Aesthetics

Washington crews destroy first U.S. murder hornets nest — photos

A very cool creation developed by intentionally misusing 3D printers. Check out the video at the bottom of the post which has delightful music!

A Broken 3D Printer Inspired This Futuristic Fabric

This Japanese city is using robot wolves to scare bears

I mean… the headline includes “robot wolves”. Need I say more?

Follow Recs

@thesarahshow (Sarah Zucker) is an artist that I like for their cool illustrations and video effects.

@polygon1993 (𝐏𝐎𝐋𝐘𝐆𝐎𝐍) is a visual artist. Their work involves a futuristic and glitchy style with heavily embellished photos.

Technology

Let’s start off today with a tweet:

Meanwhile, When coffee makers are demanding a ransom, you know IoT is screwed.

Martin Hron, a researcher at security company Avast, reverse engineered one of the older coffee makers to see what kinds of hacks he could do with it. After just a week of effort, the unqualified answer was: quite a lot. Specifically, he could trigger the coffee maker to turn on the burner, dispense water, spin the bean grinder, and display a ransom message, all while beeping repeatedly.

This reminds me of my favorite cyberpunk comic book, Transmetropolitan.

See also: @internetofshit on Twitter

Next, a surprising example of how a feature that seems small and benign could be used to steal data from your browser.

Stealing sensitive browser data with the W3C Ambient Light Sensor API

TL;DR: anything that reads your environment and transmits data can probably be misused.

Culture

McSweeny’s nails it again. Some of these would be better than the usual options!

Nihilistic Password Security Questions - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

I give Facebook a little bit of credit here for at least trying something different. The Internet is almost like a separate societal layer so there may as well be a Supreme Court there too.

Facebook’s new Oversight Board is a wild new experiment in platform governance

Above: Australian think tank ASPI’s representation of Chinese state-sponsored accounts’ favorite topics to tweet about.

Highly amusing analysis of how China’s efforts at online manipulation are faring, compared to the “industry leaders”, Russia.

China's Hopeless Twitter Influence Operations - ChinaTalk

We tend to believe in a karmically fair world, in that those we perceive as suffering are more worthy of rewards.

Just world beliefs and suffering people — the behaviorist

It’s no surprise that megacorps seek to control our actions, but the level to which they are able may be unexpected…

Corporations directing our attention online more than we realize

Thanks for tuning in. See you next time!