Politics

Obama Signs Bill Finally Allowing Netflix-to-Facebook Sharing

President Obama has finally signed a bill which allows you to legally share information about which videos you’re watching on Netflix direct to Facebook. The Hill reports that the bill, signed yesterday, sets right the decrepit laws that previously banned Netflix-to-Facebook sharing. As a refresher of the problem: https://gizmodo.com/netflix-will-finally-probably-publish-what-you-watch-5970581 The 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act…

Anonymous Wants DDoS Recognised as an Official Form of Protest

The Anonymous hacking collective has petitioned the White House, using the US government’s open forum to ask for DDoS attacks to be registered as an official form of complaint – and requesting the convictions of previous DDoS attackers be wiped from their records. The petition does make some sense. Anon claims that a DDoS attack…

WSJ: Schmidt Is Giving North Korea What For

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Eric Schmidt isn’t being backward at coming forward during his trip to North Korea. In fact, he’s been challenging officials over global Internet access, nuclear-development, and US detainees. https://gizmodo.com/eric-schmidt-actually-landed-in-north-korea-now-what-5973865 The Journal reports that Schmidt was keen to point out the economic disadvantages that a censored internet brings: “As…

China arrests 500 people for believing in tomorrow’s Mayan Apocalypse

Here in the United States, we’re mostly treating tomorrow’s scheduled End of Days as a bit of a joke — but in China, it’s deadly serious. At least, serious enough for the Chinese government to round up and detain 500 members of the Church of Almighty God, a Chinese religious sect, for spreading the notion…

I wrote a science fiction story, and parts of it came true by the time it got published

My story “Intestate” is up now at Tor.com — it’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever written, sort of an attempt to do something like The Royal Tenenbaums except with mad science. But perhaps the strangest part is how much has changed since I was writing “Intestate,” back in the heady days of 2011.…

Things From Thomas More’s Utopia That Have Come True Today

You probably think we’ll never actually live in Utopia — because Utopia is a perfect society that can never be achieved in real life. But think again. Thomas More’s Utopia, the book that gave us the word for a perfect society in the first place, contains a large number of somewhat wacky descriptions of how…

The White House has joined Pinterest. Now you can see how Obama would really like the Oval Office to look. [Digiphile]

Why do your grandparents keep falling for email scams?

We’ve all heard tales of elderly friends and relatives who have fallen for financial scams. Pyramid schemes, Nigerian emails, dodgy “computer repair” calls, you name it. That said, there may be a reason for it — a scientific explanation for how we get scammed more easily the older we get. A new article published in…

Why Smug Atheists Should Read More Science Fiction

You can’t be on Twitter these days without being bombarded with atheistic smugness. You know what I mean. People who can’t just profess that they don’t believe in God — they have to taunt religious people for believing in “fairy tales.” Or the Tooth Fairy. Most of the time, these are geeks who have immense…

“If It Hadn’t Been for Those Kids”: Red Dawn, Rebooted

All apocalyptic stories are about wish fulfillment to some extent. But Red Dawn, opening today, is the purest jolt of wish-fulfillment I’ve seen in ages, about the fall of America and the rise of some plucky kids who Suck It Up and Do What Must Be Done. This is an action movie so ridiculous, it…

Obama Has Signed a Secret Directive to Stymie Cyber Attacks

Obama has signed a highly secret directive which will allow the military to act more aggressively when it comes to stopping cyber attacks striking the US. The Washington Post reports that Policy Directive 20 outlines a series of broad but strict standards, which federal agencies will uses to guide them when dealing with online attacks.…

Bob Dole’s Sad 1996 Campaign Website Is Still Online

On August 2, 1996, Bob Dole’s presidential campaign broke the Internet. Or at least that’s what they thought they were doing. It didn’t do the Dole/Kemp ticket any good, but luckily for us, it’s still up for our collective enjoyment. Like all websites from the 90s, the Dole/Kemp site is hopelessly tacky. The graphics and…

An Anthology About The People Who Actually Keep Your Space Station Spinning

I love the idea of Menial, a new anthology from the peeps at Crossed Genres coming in January. We’ve had plenty of anthologies about space admirals and cosmic heroes — but how about the people who actually get their hands dirty keeping the spaceship flying? The engineers, mechanics, and even sanitation workers? Here’s the official…

The Story Behind the Internet’s Most Popular Photo

This photo, along with the simple caption “Four more years” became the most tweeted and most liked on Facebook photograph ever, and it did so with incredible speed. We thought you’d like to hear the story behind it. It’s probably not what you imagined. https://gizmodo.com/your-president-for-the-next-4-years-barack-obama-just-p-5958380 To get the scoop, we went straight to the woman…

Will your ballot still be secret in 2020?

Now that the dust has settled on the 2012 election, it’s time to look forward — to the election of 2020. Fox News talked to a bunch of futurists about what elections are likely to look like eight years from now, including the idea of receiving your ballot via the Internet. The most interesting comments…

Director Sam Mendes explains how Casino Royale saved James Bond

On the 50th anniversary of the James Bond films, director Sam Mendes strives to make Bond brand new again — and his new movie, Skyfall, is so self-aware that the clash between old and new is at the center of it. Can an old-school agent like James Bond still exist in today’s world? What’s the…

Top 25 Nate Silver Facts

Wow, this Nate Silver guy sure is something. His relentless statistical simulations called the election perfectly, like months before it even happened, and he stuck to his guns while right-wing pundits dismissed his models as voodoo from their televised mountaintops. http://gawker.com/5956724/shooting-the-messengers-numbers-nate-silvers-struggle-the-redux?tag=nate-silver That didn’t work out very well. Now the whole Internet’s talking about how awesome…

Obama’s Campaign Ran Millions of Virtual Elections to Predict the Future

Nate Silver, King of Math, predicted President Obama’s victory using repeated virtual elections. But inside Obama HQ, Barack’s elite data-crunchers were doing some pretty crazy things with computers. TIME has a nifty rundown of the campaign’s heavy reliance on data analysis, and the confidence that computers and pure math would be able to predict the…

What Obama’s Victory Means for Tech

Barack Obama’s victory last night has far-reaching fiscal, social, and military implications, all of which are familiar to anyone who kept at least one eye open during any of this year’s debates. But what do four more years mean for tech? Turns out, a lot. While Obama hasn’t indicated that he’ll dramatically change course on…

Re: Hey: An Analysis of the Obama/Romney Emails

Early in 2012, I signed up for the Barack Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns’ email lists with a rarely used old email address. While I knew that this small dataset couldn’t reveal the extreme sophistication of their email strategies, I set out to analyze the emails I’d received (and rarely read) – and discovered some…