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Tuesday, December 31, 2002

Word Oddities and Trivia

Fun site with examples of odd words.

According to Craig Rowland, Scrabble in North America recognizes five words which, if spelled over two triple-word score squares, and with a premium-scoring tile on the double-letter score square, will award the player 392 points on a single play. These five words are: OXAZEPAM, BEZIQUES, CAZIQUES, MEZQUITS, and MEZQUITE.

John Chew says that OXYPHENBUTAZONE is the highest-scoring word known under American tournament Scrabble rules (OSPD+MWCD). It can score 1778 under suitably contrived circumstances listed and credited in the Scrabble FAQ.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:55:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

King Tut's curse disproved

The mummy's curse has been proven false by statistical research into the lifespan of grave-robbers:

Mark Nelson, an epidemiology and preventive medicine scholar at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia conducted the study.

He found the average life expectancy of those exposed was 70 years, compared to 75 years for those who weren't.

But if you dig deeper, the age difference disappears.

"If you take into account the differences in age and the differences in gender balance, then there was no statistical significant difference between the two groups," Nelson told CBC Radio's As It Happens.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Conspiracy theories from deep in the Library of Congress

"Librarian X" is apparently an insider at the Library of Congress who is mad as hell. S/he has lots of consipracy theories, primarily revolving around James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who, apparently, is an ex-CIA spook. I'm not clear on how credible Librarian X's samizdata is, given the lack of documentation in support of the claims on the "Deep in the Stacks" website, but it sure makes for interesting conspiracy-theory readings.

This collection was acquired prior to World War I. This is--or was--a rather impressive private library of over 80,000 volumes. This was quite a collection, not just literary but scientific as well. In essence, this collection showed the intellectual achievement of Russia. So impressive was this collection that a Russian Who's Who visited and read the books, including Lenin. Part of the promise during purchase was that the collection would remain intact. Well, with over 70,000 volumes still to go it looks like this will never happen. The other problem is that Billington put a non-citizen (a federal security violation) in charge of processing this collection. A further problem is that his Russian was far too limited, the cause of the resultant disaster. A number of alert rare book dealers, recognizing the Yudin stamp, called the Library when they were offered for sale. Billington insists these are "duplicates," even though evidence given the IG shows otherwise. Since there are, according to Billington, no thefts at the Library of Congress these Yudin books will remain on the open market. If you think the FBI, Congress or Library managers are interested in retrieving these books, well...you need to go back and read the rest of this website.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:33:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

JWZ's mom discovers interface cruft

Ur-geek-turned-club-owner JWZ reports back from the anthropological intersection of interface cruft and old people:

...I recently got my mom a new computer.

She had been using a truly ancient Mac for a long time, and nothing worked any more. She wasn't able to get any version of Netscape newer than 2.0 installed on it, and she wasn't able to enable her ISP's spam-blocking feature, because it used an SSL page, and her copy of Netscape's root cert had long since expired. Faced with the prospects of either trying to explain this to her, or update the cert myself, I just bought her a new iMac with OSX.

She's aghast at the idea that this perfectly good computer is totally obsolete, only six years later. As well she should be. But, oh well, it is...

So today she proudly told me that she'd gotten it all figured out. She said, ``now I just always save everything to `Desktop' and then I can see where it is: once I save it, I drag it to the right folder!''

Now, that's just... so wrong. But hey, she made it work. Go mom.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:33:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fannish idea-virus crosses into NYC literary society

Mafia is this fiendish game that has completely eaten fandom, turning science fiction conventions into all-night gaming sessions. In the game, players compete to lie effectively to one another and collude to carry out the sham. It's a game of alliances, betrayal, and dissembling, and I've stayed the hell away from it on the sensible grounds that it appears to be a black hole whence I shall never return.

Jonathan Lethem is a genre writer who has crossed over, more or less, into NYC literary society, and he's brought Mafia with him, with predictable results:

These days, if you’re looking for a bunch of New York writers, magazine editors and publishing types on a Friday night, track down Mr. Lethem, who has become a kind of mob boss among an ever-growing salon of poker-faced literati obsessed by the spiky parlor game they call Mafia. There’s no money involved, everyone stays clothed, and the alcohol intake is surprisingly moderate—but to witness Mr. Lethem’s disciples in the throes of their favorite game is to know that the stakes run high.

"People got so upset," said Ms. Schappell, "stalking around and screaming: ‘I can’t believe you don’t believe me! How come you don’t believe me?’"

On that evening, Ms. Jackson ended up trusting Mr. Lethem, but she shouldn’t have: He was lying his face off, and everyone knew it. But Ms. Jackson was swayed. "He gets excited about pleading his case," she said, explaining why she trusted him. "My knowledge of his character worked against me, because I had too many ways to interpret his signs. And it confused me."

Link Discuss (via Gawker)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:29:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Relativity explained with four-letter words

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity lucidly explained -- using only words of four letters or less.

Get a load of this. We have Bert and Dana. Take a bus, and put Bert on the bus. The bus goes down the road. Dana, she sits here, on the side of the road. He's in the bus and she's on her ass. And now take a rock off of the moon, and let it fall at them. It hits the air and cuts in two. The two bits burn, and then land just as Bert and Dana are side by side. One hits the dirt up the road a ways, and one hits down the road a ways. Dana sees each rock at the same time, but Bert sees one rock and then sees the next rock. Now: if Bert and Dana both see Dana as the one who is "at rest", they both will say that the two bits came down at the same time. Dana will say, "I am 'at rest', and I saw them both land at the same time, so they both did, in fact, land at the same time." And Bert will say, "I move away from the rock down the road, so when I add that fact in, I can see that if I were 'at rest', I'd have seen both land at the same time. So it must be the case that they did land at the same time." Okay, but what if Bert and Dana now see Bert as the one who is "at rest"? Eh? You get to pick who is "at rest" and who isn't, no? So make Bert be "at rest". Now Bert will say, "I am 'at rest', so the one up the road beat the one down the road, on the way to the dirt, just the way I saw it." And Dana will say, "I saw them land at the same time, but I move away from the rock up the road, so when I add that fact in, I can see that the rock up the road must have beat the one down the road."

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:24:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russia sez: Harry Potter doesn't incite hatred

The Russian inquiry into whether the Harry Potter novels promote religious hatred has concluded that they don't.

An investigation was launched after claims the books "contained signs of religious extremism".

There were also claims they were "drawing students into religious groups of a Satanic type".

Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office, said they had found no basis for opening a criminal case.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:21:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Natural cork's disappearance hurts endangered species

As the world's vintners move away from natural cork -- which some claim is responsible for "corking" spoilage of up to four percent of all wine -- to synthetic stoppers, animal conservationists are sounding alarm bells about the future of the endangered species that thrive in cork orchards.

Two wildlife species, the Iberian lynx and the Iberian imperial eagle, are both seriously endangered, but can survive within cork oak forests. If the forests suffer, the outlook for these native animals will also worsen.

WWF estimates the Iberian lynx population has decreased some 90 percent in the past 15 years and population estimates range from 1,000 to only 150. It is the most threatened carnivore in Europe.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:39:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Baby-eating artist's TV show defended by Brit TV station

Tastes like chicken? Britain's Channel 4 is defending a show in which Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu appears to nosh on a dead baby, describing it a "thought-provoking film about extreme art in China." News excerpt:

"[In the] documentary... [he] shows off photographs of himself washing a dead stillborn baby in a sink and putting its dismembered parts in his mouth. Politicians and media critics have condemned the plans but the Broadcasting Standards Commission said it could not address a program before it was shown.

Zhu is also shown having a piece of his own body grafted onto a pig. He describes his work as expressing his Christian faith, saying: 'Jesus is always related to death, blood, wounds, etc.'"

This older Taipei Times article covers previous works by Mr. Yu Zhu (Thanks, Hutch!), including the smash hit shows Maneater and Canned human brains: "Zhu admitted that the meat obtained from the bodies tasted bad, and said he had vomited several times while eating it. However, he said, he had to do so 'for art's sake.' " Here is more background on the pig-skin-graft performance art piece, a snapshot of which is shown at left.

Link to news story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:58:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, December 30, 2002

A dream of flying in Flash

FlyGuy is an utterly enchanting little Flash app. In it, you are a pudgy salaryman who flys through an amazing, Hypercard-like monochrome line art fantasyland, sailing through the sky, through space, and eventually landing up in a tropical paradise where the monkey dances the hula all night long. Playing with this app made me feel like Tuttle in Brazil, having a dream of flying. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:27:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stalinist posters from Poland

Maciej sez "This is a page of wacky/disturbing Polish wall posters from the early 1950's. The posters have been reissued in Poland as a campy, popular kind of retro calendar; I've scanned in some of the stranger ones, with translated captions." Link Discuss (Thanks, Maciej!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:06:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thrill Devil Thongs: wacky pop-couture lingerie

Cool, aggro-hipster thong designs straight outta Chicago and now available online.

Link Discuss (via Nipporn)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:52:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pre-prohibition drug labels from products containing now-illegal drugs

Paul Bissex writes:

Labels and info from pre-prohibition over-the-counter psychotropics. Cocaine tooth drops, benzedrine inhalers -- fun for the whole family!

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:40:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Word Spy - daily jargon

Nice jargon watch site. Today's term: dark biology: scientific research related to biological weapons. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:17:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cellular number portability in 2003?

Wired News reports that number portability will finally come to cellular customers next year. The cell companies have been dragging their heels on this for years now -- and no wonder: any industry so hostile to its customers naturally fears anything that makes it easier for customers to sever their ties with them. Ironically, the mobile telcos have cited the already high amount of churn in their business as evidence that number portability is unnecessary: "See? Our customers hate us so much today that they are willing to reprint all their business cards every six months with a new cellular number: what makes you think that they need to have that pain eased for them?" It's possible that number portability will ramp up cellular churn to the point where one or two of these companies actually get a customer-service clue and emerge as winners. I'd sign up in a hot second for any cellular company whose motto was: "We're less horrible than a root canal with a cold chisel." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:16:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Supreme Court Intervenes in deCSS/DVD Dispute

AP is reporting a significant development in the case involving webmaster Matthew Pavlovich, who republished DVD-cracking deCSS code on his website:

The Supreme Court has temporarily intervened in a fight over DVD copying, and the justices could eventually use the case to decide how easy it will be for people to post software on the Internet that helps others copy movies. More broadly, the case against a webmaster whose site offered a program to break DVD security codes could resolve how people can be sued for what they put online.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor granted a stay last week to a group that licenses DVD encryption software to the motion picture industry, giving the court time to collect more arguments. She requested filings by later this week. The group has spent three years trying to stop illegal copying. The case puts the court in the middle of a cyberspace legal boundary fight: Where can lawsuits involving the World Wide Web be filed?

UPDATE: Lisa Rein sez: "I've made the Pavlovich Legal Decision available in non-PDF (web-friendly HTML) formats, here."

Link to AP story, Background on EFF.org, Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:58:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIP, payphones

The payphone is the twenty-first century horse-trough. It's a quaint artifact, more often employed by dope dealers than upstanding cits, who are expected to commit their action-at-a-distance through mobile handsets. The payphone has been dwindling away on this continent, from Bell South's announced shutdown of 143,000 payphones to Bell Canada's recent annoucement that it will be turning its armored public phones into public WiFi hotspots. Even COCOTs -- private, high-cost payphones that merchants install in remote places for a captive audience -- are being supplanted by cellphones. WashPo runs down the continuing demise of the coin-op telephone:

"At first it was fun, because you'd put in a new phone and you'd generate revenue right away of $600 a month," said Castro, a manager and 11-year veteran at Robin Technologies Inc. in Rockville. Castro empties the coin bin of the dead pay phone, which now averages only $2.50 a day.

There is an indignity to the way pay phones go. They are covered with detritus -- an empty 750-milliliter bottle of cheap red wine, a wet pack of Marlboro Lights and discarded phone cards. The shiny base of the pay phone shells degrade to a mottled magenta. "Unfortunately, what happens is people urinate on them and they corrode," Castro said.

Link Discuss (via Lawmeme)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:43:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA Hacked Again

Andy sez: "The RIAA is being hijacked, as we speak. I just wrote about this on my site, with all relevant links." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:13:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

E-commerce Jumping Beans King busted by Singapore authorities

The 22-year-old business school graduate and e-commerce entrepreneur known as the "Jumping Beans King" has been ordered by Singaporean agriculture officials to recall thousands of the beans he sold online. Story snip:

William Tan was told to recall the beans he had been selling as novelty pets because the moth larvae inside that make them jump pose an ecological threat, said Cheng Lee Ching, a spokeswoman for Singapore's Agri-food Veterinary Authority, or AVA. The penalty for importing jumping beans into the tightly controlled city-state is a fine of 10,000 Singapore dollars (US$5,760) or three years imprisonment.

"I'm very disappointed because the market potential for this was huge, but everything came to a sudden death," said Tan, who said he was not aware of the ban. "I marketed it as a pet, a nice little thing you can carry around and play with," he said.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:22:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Terminator 3: more robots ready to kick your ass

Speaking of deadly machines: the new trailer for Terminator III is chock full of aggro-robot glamor. Movie hits theaters in July, 2003. Link (QuickTime) Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:51:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wiley Wiggins' Solarcon-6

Wiley sez, "Alt-X publishing has just put up my first free e-book of short story-blobs, Solarcon-6."

Green metal fingernails of the mommy-robot awake larvae at 9:00 am with digital alarm-clock eyes and grubs begin feeding, still in the dark since they do not yet have eyes and the mommy robot sees by infrared. Heat signatures of the larvae show their gender and age as they slurp regurgitated protein with soft translucent mandibles. The retarded boy got his back cursed in a game of tug-o-war and now his skin is rotting at such a young age, he looks so becoming in his safety helmet... The secrets of Mexican cooking so close at hand. A man with iron-straight pant-legs like PVC pipes cuts names from roll-call sheets. He is an island of dignity in a hive of rotting, mutated children and grubs.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Wiley!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Martial Arts robot created in China, now ready to kick your ass

Anybody got photos? China's state-run news agency is reporting that a group of Beijing scientists have created a 5.18-foot, 167-pound robot that can perform T'ai Chi, the traditional Chinese martial art of "shadow boxing."

The robot named BHR-1 passed appraisal on Saturday as a major project for the Beijing University of Science and Engineering under China's High and New Technology Research and Development Program...BHR-1 had 32 joints from head to foot which made it move properly, said Professor Li Kejie, chief scientist in charge of the project at the university. It can walk with 33cm steps at a speed of 1kph, he said. The robot is able to walk and play tai chi and can also sense changing ground levels and balance itself, Li said.

Li added that this type of robot would be able to take over some dangerous jobs from humans.

Such as, what, bodyguard? Personal yakuza? Robot-assassin?

Link, and another Link from Xinhua News Agency in China. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:58:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Future of Music Policy Summit returns to D.C. this week

The annual forward-thinking music summit known to regulars as "FOMC" will return to the nation's capital in just five days. What other industry gathering brings together artists as diverse as Joan Jett, Ian MacKaye (Fugazi, fmr. Minor Threat), Vernon Reed, Doug E. Fresh, Bob Mould (fmr. Husker Du), Patti Smith and Lester Chambers (Chambers Bros.)? In addition to their participation in the three-day dialogue--covering everything from compulsory licenses to P2P filesharing to copy-protected CDs--many artists will also perform free concerts at the Kennedy Center on Saturday and Sunday evenings. FOMC co-founder Brian Zisk writes:

"No longer will corporate media and big money frame the terms of the discussion as we draw together the strongest voices in the Internet and independent music community to reframe these questions with a clear-eyed focus on the interests of the artists."

The non-profit Future of Music Coalition is putting on the third annual Future of Music Policy Summit in Washington D.C. January 5-7. It's a forum where those whose lives have impact on musicians come together to discuss the future, present and past, in front of hundreds of those who this debate most impacts, musicians themselves. It helps set the legislative agenda regarding issues which will affect musicians for the upcoming year.

Senators, Congressmen, FCC Commissioners, Copyright Office officials, Technology Folks, Consumer Advocates, Publishers, Label Folks, Academics, Reporters, Music Lovers, and many others will be coming together, as well as hundreds of musicians... Hope to see you there!

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:09:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ex-Navy-man hunts son's killers with private army

Amazing story of an ex-MarineNavy-man (thanks, Stefan!) whose son was beaten to death by Nazi skinheads while waiting for a cab outside of a bar they'd been ejected from. The father has assembled a private army of ex-Marines, PIs and bouncers from his nightclubs and is hunting down the men who killed his son, confronting them and turning them over to the cops.

Ten days ago, he caught his first. After two months of working the phones, huddling with private investigators, directing his squad of ex-Marines and security guards from the Arizona nightclubs he owns, Cole Sr. tracked down Chris Whitley, a 24-year-old white supremacist.

Through go-betweens, Cole Sr. sent Whitley an ominous message: Surrender or face a father's wrath.

So, days before Christmas, in a bizarre confrontation, Whitley met with Cole Sr. at a Phoenix coffee shop.

"It was one of the hardest and strangest things I've done in my life," Cole Sr. says. The grief-stricken father sat directly across from his son's suspected killer, whose face and head are covered with tattoos.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:28:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chat as a side-channel for face-to-face meetings

Clay Shirky's written up some findings from a brainstorming session he hosted in NYC last month that I attended. The meeting was a face-to-face affair, but virtually every attendee had a laptop with an WiFi card, and Clay set up a web-based chat for us to play with while we talked. A giant display at the front of the room showing the running chatter, and it created a really dense dialog that was very fun and productive.

Group conversations are exercises in managing interruptions. When someone is speaking, the listeners are often balancing the pressure to be polite with a desire to interrupt, whether to add material, correct or contradict the speaker, or introduce an entirely new theme. These interruptions are often tangential, and can lead to still more interruptions or follow-up comments by still other listeners. Furthermore, conversations that proceed by interruption are governed by the people best at interrupting. People who are shy, polite, or like to take a moment to compose their thoughts before speaking are at a disadvantage.

Even with these downsides, however, the tangents can be quite valuable, so if an absolute "no interrupt" rule were enforced, at least some material of general interest would be lost, and the frustration level among the participants consigned solely to passive listening would rise considerably.

The chat room undid these effects, because participants could add to the conversation without interrupting, and the group could pursue tangential material in the chat room while listening in the real room. It was remarkable how much easier it was for the speaker to finish a complex thought without being cut off. And because chat participants had no way of interrupting one another in the chat room, even people not given to speaking out loud could participate. Indeed, one of our most active participants contributed a considerable amount of high-quality observation and annotation while saying almost nothing out loud for two days.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Clay!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:18:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Safe hex for 2003

Ten reasons why 2003 should be the year that we all switch to secure computing alternatives:

* The use of Web bugs is up 500%. Switch to a free browser such as Mozilla that can be configured to expire all cookies when you close your browser and refuse all cookies coming from domains other than the one you're visiting.

* Windows XP is full of security holes that make life easier for those who would snoop on you. Time to get off the Microsoft bandwagon and switch to Linux, FreeBSD, or Mac OS-X. God knows what horrors the NSA will stick into the next version of Windows.

* Unrelated lawsuits. Get sued or get arrested for one thing, have your computer impounded, who knows what other questionable things might be found? Remember: It's not whether you're innocent or guilty, it's whether the district attorney can make a jury believe that you're guilty.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cellular companies sucked hard in 2002

Cellular Telephone companies in Washinton generated more consumer complaints than any other industry in the state.

"What really roped me in was the fact that I could cancel anytime" during a three-month "free trial" period, Aberg recalled. "I came to find that just was not the case at all."

In her complaint to the attorney general, Aberg noted that after becoming disillusioned with the service, she tried on numerous occasions to cancel before the trial period was over.

But she "could not get through because I was repeatedly put on hold for OVER 45 minutes. I then submitted e-mails to Qwest to request the phones be deactivated well within the allotted time period," Aberg said in her complaint.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:53:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, December 29, 2002

Peanuts Tarot Deck

Brilliant, hilarious, masterful re-envisioning of the classic Rider-Waite tarot deck -- populated with Peanuts characters. Features Peppermint Pattie as the Empress, Lucy as High Priestess, Linus as the Hierophant, and Charlie Brown in a variety of roles throughout both the Major and Minor Arcana. The artist Valerian pleads online, "Don't sue me," and offers this explanation of the offbeat project:

An absurd, heretical, really cool view of an ancient ritual of divination... This is a joke. Six-year-old suburban kids enacting adult emotions and situations, breaking them down and magnifying them into hilarious crumbs of childhood experience... ­ tragedy, pain, and measured triumph. With children as protagonists and innocent humor as the disarming tool, the emotions are simplified and magnified (as are the physical features of each cartoon drawing) and the exchanges between the children become both an ironic parody of adult emotions, and an impossibly close and meditative study of them.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!) (via Journalista)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:21:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Study: Internet now a mainstream info utility for Americans

A new study scheduled for release Monday reveals that more Americans than ever before now use the 'Net to obtain info on government services, shopping, and healthcare. The Pew Internet and American Life Project report goes even further, stating that "abundant evidence [exists] that the Internet is now the primary means by which many people get key information." Or, to compress all 17 pages to one short blurb: "Most expect to find key information online, most find the information they seek, many now turn to the Internet first."

Excerpt:

With over 60 percent of Americans now having Internet access and 40 percent of Americans having been online for more than three years, the Internet has become a mainstream information tool. Its popularity and dependability have raised all Americans' expectations about the information and services available online. When they are thinking about health care information, services from government agencies, news, and commerce, about two-thirds of all Americans say that they expect to be able to find such information on the Web. Internet users are more likely than non-users to have high expectations of what will be available online, and yet even 40 percent of people who are not Internet users say they expect the Web to have information and services in these essential online arenas.

For information or services from a government agency, 65 percent of all Americans expect the Web to have that information. (...) in the realm of electronic commerce, 63 percent of all Americans expect that a business will have a Web site that gives them information about a product they are considering buying. (...) For news, 69 percent of Americans expect to be able to find reliable, up-to-date news online. (...) For health care information, 67percent of Americans expect that they can find reliable information about health or medical conditions online. (...)

When it comes to personal information, the story is different. Only 31percent of Americans expect to be able to find reliable information about someone online; 35 percent of Internet users say this and 25 percent of non-users say this. However, 58 percent of Internet users say they expect to be able to reach someone via email.

Link to study summary, Link to study homepage, Download complete report (PDF), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:15:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Portland airport debacle still being investigated by bloggers

The bloggers at Silflay Hraka are following up on the "Coffee, Tea, or Should We Feel Your Pregnant Wife's Breasts Before Throwing You in a Cell at the Airport and Then Lying About Why We Put You There?" that swept through Blogistan last week. They've gotten some pretty generic responses from the Portland airport cops, an offer from a law prof to take on the guy's case, and lots more. Link, Link Discuss (Thanks Mitch!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:25:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jimi Hendrix: "Sing sloppy and have a good beat to your songs"

An excerpt from a letter Jimi Hendrix sent his father in 1965:

Nowadays people don't want you to sing good. They want you to sing sloppy and have a good beat to your songs. That's what angle I'm going to shoot for. That's where the money is. So just in case about three or four months from now you might hear a record by me which sounds terrible, don't feel ashamed, just wait until the money rolls in because every day people are singing worse and worse on purpose and the public buys more and more records.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:13:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jamming civilian GPS

The new Phrack has an interesting piece on GPS jamming. I'm no radio engineer, but this seems pretty plausible to me. When civilian GPS got its accuracy bump a couple years back, I remember reading a lot of reports that the military could selectively jam GPS, so that their opponents wouldn't get positional data, but US troops would. This is part of the premise of a story I finished rewriting the other day, about Open Spectrum guerrillas:

Lee-Daniel went out with a crew that Elaine was leading, up on the northern border of the sovereign. She had two junior surveyors with her, all of them loaded with positioning gear that tied into Galileo, the European GPS network -- the Galileo gear cost a fortune, but they'd found that their American GPS kit often mysteriously stopped working when they were working on projects in the territorial USA. They'd ordered the Euro stuff from a bunch of anti-globalization activists who'd found that the same thing happened in any city hosting an economic summit. Europeans were more likely to treat infrastructure as sacrosanct, while the US was only too happy to monkey with GPS for tactical reasons. The Series A man hated the expense of the Galileo gear, hated paying off crusty-punk Starbucks-smashers for critical tools, hated the optics of looking like a bunch of anarchists instead of a spunky startup.

Seems a little more plausible in light of this:

A low cost device to temporarily disable the reception of the civilian course acquisition (C/A) code used for the standard positioning service (SPS)[1] on the Global Positioning System (GPS/NAVSTAR) L1 frequency of 1575.42 MHz.

This is accomplished by transmitting a narrowband Gaussian noise signal, with a deviation of +/- 1.023 MHz, on the L1 GPS frequency itself. This technique is a little more complicated than a simple continuous wave (CW) jammer, but tends to be more effective (i.e. harder to filter) against spread spectrum based radio receivers.

This device will have no effect on the precise positioning service (PPS) which is transmitted on the GPS L2 frequency of 1227.6 MHz and little effect on the P-code which is also carried on the L1 frequency. There may be a problem if your particular GPS receiver needs to acquire the P(Y)-code through the C/A-code before proper operation.

This device will also not work against the new upcoming GPS L5 frequency of 1176.45 MHz or the Russian GLONASS or European Galileo systems. It can be adapted to jam the new civilian C/A-code signal which is going to also be transmitted on the GPS L2 frequency.

Link Discuss (via Joi Ito)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:58:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, December 28, 2002

Harpo Marx, G-Man

Harpo Marx was an undercover agent for J. Edgar Hoover, running secret documents out of the Soviet Union.

One letter from the FBI archives, signed by Hoover in 1949, congratulates Harpo on his "loyal past services" to his country.

Hoover hoped they might meet in the near future, saying: "There may be ways that you can help your country again."

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paranoid Flash rant

Wild Oliver-Stone-conspiracy-rant as a crazy Flash movie, "documenting" the connections between Hailburton, Disney, the bin Laden family, American Airlines and everyone else. Link Discuss (Thanks, Danny!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creepy shampoo rant PDF

Chas sez: "PDF of insane Bronners shampoo label complete with poetry and political slogans. If you have a recipe for tingly peppermint soap you could now roll your own Dr. Bronners shampoo/bodywash/mouthwash/allpurpose soap." Link (36k PDF) Discuss (Thanks, Chas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:42:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

IP over H2O

Forget IP-over-carrier-pigeon -- check out this art-project to run IP over running water:

1. The set-up at the top of the stairwell consists of a computer with a flat panel LCD screen and a USB video camera. When someone walks up to the screen they see live video of themselves. There is a button in front of the screen that when pressed takes a picture of the person. The picture is then translated into a 16 x 16 pixel grayscale image (desktop icon size) and displayed on the LCD.

Also upstairs is a water valve attached to a fixed jug of water or connection to a water source/main. When the grayscale image is created, the computer then analyzes the color of each pixel and 'prints' out pulses to the electronically controlled water valve - a different pulse pattern depending on the color of the pixel on screen. The water then falls to the first floor.

2. The set-up on the first floor consists of a plexi-glass tray that awaits the falling water drops. The tray will sit on top of a custom built wooden box with a video projector inside. A funnel situated above an infrared switch watches for falling drops and through a microcontroller, feeds information to the computer at the bottom to decode which color pixel has been printed.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fourth Harry Potter book read aloud to dying girl in 2000

JK Rowling read the unfinished manuscript for the fourth Harry Potter book over the phone for an American girl who was dying of cancer.

Rowling e-mailed Catie back with some tantalizing snippets from her fourth book -- "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" -- and then phoned her in Albany, New York to read extracts.

"Catie's face just lit up," her mother recalled.

After the child's death, Rowling e-mailed her parents to say: "I consider myself privileged to have had contact with Catie...I am crying so hard as I type. She left footprints on my heart."

That really is a menschy thing to have done, and nevermind any cheap-shots about Rowlings's fans dying for a sequel. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:50:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chickenshit car

Great article about a Brit garage-inventor who's converting cars to run on methane from animal waste:

"During the war I had done quite a bit of pig farming, and I knew that manure contained gases and that pig manure was very potent. A number of experimenters and sanitation facilities have been extracting gas from sewage for years now, but it's diluted so much that the process is slow. I therefore decided to concentrate on animal manure and find the best blend from which to extract methane... and then develop a method of feeding this gas into a car's engine.

"After experiments with just about every type of animal manure, I found I got the best results from mixing that of chickens and pigs. Chicken manure contains more nitrogen than others and pig droppings are useful because they generate heat so well."...

"I get five more miles to the gallon on methane than I get from an equivalent amount of petrol," Harold said. "This is because the dry methane has a higher calorific value and there is no waste of unvaporized fluid. Absence of oil dilution and reduced carbon deposits are just bonuses."

Link Discuss (Thanks, zorca!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:20:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wintertime QTVR panoramas from near and far

Danish photographer and QTVR enthusiast Hans Nyberg, whose Times Square feature was included in last Friday's edition of Web Zen, sends these links to stunningly beautiful full-screen panoramas.

"My Christmas show has some new QTVR -- for example, this one (shown at left) made last Sunday in New York by Jook Leung, who recently won the Fujifilm Masterpiece Award for his Tribute in Light panorama which I featured in April.

And if you want a real 'White Christmas,' look at this image by Kjell Are Refsvik."

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:53:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pregnant Barbie: no room at the Wal-Mart inn for you.

"Midge," the married, pregnant, longtime pal of Barbie, was pulled from Wal-Mart shelves this month in response to customer complaints. She has a detachable pregnant stomach, a wedding ring, a son, and a husband (both of whom are sold separately). From the Reuters story:

Mattel, the maker of Barbie, on its Barbie.com Web site, said the Happy Family preganancy-themed dolls "can help parents discuss pregnancy without having to resort to graphic descriptions of the reproductive process." It said the dolls can help children aged 5 to 8 to act out their feelings before the arrival of a new sibling.

Some shoppers said they were not convinced Wal-Mart's priorities were on target. "Wal-Mart pulling Barbie because she's pregnant, but they still sell guns and ammo?" said Laura Jamieson of San Francisco.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:33:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Perfesser Farnsworth's Fantastic Fusor lives!

The "Fusor" is a miniature nuclear fusion device invented (and abandoned) by Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of the TV. Over at the "Open Source Fusor Research Consortium" garage engineers are trying to hack working, viable Fusors without incurring the wrath of the NEA AEC (thanks, Gary!) or getting fatally irradiated. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jef!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:26:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Trashing Portland's officials' privacy, tit-for-tat

Portland top cops endorsed the actions of officers who used the contents of a flamboyant cop's trashbin to build a case against her -- without a warrant. They argued that "Most judges have the opinion that [once] trash is put out...it's trash, and abandoned in terms of privacy." A Portland alternative paper retaliated by going through the mayor, chief and DA's home trash at the curb, publishing their findings, prompting the officials to go berzerk and threaten legal action.

Our inspection of Chief Kroeker's refuse reveals that he is a scrupulous recycler. He is also a health nut. We find a staggering profusion of health-food containers: fat-free milk cartons, fat-free cereal boxes, cans of milk chocolate weight-loss shakes, cans of Swanson chicken broth ("99% fat free!"), water bottles, a cardboard box of protein bars, tubs of low-fat cottage cheese, a paper packet of oatmeal, and an article on "How to Live a Long Healthy Life."...

We uncrumple a holiday flier from the Hinson Memorial Baptist Church, which contains a handwritten note: "Mark. Just want you to know one Latin from Manhattan Loves You."

Invasion of privacy? This is a frontal assault, a D-Day, a Norman Conquest of privacy. We know the chief's credit-card number; we know where he buys his groceries; we know how much toilet tissue he goes through. We know whose Christmas cards he has pitched, whose wedding he skipped, whose photo he threw away. We know what newsletters he gets and how much he's socked away in the stock market. We even know he's thinking about a new car--and which models he's considering.

Link Discuss (via Plastic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:14:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virtual Yule Log burns up TV ratings in NYC

The "Yule Log Christmas Special"-- a Christmas morning broadcast on an NYC TV station--kicked Ebenezer Scrooge's butt in viewer ratings stats. The show is a two-hour, nonstop shot of a burning log in a fireplace. The TV tradition began in 1966 as sort of a media stand-in for real fireplaces, something many viewers in New York City don't have.

Wednesday's showing, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., boasted 284,012 viewing households, a 26 percent boost in viewership compared with last year, WPIX Channel 11 said. It smoked the 1 p.m. airing of the 1951 classic film version of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," starring Alistair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge, by 29,000 households. For its triumphant return, the Yule Log tape was digitally remastered, but the soundtrack, including "Joy to the World" and "Winter Wonderland," was left unchanged.

See the Yule Log here. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:12:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kawaii dining

Beautiful gallery of hyper-cute Japanese packaged meals. Link Discuss (via Dodoskido)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:55:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Star Wars origami

Step-by-step instructions for folding a wide range of Star Wars vehicles -- and R2D2! -- from simple paper. Use the folds, Luke. Link Discuss (via Dodoskido)

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

Quakes make "unintentional cubism"

Striking gallery of "unintentional cubism" in landscapes ravaged by earthquakes. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

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

Beating buildings into warships

Steel salvaged from the wreckage of WTC will be incorporated into a new US warship, the USS New York. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:34:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPod batteries have a one-year duty-cycle

iPods have a well-known battery-life problem: over time, their battery life dwindles from 10h to 3h or less (my 5GB iPod, purchased in November 2001, was down to less than 1h this Thanksgiving). iPod warranties expire after 90 days, but Apple will "replace the battery" by giving you a new iPod for a whopping $50 off. Over on iPodHacks, they're trying to figure out if there's a better way to change the batteries -- any ideas? Link Discuss

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

Louisiana schoolbooks won't disclaim evolution after all

Louisiana's education authorities have overturned their decision to require disclaimers in biology textbooks that state that evolution is a theory, not a fact.

"I am not prepared to go back to the Dark Ages," said Paul Pastorek, the board's president, who voted against the disclaimer.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, December 27, 2002

Ook#: Ook for .NET

Ook# -- the .NET port of Ook (a programming language with only one command, "Ook," and various punctuation, such as "Ook?" and "Ook!") -- is out, under the BSD license. Here's "Hello World" in Ook#:

# Lawrence Pit
#
# (C) 2002 BlueSorcerer
#

#example that prints Hello World!

Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook.

Link Discuss (via JWZ's LiveJournal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPod handbag

Check out this amazing iPod handbag, going for ¥10,800 ($90) in Japan. Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:38:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nazi hunters score with tech

The US deported ten Nazi war-criminals this year, setting a record. Nazi-hunters attribute their success to the technology:

* Investigators have completed their time-consuming project to track down assets and property the Nazis looted from Holocaust victims.

* OSI has quick access to government records and commercial databases and can compare names, including variations of possible spellings in English.

* Investigators are able to pore over the archives of the former Soviet bloc countries, developing leads.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dr. Who interactive episode-finder

Gene sez: "The BBC sci-fi/fantasy/comedy/drama/cult show 'Doctor Who' aired from 1963 through 1987 (with a revival in 1996) and had over 100 stories, encompassing over 500 episodes. So, how do you find a particular episode? Try the BBC's new 'It's the one with' episode guide! Choose a monster or plot point from the drop down menu, and they'll tell you what episode you're looking for. For instance: Looking for the episode with the freaky clowns? The story you remember is 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy!'"

WHAT WERE THE MONSTERS?
[Ants (Large) | Babies (Big, Orange) | Clowns (Freaky) | Cybermen | Daleks | Dinosaurs | Insects | Kittens | Looked a bit rude | Maggots (Giant) | Man in a Mask | Plants (Killer) | Rats (Huge) | Reptiles | Robots | Scary bloke (One Eyed) | Snakes | Spiders (Big) | Stones (Blood-sucking) | Sweeties (Big) | Vampires | Wearing String Vests | Worms]

WHAT HAPPENED?
[Dr Who died | Dr Who's friend died | The Daleks turn up | The Cybermen turn up | The Master is in it]

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gene!)

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

Citrus sculpture extravagoranges

With a month and a half to go till the Cloverdale Citrus Fair, it's time to have a look at the gallery of last year's winners of the annual citrus-stacking competition. Last year's theme was "Wonders of the World," and from the pyramid at Giza to the Great Wall of China, Rotarians and sorority sisters piled their oranges in enormous sculptifood extravagoranges! Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:15:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Destruction-testing a laptop

The Reg is reporting on a Czech website's destruction testing of a ruggedized laptop. The video of the testing -- which features a man jumping up and down on a closed notebook before booting it up -- is terrific. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:08:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pay for groceries by fingerprint at Kroger stores

The largest supermarket chain in the US is offering some customers the ability to pay for groceries by "finger imaging," at three of its Texas stores.

A machine scans the index finger, matching the customer's unique fingerprint with the individual's account. The company avoids the term "fingerprinting" because of its law enforcement connotation -- the same reason the technology is applied to the index finger, rather than the thumb.

Customers can register for the voluntary program by presenting a drivers license, an index finger and a method of payment -- either credit card, debit card or electronic check.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:58:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Greg Egan's stories online

Greg Egan, the brilliant Aussie sf writer/hacker, has 17 complete stories online, as well as many excerpts and tons of nonfiction articles. Woohoo! Link Discuss (via Bohnsack)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:58:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYC for gondoliers

This large pic of Manhattan under 400' of water -- and the accompanying video of the water draining away -- is a really neat sidelong look at an otherwise familiar topology. Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:35:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kiwi tire-farms slow erosion

Kiwi farmers are using thousands of tires to stop soil-erosion on their land.

This year's bitter El Nino winds have expanded the sand area by half. Mr Hull, who is now past 60, says: "The problem is just getting beyond me."

The Waiuku farmer's nightmare is an example of this country's rapidly vanishing coastline. His land is being buried under sand.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gnat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:52:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi: What threat?

Annalee's written a generally good debunking of the gub'ment's alarmist warnings about WiFi in her latest Techsploitation column, but in so doing, she says:

The ever resourceful publisher O'Reilly even has a new book out on the issue called 802.11 Security, which underscores my point by arguing that most WiFi networks -- which use the 802.11 transmission protocol specified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – are wide open to attack.

I have to quibble with this. Connecting to a WiFi network is not "attacking" it. A successful attack against a network should do some damage to it, or at least reduce its availablity to the detriment of its operator. Most home WiFi networks don't even have a computer on them much of the time (since WiFi net operators either take their machines with them or shut them down -- don't believe me? Take nstat with you on your next warstumble! Most of the nets I connect to don't have any hosts on them!). So connecting to the network doesn't constitute any kind of attack per se.

Now, there are a couple of actual "attacks" imaginable: one is a DoS attack on the network itself, putting so much traffic on the net that you shut it down. This one is much bandied, but I've never actually seen it take place. The 802.11b spec takes pretty good care to enforce good neighborship on connected hosts. It's like DoSing a hub -- theoretically possible, but not very likely, since hubs are, by nature, built to manage multiple hosts sending and receiving traffic.

Another attack is intrusion: either on the router or on another host. Router intrusion is surprisingly easy, since many operators don't change the default router password. Any time you associate with a network called "linksys", try pointing your browser at: http://:admin@192.168.1.1 -- if you get a configuration screen, congrats, you 0wn that AP. But this certainly isn't an attack that's made simpler by flaws in WEP; rather, it's a UI failure in the configurator, which should force a password change on setup. Indeed, this attack is not specific to WiFi nets -- routers connected to cablemodems are just as vulnerable.

Intrusion into systems is a much graver case. In the case of MacOS X/9 machines, this is not much of a risk, since neither of these machines have default-on IP-addressable services, and activating such services generally requires some savvy that would, one hopes, also include enough smarts to set up a decent password (maybe a poor assumption). Win* machines are much more vulnerable -- this is a well-understood phenomenon, of course, and it has to do with major failings in MSFT's security engineering. The incremental vulnerability of a Win* machine on a WiFi net is high, but only because Win* and orthodox security engineering make the fallacious firewall assumption, that hosts inside your network are trusted and hosts outside your network are not. In truth, your security perimeter should be drawn around each host, not around the network, since hosts on the network can go rogue (0wned via a trojan, say), and hosts outside of the network can be highly trusted, as when you carry your laptop to some other place and need to connect to machines back home.

Now, there is a real-live attack possible due to the failings of WEP: packet-sniffing. In the cases where you are sending sensitive info (i.e. passwords, mail, http-auth session keys) in the clear, having untrusted parties on your broadcast network is a genuine risk. But this is not a situation that's unique to, or distinctive of, WiFi. Rather, it is the case any time you're sending data in the clear on any network connection that isn't under your control, such as net-connections in airports, hotels, conference centers, classrooms, boardrooms, cable-modems, etc. This is a major flaw in the assumptions that many Internet services make (any ISP that expects you to transmit your POP info in the clear, for example).

WiFi makes these threats more visible, but not graver. Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:48:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Twisted Sister reunites: Why '80s revivalism is a bad thing

Twisted Sister is reuniting. First gigs since 1987 commence in June. They have a website. This evil must be rooted out and vanquished at any and all costs. From the AP story:

"The '80s glam-metal band Twisted Sister, best known for 'We're Not Gonna Take It' and 'I Wanna Rock,' will reunite for at least two shows next summer... 'Twisted Sister was not a regular rock 'n' roll band,' [guitarist Jay French] said. 'We were bred as a killing rock-and-roll machine. It wasn't the degree of musicianship that mattered; it was the degree of killer instinct that we had.'

One concern is 'pulling off this visual time warp,' French said. Twisted Sister will go out in makeup and costumes -- though no one yet knows exactly what they'll look like --and the stage set will incorporate the neon-pink barbed wire fence from the 1984-85 'Stay Hungry' tour."

Update: This reunion tour could be hampered by time/space continuum problems: a recent expose reveals that Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snyder is in fact Christina Aguilera. The proof is right here. (Thanks, Bryan!)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:56:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I claim this planet in the name of the EU, hmmm, isn't that nice?

Pat sez: "Europe may settle the Moon and Mars before the U.S. space agency can get its big, fat bureaucracy into gear."

The European Space Agency (Esa) believes that by 2025, the technology will exist to send humans to Mars.

It is considering two flagship missions to find a suitable landing site for astronauts and to bring back the first sample of Martian soil. A decision on whether to send humans to Mars could be taken as early as 2015.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:54:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Humane OS X replacement

The Humane Environment is an open source alternative GUI in OS X, created by Jef "creator of the Mac" Raskin. Still in development and very much a proof-of-concept.

The Humane Environment (THE) is as easy to learn as a GUI (or easier) yet as fast to use (or faster) than the command-line systems we struggle to learn but love to use. It is easier to add new software to than any previous interface-based system.

Important observation: You cannot make an interface better without making it different (that's obvious). If it's a lot better, it will be a lot different. This means that it will feel unfamiliar to anybody familiar with present interfaces. Therefore, it has to be used for a while (after you read the manual) before you unlearn your present habits and can begin to appreciate it. You are in a worse position for learning it than a novice who has only to acquire new habits and has nothing to unlearn!

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

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

Russia: Harry Potter incited hatred

Russian prosecutors are investigating complaints that the Harry Potter novels incite religious hatred.

The Interfax news agency reported that the woman who sought the investigation believes the second volume in the series contains occult propaganda.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:35:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pizza university creates soldiers for the lord

The billionaire ultra-conservative founder of Domino's pizza is starting up a Catholic university:

Instead, the bespectacled, quiet philanthropist envisions a "spiritual military academy," built in the Frank Lloyd Wright style and dispensing a rigorous, faith-centered and tradition-minded education to as many as 5,000 committed Catholics. He is willing to spend at least $220 million of his fortune to build it.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:05:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crustypunks and seniors: helpin' is as helpin' does

Montreal's Meals-on-Wheels service is recruiting crustypunks as volunteers.

It's early evening when the knock on the door distracts Helen Gross from her knitting. The 91-year-old peers through the peephole to see a tattooed, pierced teenager, her cap adorned with spikes and coat opened just enough to reveal the words on the T-shirt: "I am part of the axis of evil."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:02:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mona Lisa through popular culture

Great gallery of pop-art interpretations of the Mona Lisa from various sources. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday Web Zen: New Year's Eve Zen

Remember: When you're enjoying Web Zen, don't drink and browse.
1. Pre-Date advisor
2. Recipes
3. Condiment
4. Cocktails
5. Auld Lang Whatever
6. Times Square, NYC
7. Hangover Cures

Bonus: obligatory kitten link.

Note: Frank Davis, inventor and patron saint of the whole "Web Zen" thing, just launched a gorgeous, fun-filled archive site to kick off the new year at www.webzen.org.

Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:48:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clonaid claims first cloned baby has been born

A Clonaid/Raelian representative declared at a Florida press conference today that first one just popped:

The 7-pound baby was born Thursday by Caesarean section and will be home in three days, said Brigitte Boisselier, a chemist and CEO of a company that did the experiment. She wouldn't say where the baby was born; she did say the birth was at 11:55 a.m. local time.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:46:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, December 26, 2002

Islamic advocacy org asks NC GOP group to remove anti-Islam link

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based Islamic civil rights and advocacy organization, is asking a North Carolina Republican group to remove a link to anti-Islam rhetoric from its website and apologize to local Muslims. From a CAIR announcement today:

The website of the Greensboro-based Guilford County Republican Party has a link to a site called "Islam Exposed" that states: "This website was designed with 1 (sic) objective in mind - to expose one of the greatest evils on our planet - Islam. We have the evidence and materials to prove that this false religion is nothing more than a barbaric occult (sic) invented by savages for savages."

The party maintains the link to the anti-Islam site despite past objections from concerned American Muslims. The GOP website itself offers a disclaimer and states: "We have received a few emails from Muslims who indicate that this material misrepresents their religion."

"It is unconscionable that a political party claiming to represent all Americans would associate itself with a site that expresses open hatred for the faith of millions of fellow citizens. The Guilford County Republican Party should remove this defamatory link and apologize to the Muslim community of North Carolina," said CAIR Board Chairman Omar Ahmad.

Link to CAIR website (press release not online as of 10:30PT, but will likely be posted shortly press release here).
Link to Guilford County, NC GOP website (scroll halfway down the page. Link is on the left side).

Update: As of 9:00AM PT on 12-27-02, the Guilford County GOP website has removed the link, and replaced it with this: "This site was introduced to readers of WorldNetDaily.com. The Guilford GOP does not endorse the opinions expressed on this website, nor have we fully researched the site It is presented as interesting reading material relating to the War on Terrorism. We have received a few emails from Muslims who indicate that this material misrepresents their religion. We apologize for the link to this website and have instituted safeguards against links to such sites in the future. There is no room for hate in our society."

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:28:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Biotech yeast turns jug-wine into fine vintages

Gengineers are growing biotech yeast to allow cheap Chateau Thames Embankment to taste like Chauteau La-feet, eliminate hangovers, and extend shelf-life.

Instead, it is the other organism involved in winemaking - the yeast - which has been taught new tricks. GM yeast has dazzling potential because many of the "organoleptic" qualities of a wine - its colour, aroma and flavour - are created by chemicals spat out by yeast as it munches its way through the mush of crushed grapes. And the metabolic pathways that produce these chemicals have proved obligingly easy to manipulate...

Already, some research groups have carried out small-scale experimental fermentations. One major experimental success has been to use modified yeast to correct the balance between sugar and fruit in grapes, which can peak at different times...

But experimental yeasts are also helping to eliminate undesirable compounds. These are the off-flavours that make wines taste sweaty, eggy, gassy or vinegary, the nasties that give you a bad head in the morning, and the carcinogens that get you in the long run.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:58:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Total body-odor awareness: latest DARPA anti-terror initiative?

Smell ya later! From Secrecy News:

Talk about Total Information Awareness. Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to find out how to identify particular individuals by their genetically-determined odor.

DARPA is "soliciting innovative proposals to (1) determine whether genetically-determined odortypes can be used to identify specific individuals, and if so (2) to develop the science and enabling technology for detecting and identifying specific individuals by such odortypes."

See DARPA's presolicitation notice for the "Odortype Detection Program," December 13, here (thanks to WMA).

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:09:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rodney Brooks' iRobot Corporation profiled in NYT

Jim Mason writes:

"interesting article on Rodney Brooks' iRobot company, focusing on a military 'bot used in Afghanistan and an autonomous vacuum cleaner for $200."

image at left: iRobot engineer Greg Landry places the company's Pyramid Rover inside a shaft at the Great Pyramid of Giza. (AP photo)

Link (registration required) Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:35:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gadget alert: Ceiva digital photo frames

Interesting product. Ceiva is a Southern California-based company that offers a digital picture frame service. Costs $119.99 at Amazon after mail-in rebate. Here's a snip from the Amazon.com editorial review:

Ceiva put the future in an unassuming black picture frame with this amazingly simple yet innovative product. This Internet-enabled frame makes it so easy to receive and display digital photos that even the most tech-shy relatives will love it. The traditional frame houses an LCD screen that displays up to 20 pictures in a single-view or slide-show format. Once a day, the frame dials in to Ceiva's Web site and downloads any new photos that have been sent to you (or that you've uploaded). What's truly amazing is that it works flawlessly--it's a cutting-edge technology idea that's well executed.

The frame itself is a handsome classic black with a black matte. It's about the size of a standard 8-by-10-inch frame, and the viewing area is about 5 by 7 inches. The display resolution is 640 x 480 VGA, and the images are displayed as JPEGs. We were impressed with the picture quality, especially considering the display is passive matrix--colors were a bit washed out, but otherwise pictures were sharp, bright, and looked good. The viewing angle isn't great--you won't be able to see pictures well from the side--but overall, the screen worked very well, even in relatively bright light.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bev!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:26:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

vlogging: collaborative online video blogging at tropisms.org

A couple of weeks ago here in LA, I met an innovative documentary filmmaker and digital artist from Holland named Luuk Bouwman whose Tropisms.org site is the subject of this story in the French newspaper Liberation. The article is written in French, and describes the site as an "Internet road flick."

Luuk's work is all about vlogging -- that's shorthand for video blogging. His tropisms site is a sort of collaborative online travelogue in which participants from all over the world post video snapshots of their experiences traversing the globe. Luuk says:

"[The site] consists of 'crudities': pieces of raw experience, regularly uploaded...it aims at developing an extended version of the conventional weblog, one that allows users to upload visual input such as (streaming-) video-files and pictures as easily as texts. The attitude towards the internet is experiential: mastering equipment and getting the hang of tools comes before writing manifestos. 'Do it yourself' is the site's slogan."

He's also working on a documentary film about Miltos Manetas' neen art movement, which promises to be equally interesting.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:45:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jury Service reviewed

Bryant Durrell has posted a great review of Jury Service, the novella I co-wrote with Charlie Stross whose serialization was completed yesterday. I had so much fun writing this story -- Stross and I had never even met, lived nine time-zones apart, and still, through the magic of the Interwebs, we were able to hammer this sucker out, laughing all the way.

The interesting thing about "Jury Service" is that it's extropian phatic text. It's not at all clear to me that the extropian concepts inherent in the story are really part of the common memes of science fiction just yet; I think Doctorow and Stross are changing that with this and other similar stories. See also, of course, the father of extropian SF Neal Stephenson. I suppose, come to think of it, that Vernor Vinge is the grandfather. Bruce Sterling is the dirty old uncle, and any metaphor which resorts to a dirty old uncle should probably be put out of its misery around now.

Is this just cyberpunk? No. It differs from cyberpunk in that cyberpunk was not a product of technologically savvy authors. The stuff I'm talking about is informed by the cyber, and has not a whole lot of punk in it. The story of how Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter is legend, and it says a lot about the differences between the cyberpunk ethos and the extropian ethos.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:29:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Celebrities in Satan's Service

Awesome gallery of celebs with K*I*S*S makeup photoshopped on. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:13:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot fish, artificial muscle -- coming soon!

An Osaka company will ship robot fish powered by artificial muscle in January:

Ikeda-based Eamex Co., which specializes in developing artificial muscles, and Suita-based Daiichi Kogei, which specializes in resin processing, have developed the artificial muscle. They hope the development of the robot fish will lead to a growth in the practical use of artificial muscle.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Ann!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:58:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pepys' diary as blog

Ben sez: "Phil Gyford's taken the Project Gutenberg edition of Samuel Pepy's diary, and converted it into a blog - new entries every day from Jan 1st. It comes complete with space for annotations, and trackbacks, and has an RSS Feed with the complete entry inside." Link Discuss (via Ben Hammersley)

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

Wednesday, December 25, 2002

Movie industry thrives, "piracy problem" notably nonexistent

What piracy problem? The LA Times reports that "more Americans went to movies this year than anytime since 1959," despite what Jack Valenti characterizes as "the choices technology now provides, including VCRs, cable television, satellite dishes and the Internet."

Remember, Jack Valenti is the man who predicted, on behalf of the film industry, that Hollywood would collapse if the gub'ment didn't outlaw the VCR, and is pushing for outrageous restrictions on the Internet to keep Hollywood afloat.

Box office revenues continue to climb, as they have every year since the Supreme Court told Valenti to get bent -- which one is it, Jack? Is Hollywood sinking or flying higher than ever before? Link Discuss

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

Production art from Haunted Mansion movie

This morning on Ain't It Cool News: production art from the upcoming Haunted Mansion movie. Boy, this looks cool. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:04:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Whisperado premiere in NYC tonight

Looking for Xmas Eve day fun in NYC tonight? Catch the world premiere of "Whisperado," a band that's "25% blogger" and all heart.

JOIN US FOR
OUR LIVE WORLD PREMIERE
Wed. Dec. 25, 9:00pm
The C-Note
157 Ave. C (at 10th St.) NYC 212 677-8142

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:22:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hollings replaced by McCain at head of Commerce Committee

Interesting speculative piece that investigates the likely outcome of McCain replacing Hollings as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. Hollings' tenure has been characterized by outrageously bad anti-technology laws and proposals, but will McCain be any better?

Public Knowledge is one of many public interest groups that opposes Hollings's proposal, saying it threatens the consumer's right to "fair use" of copyrighted works, like making a personal copy of an album or a videocassette.

Sohn said the Hollings legislation probably wouldn't fit in with McCain's other policy stances. "McCain is generally deregulatory and that's good news for the opponents of this bill because it's as regulatory as it (gets)," Sohn said.

"I don't think it affects the debate at all. The change in chairmanship does not affect the need to protect creative works from piracy," Valenti said...

"I never want to underestimate the (MPAA's) ability to lobby these issues," Miller said. "If Jack Valenti had been around at the time of Gutenberg he would have organized the monks to come and burn down the printing press."

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:19:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Feliz Navidad

Peace.

Discuss

Image: our family xmas-tree, L.A. (xeni)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:15:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jury Service, part the last -- online!

Merry Xmas and a h0h0h0! The final part of "Jury Service," the funny, raunchy trans-Singularity novella that I co-wrote with Charlie Stross went live on scifi.com today. Reading parts one, two and three first is a good idea, of course.

"Siddown." Adrian waves at a bean-bag. "Milk, sugar?"

"Both, thanks. Agh--damn. Got anything for-for Tourette's?"

"'Cording to the user manual it'll go away soon. No worries."

"User manual? Sh--you mean this thing comes with a warranty? That sort of thing?"

"Sure." Adrian pours boiling water into the teapot and sets it aside to stew. Then he sits down besides the oblivious Libyan woman and pulls out a stash tin. He begins to roll a joint, chatting as he does so. "It's been spamming to hell and back for the past six months. Seems something up there wants us to, like, talk to it. For some years now it's not had much of a clue about us, but it's finally invented, bred, whatever, an interface to the human deep grammar engine. Sort of like the crappy teapots the embassy issues everyone with. Trouble is, the interface is really specific, so only a few people can assimilate it. You--" Adrian shrugs. "I wasn't involved," he adds.

"Who was?" demands Huw, his knuckles whitening. "If I find them--"

"It was sort of one of those things," Adrian says vaguely. "You know how it happens? Someone does some deep data mining on the proteome and spots a correlation. Posts their findings publicly. Someone else thinks, hey, I know that joe, and invites them to a party along with a bunch of their friends. Someone else spikes the punch while they're chatting up a Sheila, and then a prankster at the Libyan embassy thinks hey, we could maybe rope him into one of the hanging judge's assizes, howzabout that? Boy, you can snap your fingers and before you know what's happening there's a flash conspiracy in action--not your real good old fashioned secret world order, nobody can be arsed tracking those things these days, but the next best thing. A self-propagating teleology meme. Goal-seeking Neat Ideas are the most dangerous kind. You smoke?"

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:23:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paint cans get detergentized

Dutch Boy and Sherwin Williams will unveil a multimillion-dollar R&D effort to replace messy paint-cans with plastic, detergent-style pour-bottles in June. It'll be interesting to see if this actually works: paint-cans are so ingrained in our habits, but they suck so hard in practical use -- this could be the Swiffer of home-improvement projects. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:20:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, December 24, 2002

Xmas Media Scavenger Hunt!

A great competition from the WELL's media conference: the Xmas Scavenger Hunt. Post your replies with the Discuss link, below.

Everybody who has ever worked Christmas in a newsroom knows the drill: there are certain standard news stories that run every year. For instance:

• "Soldiers watched over the birthplace of the Prince of Peace..."
• "The meanest thief in the world stole..."
• "Members of the Jewish/Muslim/Sikh/whatever community demonstrated the true meaning of Christmas..."
• "American forces on duty [someplace] celebrated..."
• "Once again, a Salvation Army bellringer found a gold coin worth..."
• "The total cost of all the gifts in The Twelve Days of Christmas increased by ..."

You get the idea. Somebody probably writes those stories during a hot spell in August.

So here's the game: find this year's version of these and other Christmas cliche news stories and post the URL in this topic.

Discuss (Thanks, johnross!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:37:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYC Homeless orgs raise $3K for conscientious cop

Homeless charities in NYC have scraped up $3,000 to help out a cop who was suspended for refusing to bust a sleeping homeless man.

In gratitude, organizations for the homeless put together the fund for the 37-year-old officer, his wife and their five children. Homeless people also contributed change scrounged from passers-by, money earned from recycling cans and bottles, even a portion of their welfare checks.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:45:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bloggers start to uncover the truth behind national security abuses

Mitch Wagner has done some digging into the stories of the guy who got arrested for taking photos in his hometown and the guy who got arrested for protesting the poor treatment of his wife at a security checkpoint. His conclusions? Inconclusive -- he can't substantiate either story, and he can't pin them as completely false, but he notes that in the latter case, the site that carried the story is prone to posting revisionist nutjob rants:

LewRockwell.com's front page today links to a political cartoon at a site called RebelGray.com, where Bush is compared to Lincoln. RebelGray.com doesn't mean that in a good way.

The site's top story today defends Trent Lott and calls his ouster a "purge trial."

It is not true that supporting the Dixiecrats in 1948 necessarily reflected a racial bias against blacks. The real issue was not race; it was the place of freedom and federalism--concepts that are apparently not understood by the national press or by any of Lott's critics right and left--in the post-war period.

Of course, nuts get subject to bad treatment, too; and police-denial of a coverup is just what you'd expect if there was a coverup. It would be interesting if Denver-ites and Portland-ians with blogs followed this up, continuing Mitch's research (he suggests some avenues in the entry). A lot of this investigation is just-plain shoe-leather stuff, and distributing the load of that investigation is the best use of the LazyWeb of all. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:05:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DJ Spooky video from Creative Commons launch

More video from the Creative Commons launch: DJ Spooky talks about his use of the commons in making his art, and plays his remix of "Birth of a Nation." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:11:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Infectious wellness

A modified ebola strain is being tested as a delivery system for gene-therapy:

While replacing the infection-causing genes inside an ordinarily harmful retrovirus with helpful genetic material is a relatively common research practice, David Sanders and his colleagues have gone a step beyond this technique.

The group, which also includes Anthony Sanchez of the Centers for Disease Control and Purdue graduate student Scott Jeffers, has hit upon a way to simplify Ebola's outer shell as well, rendering it more easily produced in a laboratory and more effective at delivering genes to defective cells. Since unmodified Ebola enters through, and attacks, the lungs, defective lung cells could benefit most from therapy based on this discovery.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My book exists!

Just got email from my editor to say that he has a "stack" of copies of my first novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" on his desk. I am exploding with joy! The book ships on January 9 -- pre-order your copy today! (or wait until Jan 9 and read the thing online for free as a Creative-Commons-licensed ebook; until then, you'll have to tide yourself over with this excerpt).

Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I've come across in years. He starts out at the point where older SF writers' speculations end. It's a distinct pleasure to give him some Whuffie. (Rudy Rucker -- author, Spaceland)

"Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the reputation economy, and Ray Kurzweil's transhuman future. As much fun as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and as packed with mind bending ideas about social changes cascading from the frontiers of science." (Tim O'Reilly -- publisher and founder, O'Reilly and Associates)

In the true spirit of Walt Disney, Doctorow has ripped a part of our common culture, mixed it with a brilliant story, and burned into our culture a new set of memes that will be with us for a generation at least. (Lawrence Lessig -- author, The Future of Ideas)

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:20:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tis the season to lose your virginity

A new study predicts that the Xmas season puts teens in the mood to lose their virginity.

While June is the most common month for teens to have sex for the first time -- be it in a casual summer fling or steady relationship -- sociologists from Mississippi State University say many teens who are dating seriously choose December as the time to have sex for the first time.

Link Discuss

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

TiVo photo albums

Marc Canter has posted a leaked screenshot of an upcoming (proposed?) TiVo feature -- TiVo photo albums. Marc wonders "how the images get into the TiVO? And what you can do with them -- once they're in there." Link Discuss (via Werblog)

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

TVLand's New Year's popcult omega and alpha

Just caught a bumper on my TiVo for the TVLand Last Things Last/First Things First end-of-year marathon. On New Year's Eve Day (Last Things Last), TVLand will air a marathon of last-ever-episodes of vintage programs -- Mary Tyler Moore, M*A*S*H, etc -- and on New Year's Day (First Things First), they'll screen a marathon of first-ever episodes of those shows. It's an extravaganza of popcult omega and alpha. No link -- tvland.com is a mess of pretty, noisy and uninformative Flash chazzerai, and Google comes up empty, dangit. Link (Thanks, Gregg!) Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:57:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Walking dino coming to California Adventure

Disney's shipping an animatronic, stand-alone, walking dinosaur for its otherwise craptacular, moribund and soulless California Adventure park in Anaheim.

The character doesn't talk, but can respond with movements. Some of its potential antics are eating popcorn, "stealing" a guest's hat and sneezing.

Imagineers have long dreamed about walking Animatronics, but it took technology a while to catch up with their creative minds...

Always coy about its "magic," Disney declined to talk about how the dinosaur works. But a neuroscience professor with experience in robotics said Imagineers would have confronted issues with software to help the creature stay balanced as it walks. Robotics experts also have been searching for the right kind of spongy material to mimic muscle tissue and make movements less jerky.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:20:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crabs and Christmas

Joey recounts a very special Christmas story in his blog today, a heart-warming tale of crab-lice and friendship.

"JoeyYouHaveToHelpMeItItchesLikeCrazy AndICan'tAffordTheCreamCanYouLendMe SomeMoneyItItchesItItchesItItches!"

He was phoning me from a pay phone near the Eaton Centre, not far from where I was. I arranged to meet him at the large fountain on the bottom floor, as it was near a Shoppers Drug Mart where we could buy the anti-crablouse goo. I hung up and noticed that everyone -- the people in line as well as the cashier -- were giving me funny looks and keeping their distance. The cashier took my credit card the with the tips of her thumb and index finger, holding it as if I'd handed her a very full week-old diaper.

Damned X, I thought to myself. He gets the STD and still it's me who ends up getting the "unclean" treatment.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:58:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The book the Bells don't want you to read

Bruce Kushnick's 475-page damnation of the telecom industry, "The Unauthorized Biography of the Baby Bells & Info-Scandal" has been published as a free downloadble text. I've just skimmed it now, paying particular attention to the ringing endorsement given in the introduction by Bob "Ethernet" Metcalfe and it looks very tasty indeed. Kushnick tears the lumbering telco dinosaurs entire new digestive tracts -- and documents the hell out of their failures, rip-offs and rottenness. Jason calls this "the book the Bells don't want you to read." Link Discuss (via JOHO the blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:50:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microsoft subverts sunshine laws at state colleges

Lawmeme reports that state colleges, which are often bound by freedom-of-information-act-like provisions that require them to disclose their contractual obligations to the public who fund them, are being forced to keep their deals with MSFT secret due to non-disclosure terms.

For a yearly fee, an educational institution receives the right to sell Microsoft software at a nominal fee to it's students and employees. However, as part the of the license agreement, Microsoft has been stipulating that the terms of the contract be kept under non-disclosure. Public institutions covered by public records laws are clearly unable to abide by such terms. There are very few exemptions to the disclosure requirements of these laws. Indeed, non-competitive contracts with convicted monopolists would seem to be expressly what these laws should allow to be exposed. Surprisingly, a number of public universities have been signing off on these non-disclosure terms in apparent breach of their state's public records laws. For example, both the University of Michigan and The Ohio State University claim that they are unable to disclose substantive details of their respective Microsoft licenses due to contract terms.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Home and wireless for the holidays

Meg predicts that this holiday's home-visits by WiFi-addicted bloggers armed with access-points will be a tipping-point for wireless:

I wonder if we'll see an increase in wireless usage as wi-fi addicted bloggers head home for the holidays? I am contemplating bringing the AirPort along when I head to Boston this evening. Once non-wirelessly connected folks see how easy and great it is, I suspect they'll want to go wireless as well

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:32:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, December 23, 2002

0wn your car

The Carchip is a $139 product that reads out all the seekrit info that your car's diagnostic system normally only makes available to service personnel.

The Carchip works with most foreign and domestic cars made since 1996. It installs quickly by simply plugging into your car's onboard diagnostic (OBD) system II connector, which in most cases is under your steering wheel. (It's OK. We didn't realize it had been there all along either.) Once installed, it will blink to let you know it's working.

While you drive, it logs data including your speed, how hard you hit your breaks, throttle position, fuel pressure, and a whole lot more. When you've finished your drive, simply unplug the Carchip from your car and connect it to your computer. The software imports the data and -- here's the best part -- presents it in a very readable format.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smart Mobs install progressive leader in South Korea

One of my primary areas of skepticism around the idea of Smart Mobs is that they seem to lack the follow-through and sustained attention necessary to participate in the civil polity. Smart Mobs may have orchestrated the ouster of a corrupt regime in the Phillipines, but they failed to create a sustained reform movement and consequently, one dictator was quickly replaced by another. (credit where due: This is an objection that Sterling brought to me when I raised this with him, and I haven't been able to come up with an answer until now.)

Korean net activists slashdotted the most recent election, filling IM and email with messages to get the vote out for a progressive candidate who supported continuing South Korea's thawing relations with North Korea, and defeated the favored hard-liner candidate, who seemed bent on renewing hostilities.

The Saturday, the Hangyore newspaper in Seoul Korea carried a front-page article entitled, "Youth Politics of the IT Generation Won," on the role of network connectivity in the recent election. Young supporters of No Mu-hyon flooded the internet with e-mails and saturated text messaging services with calls to get out the vote for No Mu-hyon. The article noted claims by information technology columnist Sin Tong-nyo'k': that information and power in the mass media and representative democracy were in the past vested in a minority, but have been conferred on the majority by the internet.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:39:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSFT ordered to bundle Java with Windows

A court has ordered Microsoft to bundle Sun's Java runtime with all future shipments of WindowsOS. My peanut gallery of court-watchers on this case predict that this means eventual victory for Sun in the overweening case, which will include a broad range of anti-trust claims against MSFT. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:13:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

better !pout !cry

From a 1998 rec.humor.funny post, the nerd Xmas carol:

better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus town

cat /etc/passwd >list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice >giftlist
santa claus town

who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | grep bad || good
for (goodness sake) {
be good }

Link Discuss (via Wasted Bits)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:34:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Brick Testament

Lodrina writes: "Legos enact Bible verses. Need I say more! Moses even commits murder with lego blood."

I'm partial to all the lurid tales of begetting and prostitution, myself--a frame from Judah and the Prostitute, left.

Link Discuss (Thanks, lodrina!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:50:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

first-person account: Bethlehem's only radio station shut down by Israeli army

From Palestinian journalist, media organizer, and online radio pioneer Daoud Kuttab, who is director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University in Ramallah, Jordan. It should be noted that Mr. Kuttab has the dubious distinction of having been detained, harassed, and otherwise targeted by both the Palestinian and Israeli military, for his innovative work related to independent media development in the region.

Danny Qumsieh has been working hard this Christmas season to raise money so that Bethlehem's only local radio station can continue in its tradition of covering the holiday events. As manager of the radio station he was frustrated that he was unable to find commercial sponsors because of the devastating economic situation due to the Israeli reoccupation of the city.... Just when he felt confident that the station will be able to go ahead with the coverage, an unexpected turn of events occurred. Israeli soldiers decided on December 23 to take over the building housing the station. The staff of the radio station and the entire building was evacuated and the station had to go off the air.

For seven years now, Radio Bethlehem 2000 has provided live audio coverage of the traditional Christmas Eve parade, Christmas Eve Carols from Manger Square and Midnight Mass from the birth-place of Jesus Christ. I should know. I was there when we first started this radio tradition in the Christmas of 1996.

Along with three other Palestinians we started this radio station after the Israeli army exited the city and the Palestinian Authority welcomed radio license requests. Cell phones had been new at the time but we were able to convert roving journalists into live broadcasters using them. That first Christmas eve was so special. Radio is a great medium to create atmosphere. I remember walking around in Bethlehem and you can follow Christmas carols sung by the famous Lebanese singer Fairuz from shops and stores who were all tuned in to our 89.6 frequency. We had been working non stop for nearly 24 hours when a delivery person brought us some food. I still remember a delicious shawerma sandwich delivered to our studios by a local restaurant who wanted to show support for what we were doing. (...)

A few days before Christmas, Israel announced that it was planning to ease the curfew and other travel restrictions to allow Bethlehem's Palestinian Christians to celebrate the Christmas. The radio station was beaming carols and announcing Christmas related events when this ugly act took place.

Link to complete first-person account from Mr. Kuttab. One of his recently-published articles on how Palestinian Christians are commemorating the holiday in the occupied territories under present circumstances is here. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:26:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wanted: Eli Lilly Bandit, 10K dollar reward.

Anonymous sez: "Just before President Bush signed the homeland security bill into law an unknown member of Congress inserted a provision into the legislation that blocks lawsuits against Eli Lilly, the manufacturer. The Bush family and the administration have many ties to the company. There's President Bush's father, who sat on the company's board in the 1970s; White House budget director Mitch Daniels, once an Eli Lilly executive; and Eli Lilly CEO Sidney Taurel, who serves on the president's homeland security advisory council.

"Dick Armey (R-Texas) is claiming he did it, but virtually NO ONE believes it as he didn't have intimate access in the constructing of the bill. Because he is retiring at the end of this year the assumption is that he's taking the fall for the White House and buddy Bush.

"I'm not a huge fan of TomPaine.com, but they're spearheading this reward campaign -- I'm thankful for that." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:56:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Videos of speeches from Creative Commons launch

Lisa Rein has posted videos of some of the speeches from the Creative Commons launch, including talks by Larry Lessig, John Perry Barlow and Jack Valenti (!). Link Discuss

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

Broadcast Flag in NYT

NYT picks up an AP wire about the hated Broadcast Flag proposal, including a nice sound-bite from me.

But critics argue the flag is the latest attempt to wrest control from consumers, stifle innovation, create inconvenience, turn tinkerers into criminals and raise prices -- all for a technology that won't stop piracy anyway.

``This has to do with controlling the customary, expected uses of law-abiding consumers in their homes,'' said Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ``When they say `This keeps honest people honest,' they mean `This keeps honest people in chains.'''

Link Discuss (Thanks, jeffreyp!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:06:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Matthew and Molly -- Burning Man meets the DAR

Congrats to Molly Ker and Matthew "former guestblogger" Hawn for getting hitched -- and getting the wedding written up in the NYT!

"She makes fun of him for his motorcycle-boy image," Marjorie Ingall, a mutual friend, said. "He makes fun of her for being in the Daughters of the American Revolution, and her obsessive devotion to Brooklyn history."

Among their wedding guests were the bride's friends from her annual visits to the Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington and the bridegroom's friends from his annual treks to Burning Man, the alternative arts festival in Nevada.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIP, Joe Strummer

Extremely sad news: former Clash frontman Joe Strummer, most recently with the band The Mescaleros, has passed away.

His music changed my anguished-teen life, and many others like it.

Update: "The official Joe Strummer site" at Strummersite.com offers a wealth of information about Strummer's life and career--thanks, adamsj.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:39:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Charm school for broke-ass execs

Laid-off New York executives are enrolling in charm school to learn how to treat with the little people without coming off as badly socialized, overly entitled assholes. Link Discuss (via Gawker)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:39:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great Balls O' Broadband: WiFi airships in the stratosphere

Today, WIRED News published a story I wrote about companies developing spherical, stratosphere-positioned balloons as beacons for high-speed wireless Internet service. Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:32:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Whistle-blowers are Time Mag's People of the Year

Time Magazine has picked the Entron, WorldCom, and Moussaoui whistle-blowers for inclusion in its "People of the Year" awards. As Dan Gillmor notes, this is "far better than last year's bogus pick, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani."

This is where three women of ordinary demeanor but exceptional guts and sense come into the picture. Sherron Watkins is the Enron vice president who wrote a letter to chairman Kenneth Lay in the summer of 2001 warning him that the company's methods of accounting were improper. In January, when a congressional subcommittee investigating Enron's collapse released that letter, Watkins became a reluctant public figure, and the Year of the Whistle-Blower began. Coleen Rowley is the FBI staff attorney who caused a sensation in May with a memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller about how the bureau brushed off pleas from her Minneapolis, Minn., field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now indicted as a Sept. 11 co-conspirator, was a man who must be investigated. One month later Cynthia Cooper exploded the bubble that was WorldCom when she informed its board that the company had covered up $3.8 billion in losses through the prestidigitations of phony bookkeeping.

Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Human and pig kidneys grown in mice

Israeli scientists have grown human and pig kidneys in mice from stem cells. Amazing to see a Jewish state willing to set aside any kosher-derived aversion to pigs in the service of science, while the nominally secular US has all but abandoned stem-cell research to appease lunatic-fringe religionists.

A team headed by Prof. Yair Reisner of the Weizmann Institute of Science has induced human stem cell tissue to grow into functional kidneys, and have accomplished the same with porcine stem cell tissue.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cat in the Hat meets Sputnik

Funny and overblown analysis of "The Cat in the Hat" as a Cold War phenomenon.

Abandoned again by their feckless mother, those two sad sacks, Sally and me, are consigned to shovelling snow from a recent blizzard. The cat chooses the moment to make his return. Sally urges her brother to bar his entrance ("Don't you talk to that cat. / That cat is a bad one"). The cat brushes off the brushoff and enters the house, where he is discovered soon afterward in the tub, eating a cake. He is banished from the tub by the boy ("I have no time for tricks. / I must go back and dig"), but when the water is drained a pink stain is left. The rest of the action concerns the problem of getting rid of the stain. It is first transferred, by the cat, to a series of household items, some plainly off limits to the children, including the mother's dress, the father's shoes, and the bed in what is described as "Dad's bedroom" (no doubt a response to the mother's extramarital adventures). Unable to erase the stain, the cat reveals, under his hat, various little cats named for the letters of the alphabet ("He helps me a lot. / This is Little Cat A").

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, December 22, 2002

Legonomics

The Defective Yeti makes a terrific case for replacing the greenback dollar with four-square Lego blocks:

* When Bush announces that we're abruptly switching from the dollar to the Lego, your new wealth will depend on how many Legos you own at that moment. In other words, your affluence will become proportional to your nerdliness (which will pretty much make it a wash for Bill Gates, I guess).
* People will have a much greater incentive to save. What can you do with a bunch of saved dollars, except hide them in the Minute Maid Premium Original Low-Pulp Orange Juice container you have in your fridge (not that I do this!!). With saved Legos, you can make castles and life-size blocky replicas of Halle Berry -- hooray!
* Money would suddenly become color-coded, thereby making the US exactly like Canada.
* Legos are, like, impossible to counterfeit. Believe me, I've tried.
* When you tip a pretty waitress you could make a cat or a rose or something cheesy like that. Conversely, when you pay your taxes you could build and send in a pair of $7,860 multi-colored buttocks.

Link Discuss (via Ned Batchelder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:00:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tolkien's infantalism: Moorcock

Nice old Michael Moorcock essay comparing Tolkien to nursery-rhymes:

The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob - mindless football supporters throwing their beer-bottles over the fence the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom "good taste" is synonymous with "restraint" (pastel colours, murmured protest) and "civilized" behaviour means "conventional behaviour in all circumstances". This is not to deny that courageous characters are found in The Lord of the Rings, or a willingness to fight Evil (never really defined), but somehow those courageous characters take on the aspect of retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times and we are not sure - because Tolkien cannot really bring himself to get close to his proles and their satanic leaders - if Sauron and Co. are quite as evil as we're told. After all, anyone who hates hobbits can't be all bad.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Greg!)

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

Permalinks on Guestbar

A bit of housekeeping: I've finally gotten around to adding permalinks to the guestbar. Discuss

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

Open-source parenting: it takes an InterWeb to raise a child

Quinn "former guestblogger" Norton is going to have a baby girl in February. In order to manage the inevitable flood of advice regarding this first child, she and her family have established a wiki (a kind of blog that anyone can update or edit) for parenting advice. Thus far, there are three categories:

* help us NameHer
* help us figure out WhatWeNeed in feb
* give us RandomParentingAdvice

Link Discuss (via Ambiguous)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:43:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi amplifier coming from Linksys

Linksys has introduced a new WiFi amplifier -- of dubious legality, I fear -- that boosts the signal of your access point to get it through walls and over great distances. I am of mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, there are times when turning up the gain makes a lot of sense and does no harm (for example, if you live on a farm and want to get the signal in the main house to radiate through the barns and so on, and are confident that this won't interfere with anyone else's activity due to your remoteness). On the other hand, this sort of technology, if deployed in a dense area, would interfere with the signals generated by other APs that might be preferable for some users -- say, because your network is closed and others' are open.

Ideally, the gain (and channel selection) would be adaptive, shouting as loudly as it can without interfering with any other signal on the band. This is basically what Cognitive Radio is supposed to do. I wonder, though -- imagine that I am using channel foo and shouting at bar decibels. I feel secure in doing so because I cannot detect any signals in normal range of me on foo that are attempting to use the band. What if there is someone out there, in range of my emissions, that is communicating at very low power (sufficient to send positional and click signals from a mouse to a CPU a few inches away), on channel foo? I'm not a radio engineer, but this seems like a plausible scenario to me -- wouldn't I, despite my best efforts to be a good citizen, drown out the signals of those whose communication was too low-powered for me to hear? Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:09:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Billboards snoop your radio dial and change to suit you

New smart billboards sniff your radio-preferences from leakage from your car and tailor themselves to your taste. The next generation will network with one another to chase you from one segment of the road to another.

The billboards -- in Palo Alto, Daly City and Fremont -- will pick up which radio stations are being played and then instantly access a vast databank of information about the people who typically listen to those stations. The electronic ads will then change to fit listener profiles...

For example, if the freeway were packed with country music listeners, the billboards might make a pitch for casinos. If National Public Radio were on, the billboards could change to ads for a high-quality car or a gourmet grocery.

Link Discuss (via Lawmeme)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:53:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blog of a preacher-man

Real Live Preacher is an amazing, anonymous blog penned by a Protestant pastor in Texas. Patrick nails it when he describes the site as "...nothing like what you might expect. It's funny, profane, and profound, and full of belief, unbelief, and the dark night of the soul."

Sometimes it seemed Christian people literally took leave of their senses. Once I was at a gathering with Christians who were singing some kind of spiritual song. One of the lines included this hideous phrase, "I've never seen God's children begging for bread."...

It seemed to me that many Christians saw what they wanted to see. They needed the world to fit easily into their categories.

By the time I was out of school and ready to be an employed minister, I was having some serious problems with the church. That's not good. My options were pretty much "minister" or "you want fries with that?"

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smart SegWay Mobs

The Book of Seg is a site devoted to coming up with neat-o ways of making Segways into SmartMobs:

segway ht security "ring"...
the first thing we did is start to create a ring that has the embedded 64 bit encrypted activation. why? we now can wear the activation key on our ring.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

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

Apple //e emulator for OS X!

OSXII is an Apple //e emulator for OS X. I'm digging out my old Logo programs and BASIC games! Link Discuss

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

Smart pens -- self-contained pen-shaped email appliances

Pens with accelerometers have been around for a couple of years. The idea is that as you write, the pen records your scritching and stores -- or sends -- the motions to a device that converts them to a bitmap and, sometimes, employs handwriting recognition to convert the bitmap to text. The effect is of writing with a pen on paper and having it appear on a nearby (or even distant!) computer. Smart whiteboard markers were the rage a couple of years ago, employing the same tech -- a sensor "cap" on the ass-end of the marker that coverted whiteboard scribbles to save-able images.

This Wired News story talks about the next generation of smart-pens, which have self-contained 802.11 or Bluetooth interfaces, and are stand-alone Internet appliances that can be used to directly send email -- scribble a note and an address and the device pipes it out to some nearby Internet connection and sends it off as email. It's a pretty cool idea, and I imagine that it will be very attractive to those technophobes who are all the time whingeing about the soullessness of writing by keyboard and the emotional satisfaction they derive from scribbling with pens. Not me! I learned to type before I learned to write cursively and I loathe paper... Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Airport cops grope pregnant woman, jail her husband

Absolutely infuriating story of a man who, with his pregnant wife, lost his temper with a Portland airport security screener who'd made his wife lift her shirt in view of 100+ passengers. He was cuffed, arrested, charged, banned. When he tried to defend himself, he ran into a wall of omerta and revisionism, as the authorities manufactured sins to compound his crime with and refused to let him see the videotape of the incident, which, he claims, would exonerate him.

After some more grumbling on my part they eventually finished with me and I went to retrieve our luggage from the x-ray machine. Upon returning I found my wife sitting in a chair, crying. Mary rarely cries, and certainly not in public. When I asked her what was the matter, she tried to quell her tears and sobbed, "I’m sorry...it’s...they touched my breasts...and..." That’s all I heard. I marched up to the woman who’d been examining her and shouted, "What did you do to her?" Later I found out that in addition to touching her swollen breasts – to protect the American citizenry – the employee had asked that she lift up her shirt. Not behind a screen, not off to the side – no, right there, directly in front of the hundred or so passengers standing in line. And for you women who’ve been pregnant and worn maternity pants, you know how ridiculous those things look. "I felt like a clown," my wife told me later. "On display for all these people, with the cotton panel on my pants and my stomach sticking out. When I sat down I just lost my composure and began to cry. That’s when you walked up."

Of course when I say she "told me later," it’s because she wasn’t able to tell me at the time, because as soon as I demanded to know what the federal employee had done to make her cry, I was swarmed by Portland police officers. Instantly. Three of them, cinching my arms, locking me in handcuffs, and telling me I was under arrest. Now my wife really began to cry. As they led me away and she ran alongside, I implored her to calm down, to think of the baby, promising her that everything would turn out all right. She faded into the distance and I was shoved into an elevator, a cop holding each arm. After making me face the corner, the head honcho told that I was under arrest and that I wouldn’t be flying that day – that I was in fact a "menace."

Link Discuss (Thanks to everyone who suggested this)

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

Friday, December 20, 2002

Copy of report referred to in NYT story re: Total Internet Monitoring plan

This link to a September, 2002 draft of "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace" appears to be an earlier copy of the report mentioned in today's NYT story about Bush administration plans for centralized monitoring of the Internet.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:58:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Starf3cker t-shirts

Lee Carter's bodacious online zine Hint reports:

"Brooklyn provocateur Ken Courtney's Just Another Rich Kid collection features T-shirts with slogans like 'I F*cked Paris Hilton.' Other celebs you can claim to have done the nasty with include Chloe Sevigny, Casey Spooner, Kelly Osbourne, Gisele and Anna Wintour. Fashion-designer groupies can choose from John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Zac Posen, Yves Saint Laurent and even Christian Dior, who's been dead for almost 50 years."

Other styles for snarky, jaded urbanites are also offered on Courtney's site, such as the retro polo emblazoned with tell-all blurb at left.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:25:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fortune-tellers' scams regulated away in San Francisco

A proposed San Francisco ordinance would regulate fortune-tellers, requiring them to eschew traditional scams:

The tricks, banned under the new law, include the knot in the thread (the fortune-teller makes a knot disappear) and the blood in the glass (the fortune- teller asks a client to spit into a glass of water, then secretly adds black dye to show the client is cursed).

Also banned would be the hair in the grapefruit (the client rubs a grapefruit on his body and covers it with money, and the fortune-teller then plants a hair inside the grapefruit to prove the money is cursed, and keeps the money) and the buried money in the graveyard (the fortune-teller promises to bury a client's "cursed" money in a graveyard, but keeps it instead).

Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monkeys found in LAX man's pants

Man caught in LAX with monkeys in his pants -- authorities were tipped off by the bird of paradise that took wing when they opened his suitcase.

Asked by agents if he had anything else to tell them, Cusack responded: "Yes, I've got monkeys in my pants."

Though Cusack told authorities that he was a concerned environmentalist who had purchased the animals in Jakarta, Indonesia and was taking them to a Costa Rica wildlife sanctuary. He was arrested on smuggling charges.

Link Discuss (via Rebecca's Pocket)

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

Every PC is now a listening device

Linux kernel versions 2.5.32 have the ability to turn your computer's speaker into a microphone.

A speaker is also a microphone...2.5.32 will go into the history books as the kernel that implemented voice recognition for all AT class computers...

Greg "LinuxMan" Cavanagh notes, "Umm, you mean every machine broken into is now a listening device. Wow."

Update: Seth sez:

I think the person who wrote that misread that thread (taking something written as a joke seriously).

There is a configuration option called CONFIG_INPUT_PCSPKR, and someone was asking why the PC speaker was in the "input" category. Someone responded by making a joke to the effect that the kernel now had support for sound input through the speaker, but that was only a joke.

In the most recent released kernel, the file drivers/input/misc/pcspkr.c (which is the driver enabled by CONFIG_INPUT_PKSPKR) clearly performs only output operations and not inputs.

Link Discuss (via JOHO)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:39:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Psychoacoustics: the noisy killer

Scary white-paper analyzes the long-term harm to your hearing that can come about as a consequence of the "psycho-acoustic" compression techniques employed in MP3 and other digital sound systems, where portions of the signal are removed and other portions heightened to compensate. By consistently tricking your brain's neuroaural system, you cause it to mis-calibrate itself -- sorta like spending too much time looking through a stereoscope eventually damaging your ability to accurately converge images and perceive depth.

From the view of neuronomy it is therefore to classify, although not as acutely dangerous, at least as very precarious that a wider and wider spreading audio transmission technology for data reduction just systematically removes those spectral sound portions at the auditory threshold, on those normally the hearing processor fields of our brain decide whether they shall be perceived or filtered out, because so the signal for their self calibration is missing, whereby at longer term a maladjustment of the hearing processor fields can threaten. Possible consequences of intensive consumption of datareduced audio material could therefore include ear noises (tinitus), a general degradation of the perception of quiet sounds, as well as a worsened timbre perception (a so-called "tin ear"), which would make the human of the cyberage even more insensitive than he already yet has become by the continuous mass media infotrash bombardment he is exposed to. Actually it is still unclear whether the consequences of such maladjustments are only temporary (similarly like seeing the world in green/ red discoloured after taking off red/ green 3D glasses) or if the continuous consumption of neuroacoustically datareduced sounds can lead to long lasting or even permanent damage.

Warning: contains tin-foil-beanie conspiracy theories:

A possible advantage of the data reduction characteristic to remove all sound portions classified as "inaudible" could however even be that one could clean with it supposingly contaminated audio material (as for instance propaganda from dictatorships) from so-called subliminals (i.e. hidden hypnotic suggestion messages those are intended to get into the brain without getting into conscious awareness) before listening. The sound carrier industry plans however with their DRM campaign (digital rights management) to mix into any commercially distributed audio recordings so-called "digital watermarks", those as an artificial and likewise allegedly not consciously audible sound portion shall contain digitally readable copyright information those besides copying onto analogue cassettes shall even survive the mentioned neuroacoustic data reduction.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:46:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Convergence, circa 1895

Wonderful 19th Century predictions about the future of media and entertainment:

But what of the future of books? The narrator argues that Gutenberg's invention will soon disappear. Reading causes lassitude and wearies us tremendously. Words through the speaking tube, however, give us a special vibrancy. The gramophone will destroy printed works. Our eyes are easily damaged, but our ears are strong.

But, his listeners object, gramophones are heavy and the cylinders easily damaged. This will be taken care of; new models will be built which will fit in the pocket; the precision of watchmaking will be applied to them. Devices will collect electricity from the movements of the individual, which will power the gramophones.

The author will become his own editor. In order to avoid imitations and counterfeits, he will deposit his voice at the Patent Office. Instead of famous men of letters, we will have famous narrators. The art of diction will become extremely important. The ladies will no longer say that they like an author's style, but that his voice is so charming, so serious, that he leaves you full of emotion after listening to his work--it is an incomparable ravishment of the ear.

Link Discuss (via The Schism Matrix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:06:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bloggers oustered Trent Lott

Time magazine credits bloggers with oustering Trent Lott:

If Lott didn't see the storm coming, it was in part because it was so slow in building. The papers did not make note of his comments until days after he had made them. But the stillness was broken by the hum of Internet "bloggers" who were posting their outrage and compiling rap sheets of Lott's earlier comments.

Link Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:58:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Foreign objects: more anthropomorphic online antics from Asia

Popular Korean cartoon character Mashimaro--whose name derives from an infant's pronunciation of the word "marshmallow"--excretes cuddly nuggets of Web Zen humor in these wacky, fan-created Flash episodes:

Mashimaro 1 (theme: poop)
Mashimaro 2 (theme: spitting)
Mashimaro 3 (theme: golden bunny-showers)

Origins of the character are here. Another Mashimaro site is here.

In the same vibe, still another site here artfully combines animal potty-humor and martial arts hijinks. Think, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden South Park." Screenshot above.

Discuss (Thanks, Andy!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:10:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday Web Zen: Walking in a Winter Wonder Zen

Despite any incidental innuendo, all links are relatively G-rated PG. Enjoy.
1. Warm Your Pussy
2. Happy Tree Friends
3. Snowcraft
4. Snowrush
5. Snowball
6. Tobbogan Jump
7. You've Got (pee) Mail!
8. Christmas Consumerism

Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:56:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to hide data on the Web

The Head Lemur has posted a great rant explaining why hiding your data and posting it to the Web are mutually incompatible notions:

1. Take it down from the publicly available internet location.
2. Turn off the computer with the original files.
3. Remove the harddrive.
4. Destroy the harddrive by using a 18 LB sledge hammer.
5. Bury the remains in a land fill.
6. Have hypnosis to remove any traces of memory of the above...

The web is the last place in the world to attempt to hide anything. The code is against you. The browser is against you. The computer and its connection is against you. The structure and protocols used in the Internet are against you. I am against you, but I did offer you a solution that I know works.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Head Lemur!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US immigration procedure, an insider's view

Danny O'Brien -- a Brit in the process of a "simple" immigration to the US -- ruminates on the mass-arrest of Iranians and others who presented themselves to the INS for additional paperwork and found themselves arrested. Pictured here is the paperwork necessary for the first step of his application.

I can honestly say it's been the most inpenetrably complex bureacratic procedure I have been involved with in my life. If my livelihood and my residency in this country depended on it, I'd be terrified...

But most of all, right now, I'm lucky because I'm not from an Arab country. Because the simple form-filling errors that I've made in the past - me, English-speaking, college-educated, was-studying-to-be-a-lawyer-at-school - would have got me handcuffed, arrested and thrown in jail this week...

Anyway, I'm buying myself a Christmas present. I'm joining the ACLU. It only costs $20, which is certainly less than the $600 or so my immigration application costs. There's only one form to fill in - and I can do it online. And nobody is going to round me up and throw me in jail because I decided to come forward and hand in this paperwork. Or at least, that's the general idea.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Years Revolutions for Nerds

Ben Hammersley asks not what his Internet can do for him, but what he can do for the Internet, and comes up with a list of "New Year's Revolutions" for all good nerds to join:

* Use the FOAF'o'matic to build a FOAF file, and submit it to the FOAFNaut
* Join the EFF
* Validate your feeds
* Download Seti
* Apply Creative Commons licenses to all your stuff
* Properly ID3 tag all your sharable MP3s
* Warchalk your Wifi network

Link Discuss

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

Hollywood wants to outlaw crowbars

Great quote from Patricia Benson, an attorney for the movie studios suing 321 Studios, who make DVD copying software that can be used to make personal backups:

"It's like somebody selling a digital crowbar."

As Ed Felten notes, "...the crowbar analogy pretty much speaks for itself. Ms. Benson would doubtless be shocked to learn that an outfit calling itself 'Ace Hardware' is selling crowbars openly, right here in sleepy Princeton, New Jersey."

In other words, general-purpose technology can be used for general purposes -- good and ill. Hollywood's increasingly shrill and nonsensical demands that technologists only make gear that can be used for good are comparable to insisting that crowbar companies design crowbars that can only be used to jemmy open doors whose owners have lost their keys, and go limp when inserted into the jambs of all other doors. Link Discuss (via Aaron Swartz)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

All clauses of this disclaimer apply to the disclaimer itself, except for this first sentence

Funny, long meta-disclaimer:

DISCLAIMER: All clauses of this disclaimer apply to the disclaimer itself, except for this first sentence. All other disclaimers that may be found on this site, or sites linked to herein, are obviously subsets of this disclaimer and/or invalid, illegal, or fattening. This disclaimer is provided for informational, misinformational and metainformational purposes only and should not be construed as a solicitation or offer for anything whatsoever. All metainformation, HTML tags, photographs, artwork, text, opinions, ideas, facts or factoids contained in this site are either my own, and therefore are Copyright 1997-2002 by Rainer Brockerhoff, or duly licensed from and/or attributed to the writers, owners or copyright holders, or in good faith presumed to be in the public domain; however, you're free to copy, reproduce, expand, excerpt or adapt this disclaimer to your own purposes, at your own risk, as long as you assume all responsibility for doing so.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rainer!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Funnybook letters killed by the Interweb

Comix publishers are dropping their formerly rowdy and peevish letters columns from their funnybooks. The letters have tapered off, as comics fans find themselves arguing on the net, instead.

DC Comics recently announced the end of its letters-to-the-editor pages in all of its titles, more or less admitting that no one was really taking the time to write and mail letters to superheroes anymore.

DC's decision to kill off letters -- and with Marvel Comics inclined to do the same -- is a surrender to the far superior powers of the Internet. Fans haven't complained about the loss; they're too busy flaming each other on comic book Web sites.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:56:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Suzuki on the seal-hunt

David Suzuki -- environmentalist, scientist, and frequent bester of the trivia machines at the old Hop and Grape on College St, where I used to go for an after-class beer -- has written a great editorial in this morning's Globe and Mail, decrying the Canadian government's licensing of seal and sea-lion slaughter.

Picture this: Tens of thousands of salmon are crammed into cages that float in the ocean. Hungry seals and sea lions zoom in on this feast. Dinner is served without an ounce of fishing energy.

But what the seals and sea lions don't know is that, if they approach these net cages, they stand a good chance of being shot and killed. It hardly seems fair: Amass huge quantities of one of these marine mammals' favourite foods, then shoot them if they check out the bounty.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New plan for uber-surveillance of 'Net proposed by Bush administration

A new proposal is under way from the Bush administration that would obligate ISPs to help Feds build a centralized system for broad monitoring of the 'Net---and, potentially, of its users. John Markoff and John Schwartz report in today's NYT:

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board is preparing the report, and it is intended to create public and private cooperation to regulate and defend the national computer networks, not only from everyday hazards like viruses but also from terrorist attack. Ultimately the report is intended to provide an Internet strategy for the new Department of Homeland Security.

Such a proposal, which would be subject to Congressional and regulatory approval, would be a technical challenge because the Internet has thousands of independent service providers, from garage operations to giant corporations like American Online, AT&T, Microsoft and Worldcom.

Copy of the report a related study on how to handle privacy implications of TIA-like systems (Thanks, Tom Cross!) is available on EPIC's website, here.

Link (free registration required) Discuss (Via IP)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:45:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, December 19, 2002

WiFi comes to Marriott, largest hotel biz deployment ever

This just in: WiFI's coming to over 400 Mariott hotels, in the largest-ever rollout for the lodging industry. Link Discuss (Thanks, Hal!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:00:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Perry Barlow on TIA, IAO, and PATRIOT Act: The All-Seeing Spy

Earlier today, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder and "cognitive dissident" John Perry Barlow distributed to a mailing list of friends and fans this essay on Total Information Awareness, The Really Scary IAO Logo, and his proposed alternative to the IAO--an "Open Intelligence Office." Excerpt:

What we see here is a technological vision and depth that is generally beyond most governmental capacities. But we can no longer be assured that we will be spared their despotism by their incompetence. Even the best and brightest have now been seduced by the belief that terrorism is threat that justifies turning their intellectual resources to creating the most intrusive personal investigation system ever conceived.

With such a system comes immense power of extortion. When the government can know all our secret shames and we can know nothing of what it has gathered about us and how it interprets those data, we are at an enormous disadvantage should we seek to raise our voices against it.

Moreover, what was devised to combat terrorism can be used to investigate other "crimes" of a more cultural nature. We've already seen evidence of this with behavior the new Federal Transport Security Administration. In the past, private security screeners at airports were exclusively focused on finding weapons or threats to the aircraft. (...)

We can be assured that the quest for Total Information Awareness will have similar guidelines. Which implies that the same posse that's currently asking itself "Who would Jesus bomb?" would finally have the means to impose its cultural practices on you while preventing you practicing your own.

Note: FWIW, this message was distributed before it became apparent that The Really Scary Logo had been removed from the IAO website.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:26:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wearable spookware

Domewear: personal, wearable security cameras. Link Discuss (via The Schism Matrix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:08:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Invisible actors guessing game

FilmWise hosts competitions where readers attempt to name the actors and films associated with stills where all human flesh has been peeled away with the magic photoshop flensing blade. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:17:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Backpacks: the silent, heavy killer

Overloaded backpacks on kinder account for 100,000 10,000+ (thanks, Stefan) hospital visits per year.

On average, the children toted about 14% of their body weight on their backs each day, Lane and his team report in the January issue of Archives of Disease in Childhood. The bags generally became heavier as the children grew older. The lightest-weight bag was less than 2 kg (4.4 lbs) and the heaviest was 13.5 kilograms (30 lbs).

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:07:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shrinking DARPA website shrinks more, scary IAO logo vanishes

That Really Scary Logo has been removed from DARPA's Information Awareness Office website. Screen capture of earlier version, with Really Scary Logo, here. On Declan McCullagh's politech today:

I've put before-and-after screen captures here and here.

Previous Politech messages: "TIA, Poindexter, and the Incredibly Shrinking .Mil Website"
And let's not forget FEMA doing the same thing last month: "History revisionism at FEMA site -- Operation TIPS vanishes"

Link to IAO website. Discuss (Thanks, Stefan Jones!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:47:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fo shizzle my BoingBoing

Everything on BoingBoing sounds better after having been shizzolated by Snoop Dogg. Actually, he who Paid Tha Cost to be Da Bo$$ will shizzolate just about any website for you, via asksnoop.com. Question: A 1337-speak website translator + The Shizzolator = ?

Link Discuss (Via Mefi. Thanks, kevin!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:21:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Miyazaki's upcoming movie: Howl’s Moving Castle

Scott sez: "Hayao Miyazaki's next film is Howl's Moving Castle. Based on a 1986 children's novel by Diana Wynne Jones about a girl who is transformed into an old woman by a wizard's spell. If Spirited Away doesn't get nominated (and win) for Best Animated Picture I'm gonna scream. Disney should be pushing that campaign like there's no tomorrow -- all their "in-house" crap pales in comparison. Isn't about time Hollywood acknowledges Miyazaki's genius ... they've been cannibalising his work for years.

Another major animation announcement covered in this article is the release date for the often delayed Steamboy, Katsuhiro Otomo's first feature-length film in fifteen years, since his influential 1988 hit Akira. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:05:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prisoners fight over pet spider, skull bashed in

A prisoner at the Charlotte Correctional Institue who accused two other prisoners of stealing his pet spider got his skull fractured by the accused.

Inmates are not allowed to have any pets, including spiders, warden Warren Cornell said. It's not uncommon, however, he said.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:39:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fifty Most Loathsome People in America

List of the 50 most despicable Americans in 2002. Reads like an article from Spy during its heyday.

KEN BURNS: He made an entire nation of Volvo-driving Ikea addicts--with their disposable income earmarked for donation to a TV network that shows mostly sewing programs and shows trying to teach project kids the alphabet--believe they now know something about baseball and jazz. That's dangerous shit.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:31:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sony's deliberately broken MiniDisc tech screws customers

A lawyer who recorded an ICANN meeting with his MiniDisc recorder has discovered that he can't put his recordings online -- at least not easily. Sony's MD recorders ship with anti-copying technology designed to keep you from ever moving digital music from an MD to your hard-drive.

After three days of trying to get these files transferred to my PC, I'm still incredulous that Sony deliberately crippled its own product. I keep thinking that someone's going to write and tell me that I just haven't flipped the right switch yet.

The sad part is that the quality of the recordings I made in Amsterdam is excellent. I used a stereo microphone placed in the middle of the conference room, and when you replay the recording in stereo, you really have a sense of being there. Much better than the monoaural streaming of a typical conference call. In order to get these recordings onto the Internet though, I'll have to re-record them to another system, losing much of the sound quality in the process. I'll try to get the first day of the meeting up tonight.

The Sony advertising and packaging talk about how the NetMD device "handles mp3" files and allows "digital recordings." Sony even put "Net" into the name of the product. I picked it up to make recordings of meetings, interviews and conferences, some of which I wanted to make available over the Internet. But don't be fooled (as I was). This product is broken...and falsely advertised.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:07:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

$0.01/day blood pressure pills kick $2/day patent medicine ass

Dave sez, "Pharma companies fund massive study. Study finds that 1 cent/per day blood pressure drugs are far more effective than $2/day patented drugs. Study is released to international lay press. Wow - man bites dog, then bites self." Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:04:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Expo '67 in text and pix

The National Archive of Canada has produced an amazing web-exhibit of the Expo '67 World's Fair in Montreal. Love the pix of the Soviet pavillion! Link Discuss (Thanks, Chas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney cartoons not hypnotic enough for boys

Entertainment targetted at young boys has become so highly evolved -- replete with gore, action, loud music and other hypno-tainment -- that Disney films can't compete. That's the theory behind Disney's dismal quarterly results, anyway. In any event, this can't bode well for dark-ride fans like me who bemoan the encroachment of no-brainer coasters at the Disney theme-parks. On the other hand, maybe this spells the end for sappy Phil Collins soundtracks to Disney cartoons.

More pointedly, has Disney lost boy viewers to the likes of "Tony Hawk's Boom Boom HuckJam," a sensory-overload arena show featuring thrash music, choreographed skateboard tricks, motocross motorcycle jumping and BMX bike acrobatics? Another correlative possibility: that "Treasure Planet" was so long in production -- it was dreamed up 17 years ago -- that it was bypassed by the explosion of turbocharged video games that didn't exist five years ago, which remain largely the province of boys.

"I think there's a lot more (boys entertainment) now than there was some years back and that the stuff that is available is a lot edgier and is a lot more advanced for the (age group) Disney was targeting," said Tom Wolzien, a media analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. "Let's say they were targeting 8- to 13-year-olds, hypothetically. Well, now your audience is reduced to single digits (in age) because by the time kids are 10, they're off doing something else" than watching Disney films...

"Today's kids were raised by Viacom," Wolzien said, naming Nickelodeon's parent company, "not Disney."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:47:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saucer-clone baby about to pop

The Raelians -- a Quebecois saucer-cult -- claims that its first cloned baby will be born in two weeks.

...an official with Clonaid, the cloning company the Raelians founded in 1997, told CTV News that the clone is a girl and a genetic replica of a U.S. woman in her 30s who is unable to have children with her husband naturally.

The woman is said to be pregnant with a clone of herself, and is nearly ready to deliver by cesarean section.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

None Tomorrow's Parties: young teens give up pot, acid, booze, cigs

A new US nationwide study reports that for the first time on record, "there has been a simultaneous decline in smoking, drinking and use of such drugs as marijuana and LSD among teenagers." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:32:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free Pee-Wee!

Pee-Wee Herman has entered a plea of not guilty to charges of possession of kid-pr0n. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Report: up to 1,000 Mideast immigrants jailed yesterday in So. CA

Representatives of some local Iranian-American groups were quoted yesterday as saying they understand that the detainees may be shipped off to Arizona. Remember the WWII domestic internment camp programs for Japanese-Americans? Some folks say this is starting to feel a lot like the 1940's again.

Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern California jails on Wednesday after coming forward to comply with a new rule to register with immigration authorities only to wind up handcuffed and behind bars. Shocked and frustrated Islamic and immigrant groups estimate that more than 500 people have been arrested in Los Angeles, neighboring Orange County and San Diego in the past three days under a new nationwide anti-terrorism program. Some unconfirmed reports put the figure as high as 1,000.

The arrests sparked a demonstration by hundreds of Iranians outside a Los Angeles immigration office. The protesters carried banners saying "What's next? Concentration camps?" and "What happened to liberty and justice?."

A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service said no numbers of people arrested would be made public.

Update:LA Times story here. Evidently, those arrested were all men and boys.

Link Discuss (Via strangelove.cc. Thanks, JP.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:13:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

Out-of-body cancer therapy

Italian surgeons are treating liver-cancer by removing the organ, irradiating it and then re-implanting it -- and it works! Link Discuss (via Die Puny Humans)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:55:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese Web Zen, take two: Tissue-san!

If you were down with Sushi Seals earlier this week, you'll sneeze with delight over this Japanese pop entertainment meme that's all about anthropomorphic personal-hygeine products. There's the cheerful roll of toilet paper; the bookish box of recycled hankies; and the assertive, mischevious tub of pre-moistened wet-naps. Try reading the website copy aloud in a squeaky falsetto voice:
"It's not just a tissue you always use. Ultra-cute character Tissue san arrived!!! from designer: please pet this innocent tissue to be used without any complain every day."

All your Kleenex are belong to us.

Update: Stefan Jones noticed this bizarre panda-fetish character happening in another area of the same website. Mouseover the panda's nether-regions, and very strange, gut-bustingly funny, ill-translated copy pops up.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Kelly!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:27:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gawker: Manhattan by blog

Gawker is a new super-smart blog devoted to daily living in NYC. It's a commercial venture, designed by Jason Kottke, written by Elizabeth Spiers and published by Nick Denton. It's swell, and gives me even more Manhattan envy than I usually experience.

It is a live review of city news, and by news we mean, among other things, urban dating rituals, no-ropes social climbing, Condé Nastiness, downwardly-mobile i-bankers, real estate porn -- the serious stuff.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:15:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ken Hertz's 2002 ACLU Bill of Rights Award speech: What's wrong with the war on 'Net piracy?

Here's a copy of the acceptance speech given by entertainment industry attorney Ken Hertz (of the firm Goldring, Hertz, Lichtenstein and Haft, LLP) at last week's ACLU Bill of Rights Award dinner. ACLU press release about the award is here. Speech excerpt:

I've gained weight. I eat poorly. I don't exercise enough. I've gotten older and it's harder to take it off or keep it off. So I was more than a little intrigued by a recent commercial for a prescription medication designed to help people like me lose weight. Somewhere towards the end of the commercial, the announcer adds in a very pleasant voice, that the possible side effects might include: oily spotting, gas with discharge, uncontrollable bowel movements, and primary pulmonary hypertension -- which is fatal to 45% of its victims.

The treatment -- it seems -- can be worse than the problem. You see, you can't treat a disease like obesity by only attacking its symptoms. Treating the symptoms and ignoring the underlying problem can allow the problem to fester -- and worsen.(...)

How do the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism and my personal War on Obesity, relate to the entertainment industry's War on Internet Piracy? Our point is that treating the symptoms without addressing the problem will only worsen the problem and generate more daunting symptoms. (...)

Peer to peer file sharing is really just interactive radio -- consumers get to listen to exactly what they want -- when they want it. This demand is not addressed by the record industry. In fact, it can't be offered legally at any price. And as I think I've illustrated, technology and reality will insure that supply finds its way to meet that demand.

Update: JP reminds me that for those unfamiliar with Mr. Hertz' distinguished career, the significance of his speech--and his firm's stance on the issues at hand--should not be underestimated: "Ken represents Will Smith and Alanis Morissette (last I checked, amonst others, might want to confirm)... Not aware of others publicly endorsing a compuslory as a solution to P2P trading; they could be first. For these reasons this speech is no small matter, IMHO." Link Discuss (Thanks, JP!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:03:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Enron follies video features Shrub yukking up corrupt accounting

The Feds are looking into a video of a 1997 Enron retirement party, which featured "humorous" skits about Enron's corruption -- including a cameo by George W. Bush, yukking it up with his morally bankrupt cronies.

When the pretend Kinder expressed doubt that Skilling could pull off 600 percent revenue growth for the coming year, Skilling revealed how it could be done.

"We're going to move from mark-to-market accounting to something I call HFV, or hypothetical future value accounting," Skilling joked as he read from a script. "If we do that, we can add a kazillion dollars to the bottom line."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:58:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jury Service Part Three is up

Part Three of Jury Service, the whacky post-human gonzo novella that I co-wrote with Charlie Stross was published this morning on SciFi.com (Part One and Part Two). Only one more week to go before the whole thing's online!

The hacker sighs a put-upon exhalation. "Fine," she says. Let's get you cloned, then." Before he can jerk free, the instrument bush hovering over him has scraped a layer of skin from his forearm and drawn a few CCs of blood from the back of his hand, leaving behind an anaesthetized patch of numb skin that spreads over his knuckles and down to his fingertips. Across the room, a tabletop diamond-walled chamber fogs and hums. The mandibles recede and Huw sits up. A ventilation system kicks in, clearing the fog from the chamber and there Huw sees his cloned hand taking shape, starting as a foetal fin, sundering into fingers, bones lengthening, proto-fingernails forming. "That'll take a couple hours to ripen," the hacker says. "Then I'll implant it and we'll see what happens. Come back this time tomorrow, I'll show you what turns up." She rubs her thumbs against her forefingers.

Huw sticks his hand out to touch hers and interface their PANs so he can transfer a payment to her, but she shies back. "I don't think so," she says. "You're infectious, remember?"

"Well, how shall I pay you, then?" he says.

"Over there," she says, gesturing at a meatpuppet in the corner, a wrinkled naked neuter body with no head, just a welter of ramified tubules joined to a bare medulla that flops out of the neck-stump like an alien nosegay. Huw shakes the puppet's clammy hand and interfaces with its PAN, transfers a wad of currency to it and steps back, wiping his hand on the seat of his track-pants afterward.

Link Discuss

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

Do androids dream of electric briefs?

Deborah Marquit's online shop sells couture lingerie with a funky, techno twist:

[Her] vintage-inspired lingerie (demi-cup bras, boy briefs, bikinis, and G-strings) are delicate, handmade, and hand-dyed in a variety of fluorescent shades (they glow under black light!). Fans include Madonna, Britney, Sarah Jessica, blah blah blah. We can't guarantee the underthings will make you high-wattage, but hey, it's a start. And just think: No need for the night light; just take off your clothes.

Link Discuss (Via DailyCandy)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:39:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paul McCartney revises Beatles songwriting history

Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono are duking it our over Paul's attempt to get the famous "Lennon-McCartney" songwriting credit changed to "McCartney-Lennon" on various songs that Paul claims to have been the principal author of. Paul calls it "historical housekeeping" and Yoko calls it revisionism.

Here are the "McCartney-Lennon" songs:

All My Loving
Back in the U.S.S.R.
Blackbird
Can't Buy Me Love
Carry That Weight
Eleanor Rigby
The End
The Fool on the Hill
Getting Better
Hello Goodbye
Here, There and Everywhere
Hey Jude
I Saw Her Standing There
Let It Be
Lady Madonna
The Long and Winding Road
Mother Nature's Son
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
We Can Work It Out
Yesterday

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:39:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Librarians get Audible audiobooks

Audible, the company that provides a frankly amazing selection of downloadable -- but DRMed -- selection of audiobooks, is working with librarians to make their works available for purchase by librarians. This is great news -- I'm addicted to audiobooks, and they're so goddamned expensive that libraries are a critical source for the format. There's a new YahooGroup for librarians who want to talk about the practice. Link Discuss (via The Shifted Librarian)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Max Headroom resurgent

Matt Frewer, creator of Max Headroom, is working to resurrect his cult-favorite character.

"We're putting together a deal on a new Max Headroom project," Frewer told fans. "Then I'm doing a film with my brother. The Headroom project is still in the deal-making process, so I can't say anything about it."

Link Discuss (via JWZ's Livejournal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:12:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This is your rat brain on robotics.

Gareth writes:

MIT Tech Review has an amazing piece today about a robot at Georgia Tech that runs on rat brain. Researchers took cultured rat neurons and placed them on a silicon chip outfitted with suspended electrodes. As the neurons fire, they excite the electrodes, which in turn send signals to the drive motors of a coffee-mug-sized robot.

Right now, the steering is a little...ah...erratic. Researchers hope that feedback might allow for some learning, and therefore, make rat-bot into a better driver. The bot is equipped with light sensors for proximity navigation. Triggering of these sensors send electrical impulses back into the neuronal soup. Feedback! They're now looking for any evidence that the rat "brain" is learning anything after closing the loop.

The rat-bot is shown above. Photo courtesy of the Georgia Tech Laboratory for Neuroengineering.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gareth!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:11:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative-Commons-style science journals launch

Scientists are launching two free, Creative-Commons-style licensed scientific journals that will be peer-reviewed and published online.

"The written record is the lifeblood of science," said Dr. Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine and president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who is serving as the chairman of the new nonprofit publisher. "Our ability to build on the old to discover the new is all based on the way we disseminate our results."

By contrast, established journals like Science and Nature charge steep annual subscription fees and bar access to their online editions to nonsubscribers, although Science recently began providing free electronic access to articles a year after publication.

The new publishing venture, Public Library of Science, is an outgrowth of several years of friction between scientists and the journals over who should control access to scientific literature in the electronic age. For most scientists, who typically assign their copyright to the journals for no compensation, the main goal is to distribute their work as widely as possible.

Link Discuss (via Ideaflow)

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

Tuesday, December 17, 2002

Bruce Sterling's latest: "Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years"

A new book by Bruce Sterling--this one a nonfiction work--is now available, just in time for last-minute holiday shoppitude. From the Publisher's Weekly review:

Sterling is best known for writing social satires disguised as science fiction, but over a decade ago, The Hacker Crackdown demonstrated his ability to apply his firm grasp on the cultural forces shaping today's world to nonfiction as well. Now those analytical skills take on the future; although he can't tell readers what will happen when, he does share good ideas about how to deal with it when it does. After a primer on the various forms of futurism, Sterling offers a seven-part consideration of the 21st century, with a conceptual structure inspired by the "seven ages of man" speech from Shakespeare's As You Like It. Taking the infant, the student, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the pantaloon and "mere oblivion" each in turn, this sweeping vision encompasses everything from genetic engineering and ubiquitous computing to the real threats to world peace. (Sterling says we shouldn't be as worried about ideological terrorists like Osama bin Laden, who create momentary disruptions, as about opportunistic thugs, such as Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev, who, according to Sterling, will gladly exploit chaos for profit.) There are constant reminders that progress is rarely, if ever, orderly and efficient, because "in the real world, technology ducks, dodges, and limps" its way forward. But steady, reliable technocratic societies, if they approach the future with "flexibility and patience," should be able to weather even the most radical technological and cultural changes.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:30:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online image gallery: restaurant menus from 1880-present

Cool, searchable online gallery of restaurant menus from the late 19th century onward, housed in the rare book collection of the LA public library. After reading Susannah's guestblog posts I tried searching for menus containing the keywords "human flesh," but results were null. Link Discuss (via metafilter)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:34:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Technically legal signs for anti-USAPATRIOT librarians

Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the FBI is allowed to put taps on library Internet terminals and monitor user activities, and librarians aren't allowed to tell anyone about this. Lots of librarians really hate this, and so one intrepid librarian has created a series of technically legal signs to tip off library patrons to the presence of snoopware on their Internet connection. Link Discuss (via The Shifted Librarian)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:41:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons' animated explanation

At last night's Creative Commons launch party, the CC team played a great little animation they made to explain the purpose of their project. The movie's called "Get Creative" and features the White Stripes. Link Mirror Discuss (Thanks, Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:14:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elcomsoft not guilty on all counts!

Just heard from a reliable source that Elcomsoft -- the employers of Dmitry Skylarov, the Russian programmer who was arrested for giving a technical talk discussing the flaws in Adobe's eBook security -- was found not guilty on all counts! Woohoo! No link yet, but Lisa Rein's blog has done a great job of aggregating first-hand coverage of the trial by others and by her. Update: Here's a news.com piece on the verdict: Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:51:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weird spy radio transmissions MP3s

You can now download The Conet Project's 4 disc set of "numbers station" transmissions in MP3 format. If you don't know about this, read David's excellent Salon article about it. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:02:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beloved Blackwing pencils sell for $20 each

"We are talking about the legendary Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602, which went out of production in 1998. Up in Writers' Valhalla, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Archibald MacLeish are shedding a silent tear. Down here on Earth, Stephen Sondheim, Andre Gregory, and Roger Rosenblatt are scrounging to locate leftover 602s. The pencils once cost 50 cents; now they are selling for as much as $20 apiece on the Internet." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:55:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Techniques waiters use to get you to tip more

Interesting article on the different things waiters to to encourage you to increase your tip.

Squatting - Two studies showed that waiters who squatted next to the table when taking orders and talking with customers increased their tips from 14.9% of the bill to 17.5% of the bill in one study, and from 12% to 15% in another study. Apparently, the eye contact and closer interaction creates a more intimate connection and makes us want to give the server more money.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:25:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Definitely *not* "The Fighting of Shaolin Monks": pr0n switcheroo

Either there's a prankster on board at Amazon.co.uk, or this is a funny database error. Should help promote the benefits of martial arts, though. (permanent screengrab of the goof is here, for when they finally fix the error)
Link Discuss (Thanks, Ben!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:38:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, December 16, 2002

BBC Two Towers audio

Downloadable MP3 excerpt from the BBC radio play of "The Two Towers" on Salon today. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:29:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Designing an emotion-sensing robot

Two researchers at Vanderbilt University are trying to create a robot that has the ability to sense and respond to human emotions, by processing output from an array of physiological sensors.

"Psychologists have been trying to identify universal patterns of physiological response since the turn of the century without success. All this effort has shown is that there are no such universal patterns," says Smith. "The hard fact is that different individuals express the same emotion rather differently. But I think that we have established the feasibility of the individual-specific approach that we are taking and there is a good chance that we can succeed," says Smith.

The Vanderbilt researchers are using an approach similar to that adopted by voice and handwriting recognition systems. They are gathering baseline information about each person and analyzing it to identify the responses associated with different mental states. One advantage that the researchers have is the recent advances in sensor technology. "Extremely small, 'wearable' sensors have been developed that are quite comfortable and are fast enough for real-time applications," says Sarkar.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:18:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Changing of the Guestblogger Guard: Howdy, Reverse Cowgirl!

BoingBoing welcomes a new voice to the guestbar today. But first: much gratitude and serious blog props to our outgoing guestbar correspondent, Clay Shirky, who dished up a terrific assortment of links and observations during his stay. Thanks, Clay!

Sashaying in to the guestblog spot--live and direct from L.A.--we're now joined by the esteemed pr0nnoisseur, writer, and sex culture critic Susannah Breslin, whose consistently killer "Reverse Cowgirl's Blog" has been the source of many a BoingBoing post recently. Her work covers sexuality and technology, among other things. Her blog, in which she "attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection" is presently being transformed into a TV pilot for A Big Network. Described by those who've peeked at early footage as "Insomniac with lipstick" or "David Letterman goes to a porn film set," the show's working title is Oh, Susannah!. Here's a snip from her bio:

Her articles have appeared in Salon, Harper's Bazaar, Details, Nerve, Detour, The San Francisco Examiner Magazine, The LA Weekly, The Vancouver Sun, BUST, Mass Appeal, Playboy.com, and the UK's Arena among other publications.

Her short stories have appeared in Nerve, FC2's Chick Lit 2 postfeminist fiction anthology, Exquisite Corpse, 3AM Magazine, Minima, Alt-X, and are forthcoming in Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction and In Posse. 

Her photography has been featured in Identity Theory and Exhibit:A.

Her comixxx can be found in Fantagraphics' Dirty Stories Volume 3 and the UK's Headpress.

She is a reporter on Playboy TV's "Sexcetera," and has appeared on various television programs, such as "Politically Incorrect," where a P.A. asked her during a commercial break to please pull down her skirt; CNN, where she inquired regarding Blowgate, "What girl wouldn't want to nail the President?"; Fox News, where she inadvertently referred to "pasties" as "pastries"; and "The E! True Hollywood Story: Larry Flynt," where she accidentally condoned urination-porn. 

Welcome, Susannah! And BoingBoing readers, hold on to your saddles. You're in for a wild ride.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:17:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA cooked the books to invent "piracy problem"

A new research report suggests that the convicted price-fixers at the RIAA cooked the books to create a nonexistant "piracy problem."

So the record industry cut their inventory (and artist investment) by 25 percent and sales only dropped 4.1 percent, even though the economy is at rock bottom. There were almost 12,000 fewer new releases for the consumer to choose from in 2001 than 1999. The record companies are making more money per release than ever.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:29:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Classic BBC comedy online

w00t sez:

Last night the BBC launched BBC Radio 7, offering classic "Aunty Beeb" comedies; (The Goon Show, Alan Partridge, Brass Eye, Johnny Vegas); dramas and children's stories.

Like all BBC Radio stations they're streamed 24/7 so you lucky foreigners can enjoy it all without even paying a licence fee. Bargain!

Link Discuss (Thanks, w00t!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:25:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oustanding collection of digitized 78s

Fantastic collection of blues and country 78s, converted to MP3, on this page. I can't get enough of it. Just the artist and track names are poetry, like "Dr. Humphrey Bates' Possum Hunters" performing "My Wife Died Saturday." Link Discuss (Thanks, Heath!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:23:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Your tax dollars at work? Pr0n vid dubbed at Senate recording studio

Channel 5 on the Senate chamber's internal television system typically provides senators with replays news programs, or fun-filled tutorials on parliamentary procedure...

But on the morning of Dec. 6, two Capitol Police officers noticed something quite different emanating from Channel 5 and making its way to all Senate offices: a pornographic movie. Officials at the Architect of the Capitol's office were alerted to the situation and quickly determined that an employee in the Senate Recording Studio had been dubbing a pornographic tape on taxpayer time.

"To add insult to injury, he pushed the wrong button and [the porn movie] went out over Channel 5," Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Alfonso Lenhardt confirmed in an interview.

Lenhardt said Architect officials "quickly pulled the plug"on the movie and apparently very few people made it into their offices early enough to catch the show. "To be exact, it was 7:05,"he noted. "Suffice it to say, there were not a lot of people who saw it." (...) "I abhor pornography in the workplace,"he said. "And we have strict policies against anyone who has pornography - or uses pornography - in the workplace."

When asked for the name of the movie in question, Lenhardt answered matter-of-factly, "I have no idea. I did not see the video so I couldn't speak to that."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Burstein!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:53:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If it ain't broke, break it: New bill to regulate spectrum for Wi-Fi devices

Senators George Allen (R-Va.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) plan to introduce a bill in January that will assign areas of the wireless spectrum to WiFi devices--which currently operate in unlicensed frequencies. Why legislate something that seems to be doing pretty much just fine without direct federal oversight?

Specifically, the bill asks that no less than 255 MHz of spectrum below the 6-GHz frequency be allocated for use by unlicensed Wi-Fi devices -- as long as there is no interference with the U.S. Department of Defense's communications. There is a finite amount of the electromagnetic spectrum available for use by wireless devices, as well as by television, radio and the military.

The FCC licenses spectrum to radio and television stations, and the government uses portions of the spectrum for military communications. But thousands of wireless devices, such as cordless phones, garage door openers and current Wi-Fi devices, operate in the unlicensed spectrum bands.

Wi-Fi devices operate in the unlicensed 2.4-GHz frequency. This frequency is also used by many other wireless devices, and allocating more spectrum to Wi-Fi devices would be one way to avoid interference as the popularity of other 2.4-GHz wireless devices grows, the senators said.

The bill goes further, to require that all wireless Internet devices manufactured after 270 days from the bill's passage "be capable of two-way data packet communication ... be designed and manufactured to maximize spectrum efficiency," according to a working draft of the bill (download PDF).

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:40:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Poindexter-proof your personal information

From Declan McCullagh's weekly column on News.com:

Now a Defense Department agency is devising a way to link these different systems together to create a kind of digital alter ego of each of us. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, this proposed centralization was inevitable--and it's only going to get worse.

Blame retired Admiral John Poindexter, national security adviser for former President Ronald Reagan, who returned to the Pentagon in February to run a creepy new agency that's trying to create this mammoth surveillance and information-analysis system. It's called Total Information Awareness, and it's funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's a good idea, or that it's consistent with the traditional American values of limited government and a sharp demarcation between the private and the public sector. I'm not even sure if Poindexter's brainchild could ever work.

What I am saying is that if our personal information--some of it extraordinarily sensitive--is archived in corporate or government databases and protected only by the weak shield of the law, it's vulnerable to federal snoops.

[...] Technology offers a better way to preserve our rights against government overreaching. New crises may prompt Congress to vote unanimously to skewer the Bill of Rights. But technological protections don't vary with the whims of politicians or shifts in Supreme Court majorities.

The sad thing is that for years we've known about technology that can slow down this mass "databasification" of American society. We just haven't used it.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:30:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DARPA's magic PDA

DARPA's latest magic-tech project, "An Enduring, Personalized, Cognitive Assistant," may not be as creepy as Total Information Awareness, but it sure is silly.

...will be set in an office context and will act like a personal executive assistant to a modern knowledge-worker or decision-maker. The Assistant should demonstrate a number of key capabilities: continuous learning over significant periods of time (months, if not years), and the ability to survive "injury," intermediate failure and even complete shutdown, whether intentional or inadvertent; this includes the retention of information and skills through system failure and shutdown (Enduring); the capability of autonomous as well as supervised learning, including learning by observing a partner or by being told something directly (at any natural level of abstraction) (Personalized); the capability to have and use domain and task knowledge; the capacity to be aware of events as they transpire and of the Assistant's own place in the world; the ability to have and remember experiences of its own, and to integrate perceptual input with longer-term knowledge; the ability to explain its reasoning and behavior in natural terms to its partner; and the ability to decide what to do and to act in real time (Cognitive); the capability of cooperating in a team or multi-agent situation; the capacity to interact in a multi-modal, broad spectrum way with humans (including natural language); the ability to be available everywhere; and the capacity to develop the degree of trust necessary for successful everyday interaction with a human partner (Assistant).

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:47:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will it snow in London on Xmas? Seven gets you two

Ben sez: "This is the odds for the British national obsession - betting on whether it will snow or not on Christmas Day. To win general bets, snow has to fall on the London Weather Centre roof on December 25th. Punters are betting £300 a time."

No Snow On Aberdeen Airport: 1/6
No Snow On Cardiff Weather Centre: 1/6
No Snow On Glasgow Daily Record Building: 1/6
No Snow On London Weather Centre: 1/6
No Snow On Manchester Airport: 1/6
Aberdeen Airport: 7/2
Cardiff Weather Centre: 7/2
Glasgow Daily Record Building: 7/2
London Weather Centre: 7/2

Link Discuss (Thanks, Ben!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:44:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The music industry owes you $20 -- and you can collect

Remember when the music industry was convicted of price-fixing? Well, everyone who bought a CD between 1995 and 2000 in the US is eligible for a piece of the settlement -- between $5 and $20. If enough people sign up, the money goes to charities that are working to reform the music industry. OK, I am experiencing schadenfreude, but cut me a break -- how cool is this? Link Discuss (Thanks, Katie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:39:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Muppet Week on Family Feud

Amazing running account of last year's Muppet Week on Family Feud:

Anyway. The front-runner so far for Weirdest Muppet Moment is this. The question is: Which body part would you describe as round? The Dixie Chicks have guessed belly, face, ears, shoulders, "arse"... They don't get them all, and it goes over to the Muppets.

"Well, ah..." says Kermit. "I think the most delicate way to say this would be -- ahem -- mammary glands."

Goooood night, everybody! And a happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:15:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tabbed Terminal for OS X

Nat sez: "iterm.sourceforge.net is a supersweet *tabbed* terminal emulator for OS X. Supports Cmd-T to open a new tab, like Mozilla. Cmd- moves to that window number. And it seems to be much less of a memory hog than Terminal.app." Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)

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

Creative Commons licenses are live

Dav sez: "Creative Commons Licenses are now online! Creative Commons provides a point and click interface that allows an artist to define the copyright license that she wants (commercial vs non-commercial, attribution requirements, etc). There is also an online process that allows the artist to donate her work to the public domain with no strings attached." The launch party is tomorrow night, but I guess they wanted to get a head-start. I'm releasing my novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, under a CC license on January 9, simultaneous with the hardcover release. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dav!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:52:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sex-changed celebs

Nice collection of gender-reassignment-via-Photoshop of various celebrities. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:49:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, December 15, 2002

All I want for Xmas* is a GPX C-3960 CD Portable with MP3 Playback

My friend John Parres, co-founder of the pho digital music discussion list and an incurable gadget junkie, opines on the wonders of the GPX C-3960 CD Portable with MP3 Playback:

$40 on sale last week at Sears. Just bought one for a buddy but need to get another for myself (or will that be visa versa?)... CD-Rs of different bitrate recordings are not an issue. It seems to play them all with ease. LCD screen displays id3 tags.

Who needs an iPod when you can burn a disc with 13 hours of music and play it on a CD-R player that only needs 2 AA rechargable batteries that last 16 hours???

It's kind of odd and fun to watch through the translucent clamsell case to see the disc spin up for 20 seconds and buffer the song into memory then stop to conserve energy. It also has bass boost, phono out but more importantly line out so you can plug the player into your super-duper home stereo system or car stereo via adapter.

Random, shuffle, program, all the good stuff you would expect from a microprocessor assembled in .... China.

[* suitable for Xmas... or Kwanzaa, Eid ul Fitr, Chanukah, Solstice, Build-a-snowperson-day, whatever.]

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:34:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beavis and Butthead, wrapped up in a California Roll.

"Teletubbies" meets "South Park" meets a mouthful of broiled eel? "The Sushi Seals" is an adult-oriented Japanimation TV show structured around a bunch of characters with raw-fish cuisine names. The episode descriptions sound so not-funny, they're kinda funny. "Ikura" means "salmon eggs," btw.

Episode 1 Mama Ikura is in a panic.
The family wants to leave for a picnic, but Mama has many things to do to be ready before she leaves. She double checks the window locks and powders her face. By the time she is finally ready to leave, the family has fallen fast asleep by the front door.

Episode 2 The Omlete Triplets play in the water.
The triplets are having fun playing with towels and a water hose in the garden. Mama Ikura hangs the wet towels to dry, but the triplets just soak them more until they fall again. Finally, the triplets spray their mother with water.

Episode 3 Struggle in the hot tub.
The triplets are playing in the hot tub when one triplet pulls the drain. The water drains out of the tub and drags one of the triplets into the drain!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dav!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:23:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moz.org: You've got severance! You've got cheap irony!

JWZ notes that this week's AOL/TW/NS layoff of "half of mozilla.org" included 1000 free hours of AOL in the severance package. Link Discuss (via JWZ's LiveJournal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:41:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LazyWeb: Peter Jennings and the Wolf

Here's my LazyWeb challenge for the weekend: Take the Iraq footage that CNN is airing with scary music. Take an audio recording of Peter and the Wolf. Cut one over the other, so that each animal's arpeggio is mapped to appropriate newscasters and personalities (I want the duck's music mapped the Bush, I do!) and release it online. I'll even find ya hosting space somewhere. Discuss (Thanks, Heath!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:17:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Googleopoly's challenges

The current ish of Wired has a long feature talking about Google's moral divining rod, personified by founder Sergey Brin. Brin trys to follow the engineer's ethos, which Google's mission statement sums up as "Don't be evil" (compare with Bare Bones Software's: "BBEdit: It Doesn't Suck"). Brin's charged with evaluating the relative evilness of different possible paths, and he does so admirably, but now he's faced with new challenges: governments, religions and overly litigous entrepreneurs are all trying to influence Google's activities. Google really has become a critical piece of the Internet's infrastructure -- can a company that important be trusted to never be evil?

In fact, Google didn't fold entirely. After consulting with Brin, Kulpreet Rana, Google's head of IP, found a way that Google could comply with the law without letting the Scientologists erase their critics from the Internet. The solution: When Google gets a request to remove a link under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA Section 512, it substitutes a link to a form on the Chilling Effects' site. The form contains the Web address of the page in question, and anyone still interested in the site can direct their browser to the address.

Does abiding by the letter of a bad and flimsy law absolve Google from charges that it squashed free expression? Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is certain that a vigorous legal challenge would put an end to the steady flow of Section 512 filings Google receives but admits she doesn't expect Google to devote its resources to such a broad fight. And while some cheered Google's workaround as evidence of a rebellious bit of payback - a small point scored against the enemies of unfettered speech - the move is another instance of Brin choosing the path of usefulness over a righteous crusade.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Supplemental Web Zen: Riders on the Harp.

Funky little Quicktime movie cited this week in NTKnow. A harpist's rendition of the Doors' "Riders on the Storm."

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:37:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

20 Things, 20 People charity auction is live!

20 Things, 20 People is a great mail-art co-op project. Judith, the organizer, has solicted amazing original art for a holiday season charity auction (EFF and nine other charities will benefit). In 24, they've already raised $600 -- great gifts for the buying, and great charities for the benefittin'. Link Discuss (Thanks, Judith!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scientology's Muppet Babies and TMNT

Mike sez:

An interview with Jeffrey Scott, a writer of numerous 1980s cartoons including "Dungeon & Dragons," "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," "The Littles," "Duck Tales," "SuperFriends," and "Muppet Babies." In it, he mentions how some of the scenes he wrote for these cartoons were inspired by his belief in Scientology. Superman espouses one of the eight dynamics in a "SuperFriends" episode, and Miss Piggy is caught up by "the misunderstood word" in a "Muppet Babies" episode.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:16:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT's year in review

Scott sez: "As they did last year, the New York Times has put together a kick-ass overview of the year's most compelling breakthroughs, innovations, concepts and gadgets." Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:59:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hell fried chuck-a-lucka wanna jubba

Rubber Biscuit -- The Chips' amazing nonsense song that Dan Ackroyd made famous on the Blues Brothers' "Briefcase Full of Blues" album -- has lyrics! Who knew?

Cow cow hoo-oo
cow cow wanna dib-a-doo
chick'n hon-a-chick-a-chick hole-a-hubba
hell fried chuck-a-lucka wanna jubba
hi-low 'n-ay wanna dubba hubba
day down sum wanna jigga-wah
dell rown ay wanna lubba hubba
mull an a mound chicka lubba hubba
fay down ah wanna dip-a-zip-a-dip-a

mm-mh, do that again !
doo doo doo boooh

Link Discuss (Thanks, Heath!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:55:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CNN plays Darth-Vader-march during Iraq reportage

Dan Gillmor observes that CNN suddenly has ham-fisted incidental music:

The channel is also, in the middle of a supposed news report, playing ominous-sounding music in the background while the anchor/reporter talks and the images are displayed on the screen. This is a technique movie-makers use to stir up viewers' emotions. It works.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

December Crypto-Gram fantastic insights

The new issue of Bruce "Applied Cryptography" Schneier's excellent Crypto-Gram newsletter came out last night. It's very good this month -- there's a very sharp analysis on why counterattack is a bad idea:

And the State has more motivation to be fair. The RIAA sent a cease-and-desist letter to an ISP asking them to remove certain files that were the copyrighted works of George Harrison. One of the files: "Portrait of mrs. harrison Williams 1943.jpg." The RIAA simply Googled for the string "harrison" and went after everyone who turned up. Vigilantism is wrong because the vigilante could be wrong. The goal of a State legal system is justice; the goal of the RIAA was expediency.

And the Department of Homeland Security's broken assumptions:

Centralizing security responsibilities has the downside of making our security more brittle, by instituting a commonality of approach and a uniformity of thinking. Unless the new department distributes security responsibility even as it centralizes coordination, it won't improve our nation's security. Security has two universal truisms relevant to this discussion. One, security decisions need to be made as close to the problem as possible. This has many implications: protecting potential terrorist targets should be done by people who understand the targets; bombing decisions should be made by the generals on the ground in the war zone, not by Washington; and investigations should be approved by the FBI office that's closest to the investigation. This mode of operation has more opportunitie s for abuse, so competent oversight is vital. But it is also more robust, and is the best way to make security work.

Two, security analysis needs to happen as far away from the sources as possible. Intelligence involves finding relevant information amongst enormous reams of irrelevant data, and then organizing all those disparate pieces of information into coherent predictions about what will happen next. It requires smart people who can see connections, and who have access to information from many disparate government agencies. It can't be the sole purview of anyone, not the FBI, CIA, NSA, or the new Department of Homeland Security. The whole picture is larger than any single agency, and each only has access to a small slice of it.

And much more. Link Discuss

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

Saturday, December 14, 2002

Total Information Awareness: Great series of items on politechbot.com

There's been a really terrific series of articles, opinions, and items related to TIA this week on Declan McCullagh's politechbot.com site (and politech listserv). The volume of posts precludes my posting individual links to each of them, but visit the politechbot.com site and you'll see a number of related items clustered between Tuesday, December 10th through Saturday, December 14. Declan's work is consistently insightful and spot-on. IMHO, it's more valuable than ever right now. Give the man some paypal props here.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:56:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

80's Flashback: JC Penny's 1980 Catalog (featuring George W. Bush?)

I know this site's already been blogged elsewhere, but I saw it for the first time this week and it blew my mind. Kim at excitementmachine.org scanned the entire freaking 1980 JC Penney's catalog, and posted the images online here. One of them (left) features a male model who bears an uncanny resemblance to the current President of the United States. Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:30:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Isabel Samaras' retro-chic lunchbox paintings: pop culture, inside out

The SF Examiner just published this story on Bay Area-based painter and illustrator Isabel Samaras. Her works on canvas--and on metal lunchboxes!--put a funky, contemporary spin on classic works of fine art by "re-casting" great masterworks with pop culture icons and characters from television sitcoms. Check out her online gallery here, and her posters (suitable for framin'... and holiday givin') here. Excerpt from the Examiner story:

Samaras' lunch boxes depict Catwoman, Batgirl and Batman in humorous, "fairly sexy, quasi-pornographic" positions, juxtaposing elements of childhood and adulthood and attempting to destigmatize porn.

Her more recent paintings go a step farther, re-telling forgotten parables from bygone eras using characters that have a modern resonance, as well as their own mythologies -- characters from popular TV shows like "The Avengers," "The Addams Family," "Star Trek," "Bewitched," "Gilligan's Island," "I Dream of Jeannie," "The Munsters" and "The Six Million Dollar Man."

"On old TV shows, there is a denial of sexual appeal," she says, adding that women often are denied simple pleasures -- "Bewitched's" Darrin won't let Samantha use magic to perform domestic chores; "I Dream of Jeannie's" skimpily dressed heroine is kept in a bottle and must answer to her "Master."

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:13:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Katinka Matson's Scanner Photography

Katinka Matson's incredibly cool photography--which she creates using scanners, not cameras--is covered in this Sunday's NY Times Magazine. Kevin Kelly writes the intro on her web site. Excerpt from the NYT Mag article follows:

This year, two different artists working independently, one on each coast, mounted exhibits that were remarkably similar: a collection of dazzling images of cut flowers, "photographed" not with a camera but with the moving lens of a flatbed scanner, the kind used in offices every day... Both artists create their images by placing flowers and other natural objects on top of a 12-by- 17-inch scanner - they leave the top raised to avoid crushing the flowers - and then scanning the arrangement from below. The method creates a digital image that is vivid and precise: a photograph that requires neither film nor camera.

Behind this new style of photography is the idea that the moving wand of a scanner can capture a sense of perspective, a richness of color and a level of detail that a single, static lens cannot. Back when scanners were used only to reproduce flat images like prints or documents or book pages, people assumed that images created on a scanner would lack depth. In fact, the opposite is true: the flowers look thick and voluptuous, and the images seem almost three-dimensional. Petals touching the screen appear crisp, while ones raised an inch or two are ghostly shadows, fading into blackness.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:01:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clifford Pickover's Reality Carnival

Clifford Pickover, a mathematician and prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, has started a new blog called Reality Carnival. He picks some great links, such as a story from Nature that states "Watching a gory tooth extraction helps people remember unrelated facts, brain researchers have shown." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:56:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Trashlog

Nico van Hoorn finds one piece of trash every day, and scans it for his Trashlog. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:50:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are old suits the new fat-suits?

The old suit is a prosthetic hobble that simulates age-related disfunction so that young people will know why their elders are so cranky?

The suit has six kilograms of weights sewn in at various points to simulate a sense of heaviness. In-built ear muffs block out most noise.

The helmet has a visor which both restricts the line of vision and wraps it in a dull yellowish tinge. Arm and knee-joints are stiffened, making it hard to sit down or find a comfortable position.

Even the gloves have a little device inside which acts like a tiny needle, simulating arthritis.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:43:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Comics Journal interviews Jaime Hernandez

The Comics Journal presents an hour of MP3 excerpts from a 1989 interview with Jaime Hernandez, "the mastermind behind Maggie, Hopey, Penny Century and the rest of the 'Locas' crowd found in the groundbreaking comic book series Love and Rockets." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:34:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Geisha Asobi's blog

Geisha Asobi has been sending us terrific links over the past couple days, so I visited her blog -- wow! Lots of fantasically weird and terrifying stuff, colorfully described. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:01:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cute, dead, stuffed: The Walter Potter collection

Walter Potter was a Victorian wunderkammerer/sociopath who created a museum of taxidermied taableaux including this absolutely darling set piece which contains 37 stuffed and mounted kittens. Link Discuss (Thanks, Geisha Asobi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:51:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beethoven's rock-around-the-clock

Marc sez: "Beethoven's 9th stretched to 24 hours. One of the coolest things I've ever heard (part of)." Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Total Information Animation

The ACLU's latest advocommercial is all about the Dreaded Rear Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness initiative. Funny! Link Discuss (Thanks, Greg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:41:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, December 13, 2002

Bygone technofetish gallery

Pocket Calculator Show: an enormous gallery of calculator watches, walkmen, boomboxes, CB radios and other fetish-items of a bygone era. Link Discuss (Thanks, Geisha Asobi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:03:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday Web Zen: The sound of one web mouse, clicking

A motley assortment of aural adventures from the land of Web Zen.

1. Danish Soundscapes
2. Soundwalk
3. Eno
4. Grids
5. Pianographique
6. Infinite Wheel
7. M-Module
8. Nitrada
9. And yes, the obligatory singing holiday kittens.

Discuss (Thanks, Frank, and JimCanuk!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:56:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Top 10 Outsider Videos

Excellent collection of bizarre moments caught on tape. The outtakes of Orson Welles trying to do a wine commercial are strange. (I asked a friend of mine, who was Welle's assistant in the '70s, if Welles was as drunk as he appeared to be. He said possibly, but it may have been the medication Welles was taking at the time.) Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:31:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pudding guy turns $3k into 1.2MM airmiles and gets tax receipt to boot

So, apparently, I'm the last person to find out about the pudding guy. The pudding guy (David Phillips) is an airmiles geek who figured out that by combining Healthy Choice's 1000 airmiles for 10 UPCs with their deep-discount $0.25 single-serving pudding-cups that he could rack up 1.2 million airmiles for about $3,000. Then he donated the pudding to some local soup-kitchens who agreed to cut out the UPCs in exchange for the goo -- and gave him a tax-receipt to boot. Snopes says it's true. As a air-miles dilletante, I am wickedly jealous. (Pix here) Link Discuss (via Cardhouse)

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

Balloon hats around the world

The Balloonhats project: two balloon-hat making photographers who toured the world, convincing strangers to wear balloon hats and pose for photos. Link Discuss (Thanks, Geisha Asobi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:36:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LazyWeb: One-Armed Airport routing?

Seth tells me that in the Linux world, people are accustomed to doing something called "one-armed routing." That's where you route on a single Ethernet interface, by creating a fake virtual interface that has an internal network address as well as the real interface with the real network address. I used to do this under OS 9 with IPNetRouter when I had a machine acting as a NAT/DHCP box running on a DSL modem in my old building.

Does anyone know how to do one-armed routing under OS X on Airport? This could be incredibly useful in situations where, for some reason (having paid a subscription fee, having an authenticated MAC address, having a superior antenna) one user has access to a WiFi network but others don't -- you could republish the network around your machine and share it with others. Right now, I usually accomplish this trick by connecting my Airport base-station to my iBook with an Ethernet cable and bridging whatever connection I can get onto down to the AP. It would be handy to pull this off without the Airport AP. Any ideas? Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:29:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, December 12, 2002

EFF slashboxes

EFF and Slashdot have teamed up to create two EFF "slashboxes" -- syndicated RSS feeds of upcoming EFF news and actions. The EFF Action slashbox is for action alerts -- opportunities to send a note to your lawmaker and make a difference; EFF Press is for EFF's newswire of press release and alerts. If you've got a Slashdot account, it take a couple of seconds to add these to your slashbar, and then you'll never be behind the civil liberties curve again.

Update: If you've got an RSS reader/aggregator and want to add these feeds directly to it, the URLs are:

http://www.eff.org/rss/action.xml
http://www.eff.org/rss/press.xml

That is all. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:45:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Total Dick Awareness

What would Philip K. Dick think of Total Information Awareness?

The phrase "total information awareness" is creepy enough to merit a place alongside "USA Patriot Act" and "Department of Homeland Security," but it is not the Information Awareness Office's only gift to the language. The "example technologies" which the Office intends to develop include "entity extraction from natural language text," "biologically inspired algorithms for agent control," and "truth maintenance." One of the Office's thirteen subdivisions, the Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) program, is letting contracts not only for "Face Recognition" and "Iris Recognition" but also for "Gait Recognition." (Tony Blair has pledged the full cooperation of the Ministry of Silly Walks.) Another of the thirteen, FutureMap, "will concentrate on market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events" -- a sounder approach, ideologically, than regulation-based liberal soothsaying.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:33:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google's 2002-in-review

Google's year-end Zeitgeist roundup is a completely obsessively fascinating look into the year that was. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:55:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google: "I'm changing the zeigeist, ask me how!"

Newsweek's Steven "Hackers" Levy has written a great column this week on the rising prominence of Google in both meatspace and cyberspace:

In the singles world, for instance, "Google dating"--running prospective beaus through the search engine--is now standard practice. If the facts about a suitor stack up, then you can not only go on the date with confidence, but you know what to talk about. "If I find out he's a runner, for instance, that's something I know we have in common, and I'll say that I'm a runner, too," says Krissy Goetz, a 24-year-old interactive designer in New York City. The first thing a Google virgin attempts is the often humbling experience of typing one's own name into the query line. The next search is inevitable--a Google dragnet to determine the fate of old flames. A Nobel Prize awaits the theorist who determines a formula that calculates the number of minutes one can use Google before excavating the wreckage of sunken relationships. "It's comforting to know what they've been up to," says Gavin MacDonald, 29, who's checked up on four of his former sweethearts.

Link Discuss (via Megnut)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:35:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MacSmartMob nabs eBay ripoff artist

Amazing story of an eBay seller of a PowerBook who got ripped off by a buyer who used a counterfeit cashier's check. The seller posted his story to a bunch of Mac user boards, and the users rallied around him, helping him winkle out the ripoff artist's identity and eventually running him to ground: "I'd like to see a Dell user do something like that at 4:30 in the morning for a complete stranger a thousand miles away." Mac users, vigilante smartmobs.

He emailed me a new address and phone number, the phone number again traced back to the same address for Mr. Christmas. I called the Secret Service and the Chicago PD, pleading, all they had to do was be there when Fedex dropped off the package. It was a guaranteed hit, he'd have another counterfeit cashier's check, all you'd have to do is arrest him. Like shooting fish in a barrel. "Sorry, Detective McDonaugh will be out until next Wednesday, can I take a message?" Fine, if the cops won't do it, I decided I'd just Priceline a ticket and be waiting next door when it got dropped off. So I'd know what kind of neighborhood I was looking at, I asked for help again in the Mac boards. Two Chicago residents replied, and the next morning, courtesy of Tim, I had 23 pictures of the house, the cars in the driveway (with license plate numbers) and the neighborhood. I'd like to see a Dell user do something like that at 4:30 in the morning for a complete stranger a thousand miles away. I started planning my trip. I decided I'd leave on Saturday, have the package delivered on Monday, and make it back just in time to screw up on all my finals.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:52:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Building the transhumanist temple

Timeship: a grandiose project to build an extropian temple of life-preservation and transhumanism.

The design of the Timeship Building, a six-acre structure that will be the world's largest facility for life extension research and for the cryopreservation of DNA, biological tissues, and over 10,000 human patients, has been completed by architect Stephen Valentine with both its functional and its symbolic importance in mind.

We see the Timeship as the "Fort Knox" of biological materials. DNA, tissue samples and cryopreserved patients will be housed in Timeship, and their safety and security against all threats, both natural and human-made, will have to be maintained for hundreds of years. Timeship has been designed to provide that security at every level, from defense against terrorist attack, to sea level changes due to global warming, to interruption of energy supplies due to any catastrophe.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Excryoman!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:16:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Underground Comics book review

I reviewed a new history of underground comics, Rebel Visions, for LA Weekly. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:06:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free Expression Project roundup of copyright and free expression

The Free Expression Project has released an amazing, comprehensive report on today's conflict between copyright and free expression. From the executive summary:

Should teenagers be allowed to swap music over the Internet? Should computer hackers be allowed to decrypt the entertainment industry's electronic locks on e-books, songs, or movies? Should authors, artists, and their heirs have complete and perpetual control over the sale, copying, and distribution of their creations?

Copyright law has become a rocky, treacherous field of free-expression battles. It is at the core of today's controversies in the arts, culture, and scholarship. New laws passed by Congress to aid the companies that make up the "copyright industry" have intensified the debates. These laws have badly upset the "difficult balance" between rewarding creativity through the copyright system and society's competing interest in the free flow of ideas.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Deirdre!)

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

The Personal Telco WiFi van

Gallery of pix of the renovated van used by Personal Telco, Portland's community wireless project. It's an old news-truck whose crane is used to grab line-of-sight to open APs and then retransmit them over a wide area. Link Discuss (Thanks, Coderman!)

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

Jury Service Part Two is live!

Part two of "Jury Service," the gonzo post-human novella I co-wrote with Charlie Stross, is online at scifi.com. Part one went live last week, and there're two more parts to go!

It's a good, old-fashioned throng. From his vantagepoint atop the saddle, it seems to writhe, a mass of variegated robes and business-attire, individuals lost in the teem. He studies it for a moment longer, and sees that for all its density it's moving rather quickly, though with little regard for personal space. He dismounts the bike and it extrudes its kickstand. Planting his hands on his hips, he belches up a haram gust of bacon-grease and ponders. He can always lock up the bike and proceed afoot, but nothing handy presents itself for locking. The djinn is manifesting a glowing countdown timer, ticking away the seconds before he will be late at court.

Just then, the crowd shits out a person, who makes a beeline for him.

"Hello, Adrian," Huw says, once the backpacker is within shouting distance—about sixty centimeters, given the din of footfalls and conversations. Huw is somehow unsurprised to see the backpacker again, clad in his travelwear and a rakish stubble, eyes red as a baboon's ass after a night's hashtaking.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:02:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monkeys prefer gender specific toys

Researchers at the University of London gave a bunch of toys to some monkeys. The boy monkeys played with boy toys, and the girl monkeys played with girl toys. Link Discuss (Via Pink's Just One Thing)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:26:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Your genitals as refrigerator magnets

The Match-Your-Snatch and Clone-Your-Bone kits contain everything you need to make a colorful plastic casting of your (or a loved one's) reproductive organs. Link Discuss (Via Die Puny Humans)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:12:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wardriver bumper-stickers

Wardriver bumper-stickers: $3 gets you a high-quality stretch of weatherproof vinyl that lets you tell the world about your k-rad geek hobby! Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:11:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thurmond's stump-speech video-clip

So, how inexcusable is it for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to have avowed his support for Strom Thurmond's last presedential bid? Here's a movie made up from clips from the Daily Show with an excerpt of one of Thurmond's stump-speeches:

"What I want to tell you...Ladies and Gentlemen...That there's not enough troops in the Army...to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."

Link (25.1MB QuickTime) Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:01:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rural India's cellphone-salesmen on bicycles

India's most remote villages are getting cellular phones, thanks to bicycle-riding commissioned sales-agents who tour the back-country selling their wares:

The group behind the initiative is the nonprofit Grameen Sanchar Seva Organization, known as GRASSO. Its goal is to use telecom and IT to strengthen the distribution network of agricultural produce -- rural India's mainstay -- and make it more profitable for villagers whose livelihoods depend on it.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:57:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

War on Terror makes the case for ACLU membership

The war on terror -- with its fallacious premise that security must come at freedom's expense -- has driven membership in the ACLU. Tuesday night, at the EFF open house party, John Perry Barlow delivered a short speech in which he thanked Fritz Hollings, Michael Eisner, Jamie Kellner, Donald Rumsfeld, "Dreaded Real Admiral" John Poindexter and Dubya for providing such vivid object-lessons that make the case for joining EFF.

"Larger numbers of American people have realized that the ACLU is fundamentally a patriotic organization. executive director Anthony Romero said. There are now 330,000 dues-paying members, 50,000 of whom joined after the attacks.

Link Discuss (via K5)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:55:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

What flight engineers can learn from butterfly wingstrokes

Interesting NYT story about what's revealed in an amazing batch of high-speed digital photos of flying butterflies taken by University of Oxford researchers. Excerpt:

This is the first time that anyone has captured images that show what the wing beats of free-flying insects do to the air they flutter on. (Other visual studies have used tethered insects, moths, for example, glued to a lightweight rod.) The red admiral butterflies, moving without restraint, show an extraordinary agility and complexity in their flight. Not only do they use many different wing strokes, they use them on successive wing beats.

"One insect uses all the known aerodynamic methods that anybody has conjectured," said Dr. Adrian L. R. Thomas, an author with Dr. Robert B. Srygley, now a visiting researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, of a report published today in the journal Nature. "That's a big surprise."

Link (registration required) Discuss (Gracias, vaquera al reves)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:20:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Random butt-ugly website

Just saw this url posted on an LA web developers' list. It's the kind of gui that makes you say "please, please pass the Dramamine." But there's something comfortably gauche about how bad this site looks, too--it's like listening to your 17-year-old gawky cousin do an earnest but off-key karaoke rendition of the theme from "Grease". That circa-1996-blink-tag-vibe makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. It's got that elusive je ne sais WTF. Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:25:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vast online gallery of flight attendant uniforms

Collection of nearly 220 different female flight attendant uniforms from various international airlines. At left: a super-fly 1970s uniform from Allegheny Airlines, back when we called 'em stewardesses.

Work that fine bag of dry-roasted peanuts, Miss Lufthansa!

Link Discuss (Thanks, asobi!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:27:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gateway builds 14 teraflop cluster

Gateway is taking 8,000 computers out of excess inventory and turning them into a 14 teraflop (14 trillion floating point operations/second) parallel supercomputer, and renting out time on the system to supercomputing junkies. Link Discuss (Thanks, ronks!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:35:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

$10 from every copy of BBEdit to EFF

BareBones Software, makers of BBEdit -- the greatest text editor ever -- are giving $10 to EFF from every copy of BBEdit sold this month. I wrote my last two novels in BBEdit, I compose blog entries in BBEdit, I use it for html composition, I use it to diff documents as we work on them around the office. Not only do these guys make wicked-swell software, but they also support electronic liberty. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:18:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Total Information Flowchart

The Total Information Awareness flowchart: more proof that pure evil is pure banality. Link Discuss (via AaronSw)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:07:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Agoraphone: be the voice of the sculpture

Agoraphone: call (617) 253-6237 and speak through a sculpture in the middle of the MIT campus.

Is there something you have been aching to express or discuss, but for one reason or another have not yet found a way to feel comfortable doing so? Dial AgoraPhone! Upon calling, but before being connected directly through to the public, you will be greeted by a recorded voice giving a few details about AgoraPhone and tips on how to use the features. AgoraPhone preserves anonymity in that it performs no caller ID and records no logs. There is even the option of voice masking so that no one can recognize you. You can try on your voice before anyone else can hear you, to make sure you are happy with it. Whenever you are ready, the connection through to the public space is made by pressing the # key on the phone you are calling from. A full duplex audio link is then opened between you and the people and happenings in the remote public site of the AgoraPhone sculpture.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Raffi!)

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

WiFi vs. 3G: Wireless Smackdown!

Chris writes:

Bell Canada is trialing WiFi hotspots - I've got links to the Bell site, the press release, and to newpaper articles about the launch, then followed by a discussion of why a major 3G cellular carrier is setting up 802.11b hotspots. Isn't this going to reduce the attractiveness of high-speed cellular data services?

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:31:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Celebrity iPods

Apple's making supastah-branded iPods, like these for Beck, Madonna, and Tony Hawk.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:11:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Six Degrees of Elvis

Enter the name of any actor and see how many links he or she is from Elvis. I thought I'd stump it by entering Toshiro Mifune, but he has an Elvis number of 2. I also tried Traci Lords; she has an Elvis number of 2, too. Link Discuss (Thanks, Sean!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:07:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Honda debuts an upgraded, walking robot

Honda debuted a new and improved version of its four-foot-tall, walking robot "Asimo" today. The child-sized 'bot can walk, climb stairs, recognize voices, and understand human gestures and movements.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gatfishing!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:03:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Retro-tech gallery

Jed describes "The Museum of Retro Technology" as

A lovely little site showcasing pneumatic tube diagrams, the Auxetophone compressed-air audio amplification system, the 1903 Louis Brennan gryoscopic monorail, etc.... Also includes a link to Pneumatic Tube Products Co. which apparently still creates and maintains pneumatic tube systems -- zowie. Plus, they make a Windows-based tube-system controller. The mind boggles.

I'm partial to the site's "Combat Cutlery Gallery: a celebration of lethal flatware." It's totally working my heretofore repressed Martha-Stewart-as-serial-killer fantasies. Ginsu, gone gonzo.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:53:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kola Boof: 'Net persona, writer, Bin Laden's ex-girlfriend--or hoax?

Interesting NYT story about the controversy surrounding Sudan-born writer and web-celeb Kola Boof:

[T]he Kola Boof story demonstrates how flashpoints are reached in cyberspace, the new forum for underground literature and politics, where fact and myth become indistinguishable and publicity campaigns become a kind of performance art. Without the imprimatur of a major publisher or a mainstream review or a public appearance, she has managed to instigate anger and discussion about her work.

Ms. Boof said a fatwa was ordered up on her in London for her stand against organized religion, but particularly against Arab Muslims. Sudanese officials in London, however, said that was not true. One of those officials did denounce her in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a leading Arab-language newspaper in the United Kingdom. A number of well-known African-American activists have taken up her causes, which include her opposition to slavery in the Sudan and her condemnation of stoning and female castration and other harsh measures taken against African women. (...)

Ms. Boof's Web site appeared on the Internet a few months ago, presenting her as a mysterious but alluring figure, whose life provided a potent brew of international politics, diplomatic and sexual -- part Graham Greene, part Jacqueline Susann. Among other things, she claims she briefly was Osama bin Laden's mistress, in the late 1990's.

UPDATE: Here is her website.

Link to NYT story (registration required) Discuss (Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:16:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New hub for crap-swappers: Trodo

Leah writes about the December 8 launch of Trodo.com:

Trodo just started up--it's a new bartering hub where users sign up, list three items of their own which they're willing to send away to new owners, and get credits for requesting items of the same kind from other Trodo users. You get more credits when you successfully send an item to someone, or when you list more items of your own. It's like a CD swap writ large.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:11:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dali's paintings for the stage

About this gorgeous online image collection of vintage theatrical backdrops from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ken Coupland writes:

Stage curtains painted by Salvador Dali and others for the famous dance troupe languished in appalling conditions for decades. Since rediscovered, they're recorded here in smallish renditions that are dreamy all the same.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:58:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

Quest for the mathematically ideal shoe-lacing

The NYT reports on the quest for the mathematically perfect way to lace a pair of shoes:

A multitude of trendy shoe fashion possibilities remains to be discovered, Dr. Polster said. A shoe with two rows of six eyelets offers 43,200 different paths for a shoelace to pass through every eyelet, even with the added condition that each eyelet must contribute to the essential purpose of pulling the two halves of the shoe together. (More precisely, this condition says the shoelace is not allowed to pass in a straight line through three consecutive eyelets on the same flap; otherwise, the middle of the three eyelets does not actively help close the shoe.)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:49:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Technical difficulties with USA

Great Flash animation that likens the Bush administration's obnoxious and dangerous behavior of late to problems with TV transmission. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:05:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wickedly cool looking self-powered heat fan

This fan sits on top of wood burning stoves and operates on temperature difference. Now all I need is a wood burning stove. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:46:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bulk Turing Tests to sniff out bots

CAPTCHA (Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a Carnegie-Melon project to catalog and develop tests that a computer can deliver but only a human can solve, to curtail the activities of bots, malware, and scripts. I'm working on a novel where part of the mcguffin is an effort to use genetic algorithms to turn a dataset derived from a destructive brain-scan into an intelligent model in a massively parallel computer built out of commodity hardware. The many different attempts at generating a modelled brain test out their efficacy by joining chat rooms and otherwise inserting themselves into any machine-mediated human communication (including things like spam, scams, etc) and see how long it takes for them to be accused of being a bot. I think my fictional brain-models would smoke these tests.

Bongo is a program that asks the user to solve a visual pattern recognition problem. In particular, Bongo displays two series of blocks, the left and the right series. The blocks in the left series differ from those in the right, and the user must find the characteristic that sets the two series apart. A possible left and right series are shown here.

(These two series are different because everything in the left is drawn with thick lines, while everything in the right is drawn with thin lines.)

After seeing the two series of blocks, the user is presented with four single blocks and is asked to determine whether each block belongs to the right series or to the left. The user passes the test if he or she correctly detemrines the side to which all the four blocks belong.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If Xmas was a Jewish holiday

Hilchos Xmas: the Talmudic laws of Christmas, if Christmas was a Jewish holiday. Damn, this is funny stuff!

This is the fruitcake of our affliction, which our ancestors baked 400 years ago.

All who are in need, come and celebrate Xmas with us.
All who are hungry, come and partake of this 400-year-old fruitcake, as it is written, "Let them eat cake!"
This year we watch football in the living room, next year may the Super Bowl come to our city!

Link (currently down, year-old archive.org copy here ) Discuss (via Making Light!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:10:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SMART: the stupidnet newsletter

David Isenberg (see below) runs a fantastic newsletter about stupidnet, called SMART. Sign up here. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:49:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

David Isenberg on the stupidnet

David Isenberg just gave an amazing, stirring address on the Stupid Network at Supernova. My notes:

Sure you can do Internet on the phone network -- you can do Internet on smoke signals, too. It's yesterday's news. The best network is a stupid network, which supplies simple connections, but no "services." Instead, "services" are created by smart, network-enabled products, designed for any networked application. Bring them home and plug them in.

[He holds up a slim cable containing 864 fibers that can be run down your street or under it] Two of these fibers could handle the peak load of the entire United States. You can light this up at a gigabit, just for your home -- that's the capacity of a telephone office of a city of 100,000 people. In two or three years, you can have an entire telephone company's worth of bandwidth in your house for $2,000.

The phone companies value artificial scarcity. The most malleable of all laws (Moore's Law, Gilder's Law) is accounting law -- depreciation (as we saw with Enron). Bean counters assume the net will be replaced in five years -- but with the rate of growth in Gilder's Law, it's like replacing the paperboy's bicycle with a rocket-ship. The paper-boy can't deliver papers on a rocket-ship. [me: yay! obsolete paper-boys!]

Engineering effort doesn't scale like Moore or Gilder -- one engineer can only do one engineer's worth of work. If we increase the amount of engineering required for our rocket-ship net, we'll run out of engineers. So keep it simple, stupid. All the smarts in the network should be at the ends, in PCs or devices, not in routers or other network pieces.

Internetworking shifts control and value-creation from the network owner to the end-user. A conventional telephone call touches every node in every network, and every node's owner can add features -- call waiting, etc. The Internet's job is to ignore network-specific differences, like call waiting. Call-waiting is defined at the end-points between both parties on the conversation.

Networks that add cool features break the stupidity principle.

The Internet makes telephony into just another application. Traditionally, you need telephone wires, poles, network and service. You pay for the service, though, not all the hardware. The telephone company does business this way, it's the only way they know.

In a stupid network, telephony is just an application. The telcos know how to string wires and put up poles, but not how to make money on 'em. That's why all the winning apps weren't built by telcos: email, ecommerce, the Web, blogging, etc.

Most of the important future communications applications haven't been discovered yet. This is the green-screen, command-line era of telephony.

Inn the telco world, they charge money for providing this voice application and spend the money to support the network and physical plant.

In the stupid netowrk, the physical layer is designed for anything digital. The network layer is Internet protocol. The applications are anything: data, video, voice, whatever.

MSFT may have a monopoly, but it doesn't have the poles-and-wires monopolistic advantage that the telcos have. The potential for a marketplace in stupidnet applications exists.

So in the stupidnet world, who pays for the physical layer: poles, wires and so on? The wires are usually an expense subsidized by the voice service. When voice is free, who will keep putting poles up?

The telco won't make the transition. They're too addicted to their business. The cable-companies may have a better shot, but they're addicted to video entertainment business. They don't want to put in a net that will let anyone get any video signal they want from anywhere. Municipalities: there are 125 cities in the US that are actively investigating their own fiber nets. Utilities have wire and pipes in our homes. New kinds of companies may do it. Customers and corporations own their own networks.

Stupidnet has its own values: First Amendment, decentralization, not any-color-you-like-so-long-as-its-black.

Remember: Goliath lost! It takes smart people to build the stupidnet! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:46:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A&E explores "mankind's fascination with breasts and cleavage"

Cleavage, an A&E special airing tonight, "surveys mankind's fascination with breasts and cleavage, from the goddesses of antiquity to today's silicone-enhanced TV and film stars. Offering their opinions on why two simple mounds of flesh have wielded such power through the ages will be comedian Joan Rivers; Cosmopolitan's Helen Gurley Brown; a plastic surgeon; a female body builder; and others. Narrated by Carmen Electra." What, only two hours long? Link Discuss (via Irregular Orbit)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:35:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Searching Google for suicide

More from Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, speaking at Supernova: "People who are thinking about committing suicide search Google for 'suicide.' Depending on what they find, they may or may not kill themselves. There are businesses that depend on the kind of results that searchers get from Google, but that's very secondary compared to searches like 'suicide.'" Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:27:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sucky search engines' CEOs didn't use the Web

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, speaking at Supernova: "If you look at the other search companies that didn't do so well, you'll see that in many cases they hired an executive team that consisted of CEOs and so on that didn't use the Web that much." Link Discuss

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

Utterly hypnotic Java-toy

SodaPlay is an incredibly fun Java-toy -- sketch out skeletal, jointed constructions, tweak the physics of gravity and friction, and set it in motion. It jiggles and clatters and bounces in a way that I find utterly hypnotic. Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virtual crop circles

Land art created by traveling around with a GPS to make giant drawings. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

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

Honduras bans all violent games and toys

Honduras has blamed the rise of violent youth-gangs called "maras" on violent toys and games. Starting in June, all violent playthings will be banned on the island in the country (thanks, Wayne). The Reg points out that with 53 percent of Hondurans living below the poverty line, it's hard to imagine that the dirt-poor maras are going home from a night's wilding to chill with their PS2s and a lickle bit of the old first-person-shooter ultra-high-rez-violence. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dan Gillmor's Journalism 3.1b4

Dan Gillmor is standing in for Clay Shirky for the morning keynote at Supernova (Clay's flight from NYC was cancelled -- Frankston wants to know if he was flying United). His talk: Journalism 3.1b4 -- a riff on the Journalism 3.0 talk he gave last year at Emerging Tech (expect an expanded version of this at this year's conference -- don't miss it, and don't forget to send your talk-proposals!).

More bandwidth + more processing power + more storage = New journalism.

First, "Old Media." Then "New Media." Now, "We Media" -- the power of everyone and everything at the edge.

Sept 11 was the turning-point. Dan was in South Africa and got the same coverage the rest of the world did. Most of us couldn't get to nytimes.com, but blogs filled in the gap. The next day we had the traditional 32-point screaming headlines and photos. But we also got, through Farber's Interesting People list, links to satellite photos of the event, first person accounts from Australians explaining how it felt outside of America.

Blogs covered it, and then a personal email from an Afghan American that circulated on the Internet, got posted to blogs, made it onto national news.

9-11 sent people to the Internet. More than 2/3ds used the Internet to learn about the attacks.

New journalism is built on ubiquitous networks, wonderful tools, anyone can publish, but will anyone make money?

Journalism goes from being a lecture to a seminar: we tell you what we have learned, you tell us if you think we're correct, and then we discuss it: we can fact-check your ass (Ken Layne).

Dan's new foundation principle: "My readers know more than I do."

This is true for all working journalists, and not a threat, it's an opportunity.

At PCForum, Joe Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest was on-stage, doing a Q&A. Joe was whining about how hard it is to run a phone company these days. Dan blogged, "Joe's whining." A few moments later, he got an email from someone who wasn't at the conference, someone in Florida, with a link to a page that showed that Joe took $300MM out of the company and has another $4MM to go -- gutting the company as he goes.

Esther Dyson described this as the turning point. The mood turned ugly. The room was full of people reading the blog and everyone stopped being willing to cut Joe any slack.

David Isenberg: Dan once wrote that nothing at a conference ever happens in the main room -- it all goes down in the corridors. Blogs change that.

The office of the Secretary of Defense posts full transcripts of all press interviews with Rumsfeld: they do this because the editing process of the interviews sets the new to a slant that they feel is unfair. Dan: this will change the lives of journos -- when sources can say, "That's not what I said, and here's proof."

The new tools of new journliasm: Digital cameras, SMS, writeable web (blogs, wikis, etc), recorded audio and video.

Blogs are the coolest part of it: variety, gifted pros and amateurs, RSS, meme formation and coalescing ideas, real-time (heh -- typing as fast as I can).

15-year-olds blog from cellphones today -- they're who I ask for tips on the future. Joi Ito blogs with his camera -- so do smart-mobs. (David Sifry: A guy ran a marathon and blogged it from his Sidekick).

The next time there is a major event in Tokyo, there will be 500 images on the web of whatever it was that happened before any professional camera crew arrives on the scene.

But it's not just blogs: Email is still the best source, especially lists like Interesting people. Forums and newsgroups, and non-blog websites. The big question: what can you trust? KayCee Nicole and other hoaxes. Bloggers who debunked the story did profoundly good journalism. Rumors move at the speed of light, corrections follow slowly.

The death of big media won't be an unmitigated disaster: big media is concentrated, unduly influenced by money, and vanilla. But big media also does the investigative stuff and knows where to look for burgeoning stories.

Old media is in danger because there's lots more competition for advertising.

No one knows how new media will turn a buck.

And what happens if Hollywood wins? Disney: "There is no right to fair use." American Association of Publishers: "We have serious problems with librarians." Jamie Kellner, Fox exec: "Skipping commercials is stealing."

The Internet is a read-write medium, but Hollywood wants to make it into TV.

Get active: Lobby, support organizations, vote, support good canditates, take the issues to your friends.

The keyboards are clattering in the room -- expect lots of other takes on this talk to show up on the Supernova Group Blog.

Audience question: Do bloggers who attend events on someone else's dime have an obligation to disclose that fact? Dan: well, that's what journalists do. (Do we need a blogger speaker's bureau?)

Audience question: If bloggers are journalists, are analysts journalists? Dan: Analysts are often tainted by the same conflicts that characterize investment banking researchers. Online writers can't get credentialled for attendance at the Olympics and people who hold up their cam-phones at the event can get booted out -- a TV network owns the right to transmit photos of the Olympics. Analyst, blogger, journalist -- conflicted or not -- they're all deserving of First Amendment protection. [Wild applause!] Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:31:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More first-hand reporting from the Elcomsoft trial

Danny "NTK" O'Brien also took himself to the Elcomsoft trial yesterday and reported on the doings and the goings-on:

...if they wanted to draw attention to the flaws in Adobe's ebook, why Dmitry hadn't released his exploit on Bugtraq. This is a fascinating attack, given that it seems to imply that it would be *better* for Elcomsoft to release flaws on Bugtraq. Given that many people believe that releasing such circumvention code on Bugtraq is a breach of the DMCA itself, this seems kind of a weird condemnation. The point wasn't examined in detail by either prosecution or defence. Dmitry said that Elcomsoft didn't want to damage ebook publishers by doing this.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:27:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neuromarketing: scan consumers' brains to gather marketing data

Super-scary approach to marketing from an Atlanta company: scan people's brains with MRIs to see how the subconscious mind responds to products and ads.

In a hospital in Atlanta, researchers are trying to do that mapping. They're paying people to lie inside MRI machines and look at pictures of products while the machine snaps images of their brains. The Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences claims it's closing the gap between business and science — with the goal of getting us to behave the way corporations want us to.

"What it really does is give unprecedented insight into the consumer mind. And it will actually result in higher product sales or in brand preference or in getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave," company executive Adam Koval told Marketplace.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rushkoff!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:50:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

(Semi)-Live notes from the Elcomsoft trial

Lisa Rein, a technology activist, is attending the Elcomsoft hearings in San Jose this week and blogging it in the evenings. This is the most recent case shaking out from the arrest of Dmitry Skylarov, a Russian researcher, for violating the DMCA by explaining how broken Adobe's ebook security was. Dmitry went to jail for 30 days, and the Russian State Department has advised its scientists to steer clear of US shore lest they, too, be arrested for delivering technical presentations. Dmitry eventually had his charges dropped, in exchange for recording testimony that is being used to prosecute his employer, Elcomsoft, whose software could be used to extract cleartext from encrypted ebook files. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:48:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mad Max: Beyond Retirement Home

Mel Gibson will do another Mad Max movie, called "Fury Road." In this movie, senior citizens in a post-apocalyptic leather-clad retirement home are not threatened by elderly punks riding motorized wheelchairs and must not fight for their supply of precious lineament. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, December 9, 2002

New China net-censorship study: up to 10% of web may be blocked by authorities

A new study of Internet censorship in China by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society reveals that as many as one out of every ten websites may be blocked by the Chinese government. Read the Yahoo! News story here, and read the report itself here.

Excerpt:

Having requested some 204,012 distinct web sites, we found more than 50,000 to be inaccessible from at least one point in China on at least one occasion. Adopting a more conservative standard for determining which inaccessible sites were intentionally blocked and which were unreachable solely due to temporary glitches, we find that 18,931 sites were inaccessible from at least two distinct proxy servers within China on at least two distinct days. We conclude that China does indeed block a range of web content beyond that which is sexually explicit. For example, we found blocking of thousands of sites offering information about news, health, education, and entertainment, as well as some 3,284 sites from Taiwan. A look at the list beyond sexually explicit content yields insight into the particular areas the Chinese government appears to find most sensitive.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:40:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scam alert: do "out-of-office" e-mail autoreplies help burglars?

A report issued by UK-based Infrastructure Forum ("TIF") says spam-savvy thieves are using info from 'out of office' email autoresponders and cross-referencing it with publicly available personal data to target empty homes.

Criminals are buying huge lists of email addresses over the internet and sending mass-mailings in the hope of receiving 'out of office' auto-responses from workers away on holiday.

By cross-reference such replies with publicly available information from online directories such as 192.com or bt.com, the burglars can often discover the name, address and telephone number of the person on holiday. Tif is advising users to warn their staff to be careful of the information they put in their 'out of office' messages.

"You wouldn't go on holiday with a note pinned to your door saying who you were, how long you were away for and when you were coming back, so why would you put this in an email?" said David Roberts, chief executive at Tif.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:33:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What sex is that nose?

Guess the nose: Maragaret sez, "You are shown 16 different noses and try to guess the gender of each. It's surprisingly difficult." Link Discuss (Thanks, Margaret!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:16:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling's decade-ahead-of-its-time librarian talk

Bruce Sterling's 1992 speech to the Library Information Technology Association is eerily prescient -- the "Information Economy" is bankrupt, and it's taking the public domain down with it.

Ladies and gentlemen, there's a problem with showing Mr Franklin the door. The problem is that Mr Franklin was right in 1731 and Mr Franklin is still right! Information is not something you can successfully peddle like Coca-Cola. If it were a genuine commodity, then information would cost nothing when you had a glut of it. God knows we've got enough data! We're drowning in data. Nevertheless we're only gonna make more. Money just does not map the world of information at all well. How much is the Bible worth? You can get a Bible in any hotel room. They're worthless as commodities, but not valueless to humankind. Money and value are not identical.

What's information really about? It seems to me there's something direly wrong with the ``Information Economy.'' It's not about data, it's about attention. In a few years you may be able to carry the Library of Congress around in your hip pocket. So? You're never gonna read the Library of Congress. You'll die long before you access one tenth of one percent of it. What's important --- increasingly important --- is the process by which you figure out what to look at. This is the beginning of the real and true economics of information. Not who owns the books, who prints the books, who has the holdings. The crux here is access, not holdings. And not even access itself, but the signposts that tell you what to access --- what to pay attention to. In the Information Economy everything is plentiful --- except attention.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

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

Goodall goes ape for Sasquatch!

World-renowned primate expert Dr. Jane Goodall said in a recent NPR Science Friday interview that she believes in "undiscovered" primates like Bigfoot. Now that's a pretty damn good celebrity endorsement! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:46:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beneath Marc's Feet

Marc Schiller's (almost) daily snapshots of interesting things beneath his feet. He told me he can't stop looking down now. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:22:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turkey's [Star|Porn] Trek

Turkey's local version of Star Trek is weird, quasi-pornographic, and cheezy. Is this for real?

The Turkish Enterprise's dress code has got to cause problems. The female personnel are forced to wear miniskirts that end four inches above the bottom of their asses, and when they turn around to work on the spray-painted cardboard computers, they have no secrets. I'm sure this leads to situations where the navigator loses his concentration and says, "Miss Uhura, we are crotching a course for the panties sector, coordinates your whole ass hanging out. Repeat: panties, panties, panties."

Kirk decides to go down to a nearby planet and assembles an away team of Scotty, Mr. Spak, Dr. Makkoy and an unnamed guy in a green shirt who they hope will act as a human speed bump if any creatures on the planet rush them. The teleportation effects are, like all Turkish special effects, a strange combination of retarded and rad. The four men stand as still as possible while the camera goes out of focus. Ten seconds later, the film gets scratched in their general area and they run out of frame while the guy holding the camera hits pause and unpause. This gives more of the impression that something's wrong with your VCR than of people being transported through space. Miniskirt technology is a much higher priority among their people than visual effects.

Link Discuss (Thanks, dinsdale!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:51:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

P2P obsoletes businesses that sell people to each other

Karl Jacob from CloudMark is speaking now at Supernova. He suggests that many Internet based-businesses (like Classmates.com) essentially sell people to each other: here is some data that I input, here is some data that you input, and the software acts as a trusted-third-party/matchmaker to hook us up. Peer-to-peer networking makes these businesses superfluous: why do I need you to sell me other people, when they can connect with me directly, using distributed search? (Of course, conferences are businesses that sell people to each other, too) Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:44:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Trash-obsessed six-year-old: youngest craphound ever!

The LA Times covers the six birthday of a trash-obsessed six-year-old that was held at a city dump.

His favorite pastimes include trailing trucks on their collection routes (in the company of his parents or sitter) and peering into trash cans. He said he wants to go to college so he can learn to drive a trash truck.

"Some people have said, 'Why don't you steer him in a different direction?' " his mother said. "My answer is this is his passion. Whatever his interest is, I support it."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Doug!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:36:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily Show on Kissinger QuickTime

In case you missed it, here is Jon Stewart and friends on the Daily Show running down Henry Kissinger's unique qualifications to investigate the September 11th attack. I can't find a transcript at the moment, but the gist of the remarks are this: who better to investigate war crimes than a war criminal? Who better to investigate intelligence failures than someone who hid a campaign of secret bombings? And so on. Funny, sad, scary. Link (57MB QuickTime) Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:29:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Open standards and quality of service: pick one

IBM's Rod Smith is speaking at the Supernova conference. In his intro, he cites a lot of customer demand for both open standards and quality-of-service guarantees. Aren't these antithetical? If I'm running open standards, then the software at my end of the network can be set to abide by or ignore any signals send by the software at your end (as opposed to a proprietary system where both ends are welded-shut-boxes that always and deterministically do whatever the software author thought was best). That means that even though your software requests a priority level of x and a guaranteed pipe of y, you have no way of knowing whether my software is actually delivering x and y. All you can send me is a suggestion -- not a guarantee. Discuss

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

Camera-in-a-pill

A digestible comestible camera inside a pill is being touted in Japan as the new endoscopy alternative:

Computer-simulated footage created for the promotion of the capsule was presented at an international medical symposium in Tokyo recently. In the film, the white capsule illuminated the dark stomach wall and moved along the digestive canal while rotating.

The scenes in the footage resembled those taken by miniature submersible vessels that sometimes appear in science fiction films...

About 40 percent of the capsule's interior is still empty. This space will allow researchers to store medication or surgical tools to achieve a more efficient delivery of drugs or to carry out surgical operations inside the body.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:12:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unleash the F*&$^#% Fury!

From Roadrunner Records' Blabbermouth blog:

"Yngwie Malmstein threatened to kill a fellow passenger on a flight to Tokyo, Japan after the woman poured a glassful of water on the guitarist. The passenger, who had no prior contact with Yngwie, allegedly overheard Malmsteen making derogatory comments about homosexuals and decided to show her disapproval by emptying the contents of her glass on the hefty axeman. A member of Yngwie's touring entourage, who was traveling with Malmsteen at the time, had a tape recorder running and managed to catch Yngwie's reaction on tape immediately after the guitarist was 'assaulted' by the offended passenger."

This link is to an MP3 of the recording. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gil!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:07:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MPAA FCC comments: too many howlers and fibs to count

The Motion Picture Association of America has released its comments on the Broadcast Flag proposal before the FCC. This has too many howlers to count (though I imagine many groups will be countering 'em in their reply comments), but here are two choice ones, in which the MPAA says that sharing 19.4Mb/s video files will require no special software and only need you to save them to your hard-drive and the idea that a requirement that all DTV technologies be resistant to end-user modification would not stop open source developers from shipping compliant code.

Once received in the home, digital broadcast television content can easily be redistributed via retransmission over networks like the Internet by such means as rebroadcasting, hosting files on a web server, or peer-to-peer file trafficking. Such unauthorized redistribution can be accomplished without downloading any special software, without the need for circumventing any copy protections, without such tools as analog-to-digital converters, or indeed without any complex technical skills whatsoever. For example, all a person has to do is to select "Record" while watching TV on his or her computer using a TV tuner card, and then save the file to a publicly accessible folder on his or her hard drive, where it can be illegally redistributed to anonymous users via peer-to-peer file trafficking...

Similarly, the Broadcast Flag solution will not, in itself, interfere in any way with continued innovation in the development of open source software. While building a secure open source protection technology will no doubt be a challenge, it is a challenge faced by open source programmers in developing any secure application, not just Authorized Digital Output Protection Technologies or Authorized Recording Methods...

Link (648k PDF) Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:00:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Magic not Magick

Clifford Pickover's "ESP Experiment" is a wonderful implementation of the "pick a card, any card" online mind-reading trick. How do YOU think it works? (OK, everyone knows how it works. But it's STILL fun.) Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:44:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

One PC boots 37 OSes

Gareth sez: "Crazy Rickie, He's Insane! 1918-year-old Eagle Scout Richard Robbins has built a PC with 37 working operating systems. Includes BeOS, OS/2 Warp IV and a million flavors of Linux, not to mention Windows 1.0." Link Discuss (Thanks, Gareth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:39:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"The Man Behind 'Bigfoot' Dies" (Long live Bigfoot!)

The family of Ray Wallace says that he launched the Bigfoot phenomenon in 1958 with a pair of carved wood 16-inch fake feet. Mark Chorvinsky, editor of Strange Magazine, says that this admission raises serious doubts about the existence of Sasquatch. I disagree. The only way I'll change my mind about the reality of Bigfoot is if someone provides physical proof of its nonexistence. Link Discuss (Thanks, Doug!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:38:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stretch laptop battery life by cutting brightness

A survival tip for attendees at conferences like Supernova, where I'm at for a couple days: we've got lots of wireless bits here, but we don't have any power-outlets at the tables. You can stretch out your battery life by a significant margin by cutting the brightness on your screen down to about 50% -- provided that the indoor light is good enough. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MacArthur Foundation endows public-domain fund

The MacArthur Foundation has endowed a fund to support research in support of the protection of the public domain.

The foundation's initiative on Intellectual Property and the Long-Term Protection of the Public Domain focuses on questions of intellectual property rights in the digital era, in particular those that seek to balance the legitimate concerns of the creators of intellectual property with the public's right to access that knowledge.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Ann!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:52:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SpamSieve reviewed

Paul Bissex gives a ringing review to the Bayesian spam-fighter for OS X, SpamSieve:

That's the hot thing in spam fighting now -- Bayesian filtering. I'll leave the details to smarter people, but it is essentially a statistical method in which individual tokens (words) are mapped to probabilities. For example, a quick look at my spam log of 700+ recent spams shows that my last name shows up in 4 spams and 254 "good" messages, making it a strong (but not absolute) indicator of non-spam. Conversely, the term "hcode" shows up in 304 spam messages and no legitimate messages, making it a very good indicator of spam. What's "hcode"? I have no idea -- something that shows up in spammers' HTML a lot, I'd guess. It's obviously incredibly predictive, yet I never would have created a rule to look for it.

That's the beauty of this approach. Instead of trying to cleverly create individual rules that identify spam, you simply feed your Bayesian engine a pile of spam, and a pile of good mail, and it learns the difference. (It does weighting like SpamAssassin, but instead of weighting rules, it individually weights every unique word.) Read Paul Graham's highly influential "A Plan for Spam" essay for more on this. Really, read it. It's excellent.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:01:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virus-throttling: routers can keep malefactors *in* as well as out

Virus-throttling is a technique whereby routers analyze hosts inside their network and attempt to spot machines that are making outbound connections in a fashion consistent with virus activity. These hosts are then throttled with respect to how many other hosts they can contact over time, Early lab results from HP are promising, with a marked slowdown in the spread of malware, but I have to wonder how smart the router is -- are promiscuous IMmers and file-sharers, nstat-using security testers and swarm-downloading users going to end up throttled, too? Also, I wonder to what extent this is an attempt to prop up companies like Cisco, whose proprietary software lets them sell their product at a signficant markup, a margin that's threatened by a variety of open-source routing tech startups who run on commodity hardware. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:58:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, December 8, 2002

Tornado-in-a-can pulverizes anything

A garage inventor has built a "tornado in a can" that is an amazing way of drying and pulverizing just-about anything.

Each year, the U.S. poultry industry generates about 4 million tons of blood, feathers, heads, feet and entrails, including some 300,000 tons on the Delmarva Peninsula. An additional 50,000 tons of dissolved solids such as fat are skimmed from the wastewater stream, much of it sprayed on farm fields as fertilizer. And much of the 300 million tons of shells produced by laying hens each year is worked into the soil...

Running that material through a drier and then through Polifka's machine could produce a powder form of those poultry byproducts that could be sold as a flavoring or nutritious additive to pet foods or fertilizers, Winsness thought.

"The single most important quality of the tornado in a can is whatever goes into it comes out with its nutritional value," he said. "You can get four times the price of nonedible waste."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Henry!)

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

Blogging a marathon -- from the marathon

A guy running a marathon with his HipTop PDA/camera/browser is "moblogging" (mobile blogging) the run -- typing and snapping pix as he goes.

24 miles, close. My feet hurt :-) oh you thought this wouild be easy david.... Gatorade here we come

Link Discuss (via Blackbelt Jones)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:46:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sewer-bot standards-body

A new standards-setting committee has formed to create best-practices for sewer-bots, semi-autonomous robot subterranean conduit-zippers that pull high-speed data lines around.

The operation and maintenance of sewage conveyance systems need active preventive maintenance and sound pipeline engineering input. If proper standard of care is not practiced, it is only a matter of time until major problems will manifest. At that point the sewer lease fee paid by a fiber installer to city hall will amount to nothing compared to the cost the public will have to bear to return the sewers back to normal. Historical lessons learned more than 100 years ago in the Paris sewer tunnels when engineers attempted to place more than one utility in the same space must be studied thoroughly so as not to repeat the same mistakes.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:18:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coffee-making PC casemod

Presenting the Caffeine Machine, "a fully functioning coffee maker integrated into a computer case. You pour the water into the funnel at the top, it goes down the tube into a book-shaped water tank where it sits until you hit the power switch, at which point the heating coil boils the water, sending it back up another tube and into the coffee grounds basket." The site has a walk-through if you have a yen to make your own. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gareth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:42:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LOTR's armorer and obsessive attention to detail

Rhys sez: "The Journal of Metallurgy interviews Peter Lyon, sword- and weapon-maker for The Lord of the Rings films. Possibly the only academic journal in which you'll find a discussion of the material properties of Ringwraith weaponry."

So for four years, in an on-site foundry, Lyon focused his skills on Middle-earth weaponry. From artists' drawings he crafted swords that were designed to reflect their own histories. Those that had seen many battles were forged, then aged by applying acid and other chemicals to create a pitted, corroded effect (Figures 2a and 2b). The damaged surfaces were cleaned to give the appearance of an old blade that was still cared for. Swords used by elves were elegant and curved to represent their more evolved culture (Figure 3). Orcs who were barbaric fighting creatures, carried crude, chunky weapons...

Such details -- the metalsmiths hand-forged more than 10,000 buckles for the Orcs alone -- pass by so quickly they are nearly impossible for the average viewer to notice.

"Unfortunately, so much of it isn't actually seen in the film, and so people would argue, why do it then? Why on earth would you go to that trouble?" Taylor said. "Because the real world has a level of subliminal detail that supports a cultural inheritance through graphic design that gives you the feeling that what you are looking at in the present is predated by a huge cultural influence that goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years. . .Therefore, every single actor, every single character, had a different buckling system, a different belting system, a different level of cultural integrity built into the variety of detailing on the armoring, to emulate the feeling of this process."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rhys!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:10:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Email that won't travel more than 500 miles

Great sysadmin war-story about a university mail-system that would not transmit mail to hosts more than 500 miles away.

I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails. This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own account was delivered without a hitch. Ditto for one sent to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington. Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles). It failed. Boston, failed. Detroit, failed. I got out my address book and started trying to narrow this down. New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence (580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity. I tried emailing a friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle. Thankfully, it failed. If the problem had had to do with the geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken down in tears.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jef!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:02:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ACLU versus Ashcroft: rewriting the Constitution

The ACLU is running a spectacular TV ad campaign criticizing Ashcroft's systematic undermining of the Constitution he is sworn to uphold. I was zooming through the commercial in a "Changing Rooms" episode at 32X on my TiVo and the ad leapt out at me. This is a great, tight message explaining what's wrong with John Ashcroft's America. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:50:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Law and Order: Battlestar Galactica Unit

Battlestar Galactica is to be reinvented in cinema verite, 24/Law and Order/artsy auteur style. GalacticaGeeks are hopping mad.

This shift in tone and look cannot be overemphasized. It is our intention to deliver a show that does not look like any other science fiction series ever produced. A casual viewer should for a moment feel like he or she has accidentally surfed onto a "60 Minutes" documentary piece about life aboard an aircraft carrier until someone starts talking about Cylons and battlestars...

Another way to challenge the audience visually will be our extensive use of the multi-split screen format. By combining multiple angles during dogfights, for example, we will be able to present an entirely new take on what has become a tired and familiar sequence that has not changed materially since George Lucas established it in the mid 1970s...

Story. We will eschew the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil twins, God-like powers and all the other clichés of the genre. Our show is first and foremost a drama. It is about people. Real people that the audience can identify with and become engaged in. It is not a show about hardware or bizarre alien cultures. It is a show about us. It is an allegory for our own society, our own people and it should be immediately recognizable to any member of the audience.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Edward!)

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

Saturday, December 7, 2002

Own a real Tron Gladiator's Tunic

Up for auction on Disney's eBay zone: an original prop "gladiator tunic" from the movie Tron (also for sale, original, 1950s Mousketeer jackets! (1, 2) Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:58:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SUVs are not healthy for children and other living things

SUV's aren't only hard on the environment, they're also dangerous to their owners, to other drivers, and to their owners' kids. Not to mention the whole, "I'm changing the climate -- ask me how!" factor.

Part of the reason for the high kill rate is that cars offer very little protection against an SUV hitting them from the side--not because of the weight, but because of the design. When a car is hit from the side by another car, the victim is 6.6 times as likely to die as the aggressor. But if the aggressor is an SUV, the car driver's relative chance of dying rises to 30 to 1, because the hood of an SUV is so high off the ground. Rather than hitting the reinforced doors of a car with its bumper, an SUV will slam into more vulnerable areas and strike a car driver in the head or chest, where injuries are more life-threatening. But before you get an SUV just for defensive purposes, think again. Any safety gains that might accrue are cancelled out by the high risk of rollover deaths, which usually don't involve other cars.

Ironically, SUVs are particularly dangerous for children, whose safety is often the rationale for buying them in the first place. Because these beasts are so big and hard to see around (and often equipped with dark-tinted glass that's illegal in cars), SUV drivers have a troubling tendency to run over their own kids. Just recently, in October, a wealthy Long Island doctor made headlines after he ran over and killed his two-year-old in the driveway with his BMW X5. He told police he thought he'd hit the curb.

Link Discuss (via Ambiguous)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:50:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will compulsory licenses save P2P?

Fascinating paper by copyright scholar Neal Netanel on compulsory licenses and P2P. The idea is that P2P nets are themselves valuable, but imperiled by copyright law, whose purpose is to make work available to the public, but which often fails in this regard. In order to compensate artists and promote use of file-sharing, Netanel proposes that ISPs pay a small fee per connection that is passed on to an ASCAP-like collecting society. The collecting society uses part of the money to search the web, to seek out Nielsen-family-like volunteers and to monitor sharing networks, and uses the data gleaned to disperse the rest to artists. Under this scheme, artists get paid, P2P nets flourish, ISPs have a much more valuable commodity to sell, and there's a strong impetus to develop ever-better file-sharing nets.

It sounds like a kinda far-out idea, but it's not all that different from the compulsory license that saved radio over 50 years ago, when broadcasters were expected to seek out licenses for each and every song they played, something too expensive to realistically undertake. The advent of compulsories -- which were not without their own problems, to be sure -- saved radio by requiring that broadcasters pay into a kitty which would be paid out to the artists whose music was discovered through statistically valid random sampling of the airwaves. Link (788k PDF) Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF comments on the Broadcast Flag

EFF filed its comments on the hateful Broadcast Flag -- a proposal to turn over a veto over new general-purpose digital media technology to Hollywood studios, the same companies that tried to outlaw the VCR -- yesterday. The FCC got over 2,000 comments on the issue, most strongly opposing it. There's a reply-comment period that opens today and closes mid-January; hope you folks will all think about contributing between now and then (watch this space for more).

The value of any new technology is in large part derived from unanticipated, innovative uses, uses that spring up as the widest possible variety of technologists and end-users tinker, modify, and experiment to discover remarkable ways of extracting new value unimagined even by the technology's inventors. The explosive growth of technologies such as the Internet, the cellular phone and the automobile is characterized by a Cambrian explosion of innovation in each case. From the drive-in theater to telephone dating to Internet-based auctions, innovation has been a principal driver of consumer adoption of a new technology.

Innovation flourishes in the absence of stricture. Hot-rodders and overclockers both rely on open hardware to tweak their equipment for maximum performance, and even an average driver would balk at the notion of purchasing an automobile whose hood was welded shut. A broadcast flag mandate, particularly if it includes tamper-resistance requirements, effectively welds shut the hood of every DTV device. It insists that only authorized parties may peek at the works of any given DTV device, and requires that interoperability be subject to the prior consent of vendors who may have reason to discriminate against new market entrants. In this regime, which BPDG co-chair Andy Setos of Fox Studios described as an "orderly marketplace," competition is replaced by gentlemen's agreements between self-interested parties who seek (in the case of the entertainment companies) to control private use of DTV programming and (in the case of the technology companies whose protection technologies are chosen) to shut out their competitors.

In the absence of a broadcast flag mandate, all an innovator needs to know to build a novel DTV device is what she can find in publiclyavailable materials. She need not beg permission of a favored vendor for some exotic copy-control system nor submit to a private license agreement governing the scope of her use of that system. She need not add superfluous tamper-resistance measures that seek to prevent end-users from modifying her invention or lock out service-centers from performing minor repairs.

The broadcast flag proposal turns all this on its head. An innovator in a broadcast flag mandate world needs to build her technology to interact not with a simple MPEG file, but with a proprietary system whose only documentation and tools exist at the sufferance of a private licensor. She is bound not only by the strictures of the art and science, but by any conditions that the licensors with whom she must treat choose to burden her with. She can not rely on free/open source software -- which encourages end-user modification -- for critical components.

Link (200k PDF) Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:20:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, December 6, 2002

How to explain cricket

The rules of cricket explained: the pie metaphor is great.

Right. So the guy from the other team is called a "bowler" and he's trying to knock your pies down before you can eat them. He throws with an overhand motion, releasing the ball before he steps into the crease, usually bouncing the ball on the ground to make it harder for the pie-eater to pick up. To protect your pies, you have a bat, and when he throws the ball, you swing the bat and try to swat the ball away. If you hit it, you and the other pie-eater switch places and then you can eat one of his pies.

Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:34:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Human-powered house-move on bicycle

Great photo-documentary of a "human-powered" house-move, accomplished in the icy winter on trailer-bikes. Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:32:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Taking pictures of hotels is terrorism

2600 Magazine reports that an amateur photographer in Denver was busted for taking too many pictures of the cop-zoo surrounding the hotel when Dick Cheney was staying. The cops busted him, seized his camera, called him names and accused him of being a terrorist. Then they refused to turn over his camera or an arrest report when he was released. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:29:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DVD hacker on trial in Norway on Monday

Jon Johansen, the Norweigan teenager who helped crack the crypto on DVDs so that he could watch out-of-region disks on his PC, is facing charges on Monday in Norway. I asked a lawyer-friend about this today: if Norgeigan law doesn't have the "anti-circumvention" stuff that the American DMCA has, what has Jon been charged with? It turns out that the MPAA insisted that Jon be prosecuted and that the best the Norweigan prosecutors could come up with is a statute forbidding intruding on a computer, so they charged him with hacking his own PC. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:26:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese Pi researchers get a trillion-digit record

Japanese researchers have set the record for calculated digits of Pi, turning in over one trillion post-decimal numbers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:23:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Celebrity illustrated Beowulf

High-freakin-larious abidged retelling of Beowulf in the style of Mexican fotonovelas, with speech-ballooned photos of celebs, politicos and other public figures. Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:28:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beautiful wind-walkers

Richard sez: "Theo Jansen has developed staggeringly beautiful machines that walk when powered by gusts of wind. Created to be 'art that evolves', he's now working on a way to store the energy to provide power when there is no wind. He likens this to muscles." Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

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

Nanotechnology at Alcor conference

I wrote an article for Small Times magazine about a couple of nanotechnology-related talks given at the fifth annual Alcor Extreme Life Extension conference in Newport Beach. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:30:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Active camouflage -- tricks of the light

Stunning footage of optical camouflage technology at the university of Tokyo, where retroreflectors are used to capture the visual behind an object and LCDs paint it on the front. I'm not clear if this is actual footage of the tech in motion, or just video FX -- either way, it's croggling. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:12:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Canadian sf antho open for business

Attention Canadian science fiction authors! Bakka Books is doing a second commemorative anthology to coincide with the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto next fall. Edited by Claude Lalumiere, who used to run Nebula books in Montreal, "Open Space: New Canadian Fantastic Fiction" is open to original submissions from Canadians and residents of Canada. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nalo!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spam-king drowning in snailmail spam

A spammer whose gleeful interview -- where he revelled in the money pouring in from spamming -- was Slashdotted is now drowning in catalogs and other junkmail. Slashdotters have submitted his name to every direct marketer on earch.

"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is," he told me. "These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me..."

"Several tons of snail mail spam every day might just annoy him as much as his spam annoys me," wrote one of the anti-spammers.

Link Discuss (via Plastic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:47:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ashcrofties threaten to shut down open wireless

Consultants working for the Department of Homeland Security have announced that the Feds view open WiFi as a means of abetting terrorists, and say that they will compel the open wireless operators will have to close off their nets.

Homeland Security is putting people in place who will be in a position to say, 'If you're going to get broken into ... we're going to start regulating.'

Y'know, when I moved to this country, the Bill of Rights seemed immutable. There was a Constitutionally guaranteed right to anonymous speech, written in by the anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers, who went on to found this nation. But who needs a Constitution if you've got homeland security? Link Discuss

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

Thursday, December 5, 2002

Karl Auerbach on ICANN's corruption

Karl Auerbach, the netizen who took on ICANN (the organization that governs the Internet's domain names) after he was elected to the board of directors and denied access to ICANN's financial, has given a great interview to Richard Koman at the O'Reilly Network:

Since when has efficiency of ICANN been an important goal? ICANN has been the most inefficient organization in the world; it's only created seven top-level domains in its four years of existence. And it only had elected members for half of that period, and only a partially elected membership. ICANN doesn't need efficiency; it needs to examine itself and discover, for example, that its staff is utterly out of control. Stuart Lynn in Shanghai got up and announced to the world that ICANN is going to have three new top-level domains of the sponsored type. Who decided that's what we need or that we need only three of them? Stuart Lynn did. He didn't consult with the community yet he declared the future business landscape of the Internet. He decided who is going to be on the main street of the Internet and who is going to be forced into the back alley. That's not a decision that arose out of elections and non-elections; that arose out of the fact that ICANN has an irresponsible staff that doesn't account to the board, much less to the public, and the board doesn't do anything about it. Insubordination is rife throughout ICANN and the board simply chooses to be powerless and not do anything about it. Elections are a non sequiteur. They have nothing to do with this issue.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Richard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:13:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

20-50,000 WiFi hotspots coming

Anil sez: "the former Project Rainbow has yielded Cometa, a joint effort by Intel, IBM Global Services, and AT&T to get 20k to 50k WiFi hotspots launched across the country, putting one within 5 minutes of everyone in a major metropolitan market. The best part? The CEO's name is 'Larry Brilliant.' I kid you not." Link Discuss (Thanks, Anil!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:06:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chat with me, Wil McCarthy and Geoff Landis next Tuesday

I'll be doing a live chat on December 10th at 6:30PM Pacific/9:30PM Eastern on SciFi.com, with science fiction writers Geoff Landis and Wil McCarthy. The topic is ON THE CUTTING EDGE: two rocket scientists and a computer expert discuss what it's like to work on write on SF's cutting edge. We're up right after Marina Sitris, "Deanna Troi" from Star Trek: TNG. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:59:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A talking Bush for Xmas

What better way to say, "Irradiate your prezzies before unwrapping" than giving an Xmas package containing a talking Shrub doll that says things like "Freedom will be defended" and "I come from Texas?" Hmmm: talking Bush... Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

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

Low-carb diets eliminate zits

Evidence is mounting to suggest that bread -- not chocolate -- causes pimples.

That is the theory of a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Highly processed breads and cereals are easily digested. The resulting flood of sugars makes the body produce high levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1).

This in turn leads to an excess of male hormones. These encourage pores in the skin to ooze large amounts of sebum, the greasy goop that acne-promoting bacteria love. IGF-1 also encourages skin cells called keratinocytes to multiply, a hallmark of acne, the team say in a paper that will appear in the December issue of Archives of Dermatology.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:36:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bakka Anthology cover art and invite

Check out the exceedingly swell cover-art for the Bakka Anthology, a book of short stories by writers -- including me -- who worked at Bakka Books in Toronto over the past 30 years. Reminder: the launch party is December 19th in Toronto at 7PM, and there are only 400 copies signed by all the authors (I signed all goddamned 400 of them last week!). Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:08:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Square dancing with old fashioned tractors

Jim sez: "Check this out! Squaredancing with old-timey tractors! I used to drive one that looked just like these! I still want one really bad. To drive around Palo Alto and all. It would be so much cooler than all the Ferarris and Lamborghinis."

The video clip is great! Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:10:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Suicide or Art?

Woman kills self at an "off-beat Berlin arts center," visitors think it is performance art. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gareth!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:03:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barlow's reasons for joining the EFF

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the EFF, list several reasons why it's a good idea to join the EFF:

Thomas Pynchon on bad acid couldn't dream up the paranoid nightmares now pouring out of Washington.

Today we learn that the CIA has been given authority to kill any American citizen who is *suspected* of terrorism. Say again? You mean they *all* have a license to kill? And not just the other, but us. Summarily. Without trial. Yikes.

Then there is John Poindexter's new Information Awareness Office - about which I have much more to say in my next screed - which is being extended authorization to combine and data-mine every database, commercial or public, in a massive search for evil-doers and behavioral patterns that match up with evil-doing. Records of your buying habits, your medical problems, the books you take out of the library, your driving skills, your telephone calls are all available to the Government without a warrant or a suspect.

The Pentagon is working on a new version of Internet protocols called eDNA that would render digital anonymity impossible. (I'll write more about this in my next spam as well.)

The Homeland Security Administration is being given a 150 billion dollars, 170,000 employees and few legal constraints to become a massive internal surveillance force with vastly streamlined access to your electronic records.

Meanwhile, the Content Industry is working on redesigning the architecture of both the Internet and your computer so that they - and anyone else who might be interested - will be able to see what's on your computer and control what can pass between it and any other digital devices.

Fair use, the ability to share information with your friends, indeed - the very right to know - is being criminalized. With these legally ordained control methods, it becomes trivially easy to stop the flow of dissent since it might contain copyrighted material.

The bats of Facism have left the cave. Against this cloud of leather-winged horrors, there are few organized forces of opposition.

But the Electronic Frontier Foundation is there. Indeed, we're practically all that's there.

In a country where the corporations just bought the most expensive and incumbent Congress in history, few are standing up for the rights of the individual.

But the Electronic Frontier Foundation is still defending your tattered liberties.

I suspect you feel scared, hopeless, and impotent against this anti-patriotic betrayal of American principles. You can't register your opposition. They ignore your demonstrations. You could send them a letter, but the White House no longer opens mail because it might contain anthrax. E-mails are utterly irrelevant to the them.

Much of what is being decreed is profoundly unconstitutional. But nothing is unconstitutional until someone has proven it so in court. Someone has to be willing to plead the case for liberty. This is what EFF does. And we need to do it before the Judiciary has been completely subverted by Bush/Ashcroft appointees. In 18 months it may be too late.

This is why I believe it is very important right now that you join the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I would say that even if I hadn't help start the thing. There just isn't anything else like us out there. Without our technically sophisticated interventions, the Internet will become the most penetrating and through surveillance tool ever conceived. Click right here -> www.eff.org <- right now and join.

Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:28:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video Humanism: Multimedia masks that "amplify as well as conceal"

Great NYT article about the compelling work of multimedia artist Gillian Wearing, whose tough-to-watch video work called Trauma is now on display at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Screenshot from the video at left. Excerpt:

"In one of the video's eight short scenes, a middle-aged woman sits before the camera, her face obscured by a shiny plastic mask of a sad-faced child and a blatantly synthetic wig. It is a laughable disguise, but her words are not funny. In a pained, quiet voice, the woman recounts being molested by her grandfather as a young girl every Sunday for several years, an ordeal that ceased only with his death.

The mask alters the revelation in a fascinating way, both buffering and intensifying its dreadfulness, creating the conflicting desire to hang on every word while also pulling back to decipher the visual power and artifice of the scene. The mask is delicately tactful, yet deadening. It respects the speaker's need for privacy, yet it executes a weird, surreal transformation, turning the speaker into a kind of freak... Yet the masks' crude but effective magic can trigger hope and giddy delight, feelings that often signal the presence of good art.

In these days of reality television and confessional talk shows, when Family Feud is played for real, Ms. Wearing has managed to do something new with the ever-volatile combination of people and cameras. Making a few easily discernible technical adjustments or adding accessories, she separates voices from faces, souls from bodies, inner thoughts from outward appearances in a process of masquerade, ventriloquism and displacement, drawing the viewer into a complex emotional web. At her best she slips rather raw chunks of real life into pristine envelopes clearly marked 'art' while keeping both hands on the table."

Link to museum web site, Link to NYT article (registration required) Discuss (Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:45:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sky Dayton's 802.11 Planet keynote

Danny's posted liveblogging notes from Sky "Boingo" Dayton's keynote at 802.11 Planet yesterday:

Survey says: 97% of travelling businessmen would alter their plans to gravitate to high-speed access (high-speed access is more important to them than wireless access)...

Dayton compares it to early days of ISPs ("Nobody knew who was their customer and who was their competition"). Back then, everybody tried to do everything - owning the wires, the network, and the brands. Eventually each company concentrated in one area - end users are AOL, MSN, networks are UUNET etc, wires are the telcos. (Hmmm. Has this happened in broadband yet?)

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:15:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Radiotherapy patients strip-searched "for safety"

Recent radiotherapy patients who ride the New York subway systems are tripping the Geiger counters, resulting in humiliating anti-dirty-bomb strip searches.

They said they called New York's terrorism task force for advice and were told that doctors should give patients letters describing the isotope used, its dose and date of treatment. Such letters should also include doctors' phone numbers to allow police to verify the information, the physicians said they were told...

Patients may choose to avoid public transportation to escape the problem, the doctors said.

Last night, at AA Gate 49 at JFK airport, I was told that the seats that the waiting passengers were sitting in would have to be vacated "for safety," which translated into: "In the past 15 months, we have yet to come up with a better place to perform random anal probes than the only seats at this end of the terminal, so you will all have to stand for the next ninety minutes." I was also told that I couldn't sit on the floor against the wall, "for safety." I feel safer already. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian Supremes: no patents on mousies

The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that the "Harvard Mouse" -- a mouse bred at Harvard for susceptibility to cancer for use in lab trials -- cannot be patented. Link Discuss (Thanks, Craig!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:46:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stupid copyright claims? Just ask

Ed Felten's got a new solution to the copyright problem: just ask. Ask and ask and ask.

When companies make silly overreaching claims about the extent of their copyrights, don't just ignore them. Call them and ask for exceptions. Call WalMart and ask permission to tell your friends about their prices. (WalMart told FatWallet's ISP that that's infringement.) Call Turner Broadcasting and ask permission to fast-forward through the commercials in their shows. (Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner told Cableworld that commercial skipping is illegal.) Call Adobe and ask permission to read their e-book of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to your kid. (One of Adobe's licenses prohibited this.)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:40:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Congress makes it even harder to reach out and touch 'em

Congresscritters are sick of hearing from their constituents, so they're shutting down or obscuring their email addresses and replacing them with forms that route the mail to god-knows-where. Of course, physical mail and Congress don't get along -- that's thraxpanik for you -- and their fax machines are usually out of paper. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:37:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crazy LP covers

Wonderful gallery of obscure and humorous LP covers, with some MP3 samples. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rupert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, December 4, 2002

Lab Notes

Pocket-size DNA detectors, globally-distributed storage for billions of users, and injectable bioengineered band-aids for broken hearts... all in this issue of Lab Notes, my research digest from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. Please take a peek! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:12:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

But would suicide bombers wear pasties and hump-me-pumps?

The Reverse Cowgirl writes:

It appears that, as we speak, 8,000 male members of the U.S. Navy are descending upon the girlie bars of Hong Kong in search of strippers named Suzie Wong. and, in doing so, they may be inadvertently setting themselves up for a possible terrorist attack by members of the no-no notorious Big Al's al Qaeda striptease terrorist posse.

my god, are not even titty bars sacred anymore? to what has this world come? a Hong Kongian deputy commissioner of police says they've beefed up local patrols, but, more importantly... his name is Dick Lee.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:36:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mouse Genome will be published Thursday

Stefan sez:

The genome for the mouse is being published on several websites on Thursday. Here's you chance to get in on the ground floor of creating Red, White & Green Xmas mice, plump savory eatin'-mice, and freakish radiotelepathic hive-mice with gestalt minds and a overpowering urge to dominate mankind.

Link (NYT, registration required) Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:26:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Groovy underwater VR panoramas

Gorgeous underwater QTVR pano's. Navigate in a full circle, or vertically.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jens!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:23:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Refrigerator chills food with cool (but *loud*) sounds

Scientists at a Pennsylvania State University lab are developing ways to use sound waves to chill food. Research is sponsored by Ben and Jerry's ice cream!

They have produced a sonic fridge that converts very loud sounds to directly cool a fridge containing ice cream. The researchers hope that their work will end reliance on gases that can contribute to global warming [and] have exploited the fact that sound waves travel by compressing and expanding the gas that they are generated in. (...)

Humans feel pain when they hear sounds of 120 decibels, a level typically reached next to the speakers at a rock concert. The sounds pumped through the Penn State fridge reach 173 dB, tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert. Sounds of 165 dB would cause a person's hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Si!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:08:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will Smith to star in big-screen adaptation of Asimov's "I, Robot"

Hollywood trades are reporting that Will Smith may star in a film adaptation of Isaac Asimov's classic sci-fi book series "I, Robot." Alex Proyas ("Dark City") is slated to direct the Twentieth Century Fox project.

Production is scheduled to begin in the sprin