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For more than a year, marshalled by animator Andy Bailey, more than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire three hours. 120,000 individually drawn pages. A couple of months ago, they released the first 11 minutes:
It’s pretty amazing. It doesn’t include the audio or music from the movie, but I bet you could mute the sound on this and simultaneously play the actual movie for the sound. Here’s an earlier sneak peek at some of the scenes:
This artist wrote about their participation in the project; they contributed 108 drawings that amounted to roughly 10 seconds of animation (and took 30-40 hours to do):
The first clip I claimed was a pretty iconic scene from the beginning of the movie. I chose to render it in pencil as it’s night time and I felt black and white would be more dramatic. As I worked through the frames, I did worry that the subtle variances in shading would make the clip look disjointed, but I think it adds a cool movement to the scene. There is that rough, quirky imperfection to hand drawing. You can see the final result with comparison below (digitized and compiled by Andy).
Here’s a clip of that scene:
I can’t wait to see the finished product — I hope they’re able to release it online.
Tags: animation · illustration · movies · remix · The Lord of the Rings · video
The internet is a vast and confusing place no matter your age. Trying to help youth engage with it safely and privately is a complicated topic that touches on many different skillsets and ideas. But just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We’ve launched our Online Privacy for Parents and Youth Surveillance Self-Defense guide in hopes to provide a framework for finding solutions that work for you.
EFF rolls out this crucial resource as state and local governments consider ill-advised laws that cut young people off from essential information and experiences. This particularly harms vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online communities they can't access offline. Such laws also entail age gating, which compromises the privacy of all internet users and stifles young users’ ability to learn, grow, and express themselves.
Young people have unique needs and those needs change over time. Trying to protect from everything all the time is an exhausting process, but the security community has long had a solution for this: security planning (also called threat modeling). The idea is to provide a series of questions designed to help you focus on what’s truly important. When it comes to online privacy, this is as applicable for youth and parents as it is for anyone else.
We used a security plan as our foundation for this guide because deciding what is and isn’t important is the first step we should all take when assessing our privacy risks. But this isn’t a place for quick fixes, and every young person has their unique needs and considerations. There is no single tool or technology fix that can substitute for spending time learning, and then teaching a young person, how the internet works, how to use it, what sorts of harms exist, and how to navigate those…
I’d never heard of this before: in 1990, the BBC aired a program created by and starring Douglas Adams called Hyperland. It begins with a frustrated Adams throwing his TV out (too linear, too non-interactive) and Tom Baker (from Doctor Who) popping up as an intelligent interactive agent that promises to “do your every slightest bidding, to fetch and carry for you, to work tirelessly and selflessly on your behalf, always ready, always willing, no job too small or too menial”.
The Free Software Foundation "has never supported Raspberry Pi," writes their deputy directory Sean O'Brien, "as it depends on nonfree software for the boot process, leaving an important part of the computer outside the user's control." But they're now decrying "an even more intrusive restriction on user freedom" — the binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your ability to upgrade RAM: The restriction is not new: the relevant checks were introduced in the device firmware around 2024.…
The news of the past couple of weeks has seen the ESP32 turned into an software-defined radio (SDR) thanks to a hidden baseband mode, an exciting development by anyone’s standards. It seems unexpected SDRs are like busses in that you wait for ages and two turn up at once, because hot on the heels of the ESP32 story is [Samson1te], revealing the SDR functionality hidden within the LR2021 LoRa chip. This one is especially interesting because as well as a 2.4 GHz radio, the chip sports a radio that works from 150 to 960 MHz.
We’re indebted to them for posting this in a comment on our receive converter post, as a complimentary project to the ESP32 one. It gives a 16-bit SDR with receive and transmit, however as with the ESP32 it’s early days and we hope great things lie ahead. There are comprehensive docs available, should you wish to enter the fray. Currently the main demo is P25 digital voice.
If you’re interested, you can follow our coverage of the ESP32 SDR.
The ‘biofriendly’ nature of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) filament often gets touted as one of its main advantages over alternatives like PETG, but even a modicum of research ought to inform a person that the biodegrading feature of PLA is only true for pure PLA without additives and at temperatures at or above its glass transition temperature (Tg). Thus the results of a year-long experiment by [I built a thing] shouldn’t be too surprising.
After burying said PLA in the garden like any self-respecting person does who tries to dispose of some evidence, the PLA suffered through a European winter and very hot, dry summer, before being dug up again recently for inspection and testing. Although not the first time that someone has tested this, it’s a good reminder considering just how much PLA filament is used each year.
In total three sample sets were used, one being the control, the other two buried in soil and compost respectively. A visual inspection showed no major difference, and a tensile strength test also showed no statistically significant change among all three sample sets. The experiment could have been concluded here, but instead calorimetry was used in a laboratory setting to see whether exposure to microbes as commonly found in soil does anything significant.
This isothermal microcalorimetry test was performed at the University of Basel, effectively to answer the question whether there’s anything in the PLA samples that can feed said microbes. As it turns out, the answer is a resounding ‘no’, with microbial activity within the presence of PLA dropping off even quicker presumably due to there being less volume available for nutrients.
When [I built a thing] contacted a large number of commercial biodegrading facilities in Switzerland, Germany and the USA, many would happily take PLA, but none of them would accepted 3D-printed PLA parts, which says a lot. The primary reason for this appears to be that even under industrial composting conditions it simply takes too long for these facilities to consider these to be economical to compost.
With PLA primarily degrading via hydrolysis, it needs to be exposed to the right conditions for this process to not take an eternity. You can of course use something like PHA instead, which doesn’t require this hydrolysis step to be biodegradable. Overall PLA is quite a crummy material, with it also suffering from embrittlement due to crystallization that will happily turn a spool of PLA into lots of sad fragments. This makes PETG into a very common and very attractive alternative to PLA.
Scientists have discovered that the universe's fundamental physical constants may be finely balanced to make life possible. Even tiny changes to these constants could make liquids too thick or too thin for essential biological processes, potentially preventing life as we know it. Surprisingly, these life-friendly conditions existed billions of years before living cells appeared. The findings raise intriguing questions about why the laws of physics seem so well suited to life.
A study of more than 700 software firms found that AI coding agents significantly increase the amount of code developers produce, but not the amount of software companies actually ship. Ars Technica reports: A recent study (PDF) of actual coding practices across hundreds of firms finds that human code review forms a significant "bottleneck" for the overall efficiency of AI coding tools, resulting in "little evidence that firms increase software output or reduce employment" by using them. Any…
I 100% love this video of every time someone says a percentage on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the word “percent” has lost all of its meaning due to semantic satiation. (thx, caroline)
Here's a funny thing about the right to vote: it wasn't won by voting.
From the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to the Emancipation Proclamation to 19th Amendment, voting rights (what you might call "Big P" Politics) were always downstream of protests, riots, petitions, mass movements, strikes and good, old fashioned community organizing (that is, "small p" politics).
Which is to say, Big P politics matter, but to make them matter, we need a lot of small p politics. That means that democracy isn't something you do every couple of years with a ballot paper (though that's an important aspect of the process). Democracy is continuous.
If you've ever wondered why your vote seems to accomplish so little, I think you can blame the near-abolition of small p politics by Big P politicians of every stripe. Indeed, Obama's genius was summoning up an army of door-knocking, phone-banking small p political activists and then euthanizing that organization after he won the election:
For Obama, the grassroots were useful for one thing: getting out the vote. The last thing he wanted was for millions of activated voters to turn into activists who'd flame him and harangue him and picket him if they didn't like his compromises. Boy, did Obama ever compromise.
https://theweek.com/articles/624777/obamas-biggest-failure
He shielded the CIA's torturers from scrutiny and prosecution:
https://journals.law.harvard.edu/ilj/2009/04/obama-publishes-torture-memos-immunizes-cia-staff/
He reneged on his promise to shut down Gitmo:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/obama-failed-close-guantanamo
And his promise to hold the phone companies to account for their complicity in the NSA's mass domestic surveillance:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-government-surveillance-then-and-now/
He stepped up secret drone warfare:
https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data
And unconstitutional domestic surveillance:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveillance-powers-his-way-out
Whenever I raise this, Obama's apologists come out of the woodwork to tell me that "the president isn't the Green Lantern," and that Obama couldn't act without help from Congress and the Senate, who wouldn't back his plays.
I think that Trump's presidency has shown us how much power the president really has even when the legislature won't play ball. But even if you accept the Green Lantern apologetics, the fact remains that Obama could have had a clamoring army of ardent supporters in the streets, defending his agenda against recalcitrants in his own party and wreckers in the GOP. He chose not to have that army. He sent that army home.
It's like Obama heard the story about post-election FDR telling civil rights leaders, "I want to do it, now make me do it," and concluded, "I don't want to do it, so I'd better not let anyone make me do it":
Of course, Trump is doing everything he can to extinguish both small p politics and Big P Politics. It's not just his wildly illegal voter suppression tactics. He's banning and prosecuting political groups, invoking anti-terror laws (which Obama supported and promised would only be used proportionately and wisely) to chase his grassroots opposition underground:
Liberals are often contemptuous of grassroots movements (cf "basket of deplorables," "Green Lantern" scolding), but the right is terrified of them. The right's political leadership is terrified of its own grassroots, and rightly so, because those people are maniacs, and they're the reason the GOP has been pushed into its most extreme positions. The right's grassroots, meanwhile, are afraid of the left's grassroots. The last thing they want is a militant, organized, mobilized base pushing Dem politicians to take the stands that are wildly and widely popular in America, from Medicare for All to an end to ICE – the Mamdani agenda, in other words.
Mamdani is the anti-Obama. He shows what happens when a progressive candidate nurtures and co-governs with their base after the election, using millions of passionate, committed, everyday people to steamroller anyone who gets in the way of his agenda:
https://www.nyc.gov/content/100days/pages/
Of course the downside of this is that when Mamdani reneges on his pledges, he is loudly and furiously held to account for it:
https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/02/19/mamdani-budget-parks-libraries/
Mamdani understood that he would be corralled into compromises if he won the mayoralty and that when he made those compromises, his base would come after him with the unmistakable fury of betrayed idealists. He also understood that any comfort he enjoyed by sidelining his base while in office would come at a price far higher than being yelled at by his supporters: it would cost him the ability to get anything done.
Voting for Mamdani was important. It got him elected. But staying organized – in unions, neighborhood clubs, affinity groups, DSA chapters and mutual aid groups – is what's letting him get stuff done, and stopping him from bailing on his promises as politically infeasible.
In other words, voting only matters if it's the final stage of a sustained campaign to build and mobilize popular power. Without that, voting will get you precious little. The right's leadership understands this very well, which is why they've spent years attacking unions, community organizers like Acorn, and activist institutions like Planned Parenthood. We must defend voting rights – Big P Politics – to the bitter end, but we need to defend organizing – small p politics – just as ferociously.
The reduction of politics to voting is part of the 50 year neoliberal project whose foremost goal is to make you think of yourself as an atomized individual and not as a member of a polity. Turning "politics" into "voting" is absolutely in line with Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there is no such thing as society." It's the same move that convinced workers that the answer to bad working conditions is looking your boss in the eye and threatening to change jobs (not forming a union and…
This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc.
The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because there are so many AI-generated videos like these on YT that are just kinda lifeless and juiced with keywords to show up as related videos.
Tags: video
Last week, Rep. Darrell Issa formally introduced his long-awaited site blocking bill: the American Copyright Protection Act.
Update September 22: The text of the bill has been posted on Congress.gov.
The bill allows copyright holders to ask a federal court to determine that a website is a ‘foreign piracy site’. With that declaration in hand, they can then petition for a blocking order that requires specific service providers to prevent people from accessing the site.
These providers exclude domain name registries and root nameservers, but virtual private networks are explicitly covered.
“The term ‘service provider’ includes providers of broadband internet access services, providers of domain name resolution services, and virtual private networks, but excludes root nameserver operators and top level domain registries,” the bill reads.
From the bill
This VPN category is new. The discussion draft TorrentFreak reported on in June last year stated that “both internet service providers (ISPs) and DNS resolvers” would be covered, nothing more.
The bill doesn’t explain why VPNs were added, but it follows a European trend, including orders in France and Spain, where a broader set of intermediaries is required to block pirate sites.
Smaller services are exempt, as the proposed bill excludes “any entity that provides services to fewer than 100,000 monthly users or subscribers in the United States.” That means that it will target the larger providers.
When an order is issued, providers have 14 to 30 days to “take all commercially reasonable steps to prevent users or subscribers from using its systems or networks to access the foreign piracy site from the United States.”
‘From the United States’
For a regular ISP, that requirement is pretty straightforward. However, for a VPN provider with servers in dozens of countries, it can be interpreted in more than one way, with varying consequences.
A VPN could block the pirate site on its U.S. servers only. That would mean that American subscribers are free to connect through servers in Amsterdam or Toronto, while a Canadian user who connects through New York would be blocked.
Alternatively, a VPN could block the site for everyone who connects from an American IP address, regardless of the server they choose. That should be technically possible without logging a user’s IP address.
The bill doesn’t explain how the technical implementation should work and a judge has no say in it either. The blocking orders can’t prescribe or require any specific blocking techniques, so this choice is left to the providers.
VPN providers can contest their inclusion in a blocking order. Before naming a provider, the court has to weigh several factors, including the “technical feasibility and efficacy” of the blocking.
VPNs raised similar objections in France, with little effect. Among other things, the Paris court concluded that a no-log policy doesn’t prevent VPNs from blocking sites.
Not all blocking orders have to wait 14 days before being implemented. The court can shorten any deadline in the bill if it finds good cause. This includes blocking measures that target “time-sensitive events.”
Time-sensitive
Issa previously made it clear who this is for. At a House hearing in June, he said that enforcement has to be fast enough to make a difference during live sports broadcasts, which lose their value quickly.
“[W]hat is the reasonable speed? Can we do it at the speed of sound? Can we do it at the speed of light? More importantly, in a 45 minute or sometimes a fraction of that live sports broadcast, can we do it soon enough to make it no longer profitable for those who pop up and sell their clandestine wares?” he said.
In addition to sports, the “time-sensitive” carveout can also be used to protect movies and TV shows that leak online “not more than 24 hours after” their first authorized release in the United States.
VPNs are not the only change since the first draft appeared last year. There are other nuances as well, which will be highlighted in future coverage.
Whether Rep. Issa will get the bill across the finish line is uncertain. He retires at the end of this year, so he won’t be around to reintroduce it if it doesn’t pass during the current session.
Notably, this is not the only U.S. site blocking bill that’s being prepared. As previously reported, Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Zoe Lofgren are working on a bicameral site blocking bill of their own.
This means that, after the SOPA-ghosts were defeated, there’s now some internal site-blocking competition on the Hill.
—
A copy of the American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 (H.R. 10364) is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
The RP2350 is actually a pretty secure chip, all things considered. It has secure boot, ARMv8’s TrustZone to split secure and non-secure execution, and you can permanently disable debug — the Pi Foundation even included glitch detection, meaning the traditional ‘zap the chip until it obeys’ technique is blocked. That’s why the [Ledger Donjon] security team went full Bond Villain and strapped everyone’s favourite fruit-flavoured microcontroller to a table with a slowly-approaching laser beam.
Okay — movie clichés aside, the laser was in fact very carefully focused on target before they turned it on. That target was the register that enables the 2350’s debug features. Said register was located by decapsulating the chip and examining the die with photon-emission electron microscopy; the actual attack was carried out on a chip that had been decapped on the back side, with IR shining through the silicon wafer. There was probably more than a little trial-and-error to figure out exactly where on the die adjacent to the register to zap with the laser to flip those bits. But flip they did, restoring the debugger’s access to the secure execution zone. Then, after resetting the chip, [Ledger]’s team read the 128-bit secret the Pi Foundation hid in memory as part of the 2350 hacking challenge.
It’s long been accepted that once the black hats — or white hats, for that matter — have their hands on your hardware, they’re going to find a way in. The effort it takes to break into a simple microcontroller here is actually kind of impressive. We’ve talked about laser fault injection before; ironically, we’ve also featured Pi Pico-powered glitching attacks — the kind that this chip’s glitch detection thwarts.
The 2026 winners of the Ig Nobel Prize include papers on “a more precise definition of kissing”, “An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing”, and the discovery “that milk proteins from cockroaches pack 3X as much energy as milk proteins from cows”.
