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Sunday, June 30, 2002

I wuz robbed

Today I was in a hurry, walking down to my local subway station, the 16th and Mission BART, and, as usual when I'm too late to take Valencia, this took me past the cluster of drug-dealers who hang out on my corner, in the north Mission. I was wearing the groovy MiG goggles I'd bought last month in London at the Camden Market and have been using as shades, and this big drug dealer cornered me and started harassing me to try them on. Then he started rambling about what he does for a living, just talking a load of really boring rounder horseshit that probably sounds good and Elmore Leonardy when you say it to yourself in your head but just sounds banal and incoherent when you're standing on a corner.

He's a big guy and so I "let" him try on my shades. Then it transpires that he wants me to buy drugs from him in exchange for my goggles. I explain that I'm not in the market for drugs, but he won't give back my shades and he's talking more bullshit. Finally I say, "So, you're robbing me, right?" and more bullshit ensues. I repeat the question a couple times, then walk off.

I'm really pissed. Really, really pissed. I really liked those goggles and clearly this guy decided he wanted to just fuck with me for the hell of it. Short of flying to London, I can't replace them, ever. (Update: an alert reader pointed out a mail-order site, so I've replaced them)

I could go to the cops, but here's the thing: if I do, he'll know who did it and he might shoot me.

If I don't go to the cops, though, I am going to walk past this guy twice a day for the rest of my tenure in this apartment and he's going to know that I'm a soft touch and I'm bound to be in for more harassment.

This corner is visible from a nearby police station -- cops who park their cars there can easily and continuously see the swarms of crack, heroin and grass dealers who congregate on my corner. It sure doesn't feel like reporting a petty robbery is going to make a difference.

I asked the advice of two transit cops whom I ran into on BART. They said that cops see busting the dealers in the north Mission as a futile exercise, since the system just dumps them back out on the street. They recommended writing to the SF District Attorney's office, just let him know that there's political will to do something about this.

This is the kind of thing that drives me completely nuts about San Francisco. There is visible corruption, felony crimes, and human degradation everywhere, far more so than any other city I've been to in North America or Europe (excluding Naples). There are people squatting and taking dumps, there are streets whose sidewalks are lined with tents and whose gutters are lined with sealed, fermenting 40 oz. malt liquor bottles filled with urine deposited by tent-dwellers who don't want to live in their own piss. Everywhere you go in the city, you step through drifts of discarded pipes, needles, condoms.

The taxes here are extraordinary -- comparable to Ontario, certainly -- but the evidence of government spending is nowhere to be seen, from the potholes to the prostitutes, from the limping transit to the visible and desperate pervasive poverty.

OK, I'm ranting here. Getting robbed -- even getting robbed in such a minor and meaningless way -- sucks, and it rattles you and makes you bitter and angry. This crap makes me want to move, if not back to Toronto then at least to some yuppies-and-dogs neighborhood like Noe Valley or Pacific Heights, where my rent will be even more extortionate (you would not believe how much money I pay for my tiny apartment in my filthy, dangerous, feces-strewn neighborhood).

OK. I'll stop now. Thanks for reading.

Update: a few hours later.

Let me clarify here that I'm not advocating any kind of round-em-up-and-ship-em-off policy. I am no great fan of the penal system, the war on some drugs, nor am I unaware of the social factors that give rise to the problems in my neighborhood.

But there are damned few places where these problems are this visible and dramatic. I don't have a solution, but I do know that other cities in this state, country and continent don't suffer to this degree. There must be a lesson in one of them.

There are many things to love about SF and about the Mission. First and foremost, there's the EFF, as good a reason to stay here as any I can imagine -- working for the EFF is a dream come true, and the benefits thereof far outweigh the problems of this neighborhood.

There's the concentration of amazing, witty, intelligent, thoughtful and technically literate people in the Bay Area. On a good day, SF is a geek's Shangri-La, with excellent nerd and art culture on every corner.

There's the vibrancy of the Mission, the vast majority of good people who are running small businesses, making merry and who greet me with a smile when I walk past.

Getting robbed makes you bitter. If I could have stepped around this guy, I would have, but I couldn't and I ended up getting robbed. I've written to the SF District Attorney's office to point out the drug-dealers on my corner and their seeming truce with law enforcement. There's a great sushi joint, Country Station Sushi, right on the corner where I was robbed. The family that runs it are world-champion taiko drummers, and I feel for them, feel for their struggling business that is effectively barricaded by the dealers on the corner. It's not fair.

I don't have a solution, but it doesn't seem like the city can go on like this. Link Discuss

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

OPENdj: Swarming streamer for Linux

Another swarming streamer, OPENdj, is also free and GPLed and runs under GNU/Linux. Grandiose prediction for a Sunday: swarming will standardize on a protocol in the next three-five years, abeit one with many implentations. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:01:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hollywood asks Congress for Letters of Marque

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif has called for a bill that would create a "safe harbor" for rights-holders who want to attack P2P networks to "protect" their works. A safe harbor is a checklist of qualifications that will guarantee you immunity from prosecution. An ISP that does x, y and z can't be prosecuted for secondary infringement under the DMCA's safe harbor.

Berman is asking Congress for a safe harbor for RIAA and MPAA attacks on P2P systems. At first, this actually seemed slightly reasonable to me. Berman says that his bill won't allow rights-holders to damage individual or ISP computers, and he says the kind of thing they're planning is flooding the network with bad rips, spoofy meta-data (mislabelling tracks) and so on. Hey, that's already a problem in the wild in P2P networks, so what's the big deal, right?

There's something fishy here. Bad meta-data and bad rips are not criminal acts. There's no need for a safe harbor to protect the labels if they want to put up Gnutella hosts with 20,000,000 bad tracks (there're already Christian groups that put up inspirational/chiding images with names that suggest that the files contain porn, and so put their material directly into sinners' hands).

Why does Big Content need a safe harbor for something that's not a criminal act? Safe harbors only exist to protect people who are engaged in an activity that would otherwise be illegal. When Hollywood seeks a safe harbor for its attacks on the Internet, you know that what it's really asking for are Letters of Marque -- a license to engage in criminal vigilantism.

So either Berman's blowing smoke or he's not telling the whole story. You don't need a safe harbor to protect yourself from bad metadata. Watch out for the text of the bill when it gets introduced -- 90 percent of its social harm is lurking below the surface. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:32:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rob Flickenger explains WiFi

Rob "Community Wireless Networks" Flickenger has written an excellent primer on, well, community wireless networking for PC Magazine. He covers all the basics of technology and social phenomena, and imparts some of the vibrance of community networking, too.

The captive portal provides Web site redirection, which you may have encountered when surfing the Web from hotels that provide DSL access to rooms. When the Wi-Fi card in your laptop associates with the access point and you try to open a Web site, you are redirected to an introduction page that identifies the network and invites you to log on (sometimes after paying a nominal fee for access). Once cleared with the authentication service, you are redirected to the site requested.

The hot spot has its place in any community network project because it is relatively simple to set up and provides immediate benefits. For little more than the price of the hardware, homes and businesses can use the wireless network to access a high-speed DSL line (or other appropriate network connection), sharing its cost. Sponsors can charge competitive fees for Internet access to help offset the cost of operations.

The hot spot has one critical limitation: You can set it up only where high-speed Internet access is already available. What if you want to extend network access outside of DSL and cable range, or you want to bridge two networks together but can't afford a dedicated telco line?

Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:58:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Swarming MP3 streamer -- never run out of bandwidth again!

Streamer is a swarming MP3 streamer. Every listener to a Streamer Internet radio station relays for other users, so that you can never run out of bandwidth -- think of Onion Networks' and Blue Falcon Networks' technology, except that this is free and GPLed. I wish that the CBC would adopt this for their Internet radio streams, which are 99 percent busied-out and have a lot of rebuffering problems. I've got tons of upstream bandwidth in San Francisco, so I could handily relay CBC Toronto for other Bay Areans who wanted to listen to it, giving everyone a faster connection and saving money for CBC besides. Link /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 29, 2002

Minor-league hockey-team for sale on eBay

The Anchorage Aces, a bankrupt minor-league hockey team, is up for sale on eBay.

Within hours of its second listing, the minor league team had received four offers on the Internet auction site, including a $2 million offer.

The West Coast Hockey League franchise filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month. The team is more than $2 million in debt and owes more than 100 creditors. Last season, the Aces finished with a league-worst 19-44 record.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:27:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wham-O, we hardly knew ye

RIP, Arthur (Spud) Melin, inventor of the Frisbee and the Hula-Hoop.

"No sensation has ever swept the country like the Hula Hoop," author Richard Johnson wrote in his book American Fads. "(It) remains the standard against which all national crazes are measured."

Melin and Knerr started with slingshots and named their mail-order company after the sound a slingshot made when its projectile struck a target. They branched into other sporting goods, including pellet guns, crossbows and daggers.

They added toys in 1955, when building inspector Fred Morrison sold them a plastic flying disc he had developed after watching Yale University students toss pie tins. Wham-O began selling the disc they called the Pluto Platter two years later before modifying it and renaming it the Frisbee.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lab Notes

Nanotube pistons, tangible interfaces, and the invention of the mouse... all in my latest issue of Lab Notes: Research from the UC Berkeley College of Engineering! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:27:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Surrealflorality

Fellow wunderkammer-keeper Denise Czaja sent me this link to ultra-surreal flower prints by Dr. John Robert Thornton (circa 18th century). As Denise says, "the painting style of the flowers reminds me of Mark Ryden!" Link Discuss (Thanks, Denise!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:23:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Silence is intellectual property

John Cage's 4'33", a lengthy silent track on composition from one of his avant-garde albums performances (thanks, Mark), constitutes an original work for copyright purposes. This means that other composers who include silent tracks have made a derivative work from Cage's silence. Cage's representatives have served producer Mike Batt with a legal nastygram asserting that he infringed on Cage's copyright with his 60-second silent track on the latest Planets album.

As my mother said when I told her, 'which part of the silence are they claiming you nicked?'.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:21:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beware of falling cows

Austrian driver nearly killed by a cow that fell 15' off an overpass just as the car was passing through it. Cow does not survive. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

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

An international TV guide for public radio

Kevin Kelly (not this Kevin Kelly, this Kevin Kelly) wrote to tell us about the site he maintains at PublicRadioFan.com. Kevin's site has a massive and comprehensive guide to audio on hundreds of public radio sites around the world, with direct links to the audio streams, program home-pages and station sites. You can search by programming type, time and location. A little XML-RPC-fu and this could be the basis for a globe-spanning public-radio TiVo. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

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

Propaganda posters remixed for the war on terror

Amazing and inflammatory gallery of remixed wartime propaganda posters. I chose this one in honor of Canada Day. Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:13:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Programming language pr0n

It all started with Raverporn's photo of two young women in lingerie, one spanking the other with an O'Reilly perl book. Joey, a legendary perl-hater, struck back with a photo of his own butt getting whacked with a Lisp book that Dan left behind when he moved to SF and went to work for the Vipul's Razor crowd. Now, Coderman adds his own contribution: a savage C++ book spanking. If only my HyperCard books weren't three thousand miles distant, I'd add my own contribution to the canon, yes I would. Link (perl), Link (Lisp), Link (C++) Discuss (via Ben Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:49:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 28, 2002

Telemarketer saves life

A hiker stranded in the Andes thought he would die, but then his cellular rang. It was a telemarketer calling to get him to top up his pre-paid plan. The telemarketer got emergency services on the line and called the hiker at regular intervals to make sure he didn't lose consciousness from hypothermia. When the hiker's battery died, he put it in the snow to cool it off and it came back to life. The article doesn't say why he didn't just call 911 to begin with. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Doggy blog

Dog News: Weird, inspiring dog tales. I have never seen this many dog-related snippets in one place. I'm not a dog person, but who can resist a headline like "Man quits day job to pick up dog poop all day long" and "Prozac hailed as potential cure for aggressive dogs?" Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:28:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clicks for mammograms

Meg sez: "The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on it daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on 'Fund Free Mammograms' for free (pink window in the middle). (There is nothing to sign up for and no cost to you.) The corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate a mammogram in exchange for advertising."

I dug around on Snopes and the About.com Urban Legends database and it appears that these folks are on the up-and-up. I think it's a rotten idea to publicize this with a chain letter (the original note asks you to tell ten friends and ask them to do the same), but the principle is sound. I just went and did my clicks; if you like this idea, why don't you do it, too? Link Discuss (Thanks, Meg!)

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

Sterling on Ubiquitous Computing and the canard of stalled innovation

Sterling's sent out the text of the speech he gave this week to the CRA Conference on Grand Research Challenges in Computer Science and Engineering in DC. Mostly, it's about ubiquitous computing, a subject near and dear to my utility-fogged heart, and that stuff is extremely choice, in high Sterling style:

I don't need a "smart" package or an "agent" package. I don't much want to "talk" to a package. I don't want a package tugging my sleeve, stalking me, or selfishly begging for attention and commitment. If a package really wants to please me and earn my respect, it needs to tell me three basic things: What is it? (It's the very thing I ordered, hopefully). Where is it? (It's on its way at location x). And what condition it is in? (It's functional, workable, unbroken, good to go). The shipping company already needs to know these three things for their own convenience. So they might as well tell me, too. So I don't have to swallow my ubicomp like castor oil. My ubicomp arrives in a subtle way, as a kind of value-added service.

So the object arrives in my possession with the ubicomp attached. It's a tracking tag. When I sign for that object, I keep the tracking tag. It's mine now. Ho ho ho!

Let's say that it's something I'm really anxious to have: it's a highly evolved mousetrap. The mice in my house are driving me nuts, because I'm a programmer. I eat nothing but take-out Szechuan food, and everything in my house is fatally disordered.

Luckily my new, computer-designed mousetrap quickly and horribly slaughters all my mice. Not one vermin is left alive. That's great service, but now I'm anxious to get rid of it. I really don't need a super-mousetrap attracting attention, if I get lucky and a hot date comes over to help me play "The Sims."

Given that I'm a congenital slob, of course the mice soon return. But by then, I've already forgotten my mousetrap. Out of sight, out of mind. I paid a lot of money for it, but I already forgot where I put it.

This is just the opening of a long, funny and thought-provoking riff on what a smart environment means, and it's very good indeed.

But Bruce opens with something that I think is dead-wrong, retrograde -- something that he talked about during our joint keynote at SXSW, that I've been thinking about ever since.

The computer is a gizmo, and it's a great gizmo, but it's not an ultimate gizmo. Computer science has been the slave of metaphysics ever since Alan Turing invented the Turing Test, but a computer is not a metaphysical entity. It's not free of objective reality. Its bits are bits of atoms. The only ultimate gizmo is a clock. The clock never stops ticking. The clock has been ticking for the computer for quite a while.

It's not just that the pace of basic innovation has slowed in your field, although it has. It's not just that computers have lost the lipstick of their geek gadget romance, although they have. That which was accomplished in the 1980s and 1990s is under attack. There is a backlash.

This ought to be obvious to anybody who uses the Internet. All you need to do is examine your email. Where is Al Gore's idealistic, civilized Information Superhighway? It's a red-light district. A crooked flea market. A nest of spies. An infowar battlefield. That is the state of cyberspace 2002. There are fire sales on every block. It has anything but grandeur. It's decadent and sinister.

I've had the same email address for 13 years, and I'm not budging. That's where I staked my little claim on the electronic frontier, and by gum, I remember the Alamo and I ain't a-goin' to go. Therefore, my email in 2002 is full of 419 fraudsters from Nigeria. And unsolicited porn ads. And a galaxy of farfetched medical scams from malignant, unlicensed quacks peddling Viagra and growth hormone. With unreadable, unicode, collateral bomb-damage from the gigantic spam mills in China, Korea, Thailand and Taiwan.

I think Bruce is way off base here. The computer isn't a gizmo -- a particular computer may be a gizmo, but the computer is a universal machine. It's Turing's (or Von Neumann's) marvellous insight made real: it is as important to assisted cognition as the written word is. The fact that Universal Machines were constrained by their relative lack of power made it seem as though there was fundamental innovation taking place when machines got faster and smaller, but that was an illusion. Depending on your PoV, the innovation took place in Turing's day and stopped, or it has been continuous ever since, but the drop off Bruce describes just didn't happen.

The Internet is an insight as key as the computer. The Internet is a system for connecting anything to anything else. It is the sum total of millions of gentle-persons' agreements to follow some basic protocol, but beyond that, it is nothing more than a design philosophy.

There's a convenient way of visualizing the net: a cluster of thick "backbone" trunk-lines mated to one another with core-routers, ramifying into ever-finer pipes, down to the whiskers of copper that joins the "core" to the "edge" over the "last mile."

Like Newtonian physics, this is so much bullshit. Occassionally useful, but still: so much bullshit. The fundamental rule of the Internet is that any two points can talk to one another -- the end-to-end principle. What's more, anyone can join up, attach a computer to the network without securing permission from a central authority, and once connected, can talk to anyone else. The Internet's role in our world is to connect any two points. There is no "last mile" of the Internet, only millions (and soon, billions) of first miles.

The Internet isn't shaped like a tree. It's shaped like a bush that's contorted into Klein-bottle topology, a continuous plane whose every edge is mated to another edge.

On the Internet, we exchange messages with one another: please send me this file; please search for this record in your database, please display this file in your browser-window.

On the Internet your right to swing your fist never stops, because it only hits my nose if I execute the "hit your nose" instruction you sent me. On the Internet, it's my responsibility to decide whose instructions I want to execute.

Mozilla was designed for use by people who live on the net. It was written by people who live on the net. And because it was designed by the net/for the net, it has excellent features that would never make it into a technology designed by someone who gave a festering shit about "business models." Chief among these is the ability to right-click on any banner ad and select "block images from this server" from a pop-up menu. A little judicious right-clicking on the sites you visit most frequently and the Web is transformed in a kind of anarcho-utopoic marketing-free-zone. Where a decade ago, Mozilla's coders might have been publishing zines like AdBusters, today they're simply busting the ads.

This works because I can tell my browser to simply ignore the directives in the files that some Web server has provided me with. Those directives aren't orders, they're suggestions.

If Bruce is buried in spam, it's not because there are too many criminals sending out dumb come-ons; it's because Bruce has decided to execute the directives those criminals have sent his way. I don't execute those directives. I use Vipul's Razor and SpamAssassin; my inbox has virtually no spam in it (despite the 500-700 spams sent my way every day) because I take part in a collaborative filter, enabled by the network that lets anyone to talk to anyone else, which allows us all to aggregate unnoticeable wisps of effort that tracts the untractable. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:56:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Time-Warner's latest evil: Nastygramming open wireless operators

Time-Warner Cable is sending nastygrams to subscribers that have been snitched out for running open wireless access. The letter says that sharing your connection -- no matter what the circumstances -- is forbidden (I guess I won't plug in the next time I visit a neighbor's house, huh?), and throws a bunch of scare-tactic language about the possibility of an open WLAN being used to commit a crime, leaving you on the hook. Interestingly enough, the letter doesn't allege that anyone is actually using the subscriber's connection except the subscriber, just that someone might. It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone were to push on this and force Time-Warner to prove that anyone other than the owner had made use of the connection.

I hope that 802.11a mesh-networks without any connection to an ISP (other than at a major network interchange like MAE West) take off soon, and put these fools out of commission. The closer you get to MAE West, the cheaper bandwidth is, and when you're actually at a major interchange, the bandwidth isn't metered at all -- your only recurring cost is rack-space and service charges.

Meanwhile, it's time for wibos to continue their exodus from clue-free ISPs that frown on making best use of your pipe and switch to wireless-friendly ISPs. In San Francisco, Earthlink DSL allows wireless sharing, as does meer.net and Speakeasy. It costs a couple grand to acquire and connect a broadband customer; ISPs that try to keep broadband customers from enjoying the use of their links are going to find themselves in a pile of Northpoint-grade financial fertilizer.

Any other wireless-friendly ISPs? Post in the Discuss link. Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:35:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Warchalking in government

The State of Utah's CIO writes that he plans to implement warchalking marks in and around his official buildings to alert state employees to the presence of wireless networks.

I'm the CIO of the State of Utah. We network over 250 buildings for 22,000 employees. We're also in the planning phase of deploying Wi-Fi access points at places where cops hang out so they can connect to the net during their shift (they use CDPD for low bandwidth ops, but need a high bandwidth option sometimes). In this kind of environment, warchalking has some important uses beyond finding a free net. I'm hoping to use th warchalking icons to alert employees to the existence of wireless nets in conference rooms and other places.

Link Discuss (via Let's Warchalk!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:23:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tim O'Reilly on the upcoming Open Source conference

Tim "O'Reilly" O'Reilly (heh) has written a hell of an editorial by way of introduction to the festivities at the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source convention in San Diego (which I will have to miss this year, as I'll be taking some much-needed vacation time then in Toronto and tying up some loose ends). Tim talks about the current state-of-the-industry, the fallacies that led up to the great crash and the enduring truths that survived it. Most of all, he addresses the ongoing clash between free software/open source advocates and the proprietary software world, as epitomized by the most recent, rotten FUD from Microsoft and their sock-puppet analysts.

The willingness to make scurrilous accusations ("open source might facilitate efforts to disrupt or sabotage electronic commerce, air-traffic control or even sensitive surveillance systems") is symptomatic of the disregard for the truth afflicting corporate America these days. The willingness to harness misinformation as a tool of corporate strategy springs from the same corporate "me first at all costs" mentality that led us to the Enron debacle. Just as Enron thought it was appropriate business practice to manipulate the California energy markets to raise its profits, Microsoft seeks to influence public policy to raise the costs of software and prohibit government support for a low-cost alternative.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Sara!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:14:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Franco-Japanese high-concept interactive art

Bruce Sterling points out these amazing Japan-based French interactive artists. This is pure high-weirdness cyberpunk g0ld. Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:03:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

802.11a card for the price of dinner for two

802.11a cards drop to $70 after rebate. 802.11a is about 1600 percent faster than 802.11b (WiFi) and the chipsets are plummeting in price. At these speeds, 802.11a is well suited to home entertainment appllication (think of a TV that streams video and audio off a home server that you can set up anywhere by velcroing it to a wall) and more importantly, to providing point-to-point "wireless backbone" connections to build out alternative infrastructure to hang 802.11b "downlinks" off of.

This could drive the cost of WiFi cards down so low that they start selling 'em in blister-packs of 10 at the WalGreen's. Link Discuss (via Werblog)

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

Boombox Museum

The Boombox Museum is a wonderful pictorial history of the personal stereo, from the paleolithic 70s to the golden 80s and the decadent and declining 90s. Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired News on NPR redux

Wired News follows up on NPR's linking policy:

Examples of such "inappropriate" links include "certain kinds of commercial linking," [an NPR spokesperson] said.

"For example, if Salon.com writes a story about NPR and links to us, that would be fine," because the online magazine wouldn't be using the NPR link for its commercial benefit. "But what wouldn't be fine is if someone sets up a business to link to us and profit from that" -- for example, if someone sets up an online "radio station" whose main content was NPR's programs.

Funny, last time I checked, Salon was a commercial organization. Well, at least NASDAQ thinks so. Maybe NPR thinks than unprofitable is the same as noncommercial? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:00:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Legal scholars on linking

Here's an excellent lay summary of the legal issues surrounding links and frames:

Whether meta-sites like TotalNEWS "recast" original works depends on the manner in which "work" is defined. Consider, for example, two computers with monitors A and B. Both machines are running identical browser programs. The browser on Monitor A is displaying the Cable News Network ("CNN") home page and Monitor B is displaying the TotalNEWS site with the CNN page in its browsing window. The two displays reveal two significantly different appearances. The CNN page fills Monitor A’s entire browser display and has the words "cnn.com" in the "Location Window."151 The same page occupies a slightly smaller window on Monitor B and is bordered by two other narrow Web pages (the TotalNEWS ad and navigational frames), and displays a different URL ("www.totalnews.com"). If the "work" is what appears on the screen, then one could conclude that the original CNN display has been transformed by making it a component of a new creation and TotalNEWS has violated CNN’s copyright.

The objection to this "what you see is what you copyright" approach to meta-sites is that the authorship of the target page has not in fact been altered. Monitor B’s browser is displaying three works, not one. The screen is neatly trifurcated to allow viewing of multiple Web pages, each of which can be properly thought of as containing an "original work of authorship." Two of the pages are created by TotalNEWS, and the third and largest by CNN. Despite the interactivity of the navigational and browsing frames, there is no suggestion that they form one document. Two of the frames are stationary, while the third can be substituted at will, and all three are physically divided by the borders of the frames.152

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Early Canada Day party tonight in SF

If you're a Canadian in the Bay Area, don't forget that there's a Canada Day party tonight at Kelly's Mission Rock in China Basin. I'm gonna try to make it. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:44:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harper's Index for fair use freedom fighters

The DMCA Index: Harper's-style index of DMCA factoids:

1. Amount Cornell University Library pays for subscription to "Journal of Applied Polymer Science": $12,495.00

2. Amount charged to University Libraries for subscription to "Journal of Economic Studies": $13.40/page

3. Number of people who find the $13.40 per page ironic: 3 out of 4

4. Number of Project Gutenberg Etexts converted by voluteers: 3,551

5. Current "Cost" per Etext based on 3,481 texts: $2.87 per text

6. Number of Scientists worldwide boycotting Corporate Science Journals beginning September 2001: 26,000

7. Number of college and research institutions "Declaring Independence" by publishing themselves: 200

8. Number of days DMCA arrestee Dmitry Sklyarov spent in jail: 13

9. Number of jails he spent them in: 4

10. Amount charged to taxpayers for those 13 days: $4,000

Link Discuss (Thanks, Fiona!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:21:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How much do you know about Dick?

The Guardian is running a multiple choice quiz to test your knowledge of Philip K. Dick. I only scored 6 out of 10. Link Discuss (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:09:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Automated Evil Overlord plot-generator

Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Evil Overlord Plot Generator for writers who need to get some action into their works has been automated. Follow the link below to get a kind of I Ching reading for your sf story, ideas and elements and restrictions that come together to spur your plot. I just can't stop hitting reload.

I figured that if I could teach the students some low cheap tricks for coming up with plots, it would give them something to work with while Jim was teaching them how to do it for real. Unfortunately, I later mislaid all my notes except for the introduction, so I'm not sure what I told them.

Here's the introduction: "Plot is what maintains a decent separation between the front cover and the back cover of a book. Story is what gives the readers the incentive to read all the pages in order. Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature. And now that we've got that out of the way..."

I recall telling them some basic moves, like how you can get away with hokey crap a lot better if the story's moving fast and other cool things are happening, and how you can make two or three half-baked ideas look deceptively substantial by using them in combination. I fear I may have told them--this is like remembering what you said last night at the party--that it counts as originality if you try to do an outright imitation of some other writer but get it so wrong that no one can tell that's what you were trying to do.

Link Discuss (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tor needs interns!

Tor Books -- the largest science fiction publisher in the world -- is looking for student interns. Tor's offices are at near (thanks, Patrick!) the top of the Flatiron building in midtown Manhattan, a beautiful turn-of-the-century skyscraper, and their offices are a-burst with wonderful books, mad editors, itinerant copyeditors, and some of the greatest sf writers in the world stopping by for a free lunch. If I was a student in New York, voom, I'd be there like a shot. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Automatic warchalk symbol generation

Yoz "Internet Yiddish" Grahame (who insists that he is a far-less-than-excellent geek) has whipped up a little Web app that takes the specifics of a wireless access point as parameters and spits out a printable PDF of the wibo warchalking mark for it. Here's the one for mine. (Matt Jones adds that the back end for this was written by Dean Hall, credit where credit is due). Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 27, 2002

Uke video clip from Hawaiian public TV

I usually save my ukulele-related posts for my uke blog, but this clip is too good not to share with the boingers. See what you non-uke players are missing out on? Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:30:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Infoworld doesn't understand community wireless

Glenn Fleishman nails what's wrong with Infoworld's latest howler on why open WiFi is doomed.

The column completely misses the point of why community networks (or freenets as he describes them) exist at all: because people want them to, not as tools for business. Any business use is incidental to the notion of ubiquitous, free access. They are acts of will. Because they are communities of interest, the notion that they don't serve a business audience has no impact on their growth or utility.

Here's some of what Ephraim Schwartz wrote in Infoworld:

"If you need a presentation from your office and you had access the day before on Folsom and 10th Street [in San Francisco] and it's not there the next day, you are hosed," Pereyra said.

The point is, to get value from a Wi-Fi network, it must be reliable.

And here's a little pre-refutation from an old O'Reilly column I wrote:

Even as cable modem companies are knocking hundreds of thousands of subscribers offline, untethered forced-leisure gangs are committing random acts of senseless wirelessness, armed with cheap-like-borscht 802.11b cards and antennae made from washers, hot glue, and Pringles cans.

The Community Wireless movement is a fantastic example of how something unreliable can be cool, useful, self-sustaining, and utterly devoid of revenue potential. Wireless ISPs like Mobilestar charge a small fortune for network access at airport lounges and Starbucks in a handful of cities, and are still going broke, while a ride in a taxi through midtown Manhattan with an iBook will yield a new open network at every stoplight. Mobilestar's $60/month gets you a service that is only slightly better than what a mass of public-spirited (or security-impaired) WiFi users have accomplished without even trying. It's just too damned expensive to provide the kind of reliability that stress-feeding mobile execs demand. Meanwhile, the cranky, kludgey world of open 802.11 base-stations gains ground every day. It'll never be good enough for people who use phrases like "mission-critical," but it'll be just fine for the rest of us.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:19:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tetris with physics

Triptych: Tetris with complex physics. Link Discuss (Thanks, JJZ!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:24:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UC Berkeley Physics junque for sale this Sunday

This Sunday, the Berkeley Physics Department is auctioning off its old junk, including:

A reflecting galvanometer covered in Bakelite that's as heavy as a lead brick.

A four-foot long demonstration slide rule.

A Portable Precision Potentiometer.

Brass spectrometers.

This is just a warm up for a much larger auction to be held at the end of July. Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:18:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A con man's worst nightmare

I hate those door-to-door magazine salespeople, especially the ones from American Community Services. They are as pushy as hell, and the prices are a rip-off. (Here's an article about some of the crimes commited by ACS agents.) When some magazine scamster came to a town in New Jersey, residents started posting warnings about him on the town bulletin board. He showed up at someone's door and before he could start his spiel, the homeowner asked him if he was "Mr. Williams." It freaked this guy out and he skipped town. Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:12:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Letter to NPR redux

I've posted my letter to NPR's ombudsman about their new linking policy. If you're thinking of writing a letter to NPR, here's a model you can follow if you want:

However, NPR is a respected news-agency. When it takes the position that permission to link can be extended and revoked, it creates a climate of uncertainty among NPR's audience who use the Web. NPR is failing its commitment to journalistic ethics in promoting this harmful myth. It is misleading its stakeholders and betraying their trust in NPR's integrity.

Those audience members who understand the true facts of linking lose respect daily for NPR. Those who do not are led farther and farther astray by a trusted source of information.

You owe your listeners and readers better than this. NPR should immediately withdraw this policy in its entirety and formally retract any statements that implied the necessity of permission before linking, and so serve its journalistic mission.

Link Discuss

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

NPR renews rotten linking policy -- again

NPR has revised its linking "policy." The revision seems like an improvement, but it's not -- it's just as bad as it ever was. NPR still maintains that people who link to NPR's site require permission -- the new policy merely conditionally grants that permission.

I'll say it again: The most harmful lie you can tell about the Web is that permission is a prerequisite for linking. There is no copyright interest in controlling how people reference your work.

The most ironic thing about this is that NPR maintains that the rationale for it is to maintain "the highest journalistic ethics and standards." Journalism is about telling the comprehensive and accurate truth. Here we have NPR knowingly promulgating a destructive myth, something not borne out by copyright law or practice.

People who respect NPR's journalistic integrity may be duped into believing this harmful lie (as was one friend who emailed me to tell me that NPR wouldn't have this policy if there wasn't some debate about whether there's a copyright interest in links). If they succeed in convincing their audience that there's an interest in controlling links, we don't have any basis for the Web.

I'm sending fresh mail to Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR's ombudsman, to tell him what I think of this. I recommend that you do the same. I will also be withholding my donation from NPR until this policy is reversed. Much as I hold public radio dear, NPR's policy has the potential to irreparably damage the Web. I would give up a thousand NPRs for the WWW.

NPR encourages and permits links to content on NPR Web sites. However, NPR is an organization committed to the highest journalistic ethics and standards and to independent, noncommercial journalism, both in fact and appearance. Therefore, the linking should not (a) suggest that NPR promotes or endorses any third party's causes, ideas, Web sites, products or services, or (b) use NPR content for inappropriate commercial purposes. We reserve the right to withdraw permission for any link.

Once again, let's have a look at that:

• Therefore, the linking should not (a) suggest that NPR promotes or endorses any third party's causes, ideas, Web sites, products or services
  You don't need a link policy to acheive this end. Someone who makes a fraudulent misrepresentation is committing a crime; your policy is irrelevant to the remedies you could seek in such an instance.
• (b) use NPR content for inappropriate commercial purposes.
  Again, you don't need a policy for this. There are illegal commercial uses of NPR's programming; if someone breaks the law, the presence of this policy won't matter. As to "inappropriate" uses, who gets to define inappropriate? There are plenty of unauthorized, even impolite uses that are lawful. Prohibiting "inappropriate" uses is nonsensical, prohibiting unlawful uses is redundant.
• We reserve the right to withdraw permission for any link.
  You can't withdraw that which you did not extend. I don't need your permission to link to your site. The absence or presence of your permission is irrelevant. There is no intellectual property interest in controlling the contexts in which your work may be referenced.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shiny Junk Bots

Excellent gallery of robot sculpture made from junk. Check out the working handmade pop guns, priced from $300 to $500. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:28:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Anti-Sleep Drug

Washington Post article about modafinil, a new drug that kills the urge to sleep. (Personally, I love sleeping.)

In trials on healthy people like Army helicopter pilots, modafinil has allowed humans to stay up safely for almost two days while remaining practically as focused, alert, and capable of dealing with complex problems as the well-rested. Then, after a good eight hours' sleep, they can get up and do it again -- for another 40 hours, before finally catching up on their sleep.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:23:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mapping the spammers

Amazing -- slow loading -- map shows the known and speculative connections between spammers and the ISPs that support their mailing and product-marketing. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:18:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple's history in several nutshells

Fantastic, exhaustive, well-written, well-researched history of Apple at apple-history.com.

Announced in September 1989, The Mac Portable was Apple's first attempt at a more easily portable Macintosh. It had a bay for a 3.5" half-height drive, and could support up to two Super Drives. Reaction to the Portable was poor. It was clunky, slow, had no expansion capabilities, and its active matrix screen (later backlit) made it incredibly expensive. It sold for $6,500.

I lay my degenerating disc and chronic shoulder-pain at the tiny rubber feet of this computer. Link Discuss (via Raelity Bytes)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:05:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TrackBack: P2P blog-pinging

Movable Type launches TrackBack, a framework to allow weblogs to ping each other when one blog references another. The idea is that when, say, a Boing Boing entry links to, say, a Scripting News entry, that Scripting News will get a ping that gives it the URL of the referencing Boing Boing post. So in addition to the Discuss link at the end of the story, Scripting could also have a link to page with all the blog entries that have picked up that link. Meta-tools like Daypop can scour these pages and build meme-charts, showing the interconnectedness of all blogs.

So Ben and Mena have released TrackBack -- an event which reminds me of the release of the Blogger API -- and now it remains to be seen if other blog-software vendors/authors will integrate TrackBack support on their own tools. I know that TrackBack sounds like an amazing tool for Boing Boing; I hope that Ev thinks well enough of it to incorporate it into Blogger. Link Discuss (via Aaron)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:53:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Radio Warchalking

Matt Jones did an excellent interview with MPR's Future Tense yesterday about warchalking -- the practice of drawing hobo runes on sidewalks to indicate the presence of wireless connectivity nearby. Here's an MP3 of the interview. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:33:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Popup blocker for Netscape 7

While you might have been enjoying the wonder of Mozilla's popup-ad-blocker, pity the poor AOL user. The version of Netscape 7 that AOL users are provided with has had the preference item that allows for popup-bocking disabled by the AOL/Time-Warner/Netscape mothership.

No sweat. Hack a couple of lines into your preferences file and Netscape 7 will block popups just as well as Mozilla!

Make a backup of pref.js. Edit pref.js with a text editor and insert one of the following (don't insert the expanations after the line of code):

user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open","noAccess"); -- will cut off all popup windows

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true); -- will cut off popup windows only when a page is loading

user_pref("browser.block.target_new_window", true); -- will "override popping up new windows on target=anything"

Save prefs.js and restart Netscape 7.0 PR1. You could try each one of these and see which works the best for you.

Link Discuss (Thanks, cel4145!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:07:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Meetup: Meatspace camaraderie for Internet shut-ins

Meetup: a new service where you indicate your interests and your location, automatically locate other people local to you with similar interests, vote on a place to hang out and actually, you know, meet up. As an Internet shut-in with a permanent computer-tan, I'm a little leery of meeting up with actual raw biomass in meatspace, but I suppose that there's some reason to hang out in real-life. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:14:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Detroit: One theatre for one million people

The NYT reports on Detroit's only first-run theatre. Detroit is the model of a doughnut city (empty core, thriving suburbs), a Jane Jacobs nightmare town, and there's something about a major urban center with only one movie-house that epitomizes doughtnut-ness.

"I don't know if companies are afraid to invest in the city," said John Jennings, 38, a fourth-grade teacher sent by children to refill a popcorn tub during "Scooby-Doo."

"Thankfully, these owners were brave enough to invest," Mr. Jennings continued. "A one million population city should have at least six theaters. I think that was the number before the riots. And we should have some minority-owned theaters."

Link Discuss

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

New Canadian anti-terror protocol: Shut down wireless

The Inquirer reports that mobile radio signals are being jammed at the site of the G8 summit in Alberta (to stop terrorists from using cellphones) and speculates that the Mounties will also block 2.4Ghz emissions. More alarming is the speculation that the Pope's visit to Toronto at the end of July will evoke the same countermeasure. Blocking cellular and WiFi in the largest city in the country for a whole week is just Not On. Link Discuss

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

Wednesday, June 26, 2002

Amazon comes to Canada

Amazon has come to Canada. I can't figure out if this is good news or bad news. After all, Canadian bookselling has been demolished by big-box retailers -- the Chapters/Indigo monolith. Chapters/Indigo started strong, opening stores that were big, airy, kept amazing hours (7AM to 11PM!), stocked millions of SKUs, and hired great people who were really knowledgeable -- not to mention offering deep-dish discounts on new releases. But it went sour. Chapters consolidated its national distribution, bought out competing distributors, and became a vertical, virtual monopoly.

Independent retailers were forced to buy books from their biggest competitor, who engaged in all manner of anti-competitive practices (Chapters' distribution arm had the exclusive on Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and every store in the country -- except for Chapters stores -- was given an out-of-stock message when they tried to order it. Indie retailers ended up buying the book from Chapters retail outlets at the 30 percent new-book-discount to stock their shelves, putting money in their competitors' pockets). Indigo and Chapters merged, the number of SKUs plummeted, the prices went up, the hours were foreshortened.

The last time I was in Toronto, I stopped into the big Indigo and big Chapters at Bay at Bloor. They had empty shelves, minimal staffing, and the cluster of indie bookstores that had thrived in that neighborhood were starving.

Meanwhile, Chapters/Indigo has taken to paying its bills with returned merchandise (sometimes reordering the same books on the same day, a favorite dodge of the mega-bookstore), or not at all. Some American publishers now regard the Canadian market as a bad credit risk; fewer copies are shipped, the terms are tighter and nastier. A friend in the trade tells me that her credit-limit has been reduced to one dollar: she has to pay in advance for every book she orders -- that means that she doesn't take flyers on new titles that she thinks might take off; she just can't afford the risk.

Say what you will about Amazon and its relationship to indie stores, but its presence in Canada can't be any worse than what Chapters/Indigo did to the market. Perhaps a little competition will kick soil over Chapters' coffin.

I hear that Amazon.ca is in business with Canada Post. With luck this means that Canada Post will revise its goony package-delivery policies (when I lived in Toronto, they wouldn't even attempt package delivery to my place; instead, you'd have to go to the distant post office and queue up to get your books). And of course, by keeping the sales that formerly went to Amazon.com inside of Canada, it will repatriate (some of) the book-buying dollars that used to head south of the border. At least the money will go to Canadian distributors for Canadian editions. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:59:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

We're back!

We were offline for a couple hours this evening. Not sure why, but we're back! Discuss

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

Snowcrash: Non-disposable Swedish furniture

Snowcrash -- the Swedish design firm -- is chock full o' super-leet Swedish design. It's like Ikea for people with an unlimited budget. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matthew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:32:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WorldCom's pyramid scheme

Was WorldCom a pyramid scheme? This essay suggests that it was:

Here's how the Pyramid worked, step by step:

1. WorldCom reports great results in the carriers' carrier market.
2. New entrants raise money, pointing to WorldCom's revenue and stock price
3. These entrants buy Dark Fiber from WorldCom, as they play Telecom Monopoly to build out their global networks
4. WorldCom reports improved fundamentals -- driving its stock price up further.

Then the cycle repeats itself:

1. More entrants raise money, using WorldCom's highflying stock price to justify raising more money at higher valuations in the private and public markets. WorldCom raises money too.
2. New entrants build out their own networks with all the capital they've raised
3. Everyone buys excess dark fiber capacity from each other.
4. Everyone's fundamentals and valuation improves, for a time...

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:27:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More on corporate felons

Dan Gillmore responded to my comments about corporate corrupting on his blog:

If financial corruption is this deep in the system, rational investors -- the people without whom markets will collapse -- will get out and stay out. And if that happens, the economy will go into a depression.

As I said, some of these slime who've ripped off their investors, employees and communities must go to jail. Then we need laws, with teeth, that deal with this situation.

George W. Bush said today he was outraged to hear of WorldCom's fraud. Nice to hear this sentiment -- but come on.

Here's my response:

Here's the thing. Everyone I know assumes that the Enron people will do minimal time and pay substantial -- but not destructive -- fines. Further, they assume that Enron's crooks have their money squirreled away in secret accounts. No matter how they're punished, their children will go to Ivy League schools without debt while the children of the shareholders and taxpayers they raped will be lucky to have a roof over their heads. No matter how they're punished, they'll someday walk out of minimum-security white-collar jail and put on a suit worth more than everything in my apartment put together and go out for a meal worth twice as much on their private Caribbean island while the people they screwed go hungry.

What's justice for these people? What's an effective deterrent? Life in prison? 50 years? Penury? Scarlet letters?

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:22:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Ren & Stimpy coming to TNN

TV Guide reports that John K. is busy making a new series of Ren & Stimpy cartoons! He hates TV executives (see my interview with him) so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:22:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Me vs. NPR on TechTV

I did a TV appearance yesterday on TechTV's "The Screen-Savers" about NPR's linking policy. Computer problems conspired to keep me from blogging this before it aired, unfortunately. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:10:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gillmor on corporate criminals

Dan Gillmor blasts the corporate crooks whose transgressions fill today's newscasts, greedy bastards who milked billions from their companies, betraying their shareholders. Dan thinks they're aberrant, and that their worst sin is making investors believe that there's no way for the little guy to win. I wonder how aberrant they are -- these aren't fly-by-night operators; the perps in these billion-dollar, economy-destroying felonies are seasoned CEOs and CFOs, people who come from the ranks of Big Five consulting firms and out of world-renowned B-schools. These crooks are the kinds of talking hairpieces that VCs like to parachute into startups to get them ready for IPO; they're the kinds of back-slapping cap-toothed glad-handers who know how to talk to the investment bankers. Some days, I believe that the only way to get to the top of a venture-funded or public company is to check your morals at the door.

Rational people are starting to assume something that isn't necessarily true. They're becoming convinced that the system is hopelessly, irrevocably rigged against everyday investors by a corrupt cadre of insiders in boardrooms and on Wall Street, willfully assisted by regulators and elected officials who are either corrupt themselves or simply blind.

None of this excuses the greed that turned many of those currently rational people into greedmongers themselves. Every financial bubble brings out the sharks, and the smaller fish tend to swim en masse into the killing zone.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:09:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Contraband Kinder Suprise Eggs sales booming online

Kinder Suprise Eggs -- chocolate eggs with tiny do-it-yourself toys inside -- are banned in the US as a choking hazard. Kinder-fans have therefore had to rely on smuggled eggs retailed in "ethnic" grocery stores or on friends returning from abroad. The Internet, though, has managed to put Kinderfetishists in direct touch with suppliers abroad, letting them score their sweet sweet contraband without leaving their seats.

Jim MacKenzie began selling the eggs here six months ago via his kinder-eggs .com site and says he lives "comfortably" off his U.S. profits. He won't say what those are but says he has 3,600 customers in his e-mail address book, and has sent as many as 100 cases a day -- 2,400 eggs a day -- in cases priced at $22.95. (Fundraisers get a break: $19 a case). Mr. MacKenzie, a Canadian from Delta, British Columbia, hires extra help at Christmas and Easter to do packing.

In Heidelberg, Germany, where the eggs are known as Kinder Uberraschung, or children's surprise, Linda Oldaker began shipping to the U.S. a year ago, taking orders via her Web site. Ms. Oldaker won't disclose U.S. sales, but she says she had five e-mail orders from the U.S. over a recent two-day period, including one for eight dozen. One day recently, the eBay auction site listed 74 people offering Kinder items, including 200 eggs available for shipping from "our video and convenience store just north of the New York State border."

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:49:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alternaporn: The New New Thing

Nice Wired News story about the rise of alterna-porn, medium-core erotica starring punk/goth/raver women. These sites are small, cheap, non-exploitative, profitable and a (comparatively) huge hit with women. The models look like real (pierced, tattooed) people, and members visit as much for the chat and the model-blogs as for the photos. I was at a party at Richard Kadrey's place a couple months back and a bunch of the Suicide Girls models were there; they seemed like pretty sharp technology-fetishists, indie filmmakers, photographers, writers. Link Discuss

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

Small-claims anti-spammer

Inspiring story of an anti-spam activist who sues spammers for fraud and similar in small-claims courts, collects default judgements, and sends collection agencies after the spammers. The column's author calls for 1,000 volunteers to do the same, putting a powerful chill into the hears of spammers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Glen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

A most immaculately hip biography

Lord Buckley -- my all-time fave jazz-poet and hipster loony (tied with Slim Gaillard) -- is the subject of a new biography! Salon's got an in-depth review. I tried to find you-all some MP3s, but no dice. Take my word for it, Buckley was a mad genius. You've gotta hear his hipster version of "The Raven:"

'Twas a real drug midnight,
dreary,
I was goofing weak and weary,
over many a freakish volume of
forgotten score.

When suddenly I dug a tapping,
as if some cat were gently riffing,
knocking rhythm at my sweet pad's door

And don't get me started on his condensed ooroonie biographies of Einstein, Jesus and the Marquis de Sade, or his sound-poem about a train-wreck, or his fabulous a-capella song, "His Majesty, The Policeman." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Third Disneyland "Mayan" park to open

Disney is rumored to be building a third theme-park in Anaheim, with a Mayan theme.

After nearly two years, we've received a new update regarding the use of the new property down Harbor Street. Our source claims to have been convinced that the current approved project for the property will indeed be a highly themed water park themed after the six main continents of the world. The South American area may feature a Mayan temple adorned with six waterslides, two of which will be the near vertical dive type down the side of the temple. In Europe you'll have slides built into a Swiss Castle, and Asia will feature the Great Wall of China that will somehow house the lazy river. More on this as we find out.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:15:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video rocketeers enlist Gumby to pilot giant flying crayon

The Clay Brothers have built a six-foot model rocket that looks like a giant crayon. Gumby is the astronaut. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:29:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blog updates via MSN Messenger

BlogToaster: A web-service that spims your MSN Messenger account every time your favorite blogs update. Link Discuss (Thanks, schnick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wibomarks in the wild

First in-the-wild wibo warchalking. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wibo: A wireless hobo

New jargon, courtesy of the freshly borned warchalking movement: "Wibo." A wireless hobo. Link Discuss (via Warchalking)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:34:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese penis-kitten asciimation

Inexplicable Japanese musical asciimation of kittens that morph into penises. Helloooooo kitty! Link Discuss (via Desultory Engine)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turn your toy robo-dog into a feral gamma-radiation detector

The proliferation of cheap toy robot-dogs means a bottomless source of parts and ideas for robot hackers. This site has extensive information on transforming robot-dogs into a variety of things, including a semi-autonomous gamma-radiation detector.

The first operation was performed on the Megabyte II, aka, the Radio Control Mega Byte Cyber Watch Dog by Wow Wee International Ltd. [US$39.99] A radioactivity sensor [GeigerMuller Counter Kit; US$60] was fitted in his nose; a new brain [pic microprocessors] was transplanted into his spinal region. The new brain overides the Wow Wee program and MegaByte II now functions as gamma source radiation detector. His path is now defined by radiation concentration gradients. Watch video of MegaByte II successfully locating the source of radiation in a domestic fire alarm. rtsp://milhouse.cat.nyu.edu/docidog1.rm ; rtsp://milhouse.cat.nyu.edu/docidog2.rm See further adaptations and features refer to the DogReport

Matt Jones is live-blogging a demo/talk by the author, with even more high-robot weirdness:

* "the robotic genre of cinematography": a whole subclass of films where you see lab floors from a vantage point about 8 inches high - most famous example: mars sourjouner films

* Doing things like robotic dogs that illustrate the invisbile is about democratising and making widespread the "scientific method". Peer-review in pub lic. Allows people to ask questions of those who are making assertions and policy about the environments: "hey what are those dogs doing" "what do those cloned trees mean" etc. start a diaolgue rather than receiving wisdom.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:42:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monkey discoverer offers to name new species after land-benefactors

Scientist discovers new "kitten-sized" monkey species in the Brazilian rain-forest. Under Brazilian law, landholders who dedicate parts of their property to serving as a wildlife conservancy can get tax breaks. As an added incentive, the monkey-discoverer is offering to name any new species he discovers after landholders who help preserve the jungle. Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

James Gleick: Life is different with email

James "Chaos" Gleick talks about the phase-change of life in the online age.

Something happened starting 10 years ago that was really exceptional. The speed of change of technology is different now. It's qualitatively different. It's disturbing. We can't always appreciate that because our memories are unreliable. Our attention spans seem to be shorter. We all feel this.

But something very much like it happened a century ago, when the world suddenly got electricity and telephones, and underwent a sudden and dramatic change in the size and topology of the globe. So, it's happened before...

It's still slightly surprising to people to remember that as recently as 1994 most people not only didn't have e-mail, but they didn't really know what e-mail was, and it didn't occur to them that they were ever going to have it.

I remember it all vividly, because I started an Internet company in the summer of 1993. And I remember talking to my friends about it, and people thought I was nuts.

I would talk to lawyers, and I would say: I think it's possible that in a while, maybe in a few decades, every law firm will be able to send e-mail, just as now they use the fax machine. And my lawyer friends would roll their eyes and humor me.

Every profession operates differently now, because the online world exists. Every profession, and it's still just getting started.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:49:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 24, 2002

Britons: Who can get what info on you from your ISP

British? Online? Concerned about privacy? Danny O'Brien's compiled an excellent (and witty) guide to who can request what information from your ISP, now online on the STAND site:

To avoid this, the police and the ISPs (and indeed the phone companies and post office) use a form called a S29(3). Here is an example form (it's called a 28(3) there. Long, dull story.).

The S29(3) is one of those documents that you'll find either incredibly disturbing, or strangely reassuring. It's pretty good at ensuring that both sides cover their arses while understanding that they're about to do something fairly serious and potentially damaging to both sides. On the other hand, it shows ISPs and the police in a tacit arrangement to share customer data. (for a more detailed and sympathetic look at how ISPs handle this, have a peek at the London INternet eXchanges' Best Current Practice on User Privacy. It has a reasonably full description of the procedures, as well as much advice on how users can still preserve their privacy).

As we've said, ISP's don't have to respond to S29(3)s. If they don't, there's a good chance that the police will get Very Irritated, and may mutter something about Obstructing Justice. If they're serious, they could then go out an get a court order anyway. Police caught like this have been known to get warrants to seize whole racks of ISP servers, so from the point of view of the ISP, this is to be avoided. Most ISPs play along - but they have been known to say no if the police request is insanely disproportionate.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

VerisignOff: Let's put Verisign to death

Merlin's launched an amazing new service: VerisignOff. The idea is to compile detailed instructions and tutorials explaining how to switch Verisign/Network Solutions to any other registrar, on the sensible grounds that Verisign's domain-name business is run by a pack of incompetent, evil shitheels who will sell your bought-and-paid-for domain to any zhlub who faxes in a bogus registration address and leave you to twist in the wind. Got any suggestions for switching? Contact Merlin -- this is a project worth contributing to. One more stone on the path to putting Verisign to death. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:40:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roll your own IM-bot

WiredBots: simple toolkits for making AIM and MSN Messenger IM bots. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:28:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Broadband *doesn't* need content!

This amazing recent study of broadband adoption shows that content is irrelevant to the broadband experience. Broadband uses crave the ability to contribute to the Internet's distributed conversation and want nothing more than end-to-end connectivity.

The online surfing patterns of high-speed users reveal two values that policymakers, industry leaders, and the public should bear in mind:

1. An open Internet is appealing to broadband users. As habitual posters of content, broadband users seem to desire the widest reach for what they share with the online world. As frequent searchers for information using their always-on connection, broadband users seek out the greatest range of sources to satisfy their thirst for information. Walling off portions of the Internet, which some regulatory proposals may permit, is anathema to how broadband users behave.

2. Broadband users value fast upload speeds as well as fast download speeds. They not only show this by their predilection to create content, but also by their extensive file-sharing habits.

(Warning: 212k PDF) Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:47:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Warchalking Runes 1.0

Matt Jones, inventor of "war-chalking" -- hobo-runes that WiFi activists chalk on the sidewalk when they encouter a wireless netwok -- proposes a set of simple symbols.

I'd like to point out that while I haven't invented anything quite so fabulous as war-chalking, I did come up with the blogger gang-sign. Hold out your left hand, palm up, then grab your left forearm and make a moue of pain as you massage away invisible RSI cramps -- dude, you're throwing signs! Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:15:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Dvorak pegs me perfectly.

In his latest PC Magazine column, columnist John Dvorak (shown on left) calls me a "goofy looking schlub." That pretty much nails it. I only wish he'd gotten my first name right:

"Then there's the spike-haired Mike Frauenfelder (if that is, indeed, his real name). This guy looks as if he wants to wash a camel with cream cheese. Maybe if he tucked in his shirt he would be more respectable. Anyway, he says using the PC is like being stuck in a bad relationship. Yes, well, perhaps he should be a Mac user if he associates relationships with computers."

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:14:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Giant size eboy book

eboy is the name of a small group of German illustrators. They have a new 500+ page, all-color book, which looks amazing, if these samples are any indication. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:01:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Does broadband need "content?"

In order to stimulate lagging broadband growth in the UK, ISPs are signing up "content providers." Jeez:

"For us, the interesting thing is that everything in broadband has been focusing on speed," says Russell Craig, One.Tel spokesman, "but what we're trying to focus on is content as well. After you have gotten your emails faster, speed is sort of 'So what?', but if you can provide things like big music names, then that's going to drive broadband. MTV is the biggest name in music broadcasting so we really think this is a new stage of broadband."

What a load of tripe. You want to know why broadband isn't growing in the UK? How about the fact that getting a DSL line lit up takes three days of solid phone-calls, twenty hours of tech support, and requires you to familiarize yourself with ridiculous, unnecessary technologies like PPPoE and PPPoA (shudder) -- technologies that even the tech-support people at the ISP are unlikely to understand (and that probably will require three firmware updates and $200 worth of long-distance tech-support calls before your router or wireless access-point will get online). Even then, it'll be six weeks before they get to it.

There's this pervasive myth that what broadband adoption really needs is to be attractive to a kind of slug-like couch potato who needs a compelling reason to spend this month's Twinkie-and-Budweiser budget on data services. A "consumer" that, in William Gibson's words is

"... best visualized a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth..., no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."

Half the geeks I know don't have broadband. These are the people who know exactly why a high-speed Internet connection is worth $50 a month but don't fancy half-a-season of "customer service" hell and inpenetrable "business-model" crapola before they get hooked up, not to mention the continuous threat of disconnection for engaging in forbidden activities like running a personal server or a P2P app. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:16:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Rapture Index: Quantifying the end-times

Is it the end of the world? How to tell? The Rapture index keeps a running total of Revelations-style events and lets you see at a glance how close we are to the End-Times:

1 False Christs 3
2 Occult 4
3 Satanism 1
4 Unemployment 3
5 Inflation 1
6 Interest Rates 1
7 The Economy 3
8 Oil Supply/Price 3-1
9 Debt and Trade 5
10 Financial unrest 3-1
11 Leadership 3-1
12 Drug abuse 2
13 Apostasy 5
14 Supernatural 1
15 Moral Standards 5
16 Anti-Christian 5
17 Crime Rate 3

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jenny!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Taunting PriceWaterhouseCoopers

PriceWaterhouseCoopers have a new brand, "Monday," and accordingly, they've registered introducingmonday.com. They neglected to register introducingmonday.co.uk, and so some anonymous Briton has registered the URL and has put up an high-larious and childish animated taunt. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:07:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Burning images along with data

Yamaha has shipped a new CD burner that can write images directly on the substrate, using unoccupied sectors. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Group health-care for eBay sellers

eBay is offering health-insurance to people who make their living selling junk online. Link Discuss

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

A predictive day-timer for Alzheimer's patients

Ubiquitous computing and machine learning are globbed together to make an effective treatment for Alzheimer's patients, who carry around a little location-sensitive, environment aware pager that memorizes their schedules and gives them little reminders when they blow their buffers. I could use one of these right now. This reminds me of the "Famuluses," electronic familiars from Ian McDonald's indescribably brilliant novel "Out on Blue Six." They're also reminiscent of the tattoos on the lead character in Memento. There's something really compelling about the idea of a predictive day-timer. "People who did this activity also did this activity" -- Amazon recommendations for real life. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:00:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Short-story collection of the decade if not the century

Ted Chiang's collection of short stories, "Stories of Your Life and Others," is out. Ted is a national treasure. He writes one story every million years or so, but each of those stories is a goddamned jewel. He's won two Nebula awards (I was at one of the Neb banquets where he received an award, though he wasn't, and sat at a table filled with three or four of Ted's agents; that's right, three or four of Ted's agents. The guy's never written a novel, has no plans to, but just in case, there's a whole queue of agents ready to represent him). He's sold a short-story collection -- this collection -- to Tor, even though he has no novel planned; an occurrence that's basically unheard of. I'd be jealous if he wasn't such an amazing, humble, decent guy -- check out his bio from the jacket-flap: "Ted Chiang lives near Seattle, Washington." If I could write as well as Ted, I'd be (even more) insufferable.

So even if you're the kind of person who waits for the paperback, even if you're the kind of person who doesn't read short stories (which is basically everyone except short-story writers, it seems), this is the book you need to make an exception for. If you've read all of Ted's stories -- that's not a very large number of stories, so it's quite possible that you have -- buy this book so that you can read the original story, "Liking What You See: A Documentary." It's worth the price of admission.

I can't say enough wonderful things about Ted. Tor used to have his fantastic story, "72 Letters" online on their site, but they've since take it down. Luckily, we have the Wayback Machine, so you can still read it. Give it a shot and ask yourself why you don't own an entire book full of Ted's stories. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More Songs About Buildings and Food

Salon has a tribute to Talking Heads' second album, "More Songs About Buildings and Food." I ripped that CD to MP3 the last time I was in Toronto (where all my music is, more or less) and so I put it on while I read this. The article's bang-on right about this album; it's brilliant.

The album's juxtapositions can make you laugh. In "Warning Sign," Byrne poses a funny/pathetic/scary seduction that sounds like Arnold Horshack copping "Love Boat" come-ons. "Take it easy, baby, take it easy/ It's a natural thing and you have to relax/ I've got money now, I've got money now/ C'mon baby, C'mon baby!" He makes his move like a sweaty question mark. You can imagine the target of his desire backing toward the door thinking, "Oh ... my ... God."

While all that's going on, the music sounds as though it's being sucked into a jet engine. It's one of many Brian Eno moments. The intrepid producer and electronic-music pioneer, in his first collaboration with the Heads, blows an otherworldly breeze, playing with time and space, everything zooming backwards and forwards, coming together and flying apart. The partnership between Byrne and Eno which began here would continue through the Heads album "Remain in Light" as well as the Byrne-Eno side project "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," the music sinking deeper and deeper into pure, pseudo-tribal rhythm.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:03:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 23, 2002

Metallic Bill of Rights

For four dollars, you can buy a copy of the Bill of Rights printed on sheet-metal. Why would you want a copy of the Bill of Rights printed on sheet metal? Here's why:

The next time you travel by air, take the Security Edition of the Bill of Rights along with you. When asked to empty your pockets, proudly toss the Bill of Rights in the plastic bin.

You need to get used to offering up the bill of rights for inspection and government workers need to get used to deciding if you'll be allowed to keep the Bill of Rights with you when you travel.

Link Discuss (via Made in the Dark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photosensitive bacteria art

Denise sez: "This artist/scientist? (I don't know, it's in German) took a petri dish of photosensitive bacteria and projected a negative image of a partially submerged submarine on it. The bacteria moved to the light areas of the image forming this." Link Discuss (Thanks, Denise!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:06:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Open source" video-format to be released

Slashdot reports that Xiph (the Vorbis people) is creating a BSD-licensed version of On2's video codec. For those of you who aren't free software or AV geeks, that means that the people who make a patent-free, royalty free file-format for audio have adopted a killer video format under the same terms. If this acheives acceptance in the field, it will likely kill the brutal patent-royalties associated with MPEG4 and other proprietary formats. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:04:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DoCoMo launches $16 802.11b service in Tokyo

DoCoMo launches $16/month 802.11b service at nine locations in Tokyo -- I wonder if there's any competition there from free community wireless initiatives? Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:00:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney reopens Carousel of Progress, adopts RFID for bottomless mugs

Loads of news about Walt Disney World from the Orlando Sentinel. For starters, Disney's tagging its "bottomless mugs" with RFID chips so that they can't be resold or reused during multiple visits.

More importantly, though: My beloved Carousel of Progress is reopening! The Carousel debuted at the 1964 World's Fair and is a testiment to the goofy astro-futurism of its day. The themesong that the Sherman Brothers wrote for it, "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow," could be the Official Extropian Anthem ("There's a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day, there's a great big beautiful tomorrow, and tomorrow's just a dream away"). Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:56:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nice (fake?) video of OS X on a Palm

Here's a film of Mac OS X booting on a Palm IIIc. These seem to come around every couple months, and always turn out to be fakes, but this is better than any of the others I've seen. If the video is being matted in, they've done a damned fine job of distorting to match perspective as the screen is wobbled and jiggled and tilted. You'll need to download QuickTime 6 to get the video to play, but if you're into vaporware porn, it's worth it. Link Discuss (Thanks, Thor!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:58:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 22, 2002

Scooby Doo kicks all kinds of ass

Just saw the Scooby Doo movie. Damn. Best film adaptation of a TV show since the Brady Bunch Movie. Velma -- always my favorite -- is a stone fox. Better still are the sets and costumes: utterly delicious tiki bars, a hotel I'd give a finger to stay in for a week and a theme-park to end all theme-parks. And Matthew Lillard as Shaggy is absolutely, positively brilliant. A loving updating of Scooby Doo, by unabashed Hanna-Barbera fans, with just enough adult subtext to make it just as good for grown-ups as it is for kids. Oh, and what they did to Scrappy Doo was no more than the little rodent deserved. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:25:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eclectic Internet radio directory

Aural Delight: links to excellent and eclectic (and endangered, thanks to the recent punitive CARP royalty rate) Internet radio stations. Link Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:00:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Devising a plot, evil-overlord style

Brilliant author/editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted her "Evil Overlord" formula for devising a plot for your flagging science fiction story. It's terrific.

* A plot doesn't have to be new. It just has to be new to the reader.

* In fact, it doesn't even have to be new to the reader. It just has to get past him. (It helps if the story's moving fast and there's lots of other interesting stuff going on.)

* A plot device that's been used a thousand times may be a cliche, but it's also a trick that works. That's why it keeps getting used.

* Several half-baked ideas can often be combined into one fully-cooked one.

* If you have one plot presented three ways, you have three plots. If you have three plots presented one way, you have one plot. (I stole this principle from Jim Macdonald's lecture on how to really generate plots, which is much better than my lecture on stupid plot tricks.)

* Steal from the best.

Link Discuss (via Making Light)

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

Will the NPR ombudsman start his own blog?

David Rothman challenges NPR Ombudsman to start his own blog, in order to learn more about the nature of links:

I'm just across the Potomac River from you and would be delighted to drop by and offer some free advice on a Dvorkin-NPR blog, though your in-house Web folks could probably accommodate you just as well or better. Blogger and Radio are merely two of the blog products you might consider. Via your blog, you could effortlessly link not just to NPR programs referenced there but also to listeners' contributions to your discussion boards.

Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

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

Slashdot comes to Forbes

Forbes online has added a box of Slashdot headlines to its technology pages ("providing senior-level business readers with access to cutting-edge, high-tech content online."). Pretty cool to see /. getting this kind of mainstream cred. Link Discuss (via Raelity Bytes)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:46:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mac-friendly WiFi gear roundup

MacWorld has put together an excellent round-up of Mac-friendly 802.11b access-points. Great to finally get an exhaustive list of the APs that support AppleTalk. Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:45:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Transborder telephony inventor feud

Congress passed a resolution declaring the American inventor Antonio Meucci as the father of the telephone. The Canadian Parliament responded by passing a contrary resolution declaring Alexander Graham Bell, the Canadian inventor as the true originator of the phone. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prilosec to get generic and easy

Prilosec -- the heartburn medication I live and die by -- is about to go over-the-counter and what's more, the patent is about to expire. This is fantastic news for chronic, severe acid-reflux sufferers like me, who pay upwards of two bucks a pill (or have to hassle with insurance companies about our lifeline). No more calls to the doctor's office to renew our scrips, and with luck the price will drop to the level of ranatadine (Zantac), about $0.60 a pill or so. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:18:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 21, 2002

NPR renews linking lies and strongarm tactics

NPR claims to be reconsidering its link policy, and in the meantime, it's posted more specious rationalization. Brutally, brutally stupid.

The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism. We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio. We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause. This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.

However, NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement. We are working on a solution that we believe will better match the expectations of the Web community with the interests of NPR. We will post revisions soon at www.npr.org.

Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. If you would like to link to NPR from your Web site, please fill out the link permission request form.

Unpacking that:

• The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism.

  This policy does not serve this commitment. The end-product of independent, noncommercial journalism is public discourse, which on the Web takes the form of links. If you're committed to journalism, you must endorse linking.

• We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio.

  Was this infringement? If so, why didn't you seek redress in the courts? It's my opinion that someone who constructs a directory -- commerical or non-commercial -- of references to locations on the web no more infringes than someone who produces a tourist map to a city that marks the location of major attractions.

• We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause.

  You are lying. There is no way that one could link to a stream of a fair and impartial newscast (links to streams must be to the whole stream, from beginning to end, remember) such that it can't be distinguished from advocacy or opinion. If there were NPR stories that were indistinguishable from advocacy, this indicates that the NPR stories were not impartial to begin with.

• This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.

  No other journalistic organization of note has a parallel policy (NPR's ombudsman's defamatory fabrications about CBC and BBC notwithstanding). The idea that linking must not be permitted because it would compromise the appearance or fact of ethics is a fantasy concocted by NPR's representatives.

• NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement.

  How grand of you. All linking on the web is not infringement. The recititation of public facts -- this document exists at this location -- is never an infringment. Promulgating this myth is purely wrong, especially from a journalistic organization that prides itself on its ability to seek out and deliver the truth.

• Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.

  In the words of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, "Of course, it isn't 'prohibited.' Or rather, it's 'prohibited' with exactly the same legal force as I have when I say 'False legal claims designed to intimidate the public are hereby prohibited. Signed, Me.' This is the web. If you put a public document onto it, it's linkable. If you don't want to be linked to, use some other means of putting your information online."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:14:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TBL on myths about links

Another great TBL piece on popular misconceptions about links:

The ability to refer to a document (or a person or any thing else) is in general a fundamental right of free speech to the same extent that speech is free. Making the reference with a hypertext link is more efficient but changes nothing else...

Users and information providers and lawyers have to share this convention. If they do not, people will be frightened to make links for fear of legal implications. I received a mail message asking for "permission" to link to our site. I refused as I insisted that permission was not needed.

There is no reason to have to ask before making a link to another site

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

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

TBL on links and the law

Tim Berners-Lee anticipated NPR's absurd link policy in 1997, in this paper on Links and the Law:

The intention in the design of the web was that normal links should simply be references, with no implied meaning.

A normal hypertext link does NOT necessarily imply that

* One document endorses the other; or that
* One document is created by the same person as the other, or that
* One document is to be considered part of another.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:55:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SpamAssassin relies on SPEWS, SPEWS spews

Much as I love SpamAssassin, it's not without its flaws. It relies partly on the SPEWS blacklist of known spammers, a blacklist that is managed with a great deal of caprice and dogma, but not a lot of sense, it seems. Howard sums up a recent thread of messages regarding SPEWS thus:

"Hi, we used to have a spam problems from our customers but we've cleaned up"

"You profited from spam! You go to hell, you go to hell and you die!"

"Hi, we are a law firm that bought from UUnet and it seems the last owners of this IP block were spammer. We're not, can you please remove us."

"Every heard of due diligence? Thats what you get for buying from UUNet, you'll get unlisted when they clean up all their spammers."

"Hi, we bought from some people who turned out to have a problem with hosting some spammers, but we're locked into a 3 year contract. We're a small shop without the money for lawyers to get out of it. We're not spammers, could you please unblock this one piece of IP which is just us."

"Sorry, you have to change providers. They breached your contract by failing to provide full internet access (since people are filtering them based on our listing)"

Of course, having your name on the SPEWS blacklist isn't sufficient to cause your message to be tagged as spam by SpamAssassin; SPEWS only counts for two point towards a required threshold of five before a message is tagged. Still it seems like these blacklists always devolve into thrashes about abuse of power. I really like the Vipul's Razor approach (which is also integrated into SpamAssassin). No person or group of coordinated actors has the power to blacklist someone; distributed reputation continually demotes and promotes spam-reporters based on accuracy. Lots of checks and balances. Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:49:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A post-suffering manifesto

The Hedonistic Imperative, a post-human, post-suffering manifesto:

The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event.

Link Discuss (via The Schism Matrix)

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

License haiku

Aaron Swartz suggests expressing software/IP licenses as haiku:

MIT: take my code with you / and do whatever you want / but please don't blame me

LGPL: you can copy this / but make modified versions / free in source code form

GPL: if you use this code / you and your children's children / must make your source free

RIAA: if you touch this file / my lawyers will come kill you / so kindly refrain

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:44:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Minnesota Public Radio on NPR's link-policy

Yesterday, I was interviewed for Minnesota Public Radio's Future Tense, along with NPR's ombudsman, about NPR's link policy. The piece turned out great -- Jon Gordon, the producer, did a great job of framing the story, and he was kind enough to provide an MP3 of the interview for those of us without RealPlayer support on our OS of choice: Link Discuss (Thanks, Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:35:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My letter to NPR's ombudsman

Here's my letter to NPR's ombudsman, regarding NPR's link policy.

>"It's part of keeping our integrity that our journalism remain
>noncommercial, and we're not engaged in advocacy in any way,"
>Dvorkin explained.

Your integrity rests on the public's perception of your reasonableness, your understanding of the ways of the world. With every passing moment that this policy remains in effect, your erode that perception, erode the public's confidence in NPR's ability to deliver accurate and balanced news. No one wants to get their picture of the world from a fool; please show the world that NPR is not made up a fools and eliminate this policy immediately, apologize and get on with the news.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Internet Airplane Food Database

Airline Meals supersite collects pix of airplane food from travellers round the net, along with notes, files 'em by airline, lets you vote on 'em, etc and so on. The vittles on the Beijing to Guangzhou night flight on China Southern look pretty good. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dennis!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 20, 2002

Skyscraper database

Indulge your fetish for tall buildings with the Sky Scraper database; search by city, region, stories, architect or name and get a comparison chart back. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

King Velveeda estopped from using his nom-de-brush

Eli the Bearded sez:

Illustrator "King Velveeda" (Stu Helm) is being sued Kraft to stop him from using his pen name. So far Kraft has gotten a temporary injunction against KV so he has had to remove his name from his website.

(Some images on some of the pages on his site might not be work-friendly for you. The Castle Hassle page should be fine.)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:58:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Israeli bookies taking odds on site of next bombing

Israeli bookies are alleged to be making book on the site of the next suicide bombing.

Betting on the Red Sea resort of Eilat, which has not seen any violence during the past-21-months of conflict, is the long shot at 17-1, while often-targeted Jerusalem was given odds of 6-4 against.

Bets begin at 10 shekels ($2), the betting sheet states, adding that bets only count for attacks of "Arabs against Jews and not the opposite."

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:51:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NPR reconsidering clueless linking policy?

David Rothman reports on his blog that NPR is reconsidering its policy requiring linkers to seek permission before putting a link on their websites. This is good news! Let's hope they do the right thing.

NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin has just told me that the legal, news and Web sides will reconsider the policy this afternoon--he himself will participate. I'll think good thoughts.

Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:49:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blockbuster (supposedly) sez: Rewind your DVDs

Possibly apocryphal exchange between a Blockbuster customer and various tiers of Blockbuster management over the "Be kind -- please rewind" stickers on their DVD rental cases:

I emailed Blockbuster regarding the rewinding of DVDs, they told me that "Most DVD players have a "Rewind" button on it, what it does is spins the DVD the opposite direction from the direction the DVD spins during the play mode, so by spinning the DVD the opposite direction rewinds the DVD, it's similar to the rewind feature on a VCR."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

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

Extropian blog

Neuroatomik: a great extropian big-science-weirdness blog. Link Discuss (Thanks, Hoeken!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:45:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Asteroid collision narrowly avoided

Sneaky astronomers reveal that the earth narrowly avoided disaster on June 14 when an asteroid the size of a football pitch made a too-close-for-comfort approach to our beloved rock. Yikes!

Catalogued as 2002MN, the asteroid was travelling at over 10 kilometres a second (23,000 miles per hour) when it passed Earth at a distance of around 120,000 km (75,000 miles).

Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:12:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I heart Mozilla

It's been a couple of weeks now, and I can't adequately express my joy with Mozilla. No pop-ups, tabs everywhere, nary a spinning-beach-ball (the scourge of OS X browsing, and a "feature" that is omnipresent in other browsers, including the otherwise excellent Moz-based Chimera), and banner-ads are a thing of the past. I am in browsing heaven. I wish I could get the Bookmark Groups thing to work, but even absent that, I'm browsing faster and better than I ever have. This is a revolutionarily good piece of software, Browsing As It Should Be. Try it for a couple days -- you'll never go back. Link Discuss

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

Byline strike

Journos for the Providence Newspaper Guild and Washington Post are on a byline strike; rather than walking out, the reporters are refusing to attach their names to their stories. Of course, there's not a lot of coverage in either paper about the strike. Lucky ofr us, Sheila Lennon, a blogger who writes for a Providence paper, is covering it in her Subterranean Homepage News blog. Link Discuss (Thanks, Sheila!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:35:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Evolutionary software-driven robot escapes from custody and goes dingo

A robot in an evolutionary software experiment escaped from its pen at a robot expo and went wild, escaping across a pasture.

Sharkey said: "Since the experiment went live in March they have all learned a significant amount and are becoming more intelligent by the day but the fact that it had ability to navigate itself out of the building and along the concrete floor to the gates has surprised us all."

And he added: "But there's no need to worry, as although they can escape they are perfectly harmless and won't be taking over just yet."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wireless in Pittsburgh

Portal for the Pittsburgh community wireless project, with coverage maps and news. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:04:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ben Hammersley on setting up a open wireless node

Ben Hammersley writes about setting up his public WiFi node in his Guardian column. Ben's experience is a little unusual -- within a dya of setting up his access point, Doc Searls (who was 9000 miles from home), stumbled upon it (and Ben). Later, at a group dinner with a bunch of British geeks, Matt Jones suggested chalking "WiFi hobo-runes" on the sidewalk marking discovered wireless service, so that other netstumblers and war-walkers may connect to it. Link Discuss (via Doc)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NPR's ombudsman is either a liar or a fool

Wired News interviews NPR's ombudsman and gets a pack of clueless and disingenous quotes about its linking policy:

Dvorkin said he told the e-mailers "that NPR does not refuse links but it just wants to make sure that the links are appropriate to a noncommercial and journalistic organization.

"We wouldn't want a commercial outfit to use us in any way they pleased..."

It isn't only commercial activity that concerns NPR. Asked if a link from someone's noncommercial homepage would bother the company, Dvorkin said: "It depends on your homepage -- what if you're an advocate for left-handed socialist diabetics? We wouldn't want to give support to advocacy groups."

"It's part of keeping our integrity that our journalism remain noncommercial, and we're not engaged in advocacy in any way," Dvorkin explained.

Let's look at those:

• "wants to make sure that the links are appropriate to a noncommercial and journalistic organization."

  Inbound links do not reflect on the organization they're targeted on. This is like Disney taking the position that it wants to be sure that Mickey Mouse watches may only be worn by people who support its brand of family values, or the NYT trying to ensure that only smart and well-dressed people read the Grey Lady on the subway in the morning.

• "We wouldn't want a commercial outfit to use us in any way they pleased."

  Then get off the web. There is nothing about the citation of a web site through a link that should distinguish between commercial and non-commercial linkers. Google is a commercial organization. Does it need a special arrangement to make a link? If Google receives your dispensation, might its competitors be denied the privilege of linking to you?

• "We wouldn't want to give support to advocacy groups."

  I think you misunderstand the nature of the news (which is disheartening, considering that you work for NPR). As reporters, your job is to present facts and opinions to the public. These form the underpinnings of public discourse. That discourse (on the web) consists of links and commentary. A debate in a public hall between "left-handed socialist diabetics" and "$SOME_OTHER_STUPID_EXAMPLE" might very well include references to NPR pieces. That same debate, on the web, will augment its references with links. How very curious that a news organization would take the official position that its material is not to be cited in public discourse.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Perl is Internet Yiddish

Yoz Grahame, one of the excellent geeks I met in London last week, has posted a sure-to-be-classic essay, "Perl is Internet Yiddish." Like Yiddish, perl has no one canonical way to express any one idea, and like Yiddish, perl can be lyrical or it can be pidgin.

Let's talk a bit more about the make-up of Yiddish: it's mainly German, that much is obvious, but the vocab is heavily twisted and most of the grammatical rules have been abandoned. There's quite a bit of classical Hebrew and English in there too, probably some Russian, Slovak and Polish as well. It's where it came from. And now, where Yiddish has ended up, it has given back: chutzpah, shlep, refusenik, nosh, etc. - all essential Yinglish.

As I said, the dialects vary heavily from region to region. My father's mother says "nit" instead of "nisht", something that has my mother recoiling in disgust. Still, either works. You can chop and change as much as you like, throw bits of your native language in when it works, etc. Sure, people do this with other second languages, but in this case it's a core philosophy of the language.

In other words: There's More Than One Way To Do It. Or, as Perl hackers often say, TMTOWDI.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Yoz!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:18:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 19, 2002

Martha Stewart Living in Jail merch

Martha Stewart Living in Jail: prison merchandise in high style for the crafty con in you. Pictured here: "Apricot Inmate Baseball Hat." Also available: "The classic brimless 'black and white' spectator cap" and others. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

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

Showtime snubs Canadians

Matt sez: "Showtime's site is only accessible to Americans. I've attached a screenshot of what I see as a Canadian when I go to their home page. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:18:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The bloop that roared

A mysterious "bloop" sound recorded repeated on the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array baffled marine biologists. Now, CNN reports that Brit scientists think it's evidence of a honkin'-big deep-sea squid.

Although dead giant squid have been washed up on beaches, and tell-tale sucker marks have been seen on whales, there has never been a confirmed sighting of one of the elusive cephalopods in the wild.

The largest dead squid on record measured about 60ft including the length of its tentacles, but no one knows how big the creatures might grow.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:14:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Helen Rykens's "Deciphering Vermilion" online

My pal Helen Rykens has the lead story in the Canadian sf magazine "Challenging Destinies." Her story, "Deciphering Vermilion," is simply lovely, and you can read it in its entirety online. Link Discuss (Thanks, Helen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:55:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SMS to English translator

Meryl sez: "Enter your SMS texting lingo and let transL8it! convert it to plain English OR type in a phrase in English and convert it to SMS lingo. CU L8r." Link Discuss (Thanks, Meryl!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:13:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

When Smart-Mobs attack!

Matt Jones recounts the crushing defeat of a UK initiative to eliminate every vestige of electronic privacy. The defeat came at the hands of irate netizens who had excellent Internet-based tools like FaxYourMP.com at their disposal, allowing for rapid organization and highly effective action.

"...we thought it was worth saying that you won. And the next time you're talking to someone about these issues, and someone says "what's the point?" - well, you now may now point at yourself, and mention how you got the government to blink."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

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

Insectoid six-legged logging machine

Horrifying and fascinating six-legged insectoid Finnish logging machine with the power to stop a thousand Loraxes without straining its thoraxes. Don't miss the videos.

The walking machine adapts automatically to the forest floor. Moving on six articulated legs, the harvester advances forward and backward, sideways and diagonally. It can also turn in place and step over obstacles. Depending on the irregularity of the terrain, the operator can adjust both the ground clearance of the machine and the height of each step.

The machine's nerve center is an intelligent computer system that controls all walking functions - including the direction of movement, the travelling speed, the step height and gait, and the ground clearance. The harvester head is controlled by the Timberjack measuring and control system. To further optimize machine operation, Timberjack's Total Machine Control system (TMC) regulates the functions of the machine's loader and engine. All control systems are designed for ease of use. The operator-friendly controls are incorporated in a single joystick.

Discuss Link (Thanks, Richard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:25:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hobo Nickel revival

Hobo Nickels -- Buffalo Nickels customized by rail-riding Depression-era tramps -- are back. Sam Alfano, an American engraver, has revived the lost art and is making fantastic Hobo Nickels like the Casey Jones portrait pictured here. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:20:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Making Google part of every blog entry

David "Sputnik" Sifry has built a cool-ass Google API tool for his blog. Every entry on his blog is accompanied by ten links to related stories automatically discovered with Google (these ten stories are refreshed every time he updates his blog, though he could also put it on a timer). The integration is slick-tight, thanks to Movable Type's API, and David's published the source for his hack so that other intrepid Movable Typers can implement it. Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

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

"Home-game" version of Vipul's Razor launched today

Cloudmark, the company that is hoping to commercialize the excellent spam-busting service Vipul's Razor, officially launched last night at midnight. My pal Dan Moniz (former OpenColon, memepool editor, founder of Forwarding Address: OSX and all-round cranky LISP-geek) is their latest hire, and I'm awfully excited at the idea of this service coming to my desktop. The Cloudmark site reports that Vipul's Razor has processed 4 million+ emails today, and caught over 1.5 million spams out of that pool. Nice. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:47:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Punk sounds for babies

Punk Rock Baby -- a CD of punk classics recorded in lullabye style: "You didn't fight the punk wars for nothing: make sure they have a riot of their own." Link Discuss (via Biznicality)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Play Carabella, acquire music, protect privacy, stay legal

Carabella is the EFF's latest project -- a Flash game where you steer goth-hottie Carabella through a series of adventures in which she attempts to acquire an album without compromising her privacy, legality, or fair-use rights. Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:11:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

T-ray cameras see through clothes, comets

New terahertz "T-ray" cameras will allow us to see into space and under each others' clothes.

One camera, already built by a company called QinetiQ and working in so-called millimetric waves, has demonstrated the ability to eerily peer through clothes and reveal a concealed weapon -- as well as much of a person's body. The image shows far more detail than an infrared camera, which detects heat.

Terahertz radiation is similar to but more revealing than what the QinetiQ camera detects. Scientists say T-rays are emitted by pretty much everything. They come from "the human hand, an envelope, someone with clothes on or a comet," says Geoff McBride, who works on Star Tiger, the British project. It is supported by the European Space Agency.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jay!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:10:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 18, 2002

Picking the wireless access point for you

Paul Boutin has a great pick-of-the-litter review of 802.11b base-stations in the new Wired. It's hard to differentiate among the different access points and Paul does a good job of distinguishing among them. And on Paul's blog, Glenn "802.11b Networking News" Fleishman adds his two cents. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NPR also prohibits framing

In addition to prohibiting linking to their site without permission, NPR also prohibits framing of their site without permission: Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:45:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mathematicians damn Enigma

Damning mathematician's review of Enigma, the new movie about the protocypherpunks of WWII's Bletchley Park that somehow fails to mention Alan Turing.

Instead of dramatising intellectual discovery, as Harris made some effort to do, the film has played up the spy-thriller elements that made his novel a 'best-seller'. If you want to see a mathematician in country-lane car chases, then swimming fully-clothed in a heavy sea, while shooting a pistol at a spying colleague trying to reach a surfacing U-boat, then you should see this film. The best I can say is that it pays faithful homage to Graham Greene's 1943 atmospherics. A deeper problem is that throughout the film, the codebreakers appear as browbeaten by spymasters in the Secret Intelligence Service, and that betrayal of material to Germany is pivotal to the plot. In fact, spying played very little role in the Anglo-American war with Germany (though no doubt it was more significant in relations with the Soviet Union): cryptanalytic intelligence, obtained through scientific ingenuity and organisation, was all-important. The problem lay not in treachery but in implementation: successful use of the intelligence would tend to give it away. The British success largely continued because the German command were quicker to suspect treachery on their side, in reality non-existent, than to doubt the efficacy of the Enigma machine. There are passages in the film where the radicalism of the scientific revolution is made clear enough: the resentment at the 'swots' suddenly being 'stars,' the amused contempt of the codebreakers for irrelevant brass-hat pep-talks. There is also a fine passage where Jericho quickly calculates on information-theoretic grounds whether the coming convoy clash will supply enough material to break back into the U-boat Enigma. But these are disconnected exceptions to the overall emphasis on a traditional war-story plot.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:38:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ultrawideband's enemies at the FCC

Great Red Herring story on the attempts of incumbent wireless companies to squelch disruptive ultra-wideband radio technology at the FCC:

All of which makes one wonder: why are the wireless carriers so afraid of UWB, especially as the FAA and DOD have been using it without incident for 40 years? Perhaps because they know how effective UWB is. "This is about competitive concerns," says Maura Colleton, managing director of Qorvis Communications, the Washington, D.C., public affairs firm that lobbied Capitol Hill on behalf of XtremeSpectrum. "These companies are protecting their existing markets and their ability to go into future ones."

Indeed, UWB mightily threatens a number of existing markets. The 802.11 community will be in immediate danger, and Bluetooth, the emerging wireless standard for device-to-device communications, may be rendered obsolete before anyone actually gets to use it. But far more significant is the effect that UWB could have on the next-generation networks that mobile carriers have spent so lavishly on to develop over the past three years. "I believe the wireless carriers' objections really stemmed from a financial and a political perspective, more than from spectrum interference," says Martin Rofheart, the cofounder and CEO of XtremeSpectrum. At the current power restrictions delineated by the FCC, UWB is not yet approved for commercial use beyond networks of a couple hundred feet at the most.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:48:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NPR's brutally stupid linking policy

NPR joins KPMG and other bastions of cluelessness by requiring that anyone who wishes to link to the NPR site fill in this form. No matter how deep or shallow your link is, NPR requires you to fill in this form.

Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.

Please use this form to request permission to link to npr.org and its related sites.

Gosh, I hope they don't take away my tote bag.

Really, it beggars the imagination to think that anyone in this day and age could be this fatally stupid. If you agree, drop a note to NPR's ombudsman. Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:32:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mitnick may lose ham radio license

Kevin "Jailbird Hacker" Mitnick is in danger of losing the ham radio license he's held for 25 years; the FCC has decided that he doesn't possess the moral fortitude to own an amateur radio license.

The FCC has refused to allow his license to be renewed, despite the fact that he isn't accused of misusing it or breaking any FCC rules.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Vince!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:16:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogathon -- blogging for charity

Blogathon -- drum up sponsors, pick a charity (like the EFF!) and post a blog entry every 30 minutes to raise cash for the charity of your choice. No fair writing 48 entries in advance and using a python script and the Blogger API to auto-post!

Remember when you were in school and you would bowl for charity? And for every pin you knocked down you got, say, ten cents? Well a Blogathon is an event for charity that lasts 24 hours. Each participant finds sponsors who can either donate a flat amount for the entire event, or an amount per hour. Once you sign up, you blog for 24 hours on the day of the event and raise money for charity.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:48:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Accessible theatres come to Toronto

Joe Clark, a freelance disabled-rights activist, talks to the Toronto Star about the growing, positive trend of making TV and films accessible to the deaf and blind, and about the CRTC's (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC, which, among other things, regulates Canadian television/radio to ensure that a minimum proportion of the programming has "Canadian content") role in inadvertently undermining it:

Clark is now battling another thorny problem. Under CRTC rules, Canadian cable companies that simulcast U.S. programs on Canadian channels must carry them not only with closed captions but also with audio descriptions.

"If a U.S. (program) feed has closed captioning or audio description and the Canadian feed doesn't, the cable company cannot substitute the Canadian feed," says Clark. "But they are doing so, unintentionally."

He's complained to the CRTC in writing: "We went through this denial of accessibility with captioning in 1981, and despite years of warning that U.S. programming on commercial networks would begin to be aired with descriptions, Canadian broadcasters ... are still blocking the description signals."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:20:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Mouse goes for some Penguin lovin'

Disney's migrating its animation back-end to HP's GNU/Linux boxen. The great irony, of course, is that Disney is also using the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group to make it illegal to develop open source digital video applications. Link Discuss (Thanks Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PlasticMail comes to Plastic

Carl "Plastic" Steadman's posted a long, hilarious counterpoint to Kuro5hin Rusty's plea to K5 users. Carl's going to be selling Plastic webmail accounts to Plastic users to underwrite the cost of running the system. In his fine satirical style, Carl introduces the idea:

But I don't want your webmail, with all its elitist claptrap... A webmail with no ads? With no positively negative opt-outs to receive periodic special deals and offers from a long but selective list of partners and affiliates? That isn't "free," with an asterisk? Sounds positively un-American. What I want is a Plastic t-shirt. But not made out of plastic. Made out of cotton.

If you sign up for a year's service for US$60., you'll receive a quality heavyweight 100 percent cotton screen-printed Plastic 't,' as a token of appreciation for supporting the kind of specious, questionable thought and delusional, self-important blather you've come to expect from Plastic. And yes, of course - they'll be available in S and XS for the ladies.

So US$60. for a lousy Plastic t-shirt.

No, US$60 for the kind of exclusive email address that tells people you've managed to peck out 'I liek Pokemon' or suitable variant enough times to earn the minimum karma needed in order to qualify for a Plasticmail account - and you had 60 bucks. The t-shirt is my gift to you.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Carl!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:39:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 17, 2002

Woodcocks unwelcome at Passport

Passport won't let you create a new ID if your surname happens to be "Woodcock:"

Your lastname contains a word that has been reserved or is prohibited for .NET Passport registration. Please type in a different lastname

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:20:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Time does Dick

Philip K. Dick makes Time Magazine!

The philosophy he dreamed of. Behind the plots of empathetic androids and cybertorpedoes, two questions obsessed Dick: What is real? and What is human? He also asked, What's next? "I think, as the Bible says, we all go to a common place," he said in a 1972 speech. "But it is not the grave; it is into life beyond. The world of the future." It is in his future, our present—in readers' minds and on the huge mindscreen of the movies—that Phil Dick lives.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Guthrie on copyright

Pete Seeger describes his father predecessor (Thanks, Misha!) Woody Guthrie's view on copyright:

Pete Seeger, June 1967:

When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930s, he used to mail out a small mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs, On the bottom of one page appeared the following: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." W.G.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:48:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Graduating students threatened with arrest for silently protesting Bush's grad speech

Ohio State students who protested Shrub's presence at their graduation by silently turning their backs to the stage were led out of the auditorium by the police, who told them that they would be charged with disturbing the peace if they didn't leave the premises. Earlier, they had been threatened with arrest and withholding of their diplomas if they engaged in their First Amendment protected right to silently protest the President's policy. (For contrast, Clinton's presence at an Ohio State grad ceremony enjoyed no such protection -- he was heckled and jeered and simply toughed it out like a grownup).

Update: In the discussion area BB readers have posted some first-hand accounts and links that suggest that the AP wire that orginally carried this story misstated the facts, or rather, conflated them. It appears that the administration only banned verbal protests of the Shrub (still a First Amendment right, last time I checked), but turning one's back was permitted. Link Discuss (via Ambiguous)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:14:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Essential Blogging" catalog page is up

The O'Reilly catalog page is up for "Essential Blogging: Selecting and Using Weblog Tools," which is the blog-book I contributed to, along with Rael "Blosxom" Dornfest, J. Scott "Radio" Johnson, Shelley "Burning Bird" Powers, and Mena and Ben "Movable Type" Trott. You can pre-order your copy now; Nat, the editor, tells me that there'll be a shot of the cover up soon, too.

Anyone can run a blog (an online journal). From personal diaries to political commentary and technology observations, bloggers are making their voices heard around the world. Essential Blogging helps you select the right blogging software for your needs and show how to get your blog up and running.

You'll learn the ingredients of a successful blog, and then get detailed installation, configuration and operation instructions for the leading blogging software: Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. After showing you how to acquire, set-up, and run these leading software packages, Essential Blogging takes you through the more advanced features, so that by the time you finish, you'll be up and blogging with the best of them.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:22:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Windows to OS X mail-migration tutorial

Meg's written an excellent tutorial on migrating mail from Outlook for Windows to Entourage or other OS X mailers. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:56:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Arthur Ransome, more rollicking kids-lit

Eli the Bearded sez: "Inspired by your Joan Aiken blurb, I'll point out to you Arthur Ransome. He wrote the Swallows and Amazons series, which I suspect is even more Patrick O'Brian for kids, at least the Peter Duck one which involves a a trip to Trinidad. Other ones have them climbing an imaginary Kachenjunga an expedition to the 'North Pole,' etc. Each book has the kids get older, smarter and more ambitious." Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:34:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Get well soon, Dave!

Dave "Scripting News" Winer's in the hospital -- here's to a speedy recovery! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:27:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Explorer 5.2 for OS X released

Microsoft just released the 5.2 updater for Internet Explorer for OS X -- weirdly, there hasn't been any fanfare about this release, and there're precious few notes on it, other than:

This latest version — version 5.2 — provides all the latest security and performance enhancements for Internet Explorer 5 for Mac OS X and a new home page — www.msn.com — for Internet Explorer. It also provides support for the new Quartz text smoothing feature provided in Mac OS X version 10.1.5 and later, so text on your screen is easier to read.

Update: Just ran the installer. It makes you quit out of all your other apps before it'll run. Hellooooo? This is Unix! Jesus. The installer overwrites your preset homepage with MSN. Argh. The actual app is not visibly faster or more stable than 5.1 was and the Quartz support is no better than I'm getting with Silk.

I've gone back to Mozilla, which is not without its failings (I hate the download manager, and the inability to specify that links from other apps should open in new tabs, not new windows is a pain), but which is far more stable and far faster than Explorer. Link Discuss (via MacSlash)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:36:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Joel on the economics of free software

Joel On Software's written an excellent article on the economic reasons for free software/open source. It all comes down to complimentary components: cheap plane tickets to Miami drive up the cost of hotel rooms in Miami, so Miami hoteliers want to lower the cost of plane tickets.

By the same token, it's in the best interest of hardware vendors to drive down the cost of operating systems; of media companies to drive down the (potential) cost of browsers, etc etc etc. The essay is clear and well-argued, and a nice defense of the economic value of free-as-in-beer software (it explicitly exempts free-as-in-speech from its scope), but I think Joel makes a misstep on the question of Sun.

Sun is in the business of commidifying software (through their support of free Unix variants and tools) and hardware (through their support of Java). When the costs of everything drop to zero, where is Sun's business? As Joel puts it: "Without proprietary advantages in hardware or software, you're going to have to take the commodity price, which barely covers the cost of cheap factories in Guadalajara, not your cushy offices in Silicon Valley."

But he is mistaken about Sun. Sun's unique sales proposition is what it has always been: interoperability. Sun has always led performance computing vendors on the free-as-in-freedom front. IBM and SGI and their ilk have built hardware that attempts to lock their customers in, making peripherals and software proprietary, high-cost add-ons. (I once had a gig running a proto-hosting service that was built on an SGI WebForce Indy. The machine shipped without a compiler, and SGI wanted to charge us $1000 for "developer tools" like perl). Sun's commitment to its customers is that its products can be hacked, that other vendors will be able to support them without punishing license terms, etc. That is why Sun isn't a commodity. Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

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

OpenOffice for Mac OS X developer release available

OpenOffice, the free software/open source successor to Sun's Star Office, has shipped for Mac OS X. It's just a developer build, and you need to install XFree86 to get it to run, but it is a free-as-in-speech/free-as-in-beer alternative to MSFT Office. OpenOffice reads and writes Microsoft Office files, including most of the complex ones (you can use OpenOffice to exchange revision-marked documents with Word users, for example).

It's butt-ugly and a pain in the ass to install, but both of those are temporary conditions. The OpenOffice Mac OS X hackers are promising to build an Aqua version of the software for 1.0, which'll increase the ease of installation and the aesthetic pain considerably. Can't wait.

Meantime, Open Office 1.0 is available for most Linuxes and other Unix flavors -- enjoy the freedom! Link Discuss (Thanks, Charlie!)

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

Iranian women use blogs for gender samizdat

Women in Iran have created over 1,200 Perisan blogs, online outlets where they can discuss taboo issues of gender and faith.

"Women in Iran cannot speak out frankly because of our Eastern culture and there are some taboos just for women, such as talking about sex or the right to choose your partner," she said.

"I have the opportunity to talk about these things and share my experiences with others."

For the most part, the response to her blog has been positive.

"I've had e-mails from men who have told me that I changed their attitude towards women in Iran," she said.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Brian!)

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

Apple prepares to support 802.11g?

The rumormongers at ThinkSecret are reporting that Apple's next rev of its Airport hardware will support 802.11g, a wireless standard that runs at 54Mbs over 2.4GHz (the same frequency as 802.11b, or "WiFi," the frontrunning, 10Mbs wireless standard). 802.11a is a more mature standard, but it runs at a different frequency, 5GHz, which means that in order for hardware to be compatible with both the popular-but-slow 802.11b and the faster 802.11a, it would be necessary to include two different radios, one tuned to 2.4GHz and the other to 5GHz.

Software-defined radio, like the GNU Radio project, would make these considerations obsolete. Software-defined radio "tunes" and demodulates radio signals with software, using off-the-shelf, low-cost computer parts. A functional, high-frequency SDR will turn your PC into an 802.11* card, a cellphone, an FM/AM/digital TV/analog TV receiver, and every other radio you can think of, all at the same time. Hell, it will tune every single radio and TV station simultaneously.

But there's a catch. The Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) has drafted a would-be mandatory digital TV standard for "protecting" Hollywood movies from being captured and rebroadcast over the Internet. One of the many rotten characteristics of this proposal is that is requires every digital TV device to be "tamper resistant," so that "end users" (i.e., me and you) can't modify our lawfully acquired property to circumvent the copy-prevention that keeps us from using it to the fullest.

But GNU Radio is Free Software -- aka open source -- and it is designed to be modified by end-users. Free Software projects improve when end-users modify the code to extend its functionality and patch its bugs. And so the BPDG would make GNU Radio illegal.

The worst part of it is, no computer or IT company has come out in public opposition to the BPDG mandate. As Louisiana's Representative Billy Tauzin prepares to enact the BPDG mandate into law, he's able to proceed with ease because none of the IT giants -- Apple, MSFT, IBM, Intel, HP, Gateway -- have come forward. Yet.

A lot of IT employees and execs read this blog. If you're a decision-maker at a major IT company that believes that outlawing open source is bad for your business, contact me. If you beleive that turning the design-specs of general-purpose computers over to Hollywood (another piece of the BPDG proposal) would be bad for your business, contact me. We need one -- just one -- major IT company to speak up for its own interests in public, and we can defeat the BPDG.

But we can't do it alone. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:51:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Can Rusty keep running Kuro5shin for free?

Rusty's posted a heartwrenching note to Kuro5hin explaining the economics of running the site. K5 is powered by free software, donated hardware, gratis bandwidth and community-contributed editorial.

Nevertheless, it's a full-time job for Rusty to keep the site going, and he's got to cover things like accounting, payroll taxes, medical insurance, etc, all told, about $70,000. He's tried banner-ads, text-ads, premium memberships, whatnot, and none of them have come close to covering that sum. So he's gone to his members, the super-smart brawling K5 readers, and hit them up for an idea.

As Rusty points out, he sees over 300,000 unique visitors every month. If every one of them were to pay in one dollar, just once, he'd be set for four years. All he needs is a way of convincing them all to kick in that buck and he's in biz. If you've got any ideas to help K5 afloat, go create a (free) membership and post a message. Link Discuss

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

Bizcard-sized CD blanks cheap

Wanna burn a bunch of business-card discs? $40 gets you 100 CD-biz-card blanks, each holding 50MB. You could hand out copies of Seth Schoen's Bootable Business Card Linux, a substantial fraction of Project Gutenberg, you name it. I'm told that you can burn these with any tray-loading burner. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:18:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 16, 2002

Joan Aiken -- a kids' author for grownups

A third literary link for today. Kelly "Stranger Things Happen" Link turned me on to the "Wolves of Willoughby Chase" books by Joan Aiken last fall in NYC, and I've been hooked ever since. These are a series of juvenile adventure stories set in an alternate Victorian England (and abroad, on the high-seas). Like a kids' version of Patrick O'Brian's high-seas adventures, these books are fantastically addictive. Aiken's ear for dialog and dialect is superb, her characters are rich and well-realized and her stories -- which weave in delicate and subtle fantasy elements -- are gripping as hell. Aiken deserves a place among JK Rowling, Roald Dahl and Lemony Snicket and JRR Tolkien as one of those rare and wonderful children's authors whose works are equally enjoyable for adults. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:20:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lynn Breedlove's "Godspeed"

I gave a reading from "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" last night at the Writers With Drinks event at the Cafe Du Nord. I was followed by Lynn Breedlove, who read from her new novel, "Godspeed," which is an intense and comic story about a bike courier's unrequited love for a stripper, witty as Bukowski at his finest, but with the ferocity of Chuck Palahniuk. Another book vying for the top of my must-read pile.

Thanks, by the way, to all the friends and readers who came out last night -- it was a full house, and it was terrific to see you all. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:11:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rucker's notes for Spaceland

I heard Rudy Rucker read from his new novel, Spaceland, yesterday at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. He mentioned that when he's working on a novel, he keeps a diary of notes and thoughts and frustrations that occur to him while he's at it, and that this notebook is often half as long as the book itself. He's posted the Spaceland notes (37,000 words!) and they're fascinating. Spaceland is a retelling of Flatland, from the perspective of four-dimensional beings who discover Earth's poor, benighted three-dimensional inhabitants. I've got my autographed copy sitting here beside me and I can't wait to dig into it. While you're waiting for your copy to arrive, here're Rudy's notes from the book's creation.

The September, 2000, Scientific American featured articles about wireless broadband for "3G" (third generation) wireless phones. A really nice way to do broadband would be to stick a transmitting whisker klup into 4D and have receiving whiskers up there as well. The whiskers will be a little like periscopes, they shift an incoming light signal klup a tad and send it on its way. We can safely assume that the light will propagate along a 3D hypersheet parallel to our space, not bumping into anything till it encounters a receiver whisker. Different whisker heights get you all new interference free transmission bands. Should the beams be directed? Some guys in San Jose are talking about just that for antennas, but it seems like a lot of work, though certainly more power efficient. But with no smog or even air in 4D, it should be OK to just beam the signals out more or less omnidirectionally.

What to use for the whisker? Well...I could use Joe Cube's actual whiskers since he's been augmented to be 4D. But that's a bit uncontrolled. Also the light sent into one end of his hair in this space wouldn't have a reason to bounce up into the hyperspace part of the hair. Have to think about this one a bit. Momo might provide a carton full of the whiskers.

What's needed is like a prism that takes EM in and shunts it over into hyperspace moving in the same 3D direction parallel. One Flatland analogy for this is a cylinder sitting partly intersecting Flatland with its axis vertical, the intersection is a circle. And there are polished reflector cone dents drilled into the top and the bottom circles of the cylinder. The 4D version might look to us like a sphere with a shiny middle internal sphere, and whenever EM radiation goes into it and hits the inner sphere it disappears, bounced klupward. The receiver looks the same, but EM comes out of it.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:04:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 15, 2002

It's a small, mad, mad, small, mad, small (wireless) world

Doc Searls is in London, wandering the streets, looking for a cafe close to an open 802.11b access-point. Having found one, he sits down, has a cup of coffee and starts to blog. A few minutes later, two British geeks sit nearby him, talking about "access." Wait a sec, sez Doc to himself -- I know that guy! It's Ben Hammersley, the Guardian reporter/geek who's writing a book on RSS for O'Reilly.

So Doc says hi, and it turns out that the wireless LAN he's connected to is the one in Ben's house, around the corner from the cafe, and that Ben has only been running it for a couple days.

It's a small world, and for the bandwidth-tropic, it grows smaller by the day, bringing us into proximity with one another and fuelling serendipity. We know each-other by the signs of our secret passion: the wireless cards, the Apple mobile hardware, the tin-can antennae and the constant nattering about "access."

Doc also reports that Jabber has been ported to the Danger Hiptop, the phone/PDA device that gave me a technology boner that could cut glass back when I saw it in the spring at PC Forum. Funny old world. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:47:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Colorado homeowners' associations demand green lawns as the state burns

Colorado is burning, thousands of lives are in danger, fire departments are at a loss, state water supply have run to critical lows in the face of a punishing drought.

Idiot homeowners' associations in Colorado are sending memos to their members reminding them that local bylaws require them to keep their lawns green. The priority is that property values not be allowed to fall (at least, not until they drop all the way to zero when the houses turn into ash).

Karen Becker, a community manager for Management Associates, said the drought doesn't let homeowners off the hook.

``A certain amount of stressed lawn is going to be acceptable due to the conditions,'' she said. But, ``to use water properly doesn't mean you'll have a dead lawn.''

Carrie Hugus, a spokeswoman for the 25,000-home Highlands Ranch Community Association, said they're asking homeowners to follow guidelines of watering every three days, for up to 15 minutes.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:11:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 14, 2002

Wait Till Your Father Gets Home theme (and Simon in the Land of Magic Chalk-Drawings!)

Tribute to the craptastic seventies cartoon show, "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home," including downloadable MP3 of the theme song. (On the same site, the "Simon in the Land of Magic Chalk-Drawings" theme, too) Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:51:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ringtone Royalties: music bizmodel of the future?

Justin sez: "According to this story in the Asahi Shinbun, musicians in Japan have seen a recent rapid increase in the amount of royalties paid for downloaded ringtones."

According to JASRAC, music lovers download more than 60 million tunes for use as chakumero each month, making the service a lucrative source of income for songwriters and composers.

Every time a song is downloaded from an Internet service provider onto a cellphone, the provider pays royalties to JASRAC, which distributes the money to copyright holders.

Link Discuss (Thanks Justin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spectacularly fabulous collection of old packaging art

Totally spectacular collection of vintage consumer-goods packaging. I would so totally buy packaged goods that came in wrappers like these. I miss this look and feel. Link Discuss (via Travelers Diagram)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:25:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage Disneyland home movies for sale on DVD

DVDs of vintage Disneyland home movies available for sale. Woot! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:14:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help save UserFriendly

UserFriendly, my fave geek comic strip, is on the skids. They're down to bare minimum staffing, but the bandwidth bills are killin' them. Help 'em out with a donation, a subscription or just buy some merch. It'd be cool if the Bittorrent or Onion Networks guys could use them for a beta site, knocking the bandwidth costs down to size. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kickstart!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Record execs call for tax on used CDs: "Information wants to be $18.98"

The music industry sees Napster everywhere it looks -- CD burners, P2P sharing, used record sales... The RIAARecord execs have (Thanks, hotgrits!) proposed a six percent royalty on all used CD sales, paid out by used CD stores.

Where to begin? The doctrine of first sale, for starters. I've bought the CD, it belongs to me, I'm free to sell it on, throw it out, or give it away. The recording industry has no legitimate interest in the aftermarket for my lawfully acquired property.

And about that aftermarket... I often buy used CDs, especially from searchable places like Amazon and Half, when I'm thinking about trying out a new band. Last week, a BB reader suggested that I try out The Avalanches. I bought a used Amazon disc for six bucks, discovered that I hated the disc and gave it away to a co-worker.

But last week I also rediscovered my love-affair with the band The Jazz Butcher and ordered two of the discs that I used to own on vinyl from Amazon, and followed up the order by buying a couple more Jazz Butcher discs used that I hadn't heard before.

The idea that this thriving aftermarket in used discs challenges -- rather than augments -- the music industry's revenue is every bit as ridiculous as the idea that the industry has a legit interest in controlling that market.

This Darth-Vader-grade villainy is just inexcusable. As one reader waxpancake, a reader, has suggested, as far as the industry is concerned, "Information wants to be $18.98." Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:55:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ralph Steadman interview MP3

Gary Groth of Fantagraphics interviews Ralph Steadman, the illustrator of several Hunter S. Thompson books. (I went to a Steadman signing in London in 1984 and he drew a picture of HST in my copy of The Curse of Lono. He was flicking drops of ink out of his felt pens and getting it all over everything.) Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:43:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Destitute Cartoonist Update

Dirk Deppey of Fanatgraphics sez: "William Messner-Loebs was unable to find the rich benefactor he needed [see this previous Boing Boing post -- Mark], so now he's looking for assistance to land on his feet. With this in mind, we've opened up an unused forum on the Comics Journal message board, and named it "Bill 'n' Nadine's Online Rent Party," in hopes of turning some of the goodwill and concern expressed by the funnybook-readin' community into cold, hard cash, to help them afford an apartment, cover moving costs, shelter their animals, et cetera." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:36:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USA: Soon with 50% more open spectrum

Congressman Ed Markey has introduced a bill that would open up nearly 0.5GHz more of spectrum for unlicensed use -- that would increase the available unlicensed-applications spectrum by about 50 percent. Good news!

designates a 20-megahertz band of contiguous frequencies located below 2 gigahertz, and a band of between 300 and 500 megahertz of contiguous frequencies above 2 gigahertz and below 6 gigahertz, for reallocation to the public for unlicensed use.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:04:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WalMart ships Lindows PCs

Remember WalMart was shipping dirt-cheap PCs without OSes included (presumably so that you could install Linux on them; or, if you believe MSFT, so that you could install unlicensed copies of Windows on 'em)? Now they're shipping dirt-cheap PCs with Lindows installed, Lindows being a GNU/Linux-based OS that feels like Windows runs many Windows apps under Linux. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:16:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Soccer shamans want to hex World Cup

Soccer shamans and African continental reps at the World Cup are clashing over plans to hex the Kyoto football pitch.

The magazine said there was "a common thread of spiritual practices -- animals sacrificed and their parts buried, midnight rituals, powders and smelly lotions that embraces every part of sub-Saharan Africa and spans every variation of football success."

Casting a spell on a team is so common that players sometimes will climb fences to enter a stadium rather than use the main gate, fearing a spell may have been put on it.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How close are you to the toxic train?

MapScience takes your address and ZIP code and tells you how far you are from the nearest nuclear waste transport route. I'm real safe here in San Francisco, but I pity the poor bastards down in Fremont. Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:26:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Found photos on Discards

Matt from Scrubbles has put up "Discards," a gallery of found photographs. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:16:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Love and CD burners underpin Chinese samizdat

CD burners are the source of a new samizdat in China. Young women infatuated with an ideologically unsound boy-band media property are burning millions of audio CDs and VCDs of the the band's "real-life" show. They're smuggling themselves on rickety fishing boats to greet the band. They're defying Party authority, and they're doing it for saccharine love:

"When girls like us have needs, there is nothing anyone can do to stop us."

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:57:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US plans Dutch invasion

The Dutch are alarmed at a "US legislative proposal" to invade Holland in order to spring American citizens standing trial at the international court in The Hague.

The proposal — called the American Services Members' Protection Act — is designed to prevent the International Criminal Court gaining judicial authority over US soldiers.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogging makes the OED

Aaron reports that the Oxford English Dictionary will add "blog," "blogger," and "blogging" to the next edition. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Too many patents spoil the innovation

Forbes op-ed piece talks about how too many patents can be just as bad for innovation as too few. The story of IBM's patent flying assault squad's visit to Sun amply demonstrates the proposition:

After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.

An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.

Link Discuss (via CamWorld)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:43:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fortune sez: Blogger is Coolest

Congrats to Pyra Labs -- authors of Blogger -- for topping Fortune's list of Cool Media Companies. Link Discuss (via Salad and Steve)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:34:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cellular service that improves with density

Nice Wired News piece about applying mesh routing to cellular telephony. Why rely on congested towers (that grow more congested when you add users to their cell) when you can have every handset in your neighborhood relay signal for every other handset (and get a network where capacity increases with the addition of new users)?

SRI's PacketHop software is embedded in the phone. The signal of the device then jumps from handset to handset -– which must also have the software -– until it reaches its final destination. Theoretically, it could work from New York to California if there were enough phones lined up in the right places. Realistically, this would be a solution for short-distance calls.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos from XCOM

NTK has posted links to a number of people's photo-collections from last weekend's Festival of Inappropriate Technology. I'm particularily fond of this snap of me and Charlie "Antipope" Stross. (Charlie's the one with all the hair) Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:56:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Overclock your iBook with software

Got a new 700MHz iBook? Turns out you can overclock it to 800MHz in software -- no messy opening up of your machine, no setting of jumpers, just a little clicking around and bif-bam, you're running 14 percent faster (oh, and potentially melting your computer down into slag). Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:50:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 13, 2002

Gratuitously stupid virus story from Wired News

This is absolutely the worst article I've ever read on Wired News. It's an AP wire about "Perrun," a virus that infects JPEGs. Now, I'm guessing that there is a specific app (MSIE?) that is vulnerable to a buffer overrun (presumably, that's the "rrun" in "Perrun") that can be invoked with deliberately broken JPEGs. OK, I buy that. But that's not about JPEGs, that's about some specific app with a specific vulnerability.

The article makes no mention of this. Instead, it hysterically claims that "Perrun inserts portions of the virus code into the picture file. When the picture is viewed, it can infect other pictures. If the author wished, the virus could delete files on the computer or perform other mischief," and goes on to say "That evolution should make computer users think twice about sending pictures or any other media over the Internet."

The sky is falling! There is a specific vulnerability in some (unnamed) app! But we can be more interesting if we imply that JPEGs are considered harmful!

The howlers just go on and on: "it is the first to be able to cross from infecting a program to infecting data files, long considered safe from such threats." Well, except for infectious MS Office files, of which there are millions. MSFT (and some other vendors) have been mingling code and data for years now, with predictably disastrous results.

Whoever pulled this story off the wire and put it up on Wired News was asleep at the switch. This isn't reporting, it's hysterical fluff. The stringer should be reassigned to covering razor-blades-in-Hallowe'en-apples scares and never allowed near a technology story again. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:46:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Come hear me read my novel on Saturday!

I'll be doing a reading from my novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," at the Cafe Du Nord, this Saturday night, in San Francisco. Other writers on the bill are:

Lynn Breedlove - Godspeed
Daphne Gottlieb - Why Things Burn, Pelt
Thomas Roche - Noirotica, Dark Matter
Cory Doctorow - Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom
Annalee Newitz - Techsploitation, White Trash, Bad Subjects
Heather Gold - Qcomedy, Ladyfest

Hope to see you there! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:25:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hentai videos explained

Here's an LA Times article about Hentai ("pervert") anime.

The star is typically a perky, doe-eyed female in a high school uniform. Her co-stars range from slobbering businessmen and sadomasochistic school officials to hormonal extraterrestrials. When the two groups meet, their escapades are often a mix of graphic violence, weird sex and plot lines that can only be described as over the top.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:50:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harry Potter movie released without copy-prevention

The DVD and VHS releases of Harry Potter and the [Philosopher's|Sorcerer's] Stone in the UK (and in the US?) were shipped without the Macrovision copy-prevention technology -- which means that you can plug your VHS into your DVD player and make a copy for the cottage. It's unclear whether this was deliberate, but there's some suggestion that Hollywood has decided that paying license fees to Macrovision for its technology is more expensive than allowing for some unauthorized copying (Macrovision is trivial to circumvent in any case), and are relying on their customers being accustomed to not being able to make a copy and so not even trying. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:11:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Power-nerd slashfic

Slash (homoerotic fan fiction) has started to surface starring Steve Jobs and Bill Gates:

"(Jobs) nuzzles my neck, bites my earlobe," Slade writes. "I watch him go to his desk and rummage in one of the top drawers. When he comes back, he's holding a bottle of hand lotion.... He hooks his hand on the waistband of my chinos and briefs, sliding them both down at once.... He runs his hand up my back and leans down to whisper, 'Bill, are you a virgin?'"

"Yes." Sort of.

"I'll be gentle."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Julian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TuneBlock: Hypno-DRM

Brunching Shuttlecocks does a swell job of covering the next generation of Digital Rights Management:

Starting in a very short while, all new music published by RIAA members will feature TuneBlock, a method whereby special harmonics included in the songs will erase all memory of the melody, chords, and words from your mind shortly after you hear it, leaving nothing but a pleasant sensation of having enjoyed something.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Geoff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:42:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Running SpamAssassin under OS X

I've been using SpamAssassin for a week or so, ever since the WELL switched it on on their mail-servers. It is fantastic. I get in excess of 1,000 emails every day, and more than half are spam, and SpamAssassin just nails 'em. I get one or two false-positives a day, tops, and only two or three false negs. It's made my life livable again.

But what do you do if you don't run your own mailserver? Well, if you're running OS X, you can install SpamAssassin locally and have it prune your mail on your own computer. Ben "Movable Type" Trott has written an excellent tutorial on running SpamAssassin under OS X. Link Discuss (Thanks, Merlin!)

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

How Disney Napsterized the Silver Screen

We've been working on some EFF docs on Hollywood's poor track-record on new technology. We all know about the studios suing to keep the VCR off the market (and now pre-recorded media accounts for 40 percent of Hollywood's bottom line, versus 26 percent for the box-office, which has nonetheless grown every year since the VCR was introduced), but how about the TV itself? Hollywood boycotted TV because it was afraid that the small-screen would Napsterize the movie-houses. But when Walt Disney needed money to build Disneyland (and Roy wouldn't give it to him), he did a deal to open the Disney vaults to the broadcasters. Once one of the studios broke ranks, the cartel fell apart, and TV became the Hollywood revenue juggernaut it is today.

I knew about this from reading my Disney library, which is 3000 miles distant in Toronto, and we needed citations now, so we gave Google Answers $40 to research the question. The answer is terrific, just chock-a-block with links and abstracts. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Liberatarian think-tank changes tune on online music

Stan Liebowitz of the liberatarian think-tank the CATO institute has recanted much of his earlier writing about file-sharing and the music-industry. He says that the fantastic volume fo file-trading (he puts the number of tracks downloaded at 500 percent of tracks sold) should have an equally massive impact on music sales if we are to believe that file-sharing is bad for the music industry. But CD sales have not been hit in a way that is commeasurate with the antiicpated impact of file-sharing; depending on who you ask, sales are flat, or have fallen five percent, or 10. This has led Liebowitz to change his tune; he says that it seems that file-sharing is just like the VCR, the piano-roll, the radio, and all the other entertainment technologies that have caused the industry to cry wolf but have ultimately increased their market.

Liebowitz also does a good job of explaining what's wrong with the music-industry's dumb-ass "rights-managed" download services, but fails, ultimately on DRM itself. First off, he fails to acknowledge the intractatability of making DRM work -- providing an untrusted party with the key, the ciphertext and the cleartext but asking that party not to make a copy of your message is just silly, and can't possibly work in a world of Turing-complete computing.

At least not without the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause, which protects technical impossibility with a law enjoining people from investigating the use of their lawfully acquired property, even if the investigation results in a lawful use (say, breaking the Adobe eBook DRM in order to copy some text and paste it into a critical essay). CATO should be foursquare opposed to the DMCA's anti-circumvention, which also has the effect of preventing any interoperable technology (think VCR+ or Hitachi's IBM I/O devices in the 1960s) from being created without a license from the technology's originator.

He also fails to understand the impact of DRM and anti-circumvention on fair use. He makes a silly argument along the lines of, people can go to libraries and make fair uses of "unprotected" media there. The problem is that fair use isn't a laundry list of uses that you're allowed to make. It's specific to the facts of each use. Each new technology creates new fair uses (think of home taping) that are made explicitly without the permission of the rights-holder. DRM makes it impossible to make any use that the rights-holder hasn't previously permitted, unless you circuvment the DRM (which makes you liabile to civil and criminal penalties under the DMCA). Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Jack Kirby interview in MP3 format

The Comics Journal is known for running excellent, long interviews with the world's best comic book artists. The editor of The Comics Journal's site just clued me in to the archive of taped interviews. Right now you can download over an hour's worth of conversation between Fantagraphics owner Gary Groth and Jack "King" Kirby (my favorite comic book artist).

Dirk, the editor says "Kirby's up until Friday, when we'll be replacing the files with excerpts from our Ralph Steadman interview (including a great account of his first meeting with Hunter S. Thompson). Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:11:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Comics pioneer Bill Loebs on brink of homelessness

Comics pioneer William Messner-Loebs is in immintent danger of becoming homeless. Laid off from Marvel, burned by a dotcom that defaulted on his editorial paychecks, and hard-up for work, Bill will lose his house (and can't afford a rental) if a dedicated fan or group of fans doesn't come up with about $70,000 in loans to help him refinance. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dirk!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Simson Says: An End to Spam With SpamAssassin

SIMSON SAYS: An End to Spam With SpamAssassin
Simson L. Garfinkel

(Mark's note: I've known Simson for a good many years, and have always admired his fine writing. When I was an editor at Wired, it always excited me to get one of his email pitches. He's a very interesting fellow, and the author of several books. He wrote a column for the Boston Globe called "Simson Says" from 1995-2000, now he is self-syndicating it. Boing Boing will run his columns for as long as Simson says.)

Earlier this year my email inbox was overflowing with spam --- junk email advertising everything from bolts made in China to pornographic websites. Although it seems hard to believe now, I was actually getting more than 70 pieces of spam every day. There was so much spam, in fact, that I had given up reading messages sent to an email address that I had used since 1995. And because a few business associates didn't know that I had stopped using that old email address, the decision ended up costing me thousands of dollars in missed opportunities.

Spam is not democratic: some people get hardly any, while others get tons. If you post messages to popular mailing lists or put your email address on web pages, you dramatically increase the chances that you'll get a lot of spam. You can also get a lot of spam if you simply have an email address that's predictable --- an address that a spammer might reasonably guess, like frank@aol.com. I get a lot of spam because my email address has been widely published on web pages and, even worse, in online directories.

All of that spam now in my past: today my inbox is virtually spam free. Even better, I've been able to reclaim that old email account. Of course, the spammers haven't stopped sending me their missivies. But now that mail is being filtered out by an ingenious piece of software called SpamAssassin.

In the past 45 days, SpamAssassin has removed 3357 messages from my inbox and put them in a separate box called "Spam," where I'm free to either ignore them or review them at my leisure. This is a service for which I would have happily paid. As it turns out, there's no need: unlike other anti-spam systems out there today, SpamAssassin is free.

The underlying SpamAssassin technology was invented in April 2001 by Justin Mason, an Irish computer programmer living in Australia. Mason created a rule-based system that scores email messages according to a variety of rules. For example, an invalid time zone in the header gives an email message 2 points; a subject that is all capital letters gives the message another 2 points; and a link at the bottom of the message with the word "remove" in it gives the message 4.1 points. Any message with more than 5 points total is considered spam.

Mason's spam-detection engine was incredibly accurate. Unfortunately, it was also quite slow, sometimes taking more than 10 seconds on each message that it attempted to identify. Fortunately Mason published his program on the Internet for anyone to use. Six months later a programmer in California named Craig Hughes came up with a trick for making SpamAssassin run dramatically faster.

Since then, SpamAssassin has steadily grown in popularity. According to Hughes, more than 11,000 copies of the program were downloaded this past April. "People have downloaded it from addresses at IBM, RedHat, TicketMaster, Yahoo, FedEx, Amazon, Salon, Sun, Informix, Ikea, Nortel, Cisco, AIG, Dell, Apple, and Network Solutions, among thousands of others," says Hughes, who is now one of the volunteers coordinating the project.

Today SpamAssassin has more than 300 rules and a dictionary of 10,000 phrases it uses for spam detection. SpamAssassin also hooks in to several anti-spam networks, including the Mail Abuse Prevention System, better known as MAPS, and Vipul's Razor.

MAPS is a simple blacklist of companies or Internet Service Providers that have been caught sending spam in the past. The service, which carries a subscription fee, has been the target of criticism and the occasional lawsuit in the past. That's because an organizations have been added to the MAPS blacklist, they suddenly find that there are thousands of ISPs who will no longer accept their email.

Vipul's Razor applies an approach called "collaborative filtering" to the task of fighting spam. Developed by Vipul Ved Prakash, another California-based programmer, Razor relies on a technique for fingerprinting email messages and a network of volunteers around the world who report spam the instant they receive it.

Reporting spam is easier than you might imagine: many ISPs lose between 10% and 30% of their customers every year. (One of the leading reasons for this churn, apparently, is that the customers are getting too much spam!) After an account is turned off for six or twelve months, some ISPs turns the accounts back on and point them at the Razor reporting network. These email addresses become, in effect, spam traps. Any email message that gets sent to them is automatically fingerprinted and reported as spam.

"Spam is email broadcast, so everyone on the recipient list gets the same spam message," says Prakash. "If the first receiver shares the information identifying the contents of spam with the rest of the intended recipients, they could refuse to accept the message before it hits their mailbox. That's the basic idea behind Vipul's Razor. Given enough identifiers, every spam attack is surmountable."

SpamAssassin doesn't use either MAPS or the Razor network as all-or-nothing tests; instead, the scores from these systems are merely added to SpamAssassin's other rules. This limits the damage that occurs when an entire ISP gets blacklisted by MAPS for one or two bad customers --- or when a mail message for a popular mailing list gets erroneously sent to the Razor network.

Occasionally SpamAssassin makes mistakes. Last week, for example, I missed some messages from a mailing list that I'm on because SpamAssassin mis-identified the message and put it into my "spam" box. Once I realized that problem, all I had to do was to add the sender of those mail messages to my "whitelist." Now, when SpamAssassin sees those messages, it will pass them through without delay.

Despite the minor mishap, I've become a SpamAssassin evangelist. One recent convert: University of Pennsylvania professor David Farber, who runs an influential mailing list and spent a year being the Chief Technologist at the Federal Communications Commission. As you can imagine, Farber gets a ton of spam --- or at least he did, before he turned on SpamAssassin. Today he hardly gets any. "The spam stuff works like a charm," he told me in an email message.

Unfortunately, there is one catch with SpamAssassin: it only runs on UNIX-based email systems. If you are a typical home computer user who downloads your email from an Internet Service Provider, you can't run SpamAssassin --- you need to have your ISP run it for you. Many ISPs have in fact started to do so. If your ISP has not, drop them a note. Meanwhile, Hughes and a few of his compatriots are working on a commercial version of SpamAssassin that will run on Windows and cost under $30.

"It's only recently that end-users have become concerned with spam levels --- system administrators have been concerned for much longer," says Hughes, noting Hotmail and other ISPs are now receiving between 4 and 20 pieces of spam mail for every genuine email message.

============
Simson L. Garfinkel is a journalist, computer columnist, and the author of 11 books. His book Web Security, Privacy and Commerce was published last November by O'Reilly & Associates. Garfinkel is the part owner of Vineyard.NET, a small Internet Service Provider that serves the island of Martha's Vineyard.

More information about SpamAssassin can be found at http://www.spamassassin.org Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:45:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Milky Way due for a makeover

Stefan sez:

Despite the dangers, people often settle near volcanoes because the soil is periodically fertilized with mineral rich ash and dust.

Turns out that the Milky Way is due for a similar make over. Gas accumulating in the core may "soon" (200 million years) trigger a burst of star formation. Many of these new stars will be supernova whose death-throes spew new heavy minerals. These are required to build terrestrial planets and carbon-based life.

Alas, even if you're alive to witness the cataclysm, it won't be visible from Earth

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:12:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What does it mean for the Shrub to be ignorant of the existence of black people in Brazil?

Teresa on Making Light has posted the definitive rant on what's wrong with the Shrub asking if Brazil has black people. Beyond sniggering at yet another gaffe from the election-stealing idiot-savant presidente, Teresa tackles exactly what it means to not know that black people live in Brazil. (Note: There's some indication that Bush never made this gaffe, as is reported in WashPo. Thanks, Brian!)

Lay that aside for the moment. Let's go after this question systematically. At minimum, Bush is missing several centuries of the post-Columbus history of the New World. Within that, he's missing the history of the black Africans' emigration (kidnapping? diaspora?) to the New World. He can't know about the triangle trade, which means he has a defective grasp of early North American history, because the triangle trade was a big deal in Colonial times. He doesn't know anything about the history of Cuba, because if you know even a little about it, you'll stumble across the fact that there are blacks in Brazil. One somehow feels the Leader of the Free World ought to know something about Cuba, unless the title "Leader of the Free World" is now trading at par with"Holy Roman Emperor."

Next step: I think this also has to mean that Bush didn't know there are blacks in all the Latino countries in the Western Hemisphere. Now that he's been tipped off, he'll probably claim that he did too know that, but ... nope, can't. If he knew there were blacks in all the other countries, but he didn't know there were blacks in Brazil, he'd have to have thought Brazil was somehow an exception to the rule. But he can't have believed that. No sane person could. Brazil has the second-largest black population of any country in the world. (Nigeria's #1.) So: Bush can't have known there are black (mulato, actually) populations in every country in the Western Hemisphere. This is depressing when you consider that Latin America is supposedly his area of greatest expertise.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:48:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

XCOM on Wired News

Wired News reports on Inappropriate Technology:

The irreverence was to be expected, given the event sponsors: webzine NTKnow, "the weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the UK" and techno-art magazine Mute.

"We had twice as many people, and it was 10 times weirder than we expected," said pleased NTK co-editor Danny O'Brien. "It was like a big gathering of tribes -- you had all these geek tribes that would never normally meet."

Among the eclectic mix of exhibitors and attendants were the Commodore 64 Underground, the Campaign for Digital Rights, Copenhagen Free University, Dorkbot London, The Register, Spamradio and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:36:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SEED school to be neutered by administrator

Looks like SEED Alternative School is on its very last legs. This is the alternative high-school I attended from 1988 to 1992; it's the oldest public alternative school in Canada. The school's new administrator (who pitched a tantrum when he met with alumni, students and parents, rejecting the notion that SEED's stakeholders had any business advising him on his custodianship of a unique educational institution) has proposed the elimination of every "alternative" element of the school's day-to-day functioning. SEED School turned me into the person I am today, gave me the confidence to strike out on my own, start my own business, to become a writer.

Tim, the new administrator, has proposed eliminating outside instructors drawn from the community ("Catalysts" in SEED-speak); credit for out-of-classroom work unless it is formally assigned homework (I got English credit for writing and publishing science fiction); and will require fall classes to be scheduled the spring previous (SEED usually gathers its students every fall, determines which classes the students are interested in, and cooperatively sets a schedule that allows the greatest number of students to attend the most classes).

Finally, Tim will eliminate the idea that the students have any business guiding the direction of the school.

There are a lot of SEED alumni who read this blog; I can't imagine that we're any of us too pleased with this. Erik "Possum Man" Stewart has been working with current SEED student to try to resist this stuff; drop him some mail if you have any ideas (or just to lend some moral support). Link Discuss (Thanks, Possum!)

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

Lemony Snicket movie in the offing

Nickolodeon is making a big-budget feature-film adaptation of the pop-Gothic "Series of Unfortunate Events" kids' books. I love these books -- they're wickedly funny, nasty and smart. Best of all, Lemony Snicket, the pseudonymous author, is writing the screenplay. Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSIE 6.0 for OS X delayed

MacSecrets reports that Explorer 6 for OS X is will be delayed; doesn't mention if it will be Carbon or Cocoa. With Mozilla 1.0 (and its derivatives, like Chimera) kicking major OS X butt, MSFT had best get its act together and ship soon. IE 5.1 is really showing its age in speed and reliability. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Forget Microdrives... I want a Nanodrive!

IBM Research's new "Millipede" nano storage technology can cram a trillion bits of data--about 25 DVDs--into one square inch of polymer film. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:54:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help the EFF come up with sticker slogans

EFF is going to do a new round of stickers (laptop-sized; bumper stickers are a little too big for most purposes). We're looking for suggestions -- any ideas?

• Fair Use Creates Culture
• Copyright: A Carrot, Not a Stick
• Free the Spectrum 2.4!
• Fair Use Has a Posse

Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:36:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Using insurance companies to hack incentives for tech-security

Apropos of Bruce Schneier's ETCON talk on why security is a business problem, not a tech problem, WashPo is reporting that the Feds are pressuring tech companies to work with the insurance industry to establish liability (and relief therefrom) for security vulnerabilities.

The administration has been talking to insurance firms about the idea of writing cybersecurity insurance for companies, Clarke said, offering an example of one carrot-and-stick approach.

The catch, however, is that the coverage would only be available to companies that meet certain criteria developed by the insurance industry and the private sector.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:16:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BOMB.COM for sale

Byran sez: "This is an auction for the domain of BOMB.COM, and part of the proceeds from the auction will be donated to the American Cancer Society (actually all of the proceeds that go above $25,000... or a percentage in the case that it doesn't go that high. See the auction for details)." Link Discuss (Thanks, Bryan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vacuum tube computing

AOpen has shipped a motherboard with an on-board tube-amp; the first modern computing component to include a vaccuum tube! Link Discuss (Thanks, Higgins!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:13:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hong Kong embraces the Octopus

The "Octopus Card" is an anonymous stored-value card that was originally developed for the public-transit system, but increasingly all vendors accept it, from Starbuck's to 7-11. The card can be read through a purse or wallet, so all you need to do is wave your handbag in the direction of the reader to spend money. 95% of Hong Kong people carry the card. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill the Pill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:11:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hacked 802.11b delivers increased range, security

David Sifry (of the 802.11b tech company Sputnix) analyzes this weekend's NYT report of a new hacked 802.11b technology that yeilds increased security, range and throughput.

The company claims all sorts of neat stuff, including security, QoS, and other features. This can be performed in the CPE, probably not at the radio layer. The CPE can also be built very cheaply, and sold at about a $100 price point. A number of questions remain - are they using FHSS (old-fashioned 802.11 signals maxed out at 2Mbps and were FHSS) or DSSS? How do the CPEs react to multipath loss, reflections, and loss of line-of-sight to the brodcast tower? How well does the technology scale? Can it be used in a mesh configuration or is it point-to-multipoint? They claim that their low-cost CPE can be deployed without the need for an installer, which means it must be robust indeed.

LInk Discuss

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

Anarchism Triumphant

"Anarchism Triumphant" is a classic 1999 essay on the rise of the Free Software movement, written by a legal historian. The prose here is impeccable and incisive, razor-sharp commentary on the traditional notions of Intellectual Property and economic theorists, and the message is stirring as hell. Required reading, if you ask me.

We need to begin by considering the technical essence of the familiar devices that surround us in the era of "cultural software." A CD player is a good example. Its primary input is a bitstream read from an optical storage disk. The bitstream describes music in terms of measurements, taken 44,000 times per second, of frequency and amplitude in each of two audio channels. The player's primary output is analog audio signals [7]. Like everything else in the digital world, music as seen by a CD player is mere numeric information; a particular recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony recorded by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorale is (to drop a few insignificant digits) 1276749873424, while Glenn Gould's peculiarly perverse last recording of the Goldberg Variations is (similarly rather truncated) 767459083268.

Oddly enough, these two numbers are "copyrighted." This means, supposedly, that you can't possess another copy of these numbers, once fixed in any physical form, unless you have licensed them. And you can't turn 767459083268 into 2347895697 for your friends (thus correcting Gould's ridiculous judgment about tempi) without making a "derivative work," for which a license is necessary.

At the same time, a similar optical storage disk contains another number, let us call it 7537489532. This one is an algorithm for linear programming of large systems with multiple constraints, useful for example if you want to make optimal use of your rolling stock in running a freight railroad. This number (in the U.S.) is "patented," which means you cannot derive 7537489532 for yourself, or otherwise "practice the art" of the patent with respect to solving linear programming problems no matter how you came by the idea, including finding it out for yourself, unless you have a license from the number's owner.

Then there's 9892454959483. This one is the source code for Microsoft Word. In addition to being "copyrighted," this one is a trade secret. That means if you take this number from Microsoft and give it to anyone else you can be punished.

Lastly, there's 588832161316. It doesn't do anything, it's just the square of 767354. As far as I know, it isn't owned by anybody under any of these rubrics. Yet.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Danny!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jim Munroe's Everyone in Silico

My pal Jim Munroe's new novel, "Everyone in Silico," is out. Jim's a former editor at AdBusters, and his science fiction novels (FlyBoy Action Figure Comes with Gas-Mask, Angry Young Spaceman) are satirical political sf in the grand tradition of Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants. I read Silico in draft and was utterly delighted with it; it's a vicious and funny dissection of consumer culture. Jim is a DIY media kinda guy, so while you can buy his books in stores, but if you buy direct from him, you get his CDROM of DIY media, short films and an interactive novel called "Punk Points." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:50:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 10, 2002

My Apple Commercial

This is the first and probably the last time I'll ever be on a national TV commercial, so I am going to toot my horn. Here's a Quicktime of a TV commercial for Apple that I did. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:00:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 9, 2002

Headed home, offline while in transit

Leaving on a jet-plane -- I'm about to hop in a cab and head to Heathrow. If all goes to plan, I'll be back in SF, blogging, in about 18h. See you then! Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:16:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unwilling proctors for Turing Tests

An idea spawned by the Dyson talk: Kurzweil wants computers to think themselves smart. You write a piece of software than generates a million possibly intelligent instances, run them all in parallel, choose the most intelligent, use them as start-points for another million, repeat as necessary. The sticking point: how do you evaluate the most successful of each generation?

Answer: You point the software at IRC channels, have it impersonate human participants. A meta-process waits for someone to ask, "Goddammit, are you a bot?" whereupon you terminate the process. Millions of human IRC participants become unwilling proctors for a series of Turing Tests. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:02:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogging talk at Inappropriate Tech

Next up, the Blogging panel. Not the usual suspects: Neil McIntosh, the Deputy Editor of Guardian Online, Ben Hammersely, journo and RSS wonk, and Tom Coates, the blogger behind PlasticBag. Dave of NTK is moderating.

Ben: I have four blogs, one for each personality. One of the blogs that I write is about syndication with RSS, which subject I'm writing about for O'Reilly. Regular blogs can be just wanking, but these collaborative blogs are very useful; like email lists with a URL. Using the power of RSS, I read about 20-30 blogs a day. But I don't nead to read more, because blogs like Boing Boing reads all the individual blogs and extract the good stuff.

(I've just revealed that I read ~100 blogs and RSS feeds every day, to Dave's astonishment)

Dave: The repitition is painful. People all link to the Daypop Top 40.

Tom: Some people blog for fun, for self-promotion to pursue a special interest or to stay in touch with a bunch of friends.

Dave: Aren't blogs desined to cut down repitition?

Tom: No, my tool is designed to connect with with other bloggers with similar interests. You can get 200, 500 opinions on a given subject.

(Aside: Ben is blogging live from the stage)

Neil: The Guardian blog is only slightly collaborative -- there are only two of us.

Ben: Dan Gillmor was talking about cameras built into 3G phones in Japan and said there would come an event where 4,000 people would take pictures with their phones and post them to the Web before the new media noticed.

(Aside: the accoustics here suck and it's really hard to tell what the people on stage are saying, sorry for the spottiness of this entry)

Dave: How is this different from the DTP revolution, when the Mac made it possible for every idiot to publish bad zines and allowed newspapers to fire all their people in favor of self-taught amateurs?

Dave: What about aggregation?

Ben: Aggregation is the future. RSS is the future. It's not all sites about kittens. Good blogs are addictive: Boing Boing, Kuro5hin, Metafilter.

Tom: <damn I can't make out a word> There's a need for an editor -- Slwhether it's Slashdot like automation or a human being. My fave: kottke.org.

Neil: <also can't make out a word> I like scripting.com because it winds me up every time I visit it. Discuss

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

[George|Freeman] Dyson, Standage and Cadigan on science (fiction) at Inappropriate Technology

Watching the Dysons and Tom Standage (the guy who wrote the "Victorian Internet" telegraph book) talk about the future. Cadigan started off by pooh-poohing the singularity -- computers are a long, long way off from being as complex as human beings. Charlie and I exchanged glances -- doubling curves start shallow and grow FAST.

Aside via Charlie's blog:

Original ARPA contract to build 4000-ton nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft in 1958: 27 pages.

Original NASA contract to supply 1800-odd photocopied pages of old NASA files for NASA archives (at six cents per page): 32 pages.

George Dyson sez that if we have 100*10^6 transistors on a chip, we'll use half for the OS.

Cadigan just asked Freeman about his plan to visit Saturn by '70. Dyson sez we coulda done it, and used up all of our nukes besides (see Freeman's plan to make "putt-putt" rockets, exploding nukes off the ass-end of a [well-shielded] rocket to propel it).

Freeman: We thought we'd go to the moon, but nothing happened for 15 years. Then Sputnik went up and we said, "Thank God, now we'll get moving." We started thinking about how to use nukes to get into space.

(Aside, Charlie told me about a story he's working on where the French suboceanic nuclear tests were actually aimed at exterminating the cthuloid sea-monsters -- which is why the Brits didn't really protest)

George: I was 5 years old when the project began and it was a complete black hole of secrecy, Dad couldn't tell me he was working on a spaceship. Then the feds declassified it and he told me that we were moving to California so that we can go to Jupiter and I became consumed with the project. My most recent book with Penguin is the first public thorough documentation of the rise and slow starvation of that project.

Cadigan: How complicated was the Turk (sham Victorian chess-playing automaton)?

Standage: People like Babbage had argued about whether a machine that could play chess was a thinking machine. In the book, I disinter the old story to explore the ancestry of AI and computers. An automata is a self-moving machine, and so is a computer. Think cellular automata.

Since the Turk appeared, there have been lots of attempts to define machine intelligence: Interactivity (the earliest automata would just do something, wind down, get wound up and do it again). The Turk would respond -- it would interact and behave non-deterministically. But by that standard, an ATM is intelligent. By Babbage's time, intelligence was memory and foresight. Then Turing, who was very interested in chess, so it became a proxy for intelligence. Then conversation -- the Turing Test. It's always about imitation, trickery, games. The Turk was a trick, it was an imitation.

Cadigan: So instead of trying to develop intelligent machines, we've been tricked into developing machines that play chess! Lately we've been hearing a lot about complexity, and there's this notion that once the complexity of a machine achieves the complexity of a human brain, something intelligent emerges. It's fun to imagine this spontaneous transcendance, but this really isn't good science.

Standage: The more you know about computers, the less likely you are to believe in this. The bigger a computer is, the more brittle it is.

Me: horseshit! The Internet is the most complicated machine we've ever made, and its robustness comes from its complexity and size.

Standage: Kurzweil's arguments are spurious numerical arguments.

Me: Talk about spurious. Ever heard of evolutionary software?

George: There's a slim possibility that we could revive Project Orion. Arthur Clarke wrote me a letter: I was shocked by the story of the early nuke scientist who lit a smoke off a nuclear blast -- doesn't he know that smoking's bad for your health?

Cadigan: Freeman, what are you thinking about?

Freeman: If we're serious about going to space, we should be thinking about it. How do we grow potatoes on Mars? How to we adapt ourselves to live on other planets rather than embarking on terraforming adventures.

Cadigan: Are you still a disbeliever in nanotech?

Freeman: Oh, it exists, but it's not revolutionary, not like biotech. Most of what nano was supposed to do are being done far better with biotech. Nano is neither as dangerous or useful as biotech.

Audience: You didn't like Wolfram's book, Freeman. Is the world designed by mathematics or algorithms?

Freeman: I was quoted as saying it was worthless. I was also supposed to have said that I only glanced at it before pronouncing judgment. But that's not true, I looked at it rather carefully. But while it's interesting, it's mostly not new. Most of the interesting cellular automata was done by Conway with the Game of Life. Wolfram's elaboration of the Game of Life doesn't amount to much, despite his completely unfounded claims that CA theory governs physics, biology, etc. His programs are beautiful and interesting toys, but they lack intelligence.

Me: The most complex machine we've ever built (the Internet) owes its robustness to its complexity -- complexity is NOT brittleness.

Standage: You're right -- the Internet isn't engineered; it's grown. It's more like gardening and less like science.

Freeman: Anything complex enough to be intelligent can't be understood, anything simple enough to be understood can't be intelligent, which is why Kurzweil won't build an intelligent machine.

(me: I don't think you get Kurzweil. He wants to evolve intelligent machines that he can't understand, by using raw, brute-force computation) Link Discuss (Thanks for the new Conway link, Seth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inappropriate technology is underway

Inappropriate Technology is in force! I snagged a copy of Craphound (no, not my short story, the excellent zine of the same name -- the vendor tells me that Sean is planning another issue, hurrah! (Sean, my offer to host zine.craphound.com still stands, hear?). Ben Moor's exhibition of short educational ephemeral films is up and running. We're all chortling heartily to the strains of a serious-voiced Briton telling us to look around for calcium; now it's switched over to a talk-show that asks the musical question "Are British men lousy lovers -- calls cost 10p" The audience is vastly disappointed that we didn't get to find out whether calcium is soluble. Charlie, who used to be a chemist, says that the salts are usually soluble, but the metal burns if you drop it in water. Danny explains the interruption: "It's fair use -- we're only aloud to show as much of the film as will leave you unsatisfied, otherwise it's an infringment." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:26:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Festival of Inappropriate Technology today in London

Well, I'm off to Extreme Computing/Inappropriate Technology, where I'll be giving and getting a bunch of talks. If you're in London and looking for a wicked and thought-provoking day, head over to Camden Town. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:41:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will WiFi be killed by lamp-posts?

Glenn Fleishman analyses Cringley's column about the coming scarcity in 2.4GHz, the unregulated spectrum that 802.11 networks call home. Without regulation, there is always the possibility that someone will start abusing the spectrum, deploying noisy applications that ruin it for everyone else. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:17:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 8, 2002

Ear-wax DNA

Researchers discover the gene for ear-wax. Cotton-bud vendors rejoice, begin sinister plans. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gnat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:35:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY Haunted Mansion

Mena's written up detailed instructions (and created a printable PDF) for making your own Haunted Mansion stretch-gallery; glue it together facing in and you've got a peep-box; facing out and you've got an ornament. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:32:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chatterbot butter-substitute pitches self to supermarket drones

Special tubs of Parkay will ship with motion-sensor chips that make than say "Butter" and wiggle when shoppers pass them at the supermarket.

"These tubs are a major in-store piece of theater," Kramer told The Post.

He added that research shows shoppers make 70 percent of their buys on impulse - making a Parkay pitch in the supermarket potentially more effective than on TV.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:41:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nude clothes

These "nude clothes" are a couture version of the oversized beach-tees with silk-screened muscle-torsos and bikini-bosoms, the direct descendent of the John-Hughes-movie-rebel tuxedo-tee. Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:19:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Greasy kids' stuff trumps Xanadu

Quinn Norton's piece on greasy kids' stuff, Ted Nelson's cantankerous insistence on characterizing the Web as "decorated directories" and matters similar is fantastic.

ted nelson, still not buying in, vs. the web. as with all the old wise white guys, he makes some good points, i think he may be right about the semantic web... and as far as he seems to be confused about what xml is, he would be right. fortunately, xml isn't meant to be used as a new set of hierarchical embedded formats. but it's hard to read his purist view because it doesn't screen wrap. still, joey de villa is right- we must respect our sages, our founders. out here we have so little history and we have to treasure it.... my screen *does* wrap because of ted nelson.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Quinn!)

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

Onion article presented as fact to more than one million Chinese

Beijing's largest newspaper ran an Onion article as fact. "America's Finest News Source" indeed. Now more than ever, China needs Peek-a-Booty. Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

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

Hollywood and ISPs plug the pipes

David Janes points to two thought-provoking articles on the future of the Internet. The first is a piece on a plan by ISPs to charge you different amounts based on what you're downloading; the second is a nice bit of investigative journalism from Salon about the ever-concentrated ownership of Internet pipes. Together, they're pretty chilling reading. Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:04:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blog tools exhaustively compared

Fantastic blog-tool comparison table. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:00:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Twain's letter to the queen

This is my actual favorite Mark Twain essay of all time, the "Letter to the Queen of England." I am sitting on the floor of Manar's flat here in Shepard's Bush and wondering if this counts as subversion in the UK.

MADAM: You will remember that last May Mr. Edward Bright, the clerk of the Inland Revenue Office, wrote me about a tax which he said was due from me to the Government on books of mine published in London — that is to say, an income tax on the royalties. I do not know Mr. Bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers; for I was raised in the country and have always lived there, the early part in Marion county Missouri before the war, and this part in Hartford county Connecticut, near Bloomfield and about 8 miles this side of Farmington, though some call it 9, which it is impossible to be, for I have walked it many and many a time in considerably under three hours, and General Hawley says he has done it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best that I write your Majesty. It is true that I do not know your Majesty personally, but I have met the Lord Mayor, and if the rest of the family are like him, it is but just that it should be named royal; and likewise plain that in a family matter like this, I cannot better forward my case than to frankly carry it to the head of the family itself. I have also met the Prince of Wales once in the fall of 1873, but it was not in any familiar way, but in a quite informal way, being casual, and was of course a surprise to us both. It was in Oxford street, just where you come out of Oxford into Regent Circus, and just as he turned up one side of the circle at the head of a procession, I went down the other side on the top of an omnibus. He will remember me on account of a gray coat with flap pockets that I wore, as I was the only person on the omnibus that had on that kind of a coat; I remember him of course as easy as I would a comet. He looked quite proud and satisfied, but that is not to be wondered at, he has a good situation. And once I called on your Majesty, but you were out.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:55:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

One of my favorite Twain essays of all time: James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences:

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "Deerslayer" tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the "Deerslayer" tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the "Deerslayer" tale to the end of it.

6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the "Deerslayer" tale, as Natty Bumppo's case will amply prove.

Link Discuss (via Metalingo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:49:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wonder Twin movie: activate!

The Wonder Twins (Wonder Twin powers, activate! Form of: a blazing phallus; shape of: a gorilla!) have been optioned for a live-action feature film.

The Wonder Twins are two aliens from the planet Exxor. With the cry "Wonder Twin powers, activate!" Zan has the power to change into any water-based form, while Jayna can become any animal.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:42:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Heinlein award created

The Heinlein Society has created the occassional Heinlein Award, given for hard sf that inspires the human exploration of space. Judges are Greg Bear, Joe Haldeman, Yoji Kondo, Elizabeth Moon, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Spider Robinson, Stanley Schmidt and Charles Sheffield, plus U.S. Naval Academy English professors Herb Gilliland and John Hill. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:35:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Austrians strip Walkman trademark

Sony's lost the trademark on "Walkman" in Austria. No big loss, as Sony music appears to have strong-armed Sony electronics into giving up on digital personal stereos (Sony's MusicClip, which exclusively supported ass-tastic formats like OpenAG and Real was a total marketplace failure), ceding the market to formerly no-name Singaporean outfits like Creative and major Vaio competitors like Apple. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:31:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 7, 2002

30 years after FALILV: Hunter S. Thompson on Las Vegas today

HST interviewed about Las Vegas for Las Vegas City Life

O'Brien: The city has changed a lot since the book was published. Have you kept up with the changes or, as you seemed to indicate, is the city something you got over a while ago?

Thompson: The city's frightening now. That's the basis of my reaction to Las Vegas. It's not the same city I wrote about. It's not the same place at all. You'll notice that even the - what do you call them? - milestone or trademark casinos are gone.

O'Brien: You mentioned 14 hotel-casinos in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I think only four of them are still standing.

Thompson: Let me make note of that. [Papers shuffle and there's a break in the conversation.]

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve Portigal!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:12:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Manhattan in your back garden

Guy built a replica light-up NYC skyline just outside his window, obscuring the otherwise mundane view.

Approximately 7 feet past the window is a large (Your mother's been talking about me again has she?) single plane of wood with windows cut into it. The 7 x 11 foot plane of wood is actually two layers of wood with a ~1" air gap where xmas lights are mounted to light up the inside. The front plane is thin (1/8") and has the 1540 windows cut into it while the back plane of wood is 1/2" sheets of plywood. The xmas lights (about 700 lights) are mounted behind the front plane so that the light bounces off of the plywood (back plane) to scatter the light so that pinpoints of light are not visible. The models of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings consist of multiple layers in order to simulate the effect of having lights shining on their own roofs.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:22:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 6, 2002

Will the music industry turn into the book industry?

Very thought-provoking Michael Wolff article on the theory that the music industry will turn into the book industry; smaller numbers, reduced circumstances, fewer gazillion-sellers. A fair number of book-trade people read Boing Boing -- whatcha think?

In other words, there'll still be big hits (Celine Dion is Stephen King), but even if you're fairly high up on the music-business ladder, most of your time, which you'd previously spent with megastars, will be spent with mid-list stuff. Where before you'd be happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you'll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units -- that will be your bread and butter. You'll sweat every sale and dollar. Other aspects of the business will also contract -- most of the perks and largesse and extravagance will dry up completely. The glamour, the influence, the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs -- gone. Instead, it will be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly anachronistic business, catering to an aging clientele, without much impact on an otherwise thriving culture awash in music that only incidentally will come from the music industry.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:24:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spiderman 2 available online

IRC bootleggers are distributing copies of Spiderman 2, marking the first instance of a movie being circulated online before it's been filmed.

Movie pirates infiltrated Raimi's home while he slept. They used an advanced EEG imaging system along with Apple's new QuickTime 6.0 beta with Brain2Vid technology to capture the movie. Pirates then edited out the unnecessary portions of what they captured such as images of Raimi's mother yelling at him because he forgot to take out the garbage.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Simon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:16:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"B" Cell batteries: Mystery solved

Stefan sez:

If you go to a battery display in a drug or convenience store or Radio Shack, you'll find AAA-cell batteries, and AA-cell batteries, and C-cell batteries and big 'ol D-cell batteries.

But no A or B cell batteries.

This has bothered me for years, and past searches turned up nothing.

Now, thanks to an article on the Discovery Channel Canada site, I know what a B cell looks like.

Apparently, A cells are available in Canada, but they didn't include one on the little photoshopped battery line-up included in the article.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:03:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MC Escher lizard tesselation paving stones

MC Escher paving stones -- what a brilliant idea. I wish I had a garden. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jef!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:51:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

We're suing on behalf of ReplayTV customers, and Hollywood is *steamed*

Woo! EFF and several ReplayTV customers are suing to establish the legality of their use of ReplayTV devices.

Responding to both the lawsuit brought against ReplayTV and the industry's public claims that these actions are "theft," five customers, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Ira Rothken of the Rothken Law Firm in San Rafael, filed a federal lawsuit in Los Angeles asking the court to rule that their use of the ReplayTV device is legal under copyright law.

"The studios are using their copyrights as an excuse to control what individuals do with their own property in the privacy of their own homes," said EFF Intellectual Property Attorney Robin Gross.

"Rather than encourage innovation and provide customers with an experience worthy of attention, Hollywood intends to outlaw a new and promising technology," commented EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "It's just as alarming as the Betamax case of the 1980s when Hollywood tried to ban VCRs."

"These Hollywood guys want to stop me from using my digital video recorder like I use my VCR, like for watching shows when I want or zipping through commercials," explained Craig Newmark, craigslist.com community founder, ReplayTV user, and plaintiff in the case. "I want to give my nephews and nieces a break from the rampant consumerism on TV by using ReplayTV's commercial skipping feature."

And Hollywood has already started issuing official, dismissive FUD about it:

This suit is nothing more than a publicity stunt.  This complaint mischaracterizes the nature of the case against SonicBlue and ReplayTV.  Our lawsuit is against SonicBlue and ReplayTV - not individual users.  We have never indicated any desire or intent to bring legal action against individual consumers for use of this device.

SonicBlue and ReplayTV were aware that they were stepping over the line of legality when they made and marketed this device.  Any complaint that consumers may have is with SonicBlue and Replay.

You know you're doing the right thing when studio execs go out of their way to tell the world that there's nothing to see here, move along. Link Discuss (Thanks, Robin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:31:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mozilla 1.0: first impressions

I downloaded Mozilla 1.0 (for Mac OS X) this morning. In the few short hours I've been using it, I like it a lot. You can search from the same field you use to enter URLs (and select the search engine you want to use), and it seems to be more sprightly than IE. I also like the download manager and bookmark manager better than IE so far, too. I'd like to hear what other Boingers think about it. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:32:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dee Dee Ramone RIP 1952-2002

Ramone's bass player, Dee Dee Ramone, died in LA of an apparent drug overdose. Link Discuss (Thanks, Meri!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:30:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lightning on Demand

Neato co-op of Tesla Coil enthusiasts who stage high-energy events. Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cracked Magazine is back

Cracked Magazine is publishing again, under the ownership of the Weekly World News's senior editor! Did that little low-budg Alfred E. Neuman clone with the janitor's cap and broom have a name?

He was delighted last week to see Mad raising its cover price from the $2.99 that Cracked charges, suggesting that Alfred E. Neuman's catch phrase change to "What, me greedy?"

"Just when they thought we were gone, they raised their price," he said. "That's why you need competition. We're in business to make kids laugh, not cry. I think it's working.

"This is so classic. Mad hates us. Boy, do they hate us. It's strange. I don't understand it. If your market is healthy, you sell, too. It takes two to play the game.

"I can't worry about them," he added with a laugh. "We are not number two anymore as far as I'm concerned. What - me worry?

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:21:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gaming the community

Derek's posted an interesting analysis of online moderation systems' inevitable gaming, as when Slashdot users Karma-whore. He makes some recommendations about the optimal way to reduce gaming (some of which I disagree with, some of which sound like interesting ideas).

Slashdot has added still more inventive features. A simple but effective reputation management system is in operation now, allowing members to list each other as a friend or foe. The ratings are even public, so you can see who's list you're on. And even better, you can apply a filter to your lists, rating all your friend's comments up, and your foes' down. It's now possible to make it so you never have to see a particular user's posts again: just list them as a foe, and set all foe posts to "-5." In a few clicks, they'll be off your radar forever.

Problem is, all this groovy functionality adds several layers of new interface elements. Every filter, rating, and setting means adding another button, dropdown, and submit button. It's easy to see a future, not very far away, when the site grows so interface-heavy it will scare off all but the most determined new users. While what might not slow down the rabid Slashdotters, it would certainly impede a new site with a fragile audience.

Worse, sometimes all the widgets backfire altogether, encouraging the very behavior they're designed to avert. Sometimes all the rules have a dangerous side-effect: they create a game.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:09:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Higher learning for a lower purpose

The Learning Annex has cancelled its course on picking up Asian women. Jeez. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:59:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PalmOS family tree

Fantastically fantastic family tree of PalmOS devices. Man, that tree's got some ramified branches. Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:52:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kazaa users accidentally share everything

Usability study shows 5 out of 6 Kazaa users can't figure out that they're sharing their entire hard-drives. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:48:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neurohacker blog

Neuroprosthesis News is an excellent neuroscience/neurohacking blog. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gyongyi!)

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

Damn, that's a cute phone

The Pi-Pi-to-Phone is a dangerously cute new Japanese kids' cellphone that is preprogrammed to only dial three numbers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Yuichi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:32:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 5, 2002

Instructions for Simple Gauss Rifle

Super simple instructions on making a gauss rifle out of a wooden ruler, some tiny magnets, and some steel ball bearings. Also comes with an excellent explanation of how it works, along with why it can't be modified into a perpetual motion machine. You can order the magnets from the site. Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:57:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney's wants Tron's master control program

Gordon Mohr sez: "Has anyone else commented yet on the eerie similarity between Disney's proposed controls on all media devices, and the agenda of the evil Master Control Program (MCP) in Disney's 1982 movie Tron? If not, then let me be the first, in my OreillyNet weblog entry." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:57:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The fake persuaders

Last year, a couple of researchers at the University of Berkeley released a report claiming that pollen from Monsanto's genetically-modified corn has ruined native maize from Mexico. Monsanto hired a PR firm specializing in viral marketing to create fake people who posted pro-Monsanto propaganda on various mailing lists. Link Discuss (Thanks, Adam in Poland!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:53:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anthony's life is in your hands

Visitors to Anthony's website can vote on what Anthony should do next. His life is in your hands:

Should he go to Grand Rapids for a day for no apparent reason?

Where should he make his father sleep when he comes into town for 3 nights?

Link Discuss (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:17:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The secret ingredient is no longer beef. The secret ingredient is now a mixture of love and fear of the courts.

McDonald's will pay out #6.85MM to vegetarian and Hindu groups by failing to report on the beef tallow used to flavor their french-fries. More suits are pending. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:01:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

500,000 auto-detectable RSS feeds light up

LiveJournal has just enabled automatic RSS discovery for 250,000 online diaries (and the other 250,000 will light up when they are updated. As LiveJournal's Mark Kraft puts it:

Always love it when we can do things like this -- It's like switching on the lights at a baseball stadium.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:56:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PowerPoint Tennis

Forget Photoshop Tennis. The real leet action is PowerPoint bake-offs; competitions to make the "best" deck of PPT slides. Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:39:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 4, 2002

Muscovite mole people discovered in urban spelunking expiditions

Cool article describing the labyrinthian world beneath the streets of Moscow.

The underworld is not all rubbish, rats, and dampness. Some accommodations are well equipped--with radio, television, and heat. People cook food and bring up children. In the morning, breadwinners leave their homes through manholes to make a living.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Noel!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:19:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shiny balls of mud take Japan by storm

The latest Japanese schoolyard trend is hikaru dorodango (shiny balls of mud). Children painstakingly shape mud into near-perfect spheres, then polish them. A research scientist with an electron microscope uncovered the secret of their lustre.

In the process of making dorodango, the children demonstrated behavior that was surprising from the perspective of developmental psychology. A two-year-old child would walk behind Kayo, imitating his actions. At three, children would come up beside him and snatch his dirt. Four and five year olds pretended to ignore him out of pride, but afterwards they could be seen working with determined expressions on their faces. Children could also be found sharing information about where to find the best dirt and sand for making dorodango or even sometimes keeping such information secret. Dorodango were made famous all over Japan when public broadcaster NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.) took up the phenomenon in a program aired nationally in June 2001.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

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

Peter Bagge's Hate Annual #2

Peter Bagge has always been one of my favorite cartoonists, ever since I discovered him in the pages of R. Crumb's Weirdo in the mid-1980's. Bagge did a couple of great series for Fantagraphics. The first was Neat Stuff, which had one of my all time favorite comic book characters, Girly Girl, a character who managed to be obnoxious, stupid, mean-spirited, and endearing at the same time. Later, Bagge created Hate which became a lot more popular. Hate's main attraction was the dysfunctional Bradley family. Over the years, readers got to watch the family unravel. I don't remember when Hate stop being published, but I'm pleased to learn that it's back as an annual. I just got issue number 2 (still waiting to get number 1) and it is as good as ever. Buddy Bradley is now married with a baby, but he's just as irresponsible and slothful as ever. Also included are a couple of wonderful stories Bagge wrote for Suck.com (created by Boing Boing's webmaster, Carl), one about the Miss America Pageant, the other about Mike Love of the Beach Boys. I'm happy Bagge is still at it and in top form! Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:44:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barbie's tiki dream-hut

Check it out: Barbie-sized tiki-furniture! My God, my tastes have become mainstream. Link Discuss (Thanks, Suzy!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:38:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Maasai greive for 9-11

Zed sez: "A Kenyan village donates 14 cows (precious to them) to the U.S. after the stories of a local returning from studies in the U.S. impress on them what 9/11 was like." Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:23:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Humming is theft

Nice satirical essay about the latest Naptersization threat: humming.

The movement has also won widespread support from several of the lesser-known stars of yesterday. At a local Burger King, ex-super star Vanilla Ice was despondent over the lack of money from those who hum his songs.

"Why shouldn't I get more money? I want it. I want it. I want it. Do you think I like eating cat food every day? Everyone else gets paid for work they did 15 years ago, why not musicians?" said a confused VI.

The record companies did not, however, make it clear as to how exactly the "humming rights tax" would be collected. There have been suggestions that a levy similar to those on blank CDs and other media might be a model to follow. Every one who has a larynx (and thus has the ability to hum without paying) could be subject to a fixed yearly fee.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:20:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

802.11 wardriving auto-mapper

Sweet app that mates your GPS-equipped laptop to your NetStumbler 802.11b network-detector and a satellite, stylistic or aerial map, automatically plotting all the WiFi base-stations you discover as you war-drive/walk through your environs.

mapserver.zhrodague.net is a tool for visually displaying position and signal-strength of WiFi (802.11b) Access-Points. We are still in development, but you can see how quickly we've been able to put this together -- and it works. This was setup and functional in one week. The website and clean-up took another week. It was brought into being to have the ability to show maps, and prove that people actually use this technology in the Pittsburgh area for the Pittsburgh Wireless Community (http://www.pghwireless.com). Soon we will have each point indicating singnal-strength, I had a link to scans near my apartment, but until we get the AP-data coming from a database, it's just way to slow to load the (currently) 33589 entries, and plot them -- stay tuned!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Drew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:17:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Howard Rheingold's Reboot talk

Howard Rheingold, of Whole Earth, WELL, Electric Minds, Mindstorms, Virtual Reality and other kinds of fame, is talking now at Reboot, giving the morning keynote. He's doing a populist spiel: "The computer industry did not create the personal computer; it was created by people in their 20s who wanted a tool of their own. The Internet was created for the most part by people in their 20s, not the phone company. They didn't know what the tool was for, but they knew that other people would invent uses -- they built the Internet without a central control, to enable innovation." Damn, he's stealing my afternoon talk! "The Web was not created by VCs; it was created by thousands of people, because it was a cool thing to do: a public good.

"Now we're at a time when the public good created by these people over the past 20 years are being turned into private property. Hollywood, the recording industry, the electronics manufacturers, the cable companies -- they want us to become consumers again. We're at the beginning of the third revolution (1. Computers, 2. Internet): Communications plus pervasive computing will be the third. Governments think they know what it's going to be, but some of the people in this room will prove them wrong. The mass media, for the most part, does not know what it's talking about.

"Most journalists believe that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates invented the PC. But it's not true: they had stood on the shoulders of giants; living giants; giants who lived within driving distance of my home in the Bay Area.

"Doug Englebart said: In 1950 -- 1950 -- he was 25 years old. He drove to his engineering office every day through the largest fruit orchard in the world, now known as Silicon Valley, when he hit upon the idea of using computers to solve problems. Seems obvious, but in 1950, the world's entire RAM was 1K. He wrote a paper, "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect," which is still worth reading today.

"Not long thereafter, he found himself at DARPA. But Doug didn't want to build weapons. He gathered a group of like-minded souls, people who wanted to augment their minds with DARPA grants, not find better ways of killing people. The hippies of DARPA. In 1968, he demoed their labor, words and graphics on a screen. Everyone who was there was transformed, it changed what they wanted to do with their lives. There were no fonts, so it all looked like handwritten letters, but it was painted on the screen with vector graphics. He demoed links, he demoed outliners (Hi, Dave!).

"So came the birth of realtime computing. The hackers at MIT fed their computers on punched tape, which they kept in an open, unlocked drawer. Anyone could use the tapes, but moreover, anyone could improve them.

"Jobs and Woz started Apple: Jobs wanted to build a business, Woz wanted to build tools, and then along came Bill Gates, and his famous letter, which argued against openness, against a public good, against a commons.

"This commons, embedded in the Internet in the end-to-end principal is now under attack. Governments and corporations keep trying to push the Internet from the edges to the center. Tim Benners-Lee had an idea that embodied end-to-end, the ability for anyone to link to anything. Not just so scientists could share research, but so that anyone could create and share resources. Hey presto, the Web!

"Tim didn't need to go to the owner of the Internet and ask for the architecture to be changed. Because the Internet was created as an open platform, he could just do it. He did it. He put it in the public domain. Journos ask him if he regrets not earning money from each page, but while there's nothing wrong with being an entrepreneur, most innovation comes out of the public domain.

"Innovation is the unexpected combination of things: microprocessors and CRTs, newspapers and telephones. The Internet is place where we're no longer "consumers," we're participants. The very best innovations are ones that are platforms for other innovations. The press thought the PC was a toy until some Boston hackers created the spreadsheet.

"Technology isn't just hardware, nor software: it's the way people use it -- it's the things they create. Without this, you've got appliances, not revolutions.

"Welcome to the third revolution: the intersection of mobile telephones, embedded computing chips, and the Internet. 3G: a top-down, consumer idea is moribund, but 1.5MM wireless cards are being sold in the US alone. And that's just for starters: you will create new things, and they will change everything.

Nikolaj: TBL is now sitting as the chair of the W3C, which is now seen by many as a block to growth. In Denmark, we have a long tradition of co-ops, but it seems that inevitably these become commercial concerns. Will the Internet follow the same pattern? Will it inevitably centralize?

Howard: It's up to you. Commons have vulnerabilities. Viz. the Tragedy of the Commons. There are lots of Commons that are not misused: common grazing grounds, common fisheries. Somehow, these fail to become a centralized resource. Some hold that we will tear each others' throats out until some authority comes along and enforces civility.

"What is it that mobile devices and the Internet give us? They make it easier to take collective action; they make it easier for us to do things together. The sociologists have been investigating this for some time. They ask why the Tragedy of the Commons is not universal, why some commons persist. They study Filipino rice farmers, Japanese forresters, and thousands of others of venerable commons. There are some principles they all have in common:

1. No central authority dictates the terms by which they share.

2. The commons don't rely on altruism; rather they rely on self-interest. Virtual communities are a great example: by inviting people to your community you increase the resources that are available to you. The Spanish farmers had an arrangement like this with their irrigation; every week you got to take a certain amount of water out, and your turn immediately followed your neighbors'. Which meant that if you took more water than was your share, your neighbor noticed, and word got around. Reputation is important

3. In some commons, the sheep shit grass. When you d/l from Napster, you actually make files available.

A civic society is not government, it's not your employer, it's what we do as citizens. No society really can exist and be hospitable unless people cooperate with their neighbors. You must be able to resolve conflicts without recourse to legislation or injunction. The public sphere is how we govern ourselves. It's the debates, the arguments, the discussions that citizen have about everything from foreign policy to the conditions of the road.

The public sphere has always been closely linked to communications. The printing press didn't abolish war, but it did create a literate population that was able to educate itself. Science existed a long time, but it didn't progress much while it depended on geniuses like Newton. It wasn't just the Method that advanced science, it was the idea that any person could read the literature and perform his own experiments and advance the field.

"We have as many problems as ever, but maybe that's not human nature. Maybe we just don't know how to think about human problems yet. Until the 16th Century, people suffered all kinds of hardship, and their explanations for this was superstitious, because they didn't know how to think about these hardships. The germ theory of diseases -- contrasted with ill humors and spirits -- gave us the tools to think about this, and the printing press spread these tools, permanently.

"The mass-media, with the power to reach into everyones' homes, was based on broadcasting, a small number of people who could talk to the mass. If you were in a dictatorship and you want to take over, you capture the televisions station. Samizdat was driven by photocopiers. In a democracy, television is expensive to run, spectrum is expensive. The Internet won't create the public sphere, but it will create the opportunity to create the public sphere.

Audience member: What's the role of money in all this?

Howard: Money is great tech: I don't have to carry around three sheep to trade for shoes. It makes it possible for people to do things that were impossible before. One characteristic of money is that it accumulates. If you have a lot of it, you'll get more of it. Mass media and its power demands so much money that it generates inevitable corruption."

Audience member: What about censorship?

Howard: The Internet may interpret censorship as damage and route around it, but it seems that the Chinese government have licked this; however, Peek-a-Booty and other technologies are arms-racing with the Chinese government. Arms-races are usually very good drivers for rapid innovation.

Audience member: Can't money serve as a motivator for innovation?

Howard: Don't think that money is never a motive force, but the Internet, the PC, and the Web weren't motivated by money. There are 0.5MM blogs, but only three of them make any money, the rest are in it for reputation, love, to contribute to the commons.

Thomas: Didn't the dotcoms fail because they didn't attend to money?

Howard: We may never know -- VCs pumped huge amounts of money in, skimmed the cream very early, and when businesses failed to make a profit in two or three years, they pulled the plug. Most of the great businesses of today weren't profitable in two or three years.

But look at the winners: eBay, wouldn't exist without a lot of individuals.

The People Power 2 demonstrations in the Phillipines. Everyone in the Phillipines watched the government investigation of corruption, until someone in government pulled the plug. Twenty minutes later, coordinated by SMS messages, 20,000 people were demonstrating in the main square. The leaders told the military that they'd have 1,000,000 the next day unless the investigation was made public.

Audience member: How can we finance technology samizdat in the developing world

Howard: 1 in 8 Namibians has a mobile phone -- it's cheaper to set up mobile infrastructure than it is to deploy wire infrastructure.

Thomas: I just got back from Ghana, where ISPs are building 802.11b wISPs on the cheap. Whiel they have a demand for gear that is suited to hot and sandy climate, it seems likely that we can unwire the whole world.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:59:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 3, 2002

Grading the world's flags

Letter-grades assinged to the world's flags, by an utterly obsessive flag nut. The commentary ("Do not put a picture of a parrot on your flag! [This goes for you too, Guatamala!]") is wonderful! Link Discuss (Thanks, Derryl!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Swedish mobile phone magazine -- dull and curiously fascinating

Danny's review of Brain Heart magazine is precious:

All the articles are written in a eurojetsetting Scandlish intonation: perfectly grammatical with a plodding sing-song quality. "Let's assume that we would like to take a wireless tourist tour through Stockholm's 750-year-old Old Town, Gamla Stan. What would the tour look like?", begins one rip-roaring read. Every cover has a man and a women from the endlessly dull business world of Swedish telecoms, wearing these perfect clothes, perfectly photographed in perfect settings.

Subscriptions are free! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:27:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Empathic ATMs

ATM companies wants to ship ATMs that use expression-analysis software to detect and respond to your moods when you're withdrawing money. Better idea: assume every customer is anxious about not having enough money and assume further that they're pissed off at how long the ATM is taking and how much their bank charges them to use it, and respond accordingly.

"We're teaching the computers to be more like human beings," said Dave Schrader, an engineer with Teradata, a division of automatic teller machine manufacturer NCR. In an attempt to give consumers [(God, how I'm coming to loathe the word consumer; bank-customers aren't "consumers" of anything; they're creditors, for Christ's sake) CD] a better banking experience, Schrader is teaching ATMs to discern emotions.

"The value of the tech is we're taking the ATM one stage closer to behaving like a good, perceptive teller might so that interactive dialogue can start beginning," Schrader said. "The ATM can adapt itself to you instead of you adapting yourself to the technology."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

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

Pulsejet go-karts!

While turbojets may have replaced the venerable pulsejet in most applications, this Kiwi hobbyist has latched onto the pulsejet as a simple and hyper-cool design for building his own jet-propelled go-karts. Instructions included! Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:59:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bush admits global warming exists, report recommends AC to offset effects

Well, the Shrub has finally admitted that global warming exists. He had to, after a study commissioned by his own government said, basically, "Duh, yes, stop being an idiot." However, the same report contains such howlers as:

"Health impacts ... can be ameliorated through such measures as the increased availability of air conditioning."

CO2 junkies in denial are so sad. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

$53 WiFi access points

Now that you've got your $35 wireless card, how about a $53 access-point to go with it? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:54:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

H4x0r Economist

Heaven help me, but I just can't stop laughing at H4x0R Economist, a comic strip which basically consists of pictures of Alan Greenspan with speech balloons filled with haxor-speak. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:58:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi for $35

802.11b cards for $35 after rebate. The chipset costs about $22 wholesale; how much lower can the prices go? I'm waiting for the day when wireless cards are sold in blisterpacks of five and ten at the lcoal WalMart. Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:45:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Short futures on the cheap

Patrick's selling off cheap copies of the first two volumes in his Starlight original sf anthology series. To call these seminal is to badly undersell them. They are the best anthologies of original sf to be published since Damon Knight's Orbit series, and are the kind of summer reading that every one of us should be enriching our minds with this year. Starlight 3 is brilliant, too (hey, I'm in it), but it's still fresh and new and so you'll have to shell out several dollars more for it -- still, I like to think that once you've finished 1 and 2, you'll be drawn straight to 3, hang the price.

Starlight 1. Winner of the World Fantasy Award. Original science fiction and fantasy from Michael Swanwick, Andy Duncan, Gregory Feeley, Robert Reed, Susanna Clarke, Susan Palwick, Martha Soukup, Carter Scholz, John M. Ford, Mark Kreighbaum, and Maureen F. McHugh, and Jane Yolen. From this volume, Jane Yolen's "Sister Emily's Lightship" won the Nebula Award. "The best original science fiction anthology of the year." --Gardner Dozois, editor, The Year's Best Science Fiction

Starlight 2. Original fantasy and science fiction from Robert Charles Wilson, Susanna Clarke, M. Shayne Bell, Raphael Carter, Martha Soukup, David Langford, Carter Scholz, Ellen Kushner, Esther M. Friesner, Jonathan Lethem, Angelica Gorodischer (tr. Ursula K. Le Guin), Geoffrey A. Landis, and Ted Chiang. From this volume, Raphael Carter's "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation" won the Tiptree Award, and Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" won the Sturgeon Award and the Nebula Award. "The sort of anthology that science fiction desperately needs, driven by straightforward notions of good writing and good storytelling." --The New York Review of Science Fiction

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:29:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

In-vitro, post-mortem, in limbo

The Social Security Administration won't provide benefits to the in-vitro, post-mortem child of an football-player who was conceived from sperm frozen before her father began chemotherapy. Welcome to the future, I guess.

For the past five years, Chappell, a single parent living on a teacher's salary, has fought the Social Security Administration to get survivor benefits for their daughter.

The Social Security Administration says the case has yet to be decided at SSA's Baltimore headquarters, but the agency cautions that because Sayana's parents were never married, government attorneys have no law or precedents to guide them. That issue makes the case unique, the first in Washington and possibly the nation.

Laws pertaining to children of deceased parents have changed little since survivor benefits for children were first paid in 1940, and surely haven't kept pace with how technology has redefined reproduction.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:09:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogging for credit

UC Berkeley is offering a for-credit course in blogging, taught by (of course) experienced journalists: John Battelle (late of Wired and the Industry Standard) and Paul Grabowicz (director of the New Media Program). A quick Googling reveals that both participate in a group-blog, which is good news. Also interesting is that the class-blog will concentrate on intellectual property issues -- nice! Wonder if they're looking for a guest lecturer? They've sure got their pick of textbooks coming out in the next couple months. Link Discuss (Thanks, Sumana!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:05:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hi-density WiFi may reach critical mass

Interesting CNN piece about 802.11b density in cities and on campuses. As more people purchase and establish wireless networks at home, work and school, the signals begin to overlap and confuse the receivers (after hearing David Reed's lecture on Open Spectrum at ETCON, I no longer say "interfere with each other," since, according to Reed, "two radio signals that pass through one another do not harm each other -- there is no interference with radio waves, only confusion by receivers").

I was out with Howard Rheingold (who's also speaking at Reboot) and some of his Danish pals from his online community last night, and we got to talking about this. My feeling is that there are two very simple measures that can in large part solve this:

1. Bundle NetStumbler with the configuration tools that are shipped with wireless base-stations, revising the app so that after taking a survey of the nearby 802.11b spectrum, it makes a recommendation as to which channel the base-station should run on.
2. Bundle NoCat or another captive portal app with the base-station firmware, so that users who stumbled upon a network could easily get contact info for the base-station's operator. That way, people who are thinking about adding yet another, redundant access-point to an already saturated location can instead make contact with nearby operators and ask if they mind sharing their connections, perhaps after splitting the costs.

Of course, there are a lot of very ambitious solutions to this, too: opening up more spectrum, revising the 802.11 standards to allow for automatic back-off on busy channels, switching to ultra-wideband technologies, etc. I'm sure that in the long-term we'll see all of these approaches tried, but in the meanwhile, I think that simple software fixes can go a long way to solving the problem. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:53:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Students sue principal over bullying

A brother and sister in Ontario who were mercilessly bullied through high-school, physically and mentally, by a pair of boys who actually put up public websites and took videos to document their artistic torment, are suing their high-school administrators for not putting a stop to it. I tend to think of this as a good thing. In Junior High, I helped organize a nuclear disarmament group among my classmates, and was consequently the object of frequent harassment and assaults by a small group of military cadets who attended the school. The lame-duck administrator, a guy named Lloyd Hogg, was a supporter of nuclear proliferation and so refused to do anything about it until my father showed up to pick me up from school one afternoon and caught two boys about twice my size hurling empty glass pop bottles at my head, whereupon he leapt out of the car and dragged the little jerks into the principle's office.

Hogg's response was to retaliate by confiscating the banner and pamphlets our peace-group had made. The story linked below, about the torture these kids suffered while the administration sat idly by, is pretty familiar, though what they went through was a thousand times worse. I hope they win their case. While anti-bullying rules in other jurisdictions have had their occassional excesses (expulsion of students who have minor, isolated schoolyard scraps under a nonsensical "zero-tolerance" policy), I'd love to see a world where absentee principals like Hogg (and the unnamed prinicpal of Pearson High in Burlington, ON) are hung out to dry for their complicity in bestial torture. Maybe a little personal liability would convice these soi-distant guardians of student safety to take their responsibilities seriously. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:39:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New York State: English Lit considered harmful

The NY State school-board has been sanitizing its tests, removing all references to age, race, hate, religion, and, it seems, acrimony in the excerpted reading-portions on its standardized English exams. It wants to make sure that students aren't made "uncomfortable" by the readings. The living authors whose works are excerpted are understandably livid, as are parents and everyone who gives a damn about good writing (which lets out NY State's educational bureaucracy, I'm afraid):

Certain revisions bordered on the absurd. In a speech by Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, in addition to deletions about the United States' unpaid debt to the United Nations, any mention of wine and drinking was removed. Instead of praising "fine California wine and seafood," he ends up praising "fine California seafood." In Carol Saline's "Mothers and Daughters" a daughter no longer says she "went out to a bar" with her mother; on the Regents, they simply "went out."

In an excerpt from "Barrio Boy," by Ernesto Galarza (whose name was misspelled on the exam as Gallarzo), a "gringo lady" becomes an "American lady." A boy described as "skinny" became "thin," while another boy who was "fat" became "heavy," adjectives the state deemed less insulting.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Edward!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:18:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homeland security screws Canadian scholars

Canadians who commute across the US border to attend school part time are SOL: the US government has decreed that such students are a threat to homeland security and can just stay home (or switch to full-time, which will, of course, significantly mitigate the threat) from now on. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:07:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kadrey online

Richard Kadrey -- the cyberpunk co-founder of Future Sex, author of Metrophage, co-editor of the Dead Media project and photog for Suicide Girls -- has finally put up a personal site. Lots of good stuff here, especially full-length novels and other lovely bits of writing. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:04:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 2, 2002

Betamax testimony online at last

Jack Valenti's 1982 Betamax hearings testimony is finally online. This is the source of the "VCR is to the American film industry as the Boston Strangler is to a woman alone" (yes, Jack, releasing new technology is just like commiting a series of brutal rape/murders), but the actual testimony is even more egregious, racist, and repetitive than that. As my colleague at EFF, Seth Schoen, has noted, Jack Valenti's on a twenty-year loop, with phrases like, "The avalanche of [VCRs|P2P]" cropping up to demonize whatever technology-bogeyman has gotten up his analog hole today.

Now, my first card, Mr. Chairman, deals with what I consider to be one of the essential elements that you cannot ignore and, indeed, you must nourish. The U.S. film -- and I will read this -- "The U.S. film and television production industry is a huge and valuable American asset." In 1981, it returned to this country almost $1 billion in surplus balance of trade. And I might add, Mr. Chairman, it is the single one American-made product that the Japanese, skilled beyond all comparison in their conquest of world trade, are unable to duplicate or to displace or to compete with or to clone. And I might add that this important asset today is in jeopardy. Why?

Link Discuss (via Vitanuova)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:31:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My Blog, My Outboard Brain

My latest O'Reilly Net column, "My Blog, My Outboard Brain," is online:

Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don't know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this -- it's one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:23:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Extreme "cowboy" poker, con toros

Ah, cowboys, they have so much to teach us:

Mr. Polhamus operates an annual rodeo in La Crosse, where one of the most popular events is "cowboy poker," a contest in which four volunteers from the audience sit at a card table as a Mexican fighting bull is released into the ring.

The last person remaining in his seat in the face of the charging bull wins a $100 prize.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:10:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Auto-detect RSS

Have you got an RSS feed on your blog? You can help others automatically discover its URL by adding:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="XML" href="URL_of_your_RSS_feed" />

to the <head> section. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Camgirls and Amazon wish-lists

Mark's got a great piece in the new Yahoo! Internet Life about the underground camgirl economy where Amazon wishlist items are traded for skin:

Now meet Natalie. Or better yet, don't meet her, just buy her an RCA CC9370 AutoShot compact digital camcorder ($450). If you do, this 14-year-old girl from a small Kentucky town "will love you forever." Or so she says on the link from her site to her Amazon Wish List. (Hint: She'd probably settle for the book Girl Director: A How-To Guide for the First-Time, Flat-Broke Film & Video Maker.) But do it quick, because Natalie hasn't been having the best luck of late, judging from the nasty messages posted to her guestbook: "Did I mention that you're the 2nd ugliest girl I've seen in my life?" and "Your site SUCKS ass because of your f---ing brutal WISH list, you ain't even good-looking and yet you think people are just going to ship you that stuff?" Natalie isn't shy about how she feels about these tirades: "WAAAAAAAAAHHH people don't like me because I'm 14 and I don't know anything and I'm ugly and I have a huge Wish List and other people are stupid and I'm honest about wanting to whore my site!!! I'm a whore and you've hurt my feelings!

I was talking about this with my hosts in Denmark last night, weirdly enough. The Internet is putting pornographers out of business (witness the folding up of Penthouse), largely by connecting voyeurs and exhibitionists to have one-to-one relationships. While the wishlist-compensation phenom demonstrates that there's still money in porn, it suggests that there's not a lot of business left there. We got onto the subject while talking about musicians and P2P file-trading. Many music publishers are shutting down their Danish operations, folding up in the face of declining CD sales. One of my hosts wondered if music was becoming a commodity, but (to use the analogy), the camgirl phenom suggests the reverse: "old" porn was a commodity -- one picture for 1,000,000 viewers; this is much closer to one-to-one "bespoke" production.

I don't know how musicians will make money in a P2P universe, but I think it's a mistake to assume that technological changes that harm the music industry necessarily harm musicians. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:32:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boston Strangler Apocalypse Terror!

George Scriban's been doing some great analysis of Viant's scare-story about online movie "piracy" on his blog:

the Newsbytes headline is no big deal, though, when competitors like the San Jose Mercury News go to press with screamers like "Online film piracy cuts into industry profit: BOOTLEG COPIES BEING TRADED AT INTERNET SPEED". naturally, the Merc (like the BBC and c|net before them) leads with the Big Scary Numbers but they go one further when they haul Jack Valenti -- Big Content's most richly-rewarded foghorn -- out of cryosleep to proclaim that we are in the middle of what may (or may not) be the end of days: "It's getting clear -- alarmingly clear, I might add -- that we are in the midst of the possibility of Armageddon."

as an aside, i realize that "professional" journalists are supposed to avoid editorializing, but when Jack Valenti's morbid neo-Ludditry has driven him to compare the VCR to the murder of women and the internet to the annihillation of life as we know it in a final battle between the forces of good and evil, shouldn't someone suggest that Mr Valenti should plug the analog hole in his face?

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:14:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Little House: the lost years

A publisher-sanctioned fanfic "Little House" book fills in the years that Laura Ingalls left out of her autobiographical novels. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:05:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 1, 2002

Public Access to the Public Domain

Brewster "Internet Archive" Kahle is giving Project Gutenberg a nudge:

1. take a large catalog of books in libraries,

2. tag each entry with its US copyright status,

3. prioritize those that are out of copyright,

4. try to inspire the world to digitize the out-of-copyright books,

5. format the books for online distribution,

6. organize the resulting digitized books,

7. cause enlightenment in all corners of the globe.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Aaron!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:55:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fans pick up after George Lucas

Great story about "The Phantom Edit," a fan-cut of Phantom Menace that slices out all the gratuitously stupid, cutesy garbage. I saw Attack of the Clowns on Thursday, and I fear that a similar effort to remove every egregiously dumbass line of dialog would reduce the movie to a 12-second short. Link Discuss (Thanks, Earl!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:37:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pineapple: Your Personal Newshound

I've been beta-testing a new RSS reader called Pineapple for a couple months now and man, it's swell. It's an OSX app that feels a lot like Plucky, but with better fit-and-finish (even at version 0.3!). It's my pal Chris Cummer's (of Forwarding Address: OSX) project, and it's shareware, and you oughta give it a try. Link Discuss

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

The Lighter Side of... Death

In light of the passing of brilliant Mad cartoonist Dave Berg last week, I hope you'll all join us in revisiting bOING bOING contributor Terre Thaemlitz's classic treatise "How MAD's Dave Berg and Roger Kaputnik Introduced Me to Post-Modernity." Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:35:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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