SoylentNews

Model says she was freed after 'deep web' kidnapping in Italy: Police

The alleged abductors used encrypted accounts to ask the model’s agent for $300,000 to stop the auction from taking place, claiming to work on behalf of something called the "Black Death Group," which operates within the so-called deep web, police said.

The deep web, or "dark web," is a network of websites that cannot typically be found by search engines, and are often protected through encryption. Billions of dollars in drugs, weapons and other items have been illegally traded on the sites.

Investigators discovered evidence that the suspect, Herba, may have previously organized several online auctions of abducted women, through ads he allegedly described the women and set starting prices. Police said it is unclear whether he actually abducted the women or whether they had ever really been for sale.

Italian police described Herba as a "dangerous subject with aspects of mythomania," which is a pathological inclination to exaggerate.

"It is unclear ... whether the young people were really kidnapped or whether the man invented everything," Deputy Prosecutor Paolo Storari said at a press conference. "The man also presented himself as a professional killer."

Mythomania, they say.

Update: Milan kidnap case: Chloe Ayling 'held to pay for cancer treatment'

Is There a Giant Planet Lurking Beyond Pluto?

Not much new here, but this looks promising:

Michael Medford and Danny Goldstein, graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, think they have a solution to that problem. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of images covering the search area for Planet Nine—all shot from 2009 to 2016 using a 1.2-meter telescope in the mountains north of San Diego—their system will combine multiple images in an ingenious way that should brighten the faint flickers of light from Planet Nine enough to distinguish them from background noise.

“Because the planet is moving with respect to the background stars, you can’t just add overlapping images together,” Medford points out. Instead, their software selects each of the many distinct plausible orbits for Planet Nine, projects the planet’s movement onto the relevant patch of sky, and then offsets successive images to superimpose—and brighten—any pixels corresponding to the planet. A pipeline of software written with Peter Nugent, their faculty advisor, performs the overlapping and subtracts known objects such as stars.

The computational task is enormous because the planet’s orbit is still so uncertain. To do a 98 percent complete search, Medford estimates, they will need to perform 10 billion image comparisons. Fortunately, Nugent has time allocated on the Cori supercomputer, a new Cray XC40 system that recently ranked as the fifth most powerful in the world.

False positives are unavoidable. “Even if we get only one false hit for every million searches, we’ll still get 10,000 fake planets,” Goldstein says. “So we will be passing all detections through a machine-learning system trained to catch and reject artifacts: satellite trails, hot pixels, cosmic rays, and other spurious sources.”

With the data already in hand, the two expect the system, running in parallel on hundreds of Cori’s CPU nodes and 278 hyperthreads per node, to finish the work in just a few days when they flip the switch in August. “We’ll be sitting on the edge of our seats,” Goldstein says. “And whether we find P9 or not, this method can be used to detect other TNOs.”

I'm resigning from my role in the site, not that I had a big role anyway.

This isn't due to any problems I had with the site or administration, I've just lost interest and I've been unable/uninterested in contributing anything to the site.

I've enjoyed my time here. I've learned a lot and leave with nothing but warm feelings for everyone I've interacted with. If anyone has any concerns or questions, I'll be hanging around in IRC for a week or so. Feel free to send me a query and I'll try to get back to you.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Battle of the racial alternate reality fiction concepts:

Amazon's Making Its Own Post-Civil War Series Called 'Black America'

A couple weeks ago, HBO announced that the guys behind Game of Thrones—no, not George R. R. Martin, but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—are working on a new series about an alternate history where the Confederate South won the Civil War and seceded from the union. The show, titled Confederate, caused a big stir online from people who thought that, well, maybe a pair of white dudes best known for making a fantasy show about dragons and zombies and incest aren't the best people to tactfully address modern-day slavery.

In the wake of the controversy, Amazon took the opportunity to announce that it had also been working on a similar alternate history show over the past year—but with a few key differences, Deadline reports.

First, Amazon's show, called Black America, will be the brainchild of Boondocks genius Aaron McGruder and producer Will Packer, who did Straight Outta Compton and, more recently, Girls Trip. Also, instead of Confederate's faux-history about a split United States where slavery still lives on, Black America is set in a world where freed African Americans were given a trio of Southern states after the Civil War as reparations. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are fused to form a new nation, called New Colonia, and the series tackles its tenuous relationship with the original US of A.

Confederate reminds me of the fun but low-budget mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. Black America reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' article The Case for Reparations. He is also involved in entertainment; he wrote the new Black Panther comics for Marvel last year, which have been cited as an influence for the upcoming movie.

Amid HBO’s “Confederate” fallout, Amazon introduces alt-history show “Black America”

The African-American community has long made the case for reparations from the United States government. Ta-Nehisi Coates convincingly argued in 2014 that the freedom given to slaves after the Civil War was not enough — that black people in America had suffered through institutionalized racism long after slavery had been abolished.

Packer told Deadline that the controversy surrounding “Confederate” pressured him to divulge the upcoming project. The show itself is not a reaction to “Confederate,” as reports say it has been in development for over a year.

Coca-Cola Revamps Coke Zero

Coca-Cola to replace Coke Zero in U.S.

Coca-Cola is killing Coke Zero as we know it — and people are freaking out

What, no stevia?

I would submit this, but like, nah.

No, it's not Ethanol-Fueled. But it is relevant to Ethanol-Fueled.

Prosthetic penis sex attacker Gayle Newland jailed

I understand Gayle Newland’s impulse to catfish – I posed as a man online for sex

Continuation of Doctor Who freakout:

Two former Doctors clash over Jodie Whittaker casting

Bad Western cultural influence excised from China:

Justin Bieber banned from China for 'bad behaviour'

Japan's First Lady trolls God Emperor Trumpu-jiichan?

BBC, LA Times, Newsweek, and The Guardian.

How OJ Simpson paved the way for Donald Trump

Parole board votes to release O.J. Simpson from prison in October

Also at BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, Vice, and CNN. Wikipedia.

The OJ Simpson trials: Where are they now?

One thing to note is that despite a $33.5 million civil judgment against O.J., retirement income is protected under federal law.

Don't forget O.J.'s greatest gift to mankind. One national treasure begets another.

Woman In Saudi Arabia Arrested For Wearing Skirt, Crop Top In Video

5 Injured In Series Of Acid Attacks In London

The Evening Standard newspaper reports that nearly 1,500 acid attacks were reported in London in the past six years.

Hong Kong's High Court Expels Pro-Democracy Lawmakers

Man-Repelling Flamethrowers Are Being Marketed to Women in China

Although it's unclear if women in China are actually using these mini flamethrowers, they're not the most bizarre product aimed at keeping aggressive men away. That honor goes to the "anti-pervert" leggings that apparently give women's legs a hairier look and made the rounds on Chinese blogs in 2013.

That could attract a worse variety of pervert.

Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation (archive.is)

Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”

But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election campaign.

Emphasis mine.

Quentin Tarantino Met With Margot Robbie For Sharon Tate: Sources

Word has gotten out that Quentin Tarantino’s next film will be a drama revolving around the Manson Family murders. Deadline has heard that Tarantino met with Margot Robbie to potentially play Sharon Tate, the actress wife of director Roman Polanski who was slain in 1969 in a brutal murder whose savagery shocked the country.

How Kim Kardashian’s Lesser Siblings Are Sullying Her Brand

Every Kardashian is a snowflake: beautiful, unique, and with her own distinctive brand of merchandise. Kim is the sexy one and the famous one. Khloé is the funny one. Kourtney is the healthy one/the super mom. Rob is the boy. As soon as they graduated from puberty/fake high school, Kendall and Kylie Jenner took on their own roles in the family business, garnishing their half-siblings’ reality TV show empire with their own special flair (aka black fashion trends they found on Instagram). Kylie had big lips and a rapper boyfriend, and Kendall was a real model. Kylie wore long acrylic nails and Kendall had sleep paralysis. Kylie realized lots of things and Kendall appeared to realize absolutely nothing. With the addition of the Jenner sisters, the Kardashian brand became stronger and more inescapable than ever. This updated cast promised an era of Kardashian success and stasis: sisters and half-sisters prattling on over grilled chicken salads season after season, getting married, giving birth, growing older, customizing and re-customizing their Mercedes just to feel something.

And then 2017 hit Calabasas like a meteor, leaving a trail of escalating controversies and some abandoned Dash merchandise in its wake.

To put things into perspective, just last summer the Kardashians were celebrating the demise of family nemesis Taylor Swift, who was effectively outed for her serpentine tendencies on Kim Kardashian’s Snapchat. Following Kim’s Pulitzer-worthy work, Swift was relegated to her own ninth circle of hell: anonymity. Swift was squad-less and single and Kim Kardashian was more famous than ever, essentially dancing on her enemy’s grave in a pair of priceless custom Yeezys. Now, less than a year later, the entire Kardashian family appears to be teetering on the brink of overexposure, just like TayTay. This is the way the Kardashian world ends: not with a bang, but a potent combination of cultural appropriation scandals, Instagram revenge porn, a really bad Pepsi ad, and desecrating the memory of Tupac Shakur.

It’s hard to say if the Kardashians have been sabotaged by their lesser siblings, or are merely reaping the rewards of their own shitty seeds. After all, the main gripe that socially conscious consumers appear to have with the Kardashians is their cultural appropriation—and while these accusations have certainly escalated, taking trend cues from women of color has always been an integral part of the Kardashian brand. When Kim Kardashian was, incorrectly and ahistorically, heralded for singlehandedly making hips and butts sexy, she arguably set her family on the path to their own destruction. Ever since, the Kardashians have consistently co-opted black trends, aesthetics, and styles—everything from cornrows to, allegedly, the n-word. Sure, there’s a difference between braiding your hair a certain way because you saw a black woman doing it on Tumblr and putting your face on top of Biggie Smalls’. Then again, when you build an entire brand off of your ability to spot and repackage trends, the line between curation and harmful co-option is predictably thin. And when you’re Kylie Jenner, a 19-year-old who has repeatedly been accused of stealing things she likes without permission, the line is apparently non-existent.