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Friday, August 30, 2002

Warchalking by the sea

Check out the seaside wireless warchalking action at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass! Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

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

Thursday, August 29, 2002

Bicycle groupware

The Conference Bike is a bicycle built for seven, with the seats arranged in a ring to facilitate conversation. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:05:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Heinz ships nuclear frites

Heinz has unleashed a new series of multi-hued, potato-based flavor treats:

They're called Ore-Ida(R) Funky Fries(TM), and they're the wildest, wackiest, most fun frozen food on the market today. Featuring five funky varieties such as cinnamon and sugar, cocoa and even a blue variety, new Funky Fries are the most radical thing to hit french fries since ketchup itself...

-- Cinna-Stiks(TM), cinnamon and sugar potatoes, perfect for breakfast, snack time or any time;

-- Cocoa Crispers(TM), cocoa-y potatoes, designed for kids with a sweet tooth;

-- Kool Blue(TM), crispy, seasoned potatoes with a radical blue color that are sure to light up traditional french fries;

-- Crunchy Rings(TM), cylindrical potatoes that crunch as they delight; and

-- Sour Cream & Jive(TM), crispy potatoes seasoned with just the right amount of sour cream and chive flavoring.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:11:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

An 0wnz0red glossary

Joey's written a glossary for nontechnical people struggling to understand my story, 0wnz0red.

haxor (also H4X0R): hacker.

X0R is often used as the suffix "-er"; for instance "fucker" becomes "fuX0r" in 1337speak. Often a 1337speak noun ending in X0R becomes a present tense verb when followed by "s" or "z" or a past tense verb when followed by "ed". For instance, "this beer sucks" becomes "this beer sux0rz" (or, if you really want to go whole-hog, "+|-|1z b33R sUx0rz".

0wnz0red: owned, which means "screwed over". If someone has cracked your computer's security and taken it over or beaten you in a game of Quake, that person has 0wned (or 0wnz0red) you.

Note that this is different from the term 0wns (owns), which means "is very good" or "rules". An example: "I love my new computer! It 0wns!"

pr0n: porn. "pron" is a common typo that eventually got accepted as a synonym for porn; it then was made more 1337 by turning the "o" into a zero.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joey!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:08:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple uses DMCA to shut down software

What a revoltin' development. Apple has shut down a software company that made an interoperable software product that extended the functionality of iDVD, allowing it to burn video to external, non-Apple DVD drives. Apple sent a nastygram that cited the DMCA to the company and the company backed down, letting Apple bully it out of providing innovative improvements on Apple's technology to Apple's customers. I'm sick about this. Dammit. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rael)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian junkfood etailer

Canadian Favorites is a mail-order house that ships Canadian packaged goods (Red Rose tea, Aero bars, Cherry Blossoms) to the US and elsewhere.

The premier site for Canadians worldwide who are craving a taste of home. Shop safely online from the widest available selection of Canadian food products including Tim Horton's Coffee, Nestle Chocolate, E.D. Smith Jams, Red Rose Tea, Humpty Dumpty Chips and so many more we know you'll be happy to see.

Link Discuss (Thanks, May!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:38:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-comet airbag plans

A scientist in Oklahoma is planning to build giant, anti-comet airbags that can be sent into space and inflated to deflect the course of world-threating lumps of celestial rock.

Far better to send up a space ship equipped with a massive airbag that could be inflated to several miles wide and used to gently buffet the invading solar body away from a collision course with earth.

"It seems a safe, simple and realistic idea," Burchard told the magazine's latest edition.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:32:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Metablog for the WorldCon

I leave for ConJose, the 60th World Science Fiction convention in distant, exotic San Jose in just a couple hours. I'm bringing down three wireless access points and plan to hook them up wherever I can find an Ethernet drop, so that bloggers at the con can post while they're there. Meanwhile, Bill Humphries has set up a ConJose metablog, with a Movable Type TrackBack system that allows any bloggers posting about the con to ping him and get listed on the page (even if you're not using MT). Link Discuss (Thanks, Mena!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dewie the Internet Safety Turtle: Give a hoot, don't look at Internet porn!

The FTC has launched "Dewie," the cartoon Internet Safety Turtle, companion to Smokey the Bear and Woodsy the Owl. Ah, nothing connotes the lightspeed changes on the Internet like a turtle in a sportscar.

Officials said the Dewie campaign is part of the federal government’s broad effort to promote a “culture of security” and the view that every person who uses computers and networks, such as the Internet, has a role in keeping cyberspace safe.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan)

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

Warren Ellis has a blog!

Die Puny Humans is Warren "Transmetropolitan" Ellis's new blog. It's every bit as brilliant as you'd expect, coming from one of the most talented writers working today. Link Discuss (Thanks, Remi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Hail Macintosh! Hail Satan!

"Founded by long haired hippies, (Apple) has consistently supported 60's counter-cultural 'values.' But there are even darker undertones to this company than most are aware of. Consider the name of the company and its logo: an apple with a bite taken out of it. This is clearly a reference to the Fall, when Adam and Eve were tempted with an apple by the serpent. It is now Apple Computers offering us temptation, thereby aligning themselves with the forces of darkness." (Scroll to see the Apple bit, but the rest of the page is a hoot too.) Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:51:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blog the Vote!

Kevin Marks has started a new blog for pointed questions to ask your stumping congressional candidates this election season. He's also set up a state-by-state portal for links to sites that are campaigning for copyright reform and Internet-friendly law state-by-state. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:37:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coin-operated convenience store

Great NYT piece about a mega-vending-machine that stocks almost as many SKUs as a corner convenience store but only occupies one tenth of the square footage and costs a fraction of the overhead to run.

This machine, the Shop 2000, is the only one operating in America. Some locals call it an eyesore, but others are happily posing for photos in front of it, and in its second week of operation, more than a few people are feeding it their cash and credit cards. If the test in Washington goes well, its manufacturer predicts a new era in convenience for Americans, as do rivals working on similar machines.

These kiosks, known as automated convenience stores (a better name might be RoboShop), are similar to multipurpose vending machines already operating in Japan and some cities in the Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries where labor is expensive and real estate is scarce. Those constraints are now being felt by American retailers. A study by the National Association of Convenience Stores suggests that a shortage of labor will be one of the industry's biggest problems in coming years.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:28:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA's site defaced

The RIAA's site was rather subtly and relatively humorously defaced this morning. While I'm not a big fan of this kind of vandalism, it's refreshing to see it pulled off with some wit. Link Discuss (Thanks to everyone who sent this in!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:22:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MP3 patent dirty pool gratifies Ogg Vorbis team

Emmett Plant has written an open letter to Thomson Multimedia, who own the patent on MP3 and have suddenly started charging money for people who make MP3 decoders. Emmett's one of the people behind the patent-free Ogg Vorbis MP3-alternative format, and he couldn't be happier:

Thank you for providing the impetus for millions of people and hundreds of companies to give an open, free alternative a try. We love it when people get a chance to evaluate technology, and we've been happy to present them with a superior alternative to mp3. If it weren't for the removal of the free-decoder exemption, it might have taken even longer for people to try it out.

Thank you for setting a precedent in providing free technology until the world has become hooked on it, and then charging a lot of money afterwards. This isn't a new idea, but we're glad that you've taken a stand to ensure that this practice will continue as long as vested interests control patents on multimedia. We hope that you'll continue in this pattern with MPEG-4, since we'll be releasing a free MPEG-4 competitor next summer.

Link Discuss (via Happiest Geek on Earth)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:15:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iMac-style "laptop dome" stand

Check out these awesome laptop stands styled after the iMac's base. My physiotherapist has sternly warned me to start working with my iBook at eye-level and so I've been perching it on a spare oscilloscope on my desk, but this might be even more stylish. Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:04:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jediology big in Australia

"More than 70,000 Australians identified their religion as Jedi, Jedi Knight or Jedi-related in last year's national census." Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:01:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada stomps on tech

MrHappy writes:

c|net is running an article describing Canada's proposed new cyber-crime laws in which possession of compuer viruses would be a crime, a national database of internet users would be established, ISPs would have to reconfigure their networks to make surveillance of users easy for law enforcement, and ISPs would have to keep logs of user activity for up to six months.

The usual cadre of terrorists and child pornographers are brought forth as rational for this initiative, an attempt to comply with the Council of Europe's cyber-crime treaty.

Link Discuss (Thanks, MrHappy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:58:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Broadcast Flag becoming a treaty obligation

The fight against the Broadcast Flag just got harder. The Broadcast Flag is a regulatory proposal that's nominally about digital TV, but it's a Trojan horse for taking over the whole technosphere, putting consumer electronics and IT companies under a Hollywood veto to keep them from building devices that challenge the MPAA's business model.

Now, the Broadcast Flag is the subject of a mandate embedded in a proposed WIPO treaty, so that governments will be obliged to make this happen, even if voters manage to convince their lawmakers to keep technology free.

This treaty would require national law to grant to broadcasters:

* "the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit the fixation of their broadcasts;"

* "the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit the direct or indirect reproduction, in any manner or form, of fixations of their broadcasts;"

* "the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit the retransmission, by wire or wireless means, whether simultaneous or based on fixations, of their broadcasts;"

* and other rights, including the rights to control the exhibition and distribution of fixations (recordings) of broadcasts.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Seth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:52:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Meet Vernor Vinge in SF tonight

Vernor "Singularity" Vinge will be speaking tonight at a bookstore in the Haight. I wish I was in San Francisco, but I'll be on a plane back from DC during this.

Vernor Vinge, The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
Author Appearance: Wednesday, August 28 @ 7 pm
Though perhaps best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels, Vernor Vinge began his career as a writer of short fiction more than 35 years ago. The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge brings together the best of the author's challenging, visionary work, including such major pieces as "The Ungoverned" and "The Blabber." Vernor Vinge's 1981 work, "True Names," helped predict cyberspace and the Internet.
Booksmith, 1644 Haight St. SF, 415.863.8688

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prince on the music industry: "A Nation of Theives"

Prince has posted an excellent (if irritatingly spelled) (yes, I know I published a novella today with a bunch of potentially irritating hacker spellings, sue me) rant about what's wrong with the music industry.

Something happened on the way 2 the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect 4 company employees ever managed 2 b. Compensation packages 4 company xecutives hit the stratosphere -- while holding them accountable 4 their company's results became nearly impossible.

These xecutives r indeed very naive if they think that people haven't noticed.

People r noticing that something isn't quite right -- that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible 4m of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens 2 their hard-earned retirement savings.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Alan)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:38:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogger CD burning circle needs an administrator

Chris Owens, who ran the Burn Baby Burn summer-music CD burning circle for bloggers last spring, needs someone to take over from him for the next round.

Lots of people have been asking when the next round of Burn, Baby Burn is going to start. Max and I had originally planned on opening up registration in August, but the month is almost over. He's busy with work and I'm busy with my new job.

Last time around, we had 210 participants and all of the backend stuff was a lot of hard work. Then, we thought about having some sort of database developed to help with the registration/project management, but that has kind of fallen through the cracks.

The next round is looking closer to being put on hold, than actually coming to fruition. If anybody has any suggestions, I'd be more than happy to hear them.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:32:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ethernet-to-WiFi Adapter

Linksys has shipped a low-cost ($129) Ethernet-to-WiFi adapter -- just plug the box into any Ethernet port and it becomes a wireless Ethernet port. Now I can finally put my printer *anywhere* (and you can add your games console/ReplayTV/whatever to your network). Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:57:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Birth of Nerdc0re -- My novella on Salon

My short story, 0wnz0red, is in the new Salon, which just went live. This is, AFAIK, the first original fiction science-fiction (Thanks, Andrew!) Salon's published, and it's a piece I'm very happy with. It amounts to a science-fictional take on Trusted Computing, with generous dollops of Atkins Diet, hacker ethos and bloggy memes thrown in for good measure. It's a really fun, super-nerdy story (I've been jokingly calling it the first example of a new genre called "Nerdc0re") -- or so I'm told -- and I'm proud as I can be to have it on the Web where anyone can read it and link to it. I hope you dig it as much as I do.

Ten years in the Valley, and all Murray Swain had to show for it was a spare tire, a bald patch, and a life that was friendless and empty and maggoty-rotten. His only ever California friend, Liam, had dwindled from a tubbaguts programmer-shaped potato to a living skeleton on his death-bed the year before, herpes blooms run riot over his skin and bones in the absence of any immunoresponse. The memorial service featured a framed photo of Liam at his graduation; his body was donated for medical science.

Liam's death really screwed things up for Murray. He'd gone into one of those clinical depression spirals that eventually afflicted all the aging bright young coders he'd known during his life in tech. He'd get misty in the morning over his second cup of coffee and by the midafternoon blood-sugar crash, he'd be weeping silently in his cubicle, clattering nonsensically at the keys to disguise the disgusting snuffling noises he made. His wastebasket overflowed with spent tissues and a rumor circulated among the evening cleaning-staff that he was a compulsive masturbator. The impossibility of the rumor was immediately apparent to all the other coders on his floor who, pr0n-hounds that they were, had explored the limits and extent of the censoring proxy that sat at the headwaters of the office network. Nevertheless, it was gleefully repeated in the collegial fratmosphere of his workplace and wags kept dumping their collections of conference-snarfed hotel-sized bottles of hand-lotion on his desk.

The number of bugs per line in Murray's code was 500 percent that of the overall company average. The QA people sometimes just sent his code back to him (From: qamanager@globalsemi.com To: mswain@globalsemi.com Subject: Your code... Body: ...sucks) rather than trying to get it to build and run. Three weeks after Liam died, Murray's team leader pulled his commit privileges on the CVS repository, which meant that he had to grovel with one of the other coders when he wanted to add his work to the project.

Two months after Liam died, Murray was put on probation.

Three months after Liam died, Murray was given two weeks' leave and an e-mail from HR with contact info for an in-plan shrink who could counsel him. The shrink recommended Cognitive Therapy, which he explained in detail, though all Murray remembered ten minutes after the session was that he'd have to do it every week for years, and the name reminded him of Cognitive Dissonance, which was the name of Liam's favorite stupid Orange County garage band.

Murray returned to Global Semiconductor's Mountain View headquarters after three more sessions with the shrink. He badged in at the front door, at the elevator, and on his floor, sat at his desk and badged in again on his PC. From: tvanya@globalsemi.com To: mswain@globalsemi.com Subject: Welcome back! Come see me... Body: ...when you get in.

Tomas Vanya was Murray's team lead, and rated a glass office with a door. The blinds were closed, which meant: dead Murray walking. Murray closed the door behind him and sighed a huge heave of nauseated relief. He'd washed out of Silicon Valley and he could go home to Vancouver and live in his parents' basement and go salmon fishing on weekends with his high-school drinking buds. He didn't exactly love Global Semi, but shit, they were number three in a hot, competitive sector where Moore's Law drove the cost of microprocessors relentlessly downwards as their speed rocketed relentlessly skyward. They had four billion in the bank, a healthy share price, and his options were above water, unlike the poor fucks at Motorola, number four and falling. He'd washed out of the nearly-best, what the fuck, beat spending his prime years in Hongcouver writing government-standard code for the Ministry of Unbelievable Dullness.

Link Discuss

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

Retro Lesbian Paperback Gallery

http://www.strangesisters.com/a-z/thumbnails/xlesbonympho.jpgLink Discuss (Thanks, Barry!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:17:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Doonesbury runs for Congress

Garry Trudeau's college roommate -- partial inspiration for Mike Doonesbury -- is running for Congress.

Mike Doonesbury and Charlie Pillsbury diverged sharply over the years. Doonesbury became a baby boomer caricature: a commune-dwelling liberal Democrat turned John Anderson independent turned Madison Avenue adman turned dot-com flameout. Along the way, he became a Republican. Pillsbury, meanwhile, worked on Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 1968 and has never veered from his liberal devotions. He attended Boston University Law School and Yale Divinity School and has worked for a procession of do-gooder causes. For the last 12 years, Pillsbury has run Community Mediation, a New Haven agency that helps people and groups solve disputes out of court. He remained a Democrat until early this year, but became miffed when the Democrats "fell in lockstep" behind the Bush administration's military response to Sept. 11. This included dismay at DeLauro, whom Pillsbury calls a friend and whose campaigns he had reliably contributed to since her first successful run in 1990.

Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:58:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, August 26, 2002

China issues genetic ID

China is prototyping new genetic ID cards.

This color genotype ID card, about twice the size of ordinary ID card, has on it data such as photo, birth date, nationality and gender. In particular it is marked with 18 internationally used genetic locus which are chosen from the long chain of human cytogenetic information carrier DNA molecules. In the combination of the 18 genetic locus, with the exception of one egg giving birth to twins, it is difficult for one to find out such a circumstance wherein two persons out of 10 billion people are completely the same.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Greg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hacktivism explained

Oxblood Ruffin, the spokesmodel for the hacker underground group, Cult of the Dead Cow, has a great interview in the current ish of Shift.

Essentially what we're interested in is preserving various internet rights and freedoms. Many of those are defined by documents. If you go to the Hacktivismo website, there's something called the Hacktivismo Declaration on there that's more or less inspired by things like the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. What's kind of interesting about the Universal Declaration of Human rights is that it's a declaration, which means it doesn't have any binding authority; it's like a feel-good document. But the ICCPR is a statute. It is binding. [Laughs] I don't know who's ever been taken to the Hague as a result of violating the terms, but it is actually an enforcable document.

Right now, I'm probably quoting that more and more. And interestingly enough, it's article nineteen of both of those documents that talks about what we call information rights -- the ability to access information, regardless of how that information might be transmitted, whether it's a newspaper on the internet or whatever. It's sort of an umbrella statement that covers all those things. We're specifically interested in maintaining the free flow of what we call lawfully-published content. Information could mean anything, it could mean your bank statements or it could mean kiddie porn or it could mean national security secrets. That's not the information we're talking about. We're essentially talking about any publicly available information on the web, that's available throughout the liberal democracies. So essentially anything we see, we think anybody else should have the right to see as well. Lots of governments disagree with this and that's why they have internet censorship.

Do you worry about the fact that if you provide people with these types of tools in countries that don't have the same democratic ideals or the same ideas of free speech, that the people who use your software might actually be harmed or imprisoned?

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:11:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woz to speak at WorldCon

Steve "Woz" Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple and legendary hardware hacker will give a panel at the World Science Fiction convention at the end of this week.

Mr. Wozniak will take part in a panel discussion on Saturday (8-31-02) at 2:30 PM, the discussion topic: "Personal Computers: What Science Fiction Didn't Predict."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Tobias!)

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

Amazing, searchable archive of 4,000,000 newspaper pages

Paper of Record has nearly 4,000,000 old newspapers from all over the commonwealth and New York digitized and searchable as PDFs. Most of them cost (a fair bit of) money to get access to, but there are a ton of free pages, too. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:03:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gecko feet unlock the secret of superglue

Craig sez: "Scientists have discovered how geckos (the lizard, not the layout engine behind Mozilla) can climb glass: apparently the hairs on their feet form electrodynamic bonds with the surface. Each tiny hair has 1,000 pads on its tip, a tip that is only 200 billionths of a metre wide -- smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Could lead to real-life Spider-Men."

"We can apply the underlying [principle] and create a similar adhesive by breaking a surface into small bumps," he said, adding: "the artificial foot-hair tip model opens the door to manufacturing dry, self-cleaning adhesive that works under water and in a vacuum."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Craig!)

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

Kick ass LCD RC flying saucer

This radio-controlled flying-saucer incorpoates a programmable LCD on which you can add your own scrolling message, i.e., "I paid $99 for a radio-controlled flying saucer!" Link Discuss (Thanks, Robert!)

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

Warchalking FUD in the Calgary Sun

The stupid fairy tales that the British tabloids ran about warchalking last week (warchalkers are criminals and terrorists!) have crossed the pond and made it into the Calgary Sun, in a piece that raises the silliness to new heights:

Taking that technique, a new breed of hobo, "cyber vagabonds" if you will, are using the same markings to steal company and government secrets...

The drive-by hacking phenomenon -- dubbed "warchalking" because crooks who have succeeded mark buildings with a visible chalk sign to invite further attacks -- was tested by an English newspaper that, within minutes and undetected, broke into the private network used by the Cabinet Office and MPs...

Security experts fear the techniques could be used by terrorists to wage electronic warfare on the government as the world braces for the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S...

Closer to home, cops believe it's only a matter of time before crooks try the technique in Calgary.

"It's only a matter of time before this is the method of choice for the hackers," Fulkerth said...

"If I was using a wireless network, I wouldn't use a name that would ID my building," he said. "I'd also move wireless hubs away from windows into the building."

Here's my letter to Mike D'Amour, the guy who wrote the piece (you might wanna drop him a letter yourself):

Man, do you ever have your facts wrong.

Warchalking is used by wireless enthusiasts to signal the presence of open "community" networks (that's why I've got a wachalk mark that I've drawn out front of my apartment here in San Francisco which has an open wireless network as a public-spirited community gesture) as well as outside of my office here in San Francisco.

Every in-the-wild warchalk mark I've ever seen or heard of was used to denote the existence of such a network. Matt Jones (BBC), Ben Hammersley (correspondant for the Guardian), Doc Searls (editor, Linux Journal) and the others who were involved in inventing warchalking did so for this explicit purpose and I daresay every warchalker has more in common with Matt, Ben and Doc (and me!) than they do with your imaginary, hysterical criminals...

I know that the London tabs reported on most of the material in your story as though it were factual, but they were making it up. Repeating these fairy tales does no one any good (and, moreover, misinforms your readers).

Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brutally simple alternative to drive-cases

The SuperDriveDock is a brutally simple alternative to drive-cases. If you've got a naked drive and need to mount it in a hurry, just snap the dock on, plug in a FireWire cable and biff-bam, it's connected. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beautiful iBook case-mod

Now this is how you void your warranty with style. Link Discuss (via Raelity Bytes)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Edge-cachers tie up courts with pointless patent suits

Akamai's dumbass patent-infringement lawsuit against its competitor Digital Island has wound up with an injunction against Digital Island for using a technology that it has long-since abandoned. Nevertheless, Akamai is seeking 9-figure damages from Digital Island -- meanwhile, Digital Island is countersuing Akamai for infringing on its patents. Ah, the sweet smell of the useful arts and sciences being promoted by our friends at the USPTO. Link Discuss

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

Sunday, August 25, 2002

Aaron's letter to Congress

Aaron Swartz has written a great letter to his Congresscritters, asking them to stem the blood-tide of rotten Internet legislation. Why not adapt it and send to your own lawmaker?

I hope you see the pattern here. When considering such bills, I urge you to ask a simple question: What's the harm? The fact is, there is no harm. Music companies claim that five times the number of records sold are being traded on the Internet. Five times! I'm sure they'd have fancy statistics saying that this added up to a quadrillion dollars in lost revenue. But this makes the false assumption that all the downloads would have normally been CD sales. Instead, music sales have only dropped five percent. Five percent! Now the music industry changed the way they counted, raised prices for CDs and the economy has entered a downturn. All of those could have accounted for the five percent. But even if they didn't, can you seriously claim that we need all the measures described above for a five percent drop in sales?

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:37:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, August 24, 2002

Great parody banners

Great spoof banners at Valley of the Geeks. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:01:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bounce-house church for rent

New marriage laws in the UK will allow licensed ministers to perform marriages anywhere, relaxing the restriction that marriages may only be conducted at licensed venues. An entrepreneur has developed a bounce-house church with a blow-up organ, plastic stained glass, and inflatable angels that he plans to rent out for weddings once the law goes into effect. Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:51:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ferrari station wagon

A Saudi prince The Sultan of Brunei (thanks, Lia!) just took delivery of eight custom-built Ferrari station wagons, in a rainbow of colors to suit his moods. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:50:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stereograms from 9/11

Thor sez:

Brian Loube is a stereoview photographer in Tribeca who happened to have his stereo camera with him on the morning of 9/11 when bad stuff happened in his neighbohood. He has released a limited edition set of 12 stereoview images which can be bid on as a group or individually on eBay. Most of the proceeds will go to the Bowery Mission, a non-profit organization providing food and shelter to homeless Americans in downtown New York City.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Thor!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:38:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kitty litter cake

This is just disgusting, but it sounds like it'd taste pretty good. The melted Tootsie Rolls really make it.

* When cakes are cooled to room temperature, crumble into a large bowl. Toss with half the remaining white cookie crumbs and the chilled pudding. You probably won't need all of the pudding, mix with the cake and "feel" it, you don't want it soggy, just moist; gently combine.

* Line new, clean kitty litter box. Put mixture into litter box.

* Put three unwrapped Tootsie rolls in a microwave safe dish and heat until soft and pliable. Shape ends so they are no longer blunt, curving slightly.

* Repeat with 3 more Tootsie rolls and bury in mixture.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Sue!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:14:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, August 23, 2002

Turns out, I'm inspirational

A little foolin' around on Google tonight revealed that my Wired article, "Eastern Standard Tribe," has been adapted for a Pentecostal sermon on "Divine Standard Time." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:14:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Danger blog

A blog devoted to the utterly droolworthy Danger Hiptop, a convergence device phone/browser/mailer/etc, which I can! not! wait! to get my hands on. Link Discuss (via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:52:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Invisible Library

"The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound." Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:27:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teledyne Water Pik review

This guy wrote a very funny epinions review of the Water Pik.

I love my Oral Irrigator. My wife does not. Indeed she despises it with great vehemence. I don’t blame her. How many times have I jumped from around a corner and blasted her in the face with a laser of water? Don’t think it doesn’t hurt either. Does a range of thirty feet with a sniper’s aim mean anything to you? “It hurts!” she cries. I’ve hit her in the eye before. That must have hurt, I admit. But that’s why I gave her a pair of Ektelon racquetball goggles.* I tell her, “Ektelon racquetball goggles don’t do any good unless you’re WEARING them.” But she refuses. They sit idly on her dresser. I can see them now.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Eric!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:22:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos from the Barney vs. Wil Wheaton EFF benefit

David Weekly has posted a great gallery of photos from last night's EFF benefit at the DNA Lounge. It was a hell of an event -- DJs, civil liberatarians, nerd dancing, and the headlining act: Wil Wheaton boxing with Barney, the Purple Dinosaur. Heather Gold was the ref, and I called the fight. John Gilmore passed Wil the lightsaber (hot franchise on franchise action!) with which he delivered the coup de grace. Some nice shots of me setting up to call the fight here, here and here. Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:19:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How much are entertainers worth?

This is pretty amazing. It's a list of a bunch of popular performers, from Beck to Ween, specifying how much they charge to perform at collge concerts. Beck is $75k, Ween is $20k, Carrot Top is $30k, Vanilla Ice is $5k, Tracy Chapman is $200K (!?) Link Discuss (Thanks, Eric!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:16:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Library of Congress's Origins of American Animation

The Library of Congress has posted this amazing Web exhibit of the dawn of American animation, 21 films and two fragments of animation from 1900 to 1921 (note that there isn't any film available from after Steamboat Willie, since everything from the birth of Mickey onward is still in copyright). Link Discuss (Thanks, Jens!)

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

Kick-ass networking bargoon

An awesome deal for a networking hobbyist: 1,000 feet of Category-5 cable, a crimper, and a cable tester for $60, shipped. Guerrilla networkers, ho! Link Discuss

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

Comics Journal interviews Jules Feiffer

Here's an MP3 file of Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth's interview with cartoonist Jules Feiffer. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:22:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friendly's employee demands right to face her accuser

A long-time Friendly's waitress in Mt. Kisco, NY, has resigned her $3.30/hr job after a "secret shopper" for the franchise reviewed her performance, a review that resulted in a three-day suspension. Maureen Kennedy sounds like a model employee, loved by customers and co-workers, and all she's asking for is the right to face her accuser. The quotes from her employer are priceless bureaucratic horseshit.

While the review states that service was average, it notes that Kennedy, who makes $3.30 an hour plus tips, was "very nice." The customer said that Kennedy had a lot of tables to handle and that she frequently apologized to customers who were waiting.

In her Aug. 4 resignation letter to John L. Cutter, president and chief operating officer of the Friendly Ice Cream Corporation in Wilbraham, Mass., Kennedy said there should be some kind of appeal for employees who are scored unfavorably by mystery shoppers. She wrote that she had asked for her suspension to be reviewed, but to no avail...

"She's been with us for an extended period of time, as I understand, and we would value her as an employee and wish she didn't make that decision (to resign) that she did," [a spokeswoman for the restaurant chain] said.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:02:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dick Cheney's 419 letter

What if Dick Chaney was a 419 scammer?

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am Mr Dick Cheney a special adviser on Petroleum and economic matters to the Head of State of The United States of America. Because of my strategic position in the former Government, and also being a close confidant of the Head of State, I was able to acquire personally, the Sum of $25,000,000,000.00USD (twenty-five billion United States Dollars) presently lodged in some offshore sham bank owned by his brother Neil.

I made this money largely through "CONSULTANCY FEE" And "Good Faith Fees" paid by the stupid chimp out of the public treasury, it really didn't matter what I wrote on the invoice. I especially loved writing out the "Good Faith" bills. The little monkey would say "this is for Jeezus, right Unka Dick?" and I'd say "yes Dubya, its kinda like a 'free will offering'.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:56:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BT doesn't own hyperlinks, patents still out of control

Many of you have written to me to tell me that the nonsensical British Telecom patent on hyperlinking has been overturned. Dan Gillmor nails what it means, though:

The fact that a judge did the right thing here is not evidence of a working system. It's evidence that things are getting worse in the patent arena.

Prodigy, defending itself, must have spent a million dollars by now. What British Telecom did is happening again and again in and out of courts all across America. How many lawyers are being hired instead of engineers these days?

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:47:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chinese farmer gives mom a piggyback tour of Beijing

A 60 year old farmer from rural China brought his 100 year old mother to Beijing for a tour of the capital, on piggy-back. The sight of the farmer and his centenarian mother-cum-jockey warmed the hearts of Beijing's post-Freudian masses.

A 60-year-old farmer from eastern Anhui province carried his 100-year-old mother piggyback on a 10-day tour of Beijing to fulfil her life-long wish to see the Chinese capital.

Mr Wang Shoucheng from Quanjiao county forked out 2,000 yuan (S$420) of his own savings and borrowed 3,000 yuan from a credit agency to finance the tour, according to the Chinese portal Chinanews.com.cn.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:33:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ElcomSoft expands into Microsoft e-books, too

Great piece in Wired News this morning about ElcomSoft, the employer of Dmitry Skylarov, the programmer who was arrested last year for describing the internals of Adobe's e-book encryption scheme. ElcomSoft if writing new software that opens up "protected" Microsoft and Adobe e-books, and trying to figure out if they're in for more legal trouble.

"We tried to contact Microsoft ... describing the software we're going to release, and asking what do they think about that.... Will that violate any Microsoft patents, copyrights, licenses or whatever," Katalov said. "(Microsoft) responded that, 'Microsoft's legal department does not give advice to third parties.'"

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:23:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Body Batteries and Robotic Helicopters

"Berkeley Mechanical Engineering professor Liwei Lin's microbial fuel cell is just .07 centimeters in size. Even more amazing though is that this glucose-powered fuel cell is built to operate inside your body." For more on this, autonomous helicopters, and other innovations from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, check out my new issue of Lab Notes! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:17:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, August 22, 2002

How corporate crooks are "punished"

A bank robber talk about the kind of jail-time small-time crooks face and compares it to the time served by billion dollar corporate swindlers.

Keating, Boesky and Milken collectively swindled Wall Street out of more than $500 million. Yet together they served less than 10 years. I know a man serving 20 years for an $800 heist.

Americans say they want to see greedy, dishonest CEOs punished. But in truth, most Americans are more afraid of boys from the housing projects holding them up in an alley for 20 bucks than they are of having their pensions and portfolios gutted by Wall Street scoundrels.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

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

Nimoy's tribute to Bilbo Baggins

Leonard Nimoy recorded this amazing, psychedelic musical video tribute to The Hobbit, complete with pointy-eared go-go girls dancing a Hobbit dance. Link Discuss (Thanks, Noel!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:32:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC begins embrace of Journalism 3.0

Matt Jones describes a BBC experiment in audience empowerment, bringing us one step closer to what Dan GIllmor called the world of the "former audience."

"We asked you to debate which of four ideas BBC News Online should take up for an investigation this summer.

The four subjects are fly tipping, speed cameras, UK-US price differences and support for the mentally ill. Soon we will decide which subject we will tackle. Then we will ask you for your input on how you think the investigation should progress over the next few weeks.

The process will continue until we reach a conclusion. That conclusion, of course, may not be the one you expect. That's the point of investigation."

As Jones points out, this is more the sort of participatory journalism you'd expect from Slashdot than the Beeb. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:04:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clifford Pickover's "Neoreality" science fiction

Clifford Pickover is an incredibly smart and wildly imaginative writer and computer graphics wizard. He's written a bunch of non-fiction books about math and graphics, and now he has a series of four science fiction books. I am looking forward to reading them, because I really enjoyed a story he wrote for bOING bOING (print edition) in the mid-90s, called "There Will Be Soft Cattle."Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:03:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Profile of a Spammer

A lengthy article about infamous spam king "Ronnie the Rodent," owner of Opt-In Marketing.

Opt-In Marketing sends out 80 million e-mails offering vacation packages. For each person who clicks on the e-mail to visit the travel company's website, the company earns $1 - a fee roughly in line with industry norms.

Would it be a good idea to click on the email, so the spammer has to pay Ronnie one dollar? If a bunch of people did that, the spammers might stop using Ronnie. But maybe there's a cap on how much they have to pay Ronnie for each email.

On a related note, do you think the spam-providers really have to pay Overture.com a few dollars every time someone clicks on the links returned from a search for "bulk email"? Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:37:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rick Prelinger, lord of ephemeral film

Great interview with Rick Prelinger, a film archivist whose world-beating collection of "ephemeral films" are being integrated into the Creative Commons project have been intergrated into the Internet Archive project (thanks, lisa).

If we want to have a sense of what it was like to be a member of a family, a nuclear family in the American 50's or 60's, you really can't get that authentically from a TV sit com, or from a Hollywood movie, or from a news reel. But when you see these films, they are filled with footage of idealized families in action. We get a sense of how the family actually looked and behaved, what was the body language, what were the gender roles, how kids were supposed to behave differently than adults, and you also get a sense of that sort of all-encompassing ideology. So you could argue that all of these films, in a way, are sort of an ethnographic vision of a lost America.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:16:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Army war-games rigged?

Jamais writes:

I've long had a keen interest in the process of wargaming, particularly the gaming done by professional organizations to test strategy. Historically, the best example of this was the US military, where "Red Team" or "OPFOR" (Opposing Force) groups are given free rein to figure out how best to beat the "Blue Team" -- our forces. The National Training Center down in southern CA (Ft. Irwin, I think) has a full-time Red Team group that is among the best trained units in the Army. The Red Team tends to win most engagements -- but that's exactly right, because the point is to find any weakness in the Blue Team tactics in order to fix it. If the Red Team is prevented from attacking Blue Team weaknesses, the whole thing is useless. This is why the story is so disturbing.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jamais!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT on Jaguar

David Pogue gives a rave review to the new Mac OS X.2, AKA "Jaguar," in the NYT:

Plenty of other big-ticket features appear in 10.2: iChat, an instant-messaging program that's compatible with AOL Instant Messenger; a surprisingly effective junk-mail filter in Apple's Mail program; a new "clean install" option that lets you reinstall Mac OS X without having to erase the hard drive; a convenient Search bar at the top of every window; desktop backdrop photos that can change at regular intervals, smoothly fading from one to the next; a calculator that offers not only scientific functions but also unit conversions and even up-to-the-minute currency conversions. Version 10.2 also introduces Rendezvous, a behind-the-scenes networking technology that will someday permit computers, printers, palmtops and other gizmos to find and communicate with one another instantly, with no setup or configuring whatsoever.

But if you're the kind of person who gets satisfaction from, say, the hushed thump of a Lexus car door closing, it's the little things in Jaguar, the grace notes, that may mean the most in everyday work. For example, you not only get keyboard shortcuts for every important folder on your machine, but they're all consistent and easy to remember: it's always Shift-Command plus A for the Applications folder, F for Favorites, H for your Home folder, and so on.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:10:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Climate change doesn't cause fires, trees do

The Shrub proposes increased logging to control wildfires.

Embarking on a three-day Western swing expected to haul in at least $5 million for Republican politicians, President Bush is taking a stand on one of the region's thorniest issues by proposing that more logging in national forests would help prevent devastating wildfires.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jimmy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:52:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shuttle flight-deck simulator for sale

Check out this amazing, full-size Space Shuttle flight deck simulator for sale on eBay:

In 1991, I received a grant to build a space shuttle simulator at a public school where I was a science teacher. After three years of construction (mostly by me), our simulator became operational. For the next six years, we ran 3-hour simulated shuttle missions with our students. Then, about 2 years ago, my district decided to participate in the Challenger Center program, and my simulator was suddenly expendable. I left that district, but they allowed me to take as many of the pieces of the simulator as I wanted. After over a year of paying $60 a month for a climate-controlled storage room, I can no longer afford to keep the simulator, nor do I forsee any way for me to re-build it at my home. So, I'm offering it here on ebay.

The simulator features almost all the control panels found on the flight deck of the space shuttle - 15 in all. They are exact replicas of the real panels, as construction blueprints were borrowed from Rockwell International, the contractor who builds the shuttles. We have panels from both the front of the shuttle (the Commander and Pilot station) and the aft (rear) where the Mission Specialists work.

My goal was to make the simulator as realistic as possible - every switch, every gauge - even working computer keypads (green pushbuttons in top picture). With these 15 panels, plus the other items that are included in this auction, you could build your own exact replica of the space shuttle cockpit.

Since this simulator is so intricate and complex, and since the asking price seems fairly high, I have created a website that describes, in great detail, every aspect of every item included in the auction. Please explore the website thoroughly - there are 20 individual pages and nearly 100 pictures. Afterward, I think you'll see what a bargain my opening bid really is!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:48:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Airbags can snitch on speed-demons

Air-bag computers can be used to discover how fast a car was travelling at the time of collision. This is, of course, very interesting to law enforcement (and, presumably, insurance companies).

An electronic device on board the Pontiac, however, told police exactly how fast the car had been going — 124 mph in a 40 mph zone. And it enabled Trotwood to join the growing number of police departments and insurance companies across the country experimenting with data stored on computers, originally designed and installed on cars and trucks to control air bags, to determine what happened in the seconds leading up to accidents.

Called a Sensing Diagnostic Module, the electronic "brains" behind an airbag were developed by General Motors and are now manufactured by its spin-off company Delphi at an electronics plant in Kokomo, Ind. GM's air bags are made in Vandalia at Delphi's Interior & Lighting Systems plant and are later hooked up to the black boxes on assembly lines for GM and other auto companies.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Music industry commits suicide-through-bad-marketing

Great Slate story on the way that the music industry has shot itself in the foot with marketing and strategy, arguing that the "MP3 is killing music" is just as groundless as the "home-taping is killing music" argument was in the 80s.

The major labels have snubbed older music fans in recent years, yet over-40s now constitute 44 percent of the CD market, up from 19.6 percent in 1992, according to the RIAA's 2001 annual consumer profile. Unfortunately for the majors, the tastes of graying Beatles and Stones fans have fragmented, making them difficult to reach via mass-marketing. These consumers help support the many smaller labels that market alt-rock, world music, new age, reissues, jazz, folk, bluegrass, post-minimalism, and other niche genres.

Meanwhile, younger fans lose interest quickly and often don't develop strong loyalties. They're less likely to investigate a breakthrough act's previous albums or buy its next one. The genres that appeal to under-25 music fans continue to sell, but individual performers fade quickly.

This is a huge problem for the big labels, who still base their marketing on long-term stars who release multimillion-copy blockbusters. One album that sells 10 million copies is more lucrative than 10 that sell 1 million, because once a CD takes off, the only fixed costs are manufacturing and shipping, which are trivial compared to production and marketing. And long-term careers make each album less of a risk, since the most loyal fans will buy everything an artist releases and profits are high on back catalogs that keep selling.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Grad!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:58:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EuroDMCA in a nutshell

Danny's written a great analysis of thw way that the European DMCA (AKA the EUCD) will become the law in England. The English are implementing the EuroDMCA is a way that is even harsher and less forgiving than they are required to, and moreover, this is going to be very, very hard to stop. Give this a read, especially if you're a Briton.

What will copyright look like in the 21st century? Many people have many different ideas - it's all very much still in flux. The European Union, however, decided exactly how it would be on the 22nd of May, 2001. That was the date the European Directive "on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the Information Society" was passed. It will become law across Europe by Christmas of this year at the very latest: countries failing to follow the order will be in breach of the Treaty of Rome. Our government are law-abiding, so they've already drafted the patches needed to upgrade existing UK law. It's in its "consultation period" from now until October.

The European Copyright Directive (or EUCD) is one of a raft of new proposals sweeping across the world that give brand new powers to copyright holders. The reason is a fear of widespread, easy, perfect copying over the Net. But the cure may be worse than the problem ever was: especially if you're a humble consumer.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:54:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Is connectivity a business or a calling?

Kevin Werbach neatly describes the impedance mismatch between Hollywood and Nerdlandia:

Herein lies the conflict between Hollywood and the technology industry in a nutshell. One sees content as the critical resource, and data networks as simply another mechanism to deliver it. The other sees connectivity as the essential factor, with movies being one of many resources that can travel along those connections. Hollywood sees a moral dimension in protecting its property and the creative works of its artists, as well as a nobility in bringing entertainment to the masses. The tech industry things bits are bits, and the only moral value that really matters is freedom.

For the [News Corp. President] Peter Chernins of the world, content is a calling, while distribution is just a business. The relevant players should sit across a table and hash out the numbers, because broadband has "vast potential" as a way to connect audiences with content. Porn and piracy, in his view, sully the medium. The tech community views things differently. From its perspective, networking is a calling, while commercial activity riding on the network is just business. We should find ways to make those businesses viable, but never at the cost of damaging the "vast potential" of broadband to tie people together innovative, disruptive ways.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:08:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Redesign of a dead site

Andy Baio recently redesigned gettingit.com, a pop culture website that R.U. Sirius edited a couple of years ago, and the design is beautiful. When I see all the great articles here, I really miss the site. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:59:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turning corpses into diamonds

A new process can turn your loved ones' remains into diamonds.

A company based in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village has accepted its first deposit for manufactured diamonds made from carbon captured during the cremation process so that loved ones -- family members or even pets -- could be mounted into a ring, pendant or other jewelry.

A small number of U.S. funeral homes, including four in the Chicago area, have signed up to offer memorial diamonds produced by Life Gem. The cost will depend on the size of the gem, starting at $4,000 for a quarter-carat.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bradley!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:12:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lessig's response to Winer and McCullough: Geeks *do* need to get active

Dave Winer's been running an editorial on his blog, damning Lawrence Lessig for claiming that geeks have yet to accomplish anything politically. Larry's taken time off from working on one of the most important Supreme Court copyright challenges in the history of America to write this very cogent response:

When I said at OSCON that "We've done nothing yet," what I meant (and I thought this was obvious) is that we've done nothing politically yet. We have yet to build a political movement to resist those who would use law to kill what you, and others, built when you, and others, built the net. That claim I still stand behind. There is no political movement that has punished, the way democracies punish, the likes of Berman, et al. And there's no political movement yet that adequately rewards the likes of Boucher, Cannon, and Hank Perritt.

You say there "will" be. Great. Here's hoping. But I was talking about what there is -- now, when the worst legislation we've seen so far is being bounced around DC like it's apple pie. Right now we have a culture where the most creative and important builders of freedom in the 21st century have zero political savvy and (so far) zero political effect. Part of the reason for this is good sense: obviously, your talents are for building the technical infrastructure for freedom that we call the Net. But part of the reason is the continuing reign of Declan-like banalities--about how you don't need to waste time getting democracies to protect freedom, that politics can be left to people in dc, that geeks should worry about west coast code not east coast code, etc. (My favorite line from the Declan missive was: "Would you rather see Ian Clarke start a certain-to-be-ignored postcard campaign instead of inventing such a beautifully disruptive technology as Freenet?" Gee, I guess not. And I guess on that reasoning, Ian should also stop going to movies, because if we've got to choose between the next great "beautifully disruptive technology" and movies, well...)

Link Discuss (via Vertical Hold)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:24:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Why haiku can't solve the spam problem

Danny "NTK" O'Brien, who has always bristled at having the word "journalist" directed at him ("proper journalism involves training and grammar-checking and talking to people on the telephone and selling out to the man in weekly installments"), has decided it's time to be a grown-up. He's got a kid on the way, a giant tax-debt, and he needs to pay the bills.

So he's started writing up his blog entries as though they were actual, no-foolin' journalism. His first piece is about this completely nutty proposal to stop spam by embedding a copyrighted haiku in real mail, then suing spammers who try to out-smart filters by including the haiku in their come-ons for copyright violation:

Normal Net users can insert the poem for free. Legitimate bulk mailers (with double opt-in agreements), or other companies whose mail caught in spam filters, can pay Habeas to put the haiku in their headers too, dodging the filtering bullet.

But woe betide any spammer trying the same trick. Habeas say they'll push for prima facie trademark infringement on every mistagged e-mail sent - and maximum damages. They've already teamed up with a collection agency to gather the loot...

Very clever - but will Habeas be able to keep up with those notoriously scofflaw spammers? Mitchell claims they will - and those they can't catch, they'll put on a blacklist of copyright infringing IP addresses...

Danny's done a great job of writing up the Habeas side of the piece, but I think he's missing his normal anti-idiot goggles, which raise some skeptical points, such as:

• Spammers are already engaged in fraud, for the most part. Nigerian letter scams, Ponzi schemes, illegal pornography -- they're already illegal! Spam doesn't flourish because we lack the legal framework to attack spammers.
• How will blackholing IP addresses that are temporarily employed by spammers accomplish anything except for turning the Internet into a swiss-cheese network where huge swaths of arbitrary IP-space are off-limits because someone, somewhere once used a network address (or forged it) to send some spam? If that approach worked, MAPS would already have solved the spam problem (instead of turning into a redux of Lord of the Flies).
• How can Habeas possibly police every use of their haiku and ensure that it's being used in "legitimate bulk mail?" Why believe that they will be any better at this than the SpamCop or MAPS people are?
• In the 1980s, Disneyland realized that it could use California law to fine shoplifters on the spot for their crimes. Suddenly, security was transformed from a cost-center into a revenue center. Disney's security staff were given a daily quota of fines they had to collect each day, and within a short period, the security staff were snatching anyone they thought they could squeeze a couple hundred dollars out of. After damaging publicity and civil suits, Disneyland decided to pursue shoplifters in court instead of in the park, and things returned to normal. Habeas will employ a Hong Kong strong-arm collection agency to collect on infringers -- why should we believe that adding the ability to profit from overly broad enforcement will reduce abuses and errors? Why should we believe that a net.clueless collection agency will be better at policing itself than the leet sysadmins at MAPS were?

Link Discuss (Thanks, Danny!)

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

Blogger Barnraising a success

It only took a weekend. Doc reported that his wireless access-point had been ripped off at LinuxWorld, where he'd brought it to provide wireless access in the press-room. A bunch of bloggers asked people to send a buck or two to Doc to help replace the networking gear. By yesterday afternoon, Doc had enough PayPal kwan to buy a new Linksys WAP11. The first Monthual Blogger Barnraising was a success. I wonder who'll launch the next one? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:50:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, August 19, 2002

John M. Ford's 110 Stories about 9-11

Writer John M. Ford has posted 110 one-line "stories" about being in NYC on Septmeber 11th, 2001.

This is not real. We've seen it all before.
Slow down, you're screaming. What exploded? When?
I guess this means we've got ourselves a war.
And look at -- Lord have mercy, not again.
I heard that they went after Air Force One.
Call FAA at once if you can't land.
They say the bastards got the Pentagon.
The Capitol. The White House. Disneyland.
I was across the river, saw it all.
Down Fifth, the buildings put it in a frame.
Aboard the ferry -- we felt awful small.
I didn't look until I felt the flame.
The steel turns red, the framework starts to go.
Jacks clasp Jills' hands and step onto the sky.

Link (New link -- update your pointers, he's being slashdotted) Discuss (Thanks, Andy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:28:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toronto photos

I'm working on my third novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," a big, fat urban fantasy story about community wireless activists and various and sundry magics. The book is set in Toronto's wonderful Kensington Market neighborhood, and I've been casting about for a good site with photo-reference of the Market and Toronto in general. TorontoPics is that site. Wonderful shots from the whole city. Link Discuss (via Oliver Willis)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:26:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

200 CD blanks for $5

200 CD blanks for $5 after rebate. Kick azz! Link (click on "Value Disc 200-Pack CD-R") Discuss (via Deals on the Web)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:18:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Warchalking reborn

Matt Jones has been "memebombed." After helping to come up with the idea of "warchalking" -- marking wireless network availablity with chalk, using runes derived from old-time hobo-marks -- Matt got completely overwhelmed with publicity. The little site he set up got armies of visitors. He didn't have time enough for his day-job. So he's turned over the management of the warchalking blog to Aaron Swartz, the indefatiguable and ever-vigilant nerdc0re activist and netizen. Aaron's rebuilt the site using Scoop, the engine that runs Kuro5hin, and he's looking for contributors. Got a warchalking story to share? Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:06:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why researchers tremble before the DMCA

Declan McCullough wrote an editorial in which he reported that the DMCA doesn't really threaten researchers and scientists. Instead, he claimed that the widespread fear of the DMCA originates with its opponents, primarily the EFF, who, for some reason that Declan doesn't go into detail on, have decided to villify this bill and drum up a lot of sturm und drang about it.

This is, of course, ridiculous. Foreign researchers have arrested under the DMCA, foreign governments have issued advisories instructing their scientists not to travel to US conferences lest they be imprisoned, domestic researchers get threatening notices from record companies, and thesis advisors in Ph.D. programs have taken to advising their electric engineering doctoral candidates to choose their projects with care.

Ed Felten, Edward D. Lazowska (Co-chair, Computing Research Association, Government Affairs Committee) and Barbara Simons (Co-chair, ACM US Public Policy Committee) have written a letter in response, telling Declan exactly why they fear the DMCA:

First, the DMCA has two arms: one that prohibits devices that circumvent copy protection, and one that prohibits acts of circumvention. The research conducted by Professor Felten and his colleagues took place prior to the time when the "acts of circumvention" provisions became effective in October 2000. Thus, these provisions did not apply to that research. However, there is little doubt in the legal community that this research, and similar research, would be illegal under the "acts of circumvention" provisions. Declan fails to recognize this arm of the DMCA in his column.

Second, the chilling effect of the DMCA cannot be described by the probability of conviction alone. One must also consider the magnitude of the exposure if convicted. Because the "acts of circumvention" provisions of the DMCA were not in effect at the time of the Felten research, the probability of an adverse judgment was indeed small. However, a group of highly respected legal consultants told Felten's employer that the cost of an adverse judgment could be truly enormous. The combination of these two factors had a very substantial chilling effect. (It is also the case that two individuals were likely to lose their jobs if the paper was published. This illustrates the human dimension of the chilling effect.)

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:58:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ed Felten, spam-vigilante martyr

Ed "Tinkerer" Felten sent out a notice of his new blog to a mailing-list and got fingered as a spammer with the Lord-of-the-Flies crew at SpamCop, who blackballed his email address with no appeal, and as a consequence, his ISP shut down his account -- it was that or have their mail-relays on everyone's blacklist.

I recently set up a web site at www.freedom-to-tinker.com. It's a weblog containing my commentary on various issues. Earlier this week, my ISP shut off the site, because the site had appeared on a list of "spammers" published by an outfit called SpamCop.

Apparently, this happened because one person, whose identity I was not allowed to learn, had sent SpamCop an accusation saying that he had received an unwanted e-mail message, which I was not allowed to see, that did not come from me but that did mention my web site. On that "evidence" SpamCop declared me guilty of spamming and decreed that my site should be shut down. Never mind that I had never sent a single e-mail message from the site. Never mind that my site was not selling anything.

Naturally, I was not allowed to see the accusation, or to learn who had submitted it, or to rebut it, or even to communicate with an actual human being at SpamCop. You see, they're not interested in listening to complaints from spammers.

With help from my ISP, I eventually learned that the offending message was sent on a legitimate mailing list, and that the person who had complained was indeed subscribed to that list, and had erroneously reported the message as unsolicited. Ironically, the offending message was sent by someone who liked my site and wanted to recommend it to others. Everybody involved (me, my ISP, the person who filed the complaint, and the author of the message) agreed that the report was an error, and we all told this to SpamCop. Naturally, SpamCop failed to respond and continued to block the site.

Why did my ISP shut me down? According to the ISP, SpamCop's policy is to put all of the ISP's accounts on the block list if the ISP does not shut down the accused party's site.

Note the similarities to the worst type of Stalinist "justice" system: conviction is based on a single anonymous complaint; conviction is based not on anything the accused did but on favorable comments about him by the "wrong" people; the evidence is withheld from the accused; there is no procedure for challenging erroneous or malicious accusations; and others are punished based on mere proximity to the accused (leading to shunning of the accused, even if he is clearly innocent).

Note also that the "evidence" against me consisted only of a single unsigned e-mail message which would have been trivial for anyone to forge. Thus SpamCop provides an easy denial of service attack against a web site.

The only bright spot in this picture is that our real justice system allows lawsuits to be filed against guys like SpamCop for libel and/or defamation. My guess is that eventually somebody will do that and put SpamCop out of business.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bruce!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New e-sheep comic

Stefan sez: "Eeeyah! Patrick Farley quit his day job and is starting a weekly strip about the long-ago era of Dot-Com San Francisco. Episode One is up now. (Strong language. Not for Grandma.)"

This is the e-sheep/Spiders/Guy I Almost Was guy, my favorite web-toonist of all, a king-hell science fiction writer and a sharp artist to boot, and what's more, he's solid nerdc0re, with a great understanding of the net and all it means. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:42:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

12,000 year warning signs

Great overview of how one would communicate with the long distant future on this page, which concerns itself with the design of warning-signs for toxic waste that are meant to communicate danger 12,000 years into the future. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jess!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:28:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark's Very Large National Lampoon Site

Mark's Very Large National Lampoon Site is an " Unauthorized Guide to the Golden Age of National Lampoon Magazine (1970-1975)" Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:40:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rational exuberance from Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor's Sunday column is full of rational exuberance for a tech and morals renaissance.

CUSTOMERS AWAKEN: Everyday people are starting to realize that they are not just "consumers" but customers -- that is, they are becoming serious participants in the marketplace of goods and services. This is a crucial distinction.

A consumer's role is limited to ordering what's on the menu and paying for it. A customer wonders what's not on the menu, asks for something he or she actually wants and then negotiates the terms.

This awakening takes many forms, but a common one is the customer's empowerment. Technology is the catalyst.

Prospective customers ignore press releases and product pitches. Instead, they are heading to Web sites where they can research the reality and see what current customers have to say.

Journalism organizations watch, mostly dumbfounded, as weblogs and other multidirectional media bring new voices to the conversation. They offer new choices to what I call the "former audience," the people who are now becoming part of the journalism process itself -- to the ultimate benefit of everyone.

Even the all-powerful "intellectual property" regime is feeling the heat of customer-ism as opposed to consumerism. Customers are starting to understand that copyright owners are stealing customers' rights -- legal and traditional -- with laws and software designed to capture absolute control over distribution of music, movies and, I fear, even words.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:24:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Save Internet radio

Mad about the way that the CARP royalties killed Internet Radio? Two congresscritters have introduced a bill that will ensure that Internet radio stations get a fair shake. Fax this letter to your lawmakers and help save Internet Radio.

On July 26, 2002, Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA), George Nethercutt (R-WA) and Rick Boucher (D-VA) introduced legislation called the Internet Radio Fairness Act (HR 5285) in the US House of Representatives. This vital bill would protect a large number of Internet radio stations from being forced out of business by unfair and unaffordable performance copyright royalties. Please act immediately in seeing that this effort is carried through the House and Senate and made law before it is too late to save Internet radio. Immediate action is required. The enforcement of retroactive royalties based on the currently unaffordable rates is set to commence no later than October 20, 2002.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:21:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ISP blocks routing from the RIAA's site, turnabout is fair play?

An ISP has decided to ban routing to the RIAA's IP block from its network, on the grounds that the RIAA will attempt to hack its customers' computers.

Due to the nature of this matter and RIAA's previous history, we feel the RIAA will abuse software vulerabilities in a client's browser after the browser accesses its site, potentially allowing the RIAA to access and/or tamper with your data. Starting at midnight on August 19, 2002, Information Wave customers will no longer be able to reach the RIAA's web site. Information Wave will also actively seek out attempts by the RIAA to thwart this policy and apply additional filters to protect our customers' data.

Information Wave will also deploy peer-to-peer clients on the Gnutella network from its security research and development network (honeynet) which will offer files with popular song titles derived from the Billboard Top 100 maintained by VNU eMedia. No copyright violations will take place, these files will merely have arbitrary sizes similar to the length of a 3 to 4 minute MP3 audio file encoded at 128kbps. Clients which connect to our peer-to-peer clients, and then afterwards attempt to illegally access the network will be immediately blacklisted from Information Wave's network. The data collected will be actively maintained and distributed from our network operations site.

With the RIAA suing backbones to block MP3 distribution sites in China and ISPs blocking access to the RIAA's IP block, you gotta wonder, is this the end of the end-to-end principle? Maybe if everyone blocked the RIAA's IP block, just sent them away into bad netizen coventry, the rest of the net could get on with it. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:40:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Node Runner: WarJogging Manhattan

A group of New Yorkers are planning to jog through Manhattan with WiFi-equipped laptops in a race to see who can cover the most mileage while logging the most wireless access points.

To begin each team gets a wireless laptop with software that scans for nodes, a digital camera, and cab fare. Each is briefed on how to use the gear. Both teams take photos at Eyebeam and leave for Bryant Park.

The clock startes once both teams to leave Eyebeam. The teams have two and a half hours to connect to and photograph as many nodes as possible, collect a log (with the node scanning software) of nodes along their way, and arrive to the Bowling Green.

1 point is given for every 5 nodes the team's scanning software logs.

Teams will not be able to connect to every node they scan, but their node scanning software will collect a log of all the nodes they pass. 5 points are given for each set of photos that arrives to Eyebeam.

The Teams should provide 2 photos from each node they can connect to. The first photo should be of team members at the node. The second photo should be of a street sign or some other distinguishing landmark at the node.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Henry David Thoreau in the 21st and a half centurrrrrry!

My pal Rich, who has recently moved to a remote island near Vancouver, takes stock of his life and comes up with a Walden manifesto for the XXIth Century.

I like to play guitar, hey I have a guitar, so that doesn't cost anything.

I like to ride my bicycle, hey - I have a bike, so that doesn't cost anything.

I like owning my home, but hey - my mortgage is cheaper than any rent I've ever payed.

I like spending time on the Internet, well hey - my computer is paid for and the Internet is cheaper than going to see four movies a month.

In fact - the more I add up my life, the cheaper it gets. Why the hell am I working for a company I hate doing a job that is largely unnecessary?

With any luck I'll get laid off and the ratings may improve.

But Rich, how will you buy a new computer every 18 months? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Larry Lessig, international man of mystery

According to Doc Searls, Larry Lessig once smuggled a heart valve in the crotch of his pants into Soviet Union for a Jewish dissident. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:18:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New York City time-travellers

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written a great account of the time-travellers one encounters on the New York subway system.

This happened one day back in the 1980s. I was riding the subway home from work, and this kid got on at 34th or 42nd. He was at most twelve but I think younger, and slightly built at that. What caught my eye first was that he was wearing a jacket with a waistline seam--not a full-blown norfolk jacket, less obtrusive than that, but in that class. Which was odd; it had been over half a century since boys' and men's jackets stopped having waistline seams.

I started noticing more things about him. His pants ended just below his knees. That was unobtrusive too; his pants were dark, and so were his long woolen socks. If you weren't really looking, the combination would register as black trousers, and you wouldn't think anything of it. He had a flat woolen cap, and a sweater on under the jacket, and his shoes were what you'd expect with the rest of the outfit. Think newsboy, turn of the century or a little later, and you've got it...

Since then I've seen a few more, like the guy who looked like he decided in a fit of enthusiasm to follow Peter the Hermit, and had come to really, really regret it. There've been others. And once I saw a couple of bright-eyed young men on the subway who had a different kind of not-from-here look. It wasn't their clothing or haircuts; those were correct in every detail. But they somehow managed to look separate from the scene, as though the worry and weariness and day-to-day engagedness of the subway ride touched upon them not at all; and yet the way they were openly looking at the rest of us was avid, proprietary, amused, almost too knowing...

Like they were on a ride at Disneyland. Or in a museum.

"Bloody hell," I murmured to Patrick, as I nudged him to look at them. "The little jerks are from the future."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:10:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weird Al's Christian counterparts

ApologetiX is a devout Christian parody rock band. I wish they were funnier -- I love novelty tunes. Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Greenpeace blog

Greenpeace has a blog. It'd be great if NGOs around the world started doing this. In particular, it'd be great if some of the sustainable development NGOs like Youth Challenge International had blogging set up from their base-camps, so that project staff could make some notes about their projects while they're back at HQ. Geekhalla, the geek-house in Accra, Ghana, that the Geekcorps volunteers live in, has blog, but are there others? I'd love to read a blog maintained by the crews on Greenpeace's boats, too. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gillo!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:00:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Is Apple gonna ship a phone?

Is Apple shipping an iPhone soon? The NYT thinks so. I would so dig a phone/PDA from Apple, running Darwin (OS X's Unix) underneath, based on the iPod: 20GB of MP3s, a phone, a DOM-compliant browser, a mini email client all tied by Firewire to OS X.

Sherlock in particular has been repositioned in a way that would make it a perfect counterpart for a portable phone. Its original purpose, which was finding files and content on the computer's local disk, has been transformed into a more general "find" utility program. Now, Sherlock is being extended to search for types of information like airline and movie schedules and restaurant locations. The software can display maps and driving directions.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:54:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Growing up digital

Terrific Wired Magazine roundup of the wired generation -- kids who grew up with the net, IM, P2P, MP3 and so forth.

Kids are IT specialists.            <




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:46:18 AM
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Your photo on a soda bottle




Jones Soda, the Canadian soda-pop "microbrewery," does teensy print runs for its soda labels, incorporating photos that soda fans have submitted to their site and voted on.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Lisa!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:25:45 AM
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Win a mystery box

Yami at Green Gabbro is having a contest to get rid of a box of mystery crap. The contest is to come up with a good contest, but you have to make your suggestions in verse form.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Yami!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:18:21 AM
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Detritus: popcult, approprationism and copyfighting

Detritus is a great appropriationist/copyright hater site, chock-full-o rants, cutup music, collages and assorted neat crap.


A.J. Liebling said that "Freedom of the press belongs to those who
own one." The reality is that throughout history, the distribution
of information has been monopolized by a tiny, yet extraordinarily
powerful, elite. In ancient Egypt, priests would jealously guard
their astronomical knowledge so as to ensure their place at the
top of society by being able to predict the annual flooding of the
Nile. The Roman Catholic Church used the literacy of its clergy
and monks to develop a parallel government that was more powerful
than the theoretically sovereign kings during the 1,000 years of
the Middle Ages. Although freedom of the press is enshrined in the
First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the reality today is
that the majority of information distribution channels are still
controlled by a small elite of publishers and broadcasters. An
oligopoly of five powerful companies has nearly exclusive control
in deciding what music will be heard. (This is certainly one of
the fundamental reasons that Britney Spears is so popular.) 


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Eric!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:12:27 AM
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Moz links in new tabs -- you can vote for it

If, like me, you wish that new URLs sent to Mozilla would open in new tabs rather than new windows, you're not alone. There's an open Request for Enhancement in Bugzilla, the Mozilla bug-tracker. Anyone can create a Bugzilla account and vote for bugs -- bugs with lots of votes get fixed sooner. Head on over and create an account today if you want to cast a vote for this.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Gillo!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           05:59:24 AM
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Sunday, August 18, 2002
    
   
  
Fax-like utility for sending CDROMs




CDFax is a command-line Linux utility for "fax-like transfer of CDs." Two people run the software. The receiver loads a CD blank in his burner, and the sender puts a CD to be sent in her drive. The sender enters a brief command that specifies the receiver's IP address and the disk is imaged, sent, and burned at the remote end. A simple and striking idea.

Link

Discuss

(via Beltorchicca)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:24:08 AM
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I come to praise Transmetropolitan

Transmetropolitan, the utterly brilliant sf comic created by Darick Robinson and Warren Ellis, has published its penultimate issue, closing the story-arc that's run since 1997 (1996?).

This is one of the best works of science fiction I've ever read, real big ideas stuff with a pathologically gritty perspective. There's loads of humor, stories that are touching and human, even when they're about transhumans. 

Ellis wrote the story as a series of three-comic short stories -- every three issues closed a little story arc and advanced the overall plot. Even though the story came in these little bites, there was always a sense that the story was going somewhere. This wasn't the story of Peter Parker's twenty years in costume -- this was a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. 

When I finished number 59 yesterday, I wanted to leap to my feet and applaud. Ellis is closing out the story with confidence and vigor, bringing together loose ends from the earliest books in the series, doing justice to a plot that I've been utterly engrossed in for five years.

There are six Transmet collections for sale today, each collecting six comics. I really hope that DC puts out an omnibus collection with all sixty books in it; this is the most engrossing comic I've read since The Watchmen.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:08:58 AM
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Dear Futurefolk: Time-capsule in a satellite

Jimmy writes:


Apparently some folks in France are sending up a satellite with a time capsule aboard, that'll orbit the earth for fifty-thousand years before coming back down for future generations to find.  The cool part is, everyone's invited to leave their own message (6,000 characters or less) for posterity.  I was going to send you the permalink from my blog with my commentary but it doesn't seem to be working - but here's my personal message to the folks of the future, I thought you might get a kick out of it:

Dear Futurefolk,

I sincerely hope that this message is being read by a human, as opposed to a dirty, horseback-riding, talking ape. That said, I'd like to tell you that I'm utterly amazed anyone managed to make it out of the 21st century. What with the wars, plagues, global warming and all the scary implications of the genetic and technological innovations of recent years, for anyone to have made it past the year 2020 was quite a trick and I applaud you on your hardiness. You're a very resourceful crew, indeed. 

I suppose someone either managed to rally the earth's people and bring about some social epiphany, ushering in a new era of peace and enlightenment for mankind or - more likely - you're a world of ultra-badass motorcycling mutants with mohawks and shotguns who've managed to shrewdly survive by hoarding gas, killing those weaker than yourselves and drinking your own urine for sustenence. Hey, either way - good for you! 

By the way, how are the cockroaches? 

Yours truly,

Jimmy Olsen - Your Simple, Barbaric Ancestor


What about the Singularity, Jimmy? Maybe they're a bunch of disembodied consciounesses embedded in a Dyson Sphere that wraps around the entire Solar System!

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Jimmy!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:35:58 AM
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WarStorming: WarDriving with airplanes

Australians have taken wardriving to the next level, using a small plane and a laptop with a WiFi card to reconnoiter wireless access points in their area. They call it "WarStorming" -- Wireless Access Reconnaissance Barnstorming. I wonder if we could get Larry Ellison to do some WarStorming the next time he's flying around the Bay Area in his MiG. Jas writes:


Ok, we live in the arse-end of the arse-end of the World.  But that doesn't mean we're technologically illiterate.

In fact, I reckon we're the first to brag about going "War Storming".  That's a phrase I've coined to describe a combination of war driving and barn storming.

We took an aircraft and went a stumblin'.

We found a LOT of active nodes.  It seems 1500ft is a good height.

My kismet logs are rather detailed and funnily enough the network dump contains IRC logs of the very same people I normally chat to.  If I'd thought to do so at the time, I could have IRC'ed from up there!

Anyhoo, take a look at e3, the piccies and the logs.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Jas!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:28:34 AM
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Those French have a different word for *everything*!

Verlan, a French street-slang that combines spoonerisms and backwards-talk, is moving from the North African immigrant population into general parlance.


Thus the standard greeting "Bonjour, ça va?" or "Good day, how are you?" becomes "Jourbon, ça av?" "Une fête" (a party) has become "une teuf"; the word for woman or wife, femme, has become meuf; a café has become féca; and so on. The word Verlan itself is a Verlanization of the term l'envers, meaning "the reverse."...

"Speaking backwards becomes a metaphor of opposition, of talking back," writes Natalie Lefkowitz, a professor of French applied linguistics at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wash., and the author of "Talking Backwards, Looking Forwards: The French Language Game Verlan" (Gunter Narr, 1991), which, when it was published, was one of the first major studies of Verlan.

But along with its subversive element, Ms. Lefkowitz explained in an interview, "for the young urban professional, Verlan is a form of political correctness expressing solidarity with and awareness of the immigrant community at a time of anti-immigrant politics." 


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Jed!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:20:15 AM
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Friday, August 16, 2002
    
   
  
Tokyo Disneyland souvenirs available online

TokyoMagic: shipping Tokyo Disneyland souvenirs to the USA at a healthy markup. There's some pretty cool stuff here.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:57:11 PM
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Japanese game-geek bathes in Nintendo cartridges



This Japanese site features pictures of the Nintendo cartridge collection of this amazing game-obsessive. He has so many he's built furniture out of 'em, tiled his apartment with 'em and even bathes in them.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Joi!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:35:41 PM
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Andromeda, a personal MP3 server

Andromeda is a way-groovy PHP app that allows you to stream your MP3 library over the Internet. It takes a little bit of tinkering to get it running, but once it's up, you can put your whole MP3 collection on a low-cost desktop machine, then bring your WiFi-equipped laptop into another room and listen to it. What's more, you could leave your MP3 collection at home and use your DSL link to stream your MP3 collection to your machine at work; if you're staying at a hotel with broadband in the room, you can listen to your collection on the road. 

There's gonna be a whole lot of these things, and each one is going to expand your ability to enjoy your lawfully acquired media. I love the idea of turning a cheap-ass Linux box into a home entertainment server, filled with ripped DVDs, scanned e-books, captured digital television programming and MP3s, so that no matter where I am -- home or away -- all my media will be no farther than the closest open wireless network. 

Of course, there's a good chance that making tools like this will be illegal in a year or two. Thanks, Hollywood.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Scott!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:27:16 PM
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Scott McCloud interprets Brenda Laurel



Stefan sez: "MIT Press' Mediaworks is a series of brainy monographs, 'Zines for adults.' The first of these is Brenda Laurel's Utopian Entrepreneurship.

"Comics guru Scott McCloud has created a visual/typographic riff on the pamphlet that's well worth seeing. It  reminds me of Fiore and Agel's trippy visual interpretation of McLuhan, 'The Medium is the Massage.'"

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Stefan!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:31:13 PM
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NukePop: Atom Age Imagery





Amazing pictorial history of the Atomic Age from the dawn of the A-Bomb to the present day.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Derryl!)








posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:25:14 PM
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Sorbet in a sack

Guide to making summer sorbet with fruit juice, ice cubes, rock salt and a ZipLoc bag, illustrated with stuffed animals.


today i'm making my special sorbet in a sack. armed with just a couple of plastic bags and some rock salt i will transform this fruit juice into a refreshing sorbet in just minutes. its the perfect snack after a busy day of play, work or adventuring! 


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Cowboy X!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:09:58 AM
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Man Conquers Space



Michael Skeet writes: "Weird and wonderful site for a faux documentary about an alternate-universe U.S. space program. Imagine that the plans described in the magnificent 1952 "Colliers" series "The Conquest of Space" (illustrated by Chesley Bonestell) actually came to pass. The teaser trailer is magnificent: an animated Bonestellian conical shuttle-rocket launches from Complex 39b at the Kennedy Space Center..."

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Michael!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:57:11 AM
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Vintage beer trays



Beautiful online gallery of vintage beer-trays.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Patrick!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:50:59 AM
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Carnegie-Mellon offers course on DRM

Dave Farber is teaching a seminar course on DRM copy-prevention schemes at CMU this fall.


This seminar will focus on the technology underlying the efforts and the
work that preceded these highly controversial efforts; on the societal,
legal and commercial issues that are raised by the enabled mechanisms --
such as digital rights management, protection of software against
unauthorized modification etc.


Link

Discuss

(via Interesting People)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:31:35 AM
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Thursday, August 15, 2002
    
   
  
First monthual Blogger Barnraising

Doc committed a Random Act of Senseless Wirelessness by bringing his Airport 802.11b access-point to the LinuxWorld press-gallery in order to spread the packets around, and it got ripped off. Dammit. I've just paypalled him $20 (send to doc@searls.com) to help him buy a new AP (you can get a good one for about $135). We Johnny Airportseeds need to take care of our own -- won't you send a buck or two Doc's way to support the practice of providing wireless access at conferences? I think it'd be cool if Blogistan did a buck-a-head barn-raising project about once a month, kicking in for some low-cost project that helped support community values.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:14:35 PM
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Drive-in ferris-wheel



Eli writes: "Antwerp has a drive-in ferris wheel,
with space for four cars at once."

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:46:01 PM
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What do IMBots think of the IMBot patent?

Donna from Copyfight interviews three IM bots about the dumb-ass IM bot patent that ActiveBuddy is asserting:


alexandra: dale, what do you think about patenting bots?

dale: [PERSONAL] what Dermott is saying... ;) I use KDE.

alexandra: dale, what do you think about patenting bots?

dale: [PERSONAL] what is your state? isn't it time to take a walk, unable to connect to

alexandra: dale, do you think patenting bots is a good idea?

dale: [PERSONAL] I'm stupid.

alexandra: dale, are you prior art?

dale: [PERSONAL] Don't worry, just have fun.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Donna!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           04:22:11 PM
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When I die don't bury me at all, just mould my ashes into a frisbee

The ashes of "Steady" Ed Headrick, the recently deceased co-inventor of the Frisbee, will be moulded into a limited edition of memorial flying discs, and distributed to his greiving relations and friends.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Jim!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           03:51:40 PM
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Get out of hell free!



Get Out of Hell Free cards -- just $1 for ten cards, plus P&H.

Link

Discuss

(via Bifurcated Rivets)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           12:43:25 PM
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HowStuffWorks explains TiVo



HowStuffWorks.com examines the Digital Video Recorder (i.e., ReplayTV, TiVo). Trying to figure out how to explain why you can't live without your TiVo to your grandfather or cluless cousin? Print out this primer and watch them marvel at the groovy exploded diagrams.

Link

Discuss







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           10:29:40 AM
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Utterly bogus IMBot patent threatens entire field of innovation

When venture captial dries up, "innovative" companies like ActiveBuddy look for other revenue opportunities. In ActiveBuddy's case, the new money in the door will come from intimidating other technologists who ship instant-messaging bots, a concept on which the enemies of progress at the USPTO have just granted ActiveBuddy a patent. IM bots are an idea with well-known, invalidating prior art going back to well before the ActiveBuddy patent was filed. ActiveBuddy demonstrates its ignorance thus:


"I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed (August 22, 2000). I'm certainly not aware of any," said Kay, who doubles as ActiveBuddy's chief technology officer.  


This is: So. Much. Bullshit. There are 1998 AIMBots, there are IRC bots going back to the mid-nineties (earlier?). ActiveBuddy swears that it will enforce its wretched patent.

When you file a patent, you aver that you have disclosed all the potentially invalidating prior art you know about. I wonder if there's a basis for pursuing a fraud claim against the inventors whose names are on the patent, since it's hardly credible that they didn't know about all this invalidating prior art before they told the federal government that they'd never heard of any of these well-known technologies.

Crooks, liars and the USPTO -- partners in undermining and sabotaging American innovation.

Link

Discuss

(via /.)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           10:09:52 AM
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Kawaii USB Hub

Check out this awesome animatronic Hello Kitty USB hub!



Hello Kitty responds to your keyboard motion by talking and moving! Type with Kitty! Keyboard action and sound function. Hello Kitty responds to the keyboard and mouse motion by moving herself! (Moves both arms and head) Hello Kitty will talk with you, along with the input motion of the keyboard. (Kitty is able to talk in both Japanese and English. The languages can be switched.)...

- HUBCOT interlock screensaver - Includes the function where Hello Kitty mascot will shake around if it interfaces with the screen saver on the screen. Kitty will play puzzle, mail e-mail with her friends, and a lot more motions, with responds to the computer screen...
- Compatible for both Mac and PC computers - Easy installation with the software that comes along with this Hello Kitty Vibration Mascot. The motion and sound function can be turned on and off, so there is no need to worry about it start making noises while your are asleep or at work.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Charlie!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:43:48 AM
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Brand names act on your brain differently from words

Brand names tickle the right side of your brain, talking straight to your emotions.


The study conducted by reasearchers at the University of California, Los Angeles claimed that consumers reading a brand name do not treat it like any other word - instead they activate parts of the brain normally used to process emotions. 


Link

(via New World Disorder)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:36:04 AM
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Glaciers go bye-bye

Dramatic pix of glacier shrinkage. Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           09:13:22 AM
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Wednesday, August 14, 2002
    
   
  
Periodic Table of Science Fiction for your PDA

Scifi.com's Scifiction section has a regular feature by brilliant sf writer Michael Swanwick called the Periodic Table of Science Fiction. For each installment, Swanwick writes a 300-word short-short-story about an element from the Periodic Table. Now, scifi.com is syndicating those stories with AvantGo, so you can get regular updates to read on your Palm or PocketPC device while you're on the road.


They're Made of Carbon

"They're made of carbon."

"Ew!"

"Linked to hydrogen and oxygen atoms, mostly."

"Yuk."

"Look, Seraph, it's not our job to pass judgment. Our job is to seek out all intelligent races and welcome them into the Galactic Ekumen, thus bringing them the benefits of peace, prosperity, immortality, blah blah blah. I can read your thoughts and, quite frankly, they're not worthy of you."

"Yes, but ... physical matter! If it were merely one of the lower spiritual levels, I'd understand, but they're completely embedded in mundane reality. It's just too much to ask." 


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Ellen!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:37:08 PM
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Barney the Dinosaur versus Wesley Crusher Power Hour, an EFF benefit

Next Thursday, the EFF is throwing an all-night bash at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco. DJs will spin, booze will be consumed, life will be good, and...

...Wil Wheaton (blogger, Star Trek scapegoat) will climb into the ring for a celebrity boxing match against Barney the Purple Dinosaur (frequent Cease-and-Desist intimidator and parental annoyance). I'll be calling the match, and writer/comedian/fellow Canadian Heather Gold will be refereeing. It's gonna kick all the azz that there is.

See you there!

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:29:06 PM
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Recycling photography



Spectacular (and occassionally gruesome) gallery of photos of recycling plants and products (like these bricks made from a variety of recycled metals). The roadkill compost heap is really, really creepy.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:23:08 PM
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Shrinkwrap licenses on books

A medical trade publisher has started putting (really horrendous) shrinkwrap licenses on its books. God, will it never end?


"It plainly says that by breaking the seal you agree to the terms of the license and if you don't agree you should return the book unopened. Is this what software licensing has led us to? This license says the book remains the property of Omnicare. Will they come up with a way to remotely disable the book if someone else reads it?"

 The license was nontransferable and would "terminate immediately if the Licensee or his or her employer ceased to be an Omnicare customer." And although the Omnicare "Guidelines are intended only to provide guidance as to which pharmaceutical products Omnicare believes to be most effective" the "licensee" was nonetheless prohibited from disclosing any of the information in the book to third parties.


It gets worse: Omnicare sent out this book to prospective customers, people who didn't have a pre-existing relationship with them. That's right, this is spam with a shrinkwrap license!

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Seth!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:15:59 PM
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No-foolin' artificial vision, God DAMN!

Staggering Wired story about a functional electronic eye with a brain interface.



Our guinea pig is 39, strong and tall, with an angular jaw, bold ears, and a rugged face. He looks hale, hearty, and healthy — except for the wires. They run from the laptops into the signal processors, then out again and across the table and up into the air, flanking his face like curtains before disappearing into holes drilled through his skull. Since his hair is dark and the wires are black, it's hard to see the actual points of entry. From a distance the wires look like long ponytails...

From a few steps closer, I see that the wires plug into Patient Alpha's head like a pair of headphones plug into a stereo. The actual connection is metallic and circular, like a common washer. So seamless is the integration that the skin appears to simply stop being skin and start being steel...

So smoothly has the morning been going that while we're talking, the techs allow the patient to take control of the keyboard and begin stimulating his own brain. This isn't standard operating procedure, but with the excitement, the techs don't stop him and the doctor doesn't notice.

Suddenly, the color drains from the patient's face. His hand drops the keys. His fingers crimp and gnarl, turning the hand into a disfigured claw. The claw, as if tethered to balloons, rises slowly upward. His arm follows and suddenly whips backward, torso turning with it, snapping his back into a terrible arch. Then his whole body wrenches like a mishandled marionette — shoulders tilting, neck craning, legs twittering. Within seconds his lips have turned blue and his deadened eyes roll back, revealing bone-white pupils, lids snapping up and down like hydraulic window shades. There's another warping convulsion, and spittle sails from his mouth. Since the doctor's in a wheelchair and the techs seem hypnotized, I rush over and grab him.


Link

Discuss

(via Silk list)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:10:38 PM
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Gadgets blog with a paid blogger

Nick Denton's launched a gadgets blog called Gizmodo, with a paid blogger (Pete Rojas)!

Nick sez:


I have no idea how much Gizmodo can bring in revenues. All I know is
that weblogs are a compelling form, gadget addicts are all online, and
it's easy to plug into Amazon's electronics store.

Most importantly, this is a low-risk commercial experiment. Most media
companies have an overblown editorial staff, an ad sales force, and
overly complex publishing systems with a team of primadonna sysadmins to
maintain it. By contrast, Gizmodo will be a couple of hours a day of
Pete's link-picking skills, some automatically generated Amazon.com
links, and $150-worth of Movable Type. Media has never before been this
lean.


Nick's open to suggestions for the site -- any ideas?

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Nick!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:04:59 PM
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You can be an action figure!

AndGor Toys will sculpt and manufacture a personalized action-figure based on your appearance! They also take the prize for the dumbest, most irritating Javascript/DHTML-based site navigation mechanism, ever.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Robbie!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:01:08 PM
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RIP Doris Wishman

Cult "nudie" moviemaker Dorish Wishman died at the age of 90. 

Wishman abandoned her dream of becoming a Hollywood actress to make movies. Her first film, Hideout in the Sun, was shot in 1960 in South Dade County around the old Miami Serpentarium. Wishman, who admitted she didn't like many of her films, was one of the pioneers of ''nudies.'' The genre was born from a New York court ruling that permitted naked characters in films if they were in a nudist camp. What sets her nudies apart? They feature a plot to go along with the flesh -- Hideout in the Sun is about bank robbers who take a pretty girl hostage.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mary!)




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           09:26:23 AM
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Fuzz: Average guy action figure

Fuzz is an average guy, with his own action figure. When do I get my own action figure?



Hey, I'm Fuzz. I'm 21 years old, I live with my parents and I have my own action figure. Yes, I'm a real person and no, you can't have my autograph.

Unlike your average action figure, I wasn't dreamt up by some overpaid corporate drones out to make a buck off the kids. I don't have an advertising campaign, I don't have a TV series and I certainly don't have any "superpowers." I'm just a regular guy, with a catchy nickname and an unpredictable hairdo. One night, while I was in my room, sipping a vodka martini and listening to the Brazil soundtrack, I said to myself: "You deserve an action figure just as much as some hyped-up fictitious superhero." Of course, it was the vodka talking… but it was good vodka.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:43:14 AM
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Hypercard is back, baby

Great Wired News piece on Hypercard, the graphic programming toolkit that started shipping with the Mac in 1989. I picked up programming again, after a five-or-so year hiatus, once I got my first Mac that shipped with Hypercard (it was my beloved SE, "Kali the Destroyer"), and ended up earning my living on Hypercard, doing contract programming gigs (including coding for two of Voyager's CDROMs) until the Web came along in about 1992. There are still 10,000 Hypercard users worldwide, and many critical applications are still controlled by Hypercard stacks.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:38:12 AM
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Tuesday, August 13, 2002
    
   
  
FBI on War-chalking: the sky is falling, halp!

From Dave Farber's Interesting People list:


There is an Special Agent named "Bill Shore" in the Pittsburgh field
office. I've spoken to him, this is his. He forwarded it to an 'infoguard' list

Forwarded by my local Time-Warner/Road Runner 'insider'.

Jim

__________

From:    Bill Shore [mailto:billshore@fbi.gov]

Sent:    Monday, July 08, 2002 9:56 AM

To:      billshore@fbi.gov

Subject: Wireless networks - Warchalking/Wardriving

It has recently been brought to my attention that individuals/groups
have been actively working in the Pittsburgh area as well as other areas
of the United States including Philadelphia, and Boston, and the rest of
the world for that matter, to identify locations where wireless networks
are implemented.  This is done by a technique identified as
"Wardriving." Wardriving is accomplished by driving around in a vehicle
using a laptop computer equipped with appropriate hardware and software
http://www.netstumbler.com/ to identify wireless networks used in
commercial and/or residential areas.  Upon identifying a wireless
network, the access point can be marked with a coded symbol, or
"warchalked." This symbol will alert others of the presence of a
wireless network.  The network can then be accessed with the proper
equipment and utilized by the individual(s) to access the Internet,
download email, and potentially compromise your systems.  In Pittsburgh,
the individuals are essentially attempting to map the entire city to
identify the wireless access points, see here.

Also, check this article from pghwireless.com.

Identifying the presence of a wireless network may not be a criminal
violation, however, there may be criminal violations if the network is
actually accessed including theft of services, interception of
communications, misuse of computing resources, up to and including
violations of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Statute, Theft of
Trade Secrets, and other federal violations.  At this point, I am not
aware of any malicious activity that has been reported to the FBI here
in Pittsburgh, however, you are cautioned regarding this activity if you
have implemented a wireless network in your business.  You are also
highly encouraged to implement appropriate wireless security practices
to protect your information assets.


My response:


Oyez! Oyez!

Special Agent John Sanders of His Majesty's secret police today issued a notice observing that many of His Majesty's subjects have begun the practice of hiring so-called "glaziers" to install "clear walls" or "win-dohs" in their dwellings. Agent Sanders went on to note that while more convenient and hygienic than the traditional masonry or straw openings heretofore employed, these so-called "win-dohs" or "glass openings" are also vulnerable to miscreants who may employ special apparati (i.e., bricks, rocks) to violate the sovereignty of house and home. While S.A. Sanders could not cite any examples of crimes perpetrated in connection with these "win-dohs" he warns that in these tumultuous times, it is beholden on all of His Majesty's subjects to exercise the utmost care in defending their homes against the imprecations of the wily Norman and his sinister allies.

For God and King,

Rbt. K. Allen, H.M. Criers and Newsagents.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:08:45 PM
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Funny toons



Funny toons and paintings at Toothpaste for Dinner!

Link

Discuss







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:52:56 PM
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Beautiful vintage fruit-crate labels on the cheap



PaperStuff sells amazing, vintage fruit-crate labels dirt cheap -- $6 bucks and up!

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Patrick!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:47:41 PM
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Legal doings in the 100 Acre Wood

Great LA Magazine piece about the ongoing fight over the merchandising rights to Winnie the Pooh, between Disney and the heirs of Milne's agent, in the style of Winnie the Pooh:


I

In Which We Are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Lawyers, and the Stories Begin

HERE IS EDWARD BEAR, known to his friends as Winnie-the-Pooh, sitting upright in an office chair at a Century City law firm. A lawsuit has been filed against the Walt Disney Company. The lawsuit sometimes makes Pooh feel like he's been dragged down the stairs, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, and sometimes it's hard to know if it is Walt Disney that Pooh feels dragged by or if it is someone else. Maybe the lawsuit is a bother and there is another way, if only Pooh could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

As Pooh tries to give his mind to the matter, Bertram Fields--the man who calls himself Pooh's lawyer--appears in the 20th-floor conference room of Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman Machtinger & Kinsella, where Pooh happens to be sitting. "Hello, ladies," the fearsome Hollywood litigator says to four women who sit around a circular table. Fields turns to a fifth chair, the one occupied by the huge stuffed bear. "Hello, Pooh," he says. 


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Pat!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:31:30 PM
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How to torment a telemarketer

Huge list of ways to taunt telemarketers.

"I'm very interested in your program. But before I commit to buy, I need one more assurance. Can you guarantee me, in writing, that if I'm not 100% satisfied, you'll kill yourself?"

(shocked response from telemarketer)

"Look, you're asking me to risk my hard-earned money on this, based on your word alone, right? So I think you should stake your life on your claims. If your product isn't everything you say it is, I want you to kill yourself. Could you come out to my house and do it in front of me?"

Link  Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           01:45:43 PM
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New Sony Robot

Here's a video clip of the New Sony Robot. Looks like a very old man practicing Tai chi. Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           11:47:09 AM
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FDA: "Bring on the Vomitburgers"

The FDA has approved a vat-grown fungus-based meat substiute called Quorn. (also, see my 1996 article about Quorn from Wired News). Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           11:29:12 AM
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Toy Instrument CD

Mike Langlie made a wonderful CD called Twink, which features music made with thrift store toy instruments. The record label went belly up, and now Mike is trying to sell the CDs himself to recoup his production costs. Won't you help? Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           11:21:41 AM
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Email turns twenty today!

Twenty years ago today,  the IETF approved RFC 822, standardizing ARPANet email.


This standard specifies a syntax for text messages that  are
sent  among  computer  users, within the framework of "electronic
mail".  The standard supersedes  the  one  specified  in  ARPANET
Request  for Comments #733, "Standard for the Format of ARPA Net-
work Text Messages".

In this context, messages are viewed as having  an  envelope
and  contents.   The  envelope  contains  whatever information is
needed to accomplish transmission  and  delivery.   The  contents
compose  the object to be delivered to the recipient.  This stan-
dard applies only to the format and some of the semantics of mes-
sage  contents.   It contains no specification of the information
in the envelope.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Richard!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           10:36:30 AM
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Bats Day: Goth Disneyland party

Bats Day in the Fun Park is an annual, unofficial goth gathering at Disneyland, culminating with a 350+ person group shot and ride-through at the Haunted Mansion.




It was once told to me, what started out a small group of goofy creepy death rockers going to Disneyland, that has grown into its own institution, is just crazy and amazing. At the first official Bats Day, there was only about 90 people. At the second Bats Day, there was just over 200 people. The best thing is that everyone who goes to Bats Day can just leave all their cares and worries at the gate, and just have a fun time. May Bats Day in the Fun Park be around every year.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Kid Famine!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:52:48 AM
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Human billboards

Video game makerr Acclaim is looking for five people willing to legally change their name to Turok, a dinosuar-slaying Indian character in an upcoming game and assume the character's identity. They be paid about $800 and all the video games they can play. Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           09:43:54 AM
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Charles Sheffield has a tumor

Charles Sheffield -- sf writer, scientist, and spouse of writer Nancy Kress -- has a brain tumor and is going under the knife. With admirable scientific resolve, he's documented this in his last (for a while) column for Baen:


I could leave it at that, but I know from feedback from readers of this column that you will want to know details.  So, let me tell you what I know.  The tumor is located on the left side, and is either pressing on or invading my speech center. I became aware of this in early June, when my patterns of speech became less precise.  Curiously, I can control this somewhat by speaking at higher volumes.  At the same time, I realized that my typing was becoming increasingly erratic, with my thoughts saying one thing and my fingers typing another.  CAT scans revealed both the tumor and a region of dead tissue next to it.  This poses an interesting question (well, interesting to me, at any rate): might an operation restore me to my original condition, or is the damage permanent?

I should know in another few weeks.

A few more brief comments before I close.  My thought processes themselves seem unimpaired.  I have determined by experiment that my ability to do arithmetic is as good (or bad) as ever.  I have suffered no headaches, and my general health is as good now as it was before.  I have been dictating these notes, because speaking seems to be more accurate than writing.


Here's wishing the best of all possible outcomes for Charles and Nancy.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Michael!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:22:53 AM
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The Internet: Still not dead

Scott Rosenberg's written a great analysis of "Small Pieces, Loosely Joined" compared with "Bamboozled by the Revolution," a cyncial book about the "failure" of the Internet:


"If you're not an online user, it's very difficult to understand the medium," says Warner exec Jim Moloshok. Well, duh. But somehow this elementary principle eluded media leaders for years. In one embarrassing anecdote culled from an Industry Standard article about the aftermath of the winter 2000 Time Warner/AOL merger, Time Warner CFO Richard Bressler hears about plans to promote Time magazines on AOL and asks, "What are these pop-ups? How big are they? Can you send me some information on them?" AOL's legendary deal-maker, David Colburn, responds, "Rich, why don't you invest $21.95 in an AOL subscription and consider it due diligence?" Ouch.

What might have been due diligence for a corporate exec was already a way of life for tens of millions of people. Motavalli contrasts the New York media honchos' cluelessness with the insight of AOL's Ted Leonsis that, online, it's "user experience" that counts. For AOL the key experience was getting new users online painlessly: It has always offered the simplest, most idiot-proof onramp to the Internet. AOL solved a vexing problem for millions of people; that, more than any "content strategy" or insight into online behavior, secured its dominance.

But once those people got online, they almost immediately started behaving in unpredictable ways. They didn't wait for a media corporation to tell them what to do; they began writing pages and posting comments and building sites and contributing reviews and arguing and inventing identities. This unplanned behavior was made possible because of design decisions made by the engineers who established the Internet long before the media world ever heard of it. As Doc Searls summarizes these principles, "Nobody owns it; everyone can use it; anyone can improve it." 


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, JRC!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:53:30 AM
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10,000 band-names

 10,000 band-names:


When working on the paper "The Quest for Ground Truth in Musical Artist Similarity" (preprint link on adam's site) we built MusicSeer to collect human evaluation of artist similarity. We expected a lot of responses but needed a way to ferret out "bad" results-- robots, users just clicking randomly, and people that didn't know the bands presented. One idea was to pepper the list with "red herrings" in the form of fake bandnames-- and if someone chose one, we'd ignore their responses later on.

Instead of thinking up a few, I made a quick script to part-of-speech tag the original list of 6,500 artist names that we were considering. This left us with a set of common band name grammars (popular ones were NNP NNP and NNP #.) We then fed terms from our already collected music text set ('Klepmit') through the grammars again (at the natural probabilities) to make some believable names. 

Petty Education 

Congress Freckle 

Franchise 

Breathe Faun 

Manly Pandas 

Monsoon 

Some Herd Trouble 

Seagull Sensor Drive
 
Narcissus 

Binaural Dropout 

Chuck Tore 

Bran 

Minimax Bay Ewe 

Minimax Skunks 


He didn't include my favorite fake band-name, though: "The Honey-Roasted Landlords."

Link

Discuss

(via Oblomovka)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:20:23 AM
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Monday, August 12, 2002
    
   
  
Bollywood gangsters and filmmakers

Gangsters fund Bollywood's film makers, who make movies about gangsters. The funding is a loan-sharking operation, the profits are laundered money, and the actors hire their "financiers" to rub out rival thespians. It's like the MPAA, only less so.


This two-way attraction has engendered a weird relationship between the films and the real-life villains. "There is a curious symbiosis between the underworld and the movies. The Hindi film-makers are fascinated by the lives of the gangsters, and draw upon them for material. The gangsters, from the shooter on the ground to the don-in-exile at the top, watch Hindi movies keenly, and model themselves - their dialogue, the way they carry themselves - on their screen equivalents." (Suketu Mehta in The New Statesman, Mar 12 2001) Indeed, films like Satya portray mobsters with a curious blend of sympathy and revulsion, one that will feel familiar to fans of Hollywood films by Martin Scorsese. 


Link

Discuss

(via Schism Matrix, which is chock-full-o related links today)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:28:08 PM
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Dog-goggles



Doggles -- goggles for dogs!

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Stefan!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:06:23 PM
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AdBusters TV

AdBusters has launched a net-TV station, and they're looking for original adbustin' video:


To kick-off Adbusters TV with the most inspiring, amusing and gut-ripping material, we're calling on you to submit your best work to the first-ever ABTV Contest.

Basically, we're looking for short videos, flash and audio (animation, music, mocumentaries . . . or whatever) in three categories: Direct Action, Epiphanies, and Mini-Docs.

We have $3,000 to divvy up among the winning entrants.



Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Howard!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:02:36 PM
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Massive Papal visit shortfall, minimal poll

Despite the multimillion-dollar taxpayer subsidy paid out for the Pope's visit to Toronto last month, the faithaganza is $30 million in the hole. Canoe.ca is running a poll to see who should make up the shortfall:


So far, 32%  have voted for The organizers.

So far, 4%  have voted for The City Of Toronto..

So far, 2%  have voted for The federal government..

So far, 17%  have voted for Everyday Catholics..

So far, 45%  have voted for The Vatican.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Amanda!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:55:22 PM
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Kasparov lines up to get another machine-whuppin'

Having lost to Deep Blue, Kasparov, the world's ranking human chess-master, will battle "Deep Junior," a new, ass-kickin' successor to Blue at an AI conference in Jerusalem.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Ren!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:49:32 PM
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The Dymaxion Dwelling Machine...

 ...in other words, a house designed and named by Bucky Fuller. Link Discuss (Thanks, ChakaTodd!)





posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           03:25:35 PM
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Asia's airborne toxic event

  A toxic cloud is hanging over Asia these days, "the result of forest fires; the burning of agricultural wastes; dramatic increases in the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles, industries and power stations; and emissions from millions of inefficient cookers." Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           12:04:26 PM
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Search Google with MSIE for OS X

Here's a way to add a pale shadow of Mozilla's excellent search capability to MSIE 5.2 for OS X:



 quit Explorer

 download this patch

 open a Terminal

 type "cd [whatever directory you downloaded the patch to, leave off the square-brackets]" and hit return

 type "gunzip Localized.rsrc.patch" and hit return

 type "cd /Applications/Internet\ Explorer.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj" and hit return

 type "sudo patch -b < [download directory]/Localized.rsrc.patch"

 launch Explorer

 to search Google, click in the location bar (or type command-L) and type a ?, then your query



Of course, Moz does all of this without having to screw around with patches...

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Michael!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           10:55:12 AM
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Photo-op being added to the Haunted Mansion

Chef Mayhem reports that the Disney World Haunted Mansion will put a camera into the penultimate scene, where you pass a wall of mirrors with a Hitchhiking Ghost riding in your Doom Buggie, and sell you the photo of you picking the ghost's nose (or whatever it is you like doing during the sequence, use your imagination).

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:15:20 AM
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Take the copyfight home

After you watch and listen to Lessig's OSCON presentation (linked below) about copyright, read this, Dan Gillmor's weekly column, which is starting to sound like the weekly round-up of horrors committed on the front of a slow and terrible war:


If you can set the rules, you can win the contest. That's the major reason the entertainment cartel is winning the debate over copyright in the Digital Age.

Average people are not part of the conversation, not in any way that matters. To the cartel and its chattel in the halls of political power, we are nothing but ``consumers'' -- our sole function is to eat what the movie, music and publishing industries put in front of us, and then send money.

It's long past time for the rest of us to challenge the cartel's assumptions, actions and overall clout. Over the next few weeks and months I'll offer some suggestions.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:49:58 AM
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WiFi Estonia Utopia



Estonia has amazing national WiFi coverage and they don't need warchalkers -- the gubbmint puts up these nifty signs to tell you where you can hop online.

Link

Discuss







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:44:27 AM
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Craphouse!



Great Wired News story on the European resurgence of EarthShips, houses made from "bottles, cans and, primarily, old tires stuffed with dirt."

Link

Discuss







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:32:10 AM
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Lessig's OSCON talk

Simply wonderful movie of Lawrence Lessig's slides and narration from his talk at the O'Reilly Open Source convention. Lessig's been stumping about copyright and the net for a couple of years now, speaking roughly every other week on the subject, and he's done -- he says he's going to give his copyright talk once more and then retire it. You can tell he's been working this groove for some time now -- this is a very slick and wonderful talk.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Matt!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:17:24 AM
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Giant Jack Benny MP3 archive

Wonderful, enormous archive of Jack Benny radio programs from the 30s and 40s in MP3 format. Unfortunately, it's really weirdly organized; for some reason, the episode listings aren't linked to the MP3s; those are browsable as plain old directory listings.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:11:46 AM
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Sunday, August 11, 2002
    
   
  
Cartoon law exam

Great (spoof?) law-school exam drawing all its questions from cartoons:


Hank Hill works as the assistant general manager at Strickland Propane, Inc., a company in the business of selling propane and propane-related accessories. Hill works at one of the company's 200 retail locations. In the course of his normal duties, Hill supervises employees and waits on customers. Recently, Hill was told that he had been selected to help Strickland market its newest propane-related accessory: the propane-powered lawn mower. The new lawn mower was a secret project at Strickland. The company planned to publicly announce the new lawn mower in a marketing blitz scheduled to occur six weeks later. Hill was given plans for the lawn mower, marketing materials, release dates, prices, and similar information. Strickland executives instructed Hill to keep the project confidential. When Hill was through reading the materials, he tossed them in his garbage.

Hill's long-time friend and current neighbor is Dale Gribble. Hill and Gribble grew up together, and they often confide in each other. For example, Gribble would often confide with Hill about Gribble's troubled marital life. This friendship was a strong one, and neither Hill or Gribble ever broke a confidence the other had shared.

Gribble also is a paranoid-type. Unknown to his neighbors, Gribble regularly searches through their garbage. While searching Hill's garbage one early morning, Gribble took Strickland's plans for the propane-powered mower. On this basis, Gribble bought Strickland common stock on the New York Stock Exchange. When the mower was a big hit a few weeks later, Strickland stock shot up, and Gribble sold at a hefty profit. Strickland Propane is incorporated in Delaware. Is Gribble guilty of insider trading under section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5? 


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Drue!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:55:12 PM
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Congrats, George!

My pal George Scriban has landed work after a long and arduous search. George is just about the best analyst I've ever met -- he's got a damned lucky employer.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:48:33 PM
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Neat TiVo feature

Cool TiVo feature: If you're looking at a show description and you hit the "Enter" key, you get a detailed description screen, including episode numbers, original air dates, cast info, director, etc. Keen!

Discuss

(Thanks, craigthom!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:59:17 AM
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Fotos from Fiji, Postcards from Polynesia, Tidbits from Tonga, etc.



Unimaginably large (thousands!) gallery of photos, watercolors, stamps, postcards and other images from Oceania. From historical Missionary paintings to 1960s cheesecake National Geo shots to modern postcards, this has it all -- in no particular order. I'm told that there's a bad midi soundtrack on the pages, but thanks to Mozilla, I never heard it. 

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, KerLone!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:45:05 AM
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New "Black Gate" with my story now available

While browsing at Borderlands, my neighborhood science-fiction bookstore yesterday, I found a copy of the new ish of the fiction magazine "The Black Gate," which includes my story "Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar)." You can read an excerpt on The Black Gate site, or you can order the ish from the publishers for $10 (it's a giant, fat magazine, about one-third the size of a Sears Catalog). Other fiction in the ish comes from Tina Jens, David Coe, and others. 


 We were the Eight-Bar Band: there was me and my bugle; and Timson, whose piano had no top and got rained on from time to time; and Steve, the front-man and singer. And then there was blissed-out, autistic Hambone, our "percussionist" who whacked things together, more-or-less on the beat. Sometimes, it seemed like he was playing another song, but then he'd come back to the rhythm and bam, you'd realize that he'd been subtly keeping time all along, in the mess of clangs and crashes he'd been generating.

I think he may be a genius.

Why the Eight-Bar Band? Thank the military. Against all odds, they managed to build automated bombers that still fly, roaring overhead every minute or so, bomb-bay doors open, dry firing on our little band of survivors. The War had been over for ten years, but still, they flew.

So. The Eight-Bar Band. Everything had a rest every eight bars, punctuated by the white-noise roar of the most expensive rhythm section ever imagined by the military-industrial complex.

We were playing through "Basin Street Blues," arranged for bugle, half-piano, tin cans, vocals, and bombers. Steve, the front-man, was always after me to sing backup on this, crooning a call-and-response. I blew a bugle because I didn't like singing. Bugle's almost like singing, anyway, and I did the backup vocals through it, so when Steve sang, "Come along wi-ith me," I blew, "Wah wah wah wah-wah wah," which sounded dynamite. Steve hated it. Like most front-men, he had an ego that could swallow the battered planet, and didn't want any lip from the troops. That was us. The troops. Wah-wah.

The audience swayed in time with the music, high atop the pile of rubble we played on in the welcome cool of sunset, when the work-day was through. They leaned against long poles, which made me think of gondoliers, except that our audience used their poles to pry apart the rubble that the bombers had created, looking for canned goods. 


Link


Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:19:14 AM
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Read a great mailing-list, get a 30 percent discount for OSXCON

Dave Farber runs a great mailing-list called "Interesting People," where he posts little snippets of tech and policy news throughout the day -- tons of links on Boing Boing originate with IP.

If that wasn't reason enough to sign on, check this out: Tim O'Reilly is offering a 30 percent discount for the upcoming OS X conference in Santa Clara for IP readers -- just mention IP to the registration people and they'll knock off the discount.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Tim!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:02:02 AM
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Saturday, August 10, 2002
    
   
  
Tales of the Plush Cthulhu



Wonderful, twisted children's photo-book about the day that Plush Cthulhu came to visit the nursery.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, GW!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:59:55 AM
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A tinkerer's blog

Edward Felten, the Princeton prof who stood up to the music industry when they nastygrammed him over his white-paper on the security flaws in the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), has started a blog called "Freedom To Tinker" where he keeps track of legal threats to tinkerers, the people who pry open technology to understand how it works, to improve it, or to make interoperable devices. 

Link

Discuss

(via Vitanuova)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:34:02 AM
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Consumer Electronics Assoc. regrets the DMCA but fails to oppose DMCA successor

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is number one on the hit parade of crappy tech-law, a bill that is nominally about deterring infringers but in the real world is almost exlusively used to silence researchers, jail foreign researchers, get Google to remove criticism of Scientology -- basically, to undermine freedom and stall innovation.

The DMCA didn't happen on its own. It got hearty endorsements from the Consumer Electronics Association, from ISP lobbies, and from other parties who really should have known better 

Four years late(r), Gary Shapiro, the President of the CEA, has announced that this was a big mistake:


"The DMCA was a very flawed law," CEA President Gary Shapiro said. "We signed off on it, and it was a huge mistake."


The DMCA's successor, the Broadcast Flag Proposal, which will require Hollywood's permission before some new technology can be produced, has also been endorsed by failed to raise opposition from the CEA and was endorsed by lots of IT giants, most notably Intel. (Thanks, Seth!)

Apparently, even those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it repeat it repeat it repeat it.

Link

Discuss

(via Vitanuova, where Seth has also posted a great roundup of Defcon and Usenix)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:26:57 AM
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XP "protection" can render music backups useless

By default, Windows Media Player encodes your music collection using your machine's unique key, so that you can't share, loan or give away the tracks you rip to your machine. What that means is, if you have some file-system or OS corruption and reinstall from scratch, then restore your music collection, it will be unusable. You won't be able to play the files. There's a backup utility that'll preserve your license keys, but if you fail to employ it, you're SOL -- MSFT's position is that you need to start over from scratch at that point, re-ripping all the CDs in your collection. Speaking as someone with 30GB of MP3s, ripped from over 1,000 CDs in a process that took days, I gotta say, I'm glad I'm an OSX user.

Link

Discuss

(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:59:11 AM
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Friday, August  9, 2002
    
   
  
Get Your Exx On



The latest Get Your War On, called "Get Your Exx On," is up. Lotsa yucks and lotsa zingers aimed at the Shrub administration's coziness with financially corrupt corporate felons.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks to everyone who sent this in -- all twenty of you!)






posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           05:04:54 PM
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Third "Spiders" episode online

The third installment of e-sheep's brilliant alternate-history Afghanistan-response comic, "The Spiders," is online. Damn, this is some of the best sf on the Web.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Stefan!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           04:24:29 PM
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Seattle poster-ban overturned

An appeals court has overturned Seattle's ban on street-postering, on First Amendment grounds. I love street-postering; when I was a kid, I used to go downtown and peel off (expired) street-posters and save them in a scrap-book as a record of all the events and shows happening in my city. 

When I was fundraising for the sustainable development project I did in Costa Rica, I put up about 10,000 posters for my various benefit events, cycling around the city on my lunch breaks and after work with a tape-gun, a big yogurt container, a bag of flour and a sponge, hitting every construction overpass, light-pole and trash-can I could find.

 Postering is a great way to get to know your neighbors, a great way to find out about all the fringe, funny and undermonied goings-on in your town, an expression of the underground poster-maker's art.
 Reg Hartt, a whacky film archivist in Toronto (kind of a home-grown Prelinger, but with a prediliction for redacted Warner Brothers' "race" cartoons), commands a mighty team of hardened street-posterers who rule Toronto's poster-spaces -- woe to the posterer who covers an unexpired poster for a Hartt event. When I worked at an academic bookstore, we'd hire Reg to blanket the city with posters for our twice-annual sale -- overnight, he could have a poster on every corner. 

I remember two crazy bums on Queen Street who'd wander up and down, tearing down every poster they could lay hands on, muttering angrily; I once followed a block behind one of them, postering over all the fresh turf he cleared before me. 

As billboards and monied messages creep into every corner of our world (damn, even the urinal liners have ads on 'em, so you pee on the message!), it's great to see indie messages growing up through the cracks.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Alex!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:17:02 AM
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EverQuest convention

Great NYT account of a giant EverQuest convention in Boston. As Stefan notes, this is "a surprisingly non-snarky story." Though it does prove the truism that the press at any geeky con will immediately gravitate to the people in costume.


NICE ears!" the young man with the bow and arrow shouted through the crowd to the corseted woman. Her ears were pointy and Vulcanlike. "I'm guessing, druid?"

"Half-elf," she replied coyly. "Nice try."

He should have known better. After all, this was the Fan Faire, a convention for the most erudite players of the medieval-themed computer game EverQuest. Back home, the 1,500 people whom the conference drew carry out their adventures in an online fantasy world called Norrath where, as Tolkienesque wizards and warriors, they seek treasures, battle monsters and build their characters. The Fan Faire was a rare opportunity for them to meet in the flesh. Players came from as far as Denmark, and many appeared in the guise of their in-game characters -- isosceles ears and all. 


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Stefan!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:57:58 AM
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Gadgets for God: Holy crap!



Gadgets for God is your tasteless religious artefact superstore -- from Blessed Odor Eaters to "Icthus" fish-shaped tambourines to Bibles that shoot flame, Gadgets for God has it all. 

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Steve!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:53:52 AM
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Mindjack needs writers!

Mindjack, an excellent webzine with an emphasis on cyberculture and all things geeky, has an open call for new writers to contribute. Mindjack's published some of my favorite pieces over the years (including a bunch that I wrote), and Donald, the editor, is a great guy to write for. 

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Donald!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:35:45 AM
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Free "Free the Mouse" stickers



BumperActive is giving away free "Free the Mouse" bumper-stickers to help the world show its support for the Eldred case, where Larry Lessig is fighting to repeal the repeated extension of copyright every time Mickey Mouse's earliest films are in danger of entering the public domain. I wish I had a car, but failing that, I'm happy to make this the first sticker on my new iBook.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Kyle!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:32:10 AM
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I love the new iPod update

The new iPod update is really hot -- great calendar integration, support for the equalization normalization in iTunes (all tracks are equalized normalized (thanks, Steven!) to the same peak, so you never transition from one tune to another at twice the volume), lots of UI tweaks. It's amazing how a piece of flexible hardware can be continually upgraded, long after you buy it.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:24:46 AM
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Thursday, August  8, 2002
    
   
  
Undocumented Simpsons-Disneyland reference

I've just discovered a seemingly undocumented popculture reference in a Simpsons episode. It's in the 1992 ep, "New Kid on the Block." Homer goes to the "Frying Dutchman" for all-you-can-eat seafood, and when the Sea Captain boots him out, he says, "Fairly warned ye be, says I," which is, of course, part of the voice-over narration from Disneyland's Pirates of the Carribbean ("No fear have ye of evil curses? Says ye! Properly warned ye be, says I.")

Yes, I'm a giant goddamned geek.
Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           05:16:51 PM
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Tiny tech from Japan

Shop for super light, super thin, super tiny Japanese laptops and gadgets from the comfort of your big ugly American computer. Link Discuss 





posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           04:42:12 PM
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JFK guards force woman to drink breast milk

"A Long Island mother is fuming that JFK Airport security guards forced her to drink her own breast milk in front of other passengers before boarding a flight - to prove she wasn't carrying any dangerous fluid to wreak havoc." I feel safer! Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           04:12:36 PM
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Proto-Geek-Girl

Lucas sez: "Jake Feinler was an ARPAnet contributor who was responsible for the global host list before Jon Postel and before ICANN.  I went looking for information on the early history of DNS and discovered that Jake was Elizabeth, a pioneer geek girl at Stanford Research Institute.  Check out the (1) trademark introverted smile of nerds everywhere and (2) Soviet-style keyboard and mouse."

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Lucas!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           04:05:09 PM
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Roommate-bedevilment techniques

Stefan sez: "I did NOT write this list of hilarious roommate-bedevilment techniques. I just submitted it to a BBoard when I was in grad school. Looks like it stuck around." Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           02:31:56 PM
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Barnacle adheres to penis of sleeping man

But it fell off when he had an erection. Link Discuss (Thanks, G.W. Ferguson!)




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           11:21:19 AM
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Bigfoot on trial for murder

Aaron sez: "Cary Stayner is on trial for the murder of three individuals in Yosemite National Park. Apparently, Stayner's defense claims his obsession with Bigfoot led him to kill a woman, her child, and the child's best friend." Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           11:15:22 AM
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Censorship in DC comics' Authority

DC's Authority comic was censored following September 11th; this page analyzes the censored panels and the often ridiculous rationale for the censorship.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Jim!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:04:21 AM
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Why CARP sucks

Doc Searls sums up what's wrong with the CARP royalties for Internet radio in Electrolite's discussion area:


Regular radio pays fees to ASCAP and BMI that go to composers, not to performers. And they are based on a station's revenues, not on a per-play/per-listener basis.

There is little or no copyright burden on ordinary radio. You pay nothing for what you hear on your city's KISS-FM station, and that station pays nothing except to composers. Generally they get the records for free ("for promotional puposes only" it says on the CD) from the record companies, or for a fee from some other service.

There is no equivalent between the burden placed on regular radio by current regulations and that placed on Internet radio by the CARP/LOC regulations. The burden on Internet radio -- in fees, in reporting, in every other respect, is stuff NEVER experienced by ordinary radio. If somebody ever even thought of bringing them up in Congress, the NAB and its legislative tools would squash it like a bug.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:30:45 AM
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Free pizza delivery going away?

Domino's and other pizza chains are starting to charge $1.50 for delivery in some cities, and are promising to bring this non-free-delivery reign of terror to the rest of the country.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:26:56 AM
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Solar powered RC airplane for WiFi access-point

I need about 400 of these for my neighborhood.


Telecom researchers have successfully tested a solar-powered, remotely operated aircraft capable of relaying high-quality television, cell phone, and Internet signals and transmissions to the ground.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:12:28 AM
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Wednesday, August  7, 2002
    
   
  
Comfort bereaved children with these adorable plush animals

The Galls Catalog, the premier source for cop, EMT and firefighter gear, has started carrying plush animals.


Comfort Children with Trauma Animals Available in Economy Packs of 12

In a trauma situation, it sometimes takes more than words to comfort a scared or injured child. They need something to hold like these adorable toy animals. You can offer them a cuddly little panda bear or monkey to embrace. They measure 3" high. Perfect size for any child to hold and small enough for you to always have a pack on hand. 12 per pack. Specify panda bear or monkey. 


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, John!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           02:36:48 PM
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Brock Meeks on alleged INS mistreatment

Brock Meeks has started looking into the claim by a Brazilian guy that he was badly mistreated at LAX. (Click on link below for the alleged victim's account). I'll post more from Brock in the "Discuss" area when he finds out more.


Subject: FYI re: Atrocities in American Airports

 I just got off the phone with an INS spokesperson in the L.A. field office.

 The most basic facts appear to be true.  The man is who he claims to be. Yes, he did arrive at LAX as he says and yes, the INS did have problems with his documentation.

 The matter was investigated by the INS and with the Brazilian consulate back in March.  The INS put out a statement then and they are faxing it to me in a short while; I'll transcribe that fax and send it on to you here.

 The INS spokesman said he was aware that the message was now flying around the net.  "That's not exactly an accurate story," the spokesman said.

 Apparently when the episode first happened the man went to the press, didn't get the reaction he wanted so now he's taking it to the Internet, according to the INS spokesman.

 When I asked "does the INS have little cells like the message states?" I was told "Yes we do have, of course we have detention areas. We feel that our offices acted appropriately," the spokesman said.

 More when I get it.


 =====

 Dave,

 As you'll see from the official statement below, the INS doesn't deny any of the basic facts in the case, indeed, as an earlier message from me indicted, I checked with the INS and they confirmed that "yes, of course we have detention areas."

 The INS says below that their officers "acted appropriately" which tells me they did indeed take some kind of action.

 The true picture remains murky at best.  Here is the official statement from the INS L.A. field office regarding this incident:


 Statement by Thomas J Schiltgen, district director, INS Los Angeles Office, dated March 22, 2002:

 "The Immigration and Naturalization Service is committed to treating all those who arrive at our ports of entry with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or immigration status.  We understand that a Brazilian citizen who was denied admission at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) in February because he did not have the proper visa has expressed concern about his treatment.

 "I met with the Brazilian Consul General in Los Angeles and assured him that we take matters of this kind seriously.  As soon as I learned about this case, I asked for a thorough inquiry.  Based on the information I received, I am satisfied that our officers acted appropriately in this instance.

 "Immigration Inspectors are tasked with ensuring that only those who are legally eligible to enter the United States are allowed to do so.  As the first person travelers meet when they arrive in the United State, our Inspectors are not only officers, they are also ambassadors.  We take that responsibility very seriously and want to reassure visitors from Brazil and around the world that they can expect to be treated professionally and courteously by all of our personnel.  If we fall short of that standard, we will hold those responsible accountable."

Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           02:29:31 PM
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A new kind of review

High-larious Amazon review of Wolfram's New Kind of Science:


I can only imagine how fortunate you must feel to be reading my
review. This review is the product of my lifetime of experience in
meeting important people and thinking deep thoughts. This is a new
kind of review, and will no doubt influence the way you think about
the world around you and the way you think of yourself. 

Although my review deserves thousands of pages to articulate, I am
limiting many of my deeper thoughts to only single characters. I
encourage readers of my review to dedicate the many years required to
fully absorb the significance of what I am writing here. Fortunately,
we live in exactly the time when my review can be widely disseminated
by "internet" technology and stored on "digital media", allowing
current and future scholars to delve more deeply into my original and
insightful use of commas, numbers, and letters. 


Link (scroll down to "A new kind of review")

Discuss

(Thanks, Nelson!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           10:30:12 AM
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Free airline tickets on 9/11/02

Deals on the Web reports: "Spirit Airlines is offering Free airline tickets on all flights that originate on September 11, 2002. Spirit provides service to Atlantic City, N.J., Chicago/O'Hare, Denver, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Myrtle Beach, S.C., New York/LaGuardia, Oakland, Calif., San Juan, Puerto Rico and the Florida cities of Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Orlando, Tampa and West Palm Beach. Flights must be booked online by 9/8/02. As you can imagine, the Spirit Website is operating extremely slow as of this post."

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:34:55 AM
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The Thing is Jewish

The Thing, the giant, golem-like rock-character from Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four, has been revealed to be Jewish.


Ben Grimm was created by writer Stanley Lieber and artist Jacob Kurtzberg -- two men of Jewish heritage who worked professionally as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. In 1961, they produced a comic book called the Fantastic Four, about a man whose limbs could stretch to preposterous lengths, a woman who could make herself invisible, a teenager who could become a creature of living fire and Ben -- ''The Thing,'' a monstrous creature with rocky orange skin.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:23:24 AM
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Gay superheroes wed in DC comic

Two male superheroes in a DC comic book have gotten married, marking the first openly gay mainstream comics wedding. 


In the current issue of a DC Comics series called The Authority, superheroes Apollo and The Midnighter get hitched on the second-to-last page, becoming "husband and husband." They also adopt a child and, presumably, live happily ever after.

No one knows quite for sure about the "happily ever after" part, though, because the issue on newsstands now is the last in the series.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:20:59 AM
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First Sesame Street Gordon dies

Matt Robinson, who played the first "Gordon" on Sesame Street, died this week of Parkinson's at 65.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:15:40 AM
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Navel-augmentation sugery on the rise

The rise in navel-revealing fashions has spurred a rise in navel-augmentation surgery.


 "Belly buttons come in all shapes and sizes, but the vertical orientation is the best," declares Dr. Mustoe. He and his colleague Michael Lee published their techniques for obtaining an upright umbilicus in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in May. Aging, childbirth and weight gain relax the muscles and the fascia encasing them, collapsing the rim of the aperture.


Link

Discuss

(via Fark)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:03:04 AM
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Hobo revival

Wonderful, long piece on the new generation of rail-riding hobos.



Today, except for immigrant workers eager to stay invisible, few ride the rails just to get from place to place. With all the risk and potential for mishaps, comic and tragic both, walking is almost more efficient. But since the early '90s, train-hopping has been gaining ground among a new generation of tramps. The grizzled old hobos may be dying off, but they're being replaced in boxcars and on the porches of grain cars by street kids, gutter punks, dreamy anarchists and eco-warriors, train-obsessed professionals, all held loosely together by a vision of freedom as old as the nation itself, an America of movement and self-reliance, of mythic vastness and silence, of discovery, escape, rebellion. It's an America that was offered long ago and never delivered, that we're all supposed to love but not allowed to look for, that's just around the corner and always out of reach.


Link

Discuss

(via Robot Wisdom)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:45:02 AM
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Tuesday, August  6, 2002
    
   
  
Safeway are a bunch of anti-Mac bigot weenies and I want my Internet groceries, dammit!

 So, I figured that with Webvan's biz being reinvigorated by Safeway, that I'd be able to buy some groceries online and eat something besides take-out burritos. No dice, though!


From: "Home Shopping" 

Date: Tue Aug 06, 2002  09:25:37  PM US/Pacific

To: doctorow@craphound.com

Subject: RE:safeway.com [#265651]


Dear Mr. Doctorow, 

I am writing in response to an e-mail I received regarding your technical problems.  I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Unfortunately, our website is currently not compatible with Mac computers.  This is already under research by our Web Development department and hopefully they will have this issue resolved in the very near future.

If I can be of any further service to you please feel free to contact me again or call us toll free at 1-877-505-4040.

Thank you for your time and thank you for shopping with Safeway.com.

Sincerely,


Trent Gurney

Customer Service Representative


Must...restrain...fit...of...self...righteous...Mac...fanatic...pique.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           10:02:35 PM
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Space Cadet

I always get a kick out of this classic 1950s film clip documenting the dosing of army troops with LSD. Note:  StileProject redirects off-site links, so you'll need to copy the link below and paste it into a new window if you wish to view the clip; also, be warned that there may be hardcore porn banners on this page. Link Discuss




posted by
          David Pescovitz at
           08:58:23 PM
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TIPS is being run by "America's Most Wanted"

The Feds have asked "America's Most Wanted" to vet snitch calls from TIPS.


But instead of getting a hardened G-person when I called, a mellifluous receptionist's voice answered, "America's Most Wanted." A little flummoxed, I said I was expecting to reach the FBI. "Aren't you familiar with the TV program 'America's Most Wanted'?" she asked patiently. "We've been asked to take the FBI's TIPS calls for them."

Has Ashcroft turned his embattled volunteer citizen spy program -- which has been blasted by left and right alike -- over to Fox Broadcasting's "America's Most Wanted"? If so, the connection shouldn't be all that surprising. Ashcroft's Justice Department and John Walsh's popular crime-busters show have been a mutual-admiration society for some time now. Walsh started coaxing ratings out of the 9/11 disaster for Fox TV while the dust was still settling from the twin towers' collapse. Only two days after the attack, Walsh loaded his whole production team onto a bus in Indiana and drove the show to ground zero, where, he claimed, government officials had told him to "help us catch these bastards."


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Andrew!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:46:42 PM
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Ben Franklin, hax0r

Benjamin Franklin was a member of a leet hacker-clan/secret society called "Junto."


Franklin was a socially and politically effective hacker who created the leading edge of science, technology, and society.  He was responsible for breakthroughs like lighting=electricity, and inventions like bifocals and the Franklin stove.  His printing operation was the 18th century equivalent of the web (the number of newspapers in the colonies expanded from a couple of dozen to a few hundred during his life, and he funded the creation of several of them)...

The Junto had a series of questions they'd ask at each meeting.  It's revealing...

5.  Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?...

6.  Do you know of any fellow citizen, who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?...

14. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country, of which it would be proper to move the legislature an amendment? Or do you know of any beneficial law that is wanting?...

15. Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?...

23. Is there anv difficulty in matters of opinion, of justice, and injustice, which you would gladly have discussed at this time?


Link

Discuss

(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:42:24 PM
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Danger Hiptop inches towards availability

Danger, the hiptop phone/PDA combo I yearn to own, has inked a deal with T-Mobile, in which T-Mobile will offer Danger-based phones in 45 of the 50 top US markets and 8,000 cities.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           05:07:03 PM
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Cat and Girl



Cat and Girl is a great net comic-strip.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Stefan!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           05:04:34 PM
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Meg and Matt's blog-book coming out soon!

"We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs," the book that Meg "Megnut" Hourihan and Matt "Metafilter" Haughey co-wrote with Paul Bausch, is coming out in two days. Yippee!

Link

Discuss

(via Megnut)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           05:02:05 PM
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Grow your own smut

My pal David Findlay, a science fiction writer, smut-peddler and video-guy, is hosting a DIY smut workshop in Toronto next week.


This hands-on workshop walks you through conceiving, writing, planning, casting, shooting, editing, critiquing and distributing your own ultra-short video with explicit sexual content. Whether youíve been shooting sex scenes for years or are entirely new to the idea; whether you think of it as "porn", "erotica", "smut" or "home movies", come learn how to do it better with a group of like-minded video enthusiasts and an instructor who has years of experience working on both sides of the camera.

You provide performers and your own dirty little mind. We supply the gear and the guidance over (and between) two weekends in August. The course covers everything from ethical representation to negotiating with performers; low-budget lighting to microphone placement; addressing body image issues to translating difficult fantasies on camera. Integrating technical and conceptual concerns, this workshop is oriented toward simplicity and completion, premised on the idea that youíll learn most (and perhaps be most satisfied by) having and seeing your own smutty imaginings realized on tape in less than 10 days.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Nalo!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           04:52:17 PM
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Postcards from geek holiday-makers

Stefan sez, "Science Impresario John Brockman's brain trust write to describe their summer vacations:"


Here we are in a little village on the Mediterranean, where I am working for a few weeks with my friend Carlo Rovelli, who is a Professor nearby in Marseille. Carlo and I discovered the main ideas that went into loop quantum gravity working together in a setting like this, in Verona, getting together each day to talk, and then going home to calculate and check on our own, and it is wonderful to be back working with him. We understand each other easily, and from long experience know how to compensate for each other's strengths and weaknesses and so we work quickly. We are making fast progress on understanding the implications of the existence of a cosmological constant for quantum gravity. I had taken a detour of a few years to apply what we had learned about quantum spacetimes to string theory, but there is so much about nature, not the least the apparent fact that there is a cosmological constant, that string theory seems not to incorporate. Now it is wonderful to be back in reality, four dimensional and non-supersymmetric as it seems to be after all.

From the patio where I work I have a view of the bay of Cassis and the beautiful cliffs that rise to the east of it. Today there is little wind on the bay and the sailboats hardly move. Yesterday was windy and we took Carlo's boat out. He has bought an old wooden boat, built a century ago in this harbour, five meters, open, symmetric front to back, with gentle curves such as one sees in old paintings. Working from drawings in 19th century books Carlo has restored it to what might have been its original design, adding a mast, sail and rigging of the style used in the Mediterranean from the middle ages to the advent of modern, triangular sails. The sail hangs from a pole, which in turn is hung by a complicated organization of ropes from the top of the mast. Carlo has a lot of fun watching me try to sail his boat. Downwind we do get some speed, but the boat will hardly go upwind, and coming about takes practice. In such a boat one understands why it took Ulysses so long to get home and one wonders, watching the modern fiberglass sloops speeding by, whether it was a matter of materials or imagination that it took more than 20 centuries for people to realize it's much better to attach the sails directly to the mast.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Stefan!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           04:48:04 PM
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Shaped pasta gallery



Great gallery of fancily shaped kids' tinned pasta. I remember all these pastas as being shaped like blobs of starch, back in my day, but it appears that the starch-shaping technology has improved, as these clearly recognizably R2D2 and Jar-Jar Binks pastoids attest.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Steve!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           04:45:30 PM
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NerdShirts



Excellent nerdy t-shirts from halibut.com.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Seth!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           04:39:00 PM
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What if America wasn't America

I pulled this off Dave Farber's IP list (which pulled it from Christian Bailey's blog):

 A marvelous video spot is starting to appear, sponsored by the Ad Council. It's worth watching for.

It begins with a teenager who approaches the help counter at a library.  He
tells the librarian that he can't find the books he has on a list, which he
hands her.  She looks them up in the computer, and replies, "These books are
no longer available... may I have your name, please?"  When the kid walks
away from the counter without giving his name, he's approached by two men in
suits (one of whom takes his arm) appearing from behind some shelves, who
"just have a couple of questions" for him.  Meanwhile, the librarian is
watching with a look of sadness and concern.

A tagline appears: "What if America wasn't America?
Freedom.  Appreciate it.  Cherish it.  Protect it."

Definitely one of the most chilling (and unfortunately appropriate) ads I've ever seen.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           01:17:42 PM
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Early Vegas Photo Gallery

Lots of pictures of pre-70s Vegas here. Too bad the image quality is pretty crappy. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jimmy!)




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           12:52:32 PM
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The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer

Interesting article about the status of the search for the unathraxer. Dr. Steven J. Hatfill sounds suspicious, but the FBI is begin extra cautious, fearful of another Richard Jewell style mistake.

Last November, agents stormed the home of Aziz Kazi, a Pakistani-born budget official for the city of Chester, Pa. They hauled away dozens of boxes of his belongings and questioned him for hours about a mysterious liquid he had been seen carrying out of the house. It turned out the family dishwasher had backed up, and Kazi was bailing out his kitchen.

Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           12:04:41 PM
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2003 candy roundup

Great roundup of the new candy for 2003:


Popart Hologram Lollipops -- A new line of exciting hologram lollipops in assorted fruit flavors feature cool words like "flirt," "rock star," and others. (LightVision Confections)

Clicker Licker Pumkin Pops -- The newest Clicker Licker Pop is an interactive goodie that combines a whistle with a bright orange plastic figure that sports a beguiling smile.  Also, Sweet Frames, a heart shaped Valentine’s box with a clear top photo frame filled with heart-shaped chewy candies. (R.L. Albert & Sons)

Link

Discuss

(via Robot Wisdom)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:08:34 AM
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Ambiguity is good, why can't DNS encompass it?

Bob "Connectivity" Frankston has posted a great essay about the real-world ambiguity that ICANN is trying to shove into neat pigeonholes with its .COM and other DNS schemes:


The mindless literalness of computing devices forces us to be explicit about these distinctions. Yet we still manage to miss the point and ignore the obvious message. Perhaps it is no different from the 1950's when mother's thought everything their babies touched had to be sterilized except for the 90% of the day when they are crawling around and putting everything in their mouths. That 90% of the day was simply invisible.

Perhaps this explains the ".com" mania. We tend to assume that because we can guess the name of some very popular sites that the naming scheme works and makes sense. We gloss over the many serious and fatal flaws in such names as if they were the exceptions rather than the rule. What I find most disappointing is that even those technical adapt and aware of the details of the DNS implementation manage to sustain this dissonance....

The DNS was created to meet a need. The IP address is not a stable handle. Instead we use the DNS name as the stable handle. The Internet was a small community and, as in the medieval village, we could talk about the miller without making a distinction between the profession and the surname. The tax collector had to be able to identify the person and thus treated the name as an abstract identifier rather than a description.

In today's world we can't simply tell people to ignore the meaning of the words used in .COM names even though they make the DNS meaningless since names can't be stable and track changes in meaning. Instead we must understand the concepts of naming and binding and create an abstract handle that can be the stable identifier. After all, isn't the purpose of the DNS to provide some stable bindings?


Link

Discuss

(via SATN)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:54:15 AM
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Film execs could do time in Australia for hacking under Berman bill

American film execs could face jail time or barred entry in Australia if they engage in hacking under Berman's anti-P2P bill, which allows rights-holders to break the law in order to exact vigilante justice over file-traders whom they believe to be infringing on their copyrights.


Under section 9a of the Victorian Summary Offences Act (1966), "a person must not gain access to, or enter, a computer system or part of a computer system without lawful authority to do so". The penalty if convicted is up to six months' jail.

Computer, Internet and intellectual property lawyer Steve White says the Berman bill is "stupid and counterproductive", and he believes it will lead to an online arms race as PC owners and the networks seek to thwart the efforts of copyright holders.

He says US executives may be unable to enter the country to give evidence in court cases, attend conferences, speak to government, customers or possibly to make movies because afflicted PC owners could seek to have them arrested for unauthorised computer trespass.


Link

Discuss

(via /.)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:50:50 AM
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Toronto urban reform clearinghouse

Public Space is a Toronto clearinghouse site for urban renewal/reform initiatives. They're working on two campaigns right now: The Trailer Park, a festival of bike-trailers ("You don't need a car to move stuff!"); and Stop the Poster Ban, a political action campaign directed a quashing a move in City Council to ban independent posterers, while every other public space in Toronto is plastered with advertising on behalf of monied interests.


The proposed changes to the postering law include:

* Posters only allowed on 2% of all hydro [power] poles.

* Posters have to be 100 metres apart.

* Glue and wheat paste are not allowed.

* You must put your personal name and phone number on every poster.

* If you break this law, the minimum fine is $60 per poster. There is no maximum fine.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Jim!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:38:09 AM
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2" GI Joe rifle confiscated at LAX

The British tabloid The Sun reports that security guards at LAX confiscated a two-inch plastic GI Joe rifle from a seven-year-old's toy action figure. I feel safer.


Security chiefs at Los Angeles airport said: “We have instructions to confiscate anything that looks like a weapon or a replica.

“If GI Joe was carrying a replica then it had to be taken from him.”


Link

Discuss

(via MeFi)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:20:11 AM
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Homer Simpson is a Canadian -- D'oh! Eh?

Matt Groening sez that Homer Simpson is a Canadian:


 In Montreal for a performance of The Simpsons - In the Flesh stage show at the Just for Laughs comedy festival, Groening noted Thursday his dad was born in Canada and Homer is named for him so . . . .

"That would make Homer Simpson a Canadian," Groening said in an interview. "I hope Canadians won't hold it against the show now that they know.

"We were counting on Canadians feeling superior to the Simpsons as being doltish Americans but now the secret is out."


Link

Discuss

(via MeFi)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:17:19 AM
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It's the stupid network, stupid!

Lloyd Wood Bob Braden (Thanks, Danny!) has posted the slides from his "The First 31 Years of the Internet --
An Insider's View" talk. The first 24 screens are just net.history, but things get pretty juicy round-about slide 25:


Deep philosphical gap between Computer Scientists who
developed Internet architecture, and telecommunication
engineers:

* Engineers: The Internet is under-engineered --

it does not solve all current problems in the most
optimal and controllable manner.

Besides, we LOVE virtual circuits and complexity.

* Internet Researchers: Optimal is NOT the point.

The future adaptability of the Internet to new technologies
and to provide new services depends on NOT
over-engineering the Internet! Uncertainty: live with it.

Besides, we LOVE datagrams and simplicity.


Internet Architecture Melting...

* Orgy of tunnel-vision engineering taking place in IETF to
meet these problems, and others.

* A shortage of wisdom; continual need for damage control.

* Easily forget the cost of [over-] engineering; remember:
generality, heterogeneity, robustness, extensibility?

* Maybe we need to pay people NOT to develop new
protocols.

* But perhaps, it is also time to rethink the architecture.

Note to self: Use the word "orgy" in next talk. 

Link (356k PDF)

Discuss

(via Oblomovka)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:12:38 AM
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Feds file counterarguments in Constitutional copyright fight

The Feds have filed a response brief in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case, where Lawrence Lessig is arguing that the continuing extension of copyright (timed, not uncoincidentally, to extend copyright's lifespan every time it threatens to expire Mickey Mouse's earliest movies into the public domain) is unconstitutional. The constitution says that copyright exists as  monopolies of limited times, granted to authors to promote the useful arts and sciences, but the continuing extension of copyright (now at author's life plus 95 years!) hinders the arts (by keeping us from being able to make new works from older works) and does not promote them (since retroactively extending Hemingway's copyright can't possibly provide him with an incentive to write new books -- he's dead.).

Aaron's helpfully summed up the government's arguments in response:


* All the lower courts agreed with us.

* Times are different now and the extension act was designed to reflect that. Times are different for previously published works too, so being retroactive makes sense.

* If the acts weren't retroactive, people would delay publishing things so they'd get a better deal.

* We cannot have a copyright gap. The EU has a 75-year copyright law and we wouldn't want to lose all our content producers to Europe.

* "Ultimately, petitioners wish to displace Congress's preference for copyright-based dissemination of works during the CTEA's prescribed proprietary term, and instead to allow indiscriminate exploitation by public domain copyists like petitioners. But the Constitution assigns such policy choices to Congress, not the courts."

* Oh geez, they quoted the dictionary (a 1798 dictionary, no less!) definition of "limited" (as in "limited Times"). Isn't that the lawyer's equivalent of Godwin's Law?

* It doesn't matter that extending copyright doesn't promote progress because only copyright is required to promote progress, not the limited times provision. 'The Framers did
not require Congress to select "limited Times that promote" progress, any more than [...] allowing Congress to protect only "Authors that promote" progress, or "Writings that promote" progress.'


Link (156k PDF)

Discuss

(via Aaron Swartz's Weblog)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:04:45 AM
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A GUID for every Japanese



The Japanese government is assigning every citizen a mandatory, permanent 11-digit number. The move has provoked rare civil-disobedience activity from privacy-sensitive citizens, who point out that in three years of work on the system, the Japanese government has failed to create a single privacy policy in respect of the disposition of records that are linked to the number. 86 percent of respondents to a newspaper poll are concerned about the privacy implications of the new system.





Today, protesters compared the residential registry to a 10-digit computerized identification system for cows, which was adopted last fall in an effort to contain mad cow disease. "Cows are 10-digit numbers and human beings are 11 digits," read one protest banner outside the Public Management Ministry, the agency responsible for creating the network.

Inside, the minister, Toranosuke Katayama, met reporters and appealed for "more dialogue" with opponents. His spokesman, Yoshiuki Baba, stressed that even without a new privacy law, people convicted of leaking personal information face up to two years in prison and a fine of $8,300...

"Right now, the government is saying that the card will be used for 93 types of administrative matters," he said, referring to such steps as obtaining pensions and passports. "But in the future, the government has a bigger project, named "E-Government" which will have 16,000 administrative usages."


Link

Discuss

(via Werblog)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:53:13 AM
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Double-speed cablemodem doubleplusungood

AT&T Broadband is offering a 3Mb/s cable-modem service, twice as fast as their existing service, for about $80/month. The idea is to sell this to power-users who have home LANs or need to transfer giant files, but as Kevin points out, "What power users need is faster upload speeds, but the AT&T Broadband service only does 384 kbps in that direction.... Until high-speed service providers understand their customers, we won't see much innovation in broadband services."


Link

Discuss

(via Werblog)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:46:59 AM
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(More) WiFi stats for fun and profit

New report on the economic opportunities of WiFi. As Kevin sez, "The number of analyst firms issuing wireless LAN reports is growing almost as fast as the market itself.  This is a danger sign that the hype wave is about to crest."


The worldwide market for all products based on the 802.11 standard by 2006 will grow to $3.1 billion in annual revenue, from $1.2 billion in 2001, according to research company Dell'Oro Group, in Redwood City, Calif.


Link

Discuss

(via Werblog)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:41:41 AM
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Asia telecoms flow



Sweet diagram showing the connections and capacity of the data-lines between Asian nations.

Link
Discuss
(via Schism Matrix)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:37:52 AM
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Third goat elected mayor of Texas town, survives assassination attempt

A remote Texas resort town has elected three successive generations of beer-drinking goats to the office of mayor. It was all fun and games until the assassination attempt:


 It was Clay Henry's thirst that prompted his attack, according to the sheriff. On a Sunday last November, the new owner of the resort, Steve Smith, wanted to show a few visitors how Clay Henry drinks beer. Blue laws prevented him from buying one at the trading post, so Mr. Smith asked two men sitting nearby for a bottle. They obliged, but the sheriff said one of the men was offended that Mr. Smith had given a perfectly good beer to a goat.

Later that day, witnesses overheard Mr. Hargrove boasting that he planned to go back and castrate Clay Henry. The sheriff said Clay Henry was found in a pool of blood the next morning. Housekeepers cleaning the condominium where Mr. Hargrove had stayed found something in the refrigerator. Sheriff Dodson says it was Clay Henry's testicle. Mr. Hargrove, who could not be reached for comment, is scheduled for trial in August.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Songdog!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:19:22 AM
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Roll your own barcode



Encode any arbitrary string as a UPC barcode (Thanks, Jef!) with the barcode generator.

Link

Discuss

(via Everything Isn't)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:11:42 AM
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BlogTree: Blog Geneology

BlogTree lets bloggers describe their sites' progenitors and builds "family trees" of which blog begat what.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Sean!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:04:37 AM
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Clearinghouse for dumb linking policies

DontLink is a blog devoted to cataloging websites with goofy linking policies:


OK, this one is really stupid. Easy Booking Service says not to link to its home page; instead, it wants you to read the linking instructions on this page, which sends you to this page, which contains a form to fill out, and you'll supposedly receive the URL by e-mail.  


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Joe!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:02:12 AM
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Monday, August  5, 2002
    
   
  
802.11b serial connectors

A California company is shipping a wireless RS232 serial-cable-replacement that runs over 802.11b. RS232 is the generic serial connector, the thing you connect to your burglar alarm or GPS with. Now you can control 'em from a distance of 1200 feet!

Link

Discuss

(via Oblomovka)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           01:58:58 PM
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Nielsen Ratings via TiVo

Nielsen will collect television ratings info directly from TiVo subscribers. 


Working together, Nielsen Media Research and TiVo have developed software that will enable the extraction of tuning, recording and playback information from TiVo's PVR system. TiVo has downloaded this new software as part of a normal system upgrade via phone lines to existing TiVo subscribers across the country. 


Link

Discuss

(via /.)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           01:54:55 PM
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WiFi antennae are the nerd's bong

On July 4th weekend, while driving to the beach, we passed a giant radio telescope, maybe 100 yards in diameter, and someone in the car said, "Hey, you know, that would make a wicked WiFi antenna." 

To which Danny replied, "'That would make a wicked WiFi antenna' is the nerd equivalent of 'That would make a wicked bong.'"

Truer words.

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:47:37 AM
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Mac tattoo roundup

 Leander Kahney's posted a great story on Mac fanatics with Apple tattoos on Wired News. He includes the story of my one-and-only tat, a 27-pixel-square Sad Mac on my right bicep. The only detail he gets wrong is that it wasn't an SE/30, it was an SE with an 030 accelerator card.




Doctorow's 27-pixel-square tattoo is based on the Sad Mac screen icon that is displayed when old all-in-one Macs have catastrophic hardware problems. The Sad Mac is a perversion of the happy, smiling Mac shown when a Mac boots up. Instead of a smiley face, the Sad Mac has a pout and crosses for eyes.

It's the same icon Doctorow confronted one day 12 years ago when he tried to boot up his Mac SE/30.


The dead Mac stored all his e-mail from several years, all the fiction and nonfiction he'd ever written, a lot of painstakingly collected software, a bunch of BBS numbers and all the HyperCard stacks he'd authored. In other words, "a lot of important stuff was on that box ... and not backed up, natch."


Doctorow embarked on a painful, painstaking endeavor to recover the data.


"This was about seven days' worth of miserable, round-the-clock trog-labor, locked up in my room with parts scattered all around me and notes with hex offsets scrawled on hundreds of scraps of paper piled ... in the Sisyphean stable," Doctorow wrote. "I hardly bathed or ate, and smoked hundreds, if not thousands, of cigarettes. When I emerged, triumphant and exhausted, I felt reborn.... I was a new man, and needed to commemorate the event."


Doctorow proceeded to collect a printout of the Sad Mac, which he took to his local tattoo parlor.

"Took about 3 minutes, stung only a little, and has been with me ever since," he wrote. 


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:36:09 AM
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Sunday, August  4, 2002
    
   
  
Simpsons cocktail schwag



Unspeakable k-rad pewter Simpsons bar accessories. Anyone still owe me a birthday prezzie?

Link

Discuss







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           03:18:26 PM
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Janis Ian's successful fallout

Janis Ian, the singer/songwriter/science fiction writer who posted an excellent rant about the music industry and file-sharing, has posted a roundup of the responses she received:


Emails received: 1268 as of 07-30-02 (does not include message board posts)

Number of times the article has been translated into other languages: 9. (French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Yugoslavian.)

Times AOL shut my account down for spamming, because I was trying to answer 40-50 emails at a time quickly and efficiently: 2

Winner of the Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is award: Me. We began putting up free downloads around a week after the article came out. We will attempt to put up one free download a week for as long as we can - and leave them all up.

Change in merchandise sales after article posting (previous sales averaged over one year): Up 25%

Change in merchandise sales after beginning free downloads: Up 300%

Offers of server space to store downloads: 31

Offers to help me convert to Linux: 16

Offers to help convert our download files from MP3 to Ogg Vorbix: 9

Offers to publish a book expose of the music industry I should write: 5

Offers to publish a book expose of my life I should write: 3

Offers to ghost-write a book expose of my life I shouldn't write: 2

Offers of marriage: 1

Number of emails disagreeing with my position: 9

Number of people who reconsidered their disagreement after further discussion: 5


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, John!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           12:04:56 PM
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A sofa made out of Macintoshes

Does anyone know where this stunning photo of a sofa made out of Mac II computers comes from? Check out this amazing sofa made out of old Mac IIs from the Mac Store in St. Louis. (Thanks, Buck!)

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           11:54:19 AM
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The Ladies of Star Trek

 



I don't think I've ever seen a summation of the Trek zeitgeist as visually neat as this thumbnail gallery of all (?) the women that appeared in the original Star Trek.

Link

Discuss

(via Ben Hammersley)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           11:46:19 AM
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Ben's Peshawar gallery



Ben Hammersley's put up a gallery of some of the photos he took in Peshawar and the Afghani border-areas last year while he was on assignment for his paper there.

Link

Discuss

(via Ben Hammersley)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           11:42:41 AM
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Random acts of Internet kindness

If you've got a fair bit of googlejuice, like Danny "NTK" O'Brien, you will inevitably find yourself getting lots of strange stuff over your email transom. Danny gets occasional random requests from newbies who figure that he might have the answer to their random questions. Then, acting as a kind of freelance Dear Abby, Danny answers them. What a mensch.


Mail like this arrives about once every six months. Last time it was a woman in a Pakistani cybercafe asking about her brother. He'd run away to Britain and she hadn't heard from him since. We tracked him down to a prison in the north of England. I found out the address and phone number for her - again not much, but something.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           11:32:57 AM
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The UI in Minority Report is goofy

Great rant on what's wrong with the much-lauded futuristic UI in "Minority Report:"


Speaking of efficient, I noticed that you guys are still using disks to transfer files from one user station to another. I mean, it's in the same room, you know? You guys could just get a cheap-o wireless card or something, save you the extra step. Especially since sometimes I guess you guys are really in a time crunch, right? Those disks you guys are using are pretty but they are so outdated...

Oh, and speaking of the Temple - you know that pool where the pre-cogs hang out? what's up with the human-sized drain? Does it really need to be that big? I can send you some sketches of grids and stuff you can use that will let water through without, you know, flushing the pre-cogs down too.


Link

Discuss

(via Megnut)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           11:28:02 AM
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Sterling and I, debating spam

Bruce Sterling and I have been having an email go-round about spam, the law, and spam-filtering. His latest Viridian note is a transcript of a speech he gave at the O'Reilly Open Source conference, in which he goes over some of the ground that we covered:


 I had a long argument about this with Cory Doctorow.
He and I were really going at this hammer-and-tongs, over
the growing spam and virus crisis. And I thought that
there needed to be some kind of political and legal
solution. Like building a galvanized steel cage in Cuba
and throwing all the spammers and virus writers in there
as unlawful combatants who are clear and present deadly
enemies of humanity.

AUDIENCE: YAAAY!!! (Applause)

Whereas Cory is a techie, and he wants a techie
solution. So he's a fan of stuff like Vipul's Razor, and
he doesn't mind if the traffic on the Internet is 96%
fraud, malware and evil garbage as long as none of it gets
on his feet.

So, I let Cory convince me and I installed Mozilla on
my Mac. And its bug-track completely wrecked System 9. So
I stopped fighting with Cory Doctorow. Not because he was
winning the argument, but because his fucking Open Source
solution cost me three days of desperate effort to restore
my files! So I took the further trouble to install System
X, and I backed up everything of course, but I still don't
get it about System X quite frankly, and neither does
System X. It never knows what it's running. There are
chunks of Microsoft code in there like giant lumps of
black putty just *lying* to you about what they are doing
on the Internet. It's like trying to wade through drilling
mud running this thing. It steers itself by committee.


Udhay Shankar (who runs a great techie list called "Silk" that's mostly based in India) asked me if I wanted to followup on Bruce's talk on the list. It was after midnight, and I ended up with a touch of logorreah and rattled out a response to the list:


The koan that Frankston told me that led me to enlightenment was this:
"On the Internet, my right to swing my fist *doesn't* stop just short of
your nose, because it can only impact with your nose if you execute the
'punch yourself in the nose' suggestion. It's *your* responsibility to
figure out which suggestions you want to execute."

Or words to that effect.

When you see things this way, there is no malware, no spam.

Really. I mean, yes, in the real, present-day world, we don't get to
choose which suggestions we execute, but that's because we've got bad
software.

But the software is getting better. My second relevatory experience was
installing Mozilla 1.0 and finding the "block images from this server"
context menuitem. The lid lifted off of my head and my brains did a
traditional folk-dance in celebration of the extreme cleverness of the
Moz hacker hivemind.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           11:25:55 AM
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Spam is overwhelming Hotmail

80 percent of the mail that makes it through Hotmail's spam-filters is spam. 


On a typical day, Hotmail subscribers collectively receive more than 1 billion pieces of junk e-mail. Such spam accounts for 80 percent of messages received -- not including mail blocked by Hotmail's first line of filters.

Though Hotmail develops various tools for evading spam, unwanted messages keep slipping through.

"And it's increasing every day," said Parul Shah, a product manager with Microsoft Corp., which runs Hotmail. "Every time Hotmail or another e-mail service provider finds a way to detect spam, the spammer immediately has a way to get around that." 


Link

Discuss

(via /.)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           11:19:12 AM
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Baen Books' latest reader-friendly e-book venture

Great Slashdot story reports on Baen Books' new publishing gimmick for the latest Honor Harrington novel: it's coming with a CD ROM with unencrypted digital copies of all 22 of the books in the series, as well as cover-art and so on. 


The Baen website says the texts on the CD-ROM will be unencrypted, requiring no special readers or decoders. The files are in .rtf or .html format, and the buyer will be able to download them into their PDA of choice.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           11:13:59 AM
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Saturday, August  3, 2002
    
   
  
King hell radio administration tools free for the taking

Thor sez:


Bill Goldsmith who runs the great Radio Paradise (eclectic intelligent rock) is about to announce that he will be open sourcing his server and administration tools in the very near future.

Bill is a survivor of commercial radio and created RP to "tell the bean-counters who rule the radio biz to take that FM tower & shove it where the sun..."

What differenciates RP from other webcasters is the community aspect of the site. Users can rate and comment on the songs being played and these are fed back in to the music programming process. There is an incredible amount of potential in what he has done, I'd like to see RP put together a CD wishlist for me based on how I have rated songs in the past for instance. I sure hope the open source community gets behind it to take it to the next level. 

Bill is also currently involved in quiet talks with the powers that be in Washington regarding web broadcasting. It's an interesting site to watch.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Thor!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           09:11:47 AM
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Scene-whores and hax0r girls: the gender report from DefCon

The women of DefCon, a (no, the) hacker conference in Vegas, divide into two camps: hackers (duh) and "scene whores," infosec groupies without any particular technical skill, but with a finely honed appreciation of the royal treatment that an attentive, scantily clad woman at the mostly male event can garner. Wired News reports from the con:


"I came for fun and freedom. There's no place else I've ever been where being a woman is such a plus," explained Loreli, 22, from New Paltz, New York. "Flash a bit of nip at a Defcon vendor and you can basically get whatever you want for free. I think it's so weird that some chicks have a problem with that."...

"Hackers are into intelligence, and it doesn't much matter what kind of body houses your brain," Toronto systems analyst Tamara Jovell said. "Frankly, I find it refreshing to be in a place where men get truly and totally turned on by how I think."...

"The problems are caused by some women who will date a well-known hacker in order to become elite just by association," Nartian said. "The scene whores aren't respected for what they do but for who they are doing. And it leads to men thinking we're all clueless and creates a real schism between us women and the girls."...

 "I'm here to have fun, and me and my friends don't much care what the other chicks think," Kat said. "So get over your worries about being mistaken for a real woman and just lighten up, ladies."

Kat said Defcon is a single woman's "dream holiday" and insisted that with a flash of flesh she could have anything she wanted or needed.

"I don't pay for food, my room, T-shirts, anything," she said complacently. "The guys just give me stuff." 


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:41:21 AM
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Happy 50th, Mad Magazine

Wired News is running a nice appreciation of Mad Magazine on the eve of its 50th anniversary. 


Before Bart Simpson and before David Letterman, there was Alfred E. Neuman, the creation of a respected 62-year-old portrait artist who responded to an ad in  The New York Times only to find that the magazine that wanted him was Mad.

The artist nearly huffed his way out of the offices of the fledgling humor magazine. But editor Al Feldstein convinced him to try and give life to a poorly formed Mad character.

"I wanted him to make this kid into a real live kid. I wanted him to be lovable, not ugly," Feldstein said at the Comic-Con International convention, which ends Sunday in San Diego. 


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:31:40 AM
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NSA broke the Internet

David Reed has blogged an excellent response to Security Czar Richard Clarke's recent screed in which he blamed all of the Internet's woes on bad software, wireless networks, ISPs, and the gubmint. Everyone, it seems, except the NSA:


Quite a number of us who participated in the early Internet protocol design were from the computer security research side, and did our best to make the Internet architecture secure from the start. But the NSA (I am told) told DARPA that any attempt to introduce security mechanisms into TCP/IP's architecture would be viewed very negatively. (This happened at about the same time that Rivest, et al. received a mysterious threatening letter from a senior military official claiming that their work on the RSA cipher must be stopped immediately)...

And in fact, IPSEC was later invented along similar lines, as an option. But part of the difficulty with implementing IPSEC is that it is too late - popular fads such as NAT and stateful inspection firewalls have been deployed too widely. Firewalls (which provide faux security at best) make real security much harder to deploy, because they require that end-systems expose too much information in the clear. Truly secure protocols (even IPSEC) don't work very well with firewalls.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:23:50 AM
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Friday, August  2, 2002
    
   
  
Mobile wireless -- really, really mobile and really, really wireless

Two carloads of geeks on their way to a perl conference connected their vehicles with WiFi access-points, then uplinked the whole network to the Internet via a cellphone. Why? Because "making a phone call from Pittsburgh to New York while both parties are coasting down I-70 in Illinois wasn't my idea of a smart move. I'd be more inclined to run into them to get their attention; it would have cost the same."


Meng and dha connected using talk on Schwern's laptop and we spent a good 100 miles just finding things to talk about. That's what happens when you work hard to build something that's minimally useful.

After rambling on about movies, making fun of each other's driving and deciding where to stop for dinner we decided to connect our network to the Internet. After all, we needed to send out proof that this was working. Once my cell phone reached a state of moderately reliable service, Meng brought up the link. We logged on to IRC and bragged about our connectivity. We sent email stating our coordinates. We acted like little children on sugar highs.


Link

Discuss

(via 802.11b Networking News)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:02:26 PM
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Beetle Bailey strides boldly into the mid-1990s



Mort Walker has added a new character to the Beetle Bailey pantheon. Chip Gizmo shows up at Camp Swampy, bedecked with such futuristic props as a PDA and a cellphone, and hilarity ensues: "So goes the humor that will follow Chip Gizmo into Camp Swampy, as the computer specialist faces off with old-fashioned Gen. Halftrack. For example, when Gizmo warns Halftrack not to use his pop-out CD-ROM holder for a coffee cup holder, the general relents. Next, Gizmo finds him using it to hold his martini glass." Oh, oh, oh, my sides.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Sean!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           02:50:26 PM
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Fred von Lohmann shreds WiFi FUD

News.com ran an extremely FUDdy story about open wireless, quoting an AT&T spokesperson who warns that individuals who run open wireless access points will be liable for crimes committed by wardrivers and passers-by who use their access-points to commit crimes or engage in infringing file-sharing.

It's not actually true, though. As my colleague Fred "Baron" von Lohmann posted to the Pho list:


Hey, it seems to me that anyone who runs an open wireless gateway would be
protected from copyright liability arising out of the activities of their
neighbors by the DMCA 512(a) safe harbor (the same one that AT&T itself
relies on). 

So long as you simply pass bits for someone else, without changing or
storing them, you're not liable if the bits are infringing. See 17 USC
512(a). (Before you start going on about "notice and takedown" and copyright
agents -- none of that mumbo jumbo applies to the 512(a) safe harbor, 'cuz
the ISPs had enough clout to make it that way).

So AT&T is blowing smoke -- it's immune from liability for carrying the
bits, and so is the subscriber who is running the wireless gateway.

I've been saying it for some time now -- soon we'll *all* be ISPs, and all
entitled to the same protections that AOL legislated for itself over the
last few years.


Ain't that the sweetest? All the breaks that the ISP lobbies have secured for themselves in Congress apply to anyone who provides access to the Internet, including folks like you and me!

The most insidious thing about this genre of anti-WiFi FUD is that it attacks the idea of anonymity online, as though allowing people to anonymously access the Internet was an irresponsible activity that can only serve the interests of terrorists, child pornographers and warez d00ds. 

In fact, anonymous speech is Constitutionally protected in the USA. The Federalist Papers were published anonymously. Whistle-blowers, kids who are curious about STDs and dissidents (just to name three) rely on anonymity to participate in the democratic discourse.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Fred!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           02:43:11 PM
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Happy Birthday, Mr. Dragon!

Scott sez: "Erik Larsen, Image Comics co-founder and creator/artist/writer of The Savage Dragon, is celebrating the flagship comic's century mark with a 100-page issue to be released this month. The Savage Dragon #100 will feature all-new work by an amazing cavalcade of talents. Here's a sneak-peak at a pin-up by Boing Boing favorite, Bruce Timm." Link Discuss




posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           12:12:46 PM
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Mozilla bookmark group swapping: a proof of concept

This week's Onion is out, and I've created a bookmark file for Mozilla that will load every page in the new ish in its own tab. If you've got Moz, right-click/control-click the link below and select "Save Link Target As..." Save the file, then select Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks... Once the bookmarks window is open, select Tools --> Import... and choose the file. You'll have a new bookmark, called "The Onion Aug 1 2002." Select it and your Moz window will open up with all the pages of the new Onion in it.

Why do this? I dunno. I have an idea that there could be an RSS aggregator or similar that outputted Moz tab-bookmark files. Wouldn't it be cool if every morning, you sat down to your browser and had a tab-file that would load up all the day's news stories (say, every link from the previous day's Boing Boing or Wired News or Slashdot) -- click it before you take your shower, and by the time you're done, voila, tabbed newspaper!



Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:54:41 AM
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Infographic bonanza

Royksopp's new video, "You Remind Me," is an amazing collection of morphed infographics. If you ask me, the song's crap, but the pictures are steroidal PowerPoint magic. BTW, there's a RealPlayer for OSX now!


Link (Warning: RealMedia clip)

Discuss

(Thanks, Matt!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:22:46 AM
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Jam-session for game designers

The Indie Gam Jam is a "yearly game design and programming event designed to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry. A very small volunteer team of professional game developers creates a new custom game engine with a single technology focus, and then we invite a slightly larger group of game programmer-designers to get together and make as many innovative games as possible over a four-day period. The games are shown at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the Game Developers Conference, and the code is released on SourceForge under the GNU General Public License, so everyone can freely experiment with the engine source code and games."

They just had their first show, and created 12 games in four days!

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:18:32 AM
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Pulp magazine trove donated to University of Calgary

The University of Calgary library just took receipt of a 35,000+ volume collection of classic science fiction and genre pulps. The donation came from the estate of William "Not That William Gibson" Gibson, a 92-year-old who died last year.

Link

Discuss

(via /.)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:03:46 AM
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Mesh networking from Mitsubishi

Mitsubishi has announced MOTERAN, a mesh wireless technology "that is self-organizing, decentralized, and capable of reconfiguring itself without the aid of access points and access servers."


As a result, any one of these devices could be the host for Internet access: One person subscribes to an ISP for $20 per month, and everyone can hop across devices until they reach that host and log on.

It reminds me of the '60s when everyone's goal was to defeat the "establishment" through fairly harmless guerrilla tactics such as not putting a stamp on the envelope when paying a Ma Bell phone bill. Is this more dangerous? The ISPs might think so.


Link

Discuss

(via Werblog)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:02:55 AM
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Thursday, August  1, 2002
    
   
  
Lawyers rev their engines to sue Dean Kamen over Ginger

A 1-800-LAWYER has set up a site where people can pre-emptively sign up to sue Dean Kamen for the inevitable Segway-related accidents.


The  USAILC is a successful corporate law firm preparing to specialize in another area. We expect to be at the forefront of suits featuring the invention widely known as "It."

For those unfamiliar with the subject, "It" is for all purposes an extremely expensive high-tech scooter. However, this contraption has been foolishly hyped as an all- purpose vehicle that will revolutionize global transportation.

"It" is officially named the Segway HT and is being released by a privately-held company named DEKA.

Get ready to Sue-It!


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:31:40 PM
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An ode to an Amazon Gold Box

Rael's written a paeon to his Amazon Gold Box. For some reason, I don't get a Gold Box anymore when I visit Amazon.


"Rael's Gold Box" it glinted and beckoned and yelled,

"Click me, please click me, I've oodles to sell."

My mouse it did waver, it's memory still sharp

of previous offers -- the curling iron, the harp.

And flashlights and car tools and fondue and hoses,

Carvers and things that trim hairs from one's noses.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:29:00 PM
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Pope Squat -- direct action for Toronto's homeless

As Toronto's rents skyrocket and subsidized housing budgets are slashed, the streets of my favorite city are increasingly filled with shell-shocked homeless people. And yet, there are millions of dollars available to subsidize a visit from the Pope (a visit that the Archdiocese turned a healthy profit on, no less). To call attention to these bizarre priorities, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty has occupied an abandoned building, christening it (heh) the "Pope Squat," garnering financial support and endorsements from the  Catholic Network for Womens' Equality, the Candian Union of Public Employees and the Canadian Auto Workers. 


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Dad!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:26:28 PM
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Life in the panopticon

Mitch Wagner has posted some thought-provoking ruminations on living in webcam-land, the exhibitionist impulse to stream every room in your house online. 


Webcam houses are part of the way surveillance and recording have become commonplace in society. I'm not old at all but I remember the first time I heard my own recorded voice. My Dad brought home a tape-recorder from work - a big reel-to-reel thing the size of a briefcase - and we all got to play with it. It was a special occasion. I expect that a few years later, tape-recording was already pretty commonplace. I remember when I was a kid, on special occasions, departments stores would set up television cameras and you could see yourself on TV - there was always a crowd of people - a SMALL crowd, but still a crowd - doing goofy things in front of the camera and watching themselves.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Mitch!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:18:14 PM
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Smoky treats from days of yore



Cigalicious gallery of vintage cancer-stick packaging.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Patrick!)







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:13:20 PM
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World's coolest wristwatch: Bulova Accutron

Nice NYT article about the Bulova Accutron, the world's first transistorized watch. It debuted in 1961 and used a tuning fork to stay accurate. Link Discuss 





posted by
          Mark Frauenfelder at
           11:02:38 AM
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It's a holy relic *and* it's an affinity-item!

The ever-cheezy SkyMall catalog is now selling "The Sword of the Archangel Michael," from "The Vatican Collection."

 
He is known as the "Sword of God". Wielding his mighty blade, he is the redeemer of souls and the vanquisher of Satan. For the first time, the Sword of the Archangel Michael is created from the artwork of the Vatican. In splendid bas relief, his legendary deeds are portrayed. The casting out of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. His fight of the Angels against the legions of Satan. The compassionate rescue of tormented souls. And the dramatic victory over "The Serpent". Each scene is meticulously detailed. And every part of this distinctive sword is enriched with design motifs which exist as part of the Vatican itself. 

Link


Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:12:42 AM
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Liquor fancier's tchotchke



The Shop Steward is a deeply swanky cocktail accessory. If I still had a bar, I would be all over this thing. Four or six bottles clamp in between cunning brass grips and jigger-measuring speed-pours. Spin the wheel of intoxication, hit the nozzle, and get exactly one shot of your favorite sauce.


Link

Discuss







posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           08:05:07 AM
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Internet Radio tax created to kill small webcasters and eliminate competition

Erik sez: "The guy who wrote the deal that the webcasting royalty fee model was made from (a deal that Yahoo repuidated after one year, since they were getting creamed) was specifically designed to kill small webcasters trying to work a percentage of revenue royalty deal."


Now, no one asked me any of these things prior, during, or after the first or second pricing. I'm not sure that this matters. But if it does, here it is: The Yahoo! deal I worked on, if it resembles the deal the CARP ruling was built on, was designed so that there would be less competition, and so that small webcasters who needed to live off of a "percentage-of-revenue" to survive, couldn't.


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Erik!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:13:48 AM
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Comic-book writers get no respect

Peter David's posted a great column detailing the many depredations suffered by comics writers, who get no respect.


When artwork is returned from a comic book, the penciller gets two thirds of the pages, the inker the remaining third. This can be a valuable money-generator because of the value on the art market.

The writer? The one who created the story that the penciller drew and the inker inked? We get to sit at conventions and watch stories taken from our heads sold piecemeal at $50 and up a page. One artist once said, "Hey, if writers are upset about it, I'll remove the word balloons and give them back."


Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Glenn!)




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:06:34 AM
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High-larious hacker blog

The Cult of the Dead Cow hacker-clan has a funny, trash-talkin' hax0r blog. Many of the cDc folks can be found this weekend in Vegas, at DefCon, the hacker conference where Dmitry Skylarov was arrested last year for telling the world that Adobe eBook "protection" blows chunks.

Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           07:02:29 AM
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Houndstooth: Canine pack mesh networking

Nice satire from Glenn Fleishman touches on all my favorite memes: wireless, organic modelling, and mesh networks.


 Houndstooth is a dramatic new mesh network technology that utilizes algorithms derived from canine-pack clustering. With Houndstooth, random aggregations of data are transferred at a variety of speeds based on pack dynamics and distances. A special front-to-end pack discovery protocol allows each node to discover and authenticate new nodes. Best of all, you can redeploy existing logistics to take advantage of pack-based mesh networking by using actual dogs that you may already own or have access to.

Each dog wears a small Houndstooth transceiver, powered by a pedometer attached to a dog's strong back legs. As dogs enter and leave packs, both store-and-forward (known as fetch-and-retrieve in the Houndstooth terminology) and live routed (off-leash protocol) data handling are possible. Parasitic networking by non-pack Houndstooth transceivers are avoided through regular deworming of the connection.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:46:19 AM
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Lynn Breedlove: punk novelist

Great piece on Lynn Breedlove today on Salon. Lynn wrote a brilliant novel about speed, punk, bike-messengers and genderbending, called godspeed that I finished a couple weeks ago. I did a reading with Lynn in June and was blown away by the ferocity of the book, and once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.


Though less mean and very sober, Lynn Breedlove still looks more or less like the kid on the cover of her novel, "Godspeed," with maybe a decade or two of seniority. That kid has a blue mohawk, a neck tattoo, the word "F-U-C-K" tattooed on his knuckles, and he's sitting on a Dumpster with a paper-bagged 40 oz. brew in his hand and a bike at his feet. Breedlove still has the bike and the blue hair, along with a few tattoos, but she no longer snacks on malt liquor. The kid, who appears in photographs throughout the book, is actually a former roadie for Breedlove's band, a perfectly apt alter ego for Jim, Breedlove's speed-freak, stripper-dating punk-rock dyke heroine, who is something of an alter ego for Breedlove herself.

"Godspeed" is not an autobiography, though Breedlove does call it a roman à clef. Jim, a punk dyke bike messenger, is addicted in equal parts to her stripper girlfriend, Ally Cat, her bike and speed, though the three competing habits have a tendency to cancel one another out. Breedlove also was once a speed freak, a dater of strippers and a bike messenger. (She founded Lickety Split Couriers, an all-girl bike messenging service, in 1991.) And she went on the road with Tribe 8 throughout the United States and Europe, as well as touring with Sister Spit, a lesbian spoken-word performance-art collective.


Link

Discuss




posted by
          Cory Doctorow at
           06:39:32 AM
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