRP: $299

Sale Price: $199.99

Nodpod® Weighted Sleep Mask

This mask sits securely on any face (in any sleeping position), but that's not all. It uses tiny polyethylene beads to perform the same function as weighted blankets, giving your face gentle pressure to help soothe away anxiety. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/UYBE3yAsgrw/8-sleep-masks-that-can-help-yo.html

Cartoonists Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg take a page-by-page look at the upcoming Fantagraphics book, Original Art: Daniel Clowes. It measures a whopping 17 x 24 inches and has photos of Clowe's original art pages. I can't wait to get this book. You can pre-order a copy here. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/YDXIMTiWTCk/a-video-review-of-the-upcoming.html

When most of us think of IT, we picture towering stacks of servers and intense walls of code. And while, yes, servers and code both have their place in any IT pro's day-to-day, they're not nearly as scary as we make them out to be—at least not when you have the right training under your belt. The Complete IT for Beginners Bundle is the perfect introduction for IT newcomers and can make getting your foot in the door much less intimidating.

Each course in this 10-course package builds off the one before. You'll get a firm foundation in the basic, language-neutral elements of computer code, then branch out into specific platforms and areas of coding in later lessons.

Those lessons include comprehensive training in HTML and Python, both essential languages for any job. There's also a deep dive into the world of cloud computing (and one of its biggest platforms, AWS), web app development and more. By the end, you'll be on your way to earning certifications that will light up any resume and impress IT recruiters.

You can get lifetime access to the entire Complete IT for Beginners Bundle for 95% off the retail price.

Prices subject to change.

You can't beat free! Get $70+ worth of premium Mac apps for free today! Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/g1G4-MaCeNE/land-an-it-job-in-2020-with-th.html