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Topless Protester Arrested at First Day of Cosby Retrial Used to Be on The Cosby Show

Legalize it.

Vatican police arrest ex-diplomat over 'child pornography'

Police at the Vatican have arrested a priest who previously worked at the Holy See's US embassy on suspicion of possessing child pornography.

Carlo Alberto Capella was taken into custody after an investigation.

Monsignor Capella was recalled from the US in September 2017 after US authorities told the Vatican about a possible violation of child pornography laws by one of its diplomats.

He was ordained in 1993 and joined the Vatican's diplomatic corps in 2004.

The arrest could draw fresh attention to Pope Francis's efforts to snuff out child abuse in the Catholic Church. He has pledged zero tolerance but critics say he has not done enough to hold to account bishops who allegedly covered up abuse.

Also at NYT and The Guardian.

Are Water Worlds Habitable?

Rehash of this article. But here is a detail that may have been overlooked:

Take the fifth planet within the TRAPPIST-1 system as an example. Cayman Unterborn, an exogeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, and his colleagues think that the liquid water here extends down about 200 kilometers—roughly 20 times deeper than Earth’s Mariana Trench. That much water would create a large ice layer at the bottom of the ocean which would seal the ocean from the land and effectively shut down a geochemical cycle that plays a crucial role in Earth’s habitability.

The Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review: EVO Meets Its Match

Very fast sequential speeds and high IOPS. Endurance could be problematic (600 TB for the 1 TB model, calculated as 0.3 DWPD). I wonder what that ratio will be for QLC 3D NAND SSDs.

Western Digital bought SanDisk in 2016.

Viral Photo Of Hockey Player Breastfeeding Baby Sparks Debate Among Social Media Users

Online tumult over breastfeeding photo challenges stigmas, highlights hurdles

Furor Over Alberta Hockey Player's Breastfeeding Pic Proves Stigma Still Exists: Experts

After nearly 6 years with a Motorola Photon Q (XT897/"Asanti") I finally decided it's time for a new phone, and spent the outrageous sum of just-under-$130-including-shipping for a Moto C Plus, screenglass, and rubber body armor.

Motorola, now a subsidiary of Lenovo, is known for most of its phones being fairly amenable to rooting and unlocking. This particular one also happens to be GSM-enabled and support dual SIMs, on the off chance I ever leave the US and want a data plan. Its specs are, by today's standards, unimpressive: quad-core MT6737M CPU (4x ARMv8 A53 @ 28nm, somewhat slower than a Snapdragon 425 for reference), 2 GB of memory, 16GB of eMMC flash, and 5" 1280x720 screen. The body is all plastic, though it's not bad plastic, and the battery is a surprising 4,000 mAh that weighs more than the phone itself does.

Now, it turns out the C Plus is *not* as easily unlockable as, say, the G4 is. In particular, the usual fastboot commands such as get_unlock_data simply fail with "unknown remote command" errors. The stock ROM is also kind of pants, though it's at least a fairly vanilla Android 7.0 rather than Madokami-forgive-us-all MIUI or TouchWiz.

However, there is a program called SP Flash Tool that is able to write directly to MediaTek devices' internal flash over a USB port. This is not for the faint of heart, as it requires carefully-crafted scatter files with the exact starting addresses and lengths corresponding to each and every piece of the stock firmware, and if you mess up by even one byte, you will very likely hard-brick your phone. For even more heart-pounding excitement, the way to get a custom ROM on here is not to use this tool, but to pop into an advanced mode and specify where to start writing (if you're curious, it's 0x2d80000 and no, that's not a typo) and with what file.

The purpose here is to flash a custom build of TeamWin recovery, known by its uncomplimentary acronym TWRP. And *this* involves dissecting the machine, removing its battery, holding VolDown, and hooking it up to a PC via USB cable, *in that order.* Somehow, Flash Tool is able to write to the device even though it's powered off and battery-less.

From here, disconnect from the PC, hold VolUp and Power, and select Recovery boot. After about 30s, TWRP will load, and you can pull up ADB in your shell, place the device in sideload mode, and "adb sideload /path/to/lineageos-14.1.zip," which goes a hell of a lot faster than you'd expect it to. But there's a catch: if you reboot now, you'll go into an endless bootloop, where the phone won't go past the Motorola logo. If you don't have a stock ROM or, preferably, a Nandroid backup, this is game over.

Turns out you *also* need to install SuperSU, and you need to do it in a special way: while in TWRP, pop a terminal, and do "echo SYSTEMLESS=true>/data/.supersu" before adb-sideloading a known-good SuperSU .zip onto the phone. The output will be quite verbose, and it will warn you that 1) on reboot, the device will likely restart at least once and 2) first boot will take "several minutes."

They're not kidding. I lost count of the exact amount of time, but I believe LineageOS sat there blowing bubbles to itself for a good 15 or 20 minutes, and I was literally seconds away from forcing a power-down and starting the entire process again with a stock ROM. It also takes well over a minute to boot; I counted 33 sets of right-to-left bubbles at the LineageOS loading screen per bootup, and that's after a good 30 seconds of the phone sitting at the Motorola logo with a nice fat warning about how the device can't be verified and might not work properly.

Yeah, that's the point: from Google's PoV, it's *not* working properly, because LineageOS seems not to have all that spying junk on it. I didn't even flash a GApps zip; instead, first thing I did was to sideload an FDroid archive, which is something like an open source version of the Play Store. Everything I need is on there and more.

So far, I am loving this thing. I've been zipping all over downtown Milwaukee looking for a new place to lease the last couple of days, and there is nothing like having a portable MP3 player for those long rides. And get this: after using it to play music for a good 3 hours, *the battery was still at 95% from a full charge this morning.* That is *nuts.* The Moto C Plus punches way, way above its weight with the proper love and attention paid to it.

So if anyone wants a good budget phone to run LineageOS, Resurrection Remix, etc on and doesn't mind doing some nailbitingly-scary stuff with direct flashing, I can heartily recommend the C Plus (NOT the C, that thing is junk). Happy flashing, everyone :)

Crazed girls flood Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz with fan mail

Mass murderer Nikolas Cruz is getting stacks of fan mail and love letters sent to the Broward County jail, along with hundreds of dollars in contributions to his commissary account.

Teenage girls, women and even older men are writing to the Parkland school shooter and sending photographs — some suggestive — tucked inside cute greeting cards and attached to notebook paper with offers of friendship and encouragement. Groupies also are joining Facebook communities to talk about how to help the killer.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained copies of some of the letters showing that Cruz, who had few friends in the outside world, is now being showered with attention.

Tresorit Launches Campaign To Build An End-To-End Encrypted Social Network

Sociall.io

The new technology that aspires to #DeleteFacebook for good (Mastodon)

At the end of these charts, you can see a small spike in Diaspora users.

It might all be in the name. People/"dumb fucks" will sign up for a "Facebook", but "Prevaat"?

Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump, and Shark Week: ‘He made me sit and watch’ (archive)

Clickbait? Sure. But reading about the history of "Shark Week" in that context really makes something click.

Stormy Daniels describes her alleged affair with Donald Trump (w/ transcript)

"Wow, you-- you are special. You remind me of my daughter."

Yet Another American Football League: The Alliance of American Football

Another New Football League Says It Will Start Play in 2019

The N.F.L. is under pressure from falling television ratings, lawsuits over its handling of concussions, and fan opposition to player protests during the national anthem.

Yet investors keep lining up to help start new football leagues. On Tuesday, the longtime N.F.L. executive Bill Polian and the television and movie producer Charlie Ebersol became the latest entrepreneurs to join the fray when they unveiled plans for the Alliance of American Football.

There have been several short-lived football leagues before, including the United Football League, United States Football League and XFL. Like others before them, Polian and Ebersol say they have a formula for success. They have acquired investments from Silicon Valley firms that will allow their eight-team league to start playing a week after the Super Bowl in February 2019. Their partners include CBS, which will show a few games on its main channel and some on its cable network. They will also launch a smartphone app on which fans will be able to stream games and play fantasy football.

The league will also aim for two-and-a-half hour games (N.F.L. games generally last at least three hours). To achieve that, there will be no kickoffs or extra points — only 2-point plays — and a 30-second play clock, as opposed to the N.F.L.'s 45-second clock. There will also be no television timeouts, which will lead to about 60 percent fewer commercials.

Also at Variety.

Previously: As National Football League Ratings Fall, Could the "XFL" Make a Return?