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Monday, March 31, 2003

French's Mustard: Eat me! I'm not French!

Mustard-maker goes on the PR offensive amid nationwide fits of wartime anti-France fervor:

"The only thing French about French's Mustard is the name," the company announced. The mustard-maker said it felt obliged to hire a PR company to set the record straight after some media reports suggested it was being -- or should be -- boycotted because of its "French" links. A report on CNN apparently showed one restaurant replacing French's mustard with a Heinz product. "For the record, French's would like to say there is nothing more American than French's Mustard," it said, referring to its New York origins.

Update: one BoingBoing reader tells us of having received this response to an email sent to French's about the "Dude, We're So Not French!" flap:

French's appreciates your comments and is always pleased to hear from their customers. Please take note that French's -- in no way -- meant to be disrespectful or to distance themselves from the French. The press release was only written in response to several media outlets who incorrectly included French's mustard when encouraging their viewers to boycott all things French. This press release was not proactive, but rather, reactive. It is our job to educate and inform the public about French's mustard. French's is proud of their American roots and is next year celebrated their 100th birthday. I should hope that this sheds some light on were French's is coming from, and hope that you will continue to use their products.

Est-ce que vous avez du Grey Poupon? Link to news story, Link to French's Mustard website, Discuss, (via TKblog)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:22:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A beautiful collection of ice photography

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:04:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

30,000 words nailed on novel #3

Today, I broke the 30,000-word-mark on my new novel, "/usr/bin/god," which I'll likely finish off around Christmas. To celebrate the milestone, I've posted a 2,000-word excerpt from the opening of the book:

Mason's car -- "The Mobile Nerd Command Center" or MNC2 for short -- died the morning of the most disastrous job interview of his life. He practically lived out of the MNC2, charging his device-array -- phone, email pager, GPS, laptop, MP3 player, digital camera, and PDA -- from the DC inverter that dangled from a wad of duct-tape around the cigarette lighter; the back seat was full of dead Mountain Dews and empty coffee-cups from Highway 101's many Starbuckses; and both sun visors bore clip-on CD organizers filled with home-burned MP3 CDs that contained six hundred plus hours of music.

As Mason pulled into the empty Menlo Park parking-lot that morning, the dashboard lit up christmas with a Defcon 5 array of idiot-lights. Six different chimes sounded from the absolutely spectacular sound-system, resonating with jeep-beat bass that made his gut churn. The engine died as he pulled into the spot and the transmission made a horrible, grinding noise as he shifted into park. When he switched off the ignition, the engine made a chuggetta-chuggetta noise that sounded like a cartoon foley effect. Mason had a vision of his car's hood popping open and emitting a geyser of steam, followed by all four tires going flat in unison, but the chuggetas died down and he was sitting in the parking lot, seated at the conn of the former Mobile Nerd Command Center, with twenty minutes to his job interview.

Job interview! He cringed at the words, cringed at the memory of the grueling, humiliating pre-test he'd had to do to even *get* a job-interview, which had included fifteen essay questions on the history of the Internet, the fine points of Microsoft Foundation Classes, and SQL query-syntax. He'd had to define a glossary of no fewer than 30 technical terms, including "PEBKAC" ("Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair"), which had been his freaking *login* for five years on an underpowered Solaris box at his ISP.

Link Discuss

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

File-compression can detect life

Public-domain compression algorithms are a good, fast way at calculating the complexity and redundancy of some dataset (the more redundancy, the better the data compresses). It turns out that true fossils have really different compression characteristics from rocks that only look like fossils.

Although biological stromatolites and non-biological stromatolite-look-alike structures appear similar to the human eye, the biological origin of stromatolites makes them more ordered, more highly patterned. And it is this patterning that, while hard for the human eye to discern, is readily detected by the compression algorithm. Non-biological stromatolite-like structures are more random, less patterned and therefore less compressible.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CodeCon audio online

The audio of all the talks from last month's CodeCon -- the low cost conference where P2P hackers show off new, running code -- are online! The files are available via BitTorrent, Bram Cohen's swarming download technology that puts less load on the server the more people are downloading it. Link Discuss (via Infoanarchy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:06:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fiction, interview and review online at Strange Horizons

I'm the Author of the Month at the excellent e-zine, Strange Horizons. They've published a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a long interview that Katsi Macdonald (daughter of James D. Macdonald and Debra Doyle) conducted with me, and have reprinted my short story, Visit the Sins, which initially appeared in Asimov's and was later reprinted in one of Hartwell's Year's Best anthologies.

Grampa was switched off when Sean found him on the ward, which throbbed with a coleslaw of laser-light and video games and fuck-pix and explosions and car wrecks and fractals and atrocities.

Sean remembered visits before the old man was committed, he and his dutiful father visiting the impeccable apartment in the slate house in Kingston, Ontario. Grampa made tea and conversation, both perfectly executed and without soul. It drove Sean's father bugfuck, and he'd inevitably have a displaced tantrum at Sean in the car on the way home. The first time Grampa had switched on in Sean's presence -- it was when Sean was trying out a prototype of Enemies of Art against his father's own As All Right-Thinking People Know -- it had scared Sean stupid.

Grampa had been in maintenance mode, running through a series of isometric stretching exercises in one corner while Sean and his father had it out. Then, suddenly, Grampa was between them, arguing both sides with machinegun passion and lucidity, running an intellect so furious it appeared to be steam-driven. Sean's tongue died in his mouth. He was made wordless by this vibrant, violent intellect that hid inside Grampa. Grampa and his father had traded extemporaneous barbs until Grampa abruptly switched back off during one of Sean's father's rebuttals, conceding the point in an unconvincing, mechanical tone. Sean's father stalked out of the house and roared out of the driveway then, moving with such speed that if Sean hadn't been right on his heels, he wouldn't have been able to get in the car before his father took off.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:04:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DoCoMo to launch personal GPS phone handset in April

According to this article, Japanese telecom companny NTT DoCoMo has announced that it will launch its first GPS-compatible handset F661i at the end of April.

This is not like the GPS functionality that the US Phone companies introduced so far. In the US the GPS coordinates are only used for emergencies and not yet for actually providing value to the user in other situations. Uers of the F661i can send their current location to other i-mode enabled phones. In addition, a memo function allows users to store location information, including map, telephone numbers and addresses. The phone supports three applications of the GPS functionality:

Link Discuss (via unwired list)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:02:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spraypainted "watertight" motherboard runs underwater

Chuck sez, "I'm not really submitting the whole site. Just the directory of 11 pictures of a motherboard running underwater. According to monoperative: 'the motherboard was spraypainted to make it watertight, which was successful. the future in cooling.'" Link Discuss (Thanks, Chuck!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:36:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toronto in song

Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics has composed a list of the fifty songs that best capture the spirit of Toronto.

38. "I Hate the Bloody Queen" by The Queen Haters...

30. "Parkette" by Bob Snider: "There was no ball playing and no crayfishing/And they called it a parkette after a politician." In the song, the singer sees Toronto's woodland supplanted by a parcel of sod.

22. "Echo Beach" by Martha and the Muffins: Rush is good, but M&M might be the only Toronto band. They were so biology class, so stereo-shop employee, so Square One, so Sheridan College, so Plantation Bowl, so smooth, suburban asphalt. Cold, zippered, click-tracked. Like a robot snapping its fingers.

7. "OK, Blue Jays" by The Batboys: For the '85 American League Championship Series, the U.S. media were humoured by the politeness of this baseball "fight" song. But "OK" is beautifully us. Lose seven in a row in '87? It's okay. Get drubbed by the Twins in '89? S'okay, too. World Series titles in '92 and '93? No problem with that.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Atwood: America is selling itself out

Margaret Atwood, Canadian literary star and author of "The Handmaid's Tale," wrote a stern open letter to the USA in yesterday's Globe and Mail. The war isn't what's got her upset, though: it's the Bush Administration's exploitation of the war to undermine the civil liberties that define America as the city on the hill, the democratic proving ground to which all other democracies can aspire.

You're gutting the Constitution. Already your home can be entered without your knowledge or permission, you can be snatched away and incarcerated without cause, your mail can be spied on, your private records searched. Why isn't this a recipe for widespread business theft, political intimidation, and fraud? I know you've been told all this is for your own safety and protection, but think about it for a minute. Anyway, when did you get so scared? You didn't used to be easily frightened.

You're running up a record level of debt. Keep spending at this rate and pretty soon you won't be able to afford any big military adventures. Either that or you'll go the way of the USSR: lots of tanks, but no air conditioning. That will make folks very cross. They'll be even crosser when they can't take a shower because your short-sighted bulldozing of environmental protections has dirtied most of the water and dried up the rest. Then things will get hot and dirty indeed.

You're torching the American economy. How soon before the answer to that will be, not to produce anything yourselves, but to grab stuff other people produce, at gunboat-diplomacy prices? Is the world going to consist of a few megarich King Midases, with the rest being serfs, both inside and outside your country? Will the biggest business sector in the United States be the prison system? Let's hope not.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Greg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, March 30, 2003

Inadvertent wartime farce: the Phrasealator

Story in today's UK Guardian about the farcical cultural disconnects that result from a language translation gadget known as the Phrasealator (not to be confused with the Shizzolator):

"The object of discussion was an ancient, dust-clogged, diesel-powered water pump which the [Iraqi] farmers wanted to start, with the help of the US marines, who control the roadside area east of the town of Diwaniya where the farmers have their fields. The pump lies under the very guns of the marines, hunkered down in foxholes behind a high sand wall, scanning the landscape for signs of the elusive, intangible, incomprehensible enemy.

Cooper, a major in the military's civil affairs department, didn't have an interpreter, exactly. He had a handheld black plastic device the size of an eggbox called a Phrasealator. Users run a stylus down a series of menus on a screen, pick a phrase in English, touch the line, and the Phrasealator squawks the equivalent in Arabic.

The machine lacks elementary social skills. It only covers a handful of situations, such as crowd control, law and order and emergencies. If you want to tell someone to get out of their car slowly or not to be frightened, it's great. If you have to talk to farmers in rural Iraq about intimate details of their lives, families, crops and horticultural needs, and understand what they say back, it's useless.."

Link, Discuss, (Thanks, John Von!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:52:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy Birthday to... Jane Frauenfelder!!!

Congratulations to Mark, Carla, and Sarina Frauenfelder on the birth of Jane Holly Frauenfelder, March 29, 2003! Here's sweet Jane with big sis Sarina! Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:00:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weezer's symbolic value

Great undergrad thesis on the rise, fall and rebirth of the band Weezer, written for a Harvard social studies degree.

Utilizing the institutional framework and terminology Pierre Bourdieu establishes in his "Market of Symbolic Goods," I frame rock music as a middlebrow art that regards itself as possessing certain elements of highbrow "legitimate" art -- namely "symbolic value" beyond a work's value as a market commodity. I then use this institutional framework and aesthetic ideology to investigate the process by which Weezer's reputation changed dramatically over time. Examining data from several sources: an original survey of 150 music writers, an original survey of 20,000 Weezer fans, original interviews with music writers and editors, and an analysis of a sample of 2000 articles and reviews mentioning Weezer, I argue that a strong fan following led to a reconsideration of Weezer's artistic merits by the music press and altered the vocabulary used to discuss the band. I ultimately conclude that a number of parties play a role in deliberating claims of artistic value in rock music: music writers, artists, fans, and the commercial interests that employ writers and artists.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:53:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Forver War: time to read it again

I picked up a copy of Joe Haldeman's classic novel The Forever War last night as a gift for a friend, but I'm going to keep it. I got to re-reading it last night (for the first time in nearly 20 years) and couldn't put it down. Haldeman wrote this novel after returning from his tour of duty in Vietnam, and the book made the rounds, getting turned down by publisher after publisher, by editors who recognized the book's merit but questioned the political savvy of publishing a war-novel. Eventually, Joe rewrote one section of the book, softening it, and finally, the book saw print, becoming an instant classic. The new, author's preferred edition restores the original text, and is absolutely timely and engrossing. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:53:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Mutter Museum in color photos

Last night, I dropped in at Borderlands Books to sign some copies of my novel that people had ordered, and I happened on a giant, beautiful photo-boook about Philadelphia's Mütter Museum.

The Mütter is an historical pathology museum that began with the private collection of the 19th Century pathologist Dr. Isaac Parrish. The 20,000+ artifacts there are life-changingly weird. They have the conjoined liver of Cheng and Eng, the original Siamese Twins; the corpse of the "soap lady," an obese woman whose fat interated with the lye soil in her pauper's grave, turning her into a giant bar of soap; the twisted skeletons of hydro- and micro-cephalic babies and infants; the skulls of hundreds of suicides with crabbed copperplate phrenological annotations, such as "Note sloping forehead, indicates criminal mentality?"

There are the eaten-away skulls of tertiary syphlitics; the 9'-long colon of a man who took one dump a month until he died in his late 20s; dozens of drawers full of items removed from choking peoples' windpipes ("buttons," "coins," "wedding rings," "safety pins (open)," "safety pins (closed)") und zo weiter.

For all the PT Barnumium present, there is an air of curious dignity and solemnity at the Mütter. People whisper and murmur. The glass cases are both revolting and humbling. Their contents stay with you. Days after your visit, part of you is still at the Mütter -- quieted, humbled, repulsed and attracted.

The Mutter doesn't allow photography, and until recently the only photographic records you could take away with you were a few picture postcards and a calendar. But the Mütter Museum book, with its terse captions and beautiful color plates is a far better collection of photos than anything I could have produced. (Inexplicably, these plates are interspersed with whimsical pictures of Weimaraner dogs posed with exhibits from the museum, shot by William Wegman).

I keep opening this big hardcover and paging through it and getting stuck on this page or that, captured by the Mütter. I haven't been back in five years or so, but it feels like the Mütter's inside me again. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

L.A. art show: Nathan Cabrera's "Throwing Rocks at Girls"

Offhand, can't remember the last time I stumbled into a seven-foot-tall 3D bear or a life-sized she-Stormtrooper armed with a revolving cannon at an art gallery. But I did last night. If you're in LA between now and April 26, don't miss Nathan Cabrera's debut solo exhibition in LA, "Throwing Rocks at Girls," at sixspace gallery downtown. Cabrera works on childrens' programming at NBC and Discovery Kids by day, and art that has been described as "Toy Story Gone Psycho" by night. The show features several compelling, life-scale sculptural works, but the centerpiece of the collection is a tryptich of iris prints. Each depicts a quirky/deadly/kick-your-ass-and-laugh-about-it cartoony girl character, with a shooting target diagram superimposed via etched glass frame. Sixspace gallery is selling an affordably-priced set of high-quality digital prints from Cabrera -- can't remember the details, but was something like $50 for a collection of 60 giclee prints three 8" x 10" digital prints, signed and numbered in an edition of 50, for $60. Killer stuff.
Link to gallery website, Link to print set purchase details, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:27:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Savory Japanese ice-creams

Back when I was mainlining carbs, I was always down for a cup of lotus-bean-paste ice-cream after sushi. Not too sweet, very creamy. But Japanese ice-cream goes way beyond just slightly sweet flavors. This gallery of eel, chicken-wing, tongue, squid and fish ice-creams from Japan gives me the willies. Link Discuss (via Die Puny Humans)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:23:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Judging a book by its cover

The Readerville book-cover reviews judge books by their cover. Genre writers spend a lot of time talking about covers, but it's never this highbrow -- it more frequently runs to, "Why the hell is there a badly-proportioned busty space-mercenary in an unzipped jumpsuit firing a laser on the cover of my damned book?"

There are a lot of obvious traps a designer could fall into designing a cover for John Szwed's So What: The Life of Miles Davis, but designer Massand Peploe avoids them all -- no faux retro jazz-cover styling, no hepcat winking design tricks. The simplicity of the concept could scarcely be improved upon. In reality, it's a little, um, jazzier than this scan reflects. The whole thing's glossy black and silver, like a darkened nightclub with a single spotlit musician. And what appears to be just a simple photo of one end of a trumpet actually wraps all the way around the spine to the back to reveal Miles himself on the other end. Simple, modern, low-key (but witty -- the lines get smaller and smaller, like notes fading away) typography underscores the final verdict on this one: it doesn't blow.

Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Warren Ellis's alternate Tesla

Warren Ellis takes a break from scripting his new comic to rant about the alternate history posisbilities of Nicola Tesla.

You know Tesla patented something very like a solar panel in 1901? Do you even care?

I do, because it's going to make my spaceships fly. Tesla's solar panels, Tesla's wireless broadcast power, and the Biefeld-Brown Effect, an electrogravitational phenomenon that causes powered flight. (Tesla himself had also dicked around with electromagnetic field lift, to no great consequence. But if he'd gotten proper funding for broadcast power, things could have been different. He may have been a figure of greater stature in his later years, making Townsend Brown consider contact him. A success in broadcast power would make Tesla a more vital figure in his later years, to be certain.)

(I mean, can you imagine this? America, between the wars, was not the US of today. It did not recognise itself as a "superpower". That's one of the things that prevented a quick save of the Great Depression; America did not attempt to shape the international economic environment solely through its own actions, acting as the hegemony. It had retreated to its old policy of isolationism, as handed down by George Washington in his Farewell Address: "avoid entangling alliances". But imagine an America between the wars whose streets were lit, from coast to coast, by wirelessly broadcast power, and revolutionary ways of generating electricity. Imagine something as mad as signalling a way out of the Depression as sending men into space to photograph the world.)

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:11:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moore's new movie: Farenheit 911

Michael Moore's new movie, called "Farenheit 911: The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns," will trace the economic ties between Bush administration officials and bin Laden, and chronicle the erosion of Consitutional freedoms in America in the wake of the 9-11 attack.

According to Moore, the former president had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden's father, Mohammed bin Laden, a Saudi construction magnate who left $300 million to Osama bin Laden. It has been widely reported that bin Laden used the inheritance to finance global terrorism.

Moore said the bin Laden family was heavily invested in the Carlyle Group, a private global investment firm that the filmmaker said frequently buys failing defense companies and then sells them at a profit. Former President Bush has reportedly served as a senior adviser with the firm.

"The senior Bush kept his ties with the bin Laden family up until two months after Sept. 11," said Moore.

Link Discuss

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

Saturday, March 29, 2003

Facts don't violate trademarks

Remember the Taxes.com suit? The site had factual information that criticized one of its competitors, information that was valuable enough that it generated lots of inbound links, which gave it tons of googlejuice, so when you searched for "J.K. Harris" (the competitor's trademarked business name) you got taxes.com in the first results page.

So J.K. Harris sued taxes.com for violating its trademarks, and what's worse, they won -- the initial court held that factual information that contains trademarks was in violation of trademark law.

Luckily, human discourse was saved yesterday when the court changed its mind and ruled that facts don't violate trademarks. EFF filed an amicus brief on Taxes.com's behalf, and the court's findings drew heavily from the arguments we raised.

"The court's decision to reverse an earlier ruling on Taxes.com restores the balance between trademark law and the First Amendment right to publish truthful information," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann...

In its revised ruling, the court embraced EFF's arguments, holding that using a competitor's name in the course of conveying truthful information does not violate trademark law. The ruling pointed out that: "While the evidence submitted to the Court demonstrates that Defendants' web site does contain frequent references to J.K. Harris, these references are not gratuitous; rather, Defendants' web site refers to J.K. Harris by name in order to make statements about it."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:00:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If Imagineers opened a furniture store

Straight Line Design makes incredible custom furniture that has very few straight lines indeed. If I were a squillionaire, I'd have these guys build half the furniture in my palatial estate, and get Roger Wood to build the other half. Link Discuss (Thanks, Grad!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:51:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

KPMG makes hysterical, self-serving wardriving report

The clueless fucks at KPMG UK have decided to drum up a little security-hysteria consultancy biz by doing a "study" on open WiFi.

They created some open wireless nodes, and then logged what people who connected to these nets did. Sooprise, sooprise, most of them logged in and did nothing bad and then logged out, but 3.8/day apparently ran network probes, which KPMG characterized as an "attack."

Of course, KPMG also believes that linking to its site is an attack, too. Among the surprising risks identified by KPMG's crack squad of security consultants (available for $300/hour and up, no doubt) was that having more people on your network might reduce the bandwidth available to you. H0ly crap$0r! They are fsking 1337!

They also trot out the idea that open nets are "often" denoted with warchalking marks (something that is true only if "often" means "almost never, except as a kind of hipster joke or a marketing stunt").

The "attackers" they logged "attacked" at the same time every day, which suggests that this might have been the same person walking past on the way home from work and trying out the net. Link Discuss (via WiFi News!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:42:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Martian flu page scares my pants off

The CBC's roundup page for SARS, the Martian Flu, is impressively terrifying.

* Main Symptoms: High fever (>38° Celsius);
* Dry cough;
* Shortness of breath or breathing difficulties;
* Changes in chest X-rays indicative of pneumonia also occur; SARS may be associated with other symptoms, including headache, muscular stiffness, loss of appetite, malaise, confusion, rash and diarrhea.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:26:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 28, 2003

SMS-psyops: CIA using cellphone spam in war on Iraq

G1V3 UP! W3 0WN J00! Okay, that's probably not *exactly* what the SMS spam allegedly issued by the CIA this to military leaders throughout the mideast said, but that was more or less the point. According to this story by Jack Kelley in USA Today, and this one a day later by Farhad Manjoo in Slate, the CIA has been bombarding Iraqi generals and other officials with mobile phone text-messages, e-mail, and voicemail encouraging them to abandon their support for Saddam Hussein in exchange for -- well, not being killed by the United States. An SMS offer they can't refuse. Like those CENTCOM leaflets dropped by the millions on Iraq, only in ASCII. From the Slate story:

Jack Kelley, a reporter for USA Today, wrote on Monday of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abdul Qassab, who is apparently the object of intense wooing from the U.S. Every day for the past few months, the general has received an anonymous phone call telling him to "give yourself up. You cannot win. You will be saved if you defect."

Reuters has also reported the text of e-mails being sent to Iraqis asking them not to use weapons of mass destruction. One read as follows: "If you provide information on weapons of mass destruction or you take steps to hamper their use we will do what is necessary to protect you and protect your families. Failing to do that will lead to grave personal consequences."

Kelley reports that the campaign has been largely unsuccessful so far. If SMS spam isn't a violation of the Geneva convention, I don't know what is. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:58:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Newsweek's Steven Levy on warblogging + big media (and, kevinsites.net)

Steven Levy tackles a much-blogged subject of late -- blogs, war, and conventional media -- with fresh insight in a Newsweek story today. He also coins a handy new term: embloggers. If you find this of interest, you may also want to check out this blog that Anil Dash recently built to document press coverage of the recently-suspended-by-CNN kevinsites.net. The items in that press clip archive are tracked because they reference Sites' blog, but they all explore broader issues of blogs as a tranformative force in modern media, as does Steven Levy's story below.

The role of professional reporters is another matter. One blogger, freelancer Chris Allbritton, used his site to solicit $10,000 from readers to fund a trip to blog from the northern front. (He's just arrived in Turkey and will be in-country soon.) The BBC has a blog, and a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter has been using a blog to describe her stay on the USS Abraham Lincoln. But when CNN reporter Kevin Sites' bosses found out he’d been blogging his experiences on an unaffiliated site, they told him to stop.

CNN's response was seen in the Blogosphere as one more sign that the media dinosaurs are determined to stamp out this subversive new form of reporting. But judging from the television and print reports from journalists embedded in military units, there’s another way to look at things. Consider the reports from embedded journalists working for media institutions. They're ad hoc, using quick-and-dirty high-tech tools to pinpoint the reality of a single moment. They are shaped by the personal experience of the creator rather than gathering news from after-the-fact interviewing and document collection. They are delivered in the first person, creating a connection with the viewer that sometimes bulldozes over the deeper realties of the events

In other words, they're a hell of a lot like blogs. Not the heavily linked Weblogs like The Agonist or Instapundit but the personal accounts of Salam--or the thousands of bloggers who use the technology to keep a running diary of their activities for a small circle of friends--or anyone who cares to listen in.

Instead of documenting a trip to the video store and a random encounter with an old girlfriend, these "Embloggers" describe firefights at Umm Qasr and MRE cuisine. So while the war in Iraq might only be beginning, the pundits of the Blogosphere can already register a victory. It’s a blogger's world. We only link to it.

Link to Newsweek story, Link to press clips blog, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:29:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kelly Link interview on the WELL

Kelly Link, the brilliant short-story author (her collection, "Stranger Things Happen," is absolutely required reading -- I even got a spare copy to loan to co-workers), is being interviewed by her talented husband, Gavin Grant, on the WELL's public conference. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:23:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shirky: Why 3G is doomed

Clay Shirky's posted a great analysis about the inevitable failure of 3G (Going, Going, Gone) in the face of WiFi.

The reason the nearlynet strategy is so effective is that coverage over cost is often an exponential curve -- as the coverage you want rises, the cost rises far faster. It's easier to connect homes and offices than roads and streets, easier to connect cities than suburbs, suburbs than rural areas, and so forth. Thus permanet as a technological condition is tough to get to, since it involves biting off a whole problem at once. Permanet as a personal condition, however, is a different story. From the user's point of view, a kind of permanet exists when they can get to the internet whenever they like.

For many people in the laptop tribe, permanet is almost a reality now, with home and office wired, and any hotel or conference they attend Wifi- or ethernet-enabled, at speeds that far outstrip 3G. And since these are the people who reliably adopt new technology first, their ability to send a spreadsheet or receive a web page faster and at no incremental cost erodes the early use the 3G operators imagined building their data services on.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:22:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Massive security haemmorhage at eBay?

I just got the following email from eBay:

From: "eBay, Sven" >sven@ebay.com<
Date: Fri Mar 28, 2003 5:34:29 PM US/Pacific
To: >doctorow@craphound.com<
Subject: Urgent message from eBay SafeHarbor

Hello,

In an ongoing effort to protect the security of your eBay account, eBay has reset your password and secret question. You will need to go to the eBay site to create a new password before you can bid on or list an item. Additionally, you should have received an automated email confirming this password reset...

3. If your old eBay password was also the password for any other online account you use (Paypal, Billpoint, etc.), we recommend that you immediately change those passwords as well. Good password security means that each one of your online accounts has a different password. Even a slight difference (one letter or number) offers substantial additional protection.

1. Be wary of emails appearing to be from eBay, providing links to sign in, as these are often attempts to collect your password information. Ensure the website you are directed to is in fact one that belongs to eBay. Please note this email does not provide a link, but asks that you go directly eBay. Always make sure that you're on an eBay page before giving out your eBay password or credit card information. The best way to be sure of this is to type www.ebay.com into your web address window of your browser...

Regards,

Sven
eBay SafeHarbor

The headers (possibly forged, of course) suggest that this email orginated with eBay. I received another message right afterward, which informed me that my password and password hint had been reset from 209.63.28.12, an IP address in ELI.NET's allocation block (Vancouver, WA, 360-816-3000). No one at ELI.NET is answering the phone. No one at eBay is answering the phone.

Meanwhile, the original email, from "Sven," who apparently has no surname, suggests that there has been some kind of serious security failure there, the details of which eBay is choosing not to disclose, forcing a mass password change instead.

This, frankly, is steaming bullshit. If eBay has had a security breach that leaked my password and password hint (and possibly my other identifying info, like my credit-card number, SSN, billing address, etc), it has an ethical obligation to disclose the date and extent of the breach to me. I trusted eBay with my personal info, and if they failed to adequately secure it, then I need to know how great the risk is, and for how long the risk has persisted.

Cryptic, clueless-train messages like Sven No-name's are a poor, poor substitute for adequate notification. Discuss

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

The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists

What the name says, folks.

"The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) is a club for scientists who have, or believe they have, luxuriant flowing hair. The project was first announced in mini-AIR 2001-02. The initial list [was] assembled by a subcommittee comprised of seven members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science..."

Historical Honorary Members include Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Benjamin Franklin, and Isaac Newton. Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:58:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Retro porntech: Victorian-era nose-operated peepshow

"As the name suggests, this is a nose operated peep show. Originally made for an exhibition dedicated to embarrassment. When you look through the holes a rather boring picture of a Victorian naked lady is slowly revealed. What you do not realise is that the same time two 'decorative' cheek mirrors drop down unseen, two blusher pads come out and redden your face, thus guaranteeing embarrassment"

Link, from the Odd Objects Gallery which contains many similar weird gadgets of yesteryear. Discuss (Thanks, Cowgirl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:04:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

War headline moment of zen

Spotted on Fark:

Syria sets up Iraq the bomb. Rumsfeld: 'All Syria are belong to US.'

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:48:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: An Ark of Critters

chipmunk
rabbit
bunny vs. bear
sheep
dogs
kittens
monkees
squirrels

Link Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:41:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

American Military operation automatic name-generator

An oldie, but perhaps worth a revisit. Click this link for "20 Randomly Generated American Military Operation Names," via Dan Gillmor's blog. Here's a taste of what I got:

Operation Clambering Otter
Operation Awesome Daisy
Operation High-pressure Meerkat
Operation It's Best to Avoid Our Supernova
Operation Evangelical Python
Operation Grab Your Ankles and Prepare for Our Rocket
Operation Prepare to Be Destroyed by Our Uniform

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:25:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Iraq-o-meter provides dashboard glimpse of war

The Iraq-o-meter gives you displays continuously updated stats on the war in Iraq, including the number of bombs dropped, civilian casualties, oil wells aflame, Iraq soldiers surrendered, W.M.D. sites uncovered, and territory control. It was created by Russel Ginns, an artist, author, and ukulele player. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:47:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pirates of the Caribbean game coming

Disney's signed a deal with Bethesda Software to ship a video game based on the Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

Featuring stunning graphics, deep role-playing elements and thrilling quests, the Pirates of the Caribbean game offers players the unique opportunity to prove their mettle against the legendary buccaneers of the Caribbean.

"The Pirates of the Caribbean game transports players to the 17th Century where they can experience life as a pirate in any way they see fit," said executive producer Todd Vaughn. "Whether they want to be feared by all and welcome nowhere, or just enjoy compelling missions or a life at sea, we're creating a game that fits their gameplay style."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Robnit!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:59:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Employee-of-the-year donated kidney to customer

A waiter at a Radisson hotel in Hawai'i has been named employee of the year for donating a kidney to an ailing guest. Link Discuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:43:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gateway's "use media legally" ads too controversial for CBS

Gateway's new "Rip, Burn, Respect" ad campaign, which urges customers to make legal uses of digital media, has pissed off CBS, which is considering pulling the ads.

The commercial urges consumers to buy Gateway computers and receive a bundle of free songs. It closes with the address of a Web site that shows consumers how to copy music legally and calls on them to lobby Congress against anti-piracy mandates.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:26:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody

John Gilmore's written a great post for Farber's Interesting People list analyzing the failings with the universal surveillance proposals of the current regime.

But even if they have a dozen systems that can read the lettering on a basketball, they can't read the lettering on all the basketballs in the world. Or even all the basketballs in Iraq, or Columbus, Ohio.

So what matters is having good judgment about what to look at. And good judgment is where our intelligence bureacracy, and our current political leadership, both have notoriously bad records. The spy agencies didn't predict the end of the Cold War, didn't predict 9/11, didn't predict the information revolution, are drowning in way too much data with little understanding, and resisted the spread of the encryption that barely protects our infrastructures today. Meanwhile the President and his gang are destroying freedom at home, wasting vast resources on third rate tinpot dictators, destabilizing international law and long-standing peaceful alliances, and supporting criminality and corruption and terrorism all over the world with price supports on illegal drugs.

This government hasn't learned that if you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody. Our society was much safer when it was run by people who knew that if you spend 99% of your time investigating innocent citizens who you have no reason to suspect, you're going to have real trouble catching the people you have actual reasons to suspect. Either these guys are stupid, or they really are trying to build a police state. My friends in government try to convince me that incompetence is far more common than malevolence -- but they forget that positions of power attract such people.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:24:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kiwi telcos settle dispute with arm-wrestling

Kiwi moble telco CEOs have settled a regulatory dispute with an arm-wrestling match.

Bosses at New Zealand telecoms firm TeamTalk have been arguing with radio communications company MCS Global Digital over access to their mobile radio network.

But, worried over the time and fees involved in court hearings, TeamTalk boss David Ware challenged MCS chief Allan Cosford to settle the dispute through an arm-wrestling contest...

At stake was more than 200,000 New Zealand dollars ($70,700; $113,000), said Mr Ware, whose Wellington-based firm has previously gained a high profile for its indoor Friday barbecues.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Greg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:20:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brighton Pier burns again, caught on webcam this time

Brighton's West Pier, home to an old amusement park, has caught fire. Again. Andy Sleigh caught the action from his webcam. Link Discuss (Thanks, Andy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mugabe's auto-violation of Godwin's Law

Robert Mugabe, president and asshole dictator of Zimbabwe, has given a chest-thumping speech in which he told the world that he wanted to be as bad as Hitler. He did not invoke Godwin's Law.

"I was the Hitler of that time. I am still a Hitler of their time. If Hitler fought for the justice of mankind, many nations would not have fought against him.

"Hitler in Zimbabwe has one objective -- sovereignty for his people, recognition of their independence and their rights to freedom. If they say I am Hitler, let me be Hitler ten-fold and that's what we stand for."

Link Discuss (via Die Puny Humans)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Judith Berman has a blog!

My friend, the brilliant sf writer Judith Berman, has started a blog with co-editors Christopher East, Jeremy Lyon and Brian Wanamaker called "Futurismic." It's a terrific collection of links to wonderful techno-weirdness. Link Discuss (via I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:06:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Defying physics with left-handed material

The UC San Diego Left-Handed Materials homepage covers a class of manufactured materials that seemingly violate the laws of physics.

A Left-Handed material reverses a basic feature of light: that is, in a Left-handed medium, light propagates (or appears to move) in the opposite direction as energy flows! This leads to some very interesting consequences, such as the reversal of the Doppler shift for radiation, and the reversal of Cherenkov radiation. Russian physicist V. G. Veselago postulated these effects in a paper published in 1964 (translated in 1968). Cherenkov radiation is the light emitted when a charged particle passes through a medium, under certain conditions. In a normal material, the emitted light is in the forward direction, while in the Left-handed medium, light is emitted in the reverse direction.

Link Discuss (via I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:03:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Can B.O. repel mosquitos?

Scots researchers are looking for a mechanism to keep stinging midges (cousins to the mosquito) at bay, and they're searching for people whose body-odor naturally repels the stinging insects. Some Scottish marshes are so midge-infested in the high season that researchers were able to capture 500,000 bloodsuckers in a 2m^2 region in one night.

Researchers based at Aberdeen University in northeast Scotland plan to use custom-built software to scan odors given off by "midge magnets" -- people who attract more midge bites than most. They will then compare those odors with the scents of people who naturally repel the insects, and use the findings to create the holy grail of the Scottish tourism industry: an effective bug spray.

The team of researchers, led by zoology professor Jenny Mordue, hopes their findings could also eventually have applications against more serious pests like malaria-carrying mosquitoes in Africa and Asia.

"I have been studying these insects for more than 12 years," said Mordue. "The main research ethic has been to find ways of controlling them without impacting on the environment. We can't spray large areas of the Highlands with insecticides. So we have to find other ways."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:00:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fed snoops want to wiretap the Internet

Under the hateful CALEA wiretap law, telco equipment has to be designed and configured to allow the Feds to snoop on communications. Now the same agencies that brought CALEA to America are advocating that Voice-over-IP equipment be likewise regulated to be amenable to eavesdropping, and they suggest that this is just a runup to a general regulation of broadband ISPs to allow for DSL and cablemodem sniffing.

Opponents of the CALEA expansion include AT&T and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. But the government's argument for the additional capabilities is the same one that persuaded Congress to pass CALEA in the first place eight years ago, and it only carries more weight today. "Although we cannot describe in this forum the particular circumstances, the FBI has sought interceptions of transmissions carried by broadband technology, including cable modem technology, in terrorism-related ... investigations involving potentially life-threatening situations," the Justice Department wrote [pdf] in one of its filings last year. "Unless carriers are required to ensure such access, law enforcement surveillance capabilities will suffer a serious and dangerous gap." If the FCC adopts the government's position, then broadband's last mile will be the FBI's listening post, and Free World Dialup will be off the hook.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Can Bollywood beat Hollywood?

From LA Weekly, a long, amazing overview of the past and future of Bollywood, which has conquered the "half of the planet that Hollywood doesn't care about" and is trying to gain western legitimacy by adapting some of its conventions to Americo-palatable standards.

Even more damaging to perceptions of Hindi cinema than various technical shortcomings are knee-jerk responses to the idiom itself, to characteristics that will seem inherently outlandish to most Westerners no matter how adroitly they are executed. Take the one thing that almost everybody knows about Bollywood movies: that by rigid convention they all contain five or six (or more) elaborate song-and-dance sequences. The split between native and tourist is especially wide on this issue. Indians regard the film song (and the decades-old tradition of the pre-recorded "playback singer") as the crowning glory of their cinema. For many Westerners, though, the songs are the deal-breakers -- which is why they are often the first element a Bollywood go-getter thinks about removing when plotting a crossover to the "mainstream" (read "white") audience in America or Europe.

The problem is, in well-integrated examples of the Bollywood style, major issues of plot and character development are worked out as often in the song lyrics as in action or dialogue -- the music, in other words, can't be skipped without gutting the narrative. (This would be much more obvious to Western viewers if the theatrical and DVD distributors of Hindi films dropped the frustrating practice of subtitling everything but the song lyrics.) Bollywood movies are "melodramas," and not only in the sense of heightened conflict between characters who are embodiments of social forces, but in the root sense of "music dramas," operas (or operettas) in a glossy pop format, achieving a range of emotional effects that, at their best, can be scalp-crawlingly effective.

Link Discuss (via The Schism Matrix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Time-zones are damned hard

With Daylight Savings looming in the UK (and showing up in Iraq two days later, and in the US three days after that), Yoz Grahame, a member of the Greenwich Mean Tribe, runs down some of the amazingly complex issues associated with keeping the world's clocks in synch.

It's at this point that the brainhammers move in, because if you're going to do a decent job of calculating DST, you need to know where you are, and I mean really know where you are. While all of Europe starts and ends DST at the same time, other countries vary wildly from each other, and some aren't even able to keep it consistent internally. Australia is a prime example: each state sets its own DST dates. Israel decides its DST start and end dates every year to ensure they don't clash with the High Holy Days. However, that doesn't include the Occupied Territories because the Palestinian Authority, clearly sick of all the mucking about, moved to solid dates at the first chance it had.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:48:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, March 27, 2003

Doug Rushkoff's new book: Nothing Sacred

BoingBoing pal Doug Rushkoff's new book Nothing Sacred is about to hit the stands, and he's launching a book tour throught the US next week -- details on that are at this link. Here's what the publisher says:

Acclaimed writer and thinker Douglas Rushkoff, author of Ecstasy Club and Coercion, has written perhaps the most important -- and bound to be controversial -- book on Judaism in a generation. As the religion stands on the brink of becoming irrelevant to the very people who look to it for answers, NOTHING SACRED takes aim at its problems and offers startling and clearheaded solutions based on Judaism's core-source-values and teachings.

The book is available for pre-order online, and Doug tells us "it should be on the shelves by the first week of April." Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:12:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Librarian slams the PATRIOT Act

Jessamyn (of Jessamyn.com and Naked Librarians) writes about the effects of the Patriot Act on libraries: "The USAPA creates an entirely new class of prosecutable criminal: librarians who tell the truth."

Libraries who have been visited by the FBI can't mention that fact AFTER the visit, but many libraries and library systems are becoming pro-active and getting ready in case the feds do come to the door. To this end they have begun making staff and patrons aware of the Act and its implications. Some of them have begun tweaking their systems for greater patron privacy: tossing out Internet terminal sign-up lists at the end of the day; not requiring a card number or allowing pseudonymous Internet signups; removing patron borrowing records once a book has been returned; and in some cases, working within their communities to pass resolutions against the PATRIOT Act and pledging non-compliance in advance.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:39:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hugo nominations close on Mar 31

Nominations for the Hugo Awards close in four days. If you attended the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose last year or intend to attend the WorldCon in Toronto this September, you're eligible to nominate.

• You can download a PDF ballot here.
• The Locus Recommended Reading List for 2002 is a good place to start looking for eligible works
• The Campbell Awards site has a good, annotated list of authors eligible for the best new writer award.
• My novellas 0wnz0red and Jury Service (with Charlie Stross) are both eligible for nominations this year.

Discuss

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

State-level DMCA would outlaw firewalls, secure mail

Two new state-level bills in MA and TX propose to extend the DMCA even further (nearly identical bills are pending in SC, FL, GE, AK, TN and CO). Ed Felten describes the world these bills would create:

Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that "conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication". Your ISP is a communcation service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal -- with no exceptions.

If you encrypt your email, you're in violation, because the "To" line of the email is concealed from your ISP by encryption. If you use a secure connection to pick up your email, you're in violation, because the "From" lines of the incoming emails are concealed from your ISP by the encrypted connection.

Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for enterprise security, operates by translating the "from" and "to" fields of Internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security "firewalls" use NAT, so if you use a firewall, you're in violation.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:02:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jon Stewart on Halliburton's Iraq contract

Jon Stewart -- who appears to be doing the best reportage on the air these days -- reports that the multimillion dollar contract to douse the Iraqi oilfires has awarded with no bid to Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former company. Stewart's comment: "I feel like the government just took a shit on my chest." Here's a video capture of the segment. Link Discuss (Thanks Lisa!)

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

Commie kitsch posters

Gallery of Socialist Realist posters from Cuba, China and the Soviet Union. Link Discuss (Thanks, George!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:54:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Giger museum panaroamae

Amazing QTVR panaoramae from the HR Giger museum in Gruyeres, Switzerland. Link Discuss (Thanks, Noel!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Statistical atrotcities to convict war-criminals

Great interview with Patrick Ball, the deputy director of the Science and Human Rights Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, who uses statistical modelling of war atrocities to build human-rights cases.

Every human rights story goes like this: I am a deponent, and I'm here to tell you about things that happened to one or many victims. I myself may or may not be one of those victims. Each of those victims may have suffered one or more violations, and those violations may or may not be what historians call colligated at one or more points in time or space. Each of the violations may have been perpetrated by zero, one, or many identifiable perpetrators, and those perpetrators may be individuals with names and ranks, or they may be institutions. Each of those may be associated with one or more of the violations in this story. That's the complexity of one story. Now we're going to collect 10,000 stories, and there is a dense, complex overlapping of all the stories. Then we aggregate the stories from, say, four different organisations, and each of those organisations' sets of judgements has a dense and complex overlap with the other organisations' information. The result is a multidimensional, multilayered Venn diagram built up from this information, which I refer to as "reporting density".

Link Discuss (via Ambiguous)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:35:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ben and Mena: A blogging anthem

StevenF, a blogger, has posted an hilarous song about blogging, called "Ben and Mena." Click through for lyrics and kicky MP3.

That perfect link I hope to find
Check MetaFilter for the 40th time
I left a comment, I hope you see
How this issue pertains to me

Semantic web, RSS, and e-mail
Single white guy seeks athletic female
I'm busy building the digital commons
Cook me up another bowl of ramen

Link Discuss (via Ben Hammersley)

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

New guest blogger on BoingBoing: Jim Griffin, part deux!

Witness the passing of the guest-blogger torch again-- from our special guest Kevin Sites, whose live-from-Iraq photo and audioblogging made headlines around the world -- back to the esteemed Jim Griffin, whose earlier stint was pre-empted by world events. Thank you, Kevin, for an amazing blog-journey... and welcome back, Jim.

Aside from having co-founded the Pho digital music listserv (photo from a Sunday pho gathering at left, Jim's on the right-hand side), Jim is an author, columnist, and wireless industry consultant. During his five-year stint as head of technology for Geffen Records, he led a team that in June of 1994 distributed the first full-length commercial song on-line, by Aerosmith. Geffen was the first entertainment company to install a web server, and Geffen World was one of the first corporate intranet sites.

Jim recently returned from a month in Finland (at times working inside the arctic circle), consulting for wireless industry clients. What he has planned next, I do not know. But if Jim's driving, we're in for an adventure.

Link to Jim's personal website, Link to more pics from the Sunday pho list get-togethers in LA, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:16:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Video stream from my talk at UC Berkeley

Here's a link to the video-stream from my talk at UC Berkeley's School of Journalism on wireless -- we're starting in a couple minutes. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:53:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Top Ten Digital Photography Tips

I've been taking pictures every day since I got my Sony Cybershot U digital camera. This page of digital photography tips has some good information for a photographic know-nothing like me. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:15:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bet on first-person-shooters

YouPlayGames is a new first-person-shooter gaming service that lets users bet on the outcomes of games like Wolfenstein. The company's located offshore, natch.

The cost of entry generally will range from a few cents to a few dollars for each kill or injury players incur on their opponents, YouPlayGames creator Chris Grove said Tuesday.

No money limits have been set, but that could change, Grove said.

Another feature will let gamers cap how much money they can lose in 24 hours.

"If two players want to play a game for $100 a life, then we'll open up a server for that," he said.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:05:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japan: odd show teaches kids about war with cartoons, toys

Get out the toys! Time to teach the kids about war. About the Japanese TV show "Weekly Kids News" (Thanks, Tatsuya!) Mike sez:

While flipping through the channels here in Japan last Saturday night trying to pick up news on the war, I came across a show that was teaching kids about the conflict. They were using toys and cartoons to show a trio of very glum-looking kids what was happening in Iraq. It was too bizzare to pass up, so I grabbed my camera and started snapping photos.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:48:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Markoff eulogizes Osborne

Adam Osborne, inventor of the portable PC, has died. Markoff's obit in the NYT says it best.

The machine created a sensation in the rapidly growing PC marketplace, even though it came with a cramped five-inch display screen. The common belief at the time was that customers were paying for the software, which included popular programs like WordStar, the SuperCalc spreadsheet and Bill Gates's version of the Basic programming language and were getting the computer free.

The Osborne Computer Corporation in Hayward, Calif., became synonymous with the Silicon Valley tradition of hypergrowth defined by companies like Apple Computer and Atari. Orders for the Osborne 1 totaled 8,000 in 1981 and jumped to 110,000 in 1982. At one point, the company said that it had a 25-month backlog of orders.

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:09:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mexico sells out its future by extending copyright

Mexico is abolishing the public domain, extending copyright and turning ownership of works that expire over to the Mexican governmnet. Lessig nails the likely outcomes:

The insanity in this system is astonishing. But here's the message Mexico has got to understand: it will be easier for Mexicans to consume Hollywood content over the next 150 years than it will be for Mexicans to cultivate and preserve their own culture. Is promoting Hollywood really what the Mexican Congress is for?

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:06:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TiVo's user-observations from the Oscars

Anonymously gathered data from TiVo users reveals the elements of the Oscars that caught America's interest.

The single most paused or freeze-framed event of the live show was the stage entrance of presenter Julia Roberts...

In a post-event report on the behavior of its more than 600,000 subscribers, TiVo reported that the speeches by Mr. Moore, best documentary winner, and Mr. Brody, best actor winner, were the most rewound and replayed segments of the program...

TiVo also reported that viewership dropped off heavily during commercials in the Oscars show, but speculated that this was because viewers were using commercial breaks to tune into other sources of news programming to follow the dramatic events of the war in Iraq.

Link Discuss (via FARK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:00:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

Mark Ryden's "Blood" show

On Wednesday, I went to the opening of Mark Ryden's new show of miniature paintings, called "Blood." Creepy but wonderful work. If someone told me that there was an artist that had paintings of decapitated little girls and the like I would be very turned off, but somehow Ryden pulls it off. I heard the pieces were selling for $7k to $12k each. And that they sold out instantly. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:04:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snacks of mass destruction

Spotted in Taiwan -- a snack foods company is selling "rice crackers wrapped in images of U.S. President Bush and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein." Got links to other surreal/inappropriate/weird war-themed products? Post them in this discuss forum. Extra points if they involve badly translated "all your cookies are belong to us" English. Link to MSNBC.com photo, (Thanks, Gabe)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:04:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Social Software panel at PC Forum

My notes from the social software panel at PC Forum:

Clay Shirky: Social software is everything from chat to group email to games. Three key things:

It's native to the Internet in ways that other technologies are not. Prior to the Web we had other tools for publication. IM was preceded by phones. Social communication -- how groups gather -- has no analog except the table.

It has an inverse relationship of value to scale. Websites are better with more users. But inviting 10,000,000 to dinner or putting 10,000,000 in your Rolodex sucks. The smaller the pool, the more valuable the relationships. The unit of social software is small groups.

Business historically sucks at this. Businesses buy software that matches management goals: locked down and centralized, but social software is the reverse.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:26:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to watch Iraqi Satellite TV on the web: The Saddam Show

Paul Boutin has all the details in Slate, right here.

"Viewers be warned: American TV networks make daily decisions on what to show or not to show their viewers. On the Internet, it's easy to route around those decisions. If blogging makes everyone a journalist, then tricks like this one make everyone their own news producer. If you're squeamish, or if you're the relative of an American soldier, you may not want to watch images that the TV networks have deemed unfit for American audiences. But if you want to narrowcast the Iraq Satellite Channel to yourself to see what's being fed to the Iraqi people during this war, you can."

UPDATE I: Oops. Too bad we just blew it up. AP reports one version of the story, and CBS reports another, as follows:

The U.S. Air Force has hit Iraqi TV with an experimental electronmagetic pulse device called the "E-Bomb" in an attempt to knock it off the air and shut down Saddam Hussein's propaganda machine, CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports. The highly classified bomb creates a brief pulse of microwaves powerful enough to fry computers, blind radar, silence radios, trigger crippling power outages and disable the electronic ignitions in vehicles and aircraft. Iraqi satellite TV, which broadcasts 24 hours a day outside Iraq, went off the air around 4:30 a.m. local time (8:30 p.m. ET Tuesday). Iraq's domestic television service was not broadcasting at the time.

Officially, the Pentagon does not acknowledge the weapon's existence. Asked about it at a March 5 news conference at the Pentagon, Gen. Tommy Franks said: "I can't talk to you about that because I don't know anything about it." The use of the secret weapon came on a day that saw intense action on the battlefield.

(via Paul Boutin's blog), Discuss
UPDATE II: CBS News has altered their story linked above -- now, all references pointing to the so-called "E-Bomb" have been removed.
UPDATE III: Commenting on a Wednesday morning CNN report that Iraqi TV is back online again, Paul writes, "the story is being changed online as I type," and "I'm only able to get a static image of what looks like a press conference, above. But it's different from the image that was online while the station was reportedly knocked out last night." More on Paul's blog here. BoingBoing reader Bob posts in the "discuss" forum, "The Iraqi TV feed is back up on Telstar 5 as of 1000 Eastern 2003-03-26. One satellite board I read said it came up around 0245 this morning." And Reuters now reports that the world's biggest journalists' organization claims the bombing "was an attempt at censorship and may have breached the Geneva Conventions."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:05:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Religion helmet simulates brain's God Center

Following up on research that identified the portions of the brain that are responsible for mystical, religious experiences, a researcher at Laurentian University has built a mysitcal helmet that stimulates the mysticism center, invoking religious experience. Of course, he called on Richard "Religion is Infantile Regression" Dawkins to put one on and get into God.

The experiment is based on the recent finding that some sufferers from temporal lobe epilepsy, a neurological disorder caused by chaotic electrical discharges in the temporal lobes of the brain, seem to experience devout hallucinations that bear a striking resemblance to the mystical experiences of holy figures such as St Paul and Moses.

This theory received a recent boost from Prof Gregory Holmes, a paediatric neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School, who claims that one of the principal founders of the Seventh Day Adventist Movement, Ellen White, in fact suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy...

Unfortunately, during the experiment, while Prof Dawkins had some strange experiences and tinglings, none of them prompted him to take up any new faith. "It was a great disappointment," he said. "Though I joked about the possibility, I of course never expected to end up believing in anything supernatural. But I did hope to share some of the feelings experienced by religious mystics when contemplating the mysteries of life and the cosmos."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bryan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:31:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google's Sergey Brin at PC Forum

Here're my running notes PC Forum's chat with Google's Sergey Brin

Some day, you won't be able to email a query to a friend and rely on her getting the same results -- that's the downside of customization. If you take the average Google Query and give it to a librarian, 80% of the time, he'll be able to find the answer without any further customization -- they don't need to know how old or young the questioner is, or what her zipcode is.

But that does mean that 20% of the queries could be improved through personalization. We need to figure out how to introduce that fairly complicated technology quickly and without it being confusing.

We do Google News. It's great, but we don't know how to make money off it. On the other hand, after acquiring Deja and turning it into Google Groups three years ago -- a purchase we thought would just give us great content and no money -- but now we're running ads targeted on the content of the message posts in Google Groups. That's good for the advertisers and for users.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:03:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Intel plans to screw customers with anti-overclocking patent

Intel has patented a technology to stop people from overclocking its processors, Ah, nothing like treating your customers like crooks, AKA answering a demand-signal with a barbed-wire fence.

It claims to detect and deter overclocking of a signal for microprocessors which includes a detection circuit and a prevention circuit, which limits or reduces the performance of the processor when the circuit detects an overclocked signal.

There's a list of 30 different features implemented in the patent.

Most processors, explains the patent, can be clocked at frequencies much greater than the marked frequencies, and that could mean distributors and/or resellers remarking chips at higher frequencies and then selling them at higher prices.

Right -- in order to stop a minority, illegal activity, we'll screw the majority of our law-abiding customers by selling them a more expensive product that does less. Link Discuss (via /.)

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

Cool PBS special on Tijuana border tech + social networks airs tomorrow night

"Mixed Feelings," a terrific documentary about architecture, technology, and social networks in the Tijuana border region will have its nationwide broadcast premiere tomorrow night. Airs on PBS stations throughout the US on Wednesday, March 26 at 10:30 PM (Check your local listings). I've seen it, I've spoken with the filmmaker, and it's thought-provoking stuff. The most memorable image: A long shot of that border fence that extends many hundreds of yards out into the Pacific ocean. Here's a snip from the transcript, Teddy Cruz from San Diego Architect speaking:

"When people think of Latin American architecture they have these sort of fixed images of Luis Barragan and bright colors or pseudo-colonial architecture, but ultimately what interests me, more than anything, is really the attitude towards the city, towards the space. A lot of people talk about transnational metropolis, etc. which is a fantastic image.... the issue of improvisation, of risk-taking, attitudes towards space, of hybridity, cross-programming... something that we live with every day. When you look at maps of the city of Tijuana the Colonia Libertad is represented as a grid, but when your are in the midst of that place there is no grid. There's this sort of very organic juxtaposition, there are no property lines. This constant negotiation of boundaries, that's an unbelievable legacy."

Link to project website, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:55:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cellphones don't cause explosions at the pumps

You know those warnings about sparks from ringing cellphones setting off gas-fumes at the pumps? Lies, all lies.

Renkes said he noticed in the e-mail rumor's most recent incarnation a link drawn between cell-phone use and static electricity. Cell-phone use, he said, does not cause fires, but in rare circumstances a static discharge can create a spark at the gas pump.

For example, Renkes has documented instances in which motorists get back in their cars while refueling. When they get out of the car to replace the nozzle, they discharge static electricity -- a potentially dangerous combination in proximity to the gas tank. Renkes said no link between cell-phone use and static discharge exists, howeve

Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:34:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Liveblogging from Rio Internet Law event

Donna "Copyfight" Wentworth is doing an amazing job liveblogging the Internet Law event in Rio.

JP Barlow: There is another cost to consider in the property model. This is dumb markets. Money was spent needlessly in British Telecom spectrum auction.

Larry: Is there are difference in security in property v. openness?

Yochai: Are there security problems inherent in both systems? Yes. Have commons systems proven less secure? No.

Participant: If it's not communism, is it capitalism?

Larry: Yes, it is capitalism. The market is in the devices.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ISFDB rises from the grave

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database -- a bibliogrpahic resource that is to science fiction as the IMDB is to movies -- is finally back online after being off for some months, while it sought out affordable hosting. Whoopee! (Boy, my entry is out of date...) Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

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

NYT op/ed on Clearchannel, the Dixie Chicks, and US media monopoly

In the NYT today:

By and large, recent pro-war rallies haven't drawn nearly as many people as antiwar rallies, but they have certainly been vehement. One of the most striking took place after Natalie Maines, lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, criticized President Bush: a crowd gathered in Louisiana to watch a 33,000-pound tractor smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CD's, tapes and other paraphernalia. To those familiar with 20th-century European history it seemed eerily reminiscent of. . . . But as Sinclair Lewis said, it can't happen here. Who has been organizing those pro-war rallies? The answer, it turns out, is that they are being promoted by key players in the radio industry — with close links to the Bush administration.

The CD-smashing rally was organized by KRMD, part of Cumulus Media, a radio chain that has banned the Dixie Chicks from its playlists. Most of the pro-war demonstrations around the country have, however, been organized by stations owned by Clear Channel Communications, a behemoth based in San Antonio that controls more than 1,200 stations and increasingly dominates the airwaves.

Link to NYT item, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:25:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free book distribution could cost $15,000

Glenn Fleishman and Jeff Carlson released their book, "Real World GoLive 6," as a free download last month. Unfortunately, the book was a hefty 23MB -- lots of screenshots and a bad PDF rip made the file ginormous -- and even more unfortunately, Glenn's ISP, Level 3, has a baroque pricing-plan that bills for more-or-less peak load. So after getting a whole whack of downloads in the space of a few hours, Glenn yanked the book, realizing that he might end up owing $15,000 for the bandwidth consumed by giving away his book.

There are a couple of ways the tragedy could have been averted. If the book had been Creative Commons licensed, they could have posted it to the Internet Archive, which woulda given them free hosting. Alternately, they could have put the book into a BitTorrent package or into the Tornado Open Content Network, so that that cost of distribution would have been spread around among all the downloaders. Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

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

Ethanol fuel-cells can be powered by booze

Screw methanol-based fuel-cells: Saint Louis University researchers have presented research on ethanol cells that can be topped up from a bottle of Moskovskaya. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fake Stop Esso ads on London tube

Danny sez, "Stop Esso is sneaking in fake advertising (or fake *poetry* advertising) into the London Tube:"

Sing a song of Esso
A packet full of lies
and oily greasy dollars
to help the climate fry
When the wallet opened
George Bush began to sing
"The planet may be burning
but I don't see a thing"

Link Discuss (Thanks, Danny!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:50:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cardboard casemod

Laziest. Casemod. Evar. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:47:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Divided attention, multiplicitous consciousness

Here's a nice little Pollyannic transhumanist vignette/morality play about multiplicitous consciounesses that allow people to be several places at once.

Two hours and ten minutes later, Sanji and I were walking hand in hand along a white sand beach, watching the sun slowly sink toward the ocean and feeling the warm surf gently lapping at our feet. We would swim together, naked, then make love in the sand. Miraculously, no bugs would bother us, no sand would get in our mouths, and no one would see us there. We were alone in our own private paradise. We would enjoy a delicious dinner and a magnificent bottle of wine, and then we would fall asleep in each other’s arms beneath the shimmering stars. It was a virtually perfect way to celebrate.

Meanwhile, Sanji visited her mother in Delhi while I had dinner at home in Greenwich Village with my other wife Anne and our son Eric. Later, Sanji would spend time with her other husband, Li, in Beijing and I would attend a demonstration in Jerusalem for peace between Israel and Palestine. All in all, it was a good day, fairly quiet and uneventful. I wonder what tomorrow may bring?

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:44:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GM ads smear public transit -- again

General Motors, a company that gutted many of America's great cities by pressuring local governments to eliminate public transit in the 20th century, is running ads in a local Vancouver paper that calls transit riders "CREEPS & WEIRDOS." Another ad complains about the odor of the subway. Between Los Angeles's smog, Aussie brushfires and Middle East wars, I think we can say with confidence that GM's last kick at the public transit can incurred a debt to the human race the company could never repay. Hard to believe they've got the chutzpah to go at it again. Guess they've got nothing to lose. Link Discuss (Thanks, Heidi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:40:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, March 24, 2003

WSJ on warblogs of journos, military enlistees (and shutdown of kevinsites.net)

Today's Wall Street Journal features an article on war, weblogs, disinformation -- and the suspension of kevinsites.net.

THE DAY ALLIED FORCES began their invasion of Iraq, a Navy lieutenant based in the Gulf posted some news on his personal Web site: "Saddam fired a couple of those Scuds that he doesn't have at me." On another personal Web site someone claiming to be a Baghdad resident wrote that "there are more Ba'ath people in the streets and they have more weapons." Kevin Mickey, a Navy lieutenant commander at Camp Patriot, Kuwait, noted on his site that "we had a minor dust storm yesterday" and said the camp's missile alarms were going off repeatedly.

On top of the 500 reporters traveling with the military and the three cable-TV news channels beaming 24-hour coverage there's a new element in this war: unfiltered eyewitness accounts online.

Soldiers and citizens in the war zone are publishing in real time on their own Web sites. Families are posting on the Web the e-mails sent home by relatives in the service. And free-lance reporters -- not subject to restrictions by the Pentagon or large media outlets -- are writing online for a new world-wide audience. In all, the glut of information from the Gulf -- from the important to the trivial -- is creating a dizzying panoply of detail, as well as half-truths.

Link to WSJ story via Yahoo, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:59:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will Wright talk at PC Forum

Here are my running notes from Sims-creator Will Wright's fascinating after-dinner talk at PC Forum.

Science is about observing reality and making a model. In games you do the reverse -- take a model and generate an elaborate world.

In games today, players are getting really good at sniffing out the size of the possibility-space -- in five minutes of play, I can tell you how linear a game is. To get the complexity players demand, you need algorithms -- emergence.

We used to model with calculus -- an equation that tells you where jupiter should be. In simulations, you use little dumb automata that create stories.

Games have topologies -- Myst is linear, chess is branching, Doom is branching but collapses at the end of every level.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSFT teaching university students computer security

Microsoft is sponsoring an undergrad course at Leeds, UK, in writing secure software.

Microsoft UK Chief Security Officer Stuart Okin said: "We are working with the University of Leeds because until now Computer Science graduates in this country were not obtaining adequate theoretical or practical experience. For instance, the module will educate students about buffer over-runs and how to avoid the pitfalls such as those exposed in the recent Slammer virus outbreak."...

"This is a very important step towards introducing security engineering into mainstream computer science and software engineering," said Harrison. "It is a serious omission that we have been training the next generation of software developers without this emphasis on security design principles and I hope other universities will follow this lead."

Link Discuss (Thanks, jbrewer!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:11:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Radiohead solicits ultra-short digital films from fans

Radiohead (the most righteous band in the universe, and if you do not agree, you can just STFU) is asking fans around the world for short films and ultra-short digital animation clips. The project is presumably in support of their forthcoming album "Hail to the Thief," due out June 9 on Parlophone records. For their last release, "Amnesiac," the band developed a similar collection of very short online videos called "blips" with by UK-based interactive firm Shynola, artist Stanley Donwood, and video director Chris Bran.

We've got a plan. We need your help. We're looking for moving pictures. Can you make moving pictures? Time is short. This is what you have to do.

1. Take one of the live MP3's of a Radiohead track.
2. Make some moving pictures to it (can be anything: live action, animation, graphics etc).
3. Make it at least 10 seconds and at most a song's length (although we prefer shorter).
OR... Have you already made a short film that would benefit from an airing?

Send your work to Radiohead at: The Picture Gallery, w.a.s.te, PO box 322, Oxford, UK by Monday 8th May 2003. Formats Required: For short films / whole songs : VHS (PAL) (You will be contacted if we require higher quality masters) For shorter animations, graphics: Quicktime (720 x 576 pixels) CODEC: Motion JPEG B (High Quality). Please enclose with it your name and e-mail address/telephone number.

update: To view some of the old Radiohead blips from Amnesiac or Kid A periods, go here (link in nav to blips), or here. Got more urls? post them at the discuss link! Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:35:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Security and tech at the Academy Awards

Noah of Defense Tech writes:

Star-fuckers, breathe easy: there wasn't a single security breach at last night's Academy Awards. ("Unless you count Chicago getting past the good taste detector," a Defense Tech reader quips.)

It's all thanks to a Texas Instruments system, the company is kind enough to inform us. "The nearly 11,000 authorized attendees, guests and staff were required to wear an ID card, issued in advance of the event, which contained a TI (radio frequency emitter)," according to the electronics maker. "Five-foot tall kiosks, containing a computer monitor, (radio frequency ID) reader, and encased computer server, were placed in strategic locations at the Kodak Theater (where the Awards were being held)... Within one half second of the card being read at the kiosks, security personnel had access to information about the cardholder, including a photograph, name, physical descriptors, security clearances, and the date and time the credentials were active."

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:26:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

warnography: gas masks + amihotornot = ratemygasmask.com

Continuing with the warnography meme, this link to a website that serves gas mask fetishists with an amihotornot.com-like interface. (via RCB) Discuss (non-work-safe; includes both nude and clothed photos)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:19:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bush aministration accuses Russia of selling GPS-jamming tech to Iraq

This item just in, via AFP/Reuters and SF Chron:

Russia is putting U.S. troops at risk in Iraq by selling antitank guided missiles, jamming devices and night-vision goggles to Baghdad, the Bush administration said Monday in a growing rift with Moscow. (...) White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said there was "ongoing cooperation and support to Iraqi military forces being provided by a Russian company that produces GPS jamming equipment." The technology blocks satellite signals that guide bombs, missiles and even troop movements.

Link to SFChronicle item, Link to AFP/Reuters item, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:06:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Artificial synapse at hand

Two Standford researchers have announced the creation of a functioning artificial synapse.

Since synapses are typically around 50 nanometres across, and each chemical puff contains just a few thousand molecules, building an artificial synapse is a huge challenge. But Mark Peterman and Harvey Fishman at Stanford University in California are getting close. They told a biophysics conference in Texas earlier in March that they have created four "artificial synapses" on a silicon chip one centimetre square.

To cells on the surface of the device, the artificial synapse is simply a hole in the silicon. But each hole opens into a pipeline etched into a plastic layer on the back of the chip, connected at both ends to a reservoir of neurotransmitter. When an electric field is applied, the neurotransmitter is pumped through the pipeline, and a little of it squeezes out of the hole, stimulating nearby cells.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Henry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:50:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

O'Reilly and Kapor on Open Source

I've posted an impressionistic transcript of the Mitch Kapor/Tim O'Reilly conversation on open source at PC Forum.

Mitch: OSS has grown up -- it's no longer just one thing. People are taking the idea in different directions: MySQL is a for-profit, OSS company that gives away 99.9% of its product. Their customers modify the technology and don't necessarily distribute the source, and pay millions for that privelege. And of course there's OSAF, a non-profit that's doing something complimentary to biz, investing in core development that people can build commercial apps atop of. We're the nonprofit piece of what will become a larger ecology.

Tim: Ecology is the best way to think about this. Don't focus on licensing -- that misses the point. OSS is about technqiues for building an architecture for collaboratively building apps, including the technique of disclosing your code. But there are lots of open-source-like Internet Era activities, like the WWW's "view source," which made it easy for anyone to copy any neat feature. It makes it easy for people to join the party, which is the heart of OSS.

The Internet is changing the way we think about software. What would it mean for Amazon or Google -- both built on OSS technology -- to release their code? The value of Amazon and Google is the giant data-center, not the software. By allowing public participation in the service, through their API, they've created an architecture of participation that is at the heart of the OSS story. It's not about free versus proprietary -- it's about how inclusive you are.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:36:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SF event tomorrow: SRL benefit for Hoverdrum inventor Tim North, Tue. 3-25

Reminder: tomorrow night in San Francisco, Survival Research Laboratories and SomArts are holding a benefit for Tim "Hoverdrum" North and his family. Apart from being a talented visual artist and live performer and the inventor of the Hoverdrum, Tim is a beloved personal friend. He was recently diagnosed with stage four cancer -- the disease's most critical phase, on a scale of zero to four.

The event promises to be northing short of amazing: "A brilliant night of Music, Art-auction, Videos from local, national and international artists" is planned, along with live SRL robotics performances, an assortment of DJs, body-drum performers, -- and the (ahem) much-anticipated release of The Official SRL Nudie Calendar. Take it from me, people, the pinup calendar will be H4WT. Let's just say I have my sources.

Showtime: Tuesday, March 25, 7 p.m. to 2 a.m.; Door $10 - $10,000 sliding scale; location: SomArts Gallery, 934 Brannan, San Francisco, CA 94103. All proceeds go to the North family. Not to be missed.

UPDATE: Monday, March 24th from 10:00pm to 2:00am, Bay area radio station KFJC (89.7 FM) presents a four hour special on the life and music of Timothy North: "In 1986 North created the Hoverdrum, a massive percussion instrument. Standing at more than 10 feet tall and suspended in air, the Hoverdrum is at once a kinetic sound sculpture, interactive musical instrument and objet d'art."

Link to benefit home page, Link to poster, partial list of auction items, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:29:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Al-jazeera's english language website launches

Arabic-language media network Al Jazeera now offers an english version of web content here. Seems to be under construction right now, as I blog. Tip: for partial and clumsy automated translation of the content on the arabic-language version of their web content (which may contain different content than the English site), go to aljazeera.net via the Tarjim english/arabic translation tool.

The site, which has promised to offer a different perspective to Western readers, stuck to its word. Its graphic photos of dead American soldiers and pointed headlines ("Coalition of the willing has become a joke") will provide plenty of fodder for critics of the Middle Eastern news organization.

Link to Wall Street Journal story, Discuss (Thanks, Numair)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:56:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Netflix for porn" launches

A conspicuously Netflix-like service offering "European Hardcore" just launched at privateathome.com. Selection seems to include only movies from Private Media, Inc., but the service architecture seems at first glance to be fairly similar to Netflix. Discuss (via pho list)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:50:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

warnography: the effects of war on Internet porno

Reverse Cowgirl's blog has been on a notable roll lately, with a series of provocative posts on war, sex, and media culture. Today she points to an article from Adult Video News, "Will War Be Good or Bad for Business?", in which Greg Salsburg of IVolt Networks opines:

"I suspect it will not have a large negative effect since the sentence 'This war has me not wanting to look at naked women' has never been uttered."

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:45:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homeland Security panel at PC Forum

Just saw a presentation at PC Forum from SRD, a company that specializes in rooting out the non-obvious relationships between card-cheats, mafiosi and high-rollers and casino employees and high-rollers.

The presentation was very impressive. In one instance, SRD investigated all 20,000 employees at a casino, along with all the customers at the casino, and discovered a couple dozen cheats who were either playing at the casino -- or employed at it. They did this by applying algorithms that fuzzily matched personal information from the "insider" and "crooked" lists.

SRD has taken an investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture-capital arm, presumably to apply this technology to catching terrorists.

But this begs a question: how can you apply this to homeland security? Do we open an investigation into every American and cross-reference it against every bad-guy? How can we possibly square that with the Constitution?

And what's more, if the result of this investigation is not a criminal charge -- i.e., if you get added to a no-fly list (or worse, if you get declared an enemy combatant and denied a court appearance) -- how do you clear your name? If the basis for suspicion is that the word-fequency histograms of your public utterances have n points of similarity with our profile of a terrorist, how do you rebut the accusation? What if you never even find out what the basis of this accusation is?

The In-Q-Tel representative, Gilman Louie, is talking a good line, arguing that government shouldn't have access to commercial data, that there is no advantage to throwing more and more and more marketing and other commercial data into an already overloaded analyst's queue.

Esther Dyson says that she doesn't believe that the "Chinese walls" that keep the Feds from digging through personal info are really all that effective.

Gilman Louie from In-Q-Tel says that the real problem is local law-enforcement, who use techniques like sorting all records for Arabic last names -- technology makes bad policy worse. Unless we beef up the audit and accountability side of the house, it will get very scary.

I just put my questions to the panel: How can you square investigating everyone with the Constitution? How can an algorithm's oracular pronouncement stand in for due process? Gilman Louie's response was very good. He said that he believed that profiling is the wrong answer to the wrong question, that it should be a tool that's applied after human judgement, not before. He compared profiling to the internment of Japanese-Americans and averred that profiling is a dangerous tool for racial or ideological discrimination.

Though he didn't say it, there's good research to suggest that profiling doesn't work.

That said, profiling is alive and well in America. CAPPS is in use in all US airports. CAPPSII is coming. DARPA's spending money like drunken sailors on profiling technologies.

I think Gilman Louie was being straight, but I also think that's he's not representative of the people who are calling the shots at Homeland Security -- and that's bad news for all of us. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:28:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chinese police phone-spam sticker vandals

In China, advertisers who paste advertisement stickers on walls and lamposts are getting spammed into submission by the police.

The new system rings the mobile phone numbers of illegal advertisers at 20-second intervals, said the People's Daily. Upon answering the call, the wrongdoer hears the pre-recorded message -- "You have broken the law by posting illegal ads. You must immediately stop this activity and go to the Hangzhou Urban Administrative Bureau for punishment."

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:23:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY Jean-Jacques Perrey

Jean-Jacques Perrey is a pioneering electronic music composer with a whimsical sound. He did the theme song for Disney's Main Street Electrical Parade. This is a fun little Flash app that lets you string together little trademark snippets of his songs. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:46:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Profile of HyperSonic Sound inventor

Fun profile of Woody Norris, inventor of HyperSonic Sound, a technology that "beams" sound so that it sounds like it is coming from inside your head.

Woody Norris aims the silvery plate at his quarry. A burly brunette 200 feet away stops dead in her tracks and peers around, befuddled. She has walked straight into the noise of a Brazilian rain forest -- then out again. Even in her shopping reverie, here among the haircutters and storefront tax-preparers and dubious Middle Eastern bistros, her senses inform her that she has just stepped through a discrete column of sound, a sharply demarcated beam of unexpected sound. ''Look at that,'' Norris mutters, chuckling as the lady turns around. ''She doesn't know what hit her.'' Norris is demonstrating something called HyperSonic Sound (HSS). The aluminum plate is connected to a CD player and an odd amplifier -- actually, a very odd and very new amplifier -- that directs sound much as a laser beam directs light. Over the past few years, mainly in secret, he has shown the device to more than 300 major companies, and it has slackened a lot of jaws. In December, the editors of Popular Science magazine bestowed upon HSS its grand prize for new inventions of 2002, choosing it over the ferociously hyped Segway scooter. It is no exaggeration to say that HSS represents the first revolution in acoustics since the loudspeaker was invented 78 years ago -- and perhaps only the second since pilgrims used ''whispering tubes'' to convey their dour messages.

Link NYT Mag Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:45:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wal-Mart Opens First 'All You Can Live' Township

Man, the guy who writes the satirical articles for FutureFeedForward keeps hittin' 'em out of the park. This week: "Wal-Mart Opens First 'All You Can Live' Township," a skiffy distopian vision that combines the creepiest elements of Fordlandia and EPCOT.

WALTON, OH--Officials of the Wal-Mart Corporation announced Thursday the opening of Walton Township, a company designed and managed subdivision on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio. Walton, the first of three Wal-Mart communities scheduled to open this year, introduces residents to the company's new 'all you can live' consumer goods subscription service. "Beyond its quality environment and top-notch municipal services, Walton represents our first serious foray into flat-fee provision of consumer products," explains Michael Elmoere, Wal-Mart VP of Intra-Regional Logistics and First Regent of Walton Township. "It's a 21st century horn-of-plenty, all for one no-fuss monthly fee."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

8-track-player-cum-personal-robot

Gizmodo sez:

New personal robot from Toshiba called the ApriAlpha that has face and speech recognition, a voice synthesizer, built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, and runs on a fuel cell rather than batteries. It's not clear what the ApriAlpha can actually do, though it does kinda resemble one of those old Welltron 8-track cassette players.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, March 23, 2003

WP's Howard Kurtz on warblogs, kevinsites.net suspension

Howard Kurtz explores how technology has changed war journalism (and the suspension of kevinsites.net) in today's Washington Post.

For all the saturation coverage of the invasion of Iraq, this has become the first true Internet war, with journalists, analysts, soldiers, a British lawmaker, an Iraqi exile and a Baghdad resident using the medium's lightning speed to cut through the fog of war. The result is idiosyncratic, passionate and often profane, with the sort of intimacy and attitude that are all but impossible in newspapers and on television. Many of these so-called Weblogs eliminate the middleman -- the news outlets whose reach was once needed for a broad audience -- and allow participants to have their say, typos and all, without being run through the media's Cuisinart.

"The most interesting thing about the blog coverage is how far ahead it is of the mainstream media," says University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, whose InstaPundit.com site has seen a surge in traffic as the Iraq crisis has heated up, doubling to 200,000 hits a day. "The first-hand stuff is great. It's unfiltered and unspun. That doesn't mean it's unbiased. But people feel like they know where the bias is coming from. You don't have to spend a lot of time trying to find a hidden agenda."

Link to WP story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:57:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT on mobile tech and frontline war reporting, kevinsites.net suspension

An item in today's New York Times by Amy Harmon on technology and war reporting, which also discusses the suspension on Friday of the www.kevinsites.net warblog.

Reporters covering the war in Iraq are at one with their technology as never before. Television reporters are toting hand-held video cameras and print journalists have traded the 70-pound satellite phones of the 1991 Gulf War for svelte models that can be held up to their ear. High-speed Internet lines in the desert and more satellites in the sky mean journalists can make a connection almost anywhere. As the conflict unfolds, they are tapping into the global communications grid regularly.

News gatherers say the smaller gadgets and bigger bandwidth have broadened their reach in a way that is sure to change how people perceive the war. Just as television forced the world to confront graphic images of war for the first time during the Vietnam War, today's digital devices are beginning to provide a more intimate and multifaceted view of the war in Iraq than would have ever been possible before.

"Technology has advanced to the point where the only limitation is in the imagination of the correspondent," said Frank Governale, the vice president for operations at CBS News. "Given access by the military and willpower of the people, we can pretty much go live from wherever we want. It's a scary thought."

Image (NYT): A system used by NBC that provides Internet access and multiple telephone connections. Link to NYT story (registration required), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:49:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Perry Barlow : "War in the Land of Peace"

The latest missive from "cognitive dissident" and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, written on the road from Brazil:

I know that we can turn Baghdad - a town with 2 and a half million children - into telegenic Disney Hell with several thousand tons of high explosives and injure only Bad Guys. (Indeed, watching CNN, one might wonder if anyone gets injured at all in this marvelously surgical new form of war.)

I know that we have a lot of really cool toys in our arsenal. I know that A-10 Warthog can fire over a thousand rounds a minute. (Though no one in the media has mentioned that each of these bullets consists of depleted uranium that will be radiating birth defects into the Iraqi gene pool for many generations.)

I know that the only truly powerful country on the planet is continuing to manufacture the perilous, conscience-stunting myth that technology can make war relatively safe. Indeed, we are so delusional on this subject that we believe that bombing the shit out of the Iraqis is a humanitarian act. This is a continuation of the same national system of denial that we began to construct during Gulf War I.

Link to complete text, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:43:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dunkin Donuts co-opts "on-your-face" ads, "amihotornot" meme for Superbowl ads

Mike sez: "Dunkin' Donuts is paying fans to wear temporary tattoos bearing the company's logo on their foreheads during the NCAA Tournament. More info on the promotion in this ESPN story. The site itself is a 'Hot or Not' clone which lets users rate the tattooed fans on a scale from 'Mad Cool' to 'Mad Fool.'." Link to "Dunkin Madness" website (where fans can pick favorite tattoos), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:34:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Resignation letter from US diplomat/colonel who departed in protest of war

Govexec.com has just posted online a copy of the letter of resignation from career diplomat and and Army Reserves colonel Mary Wright to US Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wright resigned from the State Department this week in protest over foreign and domestic administration policies. She was most recently the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and also helped open the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in January 2002. Link to letter, Link to story about Wright's resignation, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:28:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PC Forum Wiki

The SocialText gang have set up a Wiki for sharing info related to PC Forum. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:58:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TrackBack aggregator for PC Forum

Nikolaj Nyholm has set up a TrackBack aggregator for PC Forum. Link Discuss

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

Outgoing mail server for PC Forum

Looking to send mail from PC Forum? Brian Behlendorf has graciously opened up his mail server to outgoing mail from the conference WiFi network. Use hyperreal.org as your outgoing mail-server, and pass it on. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:59:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great TrackBack tutorial

Michael Pusateri's posted a great, visual tutorial on TrackBack -- what it is and how to use it. Link Discuss (via JOHO the Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:16:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Today's UserFriendly is great!

Today's UserFriendly comic strip is wicked-funny. I'd include a shot from it, but I'd be giving away the punchline. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

British clubs expecting Spanish Fly drinks this summer

Snake-oil rave-beverage vendors in the UK are bringing a line of "Viagra pops" spiked with "Chinese aphrodesiacs" to British clubs this summer. Just when the market for rhino horn and tiger penis had finally been tamed...

Libido-boosting drinks will flood into bars this summer as young clubbers are targeted with a potent new range of products that have been dubbed 'Viagra pops'.

Powerful blends of Chinese aphrodisiacs, vodka and passion fruit will create a 'generation of randy super beings', according to drinks manufacturers who expect the new tipples to rock the market the way alcopops did in the 1990s.

Link Discuss (Thanks, James!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:04:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Autonomous, probablistic solutions to complex problems that aren't human-readable

Nice piece in the Technology Review on Ant Colony Optimization. This stuff is totally engrossing to me, realy great Rudy Rucker terrritory. Autonomous, probablistic solutions to complex problems that aren't human-readable -- god-dimmy, that's one funky future.

The researchers found that what works for ants and bacteria also works for autonomous pieces of computer code. "The idea is inspired by chemotactic models of tracking trail formation widely found in insects, bacteria, [and] slime molds," said Frank Schweitzer, an associate professor at Humboldt University and a research associate at the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligence Systems in Germany.

The work could eventually be used for self-assembling circuits, groups of coordinated robots and adaptive cancer treatments, according to Schweitzer.

Insect, bacteria and slime mold communities coordinate growth processes based on interactions among chemical trails left behind by individuals. The researchers set up a similar network using a computer simulation of electronic agents moving randomly across a grid containing unconnected network nodes.

Rather than determine the structure of a network in a top-down approach of hierarchical planning, agents found nodes and created connections in a bottom-up process of self-organization.

When an agent happened on a node, it began to produce one of two simulated chemical trails at a rate that decreased in time. The strength of the chemical trail also faded as time went by. The key to the self-assembling network is that the agents are drawn to the chemical trails laid down by other agents.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:53:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A theologian on gods in gaming

Check out this fascinating exchange between Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Ludicorp, a gaming company developing a massively multiplayer game called Game Neverending, and AKMA, a theologian blogger. Stewart's designing the religious pantheon in GNE and wanted AKMA's advice:

Interactions with the divine should have just enough predictability to make them worth bothering with, but absolutely no more (I except simple devices, such as T'aach boosting your karma for eating a mint). The vital element that this contingency serves is making it not worth players' while to try to *work* the game by (as it were) coercing divinities. I'll repeat later on: deities should be only slightly predictable enough for players to observe that they do indeed matter. In fact, it would make a worthwhile argument *within* the game, whether one need adhere to any divinity or not. If you could attain that degree of subtlety, you'd have won outright.

Regarding game play, I ought to be able to interact productively with my patron's enemy-spirit, even if just to placate her or him. Think of classical divinities; they're less mechanistic (by far) than our imaginations would tend to make them. It makes perfect sense for an adherent of T'aach to make a propitiatory sacrifice to Thbwappo, the Source of Halitosis even though the two of them are mortally opposed to one another, and T'aach should be nettled by this only if the adherent in question is a keystone figure. People don't matter that much to divinities.

Link Discuss

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

A list of all the books in print wouldn't fit in the store

Rael's got a funny anaedote from his trip to a local Barnes and Noble:

Me: Can you tell me who the author of ______ is?
Retailer: I can't.
Me: Well, can you look it up?
Retailer: I can't. Our computers are down.
Me: Ah. Well, can I take a gander at your Books in Print.
Retailer: [Smirks] We don't have a list of all the books in print. We wouldn't be able to fit it in the store.
Me: In fact you would. We had these great big volumes and then later microfiche when I worked in a bookstore a number of years back.
Retailer: Do you know how many books that would be?
Me: Lots, I do believe you. But the fact remains that Books in Print is indeed a real thing.
Retailer: Well, we don't have it. We have computers instead.
Me: Apparently not.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:34:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, March 22, 2003

O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference cuts entry-fee

So I recently got wind that O'Reilly has discounted entry-fees for the Emerging Technologies Conference coming to Santa Clara, CA from April 22-25, to $696 for the main sessions, and $800 if you want to attend the tutorials. I'm on the conference committee for Emerging Tech, but it's been quite a while since we finalized the speaker roster. $700 is a hell of a lot of money, and seeing that figure made me go back to the conference site and have another look.

Jesus Christ! We've got some amazing speakers coming this year! I mean, mind-bogglingly amazing. Eric Bonabeau, the king of ant-colony optimization, who achieves amazing best-effort solutions to the Travelling Salesmen problem with parallel ant-colony simulations (a solution that made Southwest Airlines profitable); Eric Blossom, the inventor of GNU Radio, the first Free Software software-defined-radio, which will make regulating radio receivers into a First Amendment violations; Eric Drexler, who coined the term "nanotechnology" and created the theoretical basis for the most disruptive technology of all; Intel Research at Berkeley's Eric Paulos, a telerobotics researcher now working on immersive games for P2P sensor networks... That's just the Erics!

There're equally fine speakers on the theory, law and practice of WiFi; on next-gen blogging tools (and next-gen blogging businesses, if that's how you're kinked); next-gen P2P networking; next-gen massively multiplayer online role-playing games (and particularily the innovative thinking that's going into understanding how MMORPGs build novel forms of social interation); hardware hacking wherein Moore's Law makes messing with the metal as easy as writing code, und zo weiter.

I speak at a lot of conferences -- two or three a month, sometimes -- and the tech-bubble-collapse has really flensed away the fat from these shows. Gone are the empty suits with empty promises, leaving only really meaty technology, policy and business questions that are being addressed by smart, passionate, novel thinkers whose accomplishments speak for themselves.

I speak at a lot of conferences -- great conferences -- but the Emerging Tech conference is the nigh-perfect event. The range of subjects and the quality of the speakers (and the attendees) makes this event into the kind of show that is the equivalent of reading a hundred of the best science fiction novels of the past ten years while getting an MBA from a really good, tech-oriented B-school. In four days.

$700 is a lot of money -- you can get a used iBook for that much. But ETCON's worth it, worth every penny, if you ask me, because the things you can learn at this conference are things that you simply can't get anywhere else. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Six Degrees of tech

My friend Sarah Granger's written a piece on small worlds in networks and real life for MindJack.

My friend -- Ben -- is the Kevin Bacon of the wired world. Everybody knows somebody who knows Ben. For example, Chuck, a friend from college (Michigan -- where, incidentally, they don't need AC for server farms -- they just put them outside), worked for a big consulting firm after graduation. There, he met Jason, who had previously worked with Ben in college. Alan S., whom I also met in college, did graduate work at Stanford and met up with Scott, who started a company and enlisted Alan B., who was previously Ben's roommate in Illinois and had worked with Tamara at SGI. (Really, there is a point to the Russian-style character introduction.) Here's where the theorizing about Ben, Kevin Bacon, and high-tech's two degrees of separation all began. But that was all a few years after I met Ben.

I first met Ben at a conference in 1994 in Tennessee, not generally a hot spot for new tech widgets. We made friends and kept in touch by e-mail for the next few years as I moved out to Silicon Valley & he started graduate work in the mid-west. Eventually he needed a change of scenery, so he moved out to finish his PhD at Berkeley. During this time, he worked for NSF and flew all over the country doing work related to the Digital Libraries Initiative. He knows a lot of people who work in all aspects of high-tech, so somehow it came about that everybody knows somebody who knows Ben.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:58:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MilSpec laptop is dishwasher safe

Paul Boutin reviews the GoBook MAX, a milspec, shockproof, waterproof, heatproof laptop for Slate. It's exciting hardware, but the war references in the review seem exploitative to me.

But the company's roughneck and military clientele belies its much larger potential market: professional parents. Finally, a laptop worthy of the term "toddler-proof." No disastrous crashes to the kitchen floor. No months of data lost to an incident with the sippy cup. Hazardous materials? Toss it in the dishwasher. Need to get out of the house? The handle flips back to mount the MAX open across the wheel of an SUV for mobile use. There's even an add-on DVD drive for movies.

With the amount of money office workers spend on their cars alone, a couple thousand dollars more for a droppable, dishwasher-safe laptop is a no-brainer bargain in total cost of ownership.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:55:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How Slashdot girds its servers

Commander Taco, one of ths Slashdot founders, describes the lengths to which /. has gone to ensure that wartime traffic-surges don't trash its servers. Reminds me of Web Site Optimization, which looks like a pretty good book on the finer points of this subject.

In preperation for more wartime coverage, we've made a few changes. One was to remove the Next/Prev links from article.pl. Those are relatively expensive DB calls, and when more users view articles, those 2 queries per article.pl add up. Someday we'll optimize them better, but they are actually quite tricky to do properly since next/prev are relative to the user. Any number of things affect them (Subscribers see stories in the future for example).

We're also going to move the AC default threshold to 2. Logged in users won't be affected, and ACs can always drop it if they want, but this means they'll be more likely to see better comments, and hopefully smaller pages and fewer clicks.

Another change we're considering is the commentsplits. Currently we split pages on 100 comments. We're considering dropping that number to 50 or something. The theory is that more-but-smaller pages will result in snappier performance overall for everyone.

Of course the obvious answer is more metal. We're also trying to see if we can't scrounge up more boxes for the comments pool. If we get a 30-40% boost in traffic, it would be nice to have at least a 10-20% increase in hardware powering it.

Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:51:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 21, 2003

Yoga for peace

Boing Boing buddy Todd Lappin took photos of a yoga for peace demonstration in the streets of San Francisco. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:52:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

War demonstration pics, vids, audio fills blogs today.

Lisa Rein sends this link -- blogged photos and quicktime movies which document a San Francisco police officer striking a protester during yesterday's anti-war demonstrations. Got your own photos, audio, or online video clips? Post the URLs in this Discuss link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:39:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

War-blogging worth reading

I've been staying away from blogging about the war for the most part. I hate the yammering talk-radio thrashes that follow every post, and I feel like there's not much I can point to that a) most people haven't seen already and/or b) I have something new to say about. But Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor at Tor, has been blogging a really amazing collection of reasoned, sometimes contrary, thoughtful and thorough blog-entries about the war that have made me think hard and have alternately heartened and depressed me. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:42:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Singing and Dancing, all day long.

skeletor
james bond
new potatoes
pepper vs. banana
the queen
mussolini
puppies with kittens
viking kittens with puppy

Link Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:58:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Advance review of Wallace and Gromit game

Here's an advance review of the upcoming Wallace and Gromit game, which will be released to tie in with the 2005 movie.

The game begins from a premise that's arrant nonsense even for a licensed platformer -- an evil penguin, Feathers McGraw, has taken over the zoo that's imprisoned him and enslaved its inhabitants as part of his jewel-smuggling operation. Wallace and Gromit (mostly Gromit, who the player controls throughout the game) have to free 24 levels worth of imprisoned baby animals in order to free the zoo from the penguin's domination and return him to the appropriate occupation of a zoo penguin, slipping around on his belly and eating herring and guest-starring in Ed Norton's psychotic fantasies.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cigarette ads from old TV shows

Great collection of cigarette ads from old TV shows, including the Flintstones. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Get Your War On

The new Get Your War On is out, and it's especially good. Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:01:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Automated current-events discovery from Technorati

David Sifry's Technorati is now pulling in 150,000 blogs every hour, and he's using the data-spikes from the feeds to identify breaking news stories. The Technorati Breaking News page has links to stories that have, in the past two hours, been the subject of extensive blogging. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:57:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Talk radio is the province of lying demagogues, bigots and fools

This Boston Globe editorial about the sorry state of talk-radio is bang-on.

Somewhere between Orlando and Tampa, a host spent the morning touting the discovery of an Iraqi drone as the smoking gun in the case against Iraq. Reporters on the scene would describe this drone as a ''weed whacker with wings.''

There was another host, somewhere between Tampa and Fort Myers, who took antiwar women's groups angrily to task on the grounds that the women of Iraq were bitterly oppressed. He didn't seem to know that Iraq -- which surely oppresses both genders -- is a secular state where women are more equal than among our friends the Saudis.

On the last lap between Fort Myers and Naples, there was the assertion, repeated again and again, that Saddam was somewhere behind the terrorism of Sept. 11. Never mind that the CIA disagrees.

Link Discuss (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:55:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Danger relaxes SDK terms, still getting it wrong

Danger has relaxed its terms-of-service for downloaders of the Hiptop SDK, but they're still layering on restrictions that, IMO, endanger the long-term health of the device, since it's only by creating a space for innovation without permission that Danger can hope to have real, killer apps emerge.

People have said that the restrictions are necessary to keep apps from sucking too much bandwidth or to prevent malware from being installed on users' devices -- but these are the same risks borne by ISPs that allow anyone to connect any PC, with any software, to their network. What's more, it discounts the possibility that apps could be developed that reduce the bandwidth sucked by a device (for example, a mailer that allows me to specify that mail with a high enough SpamAssasin score in the header shouldn't be downloaded, or a browser that uses the Google API to fetch sections of pages that are relevant to my search-terms, rather than the whole page). Likewise, it discounts the possibility that users can distinguish between good and malicious software, say, by installing software released or recommended by people they trust.

It forecloses on the possibility of someone building a Danger PIM-syncher (right now, you can put your calendar, contact, memo and to-do info into your SideKick, but you can't ever get it out of it, and if you stop being a T-Mobile customer, they'll remove all the data from your device, so your calendar only exists so long as you're a T-Mobile customer) (this is why I'm not using my SideKick as a calendar -- and carrying an extra PIM device).

In the end, Danger needs to decide if they're shipping an Internet device, one that's end-to-end and allows users to define their own services; or a telephone device that can only run the services approved by the phone-company -- and if they choose the latter, it's only a matter of time before they're displaced by someone building the former. Meanwhile, this thread on the Danger Developer Forum clarifies it still more fully: right now, the only apps that can be installed on a SideKick are the apps that Danger signs off on.

Wake up Danger and T-Mobile: this is my device: I paid $250 for it. It's contemptuous of your customers to restrict how we can use our lawfully acquired property. Link Discuss (Thanks, Katrus!, and via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:51:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chemistry experiments that go bang!

This collection of "educational" videos demonstrate a bunch of really cool, violent chemical reactions: flaming sodium and chlorine, volatile nitrogen triiodide going bang, and a cast-iron, water-filled bomb that explodes when the water inside of it is frozen with a slush of dry ice and acetone -- and much more. LInk Discuss (Thanks, Kyoto!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:20:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dog bites AIBO

Clive sez:

Many people love showering attention on their Aibos, pretending they're real. But what about actual dogs? Are they fooled? To find out, a bunch of French scientists recently had a few real dogs interact with some Aibos. It all went quite peacefully, until the scientists decided to put a piece of meat in the room and have an Aibo and a dog compete over it. Go to their site and you enjoy what is surely a first in scientific history: Live video of a snarling dog kicking the living shit out of a hapless robot.

The best part is the explanatory note by the scientists: "The horrible screams that you hear at the end of this film were made by the experimenters, who were startled to see the dog attack the AIBO ... we strongly advise you not to try anything similar with your AIBO."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Clive!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:16:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, March 20, 2003

William Gibson on John Shirley

Here's William Gibson's introduction to John Shirley's proto-cyberpunk novel, City Come a Walkin'.

Shirley made the plastic-covered Sears sofa that was the main body of seventies sf recede wonderfully. Discovering his fiction was like hearing Patti Smith's Horses for the first time: the archetypal form passionately re-inhabited by a debauched yet strangely virginal practitioner, one whose very ability to do this at all was constantly thrown into question by the demands of what was in effect a shamanistic act. There is a similar ragged-ass derring-do, the sense of the artist burning to speak in tongues. They invoke their particular (and often overlapping, and indeed she was one of his) gods and plunge out of downscale teenage bedrooms, brandishing shards of imagery as peculiarly-shaped as prison shivs.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:35:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Where is Raed" Iraq blog: hoax? real?

Interesting blog post by Paul Boutin regarding whether the much-talked-about "Where is Raed?" blog is a hoax or not:

Speculation continues that Dear Raed, the weblog of a young man in Baghdad who posts under the name Salam Pax, is a hoax, perhaps even a disinformation campaign by the CIA or Mossad. A month after Computerworld published a story quoting a "terrorist" who turned out to be a one of their former writers pranking them, it would be foolish not to wonder.

Rather than guess, I emailed Salam and asked for proof of his location just before the first attack on Baghdad this morning. "how can i do that?" he emailed back. "you don't expect me to run out in the street and take a picture near something you'll recognize." Actually, I pointed out, a +964 phone number where I could reach him would do. Dialing into Iraq from here is tough right now, but not impossible, and rerouting a phone number would be much tougher than posting a blog from outside the country. Salam hasn't given me one, but that's understandable.

Instead, I mixed what I learned as a Unix sysadmin in the 80s with what I learned as a daily reporter in the 90s. A barrage of late-night phone calls and emails to bloggers, Google, and network engineers produced the following evidence...

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:26:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Media giant ClearChannel sponsoring pro-war rallies

Story in yesterday's Chicago Trib examining the questionable propriety of the nation's largest radio station owner sponsoring pro-war-in-Iraq rallies:

In a move that has raised eyebrows in some legal and journalistic circles, Clear Channel radio stations in Atlanta, Cleveland, San Antonio, Cincinnati and other cities have sponsored rallies attended by up to 20,000 people. The events have served as a loud rebuttal to the more numerous but generally smaller anti-war rallies.

The sponsorship of large rallies by Clear Channel stations is unique among major media companies, which have confined their activities in the war debate to reporting and occasionally commenting on the news. The San Antonio-based broadcaster owns more than 1,200 stations in 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Link, Discuss (via pho)

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

Photos of San Francisco business district shutdown

Protestors have shut down several intersections in San Francisco. A friend emailed me this morning: "Up here in SF, protesters have pretty much frozen downtown... 20+ intersections are out of commission due to sit-ins and the like... very glad I take BART to/from work...!" Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:51:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Is Iraq's Internet still functioning?

There's a thread on Declan's politech list today about the status of Internet service within Iraq. Brian at pc-radio.com posts:

Despite the ease with which the USA could unplug Iraq from the Net (article link), the country's Internet services appear to functioning as of this moment. Web surfers have encountered intermittent problems reaching Uruklink.net, the Iraq government's main website, after the US launched its initial attack Wednesday night. But those access difficulties were apparently due to a surge of Internet visitors rather than to damage from the bombing.(...)

Iraq's two main e-mail servers, mail.uruklink.net and mail.warkaa.net, were still responding to pings today. The website of Iraqi's satellite TV service (reachable at http://62.145.94.28 since it lost its domain iraqtv.ws), as well as BabilOnline.net, a major newspaper, were also reachable. While Iraq's sites are available from outside the country, it's not immediately clear whether Iraqis are able to access the Internet since the initial attacks.

Link to reply posts, Link to original query, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:18:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Speaking at UC Berkeley on Wireless next Weds.

I'm speaking at UC Berkeley's School of Journalism next Wednesday, March 26, on the Future of Wireless, from 7 to 8PM. It's free and no RSVP is necessary. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:54:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SF event: SRL benefit for Hoverdrum inventor Tim North, Tue. 3-25

Next week in San Francisco, Survival Research Laboratories and SomArts are holding a benefit for Tim "Hoverdrum" North and his family, who are in a time of great need. Apart from being a talented visual artist and live performer and the inventor of the Hoverdrum, Tim is a beloved personal friend. He was recently diagnosed with stage four cancer -- the disease's most critical phase, on a scale of zero to four.

The event promises to be northing short of amazing: "A brilliant night of Music, Art-auction, Videos from local, national and international artists" is planned, along with live SRL robotics performances, an assortment of DJs, body-drum performers, -- and the (ahem) much-anticipated release of The Official SRL Nudie Calendar. Take it from me, people, the pinup calendar will be H4WT. Let's just say I have my sources.

Showtime: Tuesday, March 25, 7 p.m. to 2 a.m.; Door $10 - $10,000 sliding scale; location: SomArts Gallery, 934 Brannan, San Francisco, CA 94103. All proceeds go to the North family. Not to be missed.

Link to benefit home page, Link to poster, partial list of auction items, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:45:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

United Way will provide cheap WiFi and PCs to Philly's poor

The United Way has launched a project to cover Philadelphia's poor neighborhoods with wireless access and to supply low-income families with computers.

The project, to be completed in April, will create two Internet "hot spots" in West Philadelphia that will allow anyone with the right equipment to tap in to a broadband connection as powerful as any offered by a commercial service.

The service will cost between $5 and $10 per month, less than what many people pay to dial up the Internet on a modem.

Only people with a computer and a wireless Internet adapter card will be able to get the signals, but the United Way plans to start giving away machines to area families this summer, starting with 100 in the city's West Powelton and Haddington sections.

"The long-term plan is to have a wireless coverage blanket in neighborhoods where people probably couldn't afford the service on their own," said Stephen Rockwell, director of technology outreach for the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania.

Link Discuss (via Smart Mobs)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:20:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Revolution is Not an AOL Keyword

Eddan Katz has posted a brilliant, high-larious, hyper-linked adaptation of Gil-Scott Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" to bIPlog, entitled, Revolution is Not an AOL Keyword:

You will not be able to stay home, dear Netizen.
You will not be able to plug in, log on and opt out.
You will not be able to lose yourself in Final Fantasy,
Or hold your Kazaa download queues,
Because revolution is not an AOL Keyword...

Revolution will not be right back after
Pop-up ads about eCommerce, eTailers, or eContent.
You will not have to worry about a
Cookie in your browser, a bug in your email, or a
Worm in your recycling bin.
Revolution will not run faster with Intel inside.
Revolution, dude, is not getting a Dell.
Revolution will increase your Google rank.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword,
Is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will be no stream or download, dear Netizen;
Revolution must still be live.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mary!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:02:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cisco buys Linksys

Cisco, the giant network equipment manufacturer that specializes in hyper-expensive gear, has acquired Linksys, the tiny network equipment manufacturer that specializes in network gear that's so cheap, it's basically disposable. Linksys went for $500 million worth of Cisco stock. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Press Your Luck player gamed the system

Michael Larsen, an unemployed ice-cream salesman, obsessively taped and watched the game-show Press Your Luck in the 80s until he'd figured out how the game-board's patterns worked. Once he had the system nailed, he appeared on the show and swept the board, netting over $100,000 (which he promptly lost on bad real-estate investments). The account and video of his win is pretty amazing. Link Discuss (via Ben Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:40:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

US military leaflets dropped over Iraq, take two.

US-led forces have air-dropped 17 million leaflets over Iraq this year, and nearly two million were dumped over southern Iraq yesterday. This gallery displays the six types dropped yesterday -- new ones since the last time we blogged this. From a CENTCOM press release:

Three contained several references for Iraqis to tune to radio frequencies where Coalition forces are broadcasting information about United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's reign and other topics. Another type of leaflet warned Iraqi troops not to use weapons of mass destruction, emphasizing that "unit commanders will be held accountable for non-compliance." One leaflet warned Iraqi troops that the Coalition will destroy any viable military targets and does not wish to destroy any Iraqi landmarks, and that the "Coalition forces do not wish to harm the noble people of Iraq. To ensure your safety, avoid areas occupied by military personnel." One more leaflet type told Iraqi troops "not risk their life and the life of their comrades," and to "leave now, go home, and learn, grow, prosper."

Link, Reuters story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:14:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Two scoops of lust please, mit chocolate sprinkles

Following up on Cory's earlier post on right-wing frozen desserts: uproar in Germany over a line of ice cream flavors named after the seven deadly sins. Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:46:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

wacky "Mighty Midols desktop app" combats "forces of Monsteruation"

Alloy.com is running a bizarre online promotion for anti-PMS meds:

What is THE MIGHTY MIDOLS MENSTRUAL 'MINDER (M4)? The M4 is a fun and easy desktop application that allows you to interact with the Mighty Midols! A password protected interface lets you input your cycle information to be sure to never be caught off guard by Monsteruation again. Marissa, Mimi and Maya will battle the forces of Monsteruation and keep your computer desktop symptom free.

Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:04:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free PDF version of Real World Adobe GoLive 6

Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman are giving away their book, Real World Adobe GoLive 6, in PDF format. (It's 922 pages long = 23 Mb.) Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:22:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Latter-day ashphalters call on feds not to treat fiber like roads

Clay sez:

The 21st Century Infrastructure Consortium (21st CiC)is dedicated to bringing high-bandwidth fiber to the home. Or, rather, they are dedicated to FTTH as long as our city governments don't get involved. From the looks of the paper 21st CiC has filed with the FCC, the worst thing that could possibly happen is that someone could be scheming to offer you access to pure bandwidth, uncluttered by monopolistic business practices.

From their FCC filing: "Municipalities, even when they promise to build an open-access network, should not at all be involved with the FTTx industry."

So take that, you municipal stooges! Your puny notions of "open access" are nothing to us! (I'd suggest a drinking game involving the number of occurrences of the phrase "unfair competition" in a two page PDF, but I think the AMA would revoke my blogging license.)

The very idea that the government would want to treat access to bandwidth as even remotely analogous to access to highways has latter-day asphalt manufacturers in a tizzy. Municipal FTTH may die a-borning, if the beneficiaries of such services don't make themselves heard.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Clay!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:04:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MIT Press takes gutsy fair use stand

MIT Press sought to clear one-line excerpts from twelve songs that are quoted in a forthcoming novel. Faced with ten forms that had to filled out before proceeding, one demand of $10,000, and a flat refusal, they decided to hell with it, one-line excerpts are fair goddamned use, and decided to just print 'em. Lessig points out that risk-averse publishers try to minimize their lawyer-hours by essentially publishing no fair-use material, and MIT's doing the right thing here could very well loosen up some of that fearful tightness.

That is rare in this business. Publishers are among the most conservative “fair users� — not because they don’t believe in free speech, but because they understand the burden of non-free lawyers. If a lawsuit is filed against a publisher for copyright infringement, the cost of answering the complaint can suck up the total profit from the book. Thus, however generous the Supreme Court thinks it is when it defends “fair use,� the relevant “fair use� is the freedom publishers permit.

It is a great thing that publishers like MIT can help set the standard. The law should make it easier for others to do the same.

Link Discuss

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

Disney parks are no-fly zones

The new Orange Alert aviation regs have created a no-fly-zone around Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

The new regulations in effect create a no-fly zone around Disney World in Orlando, Florida and Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Unless pilots are granted specific exemptions from air traffic controllers, no flights are allowed within a 3-mile radius around the parks or below 3,000 feet.

Government officials said the Disney restrictions are not based on any specific or new information, but rather stem from a general concern about those two locations as possible terror targets.

Counterterrorism officials said the Disney parks have come up in interviews with al Qaeda operatives. Pictures and information about the parks have been found during some terror sweeps overseas, they say...

Disney spokeswoman Leslie Goodman said the latest airspace restriction is nothing new and expressed concern the latest restriction is unnecessarily worrying visitors. She complained Disney's phones have been ringing off the hook with anxious vacationers calling.

So there's a real possible upside to all the terrornoia: I might get shorter lines when I visit Disneyland next. Link Discuss

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

Corporate stupidity hall of shame

Business 2.0's published its annual roundup of the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business.

Panic in the heartland, part 1: The crisis begins.
Outside a Wal-Mart (WMT) in the small town of Geneseo, Ill., a 73-year-old woman buys a newspaper and suddenly finds herself trapped when the door of the news rack slips closed and catches her coat. Unable to wriggle out, she solicits a bystander to enter the Wal-Mart and ask for help. A Wal-Mart employee comes out to explain that she can't assist, citing a policy against tampering with the news rack.

Panic in the heartland, part 2: The tense negotiation.
After going back inside for a moment, the Wal-Mart employee comes out and tells the trapped woman that she'll call the newspaper and have a representative come to release her. The woman suggests an alternative solution: Somebody could simply put two quarters in the machine and open the damn door. The Wal-Mart employee rejects this out of hand, explaining that the store can't pay refunds for the news rack.

Panic in the heartland, part 3: The sweet taste of liberation.
Eventually the employee relents and puts two quarters in the machine. Later the liberated woman's daughter visits the store and gives her a $5 bill to be used strictly to finance future releases. A Wal-Mart corporate spokesperson apologizes for the incident, saying, "This is not how we do business."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:04:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cellphones vulnerable to SMS-bomb

A certain make of Siemens cellular handset, popular in Europe, can be shut down by sending an SMS-encoded message to it. Hilarity ensues.

The e-mails contain a single word, taken from the phone's language menu, surrounded by quote marks and preceded by an asterisk, such as "*English" or "*Deutsch," Siemens said.

Opening the short-text message on a Siemens 35 series cell completely disables it, Rice said. Siemens 45 series phones are less affected and can be resuscitated after about two minutes of work, Rice said. Both phones are sold only in Europe.

Link Discuss (via Smart Mobs)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:39:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

411 coming to mobile phones

Cellular companies are preparing to open their customer-databases to 411 service next year (on an opt-out basis) so that directory assistance will include wireless numbers. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:34:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wicks to replace heat-sinks in laptops

Sandia Labs is ready to commercialize its copper "wick" technology that efficiently moves heat away from your laptop's processor to vents. They promise to replace traditional heat-sinks and fans and to reduce the scorching heat of the average laptop. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:30:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ice-cream for red-baiters

Ice-cream flavors for jingoistic Limbaughites from "Star-Spangled Ice Cream:"

• I hate the French Vanilla
• Smaller Governmint
• Iraqi Road
• Nutty Environmentalist

All at $20 less per gallon than Ben and Jerry's. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

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

Victoria's secret is bulimia

A new parodical ad campaign, "What is Victoria's Secret," implies that the real secret of lingerie models is bulemia. Link Discuss (via Gawker)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Indigineous prior-art database to fight bio-piracy

Multinational pharma companies are patenting the traditional medecine of indigineous people. Now activists have created a prior-art website to foil these acts of "bio-piracy."

They hope that the Tekpad (Traditional Ecological Knowledge Prior Art Database) website will go some way to redress this bio-piracy by offering US and European patent offices a comprehensive list of traditional remedies that are already in the public domain...

"The website is a way of fighting bio-piracy which is the misuse of biological resources and knowledge," Project Director Stephen Hansen explained to the BBC's Go Digital programme.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

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

Bush's nose follows Esso

This little flash application is a fun way to spend the next 45 seconds. Move an Esso logo around the screen and watch Bush's nose follow it. (The Pinnochia guy might enjoy this too.) Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:19:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Manhattan magicians

Close-up magicians in NYC haunt the Monday Night Magic after-dinner show, despite the rotten pay, to land lucrative Bar Mitzvah and private party gigs. This NYPress story about Monday Night Magic is a great look into the camaraderie and rivalry in close up magic.

"Todd’s pick-up line is, ‘Hey darling, pick a lamp’," Swiss explains. "Then he walks over to the lamp, unscrews a lightbulb and eats it. No magic. He just eats it. And, man, nobody’s gonna be amazed that you produced their card after that."

"And he’s married," complains Chaut. "Why not me?"

"Well, the ladies just love carnies," says the sword-swallowing, fire-eating Doc Swan. "You wanna know what the secret is?" Everyone leans closer. "It’s the freak thing," he explains, in a hushed, satisfied southern drawl. "They know you’re different, but they all wanna know if it, you know, is normal too." He glances down at his crotch. "And, I tell them, ‘Sure, the middle one is…’"

Link Discuss (Thanks, Logan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Memory Stick TV-tuner

Sony has demoed a TV-tuner built into a Memory-Stick form-factor gizmo. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

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

Martian virus identified by HK researchers

An epidemiology newsletter reports that researchers have isolated the virus responsible for the SARS martian flu:

A team from the Prince of Wales Hospital and Chinese University of Hong Kong have identified the virus that has caused the recent outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome worldwide, confirming that the current anti-viral treatment applied to patients has been the right choice. Identifying the virus as a member of the Paramyxoviridae family, Professor John Tam of the department of microbiology of the Chinese University said it was detected by electron microscopy. The finding, announced late last night, was further confirmed by a molecular technique that revealed the nucleic acid sequence of the virus.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Danger repeating Apple's Newton mistakes with restrictive SDK

AaronSw sez, "Danger's launched their developer site, which shows a surprising amount of uncoolness. To download the simulator, you need be verified that you own a Hiptop. To be able to put your software on real Hiptops, you need to write a program and get it approved by Danger or work for 'a company actively engaged in development for handheld devices.' Finally, they've got a system of 'Developer Dollars' to try and stop people from freeloading on the forums. What are they so afraid of? Why can't they just put the software up on a web server?"

The thing that really got me excited about the Danger when I saw the presentation at last year's PC Forum was the promise of really simple development for the device -- write JBuilder code, run it through a bytecode converter, and biff-bam, you've got a Danger app.

But it took a year for these folks to get their SDK out the door, and we find that the terms of use are almost as restrictive than the old Newton deal, which led to a drought of apps for the Newton and paved the way for Palm (which had a free, open SDK) to kick the hell out of Apple. I'm a Danger user -- hell, I'm an addict -- but the inability to install arbitrary code on the device has really frustrated me. I don't want to wait for Danger to come up with a browser that has find-in-page, or a mailer that has filtering rules: I want someone to build the apps for me. I'd even pay for 'em.

This developer deal sucks the life out of Danger, sucks the value out of the device. How long until a smart entrepreneur clones the Danger but ships a copy of GCC for it as well? Danger, learn a lesson from Palm: the more apps your device gets, the more it'll be worth to your customers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Aaron!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elevator pitches from BigPicnic

BigPicnic has come up with a bunch of elevator pitches for a hypothetic TV show -- they're pretty funny.

Pilot: A Hero Emerges Phillip Brock is determined to meet out justice when a young girl is murdered at the city zoo. A mysterious lurker is noticed at the scene, but no evidence links him to the crime. Undaunted, Phillip convicts the murderer by systematically proving every single other living person on the planet innocent of the crime!

Episode 1A: To Catch A Crook A murderous bank robber roams the city, and time is running out. Desperate to catch this nefarious criminal, Brock sets up a phony arrest, then a phony trial using his friend's improv acting troop. After being cleared of charges at the fake court, Brock arrests this brazen burglar for real, saving the day!

Link Discuss (Thanks, JNelsonW!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:23:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beijing street-scenes

The China Blog photoblog sections feature galleries of beggars, street-vendors, trashcans, and other quotidian elements of Beijing life. Link Discuss (Thanks, __x!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:20:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pinocchio Pr0n

Some dude with a major schnozz fetish runs this online gallery of photoshopped images that transform otherwise normal Hot Babes into Hot Babes With Pinocchio Noses. Marginally work-safe. Link, Discuss (Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl, thanks, Eli The Bearded!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:18:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tale of the Dreamachine

Theatre company One Yellow Rabbit is staging Blake Brooker and David Rhymer's play Dream Machine, a "halucinogenic musical" based on Burroughs and Gysin's invention of the Dreamachine (see below). The play runs in Vancouver from March 26 - April 5. Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:02:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage Swedish rocker photos

Amazing publicity photos of Swedish bands. Circa 1970s? Link Discuss (Thanks, Gabe!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:03:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

David Woodard: Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

David Woodard is an eccentric LA-based composer, artist, and writer who was pals with William Burroughs. Woodard makes Dreamachines, the hallucinogenic "flicker" device that Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville invented and Burroughs wrote about. He also composes "prequiems," music written for a specific individual to hear as they die. Woodard is inarguably an interesting guy. This is a link to an Orange County Weekly article about him. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:03:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gallery of ugly recipes from the 1970s

No wonder so many people swear by Weight Watchers. These recipe cards have pictures of such disgusting looking food, you'll want to give up the habit of eating. Link Discuss (Thanks, Justin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:04:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Talking fish predicts the end of the world

Two fish cutters from New York report that a carp about to be made into gefilte fish uttered dire warnings for the fate of humankind.

"It said 'Tzaruch shemirah' and 'Hasof bah'," Mr Rosen later told the New York Times newspaper. "[It] essentially means [in Hebrew] that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is nigh."

Mr Nivelo told the paper he was so shocked he fell into a stack of slimy packing crates, before running in panic to the shop entrance and grabbing Mr Rosen, shouting: "The fish is talking!"

However his co-worker reacted with disbelief.

"I screamed 'It's the devil The devil is here!', but Zalman said to me 'You crazy, you a meshugeneh [mad man]!" Mr Nivelo said.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:07:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

P2P filesharing funds terrorism? Enquiring congresspersons want to know.

It was inevitable:

A congressional hearing on the links between terrorism, organized crime, and the illegal trading of copyrighted material produced more complaints about college students using peer-to-peer networks and other governments sanctioning copyright violations than it did evidence of nefarious connections. Witnesses and representatives at the U.S. House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property hearing Thursday did express fears that profits from widespread copying of movies, music, and software outside the United States were being funneled into terrorist organizations, but the hearing produced no concrete examples of that happening.

John G. Malcolm, deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, did say there seems to be some connection between illegal copying and organized crime, in that many of the groups profiting from illegal copies are highly organized and can have international distribution networks. Organized crime often supports terrorism, he suggested. "These groups will not hesitate to threaten or injure those who tend to interfere with their operations," Malcolm said.

Link to PC World story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:28:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

VPN service for WiFi users

HotSpotVPN: for $9/month, these guys will give your Windows (but not *nix or Mac) machine a VPN connection that scrambles all of your network communication -- handy when using a WiFi network. Link Discuss (via WiFi News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:39:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, March 17, 2003

Uproar over unauthorized Nokia cat-torture ads for videophones

Update in Australia's Courier Mail on the wacky ads for Nokia videophones -- spoof or real? -- blogged here on BoingBoing last week. The video spot captures an unsuspecting cat twirling around helplessly on a ceiling fan, then hitting the wall with a loud thud.

The ad purports to promote the latest model Nokia phone, released in Australia last week, and contains voices with Australian accents, adding credibility to the theory it was produced here. But the nature of the internet means it is almost impossible to tell how many people have received the clip or where it originated. Mr Wilson acknowledged the clip could have been made by an amateur digital film-maker or a professional at an advertising agency as an in-house joke.

"Agencies make a variety of options, many of which will never get shown to the client because they don't fit the client's brief or advertising guidelines," he said. "It is possible this was one of those."

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:22:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notes on reading an electronic book

Brad Templeton (EFF's chairman) has a page of very useful tips for making the experience of reading long passages of onscreen text more pleasant.

It may be best to make the type very large and to sit far back from the screen. This makes things sharper (if you have good vision) and allows you to change your posture from time to time as you normally do when reading paper. Sitting hunched over a small screen is discomforting.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:56:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chef trapped in freezer, hospitalized

A chef preparing lunch for workers went into a walk-in freezer, and the door swung shut. The latch was so corroded, he couldn't open it.

When the freezer door closed behind him, immediately triggering the refrigeration fan, Mr Stark thought someone was playing a joke. But nothing is funny when you are wearing a T-shirt and light pants and the temperature is minus 18 degrees.

After being rescued a couple of hours later, he was flown to the hospital. "Speaking outside court, Mr Stark, 51, of Sale, said that his whole life had been 'stuffed' by the incident." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:48:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phone with integrated CD recorder for storing conversations

The Vidicode Featurephone 175 is a telephone with a built-in CD recorder for recording your phone conversations -- up to 175h of speech per disc. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:40:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Slushy photography from Toronto

My friend Kevin Steele has spent this year's hard Toronto winter shooting beautiful pix of the city, shots that capture both the liveliness and the desolation of a great northeastern city buried in snow and slush. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:21:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grainmerchants set FUD-sights on Atkins

The flour-vendors and carbo-brokers are sweating the rising popularity of the Atkins diet and other low-carb/high-protein regimens, and are going on the counterattack, creating a public education campaign about the "Fatkins" diet.

Part of the consortium's push will be in Washington, where federal health officials are starting talks on revisions to the nation's 11-year-old Food Guide Pyramid.

Wheat Foods will be actively involved in defending the grains, Adams said...

The strategy is a direct attack on Atkins: Americans who follow the Atkins diet increase their risk of health problems that include cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol, kidney damage and some cancers, the Wheat Foods Council says.

Adding insult to injury, it claims that Atkins followers can also suffer headaches, constipation and bad breath.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Merlin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, March 16, 2003

New version of Freenet to launch Monday, March 17

Version 0.5.1 of the software for large-scale peer-to-peer network Freenet will be released tomorrow, project founder Ian Clarke tells BoingBoing. Among the advances promised over Freenet 0.5.0.7 are the ability to exchange very large files (up to one or two gigs), and network speeds that approach three times the speed of popular P2P networks such as Kazaa.

"For example, not that we condone it," says Ian, "But it is now possible to reliably download entire TV shows and movies from Freenet, and we have made dramatic improvements to almost every aspect of the software."

Major new features include:

Forward Error Correction and Healing
To support the reliable downloading of large files from Freenet, we now support Forward Error Correction or FEC. This allows large files to be split into pieces where only a subset of those pieces are required to reassemble the original file. If some pieces fail during the download, Freenet will then reconstruct those pieces and reinsert them - so that they will be available to the next person, this process has been dubbed "healing". Anecdotal evidence suggests that FEC allows the reliable downloading of files as large as 600MB from Freenet at average download rates as high as 90k/sec on a broadband internet connection (which compares quite favorably to more conventional P2P applications).

Address Resolution Keys
Freenet nodes on dynamic IP addresses are now able to inform other nodes when their IP address changes. This removes the reliance on services like DynDNS which reduce decentralization, and slow down Freenet. This is augmented by automatic IP address detection (previously users needed to manually specify their IP address, or rely on wrapper software - such as the Windows installer - to detect it for them). These features should ensure that a much higher percentage of nodes in the Freenet network can contribute back to the network to their fullest.

Link to project release notes, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:20:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scary first-person account of martian Hong Kong pneumonia

SARS -- the mystery pneumonia that's sweeping Asia and has been spotted in Canada and elsewhere -- is unbelievably scary. Check out this message from a Hong Kong doctor to Dave Farber's Interesting People list:

Unresponsive to various combinations of cefotaxime, chlarithromycin, levofloxacin, doxyclycline and Tamiflu. All microbiology is NEGATIVE (after one week)...

So far 2-3 of our older patients with chronic disease have deteriorated fastest. Medical staff - younger and fitter have faired better. Their radiological findings have deteriorated in all but one case...

We receive 2-3 admissions per day. So far no-one has shown any improvement. Once intubated however they remain relatively static but very oxygen and PEEP dependent. Those ventilated have solid lungs. Interestingly one patient developed a pneumothorax on the medical ward and after chest drain and re-expansion his pneumonia involves only the side without a chest drain. Another patient (ventilated) has developed surgical emphysema.

ICU is now closed for all but atypical pneumonias. All our other "clean cases" have been transferred to other ICUs. All elective surgery is being cancelled and wards are being closed and evacuated. Al ambulances are being diverted...

Masks are worn throughout the hospital. Staff are not going home to children.

Please take the warning below seriously. My impression is that even with minimal contact with an infected person people have been becoming ill.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:44:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"I fucked Gisele" t-shirt designer prevails in Xeni's "I fucked John Ashcroft" challenge

A few weeks ago on BoingBoing, I challenged Ken Courtney -- designer of the controversial "I fucked [celebrity name here] shirts -- to a dare. OK, the "I fucked Chloe Sevigny," "Kurt Cobain", and "Christian Dior" (dead for how many years?) shirts are cool, in a snarky, Brooklyn, post-starfuckerly kind of way. And Gisele reportedly sued you over the "I fucked Gisele" shirts. Instant anti-couture cred.

But if you really had cojones, I dared Mr. Courtney, you'd whip some up that said, "I FUCKED JOHN ASHCROFT." Game over. According to the e-mail I received from him this morning, Mr. Ken Courtney tiene cojones.

"fyi Xeni, fashion challenge met. the owner of RAGS A GO GO on 14th street is the proud new owner of an I FUCKED JOHN ASHCROFT tee. [PS:] I'M ONLY DOING THIS TO GET INVITED TO BETTER PARTIES."

Link, Discuss, photos are on the way, and if you don't know what I'm talking about read these previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, or read about it in Fashion Wire Daily, Gawker, Vogue, Hintmag, Arena, etc.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:24:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: gallerie zen

mark dancey
isabelle samaras
mark ryden
todd schorr
skot olsen
bill domonkos
kelly mark
kate pemberton

Link Discuss, (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:06:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More on taxicab black boxes and privacy, this time from Lisa Rein

BoingBoing pal Lisa Rein weighs in on the black-boxes-in-taxis thread, live via blog from SXSW in Austin TX:

[C]ab companies around the country already keep information on every pick-up and drop off that takes place, and that the information is already available to the cops without a subpoena or anything. The cops often need a witness or something when a crime has been committed, and can then ask whatever cabby might have been in the area at that time (like in Law and Order). (I gleaned these facts some time ago from my cabbies back home in San Francisco.)

Our Austin cab driver told us that they've had black boxes in Austin for years. That the cops know exactly where every driver is at all times within 10 feet (theoretically), and that they can tell everytime the meter is started or paused, idling, etc., and when the engine turns off and on, etc. The only way to drive anonymously is to turn everything off inside the car: the meter, blackbloxes, gps, etc. None of the other devices will work without the black box on. (Note: the car itself will operate without the monitoring equipment on.) Of course, if you turn everything else off, then that in itself looks suspicious (we all mused).

It would appear that the devices currently installed within all of the cabs in Austin, TX already go far above and beyond those described in this WSJ article.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:02:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Mexico bill upholds Constitution, spits in Feds' eye

The state of New Mexico has passed a bill that affirms Constitutional liberties, no matter what the Feds say. The bill instructs state cops to refuse to cooperate in unconstitutional searches and wiretaps, to abstain from assisting the INS and to ignore TIPS snitches. Likewise, librarians are required to post signs warning patrons that the FBI could be snooping on their reading habits, and the state official in charge of homeland security is required to get twice-annual disclosure from the Feds about the names and dispositions of every victim of unconstitutional secret arrest, detainment and surveillance. GO NEW MEXICO!

F. direct the state official in charge of homeland security for New Mexico to seek periodically from federal authorities the following information in a form that facilitates an assessment of the effect of federal anti-terrorism efforts on the residents of the state of New Mexico and provide to the legislature and the interim corrections oversight and justice committee, no less than once every six months, a summary of the information obtained:

(1) the names of all residents of New Mexico who have been arrested or otherwise detained by federal authorities as a result of terrorism investigations since September 11, 2001, and:

(a) the location of each detainee;

(b) the circumstances that led to each detention;

(c) the charges, if any, lodged against each detainee; and

(d) the name of counsel, if any, representing each detainee;

(2) the number of search warrants that have been executed in New Mexico without notice to the subject of the warrant pursuant to Section 213 of the USA Patriot Act;

(3) the extent of electronic surveillance carried out in the state pursuant to powers granted in the USA Patriot Act;

(4) the extent to which federal authorities are monitoring political meetings, religious gatherings or other activities within New Mexico that are protected by the first Amendment of the United States constitution;

(5) the number of times education records have been obtained from public schools and institutions of higher learning in New Mexico pursuant to Section 507 of the USA Patriot Act;

(6) the number of times library records have been obtained from libraries in New Mexico pursuant to Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act; and

(7) the number of times records of books purchased by store patrons have been obtained from bookstores in New Mexico pursuant to Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act; and

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:11:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

s1ngularity e-zine

Gabe sez, "s1ngularity ezine: the literary equivalent of a heroin spike in the eye. Launched at 3:15PM EST on 03.15.03. Fiction from Kage Baker and Michael Jasper. Column from Jeffrey Ford. Interview between Jeff VanderMeer and Jeffrey Thomas. Criticism." Link Discuss (Thanks, Gabe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, March 15, 2003

Charlie Daniels' anti-anti-war rant

Musician Charlie Daniels is disgusted by Hollywood types who oppose Bush's plan to invade Iraq.

You people are some of the most disgusting examples of a waste of protoplasm I've ever had the displeasure to hear about.

Sean Penn, you're a traitor to the United States of America. You gave aid and comfort to the enemy. How many American lives will your little, "fact finding trip" to Iraq cost? You encouraged Saddam to think that we didn’t have the stomach for war.

You people protect one of the most evil men on the face of this earth and won't lift a finger to save the life of an unborn baby.

Freedom of choice you say?

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:22:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barnaby Beese Whitfield: eBay Auction

My friend Barnaby Whitfield is an up-and-coming artist in New York who was recently accepted into the prestigious White Columns slide registry. He paints surreal, twisted portraits that are truly beautiful. (I'd say that even if he wasn't my pal.) Waxed Paper Press is auctioning five of Barnaby's femal nudes on eBay starting today. This link provides more info and includes a preview gallery with links to the individual auctions. Bid early. Bid often. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:34:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EPIC's gallery of Feeb blunders and abuses

EPIC -- the Electronic Privacy Information Center -- has released the latest installment in its ongoing Freedom of Information Act gallery of documents prised from governmental file-drawers. This one includes a lot of highly interesting material, including:

This internal FBI memo reveals numerous mistakes that agents made when using FISA. For instance, they illegally videotaped suspects, intercepted e-mails without court permission, recorded the wrong phone conversations, and allowed electronic surveillance operations to run beyond their legal deadline, during sensitive terrorism investigations. The existence of the memo was first revealed in documents that EPIC obtained through FOIA litigation...

An FBI anti-terrorism investigation involving Osama bin Laden was hampered by technical flaws in the Bureau's controversial Carnivore Internet surveillance system. The incident, which occurred in March 2000, is described in FBI documents obtained under court order by EPIC. A written report describes the incident as part of a "pattern" indicating "an inability on the part of the FBI to manage" its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:21:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Canadian apology to Americans

From the Canadian comedy show "This Hour Has 22 Minutes," an hilarious apology on behalf of Canadians to our US neighbors.

I'm sorry about our softwood lumber. Just because we have more trees than you doesn't give us the right to sell you lumber that's cheaper and better than your own.

I'm sorry we beat you in Olympic hockey. In our defense I guess our excuse would be that our team was much, much, much, much better than yours.

I'm sorry we burnt down your white house during the war of 1812. I notice you've rebuilt it! It's Very Nice.

RealVideo Stream Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What do officials do?

Susan's used Google to determine the verbs most frequently associated with "officials" in news-stories.

officials agreed -718
officials expressed - 521
officials found - 454
officials suspect - 380; officials suspected - 199
officials denied - 371
officials insisted - 348

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Periodic Table in haiku

The Periodic Table of Haiku is a Periodic Table of Elements annotated with haiku in appreciation of each of the fundamental units of matter.

72 Hafnium

I'm in solid, Zirc
make nuclear control rods-
I can take the heat

Link Discuss (Thanks, Raaven!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:56:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Airport luggage inspectors policing thoughtcrime

A traveller flying to San Diego from Seattle found his luggage had been opened by the Federal Transport Security Authority, who had left behind a note telling him so, on which was scrawled "DONT APPRECIATE YOUR ANTI-AMERICAN ATTITUDE" -- a reference to the "No Iraq War" signs he'd picked up in a shop in Seattle.

So, the Feds are not only inspecting our bags -- and invading our privacy -- to ensure that they are bomb-free; they're now taking it upon themselves to chastise us for our political beliefs? What the hell does keeping bombs off airplanes have to do with winkling out protest signs?

Nothing like a little thoughtcrime policing to undermine the entire mission and credibility of the TSA. Of course, the TSA is maintaining that this wasn't the work of an inspector -- rather, someone at the airport cut the security-seal left behind by the inspector, defaced the "You have been inspected" card, and replaced the seal, all without being caught by the TSA itself (wow, that gives me a lot of confidence in the TSA's ability to secure the nation's airports!).

Nico Melendez, western regional spokesman for the TSA, said the note in Goldberg's luggage will be investigated, but he said there's no proof that a TSA employee wrote it. "It's a leap to say it was a TSA screener," Melendez said.

But Goldberg said, "It seems a little far-fetched to think people are running around the airport writing messages on TSA literature and slipping them into people's bags."

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

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

Smartgun with authentication and minicam

A new South African gun comes equipped with a biometric authentication system (so it can only be fired by its owner) and a built-in minicam (so you can document the circumstances of each shot fired). Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:40:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clocks are the secret hole in DRM

Lawmeme's roundup of the Boalt DRM conference is terrific, and contains this very nice nugget:

The cryptographic handshake is more than just comparing two policies to make sure they’re identical. And, of course, if the content owner has built in an escape hatch to allow key revocation for security lapses, I’d better have some kind of strong assurance that they won’t decide to hold my music collection for ransom five years down the line.

But it gets worse. If that song is copyrighted – which, after all, is the putative basis for this whole game – that copyright will expire at some point. That means you need to build an expiration date into the rights grant (just in case your handheld is still around in 2098). Once you’ve done that, well, the device needs to be secure against rolling its clock forward to 2099; if it gets a time from a central server, that server had better be secure and trusted both by content owners and consumers.

Which demonstrates the wisdom of this:

Ed Felten also observed, in a different context, that much of computer science involves using bulldozers to shove tough problems into someone else's back yard.

The infrastructure for workable DRM doesn't just involve redesigning all hardware, outlawing open source, suppressing the speech of scientists and researchers, constraining fair use and first sale: it also involves creating a secure, authenticated timekeeping mechanism. Link Discuss (via Joho the blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moorcock savages PKD

Michael Moorcock's review of the reissued Philip K. Dick novel, "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" is quite savage.

Dick's speed-enhanced gift was to capture the illusion sometimes encountered by the deadline-conscious hack, hyped on adrenaline, playing with transcen- dental notions that creator and creations, illusions and reality are one. As with hallucinogens, the condition can cause obsession and psychosis, a distinct sense that the book is writing you. You become merely a medium. Common sense usually brings you back to shared reality. But in the case of Dick or L Ron Hubbard, inventor of Scientology, the experience formed the basis of a rough and ready belief system resembling Buddhism or Manichaeism. Does the mind control reality? Do good and evil emanate from the same source? What do we worship and why?

As he followed these themes, Dick's novels became increasingly incoherent and, for me, scarcely readable. Hacking out book after book, he gave himself no time to discover a more idiosyncratic structure or style, the search for which characterised the so-called SF New Wave and gave us sophisticated American visionaries such as Thomas M Disch, John Sladek and Samuel R Delany.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Joi Ito's Davos critique of Japan's "democracy"

Here's a 2:40 clip of Joi Ito's talk about the deficiencies in Japan's Democracy, as presented at this year's hyper-leet Davos forum. 4MB QuickTime Link Discuss (via Joi Ito's Web)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amazon's Early Adopter collection

Amazon has created a page of "Early Adopter" products that contains the desiderata of crash-test-dummy electro-neophiles. Link Discuss (via Werblog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:28:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Revolting Librarians Redux: Guardians of culture rant out

Next fall will see the publication of a followup to the classic "Revolting Librarians," a collection of radical librarian ranting.

...cover topics that range from library education and librarianship as a profession to the more political and spiritual aspects of librarianship. The contributions include critiques of library and information science programs, firsthand accounts of work experiences, and original fiction, poetry and art. Ten of the original librarians who wrote essays for Revolting Librarians back in 1972 reflect upon what they wrote thirty years ago and the turns that their lives and careers have taken since.

Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cricket-match drives sportswriter nanners

A Guardian sportswriter totally loses his shit on the way to a Cricket Match, and inserts a wild rant into his column.

It's really simple: India are already through, New Zealand have to win.

Meanwhile, have you ever thought WHAT SORT OF LIFE IS THIS AND WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING BOARDING A TRAIN FOR MOORGATE AT 6.30 IN THE MORNING AND THEN STANDING AROUND FOR AGES WAITING FOR A TUBE WHILE STARING AT A SIGN TELLING YOU THAT IF YOU WAIT FOR FOUR MINUTES YOU CAN BOARD A TRAIN TO UXBRIDGE I'D RATHER WAIT FOUR HOURS FOR A JOURNEY WITH THE GRIM REAPER QUITE FRANKLY AND THEN YOU GET TO WORK AND THEN THERE'S THIS AND I KNOW THE CRICKET'S GOOD AND ALL THAT BUT I'VE GOT OUT OF THE WRONG SIDE OF BED THIS MORNING AND IN ANY CASE IT'S NOT AS IF I'LL WRITE A CRACKING MATCH REPORT AND THEN GET REWARDED BY BEING SENT ON A WONDERFUL ASSIGNMENT AROUND THE WORLD BECAUSE I'LL BE VERY SURPRISED IF ANY OF MY BOSSES WILL READ ANY OF THIS LET'S BE HONEST THEY WON'T ALTHOUGH ON THE OTHER HAND THAT'S PROBABLY JUST AS WELL HEY I WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO GET AWAY WITH TYPING THINGS LIKE THIS KIqL!UYS^%$DFLI ZSDSAFC SFE4O92 )(^(*^o"$ bBLKU E875O3 96*&^%o*"$ogb LOOK I'M SORRY THIS ISN'T EXACTLY THE SORT OF QUALITY EDITORIAL COPY YOU EXPECT FROM THE GUARDIAN BUT LOOK AT THE FACTS I'M ADRIFT IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF THE WORST CITIES IN THE WORLD SITTING IN FRONT OF THE SAME COMPUTER SCREEN I FACE DAY AFTER INTERMINABLE DAY HELL I COULD BE WAKING UP IN SAY THE MALDIVES OR SYDNEY OR COPENHAGEN OR A CROFTER'S COTTAGE IN SKYE AND GOING FOR A WALK IN THE CRISP MORNING AIR?

Link Discuss (via Charlie's Diary)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 14, 2003

Boy-sweat makes women happy

Research shows that male sweat puts women in a good mood.

In a study to be published in the journal Biology of Reproduction, researchers collected samples from the underarms of men who refrained from using deodorant for four weeks. The extracts were then blended and applied to the upper lips of 18 women, aged 25 to 45.

The women rated their moods on a fixed scale for a period of six hours. The findings suggested something in the perspiration brightened their moods and helped them feel less tense.

Blood analyses also showed a rise in levels of the reproductive luteinizing hormone that typically surge before ovulation.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:09:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling/Woodgate rap audio

Lisa Rein has posted audio and a partial video of the Bruce Sterling/Derek Woodgate rap at SXSW. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:08:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Puma trying to intimidate bloggers into taking down material

Puma is sending out spurious cease-and-desist letters to blogs that link to/reproduce a mock-ad that is circulating on the Internet, including Gawker, and saying, "don't try any of that First Amendment jive, neither, since you're a blog, not a new-outlet, so the Constitution doesn't apply to you." Link Discuss (Thanks, Nick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:07:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Erik Davis examines our crazy times

Erik Davis (a wonderful writer whose work often appears in Wired) sez: "I have a new piece, 'Shadow Dancing,' in my friend Marcus Boon's marvelous webzine, Hungry Ghost. It's about the spooky side of the current administration's drive toward international violence and domestic repression. There are other nifty articles about 'Magical Politics' up by Boon, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and others." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:52:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jeff Jarvis, highest paid blogger on Earth

Jeff Jarvis, the creator of Entertainment Weekly, and the president and creative director of Advance.net (Conde Nast's Internet division), has come to the realization that he is being paid to blog, and is likely to be the highest paid blogger on Earth. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:50:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russian politico changes name to "Harry Potter"

A Russian politician has legally changed his name to "Harry Potter" in order to garner more votes.

But he will not be able to call himself plain Harry Potter, as election rules state that Russian citizens who change their name have to retain their patronymic - their genuine father's first name.

The man, who has so far remained anonymous, said he will reveal his true identity on 29 March, when he receives his new passport.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

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

SBC lying to customers to get them to switch

SBC is sending out deceptive, fraudulent notices to Bay Area DSL customers, telling them that they have to switch to YahooDSL or be terminated.

You have to scroll deep into the text to finally learn that subscribers do not in fact have to become members of the SBC Yahoo family (and open themselves up to unforeseen privacy issues, but we'll get back to that).

"If you do not upgrade your account to SBC Yahoo DSL, you will still have your high-speed Internet connection," the company admits, "but you will eventually lose your SBC home page and portal."

There, at last, is the truth: You don't have to make the switch, and, if you choose not to, all you'll have to do is pick a new start page for your browser. Otherwise, nothing changes.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:09:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Human as a second language

The name of this upcoming conference in Paris says it all: "Encoding Altruism: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition."

On March 23-24, 2003, the second in a series of international workshops on interstellar message design will be held in Paris. The workshop will focus on two broad themes: first, the interface of art, science, and technology in interstellar message design; and second, how to communicate concepts of altruism in interstellar messages. The workshop will focus on messages that could be transmitted across interstellar space by radio or laser signals. These communication techniques reflect the methods used by current observational programs in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Link Discuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:04:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Natalie Merchant abandons the recording industry

Pat sez, "Natalie Merchant has completely severed her relationship with the commercial recording industry. Her new album, to be released this June, won't be released by a major label, but on her own independent imprint through her website."

They expect fans to learn about the album from Ms. Merchant's Web site and through publicity and a small advertising campaign. To gauge demand, they may offer fans who order the CD in advance a downloadable file of a song from the sessions that is not included on the album. In an increasingly consolidated retail business, a handful of chain stores, like Borders and Barnes & Noble, have accounted for a large percentage of Ms. Merchant's sales in the past; now her label is approaching them directly.

"I don't know that every artist has the capability to go directly to these chains, but Natalie has a history," Mr. Smith said.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!) (via What Do I Know)

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

Pop art food for kids

New York Times article about brightly colored, toy-like, packaged dinners for kids.

"The new products are a mix of adult-pleasing convenience and child-pleasing shock value ... a hamburger meal with a patty shaped like a house and cookies that look like bricks... a line of jellies for dinner rolls in flavors like watermelon, sour apple and banana... hot pink and electric blue margarine... neon-colored salad dressings with names like Purple Pizzazzz and Outrageous Orange.... blue fries, which can be dipped in the purple, orange, pink and teal ketchups..." Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:50:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will ultrawideband (finally) kill Bluetooth?

Ultrawideband is emerging as a low-power, high-bitrate, long-range alternative to Bluetooth, a technology that's been teetering on the brink of collapsing under the weight of its own hype forever.

The impression that UWB is going to deal Bluetooth the final blow was intensified this week in meetings in Dallas, at which major manufacturers -- among them Intel and Sony -- were considering which technology of those submitted to them by leading wireless communication companies to settle on as the new standard to compete, and possibly knock out, Bluetooth. One technology has caught everyone's eye -- UWB. WPANs create wireless connections in the home over short distances, which allow for synchronization among PDAs, computers, television sets, cable TV box, etc. Allied Business Intelligence estimates that the winning technology behind the standard, to be designated 802.15.3a, will likely generate $1.39 billion in revenue by 2007. The IEEE will not make its decision until June at the earliest, but there is a consensus that UWB has emerged as the clear winner from this week's meetings: The technology was used by 95 percent of the proposals submitted, according to Ben Manny, an Intel director of wireless technology development.

UWB is simpler, cheaper, less power-hungry, and 100 times faster than Bluetooth (currently the leading WPAN technology), adopted by makers of cell phones and PDAs, as well as by companies such as Microsoft and Apple Computer.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:09:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Datamining the relationships in your own email

Steven Johnson reports on new software that analyzes your email and figures out your social network.

No doubt you've experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.

For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software called social-network mapping promises to change all that. Instead of polishing up the org chart, the new social maps are designed to locate karasses wherever they emerge. Mapping social networks turns out to be one of those computational problems -- like factoring pi out to a hundred decimal points or rendering complex light patterns on a 3-D shape -- that computers can do effortlessly if you give them the right data.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The future of the blog is Raging Platypus

From the Raging Platypus FAQ:

What is Raging Platypus?

Raging Platypus is so hip, so innovative, so revolutionary, it can be difficult to describe to the uninitiated. In fact, it is best described by what it is not.

* It is not a weblog publishing tool.
* It is not a Linux distribution.
* It is not a Flash game.
* It is not a Matrix ripoff.
* It is not an MP3 player.
* It is not an insipidly-marketed soft drink.

Raging Platypus is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now, in this very room... It is at the core of what you are, and what you can become. It believes in you, it adores you, it worships you. And it can be yours, all yours. Oh yes, my friend.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:59:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fuel-cell/space-race

This month's Wired has an amazing story on the potential future of fuel-cells, comparing the drive to wean America off of the gas-teat to the Cold-War-driven space race of the Kennedy era.

Like the car companies, oil producers have already taken steps toward an oil-free future. Over the past 15 years, corporations like Shell and Exxon have ceded their leadership in oil production to a dozen state-owned enterprises in countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, and Norway. Instead they've focused on adding value farther down the supply chain by refining crude into gasoline and distributing and selling it through filling stations. They know they could play the same role in a hydrogen economy, which is why Shell and BP have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in hydrogen storage and production technology. Indeed, BP, formerly British Petroleum, has rebranded itself Beyond Petroleum.

The major oil companies are already extracting hydrogen from gasoline for industrial uses at nine refinery complexes throughout the United States. With a little push, these plants could serve as hubs for a nascent hydrogen-distribution network.

Converting filling stations is bound to cost billions of dollars over several decades. But it should cost relatively little to retrofit clusters of stations in proximity to both a hydrogen-producing refinery and a population center where fuel cell vehicles are sold. Oil companies could meet initial demand by trucking hydrogen from refineries to these stations. As the number of fuel cell vehicles on the road rises, stations that aren't served by refinery hubs could install processors, called reformers, that use electricity to extract hydrogen from gasoline or water. The White House should ask for $5 billion - roughly $30,000 for each of the nation's 176,000 filling stations - to get the ball rolling.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:58:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Modular PVR allows easy storage expansion

Lancaster is a new PVR from TerraTec that uses an Ethernet-linked component system comprised of a tuner, an interface box, and one or more storage boxen. The keen thing about this is that you can add storage by adding more boxes -- and, presumably, you can just grab a storage box and bring it over to a friend's place and plug it into her Lancaster network. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:55:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crispin Glover's "Ben" Video

Nice accordion rendition of Michael Jackson's "Ben" for the movie Williard, which opens today. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gil!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:54:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, March 13, 2003

Thomas the Tank Engine's ultraviolence

"The children's hit television series 'Thomas the Tank Engine' shows too many crashes and may be making children frightened of going on a train, according to a British psychologist. " Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:34:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Live warblogging from Iraq: CNN's Kevin Sites launches blog at kevinsites.net

CNN foreign correspondent Kevin Sites, whose first-person accounts we've posted here on BoingBoing previously, now has a blog at www.kevinsites.net. Recent journal entries from Kuwait are available at this site, and Kevin's now also phoning in live audblog reports via his mobile phone, as he travels throughout the region covering the apparently imminent conflict.

Internet access in Iraq and the other countries he's traveling in is -- as one might imagine -- unavailable or extremely poor. This makes text blogging difficult or impossible. But by using audblog and his somewhat more reliable satellite phone connection to speak his blog posts (I understand that the CNN crews there are using Iridiums and Thurayas), Kevin's able to share these quick, immediate first-hand reflections of what it's like to be a reporter on the ground.

Audblog post: crossing the border into northern Iraq
I'm calling in from the highly-guarded border of Iran and Kurdistan. A truck is waiting for us to transport CNN staff, our personal belongings, and our television gear into Kurd-controlled northern Iraq. We're crossing into this region to cover the northern front of a potential war with Iraq, in an area dense with oil-rich fields along the northern no-fly-zone.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:29:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Black boxes" coming to NYC taxis, then maybe your car: safety over privacy?

Taxicab telematics: "black boxes" that monitor pre-crash speed and accident factors may be coming soon to New York City cabs. Insurance companies are also exploring the possibility of installing them in consumers' cars. IBM is developing the devices, and estimated price tag is around few hundred dollars apiece.

Closely held American Transit Insurance Co., New York, which insures 80% of the taxis and limousines in the Big Apple, said the devices will be installed late this summer. The company plans to offer $300 insurance discounts to induce owners of as many as 1,500 cabs to take part....Wednesday, IBM and Norwich Union, a car-insurance unit of Britain's Aviva PLC, announced plans to put black boxes in 5,000 volunteers' cars. The aim is to see whether people who drive less should get lower insurance rates. That program could raise invasion-of-privacy issues, because it keep tabs on when, where and how much the cars are driven.

Link to WSJ story (subscription required), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:42:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Memory Stick form-factor WiFi card coming from Sony

Sony's reportedly shipping a Memory-Stick-compatible WiFi card in July that will add 802.11b support to any Clie handheld. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:10:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of protest-art zen

"A carnival float shows paper mache figure of German conservative opposition leader Angela Merkel emerging from the buttocks of Uncle Sam during the traditional Rose Monday carnival parade in Duesseldorf, March 3, 2003. Merkel has strongly criticized the German government's anti-Iraq war stance and recently visited Washington. The Rose Monday parades in Cologne, Mainz and Duesseldorf are the highlight of the German street carnival season. " Link, Discuss, (Thanks, JP!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:00:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Witpunk is out!

I just received my contributor's copy of Witpunk, the new anthology of comic science fiction edited by Claude Lalumiere and Marty Halpern, which should be on shelves now. The anthology includes I Love Paree, a whacky Heinlein pastiche that I co-wrote with the brilliant writer Michael Skeet (fittingly enough, we inaugurated the collaboration at Judith Merril's wake at the Bamboo Club), which has been out of print for a couple of years now. Also in the anthology are stories by Bradley Denton (just about my favorite comic sf writer, ever since his brilliant Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede), Pat Murphy, James Morrow, Paul Di Fillipo, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman (a reprint of the fantastic "Savage Breasts"). Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:26:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The art of the bar-code

BarCodeArt: a gallery of meat and digital artwork inspired by and made from UPCs. Link Discuss (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:26:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogs are novelists' notebooks (too)

Today in Gibson's blog, a rumination on what it feels like to be a novelist between novels:

LIKE A MAGPIE WITHOUT A NEST

That's how Rudy Rucker, in an email yesterday, described how it feels to be a novelist between books. No place to take the shiny things we constantly find. He's treating his own condition, he said, by writing a horror sorry about having belonged to a country club in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the early Eighties (man, that *is* scary).

No place for the magpie mind to take the trinkets and bits of tinfoil, currently. If I bring them here, for instance, I'm just leaving them on your window-ledge, something no magpie would ever be satisfied with doing.

I've been using this blog to keep track of stuff that needs to work its way into my novels for years now. Rucker's blog is nothing but notes on his books. Sterling says you can extrapolate his next book from this links on his blog. I betcha that's true of Warren Ellis, too. Blogs are the new novelist's commonplace book. I've been saying this for a while, but I thought I might be the only one. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:26:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

700,000-card change-of-address backlog at INS

Now that the INS is enforcing the provision requiring resident aliens to send in change-of-address cards whenever we move, they are receiving over 30,000 cards a week day (thanks, Kevin!) and are sitting on a 700,000-card backlog, with no one available to enter them. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jacob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lileks's vintage ads

Lileks has started a gallery of vintage ads printed off the microfilm morgue at his newspaper and scanned in. Lovely stuff. Link Discuss (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My talk from the EFF-Austin party audio

Wiley Wiggins was kind enough to capture (and host!) the audio off my 16-minute talk at the EFF-Austin/EFF/ACTLab/Polycot party at SXSW. Can you spot the time I said "NSA" when I meant "SS?" 16.5MB MP3 Link Discuss (Thanks, Wiley!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

$33 webserver embedded in an Ethernet connector

Slashdot reports on a $33 webserver so small that it is embedded in an RJ-45 Ethernet connector. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Krofts auctioning off Pufnstuf memoribilia

Sid and Marty Kroft are auctioning off the hearts of their collections of HR Pufnstuf and other psychedelic kids' TV memoribilia. Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:24:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling and Woodgate's futurism, transcribed

Heath Row has posted his transcript of Bruce Sterling and Derek Woodgate's conversation at SXSW, a funny, high-speed discussion of the future looming on the horizon.

Sterling: Let's move onto Topic No. 4: Influence on industry. The thing that impressed me with the foamed aluminum wasn’t the thing itself but the amount of sensing. You almost need aluminum moussing. Just the right temperature. What happens when that crashes? What happens when it's no longer under the control of experts? What if I can go down to Kinko's and foam me some aluminum?

It’s the Linux model for physical objects. It's a really intriguing organizational problem that our society has that no else seems to have. What happens to General Motors if people can build cars? What if you could just download the stats to build a Model T? That can't be that hard. Henry Ford wasn't that big a guy. What if you built one out of foamed aluminum and chopped bamboo? How much would it really cost? Maybe a couple of million dollars? A Model T cost $400 bucks new. And there was no one in particular making them.

It's a Red Hat automobile. There's no digital rights management. When it wore out you'd just make another. How would we fit that into the litigation structure? Who do you sue? What are we going to do when kids are making stuff -- stuff -- not drivers, but actual stuff? We have a major military problem over it. The terrorist spread of mass destruction is basically a Linux model for nuclear weapons. That’s why were going to take out Iraq. It used to be that only governments could afford weapons of mass destruction. Now small groups of networked activists can get their hands on the stuff.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:24:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Entrances to hell

Obscure but handy online directory of gateways to the underworld located throughout the UK.

The devil's liver trouble probably began here at Crizzle after a month long drunken holiday at a mutants fairground in the 1300s. Crizzle now broadcasts confusing directions to air traffic with a view to creating controlled flights into terrain. Gold ornamentation is to be seen in the rafter work and the entire length of tunnel has 33,345,567,863,426,875,678 stained wooden steps of which five are in need of repair. This entrance is a rich source of low-self-esteem-gas and is occasionally overgrown with gorse.

Link Discuss (thanks, Gabe)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:30:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snowflake crystal hi-res image gallery

Gorgeous online gallery of high-res images of snowflake crystals. At left, one of many images captured during a single snowfall by Patricia Rasmussen, using a photomicroscopy apparatus designed for capturing ultra-high-res snow crystal images. Link Discuss (Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:04:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of inappropriate-translation Zen

All your candy-coated tripes are belong to us:

"Cream Collon" does indeed look like a cross section of a lower intestine filled with cream... [and then there's] the even more scatalogical-sounding Chocolate Collon... from Singapore airport. Tasty as these may not sound, they are a cut above the sickly sweetness of their vanilla cousins.

Link, Discuss, (via buffoonery)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:55:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vonage reviewed

Raffi Krikorian's review of Vonage's Voice-over-IP phone-service is a great, info-civilian-oriented overview of the best way to secede from your phone company.

The Edison, New Jersey based company gives you one Cisco ATA186 and a phone number in an area code of your choosing (I had a little piece of northern New Jersey in my living room). You have a choice of two different levels of service to go along with this box: for $25.99/month you get unlimited local/regional calling (where local/regional is defined by the area code you choose for your phone number) and 500 minutes of free US long distance, and for $39.99/month you get unlimited long distance. And you also get international rates that rivals most common calling cards. The only problem is that the service only delivers one ATA186, and that specific model is required to use the service -- no other SIP compatible devices are supported yet. If you want to use more than one phone with the box, you will either have to rig up a network of telephone splitters and wires; or you can do what some have done and hack your house to plug the Cisco box into your house's in wall telephone network.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Taking "French" off a different sort of menu

This could be a parody, but here's a brothel menu in the same vein as the House Cafeterias' "patriotic" menu revisions (below). Link Discuss (Thanks, Kowgirl!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:04:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Today's Specials: Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast

Today's New York Times reports that Congressman Bob Ney (R-Ohio) ordered the cafeterias in the House of Representative to remove the word "French" from all menus. Now being served: Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast. Seriously.
Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:08:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More from Shachtman on Los Alamos: "The Last Man Standing"

Noah Shachtman of Defense Tech tells BoingBoing: "My latest article on the Los Alamos scandals focuses in on Frank Dickson -- the "last man standing" among the accused in the lab's senior management."

"Give Frank Dickson, general counsel of the beleaguered Los Alamos National Laboratory, some credit: He's a survivor.

"Allegations of discrimination and espionage in the 1990s swallowed up a generation of lab-management staff; Dickson remained. Accusations of corruption and mismanagement have forced his bosses to resign and his subordinates to relinquish their responsibilities; Dickson hung on.

"Now, the nuclear weapons lab's new director has proclaimed that he's ready to "drain the swamp" and give it a fresh start. But Dickson, singled out by Los Alamos whistleblowers for repeatedly interfering with FBI investigations into lab shenanigans, clings to power -- for now...

Link to Wired News story, Link to more discussion on Defense Tech, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:47:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copyright free antiwar posters

Kimberly sez: "Graphic designers nationwide are organizing to offer provocative, high-impact anti-war posters that are copyright-free and downloadable online. Participants so far include (among others) Michael Mabry, Michael Cronan, Peter Kuper, whose work appears regularly in Time and Mad, and design legend Milton Glaser, whose 'I (Heart) NY' is arguably the most referenced design in American popular culture."

"Copyright-free" means you can use this art for anything, including adding your own information to it and even printing it commercially.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:28:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos from the EDGE Annual Science Dinner

Stefan sez: "Photos of celebrity Internet and science geeks rubbing shoulders at The Edge Annual Science Dinner. It used to be called 'The Billionaire's Dinner,' but times being what they are..." The dinner is held by uberagent John Brockman at the TED conference. I think it was called "The Millionaire's Dinner" before it was called "The Billionaire's Dinner." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:22:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

High school kids tie-wrapped for protesting war

Snapshots of cops cuffing anti-war kids with tie-wrap on Market Street in SF. I guess there weren't any fajita thieves to bust that day.Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:02:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prosthetic rat-hippocampus goes into clinical tests

A research lab in California is testing the world's first "brain prosthesis," an artificial hippocampus that interfaces directly with rat-brains. Primates in less than a year.

The job of the hippocampus appears to be to "encode" experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain. "If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories," says Berger. That offers a relatively simple and safe way to test the device: if someone with the prosthesis regains the ability to store new memories, then it's safe to assume it works.

The inventors of the prosthesis had to overcome three major hurdles. They had to devise a mathematical model of how the hippocampus performs under all possible conditions, build that model into a silicon chip, and then interface the chip with the brain.

No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:25:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Killer vaporware wearables

Motorola and Frog Design have released a whack of concept designs for a Bluetooth-linked personal device array. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jason)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:21:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Advice to Korea's smartmobs

Howard Rheingold's written an introduction for the Korean edition of Smart Mobs, which takes the form of a letter of advice to Korea's Internet generation.

First, do not mistake the tool for the task. The democratization of publishing, communication, and organizing that is afforded by PCs, the Internet, and wireless mobile devices is indeed an important tool for grassroots activism. But it is the knowledge, intentions, and actions of people in the real world -- where ballots are cast, political decisions are made, wars and demonstrations take place -- that empowers democracy. Netizens must have more in common than their technical expertise in order for them to conduct discourse rather than flame each other, to act collectively in the physical world rather than sit in front of keyboards and type all the time. Long-term political organizing is hard work.

Second, understand that not every smart mob is a wise mob. The difference between a riot and democratic discourse is a literacy: if a sufficient percentage of the population does not understand the important issues of the day and does not know how to debate those issues and the governance policies affected by them, the democracy will be hollow and easily manipulated, even if the leaders are selected in fair elections. Deliberation is important for leaders and populations of citizens alike.

Third, civility, reason, and evidence are what distinguish the public sphere -- the free and open discourse among citizens that provides the foundation for democracy -- from the emotion-charged, ignorant, slogan-slinging online combat that sometimes drowns out political debate. The Web is a wonderful resource, and search engines are powerful tools. If you are arguing an issue, take two minutes to research it and post a link as part of your argument. You can question evidence, but questioning evidence is the basis of science and jurisprudence. The point is to argue the issues and evidence, not to attack the character of opponents.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:17:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Case of the stolen website

Site designer Jonathan Hudson accuses site designer Timothy Welch of swiping his portfolio site. What do you think? Link Discuss (Thanks, Joanne!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:01:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Me on Space Channel

Here's a videoclip of me reading from and discussing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom from Canada's Space: The Imagination Station. Real Video Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:04:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RFID tags in Benetton clothing

Benetton is buying 15 million RFID (radio frequency identification) tags to attach to the labels in their clothing as an anti-theft measure. People are freaked out (again) about privacy issues, but the reality (at least today) is that the range of RFID tech is too short for someone to drive by your house and scan your closet. Still, it does make sense to zap the tags out of commission once items are paid for. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:39:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ten minutes' electricity no longer "too cheap to meter"

Chinese coin-op cellphone charging stations -- which charge $1 or so for ten minutes' juice -- are coming to a mall near you. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

California kleptocrats auctioning airport confiscata on eBay

Some California airports donate the nation's confiscated pocket-knives to thrift shops, but now the State of California is working with the Oakland and Sacramento airports to auction the confiscata on eBay.

So far, $16,281 has been made selling objects taken from passengers at Oakland and Sacramento airports -- the only ones in Northern California to participate in the state program.

Among the oddest items confiscated and sold were at least three circular saws, hatchets, curtain rods and a little girl's baton, said Robb Deignan, spokesman for the surplus property disposal program, a division of the California Department of General Services.

Also sold: 5,364 pocketknives, 350 pounds of scissors, 594 corkscrews and 309 leatherman tools.

"Surplus property disposal program," man, that's gooooood bureaucratese. Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Collaborative disinformation

Disinfopedia is a collaborative encyclopedia of disinformation.

* case studies of deceptive PR campaigns
* industry-friendly experts
* industry-funded organizations
* list of lists
* public relations firms
* think tanks
* war propaganda

Link Discuss (Thanks, Alex!)

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

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Downloads for peace: Beastie Boys' new protest-MP3

The Beastie Boys are offering free downloads of a new anti-war song they've just released, "In a World Gone Mad." Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:18:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beware of flying sheep-heads at Norwegian death-metal concerts

Life imitates The Onion: some poor Norwegian headbanger's skull was fractured when he was hit by a flying sheep's head at a Norwegian death-metal show.

The band was carving up a dead sheep as part of its stage act when the animal's head flew off lead singer Maniac's knife and struck 25-year-old Per Kristian Hagen.

"My relationship to sheep is a bit ambivalent now. I like them, but not when they come flying through the air," Hagen told The Associated Press Monday from his hospital room. He is expected to recover.

Mayhem member Rune Eriksen, whose stage name is Blasphemer, said the incident was unfortunate. "The whole thing was an accident, but maybe it would be an idea for another show," he said.

Link, Discuss, (Thanks, James)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:41:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Telephony Magazine on "Live from the Blogosphere"

There's an article in the current issue of Primedia's Telephony Magazine about the "Live from the Blogosphere" event I co-produced with Reverse Cowgirl and Rhizome LA, at which BoingBoing founding father Mark Frauenfelder spoke and the Blogger-Google hoo-ha broke.

"There's a big gap in what people are currently doing and the exciting, dynamic thing that blogging could be..." said Breslin, whose racy Reverse Cowgirl blog receives several thousand hits each day. "The potential for blogging is fantastic, but the reality falls short right now. If you can say whatever you want to say, why in God's name would you say the same things as everyone else?"

Link that one's down now, try this alternate link to story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:48:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

QTVR: Inside a dentist's mouth

QTVR guru Hans Nyberg shares another fine full-screen panorama with BoingBoing readers today -- this one is the inside of a dentist's own mouth:

"This X-ray was made using a Soredex Cranex panoramic x-ray machine at the office of Dr. Joseph K. Lever in Spartanburg, SC. This machine places an x-ray source on one side of the head and film on the other. The source and film are rotated through 360 degrees while the film is being exposed. You can see more information on this device at SOREDEX. QTVR has been used for years in medical multimedia presentations -- mostly as Object VR's where, for example, you can view skeleton parts from all sides."

Icky-cool. Link to Hans' website with links to more amazing anatomical QTVRs, direct link to the in-mouth QTVR, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:08:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

QTVR: Nude guy in a bubble, floating blissfully on the harbor

Australian photographer and QuickTime VR enthusiast Peter Murphy writes,

"Hi, Xeni -- here is a Chinese performance artist in a bubble, a performance piece in Sydney Harbour yesterday: 'During the opening week of the Museum of Contemporary Art's Liquid Sea exhibition, Chinese performance artist Zhu Ming holds a number of water-based performances on Sydney Harbour - floating across the water inside a giant transparent bubble.'"

I would like to point out that Mr. Zhu Ming is butt-naked in these photos. Link to QTVR, Link to Peter's QTVR blog (in which you can also find panoramas of another Chinese artist who licks socks and eats bugs), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:51:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My talk on the Hollywood Agenda at SXSW

Wes Felter's posted a streaming QuickTime of my talk this morning on The Hollywood Agenda. Streaming QuickTime Link Discuss (Thanks, Wes!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:36:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-war activists beseech Pope to become "ultimate human shield"

Noah Shachtman writes in Defense Tech:

Anti-war movements usually attract quite a number of, shall we say, eccentric ideas. But this has to be one of the strangest pleas for peace ever: activists are begging the Pope to go to Baghdad and become "the ultimate human shield." Dr. Helen Caldicott, a former Harvard professor, is urging people from around the globe to e-mail, fax, call, and snail mail the Vatican, and ask the Pope to "travel to Baghdad and to remain there until a peaceful solution to this crisis has been implemented." The idea, Caldicott writes, is that the Bush Administration wouldn't risk a bombing campaign in Iraq if the Pope's life were in danger. There's been no official word from Rome in reaction to Caldicott's entreaty. But new-age guru Deepak Chopra said late last month that he'd join John Paul II and the Dalai Lama in Baghdad, if the two spiritual leaders were willing to place themselves in harm's way.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:48:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Larding p2p networks with ads

My frind Gil Kaufman wrote an article for MTV online about how music studios are tricking song swappers into downloading MP3s that appear to be hit songs, but are really just ads for a CD.

The spoofs featured looped messages from Linkin Park bandmembers in which they mention the title of the album and single, its release date and discuss the making of it for approximately the same duration as the three-and-a-half-minute single. The band's label, Warner Bros., would not comment on the bogus files.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:27:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

McDonalds will offer free Wifi to its customers

OMFG. Now that's a happy meal:

In a further sign of the spread of wireless Internet technology, McDonald's restaurants in three U.S. cities will offer one hour of free high-speed access to anyone who buys a combination meal.

Link Discuss (via unwired)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:25:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kapor quits Groove board, reportedly over Total Info Awareness

Mitch Kapor, who cofounded EFF, has resigned from the board of Ray Ozzie's Groove, and the NYT says it's because Groove is being used by the Feds as part of its Total Information Awareness program. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:39:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Identity theft + computerized law enforcement = Tuttle/Buttle

Identity theft is bad, but when combined with computerized law-enforcement systems, it's nightmarish. Malcolm Byrd's identity was stolen by a serious criminal, and is now regularily arrested and jailed while he proves -- again and again -- that he's not the droid they're looking for. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:23:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Game publishing crawls up own colon, dies

Greg Costikyan's report from the Game Designer's Conference is a stirring and vicious indictment of the shortsightedness of the much-vaunted videogame industry, with dire predictions for the future.

Or look it at the crowds around the Independent Game Festival finalists. That's a bunch of machines on the showroom floor, with representatives of the finalists demoing their titles. The IGF is basically open to any game that doesn't have a publishing contract, and hundreds of hopefuls submit titles every year (every year of the five it's been running) hoping for a little glory--and a shot at a publishing contract with one of the majors. Never mind that no IGF title has ever gone on to major publication and success. It's one of the few ways a garage operation can hope for a shot at glory...

They're this desperate--this desperate for the hope of a little innovation, a little chance to do something real, a little chance to reach an audience. These 10,000 geeks (that's what CMP Game Media claims was the attendance), most of them professionals, would just love to do what the IGF guys are doing--do a game for chrissakes, work on something you believe in, not churn out the next big-budget piece of crap.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:21:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SETI@Home identifies 150+ possible alien intelligences

The SETI@Home distcomp project has borne fruit: 150+ signals that match SETI's criteria for probable alien intelligence have been identified, and the project is going back to the Arecibo radio-telescope-array to take a closer look at them.

"This is the culmination of more than three years of computing, the largest computation ever done," said UC Berkeley computer scientist David Anderson, director of SETI@home. "It's a milestone for the SETI@home project."

SETI@home users should find out the results of the re-observations - what The Planetary Society, the founding and principal sponsor of SETI@home, is billing as the "stellar countdown" - within two to three months.

Though excited at the opportunity to re-observe as many as 150 candidate signals, Anderson is cautious about raising people's expectations that they will discover a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:17:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, March 10, 2003

Nokia videophones capture the darnedest things

"It's not a home video, it's a phone video." Totally wack-ass spoof Nokia commercial (at least I'm assuming it's a home-grown parody) (which several BoingBoing readers insist is an actual spot created by an ad agency) which has to be a parody. The clip promotes new phones capable of wirelessly capturing and transmitting video, by way of (presumably) simulated cat-torture. Lordy, don't let the folks at PETA catch wind of this one. Link to avi file Alternate link, another alternate link, Discuss. Be kind to host: please right-click and save as instead of clicking directly on link, then watch again and again without overtaxing server. (Thanks, JP!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:32:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google notes from SXSW

Mike Pusateri of CruftBox took great notes from today's Google panel at SXSW.

"Google is one of the few web giants that values personal opinion."

What is desperately needed is enhanced ability to search blog content. Increasingly difficult to find intersting content. Google's expertise in searching is the key to help find the intersting content.

Reading the assumptions would make you think there are now hundreds of people working on 'Bloogle'. Not true. Same people, but the food's much better. A couple new guys. Still constrained by people inside Google. 'Never enough people, all the hardware they could imagine.'

Link Discuss (Thanks, Susan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bush Sr. spanks Shrub for not playing nice

In a speech at Tuft's University, Bush senior expressed his concern that Shrub will defy the United Nations, causing much harm.

Drawing on his own experiences before and after the 1991 Gulf War, Mr Bush Sr said that the brief flowering of hope for Arab-Israeli relations a decade ago would never have happened if America had ignored the will of the United Nations.

...

He also urged the President to resist his tendency to bear grudges, advising his son to bridge the rift between the United States, France and Germany.

Mr Bush Jr, who is said never to forget even relatively minor slights, has alarmed analysts with the way in which he has allowed senior Administration figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, aggressively to criticise France and Germany.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:29:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chat on the jumbtron at the EFF-Austin party

Tonight's EFF-Austin party, which will start at 8PM Central Time, will feature a live chat on the jumbotron that you can participate in -- sign up here! Link Discuss (Thanks, Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:28:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Model rocketry ads of the 50s and 60s

Stefan sez: "Hokey, charming adverts for model rockets from comic books and Boy's Life magazine. Some date back to 1958." Link Discuss

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

Justin Hall's Geek Out live via QuickTime

Justin Hall's "Geek-Out" is a 2.5h event at SXSW where Justin presides over a series of 10-minute nerdy lightning talks. The event will be stremed over QuickTime from the SXSW wireless net, starting at 3:30PM Central time. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:16:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AOLTW to offer crippled TiVo clone

AOL Time Warner is hoping that people will be stupid enough to sign up up for Mystro TV, which is sort of like TiVo, but lets cable networks prevent people from time shifting certain shows, and inserts commericals when viewers hit the pause button. Sounds llike it should be called Monstro TV.

But the demonstration also stresses that the Mystro TV system offers networks and studios considerable advantages over in-home personal video recorders such as TiVo or ReplayTV, which is made by Sonicblue. Not only can networks determine the availability of their shows, but Mystro TV prevents consumers from making, storing or sharing copies (something ReplayTV allows). Mystro also does not automatically skip commercials or even include a fast-forward button that leaps past one 30-second commercial at a time (another feature of ReplayTV.)

While a program is paused or rewinding, networks can insert new commercials during the process or display them around the periphery of the screen. On the CD-ROM demo, for example, a viewer pausing "Charmed" might see a commercial for Special K or Pizza Hut.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:05:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Americans get balanced news from the UK

British news-sites are seeing unprecedented traffic from US IP ranges as Americans, repulsed by the stilted war coverage in the US papers (who have collectively abandoned stories like Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam and spying on security council members at the UN) turn to Old Europe for Real News.

Jon Dennis, deputy news editor of the Guardian Unlimited web site said: "We have noticed an upsurge in traffic from America, primarily because we are receiving more emails from US visitors thanking us for reporting on worldwide news in a way that is unavailable in the US media."

The American public is apparently turning away from the mostly US-centric American media in search of unbiased reporting and other points of views. Much of the US media's reaction to France and Germany's intransigence on the Iraqi war issue has verged on the xenophobic, even in the so-called 'respectable' press. Some reporting has verged on the hysterical - one US news web site, NewsMax.com, recently captioned a photograph of young German anti-war protesters as "Hitler's children".

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:23:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dee Hock on Emergent Democracy

Dee Hock, the founder of Visa and the inventor of "Chaordism," a bottom-up organizational philosophy that mirrors the Internet, has written an amazing response to Joi Ito's "Emergent Democracy" paper.

As you may know, I have been arguing for a decade that the Internet was fatally flawed and would go the way of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television as far as its promise of elevating ideas and discourse, advancing democracy, enhancing liberty or facilitating economic and political justice. I have lived long enough to remember the claims that were made at the advent of radio and television, and read enough of the history of the telegraph and telephone to realize that the claims made by the messiahs of those forms of communication were not dissimilar from the claims made by aficionados of the Internet. The reason, from my perspective, is not complicated.

Culture brings us together, usually at a very small scale through mutual belief, trust and common interest. It educes, not compels, behavior. Culture codified is law. It is as inevitable as the day the night that as scale increases, law increases. Law enforced is government. Government does not, in the main, educe behavior, but compels it. Democratic or otherwise, rarely, very rarely, does any concentration of power or wealth desire to see subjects well informed, truly educated, their privacy ensured or their discourse uninhibited. Those are the very things that power and wealth fear most. Old forms of government have every reason to operate in secret, while denying just that privilege to subjects. The people are to be minutely scrutinized while power is to be free of examination.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:19:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EEG "cyborg" concert

James sez, "There's going to be a mass collective brainwave concert where a computer uses EEG sensors to measure audience reaction to the music and then regenerate the composition in response on the fly. Also there's an architectural exhibit examining the notion of "building as blog". Its all kicked off by an open discussion between Steve Mann (inventor/pioneer wearable computing) and Stelarc (cyborg performance artist)." Link Discuss (Thanks, James!)

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

TV ticket gallery

Great gallery of scanned tickets from TV show tapings, with personal stories about each show. Link Discuss (Thanks, Robert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jewish bikers ride out

A Jewish motorcycle club who put mezzuzahs on their Harleys will ride for the first time in the Daytona Bike Week.

wn businesses and have the time and wherewithal to indulge their hobby. "I'm a nice Jewish boy who likes motorcycles, shoots guns from time to time, and kills things for a living," said Seth Tokson, 43, of Armonk, owner of Absolute Pest Management Inc.

They are suspicious of the angst explanation. "There are many reasons we ride," Mr. Rayman said, "and the idea that we're rebelling against our parents after a protected childhood is not one of them."

Howard Rozins, 47, co-owner of the Bagel Emporium on Main Street in Armonk, likes the rush. "The speed, the freedom, the openness of it," he said. "You can't believe the beauty of riding up here."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chel!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:06:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dow sues Bhopal survivors for protesting

Dow Chemical is suing Bhopal survivors who protested the company's role in one of the worst environmental disaster in history. These guys are more evil than Darth frigging Vader.

On December 2nd a peaceful march of 200 women survivors from Bhopal delivered toxic waste from the abandoned Carbide factory back to Dow's Indian headquarters in Bombay with the demand that Dow take responsibility for the disaster and clean up the site. Dow obviously has other ideas because they are suing survivors for about US$10,000 for "loss of work". That's US$10,000 compensation demanded for a two hour peaceful protest where only one Dow employee briefly ventured out of the Mumbai corporate business park to meet the women protestors.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Forgetting your phone is rude in Japan

Gizmodo reports that leaving your cellphone at home is increasingly considered an antisocial act in Japan.

One college student I spoke to described leaving one's phone at home or letting the battery die as "the new taboo." Teens and twentysomethings usually do not bother to set a time and place for their meetings. They exchange as many as 5 to 15 messages throughout the day that progressively narrows in on a time and place, two points eventually converging in a coordinated dance through the urban jungle. To not have a keitai [cellphone] is to be walking blind, disconnected from just-in-time information on where and when you are in the social networks of time and place.

Link Discuss

Update: Here's the original Online Journalism Review Story

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:59:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogging SXSW

There's some excellent blogging going on at SXSW. Some are posting notes and analysis, Heath Row continues to publish transcripts within minutes each panel's ending, and he promises to do a roundup with analysis when it's all over.

I've barely been making it to any panels besides my own, because I'm really tightly scheduled, and the one panel I did make it to, a presentation by an exec from WayPort, was depressingly awful. His main thesis seemed to be that community networks would vanish due to their "unreliability" (in Manhattan, it's easier to get an open WiFi signal than it is to get a cellphone signal -- but this is a special definition of "reliability" meaning, "expensive" and "crappy"), and be replaced with expensive, managed networks in McDonalds restaurants in franchise ghettos on freeways near airports -- these networks would be run by the phone companies, who would "own the customer." This is the starkest, most distopian vision of a wireless future imaginable.

• David "Small Pieces" Weinberger on Lessig's keynote
• David "Loosely Joined" Weinberger on Journalism: Old and New
• Aaron Swartz on Lessig's keynote
• Heath Row's transcript of "Conceptual Firewalls"
• Heath Row's transcript of Lessig's keynote
• Heath Row's transcript of Understanding Common Sense
• Heath Row's transcript of Journalism: Old and New

Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Valenti's "moral" remix

Canis Lupus has remixed the Valenti "Moral Imperative" speech to very nice ends:

Let’s talk about fair use. What is fair use? Fair use is dead. Why? Why is that so? There are copyright laws in this country (the Digital Millenium Copyright Act). They are unfair and unwise and unwieldy and absolutely, it gives me all this power. Cooool.

1MB MP3 Link Discuss (Thanks, Canis!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:51:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, March 9, 2003

You are what you carry around

I'm interested in hearing what kinds of gadgets you carry around and find indispensible. I hardly ever leave the house without my:

Handspring Visor Edge I use it for my appointments and phone numbers, but I really use it to read article and books from Project Gutenberg and alt.binaries.e-book. When I'm waiting in line, or stuck in an office lobby, it's great to pull out. I'm reading Treasure Island right now. I'm tempted to buy the Sony Clie 665C, which has twice the resolution and is in color, but don't know if I want to spend almost $300. It has some pretty cool features, like being able to control your TV and VCR with the infrared port. It has an MP3 player, to, which would be nice to use when I didn't feel like hauling my iPod around. Anybody have one of these? I saw some beautiful-looking oranges ones at Fry's today.

Sony Cyber-shot U This miniature digital camera is easy to slip into my pocket. I take pictures nearly every day. I think I've taken more pictures in the last two months since I've had it than the last five years without one. It's only two megapixels, but I've gotten decent prints from Ofoto using it. I love this camera.

A crappy T-61 Sony Ericsson phone Why oh why did I ever get rid of my Ericsson T-28 and get this bulky hunk o' junk? Probably becuse the T-28 was rated as having the highest microwave emissions of any cell phone. Still, I think I'd rather have a cooked brain than the T-61. The display is filled with dust, and I can't clean it out, because it's under the plastic screen. Makes it hard to read in daylight. Still, I haven't found a mobile phone tiny enough to goad me into switching.

Things I don't carry with me at all times: iPod (too heavy, too much hassle with the earphones, but I like it when I run), Blackberry (good for short trips when I don't want to bring my iBook with me, otherwise, I keep it at home.)

What do you carry and why? Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:23:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notes from "Doing Good Online"

Lia "Cheesedip" Bulaong took great notes yesterday at my SXSW "Doing Good Online" panel:

chris: with npr since 1998 -- when he got there he did the website, there were six people there. had to do it every day. cut and encoded eight hours of audio every day. what we do is put content on the internet, and in a way so people can't just listen to things, but the specific things that they want. (example, the impeachment hearings, people could listen to snippets of it) ... npr's mission statement has nothing about making money, lucky enough to work in an area where you can have pie in the sky ideas and it's okay. ... "driveway moment" is when you hear something in your driveway and are so enthralled that you can't leave ... one of the top searches we get is for "this american life", which is not an npr program. since we're not concerned with profits but that people get they want on our site, if they came for that then we give them what they want.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lia!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:20:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barks, Stanley, and Clowes in Comics Journal #250

There is a lot of great stuff in the latest issue of The Comics Journal (#250, 272 pages). Besides the interview with Gary Panter (which I already blogged about a while ago), there is a transcript from a 1976 interview with two of my favorite cartoonists, Carl Barks (Disney ducks) and John Stanley (Little Lulu) and an amazing interview with Dan Clowes on the craft of cartooning. Unfortunately, neither of these are online, but you can order a copy online. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:45:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lab Notes: Research from UC Berkeley

Computationally cracking the secrets of cells, building bomb-resistant buildings, preparing extreme ultraviolet lithography for prime time, and playing data like a musical instrument ... all in my latest issue of Lab Notes: Research from the Berkeley College of Engineering. Please take a look! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:40:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The rise of R-rated radio

bOING bOING pal Gil Kaufman writes in the Cincinnati Enquirer about how pop songs are getting more risque, forcing radio station censors to work over-time:

"Though the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has strict rules regarding the airing of obscene material over the public airwaves, it has no provisions for songs that have been edited. That might explain why on a recent weeknight more than three-quarters of the hit tracks played on KISS 107.1's (WKFS-FM) 'Freak Show' ('The only show worth a bleep' is its slogan.) between 7 and 8 p.m. featured at least three or more edits."

Can you (bleeping) believe that (bleep)!?!? Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:35:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT reviews Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Today's NYT is carrying a half-page, mostly positive review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in the main book-review section. I'm doing a panel tomorrow called "Why I Dig Working in the Cultural Gutter," but this may disqualify me!

Cory Doctorow is an avid Weblogger (he can be found at boingboing.net), and his novel's ad-hocracies of ''twittering Pollyannic castmembers'' who smoke ''decaf'' crack and congratulate one another on ''Bitchun'' ideas offer a knowing, gently satiric view of a once ascendant digital culture. And the impressively imagined world of the novel is tricked out in lively prose.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:47:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gashlycrumb Tinies online

Edward Gorey's rhyming, illustrated alphabet of horrible things happening to rotten children (A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs) is online at last. Lovely. Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Heath's SXSW transcripts

Heath Row's transcripts of the SXSW panels he attends are stellar. Here are two to be sure to catch:

Dying online: Dana Robinson works for an org that provides network connectivity to chronically ill and dying children in 100 hospitals in the US and Canada. She's observed that online communities have yet to formalize any kind of social norm for coping with the death of community members (indeed, sometimes the community only infers the death from the absence of a login from some ill member over time, and confirms it much later or never) -- some gamers have mass-log-in funerals, some chat systems reserve the deceased's ID and add a RIP and rememberances to her profile, some do nothing. Dana's been studying all the online norms for coping with death she can find, and in this panel, she reports on her research.

Effective Social Networks: It's clear that online communities are capable of bringing large numbers of people with common interests together, but organizing those people into some form of collective action is much harder than just assembling them.

Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Let's take to the trees!

Great NYT story on the growing market for luxury, custom-built treehouses:

The house, built last fall in two cedars and a maple, has one large room with alderwood interior paneling and cedar exterior siding. The unfinished wide-plank floors are made of Douglas fir, and the railing of the staircase is made of tree branches. The family is still figuring out exactly how to use the house. The children have held sleepovers there, and Ms. Shera has used it as an artist's studio. The Sickelses also visited Sydney Mullock's treehouse, hidden in the woods maybe 100 yards from the main house. The leaded-glass windows were salvaged by family members and friends, typical of a TreeHouse Workshop design. The "scrounging aspect" of the process, Mr. Jacob said, is something clients seem to enjoy. Inside, the house is decorated simply: a table with a flowery cloth and a vase of flowers, a hutch with little spice bottles and a futon for sitting or sleeping. It's half bare-bones country inn, half Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother's cottage.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, March 8, 2003

Nanoethics

The Center for Responsibile Nanotechnology: otherwise, your neighborhood may dissolve into brightly colored machine-parts.

The technology is already on its way. But who will control it? If universal manufacturing is not administered properly, there is great risk of it being used badly—either by the entity that first develops it, or by groups that later gain access to it. Development or control of the technology by a special interest group would probably lead to military or economic oppression. Two competing programs could lead to an unstable arms race. Irresponsible release would make the full power of the technology available to terrorists, criminals, dictators, and teenagers. The safest course appears to be a single, rapid, worldwide development program by an organization that recognizes the necessity of wise administration.

Teenagers? My stars and garters. Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:31:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Left-wing media bias? In your dreams.

Dan Gillmor (who is sitting two seats to the left of me, blogging David Weinberger's SXSW keynote, which is delish) has written a blistering attack on the journalists charged with keeping tabs on George W. Bush.

But where the hell is the press when it comes to the current tenant in the White House? Bush has repeatedly failed to tell the truth, and his past is loaded with the kinds of behavior that have caused major news organizations to go into overdrive when Democrats were doing it. Here's one example. You probably don't know that Bush apparently went AWOL (Dallas Morning News) from his Air National Guard duty in the 1970s. It was covered by a few newspapers, but the story disappeared after he claimed he couldn't remember what happened. Right.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:28:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sleep is for the unmedicated

A fascinating diary of one writer's trial of the narcolepsy drug modafinil (creepily marketed as Provigil), a drug that slows the release of GABA, a sleep promoter in the brain.

The seduction of modafinil is that you can feel as peppy after six hours sleep as you would after nine. (It may also have a more drastic effect.) Doctors see modafinil as an occasional pick-me-up. They doubt you could take the drug everyday without consequences: Most sleep researchers agree that the longer sleep is necessary for hormonal regulation, among other essential bodily functions. (Drugs aren't the only way we may steal less sleep. Click here to read about how we may enlist gene therapy to help us stay awake.)

Tired of merely writing about enhancement (and tired, period), I decided to conduct my own unscientific trial of modafinil. As the father of a 2-year-old, I live in a constant haze of sleep deprivation. I vowed to take modafinil for a week and see what happened. Could it transform a lazy, exhausted hack into a brilliant Jeffrey Goldberg? Or recast a grouchy father into Superdad? I persuaded my doctor—and no, you can't have his number—to prescribe me a week's supply of Provigil, seven 200-milligram pills.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mesh today

Glenn Fleishman has written a very cogent piece about the current reality of mesh wireless.

In pure mesh systems, each node routes traffic across the mesh and bridges it to backhaul or a local network. In FHP’s system, nodes route traffic but distribute it through an integral Wi-Fi station. If deployed densely, these systems create a “hot zone� with reduced wiring cost and great flexibility in increasing density or changing coverage.

One FHP product type, currently called SmartPoint, handles mesh routing and Wi-Fi distribution, while another, currently called RoutePoint, bridges backhaul into the system, allowing bandwidth to be added to a mesh in any location. (The company is in the process of rebranding both products.) FHP’s approach relies on existing Wi-Fi client infrastructure.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rubik's Mosaic

Great gallery of mosaics made from Rubik's Cubeses -- the artist says he got his pixelart skills using draw programs on an Apple //e. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Legit" music services still suck

David Pogue rounds up the new "legit" music services and concludes that they all cost too much, have confusing pricing plans, use dumbass DRM, and don't have the selection to compete with the free file-sharing networks. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:28:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reservoir Dogs game

A new Reservoir Dogs game will let you play any character, but I suspect that we'll all end up being Mr. Pink.

SCi promises that gamers will be able to play all the film's key characters, including Mr Blonde, infamous for torturing a policeman in one of the movie's most visceral scenes.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:20:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roogle: RSS search

Roogle: an RSS search-tool. Good idea. Stupid name and design (why go out of your way to actually be dilutive? Ha ha, you've wasted your time getting a lawyer-letter and wasted Google's time generating it). Link Discuss (via Joi Ito)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:18:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stallman's keynote

I missed Stallman's keynote last night at SXSW, but my pal Heath took great running notes through the talk.

The theory of this is that the public pays a price. The public trades away its natural right to copy things and in exchange gets the benefit of getting more things written. The thing we traded away wasn't a right we could use easily. Then printing press technology got more efficient. Printing presses around 1900 got cheaper. Even poor people stopped copying things by hand. People started forgetting that copies could be made by hand. Things went along more or less OK. But the age of the printing press is going away for the age of the computer. Not everybody wants this to be easy for you.

Digital information technology brings us back to a situation more like the ancient world. It's true that mass producing CD's is less expensive than making a one-off CD, but the difference isn't that great. Any computer user can make copies. There's no inherent reason for copies of things to be made centrally. Copyright law now affects every citizen. It no longer affects companies. It takes away freedoms from you and me. Copyright law is no longer painless, easy to enforce, or arguably beneficial. To stop you from sharing something with a friend, the police state needs to intrude into your house. We're no longer trading away something we don't have anyway. We need to renegotiate the deal.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:16:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 7, 2003

e-War: Ring Tones & Screen Savers -- email from Kuwait, by CNN's Kevin Sites

CNN correspondent Kevin Sites has been sharing what amounts to a blogless wartime blog with BoingBoing readers over the past few weeks. An excerpt from the latest in his ongoing series of e-mailed, first-person accounts from Kuwait follows (the rest is here):

For most of the journalists here in Kuwait, this is the fear and this is the joke; that for all our technology--our videophones and portable dishes, our Thurayas, and Iridiums and Neras, our digital cameras and laptop editing systems--we could end up covering this war with wind up film cameras.

It's on the grapevine that the U.S. Air Force has developed an electro magnetic pulse weapon at Kirtland Air Force that could be used in war against Iraq. The concept is devastating simple; flying over the target area, the military emits a microwave swath, which basically fries the electronics of any appliance or device in its path.

Like a giant switch, when the EMP weapon is flicked on, the lights go out. People, however, are supposedly spared--unless they happened to be wearing a pacemaker or are hooked up to other life sustaining machinery. The EMP weapon does not apparently differentiate between cell phones and hospital respirators.

Tactically, it could help to end the war more swiftly, by denying Iraq any military communications. The order to fire a chemical weapon may be eliminated along with the chain of command.

Link to the complete text; Discuss (Thanks, JP)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:55:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A coin with a story

This is a fascinating tale about the recent auction of the last known 1933 Double Eagle gold coin (save for the one on echibit in the Smithsonian), a coin whose provenance includes shady Philly grifters, playboy Egyptian princes, and daring Secret Service stings. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kate!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:51:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

3,000 UK pubs getting WiFi

The BBC reports that WiFi networks will be rolled out in 3,000 British pubs this year. Seems to me that American caffeine jitters will result in fewer coffee spills on laptops than British barfights will lead to beer-spill tragedies. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:49:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sex and the Single Sasquatch

Bigfoot researcher Loren Coleman has found a unique niche in Sasquatch research: He's looking into bigfoot's sex life. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gil!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:36:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Crafty Geeky Zen

Easy Bizarre Crafts
Macrame Owls
Crocheted Thongs, Diamond Braid stitch
String Art
Origami Art
Pencil Art
Vintage videogame cross-stitch
Petit Point and pixel stitching, retro geek themes
MouseMod
Link Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:00:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If you're going to SXSW, be sure to bring your WiFi card

Gotta get to the airport for SXSW now. I'm bringing three access-points and a signal amp, and I've arranged to borrow hubs and such from various Austinites, bring your wireless card! Here's where you can find me during the confernce:

• Doing Good Online: Innovative Ideas From Non-Profits on the Internet (Saturday, 5PM)
• Some Rights Reserved: The Creative Commons Project (Sunday, 11:30AM)
• Bloggies (Sunday, 3PM)
• Why I Dig Working in the Cultural Gutter (Monday, 3:30PM)
• Booksigning (Monday, 4:30PM)
• The Hollywood Agenda (Tuesday, 11:30AM)
• EFF-Austin party (Monday, 8PM)
• Bruce Sterling's party (Tuesday, 8PM)

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:39:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Metabolites violate patents

Adam sez, " Basically SmithKline is saying that [generic drug maker] Apotex can't make Paxil because at a crystalline level, contamination from them making another drug will cause minute amounts of *their* patented drug to be produced as a side effect. (the judge makes an observation that people will infringe upon the patent by ingesting it even if Apotex was not)" 2.3MB PDF Link Discuss (Thanks, Adam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:26:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cluetrain for record execs

Doc "Linux Journal" Searls and David "Small Pieces" Weinberger -- two of the Cluetrain authors -- have written a new manifesto, called "Word of Ends," which attempts to explain the Internet in terms that entertainment execs and bellheads can understand.

10. Some mistakes we can stop making already.

The companies whose value came from distributing content in ways the market no longer wants – can you hear us Recording Industry? – can stop thinking that bits are like really lightweight atoms. You are never going to prevent us from copying the bits we want. Instead, why not give us some reasons to prefer buying music from you? Hell, we might even help you sell your stuff if you asked us to.

The government types who have confused the value of the Internet with the value of its contents could realize that in tinkering with the Internet's core, they're actually driving down its value. In fact, they maybe could see that having a system that transports all bits equally, without government or industry censorship, is the single most powerful force for democracy and open markets in history.

Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:23:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SeattleWireless.NET -- accept no imitations

Rob "Pringles Antenna" Flickenger of the Seattle Wireless project debunks the claims of "seattlewireless.com," a company that has taken on a confusingly similar domain name, then made of a bunch of claims that makes the relationship between the community group and the company even blurrier.

Up until today, seattlewireless.com has been little more than an annoyance to actual community networking projects. But several important lines have now been crossed:

* Various node lists and maps from projects including NYC Wireless, PersonalTelco, and of course, SeattleWireless.NET, are listed as seattlewireless.COM nodes.

* They are now taking money for the privilege of accessing these nodes, none of which are supported by their "organization". Interestingly enough, their credit card entry page doesn't even use SSL.

* The "company" is now making wild claims about what its technology can do. Here's a choice quote:

"Our telecommunications industry platforms, the Telecom Platform, the Village Telephony Platform and the Personal Telco Platform, allow roaming between different networks and across standards such as 802.11, Bluetooth, HiperLan, TDMA, CDMA, and 3G cellular networks. We partner with carriers, CLECs, ILECs, and telecom companies to license these Wi-Fi platform networks while supplying tools, content, services, branded bandwidth, and portals."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:20:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, March 6, 2003

Map of deviant desires

Big map of fetishes and sexuals obessions. I must admit that I'm almost completely lost even with the map. What are bug-seekers, magical freaks, mudlarking, and turkey men? Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:50:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Live audblogging from "Unwired" meeting in LA, part three

Q&A with Brad, continued. The recording industry will probably want to do one of two things: buy this company or nuke them. How is Xingtone different from other existing customizable ringtone services? Brad says they've developed technology that allows users to upload digital music onto mobile phones for the first time. Xingtone converts your MP3s to ringtones -- and could soon make today's robotic ringtones sound positively retro. Brad explains here:
audblog audio post, pics, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:26:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Live audblogging from "Unwired" meeting in LA, part two

I cornered Brad Zutaut for the lowdown on his company's customized ringtone and display service. Xingtone converts any sort of sound you can cram into an MP3 -- music you write yourself, the sound of your baby talking, or a popular music clip like the one he demonstrated tonight -- and plays that audio as a ringtone, along with related images on your phone's screen.

audblog audio post, pics, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:24:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Live audblogging from "Unwired" meeting in LA, part one

Tonight in Los Angeles, I co-hosted a get-together for [unwired], a listserv and community of people who work in (or cover news about) wireless technology. A couple dozen entrepreneurs, technologists, journalists, and others gathered for drinks, hot geeky gossip, and live demos of new wireless technologies at a little bar at the Omni Hotel downtown -- the only hotel in the entire L.A. metropolitan area that offers 100% free WiFi to guests, patrons, and anybody who just happens to be stopping through. The hotel's Director of Operations claims that occupancy rates have soared since the free wireless service was introduced, and told us, "Our guests who use WiFi would rather wait for an hour to have an overflowing toilet fixed than wait an hour for an out-of-service WiFi connection to be fixed." Four wireless points, installed in the maids' closets and in the elevator shafts, power the 802.11b network that permeates the building and surrounding grounds at killer speeds.

After a few rounds of mojitos and manhattans, everyone huddles around Brad Zutaut, founder of Xingtone, for a live demo of his company's technology. Read about it, and about the [unwired] gathering tonight, in this Reuters story published just a couple of hours ago. Join us at the event by listening to the audblog post phoned in from my mobile. Here, Brad is demoing Xingtones live and answering questions from the crowd.

audblog audio post, pics, Reuters news article, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:46:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GI Jargon

This DOD glossary of milspec jargon is a writer's dream. Nightmare?

electromagnetic deception
(DOD) The deliberate radiation, re-radiation, alteration, suppression, absorption, denial, enhancement, or reflection of electromagnetic energy in a manner intended to convey misleading information to an enemy or to enemy electromagnetic-dependent weapons, thereby degrading or neutralizing the enemy's combat capability. Among the types of electromagnetic deception are: a. manipulative electromagnetic deception--Actions to eliminate revealing, or convey misleading, electromagnetic telltale indicators that may be used by hostile forces; b. simulative electromagnetic deception--Actions to simulate friendly, notional, or actual capabilities to mislead hostile forces; and c. imitative electromagnetic deception--The introduction of electromagnetic energy into enemy systems that imitates enemy emissions. See also electronic warfare.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Greg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:40:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Valenti's "moral" talk to Duke U

Here's the audio of Jack "Boston Strangler" Valenti's one-hour talk at Duke University, about the "moral imperative" of stamping out file-sharing. This is so ripe for remixing. 7.2MB MP3 Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:04:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSFT's braindead back-door reveals sneaky spyware hidden in Windows Update

Windows Update spies on your XP box and sends information about your installed software back to the MSFT Death Star. Best of all, this was discovered by sniffing the "secure" SSL protocol that MSFT uses to communicate. How? By exploiting an undocumented API in MSFT's own system.

Evidence obtained by German hardware site tecChannel suggests a list of software installed on an XP machine is sent to Microsoft when users run Windows Update. When patches are downloaded, a few kilobytes of data are sent in the opposite direction over a secure SSL channel. Because the data is encrypted a simple packet sniffer can't be used to see what this data contains. However tecChannel's tecDUMP utility takes advantage of an undocumented WinInet API, enabling an examination of the data before it becomes encrypted. According to tecChannel, the information sent to Microsoft includes details of all the software installed in a machine, not only Microsoft applications.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pablos!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Audio and video from my reading last night

Here's video and audio from last night's reading of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe at The Booksmith in San Francisco. Link Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:56:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Braid Crazy book

My wife, Carla, has a new book out called Braid Crazy, published by Chronicle, the same folks who published my Mad Professor book. It's a book of fun hair braids. You can see some pictures here (our daughter Sarina is modeling the Dorothy braids). And I did the how-to illustrations. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:00:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Musical Axis of Evil Zen: Pyongyang subway tunes and photos

Ever wonder what kind of music they pipe into the subways in Pyongyang? Wonder no more! There is an unofficial website devoted to the North Korean metro system, complete with photos (like the patriotic underground mural shown at left) and downloadable music files. Don't miss North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's signature tune "No Motherland Without You," (the lyrics to which list his super-human powers), and "Reunification Rainbow," one of the songs performed by musicians with the Pyongyang Circus while visiting Seoul (with rare North Korean guitar solo).

"[The piped-in subway music] consists of North Korean anthems and patriotic songs, although the speaker system is also used for, shall we say, public service announcements, reportedly including messages exhorting people to be on the lookout for traitors and spies."

Link, Discuss, (Thanks, John!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:28:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ganguro gallery

Ganguro are Japanese girls who try to look black have very deep tans. Here's a page of ganguro girl pics. Links Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:22:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Welcome to the home of excellent beards!

"Beards don't always get the respect and appreciation they deserve. These pages highlight many excellent beards that are worthy of recognition. Take a look at the numerous examples of quality beards. Learn more about beards. Maybe you'll even decide to grow your own beard or persuade someone else to grow one! " Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:18:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Get your war-QTVR on

Quicktime panorama of the mess hall at Camp Arifjan, a U.S. military base south of Kuwait City. Link via Washington Post, Link to more QTVRs from US military stations in Kuwait, Discuss (Thanks, JP)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:19:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pancake-flipping equation will yield auto-flipper

A physics student in Leeds, UK, has developed an equation describing the optimal means of getting a pancake to flip around in the air and land back in the pan.

The angular velocity of the object equals the square root of Pi, times the gravity divided by the distance the pancake is from the elbow times four - that is how to get the pancake back in the pan...

His theoretical work laid the groundwork for students designing a pancake-tossing machine, which could one day become a feature in every home.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Seattle Wireless goes national

Seattle Wireless launched a national service yesterday, allowing Seattle Wireless customers to connect to WiFi hotspots in 12 cities. Link Discuss (via Werblog)

Update: An anonymous tipster tells me that this is not true

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

Enigma Machine on eBay

A dealer in Stuttgart is selling off a rebuilt WWII German Enigma code-machine. Bidding stands at $5100, and the reserve has not been met yet. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:35:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to avoid the dotcom shakeout: buy a better domain name

Red Herring founder Tony Perkins' new project, the AlwaysOn Network, launched with a conspicuously awkward domain name: alwayson-network.com. Web usability rule number one: hyphenated domains suck. So what was already occupying the simpler alwaysonnetwork.com? A hideous Goth-Flash-diarrhea website from self-described "Bay Area Hyper-Rock band NAKED APE" (screenshot at left). Our of "sheer frustration," 18-year-old BoingBoing reader Numair says he's created a website at aonw.com, which forwards visitors to Perkins' new venture -- with some observations on the value of a wisely-chosen url:

"Tony (the guy who started Red Herring and Upside, both now defunct) obviously didn't put much thought into the domain name he used for his project, as it is one of the longest and most annoying URLs I have to type each day. Plus you can't explain it very easily to other people when talking to them, as it comes out something like 'always on dash network' ... then you have to explain that the dash isn't a word, it's a dash ... NOBODY uses a dash in their domain names. (Even T-Mobile bought tmobile.com).

After searching WHOIS for all of about, oh, TWO minutes, I discovered a much-easier-to-remember-and-use domain name, AONW.com, was available. I registered it and created the site you see here. So now you and I and all others fed up with AlwaysOn Network's absurd URL can simply type 'aonw.com' to get to the website.

The message on the front page of this website is a take on the title of Tony's book from 1999 - The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks--And What You Need to Know to Avoid the Coming Shakeout (apparently he has been skilled at pathetically-long names for some time now). There was one lesson Tony obviously missed out on while doing research for that book, so I wrote it in big letters to help him remember for next time. I should note that I like AlwaysOn a lot, and that I have no real grudge against Tony... I just want a shorter domain name to type, dammit."

Link to the AlwaysOn Network site, Link to "The Orifice of Naked Ape," link to Numair's AONW.com site, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:27:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, March 5, 2003

Looking for Digital Folk Art

Clay Shirky says:

One of my students is building a collection of digital folk art, the non-commercial artifacts of re-mix culture, from Hamster Dance and the Dancing Baby to All Your Base, and wants recollections and suggestions.

The intro to her project says "I am cataloging early popular web culture, putting together a collection of non-commercial digital projects that were widely distributed, the funny or strange things your friends attached in emails or the interesting websites they told you about. I'm focusing on media that was made or distributed by individuals for fun or with political intent - sort of the folk art of the digital world. It's hard to know which projects were the most popular of the most groundbreaking during the early days of the web (roughly 1994 - 1998), so I'm looking for suggestions on what to include."

She's got a form for submitting pointers.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:40:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Armed soldiers replace bunnies in this year's Easter baskets

The Pope -- who's been lobbying against war in Iraq -- isn't gonna like this. National retailers including Kmart, Rite Aid and Walgreens are selling Easter baskets in which the traditional choco-bunny centerpiece is replaced with plastic gun-toting miltary action figures.

At the Astor Place Kmart, the encampment is on display just inside the main entrance. A camouflaged sandy-haired soldier with an American-flag arm patch stands alert in a teal, pink, and yellow basket beneath a pretty green-and-purple bow. Within a doll-arm's reach are a machine gun, rifle, hand grenade, large knife, pistol, and round of ammunition. In the next basket a buzz-cut blond with a snazzy dress uniform hawks over homeland security, an American eagle shield on his arm, and a machine gun, pistol, Bowie knife, two grenades, truncheon, and handcuffs at the ready.

One must hunt a little harder to find the Easter sniper at Walgreens, but what lies in wait among the bunnies and chicks there is perhaps even more surreal. The Super Wrriors (sic) Battle Set and Placekeepers (sic) Military Men Play Set bristle with toy assault rifles and machine guns, tanks, troop transports, bomber planes, commanded by armored men with shaved heads and sunglasses. The assortment also includes a space-age ray gun and other imaginary hardware for orbital combat. Packets of jellybeans are tossed in as if an afterthought, nestled in the cellophane underbrush like anti-personnel mines.

Not surprisingly, the merger of religious observance and jingoistic lust sparked the ire of Christian leaders. Bishop George Packard, who oversees spiritual care for Episcopalian members of the armed services, worries about practical issues. He's concerned about creating a backlash against the military, and questions the message sent to Muslims by the melding of a Christian holiday with images of war.

Link to Village Voice story, Discuss (Thanks Higgins!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:14:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reading tonight at SF's Booksmith

A reminder! I am going to be reading from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom tonight at 7PM at the Booksmith in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. I'll read from D&O, and maybe from something else -- either the novel that's coming next year or one of the novels that I'm working on at the moment. Booksmith gives out free author trading-cards, and is a very swell bookstore in general. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nanoscale padlock

Sandia Labs have patented a MEMS-based nanoscale padlock as a new anti-hacker measure. The security benefits sound pretty dubious, but boy, the tech is awfully cool!

The Recodable Locking Device consists of two sides -- the user side and the secure side. To unlock the device, a user must enter a code that identically matches the code stored mechanically in the six code wheels. If the user makes even one wrong entry -- and close doesn't count -- the device mechanically "locks up" and does not allow any further tries until the owner resets it from the secure side.

The six gears and the comb drives would be put on a small chip that could be incorporated into any computer, computer network, or security system. Because the chip is built using integrated circuit fabricating techniques, hundreds can be constructed on a single six-inch silicon wafer. The end result is that the device will be very inexpensive to produce. Plummer says Sandia is the only place where development of such a mechanism could have occurred.

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:52:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GoogleHacks is out!

GoogleHacks -- the new O'Reilly book written by Tara "ResearchBuzz" Calashain and Rael "Blosxom" Dornfest -- is out!

Google Hacks contains 100 tips, tricks and scripts that you can use to become instantly more effective in your research. Each hack can be read in just a few minutes, but can save hours of searching for the right answers.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:47:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

West Coast cities are most unwired in USA, Intel survey says

A survey commissioned by Intel ranks America's most unwired cities. Six of the top 10 are on the West Coast (BoingBoing readers, I beg of you: no eastside/westside playa-hata flame wars in the QuickTopic discussion zones).

The Portland, Ore.-Vancouver, Wash. area was the most unwired area, according to the survey. There are more than 3,700 hot spots in the United States spread out in cafes, airports, public parks and hotels... The survey was conducted to demonstrate that Wi-Fi technology and hot spots are not confined to labs or businesses.

"Some cities have a lot of them now," [survey conductor Bert] Sperling said. "Strong communities are bringing the technology to the people, and it demonstrates that Wi-Fi is easy enough to implement that grass roots efforts can go ahead to bring the power and freedom to the community."

The survey is based on the number of each city's public and commercially available hot spots, such as those found in hotels, airports and Starbucks, as well as cell phone coverage and Internet penetration.

Link to Intel survey results, Link to CNET story via MSNBC, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:40:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Protest online, go to jail? New European anti-hacker laws could criminalize web protests

In today's New York Times:

The justice ministers of the European Union have agreed on laws intended to deter computer hacking and the spreading of computer viruses. But legal experts say the new measures could pose problems because the language could also outlaw people who organize protests online, as happened recently, en masse, with protests against a war in Iraq.

The agreement, reached last week, obliges all 15 member states to adopt a new criminal offense: illegal access to, and illegal interference with an information system. It calls on national courts to impose jail terms of at least two years in serious cases.

Critics from the legal profession say the agreement makes no legal distinction between an online protester and terrorists, hackers and spreaders of computer viruses that the new laws are intended to trap.

Link to NYT story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:14:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robotic finger with a sense of touch

Two scientists at Spain's Polytechnic University of Cartagena have created a robotic finger with a sense of touch, using electrosensitive "smart materials" .

It is made of a polymer that can feel the weight of what it's pushing and adjust the energy it uses accordingly. This is similar to the way we use our sense of touch. If we pick up a delicate object such as a flower, our fingertips sense its fragility and so grasp it lightly. We instinctively exert more force when holding or moving a heavier, more robust item because there is feedback between our sensations and muscles. One way to make an artificial touch-sensitive limb, therefore, would be to equip it with delicate pressure sensors to provide this sort of feedback.

Link to Nature story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:10:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toshiba develops first-ever fuel cell for laptop computers

Yesterday, Toshiba debuted the world's first-ever prototype of a fuel cell for notebook computers. The device powers a laptop for five hours, and uses concentrated methanol as fuel. Toshiba says they'll further reduce size before consumer release. Link to Agence-France Presse item via SpaceDaily, Discuss Update: Link to Toshiba press release with photos of the laptop fuel cell prototype, including the one at left. (Thanks, Jeremy!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:05:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rocky Horror Muppet Show

Bored of dressing up like the same old Rocky Horror characters week in and week out? Why not try it in Muppet drag? Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:36:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fire from ice

How to make a firestarting ice-lens -- why didn't anyone tell me about this when I was between the age when snow-forts sucked and the age when I didn't want to venture into the cold, period? Starting fires, man, wow. Link Discuss (via JWZ's Livejournal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, March 4, 2003

MPAA, 20th Century Fox launch anti-Internet-piracy movie trailer in US theaters

Twentieth Century Fox and the MPAA have teamed up to produce an anti-piracy trailer intended to educate American filmgoers about the evils of movie piracy via digital file-swapping services like Kazaa.

Initially, the two-minute trailer that puts a human face on the victims of piracy will be shown at most Regal Cinemas, the nation's largest theater chain. It will be unveiled Wednesday at [the entertainment industry convention] ShoWest, which runs today through Thursday. (...)

Among some students, the notion that a trailer could persuade anyone to stop downloading movies seems naive, like the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign. "It's become so acceptable to download movies and music off the Internet that people don't think it's wrong," said USC sophomore Jacqui Deelstra, 19. Added sophomore Art Priromprintr: "Nobody's going to think 'Oh, I'm hurting the movie industry right now' -- they don't care."

Link to LA Times story (free site registration required), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:56:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tips for to avoid being spat upon when visiting Europe

USA Today has a list of tips for American tourists who don't want to get hassled by Europeans disgusted with the Bush administrations push for war.

Avoid American fast-food restaurants and chains.

Keep discussions of politics to private places, not rowdy bars.

Take a rain check on wearing clothes featuring American flags or sports team logos.

Keep your passport out of sight.

Keep cameras, video equipment and maps tucked away.

Soften your speech; Americans typically overshadow their hosts in the volume department.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:55:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rushkoff's 2nd grade penny thief confesses

My friend Doug Rushkoff posted this email on his blog:

Dear Douglas,

I am wondering if you are the Douglas Rushkoff who was in my second grade class with Miss Brownell in 1968-1969 (Chatworth Elementary, Larchmont, NY)??

If so, I owe you an apology. I stole the 1802 penny that you brought to class for Show and Tell. Ever since, I find myself saying "this is the worst thing I've done since I stole Douglas Rushkoff's 1802 penny".

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:37:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wear a peace T-shirt, go to jail

Reuters: "A lawyer was arrested late Monday and charged with trespassing at a public mall in the state of New York after refusing to take off a T-shirt advocating peace that he had just purchased at the mall." Link Discuss (Thanks, Thomas!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:48:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dave Winer: How to get audblog to work with Userland

In Dave Winer's blog today: instructions on how to get audblog to work with Radio Userland. update: Clarification for BoingBoing from Dave: "FYI, that's 'in progress' -- the download link isn't hot. I want to talk with the Audblog people before releasing it, because I think we have to take another look at how it works. I don't want to support this way of doing it, and I doubt if they do either." Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Grant)!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:27:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jack Kirby's design for a theme park

Next to Robert Crumb, the late Jack Kirby is my all time favorite cartoonist. (My last spoken word will probably be "Kamandi.") Here are some of his mind bending designs for a never-built theme park. Wow! Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:51:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reverse Cowgirl audblogs from NYC's wild-n-wooly TV frontier

Listen up. Former BoingBoing guestblogger Susannah "Reverse Cowgirl" Breslin is in New York City this week, meeting with TV producers about a television version of Reverse Cowgirl's blog. She's audio-blogging the trip, and her posts so far are fantastic. Audblog doesn't officially support Radio Userland just yet (only Blogger, though other editions are reportedly on the way), so she's set up a temporary blogspot site where you can listen to her daily spoken reports. How ironic that the sound of a human voice should seem such a novelty... Link to Susannah's audio-blogging site, Link to RCB post about the audio-blogging experiment, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:01:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apology to NewsMonster

Last night, I wrote about my frustrations with NewsMonster. Today, I realize I shouldn't have written it. It was late at night and I was in a bad mood about it. I've been corresponding with Kevin Burton, the creator of NewsMonster, and he seems like a nice, terrifically earnest guy. He makes it very easy to contact him regarding bugs, and I should have emailed or called him before posting my complaints here. The idea behind NewsMonster is wonderful, and I hope it is a big success. Please forgive me, Kevin. Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:32:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Obscure federal agency seeks anti-terror gizmos

Article in today's Wall Street Journal about a little-known federal agency known as the TSWG:

Americans worried about terrorism on their home turf will soon be able to buy a $3 sensor the size of a credit card that will show whether they have been exposed to a dirty radioactive bomb. Behind the development of the tiny dosimeter, which features a baby blue or pink stripe that blushes deeper the greater the radiation exposure, is a tiny government agency that labored in obscurity -- until now.

The 70 employees of the Technical Support Working Group are the nation's talent scouts for antiterrorism gadgets. Their job is not to build the stuff but to fund it and ensure that gizmos find their way out of the laboratory, onto the market and into the hands of those who may need them. That, of course, became all the more pressing after Sept. 11. Since then, some 16,000 proposals have landed on the desks of the group's staffers. Only 120 made the cut. But now the agency is preparing for a new onslaught of proposals. It expects this week to issue its first public call for antiterrorism gadgets on behalf of the new Department of Homeland Security, which has promised to kick $30 million into the group's budget.

Link to WSJ article (subscription required), link to agency website, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:31:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snapshots from Cuba; Cuban music at EMP popular music summit next month in Seattle

Cuban music researcher Ned Sublette (of "Afropop Worldwide" radio show and Qbadisc records fame) sends BoingBoing these snapshots he took on a recent trip to Cuba. Ned leads escorted tours of Cuba with other experts on the music, culture, and history of the island; listen to sounds from their latest trip here. Next month, he'll be participating in the EMP pop music conference in Seattle (admission for non-members is $55). This annual event is put on by the Experience Musi