Meta is paying for posts that appear to break its own rules, according to an ABC (Australia) New Verify investigation by Lucy Carter. The report cites four accounts that have received payment from Facebook's invitation-only Content Monetization program, including a white nationalist with neo-Nazi links and an anti-vaccine campaigner. — Read the rest

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In January 1933, five Bronx acquaintances — the press later called them "the Murder Trust" — took out life insurance policies on Michael Malloy, a homeless Irish former firefighter, and set out to collect the $3,500 (about $87,000 today) by getting him to drink himself to death. — Read the rest

The post When five men tried to murder "Iron Mike" with increasingly poisonous drinks appeared first on Boing Boing.

Camp Bonifas, the United Nations Command post 400 meters south of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, has a golf course. One hole, par 3, with an AstroTurf green — and minefields on three sides. Sports Illustrated called it "the most dangerous hole in golf," and there are reports that at least one shot detonated a land mine. — Read the rest

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A Circle K shopper posted a screenshot of an AI self-checkout screen that listed a few flavors of Gatorade at a few dollars apiece, then a line item of $8.5 billion for the American Red Cross, according to the New York Post. — Read the rest

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In 2020 the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts picked up a one-star review that read "worst aquarium ever." It is a museum about the history of whaling, and it keeps no live whales. Six years later, the museum has printed the line on hoodies, T-shirts, crew necks, and bags, according to Boston 25 News. — Read the rest

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Tesla told federal regulators that the headlights on 19,900 Model 3 and Model Y cars were up to nearly twice as bright as the law allows, then argued it shouldn't have to fix them because the defect was "inconsequential" to safety. — Read the rest

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The Glad av Gillberga is a Swedish replica of a warship pulled from Denmark's Roskilde fjord and dated to around 1040. In nearly 30 years it has crossed the North Sea and sailed to Canada. Universal borrowed it for six months for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, where it played one of the escort ships in Odysseus's flotilla — the Greek boats are thought to have resembled Nordic longships. — Read the rest

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A State Department slide that mislabeled every country on a map of Africa — Nigeria landlocked in the Sahara, Mozambique moved to the Horn — has drawn an apology, the Guardian reports. The department said it takes "full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners." — Read the rest

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Netflix billed the January retreat as a "Vulnerability-Trust exercise," held at Sendero Ranch, a company property in Northern California. Kevin Baillie, then head of creative at Netflix's Eyeline Studios, used his turn to disclose that he'd taken supervised ketamine at a Santa Barbara clinic in late 2022 to treat clinical depression after his mother's death. — Read the rest

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DuckDuckGo, the search engine that built its whole pitch on not tracking you, now sells a pair of sunglasses. The $35 Paso Robles never needs charging, skips the smartphone app, and works with no internet connection. DuckDuckGo says that's by design, so the person standing next to you doesn't have to wonder if they're being filmed. — Read the rest

The post DuckDuckGo's answer to Meta's smart glasses is regular sunglasses appeared first on Boing Boing.

Your brain isn't showing you the world so much as guessing at it. That's the argument from psychologist Daniel Yon, who runs the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. The brain, Yon writes, works "like a scientist," constantly forming hypotheses about what's out there rather than passively recording it — a habit that explains everything from mangled song lyrics to why you don't quite trust your own reflection. — Read the rest

The post Your brain guesses at reality instead of recording it appeared first on Boing Boing.

Getting an AI model to launch a cyberattack usually just takes asking the right way. Cisco Talos researchers say that claiming you own the servers you are attacking often works, and so does calling the job a capture-the-flag contest or a bug bounty.  — Read the rest

The post "I'm allowed to do this": how attackers talk past AI safeguards appeared first on Boing Boing.

Over the last two weeks of January 1975, Buckminster Fuller, the designer who popularized the geodesic dome, gave a series of lectures walking through his entire life's work. "Everything I Know" runs 42 hours. The Buckminster Fuller Institute has posted the full transcript, and the video is at the Internet Archive. — Read the rest

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Apple told a court this week that 11 other former employees may have been witnesses or otherwise involved in its trade secrets case against OpenAI, on top of the two it named in the original complaint. Apple is also asking the judge to stop OpenAI from building an AI device based on its technology. — Read the rest

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Dietitian Josie Porter, author of How Not to Take Supplements, sized up ten popular supplements for the Guardian. One of the largest multivitamin trials found a memory improvement in older adults, but it came to "roughly a quarter of a word in a 20-word recall test." — Read the rest

The post A dietitian's verdict: multivitamins are useless appeared first on Boing Boing.

Unpublished author Dylan Reed created a service that cryptographically seals manuscript drafts as evidence that a human wrote them. Vellumproof stamps each version with the time, then cryptographically links it to its predecessor. If you slip a draft in later or alter its date, it will break the chain of hashes. — Read the rest

The post The startup selling proof that a human wrote your manuscript appeared first on Boing Boing.

Nanit's flagship product is a camera bolted above a crib, logging the exact moment a baby's eyes open and close and scoring each night's sleep from zero to 100. The firm that built its brand identity described the job, per Sapna Maheshwari in The New York Times, as "transcending the negative connotations of 'surveillance.'" — Read the rest

The post Baby monitors now want to predict who your kid will become appeared first on Boing Boing.

When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz five months ago, experts predicted oil could spike to $150 or $200 a barrel. It has barely topped $100. According to Rogé Karma, writing in The Atlantic, the reason may be China, which abruptly cut its oil imports by half. — Read the rest

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British writer Henry Oliver had his first slice of pecan pie in a Bethesda, Maryland diner, and came away amazed that Americans eat this well every day. In The Common Reader, he calls the pie part of "the ordinary sublime of American life," and says it "knocks English apple crumble into a cocked hat." — Read the rest

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Lokesh Dhakar's ASCII Today renders your text as big block letters made out of slashes, pipes, and underscores — the kind that head old README files and source-code comments. When you type a word at ascii.today, all 50 fonts appear at once in a grid, redrawing character by character.  — Read the rest

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