Book launch this Thursday in San Francisco for my collection

By Cory Doctorow at 11:13 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

A reminder: I'll be launching my new short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, at Borderlands Books in San Francisco this Thursday, at 7PM. I'm going to be signing copies and reading from a new work. Hope to see you! Link

Newsmonster is hiring!

By Cory Doctorow at 10:21 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

Newsmonster -- a wicked-cool, Mozilla-based RSS reader -- is funded and looking to hire an engineer. The rarity value of this, a cool tech gig in San Francisco in 2003, is really astonishing.

We're looking for someone with experience in

# JavaScript, Java, C, C++ (min 5 years)

# XML including SAX, DOM, XPATH, XSLT, XUL, RSS, and RDF

# Understanding of "modern" RPC technologies (REST/SOAP/XMLRPC)

Link

O'Reilly eBay Hacks book is out, with an intro by me!

By Cory Doctorow at 10:10 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

eBay Hacks -- the latest of the O'Reilly Hacks series -- is out. It runs down 99 tips and tricks for eBay, ranging from simple buying and selling techniques to advanced programming with the eBay API. I wrote the intro for this book, and I'm really pleased with how it came out:

eBay makes us all into participants in the market again. It's no coincidence that eBay's first great wave of participation came from the collectibles trade. The collectibles market occurs at the intersection of luck (discovering a piece at a yard-sale or thrift shop), knowledge (recognizing its value), market-sense (locating a buyer for the goods) and salesmanship (describing the piece's properties attractively). It requires little startup capital and lots of smarts, something that each of us possess in some measure.

Somewhere, in the world's attics and basements, are all the treasures of history. Someone is using the Canopic jar containing Queen Nefertiti's preserved spleen as an ashtray. Someone is using George Washington's false teeth as a paperweight. Somewhere, a mouse is nibbling at a frayed carton containing the lost gold of El Dorado. A Yahoo! for junk would never break even: you simply couldn't source enough crack junque ninjas to infiltrate and catalog the world's storehouses of *tchotchkes*, white elephants and curios.

And just as Napster found the cheapest way to get all the music online, eBay has found the most cost-effective means of cataloging the world's attics and basements. It's attic-Napster, and it's spread the cost and effort around. When you spy a nice casino ashtray on the 25-cent shelf at Thrift Town and snap its pic and put it up on eBay, and when the renowned collector of glass ashtrays, ColBatGuano, bids it up to $400, you have taken part in a market transaction that has simultaneously catalogued a nice bit of bric-a-brac and moved it to a collection where it will be lovingly cared for -- and you've left a record of where it is and what it was worth when last we saw it. Buried in eBay's backup tapes is a Blue Book with the last known value of nearly every object we have ever created as a species, from Trinitite (green, faintly radioactive glass fused at the detonation of the first nuclear explosion at Los Alamos, $2.59 a gram at last check) to commodity 40-gigabyte laptop hard-drives ($30 at press-time and falling fast).

Link

10 techs that deserve to die

By Cory Doctorow at 10:07 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

Bruce Sterling's produced a list of ten dreadful technologies whose day has gone, technologies that deserve to die:

Most loathsome of all is the fiendish spam hard-burned into DVDs, which forces one to suffer through the commercials gratefully evaded by videotape fast-forwards. The Content Scrambling System copy protection scheme doesn’t work, and the payoff for pirating DVDs is massive, because unlike tapes, digital data don’t degrade with reproduction. So DVDs have the downside of piracy and organized crime, without the upside of free, simple distribution. Someday they will stand starkly revealed for what they really are: collateral damage to consumers in the entertainment industry’s miserable, endless war of attrition with digital media.

Link (via Kottke)

"New Ground" radio host Douridas to program iTunes?

By Xeni Jardin at 3:17 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

Rumor: A BoingBoing pal says that Chris Douridas, host of AOL and KCRW's syndicated radio show "New Ground," has just been tapped as music programmer for iTunes.

Mild-mannered spam victim strikes back

By Xeni Jardin at 2:02 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

Wired News story about a graphic artist whose domain and professional reputation were effectively hijacked by a spammer -- and what he did to fight back:

One week later, the spammer struck again, using Markley's domain. Five days after the second attack, the spammer struck yet again. Thousands of bounce reports and hate e-mails arrived in Markley's inbox. And Earthlink reps told Markley they could do nothing to help him. So "blood boiling, furious and literally foaming at the mouth," Markley set out to track the spammer down. (...)

Markley checked the headers on the original spam returned with some of the bounces. Then he learned how to access domain-registry information and how to use a trace-route program. Over the next two weeks, he painstakingly worked his way through a half-dozen hijacked servers and a dozen spoofed e-mail addresses and bogus identities to find "his" spammer. "Last Thursday, at around 7 p.m., I finally knew without a doubt that my nemesis was Eddy Marin, who has a reputation as the world's most prolific spammer," said Markley.

Link

New work by painter Isabel Samaras: The Haunted Dollhouse

By Xeni Jardin at 1:43 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

If you're in LA: new work by BoingBoing pal and Bay Area artist Isabel Samaras will be included in a show called "The HAUNTED DOLLHOUSE," which opens tonight and runs though Nov 8th at Copro Nason Gallery in Culver City.

Shown here: "Wednesday The Destroyer," Oil on wood.

Link

New: "Beginners Guide to Building Robots" book

By Xeni Jardin at 1:35 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

Gareth Branwyn, blogger, author, and scribe of Wired Magazine's Jargon Watch column, has a new book out: The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots. It's part of the popular Absolute Beginner's Guide series by Que publishing, and leads newbies into the fascinating world of robots and do-it-yourself bot building. Gareth explains:

"The book contains projects that detail how to build three cool robots out of a coat hanger, a trashed computer mouse, and those AOL CDs that seem to breed on your desktop. I'm not kidding. Junkbots R Us.

Ilustrations throughout the book where done by bOING bOING's amazing Mark Frauenfelder, with photos by Street Tech's very own Jay Townsend. The site will include information not available in the book, bug fixes on the projects, reader hardware hacks, robot news, and downloadable "Heroes of the Robolution" trading cards illustrated by Mark."

Link

Why grossout photos online should make you smile

By Xeni Jardin at 1:30 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

Because they're proof that the Internet is still, on whole, uncensorable:

They die over and over on continuous loop, the journalist's throat slashed again and again, the bank robber blown up by the bomb locked to his body time after time. The graphic video and still images of dead and dying people that mainstream news organizations choose not to display inevitably find their way to the Internet, where they can't be killed. Some can be legally challenged, but even if a site is shut down, the image rarely goes away.

And there's a vigorous argument over whether instant access to such images is good or bad: Are they examples of stomach-turning excess or honest depictions of a disturbing world? There's little disagreement, however, over the Internet's role in eroding the mainstream media's reign as gatekeeper -- the media's decisions to withhold images from their viewers no longer mean viewers won't see those images

Link (via politech)

Invasion of the high-tech body snatchers

By Xeni Jardin at 1:26 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

Brilliant and minstretching manifesto on the end of four billion years of Darwinian evolution, the dawn of Homo Technicus, and the ethical implications of bioengineering. Author Alan H. Goldstein is director of the Biomedical Materials Engineering Science Program at Alfred University in New York. Snip:

"The current popular fixation on clones, or science fiction's obsession with cyborgs, does not provide useful paradigms for the new forms of sentience that will ultimately emerge from nanotechnology. Both clones and cyborgs are too anthropomorphic. Ultimately, the future will not be about mixing humanity and technology but about sentient chemistry. Just as the revolution in quantum physics laid the foundation for the creation of weapons capable of vaporizing the planet, so the nanotechnology revolution is laying the foundation for the end of evolution and of life in any form we can imagine."

"A recognition of the ethical implications of bioengineering should have followed logically from the ethical questions raised by genetic engineering. But somewhere in our human hearts we apparently need to believe that, even in a cyborg, there will be a border where biology starts and technology ends -- a plug, a slot, an interface. That, unfortunately, is a fantasy. Silicon and carbon are perfectly happy to bond on the molecular level. DNA has no mandate from any deity that gives it an eternal role as the information storage system of sentience. Homo technicus will be different at the atomic level. We are not only going through the looking glass; we are merging with it."

Link (thanks, Stephen Hill)

FBI invokes Patriot Act against reporters covering Adrian Lamo case

By Xeni Jardin at 1:21 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

Via Declan's politech list, news that the FBI is demanding that several reporters retail any notes or communication records pertaining to Adrian Lamo, the "Homeless Hacker" who turned himself in to Federal Authorities earlier this month. Lamo has been charged in NYC federal court with computer fraud and unlawful access.

The letters, first revealed in a report by Wired News, state that pending authorization, the FBI will issue subpoenas for the reporters' records regarding conversations with Lamo. (...)

FBI Agent Christine Howard states in the criminal complaint against Lamo that she gained information about Lamo's New York Times break-in from articles published by Securityfocus.com, Newsbytes (a Washington Post web site), the Associated Press, MSNBC.com, ComputerWorld.com and the San Francisco Weekly. Several reporters from these and other organizations have received requests from the FBI to retain all records relating to their contact with Lamo. Howard, part of the Cybercrime Task Force in the New York field office, told Wired News that "all reporters who spoke with Lamo" should expect similar letters.

Link

First-ever Internet-ready satellite launched

By Xeni Jardin at 1:18 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

Boeing's new 376HP model satellite -- "e-BIRD" -- was successfully launched earlier this week. The satellite was launched by an Ariane 5 rocket out of French Guiana on September 27, and is said to be the first ever specifically engineered for two-way broadband communications.

With a configuration of multiple spotbeams, each providing high-power regional coverage, e-BIRD can contribute to national and pan-European broadband programmes such as the European Union's e-Europe initiative that aims for all schools, universities and businesses to have access to the Internet by 2005. It is estimated that a quarter of the population and between 10 to 40 per cent of Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the European Union and candidate countries do not have access to broadband today.

link (via pho, thanks JP!)

Study says RIAA lawsuits have decreased P2P downloads

By Xeni Jardin at 1:14 pm Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

'Net research firm Nielsen/NetRatings says fileswapping volume has decreased on popular peer-to-peer networks since the most recent bout of RIAA-vs-consumer lawsuits.

Since the last week of June, traffic to the largest network, Kazaa, fell 41 percent to 3.9 million visitors during the week ending Sept. 21. Similar drops in usage were recorded for BearShare and IMesh networks. "The RIAA is clearly sending a strong message to American Web users and the message appears to be working," said Greg Bloom, senior Internet analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings (NTRT: news, chart, profile). "With hundreds of individuals facing real lawsuits, the threat to music file sharers is serious." Usage of popular file-sharing applications is at an all-time low, he added.

Link

Xeni on NPR's Day to Day: new CA anti-spam law

By Xeni Jardin at 10:32 am Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day":

California's Anti-Spam Law: NPR's Alex Chadwick talks with technology writer Xeni Jardin about California's new anti-spam law, scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2004, and how effective the law might be.

Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.

WiFi wants to be free

By Cory Doctorow at 8:18 am Tuesday, Sep 30 • Comments • Share

Two interesting pieces on this morning's WiFi Networking News:

Intel's free networking day benefitted free networks: in hindsight, it seems obvious that the biggest beneficiary for publicity for free wireless will be free wireless networks. Still, the stats are compelling:

...the Starbucks in downtown Portland had 40 unique logins while Portland's free Personal Telco hot spot downtown had 176 unique logins.

Hotspot suppliers are offering competing packages for cafes that want to offer free wireless, including one that claims to "stop spam" (??). It's not clear to me, though, why a cafe that wants to give away free WiFi needs a "managed" solution (which requires that you depend on a tech-support queue for problems) that costs $300 when the "unmanaged" solution (a regular access-point, which can be "fixed" by turning it off and on) costs $40.

The moral of the story: Free WiFi is really, really free. Or at least cheap. The brisk market in WiFi gear, combined with the commodity nature of packets, makes it hard to engineer the kinds of market-failures in WiFi that represent gigantic marginal profit opportunities.