For the past few years, it’s become increasingly common for police to put GPS devices on suspects’ cars to track where they are. But, that’s kicked up a bunch of legal questions concerning whether or not it’s legal to do that without a warrant. So far, the courts have not really agreed. Earlier this [...]

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Mitch’s fantastic new book Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation shares a “sacred space” on my bookshelf with works by Manly Hall, Robert Anton Wilson, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Erik Davis. In fact, Mitch, who is also a book editor/publisher, has revived essential classics by several of those folks.
I’m [...]

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Uh-oh. Now that a terrorist has tried unsuccessfully to blow up a Saudi prince with a bomb shoved up his ass, the TSA is obliged to perform rectal exams on every flier for the rest of time. After all, once a jihadi failed to blow up a plane with his shoe, we all needed to [...]

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After the jump is the Real life™ version…

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Those that would give up freedom for security, deserve neither.

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Amazon.com offers the Nintendo Wii Game Console for $199.99 with free shipping. Plus, you’ll receive a $25 Amazon.com gift card with your order. That’s tied with a mention from two weeks ago (which didn’t include the gift card) and is the lowest total price we’ve seen for a new, factory-sealed unit since July. It includes [...]

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A study by German scientists showed that 10 minutes a day of ogling women’s breasts by men was as good at warding off heart disease, high blood pressure and stress as 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.

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People tend to have the misconception that making an anagram gets harder the longer the sentence is – the opposite is true. The longer a sentence gets, the more possibilities there are for making small re-arrangements in the anagram to fit the original text. See this famous anagram:
To be or not to be: that is [...]

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A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store, declassified documents obtained by Wired.com show.
Headquartered in Crystal City, [...]

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WTF? If i get invited to a Windows 7 launch party, I’m finding new friends…

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Cool Tools reviewed these cool food-grade silicone bowls and cups from Guyot Designs.
For weight- and space-conscious backpackers or car campers, the squishy bowls offer an alternative to old-school non-collapsible aluminum/stainless steel/titanium bowls. And while these food-grade silicone bowls won’t stand up to direct fire, they are oven safe up to 500° F. They can [...]

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Sneakey is a project from Benjamin Laxton, Kai Wang, and Stefan Savage at the UCSD vision lab that has shown that it is possible to duplicate keys from photos taken at a distance and/or an angle. They’ve published a paper and are offering to release their code if there is “sufficient interest.”
The access control provided [...]

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The Subway Yearbook project is the latest bit of fun from the joy-sharing pranksters at Improv Everywhere…
We installed a photography studio on a random subway car. We claimed that the MTA had hired us to take photos of every single person who rides the subway and that we’d be producing a yearbook at the end [...]

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If you’ve always wondered how AES — the Advanced Encryption Standard, the gold-standard for crypto — works, and if you enjoy explanations in stick-figure cartoon form, you are in luck, for Moserware’s “A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)” is funny, lucid and fascinating.

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NBA star and Cleveland Cavalier LeBron James(notes) signs copies of his new book “Shooting Stars” at a Borders bookstore in Westlake, Ohio on Friday, Sept. 18, 2009. In the book, co-authored with Buzz Bissinger, James tells the story of his rise from Akron, Ohio, hoops prodigy to NBA superstar.

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How about Netflix’s insane new plan to release millions of customers’ personal information — ZIP code, gender, year of birth — as a sequel to its Netflix Challenge. Latanya Sweeney’s famous study on de-anonymizing data has shown that date (not just year) of birth, gender and ZIP are sufficient to personally identify 87% of Americans. [...]

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At MIT, an experiment identifies which students are gay, raising new questions about online privacy.

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The RIAA has updated its Music Rules! school program — which contains blatant falsehoods about copyright. The new version asks kids to act as unpaid PR staff: “Take your campaign a step further by contacting the editor of your community newspaper or the director of your community cable television station to see if you can [...]

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I’ve been enjoying cartoonist Peter Bagge’s contributions to Reason Magazine for years now, which I’ve always read on their website. But now Fantagraphics has collected them into a great-looking trade paperback! Here’s a PDF of a free chapter (link).

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