Apparently they got sold (accidentally?) as part of a surplus lot to a NASA intern named Gary George back in 1976.  George's father found them in among everything else, and he's kept them safe all these years -- and apparently tried to sell them back to NASA for more money than they were willing to pay ten years ago when the active search for them was still ongoing.  Now that the 50th anniversary of the moon landing is coming up Real Soon Now, he's put them up for auction with Sotheby's, who have verified that they are in fact the genuine article.  (The tapes have been played once for verification, and once more for the purpose of digitizing their contents.)

The tapes go up for auction on the 21st (of course), with a minimum bid of US$700,000. Follow the link above to see the Sotheby's catalog page for them. And go here for the Gizmodo article on the tapes.

It looks like a journalist by the name of Andy Ngo was attacked at a protest over the weekend by 'antifas' using quickdry cement in milkshakes as weapons... Which sounds silly typing it. That, and the fact I haven't found anything besides his claims yet, makes me a little suspicious, but if it's true, they need to be charged, followed by being told how stupid they were for wrecking a good, relatively anti-violent protest meme, and giving the fucksticks the kind of response they dream of.

Did you hear?  Sting got kidnapped.
Yeah, the Police have no lead.

<rimshot>

This time, in Canada.

Cartoonist let go from N.B. newspapers days after Trump image goes viral

Quote:When he asked his editor whether it was a cost-cutting measure, or his online social media or even "gross incompetence," de Adder said, he was told no.

Michael de Adder Wrote:Cartoonists in the U.S. are painted as being from the left or the right. Some even as Democrat or Republican. Cartoonists are not partisan in Canada. We're not Democrat or Republican, we're just anti-stupid. We attack both sides. We just want to illustrate the stupidity.

POLITICO: Trump officials weigh encryption crackdown

Quote:Senior officials debated whether to ask Congress to effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption, which scrambles data so that only its sender and recipient can read it, these people told POLITICO. Tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook have increasingly built end-to-end encryption into their products and software in recent years — billing it as a privacy and security feature but frustrating authorities investigating terrorism, drug trafficking and child pornography.

“The two paths were to either put out a statement or a general position on encryption, and [say] that they would continue to work on a solution, or to ask Congress for legislation,” said one of the people.

It's July 1! Happy Canada Day!

Let's also celebrate the anniversary of the independence of Congo Free State, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Maderia.

And let us commemorate the Battle of Gettysburg, the Battle of San Juan Hill, the Battle of the Somme, and the First Battle of El Alamein, amongst others.

Oh, and it's the 145th anniversary of the day the first commercially-successful typewriter went on sale, the 138th anniversary of the first international telephone call, the 116th anniversary of the first Tour de France, the 76th anniversary of the day that Tokyo stopped being a city, the 56th anniversary of the ZIP code, the 35th anniversary of the PG-13 rating, and the 28th anniversary of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

And happy 67th birthday, Dan Aykroyd!

With all of that - and more - being commemorated today, anything happening later this week will be something of an anticlimax, right? (Of course I jest there. July 2 is the midpoint day of the year!)

Apparently, it's an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app. Does anyone here have any experience with it, or has anybody heard anything - bad or good - about it? https://signal.org/

If I wanted lots of light in the morning, even indirectly reflected off your very white vinyl siding would I have fucking chosen a north-facing room?

Now where did I put the roll of jumbo trash bags...?

This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come next week

Quote:If you bought an ebook through Microsoft's online store, now's the time to give it a read, or reread, because it will stop working early July.

That's right, the books you paid for will be literally removed from your electronic bookshelf because, um, Microsoft decided in April it no longer wanted to sell books. It will turn off the servers that check whether your copy was bought legitimately – using the usual anti-piracy digital-rights-management (DRM) tech – and that means your book can't be verified as being in the hands of its purchaser, and so won't be displayed.

Even the free-to-download ebooks will fail.

Quote:You would imagine that Microsoft considered other options: figuring out how to remove the need for DRM validation for those books; seeing if it could provide a non-DRM version; selling its database of DRM books to another company; or keeping a skeleton DRM system in place.

The fact that it decided against all these options and to simply kill the whole thing off should be a very big warning sign to anyone who has bought, considered buying, or will consider buying an ebook in the future.

The truth is that most ebooks come with some degree of DRM. Amazon and its Kindle ebooks are the biggest in the market – nearly all of them come with Amazon's DRM system.

Quote:The though occurred to me that humans were programmed in the same way.