I’m not convinced this isn’t a hoax or viral marketing campaign, since “strange news blackout” can also mean “didn’t actually happen.” Even if it’s fictional internet lore, it’s notable as such. (Appears to be real). An anonymous friend of BB says,

There seems to be a strange news blackout around the horrifying story of the “Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs”, three Ukranian teens who apparently recently performed a series of staggeringly violent serial killings and recorded them on cellphone video and then attended the victims’ funerals. Supposedly this is some of the first actual video of this kind of crime that has made it into the wild of the internet - the perspective of the deranged killer.

If you Google-news “Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs,” little if anything comes up, but the video and story is all over the gore/shock sites, putting them ahead of the news organizations here in the US.

I can’t watch the video, and only came across the story by cruising Encyclopedia Dramatica for teh (non-violent, tsk-tsking) lulz, but I glimpsed some stills and felt a little more heartsick about humankind because of it.

Purported Translation of cellphone video dialogue. See also dnepropetrovskmaniacs.com. [warning: links include graphic violence]. Link to video of teens in Ukranian court [does not include video footage of the attacks, thanks leriseux]

A NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR: I don’t want to see any more comments from people who read Xeni’s description, watched the video anyway, and are complaining about how horrifying it is. Yes! It’s horrifying! If you don’t want to see that, don’t watch the video. Furthermore, those of you who feel that stuff like this should not be given attention are hereby invited to (1.) not watch the video, and (2.) not post comments about it, either. (Ignoring: ur doin it rong.) Thank you.

p.s.: There’s a large stash of unicorn chasers further down the thread. Use as needed.

–Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Hello all. I am from Ukraine, I live in Kiev, but at that time i worked with a girl whose family lived in the same entrance of the multistoried building as one of those teenagers. I remember the horror when she was speaking about what was going on and the shock when she knew it was her neighbor. What we know from the news is… they were 3. One of them was likely an initiator (his surname was Supruniuk) and second one supported him. The third one was kinda acting under the pressure. Nobody knows what moved them, because they rarely robbed. They just liked to kill, those who were weaker than they. It is totally sick, totally criminal. Some newspapers wrote that they might have been under the cover of the dad of this Supruniuk…that he kinda was selling those videos online. N tht he was trying to hide the evindece (smb threw mobile phones in the lavatory)… Some say that they got more pending crimes imposed upon them by police. They are very calm during interrogation, etc. Their parents can not believe. In the phone of one of them police found some nazi images… What can i say… I dont want to ever watch anything about that or know anything more than i know. Their souls are sick. May God do something to that.. Regards, Margaret

From at-Largely (Larisa Alexandrovna):

“Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all “known” Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.”

Graham writes: “Unfortunately, he won’t get to talk. He died in a plane crash yesterday.”

UPDATE: A curious press release: “Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation” (Thanks, Adam!)

(Via Why, That’s Delightful)

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we interviewed Douglas Krone, the CEO of new import tech toy store Gizmine; found an astonishing $250,000 wristwatch; and beheld a giant mechanical spider.

John saw a spy cam-watch from Brando, an awesome Lego chess set, and—drool!—Moleskine iPod cases.

There was also a floating DVD player, a Roomba from 1959, and a crazy 1980s ad with Zack! Lego Maniac!

It’s been a fantastic year, thanks to you folks. It’s been an especially great year for me, writing-wise. The UK edition of Little Brother, my first young adult novel, is selling briskly, and the US edition is doing spectacularly, having just gone on to an eighth hardcover printing (the hardcover’s selling so well that my publisher’s delayed the paperback for a year!). The book’s made just about everyone’s best-of lists for 2008: the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, School Library Journal, Amazon Editors’ Picks, Amazon top teen books, Richie’s Picks, Book Sense, VOYA, TeenReads, Texas Library Association, io9 — not to mention a whopping haul of awards and award-nominations: Emperor Norton Award, ALA’s YALSA Award, Cybils Award, Prometheus Award, Ontario Library Association White Pine Award, the ALA Printz Award and the Nebula Award! My agents are doing some serious talking with a film studio (though nothing’s ever final until it’s signed and delivered), and there are more overseas publishers signing up every month to do their own editions.

Best of all is all the fan-stuff — videos, art, readings, translations, adaptations… All the stuff that takes advantage of the Creative Commons license to remake Little Brother to better suit the readers (and man, do I get awesome email from readers, from security researchers at Microsoft to activist students in rural schools). And of course, I was floored by the generosity of the donors who sent hundreds of copies of the book to libraries, schools, halfway houses, and shelters as a way of saying thanks for the CC license.

Who the hell knows what’ll happen in 2009? It’s definitely the most uncertain new year I can remember. One thing I’m sure of, though, is that whatever happens, we’ll all figure it out together, that the Internet will make it possible for us to bug-in and help each other here at home, rather than heading for a defensive position in the hills. Crappy economies are often the home of wonderful Bohemias. Two recessions ago, I dropped out of school to become a computer programmer. In the last one, I quit the company I’d co-founded and went to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now that I’m a parent — and now that I’m a little older — I feel the risk a lot more keenly than I did then. But I just keep on remembering that we live in the best time in the history of the world to have a worst time: the time when collective action is cheaper and easier than ever, the time when more information and better access to tools, ideas and communities are at our fingertips than they’ve ever been.

Have a fantastic holiday. Remind the people who matter to you of that fact. Ring in the new year with a big grin, and I’ll see you all in 2009.

Today, on my In Bed podcast, I interview Wendy Chapkis, author of Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine.

Wendy and her co-author Richard Webb conducted extensive interviews with members of WAMM (The Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana) - the patient collective that exemplifies the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” ethos when it comes to pot medicine.

In this excerpt, Wendy talks a bit about how boring ole’ cannabis became demon “mari-juana,” in D.E.A. history.

Listen to an excerpt

Read an introduction to Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine (PDF).

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

bOING bOING contributor and happy mutant Jim Leftwich says:

Exciting news! My friend and longtime colleague Steve Doss and I have been working 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week non-stop (except Thanksgiving Day) to build what we think is a pretty remarkable (in many ways) new mobile app - SeeqPod Mobile for Windows Mobile.

We wanted to get the word out that we’re giving away free downloads of the app starting today (we’ll start selling it for $9.95 on Monday, which is still about half of what most Windows Mobile apps cost, and this one is way cooler).

Steve and I have been collaborators for several years. I did all of the design and user experience architecture, putting everything I know about making a great product cool and easy to use. Steve’s been a successful mobile app designer (he’s an artist, musician, programmer, and all-around genius renaissance guy). He figured out how to do lots of things that other apps don’t do on the Windows Mobile platform.

You can read a bit about the app and it’s features at our mobile page, and here are some groovy screenshots.

We’ve built in a range of interchangeable color themes and skins, including a Steampunk skin (in honor of Boing Boing fans everywhere). The architecture allows customizability, so eventually we will have many skins available and people will be able to add to a growing collection of skins.

We also support both QVGA (320×240) and VGA (640×480) displays, which will be cool for people with the newest generation of Windows Mobile phones.

SeeqPod Mobile

Founded by Mongols in the time of Ghengis Kahn, the town of Oymyakon is the coldest permanently inhabited place on earth.

The village has a population of around 800 and is located 690 meters above sea level and lies in a valley between two mountain ranges (the reason for the low temperatures). The name Oymyakon means “non-freezing water” because of the natural hot spring close to the village.

The temperature this week is pretty low and the temperature tomorrow is a chilly -63C which based on the stats at Wikipedia equals the record low for December.

Over on Instructables, Belsey shows how to make your own Alka Seltzer for a fraction of the cost.

As I was making bath bombs to give for Christmas I felt a little heartburn. I reached for the Alka Seltzer… Wow… $8.99 for 36 tablets! One dose is made of 2 tablets, so that comes to 50 cents per dose. Then I looked at the active ingredients. Citric acid and sodium bicarbonate. Exactly what I was using for the bath bombs! Sour salt and baking soda! I made a rapid calculation: one dose comes to 2 grams of citric acid, and 3.88 grams of baking soda. If I figure that citric acid costs $4/lb and baking soda is $1/lb, the exact same dose of alka selzer’s active ingredients would cost me about 2.5 cents to make myself…. Twenty times less than the store bought version! OK to be fair, I didn’t figure the cost of filler, and the store bought alka selzer also contained aspirin, but I neither needed nor wanted the aspirin. Even if you end up spending more on the citric acid and less for the Alka Seltzer than I did, you’ll still come out ahead.

Artist Paul Fryer calls his piece of art Rehabilitation. Because it has a little room inside, I would have called it Bomb Shelter. (via Shedblog)

Fantastic EP cover from 1957 for The Goons.

There’s an MP3 of “I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas” (sung my Spike Milligan) at the link.

The Goons: “I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas”

Another fun step-by-step Photoshop tutorial at PSDTuts: how to draw the platonic ideal of an ice cream bar.

Draw an ice cream bar in Photoshop

English Russia has more photos of the vomitously ugly interior of Russia’s presidential jet.

On Tuesday a 16-year-old boy caught vandalizing at Wilson Classical High School in Long Beach, CA walked the streets for five hours with a sandwich board that read “I have wasted your tax money with dumb acts of vandalism in the public schools.” His father made him wear the sandwich board.

Baltimore, Sr., found out about the vandalism Monday, when his son’s school called him and told him the damages would cost $875. He said his son was trying to get attention when he tagged a fictitious gang logo on school property.

Baltimore, Jr., was suspended for four days, and ordered by the school to spend several days of his holiday vacation doing community service on Wilson’s campus. He will be painting over graffiti and doing other chores.

Father Punishes Son with Public Humiliation

“Say Goodbye to 2008 in the Manner It Deserves!”

Pick a shoe, any shoe….

Now choose a velocity and angle, and let the spirit move you!

Comrade Danielle in Argentina forwarded this little Saatchi present to me yesterday, but I don’t think fluency in Spanish is at all essential!

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

Aside from whether or not you think it’s an insult to entertain a notorious bigot at the television event of the year, why isn’t Obama worrying more about Warren’s charlatan-tastic profile?

If I was an underwriter, I’d say this guy has all the “tells” of a big risk.

Deja vu: major Fundie evangelist can’t stop talking about how disgusting gay people are, comparing them to incestors and pedophiles. Decries loose women having abortions. Demands his enemies be offed. Then caps it all off with how much he “loves” everybody. Send your check now!

Warren has all the earmarks we saw with Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Bob Allen, David “DiaperPants” Vitter, et al. It’s a bad rerun.

If this dude isn’t found in a bathroom with a wide stance and a hooker in the next year, someone’s not doing their job. Paging Jeff Gannon!

I have a different pastor for Obama to consider, if he’d  like to take a second look…

(Photo: Screen capture from video of a Saddleback church service Orange County Register)

Here’s a video of Obama defending his invitation.

Here’s a video of Rick Warren Campaigning for Prop 8, to stop gay marriage.

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

(Flash embed above, or download an MP4 video here.)

Happy Hols from Boing Boing tv! In this week’s Friday Unicorn Chaser episode, Sculptor Chris Yates creates laser-cut robots for the holidays, based on the Diesel Sweeties webcomic by R. Stevens.

Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.

The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.

The Torture Report

Above, a piece by “brain artist” Marjorie Taylor. Curator Bill Harbaugh explains,

This is the world’s largest extant collection of anatomically correct fabric brain art. Inspired by research from neuroscience, dissection and neuroeconomics, our current exhibition features three quilts with functional images from PET and fMRI scanning and a knitted brain. The artists are Marjorie Taylor and Karen Norberg. Techniques used include quilting, applique, embroidery, beadwork, knitting, and crocheting. Materials include fabric, yarn, metallic threads, electronic components such as magnetic core memory, and wire, zippers, and beads

The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art. If you like that, don’t miss the gallery of Wooden Brain Art. (Via New Scientist, Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Still not done your christmas shopping? Make it easy with our guide to wonderful gadgets. Add your suggestions in the comments.

If you want an Apple Netbook, see our OSX compatibility chart. If you want to pirate software, see the guilt trip that one firm has in store for you. And if you want to get your hands dry, Dyson’s Airblade is where it’s at. Add your voice to the “I’ve spotted one!” thread.

Joel found out that the Nissan 370Z has downshift rev matching, that Fujitsu’s N7010 has a tiny second screen, and that Dell’s Adamo might be a laptop thinner than the MacBook Air. Apparently, men like to be buried with their gadgets.

John found globular sticky light balls, liquid lamps that ooze gore, and pointed out the waxy unleasantness of the vintage Apple ad. Rob spotted 12seconds, an app which records video (sort of) on the iPhone, and OSX running on a Philishave.

Mitch Altman traveled to Paris, and Xeni wants to know what you want us to cover at CES next month.Finally, sad news. Majel Barret died.

Boing Boing Gadgets

This crapping robot toilet-paper holder manages to signal your literacy, robophilia, and deep commitment to bowel evacuation, all in one simple package. Bravo!

Newspaper reader - toilet paperholder

(Thanks, Alice!)