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Wednesday, April 30, 2003

3000 free trips to Toronto!

3000 free plane tickets to Toronto (RT from NYC, Montreal and Ottawa) are available from JetsGo between now and May 20. Celebrate the WHO's lifting of the SARS travel-advisory! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:20:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roger Wood's latest clock

My pal Roger Wood is an amazing assemblage scupltor in Toronto who makes the wildest goddamned whimsical clocks I've ever seen. He's just got a digital camera and he's emailing pix of his new scupltures as he finishes them to his friends. Here's one made from an old trophy and a coin-drawer, standing about 3.5' tall. Roger's work makes me so happy. It's a real treat to get the clocks by mail. I think I'll post more of these as I receive 'em. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:11:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My new story in the current Asimov's

The June (current) ish of Asimov's has my story, "Nimby and the Dimension-Hoppers," and this time, they put my name on the cover. Just picked up a copy today -- nice surprise, the lead story is a rare gem from John freaking Varley, whose new novel, Red Thunder just blew me away -- it's the lovingest, bestest Heinlein tribute evar, with an ending that just rules. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:54:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Down and Out on BookFilter

Bookfilter, an Internet reading club that spun out of MeFi, has chosen my novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for its first reading group. The discussion is continuing apace. Link (with spoilers) Discuss (Thanks, Chuck!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:48:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bill Gibson's hippie CBC moment

Vintage CBC clip of a young, shaggy-haired William Gibson giving Canada's newscameras a tour of Toronto's hippie Nirvana, Yorkville village, in 1967. The clip is encoded with Windows Media Player, because (some of) the CBC's web people have profound brain-damage. This means that I can't watch it. Someone tell me if it's any good. Someone convert it to an MPEG and post it? Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:47:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copyright dweebs are crapping all over democracy. Again.

Lessig reports that the sneaky dweebs on the other side are end-running around the domestic efforts to reform the DMCA by initiating copyright treaties with Chile and Singapore that require the US to not change the DMCA. Ah, the sweet smell of subverted democracy. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:43:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How To Make A Telemarketer Cry

Eli the Bearded says: "Mark, a lawyer, was woken at 5:24am by an automated telemarketer. This is a detailed account of how he sued and got $500 from the telemarketer, with plenty of details to help others repeat his success." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:07:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EMusic vs. Apple's Music Store

Short piece explaining why EMusic is better than Apple's new music store. I agree with everything the author says here. You could argue that Apple offers new, popular music, while EMusic has back catalog and less popular stuff only. That's true, but for me, the Cheap Suit Serenaders beat Eminem any day. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:01:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PayPal to stop offering payment services for adult items

Lawrence sez: "Paypal is phasing out payment for adult items, including, oddly enough, those of parent company eBay. So, it's OK to auction the smut, but not to allow people to pay for the smut..."

PayPal is in the process of phasing out the sale of any goods which fall under the terms of the Mature Audiences Policy, according to the following terms. As a result, all PayPal accounts must follow these guidelines:

Intangible Goods: If you have registered through PayPal's digital adult merchant process, you may continue using PayPal to process payments until May 12, 2003. If you have not registered through PayPal's digital adult merchant process, you may not use PayPal to process payments. "Intangible Goods" includes digital adult products and services, including online photos, streaming video and phone or other audio services.

Tangible Goods: You may continue to use PayPal to send or receive payments for tangible adult products and services until June 12, 2003.

After June 12, 2003, you may not use PayPal to send or receive payments for any "adult" or "sexually oriented" material, including tangible products such as magazines, DVDs and video cassettes. This includes items sold through eBay's Mature Audiences category.

In the Discuss forum, BoingBoing reader "newton" wonders aloud if it's time for someone to launch PornPal. Link to Paypal notice.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:30:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mobile phones hail London Cabs

Beginning next week, London cellphone users will be able to hail cabs with a new mobile service:

The location-based service comes from an outfit called Zingo, which, incidentally is owned by MBH, the company that makes London's taxis. (...)When a punter calls Zingo from their mobile, location-based technology pinpoints where they are. At the same time, global positioning satellites identify Zingo taxis in the area that are free. Then, punters are automatically connected to an available cab driver in their area before the prospective passenger tells the cabbie exactly where they are. Bingo.

Link to Register story, Discuss, (via unwired list)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:08:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos of elephants painting

Online photo gallery of Balinese elephants who like to paint, and snapshots of their objets d'art. Link, Discuss (via Wiley's Blog)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:47:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More eBay silliness: hidden nude self-portraiture

If the photograph were framed in some swank art gallery, they might call it Me, Sans Clothing, Reflected Obliquely in Guitar Chrome, instead of ITEM # 2527199421. Tim says: "The seller of this guitar is reflected naked in the chrome: supersize the picture on the far right to see him in all his naked glory." Update: boingBoing reader Jesse points us to what may be an earlier exploit by the same auction-flasher, archived here on Snopes. Link, Discuss Update: OK., the auction's down, but mirror is here, (thanks, Scott)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:25:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Survey: young people sick of reality TV

This doesn't bode well for Larry Namer's new network (blogged earlier this week): Nearly 70% of 13-24 year-olds are fed up with reality television programming, according to a survey released today by media research firm Bolt:

"American Idol" remains a major exception with over 91% of young viewers claiming they plan to view the next season's broadcast. "Observational" shows such as "The Osbournes" and "Competitive" shows such as "Fear Factor" appear to be declining in interest based on the previous year's viewing habits, although they are far from losing their audience completely. "Romance" Reality TV ("The Bachelorette") and "Viewer Voter" shows ("American Idol") are holding onto their audience share. Could Reality go the way of "Wild talk shows?" Perhaps. Young consumers are becoming jaded with Reality programming, with 68% of those surveyed claiming they are "getting tired with Reality TV shows" and 63% believing that there isn't much that's "real" in Reality TV.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:15:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

XXX-ray spex: "Infrared Video Goggles"

For $2,400, this company will sell you what it claims are "Advanced Intellligence Full-color X-ray Vision Goggles" with the power to see through clothes -- and document what you see with an accessory that "plugs right in to any VCR or CAMCORDERS with video input for portable recording." I wonder if they'll look good with my new tinfoil beanie cap? Who cares, the website's a hoot:

"The theory behind it is simple. Under normal light, the visible and infrared lights can pass through some type of material covering an object and are reflected by the object's surface. The reflected visible light is too strong and saturated to see. Therefore the covered object surface can not be visible using naked eyes. However, if the reflected visible light is filtered out and only the reflected infrared and the required light is captured using special made sensitive cameras inside the Goggles, the covered object surface will be visible. Some materials completely blocks the naked eye from seeing through it. But with these Goggles , you can see through it. With your purchase. We will include a piece of clothing material that you can test the X-RAY effect for yourself without having to go out doors to test it in public."

Link to product website, Link to purported sample images (caution: boobies), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:08:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

eBay Dada: Found poetry on feedback comment boards

Alex writes: "So, there's this person on EBay, Andy46477, who posts feedback that may be poetry, may be untreated schizophrenia, but is certainly very, very funny."

Praise: Nux VOMICA! I invoke you, BEAST! But I only do so because you are HONEST! "A++"
Praise: I'll bid on you til there's nothing left but crumbs! Then I'll bid on the crumbs
Praise: Uses only nice, ROUND numbers, like $10 and $12. NOT $73.98
Praise: You items carry HARMFUL DISEASES and VIRUSES. I think. I'm pretty sure. RARE! A+
Praise: There was NO REASON for you to call my house and yell at my children. Still, A+
Praise: I would rather be SLAUGHTERED for BEEF than forbidden to bid on your ITEMS!
Praise: A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ and how !!!!
Praise: Pornography is bad because God will kill you and eat your bones. TERIFFIC SALE!
Response by bishop2 - I have not dealt with this person. Do not understand the "feedback."

BoingBoing reader Jake says, "Certainly a funny site!!! Would VISIT again!!! AAA+++!!!!" link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:50:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Own your own 3D Crystal ball

Unlike regular LCD monitors that fool the eye into seeing a three-dimensional image, Actuality System's new 3D display is a glass sphere that looks like a crystal ball and creates a "360-degree spatial display" viewable from any angle. Link to Gizmodo post, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:11:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moonset, viewed from the Space Station

This NASA website offers a streaming quicktime movie of our moon setting on the horizon, as viewed from the International Space Station. The moon turns into a squashy, pink pancake as it sets, and this science primer explains why. Link to article, Link to movie, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:06:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

White nights: surreal effect of artificial light in nighttime photography

Metropolis Magazine ran this interesting profile of photographer David Allee, whose work studies the "harsh but ethereal effect of artificial light on man-made environments." Story snip:

The intrusive otherworldly effect of artificial light on man-made environments is the theme of Allee's ongoing "White Nights" series. Working with a large-format Linhof Technikardan camera, he positions himself in front of apartment buildings, houses, and gardens that are bathed in the overflow of floodlights from sports and recreation facilities. Using shutter speeds of two to three minutes, Allee subjects his film to the kind of intense light that turns night into an unnatural day, producing images that seem to capture a state between times and seasons. A photograph of a floodlit picnic area behind a 1950s-style drive-in presents a Christmas pine tree before a wintry treeless background garnished with the unnaturally luminous yellow of daffodils in full bloom. It seems to be neither winter or spring, night or day.

Link, Discuss (Thanks, RCB!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:58:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tour of the set of the Haunted Mansion movie

First hand report of the sound-stage for the Haunted Mansion movie that's shooting now.

The next stop on our tour was the foyer/front door set. It is, with only slight deviation, exactly as pictured in the original concept sketch that was displayed at Disneyland's Disney Gallery in late 2002. A large central hallway, flanked by staircases leading to the second level, is looked down upon by a pair of sculptures located on either side of a large clock. The foyer set appears to be dark wood and is heavy, brooding and very detailed, reminiscent of the sets featured in the film "The Haunting."

We moved on to the under construction grand ballroom set with its twin curved staircases which surround a massive pipe organ (sound familiar?) A very large and functional fireplace was being installed during our visit, and one window had its draperies hung to give an idea of how they would all appear. This room, unlike the foyer, had a feeling of lightness even though it was by far the largest of the sets. Credit goes to art director John Myhre (X-Men, Ali), who most recently won the Academy Award in art direction for his work on the film "Chicago," for making a space at once both intimate and imposing.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)

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

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

The first-ever science fiction in Business 2.0

I wrote a short-short science fiction story that appeared in the latest Business 2.0, as part of a feature that Pesco did on futuristic technology.

Rennie stood among the sculptural displays of ready-to-eats at D'Agostino's, thinking There are way funner things for a 16-year-old to do on vacation in Manhattan than go grocery shopping. But that's how it goes: Over lunch Dad had announced that he had to catch a supersonic back to California for a second lunch with clients. Come evening, Mom was so pooped from sightseeing without another adult to ride herd on Gemma, Rennie's kid sister, that she crashed at the hotel with the brat and sent him out to buy dinner.

Rennie knew exactly what he wanted: a big tube of SteakyPaste Extreme! SteakyPaste was blue and swirled with gold, tasted better than a Big Mac, and gave Rennie hard, fast twitches that demanded he burn off his energy playing Ultima Extreme! Just try finding SteakyPaste at D'Agostino's, though. The store didn't even have aisles -- it had sophisticated "food experience clusters" that made him feel 1 inch tall and a million miles from home.

He pushed purposefully past the shoppers and snatched up a blobby bag of Lynne Cheney's Special Recipe Beef Burgundy. The dandruff of smartdust around him blinked and zizzed as the motes established a connection between his personal area network and the slippery packaging, which faded to white and then began to crawl with messages:

SPEW! BEEF BARFANDY -- THE TIMSTER ORLANDO FL TRUSTED (*) -- 100% CRUELTY-FREE PRINTED ORGANMEAT -- VEGANCARNIVORE AUSTIN TX TRUSTED (***)

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:25:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

In search of Friendster parody websites

Spotted any online parodies of Friendster? I know they're out there. I'm researching an item for a large tech publication, and would love to know about 'em here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:51:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thousands of Los Alamos computers said missing

Noah Shachtman of Defense Tech writes:

Los Alamos National Laboratory hasn't kept track of thousands of its computers -- including ones containing classified information. The lab's own guards stole four of the machines. And employees didn't have to pay the government back when their laptops suddenly went missing. Those are just a few of the conclusions of a disturbing report (PDF) from the Department of Energy's Inspector General, who has been examining how the world's best-known nuclear lab handles its inventory of laptop and desktop PCs. The University of California operates Los Alamos on the Energy Department's behalf.

As Defense Tech readers know, Los Alamos has been involved for months in a series of scandals involving nod-off management and droopy-eyed security. This latest report offers more evidence for just how narcoleptic lab officials have been. Many laptop computers that couldn't be found were simply "written-off," without a formal inquiry. One was used for classified work, without proper approval. And 762 computers bought with government credit cards didn't receive "property numbers," which are required to track all "sensitive items" at the lab.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:48:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smarter Schmoozing: nTag intelligent name badges

A company called nTag has developed smart plastic name badges capable of storing, displaying, and exchanging personal information about the wearer. The idea: intelligent networking that goes beyond "hello my name is" to "here are a few of my favorite memes." According to an ex-Xerox PARC friend, this isn't the first time that idea has been explored -- PARC had a similar project some years ago. But it seems to be a thoroughly-conceived commercial application. ABC News story snip:

"Inside the nTags are basic computer essentials, including 128 kilobytes of memory, a two-line display and wireless communications technology. The tags can store and display simple information -- the name and business affiliation of the wearer, for example -- that would be required at most common business conferences or other public gatherings. (...) When two attendees come within 3 to 5 feet and their nTags are facing each other, information is shared between the tags, using invisible infra-red beams of light. George Eberstadt, an nTag company co-founder, says the system uses advanced software to figure out what information to show on the tags' displays. And the algorithms aren't looking for just 'matching' information, but for topics that would hopefully 'break the ice' and generate social interaction."

Any ideas for creative, alternative, social-hacking uses? Discuss them here. Link to ABC News story, Link to nTag website, (Thanks to Steve Lassovszky, who rules.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:19:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bizarre public signs in Japan

The "Virtual Picture Album: Japan" is an online gallery with lots of random images of life in Japan. A few of these are really interesting, like these two amazing public signs -- one, and two, which is said to be a sign "warning park visitors to beware of weirdos". Are these common in Japan? I could use one here in Hollywood. Discuss, (Thanks again, S!) Update: BoingBoing reader "foofie" says the sign doesn't really refer to "weirdos," but rather "says beware of sexual predators or rapists more or less." Update II: ...To which Owen William replies: "no, not really rapists either. Chikan are your basic subway groper. They're not known for actually attacking and raping people, just being creepy dirty men. It's more of a nuisance, as long as you define getting pinched on the subway as only a nuisance." Still, they don't have signs like this in my 'hood...

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:21:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

h4Wt Couture: techno wearables from XNX

XNX Designs makes cool tech-themed couture pieces like the "18th Century Borg Queen Gown With Standing LED Collar" (center) and ladies' casual gear like the "Radioactive Dress" (far right). I want everything. Now. You can buy their stuff online, and if you're in Chicago on May 10 you can see a runway event here. Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Cowgirl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:12:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Urine Control / You're In Control: pee-navigated interactive game

What will those wacky Medialab kids think of next:

The You're In Control system uses computation to enhance the act of urination. Sensors in the back of a urinal detect the position of a stream of urine, enabling people to play interactive games on a screen mounted above the urinal. In an age when few people question that computers are changing social codes, You’re In Control questions how technology can both challenge and enforce social mores. On one hand, You're In Control questions a basic social code of privacy by assuming that (even simulated) public urination is acceptable if the participant is playing a computer game. On the other hand, You're In Control proposes the application of technology to positively enforce social codes of sanitation

Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Steve)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:50:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 28, 2003

More on SMS and SARS: NPR "On The Media"

A few days ago, I was interviewed by the NPR radio show "On The Media" about a story I wrote for WIRED News on how people in Asia are using text-messaging technologies to cope with SARS. You can listen to the show here (RealAudio required), or read the transcript at onthemedia.org later this week. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:49:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

High fashion: wacky, hemp-themed wallpaper, humping-bunny fabric

Today I learned that Nest magazine runs an online shop where you can buy fabric and wallpaper in a sporty marijuana leaf motif. Well that's just splendid, isn't it. Nestproducts.com also offers a charming designer fabric for bedroom accessorizing -- the pattern is a line drawing of two bunnies doing what bunnies are known to do with one another in great frequency. See some of these products in the national Design Triennial running now at NYC's Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Link to online shop, Discuss (via Hint Magazine)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:35:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kalashnikov rifle converted to digital music player: "AK-MP3"

This company claims to have developed a casemod for AK-47 rifles that transforms killing machines into killer digital jukeboxes. Scheduled for release this month at $500.00USD with 200+ audio books preloaded ($300 without), features include 20GB storage, re-programmable firmware that supports MP3 and WMA, 8 minute anti-shock protection, USB2, up to 10 hours playback with built-in rechargeable L-I battery and up to 18 hours with external battery box. From the product release, which I can only hope is not a hoax:

"The AK-MP3 Jukebox comes with 20GB storage capable to hold up to 9000 songs or 3000 hours of mp3 audio books. AK-MP3 player built into the body of the ammunition magazine of Kalashnikov automatic rifle. Player could be used on its own or it could be attached to the Kalashnikov machinegun instead of the ordinary magazine. Stainless steel body makes this new player uniquely suitable for outdoors. 'This is our bit for World Peace,' jokes one of the partners behind ABFF, ex-rock-star Andrey Koltakov (BONIFACIY). 'Hopefully, from now on many Militants and Terrorists will use their AK47s to listen to music and audio books. They need to chill out and take it easy.'"

Sorry, Hot Chick not included. Link, Discuss, (Thanks, John Von!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:07:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

These words taste blue: Synesthesia in SciAm

"When Matthew Blakeslee shapes hamburger patties with his hands, he experiences a vivid bitter taste in his mouth. Esmerelda Jones (a pseudonym) sees blue when she listens to the note C sharp played on the piano; other notes evoke different hues--so much so that the piano keys are actually color-coded, making it easier for her to remember and play musical scales." Scientific American explores the surreality of synthesthesia! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:44:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum

A reader writes: "Edward Tufte, an expert in information design, deconstructs an ugly and unclear PowerPoint slide from the Columbia investigation." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:28:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

All reality, all the time: New 24-hour "Reality-TV" network to launch

A new television network dubbed "Reality Central" is reportedly being developed by E! TV co-founder Larry Namer with businessman/former reality show contestant Blake Mycoskie. The format: 'round the clock "reality" programming. It's scheduled to launch early next year. That gives me plenty of time to stock the house with remedies for spontaneous vomiting fits. Link, Discuss (thanks, gmyjamz)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:23:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gone Silent - Gene Kan Film

I'm told at least two films one book and one film are currently in production about Gene Kan, the brilliant young Gnutella co-creator who took his own life last summer. Here's the film. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:02:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mike Hawash charged in new "Portland Six" Complaint

Former Intel coder and 39-year-old US citizen Mike Hawash has been charged with guilt by association in a "conspiracy to wage war on the US and support terrorism," according to a DoJ press release issued today. No indictment has been issued, and the grand jury has not yet heard his case.

A federal complaint alleges that Hawash traveled with members of the 'Portland Six' to several provinces in western China and also to Beijing in an attempt to enter Afghanistan to fight against US troops.

Affidavit by Federal Terrorism Task Force Agent (TIFF format fax), PDF of DoJ document, News story from KATU-TV in Portland about why his friends continue to believe Hawash is innocent, "Free Mike Hawash" website, Discuss. (thanks, Karl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:40:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos: Robochrist robot show at Coachella, "Love is A Many-Splintered Thing"

Here are some snapshots I took over the weekend of the ROBOCHRIST robotic arts performance at the Coachella Music and Arts festival way the hell out in the Southern California desert. The robotophilia 12-step recovery program I started last week was going so well -- but then someone kidnapped me, threw me in a car, and drove me out to Indio on Sunday to watch Christian Ristow and his crew set up, then blow up, one of the most spectacular machine art shows I've ever seen. At this rate, I may never kick the bad 'bot habit.

Never been to Coachella? It's sort of like BurningMan, but with better music, more port-a-potties, somewhat less nudity, about as many E'd-out hula-hooping-and-flame-dancing love children, and half the dust and wind. Five stages with tons of bands and DJs, and art/tech/performance stuff scattered throughout the landscape. Link to part one (Robochrist show preparation), Link to part two (the performance explodes at night). I'll try to add better descriptions later, but wanted to share these with you now. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:50:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Warspying: eavesdropping on X10 video cam images

Cool how-to about building a portable device for viewing X10 wireless videocamera transmissions. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:06:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

W. C. Privy's Original Bathroom Companion

Jack Mingo is a wonderful pop culture historian. I really emjoyed his book on the origins of different products, How the Cadillac Got its Fins). He has co-written a new book out that sounds good, called W. C. Privy's Original Bathroom Companion. From the release:

It's a thick 480-page collection of diverse, short and amusing articles, quizzes, fact, fiction, and trivia, lavishly illustrated with drawings and photos.

CONTENTS
Here's a partial list of the table of contents:
History of the Hawaiian Shirt
Weird Tourist Sites
How to Build an Igloo
Prizes: Who were Pulitzer, Heisman, Nobel, Ryder, and Stanley?
Strange Tales from the Bible
How to Escape From Alligators and Quicksand
Ben Franklin's Naughty Writings: "About Flatulence" and "On Choosing a Mistress"
Penguin Love
True Facts About Pigs, Penguins, Kangaroos, and Lemmings
How to Charm a Snake
Eyewitness Accounts of the Boston Tea Party and the Lincoln Assassination
Bathroom History
Stories Behind Mona Lisa, American Gothic, Whistler's Mother & Washington's Unfinished Portrait
Latin and Yiddish Quizzes
The History of Toasters
Optical Illusions
How to Milk a Cow
What Happens After You Flush
Strange Vintage Ads
Obscure Aesop's Fables
A History of Bathroom Graffiti

I wish it were available as an e-text, because I do most of my bathroom reading these days with a Palm. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:09:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY haunted paper toys

Haunted Paper Toys: print, cut and paste an amazing variety of Hallowe'en-y paper ornaments.

THE ORIGINAL 13 PIECE HEARSE PLAYSET.
This playset includes a hearse, coffins, headstones, a mortician, a handy little coffin dolly, and a diarama background to display everything.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:38:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shiny alumnium casemod

Very sweet, TIG-welded polished aluminuim casemod. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

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

Two gonzo hacker books free under Creative Commons license

John Sundman has posted the full-texts of his gonzo hacker novel "Acts of the Apostles" and equally gonzo story-collection "Cheap Complex Devices" online as free downloads, under a Creative Commons license. John has self-published very slick paper editions of both titles that he sells for reasonable sums, and he's hoping that CC licensing will be complimentary with sales of the meatspace editions. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:30:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spam turns 25

Net.historian and net.historical-figure Brad Templeton has posted a nice essay reflecting on the 25th anniversary of spam.

Spam fascinates me because it sits at the intersection of three important rights -- free speech, private property and privacy. It's also the first major internet governance issue (possibly in tandem with DNS) that the members of the internet community have been so deeply concerned with.

The reaction to it has been remarkable. By attacking something we hold dear, and goading us by using our own tools and resources to do it, spam generates emotion far beyond its actual harm, even though that actual harm is quite considerable.

Spam pushes people who would proudly (and correctly) trumpet how we shouldn't blame ISPs for offensive web sites, copyright violations and/or MP3 trading done by downstream customers to suddenly call for blacklisting of all the innocent users at an ISP if a spammer is to be found among them. People who would defend the end-to-end principle of internet design eagerly hunt for mechanisms of centralized control to stop it. Those who would never agree with punishing the innocent to find the guilty in any other field happily advocate it to stop spam. Some conclude even entire nations must be blacklisted from sending E-mail. Onetime defenders of an open net with anonymous participation call for authentication certificates on every E-mail. Former champions of flat-fee unlimited net access who railed against proposals for per-packet internet pricing propose per-message usage fees on E-mail. On USENET, where the idea of canceling another's article to retroactively moderate a group was highly reviled, people now find they couldn't use the net without it. Those who reviled at any attempt to regulate internet traffic by the government loudly petition their legislators for some law, any law it almost seems, against spam. Software engineers who would be fired for building a system that drops traffic on the floor without reporting the error change their mail systems to silently discard mail after mail.

It's amazing.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:27:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, April 27, 2003

TiBook WiFi shiatsu

Turns out that you can seriously boost your Titanium Powerbook WiFi performance by massaging your battery compartment.

I was next instructed to eject the battery and look at the right side wall of the battery compartment where I was supposed to find an approximately 5 cm long plastic strip. (My particular powerbook doesn't have this visible -- instead, there is a plate with the serial number, etc...) Still, he told me to firmly press the side wall of the powerbook against the frame, just slowly and firmly pressing along its length several times for about 10 seconds. Next, he told me to replace the battery and start her back up.

I can't believe it, but my Airport's range is now like my iBook's!! I never could have done this from out here by the pool before, but here I am.

The reason for this as he explained it is, where I was told to press is where the antenna runs alongside the framework of the Powerbook. Sometimes it isn't situated just right, or gets out of whack from having been shipped or something. Pressing it puts it back into proper contact with whatever needs to be touching. Now it works like a dream!

Link Discuss (via A Whole Lotta Nothin)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:15:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

1 Pixel per meter

Beautifully rendered site comparing the size of different large objects (Eiffel Tower, King King, Star Trek starship, etc.) on a scale of one pixel per meter. As much fun as the MegaPenny Project. Link Discuss (Thanks, Vanessa!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:58:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Everybody complains about the SARS, but no one does anything about it

D2Ol, a "cause-computing" distributed computation project is inviting people to switch off their SETI@Home clients and instead turn their idle cycles to evaluating drug candidates for SARS. Link Discuss (via /.)

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

Bezos's private space-program

Jeff Bezos is funding a low-profile private reusable space-exploration venture that both Neal Stephenson and my pal Pablos are working for. Pablos notes, "Incidentally, we're in the market for some whip smart aerospace engineers. If you know any, feel free to point them at http://www.blueorigin.com/jobs.html. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:53:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Media Wars

Mark sez,

Danny Schechter, known by many as the "News Dissector" has just published his latest book "Media Wars: News at a Time of Terror". Danny has a long long and distinguished career as a media professional and writes a 3000 word/day weblog about media issues.

Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:50:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Darkride Munsch Exhibit

The new Edvard Munsch exhibit in Olso is in the dark, and patrons are given flashlights. Link Discuss (via Die Puny Humans)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, April 26, 2003

Taking some holidays

I'm taking a week's worth of much-needed holidays at a safe-house in an undisclosed location. Don't send me interesting links for Boing Boing, send them to the suggest a link form (you should do this anyway, but for the next week, I'll be throwing out links sent to me without reading them). If you've got something you want to ask or tell me and it's not fantastically urgent, wait until May 3. I need some time off and don't want to come back to a giant backlog, OK? Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:22:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More ETCON pix

Here are my remaining 70+ pix from ETCON 2003. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:18:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

San Francisco WiFi cafes

Here's a good -- albeit incomplete -- list of the cafes in San Francisco with free WiFi (missing is Espresso Bravo, my local on Valencia between 17th and 18th). Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:07:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 25, 2003

Web Zen: Body part zen.

face
eyelash
cheek
mouth
nose
muscles
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:08:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Physical Computing," Tom Igoe's talk at ETCON.

Here are my notes from "Physical Computing," Tom Igoe's talk at ETCON.

Interaction: a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think and speak.

Physical computing focuses on listening, listening to the human body. When you ask people to draw a computer, they draw the screen, mouse, keyboard -- the CPU is out of sight, out of mind.

If a computer saw us, it would see us as a Tralfamadorian from Vonnegut -- small hand-shaped being with an eye (and an ear). It doesn't know anything about our physical expressions -- lost on the computer.

Design interaction to capture expression.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:20:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Internet 0 -- Bringing IP to the Leaf Node"

Here are my notes from "Internet 0 -- Bringing IP to the Leaf Node," Raffi Krikorian's talk at ETCON:

IP "stuff" is expensive, but we can IPify more cheaply if the devices can manage the complexity themselves.

Barcelona: really pissed to see "expressive" Gaudi beuildings being knocked through with holes to accomodate power, network, etc. Why can't expressivity and power/network be built into matter?

[[Shows video of lightbulbs with httpds in them and light-switches with user-agents that work like regular lightswtiches over TCP/IP. You can move the lightswitch to anywhere else in the building an it will still control the same bulb. When you attack a new lightswitch, it doesn' tknow what bulb it controls. You program the switch by touching the switch and the bulb with tweezers that causes them both to announce that they've been touched and creates an association]]

India: metering the power grid. Lots of power in India is stolen through linetaps. Breaks the grid, can kill you. Need a way to detect theft and it's too expensive to use poeple and conventional meters.

Sol'n: IP power-metersm, per village, use power-lines for transporting data about how much current is sent and received so you can identify where power is stolen. Byproduct is that you're creating 100kb/s connectivity to rural Indian villages.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:32:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notes from "Roboflies, Flexonics, and the Social Life of Smart Dust"

Here are my running notes from "Roboflies, Flexonics, and the Social Life of Smart Dust," David Pescovitz and Eric Paulos at ETCON.

Cross-disciplinary research is finally enabling ubicomp.

Danny Hillis story: at compsci conference in the early 70s, someone predicted that the market for PCs would be in the millions, and other laughed -- will we have computers in every doorknob? Well, this hotel does.

Start with the UPC barcode. Last major innovention in shopping in meatspace. Future is endangered by new, smaller, smarter barcodes. Shelves, packaging and carts will all coordinate to reorder, bill, recommend, track condition.

The keyis RFIDs -- passive silicon that stores a GUID, hit it with RF and it emits the number. Already used for security -- badges for crossing doorways; for logistics -- shipping palettes that know where/who they are. Benneton's ditched RFID plans over the potential invasion of privacy.

For RFIDs to kill UPCs, they need to be dirt cheap: 0.5 cents.

Semiconducting nanoparticle inks can be printed with inkjets onto cloth, paper, etc. Based on liquid gold nanocrystals. 20 atoms across, melt at 100 deg C, 10% of normal melting temp. Encapsulated in a shell, dissolved in regular ink. Inkjet printer lays down circuits using this stuff or can be screened on using traditional packaging processes. The printing burns off the capsule.

Have printed transistors, will print diodes. Crude today, but good/cheap enough for RFIDs: balance tech and economics.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:04:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Book review: Casino Royale

Great review of Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, published 50 years ago.

It will surprise no one that Bond is an unrepentant misogynist. When finding himself paired with a female agent - the lust-inducing Vesper Lynd - he is disgusted in spite of his sexual attraction to her. Bond firmly maintains that women are only "for recreation", and declares her to be a "stupid bitch" - although not to her face, gangsta rap having yet to make that fashionable. Yet, as a chivalrous woman-hater, he is compelled to go on a dangerous pursuit when she is kidnapped by the Evil Villain. This act of overt male heroism ends with Bond getting tortured by having his genitals beaten so badly that it takes him weeks in a hospital to recover. Upon recovery, he is consumed with a desire to bed Vesper Lynd in an effort to prove he can still, ahem, perform as man. Dwelling too long on the symbolism of this theme will make your head explode.

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:27:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kay's corrections to "Daddy Are We There Yet?"

Alan Kay and Peter Deutch have added some corrections and clarifications to my notes from Kay's "Daddy Are We There Yet?" talk at ETCON yesterday. Scroll down to the bottom of the file for the new notes. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:10:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nanotechnology: Bringing Digital Control to Matter" Eric Drexler's talk at ETCON

Here are notes from "Nanotechnology: Bringing Digital Control to Matter" Eric Drexler's talk at ETCON:

The major data-storage system on your computer is the bacteria that colonizes it -- 1MB/bacterium. The major US source of electronic goods are the corn-fields of Iowa.

If something exists, we can make more stuff like that.

Processes on this scale are cheap, low-powered, clean and powerful. We won't use biology, but the principles that biology demonstrates. Aircraft are like birds, but they don't have feathers.

Chemistry shows the range of things that can be made. We have more materials at our disposal than occur in nature: the full range of possible structures that can be made from atoms.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Senator Rick Santorum's Guide to Appropriate Sex

Scarlet Pimpernel writes:

Below is a verbatim transcript of my call this morning to Senator Rick Santorum's Office.

SSO: "Senator Santorum's office."

Me: "Hello there... took me awhile to get through. Guess you're pretty busy what with all this going on."

SSO: "Yes."

Me: "Well I just wanted you to know that my wife and I are big supporters of the Senator, but we have just one question..."

SSO: "Yes?"

Me: "Does oral sex between a husband and wife, when they're both consenting... does that constitute sodomy?"

SSO: "Umm.. no. It does not."

Me: "HOT DAMN! (calling out to wife:) HONEY? GREAT NEWS!"

SSO: (stifles laugh)

Me: "Thank You. Thank You Very Much. Just one more thing..."

SSO: "Yes?"

Me: "How does the Senator feel about doggy-style?"

SSO: "Umm... I can't really speak for the Senator on that."

Me: "Oh Well... Thanks Again!" (Hangs up.)

If you've got questions for the Senator concerning appropriate sexual behavior, why not give him a call? (202) 224-6324

Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:46:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grokster court rules distributing Gnutella clients is legal!

Just got word that Judge Wilson, who's presiding over the Grokster/Morpheus case, has ruled that distributing a Gnutella client is legal! This is the best damned news I've heard all week! I haven't had a chance to read the order, but here's a copy of it. Expect some analysis at the EFF homepage soon. 1.5MB PDF Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:31:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notes from "Google, Innovation, and the Web," at ETCON

Here are my running notes from "Google, Innovation, and the Web," Craig Silverstein's talk at ETCON 2003.

Google: Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

* This gives us focus, but still gives us enough material to work on for the next 200+ years.

Google: do things that matter.

* Helps us recruit smart people, even though we pay 1/10 of what Wall St does

* Helps us not be evil -- we can succeed without being dickheads

Google: focus on the user

* Popup ads suck, text-ads are in context and don't suck

* Google Labs: interesting projects, lets our users help us make our products useful to them

* Switching costs for search-engines is really low

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:24:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Naked pilots canned

Two SWA pilots have been canned for getting nekkid in the cockpit.

The pilots involved are appealing their termination, sources say. They contend that one of them removed his uniform after coffee was spilled. A flight attendant saw them after being summoned to the cockpit to bring paper towels and soda water.

Southwest is treating the episode as a prank that went too far.

While the incident occurred on a Boeing 737 in flight, there's no implication that safety was breeched. And a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman says there's no specific prohibition against flying naked.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Ryan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:54:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unix-Haters Handbook

Apparently, the Unix-Haters Handbook has been around since 1994 (sample ToC headers: "Unix. The World's First Computer Virus," "Welcome, New User! Like Russian Roulette with Six Bullets Loaded," "Creators Admit C, Unix Were Hoax") and has been available as a free download for some time, but I just found out about it this morning. I know what I'm reading on the plane tonight. Link Discuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:36:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 24, 2003

Stewart Butterfield: "The Game Context as a Testing Ground for Social Software."

Here are my notes from Stewart Butterfield's ETCON talk, "The Game Context as a Testing Ground for Social Software."

* Raph Koster: The future of gaming isn't flashy graphics and blowing up elves, it's average people connecting with each other.

* We built a social software oriented game and run an alpha that we eventually had to shut down -- it was so significant to peoples' lives that when we shut it down, people all over the world logged in at the same time to cry together

* In the Game Neverending prototype, we made a social index -- you could count people as friends, acquaintances and enemies. We had a leaderboard whose unintended result was that all newbies were flooded with requests to be acquaintances/friends, in order to build their scores.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:47:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notes from Meg Hourihan's "Edges of the Writable Web" talk at ETCON

Here are my notes from Meg Hourihan's "Edges of the Writable Web" talk at ETCON.

Blogs are growing more explcit in their relationships:

* Trusted Blog search tool -- will restrict Google search results to your friends' blogs

* FOAFNet

[[It's hard to "reject" someone who wants to be your friend on Friendster]]

Conversational relationships

* Trackback

* More like this from others

Topics metadata

* Easy News Topic

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:37:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Welcome to the blogosphere, Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson's here at Emerging Tech today -- and she just told me she launched a blog today, "Release 4."

Well, there's no time to start a blog like when you run into Ev Williams at a conference (thanks, Tim O'Reilly) and he offers to help personally to set you up with your very own blog. As I was saying to the bloggerati this morning (Doc & Allen Searls, the Davids of all persuasions, Richard Soderberg, Geoff Cohen, et al.), a lot of what I do is stuff I simply can't write about: internal meetings with portfolio companies, corporate regime change, private briefings and such. This blog will be an experiment covering the things I *can* talk about. But now I need to give this machine back so they can close the exhibit....

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:43:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fuji USB Key Drive review

I have a 64 MB USB key drive, made by M-Systems. I use it to back up the stories and illustrations I'm currently working on. I love how easy it is to use. Just plug it in the USB slot and drag the folders into the icon. Here's a review of a similar key drive, this one made by Fuji. The beefiest version comes with 512 MB, and Fuji promises larger capacity soon. I wonder if hard drives will become extinct in a few years? Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:29:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Journalism 3.1b2, Dan Gillmor's talk at ETCON

Here are my notes from Journalism 3.1b2, Dan Gillmor's talk at ETCON.

New choices for the subjects of journalism (the "covered")

* Judo journos -- WashPo's post-9-11 series included an interview with Rumsfeld, followed by Defense Dept posting the full interview with Rumsfeld. The public could decide. When both parties tape and transcribe, whose transcription is definitive?

* Ray Ozzie's blog. Mitch Kapor and Ray Ozzie both document their companies/projects better than journalists do.

* New corporate policies: who inside can keep a blog and what can go on it? Groove has a formal policy detailing this. Lawyers will try to stop you, esp in public corps -- they'll be written by the same person who writes Barbie's blog

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:10:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lucky Wander Boy

Has anyone read Lucky Wander Boy yet? It's about a guy who is looking for an old console game that he believes holds the secret of life (At least, that's what the teaser copy on the site says). Marc Laidlaw, on of my favorite writers, highly recommends it, calling it his current favorite book. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:24:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: Clay Shirky's talk at ETCON 2003

Here are my notes from A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: Social Structure in Social Software, Clay Shirky's talk at ETCON 2003.

Pre-Internet, the last important tech that changed the way we interact in groups was the table (to a lesser extent, the conference call -- but they suck)

"Software that supports group interaction" -- bad definition, too broad, includes spam and emailers and stuff. Email can support group patterns, but it can, same with blogs. Instapundit is a broadcaster -- closer to MSNBC than a

Humans are fundamentally individual AND fundamentally social.

It's easy to see how cohesion comes out of guilds in MMORPGs, but Byam says that this is much deeper and happens sooner than you think

Example: You were at a party and you got bored. They you don't leave. Why don't you leave? But 20 min later, someone gets his coat and everyone leaves. Everyone else was bored too, but the triggering event let the air out of the group.

This is called "the paradox of groups." There are no groups w/o members, but there are also no members w/o groups.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:06:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Trailer for Hulk

The movie trailer for Hulk (what happened to "The Incredible?") looks good. Link Discuss (Thanks, Todd!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:29:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

cyberwar! on PBS tonight.

Looks like an interesting program:

In "Cyber War!," this Thursday, Apr. 24 at 9:00pm (KCET) on PBS, FRONTLINE investigates just how vulnerable the Internet is to both virtual and physical attack, and how the Internet could be used to launch a major assault on the nation's critical infrastructure. Some believe that major cyber attacks are imminent. And yet he and others have had only limited success in convincing Washington that cyber security needs to be a top priority.

Link Discuss Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:49:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Daddy, Are We There Yet?" Alan Kay's talk at ETCON

Here are my running notes from "Daddy, Are We There Yet?" The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet, Alan Kay's talk at ETCON.

The last 20 years of the PC have been *boring*.

PC vendors aim at businesses, who aren't creative in their tool-use. They're adults: they learn a system and stick to it.

We should think about children. The printing revoltuion didn't happen in Gutenberg's day, it happened 150 years later, long after Gutenberg was dead, when all the pople alive had grown up with the press.

Update: Alan Kay and Peter Deutsch have clarified/corrected some of these notes -- I've appended the email with the discussion to the end of the notes Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:51:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Quantitative modelling of bickering couples

Fascinating account of the application of mathematical modelling to bickering couples as a means of predicting divorce and other unrest.

What the students were modeling in that lounge was not "marriage" per se, but the dynamics of marital conversations. Before looking at data from any real-world couples, they began with some very simple hypotheses: the idea, for example, that spouses will react emotionally to the most recent comment made by their partners. At this early stage they sketched crude "influence functions" -- calculus equations that described a dynamic system in which a snarky comment by one spouse would result in negative emotions in the partner, sometimes resulting in a downward spiral. When they tested those first equations against the Love Lab's data, however, they did not match at all.

The scholars soon realized that they needed to add a constant that represented each partner's "uninfluenced steady state" -- that is, the person's general level of cheerfulness or gloom, independent of the spouse's behavior on a particular day. "In retrospect, we should have thought of that at the very beginning," says Mr. Murray. "But once we added that constant, everything fell in just beautifully."

Link Discuss (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:23:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Card deck of "Iraq's most wanted" looted treasures and historical artifacts

"Wanted" offers a resonant twist on the US DoD's "Most Wanted" deck of war cards: ancient Iraqi historical treasures recently lost to looting. Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Tom)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:07:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tony Pierce shamelessly pimps his blog on eBay

Tony keeps doing things on his increasingly popular busblog that make me go, "Damn, why didn't I think of that." He just did it again. He's auctioning off links on eBay. That's cool not in the "what a clever way to make money" sense, but in the "change the way you think about blog culture" sense.

I don't recall other well-trafficked blogs having done this before, but if you know of previous examples I invite you to post them in this Discuss forum. Here is the link to eBay auction "I Will Link You on My Blog Item # 2924466320". Top bid's only ten bucks right now, but the idea still made me laugh. Hard.

BTW, I'm still guest-posting cybersmut on Reverse Cowgirl through Friday (while Susannah blogs at Neal Pollack's Malestrom), so do swing by when your boss isn't looking. Nothing there is work-safe. And I'm joining Cory at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference tomorrow -- I'll be participating in Dan Gillmor's panel on warbloggging, along with Doc Searls, David Sifry, and a very special call-in guest: BBC news producer, blogger, and Iraq landmine survivor Stuart Hughes, live from the UK.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:02:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notes from Wireless Routing and Multi-Hop Architectures at ETCON

Here are my notes from Christian Dubiel's talk on Wireless Routing and Multi-Hop Architectures at ETCON:

This is a wireless Internet, but subject to dynamic environment, interference, multipath fade, limited bandwidth

Scaling challenges, throughput degredation across multiple hops (indroduced by interference and cumulative packet areas), and wireless links are not friendly to TCP/IP's coping strategies.

In a wired network, slow connections are usually congestion, which leads to back-off. In a wireless net, slow connections are caused by interference. Backing off on an interfered link won't clear the congestion, 'cause there's nothing to clear.

Link Discuss

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

Eric Blossom and Matt Ettus's talk on GNU Radio at ETCON

Here are my running notes from Eric Blossom and Matt Ettus's talk on GNU Radio at ETCON.

GNU Radio is a free software toolkit for realtime signal processing things -- radio included. Works for sonar, medical imaging, etc.

Get as much stuff as we can into software, out of hardware.

Turn all the hardware problems into software problems -- all wave forms are encoded, decoded, modulated and demodded in software.

What can you do with it?

* Conventional radio

* Spectrum monitoring

* Multichannel

* Morph mode

* Morph on the fly

* Better spectrum utilization

* Cognitive radio

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:52:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USB-powered laptop light

I've been using the Nite Key Lite, a USB-powered laptop light, to type on my iBook when I've got my baby sleeping next to me at night. The light's mounted on an 18" stiff bendable cable, and has two bright white LEDS that shine a bright spot on the keyboard (I wish the illumination was a little more diffuse, but it's not a big deal). It doesn't seem to drain the batteries quickly (the manufacturer claims it "draws no more power from a notebook battery than 90 seconds per hour of laptop life.") Seems like it would be useful out in the field, or wherever AC power is unavailable. $20. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:37:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rheingold's "Technology Innovation and Collective Action" at ETCON

Here are my notes on Howard Rheingold's opening keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference, "Technology Innovation and Collective Action."

We lived in small groups, hunting rabbits and digging up carrots for a long time, and at some point, we worked out how to team up in groups larger than families to hunt big game and to engage in agriculture, the birth of collective action.

The history of Unix is the history of people working collectively to create a common good that was useful to all of them. This was enabled by the architecture of Unix. The end-to-end principle guaranteed that people would invent their own services, unenvisioned by the creators of the Net.

The Web is the ne plus ultra: if you had asked five big corps or the govt to create the web, they'd still be working on it in our g'childrens' day. But giving a million geeks the power to post pages about their dogs was the affordance for collective action that gave rise to the Web.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:18:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Movable Type launches TypePad

Ben and Mena "Movable Type" Trott have announced a new service, "TypePad," which is a hosted Movable Type blogging service: you can either publish your MT blog to your server, or store it on one of theirs. I just set up my first from-scratch MT installation, which was easier than I expected, but still harder than it shoulda been; TypePad is the solution to this. Best of all, they're financing it with a small investment from a VC fund run by Joi Ito.

Technically, Typepad has embraced all the new things that have appeared or been requested in the blogging world in the past year. There is a built-in photo album creation tool, for instance, as well as a built-in Blogroll - a list of all your favourite sites, or lists of books and music you are reading and listening to.

The standout feature is the template maker. Users can design their blog without knowing, or seeing, any HTML code whatsoever and with a very great range of control.

Other features include real-time statistics, posting by email, and automatic creation of Friend of a Friend data - instantly taking an experimental standard and taking it to the mainstream.

Link Discuss (via Ben Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:42:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Ohio bill will forbid govt from providing free info to citizens

Jimmy sez:

In Ohio, the "Electronic Government Services Act" has been tacked onto Ohio's current budget bill.

It prohibits a state government agency from providing information if there are two or more competing private enterprises providing those services. That would mean that a government agency would not be allowed to post its regulations or decision on its Web site if, for example, Lexis, WestLaw, or other companies offer that information for sale.

Section 1306.25 (E)(1) further includes under "state agency" "similar agency of a county, township, municipal corporation, or other political subdivision,..." It then substantially limits their ability to publish electronically. While H.B. 145 is not as onerous as the previously withdrawn H.B. 482 of last year, it is a huge threat to public access.

This bill threatens the right of residents in Ohio from accessing state government information, created with their tax dollars, at no cost through the Internet. It is an abhorrent model that must be stopped short.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jimmy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Confab: chat for ETCON

Confab is an IM/groupware tool designed for the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference by Ludicorp, the makers of the keen-o multiplayer game-in-development Game Neverending. It's still in early beta, but it looks cool -- if only I could get (*&()*& FlashMX to install in my Mozilla. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:54:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pix: Day one of ETCON

I've posted a few photos from Day One of the Emerging Technologies conference. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:19:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Madonna.com hacked

After Madonna rudely planted fake tracks from her new record last week on the P2Pnets (see Cory's post below), a prankster responded on Saturday by hacking madonna.com and posting MP3s of the entire album four days before it hit stores. Link Discuss (Thanks David!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:38:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online evaluation form for ETCON

If you're at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, be sure to give feedback on the sessions you attend using the Online Evaluation Form! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:51:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's tutorial on Hardware Hacking

Here are my notes from Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's tutorial on Hardware Hacking from the O'Reilly Emerging Tech confernece. Bunnie is the hardware hacker who cracked the X-Box while at MIT; the presentation is a brilliant and inspiring call-to-arms to dig into the guts of our boxes.

Today with high-integration chips, it's difficult (not impossible) to manually probe and modify. Optical inspection of chips ineffective when line widths are smaller than visible light, aplus, it's really expensive to make your own.

Board speeds are astronomical: memory running at 200MHz, serial bus at Gb speed, processor busses at 400MHz -- these speeds require finesse.

The packaging is insane: chip-scale fully hidden connectivity, package pithces of a few 100 microns.

Societal pressures have mounted against hackers, and state of the art hhacking equipment is expensive. State of the art is defined in part by what gets thrown out by corps and ends up in swapmeets.

But hardware hacking ISN'T impossible!

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:19:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Patents in Emerging Tech

Here are my impressionistic notes from Patents in Emerging Tech, a talk by Rajiv P. Patel, Esq., Fenwick and West.

Patents are often used by big companies to force competitors out of the market. Patent litigation, including frivolous litigation, can burn tons of cash in small companies that can't afford it. Or you can just say, "Screw it, your tech violates my patent, you're off the market."

British Telecom claims it invented WiFi, the Internet, and just about everything else, and it sees this as a means of getting royalties from other companies to shore up its revenues in a sagging economy.

No one challenges this extortion because it's too expensive to design new tech and it's too expensive to litigate.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:58:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notes from "Legal Issues and Emerging Technology"

Here are my running, impressionistic notes from Fred von Lohmann's tutorial from O'Reilly Emerging Technology 2003 conference, "Legal Issues and Emerging Technology."

Vendors are including "handshakes" in their devices now: there's only one reason to do this, so that they can block competitors from interoperating using the DMCA, which bans circumventing access-control.

AOL Instant Messenger is doing this to get rid of Jabber and other interop technologies: it's not hard to fake the key that AIM clients use to authenticate themselves, but faking it is illegal because the DMCA forbids access control circumvention

Hank Berry and Hummer-Windbladt were sued yesterday for funding Napster. This gives you a flavor of the risk that funding P2P systems can create. Bertellsmann has also been sued for investing in Napster -- on the theory that investing in Napster allowed it to continue for months.

AIMSter, AudioGalaxy, Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster, Scour were all sued or are being sued for building P2PNets.

Every creative work that is fixed in tangible form is copyrighted. Just writing a note to a friend gives you a whole suite of rights that will last 100 years or more -- life of the author plus 70 years. Copying without permission violates that right: right to make copies, right to perform/display, right to make derivative works. MP3.com, by making a database of music, made a bunch of copies without permission, and hence vioalted copyright.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:22:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Don't create a network when joining the network

If you're using a Windows box at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, be very careful that when you're configuring your card, that YOU DO NOT CREATE an ad-hoc WiFi network called "oreilly" -- this happens when you enter the SSID into the "create network" box instead of the "join network" box. If you do this, you will knock other users offline, because their cards will try to connect to your machine instead of the O'Reilly network. If you're at ETCON, please pass this on to any Windows users in your vicinity: there's an ad-hoc net called "oreilly" that's screwing up my machine. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ETCON IRC

Rich Gibson has set up an IRC channel for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference:

#etcon now exists on irc.freenode.net

Jump on the channel later in the day to participate in the chatter. The first tutorials start at 8AM.

UPDATE: Realtime IRC log here, courtesy of Dav Coleman. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:53:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Syllabus for "Avoiding Future Shock 101"

Nerdbooks is the official bookseller for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference -- they're not set up to take credit-cards in meatspace, so they're using their web-based store to process all their orders. Here're the books they brought to the show with them. It reads like the syllabus for a course in avoiding Future Shock. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chandler goes 0.1

Mitch Kapor and the Open Source Applications Foundation have released the first public alpha of Chandler, the serverless, P2P mailer/calendar/PIM that looks more and more like an application framework for displacing the OS as the primary tool of info-management -- I *already* use my mailer as a database layered on top of my OS, since I email almost everything I do to someone, somewhere. I've stopped sweating careful file-heirarchies for my archived docs on my HDD and started just using my mailer's search functions to find the documents I need to retreive. Looks to me like Chandler is being *designed* for that kind of use. It's pretty exciting to think I'm going to get a mailer as closely tailored to my needs as Mozilla is to my browsing needs. Mitch Kapor does some road-mapping in his entry announcing the release:

We are focusing first on architectural issues, not end-user features, yet there are some interesting things to look at in this release. In particular, the outlines of the Chandler peer-to-peer sharing framework are visible. There are also the very crude beginnings of a calendar and contact manager to play with.

We haven't begun to focus on a polished user interface, the current user interface is a placeholder. So rest assured that future releases will bring dramatic improvement in this area as well.

Mitch will be giving an evening talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on Wednesday at 7PM -- here's the trackback link for the session. Link Discuss (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:46:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cisco's routers designed for governmental eavesdropping

Cisco is building cop spyware into its new routers, due to customer (government) demand. This interview with Cisco Fellow Fred Baker is scary as hell.

Q: Do you have any moral problems with helping to make surveillance technology more efficient?

A: I have some moral and ethical issues, but I think quite frankly that the place to argue this is in Congress and in the courtroom, not a service provider's machine room when he's staring down the barrel of a subpoena.

There are two sides. One is that Cisco as a company needs to let its customers abide by the law. The other is the moral and ethical issues. There are two very separate questions.

Q. The current draft does not include an audit trail. Could you do that by having your equipment digitally sign a file that says who's been intercepted and for how long? That could be turned over to a judge. It could indicate whether the cops were or weren't staying within the bounds of the law.

I'm not entirely sure that the machine we're looking at could make that assurance... In fact, the way lawful interception works, a warrant comes out saying, "We want to look at a person." That's the way it works in Europe, the United States, Australia and in other western countries. The quest then becomes figuring out which equipment a person is reasonably likely to use, and it becomes law enforcement's responsibility to discard any information that's irrelevant to the warrant. That kind of a thing would probably be maintained on the mediation device...

Q. A few years ago (in RFC 2804) the IETF rejected the idea of building eavesdropping capability into Internet protocols. The FBI supported the idea, but the IETF said, no way. You were chair of the IETF at the time. How do you reconcile your proposal with the decision made then?

A. I thought that what the IETF decided to do was actually the right thing to decide. What it said is that the IETF would not modify protocols that were designed for some other purpose in order to support lawful interception.

Link Discuss (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:36:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 21, 2003

A legend has passed away: Dr. Nina Simone, RIP.

The great Nina Simone, my favorite chanteuse of all time, passed away today at her home in France. She was 70 years old. Link, Nina Simone's website, Discuss

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

I'm guestblogging on Reverse Cowgirl

After managing to blog the words vagina, penis, and shit all in one day last week, there's only one place for me to go. I'll be blog-sitting for Susannah Breslin all week -- deconstructing porn, cussing egregiously, and posting totally non-worksafe images while she does a guest stint on Neal Pollack's site. Link to RCB, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:52:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Louis Vuitton SARS masks: fact or Fark?

This image, posted by Hong Kong SARSblogger Phil, may just answer that question. Some say it's the genuine article, though I doubt it -- and haven't slogged through the Louis Vuitton website to see if it can be verified there. I feel a powerful case of Puma-itis coming on. Update: Hoax. Link to JK's adept debunking. Link to blog post with full-sized image, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:31:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DumbMobs: Creationists gaming Amazon's reviews?

Are creationists gaming Amazon's recommendation system?

I think the creationists have initiated a campaign at Amazon to alter the recommendations. I went to my Amazon page, after noticing a book on Bottomquark, and in my personalized section, where I ordinarily get recommendations about scientific or historical books, because it's noticed these trends in my purchasing, there was this pile of recommendations for creationism books.

The Right Questions by Phillip E. Johnson, Nancy Pearcey How Blind Is the Watchmaker? by Neil Broom, William A. Dembski Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe

Now this didn't just happen by accident. Curious, I went to one of the creationism book's pages. There were lots of comments from readers, most with dozens of 'this review was helpful to me' indications.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bruce!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:40:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT on new web art show: Deliberately Distorting the Digital Mechanism

Article in today's NYT on some classic 'Net art going on display at Eyebeam in Manhattan. You can also view the works at www.jodi.org, asdfg.jodi.org, 404.jodi.org, wrongbrowser.com and wwwwwwwww.jodi.org.

While tinkering recently with one of the first personal computers from the 1980's, the digital artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans took a look at its technical tutorial. As Mr. Paesmans recalled, the on-screen guide delivered a reassuring message: "Remember, don't be scared. You cannot do anything wrong on this computer."

Since 1994 Ms. Heemskerk and Mr. Paesmans, collaborating under the name Jodi, have created a series of Internet-based artworks that deliberately cause computers to do the wrong thing. Viewers of these online works will find their screens filled with meaningless text and needlessly blinking graphics. Web-browser windows spawn smaller windows that race maddeningly around the screen. Links that appear to lead somewhere yield dead ends. Like a sci-fi thriller, this could be delightful, except that the underlying premise is of computers in complete control. A terrifying thought.

Link (reg required), Discuss, (Thanks, S!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:29:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Glowing, auto-destructing cancer, courtesy of firefly DNA

British researchers are treating cancer with firefly genes, which cause cancer cells to glow bright enough to auto-destruct.

In a new study, researchers from London inserted the firefly gene that activates bioluminescent light into modified cancer cells, hoping to set off a chain of events that has a proven track record at fighting the disease. This light source, known as Luciferin, caused the modified cancer cells to glow much like it does with the firefly. When a photosensitizing agent was added, the combination proved lethal.

"The cells produced enough light to trigger their own death," said Dr. Theodossis Theodossiou of the National Medical Laser Centre, University College London. University College London scientists and colleagues at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research published their results today in the journal Cancer Research.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:20:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Text Messaging Feeds SARS Rumors

I wrote a story for WIRED News about how SMS is being used in Asia to spread information and disinformation about SARS.

According to several Hong Kong and Singapore residents, a "screw SARS" counterculture attitude is emerging among younger mobile-technology users, as evidenced in forwarded SMS jokes. In cities where most people on the street are wearing surgical masks, the simple act of not wearing a mask becomes an act of rebellion, according to Elliot. "'I will breathe freely' has become like smoking Death cigarettes," he says.

As SARS gallows humor is forwarded from cell phone to cell phone throughout the region, are "cough" ring tones next? "I don't know ... but it's part of local culture to be playful with acronyms," says Kim Lai. "In SMS jokes, SARS could stand for 'Singapore Airlines Really Screwed' or 'Saddam's Awesome Retaliation Strategy.'"

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:52:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crazy vertical keyboard

ExtremeTech reviews this crazy vertical keyboard (which has a matching vertical mouse), which is designed to both astonish your friends and prevent repetitive stress injuries. Surprisingly, they say it doesn't suck. Link Discuss (Thanks, Roland!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:24:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pointed This Modern World

Today's This Modern World has some pointed observations contrasting domestic and foreign policy. Link Discuss

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

Talk on technoutopianism from the WELL to the Long Boom

On April 11, Fred Turner gave a talk to a Stanford seminar on People, Computers and Design on the rise of techno-utopianism as represented by Wired and the Whole Earth projects. Brian sez:

He starts the talk deconstructing the infamous LONG BOOM cover of WIRED. He traces the WIRED "techno-utopianism" back to the WELL community and all the way back to the original Whole Earth Catalogs.

Link Discuss (via Brianstorms)

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

Inspiring Vaidhyanathan interview

Paul Schmeizer has posted a brilliant interview with copyright scholar and author Siva Vaidhyanathan, in which Siva just showers the page with inspiring and insightful quotations. Must-read.

Both democracy and creative culture share this notion that they work best when the raw materials are cheap and easy and easily distributed. You can look at any cultural development that’s made a difference in the world—reggae, blues, crocheting—you can look at any of these and say, y’know, it’s really about communities sharing. It’s about communities moving ideas between and among people, revision, theme and variation, and ultimately a sort of consensus about what is good and what should stay around. We recognize that’s how culture grows… In the last 25 to 30 years, the United States government made a very overt choice. The United States government decided that the commercial interests of a handful of companies--we can name them as the News Corporation, Disney, AOL-Time Warner, Vivendi--these sorts of corporations were selling products that could gain some sort of trade advantage for Americans.

Therefore all policy has shifted in their favor. That means policy about who gets to own and run networks, who gets to own and run radio stations, how long copyright protection will last, what forms copyright protections will take. We’ve put ourselves in a really ugly situation though, because we’ve forgotten that a regulatory system like copyright was designed to encourage creativity, to encourage the dissemination of knowledge. These days, copyright is so strong and lasts so long that it’s counterproductive to those efforts.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:56:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why spectrum regulation stifles speech

Check out this long, scholarly paper on the reason that regulation of spectrum is at odds with the First Amendment!

The Supreme Court has distinguished the regulation of radio spectrum from the regulation of printing presses, and applied more lenient scrutiny to the regulation of spectrum, based on its conclusion that the spectrum is unusually scarce. The Court has never confronted an allegation that government actions resulted in unused or underused frequencies, but there is good reason to believe that such government-created idle frequencies exist. Government limits on the number of printing presses almost assuredly would be subject to heightened scrutiny and would not survive such scrutiny. This Article addresses the question whether the scarcity rationale -- or any other reasoning -- supports distinguishing spectrum from print such that government actions constricting the supply of spectrum would pass muster.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:44:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teresa's remedial Don't-Burn-Libraries 101

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted a great blog-entry on the kinds of things that we lose when we burn libraries:

Recently I was deeply vexed by the news that a professional author, who of all people should know better, has dismissed the burning of the National Library in Baghdad on the grounds that any book destroyed in the fire could simply be reprinted. There are moments when you find out more about someone’s scholarship and research habits than you’d ever want to know.

Apparently he was unaware that whereas reprinting might serve to reconstitute his high school library, substantial research libraries contain all sorts of odd things, possibly odd old things, some of which may be sole copies. This goes double for major research libraries, which are textual mathom-houses. Moreover, at the time that some of these odd things were catalogued, they may not have been properly recognized for what they were. (This is, incidentally, why I hate having to do research in closed-stack library systems: You have to take the cataloguer’s word on everything.) Anything can turn up there.

Just this year came the news that a big wodge of Tolkien manuscript had turned up in a carton in the Bodleian Library. It hadn’t been lost, exactly; but it hadn’t occurred to anyone who knew about the material’s existence that it might command enough general interest to warrant publication. It has now been published.

It's full of linky goodness and startlement. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:42:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Madonna diluting own trademark

Madonna recently flooded the P2Pnets with bogus tracks that appear to be leaked singles from her new CD, but in fact consist of silence punctuated by her sneering, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" This is funny stuff, but not nearly so funny as the potential consequences for her trademarked name (which she's already used to steal Madonna.com from a guy who was trying to give it to the Madonna Rehab Hospital). Wendy Seltzer, an EFF staff attorney who knows from IP, sez:

I doubt Madonna has thought about the damage these planted spoofs could do by diluting her trademarks. Trademarks, after all, are intended to protect consumers by defending a source's association with quality goods and services. If the same name is increasingly found on deliberately poor quality music files or curses, with the authorization of the trademark holder, duped listeners might reasonably stop thinking favorably of the brand -- giving a plausible argument that the artist had diluted or abandoned her own mark.

Also, don't miss this Digital Cutup Lounge remix (3.7MB MP3, via Oblomovka) of the "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" track. Link Discuss (via Scripting News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:19:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are Silicon Valley bars a buyer's market for boy-toys?

Before I dropped out of the University of Waterloo, I took a deviant sociology course with a prof who assigned us his Ph.D. thesis as the primary course reading: the results of a long study into what the hookers and hustlers and other lowlifes do in seedy bars. The study consisted of...hanging out at seedy bars. Nice work if you can get it.

Now, Peter of SemiSober.com has done one better: for his final project in a Stanford University statistics class, he's done an analysis of the odds of picking up women in Silicon Valley bars -- well, actually of the relative ratios of men and women in bars in the notoriously male tech area -- whose methodology consisted of...hanging out in bars. Nice work, etc.

Although ratios varied widely from one bar to the other, I found that on average, in the cities of Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Mountain View, the male to female ratio was about 5 to 3. More precisely, I found that the ratio was about 62% men to 38% women (95% confidence interval for men = [59.46%, 64.54%]). These ratios differed widely depending on the type of bar that was surveyed, and were sometimes as high as 3-to-1.

Link Discuss (via EvHead)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This would *kill* Dr Atkins -- Big Sugar wants 25% of diet to be sugar

Big Sugar is furious that the World Health Organization is proposing to officially recommend that no more than 10% of our diets should consist of sugar. They don't even want the notion discussed in public.

The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar.

"Taxpayers' dollars should not be used to support misguided, non-science-based reports which do not add to the health and well-being of Americans, much less the rest of the world," says the letter. "If necessary we will promote and encourage new laws which require future WHO funding to be provided only if the organisation accepts that all reports must be supported by the preponderance of science."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Charlie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:04:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, April 20, 2003

Unwirer: an online, real-time exhibitionist sf story collaboration

Charlie Stross (who's up for the Hugo, Neb and BSFA awards this year!) and I are collaborating on our third story together, working title "Unwirer." And we're doing it online.

We've set up a Movable Type blog for the collaboration. You can read along as we write, rewrite and discuss the story as we work our way through it. I think this might be a net-first -- an act of auctorial exhibitionism that no one has ever attempted before.

I think it's gonna be cool. Writing with Charlie's always as fun as a rollercoaster ride, as we try to one-up each other with ever-more-outrageous corners to turn (check out Jury Service for a look at how this works out).

For me, this is a good way to keep track of the actual creative process. Today, when I re-read the stories I've written in collaboration, I'm hard-pressed to remember which bits I wrote and which bit my partner wrote.

Charlie and I had talked about doing this before, but we needed to get an editor to sign off on it first: we didn't want to write the story and then find out that we couldn't sell it. So when Isaac Szpindel asked me if I'd write a story for ReVisions, the alternate science history anthology he's co-editing with Julie Czerneda, I told him that I'd do it, if I could write it online, with Charlie.

And away we go! The story, "Unwirer," is an alternate history in which the copyright industry's 1995 bid at the National Information Infrastructure hearings to redesign the Internet was successful. Now, America labors under a kind of MiniTel hell, where every online transaction costs a few cents and you can only field a website with the phone company's permission. Meanwhile, the French IT giant Be, Inc., has launched a global revolution with the first WiFi AP, and American guerrilla networkers are running through the hills on the US side of the Canadian and Mexican borders, establishing meshed access-points, working to provide end-to-end meshed IP from sea to shining sea. Hilarity ensues.

We're going to be updating the site daily, more or less, and we hope to have the story done in about a month.

The cops caught Roscoe as he was tightening the butterfly bolts on the dish antenna he'd pitoned into the rock-face opposite the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. They were State Troopers, not Fed radio cops, and they pulled their cruiser onto the soft shoulder of the freeway, braking a few feet short of the soles of his boots. It took Roscoe a moment to tighten the bolts down properly before he could let go of the dish and roll over to face the cops, but he knew from the crunch of their boots on the road-salt and the creak of their cold holsters that they were the law.

"Be right with you, officers," he hollered into the gale-force winds that whipped along the rockface. The antenna was made from a surplus pizza-dish satellite rig, a polished tomato soup can and a length of co-ax that descended to a pigtail with the right fitting for a wireless card. All perfectly legal, mostly.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:40:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, April 19, 2003

Dead Mall contest results

Check out this post-game analysis of the Los Angeles Dead Mall competition, which solicited bids for the redesign of derelict shopping malls.

Their design is a multi-level smorgasbord of stores and businesses to attract a wide range of tastes. The first floor is a "big box cathedral" that caters to "gathering types" with convenient one-stop shopping at stores like Kmart and Costco.

The second floor is geared towards wandering and browsing in a kasbah-style environment. In order to replicate a city, the design also leaves room for social interaction by cultivating the idea of a mall as a meeting place for groups that might be looking for a refuge. The mall would also be a mini city that never sleeps, with towers of restaurants, nightclubs and casinos serving the "raving culture."

"Part of the mall would be a new emergent public realm where people could meet to talk about culture," said Kahn. "They have an instant city. There is the skating culture and hip hop culture here, and there is no place for these subcultures. This place would make room for that."

The idea of a hub to exchange ideas was inspired by text messaging and wireless technology that can draw people together like a swarm of bees. In a recent tech incident, text messaging was used to spread news that Mariah Carey was on location in Tokyo. Within a short time, thousands of fans arrived at the scene.

Link Discuss (via Viridian List)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:20:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 18, 2003

Show-dogs getting plastic surgery

Nutcase show-dog owners are improving their hounds' chances of winning by taking them to doggy plastic surgeons.

"It's difficult for a judge who sees a dog for two minutes in the ring to say, 'What's wrong with this dog? Did he have dental work?'" said David Frei, the popular announcer on the USA Network's telecasts of the Westminster Kennel Club show.

Mr. Frei, also the spokesman for the American Kennel Club, said four dogs were disqualified last year for artificial alterations. But that's out of two million total entries, and even those guilty four were detected later, outside the ring.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Henry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:11:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Blosxom plugin makes Web more writable

Gilbert and Quinn have whipped up a sweet little Blosxom plug-in for annotating blog entry: if you have a link that you think should be added to a Blosxom post, you click the "annotate" link, select the word from the post that you want to footnote, enter the link, and click submit -- voila, annotated post. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:09:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Audi-oh!" digital music sex toy

Get your groove on:

Don't just listen to music, FEEL it! Audi-Oh (TM) is a revolution in stimulation technology for men or women. Sound is converted into infinitely variable pulses of pleasure. Audi-Oh* can use ambient sound, like the music in your favorite club, or direct audio input from devices such as portable CD players, MP3 players, your PC or home audio and video systems. You'll find a million ways to use Audi-Oh! [D]esigned to resemble a pager, its compact form and high-tech appearance allows it to be worn discreetly in public.

link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:50:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online mail-order bride spoof site: Big Bad Chinese Mama

The faux bride at left, asks, "Sorry Guys, did I ruin the mood for ya?" Step inside the Harem of Angst. You can't buy these brides, but you can buy t-shirts. Link, Discuss, (via Geisha)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:27:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SGI shares on the cheap

Just 'cause the market's collapsed is no reason you can't be a player. OneShare is offering discounts on single shares of two of the hottests stocks of yesteryear: Silicon Graphics and K-Tel. Holy crap, K-Tel went public? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:00:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"First International Moblogging Conference" in Tokyo, July 5

On marginwalker blog today:

Just to confirm the buzz: yes, the First International Moblogging Conference has been scheduled for Saturday, the 5th of July at super-deluxe on Roppongi-dori here in Tokyo. This will be an all-day event, with a morning session devoted to more technical and product-specific discussions, an afternoon session focusing on the human, social and experiential aspects of the practice, and a party ('til ?) where everyone will get a chance to meet, schmooze and share...look for the 1IMC registration & information page to be live in no more than a few days.

Sounds cool. Hope there's a live web stream for those of us stuck stateside! (via Joi Ito), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:16:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Easter Zen

(1) pagan
(2) atheist
(3) church
(4) baptism
(5) heaven
(6) holy land
(7) biblical figures
(8) god's wrath
(9) figs
(10) plagues of egypt
(11) the ark
(12) pope
(13) nun
(14) hell
Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:43:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brilliant Pirates of the Carribean site

Jeff Baham, AKA "Chef Mayhem," the creator of the brilliant HauntedMansion.com website, has put up a new site in tribute to "Pirates of the Caribbean" called Tell No Tales. The site's fantastic, with in-depth history of the rides, video and audio clips, and a catalog of PotC collectibles. Link Discuss (via DollarShort)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Well-curves: the middle drops out

Interesting Wired story on the increasing prevalence of the "well" curve -- an inverted bell-curve that's showing up in more and more contexts: students are either doing very poorly or very well on their standardized tests; companies are either very small or very large; Americans are either very poor or very wealthy.

Consumer culture is going bimodal, too. Electronics manufacturers are racing to equip us with screens small enough for cell phones or large enough for home theaters - relegating standard screens to the scrap heap. High-end luxury hotels and low-end budget chains are doing well - but at the expense of midprice accommodations. In retail, Wal-Mart is soaring, boutiques are thriving, but middlebrow Sears is struggling. As The Wall Street Journal noted last year, "consumers are flocking to the most expensive products and the cheapest products, fleeing the middle ground in between."

Then there's the drooping middle class. The Federal Reserve Board's latest analysis of family finances showed that from 1998 to 2001, American incomes were up across the board. But when economists divided the population into five equal segments, a well curve emerged. "Incomes grew at different rates in different parts of the income distribution," the Fed reported, "with faster growth at the top and bottom ranges than in the middle."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:56:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Origin of modems

Nice interview with Robert Lucky, an old Bell Labs guy who contributed to the invention of the modem:

... taking bits and turning them into an analog thing also seems like an unnatural act. You are taking digital signals and turning them into voice-like signals so that they can put into a telephone network that then turns them back into digits. It's just the opposite. Nevertheless they work, and work everywhere, so they're still around. I never would have dreamed that forty years later everyone would have these in their houses and carry them on trips. Modems were something then that would be used for big computer centers. They weren't personal things. I never thought I would actually own a modem of my own. And modems were what I worked on at that time.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Buckyballs make super-antibiotics

Buckyballs are being used to join multiple antibiotic molecules together, creating super-antibiotics.

Rice Chemistry Professor Lon Wilson decided to create a buckyball-vancomycin conjugate following years of work developing biochemical targeting mechanisms for buckyballs, spherical cages containing 60 carbon molecules. By linking antibodies to a buckyball with anticancer drugs attached to it, Wilson and two of his graduate students, Tatiana Zakharian and Jared Ashcroft, are creating targeted compounds that will bind only with certain cells, like those found in melanoma tumors, for example.

"Having the ability to target antibiotics to attack specific bacterial antigens opens the door for treatments that simply aren't available today," said Wilson. "For example, we believe it's feasible to create a C60-vancomycin conjugate that attaches to anthrax while it is still in the spore form."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:47:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 17, 2003

Why WiFi is crucial to the First Amendment

I submitted comments to the FCC today on EFF's behalf, asking it to allocate unused TV frequencies to unlicensed use under the same terms as the 2.4GHz spectrum that WiFi runs in. The cool part was, I got to advocate the position that since the FCC is in the business of regulating who gets to speak, and since WiFi shows that with less regulation, more people get to speak, that the FCC has a First Amendment duty to open up more spectrum for WiFi-like uses.

The First Amendment calls on government to eschew regulation of who may speak and how they may speak. Historically, the FCC and FRC's regulatory efforts have balanced the restriction of access to spectrum--which is a proxy for speech, since it is an effective medium of expressive communication--with the need to preserve orderliness in the airwaves so that harmful interference is minimized. The paradigm for this governance held that if anyone were allowed to speak in any way, the resulting chaos of harmful interference would result in a world where no one was heard.

The 2.4GHz experiment, which applied an entirely different paradigm--lightly regulating device characteristics, requiring devices to accept all interference, and allowing anyone to operate a compliant device--challenged technologists to create devices that could function in this very different spectrum environment, coping with contention and interference with technology rather than regulation.

The results have been stellar. The 2.4GHz band has spawned unprecedented innovation in devices and protocols, packing 802.11b, 802.11g, Bluetooth, baby-monitors, X10 cameras, and a host of other communications technologies into a narrow slice of spectrum that was once dismissed as a "junk band."

While this spectrum paradigm is unquestionably disorderly and untidy, it is clear at this point that technologists are more than up to the challenge of overcoming this disorderliness and building devices that thrive in chaos.

What's more, these devices are permitting more communication--more speech--from a greater variety of speakers, than the traditional command-and-control exclusive-use allocations have ever fostered.

The Commission has regulated speech because spectrum is considered to be a scarce resource, but the hothouse flowering of the 2.4GHz band had demonstrated that some of that scarcity was an artifact of regulation, not physics.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:54:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi for the rebuilt Iraq

Various WiFi vendors are pitching the Feds on rebuilding the Iraqi communications infrastructure with wireless Internet connections. Link Discuss (via WiFi News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:54:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Golden crap is hot shit in Japan right now

Bling-bling poo-poo is apparently the latest wacky Japanese culturefad, according to this article. Excerpt:

"Supposedly lucky charms, golden turds weigh just under 2 grams and their curl gives them a height of some 1.2 centimeters. Rather than appearing scatological, they're cute little dollops of dung, which first made them a hit among high schoolgirls. "'I bought loads of them and gave them to each member of my family as a souvenir,' a schoolgirl who developed a feel for the fake feces she bought while on a school trip to Nagasaki tells Shukan Asahi. 'I tied the one I bought for myself on the end of my mobile phone.' ...

"Current versions include turds with funny faces painted on them, and others that emit a fragrance, though the odor let off is highly unlikely to be anything like the real thing. Ryukodo employees are currently scratching their heads over how to come up with more ideas for other shitty products."

Ryukodo employees, there is an American software manufacturer I'd like to introduce you to. Update: Several BoingBoing readers point out that the publication WaiWai more or less == the Weekly World News, so take this turd with a grain of salt. Update II: Wait! Gilded-turdomania is real after all. "Espe" points out evidence in the form of Starck's Asahi building in Tokyo (actually intended to represent a golden flame). Discuss (thanks, _x)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:00:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Slavercize photos

Here are some photos from the wacky, New York-based BDSM-themed workout that Cory blogged about earlier this week. I love the irony that the woman who runs these classes has a journalism degree, but learned she could make much more money beating up sweaty, leather-clad people in a gym than she could being a working writer. Link (worksafe si), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:49:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Atkins is dead

Dr Atkins has died at 72, after slipping on ice and cracking his head. Poor bastard. I think he was secretly offed by the grain lobby. Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:26:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Straight phoonin'

An oldie worth revisiting: hilarious online gallery of photos that feature people "phooning" (striking the pose you see at left). I drive by this Southern California freeway sign regularly, and just realized that it's a phoon, too. Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:24:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sex in an MRI scanner

If you liked Susannah's BoingBoing guestblog post of yore about The Operation (thanks, Kai), the experimental art-porn film shot with infrared, then you will dig this story about a French (of course) medical researcher using magnetic resonance imaging to observe how female internal anatomy accommodates a penis in a variety of sexual positions. I want pictures. The first BoingBoing reader to score them and post urls in this discuss forum -- or roll their own MRI erotica and post them online-- wins my undying blog-respect.

Update: Boingboing reader "ellison" shares these clinically accurate and decidedly non-prurient links to photographs from an earlier MRI-sex study referenced in the story above. Erotica, they ain't, but MRI images, they are. Link one, link two. > Update Two: aktiv1 shares a link to this very funny testimonial from a female Dutch anthropologist who discusses what it was like to be the subject of an earlier MRI-sex-photography project.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:02:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecam roundup in the NYT

Helpful overview about phonecams in today's New York Times. Link to story, compare devices here, sample images, more samples. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:48:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Penis Blog Project has me thinking: Vagina Monoblogs

Susannah broke it, Doc and Halley have posted some interesting observations about it -- the Penis Blog Project, where you try to match the (male) blogger with the digital snapshot of his penis. The site's cool, in a silly kind of shameless-web-exhibitionist kind of way. So cool that I would like to post another Lazy Open Dare to all comers: someone should start the Vagina Monoblogs. Match the (female) blogger to the... you get the picture. That someone will not be me, but I'm just saying, someone oughta do it. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:27:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clever hack for compromised voicemail boxen

This is a pretty clever hack: get a couple of voicemail boxes from SBC and figure out what the algorithm is for assigning default passwords. Now, start war-dialing SBC customers looking for phone numbers with the default password in place. Now, change the outgoing message on those voicemail boxes to "[pause] Yes [pause] Yes."

And here's the clever bit: now place a call to Saudi Arabia or Costa Rica or whatever and use the automated system for third-party billing to your compromised number. When the computer calls your 0wned number, it will pick up and, if your pauses are just right, say "Yes" when the voice-recognition-enabled-software says, "Will you accept the charges?" Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:51:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

My editorial on WiFi saving broadband

I've got an editorial on the back page of this month's Business 2.0, about the role that WiFi can play in preserving competition in broadband.

The outlook is especially grim for the burgeoning market in voice-over-Internet technologies, which allow anyone to make local and long-distance telephone calls via the Internet at a fraction of the telecoms' rates. It's hard to imagine the Bells voluntarily allowing customers to sidestep their core line of business. More likely, they'll use blocking and sniffing technology to hinder the use of Internet-protocol-based telephony services.

"Open wireless" is also likely to end up in the Bells' crosshairs. Open wireless networks allow passersby to connect to the Internet for free with a laptop and a wireless card. Community groups like the NYCwireless collective have inundated public spaces such as Bryant Park with free wireless, and the group also contributed to Manhattan's disaster relief effort after 9/11 by creating a network of open wireless access points for struggling local businesses. Yet the Bells' service agreements don't allow customers to operate public networks. If niche players like Speakeasy are frozen out of the residential DSL market, open wireless access points are likely to become increasingly scarce.

Note to relations: There's a swell picture of me over the editorial in the print edition that you can show off to your friends. Business 2.0 is a magazine. You can buy it at news-stands. Link Discuss

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

Sleepdep screws you up fierce

It turns out that skipping a few hours' sleep a night will affect your cognition and performance as though you hadn't slept in days. I really think that we're all on the edge of bugfuck and have been since the invention of the electric light.

Chronic restriction of sleep periods to 4 h or 6 h per night over 14 consecutive days resulted in significant cumulative, dose-dependent deficits in cognitive performance on all tasks. Subjective sleepiness ratings showed an acute response to sleep restriction but only small further increases on subsequent days, and did not significantly differentiate the 6 h and 4 h conditions. Polysomnographic variables and d power in the non- REM sleep EEG--a putative marker of sleep homeostasis--displayed an acute response to sleep restriction with negligible further changes across the 14 restricted nights. Comparison of chronic sleep restriction to total sleep deprivation showed that the latter resulted in disproportionately large waking neurobehavioral and sleep d power responses relative to how much sleep was lost. A statistical model revealed that, regardless of the mode of sleep deprivation, lapses in behavioral alertness were nearlinearly related to the cumulative duration of wakefulness in excess of 15.84 h (s.e. 0.73 h).

Irony moment: I decided to catch up on my blogging instead of going to bed. Link Discuss (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:22:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Transhumanism bioethics conference

This June, Yale University is hosting a conference on Tranhumanism Bioethics:

What will the body be like in 50 years? How will changes to our bodies change our lived experience? How will we adapt the body to our needs and to the environments in which we live? Will we have conquered sickness, aging and death for all or only for the lucky few? Will people migrate to silicon, build superbodies, or both, or neither? This conference, the first Transvision conference to be sponsored by the World Transhumanist Association in North America, will explore the future of the body from the transhumanist perspective. TV03USA is co-sponsored by the Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Program's Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, Nanotechnology and Transhumanism.

Transhumanism advocates the individual's right to use technology to enhance the body. This conference will begin the discussion between the transhumanist movement and the communities with which transhumanists have rarely been in dialogue: professional bioethicists, anti-technology activists, disability and transgender activists, and critical social theorists of science and technology.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:54:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paul Allen building science fiction museum

Paul Allen, the billionaire ex-MSFTie, is launching a science fiction museum in Seattle, complete with real sf writers on the Board of Directors -- who apparently don't have much say in the project:

Plans call for a hall of fame for science-fiction heroes, another hall shaped like the interior of a spaceship and a third that would commemorate terrifying aliens and other evil creatures. SFX's advisory board includes the science-fiction writers Greg Bear, Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler and Arthur C. Clarke.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:49:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Doc Searls proposes a barn-raising for civilization

Doc blogs:

The art historian and archaeologist John Malcolm Russell on The Connection... just called the sacking of Baghdad's museums The greatest catastrophe ever to befall a cultural institution in the history of the world. More than the burning of the library in Alexandria? This guy is in a position to know. Long after everything else from this war is forgotten... this is the one thing that people will remember, he says. Well, I'm thinking, we're part of civilization, too, presumably -- "we" being everybody in the world who goes to the trouble of making it better.

So here's an idea for the U.S. and British governments, for Coalition Forces, for anybody else in a position of authority in Iraq right now -- plus the rest of us who care:

Devote one TV and one radio station in Baghdad entirely to the recovery of pilfered antiquities. Staff it with concerned Iraqi citizens, and put scholars on the air, where they can talk about (and show, if photos are available) these stolen artifacts and their importance to Iraqi and world culture. Do this by re-puposing old stations if they're available, or by creating whole new ones. There's plenty of equipment available. Commercial broadcasters in the U.S. shed old gear all the time. They could easily make tax-deductible donations of studio and transmitting equipment, and would be proud to brag about it on the air too, I'm sure. Create an .iq (isn't that a perfect country code... .IQ!) Web site devoted entirely to aggregating and displaying photographs of Baghdad museum properties, and of lost or damaged Iraqi antiquities. Perhaps the British Museum (which has already pledged help) or British Petroleum (its Web site sponsor) could run this thing -- or fund somebody else willing to run the thing. Doesn't matter as long as it gets done. The rest of us should start aggregating (or choose the appropriate verb) cultureblogging around the same issue. (...)

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:04:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turning turkey guts into petroleum

Discover article about a guy who has a process that converts waste into valuable oil.

The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Link Discuss Thanks, Doug!

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:37:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shocker! Big media has no idea what to do with blogs.

From today's Chicago Tribune:

It was a shock to the tight-knit blogging community when two respected blogs written by frontline reporters for CNN and Time magazine were shut down by the journalists' employers, and when another hugely popular war blog was found to have lifted several postings from another source. Trouble is, some mainstream media organizations don't really know what to do about blogs.

"Blogs have gotten a lot more publicity and they have, I think, brought people ways of learning about things that are faster and less irritating than the 24-hour news channels," says Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor whose 2-year-old Web site, www.instapundit.com, often gets more than 200,000 hits a day. The television reportage of CNN's Kevin Sites, whose bosses halted his blogging, is "good, but his blog [www.kevinsites.net] is great -- his audio posts had an Edward R. Murrow quality," Reynolds says. "I think CNN was crazy to shut that down," Reynolds says. "I just find blog writing more intimate and more compelling -- it's like newspaper writing used to be. Somehow in an evil conspiracy between [grammarians] Strunk and White and corporate management, all the blood and personality has been drained out of newspaper writing. Mike Royko would have been a blogger if he had been in the right generation."

Link to Chicago trib story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:33:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shocking Art in Edwardian Digs

Story in today's NYT about tomorrow's launch of Charles Saatchi's new London gallery featuring "brash British contemporary art" in a 40,000-square-foot Edwardian setting overlooking the Thames. Excerpt:

"Damien Hirst's polka-dotted Mini car is poised in a nose-dive on the grand columned entrance stairway, which is flanked by marble plaques with gold-leaf inscriptions of the baronesses, field marshals, dukes, earls and viscounts who served as lords lieutenant to the County of London. David Falconer's "Vermin Death Star," hundreds of freeze-dried rat carcasses encased in fiberglass and resin, stands in the arch of the door through which supplicants for municipal largesse once thronged. Turn a corner into an oak-paneled parquet corridor once swarming with councillors and aldermen, and you are face to face with Gavin Turk's "Pop," a life-size model of Mr. Turk as Sid Vicious portraying as Elvis Presley, brandishing a pistol and a puppy-dog sneer. Mr. Hirst's dead lamb in formaldehyde, "Away From the Flock," grazes alone in a former bureaucrat's office by a marble fireplace and time server's wall clock. Tracey Emin's photographic portrait of herself stuffing cash between her legs, "I've Got It All," and Sarah Lucas's self-portrait with fried eggs on her breasts are displayed in elaborate period frames and hung like old masters."

Link (subscription required), Discuss (Thanks, Susannah

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:22:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mad Professor demo and signing 4-19-03 in San Francisco

I'll be at the Exploratorium in San Francisco on Saturday, April 19, from 12-3:00, doing demonstrations from Mad Professor. If you are in the area, drop by and say hello! Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:05:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great retrofuture illos

Gallery of illustrations from Radebaugh, a futuristic illustrator who worked from the 30s to the 50s. Link Discuss (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:01:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Leaked photos of Disney's new Forbidden Mountain

At the latest Disney shareholder meeting, Michael Eisner made a soft announcement for "Forbidden Mountain," a new ride scheduled to open in 2005 in the Asian section of Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World. This may revive the sagging fortunes of the Animal Kingdom, where the pickings are thin enough that Disney insiders call it "Minimal Kingdom."

An anonymous donor snuck this high-rez photo of the model for the ride out of Walt Disney Imagineering -- I'm pretty excited by it. Link, 136K JPEG Discuss

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

Coming to an Iraqi TV near you: US-sponsored broadcasts of US network news

In today's LA Times, article about a "New Shock and Awe Campaign for Iraqi People" in which CNN -- to its credit, IMHO-- declined to participate.

Sometime this week, Iraqis with television reception will turn on their sets and see a parade of new faces delivering the evening news: Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Jim Lehrer and Brit Hume.

The news package -- which will also include nightly programming produced by Arab journalists in Washington and the Middle East -- is part of an ambitious effort that White House officials say will show Iraq what a free press looks like in a democracy.

"Iraq and the World," funded by the US government, will feature nightly contributions from CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS and Fox News translated into Arabic, and is spearheaded by Norm Pattiz, the Los Angeles-based chairman of the Westwood One radio network. He said the new project marks "the first time that we have had a horse in the TV race" to compete with coverage from Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite TV channel, and other media sources.

Link, Discuss (thanks, JP)

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

Tuesday, April 15, 2003

How GM destroyed America's public transit

General Motors is an old hand at villainizing and undermining public transit. Long before it was running Canadian newspaper ads villifying transit riders, GM was involved in a conspiracy that destroyed the effective, cheap and effective public transit systems across America.

The destruction of transit in the East Bay and across the Bay Bridge was, unfortunately, typical for California's other large metropolitan areas. The only large city in California where GM did not destroy the transit system was San Francisco. This was because it was not able to do a takeover: San Francisco's transit system was owned by the City. Of course, GM was savvy enough to not directly buy these transit systems. They used "front" companies, funneling the money through them, and when they achieved control, it was the end for the transit system. All without the public's knowledge.

California transit systems destroyed by GM included those in the East Bay, San Jose, Fresno, Stockton, Sacramento, San Diego and the biggest, Los Angeles. There were probably more, but I can prove these from records.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jimwich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Invasion of the Little Green Men

Invasion of the Little Green Men is Feorag NicBhrìde's first online comic, and it's swell. Link Discuss (Thanks, Charlie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:59:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Open Source Hagaddah

Doug Rushkoff has created an "Open Source Hagaddah" -- a Passover Seder prayer-book that anyone can contribute to and annotate. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:54:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Vaudeville circuit for zines

Jim Munroe, inveterate zinester and self-publisher, has launched the Perpetual Motion Roadshow, a Vaudeville-like circuit of clubs and other venues for indie publishers to crawl the US and Canada, showing off their zines and other wares.

The Perpetual Motion Roadshow is an indie press tour circuit with monthly stops in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Brooklyn, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Chicago. Seven shows in seven days.

On April 14th, despite border guard calamities and bronchial infections, the first round of the circuit began in Brooklyn.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cities of the future

Great gallery of "futuristic" buildings from years gone by:

Atomium 58
Century 21
SpaceNeedle
Expo 67

Link Discuss (Thanks, Adam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:49:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Slaversize: Dominatrix-led aerobics

A dominatrix is teaching aerobics classes in NYC that threaten flogging for flaggers.

"If you don't keep up, you get punished," she warned her students at a recent class, which she oversaw with a nonstop string of insults and orders. "I don't want to hear any whimpering. You're here to suffer.

"I expect complete obedience, or I'll give you a good spanking," she said. "Do what I tell you to do. I don't care if it hurts..."

Clad in face masks, dog collars, rubber suits and other sartorial S&M paraphernalia, Mistress Victoria's students run through the exercise regimen, knowing any slacking off will bring her wrath down upon

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:46:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sputnik releases Linux-based WiFi AP

Dave "Technorati" Sifry and Sputnik have released their first Linux-based, commodity hardware WiFi access point. The Sputnik AP is self-configuring, secure, and open to hacking -- based on Seth Schoen's Bootable Business Card Linux distro. Sweet.

Just set up a Sputnik Central Control installation anywhere within your network, and then start plugging in Sputnik AP 120s right into your LAN. The AP 120s autoconfigure themselves, seek out Central Control, and automatically implement a wide range of security and management features, like dynamic firewalling, SSL-based user authentication, usage tracking, and policy routing. Central control allows administrators to easily set up and configure the captive portal, manage users, monitor AP usage, and generate reports. Gone are custom MAC address tables or per-AP configuration - and when you want to cover more area, simply purchase more AP 120s and plug them into your LAN.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

2nd-rate Frazetta artist wants to retrieve her oils from Saddam's palace

Two paintings from fantasy illustrator Rowena made their way into Saddam's art collection. She wants 'em back. But like the oil wells, they belong to the Iraqi people. Perhaps each citizen will get a 1/10,0000 square inch of canvas, or the art can be used to replace the looted ancient treasures from the musuems that the US and British military neglected to protect because they were busy protecting Bush and Cheney's future the Iraqi people's oil wells. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:56:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Conspiracy freak's delight: Missing 1998 Time article by Bush, Sr. on why a full-on Iraq war would be a bad idea

The March 2, 1998 issue of Time ran a piece by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft titled, "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam." Here's an excerpt from the article:

We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.

Recently, the piece became unavailable on Time's archive page. No explanation why. But Bruce Koball scanned the microfilm from his library's archives and posted a jpg of the article on his site. Why did Time take it off? (I'm calling to find out.) Link (ascii version) Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:11:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rent retro arcade games for your next geek-bash

via DailyCandy:

You know what they say: It's not a party until someone barfs in the bushes. Maybe that's because parties are dull. All that standing around and feeling socially awkward. If only there was something fun going on, the inebriation requirement could be waived.

Say, for instance, arcade games. Party Pals will rent and deliver them to the privacy of your living room. No need for substance abuse when Alpine Skiier, Hydrothunder, and Air Hockey are in the house. More mature party-throwers will get a thrill from classics like Ms. PacMan, Frogger, Donkey Kong, and Space Invaders. Our favorite by far, however, is Dance Dance Revolution, where players follow dance steps in time to manic music. Fun to do, and even more fun to watch. Especially after a few drinks.

Link to one LA-based company that provides this service. Know of others? Post them in the discussion forum here! Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:08:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GM apologizes for "freaks and weirdos ride the bus" ads

The President of the Canadian Urban Transport Asoociation wrote a letter to the President of GM Canada, protesting GM's ads that characterized public-transit riders as freaks and weirdoes who smelled bad. GM Canada's Director of PR apologized.

We deeply regret that this ad ran and we apologize if some individuals have been offended by its content. The ad has been pulled from circulation and will not be run in any other publication.

Link to letter from CUTA president (20k PDF), Link to letter from GM Canada Director of PR (84k PDF) Discuss (Thanks, Grant!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:08:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xbox hacking book aborted by the DMCA

Bunnie Huang, the MIT grad student who hacked the Xbox, has had his publishing deal with Hungry Minds for a book on hacking the Xbox killed because the publisher is scared that MSFT will come after them with the DMCA. So he decided to self-publish the book, but the shopping-cart service he used also got scared off by the DMCA.

"The thing I have to emphasize is that the book itself is not criminal," Huang said. "It'd be like saying that breaking and entering is illegal, so you can't write a book on how locks work."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:05:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iCommune is back

iCommune -- the app that allowed OS X users to easily share their iTunes music libraries -- is back. Apple sent a nastygram to the author, claiming he'd violated his license agreement by making iCommune as an iTunes plugin, and so he's rewritten it as a stand-alone app. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jim Ray!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:50:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Windshield pitting and the madness of crowds

Great historical account of the Washington State "windshield pitting" epidemic of 1954 -- a mysterious rash of pitted windshields that were blamed on hooligans, nuclear waste, cosmic rays, and coal dust -- but turned out to just be a collective delusion, where reports of a windshield pitting epidemic caused people to notice the pits in their windshields that had always been there. Link Discuss (Thanks, Alan!)

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

Monday, April 14, 2003

Stan Robinson on adventure travel

Kim Stanley Robinson has written a stirring account of the potential future of "adventure" travel.

Because these days adventure travel is not just the simplest meanings of those two words combined. "Adventure travel" is a marketing category, an advertising campaign, a slogan, a genre of publishing, a wing of the tourist industry, a line of products and services, a registered trademark. ADVENTURE TRAVEL: It means "the effort of capitalism to package and profit from the fun people get from fooling around outdoors." From doing stuff sort of like things people used to do on their own for practically nothing.

This is called commodification, turning things you do into things you buy, and it's long since been true that experiences in America are as commodified as things.

That's been the growth area in recent capitalism, and part of what defines the watershed between modernism and postmodernism. But it relies crucially on convincing people that it is necessary to go through the proper channels to have fun outdoors; that if you buy your experience from professionals, they will arrange it so that you have more fun during your precious leisure time than you would out there trying to figure it out on your own.

Link Discuss (via More Like This)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free Comic Book Day is coming

May 3 is Free Comic Book Day, the day that comic stores across America give free comics to anyone who walks in the door -- I love Free Comic Book Day, even though I don't mind paying for my funnybooks; I just love watching all the parents drag their kids in to get hipped to the four-color future. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:25:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Terrorism databases and the fallacy of the false positive

Schneier runs down the statistical problems of keeping terrorist-suspect databases:

To see this, let's walk through an example. Assume a simple database -- name and a single code indicating "innocent" or "guilty." When a policeman encounters someone, he looks that person up in the database, and then arrests him if the database says "guilty."

Example 1: Assume the database is 100% accurate. If that is the case, there won't be any false arrests because of bad data. It works perfectly.

Example 2: Assume a 0.0001% error rate: one error in a million. (An error is defined as a person having an "innocent" code when he is guilty, or a "guilty" code when he is innocent.) Furthermore, assume that one in 10,000 people are guilty. In this case, for every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies it will mistakenly identify one innocent person as guilty (because of an error). And the number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is tiny: one in a million.

Example 3: Assume a 1% error rate -- one in a hundred -- and the same one in 10,000 ratio of guilty people. The results are very different. For every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies, it will mistakenly identify 10,000 innocent people as guilty. The number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is larger, but still very small: one in 100.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:08:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Masked wrestler wins office in Japan

Having won office, the Great Sasuke won't take his mask off -- it would diminish his "superabundant power."

A professional wrestler who fought his way to victory in local assembly elections under his ring name and wearing his trademark mask has vowed the mask will not leave his face even after he enters the staid halls of Japanese politics.

"This is my face," the wrestler -- known as "The Great Sasuke" -- was quoted by the Nikkan Sports newspaper as saying of his black and white full-face mask with bright scarlet streaks and golden wings by the eye holes.

"I won support from voters with this face, and to take it off would be breaking promises," the 33-year-old wrestler, whose real name is Masanori Murakawa, said of his victory in conservative Iwate prefecture, some 460 km (290 miles) north of Tokyo.

Link Discuss (via Die Puny Humans)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ken Macleod has a blog

Ken Macleod, kick-ass Scottish Trotskyist sf writer/computer scientist/winner of Liberatarian sf awards, has a blog. It's awfully swell, unapologetically lefty, and savagely written. Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:58:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chaismatic phrases: phrases that chiasmize

Chiasmatic phrases are those that contain an inversion, like "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." These phrases are inherently sticky, gummy in the brain. Chiasmus.com is a site devoted to cataloging and discussing chiasmatic phrases:

Every now and then a single observation contains two separate chiastic reversals. One of the first examples I found in my research--and still one of the best I've seen--comes from Leonardo da Vinci: "Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."

Link Discuss (via Ben Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:55:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Did CNN turn up the boos on Michael Moore's Oscars speech?

Check out these two video clips -- one from CNN, the other from ABC -- and see if it doesn't sound to you like CNN turned up the booing during Michael Moore's speech at the Oscars. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:15:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Automated updates on downed Disneyland rides

Here's a subscribable iCal calendar that lists the Disneyland rides that are down for refurbishment. Link Discuss (Thanks, Evan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:13:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Damn, these are cool junk-metal sculptures

Check out these amazing assemblage sculptures of science fiction movie monsters and robots built out of scrap screws, nuts, bolts, springs and bike-chains. Birthday presents ahoy! Link Discuss (Thanks, Spencer!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF analysis of the Super-DMCA

The "Super-DMCA" is a set of state-level bills that are being tacked on to anti-cable-theft bills that use seemingly innocuous language to criminalize the use of firewalls and other commonplace Internet technologies. EFF has put up a page of analysis of the bills.

The proposed bills generally prohibit four categories of activity:

1. Possession, development, distribution or use of any "communication device" in connection with a communication service without the express authorization of the service provider.

2. Concealing the origin or destination of any communication from the communication service provider.

3. Possession, development, distribution or use of any "unlawful access device."

4. Preparation or publication of any "plans or instructions" for making any device having reason to know that such a device will be used to violate the other prohibitions.

These proposals dramatically expand the power of entertainment companies, ISPs, cable companies and others to control what you can and can't connect to the services that you pay for. If enacted, they will slow innovation, impair competition and seriously undermine a consumer's right to choose what technologies they use in their homes.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:05:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Better answer to file-sharing

Fred von Lohmann frames the file-sharing debate in a new light in the pages of the Daily Princetonian:

The hysteria over P2P has gotten out of hand. While protecting copyright is a worthwhile endeavor, suing college students will not get artists a penny more in royalties. Conscripting cash-strapped universities to act as muscle for the entertainment industries is absurd. Putting entire universities under constant surveillance is simply unacceptable.

There is a better way.The problem is not P2P file sharing. In fact, file sharing is a remarkable innovation that has enabled a worldwide community of music fans to build the greatest library of recorded music in the history of the world.

The problem is that artists are not getting paid. It is time to address the problem.

The right answer is obvious: We need to collect a pool of money from Internet users, and agree on a fair way to divide it among the artists and copyright owners.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BDSM Seder

"Once We Were Slaves" is a special Passover Haggadah for people in the "leather community." One imagines that being into extreme bondage would yeild a weath of tender places to hide the afikoimen.

This ritual act should be clearly understood by all parties, and offer an opportunity to consider one of the following activities:

* putting the items that mark slavery away for 8 days in a locked cabinet

* give the items into the safekeeping of a (non-Jewish) friend who under- stands the value of your SM relationship

* give the items away in order to fully experience the opportunity to move from slavery to freedom. When the festival is over, purchase new items to mark the start of a new cycle in your relationship.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:58:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great Seder song

Great personal reminiscence of a "traditional" seder-opening song:

There's no seder like Mom's seder
Like no seder we know.
Everything about it is appealing--
Everything halakha will allow.
Don't you know we get a happy feeling
when Abie's stealing the matzah now.

There's no people like Jew people;
they smile when they are flogged.
Even when they're fleeing from a big pogrum,
the Passover melodies they will hum.
Let's remember triumphs over all that scum;
Let's go on with the seder!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Molly!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will the Japanese downturn touch Tokyo Disneyland?

Japan's flagging economy may be taking some of the punch out of Tokyo Disneyland's kick-ass financials.

Analysts note the widespread deflation hitting other parts of the economy is now driving down per-customer sales. Also, last year's attendance figures for Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea fell short of an initial 25.5 million target.

"Two years ago, DisneySea benefited from the excitement over the new opening," said Marusan's Takei. "But there are some reports that DisneySea is eating into Disneyland attendance."

The opening of Hong Kong Disneyland in early 2006 could be another temptation for Tokyo Disneyland's core fans, some of whom go as many as 20 times a year.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:50:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hong Kong mobile phone carrier launches SARS location service

A mobile phone company in Hong Kong is launching a service to inform users about which nearby buildings have housed SARS carriers. At left, a banner ad for the service currently running on the company's website.

"With the dial of a few digits, subscribers can quickly get the peace of mind the need to go about their everyday lives," said Bruce Hicks, managing director of Sunday Communicatons Ltd, among the smaller of Hong Kong's six fiercely competitive cellular carriers.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, has hit Hong Kong especially hard, killing 47 and infecting 1,190. Subscribers can access SARS-related data in Chinese or English, including the names of buildings within one kilometer of the user's calling area where SARS cases have been confirmed....Newspapers have begun publishing maps of the territory showing the locations of buildings where SARS patients live.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:42:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Declan on Hawash case: Guilty until proven innocent

Declan McCullagh writes:

Intel engineer Mike Hawash is in solitary confinement in a federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon. On Mar. 20, the FBI arrested Hawash at gunpoint in Intel's parking lot near Portland for reasons that remain confidential. A 38-year-old American citizen with a wife and three children, he has not been charged with a crime.

This is a development that deserves close attention in the technology community. More than other industries, the computer business relies on immigrants. And some, like Hawash, are getting caught up in the U.S. Justice Department's campaign against suspected domestic terrorists. The Hawash case is not an isolated situation. I wrote recently about how Attorney General Ashcroft wants more power to snoop on the Internet, observing private conversations by installing secret microphones, spyware and keystroke loggers. Combine that with the broad powers that the Justice Department received under the 2001 Patriot Act, and you've got a situation that concentrates a tremendous amount of surveillance power in a small group of federal police and prosecutors.

Link, Discuss (via politech)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:47:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Waterproof cases for Exilim cameras

Casio Japan has released a waterproof external case for its Exilim cameras. I bought one of these little two megapixel cameras a couple weeks ago, and I'm in love. It's small enough to fit into a pocket, shoots great looking pictures, and even the little movie clips are quite nice. I'm really looking forward to taking the camera under water with me. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:34:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Naked

Non-prurient, Flash-based online art piece about nakedness. (worksafe-alert: piece contains nudity, but is not porn.) Link, Discuss (Thanks, Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:03:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pulp Mag Show and Sale, Apr 26, Toronto

The Merril Collection, Toronto's science fiction reference library, is throwing its annual pulp show and sale on April 26th. This is a pretty amazing show and sale: one year, I bought 100 slightly water-damaged cowboy pulps from the 1930s for $25 Canadian.

The Show will again feature a select dealers' room of pulp magazines, pulp related items and reprints, rare and collectable Science Fiction from pre-1975, as well as periodic tours of The Merril Collection, plus an afternoon auction. The pulp magazines reigned supreme on the newsstands from the early part of the last century up until their eventual demise in the mid 1950s. There were stories and titles of every kind, from tough detective to westerns; hero to romance, as well as horror, aviation, war, sports, science fiction, adventure and many more. Named after the cheap pulpwood paper on which they were printed, the pulps enjoyed an era of success for decades as the leading form of reading entertainment for the common people. The stories of many prominent authors of the century were first featured in their pages...

239 College Street,
Lillian H. Smith Branch, lower level
Saturday, April 26
10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
$2.00 Admission

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lorna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:01:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cypress Gardens closing

Cypress Gardens, Florida's original 1936 theme-park, is closing down. They blame 9-11. Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:55:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Embroidered MacOS Classic desktop

Michael sez, "Stella Brennan is a New Zealand artist who concentrates on the strange iconography of digital culture. Yet her work often uses decidely "analogue" technology. Take, for instance, her painstakingly embroidered (pixel-by-pixel) needlepoint rendition of the Mac OS desktop. The funny thing is that by the time she finished it, the operating system had long since become obsolete." Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:53:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blackboard sends bullshit IP threat to security conference organizers

Blackboard, a courseware vendor, is threatening to sue the organizers of a technical security conference if they allow a presentation on vulnerabilities discovered in their product. They claim that reverse engineering the software violates their copyrights. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:50:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

File-paths don't infringe trademark

One for the good guys: a Sixth Circuit court has ruled that file-paths don't violate trademark: in other words, http://www.trademark.com might be infrigning, http://www.foo.com/trademark/trademark2/trademark3.html isn't. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US: Still leading exporter of bad copyright laws

Hilary Rosen, outgoing chief lobbyist for the RIAA, is writing new intellectual property laws for the post-war regime in Iraq. I can't find substantiation for this, but damn. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:42:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Feral robotic dogs stage toxic dump tech-art-protest actions

Howard Rheingold writes about a new proposal from technoartist, activist, and educator Natalie Jeremijenko:

What if owners of Superfund sitde politicked their way out of responsibility, then sold or leased their property without removing unhealthy amounts of toxic waste? What if you could modify an ordinary robotic dog by adding an inexpensive, of-the-shelf gas sensor -- the kind used in residential and commercial/ industrial alarms for detecting toxicgases, breath alcohol checkers, automatic cooking controls for microwave ovens, air quality/ventilation control sytems for both homes and automobiles? What if you could release packs of these feral robotic dogs at former superfund sites whenever a school, housing development, market opens for business on or near the site? Welcome to feral robotics.

Read Natalie's project description here, visit her feral robotic dog blog here, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:41:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TIA is like ESP research for the XXIst Cen

David Reed shows how ESP research and Total Information Awareness are based on the same fallacies:

The DoD, by the way, supported a bunch of ESP research that tended to confirm the potential of ESP in predicting behaviors of our cold war enemies.

Now this idea of extracting reliable and meaningful information from massive data collection arises. A scientist might ask, what would falsify the underlying hypothesis? Is there a null hypothesis at all?

In fact, the privacy and liberty folks, by expressing concern in the form of risks to "privacy" tend to reinforce the belief that there is any real investigatory information that can be extracted by inference from a very noisy and randomly selected pile of information.

The problem with statistical inference is that it is not neutral with respect to hypotheses you are testing, nor with respect to control of the sampling process.

I think he's on to something, but it's worth pointing out that most of the "privacy" activists are worried about due process -- being fingered by a bad algorithm without the opportuninty to defend yourself agains the charges -- as much as they are about the investigatory power of TIA. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:38:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US purchases data on millions of Latin American citizens from commercial firms

Via Dave Farber's IP list today:

Over the past 18 months, the U.S. government has bought access to data on hundreds of millions of residents of 10 Latin American countries -- apparently without their consent or knowledge -- allowing myriad federal agencies to track foreigners entering and living in the United States.

A suburban Atlanta company, ChoicePoint, collects the information abroad and sells it to U.S. government officials in three dozen agencies, including federal immigration investigators who have used it to arrest illegal immigrants.The practice broadens a trend that has an information-hungry U.S. government increasingly buying personal data on Americans and foreigners alike from commercial vendors including ChoicePoint and LexisNexis.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:30:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, April 13, 2003

London as a starry galaxy

Cool space picture of London at night Link Discuss (Thanks,Kevin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:22:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, April 12, 2003

Weird OS X problem

About a month ago I backed up my iBook's internal drive to an external drive (my 20 Gig iPod, actually). Now, for some reason, the "Volumes" folder on my internal drive has a mirror of the backup. When I erase it, it shows up again the next day. Seems to do it every night at 11 pm, in fact. Anybody know what the heck is going on, and more importantly, make it stop? First person to give me a satisfactory solution gets an iron on of one of my drawings. Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:41:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple-Universal deal talks said to be "not too serious"

Speculation on yesterday's announcement that Apple is said to be considering purchase of Universal, from today's NYT:

"It is interesting to note," said Michael Nathanson, a music analyst with Sanford Bernstein & Company, that Vivendi's shares "did not respond to the news, suggesting that media investors did not take it seriously, because they are so aware of how bad the fundamentals of the music business are."

Both Vivendi and Apple declined to comment.Several people close to the discussions said it seemed unlikely that a deal would ultimately happen. One executive who talked recently with Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, about the music business said: "It makes no sense. He didn't seem like a buyer of music."

Indeed, the new plan for an online store seems to eliminate Apple's need to have any interest in the music business because it would have access to the music. "Why buy the cow when you already have the milk?" one executive close to Apple's planning said."

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:28:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Play with your food

(1) battle chips
(2) fruit loot
(3) freaky franks
(4) squishing + scanning
(5) oracle of starbucks
(6) peeps research
(7) pop tart blowtorches
Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:14:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 11, 2003

Super-Cool Robot events in SF and LA on Saturday, April 12

If big scary machines turn you on, and you happen to be in San Francisco or Los Angeles tomorrow night -- well, life is peachy.

(1) LA: Notorious robotics performance group SEEMEN deliver a rare SoCal appearance in downtown LA, Saturday April 12. Doors open at 9:00, show starts at 10:00 prompt. Location: 1333 Willow St. between Mateo St. & S. Santa Fe Ave., admission is ten bucks. The group's website says: "SEEMEN create situations where audiences are encouraged to Interact and operate their machines and robots. You get to run a machine that can kill you. IT'S FUN!" The Reverse Cowgirl says the group's "pet dog Slug will be running some of the machines--one via his chew-toy and another via a heart monitor." Link to event information, more info on SEEMEN. Update: John Wiseman took some photos: link

(2) SF: Qbox and the Robotics Society of America are sponsoring the release party for the book Gearheads: The Turbulent Rise of Robotic Sports by Brad Stone. An all-star cast of Bay Area robot-erati will perform, including members of Survival Research Labs, Robot Wars, BattleBots, and others. Show organizers say: "We have robots, mechanical monstrosities, ant-weight robot competitions and a host of other excitement and Superlative Reality-bending Legions. The author will be there to sign copies of his book." The party takes place Saturday, April 12th, from 7pm - midnight at the Fort Mason Firehouse. Admission is $5, $15 with autographed copy of the book. Event details, book details.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:13:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jargon watch: "supershedders" -- people who spread huge amounts of viral particles.

Forbes article about SARS includes the term "supershedders" -- people who spread huge amounts of viral particles.

"Some viruses like Ebola kill people but don't spread easily. Others spread readily but don't kill," says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases. "This is extremely virulent, and it spreads easily. It's a really bad combination."

...Another mystery is why the disease has spread efficiently in some locales, like Toronto, but not much at all in the U.S., despite a number of apparent cases among returning travelers. One hypothesis is that some people may be "supershedders" who spread huge amounts of viral particles.

Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:50:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Soldier's get "Most Wanted Iraqi" trading cards

Gary sez: "I just saw that the Department of Defense has issued US Soldiers decks of playing card-sized cards with the 55 most-wanted Iraqi leaders on them." Download them here (Warning: 22 MB PDF file). Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:11:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites, Warblogger and CNN reporter, captured (then released) in Iraq

Kevin Sites, CNN correspondent and blogger was captured by Iraqi Fedayeen soldiers and held at gunpoint today along with other CNN crewmembers. Thankfully, all were released. During the ordeal, which Sites says lasted about four hours, he and colleagues were told repeatedly that they would be killed. Their captors fired guns at them, destroyed equipment, and repeatedly told the CNN crew that they were about to be executed. Thanks to the quick thinking of their Kurdistani translator, he reported on CNN today, they were all eventually released.

CNN.com story here. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:24:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steal this barcode

Salon article about re-code.com, a site that lets people print out barcode stickers that they can attach to products in stores and get reduced prices. Basically, it's a sneaky way to shoplift. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:31:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elephant frees captive antelopes

"The matriarch of a herd of elephants in South Africa opened a gate with her trunk to free antelopes being held at a camp in the east of the country, conservationists said on Tuesday." Link Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:48:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple said to be in talks to buy Universal Music

The words "holy crap" come to mind:

In a pairing that would alter the architecture of the music business, Apple Computer Inc. is in talks with Vivendi Universal to buy Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, for as much as $6 billion, sources said.

Such a seemingly unlikely combination would instantly make technology guru Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, the most powerful player in the record industry.

Universal, which reaps about $6 billion in sales annually from artists such as 50 Cent, Shania Twain, U2 and Luciano Pavarotti, would be controlled by a maverick who revolutionized the computer market and coined the mantra "rip, mix, burn," which many in the music business read as an invitation to electronic piracy.

Link, Discuss, (via pho list)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:17:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Firms scramble to own "Shock and Awe" trademark

I'm shocked and awed. Noah blogs on Defense Tech:

One day after the start of Gulf War II, Sony rushed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in an attempt to register the phrase "Shock and Awe." The electronics giant is planning to use the term as the title to a new, combat-themed video game.

But Sony is one of 15 businesses that are trying to own the "Shock and Awe" phrase. A Texas pesticide company, an Ohio fireworks firm, a California t-shirt designer, and a New York maker of beer mugs and decorative plates all have filed applications.

The worst may be a Mansfield, Texas man who wants to control the "Shock and Awe" term, whether it's used to name "inflatable bath toys," "aftermarket automobile products," "alcoholic beverages," "smoking jackets," or "television programming."

I see the domain's already taken, too. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:43:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 10, 2003

100,000 downloads of Down and Out in the first 91 days

I'm on holidays for the weekend, but I just wanted to note that just before 9PM Pacific tonight, craphound.com served the 100,000th copy of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom to be downloaded from my site. It's been 91 days since I put the book online. I'm all over pleased. What a great way to start my vacation! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:50:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UC Berkeley Lab Notes

Smart Dust radios, quantum computing, greener chip fabs, and sensor networks from the Silk Road to the Dead Sea... in the latest issue of Lab Notes, my UC Berkeley College of Engineering research digest. Please check it out! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:25:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chernorbyl radiation turns worms into perverts

Irradiated mutant worms near Chernorbyl have switched from asexual reproduction to banging each others' wormy selves. Link Discuss (Thanks, Roland!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:36:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Drinking tea in zero-G

Fun-to-watch video of an astronaut eating blobs of tea with chopsticks on the International Space Station. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:07:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Babatunde Olatunji, Nigerian drum master and world music pioneer, dies at 76

The great Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji passed away on Sunday from complications related to diabetes.

His 1960 album Drums of Passion (Link with sound samples) sold over five million copies, and is considered by many to be the first "world music" record -- I've always hated that phrase, "world music," because it seems like such a lazy way to refer to everything "other," without recognizing the specific culture from which art emerges. Olatunji didn't make "world music," he played Nigerian music. But if calling him the godfather of "world music" means recognizing the fact that he introduced African music to pop and jazz audiences throughout the world, then I think that sounds just about right. I feel thankful for having had the opportunity to see him perfom live a few times when I was a teenager. The beauty of those performances will stay with me for a long time.

And he believed in peace. WP story about his death here, More about his life and work here, NPR tribute and audio archive (thanks, Stefan), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:18:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFUD: "security experts" report on the dangers of WiFi

Amazing bogus WiFi "security" study: Z/Yen set up two wireless access points and monitored activity on them. They report that 25% of the connections were "deliberate" (which, I assume, means made through selecting the SSID instead of inadvertently associating with the network because your card was set to connect to the strongest available signal) and that 71% of the connected users sent email.

Fair enough -- that sounds like the right kind of numbers for me. I know that my net-stumbling workflow consists of finding a network, fetching my mail, moving on, answering my mail, finding another network, downloading new mail and sending the reply email.

But the amazing thing is what Z/Yen and its client, RSA conclude: that the 25% of the people who deliberately associated with the network were "malicious," and that the 71% who sent email were sending spam. This is such a transparently, deliberately (heh) stupid conclusion, it boggles the mind: how can "deliberate" equate to "malicious?" How can "sending email" equate to "sending spam?"

We keep seeing this kind of WiFUD, and a lot of it comes from self-serving "security experts."

These experts' motivation is rather transparent: if you are in the business of selling security, you require customers who feel insecure. WiFi, by dint of its novelty and popularity, is a predictable target for shrill security warnings and a healthy source of potential revenue. We can only hope that no one takes these dishonest conclusions at face value. Link Discuss (via /.)

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

BBC News producer, war landmine victim, blogs amputation of foot

Stuart Hughes, a news producer with the BBC, is blogging the amputation of his foot after encountering a landmine in Iraq:

"In the early hours of this morning the strength that had kept me going for the past week evaporated. Until now, the sheer fact of being home, alive, kept my morale high and my spirit strong. Now, for the first time, I'm faltering.

Last night as I slept I dreamed everyday dreams -- I can't even remember now what they were. But in all of them I was walking around with my full complement of limbs. When I woke up it was the reality of my situation -- in hospital, drips in each arm, with a plaster cast around the stump that used to be my right foot, that seemed more dream like.

As dawn broke, so did the realisation that the road to full recovery will be long and tough, starting with two months in a wheelchair. I won't be going back to work on crutches in a week and I'll be reliant on those around me for a long time to come. And, as far as I'm aware, feet aren't like tree branches. They don't grow back."

update: Commenting on Hughes' wrenching online account, Dan Gillmor blogs today, "Now multiply what he's going through by thousands and tens of thousands, but subtract the medical care he's getting, and you have a sense of what a relatively few Americans and many, many, many Iraqis are feeling today. The ones who weren't killed, that is.... War is sometimes necessary. But it is always hellish."

"Link to Stuart Hughes' "Northern Iraq Weblog," Link to story on BBC News about his accident and recovery, and his observations on the deaths and injuries of other journalists covering the war, Discuss (thanks Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:15:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 9, 2003

DRM makes it damned hard on the disabled

Joe Clark has written a very good white-paper on the accessibility implications of Digital Rights Management technology. Summary: DRM makes it damned hard on the disabled.

For all accessibility "tracks" (captions or subtitles, or dubbing or audio-description recordings), DRM may prevent you from doing the following:

* Scanning or monitoring the tracks.
* Downloading them.
* Posting or publishing them, including doing so in online fora like the Web, mailing lists, or newsgroups.
* Rewriting, redoing, or re-creating them

Link Discuss

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

Exploding CD drives

An unforeseen consequence of very high-speed CD-ROM drives is that sometimes they spin the disks so fast, they explode.

I’m going to send it back to the manufacturer. With the CD pieces. I doubt they’ll do anything. It’ll be blamed on the user. I put the CD in wrong. Or I somehow compromised the overall inherent goodness of their product. I could talk to the record company, but that would be pointless. They would sue me for pirating and put me in jail with the college kids who set up that P2P server. Worse, I’d tell them during the interrogation that the reason why they’re suffering in sales is due to the fact that 98% of the music they put out is complete (Edited) (Edited) (Edited) (Edited) (Edited) (Edited) crud. Radio is a musician’s enemy these days.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:13:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Get Your War On

Very nice installment of Get Your War On for V-I Day. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:11:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robots behaving badly: dancing, skirt-chasing Robodex videos

BoingBoing reader "Freedom" gathered these video clips from the Robodex 2003 convention in Japan:

Overall Scenes (9.8 MB) (Link), Sony SDR-4X II Dancing (7 MB) (Link), Honda Asimo Chases Girls (6 MB) (Link), Epson Mini Robot Choreography (5 MB), (Link), Video clips from last years show (2002) are, as thumbnails, below this year's clips. Or all clips, some in Windows Media format, can be found here. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:12:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mid-century Scientology humor zine cover art gallery

Whimsical cover art from The Aberree, a Scientology humor zine from the 1950s and 1960s. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:23:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Have Space Suit Will Travel optioned by Potter-producer

David Heyman, the producer of the Harry Potter movies, has optioned the film rights to Heinlein's "Have Space Suit, Will Travel." Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:59:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Telcos' last-ditch fight against number-portability

The telcos and cellular carriers are going to court in a last-ditch effort to fight the November 24th deadline for number-portability. If they lose, we'll be able to take our phone numbers (even land-line numbers!) with us when we change carriers. Let's pray that they lose: the only reason the telcos get away with acting as shitty as they do is that losing your number when you change providers is such a hardship, so you stick around in these abusive relationships.

The telcos, of course, say that their business is already suffering so much that they couldn't survive if their customers could switch carriers when the telcos act so badly. Somehow, I can't work up a lot of sympathy for that position. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:39:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

President of MTU's open letter to RIAA

A lot of people have been trying to figure out why the RIAA decided to bring an infringement suit against four college students for hundreds of billions of dollars. Clearly, a suit worth 10 or 20 times the recording industry's gross annual income won't actually be paid off.

What's more, the universities have procedures in place for dealing with cases of infringement. If the studios believe that a student is breaking the law, they can send a DMCA notice (something that they have highly automated, so that they can send out thousands at a time) to the university and the university will take down the offending material.

It's clear to me that the reason for going after these students is to intimidate anyone who runs campus-net search tools. Most American colleges had campus-net search-engines (that students used for lots of purposes, including research, sharing free software, and exchanging other legitimate info) before this action; now they don't.

But the RIAA's actions did more than intimidate students. By ignoring procedure, they've declared war on American universities. And college adminstrators, who can never have been very comfortable with acting as the recording industry's cops, are wondering why the hell they've been bending over backwards to assist the RIAA.

The President of Michigan Technological University is steaming mad, and has written an open letter to the RIAA:

You have obviously known about this situation with Joe Nievelt for quite some time. Had you followed the previous methods established in notification of a violation, we would have shut off the student and not allowed the problem to grow to the size and scope that it is today. I am very disappointed that the RIAA decided to take this action in this manner. As a fully cooperating site, we would have expected the courtesy of being notified early and allowing us to take action following established procedures, instead of allowing it to get to the point of lawsuits and publicity.

It has been stated by your office that this is "a bump in the road" between the RIAA and Michigan Tech, and that we will move on from here. It is unfortunate that you choose to trivialize the problem in this manner. It is not a bump in the road for Joe Nievelt or Michigan Technological University.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:30:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gizmodo does Disneyland Paris

Peter Rojas of Gizmodo paid a visit to Disneyland Paris and made a point of getting a shot of himself in front of Phantom Manon, DLP's Haunted Mansion analog, just for my benefit. Thanks, Pete! Damn, Phantom Manor has a cool facade. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:05:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Voodoo is official in Haiti

Jean-Bertrand Aristede, President of Haiti, has recognized voodoo (practiced by three quarters of Haiti) as an official religion.

Aristede paid tribute to national hero Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of African slaves who rebelled against the French colonial government. In 1802, he was taken to France, where he died in prison in 1803.

Later that year, rebels overthrew Napoleon's troops and declared independence early in 1804, the first Latin American and Caribbean country to do so.

Link Discuss (via FARK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Matzoh granola: supposedly pretty good

Apparently, you can make a decent Passover-kosher granola by roasting matzoh with honey and nuts.

Imagine dry matzo broken into little pieces, double-baked with slivered almonds, coconut, honey, brown sugar, and margarine. It's entirely different from the usual flat, unleavened boards, and it might change Passover breakfasts forever.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hidden consequences of Disney's movie-on-demand service

Disney is launching a movie-on-demand service that will transmit encrypted movies over the air to set-top boxes. Viewers can purchase a code that will unlock and play the movies. The studio's making good noises:

"If we don't provide consumers with with our products in a timely manner, pirates will," [Eisner] said.

But I can't shake the feeling that this service is yet another means for the studios to grab control of technology. The set-top cable boxes for this service have a secret key that they use to authenticate themselves to the service, and a consortium will control those keys through licensing agreements (just like the keys in DVD players). This means that anyone who wants to build a set-top box will have to come to the consortium -- which will be controlled by the studios, who have a pretty crabbed vision of what fair use and the public's other rights in copyright consist of -- and negotiate for the license.

The Broadcast Flag proposal and the DVD licensing regime give us a good picture of how licensing negotiations are hotbeds of abuse. In the Broadcast Flag proposal, the studios are trying to push a regime where the only outputs and recording methods allowed in the devices will be technologies whose manufacturers sucked up to the studios by backing the Broadcast Flag proposal, and competing technologies will only be permitted if Hollywood gets what it wants from other manufacturers.

In the DVD world, licensees end up building crippled devices and software -- like Apple's DVD player, which disables screen-shot capability throughout the OS when a DVD is in the drive -- and enforcing anti-competitive price-fixing measures like region coding.

In both cases, the licensing bodies won't give permission for their keys to be embedded in open source technology, and require a "secure path" from the input to the output. This means that if you plan on inventing a Linux-based PVR that turns all video into DiVx files that can be easily moved from the set-top to a laptop or streamed to a device in another room, you'd better think again.

Which is a goddamned shame. A general-purpose set-top box (that users could install software on) could be far more useful than any consumer electronics device: the deaf could install software that adds fan-authored captioning during playback; foreign-language speakers could add secondary audio with translation; the blind could add descriptive audio tracks. What's more, you could install drivers for new recording devices (a low-cost DVD recorder that will copy movies to discs that play in your laptop or can be shown in a classroom), install software that lets you edit out highlight reels for research and criticism, and so on.

But in order to keep the secrets of Disney's crypto secure, an entire licensing regime will be created that will narrow the universe of possible set-top-box applications to those that the studios (the same entertainment industry that tried to kill the piano roll, the radio, the TV, the VCR and the Internet) feel comfortable with. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HDTV vs. VCD MPEG vs. DiVx

Raffi Krikorian is continuing his research into the improbability of HDTV creating new risks of Internet redistribution of Hollywood movies. The MPAA argues that HD signals will be captured by digital TV devices and retransmitted over the Internet in perfect high-resolution, without any loss or compression. As part of his research, Raffi's created an enormous graphic showing the difference between an HD image and the same image after it's compressed to VCD MPEG and DiVx (the formats most frequently used today by people who trade captured TV programs). It's a dramatic visualization of how currently traded files are shrunk and compressed miles below even standard-definition, and how unlikely it is that the availability of an HD source will make any difference to video-traders. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:36:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Novelty tunes bonanza

Amazing collection of MP3s of TV stars singing pop songs -- goes way beyond the traditional Shanter-does-Lucy-in-the-Sky-with-Diamonds, including such rarities as Tony Randall doing "Nature Boy," Jerry Springer doing "Mr. Tamborine Man," and Ed McMahon singing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls." Lots more weird-ass rarities there -- odd Beatles and Stairway to Heaven covers, songs about chickens, und zo weiter. Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Daily Show kicks azz

Good appreciation of Jon Stewart's Daily Show on Salon, contrasting it to the lameness of Politically Incorrect.

It helps (comedy, at least) to have plutocratic religious fanatics with imperialist ambitions occupying the White House, and "The Daily Show" has been at the forefront in finding a new way to make political humor in the age of Dubya. Some of that feels tentative: Stewart is still honing his persona. He's an everyman with the intelligence to spot a crock, the humility to ask questions and a nifty way of keeping his mouth shut to let the absurdity of the naked facts sink in. He does, however, occasionally smirk, though he seems to be morphing that mannerism into a daffy eye-rolling gesture reminiscent of Jack Benny.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:25:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anonymous donor tees up $50K/yr to support Bruce Perens' open source efforts

CNET reports that:

Bruce Perens has found what every open-source activist needs: a sugar daddy. A sponsor has provided Perens with a $50,000 annuity to support his advocacy for open-source organizations and his opposition to the software patents that he says are stymieing industry standards on which open-source groups depend.

"I'm very concerned about software patents," Perens said. "They remain a blocker for open-source software. It's really difficult for us to coexist with them, and what we're trying to do right now is mitigate the problem in the standards arena by encouraging standards organizations to engineer standards that are royalty-free."

Link Discuss (thanks, Christine)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:21:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More robot pics from Robodex 2003

Blog photo-album with more snapshots from Robodex 2003. Roland says, "You'll find there pictures of many new robots, including Banryu, developed by Tmsuk, Inc., which will control your home while you're away, Doki, the world's first gender-aware robot, built by Intelligent Earth, from Scotland, or the Comet III, a one ton mine-clearance robot from Chiba University. There are also pictures of new machines from Sony, Mitsubishi or Fujitsu among others." Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:14:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Intel programmer Maher (Mike) Hawash: not free

According to a court order released on Monday afternoon, Maher (Mike) Hawash -- the Intel coder detained as a witness by federal authorities in an apparent terrorism probe -- will remain in jail until at least the end of this month.

For the last couple of weeks, Hawash has been held at a federal prison in Sheridan, about 50 miles south of Portland. Hawash, a 38-year-old American citizen of Arab descent, was arrested by the FBI's Terrorist Task Force on the morning of March 20 as he appeared for work at Intel. Hawash will continue to be detained as a "material witness" pending a grand jury investigation, the nature of which remains a secret, according to an order issued by federal Judge Robert Jones. The order compels authorities to present Hawash to a grand jury before April 25, or get a deposition from him. The order was issued following a secret detention hearing at a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, on Monday morning. Another secret detention hearing will be held on April 29, the order said. The judge's order is the first confirmation from authorities that Hawash is in custody as a material witness.

Link to WIRED News story, Link to copy of judge's order, photos from Monday's rally in support of Hawash's release. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:05:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, April 8, 2003

Cool film adaptation of a horror Manga: Uzumaki, the movie

Via Wiley Wiggins' blog:

The small working-class town of Kurozu-cho, much like that of Lumberton in David Lynch's Blue Velvet , appears normal on the surface: School children cause trouble in class, young lovers complain about their problems, the police chase after rule-breaking teenagers. However, things are clearly not what they seem. Long time friends and potential elopers Kirie and Suichi begin to notice odd happenings around their school and town. Shuichi's father develops an unhealthy and contagious obsession with spiral shaped objects. He collects shells and pottery, steals swirling street signs and spends hours absorbed in the act of videotaping a snail's shell. One of Kirie's schoolmates, yearning to be noticed, comes into school with her hair weaved into an ever expanding lattice of spiral locks. Male schoolmates begin to transform into slow-moving, slime-covered snail-people. Kirie and Shuichi watch as the town's spiral posession and obsession leads to a series of mysterious suicides. With a local investigative reporter, Kirie and Shuichi work to solve the dangerous mystery of Kurozu-cho, the Dragon-Fly Pond and its Uzumaki. However, as the three of them search for an answer, they draw closer and closer to these mysterious disasters until the spiral threatens to swallow them whole.

The film was released in 2000 and doesn't appear to be in theatrical release anymore. If anyone knows more about theatrical, video or DVD release, post it in the discuss forum! Update: You can buy the VCD here or here, DVD (for Region 3) here, and if you don't have a region-free DVD player go here. And Lia says, "I first saw Uzumaki on the Sundance Channel in October of last year. They call it "Spiral" and it's on the schedule for Wednesday, April 24 at 12:40 a.m. EST." (thanks, druidbros!) Link, Discuss (Thanks, Susannah!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:52:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LAPD used police computer systems to look up celebrities

LA officials are looking into potential legal falllout from an officer's use of the LAPD computer network to get data about celebrities. The city recently paid the officer's ex-girlfriend $387,500 to settle a lawsuit alleging that he used police computers to investigate her and hundreds of others, and sold the data to tabloids for a tidy profit.

For six years, Officer Kelly Chrisman used Los Angeles Police Department computers to look up confidential law enforcement records on celebrities and other high-profile people, including Sharon Stone, Courteney Cox Arquette, Sean Penn and Halle Berry.

Chrisman says he was just carrying out orders from superiors, but a lawsuit recently settled by the city for nearly $400,000 alleged that the officer had accessed the records to sell the information to tabloids. Now Los Angeles officials are assessing the city's potential liability. According to internal LAPD documents, between 1994 and 2000 Chrisman tapped computer files on scores of celebrities, including Meg Ryan, Kobe Bryant, O.J. Simpson, Larry King, Drew Barrymore, Dionne Warwick, Farrah Fawcett, Cindy Crawford, Elle Macpherson and Berry Gordy.

registration-free Link to LA Times story, Discuss (via politech)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:34:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Emerging Man: an Emerging Technology campout

Danny, Quinn and Gilbert have decided to turn their San Jose back yard into a campsite for people attending the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confernece. In honor of Burning Man, they've decided to call the event "Emerging Man," and they've got room for ten.

Differences Between Burning Man and Emerging Man

Instead of Labor Day weekend, Emerging Man will be from Apr 21- Apr 27, to coincide with Emerging Tech

Instead of being a neoprimitive celebration of someone's girlfriend running off with their best mate, it's a little micro-campsite for people who spent all their money buying a ticket for EmergingTech and so need somewhere cheap to stay (or just don't want to live in another expensive hotel room or spend three hours commuting from San Francisco )

Instead of being in the hot Nevada desert, it'll be in our quite nice back garden behind OurHouse

Instead of costing hundreds of dollars, it will be free (a daily NappyTax may be charged)

Much closer to civilisation - you'll be PrettyCloseToEmergingTech and VeryCloseToSanJose

No exciting theme camps, though you can expect a lot of SocialHacking - and BiellasFamousReadingGroup will be down at the weekend.

No burning (although there will be a BarbequeOfSorts )

And we're looking at the max ten people, not eighteen gazillion, so BookNowToAvoidDisappointment

Link Discuss (Thanks, Danny!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:05:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help Dan Gillmor write his new book!

Dan Gillmor, one of the smartest and most principled journalists working today, and an avid blogger, is writing a book called "Making the News," about the relationship of blogging to journalism. He's writing the book interactively, soliciting comments from his readers on the outline and drafts. He's just fired the first salvo, a complete outline of the book, and he's invited all of us to read it, bash it around, and help him revise it.

To that end, I hope you will become a part of this book, too. You can start by reading the outline below. My publisher, O'Reilly & Associates, agreed that this was a good idea.

How can you join the project? Please tell me what you think of these ideas. More that that, please tell me about specific things you know about that would a) help illustrate the concepts; b) refute what I'm saying; and/or c) provide further nuance and context.

My e-mail is already at a volume where I can't keep up with everything. So I must apologize in advance if I don't get back to you quickly when you tell me things. I do promise to recognize your contributions in the publication itself, and on this site. One way I'll do that is to write a chapter describing this process.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:58:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Org pays crack addicts $200 to get sterilized

If you're addicted to drugs, CRACK (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity) will pay you $200 to undergo sterilization. Link Discuss

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

Vertigo: then and now

This guy has gone out and taken photos of San Francisco scenes appearing in Hitchcock's Vertigo presenting the old (1958) with the new (2003). Excellent! Link Discuss (via Irregular Orbit)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:40:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gonzo patriotism: "freedom-everything!"

Link, Discuss, (via Geisha)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:19:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gallery of 2003 Pulitzer-prize winning photos

Online gallery of images from Don Bartletti of the LA Times, who was honored with the 2003 Pulitzer prize for photography. The images in this collection document journeys of some of the thousands of Central Americans who stow away for some 1,500 miles on the tops and sides of trains to reach the United States, desperate to escape poverty. Link, Discuss, (thanks, Susannah!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:05:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Geek garments: new book "Techno Fashion"

Spotted in Hint magazine:

From digital-display dresses to remote control couture, computerized clothing and i-Wear (intelligent wear), in this new release London-based journalist and writer Bradley Quinn investigates the fusion of fashion with communication technology, electronic textiles, and sophisticated design innovations that express new ideas about appearance, construction and functionalism... Through detailed studies of catwalk collections and interviews with designers- ranging from mavericks like Alexander McQueen to artistic pioneers like Hussein Chalayan and visionaries like Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake-Quinn assesses the impact of this new wave on fashion. Charting the disappearance of the traditional woman of fashion (see Quinn's lively section on the artist Lucy Orta), he explores the boundaries between clothing, body and machine, and reevaluates the ethics and lifestyles designated by codes of dress. His closing chapter on sportswear, from NASA to Nike, hones in on elements and ideas of style and function, utility and motion.

Link to Hintmag review, Link to book purchase, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:50:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Matrix: Reloaded's awesome CGI

Steve Silberman -- far and away my favorite Wired feature-writer these days -- wrote a terrific piece on the CG developments made by the production crew on The Matrix: Reloaded.

If the dojo fight in The Matrix was a kung fu sonata, the Burly Brawl is a symphony. Neo tears the sign from the ground and wields it as a kendo sword, vaulting pole, and battering ram. A woman walking by can't believe what she's seeing; suddenly her body is hijacked, she drops her grocery bag, and another Smith charges into the fray. Whole battalions of Smiths arrive, mount assaults, attack in waves, scatter, regroup, and head back for more. (At ESC, one massive pile-on was dubbed the "Did someone drop a quarter?" shot.) In the thick of it, Neo is dancing, chucking black-tied bodies skyward, pivoting around the signpost, and using shoulders as stepping-stones over the raging river of whup-ass.

Fans will wear out their remotes replaying the scene on DVD, but what they won't see, even riding the Pause button, is a transition that happens early on. When Neo and Agent Smith walk into the courtyard, they are the real Reeves and Weaving. But by the time the melee is in full effect, everyone and everything on the screen is computer-generated - including the perspective of the camera itself, steering at 2,000 miles per hour and screaming through arcs that would tear any physical camera apart.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:38:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wincing causes empathy, not the other way around

UCLA neuroresearchers conclude that physically mimicking others' activity (wincing when someone falls off a bike, for example) triggers large amounts of neural activity in the insula, one of the brain's centers of emotion. In other words, you don't wince because you feel sympathy -- you feel sympathy because you wince. This reminds me of some of the received wisdom from the neuro-linguistic programming camp, the idea of creating subconscious rapport by matching physical characteristics with your target (i.e., matching breathing).

UCLA neuroscientists using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are the first to demonstrate that empathetic action, such as mirroring facial expressions, triggers far greater activity in the emotion centers of the brain than mere observation...

The findings explain why humans vary in their ability to understand the pain, joy and anger of others, and how damage to this neural circuit might impair the ability to empathize with the emotions of others, as often seen in patients with autism, a socially isolating psychiatric disease.

Link Discuss

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

Hereteofore unsuspected atmospheric ecosystem

There's an entire ecosystem of microbal organisms that live in the clouds, according to recent research.

There is, they say, growing evidence that bacteria, fungal spores, and viruses may spend large amounts of time -- even their entire lives -- in the air, riding clouds across the planet.

And they don't just inhabit the clouds -- they may also be creating them. Certainly many of the clouds' newly discovered inhabitants are exquisitely designed to create the maximum number of ice crystals, the basic building blocks of clouds. Some Darwinian biologists even argue that the bugs may have evolved for this very job.

''The ecology of the atmosphere is one of the last great frontiers of biological exploration on earth,'' says Bruce Moffett of the University of East London in England. Late this year, he plans to conduct the first systematic bug hunt in the clouds above England.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Posting spammers' info on the Web isn't harrassment

A judge has thrown out a spammer's demand to have his business address and phone number (which are also his home address and phone number) removed from the Web.

Moore, who denies he is a spammer because he contracts with third parties to market his products, asked the court to force Uy to pull down the site.

Anne Arundel District Court Judge Robert C. Wilcox declined, saying there was no evidence that Uy had harassed Moore directly, which Moore also had alleged.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Henry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:56:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Epcot's France under seige by rowdy Americans

MousePlanet reports that rowdy Americans have been screaming epithets at the staff at Epcot's France Pavillion.

Fearing an anti-France backlash because of the French government's strong stance against the U.S. in the Iraq war, Disney is quietly increasing the security presence around the France pavilion at Epcot, and reassigning some of the young French nationals with French-speaking Italians and Canadians. Based on the behavior of some visitors to the area, unfortunately, park officials seem justified in having serious concerns. One MousePlanet staff member recently witnessed a group of rowdy American men storm through the pavilion as they shouted epithets and made obscene gestures at the cast members.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Oliver!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:53:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The secret history of VisiCalc

Bob Frankston, the lead programmer for VisiCalc and co-inventor of the computerized spreadsheet, has posted a long history of the project. It's fascinating reading, a kind of computer paleontology, describing the origin of commercial software products.

Before discussing keyboards, it's worth noting that back in 1979 people viewed the keyboard as an impediment to using computers. After all, only secretaries could type and the rest of us need to be able to talk to the computer. Hence the decades spent on trying to get computers to understand speech. It turns out that most people could type (at least those who used spreadsheets) since it was a basic skill necessary for getting through college. In fact, speech is a very problematic way to interact with a spreadsheet. In fact, the spreadsheet itself is used as a communications vehicle rather than speech.

The Apple ][ had a simple keyboard that only had upper case letters and only two arrow keys. There were no interrupts nor a clock. If the user typed a character before the keyboard input buffer was emptied it would be lost.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:46:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Analysis of RIAA's charges against Princeton student

One of Felten's students has written an analysis of the charges the RIAA brought against a Princeton student for operating a campus-wide search-engine. It's very good, addressing the baselessness of the contributory infringement claim.

The Wake case shares some elements with the Napster case, if only because both services enable users to search for shared music. But they diverge in several legally significant respects:

* Napster supplied file-serving as well as file-searching-and-indexing capability to its users via its software and servers. Wake-like systems possesses only the searching-and-indexing capability. The file-serving was provided by third-party SMB client software, which is part of the Windows operating system used by many of Wake's alleged users.

* Napster permitted users to share only MP3-encoded sound files. Wake-like systems index all files, regardless of format. This gives those systems systems a substantially larger set of non-infringing uses.

* Napster's clientele could share files only in the context of the Napster network. Wake's alleged clientele could share files over the Princeton network without even knowing that Wake existed. In fact, file-sharing on the Princeton network was widespread well before Wake's alleged author arrived on the Princeton campus as a freshman. Even the name "wake.princeton.edu" speaks to this: it is an allusion to the better-known "sleep.princeton.edu", an indexing service described in the Daily Princetonian that began operating before the defendant even came to Princeton.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nematode worms' untold proliferation

Good quote about nematode worms:

"Nematode worms, he says, account for four of every five animals living on Earth -- and are so abundant that if the planet's surface vanished, its "ghostly outline" could still be made out in the biomass of nematodes, almost all of species unknown."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:25:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Terry Jones making Dahl's BFG

Ain't It Cool News reports that Terry Jones is adapting Roald Dahl's BFG for film, writing the screenplay that he intends to direct. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:24:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 7, 2003

Do surgical masks stop SARS? Ok, how about the Louis Vuitton ones?

Short answer, no. They're about as effective a method for virus control as prayer/holding your breath/crossing your fingers is for birth control. Jon Cohen explains in Slate here, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:28:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

(Anti)War Injury

This is a brutal image of a woman who says she was hit by a "police weapon" (rubber bullets?) during an anti-war protest today in Oakland. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gabe!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:48:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Get unwired! Wired magazine's special issue on WiFi

Paul Boutin writes about this month's issue of Wired, to which we each contributed multiple items. Update: BoingBoing's founder Mark Frauenfelder was also a contributor!

The current issue of Wired mag includes a Wi-Fi primer, bundled as a 60-page mini-magazine that pops out to keep or, better yet, pass around. UnWired features articles on understanding the Wi-Fi landscape and setting up your own network. BoingBoing regular Xeni Jardin and I were both so enthusiastic about UnWired that we contributed two articles each.

Xeni explains our use of the radio spectrum as it is, and as it could be. I put aside my usual snobbery about doing how-to articles and business landscapes to hammer out a long getting started primer written with my family in Maine in mind. It lists specific products and services - Linksys, AirPort, Starbucks, Surf and Sip - that I know will work for those who follow the instructions, yet won't bankrupt families that can't rush out to buy a new laptop. Or businesses that can't splurge on T1 infrastructure. I also list "25 Companies to Watch," a cocktail party primer rather than an investment guide. Most of the blog-reading crowd will find much of this familiar material, so here's a suggestion: Buy Wired for Steve Silberman's Matrix story on the cover, but yank out UnWired and give it to someone who hasn't yet cut the Ethernet cord. Remember when you installed Mosaic for someone you loved back in 1994? It's that time all over again.

Update: mag contents now online here, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:35:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hotties and 'bots for a cause: SRL Nudie Calendar now available online

Boingboing pal Karen Marcelo of Survival Research Laboratories says: "The SRL Nudie Calendar is available for purchase online, right here. Quantities are limited. Each copy is $25.00 plus $2.65 for tax, shipping, handling. All proceeds go to Hoverdrum creator Tim North to help cover expenses in his time of need -- Tim was recently diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer. Images from the event are forthcoming, check back on this website to see them soon."

Never before have robots been depicted in the presence of such tantalizingly hot human company. In the interest of keeping BoingBoing relatively work-safe, I'll refrain from posting any more guaranteed-to-make-your-palms-sweaty thumbnails. I'd like to recommend the -- [sigh] -- particularly fine male posterior of July, and the remote-controlled pinups of September. But sorry, you'll have to buy your own copy to see 'em.

We love you, Tim. Link to calendar purchase site, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:41:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Today is Astroboy's birthday!

BoingBoing reader Eric and friends celebrated the Japanese techno-animation hero's birthday in San Francisco -- evidence in the photo below, photo gallery here. A snapshot of the robot boy's birth is here. More from the New York Times:

Back in 1951, Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese cartoonist, dreamed up Astro Boy, a lovable robot with laser fingertips, searchlight eyes, machine guns in his black shorts, and rocket jets flaming from his red boots. To make the 100,000-horsepower tyke seem really futuristic, the artist gave his creation a truly far-out birth date: April 7, 2003. Tokyo may not yet have flying cars, but Astro Boy's official birthday on Monday marks the coming of age of Japan's animation industry. No longer marginalized, the bare-chested rocket boy with the spiky hair, known in Japanese as Tetsuwan Atomu, is being hailed with fireworks, costume parades, intellectual seminars, an exhibit in Parliament and a $1 million diamond-and ruby-encrusted likeness in a downtown department store display.

"We Japanese want to live alongside robots, that is why we love Astro Boy," said Takao Imai, a 72-year-old lawyer, dressed in a white smock and a white wig of cotton curls to look like Professor Elefun, Astro Boy's eccentric scientist protector. Carrying a white cotton Astro Boy birthday cake, Mr. Imai was preparing to parade with his 5-year-old grandson Akinojo Ogura, who had just wowed a preparade rally with a spirited rendition of the Astro Boy song.

Update: Real-life astro-boys (cute babies dressed up as robots for Astroboy celebrations in Japan) here. link to NYT story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:24:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More cool photos from Robodex convention in Japan this weekend

Japanese PC Watch has posted tons of groovy robot pinup pics from this year's Robodex 2003 Trade Show, which took place in Japan last Thursday through Sunday. And the Japanese technology news site PC Watch Impress now has more great photos, too. Featured Robots include the Sony SDR-4X II, Honda Asimo, Pino, ApriAlpha, Wakamaru, Morph3, Hoap II, and more. Most of text on that site is in Japanese, but who needs copy when you've got images like these: Robodex 2003 Robot Photos I, part II, part III. (via I4U) Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:16:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A MeFi for ad-people

AdRag is a pretty amazing advertising community site, with over 10,000 ads online and discussion boards galore. Marco calls it "a MetaFilter for ad- and ad-obsessed people." Link Discuss (Thanks, Marco!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:04:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ObsessiveConsumption, a compulsive purchase-log

ObsessiveConsumption is a design grad-student's project to document every single thing she purchases, from muffins to sofas: every single purchase is logged to a website with a photo and a receipt, and the photo/receipt combo are stuck to a giant mosiac wall in a glassine envelope. Compulsives make the world go 'round.

This is how Obsessive Consumption works. I take a picture of the item, keep the receipt, store the picture and the receipt in a glassine envelope, mark the outside of the envelopewith the date and then rank it according to myoverall satisfaction. Some envelopes contain mor e than just a photo of the purchase and it'sreceipt. As I flip through the months, certain objects contain memories that I wouldn't have normally remembered if I hadn't been doing this project. Some purchases embarrass me,some make me sad, and others contain minute moments that would have been lost if I didn't have the pictures to remind me of them. Other items have been lost, eaten, thrown or given away, but I still have the photo of the item. I own a part of the history of the object.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Max!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:58:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Farber/Faulhaber telecomms policy webcast tomorrow

Dave Farber and Gary Faulhaber (former CTO and Chief Economist of the FCC) will deliver a lecture tomorrow at CMU on "The Regulatory Landscape for Telecommunications" at 12:30PM Eastern Daylight Time, which will be webcast. Looks meaty. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rare Neal Stephenson speech on May 1

On May 1 at 4:30 Eastern Daylight Time, Neal Stephenson will deliver a live lecture at CMU in Pittsburgh that will be simultaneously webcast. Stephenson's notoriously shy about appearing at conventions or giving speeches -- I've only heard him speak once, when he picked up the Hugo award for Diamond Age -- so this is a rare treat. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:46:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spammer suing anti-spammer for invading privacy

An anti-spam activist has published the name, address and phone-number of a notorious spammer to the Web. Now the spammer is suing the activist to have the information taken down, because he's getting pissed off at tall the junk-mail and crank-calls being directed his way by other spam-haters. Gotta admire his chutzpah.

Francis Uy, a self-described computer geek from Ellicott City, decided to fight back by employing a tactic increasingly used by a small cadre of e-mail users fed up with spam: Outing spammers by posting their addresses and phone numbers on the Internet, enabling network operators to block their e-mail or to sue them.

But Uy's target is counterattacking, resulting in a court date today in one of the more personal and unusual spam litigation cases to date. George Allen Moore Jr. of Linthicum argues that Uy's site is harassment and wants it pulled off the Internet.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Henry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gay guide to Disney parks

Queens in the Kingdom is a gay and lesbian guide to Disneyland and Walt Disney World, fillled with queer-oriented trivia about the attractions and surroundings:

Alice in Wonderland
Overall Rating: [FOUR STARS]
Attraction Debut: 1958
For our money the best of the dark rides, Alice takes guests through a Technicolor, kaleidoscopic Wonderland. But can we just point out that that girl Alice is a circuit queen–fag hag? Look at the company she keeps: Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum? The Mad Hatter and the March Hare? A fastidious rabbit and a massive queen? Come on. And let’s not forget about the “magic cookies” and pieces of mushroom she ingests. Give that girl a glow stick and send her twirling.

Fairy Fact: Alice’s voice belongs to Kathryn Beaumont, who recorded the role first for the film in 1951, then for the ride in 1958, and again for the ride’s renovation in 1984. P.S. She’s also Wendy in Peter Pan.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:40:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool-looking Korean animated feature

Wonderful Days is a really hot-looking Korean animated feature film. The high-rez trailer on the site is wild. Link Discuss (Thanks, morpheus!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:40:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC's lectures on cognition, consciousness and the brain

The BBC's Reith lectures are a series of learned and fascinating lay-oriented educational pieces about the relationship of the human brain to conciousness and cognition. They're proceeding on a weekly schedule, and the Beeb is posting the entire text of the lecture along with the full audio and video clips. The first installment, Phantoms in the Brain, conducted by V.S. Ramachandran, is up now. It's totally engrossing -- there're about five science-fiction-novels' worth of material there.

A patient I saw not long ago who had been in a car accident, had sustained a head injury and was in a coma for about a couple of weeks. Then he came out of this coma and he was quite intact neurologically when I examined him. But he had one profound delusion - he would look at his mother and say "Doctor, this woman looks exactly like my mother but she isn't, she is an imposter".

Now why would this happen? Now the important thing is this patient who I will call David is completely intact in other respects. Now to understand this disorder, you have to first realise that vision is not a simple process. When you open your eyes in the morning, it's all out there in front of you. It's easy to assume that it's effortless and instantaneous but in fact you have this distorted upside down image in your retina exciting the photoreceptors and the messages then go through the optic nerve to the brain and then they are analysed in thirty different visual areas, in the back of your brain. And then you finally after analysing all the individual features, you identify what you're looking at. Is it your mother, is it a snake, is it a pig, what is it? And that process of identification takes place in a place which we call the fusiform gyrus which as we have seen is damaged in patients with face blindness or prosopognosia...

Now what's happened in this patient? What we suggest is that maybe what's gone wrong is that the fusiform gyrus and all the visual areas are completely normal in this patient. That's why when he looks at his mother, he says "oh yeah, it looks like my mother", but the wire, to put it crudely, the wire that goes from the amygdala to the limbic system, to the emotional centres, is cut by the accident. So he looks at his mother and he says - "hey, it looks just like my mother, but if it's my mother why is it I don't experience this warm glow of affection (or terror, as the case may be). There's something strange here, this can't possibly be my mother, it's some other strange woman pretending to be my mother". It's the only interpretation that makes sense to his brain given the peculiar disconnection.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Alaina!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:34:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Home soda-fountain HOWTO

Here's a HOWTO on installing a soda-fountain at home, a geek folk-art project that combines the best of case-modding (including liquid cooling!) with caffeine-delivery-systems. On that note, wouldn't it be cool to see a Junkyard Wars episode where the challenge was to build an espresso machine? Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How Joey's blog saved his ass

Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla posted a blog entry last week about how great his new girlfriend is, how fine it was to be dating a programmer girl-geek with a CS degree and a sweet job running the Alliance/Atlantis site she had. His comments-section was full of encouraging notes from his friends, glad to see him so happy.

But the next day, a stranger emailed him with the news that his girlfriend was not what she seemed: a recovering addict who abandoned her children, a compulsive liar and identity thief, a chameleon who lied about her education, employment and technical abilities. Joey met with the stranger and got the whole story, and confronted his erstwhile girlfriend.

She denied it all, but couldn't even answer the most basic technical questions. Finally, in a fit of Columbo-like suspicion, Joey asked her a trick question -- a very, very clever trick question that I won't spoil for you here -- and realized that his whistle-blower was telling the truth. Joey got the hell out of the relationship, saved from involvement with this very broken and creepy person by his blog. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:13:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If MSFT was Halliburton, Iraq's post-war regime would be Windows-based

Lovely little science-fictional vignette by John M. Ford on Electrolite:

REDMOND, WA--Microsoft Corporation today announced a high-level arrangement with the U.S. State Department to restructure postwar Iraq as a Windows-based application.

The project, known as the Very Large Application Development In Multiple Iraqi Regions [VLADIMIR], would organize the country into a set of departments, or folders, linked by e-mail, instant messaging, and streaming video. The temporary occupation government would rule through a simple point-and-click interface.

The impact on the average Iraqi citizen is difficult to estimate at this time, but Xbox Live! will be made available at no charge to all citizens of Iraq, provided they sign an oath not to mod the consoles. MSN will be offered at a competitive price when the society is ready.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:06:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Real-time translation of foreign language TV such as Al Jazeera

From John Markoff in today's NY Times:

Most Americans likely have difficulty understanding the broadcasts of Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, but several government agencies now can watch it while simultaneously receiving an English translation of the programming. Virage Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., a maker of Internet video technologies, has recently supplied several unnamed United States intelligence agencies with a system that will provide real-time voice recognition and English translation of foreign-language news broadcasts.

The system, which was financed last year by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, can run on any fast personal computer, generating scrolling text displays of both Arabic and translated English text. DARPA is conducting a research project known as Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization, whose aim is to provide English speakers with working translations of languages like Arabic and Chinese.

Link to NYT story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:55:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, April 6, 2003

Astronauts test robot blood in outer space

NASA article on studies taking place onboard the International Space Station about fluids that may one day flow through the veins of robots and help buildings resist earthquakes. Known as magnetorheological (or "MR") fluids, they harden or change shape when they sense the presence of a magnetic field.

You can make some of this exotic stuff at home. Just mix some powdered iron filings with a thick liquid like corn oil, and presto: a simple MR fluid. Hold a magnet nearby and the bits of iron will line up end-to-end; they form a rigid lattice that stiffens the mixture. Take the magnet away and the fluid will relax again.

Link to story, streaming audio, and snapshots, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:39:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

moment of digital art zen: destroyevil.com, lovekatie.com

All I know about All Systems Go and Goal is that they're cool and hilarious. That, and the fact that both sites are the work of an American digital artist named Katie Bush, who "explores the possiblities of ready-made clip art in a warped, funny and satirical reevaluation of the American Dream....unsubtle colors, mass-produced clip art and the fast, low-tech animations emphasize the cheap, throwaway culture that Americans are nurtured on." Discuss (Thanks, Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:22:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robots, cellphones: two great tastes that taste great together

The nooper.com folks have just updated their "Showcase of Japanese Keitai Culture" gallery with photos from this weekend's Robodex convention in Japan. Juergen says the snapshots "showcase the inter-connection between Robotics and Keitai technology -- if it's not about live video streaming to a Keitai through robots' eyes, than at least cute robots make popular targets for Keitai cameras."

At left, a young Robodex attendee snaps a photo of the undisputed star of Robodex 2003 -- Honda's Asimo robot -- with her cameraphone. Link to nooper.com's Keitai photo gallery, Robodex website, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:48:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mesmerizing Rube-Goldberg Honda ad

The new Honda ads feature a brilliant Rube-Goldberg machine made out of Honda parts, an hypnotic game of Mousetrap in which fragments of automobile pivot, twist, bump and squirt a long chain-reaction that is totally mesmerizing. Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:46:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

E-sheep creator on how anti-war activists are characterized

Patrick Farley -- brilliant creator of e-sheep, The Spiders, The Guy I Almost Was, and other wonderful, thought-provoking genre cartoons -- has posted a great prose piece, a parable about the characterization of anti-war activists. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

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

New Yorker hotel's new anti-privacy policy

Dan Gillmor reports on the new "security" measures that prevail at the Ramada New Yorker hotel -- an historic old pile that is owned by the Moonies and was Nicola Tesla's home in his twilight years -- that hosted this year's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference.

The New Yorker (along with many other NYC hotels) has instituted a new policy that requires all guests to allow their credits cards and drivers' licenses to be photocopied and placed on file, seemingly indefinitely. As Dan points out, this is a recipe for identity theft, and in no meaningful way can be said to increase security.

I stay at a lot of hotels, and I've started asking, at reservation-time, what the ID requirements are for check-in, and asking the manager to explain the reasoning for them: what is the threat posed by failure to photocopy photo ID that is addressed by taking a copy? I don't know that it does any good, but I think it's important to ask people who want to take away some of your privacy to explain their reasoning -- what's the threat and how does this fix it?

Even more important is to know how the hotel proposes to keep your personal information safe and secure -- because there is a real, demonstrable threat to privacy that arises when copies of your identification are left with strangers. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:39:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Permanent war means permanent erosion of liberties

Dan Gillmor's Sunday column presents a pessimistic view of the future of civil liberties. While civil liberties have ebbed and flowed in past wars, the permanent "war on terrorism," which lacks any kind of victory condition, seems unlikely to ever reliquinish the Constitutional rights that have been claimed in its name.

The Bush administration's attitude, assisted by a Congress that long since abandoned any commitment to liberty, is that government has the right to know absolutely everything about you and that government can violate your fundamental rights with impunity as long as the cause is deemed worthy.

You, on the other hand, have absolutely no right to know what the government is doing in your name and with your money, unless the information is deemed harmless by people who have every motive to cover up misdeeds. Bush and his people have turned secrecy into a mantra, and too few people recognize the danger that poses to our freedoms, much less our pocketbooks.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:31:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kerry on supporting troops

Senator John Kerry describes the Bush administration's one-sided approach to "supporting troops," which seems to consist of lambasting anyone who decries the war as unsound policy while simultaneously slashing veteran's benefits and education for military families.

Unfortunately, this administration has failed to honor the service of citizens who are doing what's right. After Sept. 11, Americans wanted to contribute and to serve. This administration told them to go shopping. They have cut AmeriCorps when we should be expanding it so every young person has the opportunity to perform national service. But nothing flies in the face of the values of duty and service more than what this administration is doing when it comes to fulfilling our obligation to our troops, our veterans, and their families. We can do better -- and our soldiers deserve no less...

And at the same time that American soldiers are engaged in battle at home, this administration is proposing substantial cuts in federal school aid to children of military families. As we learned the hard way after Vietnam, our duty to our troops doesn't end when the battle is won. Those that put their lives on the line have earned a lifetime of support. And America must live up to that commitment.

Yet, two months ago, this administration announced it would suspend enrollment in the healthcare system of at least 160,000 qualified veterans. And now they want to deny another 230,000 veterans the healthcare they deserve.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:27:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Profiteers line up to sell Feds "security" tech

The new security-czar is so overwhelmed with profiteering snake-oil vendors that he's no longer able to answer his own phone.

An industry-supported institute called the Homeland Security Research Corporation, in San Jose, Calif., predicts that overall public and private spending on domestic security will jump to $120 billion to $180 billion in 2008 from $65 billion this year.

Another trade group, the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association of Arlington, Va., says its tabulation shows that federal spending on domestic-security technology will reach $13 billion in the current fiscal year and rise to $14.6 billion in the 2008 fiscal year, a figure that does not include inflation...

"The money is just beginning to flow," said Bruce Aitken, a Washington lawyer and lobbyist who is president of the Homeland Security Industries Association, a trade group that has signed up more than 100 companies as members since it was incorporated in July. They include the giant government contractors Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Bechtel and Fluor.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:23:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, April 5, 2003

More Hong Kong anti-SARS facemask couture

Link to Times Online story, via Trademark Blog, Discuss (Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl -- who wonders aloud if there's a market opportunity for Puma here?)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:19:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hot, sweaty, scandalous: Bikram yoga copyright clash

Laywergram... nastygram... yogagram? Salon story today on eccentric yoga entrepreneur and apparently hot-tempered fella Bikram Choudhury, and his efforts to enforce copyrights on the fastest-growing style of yoga in America. Mr. Choudhury has copyrighted the poses, and threatens to sue anyone who teaches them without his permission.

"From the business side, I kind of understand it," says Judith Hanson Lasater, a prominent Bay Area yoga instructor who has been teaching since 1971. "But from the yoga side I think it's really sad." Mom-and-pop studios across the country, owned by people like the Morrisons who feel they are doing a service by helping to disseminate the teachings of yoga, are outraged by Choudhury's hubris. "Yoga is an old philosophy and an old tradition," says Tony Sanchez, who opened a Bikram Yoga studio in San Francisco in 1985. "It's ridiculous to have someone claiming that these are their postures."

Choudhury, 56, is a yoga guru so brash that he has been known to compare himself to Superman and Buddha, teach from a throne wearing nothing but a tiny Speedo and a headset mike, and proclaim his style as "the only yoga." When asked how he could make such drastic statements, he told Business 2.0 magazine: "Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me." Perhaps because of his erratic, grandiose behavior, the hundreds of cease-and-desist letters he sent to studios across the country were remarkably effective. Most studios either met his demands, stopped teaching Bikram classes and using the Bikram name, or shuffled around the standard 26-pose sequence.

Link to Salon story (registration required), Discuss (Thanks, Mara!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:13:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Portland Hearing, rally Monday for detained former Intel employee Mike Hawash

Lisa Rein sez:

I just spoke to Steven McGeady, the friend and former employer of Mike Hawash, a long-time US citizen who has been imprisoned under a secret warrant as a material witness by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Portland, Oregon. So far Mike has been held for over 14 days (since Thu, March 20) in Oregon's Sheridan Federal Prison. He has been a U.S. citizen for 15 years, and lived in the U.S. for nearly 20 years. Mike is 38, and is married to a Roseberg, Oregon woman. They raise their three children in Hillsboro, Oregon where Mike worked as a software engineer at Intel Corp up until his arrest. Mike's finally getting a hearing this Monday morning at Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland, Oregon. Mike's friends and family ask that you show your support by gathering in front of the Federal Courthouse for a peaceful demonstration of support.

A peaceful rally by well-mannered friends and supporters will show the Justice Department and media the depth of support for Mike, and our outrage over the trampling of his civil rights. We expect Mike's wife, Lisa, to come through on her way into the Courthouse. Day: Monday, April 7, 2003, Time: 8:15-8:30 AM or so until about 9:15. Mark Hatfield U.S. Courthouse, 100 SW 3rd Ave, Corner of SW Salmon/3rd, Portland, OR.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:06:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photoshopped Fox News stills from history

Great Fark photoshopping contest-theme: historical moments as they would have been portrayed on Fox News. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:02:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Acts of the Apostles

John Sundman sent me a copy of his self-published novel, "Acts of the Apostles," some time ago, and I finally got through enough of my pile to give it a read today (FWIW, the pile is still very, very deep -- I'm more than a year backlogged on my reading and have started to reluctantly say no to requests for blurbs or reviews at this point, given how unrealistic it is that I'll finish them in anything like reasonable time).

Apostles is a really fine hacker-fiction book -- albeit longer than I like them, and with laggy pacing in places -- that really captures the spirit of geek culture and intrigue. It's spookily similar to what I'm working on with my current book, /usr/bin/god, at least in tone (obviously, we're handling the subject in pretty radically different ways). But trying to read this while thinking about my own book was too much like trying to sing a song in one key while listening to someone play it in another. After 100 pages, I just had to put it down. I expect I'll pick it up again in a year when I wrap up /u/b/g -- in the meantime, the first 13 chapters of the book are online for your reading pleasure. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:30:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Auto-industry stalkerazzi

Nice NYT piece about paparazzi who specialize in snapping photos of pre-production cars for sale to magazines, and the countermeasures employed by the auto-manufacturers to disguise their prototypes.

Carmakers take elaborate precautions to conceal their prototypes from spy photographers, going to lengths that would put a celebrity in dark shades and a baseball cap to shame. Some Ford vehicles intended for testing on public roads are sheathed in so much black leather and vinyl that they resemble a dominatrix on wheels. Other manufacturers cover their cars with stripes of dark tape, creating optical illusions that make the shape hard to discern in photos, or they dress them in ground-skimming "skirts" that conceal the drivetrain. The unwritten rule among spy photographers is that opening doors or removing camouflage is forbidden. Using digital editing software to enhance an image is another matter.

Still other manufacturers wrap their cars in prosaic disguises in an attempt to travel on public streets without tipping off the paparazzi. (Who would expect to see simulated wood-grain paneling plastered on the side of a preproduction BMW X5?) And always there is constant vigilance: at a General Motors test track just outside Detroit, signs posted along the road warn employees when they are entering a "photographically sensitive area," where the vehicle they're driving may be captured on film by someone perched on a nearby hill.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

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

Terminator meets Pride and Prejudice

Adrian sez, "Brenda W. Clough and Ryk Erik Spoor have come up with the ingenious idea of a Terminator/Pride and Prejudice crossover, and are currently writing sections on rec.arts.sf.written. Possibly the funniest thing I have read this year."

"Indeed," said the man (whom Patience could not help but think of as made of clockwork, though he manifestly was something far stranger), "I speak of these things not merely because of the way that I am made, though indeed a machine should do that which it is made to do, but because I have found that I have developed, through our many conversations, a feeling of that which is proper, both within the bounds of your society and without; and being that I am, here, a gentleman, I find that I am also bound to behave as a gentleman would, and indeed, Lady Patience, I must warn you that this Mr. Connor is a man of less than sterling character."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Adrian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 4, 2003

Cover for my short-story collection

Woohoo! I've just gotten the cover-proofs for my upcoming short-fiction collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," which Four Walls Eight Windows will publish in the fall. Sweet. Here're a few of the cover-blurbs I've gotten so far:

Cory Doctorow strafes the senses with a geekspeedfreak explosion of gomi kings with heart, weirdass shapeshifters from Pleasure Island and jumping automotive jazz joints. If this is Canadian science fiction, give me more.

Nalo Hopkinson

--

Cory Doctorow is the future of science fiction. An nth-generation hybrid of the best of Greg Bear, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and Groucho Marx, Doctorow composes stories that are as BPM-stuffed as techno music, as idea-rich as the latest issue of NEW SCIENTIST, and as funny as humanity's efforts to improve itself. Utopian, insightful, somehow simultaneously ironic and heartfelt, these nine tales will upgrade your basal metabolism, overwrite your cortex with new and efficient subroutines and generally improve your life to the point where you'll wonder how you ever got along with them. Really, you should need a prescription to ingest this book. Out of all the glittering crap life and our society hands us, craphound supreme Doctorow has managed to fashion some industrial-grade art."

Paul Di Filippo

--

As scary as the future, and twice as funny. In this eclectic and electric collection Doctorow strikes sparks off today to illuminate tomorrow, which is what SF is supposed to do. And nobody does it better.

Terry Bisson

780k JPEG Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Leaked Pirates of the Caribbean trailer

Here's an absolutely amazing trailer for the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie -- apparently, it's a leak of the trailer that was supposed to premiere on Sunday night; anyone know anything else about it? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:50:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Food and drink zen

(1) groceries
(2) hor d'oeuvres
(3) packaged meals
(4) rap snacks
(5) candy
(6) recipes
(7) hungry man
(8) brekkie
(8) wine
(10) tequila

Link Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:37:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Floppy-disc-a-gami Starship Enterprise

Step-by-step instructions for turning a floppy disc into a model of the Starship Enterprise. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DNA cheaps to be cheaply produced with inkjet printers

Canon has developed a mechanism for using inkjet printers to cheaply mass-produce "DNA-chips," chips used to trace diseases. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:33:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grimble and Grimble at Xmas online

One of my favorite English kids' books is Grimble (and the sequel, Grimble at Christmas), by Clement Freud, who is Sigmund Freud's grandson. The books are part of the English kids-lit tradition of stories about grownups who act so goddamned weird as to be essentially surreal. Anyway, I've turned up the full text of both Grimble and Grimble at Christmas online, along with scans of the original illustrations.

This is a story about a boy called Grimble who was about ten. You may think it is silly to say someone is about ten, but Grimble had rather odd parents who were very vague and seldom got anything completely right.

For instance, he did not have his birthday on a fixed day like other children: every now and then his father and mother would buy a cake, put some candles on top of it, and say, 'Congratulations Grimble. Today you are about seven', or, 'Yesterday you were about eight and a half but the cake shop was closed.' Of course there were disadvantages to having parents like that - like being called Grimble which made everyone say,' What is your real name?' and he had to say,' My real name is Grimble.'

Grimble's father was something to do with going away, and his mother was a housewife by profession who liked to be with her husband whenever possible. Grimble went to school. Usually, when he left home in the morning, his parents were still asleep and there would be a note at the bottom of the stairs saying, enclosed please find ten p. for your breakfast. As lop is not very nourishing he used to take the money to a shop and get a glass of ginger beer, some broken pieces of meringue and a slice of streaky bacon. And at school he got lunch; that was the orderly part of his life. Shepherd's pie or sausages and mashed potatoes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday; and on Fridays, fish fingers. This was followed by chocolate spodge -which is a mixture between chocolate sponge and chocolate sludge, and does not taste of anything very much except custard - which the school cook poured over everything.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA suing college kids for maintaining file-sharing networks

The Recording Industry Association of America has launched legal action against four college students who build and maintain general-purpose file-sharing technologies on campus. The RIAA's press release is full of nasty name-calling, but fails to explain how any of this harassment of college kids will do anyone any good -- presumably, the kids have no assets to sue for; shutting down campus networks won't pay artists, nor will it make more work available to the public (and it won't make the lameass Pressplay networks any better). Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:25:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big-ass "colossal" virus

A "giant virus" has been discovered in a British water-tower.

The virus is so large that at first researchers mistook it for bacteria. Most viruses can only be seen with electron microscopes but this one was spotted through a high quality optical microscope...

Mimivirus has at least 900 genes, an enormous figure for a virus. The team compared its genes to other viruses and found it is related to other large viruses, such as smallpox.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lupo!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:21:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 3, 2003

"All Your Base" prank mistaken for terrorist threat, seven arrested

Tom sez:

Police in Sturgis, Michigan have arrested seven people for posting signs around the city on April fools day which read "All your base are belong to us!" The local police chief, obviously not in on the joke, had this to say: "This is no joking matter. During a time of war and with the present concern for homeland security, terrorist acts will not be tolerated and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

Link to Sturgis Journal story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:34:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy birthday, robot boy

Matt sez: "Tetsuwan Atomu/Astro Boy's birthday is this Monday. There will be some celebratin' goin' on at the Tezuka Osamu museum in Osaka and indeed all over Japan. This news article summarises the hoo-hah. Also has some information about the "new" Astro Boy, currently airing on cable TV I don't get." Astroboy website, another Astroboy website, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:34:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My very first piece of Iraq-themed Nigerian scam spam

For the first time ever, my in-box was flooded today with multiple copies of an all-new, Iraq-themed variation of the classic Nigerian spam pitch.

By way of introduction I am Eng. Farouk Al-Bashar, I represent my family as the oldest son of the Al-Bashar family, who are the descendants of Ibrahim Al-Bashar Ali from one of the oil rich areas in Iraq... We pray they remove Saddam as he is the cause of much hardship here, but our funds are trapped here and there is no avenue to transfer any amount from Iraq without Saddam knowing. The problem now is how do we transfer the funds totalling US$12.5 Million in cash from here. We are afraid that with the capacity of the bombs America is coming to Baghdad with nowhere would be safe for the money, so we need you to help in securing a private collection agency who would come to Iraq and collect the money and have them moved to the west, where our family is planning to relocate to as life in Iraq is no longer worth living because of Saddam.I have to travel lots of miles each day to send an email hoping someone out there would assist this family, if you can we will give you the details of an agency that can lift the funds from here as given to me by a US Marine. The private collection agency would then collect the fund from here and deliver it to you for safe keep. Hoping the American campaign would be successful, we would then come over to your country for a meeting to share the funds and hopefully start a new life with you as a partner. For your assistance with this project the family is willing to give you 10% of the funds, however if this does not suit you we are open for negotiation.

Judging from Cory's earlier post today, this sounds like a job for Brad Christensen. I'd love to see that psychopathic bird-watcher take on Mr. Al-Bashar. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:28:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired News on Ex-Intel VP fighting for detainee Mike Hawash

Story in today's Wired News on the case of former Intel employee Mike Hawash, a Palestinian-born US citizen arrested and detained in solitary confinement two weeks ago by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (link to earlier post on BoingBoing).

A friend and former colleague at Intel, Steven McGeady, is championing Hawash's case. McGeady, a former vice president at the chipmaker who hired Hawash as a programmer in 1992, was a high-profile witness in the Microsoft antitrust trial.

"People say this doesn't happen in this country," McGeady said, "but one of my neighbors has been disappeared. It's not what he might have done that matters to me -- they disappeared him. They need to question him and let him go, or charge him. It's like Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka."

McGeady set up a website, Free Mike Hawash, that urges supporters to write politicians and donate to a legal defense fund. The site is drawing considerable attention online, climbing the charts on Daypop and Blogdex. Because of the campaign, the office of Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden has promised to contact the FBI about the case, McGeady said.

Link to Wired News story, Link to SF Chron story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:56:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LA Times photog fired for rasterbation

LA Times photographer Brian Walski was fired last week for combining elements from two different photos. He probably could have gotten away with it, had he made sure to erase the duplicate people on the left side of the photo. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:45:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Backyard roller coaster

Some guy made a roller coaster in his backyard out of plastic pipe. The "car" (a slab of wood) uses rollerblade wheels. Let's hope junior has a tight grip on that rope. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:20:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brad Christensen's Nigerian scam shenanigans

This guy has a lot of fun stringing along Nigerian scamsters. His letters are some of the best I've read of this type of shenanigan. Be sure to check out Brad's email correspondence with "Dr. Elvis," in which Brad pretends to be an insane bird watcher/hunter. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:29:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Atkins-biz

Business 2.0's published a long feature on the big biz that Atkins diet has become.

Company executives say they were already pushing to get everything from bread to candy on shelves, but the Times story prompted them to hit the gas on product development. During 2002 an explosion of new foods appeared. In total the company has created 95 products, from waffle mix to its own version of ketchup, in the past few years; it still hasn't conquered some, such as pasta, which has gumminess problems. The Atkins label is sold in such chains as Wal-Mart (WMT), Target (TGT), and GNC, but has yet to really penetrate convenience stores and the big shopping clubs like Costco (COST).

From the start, Wiant tried to make everything from packaging to product categories reinforce Atkins's new message: This is not diet food. He moved products into "sub-brands" like Endulge and Morning Start, because the Atkins name alone is too diet-oriented. The red "A" on stark white packaging was replaced by the sleek purple of the candy line and the energized yellow of the breakfast bars. "We're basically going to our consumers and saying, 'What do you need the most?'" Wiant says...

Questions about Atkins's medical reputation have never seemed to resonate with the millions of people who've tried his diet (the problems haven't been widely reported). The roaring buzz of recent good press also has helped drown out the doubt. But that doesn't mean Atkins Nutritionals is invulnerable. Despite its message that the diet is safe and effective, the science is far from settled, and many Atkins critics are determined to prove him wrong. Just as headlines can catapult a company to new success, they can also punish. Reports of a powerful negative study -- something like, say, "Atkins Causes Heart Disease After All!" -- could kill the company's momentum.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:12:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Robotic Sports" book release bash in SF on April 12

Survival Research Labs. Robot Wars. BattleBots. Oh my. An evening of Boys, Bots, and Books by the Bay:

Gearheads: The Turbulent Rise of Robotic Sports by Brad Stone has just come out, and it is a heck of a read. Qbox and the Robotics Society of America are sponsoring the release party, which, in turn, should be one heck of an event. We have robots, mechanical monstrosities, ant-weight robot competitions and a host of other excitement and Superlative Reality-bending Legions. DJ Vordo presides over Flash-O-Matic Tending Bar with the aid of the 240cc Blender The author will be there to sign copies of his book...

Special Guests: Marc Thorpe (Robot Wars), Trey Roski & Greg Munson (BattleBots), Mark Pauline (SRL), Kal Spelletich (Seemen), Mike Winter and Will Wright (Stupid Fun Club, etc.), Reason Bradley & Alexander Rose (Inertia Labs), Jim Smentowski (Team Nightmare), Carlo Bertocchini (BioHazard), Stephen Felk (Voltronic), and many others! (Not all builders are bringing their bots, and not all bots are bringing their builders).

Gearheads: The Release Party -- Saturday, April 12th, 7pm -12 midnite at the Fort Mason Firehouse. Admission is $5, $15 with autographed copy of the book.

Event details, Buy the book online, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:48:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

OS X floppy disk RAID

Using five USB floppy drives and OS X's native RAID software, this guy has created a floppy-disk RAID powered by an old iMac. As a followup, he built a RAID out of Sony Memory Stick. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Live QTVR blogging from Sydney protest, with sound

Australian photographer Peter Murphy writes:

Hi, Xeni -- my vr blog today features an action panorama from an antiwar protest in Sydney yesterday -- with location sound streaming audio accompaniment.

Link, Discuss

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

Found poetry from Rumsfeld's speeches

Slate's pulled a bunch of quotes from Rumsfeld's speeches and structured them as free verse, with surprisingly artistic results.

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:26:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chinese SARS secrecy punctured by SMS

One of the elements being blamed for the spread of SARS is the Chinese goverment's secrecy about the disease in China. It appears, though, that the first leaks in that secrecy came from SMS.

It wasn't newspapers or television or radio that originally spread the word about the outbreak of a serious respiratory illness, now known as SARS, in southeast China. It was SMS -- text messages on mobile phones.

In early February the South China Morning Post noted in an article -- I can't point to it, as it's apparently in the paid archives -- that a mysterious bug was causing a run on store shelves for traditional medical remedies in Guangdong province. It turned out that "the panic over the virus started when reports about people getting sick were sent via short messages on mobile phones in Guangzhou," the Post reported.

Link Discuss (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chinese gov't sends out 6MM SMSs to combat SARS rumor

The Chinese government sent out six million SMS messages to Hong Kong cellphones yesterday, informing the populace that the web-page that reported that the whole city would be quarantined to contain the SARS outbreak was a hoax perpetrated by a 14-year-old who'd been arressted.

"At first I wondered why they sent me such a weird message," said Ada Ko, a 47-year-old office assistant. "It's useful, but it came in a bit too late to calm the public."

"It's a bit odd," said 20-year-old student Forrest Kan, who had been unaware of the rumour until he got the message.

Due to network traffic, some people didn't get the government text message for about six hours, and some never got the message at all.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big Dig and "Liberty" -- the P=NP of news-stories

Reading the news today, I'm coming to the conclusion that for scandalous news-cycle items, P=NP; that all scandal/intrigue/graft stories are the same story, and merely adapt to suit their new circumstances. Look at this story about the shenanigans over what one of the tunnels in Boston's Big Dig will be called: the old guard wants it named after Tip O'Neill, while the new guard wants to call it the "Liberty" tunnel (presumably because there aren't enough New England monuments with "Liberty" in their names).

In my next novel, set in the 2020s, the Big Dig is still going, a kind of permanent revolution in earthworks, a neverending state of traffic emergency. Given that its future is in some ways being hitched to the Middle Eastern conflict -- which has been going since Old Testament times -- this scenario is growing ever-more-plausible. Link Discuss

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

Labor MP's page "for the kids" -- ironic or clueless?

This UK Labor MP's page for teenagers must be ironic, or a joke, or something -- there's no way anone could be this clueless.

We know that you're too busy fighting off your biological urges and being l33t hax0rs to Get Involved, but politics is cool, m'kay?

Nobody ever seems to do anything for The Kids! All the decisions are made by suits, man. That's so lame!!! We know you think of yourselves as responsible citizens, but what you wanna do is turn that thought into an action, dudes.

Get involved - to the extreme!

Link Discuss (Thanks, rODbegbie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:44:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blog entries from the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in NYC

Henry Farrell, cyber-rights prof from the University of Toronto, is attending the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in NYC this week, and he's taking fantastic and copious notes on his blog.

George Radwanski, Federal Privacy Commissioner of Canada

The US and Canada are very close in many ways, but are also very different. This is not to say that Canada is better, but it is different. One difference is in privacy laws

Radwanski is the Privacy Commissioner for Canada - he has responsibilities for both public and private sector. Is a voice for privacy on policy issues. There is no equivalent in the US. Radwanski is talking on behalf of Canada - he isn't able to tell any other country what to do

But in the wake of September 11, privacy has become an international issue. People were outraged by the attacks, and there was a need for security, and to address the psychological side, the crippling fear that people had. And this last is the goal of terrorism, what terrorism wants.

Usually, this is fairly specific, but by all accounts the goals of the current terrorist movement are much broader and diffuse. They want to attack the West; our freedoms and values are precisely the target. When people see what terrorists are capable of, it's easy to lose perspective, and to think that privacy has become a luxury

But this only rewards terrorism, it doesn't diminish it, it doesn't safeguard our lives. We could evacuate high rise towers, close subways and so on, but no reasonable person would advocate this. People would say "sure, we'd be safe, but at the cost of our way of life." I argue that this applies to privacy too. Privacy is a human right, as has been recognized by the UN.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:40:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inflatable haunted house

The latest issue of Haunted Attraction Magazine, the dark-ride industry magazine, featured an ad for Scair Structures, an inflatable haunted house that can fit on a dolly. The website for the product is a little on the thin side, but damn, this looks cool. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:37:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

That's one collosally big damned squid

A "collosal" squid, the biggest on record, has been retreived "virtually intact." The giant critter is way bigger than the giant squid, formerly the king of calamari.

"When this animal was alive, it really has to be one of the most frightening predators out there. It's without parallel in the oceans," said Dr O'Shea, whose work is sponsored by Discovery Channel.

The specimen, which was caught in the past few weeks in the Ross Sea, has a mantle length of 2.5 metres. That is a larger mantle than any giant squid that Dr O'Shea has seen and this specimen is still immature, the NZ scientist believes.

"It's only half to two-thirds grown, so it grows up to four metres in mantle length." By comparison, the mantle of the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, is not known to attain more than 2.25 metres.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lawrence)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:32:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling on Poindexter

Sterling's latest Wired column is a provacative look at Poindexter.

Admiral Poindexter's PROF interoffice email system (powered by an IBM mainframe) seems pretty backward nowadays, but there was an unmistakable Enron-style genius in routing charity money and Saudi profits through Israeli arms contractors to buy munitions for Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries. John Poindexter, Oliver North, Elliot Abrams, Richard Secord, John Singlaub, Robert MacFarlane, Adnan Khashoggi, Manucher Ghorbanifar: These legendary innovators created something truly new and brilliant - an offshore, autonomous, self-financing, global, anticommunist venture-capital outfit big enough to fight a private war against a sovereign nation. Lieutenant Colonel North liked to call it Project Democracy. It ran loops around Congress the way offshore Internet porn rings dodge the US Customs Service...

Considering the audacity of the scheme's challenge to Constitutional authority, its principals have done surprisingly well in the years since. Oliver North gave up his uniform to become what he always had been at heart: a right-wing political agitator. Elliot Abrams now manages Venezuelan revolution, counterrevolution, and counter-counterrevolution for the State Department. And, of course, John Poindexter is in charge of the Department of Defense's Total Information Awareness program.

But the real success story is the Contras, or rather their modern successor: al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden's crew is a band of government-funded anticommunist counterrevolutionaries who grew up and cut the apron strings. These new-model Contras don't need state support from Washington, Moscow, or any Accessory of Evil. Like Project Democracy, they've got independent financing: oil money, charity money, arms money, and a collection plate wherever a junkie shoots up in an alley. Instead of merely ignoring and subverting governments for a higher cause, as Poindexter did, al Qaeda tries to destroy them outright. Suicide bombers blew the Chechnyan provisional puppet government sky high. Cars packed with explosives nearly leveled the Indian Parliament. We all know what happened to the Pentagon.

Link Discuss (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Antibacterial fabric uses micro-daggers to slay bugs

A new antibacterial process for clothing embeds microscopic "daggers" that eviscerate microbes as they come into contact with your garments. The upshot is that you'll be able to get socks that don't get smelly, panties that cure yeast infections and uniforms that kill anthrax spores.

When bacterial or fungal spores approach the fabric, their negatively charged fatty membranes are attracted to positive charges on the nitrogen-rich rings and to the fat-seeking blades. This forces the bug or spore onto the blade, which then penetrates the bacterial membrane.

Once inside, this charged end wreaks havoc and kills the spore by disrupting the delicate bonds inside. Each spore encounters a number of these molecular chains and eventually breaks up. "The bacteria effectively spill their guts," says Engel.

"It's like resting on a bed of nails", adds his colleague JaimeLee Iolani Cohen of Pace University in New York. Household detergents, also mixtures of fatty and charged groups, disperse dirt and germs in a similar way but cannot be anchored to clothing.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:23:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The worst search engine

Numair sez: "Typing the phrase 'the worst search engine' into Google produces a timely and funny result in first place." Do this now, why this is timely and funny, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:50:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 2, 2003

Coot birds can count

A recent study reveals that a species of American bird known as the coot is capable of counting their clutch size, and can tell the difference between "parisitic" eggs and their own. Link to National Geographic story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:12:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

image du jour: Saddam SMS

Link, Discuss
(Thanks, Gabe)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:43:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pokemon condoms available online

Via Geisha Asobi. The condom is saying, "No forget! Always I am this have its nice day!"

Japanese, Badly translated English, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:56:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Warnography: are TV newscasters having a little too much fun?

Via RCB:

The war has authored lots of odd media moments, none odder, perhaps, than that witnessed by anyone who crashed home at 3am on Sunday morning and turned on the telly to find Angela Rippon, live on the ITV News Channel, describing the skyline of Kuwait as "elegant". But one of the most consistently striking things about the coverage of the conflict - and every other conflict of the modern TV era - is the way it has been dominated by an endless flow of facts, stats and graphics about military hardware, from the sort of spoddy experts usually banished to minority satellite channels aimed at men you would rather not sit next to on the tube. (...)"As a scholar of porn, I look at this and say 'these are boys with phallic toys'," sighs Linda Williams, professor of film studies and rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

For the most part, the representations of war don't put too much store in reality. "I've never had a great deal of sympathy for Baudrillard... but there is something to be said for the hyper-reality of this situation: it is intensified reality, verging on the unreal."

All the lavishly reproduced fact files and whizzy graphics, the 3D cartoon missiles and gleaming formation of tanks, photographed from above, seem to be engaged in an enterprise as unreal as their equivalent in the sex industry - an attempt to pass something ugly off as something beautiful.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:13:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blog Confab in Vienna, May 23 - 24, 2003

Beverly Tang sends this link to an upcoming conference about blogs in Vienna, Austria: "BlogTalk - A European Conference On Weblogs: Web-based publishing, communication and collaboration tools for professional and private use." Papers are still accepted through April 30. Among the sponsors: Microsoft and TechGate Vienna.

[One of the purposes of] the conference is to bring together active bloggers from all over the world as well all those people from the business world and else who havn't heard the word Weblog or Blog before. We think we are at a historical tipping point. There are lots of Weblogs already around but only the tip of the iceberg is visible. The goal... is to boost the awareness of Blogs as proper means for diverse modes for personal and collaborative publishing.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:49:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teletext Babez: Prehistoric, danceable 'Net pinups

From the website of German artist Dragan Espenschied:

"The Teletext Babez video was broadcasted for the first time on October 6th 2001 on P.A.R.K. 4DTV Amsterdam. It features the most beautiful teletext pages from german cable TV and a hot eurodance tune by Bodenstandig 2000."

Link to project home page, Watch the quicktime video preview, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:26:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SARS-masks in HK with cartoon characters

Fashion-conscious, SARS-spooked Honk Kong women have begun wearing themed antigerm masks with Minnie Mouse, Winnie the Pooh and other characters printed on them. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

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

Classic science fiction prop auction

eBay LiveAuctions is selling off an amazing lot of classic science fiction film props, like the animatronic tail from Aliens, Jane Fonda's Barabarella crossbow, Eartha Kitt's Catwoman costume, control panels from Lost in Space, Star Trek tribbles, and all for incredibly high prices that give me minor heart-attacks. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gene!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:19:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Linksys community network bashes rival "default" community network

I really like this community WiFi in-joke gag site: the "Linksys community network" is a WiFi networking group whose sign is open access points called "linksys" and whose worst enemies are the "default" community network. Weirdly enough, I'm in range of APs for both networks.

Boy, this is an obscure in-joke. I suspect that the Internet was invented so that it would be cost-effective for people who get jokes like these to make contact with one another an chuckle, mildly. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:11:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, April 1, 2003

Flaming Conestoga Wagon of Awesome-Ness

Stefan sez:

"High School Senior Nick Anderson of the Sunset Rocketry Club has built, for the upcoming meeting of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a rocket-powered flying Conestoga wagon. It currently lacks wheels, but it's undergone flight testing. The project web page has some entertaining videos."

Link, Discuss, Yee Hah!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:20:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Internet ABCs, courtesy of Google

Gabe says:

What do you get if you Google through the alphabet, one letter at a time, and look at the top result? Why, the Internet ABC's, of course! Weird that x = Netscape and i = yahoo, though. *shrug*.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:18:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prions cause Alzheimer's, mad cow disease and really small circuits

Roland sez, "Scientists working at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have turned misfolded proteins known as prions into a construction toolkit for manufacturing nanoscale electrical circuits. They say they might develop nanowires for electronics by using genetically engineered yeast amyloids. Amyloids are misfolded proteins found plaguing the victims of cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's disease and many other ailments. However, the researchers said the way they genetically engineered the protein is not infectious to humans. Remember the mad cow disease?" Link Discuss (Thanks, Roland!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:40:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Air Canada going titsup?

Holy crap! Air Canada -- Canada's national airline -- has filed for bankruptcy protection. Here I was feeling all smug for collecting United miles using my Air Canada Aeroplan card... Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:38:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Star Trek: The Condo

An apartment meticulously decorated to resemble a set from Star Trek is up for auction on eBay, starting at $2MM. Any Torontonians remember the replica Star Trek bridge that occupied the top storey of Mr. Gameway's Ark on Yonge St? Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:36:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Intel employee, US citizen Mike Hawash detained without due process

In an open letter to senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Intel SVP Steven McGeady writes:

On Thursday morning, March 20, a long-time employee of mine, Mike (Maher) Hawash, was arrested outside Intel's Hillsboro offices and taken into custody by the FBI and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. We later learned he was being "detained" as a material witness. Simultaneously, FBI agents in bulletproof vests and carrying M-16s woke Mike's wife and three children in their Hillsboro home, searched it for four hours, and presented Mrs. Hawash with a grand jury subpoena.

All of the court documents in this case are sealed. Mike was held incommunicado from his wife and attorneys for several days. When they did contact him, neither he, his attorneys, nor anyone else knows why he is being detained. Mike is a long-time U.S. citizen, originally of Palestinian birth and previously of Jordanian nationality. He has been a U.S. citizen for many years, having attended college in Texas. He worked for me at Intel on and off for 10 years. (...)

The only thing anyone can think of is that, long before 9/11/01, Mike and his wife donated to Global Relief, a once-respected international aid organization that since October 2002 has fallen into disrepute. But there is no way Mike could have known this at this time. My wife is a recently-naturalized U.S. citizen, originally from Northern Ireland, another victim of terrorism. If our donations to Northern Irish aid were to be mis-directed, without our knowledge, would I have FBI agents kicking down my door? Would my wife be put into federal prison?

Read the rest of the letter here, read more about the case via The Register, Discuss (Thanks, Lisa)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:02:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

British junk-food reviews

Dave Green of NTK has launched Snackspot, an absolutely hilarious blog devoted to new developments in British junk-food.

"Lee Maguire" spotted Red Bull Sugar Free (90p, a newsagents in London), commenting that it "tastes exactly like regular Red Bull - I assume it's for people who want energy, but not *too much* energy". Disappointingly, he failed to provide a picture, so loses out to the slightly more photogenic prospect of Private Energy, a "premium-priced ginseng-enhanced energy drink" from the (Netherlands-based?) adult entertainment company. The drink's imminent UK launch will presumably incorporate the same "attractive collector-style cans featuring some of Private's most popular stars", while the ginseng content is intended to enhance "adult activities" (ie, voting? driving a minibus with less than 17 seats and weighing no more than 3.5 metric tonnes?) This shouldn't be confused with the (also imminent) UK arrival of alcoholic "Viagra Pops", like Roxxoff, which have been criticised on the grounds that alcoholic drinks "should not suggest any association with sexual success". Nonetheless, feel free to get in touch with any sightings/ trial results you have of those - or performance enhancements you've noticed with other energy drinks, like Lucozade Solstis or RAC 124.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Seamless City: 30-mile-long continuous portrait of San Francisco

Seamless City is a really interesting project to stitch together successive panoramic photos of San Francisco streets, making streetlong photo-records of entire neighborhoods. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:14:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Do annual events presevere? Google knows

Ry4an Brase has researched the prevalance of 2nd-Annual, 3d-Annual, 4th-Annual, etc events, plotting a curve of the preseverence of events as determined by result-counts in Google.

I was eating outside today and saw a sign for the 2nd Annual Cabanna Boy Contest at a local bar. I wisely decided not to enter the contest, but then started to wonder if they had called their first one the 1st Annual Cabanna Boy Contest. That's pretty optimistic. I then started wondering how likely it is that a 1st Annual leads to a 2nd Annual to a 3rd Annual. Being a modern geek I figured google would know the answer if I asked right.

I searched for each each of "1st annual", "2nd annual", "3rd annual" though "15th annual", the cardinal numbers, and "first annual", "second annual", "third annual" through "fifteenth annual" and recorded the hit count for each.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Ry4an!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

April 1 is Make Fun of the Cheneys Day

Remember when Lynne Cheney had a nastygram sent to Whitehouse.org, trying to intimidate them into removing material that made fun of her?

April 1 is Make Fun of the Cheneys Day -- the day when websites the world round teach the VP and his spousal unit about the First Amendment. Link Discuss (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:07:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SF art event: Robots Have Feelings, Too

Chris Bishop writes: "A fantastic robot-themed art show at the Culture Cache Gallery in San Francisco featuring some well known artists and me! The opening is April 5th at 7pm and it runs until May 18th. Now that I think about it, this is not a particularly interesting link. I'm just trying to promote the show so I can meet girls."

That's okay, Chris, I only blog about robots so I can meet boys. Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:07:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Email "bullying" favors bosses

The BBC reports that email is allowing workers to "bully" their bosses, and that bosses are using email to harrass their underlings.

Perhaps surprisingly, the higher up the office ladder people are, the more likely they are to be targeted by e-bullies.

While just 15% of secretaries claim to be the victim of such attacks, 28% of their bosses are being harassed via the inbox.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:00:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

QTVR of NYC Hearings on 9/11 attacks

Hans Nyberg writes: "I have a new masterpiece by the New York VR photograper Jook Leung, made yesterday at the hearing in New York about the Terrorist attacks. In this shot, the mayor of New York City is testifying." Link to fullscreen QTVR panorama, Link to 9/11 Commission website, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:59:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bar Association wants "pirate" WiFi regulated

The American Bar Association sent around a newsletter to its members yesterday with a report from the Committee on New Information Technologies about the future of WiFi.

This is one of the most clueless documents I've ever read. It appears that the Bar Association believes that WiFi networks are essentially tools for infringing on copyright, with a grudging admission that offices find them useful sometimes.

They conclude that 802.11 should be redesigned to accomodate DRM (which they sometimes call "DMR"), though they don't really understand how DRM works. My co-worker Seth Schoen characterized the report as reading like it was cut-and-pasted from DRM-vendors' press-releases, and it draws nonsensical conclusions about incompatible technologies, which he says "is like saying 'to protect the environment, we should get recyclable toner cartridges for our manual typewriters.'"

Best of all is the conclusion that WiFi radios should tag all the information somewhere in the protocol with rights-management info -- essentially, the Bar Association want the Internet redesigned to ensure that copyright can't be infringed upon, even though you'd think that a bunch of lawyers would have some idea of how impractical that is.

Where content providers have developed digital asset management systems to identify their digital goods and services, including specialized metadata and related rights management technology, the tracking of such good and services may be important for owners of intellectual property rights. Several concepts used in 802.11 may require reassessment to accommodate this development. In particular, the medium access control (MAC) management capability is an example of an 802.11 specification that may require adjustment. For example, as described in the IEEE 802.11 Handbook by Bob O’Hara and Al Petrick (1999), at page 101, "dot11StationID is a 48-bit attribute that is designed to allow an external manager to assign its own identifier to a station, for the sole purpose of managing the station." Where an access point or "station" is an element in a distributed information management system, either entity could come within the meaning of the 802.11 standard, or parts of it could be relegated to the status of an 802.11 higher level protocol. From a content viewpoint, various software capabilities now typically treated as higher level protocols in the IEEE 802.11 standard could also be viewed as part of the access point or station in 802.11 terminology.

132k Word-file Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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