The Latest from Boing Boing

"Can opener" bridge claims 10 victims in 2014 As the end of 2014 draws near, it's time to watch this year's collection of 11foot8 videos, starring the infamous "can-opener" railroad trestle of Durham, NC. Read the rest... How to trick your brain with M&Ms Researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute made a Lego checkerboard and placed white and purple M&Ms on the squares in a way that makes the board appear to bulge. [via] Read the rest... NSA dumps incriminating documents on Christmas Eve At 1:30pm on Christmas Eve, the NSA dumped a huge cache of documents on its website in response to a long-fought ACLU Freedom of Information Act request, including documents that reveal criminal wrongdoing. Read the rest... Popular Skullture - the skull motif in pulps, paperbacks, and comics Monte Beauchamp’s book, Popular Skullture is a refreshing look back at the early days of mass culture print publishing, when skulls still evoked a sense of the macabre. Read the rest... Christmas Kitty Bokeh A lovely cat capture by Maia Weinstock, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. Read the rest... Facebook must face privacy violation lawsuit over scanning users' messages to target ads Aw, poor Facebook. What a lump of coal in their Christmas stocking. Read the rest... Alternate theory on Sony Hack points to Russian hackers, not North Korea Many in the information security community doubt that the Sony hack was North Korea's handiwork. Read the rest... Short Film: The Night Before Christmas (1905) Directed by Edwin S. Porter, a short film from 1905 that brings to life the poem first published anonymously in 1823, generally attributed to Clement Clarke Moore. Read the rest... Stress makes us work harder for pleasurable rewards, but doesn't make us appreciate them more A new study from researchers at the University of Geneva suggests that while stress can cause us to work very, very hard to achieve rewards, being stressed out doesn't help us enjoy those rewards. Read the rest... A Reasoned Account of Seasonal Anthropomorphism and Hoarding The story of a Velvet Underground CD and the plight of media formats long past. Read the rest... War on General Purpose Computers is the difference between utopia and dystopia My Wired op-ed, How Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us to Greater Harm, warns that we've learned the wrong lesson from the DRM wars: we've legitimized the idea that we can and should design computers to disobey their owners and hide their operations from them in order to solve our problems (and that we should protect this design decision by making it a felony to disclose flaws in devices, lest these flaws be used to jailbreak them). Read the rest...