Author: Robert

See the original posting on Boing Boing

The Internet of Dongs is Brad Haines’s term for the world of internet-connected, “teledildonic” sex toys, and Haines, along with Sarah Jamie Lewis, have exhaustively documented all the ways in which internet-connected sex toys can screw you, from leaking private data to physically attacking your junk.

But Lewis and Haines’s work remains an obscure curiosity that is mostly followed by information security geeks; and now the do-not-buy advice for these gadgets is going mainstream. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Mozilla updated its Privacy Not Included guide (previously) (a review of tech gadgets’ security and privacy practices),to include a suite of “romantic” gifts, from fitness trackers to “smart beds” to sleep trackers to sex toys, that track you, transmit your personal details to distant corporations, and sell, leak, or endanger your private information.

I was pleased to see Lovesense blacklisted by name, given the company’s incredible, appalling history of security blunders, including making secret audio recordings of your sex sessions (the company called this a “minor bug”).

Not all the products are do-not-buys: there’s a kegel exerciser that looks pretty good, but others, like the Lovense Lush 2 get failing grades for “shar[ing] your information with 3rd parties for unexpected reasons”; while the charmingly named Vibratissimo Panty Buster flunks for not using encryption (!).

So what makes for a cyber-safe sex toy? According to Mozilla, you’ll want to look out for things like whether the product uses encryption, automatic security updates, strong password requirements (where applicable), an accessible privacy policy, and a way for the company to manage security vulnerabilities in its products.

Read the rest

See the original posting on Boing Boing

thispersondoesnotexist.com generates realistic human faces; refresh for a new one. Most are disturbingly convincing, a warning against trusting images and a whisper of just how gnostically paranoid everything is going to get. But the more you see, the more you learn the little tells.

Read the rest

See the original posting on Boing Boing

After years of outstanding work as a cyberlawyer and science fiction/policy wonk, Kevin Bankston (previously) has published his debut science fiction story, Early Adopter, and it’s a doozy.

Bankston uses chatlogs and other exhaust from digital communications tools to spin a gorgeous and haunting tale of romance that starts with “met cute” and goes farther than you’d ever believe. If you’re not at least a little choked up by the end, then I don’t wanna know you.

Craigslist> SF bay area> san francisco> community> missed connections: September 27: Atari Teenage Riot in Dolores Park (Mission District).

We passed each other yesterday while I was walking my dog Baxter in Dolores Park. You (brunette curls, green eyes, wry smile) stopped to pet the dog (terrier, Jack Russell, brown and white) and then commented on my old Atari logo t-shirt because you were wearing an Atari Teenage Riot band t-shirt (“I guess that means I’m the more aggressive one” you said). But then you kept going before I (tall, dark, momentarily speechless) could really talk to you. I’ve never used CL missed connections before–it always seemed like a long shot–but my friend said that even if you didn’t see it, maybe someone who knows you would, and I’m going to be kicking myself for a long time if I don’t try something, so…hope we can connect!

To: w5cjq-6599435498@comm.craigslist.org
From: her@gmail.com
Subject: Atari Teenage Riot in Dolores Park

Dear Old Skool Atari Boy–Glad you posted despite not being familiar with this so very newfangled technology.

Read the rest

See the original posting on Boing Boing

I bought this nifty little lapel pin of a video arcade machine for my daughter’s birthday. It uses two pins to keep it upright. It looks cool! Read the rest

See the original posting on Boing Boing

Back in the 1980s, the giant German sf publisher Heyne tried out an experimental partnership with a soup company Maggi (they’re still around), and it was bonkers.

Under the terms of the deal, science fiction novels would be periodically interrupted by scenes in which the characters would drop everything and start eating Maggi soups, smacking their lips and exclaiming over just how delicious they were.

But to keep readers from confusing the soup ads with the novels, these scenes would be set in different type and set off with other weird textual flourishes.

To German sf fans of a certain vintage, these Maggi ads are legendary: I first heard tell of them from Tim Powers, who told me how he’d been leafing through a German edition of one of his books and discovered this weird stuff and asked a German fan about it and been told, “Oh, those are the soup ads, of course!”

Of course.

Heyne publishes some of my German editions, including the forthcoming German edition of Unauthorized Bread, and the editors I’ve spoken to there all seem weirdly proud but embarrassed by the soup ads (I’m sure there’s a long German compound word to describe this emotion). I think they should do an anthology of these weird, food-oriented fanfic short stories.

Here are the soup ads from William Gibson’s Count Zero, the sequel to his seminal novel Neuromancer. For reasons no doubt lost to history, this book was called “Biochips” in German, and boy, did it have a hell of a cover! Read the rest