History of the Polaroid SX-70

david pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

 Images Polaroid-Sx-70-Camera-631

In 1972, Dr. Ediwn Land introduced the first one-step instant camera, the Polaroid SX-70. According to Charles and Ray Eames' short promotional documentary about the camera, embedded below, the SX-70 was designed from the beginning to topple "barriers between the photographer and his subject." It was, the Eames said, "a system of novelties.”

In the new issue of Smithsonian, Owen Edwards tells the history of the SX-70:

The genesis of the little wonder machine, the story goes, was that Land’s young daughter asked why she couldn’t see the vacation photos her father was taking “right now.” Polaroid was already a successful optical company; in 1947 Land and his engineers began producing cameras using peel-and-develop film, first black-and-white, then color. Sam Liggero, a chemist who spent several decades as a product developer at Polaroid, told me recently that Land had long envisioned an SX-70-type camera, involving a self-contained, one-step process with no fuss and no mess. Liggero describes Land as someone who “could look into the future and eloquently describe the intersection of science, technology and aesthetics.”

"How the Polaroid Stormed the Photographic World"

Video: Chris Brown+Rihanna's "Birthday Cake" remixed with lyrics from police report for 2009 beating

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

[Video Link: "Birthday Cake in the Face."]

A quickie remix parody of "Birthday Cake" by Rihanna ft. Chris Brown. Lyrics quoted directly from the police report (PDF). What is this about? Created by Andrea James and Calpernia Addams. Here's a related analysis that's worth a read.

Maru, internet-famous cat, goes to the 2012 Oscars

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

Everyone's favorite internet cat goes to the Academy Awards. Well, in poster form. You can't buy the posters, or the cat, but you can buy the book. More about the legend in this previous Boing Boing post.

(Cheezburger via Swintons via Bricorama via @antderosa)

Pogue on Foxconn: hey, at least it's not rice farming or prostitution!

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.


A job seeker yawns as he queues outside Foxconn recruitment center in Shenzhen, Guangdong province February 22, 2012. REUTERS/Joe Tan


New York Times tech columnist David Pogue sure has an interesting take on the Foxconn/worker's rights debacle.

One point I agree with: it's a mistake to focus solely on Apple. Many, many Western technology companies work with Foxconn, and with factories where conditions are worse. From the January 25 NYT piece on Foxconn:

Foxconn Technology [is] China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers. The company has plants throughout China, and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, including for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung.

Let that sink in. Foxconn outputs nearly half of all the world's consumer electronics.

Few tech companies have taken the kinds of early steps Apple has to try and improve matters, and share information about the process.

And while Pogue doesn't explicitly address this point, I'll throw it out there: cheap overseas labor in rotten conditions with poor labor law standards are part of what keeps gadget prices where they are. If we mean what we say about wanting better lives for the men and women who make our consumer electronics, are we willing to change consumer culture, and pay more? I'm not optimistic.

What do you think? And is there *any* reality-based model that could lead to some of those manufacturing jobs coming back to the US (or, name your labor-friendly nation here) in our lifetimes? Again, I'm not optimistic.

Edit: Here's an Economist item about the Pogue column, and reactions focused in the study of global economics. Economics consultant Adam Ozimek has a thoughtful reaction to the Pogue column here, focusing on labor laws, and what factors motivate change. And Mike Daisey has quite a rant here. He's the author and monologist behind "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." I'll post other interesting pieces here, pro or con, as they bubble up.

Kim Jong-Un got a Gun

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un aims a rifle at the Sporting Bullet Factory, built in 1996 at the order of the North's late leader Kim Jong-il. The factory produces "sporting bullets" for developing military sports. Its exact location is undisclosed. Undated picture released by the North's KCNA news agency in Pyongyang, on February 23, 2012. Wonder what sort of computers those are, and what they're running? (REUTERS/KCNA)

Tiger bust for breast cancer charity

201202241314
Illustrator Jack Teagle painted this plaster cast to be auctioned on eBay for the charity Keep A Breast.

Kitty Lea Cast by Jack Teagle

Shepard Fairey pleads guilty over "Hope" court case

No more hope. LA-based street artist Shepard Fairey today entered a guilty plea in his criminal case with the Associated Press. He's facing a maximum sentence of six months in prison. The criminal case concerns not the intellectual property dispute itself, but charges of "criminal contempt for destroying documents, manufacturing evidence and other misconduct" in the civil case, which was settled out of court with AP. Xeni

Anti-immigration sheriff in Arizona allegedly threatened to deport his Mexican lover

Evening Standard: "A prominent Right-wing Republican sheriff in Pinal Country, Arizona, known for his conspicuous campaign against illegal immigrants, is accused by his gay Mexican lover of three years, Jose Orozco, of threatening to have him deported if he revealed their affair."

Crap guitar

Craptastic-2
After reading Pattie Boyd's memoir, Wonderful Tonight I think this spelling variant is apt. From a photo taken in Okinawa by Lawrence Downes.

Shit girls say to girls with breast cancer

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

[Video Link]

I have heard many of these lines, myself. Jenny Saldaña (Facebook | Web | Twitter) is a Dominican actor/writer/producer/speaker who is surviving breast cancer with a fierce sense of humor intact. In the video above, she re-enacts some of the many unfortunate things that presumably well-meaning women have said to her, during her experience with the disease. There's a cool interview with here here, from a few years back. Her new project is here. Jenny, you're awesome.

(via @gillyarcht, who is also a survivor, and also awesome)

The myth of the 8-hour sleep

Historically, people slept for four hours, woke up for a couple of hours, then fell back asleep for another four hours, according to historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech. In 2001, he "published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks."

His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.



During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.

A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".
BBC: The myth of the eight-hour sleep (Via TYWKIWWDBI)

Drug warrior faces 20 years on drug charges

On Thursday an El Paso County Commissioner, with a reputation for shouting down any efforts towards drug law reform, was was indicted by a federal grand jury for "conspiracy to distribute more than 110 pounds (50 kg) of cannabis."

201202241050 [Willie Gandara Jr. has] been accused of conspiring to distribute 50 kg of weed. But if he were conspiring to distribute only 49 kg, his penalties would have been less severe. Since this would be Gandara's first offense, his prison sentence would have gone from no more than 20 years to no more than five, if convicted. Meanwhile, fines would have been capped at $250,000 per offense, not $1 million. You would think a county commissioner and drug warrior would know more about drug laws.

Unfortunately, the drug war's lack of logic doesn't end there. Marijuana is a Schedule I drug, which according to the DEA, means it has "high potential for abuse, have no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and there is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision." But both meth and PCP are Schedule II.
Drug warrior faces 20 years on drug charges

The only U.S. rare earth metals mine

Kyle Wiens of iFixit reports on his visit to Molycorp Mountain Pass, the last rare earth metals mine in America. [The Atlantic, via The Verge] Rob

Trompe l'oil

Rob Beschizza

Follow me on Twitter.

Posted by The Chris Valle to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.

Photo of phones before and after the iPhone

201202241030
Imitation is the sincerest form of imitation. (Via Josh Helfferich)

Sponsor shout-out: Shana Logic

Rob Beschizza

Follow me on Twitter.


Our thanks to Shana Logic, one of the web's coolest indie shops. Everything there is 100 percent handmade or independently-designed. Plus, it's a small business so you're supporting artists. Shana Logic offers jewelry accessories, guys' apparel, tech gear and more: Take 10% off your entire order with the discount code BOINGY, or get free shipping on all orders over $75 to the USA and Canada.

Horse_ebooks unmasked

Gawker's Adrian Chen tracked down the man behind @horse_ebooks, the fascinating twitter spambot. Rob

Guess who this actress is in a lipstick ad

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A new girl indeed! Please give us back the old one, Rimmel. (Via Photoshop Disasters)

Rangefinder iPhone case

Rob Beschizza

Follow me on Twitter.


Photojojo's iPhone Rangefinder case clips onto your iPhone, making it look like an iPhone inside a case that looks like a bit like a rangefinder. It's compatible with Photojojo's magnetic fisheye, wide-angle/macro and tele lenses: you can get it with a full set for $99. [via This Isn't Happiness]

Video: Drive Across Mongolia in 4 Minutes


[Video Link] Jeff Diehl made a great video of a his drive across the barren landscape of Mongolia, condensed to four minutes. It's a time-lapse with occasional real-time breaks and his comments. This is a nice way to present a travel video.

Experience the roadlessness, the bandits, the breakdowns, the yaks, and the camels, without ever having to figure out how to steer and shift a right-driving mini-car through some of the remotest land on the planet. And see it out the windshield just like we did.
Drive Across Mongolia in 4 Minutes (video)

We don't own the news we break

Rob Beschizza

Follow me on Twitter.

MG Siegler complains that the Wall Street Journal failed to credit him when covering a story he earlier scooped at TechCrunch: Apple Acquires Chomp.

The Wall Street Journal Is Fucking Bullshit

Earlier today, I broke some news.

I don’t typically do this anymore given my new job. But from time to time this will happen. But if you read The Wall Street Journal, you’d never know. Why’s that? Because they’re fuckheads who don’t credit actual sources of information.

The WSJ's omission is rude, for sure. How hard is it to begin a sentence with "First reported by MG Siegler at TechCrunch," or somesuch? Other venues, including Bloomberg, did exactly that. WSJ reporter Jessica Vascellaro's tweets also suggest that Siegler's post is how she knew about the story, after all.

But she didn't have to credit Siegler as her source of information because she got Apple on the record to tell her itself. She had a more direct source.

Siegler's scoop was fantastic, but getting it wasn't the news. Apple buying Chomp was the news. No-one owes us politeness, and hearing a story first doesn't make us part of the story. It gives us a first-mover advantage. Isn't that enough?

Most risque ad for drain-clog remover, ever

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers
* Mar 24, London, ORGCon

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Umm?

Official Liquid-Plumr Double Impact Commercial (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Batman matrioshke

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers
* Mar 24, London, ORGCon

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)


Russian sculptor Katya Malakhova created a set of Batman matrioshkes that -- judging from the description -- actually nest. I wonder if the ears are hollow?

Batman doll (via Neatorama)

Evil computer just wants to be friends

maggiekb

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• February 20 at British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association — Vancouver. 7:00 pm
• February 29 at University of Minnesota: Frontiers in the Environment seminar
• March 1 at Huge Theater, Minneapolis: The Theater of Public Policy
• March 12 at University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign
• March 27 at Penn State Institutes on Energy and the Environment
• March 29-31 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
• April 2 at MIT: The New GeekSpeak: Science Journalists' New Toolbox, with Eli Kintisch and John Bohannon — Maseeh Hall, 4:00 pm
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins — 4:00 pm
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum

In the tradition of The Shining re-cut to look like an uplifting comedy, comes this music video, which repurposes scenes from several movies—most prominently 2001: A Space Odyssey—to tell the story of a misunderstood computer that accidentally hurts the ones it loves.

The song is "Limited" by Jascha. The video was created by my friend John Pavlus (who has also made some cool films about entropy and the Antikythera Mechanism). He says:

It seemed like a fun challenge to take images that have acquired so much "baggage" over the years — like the glowering cyclops eye of HAL from 2001, which has become visual shorthand for "evil machine" — and try to attach completely opposite emotional associations to them. What if something like HAL wasn't evil at all, but just misunderstood in its intentions, like a puppy who plays too rough with its owner? That's exactly the image that Jascha's plaintive refrain in "Limited" put into my head. Remixing material from five very different films creates a necessarily impressionistic approach to telling a story, so maybe the story this video tells in your head isn't the same one that it tells in mine. Either way I hope it's a good one.

Video Link

Pointy pencil sculptures of Jennifer Maestre

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers
* Mar 24, London, ORGCon

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)


Jennifer Maestre is a sculptor who makes extremely pointy (and beautiful) pieces out of bunched nails and highly sharpened pencils.

Jennifer Maestre (via Neatorama)

Cash-strapped UK local authorities spent £0.5B on CCTV in 4 years

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers
* Mar 24, London, ORGCon

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

"The Price of Privacy: How local authorities spent £515m on CCTV in four years" is a new report from Britain's Big Brother Watch, and it documents how the skyrocketing expansion of Britain's police and local government surveillance has resulted in over 4,000 fewer patrolling police officers, less privacy, and no appreciable reduction in crime.

CCTV has been viewed by those controlling expenditure as a cheap alternative to conventional policing, with no demonstrable equivalent success in reducing crime.

The efficiency of CCTV varies hugely across the country, with cameras regularly not working or turned off, footage being deleted before it can be used and pictures of insufficient quality for court purposes.

Local authorities have spent an unprecedented amount of money to make the United Kingdom the most watched nation of people anywhere in the world. That amount of spending on CCTV is steadily increasing, with funds being diverted from conventional policing budgets to pay for the new technology.

CCTV serves as a costly placebo for many local authorities designed to appease neighbourhoods suffering from anti-social behaviour problems.

As the number of CCTV cameras increases, so does the potential number of people being watched and the number of council officers watching – with worrying implications for personal privacy and data security.

The lack of enforceable regulation means that more intrusive use of CCTV – for example, in public toilets, schools or with audio recording capability – can only be challenged in the courts by way of judicial review.

The Price of Privacy: How local authorities spent £515m on CCTV in four years

The Periodic Table Table: all the elements, in carved wooden glory

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

Wolfram co-founder Theodore Gray, whose books, puzzles, posters, vaults (!), card decks, and apps about the Periodic Table of Elements we've featured on Boing Boing many times, has a happy obsession: a Periodic Table Table. Beautiful, hand-carved, wood. More about it in this fun video right here. The table isn't new (there's a well-worn page on Gray's website all about it), but the fun video is. (thanks, @zamieroskik!)

Did Syria's army use sat-phone surveillance to hunt down and kill journalists?

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

Jillian York and Trevor Timm, writing for the EFF, explore the possibility that the Syrian government used satellite phone surveillance to pinpoint the locations of journalist Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London and French photographer Rémi Ochlik, who were murdered in Homs, Syria this week.

On Monday night, Colvin appeared on CNN, telling Anderson Cooper that “the Syrian army is shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.” Responding to Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s statement that he was not targeting civilians in the barrage of rocketfire raining on Homs, Colvin accused the regime of “murder” and said: “There are no military targets here…It's a complete and utter lie that they are only going after terrorists.”  A few hours later, she was dead.

The Telegraph quoted Jean-Pierre Perrin, a journalist for the Paris-based Liberation newspaper who was with Colvin in Homs last week as saying: “The Syrian army issued orders to 'kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil'” and that the Syrian authorities were likely watching the CNN broadcast. The Telegraph then described how “[r]eporters working in Homs, which has been under siege since February 4, had become concerned in recent days that Syrian forces had ‘locked on’ to their satellite phone signals and attacked the buildings from which they were coming.”

How could this happen?

Read more: Satphones, Syria, and Surveillance | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Boing Boing's Beschizza talks Megaupload, ACTA, and torrent justice on RT TV

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

[Video Link]

Boing Boing's managing editor Rob, not Bob, but Rob, Beschizza speaks on the Russian television news network RT about Megaupload, ACTA, the global copyfight wars, and the high-flying hijinks of Kim Dotcom.

Nyan Cat orchestra: composer creates classical music variations on a meme theme

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

[Video Link].

Craig Davis Pinson, a composer who is a Boston Conservatory student, writes in the liner notes for the video embedded above:

This is a set of variations written on the melody heard in the Youtube video Nyan Cat. It is an experiment, in which I tried to find the limits of how far I could transform the melody before it begins losing its identity. The theme is known as Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!, originally posted by username daniwellP on the Japanese video sharing website, Nico Nico Douga. The Nyan Cat phenomenom has become ingrained in popular culture, and amazes me both in its sheer absurdity and its freakishly colossal popularity. However, fascinating as they are to me, the origins of the theme are not played upon in this composition. Instead, I treated Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! as pure musical material from which to generate music. The motivation to use this theme came from my repeated viewings of the video, and slowly realizing that it is a strangely alluring melody. Therefore, this is my tribute to Nyan Cat. Credit goes to daniwell-p for creating this theme, prguitarman for creating the gif animation, and saraj00n for joining them. Theme used for non-commercial purposes as per daniwell-P's request.

On a large scale, the work is structured along a simple alternation pattern. The theme and its variations alternate, similarly to rondo form. However, the theme is progressively dissolved, meaning that each time it returns it contains less percentage of the source material. This chipping-away continues until there's nothing recognizable left. In the variation episodes, more tools are employed to change the essence of the theme, especially, pronounced changes of duration, texture, harmonic character, and of the intervallic makeup of the melody. Each of the variations has its own defined character, and they contrast sharply with one another in mood and technique. Despite of the contrast of its sections, the piece exploits a long-scale narrative arc, playing on the contrast between the theme's duration - which remains essentially consistent at each iteration - and the durations of the variation episodes, which seem to grow out of control as their proportions become subverted.

Read the rest

Cautionary science fiction on the future of reproductive rights

Annalee Newitz at io9: "What will happen if the state takes control of human reproduction? The answers could be weirder than you think — and might terrify pro-life politicians as much as pro-choice advocates. Xeni

Free science fiction story ebooks from David Marusek

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers
* Mar 24, London, ORGCon

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

The wonderful science fiction writer David Marusek sez,

To promote my launch I am giving away two free Kindle ebooks containing several of my previously published short stories. Locked behind pay walls, these stories have been somewhat difficult to obtain (outside of pirate sites). My Morning Glory and other flashes of absurd science fiction is a mini-collection of flash stories first published by the British science journal, Nature, and She Was Good—She Was Funny is a short story about love and murder in the depths of an Alaskan winter. It first appeared in Playboy magazine. Both are kick-in-the-pants fun and will be free for the downloading from the Kindle store from February 23 through 27.

Marusek's The Wedding Party is one of the best sf stories I've ever read. It's tremendous to see his work online.

See also my review of Marusek's 2009 novel Mind Over Ship.

24 Magazine: every ish is done in a day, ad-free and kickstartered

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers
* Mar 24, London, ORGCon

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Rose Fox sez,

Right this minute, eleven accomplished creative professionals have wedged themselves into a studio in Brooklyn, New York, and are in the process of putting together the first issue of twenty-four magazine. twenty-four is a quarterly publication for which each issue is conceived, written, illustrated, designed, and produced in 24 hours. The creation of the first issue began at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on February 23, 2012 and will finish at 10 a.m. on February 24, at which time PDFs of the planned 64-page magazine will be sent to the 100+ people who backed the project on Kickstarter. Print copies will follow within a week. The first issue is 100% donation-funded and ad-free.

The first issue has the theme of "trust," which will be illustrated and explored in fiction, poetry, articles, interviews, photo essays, and drawings. In addition, the contributors are documenting their creative process and soliciting ideas from the public by posting photos, videos, and text to Twitter (using the hashtag #24mag), Flickr, Storify, YouTube, and Tumblr.

twenty-four magazine

Canada doesn't belong on the US piracy watchlist, along with 70% of the rest of the world

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers
* Mar 24, London, ORGCon

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Michael Geist sez,

In what has become an annual rite of spring, each April the U.S. government releases its Special 301 report - often referred to as the Piracy Watch List - which claims to identify countries with sub-standard intellectual property laws. Canada has appeared on this list for many years alongside dozens of countries. In fact, over 70% of the world's population is placed on the list and most African countries are not even considered for inclusion.

While the Canadian government has consistently rejected the U.S. list because it "basically lacks reliable and objective analysis", this year I teamed up with Public Knowledge to try to provide the U.S. Trade Representative Office with something a bit more reliable and objective. Public Knowledge will appear at a USTR hearing on Special 301 today. In addition, last week we participated in meetings at the U.S. Department of Commerce and USTR to defend current Canadian copyright law and the proposed reforms.

The full submission focuses on four main issues: how Canadian law provides adequate and effective protection, how enforcement is stronger than often claimed, why Canada is not a piracy haven, and why Bill C-11 does not harm the interests of rights holders (critics of Bill C-11 digital lock rules will likely think this is self-evident).

Why Canada Does Not Belong on the U.S. Piracy Watchlist

Belt-driven Devon Tread watches

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers
* Mar 24, London, ORGCon

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)


New in the Watchismo Vault collection, the $17,500 Devon Tread watches, which use a cunning system of belts and optical sensors to keep and display the time. No, I don't have $17.5K to drop on something like this, but if you asked me to imagine what a $17.5K watch should look like, it would be something much like this: "The exposed movement is a mesmerizing display of the patented interwoven system of conveyor belts. This series of belts includes critical elements that allow the optical recognition system to know every belt position at all times."

Devon Tread

Goats webcomic book IV: the Kickstarter edition

Jon Rosenberg, creator of the entirely demented Goats webcomic sez, "Just wanted to let you know that it looks like I'm going to be able to do a fourth Goats book, and I'm doing it without a publisher -- this one is going to be wholly funded by the readers themselves. The Goats Book IV Kickstarter met its fundraising goal only eighteen hours after it launched, which has made me a bit giddy. The money is nice, but the ability to do projects without big companies backing them is superb." (Thanks, Jon!) Cory

Amazon.com's many bots feud over book-prices

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers
* Mar 24, London, ORGCon

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Carlos Bueno, author of a kids' book about understanding computers called Lauren Ipsum, describes what happens when the cadre of competing bots that infest Amazon's sales-database began to viciously fight with one another over pricing for his book. It's a damned weird story.

Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.

It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

The internet has everything.

This would just be an interesting anecdote, except that bot activity also seems to affect books that, you know, actually exist. Last year I published my children's book about computer science, Lauren Ipsum. I set a price of $14.95 for the paperback edition and sales have been pretty good. Then last week I noticed a marketplace bot offering to sell it for $55.63. “Silly bots”, I thought to myself, “must be a bug”. After all, it's print-on-demand, so where would you get a new copy to sell?

Then it occured to me that all they have to do is buy a copy from Amazon, if anyone is ever foolish enough to buy from them, and reap a profit. Lazy evaluation, made flesh. Clever bots!

Then another bot piled on, and then one based in the UK. They started competing with each other on price. Pretty soon they were offering my book below the retail price, and trying to make up the difference on "shipping and handling". I was getting a bit worried.

Sidebar: Lauren Ipsum sounds so interesting, I've just ordered a copy to read to my daughter!

How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy (via JWZ)

My smiley face business card party game

mustardhamsters

Software developer and GIF archivist in San Francisco. Follow me on Twitter for tech stuff and personal musings, and Google+ for the lulz. More stuff here.


By George Webber

Last year I had 250 business cards printed up with :) printed on them and nothing else. Since then I've been finding handy uses for them: writing notes, flirting with girls on the bus, propping up the occasional table, whatever. A nearly-blank business card is a surprisingly useful thing to have around.

The best thing I've been using them for is to make meeting lots of people more interesting. I'm normally very nervous about meeting new people, I'm regularly thrust into intimidating situations, and I meet so many different kinds of people that it's often hard to come up with something to talk about immediately.

Now I ask them to play my game: I hand them a pen and one of these cards and ask them to complete the drawing. No time limit, no wrong answers, do whatever you want. You just have to give it back to me so I can take it home and scan it. Your reward when you're finished is that you get to see the whole collection of what other people have done. And once a couple of people have done one, that stack grows quickly.

I've been collecting these for a while (you can see the full collection on my blog), but last night I stumbled upon Sketch Tuesday (on Wednesday) at the 111 Minna Gallery where dozens of artists from local museums and elsewhere came to draw. This was a particularly fruitful evening for the game, and I've put all of the cards I collected after the jump.

Thanks to Christian, Willa, Tim, Paul, George, Rick, Mae, Kimberly, Jim, Andrew, Lonnie, Adam, Drew, Brandon, and whoever else did one of these for me!

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The 1990s in forty-eight pictures

Rob Beschizza

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Buzzfeed's vision of the 1990s seems close to that of many Americans. From the other side of the pond, I offer a single addendum.

Astrologers who claimed copyright on timezones apologize, drop lawsuit -- EFF declares victory!

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Mar 9, Washington DC, IAPP Global Privacy Summit
* Mar 22, London, The Economist Technology Frontiers
* Mar 24, London, ORGCon

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

A heartening development in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's ongoing effort to secure the Internet's timezone database, which was threatened when an astrology software company called Astrolabe claimed a copyright in the arrangement of the world's timezones. After EFF sought sanctions against the company's lawyers, the company dropped the suit, apologized, and signed a "covenant not to sue."

In a statement, Astrolabe said, "Astrolabe's lawsuit against Mr. Olson and Mr. Eggert was based on a flawed understanding of the law. We now recognize that historical facts are no one's property and, accordingly, are withdrawing our Complaint. We deeply regret the disruption that our lawsuit caused for the volunteers who maintain the TZ database, and for Internet users."

EFF Wins Protection for Time Zone Database