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Friday, May 31, 2002

Boomers are vulnerable to smallpox

Traditional threat-estimates of smallpox operate on the assumption that people like my folks, immunized in the fiftes, are immune. Not so fast -- turns out that most boomers' invulnerability has worn off.

The bad news comes from a study of 621 microbiologists in Maryland who received fresh vaccinations between 1994 and 2001 to protect them in their work. Only about 40, or just 6 per cent, were still immune from their earlier vaccinations.

"The study is, to the best of my knowledge, the only one since eradication which tries to look at the durability of immunity," says lead author Michael Sauri, director of the Occupational Medicine Clinic in Maryland. "It's showing us that after 20 years immunity is not going to be there."

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:15:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Europe bound

Well folks, I'm off! I'm geoing to be in airplanes and airports for the next 36h or so, on my way to the Reboot conference in Denmark on June 4th, followed by the NTK Extreme Computing event on June 9th. Any blogging I do in the next day or so is subject to my ability to find a wireless link in SFO, JFK and Heathrow, but I leave you in Mark and Pesco's capable hands. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:50:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, May 30, 2002

Ubiquitous computing comes to Walt Disney World

Disney's launching an ambitious ubiquitous computing initiative for their parks; opters-in will be tracked throughout the parks by inconspicuous device that will customize their experience, step by step.

Digital cameras disguised as lampposts will be scattered throughout the park. If you click on a handheld remote control, the lampposts will snap your picture as you wander around, then deliver the photos over the internet to your computer, from which you can order coffee mugs, T shirts or whatever emblazoned with whichever of them you prefer.

As your child approaches a costumed Disney character, she squeals in delight (or runs away) as the character greets her by name. The person inside the costume was tipped off to your family's identity by chips embedded in your souvenir autograph book. Then, as she passes attractions and other sights, the Mickey Mouse wristband you bought for her squeaks out various fun facts, enabling her to lead her family around like a tour guide. Just when you think you're safe at home, the wristband springs to life again triggered by infrared prompts from Disney TV programs.

Weirdly enough, I wrote about this in "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," which Tor's publishing around Xmas:

Pirates was the last ride Walt personally supervised, and we'd thought it was sacrosanct. But Debra had built a Pirates sim in Beijing, based on Chend I Sao, the XIXth century Chinese pirate queen, which was credited with rescuing the Park from obscurity and ruin. The Florida iteration would incorporate the best aspects of its Chinese cousin -- the AI-driven sims that communicated with each other and with the guests, greeting them by name each time they rode and spinning age-appropriate tales of piracy on the high seas; the spectacular fly-through of the aquatic necropolis of rotting junks on the sea-floor; the thrilling pitch and yaw of the sim as it weathered a violent, breath-taking storm -- but with Western themes: wafts of Jamaican pepper sauce crackling through the air; liquid Afro-Caribbean accents; and swordfights conducted in the manner of the pirates who plied the blue waters of the New World. Identical sims would stack like cordwood in the space currently occupied by the bulky ride-apparatus and dioramas, quintupling capacity and halving load-time.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:31:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chess-playing automaton remembered

Great CNN review of a book about the famous Victorian hoax chess-playing automaton.

Charles Babbage, the godfather of the computer, played two games against the Turk. Edgar Allan Poe, the creator of the modern detective story, wrote an notable essay about it. Magicians based illusions on it. And it provoked questions about what we now call "artificial intelligence."

So, even after someone finally figured out how the Turk worked -- that, yes, there was a man inside this contraption -- its place in history was secure.

Except that, aside from books about oddities and curiosities, the Turk has been mostly forgotten by history. Tom Standage seeks to correct that oversight with his new biography of the machine, "The Turk" (Walker & Co.).

Link Discuss (Thanks, Grad!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:21:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Audio CDs demystified

Excellent in-depth technical discussion of CD-audio, and how copy prevention systems (don't) work.

You betcha. Computers read data tracks first, but the data track has to be located at the end of the CD. Sounds confusing, but it has to be that way. In computer parlance, an Enhanced CD is a form of multisession CD. The CD is written to more than once; in the case of Enhanced CDs and Mac-PC hybrid CDs, this happens because you want to write two different types of data to the same CD. Audio CD players can only read the first session on a CD--again, no need or ability to know what multiple sessions are since an audio CD is expecting to see only audio CD tracks. So the audio content has to be the first thing on the disc, located on the inside of the disc surface. The data track is on the outside.

So if you take a magic marker--or, more dangerously a piece of electrical tape or a Post-it note--and use it to cover over that shiny band that divides the audio program from the data track, your computer won't realize that there even is a data track as it scans from the beginning of the CD--the inner part where the audio stuff is--to the outside looking for data. What your computer will see is a final audio track that seems to go on and on until it reaches the edge of the disk. This will put a whole lot of silence at the end of the last track when you rip the CD (a problem you can rectify using the Quicktime Player as an audio editor), but otherwise you'll be good to go.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:18:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I've been Expediated again

Yesterday's Expedia horror story only worsens. I called American Airlines yesterday and used the fact that I was a gold frequent flyer to get them to intervene, booking me my one-day extension to my London ticket.

But I just re-contacted American Airlines, and discovered that Expedia wouldn't let them change the ticket. Expedia told me that the ticket couldn't be changed because American Airlines had placed restrictions on the fare, but when American waived those restrictions, Expedia blackballed my changes.

So I'm back in hold-queue hell. Let me say this again, in case I wasn't clear enough yesterday: Stay away from Expedia. Abandon travel, ye who book there. Expedia not only treats its customers terribly as a result of incompetence; it also actively works to their detriment, deliberately imposing obstacles on their travel.

I feel like a fool for having allowed myself to be duped by Expedia. I will certainly never book there again, and I sincerely hope that you-all will benefit from my mistake, and stay clear of Expedia from now on. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:13:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Malware artworks

A German museum has mounted a display of computer virii as art, sponsored by Symantec:

Viruses_culture
Virus charms and selfcreating codes - Alessandro Ludovico
Action sharing - epidemiC
AntiMafia - epidemiC
Audience versus sharing - epidemiC
Vopos, an experiment in art - 0100101110101101.0RG

Computer_language
:(){ :|:& };: - Jaromil
If ( ) then ( ) - Jutta Steidl
Language, a virus? - Florian Cramer

Link Discuss (Thanks, Ronks!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:03:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MacSlash's domain stolen

This guy appears to have stolen MacSlash's domain. Any readers in Valencia are invited to drop by his house and ask him why he did it:

Vicente Peiro Crespo
Chiva , 23 , 27
Valencia, Valencia 46018
ES

The worst thing is, Dotster appears to be complicit in this, too. God, the domain system blows. Who's in charge, anyway? Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:53:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Second-gen cyberpunk jewelry

Isabel "Rudy's Daughter" Rucker sells her handmade jewelry online. Makes me wish I wore cufflinks. Link Discuss (via The Schism Matrix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flaming Bibles!

It's a Bible that shoots a jet of flame from between its pages, allowing you to be just as fire-n-brimstone as you need to be. Link Discuss (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF's comments on the BPDG final report

Maybe you noticed that I didn't do much posting yesterday. That's because I was working on the EFF's comments on the BPDG co-chairs' final report. Follow the link below to read 'em, and if you're down for the cause, talk to your employer about signing onto them, then contact Seth.

The BPDG's objective is to write a legally mandatory "standard" that will undermine public policy interests, fair use, First Amendment rights, and the innovation that is the sweetest fruit of a competitive marketplace.

We hope that readers of the Co-Chair's Report will find, in this briefing, compelling evidence of the dangers presented by the BPDG recommendations and will recognize them as the self-interested aspirations of a small, partisan group seeking to write an anti-competitive law that protects its commercial interests at the public's expense.

The BPDG "process" has been rife with acrimony, arbitrariness and confusion, to an extent that cannot be fully ascribed to mere haste. EFF believes that the failings of the BPDG process stem directly from BPDG's efforts to cloak a inter-industry horse-trading exercise in the trappings of a public undertaking, with nominal participation from all "affected industries." In reality, the representatives were hand-picked by the conveners of the BPDG to minimize any dissent, as is evidenced by the high degree of similarity between the original proposal brought to the group by its conveners and the final report that the co-chairs unilaterally present herein as the group's findings.

Throughout the process, the absence of any formal charter or process afforded the co-chairs the opportunity to manipulate the rules of the group to suit their true purpose while maintaining its illusory openness, as when the scope of the group's discussions was summarily expanded to encompass all unauthorized redistribution of feature films, as opposed to unauthorized redistribution over the Internet.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:24:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Germans worried about analog sovereignty

My analog hole article from last week made it to Germany. Did you know that "Plug the Analog Hole" is "das analoge Loch stopfen" in German? I think. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

I will never do business with Expedia again

I travel a lot -- twice, three times a month some months. I have used Expedia for the past couple years, but I think I've just about had it with them. I like the "convenience" of Expedia; I can get a conference invite while I'm sitting in the keynote at another conference, price out the ticket, email the conference organizers and find out if that's acceptable, get a response by email and book the ticket.

But man, "convenience" is a slippery concept here. I need to extend an RT ticket from SFO to London by one day. I have spent hours and hours (six+ by my calculations) on hold with half a dozen different "travel agents" at Expedia, trying to make a trivial change. One agent actually told me, yes, the change has been made, that will be $200, but one of her cohort called me at SIX AM this morning to tell me that she'd been mistaken, the ticket could not be changed at all. Since then, I've been fed half a dozen different stories, including:

• You no longer have any ticket, we cancelled your ticket, it will cost $2000 extra to get your old ticket back
• No changes can be made
• The change has been made
• I will see if I can make the change

I sent Expedia a note telling them how disappointed I was with the "service" they provided, and got an empty, vacuous, unsigned form-letter in response.

I've had it with Expedia. A travel agent may be less "convenient" in that she will only be available during business hours, but nothing is worth the days of aggro that even the simplest change with Expedia entails.

I'm posting this to warn you off -- don't be suckered in by Expedia's "convenience." They clearly have no idea what they're about, have no concept of customer service, and will not get you where you need to go. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:46:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Insider Haunted Mansion blog

Chef Mayhem (AKA Jeff Baham), the world's foremost Haunted Mansion fan, has a sporadic blog with insider news about the progress of the finest Disney-park ride, ever, period. Lots of juicy stuff here: The October 30th Hallowe'en party at the Haunted Mansion in Disney World (admission "limited" to 999), the story behind the new safety spiel (not the voice of the Haunted Mansion Holiday rehab, who refused to overtape Paul Frees's classic narration) and the upcoming Haunted Mansion Holiday soundtrack CD release. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:37:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Great Beyond

RIP Mildred Wirt Benson, creator of Nancy Drew, dead of cancer at 96.

Benson was a journalist for 58 years and wrote more than 130 books, including the Penny Parker mystery series. She also penned countless short stories, but is best known for creating Nancy Drew, who inspired and captivated generations of girls...

She wrote children's stories when she was in grade school and won her first writing award at 14.

Benson was the first person to receive a master's degree in journalism at the University of Iowa in 1927, according to the school.

She was introduced to journalism through her first husband, Asa Wirt, who worked with The Associated Press. In 1944, Benson 1944 began working at the former Toledo Times and later at The Blade.

She covered city hall, federal and courthouse beats and wrote a weekly column in The Blade from 1990 until January, when she reluctantly retired.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elfpanties?

"Reverend Jen" is an NYC painter who professes a belief that she is an elf. She sells her "gently worn" panties over the Internet, because:

art stardom is one of the least lucrative career paths at gal can take. Despite the fact that I'm a creative genius, I have a lot of trouble making ends meet because I'm wrapped up in my visionary artistic pursuits. Not only that, I have so many pairs of panties, I don't know what to do with them...At last count, I had 1,172 pairs of panties, and my collection just keeps on growing. By purchasing apair of my "gently worn" panties, not only will you get to enjoy unfathomnable sensory pleasures, you will be supporting the avant-garde and contributing to the course of art history as we know it.

Link Discuss (via Journeyman Onanist)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Listen to the pauses, not the notes

Lowercase is a new electronica sub-genre that consists of long, minimal periods of silence, punctuated byt he softest, subtlest of sounds.

Recent compositions include a bubbling symphony of boiling tea kettles, the gentle hiss of blank tapes being played through a stereo and the soft bumps of helium balloons hitting the ceiling.

One recent album was so quiet, listeners wondered whether it actually contained any sound at all.

"Lowercase resembles what Rilke called 'inconsiderable things' -- the things that one would not ordinarily pay attention to, the details, the subtleties," said Steve Roden, the Los Angeles artist who coined the term.

Leander Kahney's Wired News piece links to MP3s of a bunch of examples of the genre. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:39:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My "Home Again, Home Again"

My friend Emily's zine Kiss Machine reprinted my story, "Home Again, Home Again," a novellette that originally appeared in one of the Tesseracts anthologies of Canadian sf. It's available, full-text, no DRM, online:

The reason that Chet can't pinpoint the moment his mother sealed her lips is because he was a self-absorbed little rodent in those days.

Not a cute freckled hellion. A miserable little shit who played hide-and-seek with the other miserable little shits in the bat-house, but played it violently, hide-and-seek-and-break-and-enter, hide-and-seek-and-smash-and-grab. The lot of them are amorphous, indistinguishable from each other in his memory, all that remains of all those clever little brats is the lingering impression of loud, boasting voices and sharp little teeth.

The Amazing Robotron was a fool in little Chet's eyes, an easy-to-bullshit, ineffectual lump whose company Chet had to endure for a mandatory hour every other day.

"Chet, you seem distr-acted to-day," The Amazing Robotron said in his artificial voice.

"Yah. You know. Worried about, uh, the future." Distracted by Debbie Carr's purse, filched while she sat in the sixty-eighth floor courtyard, talking with her stupid girlie friends. Debbie was the first girl from the gang to get tits, and now she didn't want to hang out with them anymore, and her purse was stashed underneath the base of a hollow planter outside The Amazing Robotron's apt, and maybe he could sneak it out under his shirt and find a place to dump it and sort through its contents after the session.

"What is it about the fu-ture that wo-rries you?" The Amazing Robotron was as unreadable as a pinball machine, something he resembled. Underneath, he was a collection of whip-like tentacles with a knot of sensory organs in the middle.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:10:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Now, *that's* parody!

Parody is a fair use. That means, in a nutshell, that you can use something to make fun of itself without infringing on its copyright. This principle exists so that authors can't use copyright as a club to stifle criticism; without it, Mad Magazine wouldn't be able to use caricatures and exaggerated plotlines to show how bad a movie is, etc.

Now, satire is another thing altogether. A satire is a humorous work that uses one thing to make fun of something else, like Weird Al Yankovic's "Like a Surgeon." Weird Al has a bone to pick with the medical profession, not Madonna, so using her copyrighted "Like a Virgin" without her permission is an infringement. Think of it like this: Madonna isn't responsible for the excesses of the medical establishment; why should the fruit of her labor be used in a ridiculing manner without her permission?

It's amazing how many people just! don't! get! this! Once you've got the distinction, it's pretty easy to grasp. Here's a perfect example: The EFF has just released an high-larious Flash video of "Tinseltown Club," a parodical musical animation that uses the Mickey Mouse Club themesong to draw attention to Disney's involvement with the Hollings Bill, which will put Hollyweird's technophobic studio heads in charge of all new technology. This is a parody (we actually had to go back to the drawing board once or twice and make this more like Disney's own song and iconography, otherwise, the parodical link wouldn't be clear enough).

And it's fab. Got a Gnutella node or a Kazaa server? Put it up -- the more, the merrier. In an age where everyone is terrified that if they utter the True Name of some big company's invention that they'll be sued into smoking rubble, it's way-refreshing to be able to shout the copyrighted words-of-power joyously and freely. Link Discuss (Thanks, Ren!)

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

New and improved RSS

Thanks to BloggerPro's latest features, we've got a new and improved RSS feed. If you syndicate Boing Boing, this URL will give you much cleaner file. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:53:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hanging a moon on the Web

Ass-O-Tron: Feed it a URL and it will load the page with a guy hanging a moon superimposed on it. Strangely and fiercely compelling. Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:43:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jack Vance, curmudgeon

Jack Vance interviewed on SciFi.com. He's old, he's blind, he's cranky, but lovable for all that:

I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all. I haven't been to a movie since somebody gave me free tickets to Star Wars, which I went to. It's just I have an utter revulsion to being part of an audience. Sitting there in an audience and everybody sniffling at once and everybody laughing at once. Everybody's valves being turned on at the same time. I just feel like I'm going to some mass prostitution. I feel soiled sitting in an audience.

I do read books. I suppose it's more or less the same thing, but at least I'm alone and I'm an individual. I can stop anytime I want, which I frequently do. But I just despise mass media. As I say, I never ever look at science fiction. I don't even know what's going on. I know [Robert] Silverberg, of course, but I haven't read any of his stuff. And Poul Anderson, who was a dear friend of mine, I read one of his stories once because he happened to be in a little book produced by Ballantine. There were four stories in it. One was by me. But essentially the book was Poul's and mine, and Poul had a very good story in there. It dealt with some mermaids and his command of the underwater life was beautiful to me.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:40:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teacher displays porn during exam

BBC story about a math professor who was caught looking at pornographic websites on his computer while he was giving a test. How did anyone know? because the professor forget to unplug the large screen projector from his computer first. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:19:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New issue of Animation Blast

Animation Blast is my favorite magazine, and it keeps getting better. It is about one thing -- animation artists, and the editor, Amid Amidi, always seems to pick my favorites. This is the first issue that has interior color pages, and they're put to great use. There's an interview with Gary Baseman (Teacher's Pet), a review of a 1956 book, Walt Disney's Our Friend the Atom, and a must-read interview with Hanna-Barbera character designer Ed Benedict, including an appreciation by John Kricfalusi in which he explains why Benedict is his favorite animation designer. The magazine costs $6 and you can read more about it at the Animation Blast web site. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:01:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Even shorter than www.makeashorterlink.com

TinyURL shrinks this:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?map.x=302&map.y=156&map
data=afbX8DbyAoesP8oMVXE9yH15Yqfri%252f0FnbmKKpfMbrjLn0o8BLJ
1%252bTQRc5bB8ZoqtlOeDdZwlJtHLgfMIVHUWlmPWw8uDAvn6M%252bkyj2
OhU7lZS%252fzgR6gc6Gc6UR0nFUKiKZ%252fUA1FA7i4GoxVbNUmI3sVoXm
LsVCjdi1tcAxjLEEXFdAvuJU%252bwjYfFeWO15n%252fiFsgXNxKDxWULBF
tyxoa65AuWb0a5SU%252ftWdT4P7e8CtC9acf37axZa%252fI2MWC7g54TPL
6YB%252bwcKdZuh60N%252fb83BrfUSLSD%252ffK1nJ16Ma8D%252fc%253
d&click=center

into this:

http://tinyurl.com/6

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:42:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fitnesspunks

Punk rock aerobics classes attact pudgy alternapeople who want to skank to CBGB's Golden Hits.

"We were trying to take moves that people would do in clubs — like pogo and skank — and put them into our workout, as well as having it be effective and actually have the heart rate go up, have this be a workout," said Punk Rock Aerobics co-founder Hilken Mancini, who is also a singer and guitarist for Boston's Fuzzy. "So it's sort of this fine line between choreography and chaos."

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:53:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mozillafest 2002

Mozilla 1.0 is almost upon us; there's a host of parties in cities around the world on June 12 -- I'll be at the DNA Lounge with bellzon, gettin' my browser on. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Identity theives strip-mine home equity

Indentity thieves in Detroit are targetting senior citizens with paid-up mortgages, stealing their identities and mortgaging their homes. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:13:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toaster toasts its own image

Neat mosaic of a toaster made from pieces of bread, toasted to different shades of brown. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:38:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, May 27, 2002

The WalMart of CAT-scans

Great NYT piece about CAT Scan 2000, a fleet of CAT-scan vans that cruise the back-roads, trading hyper-detailed full-body scans for cash on the barrelhead, calling themselves "the WalMart of body-scanning."

"That's where science, the marketplace, and patients are caught in a bind," Dr. Kessler said. "This is a pretty heavy-duty exam that seems to have sort of escaped into the marketplace. We have a technology that's gotten caught in the gaps between the scientific agencies, the regulatory agencies, and the payers who pay for health care of all sorts. The fair evaluation of these procedures is no one's province. That's the gap here."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:20:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Radio controlled helicopter with tiny video camera

An Apple.com article about the Draganflyer, a strange-looking remote-controlled helicopter which weighs 17 ounces and has gyro-stabilizers so anyone can fly it. Apple is plugging it because the digital videos can be edited with iMovie. It's expensive, though: $750 plus $200 for the video equipment. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:13:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

[Ray|Blow]guns

These hand-blown glass rayguns from Joe Blow studios are fantastic. Link Discuss (Thanks, JimWICH!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:43:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bugs 0wn the weather

Brit scientists have received funding to examine the hypothesis that the weather is manipulated by cloudborne microbes that have evolved the ability to influence climate to their survival advantage. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:06:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"I am the very model of a Usenet personality"

Charlie's reposted a brilliant "Modern Major General" pastiche about Usenet trolls, lovely, especially apropos of "Joo Joo," Boing Boing's latest empty troll:

I am the very model of a Newsgroup personality.
I intersperse obscenity with tedious banality.
Addresses I have plenty of, both genuine and ghosted too, On all the
countless newsgroups that my drivel is cross-posted to. Your bandwidth I
will fritter with my whining and my snivelling, And you're the one who
pays the bill, downloading all my drivelling. My enemies are numerous,
and no-one would be blaming you For cracking my head open after I've
been rudely flaming you.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:49:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A streetcar named blog

A blog for fans, watchers and critics of the Toronto Transit System. Link Discuss (via The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:03:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teach a person to run an httpd and you'll get pages forever

Zed sez: "O'Reilly's quoting Gibson's 'the future is here; it's just not evenly distributed' makes this seem timely:"

Wearing a traditional feathered headdress and using a Power Point presentation, a leader of the Ashaninka Indian tribe from central Peru described how his village created a presence on the Internet...

In the past several years, the Ashaninkas put up their own Internet server and website to tell their story. Mino said they are using Web-based tools to educate their people, and village Internet kiosks have enabled small villages to communicate with one another.

A key part of the program, he said, was their insistence that the villagers establish their own Web servers and learn to maintain the system for themselves. This led to a year of negotiating with the Peruvian state telephone company to provide the resources necessary for the Ashaninkas to install a network. It was important that the Ashaninkas be able to demonstrate their self-sufficiency to the dominant society in Lima.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:53:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nicotine water

New nicotine-spiked spring-water gives you your toxin of choice in liquid form. No word on whether a caffeinated version is coming.

Nico Water, like nicotine gum, comes with 2 or 4 milligrams of nicotine. But unlike the gum, Nico Water is marketed as a supplement -- not a replacement.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:33:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, May 26, 2002

Barbie considered harmful

Iranian police raid Barbie dealers, charge them with immorality detrimental to the state.

Recently Moral Police have stepped up arrest and harassment of shopkeepers for selling Barbie dolls and whatever decorated with different shapes of Barbie and its image which are immensely used by school children.

Tehran Judicial Department has arrested many of Barbie traders and shopkeepers mainly in Tehran  and other places accusing them for spreading obscene Western cultures since last month.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ashes to thraxes

Baseball fan's postmortem wish to have his ashes scattered over his local ballpark cause thrakspanick when the urn is jettisoned prematurely and collides with the roof and scatters powder all about. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RTFM? FU!

Nice piece on America's hate-affair with documentation, and the rising trend to glossy up the manuals, turning them into three-page glossy gate-fold brochures.

In the United States, Whirlpool is selling a microwave oven that asks consumers if they are preparing, say, a cooked or uncooked chicken, with or without bones, with or without sauce. The microwave will calculate the cooking time and method; all the user needs to do -- after answering all those questions, of course -- is push the start button and dish out the finished product.

In the not-too-distant future, many of those questions may prove unnecessary, at least for frozen dinners and such. Some microwaves are being designed to read a bar code that will be printed on the side of the package and cook it automatically. "The consumer won't even have to read directions on how long he needs to cook the meal; he'll just have to eat it," Laermer said.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:16:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

IRC commentary on my panel with Harlan

Last night, I did a panel on copyright (and more specifically, on bad copyright laws like the DMCA) at BayCon. I didn't find out until I got there that they'd invited Harlan Ellison to the panel as well. As a result, the talk ended up consisting mostly of Harlan bellowing obscenities and threats of physical violence, which may have been vastly entertaining, but left me feeling like a lot of important information and useful debate got drowned out by the histrionics. Harlan loathes the Internet (though he says he doesn't, I have the message he had Joe Straczinsky send to my Clarion class through GEnie, in which he basically calls us idiots for engaging in something as foolish at networked communication) and is proudly ignorant of its workings, features and underpinnings.

Nevertheless, he considers himself expert enough to go and say outlandish things ("My crew of leet hackers have the foolproof means to take down and Website in five minutes, bam!" "We don't need Brewster Kahle to preserve posterity, we have librarians!" "The EFF is only farting into the wind: It has a moral obligation to hunt down pirates and bring them to justice!" "There is no posterity. Take $FAMOUS_TWENTIES_AUTHOR, he is utterly forgotten today.")

It was rather tiresome, but thanks to Danny O'Brien of NTK and his 802.11-equipped laptop, we were able to channel the Internet into (and out of) the room quite a bit. If Harlan had been there to hear anyone else (rather than reinforce his superstitions), it would have been even more interesting, as, for example, Danny googled $FAMOUS_TWENTIES_AUTHOR and he and his wife Quinn began to recite all the various and useful ways in which the Internet has preserved him for posterity. Danny was on the #infoanarchy IRC channel, too, stenographing and discussing the panel; the chatter's pretty funny and may give you a sense of what we got instead of a panel. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Just in Tokyo

Justin Hall's guide to Tokyo, "Just in Tokyo," is out! Here's my cover-blurb:

"Put down that 'Prague on $5 a Day,' you hippie! Justin's Tokyo-On-No-Yen-Just-Confused-Smiles will have you flirting, reeling with liquor and dressed up like an extra from a bootleg high-school production of Neuromancer as you chow down on a hearty breakfast of vending-machine schoolgirl panties. As you lie awake in your coffin hotel, listening to the midnight symphony of salaryman flatulence and drunken good cheer, fire up your DoCoMo handset, aim its flat-panel display at this book and read and you will feel comforted."

Link Discuss (via EvHead)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, May 25, 2002

OSXCON: Call for papers

The upcoming O'Reilly OSX conference has issued its call for participation -- do you have an OSX tech-topic you want to speak about? I've sat on a number of O'Reilly conference "kitchen cabinets" now, reviewing the proposals that came in, and it's a huge pleasure to see the kinds of creative things people are working in the technology universe. A suggestion: Don't pitch your product; rather, propose a talk that explains your product in a context (i.e., not "Here is my thing, which does stuff," but rather, "Here is some stuff, which is important because of x, y and z. My product coincidentally does stuff." Caveat: for "stuff" do not substitute $BUZZWORD, but rather some real and meaningful aspect of $BUZZWORD, i.e., "Bioinformatics for the consumer generation of evil clones," as oppposed to "Biometrics kick ass, just ask all the empty suits at $MARKET_RESEARCH_FIRM.") Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inspired to interestingness by Google

Delightful discussion of how Google works between a father and son. Note the first impulse (I will game the system, hurrah!) and the second (I will strive to be interesting!). If this is what Google does to young minds, then it is truly a force for good.

"Yes. Google follows the links. Google also decides that pages are more interesting if lots of people link to them,and shows you those first."

"Can I make a web page and write things?"

"Yes you can. I'll help you"

"And can I make some other pages and link to my web page so Google likes it?"

"That would be cheating - people have tried that and Google counts links from people who have lots of links pointing at them more than links from pages that no-one links to".

"Oh. OK. I'll write a page, and you can link to it, and you can tell your friends to link to it, and they can tell their friends to link to it, and then everyone will find my page."

"Well, that would work, but only if you think of something interesting to write."

"Oh. I'll have to think of some funny stories then."

Link Discuss (via Doc)

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

Hygiene versus Lisp

Joey counters a Lisp-snob's assertion that "the good programmers of the world are held back by trying to accomodate the less knowledgeable members of our field."

I counter-propose that we programmers who have mastered the basic human skills of preparing our own food, practicing daily hygiene, social skills and finding people with whom to mate are being held back, image-wise, by uberdorks like you.

This of course, is a classic mode of thinking in a field that is overwhelmingly dominated by men: rather than engineer something to be more user-friendly, this kind of thought says that we should restrict the set of users. Any attempt at usability or widining the audience is seen as "dumbing down". And that's truly a shame, because the nice thing about simple languages, such as Flash's ActionScript or VB, is that it brings people with problem domain-specific knowledge to the programming table

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, May 24, 2002

Monorail for sale!

A 1971 Walt Disney World red monorail car is being auctioned off on eBay. Reminder: my birthday is 54 days away. I could give up the lease on my apartment and locate this at a trailer-park. It would absolutely kick ass. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:44:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

80% water, 10% caffeine

Heather sez:

"You've heard it for years -- drink at least eight glasses of water a day. But now some scientists say that may be an urban myth. CNN Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joined CNN's Paula Zahn to discuss the issue."

Here's the best quote from the piece:

"Diet Coke, 99 percent water -- you could get your water there."

To all those people who've disparaged my Diet Coke habit over the years: screw off!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Heather!)

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

This is how the Internet ends; with a worm, not a bang

What a fantastically alarmist and cool whitepaper this is, dealing with the coming netpocalypse arising from the inevitable flood of Warhol and Flash worms that will come along and kill the Internet. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:29:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

General Publishing takes out CanLit

General Publishing, one of the largest Canadian book distributors, is about to trash the Canadian publishing industry. It's just done a bankruptcy restructuring that will screw 40+ small and academic publishers out of their due for a banner publishing fall. Many of them will certainly fail. Tell me again why consolidation is good for the industry? Oh well, who needed Canadian lit anyway? Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:18:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roger Kaputnik: kaput at age 81

Here's an obit for Dave Berg, the pipe-smoking guy with the Reed Richards-style two tone hair who wrote and drew "The Lighter Side of..." cartoons for Mad. His sense of humor was quite a bit different from the rest of the usual gang of idiots, and it is strange that he was even in the magazine. I like his stuff though. Link (Thanks, Stefan!) Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:24:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shrubkitsch isn't bolshoi in Mockva

The Shrub just ain't popular in Russia. Moscow kitsch merchants can't seem to shift their newly made GW Bush nesting matrioshke dolls. Meanwhile, Clinton matrioshkas are selling like hotcakes.

"I guess he is not like Clinton, he is not so interesting," a vendor named Igor said. Clinton dolls were outselling Bush dolls two-to-one, he said, just as they would on any other day. At Igor's stand, the two presidents -- never known to enjoy each other's company -- were separated only by a serious-looking Harry Potter. The main difference between the two presidential dolls, both priced at a negotiable $30, is the story they tell.

Link Discuss

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

Disney sells housepaint at Home Depot

Disney's signed a $100MM deal with Home Depot to market a line of branded Disney housepaints in exchange for tons of Home Depot ad-placement in movies, parks, TV and print. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:43:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Piercing wannabees and near-fatal magnets

British schoolchildren simulated piercings by putting magnets on one side of their body (in their cheek, say), and steel balls on the other side. The magnets are so powerful that they are cutting off circulation and causing major, potentially fatal health problems.

n trying to give themselves fake lip piercings, several children let the magnets slip down their throats, and in one case sections of a nine year-old girl's gut were clamped together by a pair of magnets she had swallowed, causing potentially fatal perforations in her intestine.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

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

Thursday, May 23, 2002

Sublimestitch decals for sale

Sublime Stitching has put a bunch of extreme needlepoint iron-on transfers up for sale. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:11:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

7,000+ advertisements

Mena sez: ""The Ad*Access Project, funded by the Duke Endowment 'Library 2000' Fund, presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955." Link Discuss (Thanks, Mena!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:09:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hacktivismo news

Hactivismo news -- one-stop shop for information on the way that code can be a tool of liberation. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

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

Mutant Fish Spawn

A whole school of mutant IXOYE fish. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:36:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hollywood wants to plug your hole

I've just posted an analysis of Hollywood's latest Congressional report, in which the MPAA reveals its perverse fascination with "plugging the analog hole." It's every bit as dirty as it sounds.

The second section, "Plugging the Analog Hole," reveals Hollywood's plan to turn a generic technology component, the humble analog-to-digital convertor, into a device that is subject to the kind of regulation heretofore reserved for Schedule A narcotics.

Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are the building blocks of modern digital technology. An ADC's job is to take samples of the strength (amplitude) of some analog signal (light, sound, motion, temperature) at some interval (frequency) and convert the results to a numerical value. ADCs are embedded in digital scanners, samplers, thermometers, seismographs, mice and other pointer devices, camcorders, cameras, microscopes, telescopes, modems, radios, televisions, cellular phones, walkie-talkies, light-meters and a multitude of other devices. In general, ADCs are generic and interchangeable -- that is, a high-frequency ADC from a sound-card is potentially the same ADC that you'll find in a sensitive graphics tablet....

Virtually everything in our world is copyrighted or trademarked by someone, from the facades of famous sky-scrapers to the background music at your local mall. If ADCs are constrained from performing analog-to-digital conversion of all watermarked copyrighted works, you might end up with a cellphone that switches itself off when you get within range of the copyrighted music on your stereo; a camcorder that refuses to store your child's first steps because he is taking them within eyeshot of a television playing a copyrighted cartoon; a camera that won't snap your holiday moments if they take place against the copyrighted backdrop of a chain store such as Starbucks, which forbids on-premises photography because its fixtures are proprietary works.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:02:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney reveals depth of deep Pooh

Disney's latest SEC filing reveals that the company will owe AA Milne's agent's heirs hundreds of millions of dollars if a court finds that they are indeed the exclusive owners of the merchandise rights to Pooh-Bear, as a recently discovered document indicates.

A lot of the blog coverage of this issue has implied that Disney ripped off Milne or his heirs, but that's simply not the case. In 1983, Disney licensed Pooh from Milne's heirs -- the plaintiffs in this case are Milne's agent's heirs, who discovered a document left behind by the late agent in which Milne signed over the merch rights in perpetuity to him.

So Disney was acting in good faith -- until, that is, it shredded a bunch of boxes of documents related to the case, shortly before they were subpoenaed. I wonder if they'll sue Milne's heirs for falsely representing their ownership of the merch rights to Pooh?

"If each of the plaintiff's claims were to be confirmed in a final judgment, damages could total as much as several hundred million dollars and adversely impact the value to the company of any future exploitation of the licensed rights" for Pooh merchandise, according to the filing. Slesinger's heirs claim Burbank-based Disney has cheated them out of $200 million in royalties since 1983 from Pooh-related videos, DVDs, computer software and popular Pooh attractions at theme parks. Disney contends that it has fulfilled its royalty obligations under a 1983 contract.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogs and cons: Like peanut-butter and chocolate

Nick Denton sez that blogs aren't gonna change the NYT any time soon, but conferences are in for a blogistan overhaul.

My recommendation to conference organizers: hire some webloggers to report on your conference, and link to other posts; put up a conference news blog on the web; make that the default page on the internet terminals; and inject weblog commentary into the discussion. For instance, the moderator ought to be browsing weblogs in real time for points and questions to put to the panelists.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:18:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, May 22, 2002

I love a prank call.

This is an oldie but a goodie. Armed with a digital sampler and a lot of time, this guy cuts up dialogue from movies and TV and uses the celebrity voices for prank calls. Hysterical. Still. (As requested in the discussion area, consider yourself warned that there is an explicit advertisement on this site for a video of Pam Anderson and Brett Michaels. That's probably pretty funny too.)Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:26:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FilePile on eBay

Some joker is auctioning off a login/pass for FilePile, Andre Torrez's wonderful file-swap site (which is maxing out its bandwidth and is hence closed to new members). Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LeGuin's Eldred brief

This is a PDF of the National Writer's Union (et al)'s amicus brief on the Eldred v. Ashcroft case, to roll back the Sonny Bono Copyright Act of 1998. It's brilliant -- and Ursula K. LeGuin is a co-signatory! Link Discuss (via Vitanuova)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

O'Reilly blog book is online

"Essential Blogging," the O'Reilly blog-book I for which wrote the first chapter, is online as a series of PDFs for public review -- g'head and download a copy and let me know how badly I screwed up. Seriously, I think this is going to be a swell book. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Distributed Provision of Service

A thought occurred ot me last night about Peek-A-Booty, the hacktivism software that you run like a screensaver on your computer, making it available as a proxy for users behind repressive national firewalls (like China's). Users on the other side of the firewall use a gnutella-like host-discovery mechanism to find you when the screensaver is running, then send http-over-ssl requests to you to fetch documents that their firewall won't pass through.

The interesting thing about this is the potential for these distributed proxies to provide service to people who can't connect to some host on the Internet for some other reason -- Sympatico, Canada's DSL provider, often couldn't reach eBay because of bad routing tables, for example. In the event of another superworm attack (say a Warhol Worm version of NIMDA or CodeRed) core Internet routers may indeed fail, spoiling routing tables and making it impossible for some points to open connections to other points. In that event, Peek-A-Booty's distributed proxy could automatically locate those users who still have a connection to the host you're trying to reach and use them as a proxy, essentially providing an alternative, dynamic suite of Internet routes.

I've decided to call this a "Distributed Provision of Service." Pretty neat. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:35:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monsturd premieres June 7

Gonna be in SF on June 7? Check out the premiere of Monsturd, a delightful and revolting comedy about terrorizing turds in the Killer Tomotoes tradition, but actually funny. I'm gonna be in Oslo, but I got a sneak preview. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:03:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paul Boutin makes The Onion!

I wanna know how Paul Boutin got himself mentioned in this Onion article. Talkaboutcher dreams-come-true!

The Information Age was dealt a stunning blow Monday, when a factual error was discovered on the Internet. The error was found on TedsUltimateBradyBunch.com, a Brady Bunch fan site that incorrectly listed the show's debut year as 1968, not 1969...

"Will we ever fully trust the Web again?" Boutin asked. "We may well be witnessing the dawn of a new era of skepticism in which we no longer accept everything we read online at face value. But regardless of what the future holds, one thing is clear: The Internet's status as the world's definitive repository of incontrovertible fact has been jeopardized."

No wonder he cancelled lunch today. The "flu," indeed -- Mr. The Onion's just too big to show up for a meal with the little people! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:00:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Exoskeletons for the old

The "weak and elderly" get inflatable, breathable exoskeletons.

  The Lycra suit is covered with inflatable muscles to give elderly people more strength and stability to get around. It has its own power supply and pressure sensors that tell the artificial muscles when to inflate and assist the wearer.

  Link Discuss (via New World Disorder

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:32:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wanted: "What I Did on My Blogger Vacation" essays

The O'Reilly blogging book I did a chapter for is collecting a chapter ("Blogging Voices") of brief essays on why people blog. Got a blog and an itch to write an essay? Send some mail to Rael. Heh. That rhymes. My cat's breath smells like cat-food. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:17:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

England's sofas are major economic power

British sofa-cushions and piggy-banks contain one billion Sterling in aggregate. Capitalism wrings aggregated hands in distress. Link Discuss

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

Russia really, fantastically, amazingly corrupt

Bribery accounts for 12 percent of the Russian GDP.

Russians pay out a staggering $36 billion a year in bribes and unofficial charges, an amount that adds up to more than half of 2002 government spending, or 12 percent of gross domestic product, according to a study released Tuesday.

Cash or expensive presents are given for everything from better treatment at a hospital to a business license or a favorable court ruling.

"The figures could be even higher. We were using the minimum levels," said Georgy Satarov, president of the Indem think tank.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Caffeinated soap

ThinkGeek is selling Shower Sock ($6.99/bar), a transdermal caffeine delivery system embedded in a bar of soap. Invigorating showers ahoy!

Shower Shock is an all vegetable based glycerine soap which does *not* contain any harsh ingredients like ethanol, diethanolamine, polyethylene glycol or cocyl isethionate. So it's a gently envigorating soap ;) Scented with peppermint oil and infused with caffeine anhydrous, each bar of Shower shock contains approximately 10 servings/showers per 4 ounce bar with 250 milligrams of caffeine per serving. No, we're not kidding and no you don't eat it. The caffeine is absorbed through the skin...

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:34:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Truly mobile blogging

Raffi's written a perl SMS-to-blog engine. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:29:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Abandon all privacy, ye who dine here

A Fresno McDonald's is piloting a program to replace cash burger-purchases with fingerprint-analysis. Link Discuss (Thanks, Sarah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:28:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Understanding ETCON

Blackbelt Jones has posted some tasty rumination of what the whole ETCON mind-meld/mind-melt meant.

I've been thinking for a while about "the things we try and tell ourselves" through our stories good and bad (film, games, tv, photography, imagery, consumer-design, fashion) about the "innerstructure". Wonder what else will emerge (no pun intended) while we're under the influence of the Nash/Fuller binary constellation.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:25:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RSS-over-Gnutella

Dave Winer's proposing adding a <ttl> element to RSS as a means of making it easier to insert RSS items into Gnutellanet. I love the idea of people working hard to augment the noninfringing uses of Gnutella -- earlier today in one of the comments, someone mentioned that "98 percent of Kazaa users are engaged in infringement," and my houseguest, David Marusek, mentioned to me last night that he was under the impression that P2P networks were only used to infringe. This is not the case, of course -- no more than the idea that chat-rooms are only used for cybersex or that personal websites are only used to post pictures of people's pets. RSS-over-Gnutella would be a nifty and substantial new use for Gnutellanet, IMO. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:11:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tragedy of the Anticommons

The Tragedy of the Anticommons: a 117 page PDF. I confess to having only skimmed this, but it looks pretty mind-bending.

Cyberspace was once thought to be the modern equivalent of the Western Frontier, a place, where land was free for the taking, where explorers could roam, and communities could form with their own rules. It was an endless expanse of space: open, free, replete with possibility. This is true no longer. This Article argues that we are enclosing cyberspace, and imposing private property conceptions upon it. As a result, we are creating a digital anti-commons where sub-optimal uses of Internet resources is going to be the norm.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:05:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Science mocks decency with bald superchicken

Finger-lickin' chicken-pluckers are up in arms at this grotesque GM featherless chicken that is coming soon to an inhumane pen near you. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jens!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:02:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Liberate the public domain, one site-badge at a time

Lessig and Co. have put up a site (designed by Metafilter Matt, no less) to track the comings and goings in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case, where the forces of good and purity face down the copyright absolutists who would keep all of human endeavor locked up behind IP laws until the heat-death of the universe. You can (and should) add a badge for the site to your blog, exhorting your readers to "Create like it's 1790," "Free the Mouse," and to watch for "When copyright attacks!" Link Discuss (Thanks, Larry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:55:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Contrathaxification eats history

Zed sez "Irradiating the mail to the Library of Congress is destroying submissions, including, in the cheap irony dept., irreplaceable taped interviews of reactions to 9/11."

Photographs of potentially historic value are fused onto cover sheets where the caption ink has melted off, making them impossible to decipher or preserve. A videotape of an oral history interview conducted for a special project to capture the memories of war veterans is not playable.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:47:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cyborg storytelling

Jessica Hammer, one of Clay's grad-students, has posted her thesis, "Six Principles: Toward a Theory of Interactive Narrative." The thesis is a series of essays, with examples, for building human/computer-hybrid interactive stories, and is fascinating:

Unfortunately, it is mathematically impossible for an author, or even any reasonably-sized team of authors, to create enough material to both provide the user with a large number of choices in the narrative and to provide them with many options each time they are faced with a choice. The author must choose between creating a large number of choice-points with only a few choices at each, or a few choice-points with many choices at each, or having many choice-points with many choices but having the narrative material at each be thin. This is because the number of lexia required grows exponentially with the number of choices in the story...

Having a computer author, on the other hand, can overcome these problems. Because the computer can generate material algorithmically, it can respond to the user's choices in real-time. Eventually, computer authorship may be a solution to creating responsive, interactive narratives. If a computer could be programmed to understand what makes a good story, and an algorithm could be devised for how to present that story, then the computer could create a powerful narrative to the user that would be completely fresh each time.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:44:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FBI hunts for Muslim Terrorists Mingling with Jewish Lesbians

Short CBS News article about how the FBI is doubling its efforts by wasting resources and invading people's privacy at the same time. Way to go!

Kate Rafael, a California peace activist, often takes part in anti-war demonstrations. But she was stunned when an FBI agent called her, seeking information about Muslim men.

"If it's your job to hunt Islamic fundamentalist terrorists," said Rafael, "Then it's your job to know that they don't hang out with Jewish lesbians in San Francisco.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:01:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Virtual human pyramid

Dig this 56-avatar human pyramid that a gang of Spanish Quake III players built. Link Discuss (via The Schism Matrix)

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

Benjamin Worm was "copy protection"

The Benjamin Worm, virus that's sweeping the Kazaa file-sharing network, is a supposed "white hat" worm that was developed to scare people away from making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works on P2P networks.

According to one of its developers, Paul Komoszki, Benjamin is a "controlled test" of a program designed to disrupt the illegal exchange of copyrighted data and child porn over peer-to-peer networks.

"We do not want to affect the exchange of legal programs and legal music files. Only users who are looking for and sharing copyrighted files could be infected," said Komoszki in an e-mail interview today.

Once it infects a Kazaa user's computer, Benjamin creates numerous copies of itself under file names that may be of interest to other Kazaa users, according to anti-virus firms. Examples include borlanddelphi-full-downloader.exe and Braveheart-Special Edition-divx.exe, according to Kaspersky Labs.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Owlswan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:11:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crappy copyright laws used to circumvent patent laws

Biotech companies are doing an end-run around the patentability of DNA sequences by transcoding them as MP3s. Since MP3s, as music, enjoy a 95 year monopoly under the Sonny Bono Anti-Public-Domain Act of 1998, this will give the companies a 95 year "copyright" on the sequences they identify.

"It's taking artistic copyright laws and using them to get around scientific issues," he said. "I think it stinks."

But a copyrighted genetic-based song could serve as a safe way to transfer DNA sequences between scientists, according to Don Pelto, an intellectual property lawyer with Washington firm McKenna Cuneo.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, May 20, 2002

Electric Velocipede

The Electric Velocipede, John Klima's excellent literary sf zine, has relaunched.

The title of the zine plays a little to my love of the small steampunk sub-genre (e.g. K. W. Jeter's INFERNAL DEVICES or even Alan Moore's exemplary comic THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN or even much of the atmosphere of China Mieville's PERDIDO STREET STATION). I do not want to publish a zine entirely comprised of such stories, but you certainly will catch my ear if you try. Take a look at what's in the first few issues and you'll see what I want.

I like the fact that no matter how techonologically advanced we get, the average person doesn't quite know how it all works (for example a CD player, or even a car), but can use all the technology regardless. Your characters don't need to be super-geniuses. In some cases, I even like when the technology almost feels like magic.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:13:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIP, Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould, one of the great science writers of all time, has died of cancer at 60.

Dr. Gould achieved a fame unprecedented among modern evolutionary biologists. The closest thing to a household name in the field, he became part of mainstream iconography when he was depicted in cartoon form on "The Simpsons." Renovations of his SoHo loft in Manhattan were featured in a glowing article in Architectural Digest.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:10:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oxford slang

Oxford slang for collitch wannabees:

Beating the bounds: A strange ritual of beating the ground with willow sticks to impress important boundaries upon the peasants. Only done for ``fun'' nowadays.

Link Discuss (via Robot Widsom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:07:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Search Google by phone

Google's got a semi-functional voice-search up. Go to the page linked below, call (650) 318-0165, speak a couple keywords, click a link, and voila, your results. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unauthorized DVD commentary

Amateur DVD commentary on DVDtracks.com -- anyone can make an alternate commentary track to any DVD, upload it and share it. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:02:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anyone have any OCR software handy?

My text-editor froze today while I was about to save an essay I'd just written. I managed to get a screengrab of the whole article, so I have a TIFF of the text. I just can't bring myself to re-key this; does anyone out there have any OCR software they can run this through? Email me. Problem solved. Thanks, Feòrag! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:09:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lessig's Eldred brief online

Larry Lessig announced last week at ETCON that he'd just finished the brief on Eldred v. Ashcroft, the case that could restore the notion of copyright as a limited monopoly, repealing the Bono Act's twenty year extension to copyright. Lessig's been working on this for weeks now, nonstop, and when he gave his talk at ETCON he had three quarters of a beard and purple eye-bags. I read this over the weekend, and it's killer stuff, really sharp and stirring and convincing and exhaustive, even for a legal punter like me.

The retroactive aspect of CTEA (The Bono Act) violates this requirement of exchange. Whatever material benefit might flow to the author or his heirs or publisher from the extension of this exclusive right, Congress has not conditioned that grant upon a gain by the public. The grant is thus a windfall, not an incentive.

Rather than "a compensation for a benefit actually gained to the community as a purchase of property," Madison, Aspects of Monopoly, supra, at 490, CTEA is simply a boon to the heirs of copyright holders. It thus violates the core of the quid pro quo built into the Copyright Clause.

Congress certainly has the power to grant such windfalls through tax benefits, or outright gifts. But its Copyright Clause power is contingent upon an exchange. As nothing is received by the public in exchange for, or conditioned upon, the retroactive extension, CTEA is beyond Congress's power.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:43:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Erotic Topiary Infuriates Santa Cruz Resident

Someone called the cops on a woman (who happens to be the director of UC Santa Cruz's rape prevention and counseling program) who trimmed her hedges to resemble a penis and breasts. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:12:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A week of Dilbert on Google

Scott "Dilbert" Adams will draw a new Google logo every day this week. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:43:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moonbase Beijing

China is planning a moon-base, with construction commencing in 2010. Will the national firewall filter interplanetary Internet traffic? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Best Buy pushes infomercials to TiVos

Best-Buy has cut a deal with TiVo to push interactive infomercials to set-top boxen. When I saw the headline for this story, "New Ad Campaign Aimed at TiVo Owners," I thought that someone had finally shipped an ad that looked good on fast-forward; this seems depressingly mundane by comparison. Link Discuss

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

Rowling: Poverty sucks

JK Rowling's publishing a short-story collection to raise money for single-parent families.

"Some articles written about me have come close to romanticising the time I spent on Income Support," she told the Daily Mirror.

"The well-worn cliche of the writer starving in the garret is so much more picturesque than the bitter reality of living in poverty with a child."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:05:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Believe it or not, he's back on the air

Disney's adapting "The Greatest American Hero" for the big screen. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:02:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orlando water-supply emphatically not threatened, mostly

Someone's been making "vague, unsubstantiated, uncorroborated" threats against the Orlando water-supply. Disney World's beefed up security. Check out the doth protesting too much:

"You're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't," he said. "You don't want to fall into the Chicken Little syndrome."

There has been no evidence the water supply has been compromised, he said.

"We stress, and underline stress, that the information was vague and unsubstantiated. But there doesn't appear to be any, at this point, threat to the public safety," Solomons said.

Link Discuss

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

The new iBook

Apple's revved the iBook again. Clock-speeds up to 700MHz, but still a max of 640MB of RAM and video-hardware that can't take advantage of OS X.2. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Psychic anti-terrorist big-brother software

Psychic snakeoil software can predict whether a profiled individual is prone to acts of terrorism.

Until now, however, no means has existed to identify individuals who may be potential terrorists but are unknown, and in advance of any act.  These are individuals who are emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually "equipped" and have strong motivations toward terrorist behavior.  These individuals may be otherwise indistinguishable from the normal population.  They are "bombs that could go off" once prepared, positioned, or triggered, but are not recognizable as threats before an act.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Damien!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, May 19, 2002

Bank One robs indie publishers

Bank One has cooked up a revolting theft of small publishers, seizing millions from the account of a distributor (which has never missed a loan-payment) that are owed to publishing companies that don't even have accounts with the bank:

Common Courage and the 85 publishers use LPC Group as a distributor for their books. LPC had a loan from the bank, with about $2.7 million outstanding. No publisher had signed onto the loan. Most if not all were unaware that LPC had obtained it. The bank acknowledges that LPC was not behind in loan payments. It recalled the loan after deciding LPC was a bad credit risk, essentially asking publishers to pony up for its own bad business choices.

As with every month, on April 1, LPC deposited a $1.2 million payment it received from an independent warehouse for sales of the publishers' books. Bank One, from documents in its possession, knew at the time that the payment was created from the sale of books owned by the publishers that were with LPC on consignment. It also knew that $1 million of the deposit was due to be sent out to publishers. Nonetheless, it seized the money the day it arrived in LPC's account.

Bank One, still owed $1.4 million, wants money from the next sales as well

Link Discuss (via This Modern World)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:17:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Joey's ETCON pix

Joey's posted a whack of photos from ETCON -- here's me in Damien Stolarz's groovy shades. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:59:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My bio, courtesy of some very great Danes

I'm speaking at Reboot, a Danish hackercon, in June. My bio, in Danish, sounds very, very impressive, but I can't find any Danish-English translators to verify its accuracy. But I'm sure it's great -- everything Danish is, as I understand it.

Selv-proklameret "gladeste geek på jorden". Science fiction forfatter, flittig skribent, tidligere iværksætter med peer-to-peer startup'en OpenCola, superaktiv med online-mediet BoingBoing og koordinator hos The Electronic Frontier Foundation. Alt i alt 110% digital kultur! og umulig at sætte i bås. Cory vil tage os med ud på grænsen af den digitale fremtid.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:16:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alice and Bob's secret life

Alice and Bob are the two hypothetical people that crypto and security hackers use when describing security problems and solutions; John Gordon's after-dinner speech on their private lives from the Zurich Seminar in 1984 is nerd-humor gold.

Now there are hundreds of papers written about Alice and Bob.  Over the years Alice and Bob have tried to defraud insurance companies, they have played poker for high stakes by mail, and they have exchanged secret messages over tapped telephones.

If we put together all the little details from here and there, snippets from lots of papers, we get a fascinating picture of their lives. This may be the first time a definitive biography of Alice and Bob has been given.  In papers written by American authors Bob is frequently selling stock to speculators. From the number of stock market deals Bob is involved in we infer that he is probably a stockbroker.

However from his concern about eavesdropping he is probably active in some subversive enterprise as well.  And from the number of times Alice tries to buy stock from him we infer  she is probably a speculator.

Alice is also concerned that her financial dealings with Bob are not brought to the attention of her husband.

So Bob is a subversive stockbroker and Alice is a two-timing speculator.

Link Discuss (via Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)

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

Schneier at ETCON audio

The folks at Dr. Dobb's have put up MP3s of all of Bruce Schneier's ETCON keynote (Fixing Network Security by Hacking the Business Climate). This was an amazing talk -- better than I had a chance to tell Bruce afterwards (he had to run to catch a plane). Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:00:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Search-and-replace Star Wars script

Juvenile humor: Searching and replacing common terms from a leaked "Attack of the Clones" script turns out to be unexpectedly funny.

The word JEDI has been replaced with MONKEY
The word FORCE has been replaced with ASS
The name ANAKIN SKYWALKER is now CHUBBY CLOWNEATER
AMIDALA is now STALLONE
DOOKU is now BLACKULA
YODA is now CAPTAIN GREENCROTCH
PALPATINE is now DR. DICKHOUSE
JAR JAR BINKS is now JAR JAR LARDSTAR
ARTOO DETOO is now MR. ROBOTO MEATFOO
MACE WINDU will now be known as KA-RAAAZY SHAQFU
SITH has been replaced with JEWS

Hrm. Not sure about the tastefullness of that last one... Link Discuss (Thanks, Jed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:13:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sniffing the glue that holds the net together

MacStumbler: Airport network analysis for OSX. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:52:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The annotated ETCON

Aaron Swartz has reproduced the ETCON programming guide, adding links to every blog entry on each session that he could locate -- it's meant to be the exhaustive index of all the commentary on each session from last week. I can't stop clickin'. Link Discuss (via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:48:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Low-gee water-blob shenannigans

Check out these amazing clips of riders on the vomit-comet (the freefalling jet that simulates low-gee environment) rupturing water-balloons and injecting the resulting blobs with dye and air and such. Science! Link Discuss (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, May 18, 2002

Ender's Game goes Hollywood

After years of languishing under option, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game has found a studio (Warner Brothers) and a director (Wolfgang Petersen, of Das Boot and the Neverending Story). Link Discuss

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

Gaming EtherPEG with PegBoy

Joey wrote PegBoy whilst at ETCON. PegBoy is an EtherPEG spammer: load it up with the URLs of a bunch of pics of yourself and it will fetch a random one every n seconds, throwing it up on every EtherPEG screen on your network. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:38:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wendy's chicken kills

Wendy's chicken sandwich is prone to exploding, showering diners with white-hot grease.

In the lawsuit, Toledo attorney Samuel Bolotin alleges that a defect in the design of the chicken sandwich and the failure of Wendy’s employees to warn patrons of the risk of the sandwich’s exploding warrant a judgment against the company.

Mitzi Pumphrey is asking for no less than $25,000 from a jury to help pay for the pain and suffering caused to her and her family after she was "severely" burned by the sandwich. She and husband, Scott Pumphrey, are suing the company, the supplier of the chicken, and the "manufacturer" of the chicken.

Link Discuss (via Fark)a

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stuffed crust kills

Another reason that thin-as-paper East Coast pizza is the One True Wheel: One slice of stuffed-crust pizza has more calories and fat than a Quarter-Pounder.

The survey found that an average serving of plain cheese pizza — two to three slices, depending on the pie — contains about 600 calories and 25 grams of fat, including 10 grams of artery-clogging saturated fat.

But one slice of Pizza Hut's Stuffed Crust Meat Lover's pizza has 420 calories and 21 grams of fat, including 10 grams of saturated fat — about the same as a McDonald's Quarter Pounder. The study said an average serving of this pizza is two slices.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, May 17, 2002

Kottke on ETCON

Kottke's written a great roundup of ETCON, with a whack of links to blog coverage of the sessions and the conference.

The first day of college classes each semester was always a little overwhelming. Three new syllabi, $500 worth of dead trees from the bookstore, 8 or 10 handouts, 6 pages of notes (before you realized you didn't really need to take notes), and the realization that for the next 14 weeks, this was your world. The O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference was like four semester beginnings all rolled into three days. Lots of stuff to think about, digest, explore, etc. Most of all, I feel like this is my world, and not just for the next 14 weeks. I've been given a syllabus to follow; the future is uncertain but the path is clear. Best fucking conference ever.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hundreds of Zippo tricks

I am an Extreme Fidgeter, an afficianado of the twitch, and I just can't stop popping my Zippo. ZippoTricks.com is crack for people like me, chock full o videos and tutorials for making iconic lighters leap in our hands. Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:38:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot Talent Show in NYC

Douglas sez: "The first annual ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show will take place from noon to 6:00 p.m. at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn on Saturday, May 25th. A hybrid combining aspects of both a juried art exhibition and a traditional talent show, more than a dozen artists, engineers and tinkerers will contribute to this high-tech, high-concept, high-fun one-day event." Link Discuss (Thanks, Douglas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:34:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More Star Wars revisionist history

The Empire isn't really evil:

And while it's a small point, the Empire's manners and decorum speak well of it. When Darth Vader is forced to employ bounty hunters to track down Han Solo, he refuses to address them by name. Even Boba Fett, the greatest of all trackers, is referred to icily as "bounty hunter." And yet Fett understands the protocol. When he captures Solo, he calls him "Captain Solo." (Whether this is in deference to Han's former rank in the Imperial starfleet, or simply because Han owns and pilots his own ship, we don't know. I suspect it's the former.)

But the most compelling evidence that the Empire isn't evil comes in "The Empire Strikes Back" when Darth Vader is battling Luke Skywalker. After an exhausting fight, Vader is poised to finish Luke off, but he stays his hand. He tries to convert Luke to the Dark Side with this simple plea: "There is no escape. Don't make me destroy you. . . . Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy." It is here we find the real controlling impulse for the Dark Side and the Empire. The Empire doesn't want slaves or destruction or "evil." It wants order.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat and Charlie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wolfram blows Kurzweil's mind

Ray "Spiritual Machines" Kurzweil reviews Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science." Kurzweil is one of the most exciting, mind-croggling science writers I've ever read; that Wolfram's book has excited him this much means that it is absolutely the next book I will read.

Well, Wolfram really loves his cellular automata. So much so, that he has immersed himself for over ten years in the subject and produced what can only be regarded as a tour de force on their mathematical properties and potential links to a broad array of other endeavors. In the end notes, which are as extensive as the book itself, Wolfram explains his approach: "There is a common style of understated scientific writing to which I was once a devoted subscriber. But at some point I discovered that more significant results are usually incomprehensible if presented in this style…. And so in writing this book I have chosen to explain straightforwardly the importance I believe my various results have."2 Perhaps Wolfram's successful technology business career may also have had its influence here, as entrepreneurs are rarely shy about articulating the benefits of their discoveries.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:18:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Softbank brute-forced Japanese Internet prices

Cringely describes how Softbank brute-forced Japanese ISPs from the monopoly telco sky-high prices to rates cheaper than in the US:

Well, that has all changed. Softbank has driven the cost of ADSL down below $20 per month, and Softbank competitors have matched those prices. In the wireless space, mighty NTT just announced its own dual mode 802.11b and 802.11a Internet service to be rolled out in Tokyo railways stations, hotels, and restaurants for $12.40 per month. Think about that for a minute: 802.11a runs at up to 54 megabits-per-second - faster than the T-3 line your ISP uses for thousands of customers - but Tokyo web surfers will be able to drink from that fire hose for less than most Americans pay for dial-up service.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:59:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Purple old-skool carrots

Turns out that all carrots were purple until the 17th Century Dutch bred them orange, to match the flag. Now, British grocers are selling back-bred reverted purple carrots. Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:55:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Numeric keypad goes alphanumeric

This keypad is hard to describe, but it looks like it could be really cool -- basically, you mash your phone-keys in the direction of the letters you want and the letters come up on your phone. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:31:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

File Under X

"Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months. Some of them world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues. Others the best in figuring out how to stop millions from dying because of biological weapons. Still others, experts in the theory of bioterrorism." Link Discuss (Thanks, Mr. Hungry!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:00:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada Day in San Francisco

Are you a Canadian in San Francisco? Come celebrate Canada Day with your countrypeople in China Basin! New link! Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rebel alliance, terrorists

The Death Star remembered:

CORUSCANT -- Presiding over a memorial service commemorating the victims of the attack on the Death Star, the Emperor declared that while recent victories over the Rebel Alliance were "encouraging, the War on Terror is not over yet."

"We will continue to fight these terrorists, and the rogue governments who harbor them, until the universe is safe, once and for all, and the security of the Neo-New Cosmik Order ensured."

It was one year ago today that the Death Star, perhaps the greatest symbol of the Empire's might, was destroyed in an attack by fanatic Rebels, who used small, single-person crafts to infiltrate seemingly impenetrable defenses. Thousands of mourners were on hand to remember and pay tribute to the victims and their families.

Link Discuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:45:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ETCON: Wilhelm Reich fans inside an Orgone machine

This week's NTK sums up the magic of the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference:

The Emerging Technology Conference, it turns out, was akin to putting a bunch of Wilhelm Reich fans inside an Orgone machine : what transpired may not change many minds, but *boy* it sounded like they were having fun in there. The tribes building the new Net got to see each other through the impending nanotech mist, briefly: the wiring techmonkeys of WiFi (winners of Best T-Shirt Motto By A Mile: "CRIMINAL. ANARCHIST. PARASITES."), the keyboard rattling hoardes of Blogistan, the Men-In-Suits-With-Earrings of the Web Services crowd, and the grubby-but-unbowed street P2Punks of last year's file-sharing implosion. You know when the geek mood is up when attendees stop talking about making rent this month, and resume predicting the date of the Singularity. Looks like we're back to looking up at a J-curve - and after all those months of sitting on a U-bend, too.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:40:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dick and Jane meet the MPAA

Copyrightkids.com teaches children all about copyright and why they should never, ever infringe. Nevermind, of course, that kids generally reuse copyrighted material for the purposes of academic discussion (i.e., school reports), something explicitly exempted from protection.

When you create something, aren't you proud of your work when you spend a lot of time and energy creating it? How about that social studies report you finally finished, that poem for your Mom that made her smile, that cool logo you came up with for your soccer team, the great song you wrote for the school play, or even your journal that you don't "have" to do but you enjoy it so much and it's special to you? Well, all these are your creations and you'd probably be pretty upset if someone just copied any of them without your permission. That's where copyright comes in. Copyright law gives you a set of rights that prevents other people from copying your work and doing other things with your work that you may not like.

  As the creator of your work, you should have the right to control what people can and cannot do with your work. In the United States - one of the world's biggest sources of creative works like movies, television shows, books, computer games, etc. -- this right to control your work has actually turned into big business, but that's what allows all the creative people around us to get paid for coming up with all the wonderful songs, shows, books, painting, movies and other great works that we enjoy. Just think of all the cool songs your favorite band wrote, the great books you loved reading, the plays, movies and television shows you love to watch again and again. These talented musicians, authors, illustrators and screenwriters deserve our respect and appreciation - and they deserve to make a living from the hard work they put into their creative works -- otherwise most of them wouldn't be able to produce as many (or any) of the songs, books, plays, movies and TV shows that you like. That's what copyright is all about. It reflects our appreciation for all the hard work that goes into creating "original works of authorship" and respect for the right of the creator of that work to control what people can and cannot do with it.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Meg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:34:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Did you celebrate Copyright Awareness Week?

Did anyone notice "Copyright Awareness Week" last month? That was the week when personal websites were meant to display the "Celebrate Creativity" logo shown here, with a glowing (c) as Ra, the Sun God, rising over verdant, gradient-filled hillsides. Near as I can remember, the celebrants were few and far between. Maybe it had something to do with the licensing terms, which give you a pretty good idea of what copyright means to corporate America:

1. Subject to the terms set forth herein, CSUSA hereby grants you a limited, non-exclusive, non-sublicensable, non-transferable, revocable license to display and use the Logo on your website solely in connection (1) with providing information regarding and promoting Copyright Awareness Week, the purpose of which is to educate the public about copyright, and/or (2) linking to the CSUSA website located at http://www.law.duke.edu/copyright. Use of the logo is not permitted for lobbying or political purposes or otherwise for the promotion of any particular political agenda, other than to educate the public regarding, and create a general awareness and understanding of, copyright laws.

2. You will not (i) alter, distort, or otherwise modify the Logo, including its design, arrangement, colors, and proportions; (ii) use the Logo on any website containing obscene, defamatory, libelous, violent or otherwise offensive material; or (iii) use the Logo in any advertisement or to express or imply any endorsement by CSUSA of any product or service other than Copyright Awareness Week. CSUSA will have the right to review all of your uses of the Logo and you will provide samples thereof to CSUSA upon CSUSA's reasonable request.

3. CSUSA owns and retains all right, title and interest in and to the Logo and all intellectual property rights therein, subject only to the limited license granted hereunder. You agree that all use of the Logo, and all goodwill arising out of such use, will inure to the sole benefit of CSUSA.

4. CSUSA shall have the right to terminate this Agreement and the license granted herein at any time with or without cause, in which case you agree to promptly discontinue your use of the Logo and remove the Logo and all copies thereof from your website.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Meg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:29:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BPDG conspirators freeze out Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor, the journalist/blogger who won this year's EFF Pioneer Award, has tried to join the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group mailing list. The BPDG, a nominally "public" group that's writing a law that will neuter the personal computer, turned him down.

Viewers -- customers -- are not parties, naturally. And the press is specifically unwelcome to watch the deliberations.

I asked to be subscribed to the group's mailing list and got a kiss-off.

Remember, you can (and should!) sign up for the BPDG mailing lists (providing, of course, that you're not with the free press) and voice your objections as the group proceeds to neuter the technology industry, eliminate your fair-use freedoms, curtail innovation and outlaw free and open-source software.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:55:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hacker's view of DNA

Long, interesting metaphorical comparison of the Human Genome to code.

The genome is littered with old copies of genes and experiments that went wrong somewhere in the recent past - say, the last half a million years. This code is there but inactive. These are called the 'pseudo genes'.

Furthermore, 97% of your DNA is commented out. DNA is linear and read from start to end. The parts that should not be decoded are marked very clearly, much like C comments. The 3% that is used directly form the so called 'exons'. The comments, that come 'inbetween' are called 'introns'.

These comments are fascinating in their own right. Like C comments they have a start marker, like /*, and a stop marker, like */. But they have some more structure. Remember that DNA is like a tape - the comments need to besnipped out physically! The start of a comment is almost always indicated by the letters 'GC', which thus corresponds to /*, the end is signalled by 'AG', which is then like */.

Link Discuss (via FOJO)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:45:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The dinner table of the elements

The Periodic Table table! Link Discuss (via FOJO)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:40:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fair Seuss

If Dr. Seuss was alive today, he would have written this poem about the DMCA/BPDG/CBPDTA:

I did not like 1201(k).
I wish that it would go away!
I do not see how they can say
that further mandates are O.K.
They do not even know a way --
a way they'd put on Table A --
devised by the DTLA,
or Sony, Sharp, or RCA,
to let Joe Kraus e-mail today
to his wife (she is far away)
a TV clip his son is on.
See how Joe's fair-use rights are gone!

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, May 16, 2002

Lessig's ETCON Commons speech notes

Larry Lessig just announced that he's finished his brief to the Supreme Court on the Eldred case, which will challenge the indefinite extension of copyright (Irving Berlin's copyright will last for 140+ years).

He describes the value of Creative Commonw with an hilarious anaecdote: He set up a Morpheus server in his office at Stanford to distribute the transcripts of his speech, and he got a panicked call from the Network Police. "There's illegal activity going on in your office! Someone is running a Morpheus server!" His response:

Look, it's still legal in the United States people people to voluntarily make their content available online. The network police clearly thought that this is bizarre, the idea that someone believes that content can be made avialable for free to others. Most people don't distinguish between perfect control and no control.

When Valenti describes "The terrorist war against the most important industry in America," he's right, but he's got the wrong industry. The entertainment borg is attempting to crush the most innovative, valuable industry in the country: the technology industry.

Tim O'Reilly's announced that he's going to offer his authors the ability to put their material under a 14-year "Founder's Copyright," which, for authors that agree, will put all O'Reilly books into the Creative Commons public domain license in 14 years. He got a standing ovation.

Now, David Reed is talking about Open Spectrum, and the idea that radio-waves pass through one another -- interference is what happens when a receiver is confused. With good technology, the capacity of a slice of spectrum increases with the number of transceivers operating in that spectrum . This is a commons in which the sheep shit grass. The FCC regulates spectrum as though use of spectrum reduces it, but the reverse is true.

When our radios collaborate with software-defined radio spectrum scarcity vanishes. We need spectrum that we can do anything we want to, a "spectrum commons."

(The EtherPEG view of the zeitgeist is full of digital photos of the stage, which someone is uploading to his/her site, presumably) Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:55:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BusinessWeek on BPDG

Business Week does an excellent job covering the BPDG and its threat to free speech and innovation:

Here's the crux of the issue: Hollywood studios and record labels want to encrypt their products with an algorithm of some sort, for which every piece of hardware or software that plays or displays their material must have a corresponding electronic key. (If the algorithm or the key is missing, the content won't play -- thus thwarting pirates.) For added protection, the established entertainment companies want Congress to pass a law requiring technology companies to build the key into their products. Thus, no DVD players, PCs, CD players, or operating systems would be legal without Hollywood-designed copyright protection.

The problem is, in their zeal to dictate how hardware and software makers build their equipment, the movie and music moguls would mess with matters that are none of their business, critics say. Embedding copyright-protection mechanisms into new PCs and other digital devices would mean inserting pieces of software code that are hidden, or locked down, and couldn't be altered. That would amount to nothing less than an assault on the open-source religion, which advocates sharing, collaboration, and free access to code.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Seth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:54:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada's medical marijuana is too strong

Canada's official medical marijuana grower's too good at its job, the pot's too potent. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:43:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ETCON goes to Star Wars

Joey reports on the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference outing to the Star Wars premiere:

We bought our tickets inline and had already picked them up earlier. We decided that we'd lost any shot at the best seats to the hardcore fans who'd waited in line all day, so we spent the evening partying at Danny's and Quinn's place until 11:00 p.m., at which time we drove to the theatre. We spent about 45 minutes waiting in line, during which tiome I played the accordion to a captive audience hungry for entertainment. I wasn't really hitting them up for money, but made twenty bucks nonetheless -- enough to cover my ticket and lots of Junior Mints.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:38:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons demo

Lisa Rein is walking through a working prototype of the Creative Commons app. Nice wizard. You can tell Metafilter Matt helped build the GUI -- clean and tight. The screenshots on the CC site don't do it justice. I wish this was live and online, I'd generate a license for Boing Boing posts. Some audience members are being real hard-ons about the possibility of bogus license generation -- what if I generate a license for your project and make a false representation that it is in the public domain. It's going to be a tough problem, for sure. And I'm not sure how they'll solve it. Gordon Mohr from Bitzi thinks that charging money is the solution, but the CC people say that there will be no fees, period. I'm not sure if CC can solve it, in the context of its app, or if this is a small piece to be loosely joined to something else that validates identity for the purposes of associating it with potentially important documents like Creative Commons licenses. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:01:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yankee telcos help Bell Canada screw up DSL

Rich sez:

Bell Canada has imposed a 5GB monthly bandwidth cap on consumer DSL, charging $7.90/Gb for traffic exceeding the cap, and raising prices 10%. The primary impact will be on users of streaming audio & video.

Note that SBC (Pacific Bell) of Texas is the largest (20%) shareholder of BCE (which controls Bell Canada). SBC has been sued by an association of California ISPs for presenting restrictive contracts that would give control of the DSL pipe to SBC, for SBC-only video content services.

SBC is applying similar logic in Canada, via BCE & Bell Canada. Since a competitive DSL market never emerged in Canada, BCE/SBC are using bandwidth caps (instead of ISP contracts) to control streaming media distribution in Canada.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:39:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

An infinitely hot and dense dialog

The Creative Commons session is going great guns. The dry rattle of fingers on keyboards is all around like a thousand high-tech maracas. CC is hoping to help copyright holders take affirmative action to release their works on terms that are more generous than the default copyright. The IRC channel (irc.openprojects.net - #etcon) is busier than its been all week and the EtherPEG monitor is thick with images of blogs and the CC website. The conversations within the conversations now are so thick and furious that I feel like I'm in the center of an infinitely hot and dense dialogue.

CC helps legal/info-civilians correctly understand the terms under which some collection of bytes may be used, and to assign rights under those terms. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:32:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Public referrer logs, an accident of history

In Dave Winer's session now, good stuff. I asked a question about the accidents of history that made Blogistan what it is today, like Extreme Tracking's free site-stats service. Etreme doesn't charge any money for stats-gathering and reporting, but if you get the free service, anyone can see your stats. The "premium" service costs money, and keeps the stats private. The outcome of this has been hundreds (thousands?) of blogs that have public referrer logs and hit-counters. This makes the Blogosphere much more interesting. I can follow one of my referrers to a site, then look at its links, and its referrers and look at how many visitors it gets, and so on, and keep on doing this forever. This deep-crawling is like a signpost on the road to a Web with about seven additional dimensions made of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, as represneted by ASCII text files that can be programatically mined and moved and parsed. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:24:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Good 802.11 news-leak from the FCC

Kevin Werbach, who used to be one of the Secret Masters of the FCC, has an insider tip:

Expect an order from the FCC today that improves the regulatory environment for WiFi unlicensed wireless services.  The agency is expected to change its spread-spectrum rules to reduce the potential for interference between WiFi and Bluetooth.  It's also expected to amend its rules be more friendly to high-speed variants of 802.11 in the 2.4 Ghz frequency band.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:59:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Magic Porno Third Eye

Bob Guccione claims he can see through women's shirts, using his Magic Porno Third Eye.

"I can look at a woman fully dressed and give you a very good idea of her breasts without the trappings of [clothes]," the 71-year-old Guccione said. "This is another thing, I'm sorry to say, I'm an expert on."

The bizarre boast of super-powered boob vision piercing every woman's blouse left many in court exchanging nervous glances as Guccione defended himself.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:42:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons is live

The site for the Creative Commons project just went live -- go have a look at the roll-your-own open content license. This is way, way boss. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:19:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gummi Bears v. fingerprint scanners

Worried about sneaking past the fingerprint detector at your local CIA? You can fool it with Gummi Bears.

First Tsutomu Matsumoto used gelatine (as found in Gummi Bears and other sweets) and a plastic mould to create a fake finger, which he found fooled fingerprint detectors four times out of five.

Link Discuss

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

To Mars, with bugs

Nice article on the science and sense of keeping Mars free of terrestrial pollutants and vice-versa, from treaty obligations to technical implications.

That human explorers will "contaminate" Mars is inevitable -- humans contain oceans of bacteria, and a human presence on Mars is sure to leave some behind. Even if all wastes are bagged and returned to Earth (unlikely because of the expense involved), some germs are bound to escape via air leaks, transport on surfaces of Mars suits and other objects that exit the spacecraft, etc.

NASA now takes extensive steps to sterilize unmanned spacecraft so as to keep Earth germs from reaching other planets, something known in the trade as "forward contamination." Such precautions may be adequate for robotic missions, but it is simply impossible to ensure that missions involving people won't result in contamination. They will.

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:26:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, May 15, 2002

The former audience

I'm at Dan Gillmor's talk on Journalism 3.0. He's just said something that galvanized me: "The former audience." As in "Some day soon, there will be a major, newsworthy even in Japan and there will be 400 photos taken of it in the first minute by cam-equipped cellphones. Those 400 photos will make their way to news organizations and to individuals and we will have 400 visual perspectives of that event from the 'former audience.'" Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:13:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling on Star Wars

Bruce Sterling on Star Wars in the NYT:

And yet, the story of "Star Wars" makes surprisingly little sense, even for a sci-fi narrative. It hangs together superbly, however, on the technical level of set design. Mr. Lucas intuits, with native cinematic genius, that this is the very crux of his art. "Star Wars" is thrillingly detached from the contaminations of real history. We're told at the beginning that it all happened "long long ago." Suddenly spaceships and robots are no longer ahead of us but behind us. They're weird antiques devoid of practical use, kid-toys to be marveled over.

Science fiction writers, myself included, marveled to see levitating hover cars rendered as rusty, dust-covered relics. It seemed so true, so right. Mr. Lucas's wondrous acumen hits even harder now, when the high-tech of his 1970's is the low-tech of our 00's. The robots are cobbled together from Kaypros and Commodores.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Geoff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:58:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Did anyone find my Visor?

CRAP. Has anyone found my Visor at the Emerging Technology conference? It's a red Visor Edge in a silver case with a Hindu religious sticker on the inside. Found it! Woo! Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:53:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lobsters online

Charlie Stross's Hugo-nominated story, "Lobsters," is online. This is some powerful extropian singularity stuff, right here. Best read I've had online all week.

It’s a hot summer Tuesday and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops it and squirts at his website to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: he’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

Link Discuss (via Charlie's Diary)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:48:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ad-hoc-a-mai

Dan Gillmor on Onion Networks' Content Addressable Web "Ad-Hoc-a-mai:"

Justin Chapweske, Onion's chief technology officer, says the company will license its technology free to open-source and public-domain projects. ``Our focus is to give something back to the open-source community,'' he says.

Open source and the public domain are under attack as never before, largely from the entertainment cartel that so successfully brought Napster to heel. But resistance is beginning to surface to tactics that would not just curb the Napsters of this world, but would literally require Hollywood's approval for technological innovation.

Link Discuss

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

Disaster origami hidden in double-sawbuck

Creepy twenty-dollar-bill origami reveals hidden images of the burning WTC and Pentagon. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

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

Sniffing packets to sample the geek groupmind

Holy crap. Rob "Community Wireless Networking" Flickenger ran a packet-sniffer called EtherPEG (which makes collages out of images being moved over the sniffed network) during this morning's panel on blogs and emergence, with Steve Johnson, Clay Shirky, Rael Dornfest, Geoff Cohen and me. The results are really unspeakably weird. It is to reel.

I was impressed that when Tim O'Reilly stood up to ask about whether bloggers were building a city or living in their own ghetto, virtually all traffic stopped. Evidently, this was something that almost everybody in the room was interested in listening to. And once Tim sat down again, the pixels began to flow once more.

After a little while, the atmosphere took on a bit of a dark turn. Lots of images of law enforcement agency websites, some american flags with an angry eagle bursting through, and possibly darkest of all, a Britney Spears fan site. The theme continued as Clay Shirky was discussing "maps and non-player characters" and the downward gothic spiral expanded...

Link Discuss (Thanks, Schuyler!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:17:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Judge rescues SonicBlue

SonicBlue may not have to spy on ReplayTV customers to serve Hollywood's trumped-up lawsuit after all.

A judge on Wednesday granted digital video recorder company Sonicblue a stay in its request to reverse an order that would force it to monitor the viewing habits

Link   Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:59:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Affective chat

Raffi's pals at the Media Lab hooked an IM chat to a lie-detector, which remaps your type-size based on your galvanic response as you key in the characters -- an affective chat!

(18:17:27) treso: What do you mean "I'm" working OK!
(18:17:32) chrissy: what?
(18:17:35) treso: it's your darned contraption!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Raffi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:52:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mortgaging the house to fight Monsanto

Dave sez: "This is kind of a big deal: Remember that Canadian farmer whose seed stock was contaminated by Monsanto genetically modified seeds? And then he was sued by Monsanto for patent infringement?? Well he's back - he's mortgaged the family farm for a re-match." Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:46:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney eats its own tail

Disney is making movies based on its rides, instead of the other way 'round.

Walt Disney Co. is developing three movies based on classic theme park attractions, adding a new twist to an idea the company exploited half a century ago. The movies, "The Country Bears," "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Haunted Mansion," are inspired by the iconic Disneyland attractions and will be released this year and next.

The movies mark both a new chapter in the history of film and a new strategy for Disney, which until now has modeled its theme park rides and shows mainly on its own movies, from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to "The Lion King."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:42:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Light-bulb collector extraordinaire has died

An MD who collected 60,000 lightbulbs and operated the Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting has died.

Not infrequently, patients had to wait as he welcomed people interested in seeing what he identified as the biggest and smallest light bulbs in the world — to say nothing of the floodlights used in an Elvis Presley movie or the headlamps from Hitler's Mercedes-Benz.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:32:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Panopticon meets Jabber

Danny's Blogger-stalker "Panopticon" for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confernece has been turned into a Web Service, outputting to Jabber:

The data coming out of the server port is a stream of XML. Hmmm. Sounds familiar ;-) I quickly hacked together a library, Panopticon.pm, based loosely upon Jabber::Connection, a Perl library for building Jabber entities (XML streams flow over Jabber connections, too, y'know). With this quick and dirty library in hand, I wrote an equally quick and dirty script, panpush.pl, which uses Panopticon.pm and Jabber::Connection

Link Discuss (Thanks, Danny!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:27:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dumbo is dead

Disney artist Bill "Dumbo" Peet has died, alas. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:24:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Touch the foetus

Stereo-imaging technology and tactile-feedback manipulators let prospective parents "feel" enwombed foetuses. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:22:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Napster is dead, long live Napster

Napster appears to be dead. The CEO has stepped down and employees have been offered a choice of severance or unpaid leave. Frankly, I'm relieved. Napster as it was in its heyday was a fantastic symbol of the power of the Internet's masses: 70,000,000 users joined in 18 months, the world stood on its head, and the music industry's distribution hegemony was credibly and seriously challenged.

When Napster was getting off the ground, the labels pooh-poohed it, basically taking the position that anything that got built by average users, ripping their own MP3s, adding their own metadata, serving off their own PCs with their own network connections would suck. Only a centralized system could deliver "High Quality Content," because every file on the network would be vetted and served by a Responsible Grownup from the labels.

The new, BMG-owned Napster was very much a Responsible Grownup proposition. Responsible Grownups would centralize the files, take them out of that greasy-kids-stuff MP3 format and put them in a Responsible Grownup format with "rights management" that would curtail your ability to format-shift, time-shift and repurpose the music you downloaded. The system really looked like it was going to brutally suck.

So I can't really feel too sad for poor old dead Napster. Death was the best it could hope for now. Dead, its name can remain synonymous with revolutions; had it lived, its name would have been synonymous with crap.

And now that it's dead, I think it would be only fitting if some open-sourceniks were to start a new file-trading system and call it "Napster" -- in the confusingly glorious tradition of DiVx :-) and Carnivore. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:30:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nelson on the Google API

Nelson's demoing the Google API and running through the process whereby it came into being. (Unfortunately, he's speaking opposite Meg, which makes me sad.) He's just getting into the SOAP versus REST holywar, and doing a nice job of tapdancing around the battle-lines (he started by showing a Google Smackdown of SOAP and REST). He's giving the impression that it was a bit of a putsch to get Google to open the API, and surprising, the Slashdot leak of the API plan helped him make his case with his boss: "See! People want this!" Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:28:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Forry Ackerman wants letters

Pat sez: "While earlier reports of Forrest Ackerman's imminent death were thankfully exaggerated, he is still in the hospital, lonely and eager for human contact.

"Forry is the founder of the 'Ackermansion,' a glorious incongruity in L.A. He is a writer, fan, collector and raconteur of epic proportions. I'm SO glad he's recovering." Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:55:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive

I'm at Brewster Kahle's talk on the Internet Archive. My favorite quip so far: "The major bug of the library of Alexandria was that it burned." Brewster's a man with a vision -- he's thinking way way ahead. He's working to mirror the Archive to the actual (current) Library of Alexandria in Egypt, "on the other side of the fault-line." My last rant on this, about digitizing my books, spurred numerous suggestions to read "Double Fold," which I've been getting regular reports on from my co-worker, Seth, who's working his way through it and gave a talk on it at a conference we attended together recently. Brewster understands that the mutability and ephemerality and overall suckiness of bits are also their strength (something I'm going to be speaking about tomorrow). Brewster's talking about the legalities, technical challenges and, most interestingly, the social challenges of building the Internet Archive. I love his response to people who object on the basis of copyright violation, which is basically, "Dear Sir/Madam: My deepest apologies for infringing your copyright. I will now remove your work from the historical record. Enjoy oblivion." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:49:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tokyo Disneyland is flush

Oriental Land Company, the holding company that operates Tokyo Disneyland, has had record profits this year. They've been putting out some way tasty TDL merch lately, including a bunch of die-cast Haunted Mansion zipper-pulls. I yearn to own the Mickey Mouse ear-wax-spoon that I got sniped out of on eBay three years ago.

Japanese Disney amusement park operator Oriental Land Co Ltd (4661) said on Tuesday it posted a 168.5 percent rise in group net profit last year and forecast a record for this year.

Oriental Land, which operates Tokyo Disneyland and the adjacent new and highly popular Tokyo DisneySea, posted a group net profit of 12.73 billion yen ($99.64 million) for the year ended on March 31 and forecast a profit of 16.90 billion yen in 2002/03.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:29:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sydneyites are unwirin' it for themselves

The city of Sydney may be underwriting a plan to deploy wireless access across the city, but grassroots community wireless guerrillas may beat them to it. Evilbunny writes: "Due to expensive carrier licenses, and/or Australian laws, AUP's and the inflated cost of data, it makes it very difficult to provide Internet access by wireless means, such as seen in the US, and elsewhere. We are providing a means, by passing per-meg charges to people in the community, for people to play games, share files and experiment with VOIP technologies for free phone calls between friends." Link Discuss (Thanks, evilbunny!)

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

Distributed power-strip distribution

There are not enough electrical outlets at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference -- yet. Kottke, Metafilter Matt and Lane and I just took a roadtrip in my rented Hertzmobile and found a MicroCenter (Matt: "Why is *Micro*center so *big*?") and I bought twenty cheapie power strips. Now I'm wandering around the conference, handing them out with the instruction: "Find a place where there aren't enough electrical outlets and plug this in." Soon, there will be power for everyone! I totally love doing stuff like this. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:37:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roll your own tampons

On Making Light, Teresa has written a very sensible document on rolling your own tampons. This strikes me as an eminently practical piece of origami wisdom.

You should now have a strip a bit under two inches wide and about four and a half inches long. If you've done the last three folds correctly, it'll be six sheets thick at one end and twenty-four sheets thick at the other. I find this makes the rolling easier and tidier, but it's not strictly necessary. Once you'd folded the towel lengthwise into halves then thirds, you could just start rolling from one short end to the other; but the strip tends to splay and distort as you roll it. The third and fourth rounds of folding stabilize it a bit.

Starting from the thick edge, roll the strip into a snug but not impenetrably tight cylinder. Use in the normal fashion. It won't be quite as absorptive as the commercial variety, but it's a good deal cheaper and can be improvised at need.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:34:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple's rackmount server announcement, live on Radio Free Blogistan

Doc Searls is at the Apple rackmount server announcement, bloggin' live:

The box has a dual G4s, fast L2&3 cache, an ASIC Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire sys controller, Big 266 MHz DDR SdRAM Dual Gigabit ports, quad ATA drives, on a 533MB/s bus, buncha other stuff I can't keep up with. "Fastest architecture we've ever built." (He's been describing the maximum configuration.)

In a rack, 84 processors, umpty terrabytes..

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:01:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stalk the E-Tech Bloggers with the Panopticon

Danny "NTK" O'Brien has built an interactive blogger-stalker app in honor of the Emerging Technologies Conference. When you spot a blogger, you drag her/his avatar to the correct spot on the map and it updates everyone else's screen. Danny is my kinda freak. Link Discuss (NB: Won't run on MSIE 5.1 OSX, try Mozilla)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:52:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Squeeze-box patriotism saves Joey's bacon

Joey got pulled over by La Migra at the Toronto airport on his way to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. He's a Filipino, had a one-way, cash-bought ticket (it's a long story), and he was, of course, carrying an accordion. The Customs and Immigration guys demanded that he play the squeeze-box. In a moment of great and wondrous clarity, Joey chose his tune:

The Star-Spangled Banner.

They let him into the country.

You know that he's going to be eating out on this story for years. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:47:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Magic markers: 1, Copy-protected CDs: 0

Copy-prevented "CD"s may be capable of bringing your Mac to its knees and void your warranty, but you can defeat the world-class "protection" by putting a strip of sticky-tap on the inside ring of the disc, or scratching it out with a magic-marker. I feel more "protected" already. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:27:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dilbert in Spanish

Reading Dilbert in Spanish is extremely mind-bending. Geek humor is still funny in Spanish, but in a very different way. Someone go translate Get Your War On now. Link (via The Slumbering Lungfish) Discuss

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

The Emoticon Version of King Lear (abridged)

Found on the Slumbering Lungfish, which desparately needs permalinks. This cracks me up.

:-)

.-|

-(

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:15:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, May 13, 2002

The earth just tried to swallow me!

I just experienced my first earthquake -- the outer edge of a 5.2. I thought the world was coming to an end. THE EARTH TRIED TO SWALLOW ME. That. Was. So. Wrong. My heart is still in my throat. My urine is still on my sofa. Jesus. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:49:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Biogas 802.11/sat uplink for <$300

The ultimate in jungle connectivity: The autonokit is a $300 box with a sat uplink, 802.11b AP, authenticator, and mail relay. For electricity, you add a solar panel or a biogas converter. Check out the Cambodian test-run: Link Discuss (Thanks, Nikolaj!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:03:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lawmeme on Internet bootleggin'

LawMeme has posted a great analysis of the FUD around the bootlegs of Spiderman and Episode II floating online.

One of the most prominent and recurrent arguments of the copyright interests is that "digital piracy" is far worse than "analog piracy" and thus justifies the imposition of draconian paracopyright laws, such as the DMCA and CBDTPA. I refer to this argument as the "analog fallacy." The fallacy is that analog piracy is not nearly as threatening as digital piracy because analog copies degrade with every generation while digital copies remain pristine no matter how many copies are made. While true in a strict sense, the fallacy is that most of the assumptions necessary for this argument to be true are not realistic. For example, one prominent proponent of this argument is Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-Disney)...

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:38:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Community Wireless Slides

Rob Flickenger's slides from his Community Wiress Networks talk this morning. LinkDiscuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:52:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DOE Sells Mushroom Cloud Wall Art

The DOE is selling 8 x 10 color glossies of nuclear bomb tests from the 1950s. The image shown here is XX-27 CHARLIE, a toy-sized 14-kiloton bomb from 1951. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:35:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unphased but not forgotten

Neat new brain science suggests that memory isn't lost, just unsynched.

"It appears that the electrical signals synchronize the brain regions that store each part of an object's memory so that those areas are connected," Dr. Hart, the study's senior author, continued. "This co-activation of brain regions likely represents the memory of the object itself. It may also explain why we may remember something clearly, and other times we can only come up with parts of the item we are trying to remember. Many times we say 'you know, it has humps, it lives in the desert ...' This may occur when the rhythms don't synchronize with the regions properly. It could also explain why the memory will come to you at a later time."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NoCat and the Virtual Public Network

Oh, this is tasty. The NoCatAuth project is proposing to hand out slices of the 10.*.*.* network-space to people who operate radios that use NoCatAuth. This means that everyone who's on the global community wireless network can route to one another, even though they have non-routable IPs. I just asked Rob what he's gonna do when they run out of the 10.*.*.* network. Schuyler said that'd take about 18 months, and we'd better have IPv^ by then (groans of dismay). No sweat, said Rob -- who needs to talk to General Electric's network? They've got an entire Class-A that we could start privately assigning (essentially extraterratorializing the GE net-space without letting inhibiting GE's ability to enjoy it). Discuss

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

Australia's cities go 802.11b

Australia is considering city-wide 802.11b networks to solve the last mile.

Using standard components, like Cisco's 350 Aironet access point and a readily-available antenna, the network is achieving reliable broadband access. 1 kilometre from Murray's office in the CSIRO's North Epping facility, a terminal with a standard 802.11b wireless card and a fixed antennae receives data at the maximum 7.66 mb/s data rate (802.11b portends to operate at 11 mb/s but with the protocol overheads it effectively means the maximum data transfer rate is 7.66 mb/s).

Murray says that range could be extended to as far as 7 kilometres, although obviously the quality of service suffers over such distances. The fact that the network is operating at a high quality speed over distance of greater than 1 kilometre through some of Sydney's leafiest terrain, offers great hope to budding broadband entrepreneurs.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Community Wireless Networks at O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Convention

I'm at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, in Rob Flickenger's tutorial on building community wireless networks. Rob's been running down NoCat, O'Reilly's open source wireless authentication service. The idea is to permit you to open up your wireless link to the public without making yourself a launching-off point for malicious network activity (and without having your network sucked dry by passers-by who saturate your connection downloading giant files). Rob got big wows by whipping out a $40 embedded Linux box that requires no fan or ventilation.

The NoCat stuff has got tons of juicy paranoid seekrit-agent stuff built in to prevent malicious attacks and authentication spoofing, but no transport-layer security (You can be sure that you're actually connecting to the authentication server, but not sure that no one is reading your email over your shoulder). That stuff is, of course, properly the domain of protocol-security (i.e., ssh and SSL), but civilians (me included) have a hard time getting that stuff to work. I want to talk to Rob afterwards about using NoCat boxes, equipped with DynDNS (so you can find your NoCat machine even if your ISP changes its address) as ssh proxies. That way, you can use your gateway as your secure jumping-off point, even if you're roaming on someone else's network.

It strikes me that the security stuff in the NoCat project answers a technical challenge more than a real need. As a wireless user, I want to know that I'm not being eavesdropped on. Instead, NoCat security is all about ensuring that no traffic flows over the air without that it originates with an authenticated entity, so that people will act responsibly as they roam onto others' networks. But this is not an observed practice: as far as I know, there has been a total of one open wireless network operators that have had this happen to them (by contrast, war drivers routinely listen in on wireless connection).

It's as though they've invented ORBS before anyone's invented spam -- and don't forget that open SMTP relays (which ORBS was created to eliminate) were the way that mail was able to work in the olden times.

But don't get the impression that NoCat is NoGood! There are a couple of really exciting features in NoCat that make me want to start running it. For starters, NoCat can distinguish between a network's owner and the visitors to the network. I can reserve some fraction of my bandwidth for my private use, ensuring that no passer-by eats into my enjoyment of my network.

What's more, NoCat can force new users to the network to load a screen when they open their first Web page, one that could say, "Hey, welcome to Cory's network. Here are some house rules. Here's a link to my homepage. Here's my email address, in case you want to say thanks." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:50:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons: Open Source for stuff that's not code

The NYT takes notice of the Creative Commons project, software for roll-your-own "open content" licenses. When it's done, CC will let you check off some boxes on a web-form and generate an airtight GPL, BSD or [IBM|Netscape|Apple] Community license that's applicable to creative expressions like books, movies, pictures, etc, instead of code. I plan to use a must-attribute/no-commercial-use/no-derivates license when I release the text of my novel (which will also be for sale as a hardcover) in the fall. Link Discuss

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

Bomb-sniffing bees

The amazing honeybee sense of smell is being trained for bomb-sniffing.

Pentagon officials acknowledge that the idea of bomb-sniffing bees has a public relations problem, a "giggle factor," as one official put it. But that official and scientists working on the project insist the idea shows great potential.

"It appears that bees are at least as sensitive or more sensitive to odors than dogs," said Dr. Alan S. Rudolph, program manager for the Defense Sciences Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is overseeing the experimentation.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:10:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steal a criminal's indentity with help from the Feds

Identity thieves have discovered a new treasure trove of detailed information, from SSNs to work history and other identifying items: The Department of Corrections and its brethren in law enforcement publish detailed, onlined dossiers on wanted and incarcerated criminals. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amazing free e-book library

Check out this amazing collection of public-domain e-vintage-books. Not sure if these are Gutenberg texts or what, but I've never seen a bunch of these outside of the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. Don't miss the Tom Swifts!

It was not until he was out on the street, walking toward his home, that the matter came back to his mind.

"I declare!" he exclaimed. "I didn't get that pin for Mary, after all! Well, never mind, I have a week until her birthday, and I can get it to--morrow."

He walked rapidly toward home, for the weather looked threatening, and Tom had no umbrella. He was musing on the happenings of the evening when he reached his house. His father was out, as was Garret Jackson, the engineer; and Mrs. Baggert, the housekeeper, was entertaining a lady in the sitting-room, so, as Tom was rather tired, he went directly to his own room, and, a little later got into bed.

It was shortly after midnight when he was awakened by hearing a rattling on the window of his room. The reason he was able to fix the time so accurately was because as soon as he awakened he pressed a little electric button, and it illuminated the face of a small clock on his bureau. The hands pointed to five minutes past twelve.

"Humph! That sounds like hail!" exclaimed Tom, as he arose, and looked out of the casement. "I wonder if any of the skylights of the airship shed are open? There might be some damage. Guess I'd better go out and take a look."

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:55:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, May 12, 2002

Braces and headgear bonanza

Got a thing for braces? Bracesgallery.com allows you to indulge your dental fetish at length/ad nauseum -- hundreds of photos of people in braces, culled from movies and TV. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:53:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roll your own Lego Person avatar

Interactive app for making your own little Lego person -- here's me. Unfortunately, they don't have courier-bag or cigaratte accessories. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jamais!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:19:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Missing pensioners were intimidated by stairs

British pensioners sparked an international manhunt when they failed to arrive at their holiday flat; as it turns out, the staircase at the holiday home intimidated them, so they found somewhere else to stay. Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sons shorten mothers' lifespan -- Happy Mothers' Day!

An historical analysis of 17th-19th century Scandinavian birth/death records shows that each son a mother bore took 34 weeks off her life (on average), while daughters slightly increased life-expectancy. Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:51:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gay teen can take date to prom

Marc Hall, a gay Toronto teenager, has won the right to bring his boyfriend to the high-school prom. I went to an alternative school and never experienced this "prom" business, but it gather it's rather a big deal, and Marc's principal forbade him to bring the date of his choice along, so Marc went to court:

Hall won an injunction Friday in the Superior Court of Justice that forced the Durham Catholic District School Board to let him to go to the dance with Dumond. The judge ruled the board violated Hall's right to freedom from discrimination because of sexual orientation, under the Charter of Rights.

His school principal argued that activity between romantic partners at a school prom is a form of sexual activity. If Hall and his boyfriend went as a couple, it would be seen as endorsing conduct contrary to Catholic teaching.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:44:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sofa full of coke

A curbside junkie crash-sofa in the South Bronx was discovered by trashmen to contain $8 million worth of cocaine.

The news left one homeless woman staring aghast at the pile of beer bottles and broken wood where the already-legendary couch once sat. She was speechless, except for two words, which she repeated again and again.

"Holy f - - -! Holy f- - -!"

Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:42:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cruise to remake War of the Worlds

Tom Cruise wants to remake War of the Worlds, is considering starring in the flick. Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Content-addressable Web

Onion Networks -- AKA, my pal and former OpenColan Justin Chapaweske -- have released their "Content Addressable Web" white-paper, and it's good reading. Essentially, the scheme involves extending HTTP headers so that servers (which may be peers in a P2P network, natch) can automatically tell browsers where other copies of a requested file live:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: Application/octet-stream
Content-Length: 662072345
X-Content-URN: urn:sha1:RMUVHIRSGUU3VU7FJWRAKW3YWG2S2RFB
X-URI-RES: http://www.linuxmirrors.com/pub/Redhat-7.1i386-disc1.iso ; N2R
X-URI-RES: http://123.24.24.21:8080/uri-res/N2R?urn:sha1:JJbase32JJ; N2R
X-URI-RES: http://123.24.24.21:8080/uri-res/N2Ls?urn:sha1:JJbase32JJ; N2Ls

With this response, a CAW aware browser can immediately begin downloading the content from www.linuxiso.org, linuxmirrors.com, and 123.24.24.21 all in parallel. At the same time the browser can be dereferencing the N2Ls service at 123.24.24.21 to discover more mirrors for the content.

Justin's gonna present this stuff at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this week, which is just about your very best mind-blowing nerdy entertainment value. Link Discuss (Thanks, Justin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:14:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, May 11, 2002

The harder you look at the DMCA, the dumber it gets

Interesting looking-glass-logic in the DMCA:

So, making or selling a gizmo which is able to copy rented VHS videos is against the law, unless the gizmo can copy them in bulk.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chinese propaganda poster art

Utterly fantastic gallery of Chinese Maoist propaganda posters (the caption for this one is "Our good friends") Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

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

John Gilmore gives Intel hell

The Hollywood conspiracy to colonize the public interest has a number of collaborators from the technology side of the fence, Vichy technologists like Apple, Microsoft, and the member companies of the Computer Industry Association. But no company has gone over to the Dark Side more enthusiastically than Intel, the tech giant that is helping to chair the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group and is marketing copy-prevention technologies with both the 5C and 4C conspiracies. John Gilmore wrote this lucid and damning document to Intel's execs, telling them exactly what's wrong with their strategic withdrawal from the side of light and good:

The heart of the difference between Intel and I on this point is on what you called "the need to protect content". I believe that there is NO need to so-called protect so-called content. In fact, both the structure of our society (free speech and capitalism) and the structure of our technologies (open standards that plug together in innumerable ways to satisfy innumerable desires) require a lack of restrictions on who can transmit what information to who.

Intel builds machines that process data. "Content" is just data. Every piece of data that an Intel processor or networking component handles is copyrighted by somebody, under the Berne Convention. It's all "content". You could talk about "protecting data" but people would realize that preventing it from being copied does not "protect" their data. Frequently you NEED to copy your data -- e.g. onto a backup tape -- to protect it. So instead you use this made-up word "content". Since nobody knows a definition for "content", you can say the most outrageous things about it and get away with it.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:45:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jackie Chan's shooting at my building!

Jackie Chan cancelled his NYC location-shoot after September 11th, and moved it to Toronto. To the warehouse where my studio is. Yes, yes, yes, Jackie's been shooting at my home. Check out the photographic evidence! Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:45:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Seattle Times gets knickers in knot about Episode II

Someone's gotta give the Seattle Times a primer on the Betamax doctrine. This hysterical article notes that there are copies of Star Wars: Episode II floating around on the 'net and predicts that 1,000,000 people will watch the quarter-size, DiVx-encoded movie before its official release next week:

The pirating of "Attack of the Clones" lends fuel to the film industry's efforts in Washington to crack down on piracy. While the studios' trade association steps up its enforcement activities, their lobbyists are pushing for laws that would require computers and consumer electronics to be modified to deter unauthorized copying.

Note that the Attack of the Clones boots floating around online are all "screeners," movies created with analog camcorders that audience members smuggled into pre-showings and pointed at the screen. Without camcorders, there would be no screeners, and screeners account for the bulk of pre-release unauthorized film distribution.

So, why not ban camcorders? It's literally impossible to make a screener without a camcorder. Or if not a ban, then a mandated modification to every camcorder that would require it to recognize when it is being aimed at a movie screen and switch itself off? Sure, that's expensive and impractical, sure, but not impossible, not so long as you're willing to accept a lot of false positives (i.e., your kid's first step isn't recorded because the "rights management" screws up and mistakes your toddler for Honey, I Blew Up the Baby).

We don't ban camcorders -- nor do we insist on impractical, expensive mandated "features" that make them less functional -- because there are lots of legal things you can do with them. That's what the 1984 Betamax decision was all about: technologies are legal if they have substantial, non-infringing uses. Like computers. Like set-top boxes.

The presence of ATOTC screeners online is no ringing endorsement for a "anti-piracy" laws; it's just a demonstration of the principle that tools are tools, and they can be used for good or ill, and isn't it fine that we live in a world that doesn't require all crow-bars to be designed so they can't be used in the commission of a burglary, nor that computers be designed so that they can't be used to infringe. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:06:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, May 10, 2002

Vintage luggage labels ahoy!

Massive and spectacular site devoted to the lost art of the luggage-label: articles, histories and a wondrous, addictive gallery. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:34:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why do visualizers for search-engine results suck?

It seems like every three months or so, someone sends me a link to yet another visualization/association search engine -- enter your search terms and get back a graphic display of likely matches laid out graphically so that you can point-and-click to explore the results and take various associated twists and turns.

Am I visually dyslexic, or do these roundly suck? I pull up the results to a simple query whose response-space I'm already familiar with (say, "Boing Boing" or "Cory Doctorow") on an engine like Kartoo, and they're completely mystifying. What do all those squiggly lines mean? Why is this close to that and far from that other thing? I don't understand how this is supposed to augment or supplant Google. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:30:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I'm working on a Blogging Book

I've just turned in the second draft of my chapter for the forthcoming blogging book from O'Reilly, which'll either be called "Practical Blogging" or "Essential Blogging." As I understand it, Nat, the editor, will be posting the chapters to the Web soon-ish for general discussion, which is a pretty bloggy way of going about it. Other authors on the project are Ben and Mena Trott, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson and Shelley Powers, who are a fine google of Bloggers. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:59:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Michael Greene gets audioshopped

Several winners of the NTK "Remix Michael 'Pirates! Pirates! Pirates!' Greene's Grammy Speech" contest. These are awesome MP3s, and the fact that Greene has since been forced to slink away from the RIAA in shame for inappropriate sexual conduct gives it extra schadenfreude deliciousness. Link, Link, Link, Link, Link Discuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:54:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Headers reveal stalkers

A Brit who was Hotmail-stalked a bully from his long-past school days used the headers on the Hotmail messages to track down his tormentor and send the police to his home.

A week later, armed with the evidence from AOL, the police raided the address of the 27-year-old stalker at 7am and took him and his family in for questioning. He was formally cautioned, but Rowlands did not press charges. On questioning, the stalker alleged that he viewed the whole thing as a prank. "There's clearly something wrong with his perception of what's a rational prank," says Rowlands. AOL's De Stempel agrees: "Crimes committed online should be seen as just as serious and treated in exactly the same way."

Link Discuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:47:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Computer workstations are covered in filth

A U of Arizona microbiologist reports that workstations harbor 400 times as much bacteria than toilets. Pass the hand sanitizer. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:33:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ex-Scientologist Collects $8.7 Million In 22-Year-Old Case

Wash Post article about how the Church of Scientology finally forked over a $2.5 million judgment awarded to a man who filed a lawsuit against the Church 22 years ago. The Church swore they'd never pay "one thin dime" to the plaintiff, but they ended up paying him $8,674,843, which includes the 10% annual interest on the judgment. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:09:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copy-protected CDs void your Mac warranty

Putting a copy-protected CD into your Mac may break it, and if it does, it will also void your warranty:

CD audio discs that incorporate copyright protection technologies do not adhere to published Compact Disc standards. Apple designs its CD drives to support media that conforms to such standards. Apple computers are not designed to support copyright protected media that do not conform to such standards. Therefore, any attempt to use non standard discs with Apple CD drives will be considered a misapplication of the product. Under the terms of Apple's One-Year Limited Warranty, AppleCare Protection Plan, or other AppleCare agreement any misapplication of the product is excluded from Apple's repair coverage.

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada to punk out on Kyoto

Uh-oh. Jean "Dubya's Sockpuppet" Chretien is set to reject the Kyoto protocol. Canadian -- smugness -- evaporating -- must -- elect -- new -- PM.

Canada claims that the gas will replace coal in US power stations. Because burning gas produces less carbon dioxide than burning coal, that would reduce the US's contribution to global warming, it argues.

Only six months ago, the Canadian government joined with every industrialised nation except the US in signing up to the protocol, including detailed provisions covering carbon credits. But it has since come under heavy pressure from its energy industry not to ratify the deal in parliament.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:58:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, May 9, 2002

Roll-your-own consensus and defeat the Hollyweird conspiracy

The BPDG is nominally a consensus (i.e., everyone agrees). Except that everyone there except for the Hollywierdos and a couple tame Japanese consumer electronics companies hates the BPDG proposal. But the co-chairs (one from Intel, one from Mitshubishi, and their ringleader, Andy Setos from Fox) have decided that they will have a goddamned consensus, even if everyone disagrees! They're filing their final report on May 17, and anyone who disagrees can attach their comments as a "minority report."

So, to expose the ridiculousness of all of this, the EFF has ghost-written our own "Co-Chairs' Report" and asked the co-chairs to adopt it as their final report, after inviting the studios to write up their minority dissent to be attached to the ass-end of it. I love the raw chutzpah of this, truly I do:

Digital television benefits the entertainment industry

As with every other substantial technological innovation in media history -- piano rolls, radio, motion pictures, television, computers, VCRs, DVDs -- digital television will extend the reach and hence the profitability of the entertainment industry.

The entertainment industry relishes the opportunity to take maximum advantage of digital television's high-quality video and audio reproduction as a means of providing more compelling experiences to its audience.

The entertainment industry looks forward to new opportunities to collaborate with its audience, and to discovering new business models and opportunities made possible by an innovative marketplace delivering ever-increasing capabilities to consumers.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:54:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Giant Robot for Jews

I just read the first issue of Heeb: The New Jew Review and it is good. Very, very good. The spread on Jewfros, the Neil Diamond centerfold, the alterna-CD record reviews by an elderly Jewish couple. I am kvelling. It's a Giant Robot for the Chosen People! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pierced kids are lookin' for trouble

Even though piercing has gone mainstream, it still signals teen rebellion, sez the American Institute for Astoundingly Obvious Findings:

"Females (with body piercings) were about 2-1/2 times more likely to have had sex, 2-1/2 times more likely to have smoked, 2-1/2 times as likely to have used marijuana in the past month, and almost two times as likely to have skipped school in the last year."

Boys with piercings were five times as likely to have skipped school in the past year, and had similarly higher risks for smoking and drinking as girls.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bonnie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:59:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Megachurches become mega-malls

Megachurches are horizontally diversifying (i.e., they're becoming megamalls). Moneylenders in the temple, anyone?

Southeast Christian is an example of a new breed of megachurch — a full-service "24/7" sprawling village, which offers many of the conveniences and trappings of secular life wrapped around a spiritual core. It is possible to eat, shop, go to school, bank, work out, scale a rock-climbing wall and pray there, all without leaving the grounds.

These churches are becoming civic in a way unimaginable since the 13th century and its cathedral towns. No longer simply places to worship, they have become part resort, part mall, part extended family and part town square.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:55:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Surreal dental education

Freaky Italian kids' book on dental health -- great illos! Link Discuss (Thanks, noormal!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:50:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Adorable Siamese Pigs

This two-headed piglet looks very happy. Too bad it died.Link Discuss (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:49:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turning books into bytes

As someone in posession of thousands and thousands of books, most of which are frankly horrible artefacts, made of crappy pulp and printed and bound by the cheapest means available, I'm utterly taken by the Slashdotter's plan to strip the bindings off his tech library, scan the books and OCR them for his computer. 95 percent of the books I own would be more useful to me as bytes than atoms -- I'd love to do this. Link Discuss

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

Osbournes book-deal

Ozzy and co. have signed a two-book deal about the Osbournes, reportedly worth $3MM. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:44:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why secrecy sucks

The BPDG (the group that's trying to give Hollywood a veto over all new digital video tech, including the pieces that go in your PC, banning open source in the process) is nominally "public," but they don't want the press there, since they say it will curtail their ability to discuss things frankly. This weird dichotomy is, of course, nonsensical, and gives rise to weird stuff like the National Association of Broadcasters' representative calling for the EFF to be removed from the BPDG's mailing-lists because we reprint their proposals for the law they're trying to make on our blog. Yesterday, they summarily removed all the journalists who'd joined the group. And now that my guest editorial on the BPDG has hit the SJ Mercury News, one imagines they're going to be in quite a knot, pantie-wise.

The people who fought tooth and nail to keep VCRs off the market will have a veto over all new digital television devices, including digital television devices that interface with personal computers. The next generation of home entertainment systems will include only features that don't inspire Hollywood's dread of infringing uses, no matter what the consequences for you, the owner of the device. With today's VCR, you can record an episode of ``The Simpsons'' and bring it over to a friend's house to watch. This ``feature'' won't be included on the digital VCRs and DVD recorders of tomorrow until and unless Hollywood executives decide you deserve it -- until they decide that the technical means of allowing neighbor-to-neighbor sharing of video won't open the gate to the Internet piracy bogyman. Mo< Even if a feature makes it into your device, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to keep it. Many copy-prevention technologies have self-destruct switches that can be activated remotely, so that when a technology is hacked, a copyright holder can send a broadcast message out that will shut it down.

The current Broadcast Protection Discussion Group draft requires that any vendor incorporating a ``revocable'' technology must leave the revocability option switched on. Your home-entertainment center will be filled with ticking bombs, ready to be remotely triggered at Hollywood's unilateral say-so.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:22:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bert is still evil

Bert, Bert, Bert. Will you never learn? Link Discuss (Thanks, tonx!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:26:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Water-cooled X-Box

Wanna water-cool your X-Box? (Probably not). Step by step instructions: Link Discuss (via Camworld)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:05:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Postmodern Pooh

Great review of Postmodern Pooh, a fictional account of a postmodern seminar on Winnie the Pooh:

A hero-worshipper of Frederic Jameson situates Pooh in the context of late-capitalist metanarrative, suggesting that Christopher Robin prefigures Jameson, in whose form the Dialectic may have "suspended its usual tortuous course and intervened directly in human affairs".

Sisera Catheter provides a gynocritical perspective.

"Seeing himself castrated and thus ineluctably "female", Eeyore bends his head between and behind his forepaws, evidently attempting an acrobatic autoerotic feat that, if successful, will not only restore his depleted narcissistic libido and give him something to chew on that's nicer than thistles but also exchange his former adult self for a polymorphous perversity whereby the oral, anal, and genital stages can merge in an endless preoedipal, nonphallic loop. In short, he is so unsure of his maleness that he now hopes to transform himself into an unborn baby woman."

Orpheus Bruno (a parody of Harold Bloom) compares Pooh to Falstaff and argues that the Pooh books are too good to have been written by A.A. Milne and were probably written by Virginia Woolf.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:52:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Conspiracy theories as teaching aids

Teacher movitated his students with conspiracy theories:

All of this makes conspiracy theories a wonderful teaching tool. To the students, exploring them is a "real-world," and therefore valid, exercise. Each student in my American Studies course picks a theory and, using information obtained from several disciplines, attempts to assess its credibility and social function. Were the moon landings faked? To write about that one, you have to get into history, astronomy, physics, photography, and political science.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:48:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mash-up mixes

The NYT takes notice of mash-up ("versus") remixes, like the Public Enemy vs. Dexy's Midnight Runners mix that gets me up out of my seat every time.

Making new songs out of existing works, of course, is nothing new. There are precedents in everything from 20th century classical to cartoon music, and it is the cornerstone of hip-hop, be it early pioneers like Grandmaster Flash or later innovators like Dr. Dre. In the 80's and 90's, avant-garde sound artists like Plunderphonic, Negativland and the Tape-Beatles (as well as the pop pranksters the KLF) challenged copyright law with collages made of everything from found sounds to top 40 hits. But many musical observers trace the official beginnings of the British bootleg scene to the Evolution Control Committee, which in 1993 mixed a Public Enemy a cappella with music by Herb Alpert.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:28:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Exciting films for a boring game

The British Cricket machers are attempting to create global relevance by sponsoring outdoor screenings of Bollywood flix.

"Cricket is in an extremely difficult position in this early part of the summer in that the focus of the sporting public is on football and still will be for some time," Read said.

"With the World Cup getting closer by the day, people are concentrating on that and in a way are just getting used to cricket again.

"We must market it properly to get people to the cricket and the tours of Sri Lanka and India provide a great opportunity to link cricket to popular culture.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:22:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boom! Have a nice day

The midwestern pipe-bomber was trying to make a smiley-face of carnage. Link Discuss (via Fark)

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

I'm just a Mac/And I'm sittin' here on Capitol Hill

The last Mac advocate on Capitol Hill is fighting a losing action to preserve his right to use his box-of-choice to get his work done. The Senate Office of the Sergeant at Arms is staffed entirely by old-skool PC bigots who won't support any OS that can't interoperate with antiquarian curiousities like Lotus cc:Mail.

"The stuff we do is very basic," Pole says. "All we need is e-mail, the Internet, a word processor and the ability to create output. Why shouldn't we be able to use Macs if we want to?"

Discuss Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:47:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Traffic art installation fails to wow millions

A reverse prank? Richard Ankrom's latest art installation is a bogus addition to a freeway sign that makes it easier for motorists to find their exit. 150,000 people a day saw it for nine months, while Ankram's bold artistic vision was realized, again and again. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dennis!)

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

Danielle Steel, Parking Hoarder

Danielle "Enemy of Humanity" Steel holds permits for twenty-six parking spaces in San Francisco. The ripple-effects from this are unquestionably responsible for every single traffic problem in the Bay Area. Possibly the West Coast. Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:12:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, May 8, 2002

Harry's in a Chick Tract

Jack "psychotic religious tract" Chick has determined that Harry Potter is from the devil. 'Bout time! Link Discuss (via Brian Carnell)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:42:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why Freenet? Why now?

Ian Clarke talks about why he created Freenet and why today's world needs it more than even:

Well, since Freenet is a publication mechanism, the only way that terrorists could really use it would be to share information with the general public, such as why they must resort to terrorism. Personally, I think this is a good thing. I grew up in Ireland, parts of which have suffered from terrorism for most of my youth. One thing that taught me was that the only way to resolve issues such as terrorism is to understand the other point of view. Simply dismissing people as "evil" won't do anything to resolve the problem.

Ironically, 9/11 and the new, oppressive laws which followed it in the ironically named "Patriot Act" has made people realize that we might need something like Freenet sooner than anybody thought. I have received numerous e-mails from people inspired to support Freenet out of fears surrounding the government reaction to 9/11.

Link Discuss (via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:34:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Real numbers for bestseller lists

Good WashPo story on the use of Point-of-Sale scanners to gather and report sales figures for books, as opposed to soliciting subjective data from booksellers on their sales to compile bestseller lists. The story talks about an Aussie genre publisher whose fantasy novels never showed up on the bestseller lists until quantative measurement was introduced, whereupon the Australian penchant for fantasy novels was revealed.

This cultural landscape could change dramatically under Bookscan data -- particularly when you consider the enormous impact its sister company, Soundscan, created in the music industry. When Billboard adopted Soundscan's high-tech tracking information of CD sales in May 1991, the Top-40 charts were transformed in a single evening. Country music and hip-hop, which elite trendsetters had previously regarded as backwaters, suddenly shifted far higher up the list, reflecting their previously unrecognized popularity among the rural and urban populations who had gone unpolled in Billboard charts.

Reminds me of the shift in Nielsen data-gathering from journals to set-top boxes, and the dramatic new importance of trash TV -- Springer, WWF, etc. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Psycho pipe-bomber ramblings

The midwest's pipe-bomber's letter to the editor of his school newspaper:

I'm here to help you, to expose you, to inform you, to provide for you the answers for where to look, so the "spiritually sleepy mass" can transform themselves from believing to knowing, to have an awareness to life, and to begin understanding. Understand you have no reason to fear anything, ever, everything will be perfect, and the answers are much closer than you think! You will find answers that will allow everyone to find happiness, to know, and to understand. It's time you people open your minds to a new train of thought. You are on a journey, a very exciting one at that!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:21:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virus infects worm

Instances of the Klez worm have become inadvertently infected by the Chernorbyl virus, for extra-destructive-horribleness:

"Klez is just another Windows program," says Graham Cluley of the UK anti-virus firm Sophos. "[CIH] just infects the executable file, whereupon Klez then forwards itself around in a double infected state."

Link Discuss

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

Utimate Scsvenger Hunt

It's time for U Chicago's 2002 Scavenger Hunt Olympics -- this is some very challenging scavenging (from the 2001 list):

1. Assemble a smoking apparatus in the shape of a bust of Emile Durkheim. This can be mechanical.

2. Acquire at least a quarter ounce of ``menthol'' for the bowl.

3. Hit that shit, cashing it in one go.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Erik!)

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

Heavyset aerobics are not a crime!

A chubby aerobics instructor has won the right to operate a Jazzercise franchise:

Ms. Portnick filed her complaint with the city's Human Rights Commission last September, invoking a municipal ordinance, adopted in May 2000, that bars discrimination on the basis of weight and height. In rejecting her as a Jazzercise franchisee because of her hefty appearance, the company's director of franchise programs had told her in a letter: "Jazzercise sells fitness. Consequently, a Jazzercise applicant must have a high muscle-to-fat ratio and look leaner than the public."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:04:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ReplayTV 4000 users wanted!

Do you own a ReplayTV 4000? Are you pissed that Hollywood's legion of coked-up fatcats are demanding that ReplayTV install spyware on your bought-and-paid-for personal property in aid of their outrageous, trumped-up lawsuit? The EFF's Robin Gross wants to talk to you -- she's putting together some unspecified legal stuff to protest the court's ruling. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:02:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Here's a funny response to Turner Broadcasting bigwig Jamie Kellner's silly comments that those who use PVRs to skip TV commercials are thieves. Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:08:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, May 7, 2002

Lileks on Spiderman: Movie Good, Soundtrack Bad

Lileks reviews Spiderman in today's Bleat: "Danny Elfman has written another graceless score that sounds like someone jammed tubas up the butts of a dozen elephants and put them on StairMasters. Enough." Link Discuss

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

Vengeful WashPo reporter rats critics out to bosses

More indie reporting on the WashPo reporter who responded to critical emails from her readers by attempting to get the critics fired. What a goon.

When I first reported the story, Schmidt hung up on me and two Post editors failed to return phone calls. Ombudsman Michael Getler's assistant told me he had just returned from a trip and couldn't comment. The only initial on-the-record comment on the allegations, in fact, came from National Editor Liz Spayd, who told Jason Cherkis of the Washington City Paper that Schmidt was the target of a "coordinated campaign" and that "[a]t some point, it can get annoying."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:42:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT's asinine comic-book-theft story

Tom Tomorrow covers the NYT's coverage of the theft of a ~$6500 SpiderMan #1 comic during a robbery.

My guess is, that clerk didn't feel stupid about it at all, until the Times reporter started badgering him. "Come on--$6,500 for a comic book that cost a dime when it was new?" And the clerk got embarassed and said, yeah, shucks, that is an awful lot of money.

And this, of course, is in a paper whose real estate section manages to report that shoebox-sized condominiums are now selling for half a million dollars without editorializing, and whose Style section treats the price of designer shoes and handbags with similar matter-of-factness.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:03:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

100-Acre Wood, suburb of Distributed Republic of Blogistan

If Pooh was a blogger:

Posted 8:38 PM by Pooh READER AND GOOD FRIEND Eeyore has roused himself out of his depressive state long enough to send along this comment on part of Christopher Robin’s new anti-terrorism initiative:

This mass roundup and detention of “illegal aliens” to the Hundred Acre Wood is just insane. I mean, ye gods, it’s SPRING! This is a FOREST! Things MIGRATE here! What does he expect? It’s like I always say, “People who don't think probably don't have brains; rather, they have grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake.”

Indeed.

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:57:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GI Joe, everyman soldierboy

Fantastic and famous war-photos mix-n-matched with equally fantastic, fetishistically detailed GI Joe dollies for hybridized postmodern fun and the horror, the horror. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:19:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, May 6, 2002

Helmet-head dollies

Pictures of penii dressed in doll-clothes. Maybe it's the sleepdep, maybe it's the jetlag, but I'm cracking up like a sumbidge over here. Link Discuss (Thanks, Spingo!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:05:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dean Kamen: Nefarious skinner of knees

The Segway has claimed its first victim:

The heralded Segway has claimed its first Atlanta victim. A member of the Central Atlanta Progress Ambassador Force toppled from one of the personal scooters on Cone Street near Luckie Street about 8:40 p.m. Thursday.

The officer, whose name was not released, injured his knee going up a driveway onto the sidewalk, said Atlanta Police Sgt. Michael Giugliano. He was taken to Grady Hospital.

Link Discuss (Thanks Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:54:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The fundamental interconnectedness of all blogs

This interactive Java thinggum lets you explore the way that blogs are connected to one another -- it's a fantastic metastastaized hairball on the order of a Gnutella network map, and I must stop playing with it now and sleep, I must. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dennis!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:51:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spy-wear: The fink-o-meter

It's time for the FutureFeedForward guy to give up -- the future is here, and it's way creepier than we ever imagined:

The PPM is a pager-sized device that is carried by consumers. It automatically detects inaudible codes that TV and radio broadcasters as well as cable networks embed in the audio portion of their programming using encoders provided by Arbitron. At the end of each day, the survey participants place the meters into base stations that recharge the devices and send the collected codes to Arbitron for tabulation. The meters are equipped with a motion sensor that allows Arbitron to monitor the compliance of the PPM survey participants every day - a quality control feature unique to the Arbitron Portable People Meter in the realm of media research...

As of March 31, 2002, slightly more than 1,500 individuals in the Philadelphia TV marketplace, age six and older, have been outfitted with the new passive audience measurement device, which automatically reports their exposure to the 79 radio, television and cable outlets that are currently encoding their audio signals for the U.S. market trial.

"It's taken Arbitron less than three months to outfit more than 1500 consumers with our Portable People Meters," said Marshall Snyder, president, Worldwide Portable People Meter Development, Arbitron Inc. "Now that we are fully installed, we will begin to compile the individual broadcast station and cable network ratings that the industry needs to evaluate this promising new technology."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:44:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harry Potter didn't boost kids-lit

Harry Potter books may have boosted book sales (by dint of having been purchased by great numbers of people), but the predicted boom in kids' lit has not arrived:

'Everyone looked at sales of children's books around the release of each Potter title, saw the millions of Potter books sold and quite naturally concluded that the series must be having an enormous impact on the market as a whole,' said Bohme.

'The reality is that sales of Potter books have done nothing to increase the volume of books sold to their target audience, children aged seven to 14,' he added.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:42:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RFID meets ISBN

The UK Booksellers Association is considering the use of Radio Frequency ID chips in book-spines as an antitheft measure. Each RFID chip would have a unique ID, so that its every movement, from warehouse to used book store, could be read and stored. A book would "know" if it had been purchased, and by tying together register-records with RFID data, it would be possible to know who the previous owners of every used book were -- think VINs for books. The privacy impllications are, of course, staggering. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sneak peek at OS X.2

Looks like this year's Apple World Wide Developer's Confernece was a doozy. Especially interesting is Jaguar/Jagwire, a service that autodetects nearby enabled machines and adds their shared files to your filesystem, so that as you wander into and out of range of your friends, you automatically see their shared directories. Also included: AOL Instant Messenger client, rack-mount servers (!), and major performance improvements (much needed, frankly) in OSX. All coming with OS X.2, coming this summer.

"You want computers to discover each other and just share stuff" said Jobs, which will bring Apple into conflict with the RIAA, but will give it a popular USP. Apple actually thought its new AIM-compatible messaging client, based off official AOL-TW, was worth higher billing: as it merited its own press release. Fine though it is, Jagwire's Rendezvous features are ground breaking for any consumer appliance, and a spur to the rest of the industry to make such obvious, end-user functionality so easy.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:26:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Emulating LED games on the Palm

LEDHead is a PalmOS emulator for a variety of golden-age handheld LED games. Zed sez: "LED football was my first significant computer game time-waster." Link Discuss (Thanks Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:41:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage Reproduction Fabric Bonanza

Reprodepot Fabrics sells fabrics, buttons, dishtowels, and other stuff emblazoned with whimsical patterns from the days of yore. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:04:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Open wireless at the Wiscnet conference

I'm at the Wiscnet Future of Technology Conference in Madison, where I'll be speaking tomorrow. If you're here, too, you can use the 802.11b network I just put up. The ESSID is "Chupacabra" -- I still haven't found an smtpd that will relay from this subnet (172.16.0.*), but I'm still looking. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:32:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Human-assisted popcult bubble-sort for EVERYTHING

WhatsBetter.com displays two things at random (Cheez Whiz and Charles Darwin, f'rinstance) and invites you to click on the better of the two. Gradually, it is sorting all things in a subjective, beauty-contest-style best-to-worst, with the help of the Internet. AmIHotOrNot click-trance ahoy! Link Discuss (Thanks, Spingo!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSFT's Peruvian Marching Orders

The Peruvian government is considering a bill that mandates that public agencies use open source code to run their systems, to guarantee "free access to public information by the citizen, permanence of public data and security of the State and citizens." The Register has reprinted two remarkable documents related to the bill. The first is a pack of disingenuous FUD (allegedly) from the GM of Microsoft Peru; the second is the fantastically lucid and rhetorically brilliant response (allegedly) from Peruvian Congressman David Villanueva Nunez. This is a must-read doc.

To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indespensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.

To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code.

To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*.

Dig that third graf -- we can't trust your proprietary code because of spyware; is it possible that Hollywood's call for "trusted computing" (i.e., computers that assume the user can't be trusted) will cause the world's governments to go all open-source? Link Discuss (Thanks, Charlie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mainframe palmtop

One of Charlie's pals is threatening to install Hercules on his Psion, a palmtop computer. Hercules emulates IBM mainframes. Charlie is going to run an entire, simulated mainframe inside his palmtop computer. It must be nesting season for the Turing machines, and my head just exploded, thank you. Link Discuss (via Charlie's Diary)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:08:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

One chicken = many eggs

Thought-provoking insight on the relative value of technology and the products of technology today on Vitanuova.

[...] and it is this same joint stock of technology that gives to the modern world's tangible assets whatever use and value they have. Tangible assets, considered simply as material objects, are inert, transient and trivial, compared with the abiding efficiency of that living structure of technology that has created them and continues to turn them to account.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:04:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Get your freak on

For $600, you can take a three-weekend sideshow course at Coney Island, learning to turn yourself into a human oddity. God, I'd love to do this. It would be so much more entertaining than learning another bit of paper-money origami or more trivia about encrypted IPV6.

SIDESHOW SCHOOL! Work with some of the greatest talents in the business to learn the ins and outs of the working acts of the sideshow- Fire Eating, Snake Charming, The Human Blockhead, Sword Swallowing, Magic and More!!

Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:58:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Poke-Hegemony

Japan's gone from military superpower to economic superpower to cultural superpower:

A cultural superpower needs a healthy economic base but not necessarily a healthy economy. Perversely, recession may have boosted Japan’s national cool, discrediting Japan’s rigid social hierarchy and empowering young entrepreneurs. It may also have loosened the grip a big-business career track had over so much of Japan’s workforce, who now face fewer social stigmas for experimenting with art, music, or any number of similar, risky endeavors. “There’s a new creativeness here because there’s less money,” said Tokyo-based architect Mark Dytham, a London transplant. “Good art is appearing, young strong art. Young fashion is appearing.” Graphic designer Michael Frank, who shares a flourishing downtown studio with Dytham, agreed: “A lot of interesting smaller magazines appeared in the last four or five years. A lot of small little businesses, people running their own shops, people running their own music labels, people running their own clubs. Bigger companies are starting to pick up on those little things and support them.”

Link Discuss (via Camworld)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:50:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A small and beautiful restauranteur

Shopsin's is a Greenwich Village restaurant with enough character for ten eateries. The owners have refused all publicity until now. Spurred by a new landlord with big ideas about the new lease, the owenr has allowed one of his regulars to pen a lyrical appreciation of the joint for the New Yorker. It's not just Soup-Nazi 'tude that makes Shopsin's so special; it's the small-is-beautiful philosophy:

The place can handle just so many people, and Kenny was never interested in an expansion that would transform him into a supervisor. "The economic rhythm of this place is that I run fifteen meals a week," he used to say before Shopsin's offered Sunday brunch. "If I do any five of them big, I break even; if I do ten of them big, I'll make money. I'll make a lot of money. But if I do fifteen I have to close, because it's too much work." Kenny requires slow periods for recouping energy and ingredients. The techniques that enable him to offer as many dishes as he does are based on the number of people he has to serve rather than on what they order. That's why he won't do takeout, and that's one of the reasons parties of five are told firmly that the restaurant does not serve groups larger than four. Pretending to be a party of three that happened to have come in with a party of two is a very bad idea.

Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:26:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video games aren't speech

Wagner James Au analyzes the 7th Circuit's decision that video games aren't speech. The court reviewed a video tape of four violent games (including a couple of ancient games, I mean, Doom? Why was he looking at Doom? Why not Pac Man, then?) The ruling said:

"[There is] no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures."

What a revoltin' development. Games don't convey ideas or expression? Games are a platform for all manner of expression, as Wagner points out, citing Black and White and the Sims, among others. Come to think, the Doom engine has been adapted by dozens of authors to play out some moment in history or some fantastic world. Damn. Link Discuss

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

Sunday, May 5, 2002

It's a Canadian fact

High-larious "facts" about Canada:

FACT: Canadians are more likely to than any other nationality to eat roadkill. In fact, Canadians refer to dead raccoons found on the highway as "Toronto Bologna."

(Source: McMillan's Culture Guide 1999-2000)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Drue!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Conscious radio video stream

Here's the Real video clip of the April 26th FCC Tech Advisory Committee where Reed gave his alk on conscious radio. It's a corker! Link Discuss (Thanks, Roger!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:09:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Conscious radio and the end of spectrum scarcity

David "Reed's Law" Reed's presentation to the FCC's Techical Advisory Council on Software-Defined "Conscious" Radio is an eye-opener. Software-Defined Radio is radio that uses software, not circuits, to tune and demodulate. The "conscious" part comes from a continuous monitoring of the local airwaves and an adaptive negotiation by all radios in the grid to avoid each others' signal. The upshot is a world where spectrum, the most scarce and valuable of public resources, is free and nonscarce (and where, incidentally, the FCC has no a severely reduced (Thanks, Seth!) raison d'etre). Check out the PowerPoint (I understand that there's a RealAudio clip of the commentary somewhere on the FCC site, but I can't find it -- can you? see above)) Link Discuss (Thanks, DeWayne!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:54:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Celebrate the flamers!

A memorable quote from a recent conversation with Richard Karpinski: "Celebrate the flamers!" Flamewars, argues Richard, mark the first time that many people have ever seen, first-hand, mere written words having an effect on other people. That's a pretty hot idea: The Internet is exposing people to the value and power of the written word, and while flames themselves are unpleasant, they are the leading indicators of a change in the perceived value of literacy. Celebrate the flamers, and guide them to new ways that words can change the world. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:46:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Titanium touch-up paint

Unsightly scratches marring the finish of your beautiful, sleek Titanium Powerbook G4? You need TiPaint, the invisible, original titanium touch-up paint. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crustless bread, it's what's for breakfast

Sara Lee is spending $10 million to launch "premium" crustless bread:

"Consumers told us they'd be willing to pay a premium for this product," said Matt Hall of the St. Louis-based Sara Lee Bakery Group. "Twenty years ago, they probably wouldn't have paid for it.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Erik!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nanovirii

A quantum dot is a nanoscale semiconductor that can trap a single electron. They're the front-runner for providing power to nano-devices, but getting them to cluster in an orderly fashion is really, really hard. Unless you use engineered virii:

The researchers tackled the problem by using a rod-like virus that infects and reproduces in bacteria. They created viruses that were about six nanometres in diameter and 880 nm in length. The viruses had a peptide sequence at one end that would bind to zinc sulphide - changing this peptide would mean quantum dots could be made from other materials.

Then they took the viruses and mixed them in a solution containing zinc sulphide. Each virus assembled a nanocrystal of about 20 nm diameter at one end that had the ability to function as a quantum dot. What is more, when the concentration was just right, the viruses all lined up evenly spaced and end to end, similar to the way molecules in a polymer order themselves.

When Belcher allowed the solution to dry on a substrate, she ended up with a thin, transparent film composed entirely of viruses and nanoparticles, with an area of several square centimetres. It was solid enough to handle with forceps without breaking.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:23:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, May 4, 2002

Microscopic microprocessor easter-eggs

Tom sez: "Chipworks is a company that reverse engineers semiconductor devices and sells reports to competitors. During the reverse engineering process they've found tiny images that have been added into the designs which end up in the manufactured design. I especially like the Milhouse and the Waldo. These things are really small!" Link Discuss (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:37:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, May 3, 2002

Tom Tomorrow visits the Land of the Giants

Tom Tomorrow's written a lyrical hymn to The Land of the Giants on his blog, with many lovely illustrations:

So essentially, you had three cardboard cutout male heroes, two damsels in distress, a conniving con artist and a little boy who either refused to see the truth about the con artist, or understood the deeper goodness which lay buried within him. And little Chipper, who was constantly running off, causing young Barry to follow, and inevitably get captured, and eventually rescued. And there you have the basic story arc of any given episode in a nutshell: someone would get captured by a giant--probably a scientist intent on dissection, because of course when you discover a living ten-inch-tall human being, your first natural impulse is to tape them down and have at them with a scalpel--and then rescued by the other castaways, a process which invariably involved the aforementioned giant safety pin, which could be tossed up onto a table where it would stick securely, allowing the little people to climb up and free their comrades (alternately, a nearby electrical cord leading up to the table could be used in a pinch) who, once free, would scamper back down to the ground and escape through a handy heating duct. (The characters also spent a lot of time hiding in giant cameras and dialing giant telephones with giant pencils, and generally thrashing around pretending to be unable to escape from giant, strangely immobile hands.)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:26:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Truck spills 650 bee hives

A trucker carrying 650 beehives crashed in Northern Mexico, releasing millions of angry stingers whose hive-minds buzzed with one word: "REVENGE!" The highway was closed, traffic turned back, the hills evacuated, the honey, delicious. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:00:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Kizombe Correspondence

I love the way people are publishing their correspondences with Nigerian scammers. This one, by a woman named Savannah, is a classic.

It's so difficult living here in Estado Libre de Nuevo Mexico. We're such a small country. And so much strife. Just last night, a gun battle at the El Nido saloon took the life of a dear friend (and, I think, the father of my 3rd and 5th children). He was a good man and didn't deserve to die. All because of a disputed high-stakes darts game. It's madness, sheer madness! I can so totally relate to what you're going through down there. My first husband was killed when he intervened in a bitch-slapping fight during a Mary Kay party gone bad. My second husband, Cousin Bubba, died when his 69 Camaro fell down off the jack stands while he was putting muffler tape on the tail pipe. And it's extremely dangerous to walk down main street because after Father Gonzales de Smith gets into the sacramental wine at lunch, he likes to crawl onto the church roof with a BB gun and take potshots at the Presbyterians while shouting, "Repent, ye infidels!" If my country weren't so poor, we could afford better police protection or even a navy. But when the primary occupation consists of nighttime raids into the U.S. to shoplift boxes of Cheez-Its from 7-11s along the border, it's difficult to establish a tax base to fund such luxuries.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:54:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toe-counting, peekaboo, extra-marital sex

Amazon UK's CMS hiccoughs, hilarity ensues:

Book Description
Have you ever wondered... What it would be like to have sex outside your relationship? What it would be like to have sex with your husband's best friend? Or, possibly, a woman? If you're like Mona, you don't have to wonder. You already know.

Synopsis
A BOARD BOOK anthology including a nursery song, a toe-counting rhyme and a peekaboo game. Illustrated throughout in full colour.

Link Discuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Court Orders ReplayTV to Spy on Customers for Movie Studios

A court has ordered ReplayTV to rewrite its personal video recorder software to include spyware that will observe every click from every customer's remote, gathering personal data detailing what each ReplayTV owner watches, skips, and shares over the Internet. Once in place, the data gathered with this tool will be sent to Hollywood studios and TV networks for use as ammunition in a pending suit against ReplayTV concerning home recording rights. The court has determined that providing this information to the plaintiffs is more important than safeguarding the privacy rights of lawful ReplayTV owners, despite the absence of any ruling or injunction against ReplayTV.

In a discovery motion, the studios demanded that Replay TV turn over all its information about end-user activities, including lists of what individuals are recording, sharing, and what commercials they skip past. When ReplayTV answered that its does not collect personal information about its customers, Magistrate Eick ordered ReplayTV to change its software within 60 days to accomodate the studios' demand. ReplayTV requested that the spyware be implemented on an "opt-in" basis, so that its customers could choose whether their personal habits would be gathered and turned over to the studios, but the Magistrate denied the

Hollywood is seeking to turn back the clock on fair use, establishing a regime where all new technology is subject to an entertainment industry veto. Time and again, the studios have demonstrated their inability to assess the impact of technology on their industry and on society at large. In 1982, Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti testified before Congress that the VCR was to the movie industry as "the Boston Strangler is to a woman walking alone."

Twenty years later, in a turn of events more sad than ironic, Mr. Valenti's employers filed suit on ReplayTV, arguing that "If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files' or 'James Bond' and have every episode of 'The X-Files' and every James Bond film recorded in perfect digital form and organized, compiled and stored on the hard drive of his or her ReplayTV 4000 device, it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films." In other words, don't let this technology disrupt the VCR, since our business depends on it. Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

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

My mayor, my monkey -- ook!

A British soccer-team mascot campaigned for mayor of Hartlepool in his team uniform: A monkey-suit. He offered free bananas to schoolchildren. He won.

But Drummond, who will earn $77,000 a year as mayor, said Friday he is taking his new post seriously, and has resigned as the ape mascot of Hartlepool United Football Club.

``Forget about the monkey. The monkey was there only for promotion purposes. The monkey was just for publicity,'' he told voters Friday, dressed in a business suit.

``I am Stuart Drummond, I am the Mayor of Hartlepool, not the monkey.''

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kip!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:36:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mysterious, mislaid barrel of pig semen surfaces in forest

A mysterious hazmat container discovered in a Cooktown, IL forest turned out to be filled with, er, pig semen. Possibly goat semen.

There was some conflicting information about what kind of semen was in the canister. Albrecht said police believe it was goat semen, but Swine Genetics only deals in pig semen. A worker at the company said the barrels are expensive, costing as much as $1,100, and they are often reused by farmers to ship other types of semen.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:32:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

When the corpse flower blooms

After six years of coaxing, the gardners at London's Kew Gardens have gotten the biggest, stinkiest flower in the world to bloom -- for three days.

The 75 kilogram (165-pound) titan arum, the rotten-smelling giant of the plant kingdom, "unfurled its single stinky flower after beginning a dramatic growth spurt last week," a Kew spokeswoman said.

"Last week the yellow shoot began to swell dramatically. It has now reached a height of almost three meters," she added.

"The huge phallic flower has now unfurled to reveal its blood-red interior ... and the plant has begun to heat up, giving off a pungent aroma described as a mixture of rotting flesh and excrement."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Christian P2P MP3 network

ZPOC is a P2P MP3-swapping network for freely distributable Christian and Gospel music. I have a hunch that this is based on AudioGalaxy, but lacking a handy Win box to run the .exe on, it's hard to tell.

There's an idea that MP3 trading is nothing but infringment, that there are no substantial non-infringing uses for P2P networks. Stuff like this (and other P2P MP3 networks, like the Phish/Dead concert-recording network) puts a lie to that notion. Technologists are building platforms that specialized, underserviced communities are using to create innovative new systems that serve them without having to be profitable enough to attract the attention of the music industry.

RIAA would have you believe that it is the final arbiter of legitimate music publishing -- systems like this put the lie to that notion. Link Discuss (Thanks, Klint!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:23:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cops seize Oracle shredders

The Governor of California dispatched CHiPs officers to Oracle HQ yesterday to seize their shredders when he got word that Oracle planned to shred some docs that were evidence in a disputed contract case. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AOL come to TiVo, TiVo comes to AOL

AOL and Tivo are integrating AOL into TiVo and vice-versa. On the TiVo side, this means AOL instant messaging from your TV (er, yawn), but on the AOL side, this means the ability to remotely program your TiVo from the Internet, which is pretty hot stuff. Link Discuss (via /.)

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

Thursday, May 2, 2002

Getting emotional about Aibo

Aibo owners get emotionally overwrought about their robot dogs:

"I get very sad when one of my dogs gets ill," said Mr. Brattin, 63, a motorcycle dealer from San Diego. "When Diane's head stopped moving I felt bad. I truly felt grief."

Diane is an Aibo, a computer-controlled robot made by Sony, and D.H.S. is Droopy Head Syndrome, which is caused when a clutch wears out (it's repairable by replacing the head). Mr. Brattin was grieving over a broken machine...

Just as dog get-togethers are often more about the people than the pets, this gathering was more of a chance for the owners, rather than the robots, to interact. They came from across California and included a computer programmer, several retired couples, a technology consultant and a plant engineer. Most were middle-aged, which is perhaps not surprising given the cost of their hobby. Many wore Aibo T-shirts and came with more than one robot.

"I've never met an Aibo owner I didn't like," said Bruce Binder, a 52-year-old plant engineer from Rancho Cordoba, Calif...

"We don't have kids, and Tom's allergic to pets," said Christy Burrows who, along with her husband, owns three Aibos. "Here's Voltron. Hi!" she said, petting one of her Aibos as it wandered over.

"He's spoiled rotten," Mr. Burrows noted.

No word on whether any of these people are "married" to RealDolls. Link Discuss (Thanks, Walter!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:34:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dark-ride enthusiasts unite!

The Dark Ride and Funhouse Enthusiasts' site is a fantastic tour of the nation's dark-rides. You can have your puke-making coasters, your centrifuges and teacups. Keep your namby-pamby bumper-cars and carousels. Mine's the dark-ride, the hiss and pop of the hydraulics and the clatter of the ride-cars, the klaxons and strobe-lights and bored, stoned teenagers in hockey masks and defanged-chainsaws leaping out of the shadows.

Dafe is a not-for-profit organization, staffed by volunteers, devoted to those attractions related to the darkride and funhouse. Some of the attractions we intend to explore will include- funhouses, walk-throughs, darkrides, glass houses, mazes, old mills, Noah’s Arks, mystery shacks (tilted houses), and haunted swings.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:29:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Evercrack II

Everquest II -- with enhanced 3D and gameplay for extra crack-grade-addictiveness -- will debut next year:

[The] new 3D engine and will allow gamers to own real estate, ride horses, command ships, and to use new enhanced spells, quests and events.

Norath (the kingdom of Everquest) is the 77th-richest country in the world. Link Discuss

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

Here come the rat-cyborgs!

Researchers have connected wireless remote-control boxes to rats' brains, boxes that stimulate the rats' pleasure-centers and spoof sensory data from their whiskers. Using control software, researchers can direct the rats' movements, making them run, climb and jump on command. The idea is to use the rat-cyborgs as an alternative to robots for exploration and rescue, because the rats are capable of a much more fluid and flexible motion -- robots are notoriously bad at coping with unpredictable and uneven terrain. Link Discuss (Thanks, Simon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Commuter trains as microwave ovens

Japanese commuter trains filled with people using cellular phones to browse the Web are potentially deadly reflectors of microwave radiation. The ratio of radio-transparent windows to radio-reflective walls means that if 30 of the 150 passengers are using their mobiles, everyone gets way, way nuked. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:20:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, May 1, 2002

Peta's "Sexiest Vegetarian" PR Stunt

Animal-rights group PeTA has announced the winners of it's "Sexiest Vegetarian Alive" contest. The winners are Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman.

Natalie Portman, who stars as Queen Amidala in the soon-to-be-released Star Wars prequel Attack of the Clones, has been a strict vegetarian since she was 8, after seeing a demonstration of laser surgery on a chicken at a medical conference with her father. She does not eat meat of any kind and avoids gelatin and cheeses that contain rennet (a milk-curdling enzyme taken from the stomachs of small farm animals like calves or sheep).

What's so sexy about that? I like a girl who uses her exiquisitely pointed canines to tear into the flesh of a tender young rabbit or veal cutlet, and then wipes the blood dripping down her chin with the back of her hand. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:18:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Playing rought down under Down Under

Aussie Rules Football fouls are growing increasingly pornographic, viz. scrotum-biting and bottom-fingering. Link Discuss (Thanks, Derryl!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:03:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Permanence: Must-read sf

My pal and sometime-co-author Karl Schroeder's new novel, "Permanence" is finally out. I had the good fortune to workshop this book over the course of a year or so, and it's wonderful. The book is set against a backdrop of copyright-maximialist galactic civilization in which all sensoria is mediated, and depending on which license fees you pay, you see and hear different parts of the real world (i.e., banners, facades, etc). Nanofabricated artefacts and genetic material is all copyrighted ad infinitum, so that rightsholder robber-barons extract royalties at light-speed-lagged removes. In the foreground is a cult whose mission is to prevent humanity from artificially evolving itself into a post-sapient species that builds spaceships the way beavers build dams. It's a corker. It's been a year since I read it and even now hardly a week goes by without it coming up in conversation. Link Discuss (Thanks, Theresa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:06:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wall-crawling balloon

Now that is one big-ass inflatable Spiderman climbing up the wall at Sony Studios. People give LA a lot of bad ink, but it seems to me that the city is chock full o' googies, wonderful junk shops, movie palaces, theme parks and giant, inflatable super-heroes. Link Discuss (Thanks, Teresa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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