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Friday, November 30, 2001

RuPaul has a blog.LinkDiscuss

RuPaul has a blog.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Now, normally, I'm not much

Now, normally, I'm not much of a fan of digital "annoyware" postcards, but this one from our Stefan Jones deserves a clickthrough. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:12:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Breathtaking arrogance from a spokesperson

Breathtaking arrogance from a spokesperson for an Israeli software company that has provided CD copy-protection tech that incidentally screws up your ability to make copies for personal use, to play on your computer -- in short, to use your property as you see fit within the confines of the law.

Midbar's Noam Zur called copy-protection critics a fringe group that probably are pirates themselves.

"Mainly those people have a large number of compilations on their PCs," Zur said. Midbar's technology protected the Imbruglia CD. Zur dismissed customer complaints and said the CD works on most players.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:59:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Red, white and blue M&Ms

Red, white and blue M&Ms coming to a store near you. Clearly, the terrorists have already won.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:52:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photoessay detailing the dissection of

Photoessay detailing the dissection of a Nintendo GameCube.LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:26:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hilarious overview of the music

Hilarious overview of the music industry, explaining how hopeful artists end up indentured servants, from Maximumrocknroll.

Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke."

LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:24:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

One of the big challenges

One of the big challenges writers like to potter around with is naming characters. Phone books have always been handy, as have baby naming books, but the Internet has created a whole new range of dithering options. Here's the Social Securiy Administration's stats-page for name distribution by year and decade:

* Top 100 names for births in 2001.
* Top 1000 names for births in 2000.
* Top 5 names by state for male births in 2000.
* Top 5 names by state for female births in 2000.
* Top 100 names for births in 2000.
* Top 1000 names for births in 1999.
* Top 5 names by state for male births in 1999.
* Top 5 names by state for female births in 1999.
* Introduction to 1998 update including top 40 names for births in 1998.
* Top 1000 names for births in 1998.
* Top 5 names by state for male births in 1998.
* Top 5 names by state for female births in 1998.
* Large list of names for girls born in 1997.
* Large list of names for boys born in 1997.
* Large list of names for girls born in 1996.
* Large list of names for boys born in 1996.
* Top 10 names by year of birth for years 1880 through 1997.
* Top 10 given names, by year of birth (1880-1919), and sex.
* Top 10 given names, by year of birth (1920-1959), and sex.
* Top 10 given names, by year of birth (1960-1997), and sex.
* Top 1000 names by decade.
* Top 1000 names of the 1900's.
* Top 1000 names of the 1910's.
* Top 1000 names of the 1920's.
* etc

LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:20:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A followup to yesterday's story

A followup to yesterday's story about the arrest of two Japanese users of WinMX, a P2P file-trading app. It's a press-release from the Association of Copyright for Computer Software, crowing about it. If anyone out there speaks Japanese, I have some links to some Japanese-language reportage on the case, too, that I'd love to see translated.

Investigation section for high-tech crime of the Kyoto Prefectural Police Headquarters, Yamashina Police,Gojo Police searched the home of a man (student of a university) â??`(aged 19) in Suginami-ku, Tokyo and a man (student of a technical collage) â??a(aged 20) in Saitama-city on November, 28, 2001, under the suspicion of copyright infringement (violation of the right of public transmission) and arrested them on the same day. They are alleged to have made business software and the like accessible by Internet users at large without permission of copyright holders using so-called "file-exchange software" which enables Internet users to exchange data by directly transmitting and receiving them between users' computers connected to the Internet.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Yuichi!)

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

The Time Cube. This

The Time Cube. This is some kinda theory about something, but it's mostly a fairly entertaining schizoid rant about MIT, with strange dovetails (loontails?) into theology, crypto-anti-Semitism, and high weirdness.

Just as Word viruses are destructive in human made computers, there is a deadly Word virus spreading within the English Language. Unless isolated and eradicated by your knowledge of Nature's Harmonic Time Cube, the deadly Word virus will inflict total self-destruction upon all humanity.Your ignorance of Time Cube is evil.

Time Cube is above academic comprehension. Universities equate doomed Towers of Babble. Time Cube debate will expose academic scams, so academia must "ignore" debate at all costs. Students denied the right to debate Time Cube. Educators are evil to deny Time Cube debate. Academic ignoring of Time Cube equates evil. Word worship educators beget stupid students. Students are brainwashed and do not know it. Students are taught to be stupid and don't care. Word is the most effective tool of enslavement. Stupid students believe any crap they're taught. Stupid students unable to evaluate Time Cube. Students ignore Time Cube, attack messenger.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark !)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:51:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crackermatic: A Shockwave app that

Crackermatic: A Shockwave app that lets you build your own virtual Christmas Cracker, amidst much v-e-r-y s-l-o-w cutesy animation. Christmas Crackers are (I think) a Commonwealth phenomenon, a special Xmastime party-favor made of a tube of tissue paper stuffed with bad jokes, paper hats and inexplicable and pointless trinkets. You know, when I put it that way, virtual Christmas Crackers don't seem so dumb after all. This'll be my second Xmas in the States, and I miss my homely holiday traditions. LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:41:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Buy a bag of assorted

Buy a bag of assorted 20 GI Joe heads!

Each is about 2" tall with varied features and hairstyles, from fascist buzz cut to Village People mustache. We're sure you'll think of a million things to do with these like... well... you know.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Julian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:30:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PodMaster 1000 is a new

PodMaster 1000 is a new shareware OS X app that gives iPod more control over their devices, facilitatic copying and sharing of files among iPods and multiple computers.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:24:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Dutch court has ordered

A Dutch court has ordered Kazaa, a provider of P2P filesharing networks, to stop copyright infingement among their users immediately. Only problem is, Kazaa not only can't control its users' behavior, it also can't shut down the network! The system uses a few centralized servers that Kazaa operates as a means of optimizing traffic, but it hums along just fine without them -- there is no off-switch.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:20:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Review of "Sonic Boom," a

Review of "Sonic Boom," a book that traces the history of the Napster suit and the music industry's heel-dragging passage into the twenty-first century.

In his book, John Alderman remembers attending one of the first online music conferences in the mid-1990s where an industry executive declared that the Net should be immediately closed down. Copyright protection had to take precedence over technological innovation. In contrast, the author of "Sonic Boom" -- then and now -- does get it. The music industry has no veto over the future. Its lobbyists and lawyers can only slow down the spread of peer-to-peer computing. Sooner or later, file sharing over broadband networks will become as unremarkable as making a phone call, watching television or using a computer today. The utopian vision of the Napster generation is technically feasible: every tune -- ever made -- for free. Quite rightly, what worries John Alderman is how anyone can earn a living from making music in such circumstances? While almost every other sector of the economy will be profiting from peer-to-peer computing, the music industry will have lost its major source of revenue: selling bits of plastic. Who then will pay the piper?

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:18:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A blogger's plan to produce

A blogger's plan to produce cards protesting the Salvation Army's anti-gay insurance practice for depost (in lieu of cash) in sidewalk Santas' collection cauldrons has enraged Jerry Falwell.LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:14:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scientists at UC San Diego

Scientists at UC San Diego have generated some fantastic CG pictures of neurons forming memory in the brain, based on research that generated evidence of how our brains change in response to experience.

"The long-term memories stored in our brain last our entire lives, so everybody had assumed that there must be lasting structural changes between neurons in the brain," says Michael A. Colicos, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD and the lead author of the paper. "Although there's been a lot of suggestive evidence to indicate that this is the case, it's never before been directly observed."

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:12:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The full spec for SMS

The full spec for SMS (the protocol used to send short messages to cellphones) includes the capacity for a "Ping" message, which can be used to determine if a phone is on or off/out-of-range. This is the kind of standard network utility that is perfectly sensible in the Internet universe -- chances are I can ping your computer right now and find out if it's on and where it's connected to on the Internet. Turns out that the idea of pinging phones freaks out a lot of people, though, as a German company discovered when they shipped a little Web app you could use to tell if your friends' phones were on or not, without alerting your friend or their carrier to the ping. The public outcry has caused them to abandon the project.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:05:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Run a webserver off your

Run a webserver off your keyboard! The world's tiniest TCP/IP stack and the world's tiniest webserver have been ported to the H8S/2148 chip, which is used in some keyboards. LinkDiscuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:00:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Welsh 802.11 hackers are rolling

Welsh 802.11 hackers are rolling out a regional community wireless network using Pringles-can booster antennae as infrastructure. LinkDiscuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:56:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hilarious and badly-translated interview with

Hilarious and badly-translated interview with the crotchety ex-President of Italy, whose box was toasted by a bad Windows XP install, and is now intending to sue MSFT for the value of his archived data. The guy's got powerful friends, white-hot rage, and a lot of spare time...LinkDiscuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:54:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, November 29, 2001

Patrick Nielsen Hayden explains why

Patrick Nielsen Hayden explains why the Harry Potter movie has disappointed some fans of the novels.

I can hear the objection: you can't make a full-length novel into a feature film without leaving a lot out. (As Michael Cassutt says, a movie script is about the length of a novelette.) But it seems to me this is one of the commonest problems in translating the experience of good fantasy and science fiction into Hollywood films: not that Hollywood is actually any worse at characterization, plausibility, and imaginative brio than your average decent SF or fantasy writer, but rather, that for the average decent SF and fantasy writer, this kind of deep-background is the meat in the sandwich, whereas for Hollywood it's extra coleslaw to be thrown away.

And that's why prose SF and fantasy are sometimes subversive, whereas Hollywood translations of SF usually wind up being normative. Because if you're building a world with a history, you have to think about how worlds work, which means having and defending some opinions and outlooks which, the more you think about them, the more they become political. It Is No Accident (as we ancient leftoids say) that so much written SF and fantasy is about the relationship of the individual to the commonweal. But if you take all the backstory, history, and deep-background detail and discard it as inessential decoration, what you're left with is stories about good people who are good because they're good, in conflict with bad people who are bad because they're bad. Which is ultimately what all the "smelly little isms", the dreadful simplicities, Toryism and monarchism and fascism and Islamicism and all the rest, are all about: establishing that some kinds of people are just good (brave, generous, deserving, and unfairly maligned) and others are just bad (cowardly, exploitive, foul, and deserving of obloquy)--and to heck with all that sissy "background" frippery which Just Gets In The Way Of The Story.

Link (scroll down)Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:35:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

48 pages of "The Complete

48 pages of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction," which Karl Schroeder and I wrote last year, are scanned and available for your perusal on Amazon.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:07:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Times of London

The Times of London has cooked up a bizarre infographic that purports to be a cutaway of ObL's secret cave fortress. Someone's been taking too many hits off the James Bond bong. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:00:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teresa Nielsen Hayden's scathing review

Teresa Nielsen Hayden's scathing review of "Fascinating Womanhood," a hoary old marriage text that counsels Christian women on proper wifedom.

Helen Andelin preaches constant lying as a way of life. In essence she's saying that you and your husband can never love or respect each other for who you are -- not now, and not in the future. Nothing you can make of yourself will ever earn his honest, unmanipulated love and respect. Moreover, your husband will never mature into someone who can cope with the horrible realization that he's married to an adult human being of the same species as himself. That being the case, Andelin believes, your only option is to lie like a rug -- to spend your life engaging in manipulative, seductive, and servile behavior, in hopes that your husband will continue to be fond of you and treat you well.

LinkDiscuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:37:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Headline of the week: "Kunduz

Headline of the week: "Kunduz shopkeeper narrowly avoids insight"LinkDiscuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:34:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

InPassing is a blog devoted

InPassing is a blog devoted to overheard conversation.

"Some engineer worked for years alone in a lab making circuit diagrams and signal flow graphs to make this sound card. And then some guy from Haas comes along and names it the 'Ultra Super Viper Pro 3800x."

--A guy outside Bowles Hall

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:23:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Native Indian bands are alarmed

Native Indian bands are alarmed by the clause in the new Anti-Terrorism bill that restricts the wearing of masks and facepaint, as both are part of certain tribes' sacred rituals.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Donovan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:19:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Remember Black Jacques Shellac? Slowpoke

Remember Black Jacques Shellac? Slowpoke Gonzales? Here's a gallery of forgotten Looney Tunes -- unsurpisingly, they are predominantly racial stereotypes, but there are a couple that history just forgot, like Bobo the Elephant and Rocky.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:03:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Yahoo Op-Ed columnists reports

A Yahoo Op-Ed columnists reports that airport security guards stole her jewelry under the rubric of confiscating it because it posed a security risk, and speculates heightened security measures are giving dishonest security staff a sense of impunity.

As long as the airlines insist on going through the manifestly absurd exercise of treating all passengers the same in an obscure desire to impress The New York Times editorial page, the airlines ought to abandon the personal inspections altogether. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we certainly can't keep them off airplanes -- not even by turning airports into the pleasant and welcoming environment of a federal penitentiary.

Indeed, after airport security confiscates any jewelry that might make a nice Christmas gift, the airlines hand out weapons on the planes. They still serve wine in glass goblets that can be smashed to create jagged glass daggers. They still serve soda in cans that can be twisted apart to create razor-sharp knives. They still have emergency exit doors that can be opened during flight, causing the plane to crash.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, sunspot!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:44:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Werbach discusses the possibility

Kevin Werbach discusses the possibility of unlicensed spectrum as a means of delivering subversive broadband.

Open spectrum wouldn't break the bandwidth bottleneck overnight. The necessary technology is still immature. In practice, there are still limits on how many users can communicate effectively, depending on available frequencies, power, competing uses and the design of transmitters and receivers. The benefit of open spectrum is that it's more efficient than the traditional licensing model, and that gap will widen over time.

The airwaves are a public resource. Thanks to technology, licensing them for exclusive use is no longer the best way to reap their benefits. By opening up the spectrum, we could build the foundations for a communications industry that works more like the computer industry, with rapid innovation and active competition. Instead of a tragedy of the commons, the result would be a triumph.

LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:29:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Global Walk for Capitalism

The Global Walk for Capitalism is coming up: This is a kind of "Hurray for Everything" halftime show. Not so much a protest as a victory lap. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:18:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stephen Johnson, author of "Emergence"

Stephen Johnson, author of "Emergence" and founder of FEED, discusses self-organizing systems with Andrew Leonard in Salon today, and ruminates on what threats to human existence morph into in a decentralized, self-organizing world.

This is not exactly the topic of the book, but you get to the point where smaller clusters of people can have disproportionately large effects. For example, look at epidemic weapons. We could have a smallpox attack, where you just need a dense population base and suddenly a million people can be taken out by one guy with a backpack. That's the bad news. The good news is, your odds of perishing in some kind of massively organized, state-sponsored, either internal genocide or giant war or even an influenza outbreak that happens kind of naturally, the chances of perishing in that are greatly diminished. So it's like the good news is, your chance of being hurt or killed in some kind of mass event is greatly diminished and will continue to diminish, but if you do happen to draw the wrong straw, you are much more likely to have the blow inflicted by a small group of people rather than a nation. And you know, I'd still probably prefer those; I would love it if you didn't have the bad news at all but that just may be the kind of bargain that we have struck.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:51:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A new Finnish law will

A new Finnish law will make it illegal to gab and drive. The Finns are fantastically devoted to their mobiles, and it shows:

"Finns use mobile phones a lot while driving, and you can see it because they drive absentmindedly and erratically," said Superintendent Pentti Nevala of the Finnish Traffic Police. "There was good reason for some kind of clampdown."

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:40:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A bad week for Fair

A bad week for Fair Use advocates. On Wednesday, the Supremes ruled that 2600 Magazine wasn't engaging in protected speech when it published the code for DeCSS, a utility that lets users play legitimately purchased DVDs on legitimately purchased DVD players, but still cheeses off the MPAA, who claim that it's a piracy tool. Next a court in Jersey yesterday ruled against Edward Felton, who was intimidated out of publishing an academic paper deconstructing the security model of the Secure Digital Music Initiative by a nastygram from the RIAA. The court ruled that the RIAA hadn't done anything naughty, and that Felton's perceived intimidation didn't justify a ruling postively upholding the right of scientists to publish security papers despite the DMCA. LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:36:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Looks like Dean Kamen will

Looks like Dean Kamen will finally unveil "IT" next week on a talk show. Only took him a year. The timing kinda sucks, since a lot of the PR inertia for "IT" fizzled by last summer.

People know better now; technology is no longer chic, no longer a cash-cow and no longer infallible. And so, unless Ginger is a cheap device that can sniff out "weaponized" anthrax, can it ever be as big as Kamen and others had predicted?

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:27:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Chinese Space Program has

The Chinese Space Program has resolved to land a man on the moon, and they're bootstrapping their plan with cheap space-tech from Russia. It's one of the great disappointments of the XXth Century that we've yet to do much on the moon except play a little golf. I'm thinking low-gee Tai Chi will be really mediagenic.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:25:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Time to welcome our next

Time to welcome our next Guestblogger! Taking over the right-hand column today is John "Kernel Santos" Henson. John co-founded OpenCola with Grad Conn and I, and serves as OC's Chief Scientist. He's the inventor of the fantastic "CTO Air," a skateboard trick that involves an aborted Ollie while talking on a cellphone. He's also a gifted coder and architect, a righteous player of first-person shooters, and a former concert violinist. All thanks to Matthew Hawn for the top-notch job he did during his stint as Guestblogger, too.Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My friend Yuichi Kawasaki writes

My friend Yuichi Kawasaki writes from Japan:

Today I have a news that should be told to you.Yesterday two WinMX user was arrested by japanese police.As you know WinMX is one of file sharing applications similar to Napster.

They share adobe photoshop and some business applications.These application totally cost 7M Yen and the number of shared filescount 2,400.

These two users share these files without money, just only share them.This arrestment is the first case in the world when people share fileswith file sharing applications, one of peer-to-peer applications.

I completely disagree with illegal file sharing.But I concern this case steps into banning every file sharing andpeer-to-peer aplications.

I can't find any news sources carrying this story yet, but it's notable -- this is the first time I've heard of rightsholders criminallly pursuing the users of a P2P network, rather than the technology providers.Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, November 28, 2001

Here are the smallest,

Here are the smallest, sexiest replacement AC adapters for the new iBooks and PowerBook G4s. Link Discuss (Thanks, Guy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:15:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sending a malformed SMS message

Sending a malformed SMS message to some Nokia phones can crash the phone and lock the user out.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:59:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A novel and malicious use

A novel and malicious use for Google. By manually entering the addresses of Web-aware switches, Google can be caused to probe the switches' configuration screens, which can then be viewed through Google's cache, so that the switches' owners can't identify the hackers that are probing the devices. Neat and scary, all at once. LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:16:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Windows XP Embedded -- intended

Windows XP Embedded -- intended for use in slot machines, ATMs and the like -- ships.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

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

More rumors of the G5

More rumors of the G5 chip, the successor to the G4. Apple will allegedly unveil 1GHz+ machines at the MacWorld San Francisco conference, and Cisco's reportedly nosing around as well, looking for faster chips to power their switches. I hope this means that Apple's gonna ship a G5 PowerBook and a G4 iBook!LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

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

Users of the bankrupt Excite@Home

Users of the bankrupt Excite@Home cablemodem service could find themselves offline come Friday, if a bankruptcy court orders Excite to pull the plug.LinkDiscuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:50:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

They should change the name

They should change the name from Norton AntiVirus to Norton AntiPrivacy.

Eric Chien, chief researcher at Symantec's antivirus research lab, said that provided a hypothetical keystroke logging tool was used only by the FBI, then Symantec would avoid updating its antivirus tools to detect such a Trojan. The security firm is yet to hear back from the FBI on its enquiries about Magic Lantern but it already has a policy on the matter.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:50:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hilarious notes from a presentation

Hilarious notes from a presentation at yesterday's 802.11 Planet conference in San Jose.

On coding standards: "Consumers don't care: they just want to access the Web."

On Sprint's Wireless Web (lying to the customer, he said: HDML sites only): "What they're doing to stimulate usage is to charge you a high price."

On up to: "These are lies by marketing and PR people...they use these little weasel words: up to. You can get speeds 'up to.' "

Speeds under 1xRTT et al. are not available individually: only shared. "If there are absolutely no molecules in the air at all and you are making physical love to the transmitter" you can achieve maximum full speeds.

On speeds of 40-60K, "I spit on your 40K. We don't need no stinkin' 40K - but a lot of people in the U.S. and around the world dial-up and they get around 40-50 Kbps."

LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:43:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fantastic whitepaper on the rise

Fantastic whitepaper on the rise and spread of worms, from the Morris Worm to Nimda.

All worms need to be considered highly malicious, even if they spread in a seemingly benign manner, as most worms signal that a machine is vulnerable to further attack through its attempts to spread. A good example of the way in which this can be exploited is illustrated at http://www.dasbistro.com/default.ida. This web page responds to a Code Red 2 probe (which tries to access default.ida with a string designed to cause an IIS buffer overflow) by scheduling a counterattack. The counterattack tries to use the Code Red 2 installed security hole and, if successful, disables IIS and resets the infected machine. It could have just as easily deleted all the files, installed Back Orifice, or performed any other malicious activity desired. A modified version could attack Code Red 1 infected machines by using the same buffer overflow exploit that Code Red used and similar scripts could respond to Nimda, Ramen, or other infections.

LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:24:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google's new toolbar allows users

Google's new toolbar allows users to rank the quality of the links returned, so that they can consider direct, human feedback as a means of improving search results. This is really just an extension of their current ranking philosophy, which uses the (human-generated) links on Web-pages to determine which documents are most relevant.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:08:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The BBC has unearthed a

The BBC has unearthed a 10-second clip of a young Christopher Robin Milne dressed as Winnie the Pooh, frolicking with his friends.

"The pageant went its memorable way and I see it as an ancient cine film, much faded and blurred and with many breaks, but with here and there and a sequence as vivid as the day it was shot. It was exciting doing my bit."

LinkDiscuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great quiz: Character in Harry

Great quiz: Character in Harry Potter Books, or Current U.S. Navy Rear Admiral?LinkDiscuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:11:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Powell's bestseller list. Of

The Powell's bestseller list. Of the top twenty books at powells.com this week, there are nine fantasy novels (all Harry Potter and Tolkein, natch), a horror novel, a science book (Hawking), a novel by a writer known for his science fiction (Lethem) and another about the golden age of superhero comics (Kavalier and Clay). In other words, nearly three quarters of this week's bestsellers are genre or genre-related. Cool!LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The ultimate pigeon-rouster: A new

The ultimate pigeon-rouster: A new Irish robot patrols high-tension power lines, rousting urban disease-riddled shithawks. The coolest part is, it draws its power from the lines it patrols. LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The creepiest thing about this

The creepiest thing about this story on an identity thief who was working from a bootleg copy of the entire Oregon state drivers' license database is the statement from the Oregon DMV's spokesman, that the thief "didn't legally buy the records from the agency, which is allowed to sell the data to banks and media companies." LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A British court has very

A British court has very sensibly upheld a restauranteur's right to use the name "McChina" for his shops, despite McDonald's outrageous claim that anything using the "Mc" prexfix infringes on their McTrademark. Robble robble robble!LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:20:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, November 27, 2001

Remember David McOwen, the guy

Remember David McOwen, the guy who was arrested for running a distributed computing application on the computer systems at DeKalb Technical College in Georgia? This week, he was indicted on 8 counts, with a possible prison sentence of up to 120 years. Trial has been set for December 10. The freemcowen.com site lets you sign on online petition and donate to his legal fund using Paypal. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:40:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Screenshots from Japanarama!, a video

Screenshots from Japanarama!, a video compilation of bizarre TV shows from Japan.

...show called Super Jockey ... in which people with products to promote (usually beautiful women) play a game where they have to change into a skimpy bikini before a curtain drops which will reveal them if they haven't finished changing, and then have to sit in scalding hot water. For every second they manage to stay in the water, they are allowed to promote their product for one second!

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:13:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Four Blogs on One

The Four Blogs on One Page editorship has begun to rotate. Taking over the top left corner blog is Donald "Mindjack" Melanson! LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:48:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The orginal commercial for the

The orginal commercial for the Nintendo game "The Legend of Zelda," in MPEG video. This features my all-time favorite lame-ass technology rap, "It's the Legend of Zelda/And it's pretty rad/Those monsters from Ghenna/Are really baaad."LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:40:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

When ambiguous visual arts go

When ambiguous visual arts go wrong! A teenager in Durham had a poster on her wall protesting Dubya's habit of executing Texan criminals, one that depicted the Shrub as a hangman holding a noose. When a local cop spotted the poster while responding to a noise complaint (the teenager was playing her stereo too loud), he saw the poster and decided it was anti-American propaganda and ratted her out to the Secret Service, who came a-knockin' at her door a few days later, looking for a Taliban cell.

The standoff continued, and eventually the agents explained why they had come by: "We already know what it is; it's a target of Bush," one of them said, according to Brown--apparently a reference to the poster. She informed them it was no such thing. They then said, "Well, it's Bush hanging himself." Nope, she told them.

Finally, Brown relented a bit, agreeing to open the door and show them her poster wall. "They looked in, and the lady was like, 'Ohhhh, that's not that bad.'" The male agent added, "We've seen worse."

Discuss Link(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:00:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Interviews with famous and infamous

Interviews with famous and infamous people, such as Alicia Silverstone and Charles Manson, about Cisco router issues.

Tom: We recently learned that you are the creator of the floating static route, is that so?

Charlie: Damn straight I did sonny boy. Somebody had to do it, and as usual everybody said "let Charlie do it." But that was your thought because the world is yours. I'm just in your world. I'm in your world with your permission and I can only exist with your permission because if you don't want me to exist, then I will live in another dimension.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:32:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A 19-year-old freshman at Durham

A 19-year-old freshman at Durham Tech gets a visit from the Secret Service because she has a poster depicting Pres. Bush as a hangman (refering to the people executed in Texas while he was governor). Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:25:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nice mini-gallery of foreign grocery

Nice mini-gallery of foreign grocery packaging.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:19:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Computer monitors "leak" radio-waves. Security

Computer monitors "leak" radio-waves. Security agencies have long been aware of this, working on standards like TEMPEST for shielding monitors so that their contents can't be sniffed through radio-interception. Now there's an open source project that does the reverse: Tempest for Eliza displays images on your screen that turn it into a short-range AM radio transmitter, letting you play computer-generated music on nearby AM radios.

All electronic devices send out eletromagnetic waves.so does your monitor. and your monitor does it all the time.and at very high frequencies. high enough for your short waveAM radio.

All you have to do is display the "correct" image on your screenand your monitor will emit the "right" signals.Tempest for Eliza displays pictures on your screen. one foreach note in the song.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Michael!)

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

A Spanish immunologist wrote a

A Spanish immunologist wrote a scientific journal article analyzing the difference between Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs and concluded that the two groups are genetically unified -- presumbaly, this is important in tracking the progress and treatment of genetic ailments. The author cribbed from the Encyclopaedia Britannica for historical context, and came up some unfortunate phrasing, referring to Israeli "colonists" and Palestinians in "concentration camps." The journal's readers were so outraged by this that the publisher pulled the issue off the stands and urged readers with copies in hand to tear the article out of their issues.

This is an odd one. On the one hand, it seems like the journal's response was totally over the top -- politically biased or not, the article's conclusions seem like sound and scientifically relevant ones. On the other hand, sneaking political polemic into a scientific paper is inappropriate and bound to weaken your conclusions. Seems like a good editor would have fixed this before it ever got to press.

Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East share a very similar gene pool and must be considered closely related and not genetically separate, the authors state. Rivalry between the two races is therefore based 'in cultural and religious, but not in genetic differences', they conclude.

But the journal, having accepted the paper earlier this year, now claims the article was politically biased and was written using 'inappropriate' remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its editor told the journal Nature last week that she was threatened by mass resignations from members if she did not retract the article.

Arnaiz-Villena says he has not seen a single one of the accusations made against him, despite being promised the opportunity to look at the letters sent to the journal.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Roy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:41:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fantastic results of a Spanish

Fantastic results of a Spanish propane-tank decorating contest. I guess that propane tanks figure pretty heavily into the lives of Spaniards -- nice to see the universal human impulse to trick out everything is alive and well.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, karramarro!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More driving stupidity: A Cincinatti

More driving stupidity: A Cincinatti parapalegic gave a friend a lift in a car that was not outfitted for his disability, operating the car by wedging his paralyzed foot between the brake and the accelerator, killing a teenager and injuring five others. It appears that the man took the wheel because his pal was too drunk to drive safely. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:13:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anal. Games are not what

Anal. Games are not what you think: "An Anal. Game is the contest or idle pastime played by an individual during moments of mental, physical or social inactivity."

DirEkt, daiThe player imagines they are the star and or director of a feature film, and has complete film crew. They will employ techniques such as panoramic views, long shots, slow motion and fade outs to assist the dramatics of an otherwise dull journey.

Commentation
Whilst walking along you give an imaginary speech as if you were a tourist guide, presenting a documentary or such. "To your left we can see the skip which has been left here for six months". Can also include minute gestures of the hands and faint lip movement, that shadow the actual performance that would be given if it were not a game.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:03:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The new Cybiko is out

The new Cybiko is out and it looks like a scientific calculator designed by HR Giger (that's a good thing). Nice new features, too.LinkDiscuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:49:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

After Mark mentioned eMusic's legal

After Mark mentioned eMusic's legal downloadable music service in a QuickTopic yesterday, I went off and singed up for the "free, unlimited 30-day trial." I was blown away -- there are thousands of MP3s that I want there, and the throughput is stellar, nearly 100kps on my DSL connection. I was ready and willing to convert to a paid subscription in a month when my free trial was up. But this morning, when I started downloading a Killdozer CD in toto, I got an error message: "Download Limit Reached: You have reached the download limit for your eMusic Unlimited trial." I'm not saying that 100 MP3s for free and $15/month for all you can eat is a bad deal, but at the same time, a "limited unlimited" trial seems a little false-advertising-y.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lawrence Lessig gave a stirring

Lawrence Lessig gave a stirring address at a Dublin film festival, warning his audience that the draconian re-casting of copyright will make our historical period a cipher in the future.

Copyright laws in the United States are placing the control of material into an increasingly "fixed and concentrated" group of corporate hands, he said. Five record companies now control 85 percent of music distribution, for example.

Because copyright law now also precludes "derivative use" of copyright material, people cannot develop new material based on copyrighted work without permission. Lessig said this radically changes how human culture will evolve, since "the property owner has control over how that subsequent culture is built."

This restriction also stymies technological innovation, as developers cannot follow the long-established practice of taking existing code and enhancing it to produce something new, he said.

Because companies in industries such as music, publishing and film routinely demand that artists hand over copyright on their creative work, "kids don't own their own culture," said Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow, who also attended the conference.

"The period of copyright primacy is going to end up as a huge hole in the cultural record."

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, November 26, 2001

Wil Wheaton -- Star Trek's

Wil Wheaton -- Star Trek's Wesley Crusher and a true-and-through nerd with a kick-ass blog -- will appear on The Weakest Link tonight as part of a Star Trek theme episode. If he wins, he's donating the proceeds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Too cool.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Well, we're back online! Lemme

Well, we're back online! Lemme put it this way: Big Storm: Power Outage: Server Outage. Wanna get your BoingBoing fix the next time this happens? Subscribe to the low-traffic, high-quality, most-excellent BoingBoing Listserv (see top-right corner of page).Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:27:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Finally, there's a (unsupported) AudioGalaxy

Finally, there's a (unsupported) AudioGalaxy client for MacOS X.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:29:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPods, iPaqs and other MP3

iPods, iPaqs and other MP3 players are wicked cool, but they can't play copy-protected music like the stuff coming from pressplay and the new Napster. The labels are trying to create a legal alternative to MP3-trading, but unless they can coordinate their efforts with the consumer-electronics manufacturers, they're not gonna make a dent in the file-sharing world.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:23:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cap Gemini Ernst and Young

Cap Gemini Ernst and Young needs to lay off 750 people by January 1, and they'd prefer it if their employees voluntarily left the firm. To accomplish this end, the CEO left voicemail on 9,000 employee mailboxes urging them to get lost. Somehow, this seems an especially cruel way to go about this.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

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

eBay is shipping a glossy,

eBay is shipping a glossy, eight-page print catalog as an insert in Sunday papers. I don't really understand this, I confess. LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:33:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fascinating history of the anti-Apartheid

Fascinating history of the anti-Apartheid samizdat movement's response to Apple divesting from South Africa.

Despite Apple's non-presence, I was able to win support for replacing our old Apple II lab for a lab of Mac SEs. A fair number of our faculty members had Macs in their offices. All of this, I emphasize, was not an indication that we approved of the apartheid system, and wanted to bust sanctions. On the contrary, we were active in opposing the system, and wanted the best tools for the job.

LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:17:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Search spiders have always stumbled

Search spiders have always stumbled upon documents that Webmasters had thought secret, but now that Google's adding the ability to index complex document formats like PDF, even more password files, love notes and dmaning memos are showing up online.

"Our specialty is discovering, crawling and indexing publicly available information," said Google spokesman David Krane. "We define public as anything placed on the public Internet and not blocked to search engines in any way. The primary burden falls to the people who are incorrectly exposing this information. But at the same time, we're certainly aware of the problem, and our development team is exploring different solutions behind the scenes."

LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:07:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A new study finds that

A new study finds that Internet users aren't loners who neglect their families in pursuit of the perfect computer-tan; rather, we typically spend a fair bit of time on volunteerism, and find time for our families by switiching off the TV (of course, I'm typing this while ripping a CD, watching some TiVo'ed AbFab, talking on the phone, working on a post to the WELL, chatting over AIM and watching an IRC channel scroll past, so go fig).LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:01:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Badtrans-B virus is the

The Badtrans-B virus is the latest superworm that's chewing its way through Windows boxen with unpatched copies of Outlook at Internet speed. The worm renames itself with each remailing, picking one of the following words or phrases and adding ".doc" or ".mp3" to the end. It's a good list, but c'mon, "HAMSTER NEWS?"

FUNHUMORDOCSS3MSONGSorry_about_yesterdayME_NUDECARDSETUPSEARCHURLYOU_ARE_FAT!HAMSTER NEWS_DOCNew_Napster_SiteREADMEIMAGESPICS

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

After a long hiatus, FutureFeedForward's

After a long hiatus, FutureFeedForward's back, with a doozy!

Wal-mart Tags Shoppers with Subcutaneous Cookies

WALVILLE, ARK.--Responding to public requests from privacy advocates, retailing giant Wal-mart agreed Wednesday to release details concerning a newly-implemented system for tracking shoppers in its Wal-mart and Sam's Club stores. "We understand that there is some sensitivity surrounding this initiative," notes Wal-mart spokesman Joel Scent, "And we want to be entirely upfront and open about the program and the ways it will benefit our shopping family. We've been testing the system in a few pilot stores--we've made no secret about that--and now, with that experience behind us, we're ready to talk about the program."

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:17:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, November 25, 2001

A man who posted his

A man who posted his VW-dealer horror-stories to a BBS is being sued for libel by the dealer, who is also going after the operator of the BBS. Of course, launching the suit generated publicity around the world for the poster's list of complaints against the garage.

Man, that garage had rotten legal counsel: "OK, your righteously indignant customers are comparing notes on the Internet and telling everyone to avoid your shop. What you do is, you sue 'em for millions, try to shut down the BBS, get tons of negative publicity, and if you win, you go down as the shop that uses legal harassment to bankrupt its unhappy customers. If you lose, the courts will have effectively ruled that you guys are as bad as the guy said online. No! Don't just offer to fix everything you did wrong or give him his money back! Treating your customers like they matter is the top of the slippery slope to bankruptcy!"

This would be outrageous hands down if Mantis hadn't closed his original post thus: "With no other recourse, I'm seeking revenge as best I can. This is one way: telling all of you to avoid this dealership, for sales or service, like the plague."

It's that unfortunate word 'revenge' we worry about. Any greenhorn corporate PR flack or political speech writer knows that the universally-accepted substitute for 'revenge' is 'justice'. See how much better it reads with the substitution.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, November 24, 2001

Here's a free, secure Cybiko

Here's a free, secure Cybiko chat app that implements A5, a streaming clock-controlled feedback cipher using 3 LFSRs, in only 5.6k of code, and makes your 900MHz instant messaging sessions less sniffable. LinkDiscuss (Thanks brucee!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:36:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Stinkymeat project at thespark.com:

The Stinkymeat project at thespark.com: If you are eating, skip this. TheSpark documents what happens when you put three different meats (steak, ground beef and hot-dogs) on a plate for 19 days under the broiling sun. This is like those projects we did in grade three where we let various objects rot in glass jars and documented their dessication. Only TheSpark uses his unwitting neighbor's back yard instead of a jar, and documents the "progress" of the stinkymeat with more wit than Mr Denchasi's grade three class at Crestview Public School mustered.

As for the meat itself - I am speechless. I brought my stirring utensil with me, fully prepared to churn the goop in full circular motions. Instead, I found that it resisted all my attempts.

It has somehow become a singular solid object. The picture above demonstrates its elasticity. It reminds me of fake rubber vomit. This gives me horrible ideas and makes me wish I had enemies.

I can only hope this strange state is permanent, but I feel it will revert to gelatin as it ages.

If the experiment was over, and I had gloves on, I'd be tempted to see if I could use it as a meat frisbee.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:31:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What's dumber than driving while

What's dumber than driving while drunk? How about driving while talking on a cellphone while drunk? Or dumber still: driving while drunk, while talking on a cellphone, holding the cellphone in your left hand, because you have no right arm. One-armed man arrested for blowing through a red while drunk and talking on his phone.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:07:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boong-Ga Boong-Ga is a

Boong-Ga Boong-Ga is a popular new Japanese cabinet video-game. The cabinet has the hindquarters of a bent-over mannequin sticking out of its front. Gameplay consists of prodding the mannequin's buttocks with a special outsized plastic finger while your opponents whimper and grimace onscreen. The more skilled your bottom-poking, the more virility points you score. A testimonial to your rumpular studliness is printed on a bit of cardboard at the end of the game for you to show to others.

"On the other hand, it depends on the individual. I think there are a lot of young boys who can play a game like (Boong-ga, Boong-ga), and know that it's not appropriate to go out into public and start pinching and poking people."

Jack Morin, author of a sex manual, Anal Pleasure and Health, agreed. "Obsessions generally occur in response to intense prohibitions, which give the forbidden object heightened significance," he said. "The prohibitions work both ways. They encourage some people to 'tune out' the forbidden area or activity, while others get obsessed about it. Sometimes you see both reactions within the same person -- and perhaps within the same culture as well."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Feebs're doing their bit

The Feebs're doing their bit to help beat cops identify domestic terrorists, with an alarming flyer that identifies the following as warning signs of domestic terrorism:

Common Law Movement Proponents

• Fictitious license plates
• No license plates
• Fictitious drivers license
• No drivers license
• Refuse to identify themselves
• Request authority for stop
• Make numerous references to US Constitution

(Empahasis added)

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:35:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Brits are having a

The Brits are having a domestic Game Show Crisis -- three people were arrested this week, amid speculation that they had cheated the UK edition of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

A police inquiry began in September into an episode of the popular show in which Ingram won 1 million pounds, or $1.41 million.

The episode was not broadcast, and Ingram's check was withheld because of the suspected cheating. News reports suggested that someone in the audience relayed to him correct answers to questions by coughing.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:30:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, November 23, 2001

Why bother with a

Why bother with a Linux PDA? Because you can play Quake on it, that's why. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:35:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are you so filled with

Are you so filled with postmodern self-loathing that the thought of wiping your own ass grosses you out? The "Bottom Buddy" -- a new wiping aid with a tulip-shaped grip and a tip that's rounded for comfort -- will do it for you. LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:23:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Joey's blog is carrying the

Joey's blog is carrying the story of how he and his roommates (including an infosec guru who shoulda known better!) got roocked twice by a conman who knocked on their door. Funny stuff, with an object lesson thrown in.

Dan and I each gave him forty bucks, and he gave us his phone number and even offered to let us hang on to a Macintosh computer as a guarantee that he would come back and pay. I felt a little guilty about not getting to know all my neighbours and told him it would be all right -- the phone number would be sufficient. It was only after he left that I got the sinking we got rooked.

Dan said that he got the feeling too, but he kept mum and watched for me to make my move -- when he saw me lend him the money, he did the same.

He never came back. Dan went on at length about how he'd "fucking kill" Sean if he ever dared to show his face in the neighbourhood again.

Here's Joey's story: Link, and here's the mea culpa from the aforementioned infosec guru: Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:48:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Patrick sez: "This is just

Patrick sez: "This is just too sweet. Little flash games that load fast, look pretty and are fun and relaxing to play. Nicely done shockwave and a model of efficiency (they're small files). Just check 'em out. Happy Thanksgiving!"LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:43:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, November 22, 2001

Surprise.com is a deluxe version

Surprise.com is a deluxe version of Amazon's ListMania. Surprise creates gift-categories ("Caffeine Fiend," "Gadgeteer," "Former Midwesterner," etc) and invites readers to suggest appropriate gifts for each category, along with URLs where they may be purchased. LinkDiscuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:48:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, November 21, 2001

Patrick at Electrolite's home with

Patrick at Electrolite's home with a cold today, which means that we lucky readers get tons of excellent political bloggage! Feel better soon, Patrick, but keep on blogging at speed, please. (I feel a pang of guilt here, since hanging out with his wife and me on a Long Island beach at 4AM the other day to catch the Leonids can't have helped that cold at all)LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:19:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Utility kilts! So, say

Utility kilts! So, say you're secure enough in your masculinity to wear the Scottish Skirt, but you're hampered by the lack of places to stash your phone, PDA, multitool, paperback, wallet, pager, change, lighter, cigs, cigar-cutter, utlity knife, Cybiko, 802.11 card, digital camera, maglite and multidriver set? Worry no more: The Utility Kilt is the unholy offspring of a kilt and cargo pants. Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:42:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Infinite Matrix, an infinitely

The Infinite Matrix, an infinitely cool (heh, I made a funny) online sf zine that folded after one ish is back! And BoingBoing played no small part in that renaissance: When the first ish of IM went online, with a blog from Bruce Sterling, short fiction from a string of Hugo winners, and a lovely lookenfeel, we ran a link to it, which got picked up and propagated to Wired News, /., and elsewhere. The publicity was sufficient to attract a sponsor for more issues, and the new one is terrific. Also, Eileen Gunn, IM's editor, will be excerpting a big hunk of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," my first novel, which Tor will publish next fall.

Most of my focus in the past few months has gone into getting stories and columnists for the magazine, rather than figuring out how to make money. So here's what you can look forward to:

* Schism Matrix, Bruce Sterling's daily weblog
* This Week in History, compiled daily by Terry Bisson
* Scores, book reviews by John Clute
* ViperWire, nanotales by Richard Kadrey
* The Smoke, a serial by Simon Ings
* The Runcible Ansible, a weekly column of wit and miscellany by David Langford
* A monthly short story, including a newly discovered story by the great fantasist Avram Davidson
* Monthly excerpts from significant upcoming novels, including, in this issue, Kathleen Ann Goonan's Light Music, due next June from Harper-Collins Eos, and in December, Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, due next Fall from Tor.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:34:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A new gravity map of

A new gravity map of the Earth reveals that India is subject to one percent less gravity than anywhere else.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:53:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Gadget burnout" threatens to ruin

"Gadget burnout" threatens to ruin Christmas sales.

"We are all becoming our own personal IT managers... This is what burns people out. The utility of the device is hidden deep inside, behind a bunch of confusing software that differs on every device. You, as a consumer, can't leverage what you learn."

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:01:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Julia Magnet reviews Osama bin

Julia Magnet reviews Osama bin Laden's terrorist training video.

Until I sat down to watch a two-hour Al Qa'eda recruitment video, made just six months before the September 11 attacks, I had no idea that the champion of anti-Americanism had hijacked our Hollywood gimmicks and television tricks. Far more likely, I thought, that he'd produce a dreary display of militant fundamentalism: lots of ranting against America and Saudi Arabia, with some macho gun-play thrown in for show.

What I actually saw was far more worrying: Osama bin Laden beating us at our own media game. With devilish cunning, he has plugged into the MTV generation - and it's clear he knows how to reach us. I have spent all day humming militant Islamic songs. And I am a Jewish twenty-something from New York.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:55:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rumors of Photoshop for OS

Rumors of Photoshop for OS X's release at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco next January.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:44:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Heartwarming news from Adventures in

Heartwarming news from Adventures in Crime and Space, the Austin genre bookstore that was in danger of folding (Link) last month:

Hello! Scott Cupp here again. Recently I wrote a letter that was among the hardest things I had ever had to do in my life. I told you of the plight that Adventures in Crime and Space was facing as a result of the changing economic scene and the terrorist attacks. I am happy to report that science fiction and fantasy and mystery fans across the world have responded in exceptional fashion. We met our goal of $6,000, which allowed us to continue operating. We went way past that goal thanks to your response.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Rh Baby!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:41:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Eloquent Blotter contains witty

The Eloquent Blotter contains witty and odd reports from police blotters.

1:41 p.m. Did that woman who tried to return the sack of coffee to the Sunny Brae supermarket steal it or not? Either way, no refund was given.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:35:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Welcome to our new Guestbar

Welcome to our new Guestbar Blogger, Matthew Hawn!Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:32:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A think-tank wonk has come

A think-tank wonk has come up with an entomology-derived heirarchy of hackerdom. It's pretty funny, actually:

Professionals Hakus Superior
This nuisance has the characteristics of both Hakus Hakus and Scriptus Infanti. Hakus Superiors are normally highly skilled but do not like to show off, unlike Hakus Hakus. They can often disguise themselves as a company insider, business intelligence agent or even HR professionals. They become more dangerous when organised into groups. Hakus Superior is a stealthy killer: one bite kills.

LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:27:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Found-art-du-jour: Cher Guevara. Discuss

Found-art-du-jour: Cher Guevara. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:21:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Time Magazine's running a "Best

Time Magazine's running a "Best Inventions of 2001" roundup. My favorite: The Fuel-Cell Bike.

Electric bikes have never been cool. After all, what self-respecting rider would let a battery do all the work? But fuel-cell technology, which uses pollution-free hydrogen gas to generate an electric current, could ignite electric-bike sales. The first prototype, from Italian bikemaker Aprilia, stores compressed hydrogen in a 2-liter metal canister housed in the frame. With a top speed of 20 m.p.h., the bike won't win the Tour de France. But it weighs 20% less than regular electrics and travels twice as far, about 43 miles, before it needs more gas. Now that's cool.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Larry "People Versus" Flynt wants

Larry "People Versus" Flynt wants to send Hustler reporters to Afghanistan, but the Defense Department sez no, so he's suing.LinkDiscuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:02:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vivendi (Universal's parent company) announces

Vivendi (Universal's parent company) announces plans to build a full-on music-trading network that will support itself with advertising instead of subscriptions. Let's all party like it's 1999!LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:45:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, November 20, 2001

Michael Skakel, "a nephew of

Michael Skakel, "a nephew of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, is charged with the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, a neighbor who was beaten to death with a golf club." He's 41 years old, but wants to be tried as a juvenille. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:42:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Belgian inventor claims to

A Belgian inventor claims to have invented a compression program that can stuff 20 DVDs onto a single CD. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:39:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The New York Observer profiles

The New York Observer profiles '70s songwriter Paul Williams.

“When I got sober, I weighed 187,” he said. “I weigh 137 now. When I’d run out of cocaine, I’d eat everything. I was a serious cocaine addict, and then all the empty calories in vodka.” How bad did things get? Bad enough that he wrote the songs for The Muppet Christmas Carol while on drugs.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:20:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hoax2: The Times of London

Hoax²: The Times of London spazzed out yesterday when it was revealed the Taliban left detailed plans for building a nuke behind in home in Kabul when they took to the hills. What the Times (and, presumably, the Taliban) didn't know is that the plans were a joke, a gag from The Annals of Improbable Research.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Derryl!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:17:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mail-order sheep (real, actual sheep),

Mail-order sheep (real, actual sheep), just in time for the holidays. E-commerce has found its niche at last.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:11:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Screenshots of old GUIs: Win,

Screenshots of old GUIs: Win, Mac, Lin and assorted.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:06:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A company promises to release

A company promises to release software "within a couple of weeks" that makes iPod Windows-compatible. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:59:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Beyond Contact," an O'Reilly book,

"Beyond Contact," an O'Reilly book, is a serious study of the means by which humanity and aliens may be able to communicate, both up close and at lightspeed-laggy distances.

Monochromatic (single color) light is the signature of an artificial device. Naturally occurring light emitted by a star will always blur across many colors. The yellow-white light we see from our sun is actually a composite of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet light (plus ultraviolet and infrared light, which we cannot see). When we look at the sum of these colors together, the light is white. The laws of blackbody radiation, which we discussed previously as a way to measure temperature, govern this pattern.

By understanding these natural patterns, it is possible to engineer artificial signals that stand out against them; lasers are perfect tools for this. We can use lasers to generate an extremely strong and focused source of light tuned to a very precise wavelength (color). We can also use lasers to transmit extremely brief, but bright, pulses of light. The trick is to generate obviously artificial signals that stand out against the type of light normally emitted by a star.

Knowing how starlight usually behaves, it is possible to build an artificial beacon that, while it is weak compared to a star as a whole, shines brightly at a specific color or for very brief periods of time. The receiving party can then look for evidence of this type of artificial signal by splitting the light into thousands of individual colors, or by measuring the intensity of the light during very short (billionths of a second) timeframes.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"They Fight Crime:" an hilarious

"They Fight Crime:" an hilarious comic-book themed madlibs Website. Here's some sample output:

He's an ungodly amnesiac sorceror haunted by memories of 'Nam. She's a high-kicking mute bounty hunter descended from a line of powerful witches. They fight crime!

He's a gun-slinging flyboy dwarf from a doomed world. She's a sarcastic snooty bounty hunter with an evil twin sister. They fight crime!

He's an all-American shark-wrestling gentleman spy moving from town to town, helping folk in trouble. She's a ditzy psychic mercenary on her way to prison for a murder she didn't commit. They fight crime!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:46:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Here are some screenshots (soon

Here are some screenshots (soon to be replaced by an interactive demo) of an incredible prototype interface for networked and stand-alone filesystems, called Looking Glass. The UI is built around the idea of an infinite plane of infinite resolution, on which bitmapped representations of every document in the system are arranged by their creators. You nagivate the system by scrolling in three dimensions (left/right, up/down, and zoom in/out) and by passing around rectangle coordinates that define a selection area on someone's Looking Glass. The demo I saw of this earlier this month just blew me away -- I can't wait until they put it online; the screenshots really don't do it justice. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:56:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A whole whack of old-school

A whole whack of old-school emulators, ported to OS X, released today:

• Frodo: Commodore 64 emulator
• Arnold: CPC+ emulator
• Neopocott: Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator
• TEO: Thomson TO8 emulator
• RockNES: Nintendo Entertainment System emulator
• Jum52: Atari 5200 emulator
• Generator: Sega Genesis emulator
• MO5: Thomson MO5 emulator
• Boycott Advance: Gameboy Advance emulator
• O2Em Odyssey^2 emulator
• Modeler: Sega Arcade emulator
• Oric: Oric 1/Oric Atmos emulator
• SMS+: Sega Master Syster and Sega Game Gear emulator
• Handy: Atari Lynx emulator
• fMSX: MSX emulator
• TGEmu: NEC PC engine emulator

Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:41:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The History of Interlibrary Loan

The History of Interlibrary Loan is a parable for the development of P2P filetrading, right down to the legal battles, iconoclasts, standards wars and so on. I saw Daniel Chudnov of MIT Libraries present on this subject earlier this month at the O'Reilly P2P conference, and it's mind-boggling stuff. Here are his slides from the presentation.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:27:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Here's a neat proposal for

Here's a neat proposal for an anti-search tool, a standard way of telling a search engine what your page is not about -- for example, we get tons of people coming to BoingBoing who've searched for "Nike Boing" on Google. These people are looking for nike.com, not this blog. With this proposal, we could add a meta tag to the page that says, basically, "This page is not about Nike." I wonder, though: I think that there's something marvellous about serendipity in search results (the Google link for us on a "nike boing" search reads "Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things: ... Monday, November 20, 2000. Nike TV commercial makes fun of disabled people," and I think that people see that and think, "Hmm, a directory of wonderful things -- gotta check that out."). I also worry about the legal implications of anti-search terms. If this were adopted, then Nike's lawyers may very well send us a nastygram demanding that we add metadata to stop our page coming up on searches for "nike." LinkDiscuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:05:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The real Tourist Guy is

The real Tourist Guy is not a Brazilian business-man, but rather a Hungarian. Apparently. The strangest thing about this story is that it implies that a Brazilian business-man decided to impersonate Tourist Guy. Whacky.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:51:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, November 19, 2001

R.U. Sirius, the founding editor-in-chief

R.U. Sirius, the founding editor-in-chief of three of my favorite magazines, High Frontiers, Reality Hackers, and Mondo 2000, has started a new magazine, called The Thresher. It looks great. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:49:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This gadget is the best

This gadget is the best way I've seen to play your MP3s through your car stereo. It's a little, battery-powered FM radio transmitter. Plug it into the speaker jack of any device (MP3 player, laptop, Casiotone, drum-machine, dictaphone, cellphone), tune it to an unused FM station, then tune any nearby FM radios to the same station and your device plays through your radio!LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:49:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dig these awesome homemade Afghani

Dig these awesome homemade Afghani sat dishes, made from flattened paint-tins. LinkDiscuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:21:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Make your own ANSI-standard

Make your own ANSI-standard warning signs! This site lets you pick the graphics from a range of standards-defined warning-icons, enter accompanying text, and generate a printable PDF or order your own high-wear metal signage with your design on it. This is full of extremely evil and highly fun potential. Link Discuss (Thanks, Erik!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:48:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Novelty tune jackpot! "Song-Poems" are

Novelty tune jackpot! "Song-Poems" are songs whose lyrics were written by amateur poets, who then paid music-houses to set the poem to music, get up a studio session and record the poem. There's a great album of this stuff, called "I Died Today," and here at the American Song-Poem Music Archive, you can download dozens (hundreds?) of song-poem MP3s with titles like "Love Can Strike You In The Strangest Places," "Rockin' Little Eskimo," and "The Lottery Freak."LinkDiscuss (via MegoSteve)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

American Science and Surplus is

American Science and Surplus is a classic, a decades-old tradition for denizens of the midwest and the catalog-obsessed (Toronto's Active Surplus is a pale imitation of AS&S's glory). The store sells everything, so long as it's cheap, and the product-descriptions on their website is by turns inspiring and hilarious.

Imprecision Tools 
Your writer spent over $20 a year ago for a 21 piece set of small tools: (5) end wrenches size 4mm to 6mm, (2) phillips screwdrivers #0 and #1, (6) slot screwdrivers 0.9mm to 3.5mm, (5) socket wrenches 3 mm to 5 mm, and (3) allen/hex head drivers, 1.5 mm to 2.5 mm. He was disappointed in the quality, particularly when one of the end wrenches broke on the second use. Now you can be disappointed for a fraction of the cost. We offer an "exact" Chinese copy of the set for a mere $5.00. It looks worse than it is. You can clean the burs off the socket wrenches, and although the steel is soft, it will be fine for light duty. The sample has (2) 4 mm wrenches and no 5 mm. We have no idea if similar errors occur in the other sets. So you pay your money and take your chances. We will accept returns if you don't get (21) pieces, but not for poor quality or count problems such as those described here. 32077 MINI PRECIS. TOOL SET $2.75 / EACH (was $5.00)

Batman Filmstrip
Not the kind you watch. The kind you wear. It's an 18" long plastic tie made of clear camera film with the batman logo repeating. Wear it around your collar with the elastic strip. Looks good with most capes. 30734 BATMAN TIE $0.50 / EACH (was $1.00)

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Walt Disney World has been

Walt Disney World has been wired for wireless! A Disney IT exec reveals that the Park has been seeded with some 200 802.11b base-stations, which are used primarily to offer credit-card approval to kiosks and ice-cream wagons.

(Aside: Boy, I sure hope they aren't relying on on WEP for security there, even if it is 128-bit; they'd better be working tunneled through SSH or similar)

They're also using WiFi to put census machines at the foot of the gangplanks of their cruise-ships during landfalls. When a passanger debarks, she swipes her room-key as she steps off the gangplank. When it's anchors a-weigh, the ship's captain knows exactly which passengers he's abandoning to starve on a deserted pleasure-island (or, conversely, who he needs to hang around for).

(Aside Mark II: Yes, they could put the machine at the top of the gangplank without wireless. That wouldn't be as cool. That is all)

Of course, all this tasty WiFi bandwidth is reserved for the private use of Disney's castmembers. Disney's worried that by offering Internet service to their guests, they'll end up with a park full of porn-downloading geeks hogging the old-people benches and crawling around looking for an AC outlet.

Speaking of, here in NYC, I've been going nuts with my iBook's wireless link and the MobileStar service at Starbuck's. There's basically a Stinkbuck's on every block in Manhattan, and I have yet to successfully resist the temptation to whip out my iBook as I walk past each and check my mail. There's a baseline of caffeine consumption expected from those who tie up tables inside, so I've been avoiding that except when my battery runs down and I need an AC outlet -- even so, I've been consuming on the order of 60 ounces of caffeinated beverage every day since I got here.

I may have to switch to the proliferate community wireless networks, if only to spare my stomach lining. Right now, I'm logged into someone named "Deb"'s AirPort base-station, which is connected to a RoadRunner cable modem and running firmware V3.64. This Deb person is presumably within 300' of my cousin's flat on the 11th floor of an apartment building at 27th and Lex. I assume it's in one of the line-of-sight apartment buildings, since I only get signal when I'm sitting near my cousin's window, and not at all on the ground or in the living room. Thanks, Deb, who and where ever you are.

(Aside Mark III: On the cab-ride in from Penn Station last week, I was able to log in to a different 802.11 network at each red light and check my mail) Link Discuss (Thanks, Raphael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:10:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Larry Ellison has declared his

Larry Ellison has declared his new mail-server "unbreakable." He doesn't specify why he believes this is so, but does hint that it has something to do with Oracle server storing all the mail in a big Oracle database. OK, I understand why that's profitable, but unbreakable? This ZDNet editorial predicts ruination in Larry's future as hackers take up his gauntlet.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:52:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Middle-aged Brit balloon-hobbyists are building

Middle-aged Brit balloon-hobbyists are building a record-breaking, skyscraper-sized helium balloon and will fly to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere this summer, wearing ex-Sov spacesuits and big, silly grins.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:48:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Douglas Adams' widow has retreived

Douglas Adams' widow has retreived the manuscript for the sixth and final Hitchhiker's novel from the dead author's harddrive, and we can expect to see A Salmon of Doubt on the shelves in about a year.

"We have pored over Douglas's hard drive. There were so many different versions of the novel.

"He would take it and then revise it repeatedly so there were many files.

"As soon as he wrote anything he would say, 'Oh, God that's terrible'. He was a very, very self-critical author and so had a lot of trouble writing. He was a perfectionist."

LinkDiscuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:43:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jenn Shreve explores the culture

Jenn Shreve explores the culture of rasterbation, interviewing inveterate Photoshoppers and getting some nice quotes on the urge to bit-twiddle.

"Some people can see a message. Myself, I do it because it's fun and because I like to take these pictures of celebrities, stand them on their head, and satirize what I see to be a trend in society that I'm not really fond of: that people need to change themselves to be beautiful," Webb said...

"That picture of the World Trade Center man: People love hoaxes like that and love being able to create the hoax themselves. That sort of thing really takes off when you have the power to create that and send it around to your friends," Muchnick said.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:40:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Internet-based businesses are fantastic at

Internet-based businesses are fantastic at organizing their catalogs, warehouses and customer-relations, but they have a lot to learn about packing for shipment. This Wired News story explains why Amazon ships you a single CD in a box big enough to hold twenty of 'em, and what it costs etailers who use outsized packaging and fill up the empty space with bubblewrap or ghost-turds.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:37:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, November 18, 2001

Christian Analysis of American Culture

Christian Analysis of American Culture has a white paper on the alleged subtexts of Disney cartoons. This is tinfoil-underwear lunacy of the first water.

I, as many did, grew up with Mickey, Donald, Goofey and a whole parade of other Disney characters. Each provided a wholesome, fun-filled experience. Now I have to be concerned whether Mickey will kiss Donald on the mouth or do other things associated with gender perversity and distortion. And I now have to be concerned even about the subliminal homosexual expressions made on video tape covers from Disney. What kind of further destruction can Disney do? How is it we as consumers have lain idle for so long that a long-trusted giant of wholesome family entertainment has become a destroyer of proper, Bible-based gender identity? And they do it almost invisibly - invisibly at least to the children who develop character from that which they observe; invisible to their at-the-moment understanding, but not invisible to their long-term character development!

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Matthew!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:35:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stupid Google tricks! If you

Stupid Google tricks! If you want to find terrible poetry in a hurry, search for "peotry." Link Discuss (Thanks, PNH and TNH!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A talented speech therapist attended

A talented speech therapist attended a science fiction convention with her sister, a longtime fan. The therapist observed something very like a fannish accent, a mode of discourse and a suite of physiological characteristics that are unique to fandom. After spending some time studying this phenomenon, the therapist returned to the convention to report on her findings. Here's a fascinating Usenet thread discussing the presentation -- are fans speciating?

We also speak in larger word groupings between breaths. This does notnecessarily mean that we speak faster; we just pause for a shorter timebetween words -- except where there is punctuation. She pointed out thatwhen Teresa Nielsen Hayden said she came from Mesa, Arizona, Teresa actuallypronounced the comma by putting a slightly longer pause there, while mostmundanes would simply run the words together. Mundanes slur a lot ofconsonents that we pronounce individually. We use punctuation in our spokenutterances. Sometimes we even footnote.

What we say in those large word groupings is also different. We tend to usecomplete sentences, and complex sentence structure. When we pause, or say"uh", it tends to be towards the beginning of a statement, as we formulatethe complete thought. The "idea" or "information" portion of a statement isparamount; emotional reassurance, the little social noises (mm-hmm) arereduced or omitted. We get to the heart of what we want to say -- ifsomeone asks us how to do something we tell them, not leading up to itgently with "have you tried doing it this way?"

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, PNH and TNH!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:12:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Schneier isn't just a

Bruce Schneier isn't just a cypherpunk god, he's also an inveterate foodie. The restaurant guides he and Karen Cooper write are good enough to garner Hugo nominations, and chock full of fantastic foodie obsessiveness. I've never read any document quite like this one, in fact.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, PNH and TNH!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tired of having your cigars

Tired of having your cigars crumple in your pockets? Why not invest in a milspec, high-impact safety yellow plastic "armored humidor?" If only it were TEMPEST-hardened...LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:58:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Virtual Fish Tank is

The Virtual Fish Tank is one of the coolest interactive exhibits I've ever seen. It's situated in the Boston Science Museum, a giant wall of screens that are windows into the tank (a screen tucked away on one side give a longitudinal view of the tank). The tank is populated by fish whose characteristics -- hunger, aggression, friendliness, etc -- are determined by visitors using nearby kiosks. Motion-sensors tell the tank when someone is "tapping on the glass," and the fish react appropriately. Using the Web interface and webcam feed at virtualfishtank.com, you can design your own fish for release into the tank, in real time, tagged and ready to swim with the fish that are being designed by the museum's meatspace visitors.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:54:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, November 17, 2001

The greatest Hello Kitty accessory,

The greatest Hello Kitty accessory, ever: the light-up Hello Kitty earpick! You know, my greatest eBay regret is losing the bidding for a Tokyo Disneyland ear-wax scraper, but this thing trumps even that for bizarre and cute hygeine accessorydom. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Drue!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:01:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Modern Humorist's glossary of

The Modern Humorist's glossary of alternate definitions for the Potterjargon that today's kooky kids can't stop spouting.

Quidditch: A hole in the ground in which to put your quid.

You-Know-Who: You know who it is. Don't kid yourself. It's Warwick Davis, diminutive star of "Willow" and "Leprechaun"!

Azkaban: Country that borders Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

Hufflepuff: Star of the classic Sid and Marty Krofft show "H.R. Hufflepuff." Still loved by Gen-Xers who assume that the name is a reference to "huffing" inhalants.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:52:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A new WiFi Standard, 802.11g,

A new WiFi Standard, 802.11g, was approved yesterday, combining the best of the traditional 802.11b (AKA Airport) and the next-gen 802.11 (which runs five times faster than .11b, but at a different radio-frequency, which means that interoperation requires two different radios tuned to the different frequencies). .11f runs at the same speed at .11a, but in the same band as .11b, and that's great news -- mostly. The only catch is that .11b/f's frequency, 2.4GHz, is also used by BlueTooth devices and some cordless phones, which creates lots of opportunities for radio-frequency interference that can toast your wireless network. Here's Slashdot's rollicking coverage of the news.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:37:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Growing up in Toronto, my

Growing up in Toronto, my friends and I used to joke that pissing in the Don River actually improved the overall quality of that polluted course. In a similar vein, it turns out that shelling Kandahar actually increases its net worth, so much so that resourceful entrepreneurial scrap-dealers are building faux bunkers with battery-powered lamps to attract US bombs so that they can salvage the shells and re-sell them.

Naimattullah narrates an incident which aptly illustrates how desperation can drive one to desperate measures. A villager from the Dahnd area of Kandahar, according to Naimattullah, had only few thousand afghanis to feed his wife and five children.

"But, instead of buying food, he invested in a small motorcycle battery, a few metres of electrical wire and a bulb. Then he lit the bulb on a hill near Chell Zeena at night and waited for the U.S. bombing, but nothing happened."

The next evening, the intrepid villager revisited the site. "This time, he tied up a dog near the site to show the Americans some signs of life," the Taliban official said. And he finally succeeded in his mission - to make the Americans direct their bombs more accurately, this time at his lone shining light.

"The next morning, he was several times richer than two days ago," the official claimed.

LinkDiscuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:33:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BOING: Belligerent, Obtuse Interposer, Nefarious

BOING: Belligerent, Obtuse Interposer, Nefarious for Greed. The automated acronym expander ("The Bile Machine") generates random, insulting things that any 2-7 letter word can stand for.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:22:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Benjamin Rosenbaum, the talented science

Benjamin Rosenbaum, the talented science fiction writer responsible for "The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale," is doing a monthly series of vignettes describing fantastic stories on StrangeHorizons, an online sf magazine. Wonderful stuff.

The Censors' Building is in an olive grove gone wild (olive oil is no longer among the principal products of Bellur), and during their afternoon break and their evening break the censors wander the groves, picking and nibbling on the bitter olives, searching for inspiration. Censorship in Bellur is an art, it is the Queen of the Arts. Other cities celebrate their poets or sculptors, offer the world their playwrights and clowns; Bellur, its censors. The censors of Bellur can censor the twentieth part of the thickness of one serif of the letter h in 10-point Garamond type, and alter the meaning of a poem entirely; they can censor four thousand pages of a four thousand and fifty page novel, and leave its meaning intact. But this is not the extent of their art; these are mere parlor tricks, mere editorishness. Censorship is a dance with history; by censoring the right word at the right historical moment, the gifted censor can unleash or throttle a revolution.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:07:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, November 16, 2001

Incredible archive of television news

Incredible archive of television news coverage on 9/11.Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:09:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chris Ware, creator of the

Chris Ware, creator of the Acme Comic Novelty Library comic book series, is also an antique-style toy maker. He usually includes a cardboard cut-out toy in each issue of his comic book. I've always wondered what the toys would look like if they were assembled, but I didn't want to cut my comics up. I'm glad somebody else cut their comics up to make this gallery of assembled Acme Novelty Toys.Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:47:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A preeminent neuroscientist, a Fulbright

A preeminent neuroscientist, a Fulbright scholar, was removed from an Alaska Airlines flight on Sunday. An anonymous passenger reported that he was "acting strangely" (he was reviewing a complex scientific paper he was to deliver at a scientific symposium). The strangest thing about him, of course, is that he is Greek, olive-skinned, and easily mistaken for an Arab by people who are not ever going to receive a Fulbright scholarship. The scientist was not given the opportunity to explain himself, he was not searched. No one attempted to assess the notional risk he presented to the flight. He was simply removed, with no appeal. The guy flies Alaska fifty times a year in a good year, but that didn't make a difference either. Here's an idea: Let's invite every hair-trigger, hysterical jackass who doesn't feel safe flying with nonwhites to take the goddamned train and leave the skies open for the rest of us.LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:10:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A new censorware app lets

A new censorware app lets parents virtually delete certain scenes from DVDs to protect their kiddies from violence, nudity, cussin' and product-placement.LinkDiscuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Homies -- tiny LA

The Homies -- tiny LA Chicano gangsta figurines sold in gumball machines -- are drawing fire from the LAPD, who want their sale discontinued on the grounds tha they provide a poor role model for Hispanic children.

My favorite Homie is rapping into a black microphone. His name is Ice, and he looks a bit like Kid Frost, whose hit song "La Raza" introduced Mexican American pride to the hiphop world in the early '90s. Ice likes to let his pants sag, so that the top part of his boxer shorts is visible, and he has a pager just above the right butt pocket. The next Homie I adore is the blind Homie--or at least I think he is blind. He wears dark sunglasses that hide his eyes, and a white, long-sleeved shirt that's buttoned all the way up to his neck and runs down to his knees. The blind Homie holds a brown cane with ringless fingers, and has a mustache that looks like two leeches sucking the life out of his nostrils.

LinkDiscuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone streaming audiobook on Salon today.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:22:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anarchist Santa impersonators around the

Anarchist Santa impersonators around the world take to the streets, stage mock lynchings of one another, stagger drunkenly through shopping malls, aggressively panhandle gawkers. Just a little holiday cheer, folks! Link Discuss (Thanks, Evan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:13:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, November 15, 2001

Don't ship your computers UPS!

Don't ship your computers UPS! A poor geek shipped his boxen from Canada to the US and they arrived in bits and pieces. UPS Canada blames UPS USA and vice-versa and neither will reimburse him for a some pretty nasty and gratiuitous damage. He gets his revenge, tho' -- posting his story to Slashdot is sure to get someone's attention at UPS. LinkDiscuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:47:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Can you tell the difference

Can you tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans? Take the test. I scored a 9. Average is 7. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:33:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great Usenet math and candy

Great Usenet math and candy rant:

Hershey Bar, Now With Natural Logarithms!

.02 oz. Fun Damentalparticle Size Hershey Bar
.05 oz. Fun Size Hershey Bar
.14 oz. Junior Size Hershey Bar
.37 oz. Mini Hershey Bar
1.0 oz. Regular Hershey Bar
2.7 oz. Hungry-Man Hershey Bar
7.4 oz. Giant Size Hershey Bar
20 oz. Ultimate Hershey Bar
55 oz. Nuclear Evil Tooper BOOM! Size Hershey Bar

Also try new Twinkies with golden ratio!

In other mathematical candy news, Google.com has purchased the company thatmakes the 100 Grand bar and has changed its name to the Femto-Google bar.

LinkDiscuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:11:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, November 14, 2001

I've been running the breveWalker

I've been running the breveWalker OS X screensaver for a couple months now. breveWalker is a four-legged critter that uses genetic algorithms to learn how to walk through exploiting your idle CPU cycles. Now 'Walker's got a family: the breveSwarm, a screensaver that simulates flocking behavior. Too cool. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:26:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Email from beyond the grave:

Email from beyond the grave: Queue up your last words, address 'em, and wait. Once you croak, the service spams your loved ones with your pithy commentary. Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:17:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Punk Sims and punk Sim

Punk Sims and punk Sim decor! Posters, records, S&M gear and guitar amps!LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:17:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Famous sideshow perfomer Melvin "The

Famous sideshow perfomer Melvin "The Human Blockhead" Burkhart died last week at the age of 94.

"He was the Anatomical Wonder who could breathe with one lung at a time, the Two-Faced Man who could frown with half his face and smile with the other, and the Rubber-Necked Man. He swallowed swords, threw knives and gobbled fire. He said he was a freak and was proud of that too."

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:06:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Teletubbies shooting gallery. This

The Teletubbies shooting gallery. This is so wrong, but it feels so right.LinkDiscuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:42:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The entire film Star Wars,

The entire film Star Wars, adapted for ASCIImation -- this time, without any crazy Java applets. Just telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl and watch in amazement.Discuss (Thanks, monkbryson!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Charming first-person account of the

Charming first-person account of the hunt for the perfect Godzilla toy.

Then my foot hit a cardboard box down on the floor, one that I hadnâ??t previously noticed. I looked down to see that it was filled to overflowing with cheap plastic Godzillas. And not just Godzillas, either! Mothras and Baragons and King Ghidorahs as well! Then I heard another voice. A voice that wasnâ??t in my head this time.

"Mommy! Mommy! Look! Godzillas!"

Just as I was bending down toward the box (a slow and laborious process, mind you), my passage was blocked by this little blonde girl, who savagely commandeered the box of affordable Godzilla merchandise.

I made a sound deep in my throat, a sound of panic and hatred, half-growl and half-whine, as she started pulling things out of the box and announcing them to her very patient mother.

LinkDiscuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:39:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A paeon to spam: The

A paeon to spam:

The sheer number of people out there trying to sell me ink cartridges, chain letters and bogus university degrees -- on an hourly basis -- is starting to give me a kind of strange high. Remember those books about prosperity thinking? How the world is overflowing with digitally encoded cash, brilliant ideas, truckloads of freshly baked bread, sports bags filled with emeralds, whatever? Well, what could give a better sense of abundance and vastness and plenitude than masses of desperate, corny sales pitches delivered right to the desktop? He has only to log on and his in box shall be filled until it brimmeth over.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Normally, kit rockets are things

Normally, kit rockets are things you launch while standing safely to one side. Now, a company has announced a hobbyist's kit jetplane that will actually launch you into orbit.

"Currently the price of getting a satellite into orbit is at least $12 million," said DeLong. "We think we could cut the price to about half a million dollars," he added.

XCOR's supersonic craft might look somewhat similar to the Concorde airliner with a wing form like a Mig-15 or Mig-21. The engine would be a larger version of the one on the EZ-Rocket, said DeLong.

The plane could potentially be ready within two years and ready for operation in three.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:48:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

No good deed goes unpunished.

No good deed goes unpunished. A Canadian lumber company's charitable donation of five bits of wood is construed as dumping by the US Commerce company, which levies a $10 million fine against the giver.

A gift to charity of five pieces of lumber is going to cost Slocan Forest Products more than $10 million in anti-dumping duties after U.S. investigators used the lumber as evidence the Richmond-based company is dumping into the American market.

The U.S. commerce department made an error by placing a value on the donation and then refused to correct it, slapping a 19.2-per-cent anti-dumping duty on Slocan last week, company president Jim Shepherd charged Thursday.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:24:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Memes.org: Attempting to track and

Memes.org: Attempting to track and consolidate every meme in popular culture. Cool site, miserable popup ad when you close the window. Turn off Javascript first!LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:25:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great gallery of pictures taken

Great gallery of pictures taken with a teeny weeny Casio WristCam, a camera in a watch. Like the eyemodule and the PenCam, the low shooting angle and the contrasty (almost PixelCamesque) B&W imaging gives these shots a marvellous, dramatic flair.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Bob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:24:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Artists file a brief in

Artists file a brief in support of Napster! The RIAA's members are suing Napster on the grounds that Napster violated their copyrights when the service allowed MP3s of popular music files to circulate. The artists in question are signed to the labels whose members make up the RIAA, and they contend that the copyrights to their music doesn't belong to the labels, but to the artists themselves, and the artists don't mind if their stuff circulates online.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:24:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, November 13, 2001

Goodbye polygraphs, hello brainscans! Unlike

Goodbye polygraphs, hello brainscans!

Unlike conventional polygraphs, which assume that liars are anxious and that such anxiety causes measurable changes in skin and blood pressure, brain scans offer even coldblooded liars little opportunity to cheat because people cannot mask the mental processes responsible for lying.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:10:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Here's the full text of

Here's the full text of Hilary "RIAA" Rosen's talk at the O'Reilly P2P conference, in which she told us that P2P needed to be reigned in, not just to save the poor artists whose music is being stolen -- that being uppermost on the RIAA's list of priorities, natch -- but also to keep terrorists and chickenhawks from doing their dirties. Let's see, Hil, P2P is about theft, terrorism and tot-fondling; any other fearmongering quarter-truths missing from your list? Is P2P Communism?

Increasing security concerns and even national security concerns at this delicate time. Peer-to-peer will get attention because of the soldier risk in denial of service attacks, the spread of viruses that endanger national computer network infrastructure and other things of current concern.

The fact that it is also used as a transmitter of child pornography has not gone unnoticed by many federal and law enforcement authorities.

LinkDiscuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:34:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scientology Fan Fiction! It's a

Scientology Fan Fiction! It's a sick old world, all right. Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:22:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Here are Meg's slides from

Here are Meg's slides from her "Weblogs as P2P Journalism" talk at last week's O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference. Good stuff, great talk!LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:13:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Folky Song Funny Note" is

"Folky Song Funny Note" is one of the creepiest, coolest and stickiest novelty songs I've ever heard. It's the final track on Vinnick Sheppard Harte's first disc, "And They All Rolled Over..." and it will indeed make the hair on your neck stand up, straight up. Here's the track itself, ripped and posted with the artists' permission. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:44:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, November 12, 2001

This week's Guestbar editor is

This week's Guestbar editor is Dan Moniz, boy wonder. Dan's young enough to make me feel old (and I'm just a punk kid myself), and is blindingly smart. He's a security d00d, a self-taught math genius, and an unapologetic Rush fanatic. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:27:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jason Salisbury of Atom Grid

Jason Salisbury of Atom Grid made a little Boing Boing icon that shows up in your browser menu when you select it as one of your favorites. Thanks Jason! Here's where you can find out how to do it for your own site. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:55:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stefan sez: Fox's Saturday Morning

Stefan sez: Fox's Saturday Morning lineup includes something mighty peculiar: A superhero spoof called Ripping Friends.

There have been plenty of those through the years, but this one is masterminded by John Kricfalusi, the brilliant but notoriously difficult animator who created Ren & Stimpy. Last I'd heard had been banished to web animation land by freaked-out producers. It appears he's returned . . .

The Ripping Friends are a team of superheroes. Their sidekick is Kricfalusi's Jimmy the Idiot Boy. (No sign of George Liquor: American yet.) I caught a couple of episodes. It's mightily perverse. I can't imagine how they got this one on the air. This morning's adventure pitted the Ripping Friends against a shrimpy villain with the power to emit hideously stinky farts. And they call them farts, almost certainly a first for Saturday morning. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:35:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This is more along the

This is more along the lines of what I was hoping Apple had in store for us instead of the iPod. The Geode Origami, National Semiconductor's concept PDA, combines eights handheld gadgets: digital camera, video camcorder, smartphone, MP3 audio player, PDA, Internet access, Internet picture frame, email device, and video conferencing terminal. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:03:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HyberBee, a distributed search engine

HyberBee, a distributed search engine that uses SETI@home-style distributed computing to crawl the Web, is set to launch January 1, 2002. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:58:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Crazed Twins story below

The Crazed Twins story below is a hoax. Dammit. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:20:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crazed identical twins -- one

Crazed identical twins -- one of them's a surgeon -- realize that there's no rejection risks associated with transplanting bits of their bodies from twin to twin, and so they do. No word on what their mom thinks.

BME: The arm is amazing, but I've got to admit that this "alien finger" thing you've done is really something. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before. It's actually quite disconcerting!

RYAN: Yeah, we're very proud of it. When people see the arm, they think it was an accident -- transplants like this do get done every once in a while for medical reasons. The finger though, that's art. We challenge anyone to take body art to a higher level.

BME: How did you pull this one off?

DAVE: First we removed the centre joint of my finger, along with the skin and just over an inch of overhanging tendon. Then we split Ryan's finger at the end of the first joint. It was relatively easy to insert the extra joint, especially since we had so much extra tendon to play with. The amazing thing is that Ryan actually has feeling in the end of that finger now -- the nerves were compatible!

LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:17:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The alarming story of MathWorld:

The alarming story of MathWorld: originally the pet-project of a math-obsessed high-school student, the site grew to be one of the definitive resources for math online. By the time the author was in college, he had a book deal to publish a math encyclopedia based on the site. Almost immediately, it became apparent that his publisher thought that now that the material was available in book form, it should come down off the Web. The author got a job with a research institute and moved the site from his school's server to his employer, and before he knew it, his publisher had sued him for copyright violation. Now, after a long hiatus, the site is back online.

Another important consequence is that, as part of the settlement agreement, CRC Press will now be given permission to create editions of the printed book based on future snapshots of the web site. As a result, CRC insisted that broad reproduction rights to all contributed material be secured. Furthermore, if we are not able to secure such rights, then Wolfram Research and I, at our own expense, must rewrite the entries in question from scratch for CRC to reproduce. This makes it extremely difficult for us to include any new contributed material on the web site unless we first secure permissions using CRC's boilerplate permissions form. This form is endorsed by neither Wolfram Research nor myself, but, as part of the settlement agreement, we are required to ask contributors to sign it. Since our goal is and always has been to provide your contributions online to the worldwide math community, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or imposition this CRC-mandated form may cause you.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, JIMwich!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:12:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

From the lastest ish of

From the lastest ish of Ansible, a science fiction zine:

China Mieville has the inside story: `My supervisor, an expert in the Middle East, told me about a rumour circulating about the name of Bin Laden's network. The term "Al-Qaeda" seems to have no political precedent in Arabic, and has therefore been something of a conundrum to the experts, until someone pointed out that a very popular book in the Arab world, Arabs apparently being big readers of translated sf, is Asimov's Foundation, the title of which is translated as "Al-Qaeda". Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up with.'

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:03:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Iranian is a newspaper

The Iranian is a newspaper full of irreverance and alternative views on Islam and politics.

This revolution is not about Reza Pahlavi or anybody else. It is not about monarchy or communism. We are sick of these labels and these discussions about individuals (which were prevalent in your generation's time). It is about something that the previous revolution neglected: DEMOCRACY. Government of the people, for the people, by the people. It is about inclusion, not exclusion.

Link)Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:53:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Read about the Current Situation

Read about the Current Situation through Middle Eastern news sources: the Middle East Media and Research Institute is "an independent, non-profit organization providing translations of the Arabic and Farsi media and original analysis and research on developments in the Middle East." LinkDiscuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:42:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Al Gore actually won the

Al Gore actually won the election. Yawn.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:26:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, November 11, 2001

Sue Townsend is continuing Adrian

Sue Townsend is continuing Adrian Mole's adventures in her topical Guardian column -- Adrian Mole is the fictional character whose fantastic "secret diaries" are UK classics and my personal angst bible.

Dear Mr Mole,

In this time of national crises, it is incumbent on us all to support our government. During a senior pupils debate, chaired by myself, your son Glenn succeeded in undermining the morale of teachers and pupils alike by his passionate denunciation of the bombing of Afghanistan. He also called our great leader, Mr Blair, 'a leading Twat'. I have therefore excluded him from the school premises for the duration of the war.

I hope to God (or Allah) that the war will be over by Christmas. I can't have Glenn hanging around the house all day. It is imperative that I finish my post-twin towers novel quickly. The book (as yet no publisher) must be ready for publication in the spring.

Glenn protested his innocence, saying, "I didn't say Tony Blair was a leading twat. I said he was leading TWAT (The War Against Terrorism)."

LinkDiscuss (via LinkMachineGo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:38:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alleged -- and very funny

Alleged -- and very funny -- resignation letter from a sysadmin at an educational institution to his supervisor.

* I have all the passwords to every account on the system and I know every password you have used for the last five years. If you decide to get cute, I am going to publish your "favorites list", which I conveniently saved when you made me "back up" your useless files. I do believe that terms like "Lolita" are not usually viewed favourably by the administrators.

* When you borrowed the digital camera to "take pictures of your mother's birthday", you neglected to mention that you were going to take pictures of yourself in the mirror nude. Then you forgot to erase them, like the techno-moron you really are. Suffice to say, I have never seen such odd acts with a ketchup bottle, but I assure you that those have been copied and kept in a safe place, pending the authoring of a glowing letter of recommendation (try to use the spell check please: I hate having to correct your mistakes).

LinkDiscuss (via LinkMachineGo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:32:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

David Pogue, my favorite Mac

David Pogue, my favorite Mac columnist, has written a book on OS X for O'Reilly, OS X: The Missing Manual. Pogue is consistently funny, and has a clear, concise prose-style as well as Mac chops to spare. This is on my must-read list -- if you've got an OS X box (or plan on getting one), it should be on yours, too.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:45:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple's new iPod has more

Apple's new iPod has more computational punch than a Palm PDA, and runs an OS called Pixo that's been designed for PDAs and smart phones. Could Apple be laying the ground for a souped-up PDA disguised as a kickass digital Walkman? Or will smart Pixo haxors start writing organizer apps for their iPods?

Equipped with 2 ARM processors, the iPod packs more punch than you'd expect it to -- and it runs an OS developed by a company called Pixo, a company founded by a once "key member" of the Newton team. Their OS is intended for cell phones and other embedded devices

Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:40:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WayTooPersonal.com: A mate-seeking woman reposts

WayTooPersonal.com: A mate-seeking woman reposts the weirdest, grossest and worst responses to her Internet personal ad.

My crew call me KingPin. I am a 5'11" 200lb, 10'&thick, healthy, fit, Italian Scorpio from NYC. I am a 40 year old who looks 30, has a light complexion, hazel eyes and a full head of black/silver hair. By day a successful shirt and tie businessman, by night a member of a fameous national motorcycle club, actor and model currently in a highly successful HBO series. I seek someone that shares the same fearless sence of adventure and excitement that I do. You must have great legs, big natural tits, a muffin shaped ass and love all kinds of sex. And most of all look great on the back of a big black and chrome custom Harley Davidson. My two major faults are generosity and insecurity so I need my ego stroked constantly. I don't like movies, television, sports or any other substitutes for having a real life. Do you think you could play this part?KP

LinkDiscuss(Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Welcome to the woo-woo war:

Welcome to the woo-woo war: The CIA has renewed their interest in tactical ESP -- "Remote Viewing" in defensespeak.

Prudence Calabrese, whose Transdimensional Systems employs 14 remote viewers, confirmed that the FBI had asked the company to predict likely targets of future terrorist attacks.

"Our reports suggest a sports stadium could be a likely target," she said.

The FBI and CIA refused to comment but confirmed investigators have been told to "think out of the box".

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:31:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gavin Grant, co-publisher of the

Gavin Grant, co-publisher of the amazing sf zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, reviews Geoff Landis's new short-story collection, Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities. Geoff's an amazing writer and a kickass science-dude, a bona-fide NASA scientist who can (and does) point to the spot on a HotWheels miniature Mars Pathfinder that he's resposible for designing. His short stories have won oodles of Hugos and Hugo noms, each more deserving than the last. It's great to see that SF small-presses are bringing back the short-story collection.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:24:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Seeing pretty female faces generates

Seeing pretty female faces generates brain-reward in het men:

When men in the study were shown pictures of various faces, only the female faces deemed beautiful triggered activity in brain regions previously associated with food, drugs and money...

LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:15:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eulogy for the Sony Metreon,

Eulogy for the Sony Metreon, a googleplex in downtown San Francisco with all the zest and originality of a Taco Bell Gordita^TM:

And that's the problem with Metreon. "A celebration of urban life and vitality" is fine when the competition is a stale shopping center or a hollowed-out downtown. But for all of San Francisco's rough edges, make no mistake: This is still a city that knows how to put on a show. "Authentic urban districts offer creativity and surprise . . . the place is the major attraction, the crowds, the people-watching," Musbach says. "If you have the real experience at hand, why pay

LinkDiscuss (via EvHead)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:10:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friends Reunited -- a website

Friends Reunited -- a website where British schoolchums to find each other post-graduation and reminisce about the Old Tie -- is in danger of being shut down by the British Teachers' Unions. The teachers are concerned that the gossip areas of the site contain less-than-pleasant memories from their former students, who are trading notes about which teachers were chickenhawks and which ones were drunks, and which were both. The UK -- and indeed, the Commonwealth -- has pretty strict libel and slander laws, far stricter than in the US. I think the chances are good the teachers will get their way.LinkDiscuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:58:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Basta is one of my

Basta is one of my favorite music labels. Based in Amsterdam, they've reissued a lot of Raymond Scott's work, from his early big band songs (many of which were used in Warner Brothers cartoons) to his mindblowing 1950s and 1960s pre-Moog electronic music. Their CD covers are illustrated by the likes of Robert Crumb and Chris Ware.

Doug Rushkoff let me know about Basta's release, The Langley Schools Music Project: "INNOCENCE AND DESPAIR" and the clips are great. Check it out.

The Langley Schools Music Project is a 60-voice chorus of rural school children from western Canada, untrained but captivated by melodic magic, singing tunes by the Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, The Bay City Rollers, and others. The students accompany themselves with the shimmering gamelan chimes of Orff percussion, and elemental rock trimmings arranged by their itinerant music teacher, Hans Fenger. These 1976-77 recordings, captured on a 2-track tape deck in a school gymnasium, weren't staged to achieve money or fame, to sell albums or land a record contract. These kids played music because they loved it. Innocent, flawed and bittersweet, guided by Fenger's unsuspecting genius, these recordings deserve to be heard and preserved. They brim with charm and youthful elan, sparked by flashes of lo-fi Spectorian majesty and Pet Sounds subtlety. Call it folk art, outsider, or campfire rock -- the labels don't matter. These are gorgeous, heavenly artifacts. Period.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:29:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Conceptual art comes to eBay:

Conceptual art comes to eBay:

Please note that according to the Ebay User Agreement, section 7, Access and Interference:

Much of the information on our site is updated on a real time basis and is proprietary or is licensed to eBay by our users or third parties. You agree that you will not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, create derivative works, or publicly display any content (except for Your Information) from our website without the prior expressed written permission of eBay or the appropriate third party.

Therefore, the artist is neither offering this listing nor any derivative work nor any of the content from this nor any other website. You are bidding strictly on the auction. However, the artist has personally overseen and approved of the composition of this listing. The artist will print and sign this listing and send it to you to confirm that he has relinquished any claim of ownership over this transaction.

This is a very rare piece and this is the first time it has been made available on Ebay. This is a limited edition of one. The artist affirms that any future transactions taking place on Ebay for works or items sold by the artist will not be sold and will have, in fact, no owner.

This is a no reserve sale. Winning bidder will pay by check, money order or Paypal within 10 days of auction close. The item will not be shipped because it is conceptual. The signed, printed copy of this listing will be sent to the winning bidder at the seller's expense. Please email with any questions prior to bidding.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:32:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Wildlist is a nonprofit

The Wildlist is a nonprofit organization where malware experts converge to report and discuss new virii, worms, and trojans discovered in the wild. Discuss

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

Newsweek's Website is running the

Newsweek's Website is running the photos found in the camera of Bill Biggart, a photographer who rushed to the site of the WTC just after the first plane hit, got too close, and was killed. LinkDiscuss ( via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:53:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, November 10, 2001

Ken Kesey, R.I.P. Link Discuss

Ken Kesey, R.I.P. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:45:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The makers of this special

The makers of this special birdfeeder pretty much admit that the main reason anyone would want one is to watch squirrels get frustrated as they unwittingly re-encact the Curse of Tantalus. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:26:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RealAudio from NPR's "All Things

RealAudio from NPR's "All Things Considered," about the Radiation and Public Health Project's baby-teeth initiative. Pat sez, "Scientists used a massive number of baby teeth collected in the fifties toprove that above ground nuclear testing was exposing American kids to bigdoses of Strontium-90. Now, have a century later, the owners of the teethare about to be tracked down and their heath studies to see the long termeffects of childhood radiation exposure. And you thought there was no toothfairy!"LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:14:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, November 9, 2001

Kevin Kelly is a friend

Kevin Kelly is a friend and an author of one of my all-time favorite books, Out of Control. (You can download it for free here.) I was poking around his site, kk.org, and came across this great paper he wrote for Technology in Society called "Nerd Theology." He claims that the most earth shattering event -- in terms of potential for religious upheaval -- would be contact with alien intelligence. Then he goes on to explain that scientists are creating alien intelligence right here on Earth, so it doesn't matter whether we are ever visited by ET or not. Then he looks at the way scientists consider themselves as gods, and rightly so. Unfortunately, the paper is a scanned and put into a PDF file, so you'll have to print it out if you want to read it. But it's worth it. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:14:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

We know that the military

We know that the military and the recording industry are on opposite sides of the P2P technology fence, but who knew that Uncle Sam was also at odds with the film and software industry? Here's a story about a US Marine onboard an amphibious assualt vehicle who's making great coin bootlegging games, porn, music and movies on burnable CDs and selling 'em to his shipmates.

Keenly aware that the law discourages copyright infringement, he is careful to stress that he copies software and music only for Marines who want a backup of software they have purchased legally. His business is clearly tolerated, conducted in plain sight of sergeants who wander past his shop in the lounge. He says he even has done technical computer work for some officers on board.

At the moment, he is putting together a compilation CD of another Marine's favorite porno clips, plus a few other odds and ends. Pfc. Winter likes to keep his customers happy. He knows they have limited funds, and so, in this case, he went back and told the client that the CD had plenty of space left. He is giving the guy a few days to collect some more material.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:48:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

We've all heard that "security

We've all heard that "security is a process, not a product," but what does that really mean? This exhaustive study of ATM fraud in the UK highlights the way that the most fabulous cryptosystem in a substandard social/procedural system can be circumvented.

When an aircraft crashes, it is front page news. Teams of investigators rush to the scene, and the subsequent enquiries are conducted by experts from organisations with a wide range of interests - the carrier, the insurer, the manufacturer, the airline pilots' union, and the local aviation authority. Their findings are examined by journalists and politicians, discussed in pilots' messes, and passed on by flying instructors.

In short, the flying community has a strong and institutionalised learning mechanism. This is perhaps the main reason why, despite the inherent hazards of flying in large aircraft, which are maintained and piloted by fallible human beings, at hundreds of miles an hour through congested airspace, in bad weather and at night, the risk of being killed on an air journey is only about one in a million.

In the crypto community, on the other hand, there is no such learning mechanism. The history of the subject ([K1], [W1]) shows the same mistakes being made over and over again; in particular, poor management of codebooks and cipher machine procedures enabled many communication networks to be broken. Kahn relates, for example [K1, p 484], that Norway's rapid fall in the second world war was largely due to the fact that the British Royal Navy's codes had been solved by the German Beobachtungsdienst - using exactly the same techniques that the Royal Navy's own `Room 40' had used against Germany in the previous war.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:38:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I just wanna say that

I just wanna say that I was massively pissed when I checked into my Cambridge, MA hotel this morning and discovered that they charge SIX BUCKS AN HOUR FOR LOCAL CALLS, and realized that I'd make an entire DSL-bill's worth of local calls every friggin day that I was here, just keeping up with the Internet. So I unpack my iBook2 in my hotel room and lo and behold, there are THREE open 802.11 networks for me to choose from! I've been operating a couple public 802.11 nodes in San Francisco and Toronto for the past year or so, and I'm delighted to see my karma repaid. Thank you, my unknown benefactors!Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:10:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Here are some bookmarklets (JavaScript

Here are some bookmarklets (JavaScript widgets you can drag to your favorites bar) for interacting with the Internet Wayback machine. One will take you to the most recent archive copy of any given page -- so when you get a 404, you can see what used to be there -- and the other one will open up the Wayback Machine archive for that page and let you pick any version of the current page for browsing. Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:03:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DivX goes legit! DivX is

DivX goes legit! DivX is an open-source fileformat for video that can compress braodcast-quality video files to manageable sizes in just the way that MP3 compressed CD-quality audio. Now, a company that is licensed to distribute videos of Broadway musicals is using DivX to supply a new video-on-demand service.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:38:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bootleg DVDs of the Harry

Bootleg DVDs of the Harry Potter movie are selling briskly. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:16:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, November 8, 2001

Bruce Sterling ruminates on Pokemon

Bruce Sterling ruminates on Pokemon in an MP3 interview on Wired News.

But, you know, I'm quite the fan of Pokemon. I'd love to do some writingfor them. ButI think they're probably a harbinger of even more sophisiticated kinds ofthings. [...] These programs, I think, really are preparing them for apost-human future. I mean, you look at Pokemons--they're all obviouslygenetically altered shit. They're straight out of the WTOG (sic) splicingnightmare. They're animals that are cute, cuddly, can sort of talk, and arelike, you know, they glow in the dark, and have extra sets of chickenwings, I mean, they're all biological violations. And cuddly!

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:30:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The New Scientist Reports on

The New Scientist Reports on the results of a three-year study of eBay buying and selling trends, and discovers that:

• Longer auctions get more bidders and higher sale prices
• Reputable sellers attract higher bids

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:34:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Artist Danilo Strulato's work from

Artist Danilo Strulato's work from an exhibit entitled "The Hell Inside Me." Link Discuss (Thanks, Enrico!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:18:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"A Cleveland man has been

"A Cleveland man has been charged with felonious assault for trying to shape his 5-month-old son's head to make it look more like his own." Nuff sed.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:29:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

 Gothbabies! The Internet's goths provide

 

Gothbabies! The Internet's goths provide their baby pictures. Awwwwwww... You know, my parents always say that their first mistake was teaching me to talk. I wonder if these kids' folks feel the same way about leaving eyeliner lying around.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:04:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Peer-to-Peer may enrage the music

Peer-to-Peer may enrage the music industry, but the military's getting pretty hot to trot when it considers the "decision superiority" potential of P2P networking.

[ Lt. Col. Robert Wardell, special assistant to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] recalled how incompatible computer systems forced an F-14 Tomcat pilot flying over Kosovo to shut down his secure radio system in order to talk freely to officers aboard a B-52 bomber and tell them the location of ground targets.

Several times, he said, the targets were able to move faster than their attackers after the enemy apparently intercepted their radio talk.

More recently, he said the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier whose computers are set up to communicate primarily with Navy planes, found itself facing communication troubles when it suddenly had to carry Army helicopters to Afghanistan.

Soldiers need a communication system that will be more nimble and flexible if they are to counter the threat from international terrorists, Wardell said: "You have a dispersed enemy who basically is operating on a peer-to-peer system, at a very low level. How are we going to attack that? Probably the same way."

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:04:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The world's most prolific eater

The world's most prolific eater of Big Macs:

Gorske has gone through 14.5 cows, 6.25 million sesame seeds, 1,900 whole pickles, 563 pounds of cheese and 100 gallons of special sauce.

LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:03:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

An excerpt from Kelly Link's

An excerpt from Kelly Link's story ""Travels With the Snow Queen."LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:02:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kelly Link is one of

Kelly Link is one of the most startling and wonderful new science fiction writers working in the field today. Her stories are mind-boggling and funny and fine. Today, Salon interviews Kelly about her collection of short stories, Stranger Things Happen.

...I'm fascinated with romance as a genre. If you sit down to write a romance novel, it's like a sonnet; all the rules are in place. It has to have this kind of ending. Depending on the type of romance, it has to have this kind of sex, but not before a certain point. Part of that story was that I was trying to figure out the structure of a romance story. And I was very interested in London subway names at the time, so that got in there, too. This was one of those stories where a lot of ideas got stuck together.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:02:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

eBay is planning a live

eBay is planning a live auction of the world's rarest and most valuable Trek schwag, much of it donated by the original cast and crew. The bidding for a production model of the Enterprise starts at $15,000.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, November 7, 2001

My pal Fixer just moved

My pal Fixer just moved from LA to Ireland, the land of his ancestors. He's a big goddamned geek -- basically, all my friends are big goddamned geek, like attracts like -- and is discovering and reporting on the geek zeitgeist in the land of Eire in a new blog.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

South By Southwest (SXSW), the

South By Southwest (SXSW), the killer culture/music/tech conference in Austin, has updated its site, and lo and behold, I'm doing the keynote with Bruce "Zeitgeist" Sterling. Woo! I think I musta attended 40 conferences last year, and SXSW is in the top two. What a great show. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:45:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I don't know which car

I don't know which car I'd rather have: a Dymaxion Omnitransport or a Honda Unibox (shown here). Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:02:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I'm currently sitting in on

I'm currently sitting in on a talk at the O'Reilly P2P conference on the EFF's Open Audio license, an "open source" license for music that the EFF produced to allow musicians an alternative to either giving away their art holus-bolus or locking it up with a draconian traditional license. This is a prototype of an overarching, viral, free license that I think we'll see in the near future, something that covers film, music, prose and so on. I hereby declare that this license will be known as the "Enthusiastic License" -- the license of choice for the Enthusiastic Movement.

[..T]his license is designed to serve as a tool of freedom for artists who wish to reach one another and new fans with their original works. It allows musicians to collaborate in creating a pool of "open audio" that can be freely modified, exchanged, and utilized in new ways. Artists can use this license to promote themselves and take advantage of the new possibilities for empowerment and independence that technology provides. It also allows the public to experience new music, and connect directly with artists, as well as enable "super distribution" where the public is encouraged to copy and distribute a work, adding value to the artist's reputation while experiencing a world of new music never before available.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:55:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Firsthand account of the first

Firsthand account of the first eBay University seminar outside of the US, held in Toronto's Metro Convention Centre:

By lunch, everybody is talking eBay. Moez Ladha, 26, who runs a cellphone accessory business and uses eBay to boost sales, is having a conversation with Heidi Goertz, 34, who sells porcelain dolls. They've found common ground talking about the difficulties of competing with U.S.-based sellers.

I interrupt to ask Ladha what his user rating is. The number is often a source of pride among eBayers; it's a performance gauge that refers to the amount of praise a user has received from successful transactions. He tells me his rating is 256, though he assures me that it should really be something like 1,400.

"Nobody ever leaves positive feedback any more," pipes up Goertz in sympathy.

LinkDiscuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:47:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

David Byrne has this weird

David Byrne has this weird little book out -- it looks like a red Gideon bible, with the title -- "The New Sins" -- stamped in gold leaf on the cover. Inside, it looks like a weird, vaguely Satanic bible, with strange chapters and verses interspersed with lush and faintly surreal images. This British review of the book sums it up neatly.

Byrne is often witty - "Our loved ones demand honesty, but what they really want is better fiction" - and sometimes wise - "One would do well to be suspicious of all things sweet and cuddly" (and, we might add, of those cuddliness-mongers who promise to make the world safe for our children). In its goofy way, this book works like such earlier instances of Christian satire as Erasmus's Praise of Folly, La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, or Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It frees up religious apprehensions from their tendency to petrify over time into ethical codes or mere patterns of social conformity, more or less strictly enforced by more or less plausible leaders in whose hands lie merit awards, penalty points and, should the need arise, depleted uranium.

LinkDiscuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I love the logic in

I love the logic in this spam I got:

Internet scams, con games, illegal pyramid schemes.

There are so many business opportunities available on the internet,

How do you know which one to pick?

Simple, Let us pick one for you!

Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:32:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lawrence Lessig's new book, "The

Lawrence Lessig's new book, "The Future of Ideas," reviewed on Salon today. I saw Lessig speak a couple weeks ago at the Internet Wayback Machine launch, and he's delivering the evening keynote tonight at the O'Reilly P2P conference. He's a way, way smart guy, and he is full of interesting, one-of-a-kind insights into the nature of civil liberties, law and policy online.

In "The Future of Ideas" Lessig argues that future prosperity is impossible without the freedom to innovate -- but that freedom is under attack by vested interests. Lessig's effort to bind innovation to prosperity is as big an idea, perhaps, as Adam Smith's rebuke to the mercantilists in "The Wealth of Nations." Although free-market capitalists look to Smith as their intellectual fountainhead, Smith was not battling the yet-to-be-born Karl Marx in the latter part of the 18th century. He took aim at those who believed that a nation's prosperity could be measured by the gold it acquired. Prosperity, Smith reasoned, was an ongoing process.

Lessig offers a similar insight about the information economy at the turn of the 21st century. Prosperity requires progress and progress requires innovation. But while some intellectual property theorists and the shareholders of Disney may favor the extension of intellectual property rights into the infinite future, the long-term impact of an economic system that piles high property rights, while burying the intellectual commons that makes progress possible, could be that all new forms of production grind to a halt.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:20:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Streaming "Harry Potter and the

Streaming "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" audiobook on Salon today. LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:16:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turkish prison inmates and their

Turkish prison inmates and their families have been on a fatal hunger-strike for a year, protesting changes to the prison-system that have increased the frequency and severity of beatings by guards. The protestors threatened to immolate themselves if the police attempted to take them into custody or force them to eat, and several of them did, yesterday, during a raid. Now, Turkish Human Rights organizations are speculating that the acts of immolation may not have been voluntary.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:15:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Linux hackers have built a

Linux hackers have built a Linux filesystem that can handle up to 144,000,000,000 megabytes -- 144 petabytes. This is way, way more than any other desktop OS.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:05:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tourist Guy's identity has been

Tourist Guy's identity has been revealed. He's a Brazilian who has visited NYC once, but won't go back ever again... LinkDiscuss (Thanks, DanielJ!)

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

Tuesday, November 6, 2001

"Pope John Paul, who writes

"Pope John Paul, who writes most of his speeches by hand and does not own a computer, will dedicate his message for World Communications Day to the Internet, the Vatican said Tuesday." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:36:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fred "Baron" von Lohmann is

Fred "Baron" von Lohmann is a lawyer at the EFF and a former IP hotshot attorney at white-shoe lawfirm Morrison Foerster. He untangles the California Appeals Court ruling on DeCSS, and explains what it really, actually means.

So, you can republish DeCSS without worrying about a "stop the presses" injunction based on trade secrets law. You still might be sued for damages (assuming the secret hasn't been lost), or for violating the DMCA.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:29:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wesley "Hack the Planet" Felter

Wesley "Hack the Planet" Felter is blogging from the O'Reilly P2P conference (Link), as is Meg "Nut" Hourihan (Link, Rael "Meerkat" Dornfest (Link). Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:25:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dance Dance Ressurection is a

Dance Dance Ressurection is a blasphemous -- and funny! -- parody of Dance Dance Revolution, a strange, kinetic and addictive videogame.LinkDiscuss (via None More Negative)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:29:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tiki King has posted

Tiki King has posted a new batch of his ukulele tunes for you to listen to. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:18:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos from the O'Reilly P2P

Photos from the O'Reilly P2P conferences, including a couple of me. Have I mentioned how much goddamned fun this conference is? This conference is a lot of goddamned fun.LinkDiscuss P2PCon Pix

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:07:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Barney Macintyre, age 6 and

"Barney Macintyre, age 6 and three-quarters [on the Harry Potter movie]: 'This is great, the best film I've ever seen, way better than any of the Disney cartoons.' Kids review Harry Potter. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Drug subculture and gaming subculture

Drug subculture and gaming subculture intersect at stoner LAN Parties.

Quake II On Drugs: The Guided Tour. An enterprising German duo played Quake II under the influence of every drug known to man or woman and posted the results of each experiment. The Web site rates drugs on fun factor and effects on fragging capacity. Cocaine scores 3 out of 4 for fun, and 4 out of 4 for ability distortion: "Who doesn't know the superior feeling to come with invulnerability, quad damage, and a BFG [Big Fucking Gun]? On cocaine one feels always this way, even if one has only a blaster [i.e., Small Fucking Gun]."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

After the Potter movie comes

After the Potter movie comes out, we will forever lose our innocence.

But once the movie hits, there'll be no going back. Reading a book is an intensely private interaction between reader and writer, and even a chart-topping book like each of the Harry Potter installments has had to win over its converts one reader at a time. But going to the movies, especially a costly, much-anticipated would-be blockbuster, is about as public an act as you can commit. And so, even before the movie's release, our personal, intimate imaginings of quidditch, potions and chocolate frogs have been diluted by Harry on the Coke can, Hagrid in FAO Schwartz and wizards by the dozens on our Halloween doorsteps.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rumors of Apple's new G5,

Rumors of Apple's new G5, 1600mHz, 400mHz bus computers, now in use at some software developers' shops.

The machines we have here are much faster than Pentium 4s in every single task," notes our Adobe insider.

Link Discuss

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

Visitors to this year's ComDex

Visitors to this year's ComDex won't be able to lug their laptops and bags and other nerdiphenalia onto the trade floor, on the off-chance that their gear is a ticking bomb.

In addition, the organizers advise visitors to "please leave bags, briefcases, backpacks, laptops, etc. at home or in your hotel room." People carrying purses and fanny packs must enter through a separate security check.

Attendees will be able to collect literature and freebees in "plastic bags" distributed by vendors, but they will not be able to leave the show floor and return with the bags. A bag check will be available at the convention center.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:04:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pick my jaw up off

Pick my jaw up off the ground: EMI has agreed to put a bunch of their media online on Gnutella, without any copy-protection. LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:36:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, November 5, 2001

The Einstein Memorial in Washington,

The Einstein Memorial in Washington, D.C., captures the spirit, genius and sadness of my favorite patent clerk. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Schuyler!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:28:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vint "Internet Pioneer" Cerf co-authored

Vint "Internet Pioneer" Cerf co-authored this IETF RFC, which is working to establish a standard for stringing up an Interplanetary Internet. The preamble alone is worth the read, stirring and thought-provoking stuff.

Remember always that launch mass costs money. Think not, then, that you may require all the universe to adopt at once the newest technologies. Be backward compatible.

Never confuse patience with inaction. By waiting for acknowledgement to one message before sending the next, you squander tracking pass time that will never come to you again in this life. Send as much as you can, as early as you can, and meanwhile confidently await responses for as long as they may take to find their way to you.

Therefore be at peace with physics, and expect not to manage the network in closed control loops -- neither in the limiting of congestion nor in the negotiation of connection parameters nor even in on-demand access to transmission bands. Each node must make its own operating choices in its own understanding, for all the others are too far away to ask. Truly the solar system is a large place and each one of us is on his or her own. Deal with it.

LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:17:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stefan sez: "I'm losing it

Stefan sez: "I'm losing it . . . why didn't I think of this? Via Paul Riddel's newsletter: Two (count 'em, two) different pages describing how to make faux otherworldly biological specimens inna jar: Bottled Deep One, Bottled Thing in a Jar. Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:08:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What a cool hack!

What a cool hack! The Game Boy camera only shoots black-and-white photos. In order to make color photos from the black-and-white output, the photographer on this site uses color gels to capture three images (a red, a green and a blue) of each shot, then digitally superimposes them to make a color image. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:24:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Drug smugglers are getting back

Drug smugglers are getting back to business: After a couple months of going (even more) underground, America's drug smugglers have overcome their fear of ensnarement in the anti-terrorist net and are back at it.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:17:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic

The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic Terror.

Throughout the Islamic Middle East, men and women are taught to be vehemently opposed to pleasure, especially of the sexual variety. Men are raised not only forbidden to touch women, but to even look at them. Sex before marriage is not just a sin -- but a criminal offence. It is punishable by a severe beating at best, and an execution at worst....It is excruciating to imagine the sexual confusion, humiliation, and repression that evolve in the mindsets of males in this culture. But it is no surprise that many of these males find their only avenue for gratification in the act of humiliating the foreign "enemy," whose masculinity must be violated at all costs – as theirs once was.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:12:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This alarming census describes the

This alarming census describes the volume and kind of weapons seized at airport security checkpoints over the past decade or so. 60 handguns were seized at Logan, 600 at DFW, and 762 at LAX. LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:11:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ah, the hazards of a

Ah, the hazards of a "What would you do to win a _______?" contest: Desperate gamer eats worms to win a Nintendo GameCube.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:20:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The nastygram redefined: Dutch cops

The nastygram redefined: Dutch cops spam stolen phones with intimidating SMS messages, rendering them useless. The article doesn't make it clear why they just don't ask the cellphone provider to disconnect the phones.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:36:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Recently declassified CIA documents. If

Recently declassified CIA documents. If you thought the exploding cigarbomb they aimed at Fidel was goofy, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

In a project known as "Acoustic Kitty" the Directorate of Science and Technology sought to train a surgically altered cat, wired with transmitting and control devices, to become a mobile, eavesdropping platform. In its first test, the cat was run over by a taxi.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:21:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Aww... isn't it cute. A

Aww... isn't it cute. A wee digital camera. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:07:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lengthy paeon to the Simpsons

Lengthy paeon to the Simpsons in the NYT.

Measuring the creative entropy that afflicts TV series has become a popular form of do-it-yourself cultural analysis. Recently, the phrase ''jumping the shark'' has entered the lexicon, referring to that point in its run when a series, having exhausted its premise, resorts to desperate novelty to keep itself alive. At the Web site that popularized the concept -- named after a late episode of ''Happy Days'' in which the aging Fonzie undertakes a death-defying water-skiing stunt -- the various ways in which a show can go bad are cataloged by example: ''New Kid in Town,'' ''Special Guest Star,'' ''Singing,'' ''Birth,'' ''Death.'' The part of the site dedicated to shows that never jumped the shark is headed by a picture of the Simpson family squeezed together on their indestructible living-room couch.

Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:44:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"That was inedible garbage, and

"That was inedible garbage, and there wasn't enough of it!" A former guest of the US Penal System tells the story of prison food.

LACJ food is slightly worse than prison food, but in the hole it gets really awful... instead of a thrice-daily plastic tray half-full of various kinds of nasty, cold, starchy gloop, you get a daily "jute ball" to eat (at least, that's how it was in the '80s). Jute balls are made by taking the three meals that everybody else gets to eat, tossing them into a grinder and grinding everything up together, and then baking the result.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:20:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, November 3, 2001

Great page about World Power

Great page about World Power Systems, Inc., a scam company that made impossibly cool peripherals for TRS-80 computers in the late '70s, and advertised them in Byte magazine. Be sure to look at the scanned ad pages. I wonder what happened to these people? Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:41:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The All Species Project is

The All Species Project is attempting to catalog and genetically sample every species on Earth, somethat that, amazingly, no one has ever done.

In the realm of physical measurement, evolutionary biology is far behind the rest of the natural sciences. Certain numbers are crucial to our ordinary understanding of the universe. What is the mean diameter of the earth? It is 12,742 kilometers (7,913 miles). How many stars are there in the Milky Way, an ordinary spiral galaxy? Approximately 1011, 100 billion. How many genes are there in a small virus? There are 10 (in X174 phage). What is the mass of an electron? It is 9.1 x 10-28 grams. And how many species of organisms are there on Earth? We don't know, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. For several centuries naturalists have relentlessly explored Earth's wilds to catalog the incredible variety of species (both living and extinct). Each year their collective work takes us a few small steps closer toward the implicit goal of recording all species on Earth.

Link Discuss (via Four Blogs on One Page)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fine explanation of steganography --

Fine explanation of steganography -- the practice of hiding messages inside of other files -- and the detection thereof:

What do these statistical artifacts look like? In most cases, the files get _more_ random looking as data is hidden inside them. This is because digital cameras and scanners aren't very precise. The least significant bit is often highly correlated with the more significant bits. Think of a very bright spot on the image, perhaps caused by a glint of sunlight. These peg the pixels at the maximum value, usually 255 (11111111 in binary). There aren't that many 254s skewing the number of 1's and 0's in the least significant bit plane.

Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:24:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Packet Geography 2002 report

The Packet Geography 2002 report graphs the number of outbound Internet connections from the world's wired countries. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tech Review story on wind-power,

Tech Review story on wind-power, and the movment to seed America with eggbeater farms whose every stalk reduces the world's CO2 burden by 17,000 tons (the greenhouse equivalent of 42 million miles driven in yer stinkmobile) and provides enough juice to power 2500 homes. LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:05:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roundup of the problems and

Roundup of the problems and successes that airports around the US have had installing WiFi networks for biz travellers. All these little, out of the way airports like Calgary and Ottawa have wireless Internet access, but none of NYC's airports, SFO, or Toronto's Pearson have it. The article implies that the big airports attracted service contract bids from sleazier players than the little guys, and consequently their services never materialized.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:57:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, November 2, 2001

Geraldo Rivera is quitting his

Geraldo Rivera is quitting his daytime TV show to become a war correspondant. I dunno how we managed to get this far without his considered and thoughtful insights into political events.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:30:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Another guy (temporarily) denied entry

Another guy (temporarily) denied entry on plane for carrying a book. This time, it was in Munich and the offending book was by Karl Marx, about suicide.

On the way there the arresting officer gave me a triumphant smile. "After 11 September, you can't travel with books like this," he said. "In that case," I replied, "perhaps you should stop publishing them in Germany, or, better still, burn them in public view."

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:51:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Animation Blast is the world's

Animation Blast is the world's best zine about animation. The editor, Amid Amidi, likes to focus on old skool masters, and issue no. 6 has a long feature with character designer Tom Oreb, who remains all but unknown, despite his tremendous influence on cartoonists and illustrators. I've been attempting to ape his style for years without ever knowing who he was. Oreb is the guy who came up with the look of Disney's 1953 short subject, "Toot, Whistle, Plunk & Boom," perhaps the most influential ten minutes of animation to have ever entered my pupils. Don't bother looking him up on Google; there's nothing there. Just buy the zine. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:07:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I can barely contain my

I can barely contain my excitement! The taxi's coming in an hour, and I'm jumping on a plane and heading to Washington DC to attend and speak at the O'Reilly P2P conference, starting on Monday. I've been on the conference committee since last spring, and we've put together an amazing line-up of panels, keynotes and tutorials. I hadn't really understood how amazing the line-up was until I sat down yesterday to schedule out which panels and events I'd be attending, in order to set up some meetings while there, and realized that every waking moment in DC next week is occupied with can't-miss events. If you're up in the northeast, this could very well be the coolest thing happening in your region next week.LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Previously only known to professional

Previously only known to professional clowns, these precision-made miniature novelty bicycles are now available to the general, miniature bike-riding public. Teeny bicycles for everyone! LinkDiscuss (via Blather)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, November 1, 2001

So here's my latest project:

So here's my latest project: the Four Blogs on One Page blog. The idea is to make a blog out of nothing but guestblogs, like the guestbar on the right. The Four Blogs on One Page blog has, as you may have guessed, four blogs, arranged in a table. There's the Top Left Blog, the Top Right Blog, the Bottom Left Blog, and The Bottom Right Blog. I'm inviting different guest-editors to manage each corner of the page every couple of weeks. I love the idea of having four radically disparate POVs side by side, and seeing my pals interact on the page.

The inaugural editorial board is terrific, if I do say so myself:

Top Left Corner

Molly Steenson, of Girlwonder. Molly's a dynamo of squeaky, smart energy. I know her form the WELL, and we tend to meet up in strange cities, like Austin and Chicago. She's just bought her first home.

Top Right Corner

Jon Lebkowski, AKA Jonlzebub, is a hell of a blogger in his own right, and was one of the original contributors to BoingBoing back when it was in its print incarnation. He's also one of the founders of Fringeware Review, and introduced me to Texas BBQ -- a favor I can never hope to repay.

Bottom Left Corner

Helen Waters, of drokk.com. Helen's an old pal, a former co-worker, a Brit-cum-Canadian living in Holland and a soon-to-be bride. Her hilarious and demented crafts projects -- like the meat helmet, the everybody in icicle lights campaign, and the stink-beetle cross stitch -- never cease to amaze me.

Bottom Right Corner

Roz Doctorow -- my mother! Newly retired and just getting used to the idea of blogging, my Mom is a highfalutin' PhD educator (both she and my dad got their doctorates within a year of each other, making them Doctor and Doctor Doctorow), a consultant on kooky high-tech education ventures, and a groovy old radical.

Go check it out! I'm totally wowed by how cool this thing is already. Also, lemme know if you'd be interested in guest-editing a corner on the page!LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:08:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This Japanese website has photos

This Japanese website has photos and text (in Japanese --natch!) chronicling the dissection of the new Apple iPod. Topline summary: It's full of tiny, elegant sexy electronics. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:30:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A California Appeals Court ruled

A California Appeals Court ruled today that DeCSS, the code used to descramble a DVD (and hence, theoretically, make duplicates of it, as well as view with an operating system like Linux, which has no official DVD-playing software) is "pure speech," which will really put a crimp in the prosecution of magazines and Websites that publish the code in defiance of the film and TV industry, who have been dishin' up anti-DeCSS lawsuits under the foul and filthy DMCA since 1999. Pure speech is protected by the First Amendment, which trumps bad and stupid laws. Memo to the judicial system: More decisions like this, please! LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:19:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The maintainers of this website

The maintainers of this website have done some homework and come to conclusion that the complete works of horror legend HP Lovecraft are in the public domain. Accordingly, they have digitized pretty much everything the man wrote and put it online as textfiles, along with some pretty amateur readings of his stories, whcih you can buy on MP3CD.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Marc!)

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

The New York Post continues

The New York Post continues its fine tradition of reasoned reportage today with the theory that the spamthrax epidemic is the work of pagans from Indianapolis. Now that I hear it, it seems plain as the nose on my face -- how could we have missed this obvious explanation?LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:52:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This is the wittiest, nerdiest,

This is the wittiest, nerdiest, most literary geek project I've ever seen! The Shakespeare Programming Language is an actual programming language whose syntax is based on Shakesperean drama. Variable declarations take place in a section of the code called Dramatis Personae (and only Shakespearean chararacter names can be used for variable names, natch). Variable are loaded into memory with the Enter command, and unloaded with Exit. This is valid SPL syntax:

[Enter Hamlet and Romeo]

Hamlet:
You lying stupid fatherless big smelly half-witted coward! You are as stupid as the difference between a handsome rich brave hero and thyself! Speak your mind!

You are as brave as the sum of your fat little stuffed misused dusty old rotten codpiece and a beautiful fair warm peaceful sunny summer's day. You are as healthy as the difference between the sum of the sweetest reddest rose and my father and yourself! Speak your mind!

You are as cowardly as the sum of yourself and the difference between a big mighty proud kingdom and a horse. Speak your mind.

Speak your mind!

[Exit Romeo]

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Joey!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:41:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The duct tape fashion

The duct tape fashion gallery! I love duct tape with a fierce and unabashed passion -- where do I get one of these duct-tape tuxedos? Link Discuss (Thanks, Owen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:23:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

7/17/71 is my date of

7/17/71 is my date of birth. 71771 can be found at the 25,858th digit of Pi. How far along in Pi is your birthday? LinkDiscuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:36:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AOL has begun to ban

AOL has begun to ban "suggestive" song lyrics from being quoted by users in their music chatrooms. How suggestive? Well, My love is bigger than a Honda, yeah it's bigger than a Subaru, a Bruce Springsteen lyric from "Pink Cadillac," is too rude for their delicate sensibilities. LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:33:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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