Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

Sunday, March 31, 2002

Vanilla Coke

Coke is planning yet another brand-extension: Vanilla Coke. Sure to be as big a success as Evian Brake Fluid and Spicy Cajun Visine. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:40:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Painted nudes

Amazing gallery of painted nudes. Link Discuss (via Cloudmonkey)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to tell that it's already April 1 in England

The April Fools begin. Andrew Orlowski fires the opening shot with "You've got Blogs! AOL buys into homegrown media" in the Reg:

AOL-TW executives seemed pleased with the company's acquisition spree.
"You can't really put figures on this," one executive told The Register, "but we think we have 78 per cent of the libertarian news blogs, 91 per cent of the ClueTrain Manifesto fan sites, and 59 per cent of all blogging female arts graduates, many of whom are Virgos," he said.
"And the possibilities for vertical integration are endless," he enthused. "No cat will ever go ill again in America again in obscurity."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:34:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

XXL dummies

Overweight people are more likely to be injured in car accidents, though no one knows why. Labs are ordering XXL crash-test dummies to run tests with. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:49:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rollercoasters in Bangladesh

Bangladesh gets its first theme park.

Located on a greenfield site more than an hour's drive from Dhaka, the Disney-style theme park sits a little incongruously alongside paddy fields and villages that have no running water or electricity.
The sponsors expect 5,000 visitors a day
On offer is everything the fun-lover would expect to find in a western theme park, right down to the hamburger bars, popcorn stalls and a large amusement arcade.
Critics argue the park itself is incongruous in a country where around half the population of 130m lives below the poverty line.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:21:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, March 30, 2002

Parochial messages

Praize: The Christian IM client. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:38:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ICANN blog

Paul sez: "You might want to point BoingBoingers towards the ICANN blog, which is a nice, even-handed blog about all things ICANN." ICANN is a big old mess and complicated as hell, but this is pretty fascinating stuff. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

300 most failed domain names

That 300-most-common-words meme sure has legs. Paul Hoffman's using it to prove the failure of ICANN's new top-level domains.

The "common knowledge" is that the new TLDs (.biz, .info, and so on) have been pretty much of a failure for the TLD owners because the only people who have registered in them are trademark holders or domain name squatters. You almost never see any of the new TLDs being used on the net.
To test out this hypothesis, I wanted to see if they were being used for easy-to-find web sites. I took the list of the 300 most commonly-used words in English (found here) and searched for them on Google. I went ten pages deep on each search, grabbing every URL Google gave me. Of these 3000-odd URLs, exactly two of them used a new TLD: aaronland.info and www.nic.name. I assume that the latter came up on searching for the word "name", so it is almost not even countable.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:26:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Worker and Parasite

Speaking of Worker and Parasite (the whacky Soviet cartoon from the Simpsons Gabbo episode), here's a little lo-res Quicktime clip of it, courtesy of the Internet Archive. I'd kill for a high-res still from this to make a t-shirt out of. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:39:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Deaddog's doo-wop rarities

I just got a shipment of fantastic doo-wop and swing rarities from Deaddog music, a microlabel bringing back old 78s and singles. My favorite? Steve Gibson and the Red Caps "You're Driving Me Crazy." I discovered Steve Gibson about eight years ago when his "Boogie Woogie on a Saturday Night" was briefly released (and quickly deleted). I have one other disk of his stuff, but most of his vast catalog of 78s is lost to history. The Deaddog disc has got some awesome stuff on it. I can't stop listening to the Boogie Woogie cover of "San Antonio Rose." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russia's answer to South Park

The Globe sez:

She's a pot-smoking, foul-mouthed wreck and the idol of millions of young Russians.
Masyanya, an Internet cartoon based on the life of a hard-living, often unemployed, young woman wreaking havoc in St. Petersburg, is Russia's answer to both South Park and Dilbert.

I just watched a bunch of these, and while they're slightly more comprehensible than, say, the "Worker and Parasite" cartoons that Krusty the Clown put on after he lost Itchy and Scratchy to Gabbo, but they do lose something in the translation. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:10:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The stone-eater

Pat sez:

This is weird, poignant and...I don't know. This Afghan guy swallows stones for attention. He dreams of marrying a U.S. female pilot who will fly him away to Dubai or the U.S....

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

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

Extreme environmental irony, Shrub-style

The Shrub took money out of the budget for solar and renewable energy and used it to print the Department of Energy's budget (in which he announced that he was cutting the budget for etc etc etc). It's recursive evil. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:35:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 29, 2002

Conjoined Peep surgery

Some whacky netizen with access to an operating theatre and a fetishist's paradise of medical paraphenalia has documented his attempts to successfully separate conjoined Marshmallow Peep quintuplets. Pictured here is the doomed CPR attempt, made upon discovery that the newly separated Peep had no pulse. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:40:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

We're going to hell for sure now

Mean, funny captions for the "I'm With You Always" Jesus charcoals we pointed to last week. Like a Disfunctional Family Circus for sappy Jesuspix. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:31:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WORK FROM HOME ASK ME HOW!

Here's a good debunking of the Herbalife MLM scam that is responsible for the choking of the world's streets with "WORK FROM HOME" signs on every possible surface. The author is really nonconfrontational in his language, patiently stepping through the impossibility of making money at MLMs, and talking in depth about the cost to society through the uglification of our commons with millions of shrill "ASK ME HOW" plastic signs.

They all had the SAME message. It was a woman's voice, and she started the message with a distinctive "Ya know". In the upcoming days of� phone number investigation, I heard this message dozens of times. The next one was a wrong number, the sixth number was the "ya know" message. The seventh number had a different message, but it had some aspects of the first message, "20-year industry leader" and "tap into mail-order".� This message, too, was an effort to send me a 14-page booklet.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:27:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling in 300 words

Bruce Sterling's written a story using only the 300 most common words in the English language. It's a little short on eyeball kicks, but the rhythm's pretty tasty.

As many of you figured out, I had the wrong file pasted in. Below is the corrected text. Sorry. Busy day.

The of, and a to in, is you. That it? He for was on -- are as with his they. At be this: "From I have, or by one had not; but what all were." When we there can: an your which! Their said, "If do will each about, how up out them?" Then she many -- some -- so these would other into. Has more; her two, like him. See, time could no make than first.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bruce!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:48:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Searching for Bruttney Spears

Here's a Google page with a list of all the different spellings people have used to search for Britney Spears. (And this list doesn't even include all the variations on "spears," either!) Some are obviously typos, but plenty are just shots in the dark at getting her name right. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:39:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fly a Plane, Get Cancer

If the terrorists don't get you, cosmic rays will. Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

Though not widely known, in-flight radiation is becoming a growing concern among researchers, crew members and the fliers who have to log thousands of miles a month. On any flight, radiation from stars penetrates the airplane, and experts say repeated exposure may be a health risk, similar to getting too many X-rays. The issue has not only led to changes at some foreign airlines, but prompted the FAA to set up a new radiation Web site. And next year, the U.S. government plans to release findings on the long-term effects on crew members, covering everything from miscarriages to cancer.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:27:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mission to Mercury

NASA is planning a mission to Mecury in 2004. The unmanned orbiting satellite will take pictures of the planet and collect information on the planet's composition and atmosphere. Interestingly, Mercury is the only planet besides Earth with a magnetic field. (Makes you wonder how John Carter made his way around Barsoom.) Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:23:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yahoo's new "privacy" policy

Yahoo's new "privacy" policy will hand your personal data over for legal investigation (Zed asks: "any government agency that asks? domestic or foreign? non-governmental organizations?"). Even better:

by interacting with or viewing an ad you are consenting to the possibility that the advertiser will make the assumption that you meet the targeting criteria used to display the ad

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:01:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cellphones and the military don't mix

Chinese soldiers are barred from carrying mobile phones and pagers, to protect military secrets. The article implies that the ban extends to off-duty soldiers, too. Are landlines so unheard-of in China that you can stop long-distance communication by banning mobiles? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Seizure dogs

A new kind of service dog can predict epileptic seizures through subtle changes in their owners' behavior -- now, if we can only get fast-food franchisees to stop kicking them out of their restaurants. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:52:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The DMCA finally takes down an infringer -- well, that was worth it

The DMCA has finally been used to prosecute someone who was infringing on copyright. It's the first time.

Mohsin Mynaf, a 36-year-old from Vacaville, California, was accused of running a videocassette reproduction lab in his home to pirate movies that he rented or sold at three video stores...
``It's the first time the DMCA has been used to go after someone who is actually infringing copyright,'' Robin Gross, an EFF staff attorney, said after hearing about the Mynaf plea agreement.

Link Discuss

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

Thursday, March 28, 2002

The Web is not boring

Every six or eight months, the NYT dredges up some netphobe to tell us all that The Web is Boring. Derek takes exception to the assertion, and is inviting people to suggest non-boring things online.

Now is a great time for the web! I've seen more interesting projects turn up in the last year than I can count, and I feel like we're just getting started. Weblogs, community sites, real world experiments. RSS, XML, web services. And more and more.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Multiethnic head-cases

Culture-specific psychosomatic illnesses from around the world:

qi-gong psychotic reaction: (China) an acute, time-limited episode characterized by dissociative, paranoid, or other psychotic or nonpsychotic symptoms that occur after participating in the Chinese folk health-enhancing practice of qi-gong.
koro: (Malaysia) an episode of sudden and intense anxiety that the penis (or in the rare female cases, the vulva and nipples) will recede into the body and possibly cause death.
spell: (southern U.S.) a trance state in which individuals "communicate" with deceased relatives or with spirits.

Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:17:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Another bad day for the differently plastinated

A University lecturer smashed one of the plastinated corpse exhibits at the Atlantis Gallery in London with a hammer. Everybody's a critic.

Mr Lee, from Islington, North London, has been charged with criminal damage and will appear at Thames Magistrates' Court next month. He believes that a jury will agree with his view that you cannot commit criminal damage on a dead body. He said yesterday: "I decided I would walk into the exhibition with a hammer and smash up the most expensive exhibit to make the point that you cannot turn bodies into commercial exhibits."
He launched the attack after seeing the young girl being taken around the gallery. "I was enraged that he (Professor von Hagen) was capable of inflicting that horrific exhibition on an innocent child. I smashed up one of them to smithereens. It's not easy to hit a hammer through a dead body and it took some doing."

Link Discuss (via Link)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:03:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Run Office on Linux

Crossover lets you install and run MSFT Office on an Intel/AMD Linux box without an emulator. Office for Linux! Looks like there're still some bugs and performance issues, but with any luck they'll sort 'em out.

Installation of all Office programs under CrossOver was point-and-click easy. After installation, all of the basic functions of each Office program worked well. Only features that involved graphics, such as adding clip art to Word documents or animations to PowerPoint files, were somewhat unstable.
Office programs loaded and operated quickly under CrossOver, but slowed, sometimes to a crawl, when more than two applications or several windows in one application were open at once.
Outlook was the most difficult program to set up, and it occasionally froze during long e-mail transfers. Internet Explorer performed perfectly, as did Windows Media Player 7, although sound in the player was muffled even at the highest volume settings.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:25:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Benefits: Quality time with Tom Cruise and John Travolta

"Los Angeles-based PR agency seeking journalist/writer to work exclusively on the account of a not-for-profit, somewhat controversial not-for-profit association. The client is a spiritual growth/personal development -type movement. The opposition is made of disgruntled members/apostates and is very active on hate sites on the internet." Scientology, I presume? Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:36:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Advertising on tombstones

Tell me this is an April Fool's gag:

Acclaim Entertainment has announced that advertisements for its game Shadow Man: 2econd Coming for the PlayStation 2 are set to appear on gravestones across the UK as part of the first advertising campaign to use memorial plaques as part of a marketing strategy. The company is inviting relatives of the recently deceased to contact them if they are interested in subsidizing the costs associated with death in return for a small advertisement promoting the game with lead character Mike LeRoi's head and the logo as seen in the photo attached to this story.
Shaun White, communications manager at Acclaim said, "The concept of what we're calling 'deadvertising' is entirely consistent with the theme of the Shadow Man: 2econd Coming game and provides us with a permanent presence for our advertising. Content and context are two important principles of marketing Shadow Man."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:01:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Suspended on a dog's say-so

A teenager in Ottawa was fingered (nosed?) by a drug-sniffing mutt. Even though a subsequent search failed to actually turn up any drugs, the kid was suspended from school. Now the kid is suing. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:57:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Quayle's no dove

Did Dan Quayle put a hit out on the Chief Kiwi?

Former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange has claimed that ex-U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle threatened to have him "liquidated" over his country's anti-nuclear policy in the 1980s.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:53:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Proto-postcards

I have a new collection: Victorian Carte-De-Visites (CDVs) and Cabinet Cards from the 19th century! (Three of anything makes a collection!) CDVs, introduced in 1859, were essentially photographic calling cards. A few years later, slightly larger albumen prints called Cabinet Cards became all the rage. Here's one that I just scored on ebay and one that I lost (dammit). Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:10:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bureaucrat humor -- ar ar ar ar ar

The head of the Council on Foreign Relations opens a speech with:

Good Evening, my name is Leslie Gelb. I'm President of the Council on Foreign Relations and Commander in Chief of our black helicopter forces. Only kidding Kofi, the helicopters are yours

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Celine Dion broke my Mac

The copy-prevention "feature" of the new Celine Dion CD seriously breaks Macs:

* It won't eject via normal methods.
* Booting into Mac OS 9.2.2 will take up to 30 minutes until the hard disk will start spinning. Booting into Mac OS X works.
* Corrupt session data could unpredictably affect the drive's firmware.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:44:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln

Michael Eisner has ginned up some quotes from Honest Abe Lincoln to defend technology mandates, things like "any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things."

Here's a counterquote from the Lincolnbot at "Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln" at Disneyland.

Shall we expect some Transatlantic giant to step across the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Africa and Asia combined could not by force make a track on the Blue Ridge nor take a drink from the Ohio River, not in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author, and its finisher. It cannot come from abroad. As a nation of free men, we must live forever -- or die by suicide.

Stirring words as the American Techniban greedily slaughter American innovation. Discuss Link

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

The 300 most common words

Derryl sez, "It reads like a zen poem."

the of and a to in is you that it he for was on are as with his they at be this from I have or by one had not but what all were when we there can an your which their said if do will each about how up out them then she many some so these would other into has more her two like him see time could no make than first been its who now people my made over did down only way find use may water long little very after words called just where most know

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derryl!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:16:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Occupational hazards of the conceptual artiste

A British conceptual artist lost her cat. Her neighbors mistook the posters she put up with a pic of the missing moggy for art and so took them all down, believing them to be quite valuable.

While enthusiastically endorsing her other works, including a tent embroidered with the names of all the people she has slept with, Miss Emin�s agent insisted that this time, the poster was definitely �not art�.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Glenn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:55:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online Visual Autobiography

Miles Hochstein has created a really amazing autobiography using pictures of himself from every year he's been alive. I would love it if every person on the planet made one of these. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:46:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weblogs and Googlebombs

From Slate: "Google searches favor Weblogs because they're sites that contain freshly updated content with lots of links. Conceivably, Weblogs could unleash powerful Google Bombs and threaten the legendary accuracy of the world's favorite search engine." Link Discuss (Thanks, Bonnie!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:36:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AdCritic will be reborn

Advertising Age has bought up (the late, lamented) AdCritic.com, and they're soliciting consumer feedback on what netizens want from the new AdCritic. Link Discuss (Thanks, Roy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:46:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Captain Kirk rules Liberia OK

The Republic of Liberia is putting Star Trek captains on its money. Link Discuss (Thanks, inne!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:41:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Space elevators ho!

Civil engineers are watching the progress of carbon nanotube fabrication and licking their chops in anticipation of groovy sci-fi space elevators in 12 years.

For a space elevator to function, a cable with one end attached to the Earth's surface stretches upwards, reaching beyond geosynchronous orbit, at 21,700 miles (35,000-kilometer altitude). After that, simple physics takes charge.
The competing forces of gravity at the lower end and outward centripetal acceleration at the farther end keep the cable under tension. The cable remains stationary over a single position on Earth. This cable, once in position, can be scaled from Earth by mechanical means, right into Earth orbit. An object released at the cable's far end would have sufficient energy to escape from the gravity tug of our home planet and travel to neighboring the moon or to more distant interplanetary targets.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Grad!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:37:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blue embroidery

The extreme embroidery at Sublime Stitch just got blue. Jenny sez:

I'm starting a series of full-busted babes. And speaking of BUSTs, the magazine survived and I have a full-page embroidery/illo in the current ish.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:36:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lights out in the Czech Republic

The Czech republic bows to the powerful skywatcher lobby and bans light-pollution:

The new law defines "light pollution" as "every form of illumination by artificial light which is dispersed outside the areas it is dedicated to, particularly if directed above the level of the horizon."� Under the law, Czech Republic citizens and organizations are obligated to "take measures to prevent the occurrence of light pollution of the air."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:29:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

P-mail yeilds to email

India's police are abandoning "P-mail" -- the carrier pigeon network that gets messages to remote stations.

The carrier pigeons were often a vital link between remote police stations when traditional communications failed, beating storms, disasters - and birds of prey.
But the government's audit department now believes that the service - employing some 800 birds - has become redundant with the advent of e-mail and electronic communication.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

IBM and Nazi Germany

The damning evidence of IBM's collusion with Nazi Germany continues to mount -- IBM leased and serviced the automated machinery of the Holocaust.

IBM constantly updated its machinery and applications for the Nazis. For example, one series of punch cards was designed to record religion, national origin, and mother tongue, but by creating special columns and rows for Jew, Polish language, Polish nationality, the fur trade as an occupation, and then Berlin, Nazis could quickly cross-tabulate, at the rate of 25,000 cards per hour, exactly how many Berlin furriers were Jews of Polish extraction. Railroad cars, which could take two weeks to locate and route, could be swiftly dispatched in just 48 hours by means of a vast network of punch-card machines. Indeed, IBM services coursed through the entire German infrastructure in Europe.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:59:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Irradiation reduces farting

Indian scientists determine that irradiating fart-causing legumes can reduce oligosaccharides, the carb that breaks down into sufur and methane.

"In India, beans are a very popular and important part of the national diet, but some people can't eat a lot of beans because of the flatulence problem," Machaiah said.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:47:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Horoshoh Harry

Harry Potter is bolshoi in Russia.

Over 415,000 Russians have rushed to see the adventures of the trainee wizard created by novelist JK Rowling, said the film's distributor, Karo-Premier.
Pottermania has also hit Moscow bookstores, which have been flooded with Harry Potter books for weeks.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:23:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, March 26, 2002

Doonesbury on Napster

Garry Trudeau's doing an interesting series on the generation perceptual shear between parents and their Napsterized kinder. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:58:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Musee Mechanique is saved!

Hurrah! The Musee Mechanique is saved!

So I'm happy to report today that the charming and historic Musee at the Cliff House will be saved, and the officials from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area deserve some credit for responding to the protests from around the country.
Just where Laughing Sal, the Tijuana Brass bear and peep-show machines of early 20th century belly dancers will end up while the park service rebuilds the Cliff House is still being worked out. But for the first time since the Musee became an endangered species, both the recreation area and museum owner agree that a temporary home for the historic toys will be found until a permanent home is built above the new Cliff House.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Heather!)

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

Will this bring peace to Canadian rightsholders and their audiences?

Canadian rightsholders have convinced Parliament to consider (sometimes punishing) levies on all media on the grounds that it may end up being used to store copyrighted material. I wonder if this means that they're going to give up infringement claims against people who share files? After all, they're getting compensated.

If approved, the new tax would levy an additional fee of 59 cents (Canadian) on blank CDs. Memory cards, such as those used in handheld computers or digital cameras, would be taxed at 0.8 cents per megabyte of storage space. Manufacturers of blank DVD discs would pay an extra $2.27 per disk.
Hardware manufacturers would also be affected. Makers of MP3 players would pay $21 in fees for each gigabyte of memory available on their devices, raising the cost of devices like Apple's iPod by more than $100.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

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

Indy promotion gone mad!

This is indie media promotion at its finest. Greg Knauss has written a book called "Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard" that he's selling off his site, and to promote it, he's doing a virtual book-tour, where he takes over a different person's blog every day and does a little promotional stumpage. Betcha he sells a jesusload. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:20:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What if the labels designed Napster? Ewwwww.

Shift's done a roundup of the music industry's grotty little replacements for Ur-music services like (the original) Napster.

* You will be billed if you do not proactively cancel your fourteen-day "free" trial at the end of those fourteen days.
* You can�t burn more than two tracks per artist per month. Because you have to be online to burn pressplay downloads and you have use the integrated burning software (the tracks are encrypted), pressplay can monitor what you burn. Want to make a mixed Radiohead CD? Too bad. You can�t. You can mix two Radiohead tracks with other artists� tracks though.
* If you unsubscribe, all of the tracks you�ve downloaded to date deactivate themselves and become unplayable. So, if you�ve been a subscriber of the Premium Plan for a year, you lose $400 of music. (Your tracks can be reactivated if you re-subscribe within six months). I can�t imagine how frustrating this would be for a dial-up user.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:15:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Punk poster art

GigPosters is an amazing collection of alternaband poster-art from around the world. Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:23:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Forbes takes the cake

Amazing first-person account of a ~~woman~~ guy (thanks, JRC!) who, through an amazing set of circumstances got commissioned by ~~Steve~~ Malcolm Forbes to bake a 3' high Fabrege Egg replica cake -- after he stole the first one.

Still not satisfied, three stewardess and one steward stewed over the problem until the plane was almost 10 minutes late (Headline: CAKE HOLDS UP PLANE). Finally, the pilot came back, surveyed the situation, and told them all to get a grip, that he thought the cake was fine. Phew! We flew.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

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

My God, what have I bid on?

The logbook of Captain Robert A. Lewis, the US Army Air Corps pilot who dropped the first ~~H-Bomb~~ A-Bomb exploded as an act of war on Hiroshima is up for auction in the UK. Ghouls and ~~H-Bomb~~ A-Bomb enthusiasts can own the 11-page book that contains the famous line "My God, what have we done?" and the less-known line, "Damn, that cheeseburger is rebounding on me something fierce -- hoo-ee!" Link Discuss (via New World Disorder) (Thanks, Maurice!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Forget butterflies, they need warfarin ballots

Electoral recounts in Thailand are being foiled by the fact that mice have eaten the archived ballots. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ali G's porno film poster

Ali G, the UK's answer to Tom Green, is a comedian who goes all the way through stupid and comes out the other side. His risque film poster ("Vote Ali G: Tax Da Panty") is drawing fire in England. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Worst terrorist ever

A Reno craps dealer seriously lost his shit Friday and barricaded himself in a comics store, threatening to blow it up or burn it down. He was convinced that the store had fenced pieces of his beloved funnybook collection after it was burgled from his garage. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Playboy: Women of Enron

Playboy is seeking former Enron employees to pose for a "Women of Enron" ish. Is Hef channeling Larry Flint? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:50:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney's California Adventure to suck less

Disney is revamping the California Adventure, their brain-damaged theme-parklet next door to Disneyland. Built with the "assistance" of some high-priced McKinsey consultants (the same consultants who advised them to cut back on the maintenance regimen in Disneyland, a suggestion that has led to several near-fatal accidents and at least one fatality), the California Adventure is a prime example of what happens when a company abandons its visionary roots.

Walt built Disneyland because he wanted a park where kids and grownups could play together, where ripoff midway games and nauseous midway rides took a back-seat to storytelling, wonder and art.

California Adventure was built by repurposing rides from other parks, buying off-the-shelf rides from midway suppliers, and tossing in a bunch of those awful ripoff midway ring-toss games. Many of the rides are either kid or adult-specific, and the park offers little by way of storytelling, wonder or art, having no strong thematic continuity and attractions that you can find in your local travelling carny.

Disney's Parks and Resorts Chairman weasels around on this:

"People want new stories to be told," Pressler said. "But there are also some truths. When you try to push the envelope a little in terms of sophistication, it doesn't resonate as well inside the park as outside the park."

Vomitous coasters, ring-toss and whirling swings are "sophistication?" Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:48:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, March 25, 2002

Will Wright and Scott McCloud at GDC

Short recap of a talk given by Wright and McCloud at the Game Developers Conference. McCloud pointed out that from a business perspective, you want your product to be as addictive as possible. But there's a line, he said, separating "earned addiction" (desirable) from "compulsion" (not necessarily good). For instance, there are people who are sick of Everquest, but feel compelled to continue playing to explore just a little bit more, or achieve that next character level. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:17:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Treat me like a customer, not a thief

Dan Gillmor's written a stirring editorial on the Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act and related technology mandates.

1. Do you care if a few giant companies control virtually all entertainment and information?
2. Do you care if they decide what kinds of technological innovations will reach the marketplace?
3. Would you be concerned if they used their power to compile detailed dossiers on everything you read, listen to, view and buy?
4. Would you find it acceptable if they could decide whether what you write and say could be seen and heard by others?
...
Here's my message to the record industry and its allies:
I'm not a thief. I'm a customer. When you treat me like a thief, I won't be your customer.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple treats child prodigies like crap

Apple is excluding under-age open-source haxors from their development efforts. Idjits. Link Discuss (via Doc)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:18:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Danger Hiptop kicks AZZ

Just saw a demo of the Danger HipTop and I am SPAZZING OUT. Jesus Christ, this is the coolest goddamned phone/PDA/cam/email/SMS/thing in the entire universe. I have a technology boner that could cut glass. The site doesn't do it justice. You need to see it. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:59:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nerd squillionaire sporting bets

The Long Bets foundation is the nerd squillionaire version of those Around-the-World-In-80-Days gentlemen's agreements. When one nerd squillionaire makes some hubristic prediction about the future, another nerd squillionaire can call her/him on it and challenge her/him to a friendly wager of $1000 or more. Bets are even-odds, must have binary outcomes (no partial wins), and involve some event that takes place at least two years in the future, and bettors must write reasoned essays explaining their premise. Proceeds go to the winner's charity of choice. Here at PC Forum, anyone who asserts any futuristic thing will likely be challenged to put down a gee on it.

1. A computer - or "machine intelligence" - will pass the Turing Test by 2029.
Ray Kurzweil vs. Mitchell Kapor ($20,000)
2. In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.
Dave Winer vs. Martin Nisenholtz ($2,000)
3. A profitable video-on-demand service aimed at consumers will offer 10,000 titles to 5 million subscribers by 2010.
Jim Griffin vs. Gordon Bell ($2,000)
4. By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes. �
Craig Mundie vs. Eric Schmidt ($2,000)
5. By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect.
Esther Dyson vs. Bill Campbell ($10,000)
6. By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks.
Jason Epstein vs. Vint Cerf ($2,000)
7. The universe will eventually stop expanding.
Danny Hillis vs. Nathan Myhrvold ($2,000)

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What the Past Will Look Like Some Day

Diveintomark has reposted this topical editorial on the consequences to posterity of copy-prevention. The author describes his difficulty getting hte games he bought to play on his various machines and devices, and the problems he's had as his modifications to those boxen triggers false positives in the copy-prevention technology. Upshot: if he wants to play these games, he needs to download the cracked versions floating about in the noosphere.

In twenty years, the only playable versions of these games will be the cracked ones, which guarantees immortality to the craxors who insert splash-screens with paeons to their psuedonymous technical studliness, and obscurity for the companies that actually wrote the games. Link Discuss (via The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:40:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A truly excellent acronym

Heard at PC Forum:

BOHICA (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again): Every two years, the technology industry turns itself upside-down and reinvents itself and generally emulsifies all socio-economic order. Hence, BOHICA. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hearings in Toronto tomorrow on the Canadian DMCA

If you're in Toronto tomorrow, you've got a chance to help defeat the Canadian version of the ~~Business Model Protection Act~~ Canadian DMCA:

Significant "Digital Copyright" legislation is currently in the public consultations phase.
This is the process: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp01100e.html
This is the consultation paper itself: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp01099e.html
This legislation will impact all of our lives on both the professional and the personal level. In the smaller sense by creating rules and regs. to control/define much of the legal (and not so legal) freedoms that we take for granted on the Internet.
In the larger sense it impacts us by formalizing a new balance between the interests and rights of creators vs. brokers vs. consumers of intellectual "property".
If you want to say to your grand-kids, "I was there when they wrote that piece-of-junk || excellent bill", you might want to attend these hearings.

Discuss (via The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Indispensible resource for kids online

David Weinberger, author of "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," has produced a version for middle-school kids that does a fantastic job of explaining what the Internet is and what it is for. I'm at PC Forum this week, surrounded by Captains of Industry, Founding Parents, analysts, journalists, startupniks and sharks, and for all that I've heard a half dozen remarks in the past 24h that suggest that the speaker could really use a perusal of this text.

My kid brother is an elementary school teacher and my Mom's a retired elementary teacher: Guys, are you reading this? Send it to your colleagues, please. Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

France legalizes cellular jamming

The French have legalized cellular jammers, devices that make it impossible to send or receive a call, text message, or voxmail on your mobile. They'll be in use by summer. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Warhol battery

A new rechargable battery intended for use in cell-phones, digital cameras, etc., can be brought to a full charge in fifteen minutes. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Stalinist musico-industrial complex

Some very tasty red-baiting in this Observer column comparing the music-industry's attempt to mandate copy-prevention and the Stalinist regime's tight control on photocopiers.

There is, however, one sobering statistic which may eventually cause even Congress to balk at the studios' arrogance. US domestic spending on computing technology is running at $600 billion a year, while Hollywood generates a measly $35bn.
To concede the demand for copy protection would be tantamount to compelling a huge, dynamic industry to march to the soporific beat of a technophobic industry desperate to preserve its obsolete business models.

Link Discuss (via Intersting People)

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

Sunday, March 24, 2002

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

"There�s this stupid myth out there that A.I. has failed, but A.I. is everywhere around you every second of the day. People just don�t notice it." MIT robot evangelist Rodney Brooks talks to Technology Review. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:48:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Entourage notes and events on your iPod

Export your Entourage Notes and Events to your iPod with these little OS X apps. Notes: Link, Events: Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:05:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sending mail from PC Forum

~~Attendees at PC Forum: The outgoing mailserver on the 802.11 network is external-mail-router.uu.net.~~ Screw that, I'm wrong. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Today's kids are all thumbs

The index finger is the first casualty of the GameBoy age.

New research carried out in nine cities around the world shows that the thumbs of people under the age of 25 have taken over as the hand's most dexterous digit, said The Observer.
The change affects those who have grown up with hand-held devices where the thumbs are used for keying in text messages and emails.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:32:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Rube Goldberg Agency

This NYT lede is so delish.

Only the Immigration and Naturalization Service could the task of streamlining the agency fall to an official recently named to be "assistant deputy executive associate commissioner for immigration services."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:49:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Mac is a circumvention device

Remember Dmitry Skylarov, the Russian scientist the US imprisoned last year for showing people how pointless Adobe's PDF "security" was? And whose former employer the US is still pursuing?

Well, time to add another notorious pirate organization to the list of defendants: Apple.

"Mac OS X's Preview program is able to ignore the security settings in an Acrobat encrypted file and do whatever it wants with the file. And if OS X's Preview can do this, then any program can be written to exploit this security hole. ... The process of destroying the security settings in an encrypted PDF document is surprisingly easy and straightforward."

See the link below for explicit, step-by-step instructions for gaining access to the files you've purchased, even if the person who created them has set "protection" flags that defeat fair use, format-shifting, excerpting, and the Doctrine of First Sale. Link Discuss (Thanks, Seth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vandalizing art for the children

A self-aapointed critic has vandalized the flayed-corpse exhibit. His defence? He's a father, and wanted to keep his children safe from moral corruption. Way to set an example, Dad. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, March 23, 2002

Mail archiver for Entourage for Mac OS X:

Entourage Email Archive (EEA X) is a simple and fast utility for archiving emails and attachments you have received or sent using Microsoft Entourage. Entourage Email Archive X can archive your email in three different ways:
* 1 - Archive email and/or attachments in the Finder
* 2 - Export or append email in a text file
* 3 - Export or append email in tab-text format
(for this function a freeware FileMaker Pro template is enclosed in EEA X folder)
* Settings 1 produce produce a Finder-structured-folders archive where emails and/or attachments are grouped by day.
* Settings 2 produce a long �paper trail� file that can be viewed with a robust text editor like BBEdit, Apple TextEdit or Microsoft Word.
* Settings 3 produce a tab-text file that can be imported into computer database programs like Filemaker Pro.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:16:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Internet reaches the ends of the earth

Pat sez:

O.K. Now I believe that the internet has penetrated every corner of the planet. Here is the virtual shopping center for Pitcairn Island. Actually, the stuff doesn't look bad. Natural, tropical honey, dried fruit, nice earrings and wood carving---and you support the shrinking population of this last place on earth.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Some xenu.net links restored to Google's database

Score half a point for the good guys -- Google's put some of the censored xenu.net anti-Scientology links back into its database.

Don Marti, an activist who protested the arrest of a Russian programmer under the DMCA last year, said he and other activists met with Google on Thursday to discuss the situation.
"Google invited us right in," said Marti, whose ad hoc group is called "Mountain View, California, Xenu Independent Study Group."
Google had the Web site back up before the group arrived at its Mountain View offices on Thursday afternoon, he said.
"We're discussing Google's DMCA policy and trying to keep this from happening again," Marti said. "Google should be a fair and accurate representation of what's on the Internet."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:04:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nixon explains All in the Family

Nixon tape transcripts: Even more reason to hiss when they highlight the Nixonbot at the Hall of Presidents in Walt Disney World:

It takes the president a while to get to the point, which begins with his review of a popular TV sitcom he has just watched, apparently for the first time:
"Archie is sitting here with his hippie son-in-law, married to the screwball daughter. . . . The son-in-law apparently goes both ways."
Nixon seems to have concluded, against all evidence, that Meathead is bisexual. Possibly it is the length of his hair. Another character in the show, Nixon reports, is "obviously queer. He wears an ascot, and so forth."
The president is outraged that this filth should appear on TV:
"The point that I make is that, goddamn it, I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality. You don't glorify it, John, anymore than you glorify, uh, whores."
The president asserts that America is in jeopardy from this Archie Bunker gay thing:
"I don't want to see this country to go that way. You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates."

Link Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:18:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Historical online bookselling design

A Razorfish Web-guy has written up a fascinating analysis of the historical design of Barnes and Noble, Amazon and Borders' homepages.

Amazon communicates using images and links rather than text descriptions.
From 1999 through 2001, Amazon used more images and fewer text descriptions than Barnes and Noble. In 2002, both sites used about 560 words per page, yet the density of words was 33 percent lower on Amazon; Amazon distributes the words across the page as links rather than bunching them together in paragraphs. Over time, Barnes and Noble is becoming more like Amazon in this respect.

Link Discuss (via Camworld)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:08:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Starbucks as clueless as KPMG?

Starbucks joins the KPMG Memorial Hall of Cluelessness for sending a registered lawyer-letter to the community site Backwash demanding that they remove links to the giant coffee-chain because Starbucks believes that linking to them without permission is a copyright violation. Starbucks needs a clue. Link Discuss (via Fark)

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

iPod text editors emerge

As soon as I saw the Contacts import for the new iPod update, I immediately wondered why Apple hadn't released a Notes and To-Do version -- simple data-types that should be easy to import. Well, just a couple days later, there are two Cocoa OSX apps that allow you to put unstructured notes into your Contacts folder. Unfortunately, neither is particularily user-friendly; both require that you launch the app, tell it which text you want on the note, hit Save, locate your Contacts folder on your mounted iPod, enter a filename, hit save again. A much better version would be an OSX service or Scriptie that grabs the highlighted text, prompts you for a title and saves the file (giving it a title like "00Note__, so that all the notes are grouped together at the top of the list). Still, it's quite promising. Link (Podnotes), Link (iPod Text Editor) Discuss (via MacSlash)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:51:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Schoolhouse Rock -- Live!

In Seattle? Love campy 70s campy throwback cartoons? The Seattle Times recommends this off-off-off-Broadway live production of "Schoolhouse Rock."

If, as the show's theme says, "Knowledge is Power," then "Schoolhouse" is only a lesser superhero. The often overly simple songs chosen for the live version � ranging from grammar rock to folksy math ballads � aren't going to help anyone pass a math test and probably won't win many friends among history teachers either.
Add to this lyrical mess frenetic choreography and actors valiantly but unsuccessfully singing out of vocal range, and information is a rare commodity.
But, oh, does this cast want to win its audience. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone onstage without his Mouseketeer smile on full-blast. Though low on budget, ReACT's cup of cheerleader spirit runneth over.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:34:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 22, 2002

Still Blindly Consuming...

Hate those "Open for Business" consumerism-is-the-answer-to-terrorism signs? Show your opposition to them by, er, buying mugs and other cafepress.com schwag with this rather clever riff printed on 'em. Link Discuss (Thanks, Flux!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:18:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yodaclone

Ever notice how much Marjorie "Dog Mauling" Knoller looks like Yoda? Link Discuss

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

Harry Potter saves Lego

Harry Potter toys saved Lego's ass in 2001. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:32:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Religious Outsider Art

Patrick sez: "A self taught artist from Niceville, Fla (seriously!) has drawn a series of pictures of Jesus with various ''ordinary people' (e.g. Jesus and a french horn player, Jesus and a truck driver, Jesus and a dental assistant) in order to illustrate the idea that 'Jesus is with you always'. The artist is obviously a very sweet old man, and the result is loony, amusing, and endearing." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:36:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sorority Boys director meets PK Dick

The director of Sorority Boys is adapting PK Dick's "The King of the Elves" into a children's film for Disney. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Now that is a messy apartment

Justin sez:

Hey Cory, my good friends who have been hit hard by the dot-bomb are finalists in the apartments.com messiest apartment contest. If they win they get $10k to pay their rent with and free cleaning service, and they really really need it.
Anyway, they are by far the messiest, but its the votes that count. They are the ones from Minneapolis. You don't need to endorse them or anything, because if the votes are fair they'll win hands down.

That really is one goddamned messy apartment. My skin is all a-crawl with squalory squeam. Link Discuss (Thanks, Justin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:27:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saddam Hussein, Novelist

Is Saddam Hussein the anonymous author of these thinly veiled propaganda novels?

The previous novels, which earned rapturous reviews from the local press, were "al-Qala'ah al-Hasinah" (The Fortified Castle) published last year and "Zabibah wal Malik" (Zabibah and the King) printed in 2000.
"Al-Qala'ah al-Hasinah" combined romance and Iraqi politics after the 1991 Gulf War, telling the story of an ex-soldier who falls for a girl from northern Iraq.
"Zabibah" is a tragic novel depicting a ruler falling in love with an unhappily married woman, who refuses to marry him after separating from her husband.
In the story, Zabibah is raped on January 17 -- the same day U.S.-led forces launched the 1991 offensive that drove Iraq out of Kuwait, forcing subsequent Iraqi surrender and a sharp economic decline, which Iraq blames on the U.N. sanctions regime.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tales of Mere Existence

A bunch of terrific little Quicktime movies of a cartoonist drawing pictures (usually depicting himself) while he tells a story in a depressed, nasally voice. Something about this works so well. Maybe it's the way he completes the drawings with such confidence, yet speaks in such a self-deprecating way. Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:59:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, March 21, 2002

The Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act

That's great it starts with a mandate, birds and snakes and aeroplanes...

Senator Fritz Hollings has introduced a modified version of the SSSCA, called the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which will do just what it says: convert our rich innovative technosphere into a one-way medium run by coked-up Hollyweird fatcats who thought that the VCR was a bad idea but that Police Academy n -1 was just dandy.

The CBDTPA (let's call it the Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act and have done with it) requires technologists to arrive at a trumped-up "consensus" with Hollywood Political Officers before they can bring any new products to market. This "consensus," reached at lawyerpoint, establishes what features every product that can store, trasnmit, display or manipulate digital files must have and which files it must not have: everything not mandatory is verboten.

If Senator Fritz has his way, no new technologies will be brought to market without a one-year review. Open Source will be dead, since there will be no way to ensure that your users don't remove your mandated copy-protection measures.

Now more than ever, it is time to put your money and time and energy behind organizations like the EFF as our technologies' very right to exist is challenged. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:58:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Klingons are science, Harry Potter is magic

High-larious anaeccdote about "Klingons" negotiating their reservation at a local community library:

KLAS contact: Well, I don't know if I have the authority to make that decision about switching rooms. I am only the communications officer. I will have to talk with my captain.
Librarian: Your captain? What kind of a community group is KLAS?
KLAS comm. officer: Why, we're the Klingons.
Librarian: Well, do you anticipate adding a dozen or more Klingons to your federation between now and next Saturday? If not, you will fit into the small meeting room. Unless you are going to have one of those blood battles with big swords.
KLAS comm. officer: I guess it will be all right to switch.
Librarian: Thank you so much. This really helps me out.
KLAS comm. officer: No problem. I'm really a fan of Dr. Seuss's books. I used to read them to my children all the time when they were little. They are so much better than this terrible Harry Potter stuff that forces magic on children.
Librarian (unable to restrain herself): How can you say that about Harry Potter? You belong to a Klingon organization!
KLAS comm. officer: Harry Potter is about MAGIC! WE are about SCIENCE!!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gavin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:36:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jailing the Welsh

The British "Prison! Me! No Way!" charity has launched a program(me) to throw Welsh schoolchildren into gaol for a day to give them a taste of what they have coming to them if they don't walk the straight and narrow.

"This scheme will show young people the real consequences of making the wrong choices."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:07:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Green Fairy

*CAVEAT EMPTOR! Reader Khris Brown tells me that EAbsinthe's beverages lack the hallucinogenic punch of true Absinthe! Click here for a lesson about thujone, the magic ingredient in true Absinthe. ~~Apparently you can now import Absinthe into the US from this UK distributor. I wonder how they sorted out the legalities!~~ Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:33:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google censored by the Church of Scientology and the DMCA

1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act - the DMCA -- was enacted to protect rights-holders from infringment online. It allows for massive civil and punishing criminal penalties against infringers and those who abet them.

This awful, draconian law has not been used to safeguard copyright, however. Instead, the DMCA is used as a club to threaten competitors (i.e., Vivendi's Blizzard gaming division suing the open-source hackers who implemented their own version of the Blizzard gameserver), to stop innovation (i.e., the action against the people who wrote the Linux DVD player, DeCSS), and, of course, to silence critics.

The Church of Scientology, notorious for its campaigns to silence former Church members who speak out against the Church's practices has served a DMCA notice on Google. They have forced Google to remove from its database links to materials that the Church claims are infringing.

The implications are staggering. Any yahoo (no pun intended) can now have other people's materials removed from any search tool, just by writing a spurious poison-pen letter.

Sez Google: "We removed certain specific URLs in response to a notification submitted by the Religious Technology Center and Bridge Publications under section 512(c)(3) of the the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Had we not removed these URLs, we would be subject to a claim for copyright infringement, regardless of its merits." (emphasis mine).

Here are the allegedly infringing links:

www.xenu.net/
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/index.html
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop1.html
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop2.html
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop3.html
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop4.html
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop5.html
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop6.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/ clan-images.html
www.xenu.net/archive/photoalbum/lisas_case_sup.html
www.xenu.net/archive/events/
www.xenu.net/archive/events/lisa_mcpherson/
www.xenu.net/archive/disk/
www.xenu.net/archive/disk/enemy/
www.xenu.net/archive/disk/enemy/da.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/disk/enemy/targets.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/disk/archive/grd_chrt.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/disk/OTIII/
www.xenu.net/archive/hubbandcw/
www.xenu.net/archive/greece/
www.xenu.net/archive/HCOB/FU-HCOB-630511.html
www.xenu.net/archive/HCOB/FU-HCOB-630714.html
www.xenu.net/archive/HCOB/FU-HCOB-610619.html
www.xenu.net/archive/enemy_names/
www.xenu.net/archive/enemy_names/dead_agenting.html
www.xenu.net/archive/enemy_names/targets.html
www.xenu.net/archive/tonelevel.html
www.xenu.net/archive/grade_chart.html
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenuleaf.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenusw.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenunl.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenufr.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenufi.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenuno.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenuge.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenuaf.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenuru-k.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenuheb.htm
www.xenu.net/archive/so/
www.clambake.org/
www.clambake.org/ archive/photoalbum/
www.clambake.org/archive/photoalbum/propaganda
www.clambake.org/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/index.html
www.clambake.org/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop1.html
www.clambake.org/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop2.html
www.clambake.org/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop3.html
www.clambake.org/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop4.html
www.clambake.org/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop5.html
www.clambake.org/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop6.html
www.clambake.org/archive/photoalbum/ clan-images.html
www.clambake.org/archive/photoalbum/lisas_case_sup.html
www.clambake.org/archive/events/
www.clambake.org/archive/events/lisa_mcpherson/
www.clambake.org/archive/disk/
www.clambake.org/archive/disk/enemy/
www.clambake.org/archive/disk/enemy/da.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/disk/enemy/targets.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/disk/archive/grd_chrt.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/disk/OTIII/
www.clambake.org/archive/hubbandcw/
www.clambake.org/archive/greece/
www.clambake.org/archive/HCOB/FU-HCOB-630511.html
www.clambake.org/archive/HCOB/FU-HCOB-630714.html
www.clambake.org/archive/HCOB/FU-HCOB-610619.html
www.clambake.org/archive/enemy_names/
www.clambake.org/archive/enemy_names/dead_agenting.html
www.clambake.org/archive/enemy_names/targets.html
www.clambake.org/archive/tonelevel.html
www.clambake.org/archive/grade_chart.html
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/xenuleaf.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/xenusw.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/xenunl.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/xenufr.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/xenufi.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/xenuno.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/xenuge.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/xenuaf.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/xenuru-k.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/leaflet/xenuheb.htm
www.clambake.org/archive/so/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/propaganda
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/index.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop1.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop2.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop3.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop4.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop5.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/propaganda/prop6.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/ clan-images.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/photoalbum/lisas_case_sup.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/events/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/events/lisa_mcpherson/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/disk/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/disk/enemy/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/disk/enemy/da.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/disk/enemy/targets.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/disk/archive/grd_chrt.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/disk/OTIII/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/hubbandcw/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/greece/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/HCOB/FU-HCOB-630511.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/HCOB/FU-HCOB-630714.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/HCOB/FU-HCOB-610619.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/enemy_names/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/enemy_names/dead_agenting.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/enemy_names/targets.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/tonelevel.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/grade_chart.html
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/xenuleaf.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/xenusw.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/xenunl.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/xenufr.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/xenufi.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/xenuno.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/xenuge.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/xenuaf.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/xenuru-k.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/leaflet/xenuheb.htm
home.kvalito.no/~xenu/archive/so/

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:53:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chicken Little is a fish

Meat-from-a-vat:

Chunks of goldfish muscle grew 14 percent after a week immersed in a nutrient-enriched liquid extracted from the blood of unborn calves, the New York-based scientists found.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave and Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:29:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Zed's blog

Frequent Boing Boing contributor Zed Lopez has a blog: MemeMachineGo! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Charlie versus God

A loony fundie emailed Charlie before his morning coffee to tell him he was going to hell. Charlie's mini-flamewar with him is on his blog.

Okay, so I was rude. Excessively rude, to be quite honest. But I maintain that this sort of religious invective is also rude. It's an intrusion, uninvited, into somebody else's life, uninformed by any actual knowledge of the person concerned (other than their published blog, which may be downright misleading as to their personal life), and without any trace of interest in them as a person -- it's just a salvo of abuse intended to intimidate a sinner into re-assessing their views.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:24:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hugo on science fiction

Hugo Gernsback -- founder of the first sf magazine, coiner of the phrase "scientifiction," namesake of the Hugo Award -- on writing science fiction, from 1930:

(1) A Scientific Detective Story is one in which the method of crime is solved, or the criminal traced, by the aid of scientific apparatus or with the help of scientific knowledge possessed by the detective or his coworkers.
(2) A crime so ingenious, that it requires scientific methods to solve it, usually is committed with scientific aid and in a scientific manner. Therefore the criminal, as well as the detective, should possess some scientific knowledge. You will see that this is not an absolute essential to a good story; a scientific detective can use science in tracing the perpetrator of an ordinary crime, but judicious use of science by both criminal and detective heightens the interest because it puts the two combatants on a more equal plane.
(3) As most of our readers are scientifically minded, the methods used by criminal or detective must be rational, logical and feasible. Now, this does not limit the author's imagination; he can develop many imaginative uses of science, provided they are reasonable. For example: one author sent us a story of a man who rendered himself invisible by painting his clothes and face with a non-light reflecting paint. By explaining some of the laws of light and color he made this accomplishment sound plausible, as indeed it is. But he forgot to mention the shadow which is naturally cast by any object standing in the light, whether or not it is visible to our eyes. Readers of our magazine pick us up on these little details. To avoid such mistakes in writing, which really arise from lack of thought, consider your story from every angle before you write your final copy.
(4) What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer. Here again the author must remember that his work will be read by competent scientists among our readers; and, without careful reference to the encyclopedia, no descriptions of scientific instruments should be included in your stories. If you are not in touch with a Public Library, it is advisable to buy a few really good reference books. Criminoscientific fiction has come to stay and your investment will pay you dividends.

Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New stuff from Apple

I've lost track of the number of people who wrote to me about all of Apple's announcements yesterday at MacWorld Tokyo, but Rael linked to some of the best coverage I've seen. In a nutshell:

They raised the price on the new "desk-lamp" iMacs

They shipped a 10GB iPod (dammit!) (where's my upgrade offer?)

They shipped a new iPod updater that supports contacts (export your contacts to from your PIM to .vcf format, drop the file into your iPod's new "Contacts" folder and then browse away) and EQ presets

They shipped an even bigger, more unattainable flatscreen display (Fred points out that there's "no mention of DRM built into its digital input")

Link Discuss (via Raelity Bytes)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

b3ta needs $5,000

b3ta, a great group blog, is losing its free hosting and needs to raise $5k to cover its bandwidth for a year -- it's up to about $3500 now, all from reader donations. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:23:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPod by Dior

Christian Dior has designed an iPod case. An unattractive iPod case. Link Discuss (via MacSlash)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Treating tinnitus like phantom limbs

Tinnitus -- a persistent, largely untreatable ringing in the ears -- can be is fantastically debilitating. Severe tinnitus sufferers can't sleep, sometimes can't even hear. Now, German scientists are testing a promising tinnitus therapy based on the system used to help amputees recover from phantom-limb pain.

Flor's group has successfully treated amputees by asking them to recognise the position and frequency of non-painful electric shocks applied to their stumps. The shocks stimulated the corresponding brain areas and persuaded them to expand again. This reduced the patients' pain by almost 70 per cent.
Flor believes tinnitus is also a kind of phantom sensation, so her group tried using the same principle in reverse to treat it. They trained nine people with chronic tinnitus to discriminate between different pairs of tones, closely matched, that were pitched at frequencies near to the phantom noises.
The patients trained two hours a day over four weeks, after which they reported a 35 per cent reduction in their tinnitus. A control group that trained using unrelated tones showed no improvement.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:16:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Simpsons Math

Math from the Simpsons -- turns out that the Simpsons is chock-full-o nerd humor. I was raised by a math teacher: Dad, are you reading this?

Kid:� How come we�ve never seen you in school?
Bart:� I don�t go to school.
Kid:� OK, what�s 2 plus 2?
Bart:� 5.
Kid:� Ah, his story checks out.

Link (site is under Slashdot load -- here'a a mirror at archive.org) Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:59:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hong Kong comes to Toronto

Hong Kong is one of my faovrite cities in the world -- Toronto is another. Since my adolescence, there's been a massive influx of Hong Kong people to Toronto, which has established entire neighborhoods that might have been lifted from HK and dropped into the city. It's fantastic.

Shops in the Pacific Mall carry big glass jars filled with salty sour prunes, garlic-flavored brown beans, spicy shredded squid, and chocolates the shape of firecrackers. Green teas are brewed with every fruit under the sun. House accessory stores exhibit an enormous array of porcelain vases and Buddha and dragon statuettes, and there is a feng shui consultant on the second floor to advise how to distribute the imported wares in just the right way to assure good luck, health and prosperity.
Young people are attracted to the plush karaoke booths, a noisy video game arcade with games featuring martial arts and Chinese pop music, and the chance to practice their native tongue.
"Chinese malls provide the identity that many Canadian Chinese want," said Lilian Lau, 17. She said she avoided stores like Gap and Stitches, which are nowhere to be seen in Pacific Mall, adding: "I don't want to look like everyone else. Chinese designers have different ideas."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

An exhibit people are dying to get into!

Controversy surrounds the London opening of Body Worlds, an amazing display of 175 body parts and 25 corpses all preserved by draining bodily fluids and pumping in a reactive polymer that hardens when cured. Link Discuss (Thanks Jenn!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:45:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Something big and seekrit at MacWorld Tokyo

Apple seems prepared to unveil something wondrous, seekrit and hypeful at MacWorld Tokyo. My money's on a PDA. Or a time-machine.

Even the tops of the booths are draped in the thick material, preventing workmen on ladders or lighting gantries from peeking inside. Adding to the air of mystery, a fluorescent glow from inside the booths can be seen where the curtains meet the floor.
Each booth is under the watchful eye of a pair of uniformed guards, stationed at opposite corners to give them a commanding view of all four sides...
In addition, there was a large metal box on wheels at the corner of Apple's display area. The box, which appeared to be designed for air freight, was also watched over by a uniformed guard. It was adorned with a prominent red sticker that said, "Apple Booth: Secret."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I will ignore animals' advice

Talking Heads reunite and perform for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Link Discuss (via Amygdala)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:39:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The secret lives of toys and dolls

Gabrielle writes: "Imaginative photographs exploring the secret lives of toys and dolls, with over 60 images from 6 different series since 1989." The one on the left is called Carnevale at the Hotel of the Bridge of Sighs. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

A tribute to tribute bands

Hilarious New York Times Magazine article about tribute bands.

I am the first reporter who has ever done a story on Paradise City. This is less a commentary on Paradise City -- named after one of Guns N' Roses' biggest hits -- and more a commentary on the phenomenon of tribute bands, arguably the most universally maligned sector of rock 'n' roll. These are bands mired in obscurity and engaged in a bizarre zero-sum game: if a tribute band were to succeed completely, its members would essentially cease to exist. Their goal is not to be somebody; their goal is to be somebody else.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:09:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spam Radio

This guy makes songs from the spam he receives by running them though a text-to-speech synthesizer and adding an ambient soundtrack.Link Discuss (Thanks, boogah!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:08:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A real-life Lara Croft?

Michael sez: "This woman, now old and frail, wedded a French industrialist, kicked Nazi ass, and became the most decorated woman in World War II. Too bad Angelina Jolie didn't play her in a movie. There is more than a passing resemblence."

There were 22,000 German troops in the area and initially 3-4,000 Maquis. Gaspard�s recruitment work, with the help of Wake, bolstered the numbers to 7,000. Nancy led these men in guerrilla warfare, inflicting severe damage on German troops and facilities. She collected and distributed weapons and ensured that her radio operatives maintained contact with the SOE in Britain.�
On one occasion Nancy cycled 500 km through several German checkpoints to replace codes her wireless operator had been forced to destroy in a German raid. Without these there would be no fresh orders or drops of weapons and supplies. Of all the amazing things she did during the war, Nancy believes this marathon ride was the most useful. She covered the distance in 71 hours, cycling through countryside and mountains almost non-stop. Her focus was rock steady to the end of her epic journey, when she wept in pain and relief.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:48:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

100 best characters of the 1900s

100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900, from Book magazine, March/April 2002

1 - Jay Gatsby, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
2 - Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, 1951
3 - Humbert Humbert, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
4 - Leopold Bloom, Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922
5 - Rabbit Angstrom, Rabbit, Run, John Updike, 1960
6 - Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902
7 - Atticus Finch, To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1960
8 - Molly Bloom, Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922
9 - Stephen Dedalus, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
10 - Lily Bart, The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton, 1905

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:29:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Wild Sloth Chase

Alex Steffen's working on a collaborative travelogue about all those present-day places that the future has leaked into:

Bruce Chatwin starts his book, In Patagonia, by describing the piece of dark and hairy dried-out giant sloth hide that sat in his grandmother's cabinet, and how dreams of finding a giant sloth drew him to South America. In Patagonia is not about giant sloths. But the giant sloth pulls him along -- sloth-sightings and rumors of sloths drive the book. And in searching for the giant sloth, he finds Patagonia.
Here's what I'm asking: send me your giant sloths. Tell me what in your city (or any city you know well) has the stink of the new on it. What art, what architecture, which community groups, what design innovations fill you with hope, awe you, give you shivers? I have some great leads, enough to convince a publisher to pay me to take this trip, at least. But I need your help.
In a sense, this book may well be the world's first network-supported travelogue. It's an experiment -- and you get play. Use the Giant Sloth link to the left. Send me your lead. You can do it anonymously or not. Anyone whose story is actually used in the book will get an author�s copy, handsomely personalized, directly out of my little stash. And, of course, you can follow my progress on this crappy little blog.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:31:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

500 billion tons of south-pole ice melted in the past 30 days

500 billion tons of ice have melted in Antarctica in the past month. As Michael says, "Glug glug." Link Discuss (Thanks Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:03:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Projector-based keyboards

"A full-size fully functional virtual keyboard that can be projected and touched on any surface is shown by Siemens Procurement Logistics Services at the CeBIT fair in Hanover, northern Germany, on Monday, March 18, 2002. The virtual interface from Developer VKB Inc. from Jerusalem in Israel can be integrated in mobile phones, laptops, tablet PCs, or clean, sterile and medical environments and could be a revolution for the data entry of any mini computer. The mini projector that detects user interaction with the surface also simulates a mousepad." I tried to visit the manufacturer's site the other day, but they incorrectly detected that my browser wasn't Java compatible (it is) and wouldn't show me the site. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jef!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:57:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This tastes red! And smells triangular!

A new scientific study explores the uber-psychedelic alternate reality of a synesthete. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:51:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

9-11 teen idiom

Teenagers have assimilated 9-11 and given us a rich, bountiful harvest of insensitive slang to thrill to:

Their bedrooms are "ground zero." Translation? A total mess.
A mean teacher? He's "such a terrorist."
A student is disciplined? "It was total jihad."
Petty concerns? "That's so Sept. 10."
And out-of-style clothes? "Is that a burqa?"

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Co-starring Leonardo DeCaprio as the American Taliban...

Bin Ladin's half brother Sheikh Ahmad has kindly volunteered to play his big bro in the inevitable Hollywood blockbuster. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:23:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AOL pimps out Alfred E Neuman

AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape-Crazy Joe's Discount BBQ is whoring poor old Alfred E Neuman out to Land's End.

Although Mad's founder, the late William Gaines, once vowed to teach kids not to believe in ads, his cartoon protege has chosen another path, dishing out product endorsements for everything from Lucky jeans to Tang to computer gear. "Advertisers are realizing Neuman puts a smile on people's face and creates immediate brand recognition," says Joel Ehrlich, senior vice president of advertising and promotions for DC Comics and Warner Bros., Mad's parent company.

Link Discuss (via This Modern World)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New sound effect at Disneyland Haunted Mansion

The Disneyland Haunted Mansion has added a kind of growling chuckling to the ride's end, after the "Hurry baaa-ck, hurry baaa-ck" sequence. Click below to download an mpeg clip of the sound effect. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stephen King by infrared

The publicity for the new Stephen King collection is killer: infrared-equipped totems across Manhattan are continuously beaming excerpts from the stories to any PalmOS device in range. It's too bad that the NYT piece appears to have been written by someone who's tragically humor-impaired. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:46:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jonl on SXSW

Jon Lebkowsky's take on SXSW in the new Mindjack:

Embedded Linux in task-specific devices that are more flexible and scalable (single-use devices can have multiple uses - e.g. a clock that also measures a room's temperature and moisture levels and "tells" the air conditioning system what it needs to do. Games that are actually sophisticated interactive narratives offering diverse perspectives and plot paths. Activist networks that are increasingly sophisticated in their responses on issues and events. Local virtual communities that pull 'hoods together in intriguing ways. New ways to think about intellectual property and innovation. New structures for activist networks that change the face of politics�

Link Discuss (Thanks, jonl!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:40:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, March 18, 2002

Beck's iPod in ASCII

Fred just walked into my office and rhapsodized over the back page of the Sunday NYT Magazine, which had an ASCII-art sillhouette of Beck's head made up of the names of all the songs on Beck's iPod, with some marketing copy explaining that Beck has a ginormous library of MP3s from which he loads 5GB at random onto his iPod every day. Then I opened up Kottke.org and there was a link to a PDF of the ad (minus the marketing copy), which is indeed cool. What would be even cooler wwould be a script that randomly dumps 5GB out of your library onto your iPod at every sync, overwriting the previous contents -- I hate having to triage my collection to choose which stuff I'm going to take with me; I'm willing to yeild to serendipity. Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:15:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Plastic in the 1950s

This timeline of the history of plastic in the 1950s is simply yummy.

1957: The 'House of Tomorrow' opens at Disneyland. Created by Monsanto, its walls, roof, floors, rugs and furniture are all made of plastic. (It's so strong that the wrecking crew has trouble demolishing it years later.) The injection-molded polyethylene Frisbee is developed. The Hula Hoop is introduced (right); the fad peaks in 1958 (over one million pounds per week of polyethylene plastic is consumed trying to keep up with demand); it's dead by '59. Loma Industries produces the first 20-gallon plastic trash container.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Thor!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:39:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Six months in video collage

Guerrilla News Network has put together this amazing video-collage of news footage, audio and stock footage recapping the events since 9-11. By turns funny, outrageous, stilted and thought-provoking, this is one of the most interesting files I've ever downloaded. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Defunct amusement parks

This gallery of defunct amusement parks is indefinably and infinitely sad for me. There's something quaint and charming about a wooden coaster surrounded by tall grass an d ragweed, about naive midway games, about the crackled paint on the fat, psychotically cheerful lettering on the signage. Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:08:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spiders on drugs

The web on the left was spun by a normal spider; the one on the right was spun by a spider who'd been dosed with caffeine. This page has webs spun by spiders on LSD, hashish and mescaline, too. Where do arachnologists get LSD? Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:00:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Firecracker Alternative Book Awards

Vote for your favorite alternabooks in the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Awards. Some of my favorites from this year are on the ballot: Kelly Link's "Stranger Things Happen," Haruki Murakami's "Underground," Chomsky's "9/11," Shoichi Aoki's "Fruits," Joe Sacco's "Palestine," and Lemony Snicket's "The Hostile Hospital." Link Discuss (Thanks, Gavin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:06:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC update on the theory

BBC update on the theory that the CIA was involved in the anthrax attacks. Three weeks ago Dr Barbara Rosenberg - an acknowledged authority on US bio-defence - claimed the FBI is dragging its feet because an arrest would be embarrassing to the US authorities. Tonight on Newsnight, she goes further...suggesting there could have been a secret CIA field project to test the practicalities of sending anthrax through the mail - whose top scientist went badly off the rails... Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:33:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dan Bricklin on the Treo

Programming whiz Dan Bricklin reviews the Handspring Treo 180, a mobile phone that uses the Palm OS. "Bottom line: A tiny keyboard and clever programming increase the usability of a PDA by a noticeable amount." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:29:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ferrari themepark

Ferrari is planning a sportscar themepark. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:50:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, March 17, 2002

Who watches the newsmen?

Great roundup of newspaper watchdog sites that painstakingly dissect each day's issue of major media organs, pointing out lies, omissions, errors and inconsistencies. There used to be a great lefty print zine called "Lies of Our Times" that did this on a monthly basis for the NYTimes -- good to see the idea resurrected, I've missed it.

"I started SmarterTimes.com to illuminate for people who viewed The New York Times�as infallible wisdom from on high that the paper had flaws," he said. Stoll had a more personal reason for wanting to spear the Times, too.�
"At the Forward, I was often frustrated that I would write a story and then weeks or even months later, the Times�would run it without giving me credit � sometimes getting some of the basic facts wrong or leaving out points of view," he said.�

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:33:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daisyfresh corpses, courtesy of Oil of Olay

Who needs embalming when industrial civilization provides all manner of pricey preservatives and anti-aging elixirs?

Head of the team from the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Professor Rainer Horn, is quoted by the Sunday Express as saying: "The natural decomposition processes are being slowed down. If it's happening here, it's probably a problem everywhere."
Berlin undertaker Walter Mueller said: "Bodies that went into the ground 30 years ago look like they went in last week. It's like people have been pickled in preservatives.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:54:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Four hours of audio from Fray Cafe 2

One of the highlights of SXSW for me was Derek Powazek's Fray Cafe, a four-hour open-mic storytelling event that was basically spoken blogging (in more ways than one, since most of those on the mic were bloggers). Derek's posted photos and four hours of audio from the event to his site. Unfortunately, the audio's all in Real format, so us OSX folks can't listen in, but it's worth rebooting into OS9 for. Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Me reading from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Jonathan from Kill Your TV recorded my reading at SXSW -- it's a sixteen minute excerpt from chapter six of my forthcoming novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." I had fifteen minutes, but I went overtime. All told, it's an 6.1MB MP3 -- the sound quality is amazing, considering that this was recorded with a camcorder's directional mic at an outdoor event.

I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything on Zed. She only talked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn't do, and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whim that crossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bareskinned and spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.
I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangle her twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days, floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior. She had no way of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I was watching. Or maybe she didn't, and she was making faces for anyone's benefit.
But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and her eyes full of the stars she'd seen and her metallic skin cool with the breath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through the station, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher and shinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and bubbles as we interrupted a thousand acts of coitus.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jonathan) (Photo credit: Denise)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, March 16, 2002

Tell the FCC how you feel about Sirius

Over on 802.11b Networking News, Glen's calling on WiFi enthusiasts to write to the FCC in response to Siruis's anti-freedom petition against 802.11b. Sounds like a plan to me:

Let's raise a ruckus. Time to contact the FCC and offer some public feedback. Time to call and write Agere, 3Com, Linksys, D-Link, Cisco, Apple, Buffalo, SMC, Asante, Proxim, and others and alert them to this issue and get them to have their lobbyists go to work. Time to remind the Bush administration of the freedom of the marketplace, and that spectrumholders hold spectrum only at the sufferance of the public good. Time to call the IT department at your company and have them write letters to your congressmen. Alert your CEO. Call IBM and tell them that their hundreds of millions in savings (internally) and revenue (through IBM Global Services) is about to go kerblooey.
Let's take a stand on spectrum.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sirius's hate-literature for the FCC

Here's a link to a 1MB PDF of Sirius's (boo-hiss, rot in the trashbin of history, you motherless sons of dogs!) petition to the FCC to shut down 802.11 so that their craptacular sat radio service can operate without interference. Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steampunk car-wars

Landships of Ouargistan is a strategy wargame that's like the beloved Car Wars, but involves fictional steam-powered Victorian "Landships," inspired by HG Wells. Ouargistan gamers trade plans for their fictional vehicles along with downloadable 3D art you can use to generate your own game-tokens. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Autocomplete for BBEdit

Tired of retyping the same long words over and over again in BBEdit? I've just scored this terrific freeware autocompletion module for BBEdit for OS X -- just type the first few letters of a word that appears in any of your open windows, type cmd-/ and biff-bam, the first matching word is inserted; keep hitting cmd-/ to get to the right word. Autocomplete is just about my favorite thing for computers to do. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:54:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Every time you forward that picture, God kills a Domo-Kun

This K5 story does an admirable job of explaining why all your inexplicable Japanese turds-with-eyes are belong to kittens. Link Discuss (Thanks, Thor!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:07:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Car-sized wasp-nest

Kiwi pest-control authorities are fighting a holding-action against a car-sized wasp-nest.

Ecology professor Robin Fordham says the nest will have a complex structure and all the wasps won't have been killed.
The Massey University associate professor says the nest probably has separate, walled-off internal sections.
It's also possible Queen wasps have settled nearby after escaping from the attack, he says.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

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

Lightspeed Japanese fashion

This incredible piece on Japanese fashion makes me want to follow Justin's advice, hop on a $500 plane, check into a $30/night coffin, and get my brain melted.

One of the striking things about spending any time among fashion-conscious Japanese kids is how utterly nerdy they can be in their pursuit of cool. In Europe and the United States fashion falls decisively into the category of the frivolous and playful; in Japan the right T-shirt or cap is sought with a kind of dogged intensity, and not just by a fringe group of fanatics. Japanese boys in particular seem to treat fashion in a manner appropriate to stamp collecting or train spotting. Entire magazines are dedicated to the subject of teen boys' haircuts. The look of the moment is to have it bleached to a coppery color, cut into spiky peaks on top, and left shaggy around the ears and neck. The style is called "the wolf," although the boys look less lupine than feline, as if they were chorus members from "Cats."...
The past couple of years saw the flourishing of the yamamba, or "mountain witch" girls, who tanned their skin dark brown, teased their bleached hair into silver snarls, and wore pale pearlized lipstick of the sort not seen since Dusty Springfield; they appear mostly to have retreated back to the mountains, though there are still a substantial number of tanned-and-blonded girls to be seen who model themselves on the look of Ayumi Hamazaki, one of Japan's several Britney Spears derivatives. These girls can usually be found hanging around a store called Egoist, which for a time was so trendy that the salesgirls themselves became icons. They appeared in the company's catalogue, and some of them established their own Web sites to dispense advice to their followers. One of the Egoist girls, a twenty-three-year-old named Shizue Nohara, told me that she'd worked at Egoist for three years. "I like to be the leader and have other people follow me," she said. She was dressed in a gray rabbit-fur jacket and bluejeans, Egoist's theme for the season being "Rodeo Girl." The previous season had been "Sexy and Boyish."

Link Discuss (via Amygdala)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:27:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Kelly on the future of music

Kevin Kelly's written an excellent essay on the past, present and future of music. He goes farther than a lot of us are willing to, and actually proposes some ways that people might make money off of freely traded music. None of them seem massively compelling to me, but Kelly's a sharper sumbitch than I.

At first glance it seems audiences were drawn to online music because of the power of the free, but in reality the rush to online music came from digitized sound's ever-expanding power of liquidity. Once music could swirl around one's life unencumbered, the millions of people who downloaded peer-to-peer file-sharing software suddenly and simultaneously imagined a thousand ways to conjure with music's liquidity. It wasn't only that it was free; it was all the things you could do with it.
Once music is digitized, new behaviors emerge. With liquid music you have the power to reorder the sequence of tunes on an album, or among albums. To surgically morph a sound until it is suitable for a new use. To precisely extract from someone else's music a sample of notes to use oneself. To X-ray the guts of music and outline its structure, and then alter it. To substitute new lyrics. To rearrange a piece so that its parts yield a different voice. To re-engineer a piece so that it sounds better on a car woofer. To meld and marry music together into hybrid breeds. To shorten a piece, or to draw it out so that it takes twice as long to play.
With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again.

Link Discuss (via Scripting News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:14:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Facemaker

Thor (who shares my birthday!) sez: "Not a lot of info on this Russian sight, but great flash work. The idea is to build a face from various selections of hair, eyes, mouths etc. Sort of like the police do." Link Discuss (Thanks, Thor!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:01:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sirius Sat Radio deserves immediate bankruptcy, followed by expunging from the historical records and salting of their fields. Bastards.

Sirius, a carpetbagger sat radio service, has petitioned the FCC to restrict -- and possibly eliminate -- the unregulated use of the 2.4GHz band. These weasels haven't shipped their sat radio service, but they're pewling over the raw speculation that use of 2.4GHz in 802.11 and other technologies might interfere with their service.

Check it: These guys are asking the Feds to eliminate the single most exciting technology to hit the noosphere in the past five years, a profoundly democratic and paradigm-shifting technology and these guys want to get rid of it because they're worried that it might interfere with a commercial service that they haven't even demonstrated a need, a use or a wish for. These stinking whores are asking the FCC to eliminate a bottom-up, popular technology that puts people online with minimal infrastructure (i.e., putting hundreds of people at SXSW online last week with $300 worth of gear and ten minutes' work) in favor of the most centralized technology imaginable: Sattelite. Expensive, high-latency, heavily regulated, out of reach to all but the richest and most powerful of us.

They should be ashamed of themselves. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:38:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 15, 2002

Muskox flavored condoms

AIDS is out of control in the Arctic. Hence:

The Pauktuutit Inuit Women's Association will try to promote safer sex by distributing specially designed arctic condoms at the 2002 Arctic Winter Games.
The condoms advertise that they taste like like arctic char or muskox. In fact, they don't, but they are meant to send a strong message.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:33:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Airport porn

New pervy airport scanning machines let security staff probe your innermost innards with EM waves. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:44:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

OSX in 3D

3DOSX is a three-dimensional Finder replacement for OS X that runs on machines with OpenGL accelerated hardware. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scoo!)

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

Bakers squeezed by supermarkets

The entertainment industry isn't the only pit of payola and corruption -- witness this testimony from a rep from the Independent Bakers Association on the practice of "slotting fees" -- bribes that supermarkets demand from manufacturers who want their products carried in a way that is likely to generate sales.

* A New England supermarket chain was purchased approximately five years ago by an individual who used the proceeds of slotting fees to cover a portion of the equity for the purchase. A "pay or stay" slotting fee was required for each item in the supermarket.
* A New York area supermarket chain regularly charges $20,000.00 for each new item introduced by a food manufacturer, as well as "requesting" annual contributions to the purchasing manager's Christmas party.
* A West Coast supermarket chain was solicited and paid a one million dollar fee to change from one food manufacturer's products to another's. The justification was cost of computer reprogramming.

Link Discuss (via Peterme)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:41:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disneyland Paris 2

Disneyland Paris has opened its second park, an MGM Studios sort of thing. Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:01:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Get the Shrub an intern

Does the Shrub just need some extramarital release?

We, the undersigned, in the interest of international harmony and seeking an end to all violence in this world, do hereby call on the president of the United States, George W. Bush, to find a fully consenting adult intern to service his sexual needs.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Invoicing for product placement in sf novel

My pal Jim Munroe's a funny guy and a hell of a science fiction writer. In his new novel, Everyone in Silico, he references a bunch of corporate brands. Pre-empting any nastygrams that the trademark holders might fire his way, he invoiced all the companies that he mentioned in his book for the "product-placement." The collection of mystified responses and his replies is priceless.

Telephone call, March 14th, 1:30pm
Hello?
Hello, can I speak to Jim Munroe from No Media Kings?
This is Jim.
I'm Chris Gorley from Starbucks in Seattle, and we were wondering about your invoice...?
Yes?
Who did you talk to about pre-arranging this?
I didn't talk to anyone.
Well, it's a very minimal amount, but unless you talked to someone in the Starbucks Family about pre-arranging this...
Uh huh. Well, it's just such a small amount compared to what you pay for movies...
Yes, you're right, I deal with the film and TV arrangements... I received your original invoice, but quite frankly I didn't know what to make of it so I sat on it for a while... and I just got the letter... It sounds like from your letter that we're on your bad guy list, I'm sorry about that. This bit about "dark skinned foreigners languishing"... what did you mean?
Well, it's just that the pickers who provide your coffee get paid very little, and it's only recently that you've even considered fair trade sources. And Starbucks quashed a boycott many years ago by promising to investigate this, but never did...

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:21:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

P2P teaching

Pat sez:

This is the best program I have -ever- seen for integrated web materials into day-to-day education. Most times a free-wheeling web search is just too time-consuming and unfocused for a 45 minute class. Worse, the amount of actual learning that goes on is almost nil. A big a fan of the net as I am, I had almost stopped using it until WebQuest.
It's peer-to-peer at its purest (imho). Teachers design interesting, involving units, they pre-screan web sites and plug them in, then send the whole thing into the ether for other teachers. The quality varies a lot, but, then so does the quality of all school materials.
The beauty of Webquest is that everybody follows the same basic template, lists specific learning objectives, evaluation rules etc. Most important, each WebQuest lists the Learning Standard it addresses. Learning Standards rule our lives these days as we try to justify what we're teaching.
That consistancy and those controls are what the web-based learning has been missing up until now. I predict that WebQuest will cause a quiet revolution in the way computers are used in the classroom.

I'm the only member of my immediate family who isn't a teacher -- this stuff is endlessly fascinating to me. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patty!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:07:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Language-aware email worm

A new email worm propagates itself in Japanese to addressees in the .jp top-level domain, English for everyone else... How long before these things start doing whois queries and customizing themselves for .coms and other generic top-level domains? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:01:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The space-fungus that ate Mir

Amazing article on the rapidly mutating space fungus that ate Mir.

Penetrating into every single corner of the station, they showed an enormous appetite and demonstrated their capacity to eat up even highly durable materials. A vivid example of the bacteria's' "outrage" is illustrated by what happened to the window of a transportation spacecraft that docked to Mir when piloted by its last crew. Some time after docking, the cosmonauts' attention was drawn to the rapidly deteriorating window glass. It was covered by a strange film, spreading "as quickly as in the horror movies," and became absolutely non-transparent.
The test results raised the researchers' eyebrows. It turned out the quartz glass and the titan, which framed it, were damaged by a large colony of bacteria. As experts explained later, these microorganisms exuded a metabolism product--an acid so strong that it could easily corrode the window the creatures had settled on.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dennis!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:42:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Taschen e-postcards

Taschen, purveyors of unspeakably great photography books, have selected some incredible images from their books for use in e-postcards. Some good vintage raunch here, too. Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:34:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tim O'Reilly responds to Michael Eisner

Tim O'Reilly responds to Michael Eisner's characterization of the technology industry as a bunch of theives.

According to the NY Times story, Michael Eisner of Disney says that he doubts that "any new business model could compete with digital copies that were free, flawless, and accessible from the comfort of his prospective customers' living rooms." And Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation reportedly suggested that matters might be different if the tables were turned. "Let's say I decide to broadcast on my network the code for how to make Intel chips or Microsoft software," he said. "I think they'd find a way to stop it."
These entertainment and publishing industry executives are either being disingenuous or are ignorant of both technology and history. The software industry faces exactly the same conditions that the entertainment industry fears will destroy its markets. Software is digital, easily and perfectly copyable, and pirated copies are in fact available through a variety of illicit channels, but that hasn't kept companies like Microsoft from going on to become among the largest and most successful in the world. What's more, copy protection was widely explored by software companies in the 1980's, and what they learned was that consumers avoided copy-protected products. Consumer behavior gave marketplace advantage to companies that didn't use copy protection, and after a relatively short time, the industry got over its fears and got back to offering products that people were glad to pay for.

Link Discuss

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

Quirks and Quarks is not dead!

Quirks and Quarks, CBC Radio's brilliant weekly science show, has been spared from the budgetman's axe. Yay! Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:06:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

'Reading Lord of the Rings: The Final Attempt': An Analysis of a Web Community

My pal Debbie reported on her final attempt to read Lord of the Rings in her online journal, and spawned a healthy discussion board where fans of the book helped her get its nuances. This was in turn fascinating enough to spawn an academic presentation from a Tolkien scholar at the University of Oklahoma, called "'Reading Lord of the Rings: The Final Attempt': An Analysis of a Web Community." Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

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

Roald Dahl's "Pig," illustrated by photoshopper

A photoshopper has created a series of collage illustrations to accompany Roald Dahl's creepy, macabre short story "Pig."

...but if you ask adult or child about the macabre story of a boy whose parents are murdered in his first year, and sees out the final moments of his last hanging from a butcher�s hook, the chances are that this author�s name would not be the first to spring to mind. However, by Roald Dahl it is, and it�s a particularly grisly tale too.

Link Discuss (via K5)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:52:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unix cereal

Other trademark uses for "Unix" from around the world. Link Discuss (via Chumpsquad)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Deep Impact: Comet gets what's coming to it

Vanessa sez: "The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has decided to get back at those nasty comets for all the times they slammed into the Earth. In 2005, JPL will crash a 770-lb. payload into the comet Tempel 1, supposedly in order to get the first-ever look at the inside of a comet. The impact will be visible from Earth. Hey comet, do you like apples? We're going to take a football-field-sized crater out of your core, how do you like them apples?" Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:58:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

3G and 802.11b peacefully co-existing

Are 802.11 and 3G natural enemies? DoCoMo -- the giant Japanese telco that eats schoolgirl fads and craps out neuromancer futures -- is rolling out 802.11b networking in Japan at the same time as they're installing 3G cellular data networks. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:51:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A new way to represent 802.11 signal

Those pushpin maps of 802.11 coverage are going to be useless once, mwahahaha, community wirless activists take over the world and a) put a broadband connection into every residence and; b) connect a base-station to every broadband connection. Jason's proposed an alternative way of representing the density and presence of our beloved parasitic grid. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, March 14, 2002

Kottke are four today

Kottke.org is four years old today -- happy b-day, you old-skool blogger, you. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:19:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Interactive armageddon

What do you get when you tie a Mapquest-style GIS database in with the OTA's estimates of nuclear damage? An interactive Web-app that lets you see what'll happen to the people and structures in your ZIP code in the event that a nuke is dropped nearby. Link Discuss (Thanks, Higgins!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:32:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My T-Shirt Iron On in Action

Here's a pic of someone wearing a shirt from one of my iron ons. I'd love to post more pics of people who bought my iron ons. Send 'em in! Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:47:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google News

Google has a news search site (in beta). Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:37:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nano-armor

MIT wins the contract to develop nano-armor for the US military. Mecha-Rumsfeld!

"Imagine the psychological impact upon a foe when encountering squads of seemingly invincible warriors protected by armor and endowed with superhuman capabilities, such as the ability to leap over 20-foot walls," ISN director Ned Thomas said in a release.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:26:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Multiple Origami

Thepod is a temporary geodesic housing structure made out of folded and stiffened fibreboard.

When the hollow triangular panels are assembled to form a complete structure, the principle of convection goes to work, and as the exterior structural surface heats up, air inside the hollow panels will slowly expand and rise.� As the warmer air exits the top vents, cooler air is drawn into vents located along the ground facing edge of the structure effectively washing away the heat before it can be transferred to the interior of the structure.��

Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:52:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fight the Mouse desktops

Matt "Metafilter" Haughey was so inspired by Lessig's keynote at SXSW that he's cooked up this groovy desktop texture that you can install to impress your friends with your committment to rebooting copyright. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:31:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This is a lovely paeon

This is a lovely paeon to the historical role of the Mac in bringing computing to the world.

Here, finally, was that machine. The Macintosh met us halfway in our interaction, speaking a human language and encouraging us to open ourselves to our potential. Possibilities appeared before us, not as obstacles to surmount, but as a welcoming, forgiving environment for experimentation and discovery. It was the foundation of what we called "The Macintosh Way" and it became part of our lives and soon part of the entire culture. Every aspect of what we've come to know as "the personal computer," even from the Mac imitators, grew from the rich subliminal philosophy of The Macintosh Way. Without the grand new paradigm of the Macintosh, we would still think of the computer as simply the extension of a mainframe, as a taskmaster instead of as a portal to a better world.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Roger!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:13:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NatGeo's famous cover girl found

Seventeen years after she appeared on the cover of National Geographic, the green-eyed Afghan girl has been rediscovered. (Thanks, Alena!) Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:50:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged

Steve Portigal sez: "Canadian cyborg Steve Mann encountered ridiculous problems when trying to board an Air Canada flight from Nfld to YYZ. When they made him get on board without his computer display eyeglasses, he had to use a wheelchair and fell and hit his head at one point." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:24:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The entire 1911 Encylopedia Britannica,

The entire 1911 Encylopedia Britannica, scanned, OCRed and posted online.

When reading the articles of the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, it may help to keep in mind the time period in which this was published. The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of unprecedented wealth, and an age of great technological achievements when humankind bragged that it could build an ocean liner that God, Himself, couldn't sink. It was a time of honesty when people said what they felt, in spite of whom they may offend. It was a time of great passions and the beginnings of serious reforms in society. Teddy Roosevelt and his trustbusters had not yet dissolved the great business conglomerates of Standard Oil, the Motion Pictures Patent Company and U.S. Steel. The economy was booming -- sort of. Yet with all the razzle-dazzle, the early part of the twentieth century was still an age of innocence when the syrupy-sweet sentimental movies of D.W. Griffith were major box office draws and novels like "Trail of the Lonesome Pine" dominated bestseller lists.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:33:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Holy crap -- Slashdotted thrice

Holy crap -- Slashdotted thrice in a week! This time, I resolve not to read comments at -1. Slashdot's got a partial transcript of Bruce's and my keynote on "The Death of Scarcity" at SXSW. The author points out another partial transcript here, at Krow's Livejournal. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Now this is extreme

Now this is extreme knitting: an iPod cozy! Link Discuss (via Raelity Bytes)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:51:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Special Google syntax

Researchbuzz has continued its excellent work uncovering hidden Google features. Today it describes how to mix Google's special tags:

Say I want .edu pages about Mae Jemison. Google now allows the following search:�
allintitle:"mae jemison" site:edu

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Support Therapeutic Cloning With One Click

You can automatically have your senators faxed a letter showing your support for stem cell research and somatic cell nuclear transfer (therapeutic cloning). This is very important. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:31:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, March 13, 2002

Googlebombing? What Googlebombing?

Doc's written a good rant in response to the Beeb's hysterical piece on Googlebombing (the practice of bloggers linking en masse to some non-sequitur page in order to make it an authoratative result on Google):

�As the piece does accurately report, if corporations are getting bombed, it's not by themselves or their friends. Look up Unisys on Google, and then down the front page of search results at the Burn All GIFs link. How do you think it got there, hmm?
And does it freaking matter? No. Does this story give any sense of how Google really works, or how little any of this has any effect on 99.999.999.999% of the searches going on out there? No.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:19:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saving entertainment from itself

George Scriban's written a great rant on how technologists keep on saving the "content" industry from its own neophobia.

what's strange is that every technology that makes it easier for us to consume media inevitably benefits the content producers. when the technology creates new distribution channels (as in the case with radio, television, and cable), content must be provided to fill those channels. when technology makes it easier for us to listen/watch/play when and where we want (as did the the VCR, audio compact cassette, compact disc, and Walkman-style personal stereo) we always created an upswing in the sales of "prerecorded" media.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:51:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hawai'i guerrilla wireless

Having just spent a couple days keeping the modest 802.11 network running at SXSW, I read this piece on a one-man island-wide community network in Hawai'i with great interest. I'm particularily fascinated by how the guerrilla netowrker secured the rights of way for his base-stations:

One of Wiecking's base stations is on a solar-powered ranger's cabin halfway up Mauna Kea, the Big Island's 13,800-foot volcano; the state Department of Fish and Wildlife uses a remote camera there to keep an eye on a feeding station for the endangered state bird, the nene. The camera streams video back to a ranger station at the base of the volcano. Meanwhile, Wiecking's 13-year-old stepson, Andrew, recently used the technology for an inventive solution to sibling management. He placed wireless cameras around the house to spy on his younger brother and sister. "I put a stop to that," says Wiecking's wife, Sydney. "Our bedroom could have been next."

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:43:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SXSW keynote review

Bruce Sterling and I did a keynote at SXSW yesterday on "The Death of Scarcity." The Austin Chronicle sez we done good!

Sterling ended the session by reading gleefully from a news report about a riot in Chiapas that started with a raid by the police on some vendors of pirated software, hinting perhaps at real consumer price wars in our future. Doctorow ended with a comment on media industries, like Disney, and how they will make it in the age of Open Source. Disney will have to rely on its theme parks, for one thing, Doctorow asserted, since physical locations can't be downloaded.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Meryl!)

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

Forgotten girlie mags

Popcult Magazine's running a terrific retrospective of forgotten girlie mags. Mark turned me on to Kayo Books last year, here in San Francisco, and I was delighted to discover their fantastic collection of reasonably priced lift-and-separate smut. Link Discuss (Thanks, Coury!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:28:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moore's signing raided by riot-police

Michael Moore's new book, "Stupid White Men," is a hell of a read. It's one of those exhaustive, nagging, delightfully one-sided polemics and it's selling like hotcakes. His signing tour is proceeding with marvellous success (despite a lack of publisher support) so much so that his reading at a San Diego middle-school was "breathing room only." When 11PM rolled around, he hadn't finished signing all the books for the crowd, and the police showed up in riot gear and forcibly cleared the auditorium.

Somewhere around 11:30pm, I hear a commotion at the back of the auditorium. I see people start to scatter. The San Diego police are coming down the aisle, their large flashlights out (the auditorium lights are still on, so we all understand the implied "other" use of these instruments). The police are telling everyone to "VACATE THESE PREMISES IMMEDIATELY OR YOU WILL ALL BE ARRESTED!" I cannot believe what I am hearing. "YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE ANOTHER WARNING. LEAVE NOW -- OR FACE ARREST!"
The cops approach the stage where I am signing the books. People are visibly frightened -- and about half the book-line bolts toward the doors. I stand up and speak to the officers. "I am the author of this book," I tell them politely. "These people are only here to get a book and all I am doing is signing them. We will be done shortly."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

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

Universal Display: FOLED Technology

These Flexible Organic Light Emitting Devices (FOLED) are amazing. I would love to have a t-shirt with an embedded screen playing a cartoon of Mark's illustrations. On a related nanotech note, here's a piece I wrote about Vivek Subramanian, an amazing researcher at Berkeley who is printing organic circuits on various substrates using a cannibalized Epson inkjet printer! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:57:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Irrational Exuberance

"Yatta" is the fanimutation dujour. Stefan sez: "Watching this just kinds of rubs the ol' mental slate clean. (Hey . . . what was my job description? Is this _my_ office? Why am I holding a soldering iron and an otter's pancreas? This is not my beautiful house!)" Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:49:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool robot of the week

This Nasa site features a different robot every week. This week's featured robot, a 19th century marvel called Boilerplate, is a Chris Ware character come to -- er, life. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:57:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

National Review editor ponders nuking Mecca

The editor of the National Review on the idea of bombing Mecca with a nuclear missile: "[F]ew people would die and it would send a signal."Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:51:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cheque out this groovy

Cheque out this groovy vaporware folding computer! Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:39:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Squishy keyboards on the cheap

Want a waterproof USB keyboard that's flexible to roll up into a tube? Now you can buy one for $60! Link Discuss (via Deals on the Web)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:15:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The worst of all possible airlines

The Denver Post tries to imagine the worst of all possible airlines -- just a thought-experiment.

First we'll fire all the counter agents except one. Then we'll make two lines: one for rich people, and one for the rest of us. The line for rich people will have one person in it, no waiting. The line for the rest of us will begin back in satellite parking; your wait for the ticket counter in San Francisco actually will begin across the bay in Oakland.
While you are moving through the line, our bad airline will make you move our 300 pounds of luggage forward 6 inches at a time through a maze that doubles back on itself 18 times, thus ensuring that by the time you reach the counter you will have pushed a total of 84,000 pounds while moving an actual distance of 6 feet.
Our newest innovation will be to pull you out of the line just when you've reached the front and wipe your hands and luggage with a Swiffer. Highly trained former grocery clerks will then put the Swiffer into an EasyBake oven to analyze it for complex explosive chemicals. Don't worry, they know exactly what they're doing. Then someone else will take your luggage to a huge CAT scan machine to look for bombs. They will then use loud voices to ask you questions about what they see: "Is that just one beer bottle in there?" This happened. Really. And our fantasy-bad airline will do it over and over again.

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:43:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Commodore 64 songs on OSX

Got an OSX machine? Yearn to listen to groovy old Commodore 64 tunes? Here's a sweet little .SID player for OSX -- old formats never, ever die. Link Discuss (Thanks, h0l!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Found haiku

Danny O'Brien's written a Python widget that locates "natural haiku" in text files. Here are some haiku found in the GPL:

verbatim copies
of this license document,
but changing it is
but changing it is
not allowed. Preamble The
licenses for most
software are designed
to take away your freedom
to share and change it.
By contrast, the GNU
General Public License
is intended to
it is not allowed.
Preamble The licenses
for most software are

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, March 12, 2002

Disappearing 802.11 at SXSW

Just figured out why the 802.11 guerillanet at SXSW keeps disappearing -- it gets toasted by the 2.4GHz walkie-talkies the volunteers at the con use to stay in touch. Next year, we'll have to get them 802.11 VoIP appliances. Discuss

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

More on the Orinoco-to-Airport 802.11 hack

More detail on hacking your cheapass Orinoco 802.11 base-station to turn it into a functional Airport base-station. Turns out there's a model that's only $30 more that comes with the modem, giving you all the WiFi lovin' you need, regardless of your network connection. Link Discuss (Thanks, Boogah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:45:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Maps of the stars' homes

Stefan sez:

I've been puttering on a space opera for a few years. Part of the plot involves a realistic-as-I-can-make-it voyage of a ship bushwhacking 10,000 LY coreward. (Without omniscient magical sensors, FTL is a way of getting lost really quickly.)
One of the excuses I've been using to procrastinate: Lack of an idea of the "terrain." What bright stars would the navigate by? Yesterday I stumbled on this amazing site.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Googlestore

Googlestore sells extra-kickass affinity items from lava lamps to "I'm Feeling Lucky" 3/4 length tees. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:37:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Surreal cam

A digital camera dropped in the water has turned into a surrealist goldmine. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:24:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, March 11, 2002

NAT at SXSW

I think I've figured out why connections keep disappearing at SXSW. The DHCP server here is handing out real, no-foolin' IP addresses, which means that they're in limited supply. Popping a couple of 802.11 base-stations on the network seems to periodically exhaust the pool of IPs. So I've turned on NAT on the bointboint.net NAP, distributing 10.0.1.* addresses. Let's see if that fixes it. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:58:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microdots: Creepily cool security measure

Microdots are a new anti-theft system. Each dot is about the size of a grain of sand, and etched with a unique serial number. Car manufacturers can firehose 10⁵ dots all over their car -- inside, outside and on engine components -- and hence make the car extremely resistant to chopshopping, since it's nearly impossible to remove all the dots and they will unambigiously identify all the parts for ever. The privacy implications are revolting, of course, but I love the idea of being able to make "Ex Libris Doctorow" microdots that I can spray over my entire library.

The dots are as small as grains of sand, and the information on them can only be viewed with a magnifying glass. They're sprayed all over a car's engine parts, air ducts and other automotive nooks and crannies. The dots are visible with black light because Allen wants thieves to know they are there.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:31:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The wireless net at SXSW is complete

Wes brought in a second 802.11 base station (SSID: Wireless) that we're using to cover the rest of the third floor at SXSW -- from about 9A to 10B. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:21:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

History of motel postcards

The wonderful Lileks has an equally wonderful gallery of vintage motel promotional postcards, with commentary. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:12:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moggycam!

Britons are obsessed with a webcam trained on a pet cat injured by a car.

Frank the cat was run over at the end of January near his home in Cambridge, UK, and has been recovering from a broken pelvis ever since.
People from all over the world can follow his recovery via two webcams, as well as find out facts about Frank or look at x-rays of his injuries.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:12:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Leatherman of PDAs

Sony has just released the Leatherman of PalmOS devices: A handheld with an MP3 player, a camera, a keyboard and a flip-over screen. Only available in Japan, natch. Link Discuss (Thanks, Erik!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:05:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Breakfast cereal full of waxy goodness

The next generation of Cap'n Crunch cereal will come in colors inspired by Crayola crayons: screamin' green, outrageous orange and unmellow yellow. Is wax really something you want to invoke with your breakfast cereal?

he new packaging, which taps into kids' desire for fun and fantasy will feature - for the first time ever - a colorable Cap'n on the front and a kid-friendly, colorable back panel on selected boxes. Kids get to pick their favorite color on www.Crayola.com, or they can mail in the cut out ballot printed on every box. The cool new boxes hit shelves this January for a limited time only. "Kids will find excitement on the box and in the bowl with these new wild Crunch Berries," said Natasha Brown, Marketing Assistant. "Our colorable package will generate imagination and creativity while allowing kids to personalize their own cereal boxes," says Natasha. Every box includes a coupon for $.75 off a 64-count box of Crayola crayons or Crayola's new Gel FX markers.

Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:07:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PetsWarehouse sues customers who complain

Members of an online message-board for aquarium fanciers compared notes on the rotten service they'd gotten from an online vendor, PetsWarehouse. PetsWarehouse responded by suing them for $15,000,000. This is KPMG-grade bullying, and someone needs to shine a light on it.

The long and short of it, folks, is that John and Mary Doe are YOU and ME! In my view, this is just a plain and simple threat from Novak: If you criticize PetSwarehouse, you may find yourself defending the lawsuit too. Never mind whether your statements are true, or whether you believe in your heart of hearts that PetSwarehouse delivered poor service to you and yours; make a "negative" or "derogatory" comment about PetSwarehouse, and you just might find yourself defending a lawsuit. That's the message I take away from reading Novak's complaint.
This type of threat and its affect on our free speech rights is exactly why several states, including California, have adopted what has become known as "Anti-SLAPP" legislation. SLAPP stands for "strategic litigation against public participation." In other words, states are saying that they don't want litigious individuals, such as Novak, chilling free speech simply by suing folks who participate in public forums such as ours. Folks shouldn't be able to quash free conversation by filing strategic lawsuits against individuals whose speech they do not like. That's the reason I suggested a boycott against PetSwarehouse, urged that we start a defense fund and suggested that we look at other actions we might take to remedy this situation. That's the reason I sat down with a television reporter for two hours and discussed the implications of the lawsuit.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:46:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, March 10, 2002

Open wireless at SXSW, courtesy of boingboing.net

If you're at SXSW and looking for a wireless drop, try SSID: boingboing.net on the third floor. I've just plugged in a spare 802.11 base-station and it's wide open. Others are planning to do the same. If you're out and about in Austin, try SSID: Chupacabra in the neighborhood of Riverside at South I-35; that's my other base-station, on 56k Earthlink dialup. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The SSSCA is baaaaack

Well, my first (half)-week on the job at the EFF has come and gone, and I have something to show for it. This rant is a call to action for folks like you and me to drop a line to Les Vadasz, the only technology exec who had the chips to stand up to Senator Fritz's technology witch-hunt in DC last week. Bad Senator, no donut.

Technologists have always saved the entertainment industry from itself. From Marconi's telegrapher-reviled radio to Jack Valenti's campaign against the VCR, the entertainment industry has always fought to keep new technologies out of the marketplace. Again and again, new technologies have generated fresh millions for the labels and studios and publishers, and again and again, they've come back to bite the byte that feeds them, blustering in front of lawmakers for the right to control what technologists can build in the privacy of their own garages.
But this time, they've gone too far. The movie studios have cooked up a Congressional fire-drill whose objective is nothing less than total control over the computer and electronics industry. Senator Hollings' stalled one-law-to-rule-them all, the reviled SSSCA, is still lurking in the wings. In the meantime, the entertainment industry is intent on sneaking the SSSCA past Congress with a series of technology-specific "mini-SSSCAs."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:31:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Linking to Thomas demystified

People attempting to link to Thomas, the online Congressional record, have been stymied by Thomas's braindamaged link-structure. Thmoas has a top-seekrit page for anyone trying to link into their site.

<a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r104:FLD001:H51564:">House Page 1564</A>
Hotlink corresponding to above syntax: House Page 1564 in the second session

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bennett!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:49:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Asimov died of AIDS

Janet Asimov -- Isaac's widow -- has released a new bio of her late husband, one of the founding fathers of science fiction, in which it's revealed that the Good Doctor died of AIDS, contracted from a blood transfusion during open heart surgery. The doctor at the time advised them to withhold the information, which, Charlie points out, contributed to the erroneous notion that AIDS is a gay disease. Poor Isaac. Link Discuss (via Charlie's Diary)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:46:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hack your own half-price Airport Base-Station

This is so sweet. The Orinoco RG-1100 has the same guts as an Apple Airport Base Station, but only costs half the price. Buy the cheap box, download one of Apple's Airport firmware updaters, flash the Orinoco and voila, a half-prince Airport that can be administered with the Airport Admin tool and will bridge AppleTalk. Link Discuss (Thanks, Wes!)

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

Turing's ENIGMA treatise

Alan Turing's treatise on the Enigma machine -- one of the documents that gave rise to modern cryptanalysis -- has been declassified since 1996, but it wasn't until now that it's been available on the Web. Brucee's working on scanning and posting all 160+ pages and posting them as PDFs as he goes. Link Discuss (Thanks, Brucee!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

It's a criminal activity and its art!

Now that a certain Three Letter Agency has changed the name of their principle spyware from Carnivore to the much spookier-sounding DCS1000, some open-source art-haxors have appropriated the name and made whacky cyber-art out of it. The new Carnivore starts with a packet-sniffer that captures all the traffic on a target network and forwards it to an IRC channel -- so far, it's your basic black-hat hacker crap. Where it gets cool, though, is in the visualizers: WinAmp-style graphics engines that make kaliedoscopic fractals out of hijacked network traffic. The thing that gets me is how useful this would be in detecting subtle anomalies in network traffic that might detect a slow-and-sneaky hack-attack, drilling straight through the optic nerve into the subconsious mind. Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:56:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, March 9, 2002

The Panopticon

My latest O'Reilly Net column, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon" is up. The next one, "The Street Finds its Own Uses for the Law of Unintended Consequences," will be up as soon as I write it.

Remember when searching the Internet was hard? The dark days when we relied on dumb-as-sand machine intelligences, like those on the back-ends of AltaVista and Lycos, to rank the documents that matched our keywords? The grim era before Google, when searching was a spew of boolean mumbo-jumbo, NEAR this, NOT that, AND the other?
God, that sucked.
Lucky for the Internet, Google figured out the One True Way to make sense of the Internet, to defeat gamers of the system and send info-free brochureware plummeting to number n - 1 out of n results.
They did it with our help. Google's near-magical ordering of the Internet is built around the notion that computers are good at doing repetitive, uncreative things -- fetishistically counting things, for example -- and rotten at understanding why they're being asked to do these boring tasks. By contrast, human beings are great at understanding why they're doing something, but they're woefully deficient in the do-the-same-thing-perfectly-and-forever department.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:11:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 8, 2002

Honoring hawks for their doveliness

Someone buy Satan a snowshovel. Shrub and Blair have been nominated for a Nobel peace prize.

One has ordered his forces into battle more times than any other postwar British leader. The other threatens military action against "evil" nations and keeps a scorecard of dead al-Qaida leaders, marking each fatality with an X.
Now, Tony Blair and George Bush have received international recognition for their unswerving willingness to use force: a nomination for the 2002 Nobel peace prize.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

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

EFF party at SXSW

Here're the details on the boozy, whacky EFF party at SXSW. See you there!

EFF Party
8:30pm
El Sol y La Luna (1224 S. Congress)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with Andrews and Kurth, L.L.P. and Polycot Consulting L.L.C., will co-host a party during the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. EFF's Cory Doctorow will be on hand, along with former EFF-Austin leaders Ed Cavazos (currently with Andrews and Kurth, L.L.P. and Jon Lebkowsky (currently with Polycot Consulting L.L.C.). The party will be held at Austin's great El Sol y La Luna, a restaurant, one of the 50 best Hispanic restaurants in the U.S. (per Hispanic Magazine). Starts around 8:30PM on Monday, March 11 at 1224 S. Congress Avenue, Austin, TX 78704. Free munchies, lemonade, tea (and Sangria while it lasts, then cash bar) - and a happenin' crowd!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:07:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, March 7, 2002

Comet Ikeya-Zhang back after 341 years

Comet Ikeya-Zhang will be visible to the naked eye until mid-March. "According to SKY & TELESCOPE magazine, the comet is now bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye from very dark sites free of any light pollution. Binoculars show a bright, starlike nucleus surrounded by a small, faint cloud, or coma. A delicate, wispy tail has been seen pointing away from the Sun, and in time-exposure photographs the tail is already a few degrees long. The comet's nucleus appears to be releasing more gas than dust, which is giving the coma and tail a slight bluish cast that is especially noticeable in photographs." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:43:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Raping Murdering Pastor Gets Life

Since we've already had one story about a disgusting murderer, we might as well have two.

A Belgian pastor convicted of killing six family members and dissolving their bodies in drain cleaner was sentenced by a jury to life in prison. A daughter who assisted him received a 21-year sentence. Andras Pandy, 74, was found guilty Tuesday of murdering six family members. Agnes Pandy, 44, was convicted of five murders. Agnes Pandy's lawyers said her father raped her and coerced her into collaborating in the killings. Prosecutors say Pandy raped his daughters and stepdaughters, then turned to murder between 1986 and 1989 to cover up the incest after one became pregnant.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:10:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Heartbreaking naivete gets techsupport worker fired

This is a nearly heartbreakingly naive story about a tech-support rep temping for Earthlink who discovered a nationwide outage of one of their critical services. He'd been thoroughloy indoctrinated with a bunch of customer-centric corporate rhetoric about getting the right thing done, no matter what, and so when his report of this outage fell on deaf ears with his supervisors he went over their heads -- and got fired for his trouble. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:58:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Enron voicemail number

(510) 809-4466 Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:18:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Backwards Masking Reveals Ken Lay's Evil Nature

"Turn me on oil man." This is even better than the Pentagon truck bomb conspiracy theory. Dave sez: "Jon Kelly is an Inner Voice Analyst who provides counseling services to clients who are seeking new insights from their life experiences. As samples of his work, Jon provides analysis of speeches by public figures covering widely-followed news topics. For example, from his front page:"

Enron and Beyond:
The BBC Interview 02/14/02
Ken Lay: "Sue my ass!"
San Jose, CA - Results from an unconventional analysis of today's opening remarks by Kenneth Lay confirm popular public opinion by revealing the ex-Enron CEO as a defiant confidence artist.
Backwards speech analyst Jon Kelly claims that when the audio track of Lay's statement is played in reverse, he can hear him say, "Sucked them in - the thief," "Citizens choke - a loss," "May lead again," and "Come leaders, sue my ass."
Recent testimonies by ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and Andersen CEO Joseph Berardino were equally revealing, according to Kelly. The founder of website yourinnervoice.com claims that Skilling's remarks included the reversed comment "He had this greed - it's his devil," while Berardino's unconscious message stated "Must not judge others."
To Kelly, Berardino's comment suggests Andersen leadership lacked the resolve to stand up to money-obsessed Enron executives.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:55:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ben Brown at SXSW

Ben Brown will be talking about DIY media at SXSW. Here's a preview:

Ben Bown: "The creative work you do on Web sites, even if it's really good, will never get the respect it deserves. Web sites are transient. They're trivial. They're easy to discard. They leave only the faintest of impressions. But a book! A magazine! A manifesto! -- Printed at work and stapled together, passed out at the coffee shop in your neighborhood -- by virtue of the constituent atoms, it's already more important to 99% of the world's population than your Web site." Link
Derek Powazek responds on The Fray: "I think you're attributing a golden glow to this Offline Stuff that isn't necessarily there for everyone. Spend a few years going broke paying printers with ink stained hands, and you may just run screaming back to the free, cheap, easy web. I guess what I'm saying is, while I agree with your general call to Do Something with all the tools we've got at our disposal, I think that there's nothing inherent in a magazine that makes it more special than a website. Depends on the magazine. Depends on the website. Get it?" Link

Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:32:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Man Lives 2 Days Stuck In Windshield

(I didn't really need to know about this, but since Boing Boing reader Jenny pointed this article out to me and I read it, I want everyone else to feel as bad as I do.) Jenny sez: "This is unbelievable. Man, hit by a car, and wedged in the windshield. Driver panics, and she drives home with the man still lodged, head first, in her windsheild. She parks the car in her garage, leaving the man, still alive and begging for help from the windsheild for two days, until he dies. Then she dumps the body." (And of course, the murderer says it's not her fault; it's the fault of all those naughty drugs and booze that forced their way down her gullet.) Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:06:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elastic artillery

The rubber-band machinegun's 12 barrels allow you to fire 144 rubber-bands at high accuracy without reloading. The design is based on the Gatling gun and can be rotated a full 360 degrees for extra eye-putting-out goodness. If $400 is more than you want to spend on a rubber-band gun, check out the other pistols available on the site. Link Discuss (Thanks, GW!)

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

Wednesday, March 6, 2002

802.11 for your TiVo

Groovy hacked-up 802.11 cards for TiVos! The guy who made them is planning to go into business selling them, so he's auctioning off four beta units with proceeds to charity. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:57:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dirt cheap wireless

Check it out, an 802.11b base-station, with AppleTalk support and three 10BT connections, for $105.99! Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

All Pigs Are Men

Michael Slavitch sez: "Sows love badass boars. Scientists see parallels with human behavior." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:33:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Old but good interview with Richard Dawkins

A 1995 Skeptic interview with Richard "Selfish Gene" Dawkins.

Skeptic: In your speech the other night you said that the perceptual systems of animals represent the world as their near, or possibly even far, ancestors constructed them based upon natural selection. Can the world evolve faster than the sensory systems of the animals? Are many animals living today in a sensory world that no longer exists, as when the moth flies into the candle flame?
Dawkins: When a moth flies into a candle flame presumably it is responding to the candle flame as if were a celestial object at optical infinity and acting appropriately to that situation, not the one it is in fact currently facing. It frequently happens that the real world evolves faster than an animal's cognitive map of it.
Skeptic: Does that ever happen to human beings?
Dawkins: Human beings are completely surrounded by the equivalent of "candle flames."'

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:39:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Was the Pentagon actually hit by a truck bomb?

Conspiracy theory: The Pentagon was not hit by an airliner on 9/11. Here are the pictures to prove it. Link Discuss

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

Digital dead letter office

The post-office is selling off the contents of the dead-letter office -- undeliverable collectibles, books and other media, and assorted random schwag -- on eBay. Link Discuss (via Deals on the Web)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will Turing Machines be illegal?

Here's an excellent open letter from a blogger to Jack Valenti and Michael Eisner, in response to their push for hardware-level copy-protection-rackets mandated in all technology, and their characterization of the technology industry as pirates and thieves.

Turing's Universal Machine means that you cannot have a software or hardware protection scheme that is secure. Whatever scheme you come up with can be simulated by another computer. The computer industry are not opposing your bill because they want to encourage copying, or because they are bloody-minded, they are not opposing you because of your self serving rhetoric about rewarding artists (remember Peggy Lee, Michael?), they are opposing you because what you want is provably impossible. You can only succeed by making all Turing machines illegal.

And here's a Heinlein quote from Doc's blog that deserves re-posting:

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or turned back, for their private benefit.

Link Discuss (via Doc)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SXSW looks like a ball!

I'm leaving for SXSW on Friday -- if you're gonna be there, be sure to stop by some of these events.

Bruce Sterling and I are having a "Keynote Conversation" next Tuesday at SXSW, called "The Death of Scarcity." We're talking about the stuff that Bruce covers in his "Information Wants to be Worthless" editorial, the ideas I cover in my forthcoming novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," about what parts of the economy are still scarce -- and hence valuable -- in a world of zero-cost duplication, and having a high old time. Link

I'm on a panel on Tuesday called "P2P and Superworms: Will P2P kill the Internet?" Here's the premise for the panel:

The antecedants to Warhol and Flash worms, i.e., NIMDA et al, have been fantastically destructive (NIMDA took TorEx, the main internet interchange for Toronto, offline for two days, effectively knocking the whole city off the Internet). Warhol and Flash worms will be far more destructive, because there will be no warning and hence no chance to harden vulnerable machines against their exploits, so you'd have the whole net going zombie and attacking at once.
But "the whole net" in this case is just the routable, persistently addressable machines (i.e., servers). What if you could expose "the dark matter" of the net to a Warhol/Flash attack, infecting an order of magnitude more machines -- mightn't you really hurt the Internet?
P2P makes it theoretically possible. Almost all P2P systems provide an alternate nameservice, providing persistent addressablity for dynamically addressed machines; likewise, they provide proxy-services with http-push and similar technology for machines that are unroutable because of firewalls or NATs; finally, machines in a P2P network run common services (the P2P app) that may have common vulnerabilities.
Put this all together, and you've got the ability to conduct a census of all machines on the Internet, not just the servers, infect them quickly, even through firewalls and NATs, with a Warhol/Flash attack, and have zillions of nearly instant zombies at your disposal to DDOS all routers and other points of failure.
So that's pretty apocalyptic. But I may be full of shit. What do other people think?

My co-panelists are Wes "Hack the Planet" Felter, Steven "Audiogalaxy" Hazel, Brandon "Wacky Freenet Haxor" Wiley and Jason "The Moderator" Levitt. Should be a blast of good, old-fashioned hysterical doomsaying! Link

Monday night at 7PM, I'll be reading from "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" at the VoxNox event at the Red Eyed Fly (715 Red River).

Join us at Vox Nox (Voice Night) as several popular SXSW authors read selections from their works. This is a unique opportunity to hear writers such as Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), Mark Meadows (Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative), Derek Powazek (Design for Community) and Philip and Mikela Tarlow (Digital Aboriginal) in their own voices. Words leave the page and become real, and you gain rare insight into the authors, their books, and their passions.

Link Other stuff I plan on attending:

The EFF and Polycot Consulting will be holding a party, venue TBA, on Monday night after VoxNox.
Lawrence Lessig's keynote on Saturday at 1PM
The Online Activist Peer Meeting on Sunday at 12:30
Jeff Veen's keynote on Sunday at 2:15
Fray Cafe on Sunday at 8PM at the Hideout, 617 Congress
Open Source Politics on Monday at 10:30 AM
Interactive TV (with TiVo's evangelist extraordinaire) on Monday at 3:30 PM

Also, I plan to eat heart-stopping quantities of BBQ. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:08:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The original pitch meeting for the Big Dig

Meg posted a little blurb about the Big Dig -- Boston's interminable, distruptive, over-budget and behind-schedule largest-earthworks-project-in-human-history -- that reminded me of a funny bit John Henson and I came up with in the back of a cab in Boston a couple years ago, about the original pitch meeting for the Big Dig:

Aye, M'Lud Mayor, yon Big Dig shall be completed in no more than six months, cost no more than fifty guineas, and shall cause the death of no more than 300 Irishmen.

Meg affirmed that people other than John and me find this funny, so I'm posting it here. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:49:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The happy homeless hacker

Here's a great Wired News story about Adrian Lamo, a homeless hacker who squats, couch-surfs, or rents a cardboard condo by night and finds headline-grabbing security vulnerabilities in major corporate networks by day from Internet cafes.

Living out of a backpack, getting online from university libraries and Kinko's laptop stations, the slightly built, boyish Lamo wanders the country's coasts by Amtrak and Greyhound bus.
"I have a laptop in Pittsburgh, a change of clothes in D.C. It kind of redefines the term multi-jurisdictional," Lamo said with a mild stutter. "It'll be hard to get warrants for it all."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barney is a thug

Cindy Cohn, the EFF's legal director, is fed up with Barney the Purple Dinosaur. His corporate masters are sending nasty lawyer-letters to anyone who hosts a site that lampoons the repetitive Rex, despite the clear exemption in copyright law for parodical uses. Cindy sent BarneyCorp a letter last year telling them to give up their protection racket, but they haven't learned, and so now Cindy's getting ready to take 'em to court for harassing their detractors with misleading legal threats.

"As they were when you threatened the EFF directly, your claims are baseless and a misuse of your copyrights," she wrote. "We once again urge you to cease threatening noncommercial hosts of parodical material.
"Should you continue, or should you carry out your threat to send this baseless threat to Dr. Frankel's ISP, we will investigate bringing affirmative claims against you," she also wrote.
In an interview with Newsbytes, Cohn said Frankel received "essentially the same letter" that the EFF had received from Barney's protectors last summer.
"What that told me was that the Barney guys didn't get it," Cohn said. "They still didn't understand about parody, in spite of the fact that I had laid out for them what the Supreme Court has said about parody and why it's protected expression. They were still going around trying to scare people, claiming that any use of Barney's image required a license from them. That's just not the law."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, March 5, 2002

More on Google's phonebook

ResearchBuzz continues their excellent factfinding on Google phonebook service:

...[T]he Google phonebook: syntax can be altered slightly depending on the kind of results you want. rphonebook: finds residential listings, while bphonebook: finds business listings. Run the search rphonebook:sears ma and then the search bphonebook:sears ma and you'll see what I mean.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:03:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tim O'Reilly on Dune

Tim "World's Greatest Technical Books" O'Reilly's first publishing venture was a bio of Frank "Dune" Herbert (which text is now available for free under an open content license). In this week's "Ask Tim" feature, Tim handles sticky questions about Herbert's intention with Dune.

I believe Herbert may have meant for us to see Leto as the better leader, and for us to see Paul as flawed. But as Frederick Lerner said when he remade Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, and had Eliza Doolittle end up with Henry Higgins rather than Freddy Eynsford-Hill, "God and Shaw forgive me, but I'm not sure he was right."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Sara!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:01:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Evidence of an era when the travel industry had taste

Wonderful, nostalgic gallery of vintage travel brochure art. As I sit here in Sea-Tac's SW Airlines departure lounge, assaulted by the vomitous no-design design of contemporary travel branding, I feel a sense of loss and misery browsing through these images. OTOH, airports in the 30s didn't have wireless Internet connectivity and fancy west-coast novelty coffee beverages. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:54:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sexy biohazard

Rate My Gasmask is an "Am I Hot Or Not?" site for gasmask fetishists, a fetish I hadheretofore never suspected the existence of. The Internet is really, really cool some days. Warning: Naked people in gas-masks ahoy. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Charlie's in bloxsom

Charlie Stross has moved his excellent blog to blosxom, Rael Dornfest's content-management-system-in-thirty-lines-of-perl. I dunno if Rael expected anyone to actually, you know, use bloxsom (I think it was more about proof of concept), but it's cool to see it actually in use in the field. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:10:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Defeating mother nature, one Twinkie at a time

I've always thought that exercise was a stupid way to lose weight (make muscle, enjoy yourself, experience zen moments in nature, compete with peers, sure, lose weight, no). I mean, all this running around and jumping up in down is just in aid of getting your body in the mood to do the cellular stuff that makes all your fat vanish. Why can't it just, you know, get in the mood? University of Dundee researchers are playing with a therapy that tricks your body into thinking that you're being physically active (and hence deserve to burn off some dim sum and pizza) even if you're just, you know, blogging. Where can I get some? Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:58:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A local Daypop Top 40?

Hey, you perl haxors, someone should make this: A widget that runs once an hour, looking through the last 24h worth of httpd logs, identifying pages that have been arrived at through search engine referrers (i.e., pages that people are looking for right now, using means other than the existing navigation for your site). Then it tallies up the most popular pages among searchers and writes a text file (suitable for ssi) with the top ten -- so that I can put a sidebar on my homepage with "Ten most interesting pages on my site right now" as the title; the other with all pages discovered via a search-engine on my site, in order of popularity (with their search-terms?). That would be cool, and it would resolve the interminable debates about which documents were important enough to go on the homepage -- let visitors to the site decide. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, March 4, 2002

Cold Fusion, take n (-1?)

Tabletop fusion has been achieved. Again. Maybe.

Because the collapsing bubbles produced temperatures as hot as those found in the sun, the experiment does not mean that the long-sought goal of cold fusion has been achieved, scientists warned.
But if it can be replicated, it could mean an easy way to generate nuclear energy has been found � one that mimics what the sun does and that would be many times safer than current nuclear fission methods used by modern-day power plants and makers of atomic bombs.

Link Discuss (Thanks, pberghs!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:39:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Word a Day

A Word a Day is a cool little daily multimedia email zine -- sign up and they'll mail you a vocab power-word with digital audio of the pronunciation. I am all a-tremble with aspiration at the forthcoming bounty of verbiage that will soon ingress to my electrical correspondance receptacle.

philomath (FIL-uh-math) noun
A lover of learning.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:37:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Buy a Cockroach Coaster for the EFF

Let's congratulate Cory on his new job at the EFF by purchasing one or more ceramic tile coasters featuring Boing Boing's favorite radiation-resistant mascot, the mighty cockroach. All profits ($1.50 per coaster) will be donated to the EFF. The coaster is only available during the month of March, so order yours today! Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:53:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The reality of WiFi in San Francisco

Paul Boutin's written a good piece about the realpolitik of wireless hotspots in San Francisco. He talks about my old apartment, which was pretty close to an on-ramp en-route to the airport, and had a public, listed 802.11 base-station. I used to get people parked in front of my place on their way to the airport, checking their mail one last time. Now that I'm living in a new neighborhood far from the highway but close to the crack dealers, I wonder if I'll be getting logins from people who want to check their mail while they're waiting for the man. Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:29:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Art Therapy

Artist Mark Gilbert painted a series of portraits of seriously disfigured individuals before and after (and sometimes during) their amazing reconstructive surgery at the Royal London Hospital under the care of maxillofacial master Dr. Iain Hutchison. The paintings are surreal, emotional, unnerving, and intensely beautiful. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:27:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I've got a new job!

It's official and Now It Can Be Told. I am no longer working for OpenCola. Effective tomorrow (providing that the INS grants me the visa I've travelled to Vancouver to renew), I will be working as the Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm staying in San Francisco and I'll be working with the EFF to come up with novel ways to show comporations that the cheapest and best way to cover their asses is by donating cash and resources to us. I did a 20-Questions interview with Destroy All Monsters this week where I came out, so I figgered I might as well break the news here, too. Wish me luck in the new gig, and join the EFF! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Horrible but lovable comic book ads

Higgins writes: "Illustrator Stephen Conley has combed 60's comics for the most manipulative of all advertising ever created for children. Mini ads touting Atlas bodies, hovercrafts from lawnmower engines and the joys of x-ray glasses. The frames on this site are quite annoying." Link Discuss (Thanks, Higgins!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:49:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogwhoring as a business model

The editor of ~~tonyblair.com~~ tonypierce.com (thanks, Jon and Jay!), a blog, just auctioned off a link on his site on eBay, fetching some $15 for it! Hrm. If we do about 15 links a day on BB at $15 per, that's $255/day, call it a round $250, to that's $1750/week, like $75k/year! Woo! I smell bizmodel! OK, not really. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jef!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The art of Mary "Small World" Blair

This site chronicles the life, times and work of Mary Blair, the genius designer behind It's a Small World and much of Disney's trippier, stylized artwork, including Alice in Wonderland. The Disney Channel has a great mini-documentary on Mary Blair they run as an interstitial during Walt Disney Presents, and she's just amazing, animated and feverish as she describes her elegant design choices in words simple enough for Walt to appreciate.
Design is, or should be, an indespensable concomitant in every kind of picturemaking, even in magazine illustration which is primarily concerned with naturalism. But when an artist enters the world of fantasy, discarding practically every vestige of anatomical verity, as in Mary Blair's whimsical creations, design takes over one hundred percent. Well, not quite; the fanciful world, albeit in the realm of decorative art, must not be completely divorced from reality, it's inhabitants cannot be pure abstractions even when they are essentially devoid of natural attributes.

A Mary Blair horse, though quite unlike a horse, is yet a horse. The same tenuous reference to human beings is seen in her delightfully impossible girls with moon faces, pipelike necks, and legs which dangle helplessly without bone or muscle even when skipping in a field of daisies. Link Discuss (Thanks, Charles!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:23:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Record-deal reality check

The Royalty Calculator lets you spec out your dream record deal -- advance, production and promotion budget, royalty rate -- and it calculates how many copies your band will need to sell before you break even. The results were predicatably depressing, I'm afraid. The industry standards for a first deal have been clicked for you. When you are done customizing your deal, click on "calculate." The slot at the bottom will reveal how much is made on each actual sale and how many sales one will have to make before the record company begins paying royalties. See the hints page for how much the Advance should be, as well as the other variables. Keep in mind that Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:21:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Schoolhouse rock coming to DVD

Schoolhouse Rock to be released on limited edition DVD. I'm just a bill! Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why the Bono act sucks

Dan Gillmor's got a great editorial in this morning's Seattle Times explaining what the 1998 Bono copyright extension means to consumers, and why the Supremes' agreement to hear a Constituional appeal is a beacon of hope for us all.

...Disney and its collaborators are stealing our heritage. As several critics have noted, anyone using the image of Santa Claus as a fat man with a beard and red suit would have had to pay royalties during much of the last century if the Bono law had been in effect when a cartoonist dreamed up that caricature in the 1880s. This is absurd....
Another peculiar rationale for the Bono law was to make U.S. copyright terms match their European counterparts. By that logic, the United States should bring all its laws in line with the worst statutes around the world. Heck, they don't have free speech in China, so we might as well do away with it here.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:55:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Extreme unicycling

Kris Holm is an extreme unicyclist who rides his one-wheeler in places where I wouldn't try to take a jetpack. The trailer for "One Tired Guy," a documentary about Holm's uni-stunts, features breathtaking rides that put snowboarders and skaters to shame. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:54:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A radio in every chip, the end of copy-protection rackets?

Intel wants to include a software-defined radio on every chip it produces within ten years. Software-defined radios are radios whose in-use spectrum can be changed by the computer, so a single PC add-on coulod go from being an FM radio tuner to a cell-phone to an 802.11 card with the click of a button. The MPAA is currently cooking up a copy-protection scheme for the next generation of digital TV that would require every device capable of receiving and demodulating broadcast digital video to comply with a copy-protection ~~racket~~ scheme so that no device will ever make consumer-initiated copies against the rightsholders wishes. With software-defined radio, any consumer PC could be turned into a tuner that disregarded the copy-protection signals. Uh-oh.

Under this model, said Gelsinger "we want to get where one corner of every die has an integrated radio." This would mean, in effect, that every processor Intel produces would be potentially radio aware, and could seamlessly roam between available network technologies, from WANs down to PANs.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Handicapped"

"Handicapped" is a new short story just posted to Fray.com. It's a haunting little vignette about faith, human kindness and guilt. I feel itchy having read it. Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:42:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Classic works of capitalist propaganda

AdFlip's got an amazing gallery of classic ads, organized by decade, theme, publication, etc. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Buoyed up on the righteous gas of the Great Helmsan, we fly boldly forward to the future

This gallery of Chinese Communist propaganda art just made my day. The futuristic ones are un-creed-able. I am leaping forward, greatly. Link Discuss Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The last Grammys?

Here's a stirring editorial on the psychic fallout from the Grammys, which nobody watched, and which awarded all of its major hero-biscuits to the soundtrack from "O Brother," which sold on word of mouth, was "profoundly anti-pop" and is "either a statement of the abiding values that got them into this business, or a gesture of self-loathing."

The generally dismal quality of America's mass-marketed pop music is an esthetic national emergency. And last week's Masque of the Red Death extravaganza at the Staples Center couldn't disguise the dire portents. Teen-pop cash cow Britney Spears, apparently ineligible for any 2001 nominations, showed up to present an award and to remind arty types what actually pays the bills. Insiders from Nashville's hard-hit labels watched in silent disbelief as hunk du jour Tim McGraw got skunked for male country vocal. The winner? Again, the white-haired Stanley, for "O Death," his a cappella plea to the grim reaper to "spare me over till another year." (A few VPs and A&R honchos must've had the same thought.) But the worst portent was simply that so many people decided not to bother watching the Grammys at all. The telecast got its lowest ratings in six years, and its 21 percent drop from last year reflects all too clearly the drop in record sales.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:19:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, March 3, 2002

No more free bin-liners for the Irish

Wasteful Irish will have to pay a 15 cent levy on every plastic bag they take home from the shop, which money will be passed straight to the government for environmental spending. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monster poster gallery

Attack of the 50-foot Website has an amazing gallery of rare and wicked monster-movie posters. Link Discuss (Thanks, ~~Wes~~ Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:53:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, March 2, 2002

Great monster cards of the 50s and 60s

Fabulous directory/gallery of classic monster and sci-fi cards. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

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

Quizzical invasions

A sneaky way to invade privacy: These folks will create a fake "quiz" and send it to your target, who, if s/he is typical of two thirds of Internet users, will fill it out. The results are forwarded on to you.

1. Name
2. Gender
3. Birthdate
4. Are you easily excited?
5. Do you have a girlfriend or boyfriend?
6. If so, what's their name
7. Biggest crush
8. First crush
9. Ever had sex?
10. Watch porn?
11. How often do you masturbate?
12. Attracted to someone of the same-sex?
13. Biggest turn-on
14. Favorite sex-toy
15. Recurring dream

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:05:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help identify Martian craters

Dan writes:

Have a few spare minutes? You can help identify craters on Mars!
"What is this site all about?
There are many scientific tasks that require human perception and common sense, but may not require a lot of scientific training. Identifying craters on Mars is something almost anyone can do, and classifying them by age is only a little harder.
>From November 2000 to September 2001, we ran an experiment that
>showed that public volunteers (clickworkers), many working for a
>few minutes here and there and others choosing work work longer,
>can do some routine science analysis that would normally be done
>by a scientist or graduate student working for months on end.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:56:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Whither the digerati?

Much has been made of the mass of email sent to the DoJ, commenting on the MSFT settlement, but where are the comments from the noosphere's Usual Suspects?

* Steve Jobs
* Slashdot, Rob Malda, Jeff Bates or John Katz
* Steve Wozniak

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kickstart!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:35:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cognitive dissonance, the Japanese fashion way

Note to Japanese Boing Boing readers: If this shirt is for sale in (North American) XL near you and you want to do me a helluva favor, buy it for me and I'll pay you back. Link Discuss (Thanks, waxpancake!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:30:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Words make thought made deed

Fascinating piece on the resurgence of the "Whorfian hypothesis," the idea that launguage shapes thought.

In English, time rushes forward. In Mandarin Chinese, it moves down. The past lies above, and the future lies below...
Last year, [a researcher] published a study in which she asked people to answer simple time sequence questions while watching a video screen. When objects on the screen move vertically, the Mandarin speakers are able to answer faster than English speakers - implying that their brains processed time questions differently, and hinting that there could be other differences.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:07:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dianetics gaming Google

Is the Church of Scientology gaming Google to keep pages critical of the church out of the top listings? And if so, will linking to this page that asks that question and documents an answer in the affirmative convince Google's algorithm to pay less attention to official CoS documents? Link Discuss (via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:49:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dead Man's Switch

Dead Man's Switch is a Win32 app that requires you to periodically check in with it. If you don't, it encrypts your sensitive files, and sends your user-configured last words to friends and family. Link Discuss (via Amygdala)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:39:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Banned from owning Sony

Sony customer sues Sony for not honoring the warranty on his hyper-expensive TV (the latest in a lifetime of Sony purchases). Sony settles, but insists on the following in the settlement: "[Mr. Scott] agrees that he will not purchase or otherwise obtain or receive a Sony product of any type in the future." Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:35:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Who gets paid what in the music biz

Netagivland's site features Steve Albini, doing the math on who gets paid how much in a 3,000,000-selling CD:

The Balance Sheet: This is how much each player got paid at the end of the game.
Record company:	$ 710,000
Producer:	$ 90,000
Manager:	$ 51,000
Studio:	$ 52,500
Previous label:	$ 50,000
Agent:	$ 7,500
Lawyer:	$ 12,000
Band member net income each:	$ 4,031.25

Link Discuss (via Blogaritaville)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:19:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 1, 2002

Arthur Lyman, RIP

"Arthur Lyman, a vibraphonist best known for his contributions to so-called 'exotic music' from Hawaii in the late 1950s and early 1960s, has died. He was 70." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:22:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling on SXSW

Bruce Sterling's written a marvellous rant for the Austin Chronicle that explains why SXSW is still a vital, active conference, while other conferences are cratering. It's a great piece. Bruce and I will be delivering a keynote at SXSW next week-ish, about the "Death of Scarcity." It's gonna be tonza fun.

If you think the business scene at this year's Austin 360 was morbid, and demoralized, and pitiful, and I was there, and boy was it ever -- well, you should have seen the Davos World Economic Forum up in New York City. Which I also witnessed, for reasons I don't much care to explain. Okay, I'm topic-drifting here, but don't flame me just yet. You see, everybody at Davos was scolding, not the computer-crazy Americans, but the Japanese. They expect the Japanese banks to crater just any minute now. And get this: The Japanese never swallowed any New Economy Kool-Aid. The Japanese bend metal, they make Sony Walkmans and cars. They're still royally screwed. Try explaining that. It's sure more than Fortune or The Economist are able to manage.
Houston is supposed to be a solid, non-nonsense, oil-bidness town. Houston doesn't have any SXSW. Poor Houston is the snakebitten home of Enron, while Austin's feckless cyberslackers are still grinning and hitting the Return key. Yeah, Dell fired some people here, so maybe local rents will drop and all the potters and tapestry weavers will return from Wimberley. Man, anything's possible these days.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Hugh!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:26:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lifetime of fries

A fifth-grader in Michigan wrote to her local Arby's franchulate and expressed great appreciation for curly fries, ending her paeon with a request for a lifetime supply of the starchy cardio-bombs. Arby's granted her wish. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:26:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney breakfast cereal

Disney and Kellogg's have launched "Mickey's Magix," a "naturally sweetened toasted oat cereal with marshmallows." According to the commercial, it turns the milk blue. Excuse me, I need to hit the grocery store. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:22:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stalin World

A Lithuanian entrepreneur has opened a gulag-themed amusement part, called "Stalin World." Someone, please send me pictures of this place!

During a recent gala opening, thousands of invited guests were greeted at the gate by an actor dressed as Stalin; a Lenin look-a-like, complete with a goatee and cap, sat fishing by a nearby pond. Guests were invited to drink shots of vodka and eat cold borscht soup from tin bowls, while loud speakers blared old communist hymns. Nearby, red, Soviet-era propaganda posters read: "There's No Happier Youth in the World Than Soviet Youth!"
"It combines the charms of a Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet gulag prison camp," Malinauskas told assembled journalists, including a handful from abroad who'd flown in to report on the bizarre spectacle.�

Link Discuss (Thanks, Geoff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:13:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Slashdot goes pay

Slashdot's going subscription! The new Slashdot will feature humungous, annoying advertisements ("We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer."), but you don't have to look at 'em. For every $5 you feed to your /. subscription, you'll get 1,000 ad-free pageviews. I wonder if a $5 PPM is competitive with what they expect advertisers to pay 'em. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:09:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lightweight blogging with 30 lines of perl

Rael Dornfest has written a "blosxom," a simple and powerful perl-based blogging app. If you've got a machine with perl and a webserver installed (i.e., an OSX or *nix computer), you can run blosxom (pronounced "blogsome" or "blossom") and publish your blog just by writing simple ASCII files into a directory.

Blosxom is a lightweight (to say the least -- it's <30 lines of code) Weblog-in-a-jiffy Perl CGI script for (but in no way limited to) Mac OS X. Blosxom simply nabs text documents (written in your text editor of choice) from a particular directory and displays them (in reverse chronological order) as a Weblog. Simplistic -- but a potentiallly useful spot of fun nevertheless.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:55:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Celebrity deathmatch

Celebrity boxing: Not just for Claymation anymore! Fox's newest show features tabloid antiheroes pounding the snot out of each other in ring.

Yes, it will be the bad girl of figure skating vs. the Long Island Lolita in one of three "celebrity" matchups. Another will pit Barry Williams (Greg Brady on "The Brady Bunch") against Danny Bonaduce (Danny Partridge on "The Partridge Family"). A third bout will involve "people from the music world," Fox people say. The "fighters" will wear weighted gloves and protective headgear. The three-round bouts will be taped next week in Los Angeles. Let's get ready to shower!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:51:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Purloined Everything

The US Customs Agency brings us this nifty gallery of innovative (but not innovative enough, apparently) smuggler's caches. The gun-in-the-Bible dodge is full of semiotic goodness, dontcha think? Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:39:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inflatable commando encourages snitching

Colombia's national army has deployed a guy in a 10' high inflatable soldier suit as a means of convincing the citizenry to rat out rebel forces. Link Discuss (via Amygdala)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sis-boom-bah

An index of downloadable college fight songs. There's a great Hoosier Hotshots track called "That's What I Learned in College," with great lines like "Rickety-rack, give 'em the axe, that's what I learned in college!" Link Discuss (Thanks, ces)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:51:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cause-computing via Google

The latest rev of Google's toolbar includes a client for Folding@home, a distributed computing project from "Stanford University that is trying to understand the structure of proteins so they can develop better treatments for a number of illnesses." Ever since SETI@Home launched, I've been waiting for something like this: A company with zillions of installed clients adding a distributed computing module. Prediction: The Folding@home client will be an unspeakable success, crunching more scenaria than anyone expected, maybe even exhausting the problem-space in very short order. Link Discuss (via Scripting News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nimble searching

The lightest-weight Google ever. Link Discuss (via Scripting News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:36:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

It's fandom!

Joey's written a great rant on copyright, in the wake of the Grammys and Fritz Holling's latest protection-racket hearings.

They're taking intellectual property protection to ridiculous new heights. The music industry would love nothing better than for you to shell out extra ducats in order for you to know what the lyrics and chords to your favourite songs are. That's why the Harry Fox Agency tried to shut down or neuter OLGA -- the On-Line Guitar Archive -- and several other sites providing lyrics, tablature and chord charts. Listening to your favourite piece of music over and over again so that you can transcribe its lyrics and chords and then sharing that information isn't a crime -- once again, it's fandom.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

E-books aren't dead yet

E-books may not be an economic powerhouse, but sales are still growing by double-digits. LInk Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prince Philip: Do you throw spears?

The Royal Consort took a trip to Australia and surprised his hosts of an aborigine cultural event by asking if they "still throw spears."

The successful Aboriginal entrepreneur said it was quite funny but he was rather surprised.

Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:40:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Computer cuisine

Step by step instructions for cooking an egg in 11 minutes on an Athlon 1500 MHz processor. Link Discuss (via The Reg)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:34:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Repairing your plastic pal

Amazing and creepy gallery of photos of "surgery" to RealDoll high-tech sex-dolls. Link Discuss (via Milk and Cookies)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:25:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, March 31, 2002

Vanilla Coke

Painted nudes

How to tell that it's already April 1 in England

XXL dummies

Rollercoasters in Bangladesh

Saturday, March 30, 2002

Parochial messages

ICANN blog

300 most failed domain names

Worker and Parasite

Deaddog's doo-wop rarities

Russia's answer to South Park

The stone-eater

Extreme environmental irony, Shrub-style

Friday, March 29, 2002

Conjoined Peep surgery

We're going to hell for sure now

WORK FROM HOME ASK ME HOW!

Sterling in 300 words

Searching for Bruttney Spears

Fly a Plane, Get Cancer

Mission to Mercury

Yahoo's new "privacy" policy

Cellphones and the military don't mix

Seizure dogs

The DMCA finally takes down an infringer -- well, that was worth it

Thursday, March 28, 2002

The Web is *not* boring

Multiethnic head-cases

Another bad day for the differently plastinated

Run Office on Linux

Benefits: Quality time with Tom Cruise and John Travolta

Advertising on tombstones

Suspended on a dog's say-so

Quayle's no dove

Proto-postcards

Bureaucrat humor -- ar ar ar ar ar

Celine Dion broke my Mac

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln

The 300 most common words

Occupational hazards of the conceptual artiste

Online Visual Autobiography

Weblogs and Googlebombs

AdCritic will be reborn

Captain Kirk rules Liberia OK

Space elevators ho!

Blue embroidery

Lights out in the Czech Republic

P-mail yeilds to email

IBM and Nazi Germany

Irradiation reduces farting

Horoshoh Harry

Tuesday, March 26, 2002

Doonesbury on Napster

The Musee Mechanique is saved!

Will this bring peace to Canadian rightsholders and their audiences?

Indy promotion gone mad!

What if the labels designed Napster? Ewwwww.

Punk poster art

Forbes takes the cake

My God, what have I bid on?

Forget butterflies, they need warfarin ballots

Ali G's porno film poster

Worst terrorist ever

Playboy: Women of Enron

Disney's California Adventure to suck less

Monday, March 25, 2002

Will Wright and Scott McCloud at GDC

Treat me like a customer, not a thief

Apple treats child prodigies like crap

The Danger Hiptop kicks AZZ

Nerd squillionaire sporting bets

What the Past Will Look Like Some Day

A truly excellent acronym

Hearings in Toronto tomorrow on the Canadian DMCA

Indispensible resource for kids online

France legalizes cellular jamming

The Warhol battery

The Web is not boring

Now that is a messy apartment