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Sunday, September 30, 2001

Man takes break, buys "Ora

Man takes break, buys "Ora Potency Fruit Punch," takes sips, discovers severed human penis in bottle.

A DNA test will be conducted on the penis, in case it may be related to an ongoing Adams County investigation where various body parts, including a head and part of a leg, have been found but not identified.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:19:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Take a panoramic photographic tour

Take a panoramic photographic tour of the (pre-9.11) Twin Towers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:07:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grotesque first-person account of atrocities

Grotesque first-person account of atrocities committed in Afghanistan, from a former Taliban secret policeman. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Remember the German hacker who

Remember the German hacker who offered a $10 million reward for Bin Laden? Now he claims to have cracked a Sudanese bank's computer and recovered Bin Laden's account information, which he says he's turned over to the FBI. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:44:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, September 29, 2001

Poor sod: Akram Mena is

Poor sod: Akram Mena is an Egyptian gas-station attendant in Jersey who's a dead ringer for Akram Mena, one of the suspected pilots of the suicide jets that crashed into the Twin Towers. His boss fired him after local yahoos started screaming obscenities at the gas-station and business dropped 75 percent. Now, Mena's got to find some other way to raise the cash to bring his family over from Egypt.

"I love this country too much," he said. "I want to spend the rest of my life here. America is the most beautiful country in all the world."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:42:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Palm weasels over its latest

Palm weasels over its latest round of nastygrams, in which it tried to bully fan-site owners into changing their URLs from "PalmWhatever.com" to "PalmOSWhatever.com"

Palm now says that it was just making a friendly suggestion in the spirit of "collaboration and open discussion." Funny, my collaborative, open discussions don't usually revolve around:

1. Letters from lawyers
2. Unilaterally imposed two-week deadlines
3. Accusations of trademark infringement

Honestly, would it be so hard to just say, "We did a dumb thing. Please, forgive us. Go ahead and keep on promoting our business, with our thanks and apologies?" Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:42:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Excellent CNet article explains why

Excellent CNet article explains why crypto-limitations won't make America safer. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:10:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gagpipe aggregates headlines from humor-sites

Gagpipe aggregates headlines from humor-sites around the world, including a bunch of exotic Commonwealth ones I'd never heard of, like "Squeal, NewsPig," and "Spin on This." Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:34:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The CEO of SunnComm, a

The CEO of SunnComm, a DRM company that's providing copy-resistant CDs that can't be easily ripped to MP3, does a News.com interview in which he makes the ridiculous assertion that "The 'fair use' of sending thousands of copies to file-sharing services to be copied hundres of thousands or millions of times is the only use we've limited. And that's not fair use." What weaselling! How about the fair use of format-shifting? Making a personal backup? Making a copy to keep in your car? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:24:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A lyrical essay by AS

A lyrical essay by AS Byatt describes the evolving human relationship with smell.

I know and can remember the scent, the smell, of all my four children's hair when they were babies. There are no words to describe these unique scents. When they are very small there is something extraordinarily painful about other women picking them up and making them smell briefly of L'Air du Temps or Chanel No 5. Other women's children at that stage always seem to me to have a Noli me tangere [Touch me not] smell - unless they are perfumed with talc and Bounce in their babyjamas. Sheep only accept other ewes' lambs if they are rubbed with their own lambs' smells.

We are losing functions - we don't recognise, we don't detect; it is all ersatz. Ants, as EO Wilson discovered and described, communicate and organise their complex societies with odours and pheromones. We also recognise - or used to recognise - good and bad food with our noses. I know the smell of tainted meat or fish, or mouldy sprouts - but I believe our senses are being blunted by the chemical haze we choose to live in, like living in a constant buzz of high-level interference, snow on the television screen, just audible screeching on the radio to which we have had to become inured.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:19:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, September 28, 2001

NYC authorities believe that organized

NYC authorities believe that organized crime gangs have looted the site of the wrecked WTC, stealing steel (which is technically evidence) for scrap metal. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Somebody on ebay was auctioning

Somebody on ebay was auctioning an ass-kicking! Link Discuss (Thanks, Dug!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:07:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oh, my dear sweet Buddha.

Oh, my dear sweet Buddha. This video shows you how to quickly fashion a high-powered WiFi antenna out of wire, washers, yogurt-lids -- and a Pringles can. Swoon. Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:21:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

O'Reilly has compiled an amazing

O'Reilly has compiled an amazing annotated bibliography of books on computer security. I know that we have a bunch of security geeks reading this blog (yes, Dan, I mean you). Any thoughts on this? Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:22:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

An Australian garage-inventor has built

An Australian garage-inventor has built a machinegun that can fire 1,000,000 rounds per minute, or what Wired News calls "A Laser of Lead." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:19:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A US Senator is calling

A US Senator is calling for the creation of a National-Guard-like organization for techies, called the National Emergency Technology Guard, or NET Guard. NET Guards would be the people who re-wired the warzones, brought IT back online. I really like this idea -- I've followed various high-tech volunteerism organizations like Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and Geek Corps with disappointment, as they failed to materialize large and dedicated groups of nerd activists who made it their business to bring high tech to the world. With the tech economy collapsing, an opportunity to turn one's high-tech skills to the commonweal seems well-timed. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:14:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Cold War Era Civil

The Cold War Era Civil Defense Museum is chock-a-block with the history of Civil Defense, from images to stories to bomb-shelter tours to audio files of radio ads. Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:07:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Haunting first-person account of the

Haunting first-person account of the events of 9.11 from a firefighter, published in a firefighter's newsletter.

I am pulling a heavy six-inch hose through the muck when I see Mike Carter, the Vice-president of the firefighters union, on the hose just before me. He's a good friend, and we barely say hello to each other. I see Kevin Gallagher, the union president, who is looking for his son who is unaccounted for. Someone calls to me. It is Jimmy Boyle, the retired president of the union, the man who gave us such great leadership in my time in the job. "I can't find Michael," he says. Michael Boyle, his son, was with Engine 33, and the whole company is missing. I can't say anything to Jimmy, but just throw my arms around him.

Link Discuss (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:03:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Yorkers are seeing the

New Yorkers are seeing the ghosts of the Twin Towers, and they're glad of it. Link Discuss (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:00:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Real-world butter-bombing: the Pentagon has

Real-world butter-bombing: the Pentagon has a parallel humanitarian relief effort planned:

The Pentagon is considering several ways to provide assistance, including dropping supplies by air and using military bases in the region as staging areas for humanitarian relief. Russia gave permission this week for the United States to use its airspace for humanitarian missions. Japan also offered help.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jay!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:00:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, September 27, 2001

Viagra has a new application:

Viagra has a new application: Preventing breathlessness in mountain climbers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Timothy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:03:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The circumstances under which the

The circumstances under which the USAF can shoot down a civilian airliner have just been substantially relaxed. It used to take a direct order from the President, but after today, either of two USAF generals can order military pilots to shoot down airliners that they believe are in danger of crashing into a populated area. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:02:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are you smarter than Miss

Are you smarter than Miss America? Take the Miss America quiz and find out which states fared better and worse than you. I got a six, but I plead Canadianness. Link Discuss (via 24-hour drive-thru)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:04:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

British scientists unveil "Magic Trousers"

British scientists unveil "Magic Trousers" -- tight pants that naturally treat angina by contracting and releasing, forcing blood northwards.

It squeezes them like a tube of toothpaste," said Amal Louis, clinical lecturer in cardiology at the Royal Infirmary. "The blood bypasses blockages and makes its way through other, narrow blood vessels round the heart muscle. It's really like having a natural heart bypass."

Link Discuss (Thanks, kimages!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:49:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MacOS X.1 is out. Kinda.

MacOS X.1 is out. Kinda. The update to OSX will turn Apple's next-gen operating system into something genuinely functional, as opposed to a penance that the Mac faithful endure in the service of getting involved with the new new thing.

The update is free. As it should be. X.0 - X.0.4 aren't even betas (a beta is feature-complete -- the previous OSXs are missing key features that are provided in X.1), and the Mac faithful paid cash for them. We have a right to expect our faith to be rewarded.

Free it may be, available it ain't. There are currently three ways of getting the update. You can go to Seybold, you can give Apple $20 and wait an unspecified number of weeks for them to ship you the CDs, or you can get it free from a Mac dealer on Saturday (except that what few Mac dealers remain after Apple squeezed their retail channel dry have no idea how they're expected to get the free discs to distribute).

You can't download it. Granted, it's a big, big file -- 500MB! -- but isn't that why Apple bought such a huge stake in Akamai? Apple's not even permitting its faithful users to redistribute the file. If Apple has its way, no one, anywhere, will be allowed to distribute the update over the Internet.

Computers got valuable about 15 years ago when they got really good at converting bits (page layouts) to atoms (paper). Apple led that charge. Now, the real value of computers comes in their ability to move bits from one place to another -- to exploit the Internet and live on it like a real peer. Apple usually understands this: That's why we've got a new MacOS built around Unix, and why Apple brought 802.11 networking to the world. So why is it that Apple has been so clueless on the distribution of the OSX update? Even if Apple opted not to make the update available online, keeping their users from doing so -- bearing the costs on Apple's behalf -- seems like sheer mailice.

I'm stymied. And I want my update, dammit.

Here's a MacSlash discussion of the issue: Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:43:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NASDAQ has suspended its $1

NASDAQ has suspended its $1 minimum share price so that it won't have to de-list all the companies whose shares have fallen in the wake of 9.11. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:47:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The grassroots response of the

The grassroots response of the Internet to the Current Situation -- Websites, newsgroups, etc -- is being archived and stored for posterity. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bomb them with Butter: Kent

Bomb them with Butter: Kent Madin's inspirational rant calling for a humanitarian response to the Current Situation, on the grounds that feeding and propagandizing the Afghanis will do more to undermine the Taliban than any amount of military intervention. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Costume and prop-shop TotalFab has

Costume and prop-shop TotalFab has released a line of outsized foam novelty masks just in time for Hallowe'en! I'm personally very fond of the giant tiki "Witch Doctor" mask, in case anyone out there missed my birthday. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:12:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Security guru Bruce Schneier gave

Security guru Bruce Schneier gave a speech a few days ago in which he stated that a reliance on surveillance is the failure of security. In other words, good security relies on keeping people out, not catching people at breaking in. With claims that the authors of the Current Situation used the Internet to organize their villainy, Internet surveillance technologies that government agencies have deployed ahve come under great scrutiny. Here's a good article that describes the sheer volume of intercepts that intelligence agencies accumulate, and the intractability of making sense of them. Link Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:15:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Frank Chu, the apocalyptic nut

Frank Chu, the apocalyptic nut who paces the streets of San Francisco with a sign that warns of various officials' sins against any number of "Zagnatronic Galaxies," has become a fixture in the city. Now, he's selling ad-space on his sign: "Underwritten by Quizno's subs, oven-baked classics. The galaxy's best sandwich." Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:07:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pornagami! Erotic paper-folding, illustrated and

Pornagami! Erotic paper-folding, illustrated and described. I am having multiple origami! Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:00:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lexical FreeNet allows you to

Lexical FreeNet allows you to explore the language, identify and visualize the relations, connections, intersections, and rhymes between words. Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:58:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DeskSwap: A screensaver that replaces

DeskSwap: A screensaver that replaces your idle desktop with some random person's active one from somewhere online. Link Discuss (via MemePool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:55:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, September 26, 2001

Stephen King's Dark Tower series

Stephen King's Dark Tower series is maddening. It's epic. It's haunting. And it's progressing very, very slowly. At the current rate, it's my guess that SK will have to live to 142 if he intends on finishing the story. Nevertheless, I eagerly await the coming of each book just as I have for the past fifteen-odd years. Book five is some ways out -- years! -- but King has posted the prologue to his site. Good stuff. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:25:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Interactive Underwear Project: Send

The Interactive Underwear Project: Send Frieda and Guido underwear and they will wear them. Then they will take a picture. Then they will put the picture on the Internet. Link Discuss (Thanks, Drue!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:24:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Australian Ministry for Aged

The Australian Ministry for Aged Care has published a national public toilet map. <insert potty humor here> Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:15:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fun list of puzzles compiled

Fun list of puzzles compiled by evo-art pioneer Karl Sims.

"Fair Cake: When two people want to share a cake fairly, one cuts, and the other chooses. Assuming this is a fair scheme, devise a similar scheme for 3 people and 1 cake. Nobody should get short caked even if the other 2 cooperate."

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:02:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PimpHats.com -- for all your

PimpHats.com -- for all your pimpwear needs. Hats, wigs, sunglasses, etc. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:13:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Somebody come up with a

Somebody come up with a parody of this. Paging Jim Leftwich? Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:27:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Twink.com has original tunes played

Twink.com has original tunes played on toy pianos from flea markets. Neat music and a great photo gallery of old toy pianos. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:08:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"A simple tourist getting

"A simple tourist getting himself photographed on the top of the WTC just seconds before the tragedy... the camera was found in the rubble!" And the expected debunking of said image.Link Discuss (Thanks Gil!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:26:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gord works in a video

Gord works in a video store. Here are his tales of true encounters with idiots.

"Do you have any used PlayStations?"
Not at the moment, only new ones are in stock.
"I'd like you to order a used one for me please."
Well, it doesn't quite work that way.  I can only order them in new.
"Just order me a used one.  I don't want to pay for a new one."
I'm serious here, I can't just phone up and order used ones as Sony doesn't sell used machines, and neither so suppliers.
"Yes they do!"
No, no they don't.  Trust me on this one, being that I'm the one here with the game store.
"If you don't order me a used one, I'm not going to buy one from you."
If I don't order you something that I can't get, you won't buy it from me.  Sure, sounds about right.
"Just order me a used PlayStation!"

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:01:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Liberty at Risk: "In 1798,

Liberty at Risk: "In 1798, Congress enacted the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, making it a federal crime to criticize the government. In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, citing the need to repress 'an insurrection against the laws of the United States.' Ulysses S. Grant sought to expel Jews from southern states. World War II brought about the shameful internment of Japanese Americans, which even the Supreme Court failed to overturn." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:16:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If this first person account

If this first person account of an American-born physician's encounter with bumbling FBI agents is any indication of US intelligence's abilities, then terrorists have little to worry about. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:13:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Surgeons removed the gall bladder

Surgeons removed the gall bladder of a woman from 7,000 km away, using remote-controlled robots. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A frustratingly brief article from

A frustratingly brief article from Scientific American claims that Quantum Computing solves the Prisoner's Dilema.

Hayden's group discovered that this entanglement actually removed the dilemma. In other words, it eliminated the incentive a player would have in the real world to betray his opponents.

Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:54:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gone and Forgotten: the webzine

Gone and Forgotten: the webzine devoted to the worst comics, ever. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:43:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

In Defense of Freedom: a

In Defense of Freedom: a petition signed by 150 organizations, 300 law profs, and 40 computer scientists urging the US government to fight terrorism without declaring war on freedom at home. You can sign, too. Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:06:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

British coverage of the Current

British coverage of the Current Situation that lauds Americans for their positive and reasoned reaction.

The single most impressive fact about the past few days has been the general refusal to adopt an ugly or chauvinistic attitude towards America's most recent and most conspicuous immigrants: the Middle Eastern ones. The response of public opinion has been uniformly grown-up and considerate. As if by unspoken agreement, everyone seems to know that any outrage to multiculturalism and community would be an act of complicity with the assassins. And in rather the same way, no one chooses to be very raucously in favour of hitting just anyone in "retaliation" overseas.

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:01:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Uptalking -- ending every sentence

Uptalking -- ending every sentence with rising, questioning inflection -- is taking over the English language. Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:57:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

In Heinlein's Friday, the story

In Heinlein's Friday, the story opens with the city of Seattle long-destroyed by terrorists. Throughout the novel, the various characters explain how the disaster allowed them, and an entire generation of dropouts, to create new identities, and kill off their old ones. Will the Current Situation create the same opportunity? Here's New York's streamlined death certificate program -- with nothing more than a signature, you can legally die. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:51:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Onion took last week

The Onion took last week off -- no one was in the mood for satire. They're back this week, and funnier than ever:

• Hugging up 76,000 percent
• Jery Falwell: Is that guy a dick or what?
• Rest of country temporarily feels deep affection for New York
• Massive attack on Pentagon page 14 news
• President urges calm, restraint, among nation's ballad singers
• Report: GenX irony, cynicism may be permanently obsolete

Discuss Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:33:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Computing pioneers and super-leet haxors

Computing pioneers and super-leet haxors tape a TV public service announcement pleading with "patriot hackers" to stop screwing around with the Arab world's computers. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:30:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Interesting Salon piece compares the

Interesting Salon piece compares the war on terrorism with the war on P2P file sharing.

When the MPAA tried to suppress the distribution of DeCSS, it quickly discovered that many of the individual users posting the code to the Web were prohibitively difficult to identify, ruling out direct legal action against them. The MPAA instead targeted their ISPs: legally, the Web hosting companies were obligated to take down DeCSS pages, unless the users were willing to stand up in court and be sued. Through this sidestep, the MPAA was able to sic its lawyers on the people it really wanted to sue, or failing that, make the problem go away.

In declaring that the U.S. government would not distinguish between terrorists and regimes that harbor terrorists, President Bush acted on the same principle. Like the ISPs, the Taliban would prefer to be a bystander in any conflict. By making them liable for the safe harbors they grant, though, Bush transferred some of the weight of U.S. pressure to a more identifiable target -- in order to acquire greater leverage against his real enemies.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:27:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, September 25, 2001

Good piece on Generation Y's

Good piece on Generation Y's double-identity: bovine consumers and globalization-busting hacktivists. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:15:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

14 e-gold users made transfers

14 e-gold users made transfers between 2,890,982.78 USD and 28,911,165.55 USD yesterday. Something's a-brewing. Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:27:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Random.org is a nonprofit Web

Random.org is a nonprofit Web service that generates really, really random numbers, for all your truly random needs.

True random numbers are typically generated by sampling and processing a source of entropy outside the computer. A source of entropy can be very simple, like the little variations in somebody's mouse movements or in the amount of time between keystrokes. In practice, however, it can be tricky to use user input as a source of entropy. Keystrokes, for example, are often buffered by the computer's operating system, meaning that several keystrokes are collected before they are sent to the program waiting for them. To the program, it will seem as though the keys were pressed almost simultaneously.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:40:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clay Shirky argues that cities

Clay Shirky argues that cities are an example of the vigor of decentralization, not (as some argue in the post-9.11 world) a vulnerable centralized point-of-failure.

New York City happened not because the Bureau of Centralized Cities decreed that New York City should be the largest. Indeed, at the founding of the United States, either Philadelphia or Boston would have seemed liklier candidates for that sort of pre-eminence. New York is big because over time more people came than left, because millions of uncoordinated actors decided independently to move to New York. The population is not a single variable, it is the sum of these countless distrbuted decisions.

Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:39:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phil "PGP" Zimmerman says that

Phil "PGP" Zimmerman says that the Washington Post misquoted him, and he has no regrets over releasing strong crypto, despite speculations that strong crypto may have enabled the authors of the Current Situation to plot their plots.

In these emotional times, we in the crypto community find ourselves having to defend our technology from well-intentioned but misguided efforts by politicians to impose new regulations on the use of strong cryptography. I do not want to give ammunition to these efforts by appearing to cave in on my principles. I think the article correctly showed that I'm not an ideologue when faced with a tragedy of this magnitude. Did I re-examine my principles in the wake of this tragedy? Of course I did. But the outcome of this re-examination was the same as it was during the years of public debate, that strong cryptography does more good for a democratic society than harm, even if it can be used by terrorists. Read my lips: I have no regrets about developing PGP.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Check out Wikipedia! It's an

Check out Wikipedia! It's an "open" encyclopedia -- that is, one that anyone can write an article for -- that is growing at an amazing rate, and remaining amazingly cogent and crap-free.

So, we're are constantly monitoring Wikipedia's Recent Changes page. When--as happens rarely--some eedjit shows up and vandalizes a page, it's fixed nearly instantly. (We save back copies of all pages, and these are very easily accessible.) We (that is, we participants) work on a lot of different pages, and I think most of us feel some collective responsibility for how the whole thing looks. We're constantly cleaning up after each other and new people.

In the process, a camaraderie--a politeness and congeniality not found on many online discussion forums--has developed. We've got to respect each other, because we are each other's editors, and we all have more or less the same goal: to create a huge, high-quality free encyclopedia.

Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:10:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, September 24, 2001

The proposed antiterrorism act would

The proposed antiterrorism act would make "black hat" hacking (releasing a virus, cracking a computer to obtain anything of value, etc) punishable by life imprisonment. Is it just me, or does this trivialize real terrorist acts (like crashing airplanes into buildings), while simultaneously sneaking an anti-nerd agenda into a Motherhood bill? Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:04:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chilling poll results: One third

Chilling poll results: One third of New Yorkers favor establishing internment camps for "individuals who authorities identify as being sympathetic to terrorist causes." Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Richard Dawkins' lovely and funny

Richard Dawkins' lovely and funny eulogy for Douglas Adams. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:55:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pregnant? Want to tell the

Pregnant? Want to tell the world? Why not send a greeting card with a cartoon foetus on it? Link Discuss (Thanks, Drue!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boing Boing reader Mike needs

Boing Boing reader Mike needs your help in identifying a movie:

"I have been trying for years to find a movie that someone has suggested to me might be based on a Russian Fairy Tale. If you could bear through my long description of it, maybe you could help me. The ending gives the best clue. It was made in the late 60's to early 70's. It was a fairy tale about two princes (a good one and an evil one) sent on a sort of scavenger hunt to see who would marry the princess. Among the things they had to get: a golden apple, a witch's magic flute, the ring off a king's finger in the next kingdom, a golden key. It was live action. Some of the images from the film: both princes scaling a tall tower on opposite sides using the same rope, the princess being attended to by her handmaids, sad at the prospect of marrying the evil prince- she looks down and the rose in her hand has produced an enormous tear and she says "Look, it's crying" and she shows all her attendants. The good prince by a pond playing the witch's flute, which drives her mad and she dances crazily around her hut. Father Time, who the prince consults, who turns the enormous wheels of time in the sky. The prince rides his horse across a bridge of clouds to meet with him. There's more and more....here's how it ends. They both go to the king, claiming to have found the golden key. The king weighs them on a balance, and as the evil prince's key is a fake, and the balance drops, he writhes, falls to the floor and disappears in a cloud of black smoke. The prince and princess marry, and as they are leaving the castle, he sees a fountain and says he's thirsty and wants a drink. She begs him not to, but it's too late, and he turns into an old man. She explains that it is the fountain of old age, and she drinks from it as well. The story ends with them as aged newlyweds. If any of this sounds familiar to you or anyone in blogland, I would greatly appreciate any info on what film this might be."

Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:20:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

These are the smallest video

These are the smallest video games I've ever seen. How cool. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:39:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"The Taliban have threatened to

"The Taliban have threatened to execute any U.N. worker who uses computers and communications equipment in Afghanistan." Jesus. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:33:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Antiques Roadshow Drinking Game:

The Antiques Roadshow Drinking Game: it was inevitable. Great rules!

Drink if...

* the owner of the item claims to have no idea as to the value of the item.  Drink twice if they give an amount that is hideously low ("Oh, I don't know.....a hundred dollars?" for a Tiffany lamp, for example.)

* the item brought in is larger than the trunk of an average car

* the item is from the Civil War

* the appraiser expresses his/her joy that the owner brought in the item

Link Discuss (Thanks, Drue!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:29:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Sterling gives the Viridian

Bruce Sterling gives the Viridian perspective on the Current Situation. Required reading.

However: our core issue, the Greenhouse Effect, is not going to forsake us. On the contrary: the USA is about to undergo a military-entertainment dust-up with one of the poorest and most stricken countries on Earth, a place of incessant gunfire, poxed with landmines, that hasn't had a decent rain in 3 solid years. People who can live on naan bread and goat cheese are starving there from bad weather. Is it an accident that a place like that hides people of the Al Qaeda ilk? They're the New World Disorder, and they've learned how to ship.

    Look at the economic impact from the sudden loss of two skyscrapers in New York City. It's colossal. That's straight from the file we Viridians like to label "world becoming uninsurable."

    Now try to imagine New York hit by a Category 5 hurricane. Imagine the payout crisis around, say, 2050, with all the coral dead and the seas rising along entire continental coastlines. There are serious people in the re-insurance industry who claim that weather damage in the 2050s will outmatch the planet's entire GNP. Smashing skyscrapers with aircraft full of blazing fossil fuel -- that is by no means a Greenhouse disaster, it's just a war crime. But that event is of the scope and scale of the disasters that society is courting.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:38:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mindjack, Donald Melanson's cool webzine,

Mindjack, Donald Melanson's cool webzine, is running an excerpt from Eastern Standard Tribe, the novel I'm working on at the moment. I hit the 20,000 word mark this morning, and plan on finishing it by Christmas.

Art's car was running low on lard after a week in the Benelux countries, where the residents were all high-net-worth cholesterol-conscious codgers who guarded their arteries from the depredations of the frytrap as jealously as they squirrelled their money away from the taxman. He was, therefore, thrilled and delighted to be back on British soil, Greenwich+0, where grease ran like water and his runabout could be kept easily and cheaply fuelled and the vodka could run down his gullet instead of into his tank.

He was in the Kensington High on a sleepy Sunday morning, GMT0300h -- 2100h back in EDT -- and the GPS was showing insufficient data-points to even gauge traffic between his geoloc and the Camden High where he kept his rooms. When the GPS can't find enough peers on the relay network to color its maps with traffic data, you know you've hit a sweet spot in the city's uber-circadian, a moment of grace where the roads are very nearly exclusively yours.

So he whistled a jaunty tune and swilled his coffium, a fad that had just made it to the UK, thanks to the loosening of rules governing the disposal of heavy water in the EU. The java just wouldn't cool off, remaining hot enough to guarantee optimal caffeine osmosis right down to the last drop.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:12:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Security pundit reports that in

Security pundit reports that in 1999, one in 1400 emails had viruses attached, and predicts that by 2015, three in four will. He goes on to predict that by the year 2008, the Internet will become functionally useless. Unless, of course, something is done. Something about this whole article reminds me of Xeno's Arrow -- you can proove and proove all you want that the arrow will never hit the tree, or that the Internet will collapse under its own weight, but the arrow does hit the tree and the Internet muddles through, somehow. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:47:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A discography of whistling records.

A discography of whistling records. Link Discuss (via Scrubbles)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:53:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A chilling comparison of Operation

A chilling comparison of Operation Infinite Justice to the permanent war of Orwell's 1984.

The permanent war undergirds every aspect of Big Brother's authoritarian program, excusing censorship, propaganda, secret police, and privation. In other words, it's terribly convenient.

And conveniently terrible. Bush's alarming speech pointed to a shadowy enemy that lurks in more 60 countries, including the US. He announced a policy of using maximum force against any individuals or nations he designates as our enemies, without color of international law, due process, or democratic debate.

He explicitly warned that much of the war will be conducted in secret. He rejected negotiation as a tool of diplomacy. He announced starkly that any country that doesn't knuckle under to US demands will be regarded as an enemy. He heralded the creation of a powerful new cabinet-level police agency called the "Office of Homeland Security." Orwell couldn't have named it better.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:44:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Illustrator 10 is announced --

Illustrator 10 is announced -- Mark, is it time for you to switch to OS X? This looks really cool. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:50:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Teddy Bear Search Engine

The Teddy Bear Search Engine allows you to simultaneously search multiple teddy bear sites, portals, vortals, homepages and blogs. Mmmm... specialized.. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:43:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eric Raymond apologizes publicly for

Eric Raymond apologizes publicly for slagging off the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman to a reporter, who ran his remarks verbatim. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:36:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Man shoots hermaphrodite moose. Link

Man shoots hermaphrodite moose. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My pal Jim Munroe and

My pal Jim Munroe and his buddy Sandy live across the street from each other in Toronto's Kensington Market. They have strung up a laundry-line between their apartments, and they're using it as a "semi-public art-space." They invite local artists to come and sit up in their apartments, and the guest artists create and pass works of art back and forth on the line with clothespegs. It's analog Photoshop Tennis, in realtime! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:25:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, September 23, 2001

QuickTime files of the funniest

QuickTime files of the funniest Japanese TV commercials. Really funny! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A lone Finnish coder (no,

A lone Finnish coder (no, not Linus Torvalds, another Finn) with a tenuous grasp on English spelling was written an entire, GPLed operating system in 32-bit assembler that fits on a floppy. He's only got one computer, so he can't tell you how it'll run on your machine. I love this kind of thing. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:06:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fresh perspective on the Current

Fresh perspective on the Current Situation, and the role that airline deregulation and the pursuit of profit played in its unfolding.

...[T]he U.S. is the only major nation that leaves airline and airport security in the hands of private corporations, which by their very nature are motivated to spend as little as possible. So the system was tossed in the lap of lowest-bid contractors who hired people for minimum wages. Training has been inadequate and supervision extremely lax. Turnover was 126 percent a year and the average employee stayed in airline security for only six months. Getting a job at Burger King or McDonald's represented upward mobility for the average security worker. In an anti-government political climate the airline corporations were able to shrug off the government inspections that consistently revealed how easy it was to bring weapons on board. The competition for customers sacrificed safety to avoid any inconvenience. How else to explain the insane notion that a 3-1/2 inch knife blade is not a weapon?

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:55:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Matt Feazell is the author

Matt Feazell is the author of a totally amazing minicomic called Cynicalman, and he is like a god to me. I met him again today at CanZine, the zine festival in Toronto, and bought a framed stick-figure version of American Gothic (last year, it was a stick-figure version of Nighthawks at the Diner) and a fistful of copies of Understanding Minicomics to give away to deserving pals. Complete minicomics are scanned and available for perusal on his site. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alas, Microsoft denies the Wingding/Webding

Alas, Microsoft denies the Wingding/Webding conspiracy (see Mark's post below) which originally surfaced in 1992. I don't really care if it was intentional or not--it's still spooky as hell. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:56:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Good Douglas Rushkoff rant on

Good Douglas Rushkoff rant on the Current Situation.

Introspection and self-loathing are extremely positive when they can be used to make real changes to one's outlooks and behaviors. But they can be crippling when taken too far, or when they're indulged at the wrong moment.

Similarly, fist-waving and hyper-patriotic rhetoric seems, to me, like a retreat into the symbols of an ancient war rather than an expression of the values we aim to defend.

This is an opportunity take our ongoing struggle for plurality and human creativity to the next level. For more consciousness, not less. For the dismantling of a war machine that is, in part, our own creation.

Link Discuss (via Cardhouse)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TV Kids: a groovy, creepy

TV Kids: a groovy, creepy animated gif. What is it about recursion that just screams Twilight Zone? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:10:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jon Stewart, host of the

Jon Stewart, host of the hilarious "Daily Show," gave an amazing address last week, in which he managed to greive and laugh simultaneously. Wonderful stuff. Here's a RealVideo stream of the event. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:12:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The British Guardian breaks the

The British Guardian breaks the story that a land war in Afganistan will commence shortly. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:03:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Schoolblogs offers free weblogging space

Schoolblogs offers free weblogging space for schools. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:00:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Repuslive opportunism. Larry "Oracle" Ellison

Repuslive opportunism. Larry "Oracle" Ellison is calling for mandatory ID cards for Americans, and offering free Oracle gear to run it on. That the incremental cost of Oracle licenses to Mr. Ellison is $0, and that the resulting system would give Ellison bragging rights, service contracts, and increased ubiquity did not seem to cross Ellison's mind. Thanks, but no thanks, Larry. Nothing like firing your business with the still-smoking corpses of martyrs. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:56:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIP, Samuel Z. Arkoff, maker

RIP, Samuel Z. Arkoff, maker of such howlers as "I Was a Teenage Werewolf" and "Wild in the Streets."

Through 463 movies, Mr. Arkoff's philosophy of moviemaking never changed. "Thou shalt not put too much money into any one picture," he wrote in his 1992 autobiography, "Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants." "And with the money you do spend, put it on the screen; don't waste it on the egos of actors or on nonsense that might appeal to some highbrow critics."

Link Discuss (via 24-hour drive-thru)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:28:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Manhattan skyline, writ in

The Manhattan skyline, writ in Lego. Link Discuss (via 24-hour drive-thru)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:23:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, September 22, 2001

Kudzu is eating the world

Kudzu is eating the world alive. Why not put that stuff to good use? Turns out it's edible -- and delicious. Link Discuss (Thanks, Drue!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:36:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Be careful who you trust.

Be careful who you trust. A cracker spoofed a security mailing list into believing that s/he was a bestselling (and widely derided) security expert, with a message that claimed to have located a vulneratbility in a popular ftp server. The message had an attachment, the sourcecode for a patch that would close the hole -- nominally. Actually, what the code did was erase all the important files on your hard-drive, but only if you compiled it and ran it, which many of the readers on the list did. D'oh. Link Discuss (via Meerkat, with corrections from Dan)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:09:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amazon's Jeff Bezos is doing

Amazon's Jeff Bezos is doing Taco Bell commercials on the side. <insert snotty joke here> Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:12:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A $99 Palm III clone

A $99 Palm III clone that runs Linux. Mmmmm, tasty! Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:09:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

An excellent article by Lisa

An excellent article by Lisa Rein makes sense of the snarled mess that is US Copyright Law as it pertains to streaming audio. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:53:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Webgirls, a collective of indie

Webgirls, a collective of indie Internet erotic artists, are auctioning off photos, memberships, toys, and lingerie to benefit the Red Cross. Virtue and vice! Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:50:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

United pilots have a new

United pilots have a new spiel to kick off their flights with, in which they explain to passengers how to cope with hijackers:

If someone were to stand up,brandish something such as a plastic knife and say 'This is a hijacking' or words to that effect here is what you should do: Every one of you should stand up and immediately throw things at that person — pillows, books, magazines, eyeglasses, shoes —anything that will throw him off balance and distract his attention. If he has a confederate or two, do the same with them. Most important: get a blanket over him, then wrestle him to floor and keep him there. We'll land the plane at the nearest airport and the authorities will take it from there.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stefan Jones writes: If all

Stefan Jones writes:

If all this Homeland Defense consists of is stocking vaccines and training fire departments, hey, go for it.

But there's a creepy* tone to it that makes my ACLU membership card glow and buzz**.

I thought it might be fun to have a slogan contest. Something that would look good on flyer.

Stefan

* I'd say "Orwellian" except Orwell spent a lot of his energies skewering the twisting of language and misuse of power.

** I gotta keep it away from my Safeway frequent shopper card. It keeps erasing the thing.

Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:31:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Don't-miss stirring audio and video

Don't-miss stirring audio and video of copypunk Lawrence Lessig giving the film industry what-for. Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:53:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of

Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of Pretty Good Privacy, is plagued by crying jags and fear that PGP was used by the architects of the Current Situation, but still stands by his decision to release the code. Link Discuss (Thanks, Richard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:50:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, September 21, 2001

Criticize Microsoft, Get Sued: Frontpage

Criticize Microsoft, Get Sued: Frontpage 2002's End-User License Agreement states, in part: "You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate any state, federal or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography." Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:22:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Last night, my friend Craig

Last night, my friend Craig told me to type the letters "NYC" in Microsoft Word, and change the font to Webdings. The result is a little picture of an eye, a heart, and a city skyline - "I Love NY." Then he told me to change the font to Wingdings. Take a look at the result for yourself. Link Discuss (Thanks, Craig!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:12:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More collective unconscious: an eerily

More collective unconscious: an eerily prescient poem of W.H. Auden's from 1939, which is far more convincing prognositcation than anything from Nostrildamus. Link Discuss (Thanks, Denise!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A list of five alternatives

A list of five alternatives to "Operation Infinite Justice."

1. Operation Nonlinear Feedback
2. Operation Hyperbolic Reformation
3. Operation Albigensian Catharsis
4. Operation I'm Rubber, You're Glue
5. Operation Russian Firedrill

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fantastic gallery of WWI/WWII propaganda

Fantastic gallery of WWI/WWII propaganda films in RealVideo. Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:30:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

There's always a brighter side.

There's always a brighter side. My pal Michael was stranded in Atlanta with four cow-orkers on Sept 11, with a pressing need to get back to Ottawa. After authorizing extraordinary expenses to accomplish this end, Michael and co. chartered a 40' stretch SUV with multiple TVs, aquaria, etc, and two drivers to take them to Ottawa over the next 2.5 days. Here're the photos of their alcohol- and porn-soaked trip across America, including the cute cheerleaders they gave a ride to. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:23:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, September 20, 2001

The national flag shortage is

The national flag shortage is spawning repulsive behavior: "patriots" are stealing their neighbors' flags (inlcuding family heirlooms) to show their love of freedom, and to resell at a profit. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:12:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lenore is a really cool

Lenore is a really cool little goth comic that I found out about last night. After poking around on the site, I've called my comics shop and ordered the whole run. Very nice stuff, but what really got me was the splash page for the site, which has an animation of creepy little goth characters riding around in the Doom Buggies from the Haunted Mansion. Link Discuss (Thanks, Quinn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:35:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rejoice! HyperCard is back! Runtime

Rejoice! HyperCard is back! Runtime Revolution has built a cross-platform application-development framework that clones my beloved, departed HyperCard, adding a bunch of cool, Flash-like features. You can save your Revolution projects as stand-alone applications for MacOS, Windows, Linux, and umpty-nine flavors of Unix. Very nice! Link Discuss (Thanks, Danny!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:30:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Worse than Satan. An anonymous

Worse than Satan. An anonymous Boing Boing reader discovered a visage of Blue Dog in the WTC smoke. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:48:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The headline says it all

The headline says it all "Border crackdown hurting British Columbia pot growers." Link Discuss (Thanks, theek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:11:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"The New Math of Gambling"

"The New Math of Gambling" is an interesting Discover article from April 2000 about card counting and other mathematical techniques that can give the player an advantage in Vegas. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:03:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More search-engine zeitgeist: for the

More search-engine zeitgeist: for the first time in the history of search-statistics, "sex" has dropped off the top-ten-searched-for terms online. It turns out that it really is possible to get the world's mind out of the gutter. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:27:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Page from a 1997 Donald

Page from a 1997 Donald Duck comic book that shows the destruction of twin skyscrapers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Vladimir!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:54:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microsoft is making some welcome

Microsoft is making some welcome changes to Passport and Hailstorm, the underpinnings of .NET. The changes allow third parties to host Hailstorm data (such as credit-card info and demographics) and to integrate their login systems with Passport. Practically speaking, this is an essential ingredient if Microsoft wants to credibly present themselves as the Internet's P2P plumbers, the people who provide the framework and infrastructure for P2P services to run on top of. While it's true that P2P companies would rather not pay to develop and maintain mundane stuff like login databases and wallets, they also don't want to sign on for a system that is totally at the mercy of one player. By opening up Hailstorm and Passport, Microsoft creates a potential multiplicity of providers, reducing the power they weild over their partners while strengthening their bid to set the standards for providing these services online. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:13:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

And I thought I had

And I thought I had service outages. Dragging anchors from shipping vessels damaged SEA-ME-WE3 (a 38,000 km undersea cable running from Gemany to Japan) and China-US (a 27,000 km undersea cable) yesteday, essentially knocking Asia off the Internet. Ouch. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:58:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stefan sez: "Quantum fluctuations predicted

Stefan sez: "Quantum fluctuations predicted 9/11! Yeah, really! I mean, they have a web page with charts, so it MUST be true! What's more, sessions of silent prayer smoothed out the fluctuations, showing the way to world peace and harmony." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:02:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, September 19, 2001

The Airline Pilots' Association International

The Airline Pilots' Association International has a bunch of kick-ass recommendations for its members:

Suicidal hijackers, however, should be dealt with in an aggressive fashion in which the cabin and cockpit crew work together to eliminate the threat as soon as possible using all available means.  This may include, as examples, depressurizing the aircraft or drastic aircraft maneuvering designed to keep hijackers off-balance and away from the cockpit....

Aircraft cockpits are equipped with a crash ax, which should be considered a potential defensive weapon in the event of a suicidal hijacking.  The ax should only be wielded if the crewmember is convinced that using it is necessary to save lives – the pilot must be both mentally and physically prepared to take the life of a cockpit intruder, or the ax could be used against the pilot.

Link Discuss (Thanks, argh!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More idiotic goonery in the

More idiotic goonery in the service of branding. Palm sent nastygrams to operators of sites whose domains included "palm," telling them to switch the phrase to "palmos." I mean, who give's a rat's ass whether the fan sites that are devoted to promoting your products are called "PalmFoo" or "PalmOSFoo?" The jackass lawyers at Palm, Inc. offered a bone in the form of a license that allowed fan-sites free use of "Palm OS" (which is covered under the doctrine of Fair Use anyway, thanks a million) while making threatening noises about insisting "that you work with us to re-brand your Web site in a manner that does not infringe Palm's trademark rights," and giving the sites' owners two weeks to comply. In retaliation -- or out of fear of future ham-fisted bullying -- many of these sites switched their names to "PocketWhatever," opting to promote Microsoft's PocketPC platform. Nice job, Palm. You've just set back your branding effort by years.

To my mind, corporate counsel is problematic because it's a non-bankable resource. Either your lawyers are harassing your customers or they're sitting around with their thumbs up their asses. Either way, they're drawing a salary, and that means that at corporate year-end, they need to account for their draw on the bottom line. So coopering up a bunch of nastygrams makes a handy justification: "This year, Legal cost the company $1.2 million in salaries and overheads, and successfully defended 187 attacks on the corporate brand and IP, valued at $1 billion, which means that we saved the company $187 billion - $1.2 million. Hell, we're revenue-positive!"

I'm convinced that if there were some means to time-share in-house counsel, paying an hourly only for the genuinely useful stuff -- real threats to IP, contract negotiations, etc -- that we'd see a lot less of this idiocy. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The O'Reilly P2P and Web

The O'Reilly P2P and Web Services conference has been rescheduled. I was heartbroken when we had to cancel it (it was to have been this week, in DC, and for obvious reasons that was not possible). Now it's back on, at the Westin Grand, in Washington, D.C., November 5-8, 2001. Boo-yah! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:23:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BoingBoing is BACK! We've been

BoingBoing is BACK! We've been offline since Sunday afternoon, because a planned, orderly server-move turned into chaos and bad cess. See the message below if you want to subscribe to the BoingBoing mailing list and so be kept up to date in the event of future outages. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:34:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mixed blessings: All of AGENCY.COM's

Mixed blessings: All of AGENCY.COM's NYC employees are safe and sound, and AGENCY.COM won't be laying them off either (they've been axing employees like mad). The Portland office, on the other hand, is being burned to the ground. Link) Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:00:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Search terms reveal the state

Search terms reveal the state of the collective unconscious. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:32:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A journo has cooked up

A journo has cooked up a conspiracy theory about domain names and the current situation. Citing dozens of domains, like attackontwintowers.com, that presaged the events of 9.11 and were registered over a year ago, this guy thinks that terrorists decided to slyly telegraph their intentions through the most nefarious of means imaginable: domain-name squatting. Me, I figure that it's more evidence that the events of 9.11 had been knocking around the collective unconscious -- just like those unfortunate album covers. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:55:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

See Google in hacker mode.

See Google in hacker mode. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:37:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Proactive medicine: LaBrea is an

Proactive medicine: LaBrea is an open source tool that fights back against worms. It simulates lots of tasty, infectable machines, and when they're probed by a worm, it grabs the worm's network connection and holds it -- for a very, very long time. Sometimes forever. The worm gets stuck and can't infect other machines. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:34:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

On September 14, Congress voted

On September 14, Congress voted to give Dubya sweeping powers to answer the attacks with force. One Congresscritter, Barabara Lee (Rep D-CA) voted in opposition to the bill, a move that has earned her death threats and a police bodyguard. Here's why she took such a singular stand.

This resolution does not obligate the President to report back to Congress after 60 days, as was required by Congress during the Gulf War, about the actions our military will take. Additionally, this resolution authorizes an open-ended action and significantly reduces Congress’s authority in this matter. We must bring the perpetrators of this horrific action to justice. But during this period of grief, mourning, and anger, the U.S. Congress has a responsibility to urge the use of restraint so that the violence does not spiral out of control and to consider all of the implications of our actions.

Link Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:15:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If you're reading this, it

If you're reading this, it means that BoingBoing is back on the air (all thanks to Carl, sysadmin to the stars!). Given the volume of people who wrote to us asking wtf was up with the blog during the outage, I figured that a mailing-list was in order. Therefore, I have started a mailing list at YahooGroups, which you can join by clicking the link below. We'll be posting any important notices (such as outages, planned and un-) about the blog there. Go ahead, be a joiner. All the cool kids are already there. Link Discuss

You can also subscribe by entering your email address here:

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:23:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, September 18, 2001

Urban Legends regarding the Current

Urban Legends regarding the Current Situation are debunked here. Good reading. Link Discuss (Thanks, hlr!!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:58:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nixlog has compiled an amazing

Nixlog has compiled an amazing collection of links to Current Situation infographics from around the world. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:21:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Excellent infographic from The Times

Excellent infographic from The Times showing the nationalities of those missing or dead in the wake of the Current Situation. It really wasn't just an attack on America and Americans. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:17:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Welcome to woo-woo land. A

Welcome to woo-woo land. A respected defense correspondent for the British Daily Telegraph has psychically determined that the cause of the Current Events is crypto (we should get him together with Jerry Falwell so they can share insights). Consequently, all ISPs should be required to filter out all crypto (including ssl for shopping baskets, presumably -- what's a cleartext credit-card number of two when you're defending the world from terrorists, who presumably enciphered their box-cutters to slip them past airport security?). Foreign ISPs that don't comply should be taken out with cruise missiles. Ah, the voice of reason! Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:10:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A German public TV station

A German public TV station hired hackers to break into a bank's server so they could do a show on security. The bank fixed the security holes and threatened to sue. The station's hackers broke in again. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:55:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

It's official: the Mac and

It's official: the Mac and OSX constitute a kick-ass gaming platform. The new build of Mac Wolfenstein, based on the Quake III Arena engine, running on a G4, renders three times faster than on a similarily equipped PC. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:43:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Well, the Current Situation is

Well, the Current Situation is tragic for all kinds of reasons, including: It makes it harder to sell things to you. Luckily, the author of "Why People Buy Things They Don't Need" is on the case, with these insights:

For consumer marketers to move the consumer to action, that is to buy something they don't need, marketers must provide the consumers with sufficient justifiers that overcome barriers to purchase and give them a reason to buy. Now, in the face of national crisis, the importance of these justifiers suddenly becomes more critical...

Consumers will also crave the comfort of traditions, so there will be new demand for products that support family traditions, such as Christmas and Santa ornaments and decorations, tabletop and dinnerware for family get-togethers. Back-to-basic toys will give parents a chance to get down on the floor and play with their kids. Suddenly "Made in America" is a much more potent positioning statement, as buying American now is a patriotic duty. Nostalgia-themed products that hearken back to a better, simpler time and greeting cards may also be in demand.

Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:33:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A firewall for phone lines:

A firewall for phone lines: plug this into your phone system's "outermost permiter" -- the place where your office phone system meets your telco's local loops -- and it will monitor incoming and outgoing calls. Why? So you can keep employees from compromising network security by plugging modems into their desk phones and providing a back-door to the network. You can tell the system which lines are allowed to send and receive what kinds of calls (data, voice, fax). While this is clearly a good idea securitywise, it does seem to play into Dilbertian power-fantasies of total control over your corporate infrastructure. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:25:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Well, Falwell was right: it

Well, Falwell was right: it was all the ACLU's fault. Just look at these outrageous statements of theirs:

We are now in a fight against an enemy that has targeted not only our lives and property, but also the fundamental values of freedom and equality that are the hallmarks of our democracy...

Terror, by its very nature, is intended not only to kill and destroy. Terror is also designed to intimidate a people and force them to take actions that may not be in their long-term best interests. If we allow our freedoms to be undermined, the terrorists will have won...

We cannot let our grief and anger overwhelm our democracy. Now is the time for the people's representatives to be even more thoughtful and deliberative than usual.

Link Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:14:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A little MPEG clip from

A little MPEG clip from The Family Guy illustrates one of the fundamental flaws in airport security. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:04:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ernie "Mr. Dressup" Coombs is

Ernie "Mr. Dressup" Coombs is dead. A protege of Mr. Rogers, Mr. Dressup was on Canadian TV for 30 years, and he molded the minds of generations of Canadians, including mine. Of course, he was born in the U.S. Link Discuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This is so ironic, I

This is so ironic, I assumed it was an urban legend until I found verification from a print source -- The Times of London. The last US soldier out of Saigon, Retired Master Sergeant Max Beilke, was killed in the Pentagon crash. Jeez. Link Discuss (Thanks, dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:19:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, September 17, 2001

Japanese researchers have developed a

Japanese researchers have developed a radio-controleld "backpack" that can be strapped onto a live cockroach for to deliver pulses of electricity that guide the roach's path. The result? An RC roach. Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:08:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wireless signals emanate from the

Wireless signals emanate from the wreckage of the WTC.

The ad-hoc ``wireless emergency response team,'' composed of technicians from some of the major telecommunications companies, has begun searching for activity on about 2,000 wireless phone numbers of people believed trapped in the wreckage.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:43:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Visor user captured the

A Visor user captured the Pentagon crash with his eyemodule. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:41:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tim O'Reilly is a total

Tim O'Reilly is a total stud. The founder of O'Reilly and Associates -- publishers of the world's greatest technical books, and conveners of the world's greatest technical conentions -- Tim got his start writing a bio of Dune-author Frank Herbert, then went on to write the first Unix user-manual. O'Reilly and Associates are a real writer-friendly press, and Tim himself is a polemicist of the first water. Now, Tim has collected in one place every article, book, review and interview he's ever done. Kick ass. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:37:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Iconic editorial cartoons and photos

Iconic editorial cartoons and photos from WWII are mirrored in the Current Situation's iconography. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patricio!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Remember this? Back in December,

Remember this? Back in December, cops around the world discovered that terrorists had started minting replica cellular phones that fired up to four .22-caliber rounds. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:55:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Boston Globe is reporting

The Boston Globe is reporting that Americans are buying up cellphones despite the economic downturn, convinced that phones are a lifeline to their loved ones in the event of imminent demise. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Through most of last week,

Through most of last week, the world took a vacation. My email, normally a torrent, slowed to a trickle. Aside from messages about the blog, and checkins from friends in NYC reporting in, there was hardly incoming mail.

Except spam.

Tons and tons of spam.

I'm convinced that most spammers were -- like most people in general -- glued to CNN, watching the Current Situation unfold. I think that the spam I received all through last week was the result of automated, timed tasks, cron jobs running in the background on thousands of servers and desktops around the world.

My mood's a little apocalyptic these days, so I got to thinking about what would happen to the Internet if humans vanished, and I imagined a world of Flying Dutchmen, automated processes that sent spam, deleted spam, spawned bots on IRC channels, infected each other with worms and fetched down antivirus medecine... It's an eerie image.

If the world ended with a whimper -- say, a fast, world-killing bug -- and our power apparatus held out, visiting aliens would discover a richly populated Internet of spiders, bots, mobile code, spam and cockroaches, nattering away at one another while humanity lay in its grave. Creepy, huh? Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:46:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hackers are striking Islamic/Afghani sites

Hackers are striking Islamic/Afghani sites and Palestinian ISPs in retaliation against the Current Situation, despite the FBI's pleas to the contrary.

"We have the potential and the power, if we push hard enough, to knock an entire country that we target offline for over a week."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF co-founder John Gilmore is

EFF co-founder John Gilmore is calling for cypherpunks to move their strong crypto projects to servers located outside the US, before Congress enacts any anti-export or backdoor legislation. This pre-emptive strike would put the US where it was before the Bernstein case (which struck down the ban on strong crypto exports), the last-place runner in the secure communications race. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:33:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Evolutionary biologist and crank polemicist

Evolutionary biologist and crank polemicist Richard Dawkins points the finger for the Current Situation at Heaven:

If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that naive and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions?

There is no doubt that the afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a smart missile, and its guidance system is in many respects superior to the most sophisticated electronic brain that money can buy. Yet to a cynical government, organisation, or priesthood, it is very very cheap.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:36:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, September 16, 2001

A few weeks ago, I

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Warhol Worms, theoretical viruses that could infect every vulnerable server on the Internet in 15 minutes or less. Now a group of researchers have mapped out "Flash Worms" -- worms that could infect every vulnerable server on the Internet in 30 seconds. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:52:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

An audience-participation show in the

An audience-participation show in the UK with the former US Ambassador deteriorates into an America-bashing match, prompting the BBC to do something unprecendented: apologize. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:32:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Buried treasure: nearly 12 tons

Buried treasure: nearly 12 tons of gold was stored in WTC's basement. Link Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, September 15, 2001

The new Counterpane is out,

The new Counterpane is out, and Schneier weighs in on the Current Situations.

In times of crisis it's easy to disregard these liberties or, worse, to actively attack them and stigmatize those who support them. We've already seen government proposals for increased wiretapping capabilities and renewed rhetoric about encryption limitations. I fully expect more automatic surveillance of ordinary citizens, limits on information flow and digital-security technologies, and general xenophobia. I do not expect much debate about their actual effectiveness, or their effects on freedom and liberty. It's easier just to react. In 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed in the Atlantic. Originally people thought it was a missile attack. The FBI demanded, and Congress passed, a law giving law enforcement greater abilities to expel aliens from the country. Eventually we learned the crash was caused by a mechanical malfunction, but the law still stands.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:24:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Excellent About.com piece on the

Excellent About.com piece on the explosion -- and implosion -- of online survivor lists in the wake of the Current Situation. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:12:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

We've all seen the bizarre

We've all seen the bizarre coincidental cover for The Coup's latest disc (which depicts the WTC exploding), but this cover for Insekt Angelica's indie CD is weirdly prescient, showing two planes colliding in front of the Twin Towers. Something about The Current Events appears to have lived in the collective unconscious for years. Link Discuss (Thanks, Enrico!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:21:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great article from Lisa Rein

Great article from Lisa Rein at the O'Reilly Network: Weblogs, IRC and other person-to-person and peer-to-peer services kept the news coming while the monolithic news sites collapsed under load. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:02:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prescient commentary from Neal Stephenson's

Prescient commentary from Neal Stephenson's polemic on operating systems, In the Beginning Was the Command Line.

...But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds...

To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds...

In this country, the people who run things--who populate major law firms and corporate boards--understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don't raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way...

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:44:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, September 14, 2001

Terrific introduction to Quantum Computing,

Terrific introduction to Quantum Computing, a new kind of computing that is fast becoming a reality (I actually saw a working prototype Quantum Computer at the MIT Media Lab a couple months back). With a Quantum Computer, you can ask the machine to simulate every possible state of a problem set (for example, every possible key to a cipher) and then "collapse" on the solution. I'm not an expert on the subject by any means, but one of the traditional predictions for working Quantum Computing is an end to traditional crypto, while creating quantum crypto schemes that cannot be eavesdropped upon. Link Discuss (via Meerkat -- thanks, Dan for clarification)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:43:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Truly scary Slate article about

Truly scary Slate article about Osama Bin Laden's agenda:

It is a mistake to assume that killing Bin Laden means killing his movement. It's true that Bin Laden is an iconic leader who inspires his followers and millions of sympathizers in the Muslim world. But eliminating Bin Laden would do nothing to decrease the intensity of the other militant Islamists. The Afghan war created a cadre of warriors and belligerent clerics who are constantly recruiting. Bin Laden has a core of highly trained aides ready to continue his work. His trainees are scattered in two dozen countries. It is hard to imagine how the United States could neutralize all of them. And attacks on Bin Laden have only increased his popularity: Killing him would likely rally many more Muslims to his cause. Is there anything we can do to persuade Bin Laden to stop? The terror groups Americans are familiar with—Palestinian bombers and hijackers, IRA hard men—have desires we understand. They perform acts of terror in order to gain sympathy or sow fear. That sympathy or fear is a means to their end: political recognition, a state, compensation. They seek to participate in our world. But Bin Laden and his followers are alarming because they don't want anything from us. They don't want our sympathy. They want no material thing we can offer them. They don't want to participate in the community of nations. (They don't really believe in the nation-state.) They are motivated by religion, not politics. They answer to no one but their god, so they certainly won't answer to us.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:16:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This is from the DaveNet

This is from the DaveNet mailing list, by an Afghan American writer.

Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens [2], on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done." And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing. I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan , a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban. We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time. So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else? Mir Tamim Ansary

Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:54:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired News reports that "FBI

Wired News reports that "FBI agents soon may be able to spy on Internet users legally without a court order. On Thursday evening, two days after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, the Senate approved the 'Combating Terrorism Act of 2001,' which enhances police wiretap powers and permits monitoring in more situations." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:40:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MP3 first-person account from the

MP3 first-person account from the fire-safety director of WTC2, who barely made it out alive. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:36:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Here's a picture that David

Here's a picture that David emailed me of a proposed replacement for the Towers.Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:08:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ABC News Poll: "Ninety-two percent

ABC News Poll: "Ninety-two percent support new laws that would make it easier for authorities to investigate people they suspect of terrorist activity; 71 percent feel that way even "if it meant giving up some of Americans' personal liberties and privacy." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:00:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Two great pieces from the

Two great pieces from the archives of the New Yorker: a profile of bin Laden from last year, and a 1972 article about the construction of the World Trade Towers. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:17:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Of the 1,000 people who

Of the 1,000 people who worked at bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald at the WTC, only 270 are accounted for. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:14:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark Twain dictated "The War

Mark Twain dictated "The War Prayer" around 1904. His publisher rejected it. Link Discuss (Thanks, Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:23:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Euro airlines permit carry-on laptops,

Euro airlines permit carry-on laptops, but not laptop bags. Huh? Link Discuss (Thanks, foxhedge!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:59:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More specialized opportunities to help:

More specialized opportunities to help: the ASPCA is soliciting donations of booties for the rescue-dogs. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:42:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are you a Citrix Engineer

Are you a Citrix Engineer or a Microsoft Certified Engineer? If so, the Red Cross needs you in NYC. (If only they needed a really sharp Mac guy...) Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:14:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More good stuff from Dan

More good stuff from Dan Gilmour:

A few brave commentators are asking uncomfortable questions this week, and being pilloried for their trouble. They are asking America to ask itself why we are so loathed in much of the world. President Bush's statement that the terrorists hate freedom is probably true, but it's incomplete.

To ask those questions is not to assume some kind of bizarre moral eqivalency. The United States has many flaws, but on balance it's a beacon of light on this troubled planet. The people who organized and supported Tuesday's atrocity are beyond the pale. I have nothing in my heart for them.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:44:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Falwell's lame-ass apologia. First, he

Falwell's lame-ass apologia. First, he said

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen

Once he got called on the carpet for his fearmongering, he said

I would never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize.

Nice one, Rev. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:28:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jerry Falwell and Eric Raymond

Jerry Falwell and Eric Raymond should have a head-to-head debate. Falwell thinks the Current Situation was brought on by secular elements:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell said yesterday that the American Civil Liberties Union, with abortion providers, gay rights proponents and federal courts that had banned school prayer and legalized abortion, had so weakened the United States spiritually that the nation was left exposed to Tuesday's terrorist attacks.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:24:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More urban legends about the

More urban legends about the Current Situation. Canadian broadcaster Gordon Sinclair penned a stirring editorial in support of America that circulated widely yesterday. The problem is, he wrote it in 1973, about the Vietnam war.

This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth.

Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:15:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, September 13, 2001

As if the writings of

As if the writings of Nostradamus aren't bullshit enough, now people are forwarding around these words from the "prophet:" "In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb." -Nostradamus 1654 The irony is not only that Nostradamus died in 1566, but that this specific quatrain was actually written recently by a student as part of an online essay entitled "Nostradamus: A Critical Analysis" as an example proving how if you "are intelligent enough to word (your predictions) in such a way that they are abstract" you'll be celebrated as a seer! To really top things off, people are now adding their own nonsense to the email hoax in Nostradamus's name including references to the date of 9/11 when "two metal birds will crash into two tall statues." Mark half-jokingly suggested to me that the email originated with publishers who are trying to sell more Nostradamus books. Seems to me like the kid who wrote the essay should take credit and score a fat book advance! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:36:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tony Pierce has collected a

Tony Pierce has collected a photo-essay of reactions to the Current Situation from around the world. This is very moving stuff. Link Discuss (via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:35:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Technical Remote Viewing Institute,

The Technical Remote Viewing Institute, run by ex-military remote viewer Ed Dames, says: "The September 11th attack on the U.S. was planned and orchestrated from an underground command and control bunker complex, located beneath (and accessed via) Ahmad Shah Durrani's Tomb, in Kandahar, Afganistan. This information was passed through official channels to the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), McDill AFB, Florida." And here's a diagram! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:09:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rich sez: "Currently, four of

Rich sez: "Currently, four of the ten bestselling books at Amazon have the prophecies of Nostradamus as their subject. I find that slightly alarming." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:06:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Haunting account of the last

Haunting account of the last phone calls of the passengers on the PA-crashed flight.

"He said, 'Deena.' And I said, 'Are you OK?' And he said, 'No.' And I knew then that he was right in the middle of it," she said. "He said, 'I'm on the airplane, the airplane that's been hijacked and they've already knifed a guy. They're saying they have a bomb. Please call the authorities."'

The most amazing, futuristic thing about the Current Situation is the amount of civilian-generated content and coverage, from amateur photos and videos to first-person accounts to grassroots survivor-lists to the passengers themselves, making wireless calls to the ground as they prepare to rush the cockpit. The world has changed. The filpside of the Orwellian nightmare of the panoptic surveillance society is the voracious data-gathering and republishing of the distributed world, a weird utopia of ubiquitous information and observation. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:21:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spammers are creating bogus disaster-relief

Spammers are creating bogus disaster-relief funds and capturing credit-card info from the well-meaning. This was inevitable, I suppose. What's next? I'm waiting for the discount real-estate brokers to swoop down on Battery Park and start soliciting tenants. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:11:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

There's been a lot of

There's been a lot of talk about Osama Bin Laden's "signature style" in relation to the Current Situation. The Smoking Gun hosts this partial translation of a "terrorism manual" that describes that style, recovered from the home of a Bin Laden follower in Manchester, UK, in May 2000. This is disturbing (if largely obvious) stuff, and it does describe the kind of atrocity that we saw on Tuesday. Link Discuss (via Linkfilter)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:46:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Fly High on Intelligence, Not

"Fly High on Intelligence, Not Drugs!" The CIA's homepage for kids. Link Discuss (via Linkfilter)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:38:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

100 Questions and Answers About

100 Questions and Answers About Arab Americans: A Journalist's Guide. Link Discuss (via Kottke.org)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:22:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This was sent to Dave

This was sent to Dave Farber's IP list by Gordon Peterson (Dig that regulation Unix Freak hair and beard!)

"One of the more curious reports I've heard here in Dallas is that American Airlines (based here in Fort Worth) is seriously considering to ban *all* carryon articles, presumably including attache cases, camera bags, and notebook computers. (I know from personal experience that it is **not** safe to check notebook computers and video camcorders on airplanes, even with serious efforts to pack them well to protect them)."

Want to get rich off this tragedy? Design and sell a shockproof notebook case. Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:22:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If the WTC bombing is

If the WTC bombing is considered an Act of War, will the tenants' insurance policies (and the victims' life-insurance policies) pay out? Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:15:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The FAA has announced its

The FAA has announced its new safety measures, including removing all metal food-service knives, banning shaving-kits with razor-blades, and eliminating curbside checkin. Oh, and they're warning passengers to allow for up to three hours of security delays before their flights. I feel safer already. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:55:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Welcome to the Kristallnacht II

Welcome to the Kristallnacht II rehearsals. Moslems, brown people and Arabs need not apply:

• 300 demonstrators marched on a Mosque in Bridgeview, IL ("I'm proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have," said 19-year-old Colin Zaremba who marched with the group from Oak Lawn.")
• Molotov cocktail tossed into a Moslem community center in Chicago
• Armed robber in Gary Indiana threatens a Yemeni-American gas-station attendant with a high-powered assault rifle
• A drunk driver in Huntington, NY tried to run down a Pakistani woman in a parking lot, then followed her into a store and threatened to kill her for "destroying my country."
• In Australia, a schoolbus carrying Moslem children was stoned
• In Australia, a Lebanese church is burned
• Jish, a local blogger, is chased out of the coffee shop by rednecks who want to know if he's Afghani.
• Muslim students at the University of Texas are subject to search

Link, Link, Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:25:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Current Situation has entered

The Current Situation has entered the Nintendo Phase. This Spanish news site has posted an amazing, stylish interactive multimedia tutorial that shows every single detail, facet, and event of Tuesday in clean, antialiased lines. Link Discuss (via Kottke.org)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Welcome, Wired News readers! Leander

Welcome, Wired News readers! Leander Kahney quoted BoingBoing and linked back here in a story on successful indie Web coverage of the Current Situation. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:02:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dumbass editorial from ZDNet Australia

Dumbass editorial from ZDNet Australia on the "hidden" costs of PDAs: you have to buy software for them, you have to teach people how to use them, and you have to upgrade them. Soo-prise, soo-prise, soo-prise. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:40:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why the Bombings Mean That

Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics: Bang-on mock-editorial about the forthcoming tide of self-serving chest-thumping over the Current Events.

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:03:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alleged -- but jaw-dropping --

Alleged -- but jaw-dropping -- sat photo of Manhattan, with what appears to be artificial color. Is this real? Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scary data-terror: a recent Popular

Scary data-terror: a recent Popular Mechanics cover story explains how to build an EMP bomb for $400 that will toast PDAs, PCs, and every other electronic device we rely on. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:57:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

eBay pulls WTC/Pentagon-related auctions, from

eBay pulls WTC/Pentagon-related auctions, from ghoulish bits of salvaged wreckage to legit memoribilia whose posting predates the Current Situation. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:42:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jason Kottke's posted a lengthy

Jason Kottke's posted a lengthy and excellent list of first-person accounts, personal photos, and other noteworthy bitzenpieces about the Current Situation. The news coverage thus far has been heavily skewed to talking heads, while the Internet has overflowed with promiscommunicating New Yorkers and DCites, telling the real story. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogger's automatic index of blog

Blogger's automatic index of blog entries mentioning the Current Situation. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ASCII is the new PDF!

ASCII is the new PDF! Plain text -- in email, documents, and interchange -- is the future of computing. Formatted text is printer-centric, and in a network world, who needs a printer? Good Easy is a Mac OS 9 replacement that creates en entire productivity suite around plain old text. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eric Raymond (Open Source advocate,

Eric Raymond (Open Source advocate, science fiction fan, liberatarian, gun nut) weighs in on the tragedy, with a note that starts well enough, ends well enough, but in the middle contains an argument for arming airline passengers so they can defend themselves against terrorists. Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:00:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

Here's the first of many

Here's the first of many inevitable pieces of irresponsible journalism linking terrorists and crypto, from USA Today. We're going to see a lot of this kind of hysteria, along with anal-probes in the airports, and any number of abridgements to our freedom.

"Uncrackable encryption is allowing terrorists -- Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaida and others -- to communicate about their criminal intentions without fear of outside intrusion," FBI Director Louis Freeh said last March during closed-door testimony on terrorism before a Senate panel. "They're thwarting the efforts of law enforcement to detect, prevent and investigate illegal activities."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:43:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Mercury News' Dan Gillmor

The Mercury News' Dan Gillmor weighs in: "What happened on Tuesday was an act of war. The American government and military should and will respond in kind. If law enforcement and national security agencies declare war on the American people in the process, they will give the terrorists a gift. The despicable people who planned this will triumph if we add to the damage. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:38:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Akamai Technologies co-founder killed when

Akamai Technologies co-founder killed when the jet he was in crashed into New York's World Trade Center. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:43:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

From John Perry Barlow's mailing

From John Perry Barlow's mailing list:

*DO* WORRY ABOUT US. AND, MORE TO THE POINT, U.S. As most of you know, I believe that the United States has gradually, subtly, invisibly to most of us, become a police state over the last 30 years. This morning's events are roughly equivalent to the Reichstag fire that provided the social opportunity for the Nazi take-over of Germany. I am *not* suggesting that, like the Nazis, the authoritarian forces in America actually had a direct role in perpetrating this mind-blistering tragedy. (Though their indirect role deserves a much longer discussion.) Nevertheless, nothing could serve those who believe that American "safety" is more important than American liberty better than something like this. Control freaks will dine on this day for the rest of our lives. Within a few hours, we will see beginning the most vigorous efforts to end what remains of freedom in America. Those of who are willing to sacrifice a little - largely illusory - safety in order to maintain our faith in the original ideals of America will have to fight for those ideals just as vigorously. I beg you to begin NOW to do whatever you can - whether writing your public officials, joining the ACLU or EFF, taking to the streets, or living visibly free and fearless lives - to prevent the spasm of control mania from destroying the dreams that far more have died for over the last two hundred twenty five years than died this morning. Don't let the terrorists or (their natural allies) the fascists win. Remember that the goal of terrorism is to create increasingly paralytic totalitarianism in the government it attacks. Don't give them the satisfaction. Fear nothing. Live free. And, please, let us try to forgive those who have committed these appalling crimes. If we hate them, we will become them. May God - or Whatever you want to call It - bless us all. We'll need it. Barlow

Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:06:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bill Shunn, a New Yorker

Bill Shunn, a New Yorker who's doing fine, has set up a guestbook for New Yorkers and DCites to post to if they're OK, too. Spread the word. Good idea, Bill. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

After the Oklahoma bombing, everyone

After the Oklahoma bombing, everyone was convinced that the only people well organized enough and hateful enough to have attacked the Federal building were Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists. Of course, it turned out to be a good ole boy. The same thing's happening again, and now the Internet's getting in on the act: the Taleban's web-site has been defaced. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:22:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A trucker who hit and

A trucker who hit and killed a child in LA was dragged from his cab and beaten nearly to death. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

6:15AM in San Francisco: I

6:15AM in San Francisco: I fire up a browser and start looking at blogs and such. Then I happen on this entry, from my friend Teresa in New York:

I just climbed back down from my Brooklyn rooftop. An airplane has flown into the World Trade Towers. There's thick black smoke billowing out of several floors of both towers.

Let me pause for a moment to say with all the lucidity I can muster that it is the strangest sight I have ever seen in my life.

I can hear the sirens of multiple emergency vehicles, 360 degrees around. There were people on other rooftops in my neighborhood, some of them talking on their cellphones. Down in the street below me a workman was shouting in some language other than English for the rest of his work crew to come out of the house they're renovating and see what's happening. I couldn't make out a word of it, but there was no mistaking the sense.

Patrick called from the office. He says from where I'm standing I can't see the big hole in the side of one tower.

So off I go to the usual suspects: CNN, Yahoo, BBC, CBC -- and they're all so busy with people doing what I'm doing, they refuse to load. The Internet's major news sites have been shut down by a massive flood of traffic as everyone in the world calls and emails everyone else in the world to tell them the news. God, this feels so apocalyptic. Five people have just called me to tell me about this, and more -- all flights in the US have been grounded, the Pentagon's been hit, the flights were hijacked commercial airliners... Holy crap. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:07:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, September 10, 2001

Hackers are fixing the odds

Hackers are fixing the odds in Internet Casinos. An attack in late August cost one casino 1.9 million dollars. I like them odds! Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:21:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thanks to Julian Bond, BoingBoing

Thanks to Julian Bond, BoingBoing now has an experimental RSS feed! I honestly don't know enough about RSS to tell you how to do cool stuff with this (feel free to post a comment if you have ideas), but cool stuff most assuredly can be done. Link Discuss (Thanks, Julian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:59:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bioluminescent pet fish from Taiwan!

Bioluminescent pet fish from Taiwan! Link It's another fine example of life imitating art imitating life. Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:17:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Is chess legend Bobby Fischer

Is chess legend Bobby Fischer playing anonymously on the Internet, as a British chess grandmaster is claiming? Link Discuss (Thanks, Barry!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:11:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada's hard at work on

Canada's hard at work on its own version of the craptacular DMCA, and the CanGov is soliciting feedback on their proposal from Canadians -- I've already sent them a copy of my essay on sf and copyright (Link). Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan, Fred and Jean-Francois -- boy a lot of people thought I should know about this!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:10:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More info on the new

More info on the new copyright bill I mentioned here a couple weeks ago (Link). This is some deeply sinister, poorly thought out shit. Under the terms of the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), hardware vendors will have to build copy-protection into their gear, right at the drives and the controllers. People who plug a computer into the Internet that isn't compliant with the copy-protection stuff are liable for a $500,000 fine. Urp. Link Discuss (Thanks Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:01:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great Eric Raymond editorial on

Great Eric Raymond editorial on how to ask a question on a technical mailing-list.

Never assume you are entitled to an answer. You are not. You will earn an answer, if you earn it, by asking a question that is substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking — one that implicitly contributes to the experience of the community rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from others.

Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Factories are starting to use

Factories are starting to use "3D Printers" (AKA Fabbers, see last week's blog entry, Link) to spot-manufacture replacement parts for critical manufactory apparatus. My great-aunt Lisa and great-uncle Bora used to have a machine-shop in the former Leningrad, where they made custom parts for cars and machines that were in short supply after Glasnost (they lost the shop when it was expropriated at gunpoint by the Russian Mob, who wanted the location: ah, sweet liberty!). Bet they woulda loved one of these. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:39:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ha! My post about Wired

Ha! My post about Wired News's coverage (Link) of the new WiFi stuff is vindicated! A week ago, Network World Fusion covered an IEEE initiative to define 802.11 cards and access-points that can handle both the new and the old WiFi standards. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:32:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are you hyperlexic? Hyperlexics read

Are you hyperlexic? Hyperlexics read fabulously, understand spoken words poorly, and are badly socialized. Hrm. Link Discuss (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:24:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oh, the merry pranksters of

Oh, the merry pranksters of the Internet have been having a fun time playing around with the White House's glossary of urban drug-slang (Link), and none more so than the happy tricksters at the Brunching Shuttlecocks. They've created a Web-page parser (Link) that will take any page, search for White House defined drug slang, and replace it with the White Houre provided definition. BoingBoing gets pretty funny in translation (it translated "Rave on!" as "Parties designed to enhance a hallucinogenic experience through music and behavior on!"). Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:16:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

JimWICH has posted an incredible

JimWICH has posted an incredible series of photos of Greg Browne's whimsical and brilliantly executed Trompe L'Oeil murals in Palo Alto. Link) Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:07:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ever since I read Bradley

Ever since I read Bradley Denton's Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede (Link) -- one of the greatest humorous sf novels of all time -- I've been obsessed with Buddy Holly. You will understand my disappointment, then, when I tell you that I was not present at the Texas Tech-New Mexico football game where 49,000 people sang "Peggy Sue" in unison as the conclusion to a four-day Buddy Holly symposium. Rave on! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:47:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WAP sucks. Fine. But here's

WAP sucks. Fine. But here's a cool WAP-app: next time you're standing somewhere cool and feel the need to write a haiku about it, visit this service and tap out your three lines on your keypad, then you can see the haiku that other visitors to the same spot have left -- invisible grafitti! Link Discuss (Thanks, hlr!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:22:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I have a real love-hate

I have a real love-hate relationship with Wired News. The hate part comes in two flavors: I hate the stories that just gush about some nebulously defined bit of vaporware from a press-release (see this blog entry for an example: Link) and then there're stories like this one, where Elisa Batista covers the new 802.11a wireless standard, which is nearly five times faster than existing WiFi networks.

The hook for her story is that making the switch will cost a lot of money, since 802.11b (the old kind) cards aren't compatible with 802.11a (the new kind) base-stations. The headline (which I'm sure she didn't write, which is why this is about Wired News, not Ms. Batista) is "Wi-Fi Cost May Be Sky High." It seems like total chickenlittling to me. This is a new system, and so of course you need to buy new gear to make it work. Upgrade paths in high-tech should not come as a surprise, but the headline and the lede for the story makes the whole thing come off as a kind of conspiracy to jack the consumer for a couple extra bucks.

Here's my take: New! WiFi! Gear! Fast as hell! Not compatible -- yet -- and here's how long people who maintain public WiFi networks (WUGs, Starbucks, LaptopLanes, hotels) say they're going to take to implement it, and how they plan on doing so. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, September 9, 2001

While it's a fun idea,

While it's a fun idea, using annoying laser pointers to "Paint the Moon" (described below) is a physical impossibility. The whole thing kinda reminds me of one of those prophesized apparitions of the Virgin Mary--as long as all the religious pilgrims come together in "belief," they consider it a success even when she doesn't show.Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:39:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The "Paint the Moon" project

The "Paint the Moon" project wants the whole world to point their laserpointers at the moon at the same time, turning it pink. This may turn out to be a very bad idea, since it may blind pilots and cause plane crashes, a federal offense for which the death penalty is maximum sentence. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:50:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Groovy new German sign for

Groovy new German sign for warning passersby of Mad Cow Syndrome contagions. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:02:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Librarians and publishers are getting

Librarians and publishers are getting into the same kinda trouble that Napster and the recording industry got into last year. Watch out -- there's a shitstorm-a-comin'.

"They've got their radical factions, like the Ruby Ridge or Waco types," who want to share all content for free, said Judith Platt, a spokeswoman for the Association of American Publishers...

"We are not the enemy," said Miriam M. Nisbet, legislative counsel for the American Library Association's (ALA's) office of government relations. She pointed out that libraries have always fostered a love of reading that encourages people to purchase books....

"The mission of libraries is to ensure access," she said. "The nature of copyright is to restrict access. There's a real tension there."

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Terrific article/interview on the role

Terrific article/interview on the role of the PR industry in America.

And then one day while we were finishing up our book, I got a call from [a woman] at the Water Environment Foundation. And in my business, when you hear something like "Water Environment Foundation," you turn the needle 180 degrees [and ask suspiciously], "What's the Water Environment Foundation?"

Well, it turned out to be the sewage sludge industry, and she was calling because she said, "I heard that you have this book coming out, Toxic Sludge is Good for You, and I'm really quite concerned because, frankly, it's not toxic anymore and we don't call it sludge. It's now bio-solids, and it's a natural organic fertilizer. And we're very concerned that your book title is going to interfere with our education campaign to get farmers across the country to use bio-solids as a fertilizer on their farm fields."

So, that became a chapter in our book called, "The Sludge Hits the Fan," and we actually broke nationally this whole story about how this toxic sludge -- mountains of it building up at sewage plants all across the country that the Environmental Protection Agency had deemed too toxic to landfill or incinerate or dump in the ocean -- has basically been renamed "bio-solids -- a natural organic fertilizer." And now half of it is being spread all across the country on farmlands, despite the fact that it's still as toxic as ever.

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:26:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, September 8, 2001

The last time Marc Davis

The last time Marc Davis (the genius behind the Haunted Mansion) spoke with Walt Disney, it was to show him concept sketches for a new attraction called "The Country Bear Jamboree." The Country Bears, with their corny jokes (To a snoring moose-head mounted on the wall: "Melvin! They way you're always hibernatin', you must be part bear!" "Aw heck, I'm only part moose as it is!") and comedy bluegrass routines have always been one of my favorite Disneyland attractions. Now they're being shut down in Disneyland (though they'll continue in Walt Disney World). This is a really nice little maudlin personal essay about one of Laughingplace.com's contributor's last visit to the Bears. Link Discuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:05:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Garry Trudeau falls for a

Garry Trudeau falls for a hoax study that says GW has the lowest IQ of any prez, then apologizes. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:01:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, September 7, 2001

The Cabelas catalog came in

The Cabelas catalog came in the mail yesterday. I've never hunted in my life, but I just can't get enough of this catalog. It is a trove of cool and unlikely gear.

Synchron-Eye Mounting Kits (creepy!): Link

The Gear Vest is stylish, "blaze" orange, a has enough pockets for even all of my gadgets and kit: Link

Real deer-antler chandeliers, available in Mule or Whitetail. Link

Camouflage dog-vests: Link

Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:38:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

From metafizix: Instead of spouting

From metafizix:

Instead of spouting off about my plans for it or how great I think this weblog is going to be, I'd just like to commemorate it's birth by saying if it wasn't for boingboing.net, I would never have been interested in doing this. Curse them and their martian brain-ray for wanting to rule the earth!

Hey -- put your name or email on your site! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:52:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Babies exposed to sign-language learn

Babies exposed to sign-language learn to "babble" in sign

"You see bite-sized nuggets of sign on the hands," says psychologist Laura Ann Petitto of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire - much as vocally babbling babies say 'ga' or 'ba'. Hand babbling in hearing babies shows that the brain's language-learning mechanisms are "not just for talking", Petitto says.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:09:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hooligans: Storm Over Europe is

Hooligans: Storm Over Europe is a new video game where you direct gangs of football hooligans on a rampage across the EU. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:57:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The latest Atlantic City casino

The latest Atlantic City casino game: Chicken Tic-Tac-Toe. That's right: playing tic-tac-toe against a live chicken. The chicken goes first. Animal rights activists are not pleased. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:55:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MP3s of rare, 1930s-era recordings

MP3s of rare, 1930s-era recordings of Edna St Vincent Millay reading her poetry on Salon. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:43:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"The law requires companies who

"The law requires companies who are selling products to give the consumer material information that is relevant to making decisions about whether to buy the product or not:" Which means that if you sell a copy-protected CD and don't warn consumers of the protection, you're open to a lawsuit. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:39:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

D1,000,000K day! The day approaches

D1,000,000K day! The day approaches when the Unix internal clock (which ticks off the seconds since midnight GMT on 1/1/70) will hit 1,000,000,000 -- Unix is very nearly one billion seconds old. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:31:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scott McCloud, gifted comic-author and

Scott McCloud, gifted comic-author and polemicist, has launched a daily comic strip, called "Morning Improv." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:17:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New anti-DUI technology. A fuel-cell

New anti-DUI technology. A fuel-cell that converts ethanol vapors into electricity, closing a circuit and stopping your ignition. In other words, your booze-breath stops gets turned into electricity that shuts down your car. Doesn't work if you're stone sober and your buddies are likkered up in the back seat, though... Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:12:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I've added permalinks (so that

I've added permalinks (so that an individual item can be referenced in perpetuity) to BoingBoing. Distracting? Useful? Lemme know what you think. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:55:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TiVo hackers are installing Ethernet

TiVo hackers are installing Ethernet cards and video-ripping software (so you can pull video off your TiVo and onto your computer) in their machines and reselling them as premium TiVos on eBay. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:06:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jessica Litman, author of Digital

Jessica Litman, author of Digital Copyright is being interviewed in another one of those excellent, week-long participatory interviews on the WELL.

I have bad news for you. I'm afraid that section 1201(a)(1)(A) *does* make it illegal for an individual consumer, acting alone, to figure out how to get a piece of password-protected content. ("No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the copyright law]") The law does allow consumers to get around copy-protection (although it makes the tools for doing so illegal). It prohibits individuals from circumventing "access protection," no matter what the reason, unless the behavior comes within specific, narrow exeptions.

The American public stood for this because it didn't make it onto the news media radar screen until the law started being enforced. We in the copyright law community were not very articulate in our efforts to explain why the law would be a disaster. Both as lobbyists and as media spokesfolk, law professors, librarians, computer scientists and public interest groups are amateurs. Interested journalists who did understand had difficulty persuading their editors that there was a story here that readers would care about. The supporters of the law insisted loudly and effectively that the only people that the law would hurt were the copyright pirates.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TiVo's walked a fine line

TiVo's walked a fine line between delivering what their audience wants -- lots of great TV, no commercials -- and what the networks (who are investors in the company) want: controlled digital video, with rights-managed material and ever-so-slightly broken commercial-skipping tech.

ReplayTV have dispensed with the fine line and thrown caution to the wind. With their new service, users can record hundreds of hours' of programming, share it over the Internet, and use a single button to skip commercials. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, September 6, 2001

The ScotteVest is nerdwear of

The ScotteVest is nerdwear of the first water, a garment festooned with zillions of pockets of varying sizes, linked by conduit that allow you to run wires from one pocket to the next. They've also filed for a patent, despite the fact that the Wearables group at MIT has been making invalidating prior art for years and years.

WARNNG: U.S. AND INTERNATIONAL PATENT APPLICATIONS HAVE BEEN FILED WITH RESPECT TO THE DESIGN AND UTILITY OF THE SeV™ ANY ATTEMPT TO COPY OR REPLICATE ANY OF THE FEATURES OR DESIGN OF THE SeV™, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE PERSONAL AREA NETWORK (PAN), THE CONDUITS, AND/OR THE POCKET-IN-POCKET™ (PIP™) FEATURE, WILL BE CONSIDERED AN INFRINGEMENT AND WILL BE ACTED UPON IN ACCORDANCE WITH ALL APPLICABLE LAWS. WE TAKE OUR INTELLECTUAL RIGHTS VERY SERIOUSLY!!!!!! IF YOU WANT TO USE THE PAN, PLEASE CONTACT US AND WE WOULD BE HAPPY TO DISCUSS LICENSING OPPORTUNITIES.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:01:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, September 5, 2001

Can't afford a Sony AIBO

Can't afford a Sony AIBO robot-dog? How about a half-price AIBO robot-puppy? All the love of a real pet, and none of the stink or responsibility. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:40:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How cool: a wind-up, universal

How cool: a wind-up, universal cellphone charger. Soon to come: a wind-up, universal anything charger. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:36:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The world record for simultaneously

The world record for simultaneously ringing cellphones has been set. Turns out it only took 250 phones. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:34:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SMS messages from mobile phones

SMS messages from mobile phones are being introduced into evidence in British divorce courts. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Researchers are creating transgenic, true-breeding

Researchers are creating transgenic, true-breeding mosquitos that are biologically incapable of vectoring malaria, dengue and other pest-borne, millions-slaying illnesses. The trick here is "true-breeding" -- if the planned release into the wild goes as planned, the transgenic vampires will mate with their disease-prone cousins and birth non-carrying offspring. I think the next step should be breeding a skeeter whose saliva doesn't evoke a histamine reaction. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:24:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Marc Laidlaw wrote in with

Marc Laidlaw wrote in with this truly mind-croggling story about "autobiographical advertising" -- campaigns like Disney's "Remember the Magic." Researchers have shown that such campaigns are capable of planting false memories in consumers, recollections of events that never occurred, like meeting Bugs Bunny in Disney World (Bugs isn't a Disney character). Remember that false memory syndrome first came to light during a rash of lurid revelations about fictional baby-eating Satanic cults -- interesting to see it commercially exploited. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:09:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, September 4, 2001

A new book collects all

A new book collects all the religious aphorisms from The Simpsons in The Gospel According to the Simpsons.

How God appeared in a dream: "Perfect teeth. Nice smell. A class act all the way."

The family religion: "You know, the one with all the well-meaning rules that don't work in real life. Uh, Christianity."

Church signboard slogan: "God Welcomes His Victims."

Link Discuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PublicData has a creepy amount

PublicData has a creepy amount of searchable info online for the taking, from car and real-estate titles to criminal records to driver's license numbers. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:01:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Our pal Donald Melanson over

Our pal Donald Melanson over at Mindjack has just launched Synapse, a terrfic online conferencing system for discussions of all things techie/social/cool. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:00:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ennex is a company that

Ennex is a company that builds "fabbers" -- computer-controlled devices that automatically manufacture devices to software-specified designs. This is the kind of tech that should develop into a household device that manufactures a new bookcase, teakettle or bookend on demand. Too cool. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The little blog that grew!

The little blog that grew! Last month, we had nearly 47,000 visitors to BoingBoing, including reloads! I spent the last four days wandering around the WorldCon with my Jackhammer Jill courier bag, and at least a dozen times, people stopped me to ask me about it, and then told me that they were already readers! Woo hoo! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:09:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Another blog from the editorial

Another blog from the editorial staff at Tor: Teresa Nielsen Hayden (the other half of the Nielsen Haydens) has a delightful, eclectic and lyrical Weblog called Making Light. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:59:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My editor at Tor, Patrick

My editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, has revived Electrolite, his blog. Patrick's digging up some great linkage, but it's the commentary that really shines here. Take this bit, a nice rantlet on the diminishing intellectual commons (and remember that this is coming from the manager of the largest, most successful line of science fiction and fantasy books in the whole world)

If my comments on Mike Godwin's copyright piece, below, strike you as alarmist, read about this person's real-life experience, which nicely dramatizes the way that the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act"--now (with the support of Disney, Microsoft, AOL Time Warner, etc) the law of the land--institutes a regime under which those accused of violating certain copyrights are legally treated as guilty until proven innocent.

No, you say, that can't be. It's obviously unconstitutional. It's obviously unfair.

But it is. And it's the law. And it's being supported by some of the very writers and intellectuals who, in any other circumstance, would be the first to lead a charge against such a travesty--because, I guess, they think that in this case, if they side with the big dogs, the big dogs will remember them with fondness.

But just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side.

And you may think you're just defending yourself against smartass hackers who pirate your texts on Usenet. But when you rearrange the basic legal structures that undergird society, it's not actually likely that the consequences are going to be limited to those you happen to find satisfactory. We are trading an old civic and civil model of intellectual property for a strange, ruthless new thing, red in tooth and claw. And its next victim won't be hapless hackers who pirate Harlan Ellison stories on Usenet. Its next victim will be people like you. And you. And you.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:55:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mafia is a parlor-game that

Mafia is a parlor-game that has stolen the lives of about half the people I know. The rules are rather simple and the gameplay revolves around lying convincingly and reading the other players more than caclulating odds or plotting strategy. It's weirdly compelling, as evidenced by the number of people stumbling around the WorldCon bleary-eyed from having stayed up until dawn playing. Here are the rules -- note that the only prop required is a deck of cards, and strips of paper can be substituted for even that. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:28:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mickey Katz was this amazing

Mickey Katz was this amazing jazz musician who did humorous (think Allan Sherman) Klezmer renditions of popular songs ("Borscht Riders in the Sky," "The Ballad of Dovid Crockett"). Don Byron has released an amazing CD of Katz covers. Woo-hoo! Link Discuss (Thanks, Ellen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:19:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Here's the Website of a

Here's the Website of a proto-Enthusiastic (see below) success-story: Cecilia Dart-Thornton was (is?) an active participant in Ballantine/Del Ray's online writing workshop, where writers critique one anothers' works under the watchful eyes of Del Ray's editors. The editors mine the workshop for work to publish. Cecilia didn't get picked up by Del Ray, but someone from Warner's Aspect imprint noticed her stuff and bought a trilogy from her. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:11:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A BMW series 7 car

A BMW series 7 car has been parked in a public garage for over a year at the Austin airport. The parking fees are over $6500 at this point. The car is covered in dust. Here's a bulletin board where people are talking about the car, and have posted pictures of it. Link Discuss (Thanx, unotito!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:44:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oh, what a time I

Oh, what a time I had at the WorldCon! One of the highest of the highlights was meeting up with Gavin Grant and Kelly Link, the dynamic duo behind Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, a literary zine without equal.

Apparently, we're starting a new literary movement, at the behest of Gardner Dozois, and I've been appointed ideologue. We spent some time yesterday coming up with names for this movement, and my favorite (though certainly not the final answer) is "The Enhusiastics" -- the opposite of the Stoics. Here's what I think The Enthusiastic movement is about: A recognition that genre writing is not a professional endeavor (since the odds of earning a living at licensing one's work are slim to gaillard); a consequent breaking down of the artificial divide between "pro" and "amateur" venues for our work; a belief in partnering with our readers as distributors of our work (instead of suing the pants off them); and a committment to self-distributed work, via zines, blogs and posted works. Enthusiastics aren't opposed to old ways of doing things, they're in favor of new ways.

The thing I like best about the name "Enthusiastics" is all the potential for cool schisms:

• The Diminished Enthusiastics
• The Unbridled Enthusiastics
• The Tempered Enthusiastics
• The Visible Enthusiastics

You get the picture. Here's the link to Small Beer Press, Kelly and Gavin's publishing empire. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:08:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cheap and easy taxi-travel is

Cheap and easy taxi-travel is one of the things that I miss most in San Francisco. In London, where taxis are a way of life, all manner of things turn up in cabs, including tens of thousands of mobile phones (often unclaimed, since the fiercely competitive British cellular companies will replace lost phones gratis rather than risking customer defection), Royal bodyguards' PDAs (rich with personal numbers for the Royals), goldfish, and suitcases full of diamonds. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:37:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Marriott is forced to retract

Marriott is forced to retract a travelling tip on their Thailand city-guide that advises female visitors not to wear shorts because in Thailand "the only women who wear shorts are prostitutes." Needless to say, Thai women's groups were not amused. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:30:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daypop is a search engine

Daypop is a search engine that crawls weblogs and newssites every day. I think Google is already doing this. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:51:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

In case you haven't heard,

In case you haven't heard, the fourth Harry Potter novel won the Hugo Award for best novel on Sunday night. It really is a hell of a book, and it has certainly provided a compelling reason for reading to millions of kids, who -- I hope -- will keep on reading, both inside and outside the genre. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:39:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alan Moore's brilliant "League of

Alan Moore's brilliant "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" reviewed in the Guardian. Link Discuss (via RobotWisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:03:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grand Royale, the Beastie Boys'

Grand Royale, the Beastie Boys' label/labor-of-love/website/zine has folded up. Bummer. Link Discuss (via Evhead)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:59:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Salon columnist reposts an

A Salon columnist reposts an hilarious and terrible exchange with Earthlink support, who are clearly guilty of the kind of skimming and unresponsive responses that Katz talks about in the link below. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sorry for the hiatus, everyone.

Sorry for the hiatus, everyone. I've been at the World Science Fiction Convention since Friday, and unexpected hardware problems and unanticipated busy-ness levels kept me from posting while there.

I had a terrific time this weekend, and gathered a nice backlog o' URLs that I'll be posting through the day.

I'm back now and I'm finally ploughing through the backlog of new material and email that came in while I was in Philly. It's a very, very deep backlog. I got something like 2,000 emails over the weekend, and even after clearing out the spam and dumping the low-priority stuff, there're still several hundred messages demanding my attention.

Coincidentally, Slashdot is running this editorial from Jon Katz on the growing problem of information overload -- god, can I ever sympathize.

There is a sense of feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the problems e-mail creates (also acute for people not in college, since the vast majority of Americans are still on dial-up systems). Employers get frustrated because workers spend so much time messaging one another with questions, problems and data sent merely because it's so easy. As we move towards an instantaneous model of communicating information, the pressure on everyone to manage information rises. Most people aren't getting much help.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:39:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Stephen Hawking, the acclaimed scientist

"Stephen Hawking, the acclaimed scientist and writer, reignited the debate over genetic engineering yesterday by recommending that humans change their DNA through genetic modification to keep ahead of advances in computer technology and stop intelligent machines from 'taking over the world.'" Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:33:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Washington State lawyer rakes in

Washington State lawyer rakes in money by suing spammers.

"Martin Palmer, an attorney who lives in Washington, says he's collected more than $13,000 from spammers in 24 small-claims court actions, all of which he's won. Palmer, who said he often doesn't even have to go into court to win, initially requests that a spammer simply pay him $500 for violating the law or face a lawsuit. He says he's settled another 15 cases this way for $275 from each spammer."

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:31:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A couple of weeks ago,

A couple of weeks ago, Cory posted an item about the US goverment imposing fines on US citizens who travel to Cube. Now the US Treasury Department is fining Ry Cooder $25,000 for making Buena Vista Social Club. If this isn't censorship, I don't know what is. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:26:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, September 3, 2001

This guy Paul "Freck" Morgan

This guy Paul "Freck" Morgan wants to have his useless paralyzed feet amputated so he can wear effective hyrdaulic prosthetics. The problem is his insurance company won't cover the procedure or the new prosthetics. So Freck is taking the DIY route. For a $20 donation, you can watch! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:57:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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