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Monday, June 30, 2003

Musicians petition the RIAA to drop its lawsuits

Musicians are circulating a petition asking the RIAA to stop suing their fans for using file-sharing software, asking them to instead focus on action against organized criminals who sell pirate CDs.

In response to the continuing legal attacks by the RIAA and major record labels on internet music sharing, which now include both criminal charges and civil suits against individuals, musicians are joining together to say NO to the action supposedly being taken on our behalf.

Just because the major labels haven't figured out a way to make money out of the internet doesn't mean that individuals who have shared music should go to prison, or be forced into bankruptcy. The industry is alienating the very people it hopes to sell music to in future with its heavy handed action.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:15:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pre-Columbian Mickey

Wonderful gallery of modern iconography rendered as pre-Columbian sculpture. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:52:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My short story collection now available for pre-orders

Amazon has put up its sell-page for my forthcoming short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, which will be published by Four Walls Eight Windows in September 2003. This book is coming along famously, with an intro by Bruce Sterling and blurbs by a variety of people, including Neil "Sandman" Gaiman. If you pre-order now, you get a 20 percent discount.

From the introduction by Bruce Sterling:

Many writers, especially gray, creaky, well-fed ones, have ambivalent feelings about copyrighted ink versus slithering electronica. Me, for instance: I wrote two novels on typewriters, so I still remember the Pleistocene. But Cory possesses an advanced mode of cyber-analysis. Paper versus pixels, that's yesterday's battle, an intriguing archaism for him. It provokes that nose-flaring delight that he takes in old industrial equipment and Howdy Doody dolls.

---

Cory Doctorow straps on his miner's helmet and takes you deep into into the caverns and underground rivers of Pop Culture, here filtered through SF-coloured glasses. Enjoy.

- Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods and Sandman

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:59:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lab Notes from UC Berkeley

Virtual "force fields" around no-fly zones, earthquake-proofing buildings with burlap, collaboratively-controlled telerobotic webcams, and more in my latest issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. Please take a look! Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:35:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Welcome to our new guestblogger, Marc Laidlaw!

Today, the guestbar torch is passed to Marc Laidlaw.

Marc is the author of numerous short stories and six novels including Dad's Nuke, Neon Lotus, The Orchid Eater, Kalifornia, The Third Force, and The 37th Mandala. He was a frequent contributor to bOINGbOING the zine, way back in the days of paper. For the last six years he has worked for Valve Software, serving as writer for the games Half-Life and the forthcoming Half-Life 2.

Many thanks to departing guestblogger John Dvorak of PC Magazine for his terrific BoingBoing stint -- and for the accidental composite image of J. Edgar Hoover sporting a gigantic pair of "man tits" which is now forever burned into my memory. Yeah. Thanks a lot, John. ;-)
Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:44:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese mags take on "digital shoplifters"

Japanese magazine publishers are all panty-bunched about a practice they call "digital shoplifting." A "digital shoplifter" is a woman who sees an interesting hairstyle or garment in a fashion mag and snaps a photo of it with her camphone, then emails it to her pals to see what they think of it. The magazine publishers have created an "educational campaign" to intimidate these nefarious criminals into giving up their infringing ways.

...[T]he publishers of those magazines feel they are being cheated out of valuable sales.

Together with Japan's phone companies, they are issuing stern posters which warn shoppers to be careful of their "magazine manners".

Link Discuss (via Smartmobs)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bloggers, email list moderators gain libel protection

An appeals court ruled last Tuesday that bloggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish. I covered the story for Wired News:

Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily.

"One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they're not just selling information -- they're selling reliability," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren't necessarily selling anything, they're just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward."

The court based its decision on a section of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, or the CDA. That section states, "... no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Three cases since then -- Zeran v. AOL, Gentry v. eBay and Schneider v. Amazon -- have granted immunity to commercial online service providers.

Link to Wired News story, Discuss

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

Congress may get pissed at RIAA over lawsuits

Good LA Times editorial on the damage the recording industry is doing to its cause by threatening to sue thousands of American file-sharers. Turns out that you can get a lot of play in Congress by playing victim, but bullies don't get the same amount of sympathy.

"I would guess that you would then see stories about the family faced with economic ruin and the cost of having to hire defense counsel, settling for $10,000 or $20,000, and the money they were saving for Timmy's college education now has to go to Kid Rock," said Philip S. Corwin, a lobbyist in Washington for Sharman Networks, distributor of the Kazaa file-sharing software.

"That's the kind of stuff that would scare a politician."

Even Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-North Hollywood), a frequent ally of the entertainment industry, said the labels' standing in Congress would suffer if they "overreach and refuse to settle these issues reasonably." But, he added, "I don't think their goal is to collect a huge amount of revenue through the vehicle of lawsuits; I think it is to deter continued illegal conduct."

Link Discuss

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

Wicked-cool idea for a portable printer

PrintDreams is a really cool idea for portable printing. You download the output to it using a Bluetooth link, then you swipe it rapidly and randomly over any surface. It senses where it is and lays down ink in the appropriate spots to paint a decent-looking output onto the surface. It will be interesting to see how this works -- I've tried out half a dozen wee printers and they all roundly sucked.

The printer has the length of a normal ball-point pen while its width and height are more or less equivalent to the width of a modern mobile phone. The total volume is less than 300 c.c. and weights around 350 grams. This first version of PrintBrush was designed to fit into a shirt pocket.

Internet content, SMS, pictures and other information is downloaded to the PrintBrush from PDAs, mobile phones and laptop computers via a Bluetooth wireless link. Then, by following the RMPT principle the device is hand operated by sweeping it across any type of print media, no matter what its shape, size or thickness. The printout will then start to appear right behind the sweeps. The device takes into account all the parameters of the hand movement, including rotation and sudden changes of speed and acceleration. The resulting image on the printed media is very much like its digital counterpart.

Link Discuss (via JWZ)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:16:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

OpenOffice for Mac goes gold

OpenOffice, the free, open source office suite that reads and writes Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (as well as including a nice drawing app), has gone gold for OS X. This first stable release is enormous (170MB download!), and it uses X-Windows (a Unix graphical user interface that accounts for much of the download size), but it's free, it doesn't feed the beast, and it lets you interoperate with your Microsoft Office-using pals without dropping $500 on a piece of technology intended to lock you into an expensive upgrade cycle.

There's a MacOS-native version in the works, too -- one that uses Aqua, OS X's built-in window manager. It's exciting to see this stuff maturing. Mozilla is getting tighter and tighter, providing a real alternative to Explorer and Safari, one that users can hack cool applications out of, like Kevin Burton's Newsmonster. Now, with the maturation of OpenOffice, which runs on every major OS, there's hope that we'll be able to get a full suite of tools that respect our freedom and provide an open platform for innovation. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:10:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About: the novel

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About is a classic and utterly hilarious website in which Mil Millington documents his stormy relationship with Margret, his German girlfriend. Now, the website is a novel, in which Millington uses his life as the basis for a bureaucratic thriller about an IT professional at a University library whose co-workers use him as a patsy in their shady dealings.

I read the novel yesterday on a long plane ride, and it's pretty good. It's every bit as funny as the website (which is saying something), and the characters are well-drawn and sympathetic. The plot is pretty much a bolt-on, of course, and you won't get up from this book and change the world, but it's certainly a nice bit of summer reading. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:00:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese miniaturize Ikea

Muji is a chain of Japanese clothing and furnishings stores, featured in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition as a place where none of the goods have any labels or logomarks. The furnishings are really interesting -- made from recycled carboard and similar materials, and designed to go into miniscule Tokyo flats, Muji furnishings are like Ikea for itty-bitty pads. Unfortunately, it seems like most of the good stuff is only available through the meatspace stores, not on their e-commerce site. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:53:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inkjet printer made of spraypaint

Hektor is an inkjet printer made out of a can of spraypaint and a series of clever, machine-controlled pulleys. The site features a making-of guide in PDF and a really sexy movie of Hektor in action. Link Discuss (Thanks, BK!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:49:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Gothic Lolita Bible scans

My favorite weird-ass Japanese fashion trend of recent years is "Gothic Lolita," which is pretty much what it sounds like, but elevated to a kind of exquisite art. Here are scans from "Gothic Lolita Bible," showcasing kick-ass, weird-ass GL fashion spreads. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:20:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google + wireless = God?

From Thomas Friedman's New York Times op/ed today:

Says Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider: "If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."

In other words, once Wi-Fi is in place, with one little Internet connection I can download anything from anywhere and I can spread anything from anywhere. That is good news for both scientists and terrorists, pro-Americans and anti-Americans. And that brings me to the point of this column: While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less. Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us -- whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet -- more than ever.

Link to NYT column (registration required), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:27:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reboot video is online

The videos from the talks at Reboot have been posted, including my talk on DRM, copyright and the net, along with Meg Hourihan, Scott Heiferman, and so forth. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nikolaj!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More Agent Smith drag at Japanese Matrix screenings

Japanese Matrix Reloaded cosplay fans are still showing up, by the hundreds, at M:R screenings in Agent Smith drag. Link Discuss (Thanks, Juergen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:28:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Airport feds rip off travellers

The Transport Security Agency requires all fliers to travel with their luggage unlocked, so that highly trustworthy federal employees can rummage through them and ensure that they are WMD-free. And steal things. TSA employees are ripping off choice items ($1,000 binox and such) from the mandatorily-unlocked bags of America's travellers. I feel safer already. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:24:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 28, 2003

Here we are in Rarotonga

We're starting to get settled in to Rarotonga. I had to pay NZ$525 (US$300) to get an Internet account and it is really really slow. It's mind-boggling to be here, on this emerald speck full of life: the sounds of roosters and motor scooters, the smell of burning palm fronds, the sight of the stars at night, the beautiful green mountains, and the ocean and sand. Carla and I still aren't sure what we've gotten ourselves into, but the weirdness factor makes it all worth it. We have a deal with a publication to post weekly online dispatches, and I'll announce it as soon as the deal is finalized. In the meantime, you can see some pictures, inlcuding one of our new home. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:21:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Charlie Stross got hitched!

Congrats to Charlie Stross and Feorag Whose-Surname-I- Always-Misspell-and- Which-Does-Not- Appear-on-Her-Home- Page on their wedding! Hurray! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How Apple's DRM works

The author of the excellent PodWorks iPod utility is working on reverse-engineering the DRM in Apple's iTunes Store AAC files, documenting the ways in whcih the DRM restricts your use of the file, and how those restrictions may be defeated. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:49:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copyleft: Copyright versus Freedom

Miriam Rainsford, an activist with the UK's Comapaign For Digital Rights, is working on a book on copyright and digital freedom, called Copyleft, to be published by Gnu press. She's documenting the project online. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paris photoblogger documents personal tragedy of forced evictions

BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc in France writes:

Hello Xeni, today I was furious, and very moved, when I discovered this post from desordre blog in Paris (no permalink). On June 23rd, the French police suddenly tossed out families "without papers" who had been living in an old abandoned building for the past nine years in Paris. It was 6 AM. The pics show a man who prayed, also the abandoned luggages and the policemen (with 3 bus) that have totally closed the street. During the day, bricklayers came to seal up all the doors. The people there weren't delinquents... they just don't have their French papers for 10 years. Most of them are employed. Philippe De Jonckheere (a well-known blogger here in France) quickly shot pics and posted them in his photoblog. I also blogged about it this this morning, and I'm very upset by the facts behind the evictions.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:59:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 27, 2003

Bay Area event tonight: Crazy pyro show with Flam Chen, on the waterfront

BoingBoing pal and robotics aficionado David Calkins says:

Awesome fire show in San Francisco, tonight only! Flam Chen really do travel all over the world. They're doing a once in a lifetime show tonight, Friday June 27th at 8:30 PM on Toxic Tire Beach for a scant $10. "Flam Chen creates unique panoramas of spectacle and narrative- Performers spin Balinese fire chains, combat with fire staffs and flaming swords, dance with fire fingers and fire fans, eat and breathe flames, and light costume pieces, sculptures and very often the set itself ablaze during the course of the evening. " This is a real fire show with a real fire permit from the city. I had the great pleasure of seeing their rehearsal Thursday night, and you can see their one-time only show tonight. It ends by 11, so there's still plenty of time for Tiki drinks at some seedy bar I wouldn't approve of. Surely to be a spectacular among spectaculars, Flam Chen will present a stunning rendition of their classical outdoor Show, Ling Ling, before a teeming audience of amazed and enchanted men, women and children! The Show is at Toxic Tire Beach, which the city knows as Warm Water Cove. Just up from Cesar Chavez off of 280 at the Terminus of 24th street, just off of third (MAP). Bring a picnic and watch the sun go down, then Be Amazed as this lively venue provides a shining example of the phenomenon of Live Entertainment! 8:30-11, sharp, so arrive on time.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:52:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sensors of the World, Unite!

In Technology Review today, an interview with Ember CTO Robert Poor on using wirelessly-interconnected sensors to create "smart" fields of networked devices.

Imagine sprinkling tiny sensors on road and fields for surveillance, putting them in buildings and bridges to monitor structural health, and installing them in industrial facilities to manage energy, inventory and manufacturing processes.That's the idea behind the emerging technology of wireless sensor networks (see "Casting the Wireless Sensor Net"). Boston-based Ember is at the epicenter of this field. The MIT spinoff sells radio chips with embedded processors that can organize themselves into networks to manage real-world data from sensors. Ember CTO Robert Poor-whose past life includes stints as a programmer in the computer graphics group that became Pixar and as a guitar technician for the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia-spoke with Technology Review staff writer Gregory T. Huang about his visions of a world filled with wirelessly networked devices.

Link, Discuss (Thanks, Bev!)

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

Los Alamos staffer buys Mustang, not nuke research parts, by mistake?

Noah Shachtman says:

The many-faceted drama at the troubled Los Alamos National Laboratory has produced some strange moments. But this has to be the weirdest of them all: Los Alamos equipment buyer Lillian Anaya thought she was ordering $30,000 worth of transducers. But she dialed a number that had been changed from an industrial equipment dealer to an auto parts shop, and wound up buying a Mustang with government money instead. That's the assertion of Los Alamos and University of California investigators, who today cleared Anaya of any wrongdoing in a case that helped engulf the world's most important nuclear research center in a fog of scandal. It's a move, lab critics said, that shows that the birthplace of the atomic bomb still hasn't come to terms with the problems of mismanagement and widespread fraud that have plagued it for years.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:02:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

T-Mobile drives a nail into the Sidekick's coffin

T-Mobile has announced that they are "no longer supporting" the video games they bundled with the color Sidekick. Normally, this would be pretty straightforward -- you could use 'em unsupported, you could find someone else to support 'em, whatever. But because the Sidekick is a phone first and a computing device second (not a technology decision, but rather a marketing/operations one), "no longer supported" has a much more sinister meaning: when T-Mobile withdraws its "support" of the games on the color Sidekick, it wil remotely erase the games from the color Sidekicks of all of their customers.

Hard to say why they're withdrawing the games. Some say that it's because they don't want to incur the ongoing licensing costs, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. The fact is that the Sidekick's promise has been sucked dry by T-Mobile's phone-company shenanigans. You may remember that earlier this year, the long-awaited, long-overdue SDK shipped, along with the news that only that code which had been approved by T-Mobile would be installable on any device.

They still haven't delivered a synch tool that lets you download your PIM data (calendar, contacts, to-do) from your Sidekick to your PC, and what's more, this latest move shows very clearly what you can expect to happen when you stop being a T-Mobile customer: they will "withdraw their support" from your handset, erasing your personal info.

Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently, even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped $250 on mine). You need T-Mobile's permission to install software on their device. T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from your device. And when you stop subscribing to their service, T-Mobile will delete all your data forever, without giving you any mechanism for moving it off the device (and without giving you the ability to design a tool that would let you do this).

I apologize, then, to all the people I've recommended Sidekicks to. Clearly, this device is a mistake, at least as offered by T-Mobile (it may be that AT&T will do a better job of marketing the tool -- there's no technical reason it has to suck, but T-Mobile's operational division has castrated it into near-uselessness).

I've been looking at the Nokia Sony-Ericsson P800. It looks like it does everything the Sidekick does (albeit at a retail cost of 3X the Sidekick's), and is, moreover, a real PC, that you can install software on, back up, etc. It works with a variety of carriers (in Europe at least, is there any US support apart from T-Mobile?), and has a pretty good UI and featureset. My Sidekick's plan is up in September, and I won't be renewing. Any US users of the Sony-Ericsson care to weigh in on this as a replacement? Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike!)

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

Australian cops don't know the meaning of Sorry

An Australian woman whose unpaid parking tickets resulted in her being ordered to perform community service was strip-searched by the police who were overseeing the work. She asked for an apology, and, failing to receive one, sued the cops, and was awarded over AUS$300K. The Aussie cops appealed -- she asked for an apology. She didn't get one. She litigated the cappeal and her award was knocked down to AUS$138,000. Now all she wants is an apology. Which she won't get. Jesus. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:04:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Toaster casemod

Luis points us to a particularly zany casemod: a toaster PC. We've featured toaster casemods on BoingBoing before -- twice -- but this is one offers a new spin on the toastmod theme. Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:42:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF P2P: Tired of being treated like a criminal?

In the wake of the RIAA's announcement that they intend on suing thousands of customers, EFF has posted a campaign in support of P2P music sharing and the striking of a new copyright bargain that will compensate artists without criminalizing millions of Internet users.

File-sharing has enabled music fans from around the world to build the largest library of recorded music in history. While this should be cause for celebration, large record labels have spent the last three years attacking peer-to-peer (P2P) technology and the people who use it. But neither user-empowering technologies nor consumers' desire for easy access to digital music are evil. Targeting technologists and users is not addressing the real problem.

The problem is that there is no adequate system in place that allows music lovers access to their favorite music while compensating artists and copyright holders. It's time to start addressing this problem head on. In the past, we've used a system called "compulsory licensing" to reconcile copyright law with the benefits of new technologies like cable television and webcasting. This approach has drawbacks, but it's certainly better than the direction that the recording industry is taking us today.

Many innovative payment models have been proposed (with or without a compulsory license), and we have highlighted some of them here. In addition, several artists and record labels are leading this effort, offering creative ways for their fans to get access to their music while rewarding the artists for their talents. A few of those artists and labels are highlighted here, as well.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:40:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wacky Seussian Wonderland: Ricky Boscarino's Luna Parc

Gaudi or just gaudy? BoingBoing reader Allen Knutson says:

This artist transformed his home into a Dr. Seuss-like wonderland. The bathroom is particularly crazy. He makes amazing miniatures in metal (though I am having trouble figuring out how big they really are); here's one. The obvious front page image is his house. I read about him in the NY Times today, which includes the good news that he's doing well financially as an artist.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:40:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online gallery of smashed-up exotic cars

Fancy a little schadenfreude? This very weird website is an online repository of car wreck photos involving expensive and sexy sportscars. Includes descriptions of how the wrecks happened. There's a fetish here somewhere, I just don't know what its name is. Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:38:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USA Today: fansites' influence on moviemakers

Interesting article about the growing influence that fan websites have on directors and film studios:

"I used to hate the Internet," [Marvel Studios head Avi Arad] says. "I thought it was just a place where people stole our products. But I see how influential these fans can be when they build a consensus, which is what we seek. I now consider them filmmaking partners."

Link, Discuss (Thanks, Jed)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:30:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Save the Whole Earth Review Singularity!

The next Whole Earth Review issue is delayed due to lack of funding. It's a special issue on the Singularity, one that lots of people (including, me, Stross and Vinge) wrote pieces for. In classic WER style, they're appealing to their readers to come up with the printing costs to get the ish out the door and they've posted some of the articles that will come out with the issue as an enticement (including mine). Link Discuss (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:23:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecamblogging: build a hotrod, hack into its brain via open source app

I visited the clandestine LA workshop of a mad scientist, and posted some phonecam pics on the fly to my phonecamblog.

I'm standing in the garage of a supercool geek guy who is building an obscure, rad, retro sportscar. He's hacking into its electronic "brain" by way of an IBM thinkpad running an open source application that gathers and analyses performance data. Steven is a technician with one of the world's largest aeronautics companies. He is also a fearless robot master and pyro terrorist. Once, he rescued me from a bunch of bees. (Sanyo 8100/Sprint)

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:23:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

QuickTopic Goes Pro

QuickTopic -- who provide our message boards gratis -- has launched a premium service with lots of great bells and whistles (and a reasonable pricetag). Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Decease: new 'zine about death seeking submissions

bOING bOING pal Meri Brin is starting a 'zine that I'm dying to read! (hahahaha... ba-dum-bump)

Decease, a general interest magazine about death, is looking for submissions. Decease explores different aspects of death from the practical, like exploring cremation options, to the esoteric, including cryonics and art exhibits. Decease wants to remove the stigma associated with and explore humans' natural curiosity about death.

Submissions can be artwork, images, poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction). All artists are encouraged to submit work that may fall under the theme of Death. Work can be humorous, tongue in cheek, investigative, or personal. Some sample examples include:
-Interviews with morticians, embalmers, taxidermists
-Photo Essay of interesting headstones
-A review of a book, movie, art show, television show
-Essay about the interesting death of a person, famous or not
-Places to visit - like the Museum of Death in Hollywood, or the Bone Church near Prague
-Visuals good for everything - collages, photos, drawings, illustrations!

Interesting? Interested? Send it to me!
Comments, Ideas, Let me know!

Thanks!
meri@idiom.com

Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:40:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neocons: scarier than Decepticons

Sweet photoshoppery from Matt Jones, now available in Cafe Press tees and such. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:56:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF's Von Lohmann on today's RIAA lawsuit announcement

This response from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

It's plain that the dinosaurs of the recording industry have completely lost touch with reality," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF senior staff attorney. "At a time when more Americans are using file-sharing software than voted for President Bush, more lawsuits are simply not the answer. It's time to get artists paid and make file-sharing legal. EFF calls on Congress to hold hearings immediately on alternatives to the RIAA's litigation campaign against the American public.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:59:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory Doctorow on BBC's radio 4 "Today Programme"

BoingBoing co-editor Cory Doctorow, currently traveling in the UK, talked about blogs on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme yesterday morning. Listen (Real), Listen (un-Real, thanks Gerard), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:43:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saudi students get test scores by SMS

Saudi Telecom is offering a service through which students at secondary schools in Saudi Arabia can receive their exam results via SMS, according to an article in Arab News.

The service by STC in association with the Ministry of Education requires the student to message his or her seat number... results will be messaged back to the student, and on successful completion the service is charged at SR1.50, he said.

link Discuss (Thanks, Jon, via unwired)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:10:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA about to sue hundreds of uploaders, using DMCA

A BoingBoing pal who asks to remain anonymous says that the RIAA has just announced that they will be filing lawsuits against hundreds of uploaders, using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to obtain names. They'll apparently begin filing the lawsuits in 8-10 weeks, according to announcements in a press conference held earlier today at 11 AM Eastern Time.
Update: the Washington Post now has a story here, and Ted Bridis of AP now has a story online here.
Update II: The RIAA has now posted an announcement here.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:59:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Newsmonster: Now with Whuffie

Kevin Burton continues to make improvements to his program NewsMonster, a Mozilla-based RSS reader that uses a Whuffie-like reputation system to rank and suggest items and feeds to his readers. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for OS X yet (weird, considering that it's all Mozilla-based), but Kevin promises that by end-of-week (apparently, he's going to patch some longstanding Moz bugs and submit the changes to the Mozilla codebase). Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:05:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Open Spectrum list

A new mailing list for talking about Open Spectrum:

Open Spectrum is the frequencies that supports the use of Wi-Fi/802.11b, and other wireless internet access technology. Wi-Fi and other wireless data systems make a very good urban/rural internet access solution, as shown by the massive growth in Wireless ISP and community wireless networks. However, in many places regulatory uncertainty leaves its users at risk. The purpose of this list is to further the proliferation of good open spectrum policies world-wide.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Simon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:02:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big Pharma FUDs Canadian dope-by-fax service

Florida retirees are getting their health-critical meds on the cheap by faxing their scrips to Canadian mail-order pharmacies, a practice that was newly legalized. The minions of Big Pharma (and, to be fair, of US pharmacists who are hamstrung by Big Pharma and will be outcompeted by lower Canadian dope pricing) are starting a $750,000 smear campaign to "educate" seniors about their duty to give more money to fortune-100 pharmaceuticals companies.

``People need to be aware they are taking a lot of risks if they are going to unlicensed and unregulated pharmacies,'' said state Department of Health spokesman Bill Parizek, whose agency includes the pharmacy board. ``We want to educate the public...''

Canadian pharmacies can sell some of the drugs most commonly used by Americans at 30 percent to 50 percent less, as a national health care plan covers its 33 million citizens and the government negotiates bulk medication prices.

On Friday, the U.S. Senate voted to let drugs be imported from Canada and resold at lower prices, as long as it was determined the practice posed no health risks. But the Food and Drug Administration continues to insist it cannot vouch for the safety of Canadian drugs.

Link Discuss (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:56:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AdSense previewer

Aaron Swartz has ginned up a Google AdSense previewer. Enter the URL of your page and it will give you a sample of the kinds of Google Ads you'd get if you put them on that page. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:50:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eldred Act coming to Congress

Lessig reports that Representatives Doolittle and Lofgren will introduce the Eric Eldred act to Congress. This is the bill that would require copyright holders to drop $1/work at the fifty-year mark in order to retain their copyright interests for the full duration set out by Congress -- otherwise, the works would enter the public domain. That way, you could find out what was and wasn't in copyright, and who held the rights to what. This is astonishingly good news. Go public domain! Some rights reserved! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:48:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC breaks new ground with RSS feeds

The BBC News has switched on what may be the most sophisticated collection of customizable RSS feeds offered by any mainstream news organization. Matt "Helped design BBC News" Jones posts the elated in-company memo on it:

"Yesterday afternoon [we] pulled the big red lever to make the CPS start publishing RSS versions of all the NewsOnline indexes on the website.

Examples:

Front Page http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/ front_page/rss091.xml

Cambridgeshire http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/england/ cambridgeshire/rss091.xml

Arts http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/ entertainment/arts/rss091.xml

News 24 http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/ programmes/bbc_news_24/rss091.xml

...and for all of you going away to Glastonbury next weekend, Summer Music Festivals 2003 http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/in_depth/entertainment/ 2003/summer_music_festivals/rss091.xml in the UK Edition

And similarly in the World Edition,

Europe http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition /europe/rss091.xml

And Business http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/ business/rss091.xml

Etc.

The more ambitious of you out there should be able to work out the URL's of any index you want."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:44:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google AdSense

Google's got a new affiliate program, Google AdSense. Sign up, add a little scrap of Javascript to your pages, and you'll get a few targetted text-ads whenever your page is served. Clickthroughs get you $0.50 per. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Merlin's spamtrap catches a grifter

Merlin Mann, whose notion for a spammer honeypot I blogged a few days back, has caught his first spammer with it. The perp is running an identity-theft scam that sends you a deceptive URL (http://www.paypal.com@207.44.196.35/~redbarpr/cgi-bin/webscr%3fcmd=verification/( for what appears to be a PayPal renewal screen and sucks up your personally identifying information and credit-card info.

This was mined on June 19th at 7:41pm (EDT) by IP 62.215.3.38...

I'll can post more later if needed, but I wanted to let you white hats, wizards, and net detectives go nuts on researching these IPs if the spirit moves you.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:40:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scientology's shag-carpet-era art

This site contains the scanned images and text of a 1970s-era Church of Scientology picturebook, laughably written and lavishly illustrated with photos of loinclothed enlightened souls who look suspiciously like Jim Morrison. Link Discuss (via JWZ's LiveJournal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:33:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Blogging standardization effort underway

Numerous blogging toolmakers and hackers have signed onto a new effort, led by Sam Ruby, to define standard interfaces for posting to and syndicating blogs. Blogger's just thrown its hat into the ring, too. Link Discuss (via EvHead)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:28:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Report: Palo Alto school exposed student data on unsecured WLANs

This story in today's Palo Alto Weekly says Silicon Valley's Palo Alto Unified School district exposed sensitive student records through unencrypted, unsecured 802.11b wireless networks. Link, Discuss, (Thanks, cfarivar)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:08:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LA Wardriving with socalwug.org

I went wardriving in downtown LA this morning with Frank Keeney and Mike Outmesguine from SOCALWUG, and published a few quick phonecam snapshots from the road which you can see here. Both Frank and Mike drive incredibly tricked-out vans packed with wall-to-wall wardriving gadgetry. Their recipe is basically (a) one or more notebook computers equipped with an independent wireless connectivity source (sierra wireless, boingo, or Sprint PCS 'net service), because they don't exploit the networks they sniff; (b) GPS device cable-connected to the main wardriving notebook to map out longitudinal/latitudinal coordinates of each WLAN along the way; (c) ham radio for two-way chat with fellow wardrivers in your team who are on the streets with you; (d) handy power converters that plug into your cigarette lighter and handily power a six-plug power strip so you can wardrive all you want with no battery worries.

Mike and Frank use several apps for network sniffing. Netstumbler is one, and is probably the best known. There are a few cool apps for PDAs, one of which is a PDA-specific version of Netstumbler. But this morning, the guys also used an application you may not have heard of -- Kismet, which Frank prefers for his Linux laptop. It serves up insanely detailed data that goes way beyond SSIDs and network strength. Kismet allows you to view details of network traffic, right down to actual filenames being transmitted through unencrypted WLANs. We sniffed close to 400 network points during a 40-minute cruise that covered Chinatown and downtown LA's financial core. The percentage of these which were totally open, vulnerable, unencrypted networks was mindboggling. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those naked WLANs appeared to belong to city/state government and law enforcement offices. Always good to know the public's data is in good hands. More on Kismet here. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:32:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Illustrator Kenn Brown imagines the "Perfect PC" for PC Mag

Very cool images from Canadian artist and SARS Art project contributor Ken Brown, who says:

Here's a series of illustrations I did for the current PC Magazine. The challenge here was to create contemporary looking and aesthetically pleasing PC designs that were not so futuristic as to alienate the audiences visual understanding of PCs and their components. The article seeks to educate the audience about the various components of a system that are suited to a specific groups needs - so that the reader can make a more informed decision about the PC they want to purchase. The translucent reveals and components allowed the writers to indicate video cards, processors etc.

BoingBoing reader Robert points our that the images are "also available as part of a very cool set of flash presentations here that give you more insight about what actually makes up the machine, as well as crisper visuals." Link to gallery of "Perfect PC" images, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:05:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecams and politics: Hellweg in CNN/Money

Eric Hellweg wrote a piece on phonecams that appears in CNN/Money today. It's interesting, in that it's among the first about phonecams in recent memory that tackles issues of privacy and politics head-on:

[T]he industry sees camera phones as the first wave in their battle to convince consumers that cell phones are for more than just talking; they're thinking of more lucrative activities like sending and receiving video and audio. A spokesperson for Sprint PCS (PCS: Research, Estimates), which debuted its camera-phone service in August 2002, says more than 2 million photos were shared in February and March through its networks. Wireless investors should keep their eyes on the camera phones and the U.S. adoption rate: Research firm IDC predicts that 1.9 million camera phones will be sold in the United States this year, and that the number will rocket up to 4.9 million next year -- a 162 percent gain.

But investors -- and the cellular companies -- should gird themselves for an impending battle with consumers, courts, and possibly even Congress over questions of privacy and the proper and improper uses of these phones.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:58:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First nationwide free WiFi

The Pacific island nation of Niue has rolled out island-wide, free national wireless access. The Atlantic island nation of England is lagging some ways behind them at the moment, unfortunely for me. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:24:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Terrorizing popstars with an accordion

Joey DeVilla roams the world with an accordion strapped to his back, deconstructing popular music with it (he led a procession of newly millionaired Slashdot founders down Broadway one night, playing Fatboy Slim on the accordion). He's had the good (?) fortune to run into various pop-stars on the way, and he confronts them with his squeeze-box, faking out rendiitons of their hit singles and singing along with great enthusiasm. Here're four anaecdotes about four popstars' reactions to this practice:

"Joey! It's Chris from Sloan!"

Once again, Sloan may not be familiar to people outside Canada, but they were -- at least until their current album, which ain't so hot -- a band with a knack for really good songwriting.

"Play some Sloan! Do you know any Sloan? Play some Sloan!" she screamed.

I started playing their first big single, the grunge anthem of unrequited university love, Underwhelmed:

She was underwhelmed if that's a word I know it's not 'cause I looked it up It's one of those things I learned in my school...

Chris' face first showed curiosity. Then it showed recognition. Followed by shock. And then we didn't see his face at all.

"He's...he's running away!" said Meryle, who burst out laughing.

"Come back, you coward!" I yelled. "Even Alanis would've faced me!"

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:22:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 23, 2003

TIME on phonecam blogging

This week's Time Magazine features a brief feature on phonecam blogging, and mentions textamerica.com -- the free service I've been using for mine. Hey, if your blog is a moblog *and* a photoblog, and you don't want limit the scope to phonecam pics only, could you just call it a mo-pho blog? Link, Discuss, (via Jason DiFilippo's Journal, which is always filled with amazing photos that you really must see.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:22:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Schools' censorware sucks

EFF published a major report on censorware today. What we did was, we googled all the keywords from all the US core curriculum, then checked to see if the censorware employed by schools and libraries would let you get at the top curriculum-related links (with human intervention to determine whether the pages were really relevant to the curriculum). In a nutshell: censorware stinks, and if your school or library uses it, it will stop you from using it to look up timely, relevant information related to your curriculum.

+ The use of Internet blocking software in schools cannot help schools comply with the law because schools do not and cannot set the software to block only the categories required by the law, and because the software is incapable of blocking only the visual depictions required by CIPA.

+ Blocking software does not protect children from exposure to a large volume of material that is harmful to minors within the legal definitions. Blocking software cannot adapt adequately to local community standards. Most schools already have in place alternatives to Internet blocking software, such as adoption and enforcement of Internet use policies, media literacy education, directed use, and supervised use.

+ Blocking software in schools damages educational opportunities for students, both by blocking access to web pages that are directly related to the state-mandated curriculums and by restricting broader inquiries of both students and teachers. Teachers and students 17 years or older (most high school juniors and seniors) should be exempt, yet suffer the consequences of CIPA implementation.

After testing nearly a million web pages related to state-mandated curriculums, the researchers found that of the web pages blocked, 97 - 99% of a statistically significant sample were blocked using non-standard, discretionary, and potentially illegal criteria beyond what CIPA requires.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:25:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scooterman: drunkard's chauffeur on a folding scooter

Scooterman is a London-based service, wherein drunk people call a number, and a guy on a folding scooter comes over to the bar, puts his scooter in the trunk of their car and drives it and them home. Brilliant. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:21:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chris Pirillo interviews "Weird Al" Yankovic

Digital video never lies. Link, Discuss

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

My new phonecam blog, and syndicating moblogs with RSS

I've been fooling around with some new phonecams and a free phonecam blogging service called Textamerica lately. You can see the results at xenijardin.textamerica.com. Each of the phonecams I've demoed have been wildly frustrating in one way or another. Motorola's T722i add-on cam produces grainy thumbnails at best; image quality on Sanyo's 8100 (Sprint) is teh suck in all but bright light conditions. Until those megapixel phonecams hit America, mobile photobloggers might be better off combining a good, small digital camera like the Pentax Optio S with a wireless PDA for uploads and text captions. But despite limitations, the convenience, speed, and novelty of phonecam blogging has been fun so far -- even if the results are mediocre, stamp-sized snapshots.

Chris Pirillo -- whose terrific phonecam blog inspired me to finally get off my digital butt and publish one of my own -- has been corresponding with the textamerica.com folks for weeks with service improvement suggestions. His persistent e-badgering led to the company's introduction of RSS feeds last week. Free, instant phonecam blog syndication. How cool is that? I'm exploring other phonecam blog services, and plan to post more on that soon. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:50:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Balloon trip into "space"

In an attempt to break the balloon altitude record, two Brits will fly a helium balloon as tall as the Empire State Building to 40 km above Earth. OK, it's not really "space," but the pilots will be exposed to massive amounts of cosmic rays. That's why they'll be sporting space suits. Withouth them, their "blood would boil and (they'd) be vaporized above 63,000 feet because of the low air pressure." Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:07:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

P2P Summit debuts in LA on August 8

Hal Bringman says:

The P2P Summit announced today its formation and date for an upcoming event focused exclusively on the explosive filesharing phenomena, and its impact on the future of entertainment. The P2P Summit is seeking speakers, sponsors and exhibitors for the first-ever P2P Summit to be held August 8, 2003, at the Wyndham Bel Age Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. The Summit's focus is on the future of P2P file sharing and explores the various circumstances and developments that have recently turned the once underground and allegedly illegal movement into a seemingly booming business sector as digital music pay-per-download and subscription services begin to flourish.

link to P2P Summit website, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:00:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Female avatars are worth less than male avatars

I spent the weekend devouring a draft of Brad King and John Borland's forthcoming book Dungeons and Dreamers, which charts the community history of gaming... profiles the individual quirky, wacky developers and super-fraggers, but unlike other books, weaves them together to sketch out a broad map of gaming's social DNA. Some interesting tales of women gamers and developers, too. Good stuff -- more on the book and the Dungeons and Dreamers blog later. But this morning, an item on Declan's list from Age and Sydney Morning Herald deputy IT editor Nathan Cochrane's blog:

US economist Edward Castronova has discovered that female avatars, from worlds such as EverQuest, trade online at an average 10 per cent discount to their price were they male-designated. Castronova theorises that the same forces at play in the real world that keep womens' earning power below that of their male counterparts -- even where they have identical skills -- are also at work online. Men, it seems, like to appoint in their real-world successors analogs of themselves. Online, that behaviour carries over into who they appoint as their virtual alter-ego, the avatar.

permalink to Nathan's blog post, link to Castronova's report "The Price of Man and Woman: A Hedonic Pricing Model of Avatar Attributes in a Synthetic World," Discuss.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:47:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oxford University, this Wednesday

I'll be speaking at Oxford University this Wednesday night, at 8pm, Graves Room, St John's College, Oxford. I'm going to read a little recent fiction, talk about copyright a little, and where I see the state of the science fiction today. Hope to see you there! Discuss

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

Sunday, June 22, 2003

I.P. Beetles

"A 13-year-old Indian boy has begun producing winged beetles in his urine after hatching the eggs in his body, a senior medical official said Monday." Link Discuss (via Land of the Dead)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:24:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Listen Today: 24 hours of Throbbing Gristle

Today, experimental record label Mobilization and KFJC radio are presenting a twenty-four hour Webcasted audio celebration of Throbbing Gristle, the proto-industrial, transmedia, civilization-wrecking, musical extravaganze of the late 1970s. Tune in, turn on, and burn out your mind to 6 hours of interviews, the new 24 CD release of TG live, and the entire back-catalog of Throbbing Gristle recordings. Link Discuss (Thanks, Richard!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:47:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oddball net-traffic: 55,808 bytes and fake IPs

The Internet is seething with many spurious and oddly formed packets, and their origin and purpose remain a mystery.

Since mid-May, security researchers and network administrators have tried to track down the source of odd traffic that they have been seeing on their networks. The data frequently attempted to connect to nonexistent servers or to services not offered by existing servers. The only common thread seemed to be that the data packet had a window size of 55,808 bytes and, in many cases, came from a nonexistent Internet address.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Luis!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:20:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

QTVR Panorama: All aboard the Hogwarts Express

Australian photographer and QuickTime VR enthusiast Peter Murphy says:

"Hi Xeni, I shot this panorama yesterday on the Hogwarts Express in Sydney -- a steam train excursion of 800 Harry Potter fans - prior to the launch of the new book. Amazing scenes."

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:58:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big Dig's impermanence hits home for sandhogs

Now that the Big Dig -- Boston's ambitious, interminable plan to bury its freeways -- is finally winding down, thousands of workers who have devoted years to the largest earthworks project in human history are receiving pinkslips.

For now, though, instead of finding jobs elsewhere in Boston, many former Big Dig employees are eyeing potential, long-term work out of state, such as the proposed Second Avenue subway in New York City, an ambitious light-rail project in Washington state, and an ongoing sewage-overflow project in Providence...

''A lot of craftsmen that have worked here have never been laid off and have worked a ton of overtime,'' said John Pourbaix, executive director of Construction Industries of Massachusetts, a trade association.

''The scary part to me,'' he said, ''is these employees pretty much became accustomed to a lifestyle and paycheck that might be going south.''

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:04:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GSM spectrum may be turned over for WiFi in UK

The British Radio Telecommunications Agency is seeking comments from the public on a proposal to re-allocate the GSM guardbands for unlicensed or differently regulated uses, including WiFi-style data. Pretty exciting stuff, as it open the possibility of modding GSM handsets (cheap as hell) to do unlicensed data comms. British? Interested? Read the consultation and send in a comment to the Agency. The more the merrier.

Question 1: Given the other potential uses outlined in this document, do you consider it most appropriate to make the spectrum available for wide-area public use?

Question 2: If your answer to question 1 is yes, do you consider it most appropriate for the spectrum to be used to supplement the spectrum of the existing GSM operators, or to be made available for potential new GSM operators on a regional or national basis?

Question 3: If your answers to questions 1 and 2 are yes, do you consider it most appropriate for the spectrum to be awarded via an auction process?

Question 4: Given the other potential uses outlined in this document, do you consider it most appropriate to make the spectrum available for short-range, low-power GSM use on a licence-exempt basis?

Question 5: If your answer to question 4 is yes, what kinds of application do you anticipate will develop? Estimates of potential market size and anticipated penetration would also be useful.

Question 6: If your answer to question 4 is yes, should the use of this spectrum for the provision of public services be allowed?

Link Discuss (Thanks, Julian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:25:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 21, 2003

Modular Self-Configuring Robots

PARC researcher Mark Yim builds amazing modular robots that can self-reconfigure from a snake to a loop to a spider without stopping. Check out the videos--very Transformers-esque! For those in the San Francisco Bay Area, Yim is speaking on Monday in a public seminar at the Intel Research Berkeley lablet! Link Discuss (Thanks, Eric!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:49:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lessig, Felten on DRM

Lisa Rein has posted video of Ed Felten and Larry Lessig doing a Q&A session on digital rights management systems. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:36:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 20, 2003

Wireless cottage industries: "phone ladies" of Bangladesh

A new service expansion by GrameenPhone, Bangladesh's leading cellphone company, is sparking the creation of new family businesses in the impoverished country -- where there are only about three land lines for every 1,000 people.

Under a special low-priced package, it has been offering phones to village women, now popularly known as phone ladies, and changing lifestyles into the bargain. The phones are registered only in the name of women but they are also operated by their husbands and sons and shared out in the village at a few taka per call. With just one phone, the service has now become a family business in many villages, with monthly earnings averaging $170, a lot of money in poverty-ridden Bangladesh which has an annual per capita income of $368.

"This has improved our living standards and made us feel proud in every sense," said operator Masuda Begum. The phone ladies also enjoyed a bigger say in family decisions, including marriage of children, Masuda said. Many have renovated their homes with their new income and in villages with electricity they have bought color televisions and refrigerators. Some are even sending their children to the cities for school where they also have access to qualified doctors.

Link to Reuters story, Discuss (Thanks, Hal)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:39:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Society for Amateur Scientists Conference

This "garage science" conference at Caltech July 17-20 sounds like fun: Paul MacCready from Aerovironment presenting technology for "citizen flight" experiments, Michael "Skeptic" Shermer, John Lighton from the University of Nevada on DIY sensor networks, and many more speakers. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:12:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homeland security adornment

For sale: silver and plexiglas homeland security chokers, in every color of the terrornoia rainbow. Link Discuss (Thanks, Ernie)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:20:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: musical Zen

mic in track
moylan sisters
wing music
nut lady
beatbox
cowbell
and a classic: eugene mirman
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:36:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Healing bones by printing out new ones

It seems like there's nothing inkjet printers can't do: print out organs, RFIDs, cake-icing... And now, bones:

The idea is to scan a damaged bone, using either computer aided tomography or magnetic resonance imaging, and generate a 3D computer model of the missing section. This would then be fed into ACR's machine, which can create more precise shapes than most prototypers. This approach is already occasionally used by surgeons, but not to replace load-bearing bones.

A missing bone segment could be created on the spot in the operating theatre, says Tony Mulligan, head of ACR. "Big segments would only take about an hour-and-a-half," he says, a fraction of the time it takes to build up a gap segment.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Ernie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:46:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tim O'Reilly's Reboot talk

Here are my notes from Tim "O'Reilly" O'Reilly's talk at Reboot, "The Open Source Paradigm Shift"

1770: The Mechanical Turk. A hoax chess-playing machine. Babbage lost to it, and he knew it was a hoax, but he wanted to know if it was really possible. The secret of the Turk is that there was a man inside.

Every app has a programmer inside. Take the programmer out of Amazon, Google, etc, and it stops working after a while. This is different from desktop software.

This is customization at work. Google/Amazon/eBay are updated constantly, but MSFT only revs every 3 years.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crappiest ToS evar

Check out these utterly craptacular Terms of Service for a magazine-sales site. Courtesy of Jason Fried's Reboot talk, as an example of how developers blame UI failures on users. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tiny keyboard light

The iLite is a teeny, cheap white-LED-based USB keyboard light. $10 including shipping. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:14:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TiVo for your eyes

This specs-mounted wee camera continuously buffers the last 30 seconds worth of what you've seen, with the option to rewind and instant replay the things that have entered your field of vision. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:11:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Marc Canter's Reboot talk

Here are my notes from Marc "Marcomedia" Canter's talk at Reboot.

Things need to be small and modular: programmers working nights, little companies. The VCs pushed us to head for IPO, so entire companies were based on one feature. In my world, companies have multiple products.

I'm going to talk about Longhorn and how we can compete with MSFT.

Open source: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. With the right standards, we can equal Longhorn by building a people's mesh.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:08:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jason Fried's Reboot talk

Here are my notes from Jason "37 Signals" Fried's talk at Reboot.

Contingency design

Design for when things go wrong. On the web, things go wrong all the time. There's never a web-day where nothing goes wrong.

You need to make mistakes well.

Crisis points (when users are most likely to abandon their session):

* Error messages

* Bad search results

* Form mistakes

* Pages not found

* Confusing wording.

Prevention and first-aid.

Hall of shame:

* Mag subscription site FAQ: What happens if you click order now twice? Our documentation tells you not to do this. It's your fault if you do. You'll get a duplicate order and it'll get charged long before you find out it happened. So you're screwed. You get a 25% refund. Maybe you could ask for for a two-year sub.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:41:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dan Gillmor's Reboot talk

Here are my notes from Dan Gillmor's talk at Reboot ("Making the News").

Assembling an amateur newsroom

* US SpaceCom asked for amateurs to ftp up pix of the shuttle disaster

* BBC asked for demonstrators to send in photos

* Self-assembling newsroom: group real-time linking to war coverage

* Moblogging: Not sure on the concept, but sure that it matters, it's a big deal that people can take photos and send them straight to the Web (it will only get worse: the cameras are getting smaller). Implies that journos will get a lot of pix from

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:04:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Meg Hourihan's blog-talk at Reboot

I'm at Reboot in Copenhagen. I gave my talk this morning and didn't get my systems running well enough to blog the two talks that followed it (Ben Hammersley on RDF and Scott Heiferman on Meetup.com). But now I'm humming along, and taking notes. Here's my notes from Meg Hourihan's talk on Weblogs.

The blog is becoming an online identity -- who I am, what I do, what my pix are of, who are my friends.

Today, you can review a book on your blog and a review on Amazon. It would be better if you could just tell Amazon about the review on your site. More distributed.

It would be cool to link recipes/reviews to Epicurious and collaboratively filter that info (people who cooked this, also cooked this). You get to own your content but connect with others, retain copyright but still participate in your discussion.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Bay Area mobbing site

Rob Zazueta is setting up a San Francisco based (dis)organization to put together mobs, a la Manhattan, in the Bay Area. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:59:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orrin Hatch's senate website links to porn site

By the time you read this, the pr0n-goof may have been fixed. But as of 8:30PM LA time on Thursday, June 19, if you visit this section of Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch's website (screenshot) and click on the image icon (scroll down, right-hand side) for "myUtahSearch.com" -- (which links here) -- you will be directed to a porn website that promises "Huge natural titties @ bignaturals.com!", and looks like this (not safe for work). Whoops. Discuss, (Thanks, JP)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:48:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dan Gillmor on phonecam nation

From Dan Gillmor's column and blog (which now includes phonecam snapshots):

I've noted before the potential for making these cameras an integral part of tomorrow's journalism, as when everyday folks might capture breaking news or get evidence of wrongdoing. I've thought less about the evident drawbacks, which are unfortunately growing as well. Example: On a Web site I won't name, people post images they've taken -- in public places -- of other people's (clothed) behinds. Several health clubs have taken to banning camera-phones in locker rooms to prevent more serious abuse. It won't be long before we can embed cameras into our clothes or eyeglasses. What will happen then? Will we decide to be nothing but snoops? We'll all be answering these questions for some time to come.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:17:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fredric Brown's "The Fabulous Clipjoint" is an e-book

Ebooks have never really taken off. I guess the readers are expensive and cumbersome, but I love reading books on my Sony Vaio (a color handheld that uses the Palm OS). Palm Digital Media sells lots of excellent books for the Palm OS, and the prices are quite reasonable. I am reading Bill Bryson's latest, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and was happy to see that Fredric Brown's terrific nover, The Fabulous Clipjoint is available there for under $5. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:46:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Getcher nukular GM apocalyptic singularity tropical fish rightchere!

Fluorescent GM pet fish are all the rage in Tawian and coming to the US.

The Night Pearl began as a research tool created by HJ Tsai, a professor at National Taiwan University. He was looking for a way to make fish organs easier to see when studying them, and isolated a gene for a fluorescent protein that he had extracted from jellyfish and inserted it into the genome of a zebrafish. To his astonishment, the jellyfish gene made whole zebrafish glow...

Now the first fruits of this collaboration have gone on sale in Taiwan and will soon appear in the US. The Night Pearls glow in different red and green patterns thanks to genes from jellyfish and marine coral. Now the team is working on a glowing dragon fish, which many Asians believe is a lucky species.

Link Discuss (via JWZ's LiveJournal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:43:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Articulated cardboard robot PC case

This is pretty hot right here: an articulated, assemble-it-yourself carboard robot that is meant to contain a PC. Link Discuss (Thanks, Ernie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:40:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NPR segment about voice actor Joe Bevilacqua

Stefan says: "Joe Bevilacqua (http://www.comedyorama.com) is a radio producer and voice artist. Last Sunday's 'Weekend Edition' featured a great story by him, describing his relationships with his angry father and with Hanna-Barbara voice artist Daws Butler, who gave the teenage Bevilacqua lessons after recieving an unsolicited cassette-tape demo. (Scroll down to 'Fathers' Day,' near the bottom of the page.)" Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:37:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SARS Digital Folk Art "Z": Kenn Brown, global flavor, thank you.

At left, an exclusive contribution (link to full-size) created by Kenn Brown, a Vancouver-based SciFi and fantasy illustrator whose work has appeared in publications such as Wired Magazine (that cool cover for the 12/02 "Science and Religion" issue), Scientific American, New Scientist, GQ, and many others. Check out his nanotechnology spread for Focus Magazine, on newsstands in Italy this week. His current projects include cover illustrations for a three-volume Sci-fi anthology edited by Ben Bova, published by Tor Books.

Chronicle Books editor Alan Rapp shared this photo with BoingBoing co-editor David Pescovitz (see this website if you don't get the joke). More stuff from readers: Australian blogger Andrew Bulhak shot these photos (one and two) of masked mannequins in a Melbourne storefront. Sean spotted a SARSparilla ad and the Official SARS Website which will totally flip out and kick your ass. Charles V. painted this for you, e-mail him to purchase prints. Eli the Bearded points us to this story from North Korea claiming creation of a wacky new anti-SARS drug made from ginseng, gold, and platinum. Charlie O in Seattle submits this on-stage snapshot of indie band Melt Banana's guitarist: "I didn't get a chance to ask him if this was just for the stage, but he played the whole set in a facemask."

Canadian BoingBoing reader Kean Soo writes: "I only recently discovered sarsart.org, but wish I had found it sooner. I've already been exposed to some of the direct-and-less-than-savoury discrimination as an Asian living here in Toronto. Since then, I've been obsessed with SARS, and since I've been keeping a semi-daily journal comic online, I figured I would write about it in some way. It isn't finished, but I do have one panel that I turned into a wallpaper."

Blogger kaminogoya from Osaka, Japan found the provocative photo at left (Link to full-size image). If anyone knows who took the shot, please let me know.

Taiwanese blogger Wei-Chung Yang says, "I noticed that your project doesn't include any works from Taiwanese artists, so here are some of mine. I created a comic series that combines the two hottest issues in Taiwan right now - SARS, and the hugely popular TV show, Taiwan Thunder Fire, whose protagonist also plays a starring role in my blog comic. His name is Liu Wen-Tsung the Beast, played by Taiwanese actor Ching Young. Liu Wen-Tsung is a 'never-nice' guy -- he bankrupted his own father, and killed a bunch of people for personal gain. But he's cool, tough, and loved by the TV audience, hence his nickname 'the Beast' . So, my comic is called The Diary of the Beast about SARS." View Wei-Chung Yang's amazing contributions here.

Discuss. Read about it in The South China Morning Post here (600k JPEG). Future contributions will be added to the SARS Art Project Archive website, and we may post brief updates on BoingBoing from time to time. Much gratitude to each of the artists and bloggers who contributed, and to Sean Bonner for building sarsart.org. Very special thanks to Reverse Cowgirl for introducing us to many of the illustrators and artists who generously created original works exclusively for this project. Susannah, this wouldn't have happened without you.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:37:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Booty Call: liked mobilesses.com? you'll love photocide.com

PhotoCide.com appears to be yet another site showcasing mass-contributed, voyeuristic, illicit phonecam snapshots. Appears to consist entirely of butt pics from one guy right now, who seems either (a) rather lonely, or (b) heavily into gluteus maximus. Discuss (Thanks, Jon)

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

Online video from recent INS protests in SF

BoingBoing pal Lisa Rein shot digital video of ACLU and NLG lawyers speaking at last Friday's INS protests in San Francisco, and she's posted the footage here for online viewing: Samina Faheem, American Muslim Alliance, Pakistan American Democratic Front (Link), Jayashri Srikantiah, Staff Attorney, ACLU (Link) Riva Enteen, Program Director, National Lawyers Guild (Link), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:15:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot Games and Expo in SF July 27 = supercool event

David Calkins says:

Robots needed! Wanna show off your robots? Wanna win some money? Wanna get national exposure? We've got a big expo coming up, and if you'd like to show off your bots, the Summer Robot Games & Expo in San Francisco is a great opportunity to do so. Takes place on Sunday, July 27, 2003, Noon ­ 7 PM (Competitors arrive early!) at Ft. Mason, Building C, 2nd floor. Cost: $10/adult, kids 17 and under free

The biggest amateur robotics show in America returns with movie robots, combat robots, NASA explorers, and more! Watch robot competitions, demonstrations, and displays. Everyone, regardless of age, is encouraged to come and watch or bring their own robot to compete. Also featuring robot related slides, videos, lectures, shops, and other great events. The RSA is also looking for anyone - artists, school kids, mad scientisits - who would like to demonstrate their robots (and get some practice in.) Email us if you’d like to show off your team and your robot!

Link to RSA website, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:10:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecams, law, and privacy: pedophilia concerns spark debate, bans

Parents and child welfare groups worry that increasingly popular cameraphones will be used by pedophiles to capture and publish snapshots of children in changing rooms or other public places. This MSNBC article explores some of the possible remedies being considered around the world, from legislation to radio jamming:

Britain's Home Office, the country's main policing body, joined recreation and child protection agencies recently issued a guidance statement warning of the potential risks involved with the new technology. Sport facilities across the country have since addressed the issue and many have decided to put up signs alerting the public that camera phones are banned on their premises. "There was an incident in one center. No-one had realized the potential threat (of camera phones) before, but the huge potential from the one incident alerted us to what could be a significant problem," said Ralph Riley, director of the privately run Institute of Sport and Recreation Management.

Riley declined to give details of the incident. He added that people have always been asked to use traditional and digital cameras "with discretion in a swimming pool" and that photography will continue to be allowed with special permission. Meanwhile, a local authority the area of Manchester in northwest England has issued a statement that anyone wishing to use any camera, including camera phones, will have "on their person a visible sticker authorizing consent if challenged by a member of staff or public." Though few disagree with the ban, most agree that its enforcement will not be easy. Unless swimmers spot the culprit eye-to-eye, the sound produced by the click of the camera's simulated shutter would likely be drowned out by youngsters' shouts resonating through tiled changing rooms.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:46:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Australian inmate busted on smuggled phonecam charge

Bottom line: phonecams as prison contraband. OK, so Rene Rivkin is a sort of colorful and infamous Australian stockbroker who was recently sentenced to weekend detention for insider trading. According to this news story in the Sydney Morning Herald, another man serving periodic jail time has been charged with smuggling a cameraphone into the prison where Rivkin is being detained, for the purpose of taking camphone paparazzi snapshots that soon showed up in an Australian tabloid. You still with me here? Good.

The 26-year-old man is understood to be serving several months of weekend detention at the prison following his conviction for a minor drug offence. He was charged with introducing contraband to a correctional facility and faces up to two years' jail when he faces Central Local Court on July 23. Photographs of Rivkin on his first day of detention appeared in a Sunday newspaper, sparking a security shutdown in the jail. It was during a search of his cell that Rivkin collapsed and was admitted to hospital. Police would not reveal whether the phone camera had been recovered or how it was smuggled into the jail.

Link to story.
Update: QTVR enthusiast and photographer Peter Murphy says, "I did this panorama of Rivkin leaving court on the day before he started his periodic detention sentence, and blogged about it here."
I invite you to debate which orifice that smuggled cellblock phonecam may have been crammed into here: Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:37:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hilary Rosen, CNBC pundit?

According to the NY Post, the soon-to-be-former head of the RIAA will soon become an on-air personality at CNBC: "Her gig will begin Aug. 1. According to the e-mail, she will discuss politics on the network's evening show, Capitol Report, and give commentary on the media industry on the shows Power Lunch and Squawk Box. Link Discuss (via pho list)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:24:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Right-to-tape customer support calls

Fed up with crummy service from call-centers, Larry Lessig proposes a sensible solution: grant customers the right to record conversations with the companies they treat with, and provide them with the tools to do so.

But what if customers were able to document conversations on the phone easily? Then rogues would be much more certainly caught. Customers could activate the "record" button when things spun out of control. Complaints to management could then be validated easily--or discounted, depending on what was recorded. Rogues would fear retaliation for their behavior. They then would either give up the game, or move on to another job where nastiness could be practiced with less chance of detection.

Only trouble is, under current law, 40 percent of Americans live in jurisdictions where a telephone call can be recorded only with the express consent of everyone on the call. (See the very helpful summary at www.rcfp.org/taping/). In these jurisdictions, to document your phone call without announcing you're recording it is a crime. For ordinary people -- those who don't routinely answer their phone with a recording that warns that the call may be monitored -- this means that monitoring phone calls is effectively out of the question. Announcing the practice upfront seems odd, and announcing it midway through the conversation is likely to get the other party to simply hang up.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:39:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ingenious email-harvester honeypot

Merlin Mann outlines an ingenious procedure for identifying spammers' email-harvesters' IP addresses and user-agents:

In each page I serve, I include a bogus email address, encoded with the date of access as well as the host IP address and embedded in a comment. [Apache's server-side includes are great!] This has allowed me to trace spam back to specific hosts and/or robots.

One of the first I caught with this technique was the robot with the user agent "Mozilla/4.0 efp@gmx.net", which always seems to come from argon.oxeo.com - it's identified it above as simply rude.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:50:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roadrunner's spam-filter screws Roadrunner customers

Good Salon article about the contempt that Roadrunner's anti-spam admins are showing for the ISP's customers.

No matter whom I managed to contact, I received robotically identical responses explaining the necessity of spam filters and reiterating that only Security could lift a block and only the sender's network administrator could negotiate the unblocking. One rep did slip me a special customer service address where I sent a complaint about the inconvenience of the whole thing and suggested that Road Runner's spam blockers might be a tad excessive. Someone wrote back: "Our system has spam filters in place to protect our network from being overloaded by bulk unsolicited e-mail. The end result benefits our subscribers, who can expect less downtime and higher service levels." When I suggested that the willy-nilly blocking of perfectly legitimate e-mail necessary to one's livelihood didn't really seem like a "higher service level" to me, he replied that I shouldn't be using my e-mail account for "commercial, or revenue generating purposes."

Somehow, my cheerful, speedy, efficient cable modem service had morphed into evasive, officious martinets; Road Runner had turned into Ari Fleischer. I was trying to speak up on behalf of the unjustly stigmatized, but I was treated as if I were some kind of soft-headed liberal spam lover. Didn't I understand how important it was to protect the network? What were a few abused messages when the greater good was at stake? And what was I doing getting that kind of message, anyway? Broken, I reverted to using my Salon.com address as my main account.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:58:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese mass Matrix cosplay

Great Rotten Tomatoes thread about the hundreds of Matrix fans who descended on the Shibuya launch of the movie dressed as Agent Smith. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:56:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ian Clarke's to-do list

Ian "Freenet" Clarke has updated his Slashdot journal with some status reports on the P2P apps he's working on now.

Whisper
This is basically an instant messaging application where all communication is encrypted, and an IRC server is used as the back end. The idea is to allow people to communicate secure in the knowledge that nobody's eavesdropping on their conversation. Users are authenticated using PGP-style fingerprints to prevent "man in the middle" attacks, and the communications channel is encrypted using AES. There is other software out there which does this, but typically it is unpolished, difficult to use, and require mucking around with NATs and firewalls as they require direct connections between clients. By using the IRC server network as the back end, Whisper can pretty much work out-of-the-box without any complex network configuration.

Implementation language: C#

State of completion: Crypto all works, UI is more or less there, some minor superficial bugs still need to be worked out.

Link Discuss (via Infoanarachy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:46:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Debunking Jesus' brother's bone box

A stone box believed to have once contained the bones of Jesus' brother James is a forgery. Known as an ossuary, the box was hyped as the oldest evidence that Jesus was real. It turns out that the ossuary is from the correct era, archaeologists say, but the Aramaic inscription on its side - "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" - was a relatively recent addition. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:42:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hatch using pirated software on his own website?

Oh, the irony. In this lengthy, amply-footnoted post on Amish Tech Support blog, Laurence Simon does some HTML sleuthing to reveal that Sen. Orrin "Destroy Infringers' PCs" Hatch may be illicitly using copyrighted material from Milonic Software on his own website. If hatch.senate.gov were in fact in violation of Milonic Software's License agreement, and the senator's latest proposals became law, would Hatch's web server be eligible for destruction?

Senator Orrin Hatch's website uses a very impressive set of Javascript code for its menus, developed by Milonic Software. A professional developer's license is $34.99, and a corporate side-wide license goes for $899.00. However, non-profits seems to have access to the code for free as long as a license number is obtained. (...) So, does Orrin Hatch and his web support staff have a license number, or is he guilty of using unlicensed software himself? There's a "* i am the license for the menu (duh) *" comment in the View - Source, but no license ID number. Strange. Bigwig suggested to me that I compare his site's code to a licensed site's code. So I checked The Warren Human Society... no tag in the HTML mentioning licenses with a (duh)...

Not only does he not include a link to the software's home page, but his software's out of date. Close enough for government work, I guess, and he's too busy threatening to blow up copyright violators' computers to have his technicians maintain their systems (the software is actually up in the 3.4.x release level now, if I'm correct) Since I'd hate for one of the representatives of my country to be caught as a hypocrite on such an important issue (well, except for Robert Byrd, but after all these years he probably can't find his Klansman robe), I've sent a note to the author of the software...

Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Sean)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:58:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hatch Introduces Bill to Burn People's Eyes Out

The distinguished Gentleman from Utah is on a proverbial roll:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) today introduced legislation authorizing the use of high-powered microwave lasers to burn out the eyes of non-paying viewers of copyrighted material. "If we could develop technology which just burned out the parts of their brains where the illegal memories are stored, that'd be fine with me--but we can burn their eyes out right now!" said Hatch, while introducing the Hatch/Hollywood Eyeball Evisceration Act.

Hatch's previous legislation authorizing the remote detonation of PCs used, or potentially used, or thought to have possibly been used, or potentially able to be used after some jumper cables and soldering, assuming a radically defective new security model, to access copyrighted material was defeated in the Senate on a 51-49 vote last week. "I understand why the Senate was hesitant to pass a bill that authorized the destruction of personal property," Hatch said. "But this doesn't destroy any property. It just turns your eye sockets into puddles of bubbling goo. Okay, you might get some melted eyeball on your shirt, but only if you panic. Keep your wits about you and you can get those eyeballs to dribble into your cupped hands."

Link, Discuss (thanks, adamsj)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:46:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Genetically-engineered decaf coffee

Japanese gene jockeys at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology have knocked out a key gene for caffeine in coffee plants. They report in Nature that their GM coffee plants contain 70 percent less of the buzz-inducing compound. Future work will focus on genetically-engineering Arabica to produce vanilla flavoring. (Just kidding on that last part. I think.) Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:55:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF on Hatch's nutso copyright proposal

EFF has issued a very pithy response to Sen. Orrin Hatch's proposal that online infringers' computers should be destroyed:

"This is an entirely unreasonable proposal, tantamount to a debt collector sending you two warnings that your car payment is late and then claiming that he is entitled to burn down your garage," said EFF staff attorney Gwen Hinze.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:14:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Securities dealers' IMs to be saved for 3 years

The National Association of Securities Dealers is requiring its members to retain all IMs sent for three years. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:00:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi shootout in Vegas

This year's DefCon hacker event in Vegas will feature a WiFi shootout, in which radioniks compete to complete the longest WiFi point-to-point shot.

Competition categories:

1. Stock/unmodified, with commercially made omnidirectional wi-fi antenna

2. Stock/unmodified, with commercially made directional wi-fi antenna

3. Homemade omnidirectional antenna

4. Homemade directional antenna

5. Enhanced power, (omni or directional) commercially made

6. Enhanced power, (omni or directional) homemade

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:58:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cat slobber is everywhere

Cat owners track humongous quantities of highly allergenic dried cat saliva wherever they go, which is why cat-allergics can end up with sneezing/coughing fits at the movies, snuffling up the aerosolized moggy-slobber that floats off of the cat-lovers' garments. Link Discuss (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:55:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Linksys kills WiFi amp

Linksys has yanked its WiFi amp off the market. The FCC had certified it for use with a couple of Linksys's APs, but not all of them, and the pesky users kept pluggin' 'em into whatever they could lay hands on. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

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

Microscale guitar

Sure, a uke is a pretty portable stringed instrument, but it hasn't got anything on this microscale guitar, 10 micrometers long, that requires an atomic force microscope or similar to pluck its tiny strings. Also, it's really hard to tune. Link Discuss (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:47:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Blog your Music" online/offline event in France

BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc in Paris writes:

We have launched a collaborative event for June 21st, "Music Day" in France and other countries. On that day, every blogger (wherever he lives) can do on his blog a post or more about music in general and must link to another blog that participates in "Blogue Ta Musique" (blogging your music). Every blogger can participate (it's free of course !) by sending me a message with the URL of his blog at mediatic@netcourrier.com . We include it in the blogroll of "blogue ta musique" blog here. And on June 31st, Blog Ta Musique and mediatic will mention hour per hour each new music message.

More than 30 french speaking bloggers will participate. Some examples will be interesting : Kill Me Again will create a song for this day and will post it on his blog, Philippe Allard will cover the Music Day in Brussels by moblogging, and on a Wiki page here Christophe Ducamp will create a collaborative page about Joe Strummer. "Blogue Ta Musique" is an initiative from me and the french free solution for blogging.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:39:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Blog Your Music" event in France

BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc in Paris writes:

We have launched a collaborative event for June 21st, "Music Day" in France and other countries. On that day, every blogger (wherever he lives) can do on his blog a post or more about music in general and must link to another blog that participates in "Blogue Ta Musique" (blogging your music). Every blogger can participate (it's free of course !) by sending me a message with the URL of his blog at mediatic@netcourrier.com . We include it in the blogroll of "blogue ta musique" blog here. And on June 31st, Blog Ta Musique and mediatic will mention hour per hour each new music message.

More than 30 french speaking bloggers will participate. Some examples will be interesting : Kill Me Again will create a song for this day and will post it on his blog, Philippe Allard will cover the Music Day in Brussels by moblogging, and on a Wiki page here Christophe Ducamp will create a collaborative page about Joe Strummer. "Blogue Ta Musique" is an initiative from me and the french free solution for blogging.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:47:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A model letter to the

A model letter to the your Senator, protesting media consolidation. Slashdot the vote!

Dear Senator _____________,

I am writing to urge you to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's June 2, 2003, ruling that relaxed ownership limits in local media. As conservative commentator William Safire wrote in the New York Times on June 16, this decision "opened the floodgates to a wave of media mergers that will further crush local diversity and concentrate the power to mold public opinion in the hands of ever-fewer giant corporations."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:45:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Model Senate letter re: FCC

A model letter to the your Senator, protesting media consolidation. Slashdot the vote!

Dear Senator _____________,

I am writing to urge you to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's June 2, 2003, ruling that relaxed ownership limits in local media. As conservative commentator William Safire wrote in the New York Times on June 16, this decision "opened the floodgates to a wave of media mergers that will further crush local diversity and concentrate the power to mold public opinion in the hands of ever-fewer giant corporations."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:34:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Model Senate letter re: FCC

A model letter to the your Senator, protesting media consolidation. Slashdot the vote!

Dear Senator _____________,

I am writing to urge you to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's June 2, 2003, ruling that relaxed ownership limits in local media. As conservative commentator William Safire wrote in the New York Times on June 16, this decision "opened the floodgates to a wave of media mergers that will further crush local diversity and concentrate the power to mold public opinion in the hands of ever-fewer giant corporations."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:34:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scientific musical composition yeilds worst. Song. Evar.

Komar & Melamid, an artist duo, conducted a survey about what people like about various kinds of art, including music,and then recorded "The Most Wanted Song" and "The Most Unwanted Song," according to their market research. I really like the sound of The Most Unwanted Song:

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and “elevator” music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Clay!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:07:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scientific musical composition yeilds worst. Song. Evar.

Komar & Melamid, an artist duo, conducted a survey about what people like about various kinds of art, including music,and then recorded "The Most Wanted Song" and "The Most Unwanted Song," according to their market research. I really like the sound of The Most Unwanted Song:

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and “elevator” music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Clay!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:07:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

UK pub toilet rape captured on phonecams by onlookers

BoingBoing reader Adrian points us to a truly chilling story:

The rape of a woman in the toilets of a British pub was filmed by onlookers using their video mobile phones, it emerged yesterday. Sussex police said the 27-year-old was attacked "while not in a fit state to refuse or resist" when she was out in the south coast town of Brighton celebrating a friend's birthday. She was found collapsed on the floor, semi-conscious, incoherent and partly clothed in the men's toilets at the Toad at the Picture House pub in East Street. Brighton and Hove CID are investigating the possibility that she had been drugged.

Police said the woman had been approached by two men prior to the attack and later walked past them and into the men's toilets. She was then forced into one of the cubicles and raped. Police inquiries have established that other men, probably not connected to the two suspects, watched the rape and it is believed some recorded it using hi-tech mobile video phones. CCTV footage has been seized from the pub and detectives are considering releasing images of potential witnesses in a bid to catch the attackers.

Link to The Age (Australia) article, UPDATE: BBC News has more detail. UPDATE II: Local Brighton, UK paper Argus that first broke the story now prints this follow-up story, which includes the priceless line, "Detectives think the witnesses may have recorded the rape in the belief they were watching an amorous couple." Yeah, right. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:23:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

All mobiles to be banned from Australian courts over phonecam fears?

BoingBoing reader Dan sez: "More dispatches from the anti-cell-photo frontlines. All cellphones are likely to be banned in Australia from courts, on the basis that perps with photo-enabled cellphones might take photos of witnesses and threaten them." Link to story from Australia's The Age, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:22:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney's Mission: Space site

Disney's put up a pretty good site (with video) for the new Mission: Space ride at Epcot. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:47:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flashcrowds in Manhattan

New Yorkers are putting together ad-hoc flashcrowds, using email, arranging for thousands of individuals to converge on a place at a preset time and milling about and then melting away after a few minutes.

You are invited to take part in MOB, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people in New York City for ten minutes or less. Please forward this to other people you know who might like to join.

At the very least, please forward this to all those to whom you sent the invitation for MOB #1, because someone seems to have gotten the wrong impression about the MOB. I am thinking, in particular, of whoever saw it necessary to tell the store and/or the police department about MOB #1, causing SIX POLICE OFFICERS AND A PADDYWAGON to be sent out to disrupt it. Let us call this person "Squealy."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:46:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Europe proposes right-of-reply

A European policy group is proposing that those who are criticised on the Internet should have a right to reply in the same space where the criticism appeared -- IOW, bloggers would have to give time on their blogs to the people they flame. I've always presumed that there was no legal interest in ensuring that people don't feel sad -- but rather, preventing real harm (which can be addressed through courts, should such harm be proposed).

The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or "blogs"), must offer a "right of reply" to those who have been criticized by a person or organization...

* "The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours."

* Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. "It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it" from the spot of the original mention.

* "So long as the contested information is available online, the reply should be attached to it, for example through a clearly visible link."

* Long replies are fine. "There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media."

Link Discuss (via Lawmeme)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:43:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 16, 2003

Chinese Govt. arrests cellphone users for text-messaging SARS rumors

"Beijing goes high-tech to block Sars messages," from today's New Zealand Herald;

by February 10 news of a "fatal flu in Guangdong" had reached 120 million people through text messaging, say some reports, and an untold extra number through email and internet chatrooms. Chinese authorities had little choice but to acknowledge the outbreak and try to restore calm. The Government had been taught a painful lesson about controlling the news in a burgeoning high-tech society. That message would be repeated under similar circumstances two months later, when it was forced to admit it had been covering up the number of Sars cases in Beijing. In return, it has since sent a few painful messages of its own.

By mid-February, officials began complaining about the use of text messaging to spread "rumours", deeming them subversive activity and a threat to stability. Then they began arresting people. By the end of May, 117 people in 17 provinces had been arrested and charged with disturbing social order by spreading Sars-related rumours, the Xinhua news agency reported. The official People's Daily said on June 8 that 108 Falungong followers in Hebei province had been arrested for spreading rumours that hindered the Government's bid to control Sars, but did not state how those rumours were spread. In the past, such arrests would probably have received little publicity. But this aspect of the Sars crisis and the following crackdown illustrate the enormous challenges Beijing faces in trying to maintain control of news and information in the age of communications technology, and the strategy it has developed to meet those challenges.

Link to New Zealand Herald story. Also see this Taipei Times article on smart mobs, freedom of press, and SARS, "SARS provokes journalists in China to call for more openness." Discuss

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

SARS Digital Art "Y": Graham Roumieu, Kozyndan, thanks FARK

Click here for full-size image. Renowned Toronto-based artist Graham Roumieu contributes this piece to the SARS Digital Folk Art project, Cover Your Mouth. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the NY Times, the LA Times, Canada Globe and Mail, Shift Magazine, and many other publications.

He is also the author of several graphic novels. His latest: the hilarious In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot, which I haven't been able to put down since Susannah Breslin reviewed and shared it with me.

Graham also shares these brand-new works unrelated to SARS, some of which were just completed within the past few days: Robot Poem, Ninja, Grilled Cheese, How I Spent My Summer, and Crap Alarm.

Below, detail from this large, panoramic piece contributed by kozyndan, via Wiley Wiggins. They're a pair of mad scientist artists/freelance illustrators who live and work in LA. Kozy and Dan say they're "working on a secret formula for controlled nuclear fusion, and creating a line of edible chickens." For fun they "like to take long deep breaths and dip their heads into bowls of rasberry jelly and lemon curd." Note: prints of this amazing panorama piece will be available soon, e-mail [us@kozyndan.com] for details.

Bonus contributions from readers: Hong Kong snapshots from John. Rich Ragan submits the pulp Western fiction mashup, Bartender, I Don't Want No SARSparilla -- riffed off the 1948 paperback Sundown Jim by Ernest Haycox.

And my co-editor David Pescovitz contributes this: "BoingBoing pal Terre Thaemlitz (his bio is here) sent me a parody ad for a Michael Jackson-style SARS mask. You should read through the 'real' website he refers to in the parody ad -- it's a trip (and not a parody). Here's an excerpt:

"Some Christians interpret diseases such as SARS as a judgement from God against the sinfulness of the world. Others see them as attacks from Satan. Still others regard SARS and other diseases as the natural consequences of living in a fallen world."

Discuss, visit the SARS Art Project Archives at www.sarsart.org, read subscription-free scans of the Sunday NYT article on the project here: Page One, Page Two (JPEG). Humongo-props to the mighty and benevolent Drew Curtis who offered to host sarsart.org images on FARK when traffic blew our servers out. Thank you, Drew.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:55:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mustang Ranch amenities on the auction block

CNN.com reports that the US Bureau of Land Management is auctioning off the fixtures and furnishings from the famed Mustang Ranch bordello on eBay later this month. The IRS seized the Ranch property in 1999 after its parent companies and manager were busted for fraud and racketeering. Sadly, all of the good stuff may have been snapped up in previous auctions.

"The risque stuff is really all gone," said Cindy Becker, assistant director of Oregon's Department of Administrative Services. "It's just run-of-the-mill stuff, like tile and doors, lamps, appliances, a sink."

Apparently though, the Mustang Ranch logo and trademark will also be auctioned in the near future. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:46:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-microbial Saran Wrap

Scientists at Israel's Technion Institute of Technology have developed a plastic food wrapper that oozes anti-microbial chemicals extracted from basil. The wrap could prolong the refrigerator shelf-life of cheese and meat. (And no, it doesn't give the food a basil aftertaste.) Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:37:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecams banned from Swiss beaches and bathhouses

BoingBoing reader Jan in the Swiss town capital city Bern says, "in zurich switzerland authorities are banning mobilecam's from public baths and beaches. I blogged about it here and here. quite an issue i think, they say its to prevent voyeuristic fotos from being taken in a sneaky way."

A quick Google search doesn't reveal news articles or other online info to substantiate this, but I'd welcome urls (or additional personal testimonials) in the Discuss forum. Update from Bern: "Tagesanzeiger, the big newspaper from zurich/switzerland, where i first read about this, has a subscription only website. only today's edition is open. backisssues are not available. thats why i did not include any links in my blogs. Here are some articles i found, all in german i am afraid: this is from basel, this from zurich, and this article talks about bolton/england, sydney/australia and germany."

BoingBoing reader Diane Duane says:

"Here's a rough-and-ready translation of the 20-min.ch story here. Handy is the casual name for a cellphone in Switzerland and Germany. The headline: 'Zurich pools will no longer tolerate picture-Handys.' Starting immediately, the use of the newest generation of Handys is forbidden at public pools. Pool operators have been forced into this decision by the fear of secretly-shot photographs. The main targets of the new rule are the so-called 'MMS-Handys', which are able to take photographs; Swisscom alone has already registered 100,000 users of these devices. A pool user operating using his Handy in a way such as to make pool staff suspicious will be given no second chances; staff will immediately notify the police, says regional pool manager Hermann Schumacher. 'We have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment.''

Update II: Oliver directs us to "another article from nzz, the other big Swiss newspaper where they point out that (a) first there were two gyms last year which started a ban of mobile phones (not just camera phones), (b) basic reason is [privacy] protection (c) ...the regulation has only preventive character, first action would be to expel them from the public pool, the second action to forbid to come to the pool and that for sexual harassment the victim would have to make a charge."

Read the rest in the Discuss forum.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:55:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Leaked Misson: Space video

A completely crappy -- but intriguing -- home video of Epcot Center's Misson: Space has leaked onto the net. It's particularily irritating in that it's a RealVideo file and hence superjerky and nasty. Link Discuss (Thanks, Todd!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:35:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Celebrate permalinks

Tom Coates has posted a very, very good essay on permalinks and what they mean.

It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else's site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And - as a result - friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs. It existed way before Trackback and I think it's been more fundamental to our development as a culture than comments... Not only that, it added history to weblogs as well - before you'd link to a site's front page if you wanted to reference something they were talking about - that link would become worthless within days, but that didn't matter because your own content was equally disposable. The creation of the permalink built-in memory - links that worked and remained consistent over time, conversations that could be archived and retraced later. The permalink stopped all weblog conversations being like that guy in Memento...

Link Discuss (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:56:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadians get recycled Potter

Raincoast Books is a Canadian children's press that took a flyer on an obscure British children's book called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone some years ago -- part of the deal was that they got first refusal on the Canadian editions of sequels should they appear.

Raincost is a great small publisher, and though they're rolling in dough, they're still acting like a groovy, small business -- for example, the Canadian edition of the next Harry Potter book will be printed on recycled paper.

The books, which include the original British text, will be printed and bound in Canada on 100% post-consumer recycled paper. To read more about Raincoast's green paper initiative, visit our Ancient Forest Friendly page.

Link Discuss (via Ambiguous)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:53:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Joi Ito joins Creative Commons

Joi Ito has joined the board of the Creative Commons. He's trying to get Japanese CE companies to use CC licenses for the work they do, and on the Japanese ports of the CC licenses. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:45:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 15, 2003

SARS Digital Art Series, Exhibit X: Laurenn McCubbin

Link to full-size image. This installment was created exclusively for BoingBoing by Laurenn McCubbin, author and illustrator of the Xeric Award Winning XXXLiveNudeGirls and XXXLNG:Pretty Like A Princess (with Nikki Coffman), as well as the Creative Director for Kitchen Sink Magazine. She lives in West Oakland, California and writes at www.laurennmccubbin.com.

About this piece, she explains: "The title is kind of obvious. I was just thinking about how all these stories in the papers about how local Chinatowns were becoming deserted, bad for SF, a tourist town. And how people are just kind of closing recent immigrants into these city centers, isolating them and reverting back to a century old racist practice without even realizing it. And I am wondering about local 'Koreatowns' and 'Japantowns', if they are affected by our sudden American contraction from all things unlike us... I know the hookers in the Tenderloin are still doing a swinging job outside all the Vietnamese restaurants."

Her recent projects include "No Goodbyes" in Kitchen Sink Magazine, and "Harvest Gypsy" for ARTBOMB. Upcoming projects include "Perfect," due out in TRUE PORN this month, and "Click" in PROJECT:TELSTAR. For details on Laurenn's work, including a forthcoming graphic novel, visit her web site.
Discuss, visit the SARS Art Project Archives at www.sarsart.org.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:38:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New York Times on BoingBoing SARS Digital Art Project

In today's New York Times, a feature on the BoingBoing SARS Art Project. Also just out today, www.sarsart.org, a site created by Sixspace Gallery founder Sean Bonner -- a permanent archive where all posts in this thread are gathered in one place for easy browsing. From the NYT story:

[H]istorians of folk art say the digital SARS creations are part of a long tradition of ordinary people responding to traumatic events through art, from Hmong women in Thai refugee camps using applique embroidery to portray the horrors of war in Indochina to the AIDS quilt that covered the Mall in Washington (to which people all over the country contributed) and the memento collages that blanketed New York after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"In one way or another, individually and as communities, we integrate our hopes and fears into the work of our hands," said Gerard C. Wertkin, director of the American Folk Art Museum in New York. "The creative instinct will always result in works of art using whatever technology is at hand to make statements about the concerns of the day."

Rebecca Hoffberger, director of the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, said the adolescent tone of some Internet SARS art also echoed folk art of the past, noting that the nursery rhyme "Ring Around the Rosy" is thought to have originated in the 14th century as a humorous description of the fatal progression of the bubonic plague. "What better way to deal with calamity but reduce it to a children's rhyme?" Ms. Hoffberger said. "In chaotic times there's a grass-roots tradition of irreverence for the party line."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:28:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 14, 2003

Popdex 0wned: Shanti speaks

Shanti Bradford of Popdex says:

Glimpse Into My Mp3 Collection (circa 1999)
Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing discovered that the Popdex server had been 0wnzer'd by some script kiddies, and replaced with a bad Mp3 collection full of old songs from 1999 and before. Here's a screenshot. Well, that was just my old Mp3 collection. The server Popdex runs on can actually boot to 5 different OSes. I needed to get at my old Mp3 collection that is on one of the hard-drives. Rather than trying to mount it under Linux, I just booted up to Win2k for an hour and copied the Mp3s over. I actually didn't realize that under that OS, I had setup the web root to be to my Mp3 directory! Doh! Sorry for the confusion! and yes... I do have an Mp3 directory called "Chick Music", which is where I put my Ani Difranco & other chick rocker songs. in unrelated news.... Popdex.com stats skyrocket after the normal content is replaced with 7 GB of Mp3s instead.

Update: Shanti, I'm sorry I called your '90s music collection lame. I confess: I was just frustrated because all the download links were timing out. If you came late to Shanti's MP3 collection that night, you missed the party. Link to previous BoingBoing post, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:38:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CAPPS2 is dead -- for now

Fantastic news: CAPPSII, the automated passenger screening system that the feds were planning as a kind of mini-version of the Total Information Awareness program, has been shelved, pending a review of the privacy implications of the technology.

CAPPS II testing has ceased pending the implementation of a privacy policy, according to officials at the highest levels of the Department of Homeland Security. They've even stopped all internal testing of the system until changes are made to the Federal Register that tell us, the American people, what they're doing and how it will impact our constitutional rights and freedoms.

It's nice to know that there are now people within Homeland Security that have taken the time to read the Bill of Rights. They are going back to square one and are doing now what they should have done before: to see if it's even possible to devise a passenger screening system that will not only work, but not destroy our rights as Americans in the process. Let us hope that Homeland Security's promise of transparency and openness will continue.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:34:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cement casemod

Great PC casemod project: fill your tower-case with cement to make a box that's too heavy to steal! The guy implies that the machine ran after he did this, but I have a hard time beleiving that, given the ventilation issues with components that are embedded in a solid block of cement.

After having this computer in front of my house for approximately two months, it was finally stolen! It was recovered the next morning in a ditch, one block from my home. The cover plates of the two empty drive bays were missing. I assume the criminal knocked them out to allow a location to grip the case. The computer was still intact and the thief is probably sore and suffering from back problems, but be aware that this method of protection is not fool-proof.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeremy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:29:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 13, 2003

Martha's Jail as envisioned by photoshoppers

Jim says: "Here's an awesome Photoshop contest for Martha Stewart's jail cell." Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:27:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DJ in Philly rents iPods to venues instead of spinning vinyl in person

Botany 500, a Philadelphia-based DJ, rents iPods full of custom music mixes to local restaurants, stores, and salons to play through their sound systems.

Armed with a small fleet of iPods, Porter's embarking on a one-of-a-kind business venture: filling the little mp3 players with a specially created musical catalog and renting them out to area businesses. "Instead of going in with my vinyl and DJing for four hours, I can DJ for them for the whole month." As far as he knows, he's the first to come up with this particular business model. (...) "He makes it easier for us," says Adriatica bar manager Albert Gotto, who is glad not to have to change CDs anymore. Now finding the right mood is painless. "We can kick it up a bit after dinner. It's a very convenient service.

IANAL, but it would seem that there are a number of problematic legal issues here with regard to rights clearances. Any lawyerly BoingBoing readers care to comment? Update:Reader Joe Hughes points out this snip from the story: "Because many businesses already pay licensing companies like ASCAP and BMI for the right to play the radio in their establishments, Porter doesn't have to worry about licensing issues. And most places already have some kind of sound system in place, meaning they just have to plug the iPod in and press play."

Update II -- Not so fast. Fred Von Lohmann of the EFF replies: "This one is such a tangle that it'd make a great exam question in a law school copyright class. Let's break it down:

For Mr. Porter:
(1) he's making lots of unauthorized reproductions, potentially infringing both the musical work and sound recording rights embodied in each song. Is it a fair use? It would be a fair use to rip your own CDs for personal use on the iPod, but does that mean you can then start renting out the iPods? Well, it's commercial, it's the entire work, and each work is creative. That's three strikes against him. Does it harm the market for the works? That's a bit harder, although copyright owners can argue that this activity makes it hard for them to enter a nascent licensing business for this kind of activity.
(2) Once he's made the reproductions, he's distributing them. Rental of sound recordings and the music works therein embodied, even if lawfully made, is forbidden by section 109(b).
(3) If he rents them to any merchant, knowing that they do not have the necessary performance licenses, then he might be a contributory infringer, as well.

How about the merchants?
(1) Assuming they have the necessary performance licenses (BMI/ASCAP/SESAC), they are covered for public performance of the musical works. I don't think they need licenses for performance of the sound recordings, since this is not a performance by digital transmission.
(2) The merchants are not making copies or distributing them. Mere receipt of infringing good is not illegal under copyright law.
(3) But if Mr. Porter is violating copyright law, and the merchants are working with him to choose the music and the like, they might be contributorily liable for his activities.

Given the number of works in question, at a maximum statutory damage amount of $150k per work, Mr. Porter could easily be on the hook for tens of millions in damages. I'd say Mr. Porter needs a very good copyright lawyer."

Update III: DJ Botany 500 responds, in the Discuss board for this post: "The City Paper article kind of blew it up before the project really started. I am doing this for the love of the music not money, I am not putting 50 Cent or Destiny's Child in the mix, and I'm trying to expose noncommercial music. This project has been conceived by a DJ/Independent Record Store Owner not to replace DJ's or steal music, but to turn a wider audience on to better music locally." Link to Philadelphia City Paper story, Discuss (Thanks, Mark)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:16:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Urban survival made chic

Leave it to the French to make urban decay fashionably survivable. Bezenville appears to be an Paris-based design firm that creates masks and other protective environmental gear for fashion victims. Kind of Bladerunner meets Prada. Click on "it's in the bag" link to browse catalog. Bonus: fantastic tagline: "Cocking a snook at urban pollution!" So, like, qu'est-ce que c'est un snook? And do they work on monkeypox? BoingBoing reader Edward translates, "The phrase 'cocking a snook' is brit for the five-fingered salute (thumb to nose, fingers waggling)." Link, Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:41:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fun with floppies: build a robot from a floppy drive

Spotted by David: "Complete plans to build a robot from a 3 1/2" floppy drive without taking it apart. The floppy drive has all of the motors and electronics you need to get started and compete in a robot contest." Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:10:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Aurora Australis, as seen from space

A high-speed solar wind stream blasted our planet last week, triggering a geomagnetic storm. High above earth, astronauts on the International Space Station science captured the Southern Lights -- aurora australis -- in a digital movie you can watch here. Discuss

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

Japanese cocktail weenie art

Online gallery of fun with little vienna-sausage-esque foodstuffs in Japan. I'm sorry, even if they're shaped like sharks or happy birdies, they still taste gross. Link Discuss (Thanks, John)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:54:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Scary Evil Clown Zen

(1) scary clowns
(2) save the evil clown
(3) evil clown generator
(4) clown tree
(5) clown hat
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:47:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogstumping: presidential candidate Howard Dean's weblog

Democratic presidential candidate and former Vermont governor Howard Dean is campaigning by way of "the Howard Dean Blog" and a site called "Blog For America." He's also using Meetup forums to organize local supporters. This is the first example I've seen of blogs being used in a significant way in a presidential campaign. It's nice to see that the former governor has taken care to carry on one of the blogosphere's longstanding traditions -- blogging about the details of what you ate today. Here's the July 12 "blogforamerica.com" entry from the Manchester, New Hampshire campaign trail stop:

It has been a fun day already and the day is not even half over! This morning I drove down from Vermont to meet Gov. Dean. (The Gov. came down yesterday for his son's hockey tournament). The drive down was exciting. Tricia Enright, Bob Rogan, Tom McMahon and I drove down together. Joe Trippi met us in Manchester. (Since the Gov. is rarely in Vermont, we have to meet where he is!). We met the Gov. at lunch time and some very nice people let us join their office picnic lunch: barbeque, corn, baked beans, corn bread and the Gov's favorite strawberry shortcake with whipped cream.

As I write this, my colleagues have headed by to Vermont, leaving the Gov. and me to finish the day in NH. We have a meet the candidate reception and a health care forum before we are done for the day. Tomorrow we're off to Chicago and Wisconsin! (I want to apologize to my friends in South Carolina for not blogging about our trip. My office mates forgot to tell me how to get on the new blog! So, South Carolina, it was a great visit. Thank you!)

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:38:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turing Machines aren't as universal as they could be

Geoff Cohen's posted another provocative and fascinating essay about the limitations of Turing Machines.

First, there's the issue of whether a computational model can, in any amount of time, solve a certain problem. Recall that it was Turing's proof that there are problems that the Turing machine cannot solve, notably the Halting Problem. This is an extension of Godel's incompleteness principle. Keep this in mind: Turing's accomplishment was not showing the universality of the machine, although he did do that; it was in showing the fundamental limits of it.

Now even given two models that can solve a problem, there's still performance questions. This isn't a trivial difference; a model that can solve a problem in polynomial time really is fundamentally more powerful than one that takes exponential time. And there are tons of computational complexity classes above the standard P and NP that represent problems that deterministic and non-deterministic Turing Machines can solve in polynomial time. Just for one example, the class of problems that can be solved by a Turing Machine that can, in turn, use another Turing Machine as an oracle is more powerful than a single Turing Machine.

Link Discuss

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

Your ass is the airlines' business

A UK defense-lab is developing "smart" airline seats that attempt to make guesses about your terroristic propensity (and your likelihood of a thrombosis) by monitoring your buttular activity while you're flying.

The seats will contain a thicket of pressure sensors that will relay signals to a central computer to assess the seat occupant's behaviour. Are they asleep? Motionless for too long? Jumpy? Qinetiq designer Chris Thorpe says the system could have a display that is only accessible to the cabin crew - perhaps in the galley - to warn if a passenger's behaviour is out of the ordinary.

If they have been asleep or sitting still too long, say, a "DVT Warning" might flash beneath the passenger's seat number, and a crew member could prompt the passenger to take a walk around the plane.

Link Discuss (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:30:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MicroFM + Internet = Nationwide radio stations

A group of underground music enthusiasts have come up with an ingenious hack to the FCC's rules on low-power FM radio. It's legal to broadcast very low-power FM radio signals that can be received in a 200-foot radius. By encouraging Internet users spaced at 200' intervals around your hometown to download the same Internet radio station and rebroadcast it over cheap-lass low-power FM emitters, you can create a micropower city-wide radio-station. Link Discuss (via Burning Down the House)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:45:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Burning Down the House: audio-hacking for techno-illiterates

Burning Down the House is Eliot Van Buskirk's new how-to guide for acquiring, manipulating, storing and sharing digital music. It's basically a step-by-step reference for turning unsophisticated computer users into mash-up-crazy, rip-mix-burnin' monster DJs. As such, it is a really fantastic book, one that clarifies a lot of rather opaque subject-matter, from the physics and psychology of sound to the free software movement's contribution to codec and tools development to the best places to find the raw components of mash-up mixes to the state of copyright law as it befits digital music. It's organized into a series of projects of increasing sophistication, and Eliot's very careful about identifying tools that will enable both Mac and Windows users to hack audio.

I got a review copy last week and just finished reading through it on an airplane, and I'm mighty impressed. For years, Eliot's been turning out top-notch columns on digital music for CNet -- it's clear that he has a deep and thoroughgoing knowledge of the subject, and the ability to explain it. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:45:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 12, 2003

Popdex 0wned

Unless I've taken one too many hits on the crack pipe this evening, it appears that Popdex has been hacked -- and replaced by someone's really bad '90s music collection, which includes a section called "Chick Music." screenshot, Discuss Update: Game over, all clear. Popdex is online and operational again.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:50:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Honeywell 0wnz the circle

Steve sez, "Honeywell is asserting that they own the circle, at least as applied to home thermostats. What's next -- Microsoft asserting rights to the square?" Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Excellent wacky Reebok TV ad: Belly Gonna Getcha

Michael says: "Excellent Reebok ad featuring a runner being chased by an enormous beer gut, with a KOMPRESSOR-like refrain going "BELLY GONNA GET YOU!!! BELLY GONNA GET YOU!!! BELLYBELLYBELLYBELLYBELLYBELLYBELLYBELLY GONNA GET YOU!!!" Link to streaming quicktime movie, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:15:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russian Rapper "Ill Mitch"

Word up, comrades:

Snow's slick tongue brought them fifteen minutes of fame. Vanilla Ice dug a deep hole for all that followed in his footsteps. Eminem filled the hole and brought them their first signs of hope and respect. Ill Mitch, though, opened up a whole new world for white rappers. Next to potato vodka and mail-order brides, Ill Mitch is arguably Russia's best export. Complete with headband, sleeveless life vest, and a penchant for systematically destroying every rule of grammar in the English language, Ill is determined to be happy as a recording artist. Successful? Well, that's a different story.

Ill Mitch is badass. His debut English CD is entitled "Punch While Rap," featuring such songs as the homage to skateboarding, "Fast and Danger." In addition to "rap and ride on my skateboard," Ill loves to hit his boxing bag, to which the album title, "Punch While Rap" alludes.

Link to full text of Colorado Daily story, Link to Ill Mitch's phat website where he waxes poetic over hard beats, tossing out lines like "On full moon I ride / with boner." Discuss (Thanks, Sean) Update: should be obvious that this is a hoax. But if it's not, well, now it is.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:29:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

QTVR panoramas: Burning Man

I can taste the dust already. VRMAG Senior Editor Michelle Bienias says, "Hi Xeni, we've just published the latest issue -- there's an article on Burning Man festival that I think your readers might enjoy. Charles Evans shot some stunning panoramas there and relays his experience of the festival."

Link to article and panoramas, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:20:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SF film event: "Bad Reception: Wireless Revolution in SF"

News of an interesting film screening on Friday in San Francisco:

Following a well-attended premiere screening before an enthusiastic crowd in January 2003, Artists' Television Access is once again presenting "Bad Reception: the Wireless Revolution in San Francisco" - a vital chronicle of San Francisco community resistance to the telecom industry. The dot-com era in San Francisco provoked responses from the activist community over live-work lofts, illegal evictions, and the displacement of working people and artists from their traditional communities. Less widely reported was the response by ordinary residents to another by-product of this technological revolution - the proliferation of wireless antennas to feed the booming use of cell phones throughout the city.

FRIDAY, JUNE 13TH, 8 PM - $5; Artists Television Access, 992 Valencia Street - San Francisco. Discussion with the producers and invited guests follows.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:18:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SARS digital art exhibit "W": illustrator Anthony Ventura contributes

Link to full-size image. This piece was created exclusively for BoingBoing by Anthony Ventura, a Toronto-based illustrator whose work has appeared in CXO Magazine, SPIN, Time Magazine, Ad Age Global, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. He is currently collaborating with Susannah Breslin on the forthcoming graphic novel The Fetish Alphabet, about which Ventura says "I am having a blast illustrating."

More contributions from BoingBoing readers:

Niklas found this Kung Fu Videogame Hack, Lawrence points us to this news story about SARS as corporate-loss scapegoat, and MeFi's own Matt Haughey says:

"It appears they're selling fear at my local Walgreens in the Bay Area. Thought you might be interested in this. Are these sorts of masks commonly sold in drugstores? This was on the end of a major aisle, far from the pharmaceuticals."

Discuss. (Previous posts: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:57:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

IP-block jacking

A new form of online crime -- hijacking IP addresses.

Los Angeles County had been hit by a growing type of hi-tech fraud, in which large, and usually dormant, segments of the Internet's address space are taken away from their registered users through an elaborate shell game of forged letters, ephemeral domain names and anonymous corporate fronts. The patsies in the scheme are the four non-profit registries that parcel out address space around the world and keep track of who's using it. The prizes are the coveted "Class B" or "/16" (read "slash-sixteen") address blocks that Internet authorities passed out like candy in the days when address space was bountiful, but are harder to get legitimately now.

The most rapacious consumers of the stolen address space are spammers trying to stay a step ahead of anti-spam blacklists. A /16 provides a lot of addresses to hide behind, a lot of launch pads for unwanted e-mail, squats for hastily-erected spamvertised websites, and attack points from which one can scan the Internet for misconfigured proxy servers-- useful for laundering even more spam. Some anti-spam investigators believe an underground economy exists in which a large block of address space is broken down and re-sold in smaller chunks like a boosted Acura in a chop-shop. "Money is changing hands," says Kai Schlichting, a veteran network engineer who tracks down stolen IP space in his spare time. "I wouldn't be surprised if you could sell a /16 for $100,000 in bits and pieces."

Link Discuss (via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:09:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Panasonic exoskeletons

Panasonic is developing a powered exoskeleton through its new Activelink division, for use by the disabled. Japanese Link Discuss (via KoKoRo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:07:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 11, 2003

More on ringtones: WSJ -- freebies may threaten ringtone biz

The Wall Street Journal ran this story on issues affecting growth of the ringtone business:

Research firm IDC, for instance, expects annual ringtone sales to grow to more than $400 million by 2005 from $16.6 million last year as people replace the standard ringers on their phones with computerized versions of their favorite songs and sound effects. Different ringers can even be assigned to different callers. The theme from the "Looney Tunes" cartoons might play when your mother-in-law calls; "Mission Impossible" for calls from the office. Profits are split between the cellphone companies, the software providers and artists or other copyright holders of the actual music.

But that growth could be in jeopardy before it ever takes off. A number of file-sharing services have sprung up on the Internet, offering free Napster-like access to content that users can add to their cellphones. MyPhoneFiles.com, for example, lists dozens of songs and images that can be sent wirelessly to a user's cellphone. MyPhoneFiles says it isn't responsible for content exchanged on its site and says it will remove anything offensive or illegal. "I don't participate in piracy," says Maceij Gorny, owner and operator of MyPhoneFiles. He says 83,000 people have registered with his site, and 2,500 members log on each day.

Link (paid subscription required), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:16:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ringing in the new: ringtones and the music licensing biz

I wrote a feature for this month's issue of Grammy Magazine on the changing business of mobile phone ringtones:

Still considered an emerging trend in Japan, Wav-based ringtones of actual song clips, called Chaku-uta, are hayatteru ("totally trendy") with the under-30 crowd. Chaku-goe, ("voice,") is "another popular type of ringtone," says Collier, "and this can be either pure voice -- such as a celebrity saying, 'Answer the phone' -- or a blend of music and speech, like a Beatles melody with the spoken words 'Come on' popping up during the chorus." Roughly 80 percent of the ringtones in Japan are Japanese songs, and J-Pop (Japanese pop music) rules the ringtone charts, according to mobile entertainment executive Kunito Komori of Yokohama, Japan. "There are also some interesting niche services in Japan," says Komori, "like all-indie-band songs, all-rock, or audiophile ringtones" -- high-quality files produced by best-of-the-best specialists.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:33:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Extreme nerd builds full size 737 flight sim in garage

A fellow by the name of Matt Ford is building a full size cockpit flight simulator of a 737-300 in his garage. Looks amazing. Link Discuss (Thanks, Todd!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:47:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Computing 1976 archive online

Stefan sez, "From the primordial depths of personal computing history: A collection of scanned pages from the pioneering educational/entertainment zine, Creative Computing. I read a lot of these pieces in the original magazines, circa 1976. It has a BASIC listing for one of the very first computer games I ever played, DEEPSPACE. Volume 1 is also available on the site. Look for the advertisement by Roger Crumb!" Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:21:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Men who do housework are sexier and have better kids

Shades of Free To Be You And Me (and for fun, do a whois -h geektools.com freetobeyouandme.com): a study shows that men who help with the housework have better-adjusted kids and get laid by their spouses more often.

ociologists Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams of the University of California, Riverside, looked at national survey data and found that school-aged children who do housework with their fathers are more likely to get along with their peers and have more friends. What's more, they are less likely than other kids to disobey teachers or make trouble at school and are less depressed or withdrawn.

"When men perform domestic service for others, it teaches children cooperation and democratic family values," said Coltrane, who studies the changing role of fathers in families. "It used to be that men assumed that their wives would do all the housework and parenting, but now that women are nearly equal participants in the labor force, men are assuming more of the tasks that it takes to run a home and raise children."

Link Discuss (via Ambiguous)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:48:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oldest human skulls discovered

The oldest human skulls ever unearthed were just discovered in Ethiopia, two adults and a child that have been buried for 160,000 years. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:47:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AICN: who's a pirate?

Moriarty, one of the editors on Ain't It Cool News, has written an apologia for a flamewar he started the other night when he vilified film-fans who had downloaded bootleg work-prints of The Hulk from the net and were posting reviews to AICN. Moriarty criticized the reviewers for their "piracy" and called them all sorts of nasty names. The "pirates" responded by pointing out that AICN's stock-in-trade is stolen scripts, violated NDAs by test-screeners and leaked secrets, and what's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. AICN's initial reaction was to delete some of the more critical posts, but Moriarty's apologia is, to my mind, a much better response.

When I first met Harry Knowles... the very first time... we hooked up because I was looking for a way to get something onto the Internet for other fans to enjoy.

It was something I wasn't supposed to have.

It came from someone's office who had no idea I had it.

I was told by someone online to try Harry Knowles. I got in touch with him in Texas. He hooked me up with a guy in Australia.

Why? To circumnavigate US copyright law. That's why.

Hello, kettle? It's the pot. I'm black.

So mea culpa. No other arguments are really needed to convince me that I made a colossal mistake the other day. You don’t have to try to go through every single word on the site looking for just the right phrase with which to hang me.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:40:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Liveblogging from Weblog Business Strategies

Heath Row has been doing a killer job live-blogging from the Weblogs Business Strategies conference.

I've been in journalism since college. I worked through the '70s working for the New York Times covering politics. In the '80s I worked in public television. And in the '90s I worked on the smartest radio show called the Connection, What I want to talk about today is how to use blogs to create a new kind of conversation. I also want you to think of me as a low-tech Dave Winer. I'm Dave Winer without the brains and the money. But it's not the brains or the money that's most important about Dave. Dave is a student of the culture, and he's a relentless listener to democracy. He's tremendously distressed about it. I'm not an entrepreneur, I'm not a technologist. I'm a citizen. And I speak with a lot of misgivings about where we're at and how we talk to each other.

I talked to Dave about the perfect caller. First she called herself Crystal from Cambridge. Then it was Rose from Roslindale. Finally she settled on Amber from Boston. We always knew she was the same person and she took on all of our most powerful guests. I told our staff I wanted to find her. She made an enormous mark. Dave said that's the ideal blogger. I said that's the ideal caller. My mission in our new radio Internet blog incarnation is to give the Ambers of the world not just a place to vent but to speak her mind. She found on our program a place she could be as big as she was.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amiga-otaku raise money for Moz port

Amiga faithful have pooled their money via PayPal and come up with more than $3600 for the first person or team to successfully port Mozilla, the king-hell open-source browser, to the creaking Amiga platform. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:28:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AME-359: the anti-blow

An extropian company called "Applied Molecular Evolution" have shipped a designer molecule that neutralizes cocaine in the bloodstream.

The researchers developed AME-359 by tweaking a protein to create an optimized version of an enzyme that's common and present in all humans.

"It's a scavenger enzyme (that) goes around the body chewing up a bunch of stuff, but not particularly well," Bloch said. "We’re engineering part of the human body to do something a lot better that it was originally meant to do."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sturgeon Award finalists announced

The finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short SF of the year have been announced! Congrats, Bruce, Greg, Charlie, Ted and Paul!

Bronte's Egg - Richard Chedwyk - F&SF, 8/02
Liking What You See: A Documentary - Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others, Tor
Singleton - Greg Egan - Interzone, 2/02
Year in the Linear City, A - Paul di Filippo - PS Publishing
Madonna of the Maquiladora - Gregory Frost - Asimov's, 5/02
Stories for Men - John Kessel - Asimov's, 10/02
Seasons of the Ansarac, The - Ursula K. LeGuin - Infinite Matrix, 6/3
Wild Girls, The - Ursula K. LeGuin - Asimov's, 3/02
Breathmoss - Ian R. MacLeod - Asimov's, 5/02
Coelacanths - Robert Reed - F&SF, 3/02
Over Yonder - Lucius Shepard - SciFiction, 1/02
In Paradise - Bruce Sterling - F&SF, 9/02
Halo - Charles Stross - Asimov's, 6/02

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:24:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

TVphones arrive: Samsung's new cellphone has color television

Samsung just released a mobile phone that includes color TV functionality. It's capable of receiving TV broadcasts over public access channels, and allows you to view either horizontally or vertically. The device also allows you to snap up to 50 frames of TV broadcast for use as screen background image. You'll have to move to Korea to use it though, no word on when it will be available elsewhere. Link to image, Link to press release, Discuss (Thanks, Jonno, via Gizmodo)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:12:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Kelly's Recomendo

Before Kevin Kelly was the executive editor of Wired, he edited Whole Earth Review. I became hooked when he took over WER, and loved his Whole Earth book, Signal (which was based on an issue of WER that turned me on to Factsheet Five and the zine world). For the past few months, Kevin has been quietly publishing the wonderful Cool Tools email newsletter. It consists of reviews of "cool stuff":

I include any books, tools, software, videos, maps, gadgets, hardware, websites, or gear that are extraordinarily handy or useful for individual and small groups. The best items are those that open up new possibilities. I depend on friends and readers to suggest things. Generally I try something out first if I can. I only recommend things I like and I ignore the rest. Tell me what you love. Suggestions for tools better than what I recommend always welcomed.

I bought a first aid kit for my trip to the islands based on Kevin's review in Cool Tools. You can see all the past picks from Cool Tools on Kevin's Recomendo site. Also, if you email him, he'll put you on the Cool Tools list. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:08:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

London Open Spectrum debate, June 24

I'm debating open spectrum at the iSociety in London, June 24. The event's open to the public. Hope to see some British friends and readers there!

Wireless technologies can revolutionise the way we live and work. But all wireless technologies, from Wi-Fi and 3G to taxi satellite systems and digital radio, need scare radio spectrum to work. And spectrum regulation is in a mess.

The American Government recently announced a high level task force to look into the issue. An emerging consensus argues that restrictive Government allocation of spectrum hampers innovation and lessens competition. Allocation through auctions, the other popular model, is publicly discredited after 3G licenses nearly bankrupted the UK telecoms industry. But what system could take their place? Should spectrum be seen as private or common property? And what will be the social and economic consequences of that decision?

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:42:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Camera Phones used for butt-rating site

People are using cameraphones to take pictures of other people's butts and and submitting them to a hot-or-not style site called Mobile Asses. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:35:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cheap and good web hosting?

I'm in dire need of a cheap but good Web host for pesco.net. I have lots of aliases and .forwards so it would be ideal to have a Web-based control panel for administration. I signed up with Sharp Web Services a couple weeks ago for $5.50/month for 50Mb, but their customer service is nonexistent. Seriously, I received no order confirmation or replies to email or phone inquiries. Any suggestions of reputable hosts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Update: Thanks for all the suggestions! I went with boing boing pal Scott Beale's Laughing Squid. Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:02:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired Magazine: Phonecam Nation

I wrote an essay for this month's issue of Wired Magazine about camera-phones and cultural change. Snip:

The trend started innocuously a few years ago, when novelty cameras that plugged into mobile handsets were marketed to gadget-obsessed kids in Japan and Europe. But in the past few months, a global phonecam revolution has begun to emerge. Take the device's portability, add its ability to post images online, multiply by its growing ubiquity, and what do you get? A cheap, fast strain of DIY publishing in which everyone is an embedded reporter. The rise of the technology resembles the leap from late-'90s personal homepages to today's weblogs: Like blogs, phonecams are a fresh combination of familiar elements that equal way more than the sum of their parts.

Here's a link to the online version, but I encourage you to step away from the laptop and go buy a hard copy. Paul Boutin's historic Slammer story, in the same issue, is nothing short of stunning in print. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:38:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Robots" movie in the works from creators of CGI pic "Ice Age"

The trio responsible for 2002's computer-animated feature "Ice Age" --- 20th Century Fox, Blue Sky Studios and director Chris Wedge-- announced last night in NYC that they're teaming up again to create another CGI film, "Robots." Release is slated for March, 2005. Confirmed voices on board includes Halle Berry, Ewan McGregor, Mel Brooks, and Drew Carey.

Mattel, Burger King, Kellogg's, Keebler, Hewlett-Packard, HarperCollins and Vivendi Universal Games have signed on as promotional partners for the film's release. Set in a world composed entirely of robots -- designed by William Joyce ("Rolie Polie Olie") -- the Lowell Ganz- and Babaloo Mandel-scripted project centers on Rodney Copperbottom (McGregor), a young genius inventor who dreams of making the world a better place. Berry voices Cappy, a sexy executive rebot with whom Rodney is instantly smitten. Other lead voices include the nefarious corporate tyrant Ratchet (yet to be cast), who locks horns with Rodney, and Big Weld (Brooks), a master inventor who has lost his way. Other characters include a group of misfit robots known as the Rusties.

Update: the movie's official url hasn't been announced, but in a bored moment of idle whois-ing, I queried robotsmovie.com -- and 20th Century Fox Films owns it. Link to Hollywood Reporter story, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:57:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kid-made graphic novels: "Boys are Sexxy"

Jennifer Robbins is running a hilarious series on Jennville about picture-books she created when she was a girl. I love this. Anyone have links to other sites where adult bloggers/web artists are posting scanned copies of books they made as kids? Post them in the Discuss forum!

Jennifer says: "Boys Are Sexxy, Age 6: The traced outline of a man cutout found in the Sunday paper became the basis of this book. Notice that at 6 years old, I wasn't sure what happens on a date after getting into the car."

Update: Killer! BoingBoing reader and former child geek Kirk contributes The One-eyed, Six-toed, battery operated laser sloths, which he made in seventh grade.
Discuss (via Reverse Cowgirl)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:45:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Taste Tribes: Smartmobbing your aesthetics

Mindjack's running a great article by Joshua Ellis about the way that technology is giving us the capacity to connect with like-minded people around the world.

There's a great line in the film High Fidelity where the main character, Rob (played by John Cusack) makes the observation that he doesn't like people because of who they are – he likes them because of what they like.

At first glance, this position sounds incredibly superficial. But on closer examination, it becomes more reasonable. After all, why do you talk to the stranger in the coffeehouse or in the bar? Unless you're a creepy freak who just bothers random strangers, it's probably because they're wearing a t-shirt sporting the logo of a band you like or reading a book by your favorite author. This spurious connection gives you a reason to talk to them.

And why not? Taste is based upon a certain set of assumptions about what is good or bad in the world. It's an arena of moral choices, to paraphrase rock critic Greil Marcus. Chances are that the guy down the bar in the Kraftwerk t-shirt and I will have more commonalities than we do differences – and not just in regards to music. We may not become best friends, but at least we'll probably have an interesting conversation.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joshua!)

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

Monday, June 9, 2003

Halal and Kosher butchery too cruel for Britons

If yer gonna kill an animal and eat it and then grind up the leftovers to feed to other animals, for heaven's sake, don't let your religion blind you to the fundamental kindness of killing with a bolt the head.

The Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC), which advises the government on how to avoid cruelty to livestock, says the way Kosher and Halal meat is produced causes severe suffering to animals.

Both the Jewish and Muslim religions demand that slaughter is carried out with a single cut to the throat, rather than the more widespread method of a bolt into the head.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stunning gallery of extreme,

Stunning gallery of extreme, mecha/Transformers-lookin' truck-mods from Japan. I've never owned a car, and until I can drive one of these, I never will. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:55:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Felten explains why "black box" DRM tech is bad for society

Lisa Rein's posted her video of Ed Felten's amazing talk on why DRM is bad for technology, from the Berkeley DRM conference in March. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:54:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Killer Star Wars casemods

Amazing Star Wars-themed casemods: Darth Vader shown at left (Hey! Note the OS!), Falcon Battleship, and my favorite: Rebel Forces. Discuss (Thanks, David!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:02:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gadget flashback: Gizmodo goes eighties!

BoingBoing pal and Gizmodo editor Peter Rojas sez:

I spent Saturday cooped up in my apartment because of a torrential rain storm, and in my boredom whipped up "Gizmodo 1983", a look back at what Gizmodo would have been like twenty years ago. Turns out 1983 was a good year for gadgets, there was the first commercial cellphone in the US (a $4000 brick from Motorola), the first CD player, etc.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:47:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SARS digital art exhibit "V": SARS art in China, and what is folk art?

At left: a handpainted silk protective mask featured in the Shanghai Art Museum's online anti-SARS art show. Check out this bas-relief portrait from the same show. The museum's online exhibit features the work of professional artists -- not "folk art" per se -- and pulls together works from similar, smaller projects at museums and galleries throughout the region. This Newsweek article has more details, and examines how painters, sculptors, filmmakers, playwrights, and 'Net artists throughout Asia are exploring the epidemic's cultural impact through art:

"At least seven SARS movies are rumored to be in the works -- including one that will tell the story of a Chinese nurse, modeled after Florence Nightingale, but set in modern SARS-crisis days. The City of SARS director Steve Cheng is hopeful that his flick will capture a momentous time in history. 'No other event like this may pass my way again,' he says. But with scientists worried that the outbreak will resume this fall, SARS may become as much a fixture in Asian art as it is in Asian life."

What exactly is "folk art" in the digital age? During the past few days, our readers have been hashing that out via email and on the SARS art thread discuss board. BoingBoing pal JohnVon submits this to the ongoing debate: an excerpt from a DeBug magazine interview with Sean Booth of electronica group Autechre.

"Folk has always been economically defined. [Consider] indie [guitar band] music, the cheapest thing to buy in the 80s was probably a guitar and a little fuzzbox, so they made guitar and fuzzbox music... there is very little independent music that uses guitars anymore cause it just costs more then computers, end of story. Computers are just the cheapest way for people to make music now... The next few years there is going to be a really major upsurge cause now it is not only kids that are into electronic music or dance music that are using computers it's everyone. Anyone who is into music is getting one."

More SARS art contributions from BoingBoing readers: Madrid-based blogger Marta spotted this and this painted on Barcelona streets; Mike contributes this card game; Rich found snarky new tshirts; JohnVon dug up a gem of Chinese government doublespeak prose; Alan shares a sign.
Discuss. (Previous posts: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:26:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unwirer is in the can!

w00t! Charlie Stross and I have finished the complete first draft of Unwirer, the story we collaborated on in public, via Movable Type blog. The first draft clocks in at nearly 11,000 words, and that means we've got to trim 4,500 words before we can turn it in. We're likely going to be doing that by email, though, so until the antho comes out, this is the only draft you're gonna get!

Marcel dropped his fork, clattering. "You're going to take your pet blonde on a repeater splice and show her everything and you're afraid to let me help you run a new fat pipe in? What's the matter, I don't smell good enough?"

"Listen." Roscoe stood up, and Marcel tensed -- but rather than move towards him, Roscoe turned to the pizza box. "Get the *Wall Street Journal* on our side and we have some credibility. A crack in the wall. Legitimacy. Do you know what that means, kid? You can't buy it. But run another fat pipe into town and we have a idle capacity, upstream dealers who want to know what the hell we're pissing around with, another fiber or laser link to lose to cop-induced backhoe fade, and about fifty percent higher probability of the whole network getting kicked over because the mundanes will rat us out to the FCC over their TV reception. Do you want that?" He picked another cooling pizza slice out of the box. "Do you really want that?"

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:05:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Your screen on your sleeve: new prototype wearable computing jacket

Bev points us to this AP story and photo about Pioneer, a Tokyo-based firm that has created a wearable computer prototype jacket with built-in sleeve display: "Using an organic film electro-luminescent (EL) display, the wearable computer is being developed with a new information technology by a collaboration of academic institutes and electronic companies. The development is expected to help medical, firefighting, and farming workers." Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:01:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

QTVR fun: panorama of Indiana Jones' lost city of Petra

QuickTime VR evangelist and BoingBoing pal Hans Nyberg says:

In the last scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Treasury is a secret temple, lost for hundreds of years. The City of Petra was hidden in the mountains of Jordan for thousands of years when a young Swiss explorer Johan Ludwig Burckhardt rediscovered it in 1812. This place is impossible to capture in a normal still image. You have to visit it -- or, see it in the cubic QTVR that Greg Downings created last year on assignment for Intel. Greg visited some of the most famous places in the world during this assignment, but he describes the visit at Petra as the most memorable.

Link to panorama, Link to interview with photographer, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:53:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Keitai snapshot galleries: wristphones and megapixel phonecams

Two terrific new online snapshot galleries from Nooper.com in Japan.
(1) "DoCoMo introduced the new Wristomo PHS phone and the first 1,000 where sold out in just a few minutes. We wondered why and got our own. We're not quite sure why Dick Tracy ever liked this concept... (link)"
and
(2) "DoCoMo launched the new 505i series of Keitai recently. With onboard megapixel camera, Flash, Java and a high resolution screen to go, we just had to get our hands on them. Here's a look at some of the phones on the market currently including the Wristomo (PHS wristwatch style phone). (link)"
Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:44:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inch-high astrobots are flying to Mars

Roland writes:

Florida Today says that the Planetary Society announced Saturday that Biff Starling will be the first astrobot to fly to Mars today. Biff was supposed to be a backup astrobot, but Sandy Moondust, the designated astrobot, suffered from a "freak zucchini accident." Here are the details about these robots, designed by the Planetary Society through a partnership with the LEGO Company. These robots are only 1.2 inch high and will land on Mars with a mini-DVD carrying the names of 4 million people who submitted their names before launch. This summary contains additional references and a nice picture of the happy Biff Starling and the adventurous Sandy Moondust.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:34:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool online comic: Nowhere Girl

Nowhere Girl is a haunting, resonant web comic by Justine Shaw. It was recently nominated for two Eisner awards, and winners will be announced at San Diego ComicCon in July. For now, the seies is web-only, but about the possibility of a print edition Justine says, "Not currently...I hope to print it someday, when I have more of the story completed. I hope to release it as full-color graphic novels. "Link, Discuss (Thanks, Warren Ellis!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:28:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Full-text search for Technorati

Dave Sifry spent the weekend whipping up a full-text search for Technorati. Now you can search the complete text of over 300,000 blogs, and all matching text posted two hours ago or more will be returned. What's more, he's created an API for it that makes it all accessible programatically. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Biopiracy: a new colonialism

Interesting piece on how global Intellectual Property treaties are enabling a new kind of colonialism: Big Pharma companies headqaurtered in the industrialized world are "discovering" biotech building blocks in poor countries, patenting them, and using patents to screw the developing world out of the profits.

Bioprospection, or biopiracy, is not a futuristic scenario but a reality. In 1998 the U.S.-based Diversa Corporation signed a deal with the Mexican government to obtain access to the biodiversity of Chiapas. Also in Mexico, British company Nature Ltd. is exploring traditional Maya knowledge of medicinal plants with $2.5 million from the International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG), an American public-private consortium that includes the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Allan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:23:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK to tax the hell out of junk-food

The British government is thinking of introducing a sales tax on fatty, crappy junk-food to encourage (poor) Britons to get skinnier.

"We have a culture now where the population is eating foods which are high in fat and energy because fat is a cheap and filling ingredient.

"For many patients, it is hard to make changes to their diet because of the ubiquity of unhealthy foods.

"It is an utterly cynical exploitation and the poorest are affected disproportionately because they have less choice about where they shop and what they can buy."

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:15:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pix of Earth, Luna from Mars

Fresh from the NASA Mars Global Surveyor, a picture of the Earth and the moon as seen from Mars. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:13:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 8, 2003

Ecrypted AIM

The new AOL Instant Messenger beta offers encrypted chat. About freaking time.

AIM users can now send and receive messages, participate in chats and send files using industry-standard digital encryption using AIM (version 5.2.3211 or higher, Windows operating systems).

Messages sent between AIM users with security credentials are digitally signed and encrypted and remain encrypted during message transmission. Referred to as "end-to-end encryption", AIM encryption goes beyond basic Secure Socket Layers (SSL) encryption — which is commonly used for encrypting messages between a user's browser and a server's web site.

Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:08:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bezos plugs my book on NPR!

Jeff "Amazon" Bezos did a spot on this morning's NPR Weekend Edition on the best summer reading. His first choice was Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom! Color me stoked. Link to 1.3MB MP3 of the plug Link to NPR's page for the broadcast Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:07:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harvest Gypsy

On Artbomb: Harvest Gypsy, an online comic strip for the road. Link Discuss (Thanks, Warren!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:07:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 7, 2003

Floppy disk WiFi antenna

My nipples explode with delight: a French hacker has posted a recipe for making a WiFi antenna out of an old floppy disk and a paperclip! Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:46:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 6, 2003

Aerobic Shakespeare

Shakespeare on the Run is a Manhattan twist on Shakespeare in the Park. Every 5-7 minutes, the show is moved 50 yards away, and the entire audience has to run to the next stage to see it. Link Discuss (via Megnut)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Slammer autopsy

Paul Boutin's written a fascinating feature on the Slammer Worm for Wired magazine. Particularily cool is his human-readable analysis of Slammer's ingenious code.

Slammer masquerades as a single UDP packet, one that would normally be a harmless request to find a specific database service. The first byte in the string - 04 - tells SQL Server that the data following it is the name of the online database being sought. Microsoft's tech specs dictate that this name be at most 16 bytes long and end in a telltale 00. But in the Slammer packet, the bytes run on, craftily coded so there is no 00 among them. As a result, the SQL software pastes the whole thing into memory.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:44:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA/MPAA make Edison's mistakes

George Ziemann, editor of MP3NewsWire, is serializing a fascinating series of essays about the history of copyright on music and movies, and drawing particular attention to the way that today's copyfights echo the mistakes that Edison made.

It's funny that the record labels and especially the movie industry don't see the irony of history. The Hollywood companies that are now trying to use every possible and impossible way to hinder the evolution of the Internet, are the very same independent companies that 100 years ago moved to Hollywood to be out of reach of Edisons agents.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:42:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dewey Decimal hotel

The Library Hotel in Manhattan organizes its rooms along the Dewey Decimal system. The concept's wicked-cool, but the panaoramae of the rooms make them look like pretty bog-standard hunchbacked-mouse NYC hotel rooms, with pretty minimal theming.

Most library users know the general structure of Melvil Dewey's decimal classification. First published in 1876, the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) divides knowledge into ten main classes, with further subdivisions. More than 200,000 libraries in 135 countries use the DDC to organize their book collections. Its simple and logical framework is based on the principle of decimal fractions as class marks, which are expandable to make further subdivisions.

The Library Hotel in New York City is the first hotel ever to offer its guest over 6,000 volumes organized throughout the hotel by the DDC. Each of the 10 guestrooms floors honors one of the 10 categories of the DDC and each of the 60 rooms is uniquely adorned with a collection of books and art exploring a distinctive topic within the category or floor it belongs to. 3rd.floor: Social Sciences

Room#
300.001 Communication
300.002 Political Science
300.003 Economics
300.004 World Culture
300.005 Money
300.006 Law

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bryant!)

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

Japanese little-old-guy gallery

Check out this gallery of statuettes of old Japanese guys looking like schmendricks. I don't read (or speak) Japanese, so I'm not sure if these are a personal art project or collectible figurines or what. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pirates of the Caribbean sneak

Ain't-It-Cool-News provides from a sneak peek at the Pirates of the Caribbean movie:

The entire rest of the film is one great battle after another. There are plenty of plot twists and a great ending that might end up at the end of the credits! So keep your eye out at the end!

Overall the film is almost perfect, just don't go in thinking it's JAWS or Citizen Kane! I hate it when people forget that films are entertainment! Just relax and have a good f'n time! I will definitely need to see it several more times to really soak it all in! This film is EXTREME EYE CANDY! I can't wait to see it finished with the proper theme score! The temporary Gladiator theme was starting to annoy me!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Cris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:30:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roger's Jules Verne clock

Roger Wood has started a new series of wall-clocks, which he calls his "Jules Verne clocks." Here's the first. Click the link for a larger view. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:22:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brits pick 50 worst books of all time

Well-known Brits talk about the books they hate. Worst of the worst is the Lord of the Rings.

There have been many contenders, but for inspiring life-long loathing and contempt, nothing beats The Lord of the Rings. The childish storytelling, the valetudinarian mythologising, Tolkien's lack of any feel for language, description, landscape, emotion or confrontation, the desire to garotte Pippin and Merry in a dark alley ­ how can so many readers have put up with such codswallop for so long? -- John Walsh: Author and Independent columnist

I've never understood the point. It's strange, weird and frightening, and makes me feel like I'm on the sidelines of a joke I don't understand. -- Alain De Botton: Author and philosopher

Anything about Gandalf, and those little things with hair between their toes. I hate that sort of portentous, phoney, medieval-magical way of writing. -- Sir John Mortimer: Author and creator of Rumpole

Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:07:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Area 51 flight simulator

Sean says: "Some guy in the Netherlands has developed a Microsoft Flight Simulator model for the so-called TR-3B Astra Locust... a rumored super-secret spyplane being developed at Area 51! Now anyone can step into the cockpit of their own UFO! " Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:55:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Federal court approves cellular number portability

Hallelujah. Today, a federal court rejected an appeal from wireless companies and ruled that consumers should have the right to retain their old phone numbers when switching carriers.

Consumer advocates say the inability to retain numbers is one of the biggest barriers preventing more cell phone users from switching in search of better service and prices. The Federal Communications Commission is requiring wireless carriers to provide "number portability" by Nov. 24. In April, attorneys for Verizon Wireless and the CTIA told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that the FCC overstepped its authority by imposing the requirement. They said it will raise costs while doing little to increase competition. The court rejected that challenge, calling the FCC's action "permissible and reasonable." The court also said the cell phone companies waited too long to object to the rule.

Link Discuss (thanks, Colin)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:57:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WB cartoon characters on NASA patches

This summer, Marvin The Martian and Daffy Duck will appear on official First Space Launch Squadron patches for two NASA Mars Rover Missions. "Ooooo Oooooo, you Earthlings make me very aaaangrrrrry!!" Link, Discuss (thanks, JP)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:06:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Keanu's generosity to Matrix f/x guys in doubt

Hello magazine says Keanu gave $80 million to the Matrix's special effects team. But Fox News says he didn't. Discuss (Thanks Rick!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:35:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SARS folk art exhibit "U": Comrades! Bad News! SARS is here!

Link to complete image. A BoingBoing pal in Beijing who asks not to be identified explains this "found" 'net art circulating chatrooms and in-boxes throughout China:

"Xeni, this is a collection of famous propaganda posters from the Mao days, but with the dialogue changed to reflect the fight against SARS. Read from left to right, top to bottom.
1. Comrades! Bad News! SARS is here!
2: How could this happen? What can we do? 3. What's to fear? I've got a gun!
4. Won't work! The enemy is crafty. Guns won't work! (other guy) Hey, what about grenades?
5. No go! SARS is only afraid of disinfectant! 6. But we've got none!
7. Brothers, Chill! First of all, we must pay attention to hygiene to prevent SARS.
8. Right! Bathe! Wash! (other caption) Hey, where's the soap? 9. And don't forget to wear a mask!
10. Good thinking! I'm off to put up posters to tell everyone to wear a mask!
11. Comrades! The disinfectant is here!
12. Excellent! we've washed so much, we've taken off a layer of skin!
13. Spray! Spray it all!
14. 'Victory!' 'We have defeated SARS.' 'Great!, as a matter of fact, I hate washing.' 'No more masks, no more anti-rash powder!' 'Now we can eat whatever we want!'

Bonus art from readers: comics (thanks, Bryant), family history (Thanks, JBF), and a Kentucky-fried photoblog prank from Kim -- "This is the work of my crazy girlfriend, while passing through Bangkok airport. Security just laughed."
Discuss. (Previous posts: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S T.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:31:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grinding Nemo

A company that makes sewage-treatment equipment is warning parents whose kids have seen "Finding Nemo" that flushing a fish down a toilet is a bad way to get it to the ocean:

...drain pipes do lead to the ocean -- eventually -- but first the fluid goes through powerful machines that "shred solids into tiny particles."

"In truth, no one would ever find Nemo and the movie would be called 'Grinding Nemo,"' wrote the JWC Environmental company, which makes the trademarked "Muffin Monster" shredding pumps.

Link Discuss (via SFGate Morning Fix)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:54:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rage against the fruit machines

A UK activist clade is taking on the insidious digital fruit machine (AKA, "slot machine"). These things are supposed to be random and fair, but by design or by glitch, the pubside gambling systems are anything but.

Fruit machines cheat you on practically every spin of the reels. Almost every spin is entirely predetermined - which symbols are going to drop in, whether you're going to be awarded nudges, which numbers the "random" stop will land on, the lot. Ever had two cherries on the win line, not held them, then watched the third one drop in on the next spin and thought, "Damn, if I'd held them I'd have won"? Well, you wouldn't. If you'd held the two cherries, the machine would have dropped in a different symbol. And now we can prove it.

Link Discuss (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:45:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Generators

salary
lies
flattery
military ops
slogans
posters (shown at left)
safety signs

Link, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:44:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

An idea for email clients

Why don't email clients have panic buttons? My mailer takes about five seconds to send a short text message to my mail-server, but it takes about five seconds to bring up the progress-dialog and click the cancel-button. How many times have you hit the "Send" button and then thought, "oops, I shouldn't have done that?" Un-sending is a pipe-dream, but why don't more mailers have a "cancel all pending sends and move to drafts" button? Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:29:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Subculture morphology

Exactititudes: a photo-project of members of a the same subculture in the same poses. As Joey notes, "The effect is pretty striking: you quickly discover that in one's attempt to express their own individuality, one often ends up looking like a helluva lot of other people." Link Discuss (via The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:24:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New arteries from scratch, sans stem-cells

A researcher at Duke has created vat-grown arteries without using stem-cells:

In 1999, Duke researchers led by Laura Niklason, M.D., reported in the journal Science on experiments in which they grew pig arteries in a novel "bioreactor" system that mimics the fetal environment, and then successfully implanted these bioengineered arteries back into the pig. Unfortunately, researchers found that human artery cells did not possess enough life cycles to be grown into functional arteries.

The key to overcoming this hurdle was found in a cancer research lab. Every time a cell divides, the ends of its chromosomes, or telomeres, erode until they become so short that the cell receives a signal to stop growing. While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, current Duke researcher Chris Counter, Ph.D., had previously cloned the hTERT (human telomerase reverse transcriptase subunit) component of the enzyme telomerase that stops telomeres from shortening, and had shown that expression of hTERT permitted some human cells to continue to divide indefinitely, in effect making them immortal.

Link Discuss (via Science Daily)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 5, 2003

Your hands are a camera

This is a groovy new Japanese UI widget: a wearable that can detect the presence and orientation of your hand. By framing a rectagle with your hands, you can snap a picture of whatever you're looking at and store it to your beltpack computer. Link (in Japanese) Discuss (via KoKoRo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:16:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos from Dorkbot geek confab in SF with Karen Marcelo

At Wednesday's standing-room-only Dorkbot fete in San Francisco, Karen Marcelo -- SRL code engineer and recent BoingBoing guestblogger -- hosted a house full of hackers, handhelds, hardware, and h'ors doevres, with stunt-performing hounds and hotties. People pigged out on pizza, perused pixelated psychedelia and Powerpoint projections, then partied.
Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:59:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Space program quote

This morning on The Current, a CBC radio show, Bob MacDonald (the CBC's science commentator and host of the brilliant show Quirks and Quarks), was asked to justify the expense of the space program. Among other things, he said:

"It costs NASA less to send a probe to Mars than it would cost Hollywood to make a movie about it"

Link Discuss (Thanks, paulbel!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:54:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bush charters govt spectrum use task-force

The Bush administration has announced that it will take a long, hard look at spectrum allocation in the US, with an eye to improving governmental spectrum use.

Evans will form a high-level interagency Task Force under an Executive Memorandum issued by President Bush today that will recommend ways to stimulate more efficient use of the radio frequency spectrum by government users. This effort will be the first comprehensive study of federal government radio spectrum policy in the modern era and will build on previous administration efforts to improve the spectrum management process.

Evans said the Administration has succeeded in identifying additional spectrum for advanced new wireless services known as 3G, paved the way for ultrawideband technologies, and helped broker an agreement that could double the amount of spectrum for WiFi technologies.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:47:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Speaking at WebGuild next Wednesday

I'm speaking at the Silicon Valley WebGuild (free admission!) in San Jose next Wednesday, June 11, from 7PM to 8PM, on civil liberties on the Web. Hope to see you there!

From deep-linking (the right to give someone directions) to DRM (the right to be treated like a customer, not a criminal), civil liberties are inexorably entwined with the Web. Increasingly, legal mandates are in the offing to force you to design and deploy technology that restricts what you and your users may do. Find out where these proposals are at, where they're going, and what you can do about them.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Cathy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:32:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bizcard origami

Great instructions for folding six business-cards into a self-contained cube. There's a project to fold 64,000+ of these things and build a fractal shape called a Menger's sponge. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jonathan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

T-rays: like X-rays, but cooler

Teraherz imaging provides high-resolution scans of people and objects without the radiation hazards associated with X-rays. T-rays are also responsiive to differences in material composition, which makes them useful for detecting tumors and counting the change in your pocket.

Terahertz frequencies are tough to produce and detect. They're higher than microwaves but lower than infrared light. "You're never sure whether to use electronics-based or optics-based" technology, says Martyn Chamberlain of the University of Leeds in England, a leading terahertz researcher. The terahertz sources now on the market tend to emit many frequencies at once, limiting their utility. In the past year, however, several research projects have made substantial progress in developing devices that produce t-rays within a narrow frequency band--a requirement for precise chemical sensing and medical imaging.

Link Discuss (via Die Puny Humans!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:24:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1840-1902, fully searchable and online

Eli the Bearded sez, "The Brooklyn Public Library has scanned in a daily paper from when Brooklyn was an independent city, the Daily Eagle. Papers from the 1840s to 1902 are available."

This is an astonishingly cool archive, with full-text search of this crumbly old newspaper that returns both scans and converted ascii text. Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

High-school student busts cops who pretended to be Feebs

A 17-year-old high-school student busted two local cops who pretended to the FBI agents and dropped by her place to grill her over a blog entry in which she made a joke about the school server being hacked.

The afternoon that Erin Carter was interrogated by two FBI agents, the Chapel Hill High student and a friend went to have the officer’s business card, which bore the organization’s name, laminated.

Looking back, she considers that a good move.

The two Chapel Hill police officers are under investigation for having allegedly misrepresented themselves as FBI agents and have been placed on administrative leave with pay pending further investigation, Chapel Hill Police Chief Gregg Jarvies announced Thursday.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:09:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

6,000 words of my new novel

I'm taking a break from working on /usr/bin/god, one of the novels I'm writing. Instead, I've been working on "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," another book, this one an urban fantast/magic-realist thing about community wireless networking. I cracked the 30,000-word mark this morning (target length is 120,000 words or so) and I thought I'd post a 6,000-word excerpt to celebrate.

Alan's father was a mountain, and his mother was a washing machine -- he kept a roof over their heads and she kept their clothes clean. His brothers were: a dead man, a trio of nesting dolls, a fortune teller and a island. He only had two or three family portraits, but he treasured them, even if outsiders who saw them often mistook them for landscapes. There was one where his family stood on his father's slopes, mom out in the open for a rare exception, a long tail of extension cords snaking away from her to the cave and the diesel generator's three-prong outlet. He hung it over the mantle, using two hooks and a level to make sure that it came out perfectly even.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:20:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teen girls train FBI to pose as teen girls

The FBI is hiring teenage girls to teach its undercovers to convincingly impersonate jailbait in chatrooms and catch pedophiles.

"They, like, don't know anything," said Mary, 14, giggling.

"They're, like, do you like Michael Jackson?" said Karen, 14, rolling her eyes at just how out of it adults can be.

Probably the youngest instructors ever in an FBI classroom, the girls have become an invaluable help to Operation Innocent Images -- an initiative that tries to stop people from peddling child pornography or otherwise sexually exploiting children, FBI officials said. The Washington Post agreed to withhold the girls' last names to protect them from harassment on the Internet and elsewhere.

Link Discuss (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Milwaukee getting free WiFi in the park

Milwaukee is getting free WiFi in two of its parks, courtesy of city government. I love seeing this kind of thing, and we're seeing more and more of it.

However, it's a pity that the author of this article felt the need to find a "security expert" to crap all over it with half-assed, semi-accurate warnings:

Ben Sherwood, a privacy adviser and president of Sherwood Personal Security, based in Oakbrook, Ill., said people using a wireless network should not conduct sensitive or private communication over the system.

"It's a huge security risk. Whenever you use a wireless network, you are opening yourself up to the information you're sending being snatched out of the air by someone else," he said.

Sherwood said buying items over the Internet or checking an online bank account using a wireless network would be a bad idea.

Sherwood is just sowing FUD here. First of all, anyone with a cablemodem connection is in the same boat as a wireless user: your communications can be captured by anyone in your neighborhood and read. This is also true if you're using the DSL in your hotel room -- and the connection in your office is sniffable by your sysadmins.

The most glaring inaccuracy is the business about buying stuff and checking a bank-balance over a wireless link. The security of this activity is determined by the presence or absence of an SSL connection. If your bank uses SSL (and all of them do), then you're (relatively) secure. If your e-tailer uses SSL (and nearly all of them do), then you're (relatively) secure. And if they don't, you shouldn't be doing business with them in the first place: sending sensitive information in cleartext over the Internet is insecure regardless of your connection.

The other thing that ticked me off about this article is this:

The wireless networks use a popular technology called Wi-Fi, which is short for "wireless fidelity" and sometimes mentioned by the technical description 802.11b.

As Glenn Fleishman has pointed out, "WiFi" isn't short for wireless fidelity. It's a play on words, a joke based on "Hi-Fi." Explaining to readers that "WiFi is short for 'wireless fidelity'" is nonsensical. A reader who hasn't heard of WiFi won't be enlightened by this explanation. If you feel that your readers are so dim as to miss the gag, then, for heaven's sake, why not write something like, "WiFi, a pun on 'HiFi,' is a marketing term for the 802.11b wireless standard, which allows computers to connect to the Internet at high speeds from distances of up to 300 feet." Link Discuss (Thanks, Layla!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:51:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

G8 photoblogs: Geneva riots

Christophe in Switzerland writes: "This is a photoblog of the riots which have happend over the past four days in Geneva, during the G8 summit. More pictures (other days) : one, two, and three." Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:36:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

T-mobile launches $300 color Sidekick with cam, phone, PDA in USA

Only available on T-Mobile. Hal sez: "Now they just need some decent service plans for Sidekick customers!"

The Sidekick handheld device combines Web browsing, e-mail, AOL Instant Messenger service, cell phone, personal digital assistant and camera features on a single platform. In addition to a color screen, the new Sidekick has double the memory of its predecessor and its accessory camera offers better resolution and a larger picture size, T-Mobile said. The color-screen Sidekick will cost about $300 and will be available starting on June 6 through a T-Mobile 1-800 telephone line and CompUSA Inc. retail stores, the carrier said.

Link to Reuters story, Discuss (via unwired list) update: here's an image, via CNET (thanks, ernie).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:32:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 4, 2003

Aimster arguments audio online

The Sevent Circuit Court of Appeals has posted audio of the oral arguments in today's hearings on Aimster, a P2P file-sharing tool that the entertainment companies are all verklempt over. Link Discuss (via Lessig)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bulletproof sawdust-and-ice ships almost won the war

During WWII, Lord Mountbatten tried to get the American military to build warships out of Pykrete, a mixture of sawdust and ice which was bullet- and bomb-proof.

In early 1943 two American professors discovered that a very tough material could be produced by adding a small amount of wood pulp to water before freezing. They called this material pykrete, in honour of Geoffrey Pyke.

Lord Mountbatten had a block of pykrete prepared by a Canadian engineering company, and took this block to the Quebec Conference in the fall of 1943. As it appeared that "Habbakuk" would run into supply and technical problems, not to mention the high costs ($100 million for the first ship), it was Mountbatten's aim to get the Americans to take over the project. It is reported that he fired a revolver at the pykrete block during a coffee break, and the bullet bounced off and struck one of the senior officers who were present -- thankfully without serious injury!

Link Discuss (via Memepool)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:42:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harry Potter reading webcast on June 26

JK Rowling will read from the new Harry Potter novel at 4PM London time in the Royal Albert Hall on June 26. The event, including a Q&A, will be webcast. Link Discuss (via Kottke)

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

Restore Apple iTunes 4.0.1 'Net sharing feature with "401(ok)" freeware app

iCommune creator Jim Speth tells BoingBoing:

Well, I whipped up a crappy little application called 401(ok) that combines a few hacks to restore internet-wide sharing to iTunes 4.0.1. I know I really liked the ability to access *my* music from anywhere, and I didn't like that the 4.0.1 update removed that feature. Steve giveth, and Steve taketh away. You can download it here. I made it as quickly as I could, and it could use a lot of improvement. I'll make it better if people think the basic functionality is worthwhile.

Why is this rad? Read Cory's 05/27/02 post about Apple's removal of the share feature: Apple force-feeds customers shit, calls it sunshine. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:08:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hong Kong pimps like phonecams

Sex trade brokers -- okay, pimps -- in Hong Kong are MMS'ing color snapshots of prostitutes to potential johns via cellphone, according to a South China Morning Post item on Tuesday.

Police are investigating the phenomenon and have been checking the cellphones of pimps arrested in raids in the city's red light districts, according to the newspaper. No one has so far been arrested for soliciting by cellphone, however. A police source quoted by the newspaper said: "The first to maximise the technology are the pimps in the red light area. Before they make the deal they show the client a photo preview on the cellphone." Hong Kong residents have one of the highest rates of cellphone ownership in the world with more than eight out of 10 of the territory's 6,8 million population owning a handset. New-style phones with colour screens are increasingly popular in the gadget-hungry city.

Link Discuss (via gizmodo, via pho list). BoingBoing reader Chico quips: "We put the HO in phone."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:36:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Willful Infringement -- illegal copyright documentary

Willful Infringement is a feature film about the ways that copyright has harmed free expression and creativity. The movie features clowns talking about the legal threats they got for twisting balloon-animal Barneys, Negativland conspiracists discussiing life after being crushed for making music out of samples, as well as lots of legal geniuses and iconoclasts talking about how we got here and where we're going. I was interviewed for this flick, but I didn't make the cut I saw (who knows if I made it to the DVD?). The movie is now out on DVD -- in glorious infringe-o-rama, sure to be removed form the market in short order. Get your copy while you still can! At $50, the price-tag is a little steep, but it's a fascinating watch. Link Discuss (via Lessig)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:16:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SARS digital folk art, exhibit "T": Susannah Breslin contributes

Phone sex is safe sex: don't touch me, don't breathe on me, just call me. Hu Wo -- "call me," in Chinese -- is the title of this image created for BoingBoing's digital art series by Susannah Breslin.

A former BoingBoing guestblogger, Susannah is a writer, blogger, photographer and illustrator whose work explores sexuality and technology, among other things.

She lives in Los Angeles, where she is working on the short story collection You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?, which will be published by Future Tense Books, and the graphic flash fiction book The Fetish Alphabet (which is still in need of a publisher with cojones). You can find more of her work on Reverse Cowgirl's Blog, in which she "attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection."

Discuss. (Previous posts: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:18:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

French blogger blogs Concorde's final flight

Jean-Luc in Paris writes, "This week, a French blogger flew on the infamous Concorde plane's last and final flight from a French airport -- from Paris to Paris, via the Atlantic Ocean. I just discovered this blog-post about his experience, which includes pics."

Link (both blogs = French text), Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:12:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online audio, video of FCC decision protests at Lisa Rein's blog

BoingBoing pal Lisa Rein points us to this extensive archive of TV footage, home-shot digital video, and street-captured audio documenting reactions to this week's FCC ruling. Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:06:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot Talent Show "ArtBots" in NYC this July

'Bot curator Douglas Repetto says:

BoingBoing has mentioned ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show before, and I thought your readers might be interested in our current status. We're ramping up for our July show; information about this year's participants are now online here-- including bot pictures and artist statements. There's lots of great work, with 23 participants from six countries!

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:01:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A librarian on PATRIOT

A Cal State librarian intern has written a stirring op-ed for the LA Times about the way that the PATRIOT Act forces librarians to act in a way that betrays their calling.

An elderly woman approached the reference desk recently to ask for help in finding a novel. My impression was that neither her vision nor her legs were up to the task of the search, so I retrieved the book for her from the large-print section. While I was thus engaged, my patron was busy reading the placard that the library where I intern has placed at the reference desk. Its purpose is to inform patrons about the USA Patriot Act [the law passed after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the government's surveillance powers in terrorist investigations]. It took her a while to absorb the meaning before she spoke.

She said: "What does this mean? This is like the Red Scare. You surely aren't going to participate in this, are you? I have lived a long time, and never thought I would see this happen again."

With that she departed.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cracking the "Bible Code"

In his books The Bible Code (1997) and its sequel, the Bible Code II (2002), Michael Drosnin claims that there are secret prophecies encoded in the Hebrew Pentateuch, readable using software that takes every nth letter and helps you search the text blocks for patterns. In the first book, Drosnin claimed that the code predicted Yitzhak Rabin's assasination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the end of the world in 2000 (ooops!). The sequel highlights predictions of "more current" events like the Bush/Gore election controversy and, natch, 9/11.

Physicist Dave Thomas applied the same technique to an excerpt from the Bible Code II he grabbed off Amazon.com and discovered this important message:

"THE BIBLE CODE IS A SILLY, DUMB, FAKE, FALSE, EVIL, NASTY, DISMAL FRAUD AND SNAKE-OIL HOAX."

More on this Bible Code crap in Michael "The Skeptic" Shermer's latest column in Scientific American.... Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:25:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 3, 2003

Gnutella author quitting AOL over inability to express in code

Justin Frankel, the founder of Nullsoft and author of Gnutella, WinAmp and WASTE, has posted a blog entry in which he eloquently describes his feeling that coding is a form of expression, and his inability to reconcile AOL (his employer)'s total control over his coding. He says he's quitting AOL.

For me, coding is a form of self-expression.

It's probably the form I'm most effective at.

Everything I own is arguably owned by the company.

The company controls what I do with my code...

The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have.

Link Discuss (via Hack the Planet)

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

Christian group wants to fly anti-gay banners over WDW no-fly zone

A Christian group in Orlando is calling for a lifting of the no-fly ban over Walt Disney World so that they can charter airplanes to drag anti-gay banners over the park during Gay Days, an unofficial gathering of gays and lesbians at the park. Link Discuss (Thanks, Todd!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Malaysia calls for boycott of Hollywood

A minister in the Malaysian government is calling on Malaysian citizens to boycott CDs, VCDs and DVDs until the entertainment industry cuts its prices.

Ironically, the government made the request in order to help the industry: it offered the move as a solution to escalating music and movie piracy.

"There are some new local movie releases that are priced at MYR10 ($2.64). The VCDs are affordable and not bootlegged by illegal manufacturers," said Subramaniam. "Those priced at MYR30 ($7.91) and above are normally the ones that get pirated. This proves that the price factor is the main reason why consumers buy pirated CDs and VCDs."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Randy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:17:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homeland security honcha has phony PhD

A senior technical official in the Homeland Security Department has a phony Ph.D. from a diploma mill. I'm thinking that I'd like to get one of these and join my parents (Dr. and Dr. Doctorow) as Dr. Doctorow, Jr.

Laura L. Callahan, now senior director in the office of department CIO Steven Cooper, states on her professional biography that she "holds a Ph.D. in Computer Information Systems from Hamilton University." Callahan, who is also president of the Association for Federal IRM and a member of the CIO Council, is commonly called by the title "Dr."...

Hamilton University, according to an Internet search, is located in Evanston, Wyo. It is affiliated with and supported by Faith in the Order of Nature Fellowship Church, also in Evanston. The state of Wyoming does not license Hamilton because it claims a religious exemption. Oregon has identified Hamilton University as a diploma mill unaccredited by any organization recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Cutter!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:15:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SARS digital folk art, exhibit "S": artist Katie Bush contributes

Acclaimed 'Net artist Katie Bush created this exclusive for BoingBoing: SARS! (link to full-size image). And here is a related gif-based, moving-image web art piece from Katie about virus, disease, and media memes.

Katie is an American artist whose work explores the possiblities of ready-made clip art in a warped, funny and satirical reevaluation of the American Dream. In All Systems Go, users navigate through little animated vignettes that depict the banality of suburban existence. The scenes in destroyevil.com question the 'goals' of money, power, sex and fame, the pursuit of happiness as presented to us by mass media. Vivid colors, mass-produced clip art and the low-tech animations emphasize cheap, throwaway culture that Americans are nurtured on. Her digital and analog works have been shown in venues throughout North America and Europe, and in print and online at Rhizome.org, Eleven Bulls, and Sissorkick.com.

Bonus links: on Declan McCullagh's politech list, this interesting item on How Singapore is confronting SARS. And for "Discuss" board trolls who tire of SARS-meme posts on BoingBoing, I offer this trollbait: one (thanks, Modesty) and two (Thanks, Jaison).

Discuss. (Previous posts: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:19:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

For sale by government: used car, loaded (with pot)

A Mexican national is looking to sue the US government after Customs agents arrested and imprisoned him for driving across the border with199 pounds of marijuana stuffed into his car's bumpers. The irony is that he bought the car, pre-packed with the pot, at a US Marshals Service Auction in San Diego. The car had been seized by the INS when it was used to run illegal immigrants into the US. The INS officials had apparently missed the hidden weed though. Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:50:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 2, 2003

Media diversity...through Congress?

Senators from both sides of the floor are cooking up legislation that will force the FCC to create new regulations that ensure diversity in media ownership.

The group said it was pressing ahead with legislation to retain limits keeping a network from owning stations that together reach more than 35 percent of the national audience...

But Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi told a news conference there was no partisanship in Senate opposition to the new cap.

"A lot of Republicans, in fact, probably most of the Republicans in Congress, would not agree with this decision," said Lott, the former Republican leader of the Senate.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:08:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Guys spend six years recreating Raiders of the Lost Ark

Zed sez, "This is one of the most beautifully geeky things I've ever heard of. In 1982, 3 12-year-olds decided to make a shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. 7 years later they'd finished. The linked article includes a link to a trailer, but it's very short. I really hope this isn't an elaborate hoax, 'cause I'd love to see it." Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orlando ^H^H^H^H^H^H Georgia slum themepark

Habitat for Humanity is opening a slum themepark in Orlando Georgia (thanks, senor), to help visitors understand how most of the world lives.

"Essentially, it's a theme park for poverty housing," Fuller told Reuters. "You'll come out of the center and walk right into a slum. You'll see the kind of pitiful living conditions so many people in the world have."

After touring mock slums from Africa, Asia and Central America, visitors to the Global Village will see examples of the modest homes Habitat builds in those regions.

"You see what a steep improvement acceptable housing makes in someone's life. We think we'll recruit a lot of volunteers this way," Fuller said.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Caines!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:39:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Petition for the Eldred Act: save the public domain

Lessig and company have authored a petition to Congress, asking them to pass the Eric Eldred Act to preserve the public domain. Under this proposal, rights-holders who want to retain their copyrights beyond 50 years need to pay a dollar per work at the 50 year mark (tax-deductible) to register the copyrights. When the Supremes heard the Eldred case, they heard that 98% of the works in copyright are lying fallow, earning nothing for anyone, out of print and not available to the public. In this proposal, the 2% of copyrights that earn money can go on earning money, while the remaining, vast majority will be rescued from history's dustbin.

One solution in particular that we ask Congress to consider is the Public Domain Enhancement Act. See http://eldred.cc This statute would require American copyright owners to pay a very low fee (for example, $1) fifty years after a copyrighted work was published. If the owner pays the fee, the copyright will continue for whatever duration Congress sets. But if the copyright is not worth even $1 to the owner, then we believe the work should pass into the public domain.

This legislation would strengthen the public domain without burdening copyright owners. It would also help clarify rights over copyrighted material, which in turn would enable reuse of that material. The law could thus help restore balance to the protection of copyright, and support the public domain.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:37:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roger's latest clock

Roger Wood's latest clock, made out of an old pram, has made me smile for the first time today. Rotten day. Good clock. Click the link for a larger view. Link Discuss

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

Keanu gives Matrix F/X guys millions each

Keanu Reeves says he has enough money to last him "for the next few centuries." So he is giving £million to the 29 people on the special effects team behind The Matrix: Reloaded. Each will get £5 million. What a cool guy! Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:41:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Farewell to guestblogger Karen Marcelo

Karen Marcelo's guest-blogging hijinks end today. K0re, you did a fantastic job, and we'll miss you -- and guest-guest-blogger Macki -- a lot. Boingboing readers, if you're in the San Francisco area this week, don't miss Karen's Dorkbot event on Wednesday June 4th, 7:30pm, at polymorf's. The last one was standing-room-only, and this one-year-anniversary event (with afterparty) is shaping up to be terrific. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:52:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New guestblogger: John C. Dvorak

John C. Dvorak, legendary net.curmudgeon and old-school computer columnist, joins us now as our latest guestblogger.

John C. Dvorak is a long-time columnist for PC Magazine and PC Magazine Online and his writings can be found in China, Croatia, Brazil, Portugal, Greece and other locales. How they got there he is unsure. Formerly a columnist with Barron's and Forbes while hosting both a TV show and a syndicated radio show he now eschews such folly and is finishing ONLINE! -- the book, to be published by Prentice-Hall this Fall. Discuss

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

Bill Bryson interview

New Scientist interviews Bill Bryson, the travel writer whose new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, is apparently a wonderfully broad and readable introduction to science.

"The part that I sometimes found hard was sitting with a scientist as they explained their work to me. I had one scientist who was extremely patient at explaining particle physics to me, and I simply couldn't grasp it at all. It seemed like the sort of thing that someone on LSD would be telling you."

Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:19:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More G8 protest moblogging: pics from France/Switzerland

Geoffroi of the French blog Fraternet writes: "Hello Xeni, Pics from live blog coverage of the demonstration in Annemasse-Geneve are are online now -- Merci et a bientot!" Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:18:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gecko Gloves for humans

Through the brilliance of biomimicry, researchers at the University of Manchester have produced a sticky tape covered in "billions of tiny plastic fibers which are similar to natural hairs covering the soles of geckos' feet." I love this quote from one of the researchers:

"We have also considered producing a large amount of gecko tape - sufficient amounts to enable a student to hang out of a window of a tall building. However it would cost too much money, and would not benefit us scientifically..."

Link Discuss

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:10:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Say Hello to MTV, the phone company.

MTV's about to become Sweden's latest mobile operator:

Music video channel MTV is to venture into the world of mobile phone service provision in Sweden. Beginning this month, MTV Europe is to offer pre-paid mobile services in the Scandinavian country as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) over Telia Mobile's GSM network, branded "Hello MTV". Aiming its service at the young viewers of its music television network, the country's newest mobile operator will include various musical data services such as music news, premium ringtones and programme information. Users will also be able download music charts and contact musicians and MTV VJs though special numbers. The music channel has subcontracted mobile virtual network enabler Spinbox to provide network management, billing and customer care. This company, has, in turn, subcontracted SmartTrust to provide and manage the network's mobile data services.

Link, Discuss (via pho list)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:10:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gillmor on FCC media concentration ruling

The ever-prescient Dan Gillmor posted a particularly eloquent column in advance of today's FCC action:

Where do we go from here? We, the people, need to understand what's happening, and why. Then we need to get angry. We need to get organized, and take the fight back to the halls of power.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:11:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SARS digital folk art, exhibit "R": artist Dave Cooper contributes

This nonworksafe image -- and the "censored," work-safe thumbnail posted at left -- was created exclusively for BoingBoing's SARS digital art series by acclaimed artist Dave Cooper, creator of the Harvey Award-nominated graphic novel Suckle: The Status of Basil (Fantagraphics, 1996).

Cooper has been busy in recent years: at one point, he was simultaneously creating three different serials for various anthologies: "Dan & Larry" in Dark Horse Presents, "Crumple" in Zero Zero, and the all-ages "Pip & Norton," published in a wide array of publications. Each of these three serials feature divergent styles and display a range of cartooning that Cooper is currently showcasing in his ongoing quarterly series WEASEL.

In addition to comics, he has created designs for animated television series, most notably Matt Groening's Futurama. David Charles Cooper lives in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife, Julie. He makes his living in cartoon design, magazine illustration, & through the sale of original comicbook artwork & his fine art oil paintings.

Discuss. (Previous posts: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q.) PS: Fantagraphics needs your help.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:42:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FCC loosens media concentration, screws America

The FCC has, as predicted, loosened up the rules of media concentration, casting aside the last vestige of competition and diversity in the media, opening the gates for even more uniformity in the news and information we receive. Me, I'm just glad that ClearChannel's afternoon Three Minute Hate show will be on every channel on my dial every day.

The coaltion in opposition to this was the most diverse I can remember seeing. Bipartisan, from all walks of life. The FCC was innundated with thousands and thousands of comments from the public in opposition to this. Meanwhile the main voice in favor of this came from the same self-interested parties who will benefit under the new regulation. It's a revolting and perverse demonstration of "regulatory capture," where a regulated industry calls all the shots at the body that's nominally overseeing it -- the fox guarding the henhouse.

The Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 -- along party lines -- to adopt a series of changes favored by media companies.

These companies argued that existing ownership rules were outmoded on a media landscape that has been substantially altered by cable TV, satellite broadcasts and the Internet.

Critics say the eased restrictions would likely lead to a wave of mergers landing a few giant media companies in control of even more of what the public sees, hears and reads.

The decision was a victory for FCC Chairman Michael Powell, who has faced growing criticism from diverse interests opposed to his move toward deregulation.

"Our actions will advance our goals of diversity and localism," Powell said. He said the old restrictions were too outdated to survive legal challenges and the FCC "wrote rules to match the times."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pete!)

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

Can Mozilla live without Netscape?

In the wake of last week's "settlement" in which Microsoft paid Time-Warner $750,000,000 to settle its wrongdoing in the browser-wars (and got the right to ship Time-Warner's music with Microsoft DRM in return), Andrew Leonard has posted a good editorial pondering the future of Mozilla, now that Netscape's stern parent-company is in bed with Redmond.

If Blizzard is correct, maybe Mozilla doesn't really need Netscape anymore -- maybe it's ready to leave the nest. And wouldn't that be the greatest irony of a long and tortuous story? After years of effort by the federal government, Microsoft got away with a slap on the wrist. And after years of tussling with AOL, Microsoft is getting what it wants by handing over buckets of cash. But still, it can't stamp out those pesky open-source coders, who, like cockroaches after a nuclear blast, seem to be able to survive everything. Companies come and go, stock markets rise and fall, and still the developers make their bug reports, check in their new code, and prepare their next release. Maybe the browser wars aren't really over, after all.

Salon Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Computer parrots are more lovable

Japanese researchers have found that people form emotional bonds with talking software if it mimics their own voices.

... the character hummed back sounds that mimicked characteristic features, such as the rhythm, intonation, loudness and pitch of the user's voice. The extent of the mimicry varied.

The users then rated the character in areas such as cooperation, learning ability, task-achievement, comfort, friendliness, and sympathy. The animated character scored highest on all these factors when its voice was mimicking about 80 per cent of the user's voice.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:34:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dutch court locks up 419 scammers

A Dutch court has sentenced six Nigerian-letter scammers to 1-4.5 years in prison.

One Swiss professor - presumably he wrote his doctorate on complete stupidity - gave the gang $482,000 on the promise of a $9 million return. Among the "expenses" he shelled out was a sum for chemicals needed to "clean" the illicit cash. This is a 419 classic - the notes have allegedly been marked with a special dye to prevent recirculation. Obviously, getting it off requires special, expensive liquids...

The prof did, however, eventually get his revenge on the ne'er-do-well Nigerians. He helped the Dutch police lure the scammers to an Amsterdam railway station in the Summer of 2002, where the whole bunch had their collars duly felt. Sadly, the total amount accrued by the jailbirds is unknown. The authorities believe it runs into millions of euro, none of which is likely to be recovered.

Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fantastic Metropolis: now on paper!

Fantastic Metropolis, a brilliant science-fiction webzine, has published an anthology of the best of its first year of publications, including pieces by Moorcock, Vandermeer, Ballingrud, Mieville and others. The whole book is available online, or you can pony up for the physical book. Link Discuss (Thanks, Luis!)

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

Bloggers cover G8 summit live from Swiss/French border

BoingBoing blog-pal in Paris Jean-Luc sends word of mobloggers covering the news on-site from massive anti-G8 protests in towns near the border of France and Switzerland:

Hello Xeni -- from June 1st to 3rd, the G8 World Summit takes place in Evian, France, with presidents of major countries. "Altermondialisation" (antiglobalization) people who are against the G8 have gathered at the French-Swiss border, in Annemasse (France) and Lausanne (Switzerland). Bloggers on-site are there covering in French (but with pics with speak on their own!). Here is one called live from Annemasse. Fraternet is also blogging from there, and they announce in this post plans for live blog coverage of the international demonstration at the frontier attempting to go into Evian. Also, this moblog called "Project Hive" works, and people there are sending in MMS, SMS and pics via their cell phones or PDAs.

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:07:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alife toolkit for OS X

Avida, a graphic, open-source toolkit for experimenting with artificial life, looks fascinating. The research projects that it's sparked -- including self-modifying code -- are wild.

Avida is an auto-adaptive genetic system designed primarily for use as a platform in Digital or Artificial Life research. In lay terms, Avida is a digital world in which simple computer programs mutate and evolve.

Avida allows us to study questions and perform experiments in evolutionalry dynamics and theoretical biology that are intractable in real biological system.

Link Discuss (via Ambiguous)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SARS digital folk art, exhibit "Q": Andi and Lance Olsen contribute

Writer Lance Olsen and artist Andi Olsen contribute word and image to BoingBoing's exploration of SARS reflected in digital culture.

"Spontaneous Ars Poetica" is a collage text from a fictional medical journal that Andi createad in collaboration with her partner, "speculative fiction" writer Lance. Look for it in the next issue of Fiction International. At left, Andi's illustration for the collage text (see image full-size). She says, "It was created before SARS took off, but it's still applicable in the way it rethinks the mask and deals with the idea of communicability, both viral and verbal."

About the illustration: "The sutures and wound (albeit manipulated in Photoshop) were a result of a chainsaw accident from last summer that left me with a gash to the shin bone," says Andi. "It was fascinatingly gruesome, and I couldn't help but photograph the various stages of recovery. The image of the face is taken from a pathology book."

Bonus browsing: BoingBoing readers found these -- Chinese government poster (thanks, jude), Mona Lisa (thanks, Geisha), aggro facemask, smoking surgeon, more Sean Bonner, Seattle club flyers (thanks, Eric).

Discuss. (Previous posts: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:40:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 1, 2003

Streisand suing environmentalists over California Coastline project

This site was suggested a couple times earlier this week, but not using the suggestion form, so it fell off my radar (seriously please please please use the form if you want to suggest a link, otherwise I just can't keep track of it; I get 1200+ emails a day and without the rules-based filters I use, I can't stay on top of things).

In any event, Barabara Streisand is taking legal action against the California Coastline project, which we've written about here before. The project is an astonishingly cool one, in which a photographic record of every inch of California's coastline is posted to the web and archived as new photos come in. The project has already been useful in filings regarding environemntal regulation, demonstrating the malfeasance of users of the coast, and in showing the effects of abuse of land.

Streisand is pissed because the photographers who shoot the coastline that her home abuts are, to her mind, invading her privacy (nevermind that dozens of satellites invade her privacy in exactly the same way, several times a day). Streisand, who has been active in environmental causes, has totally lost her shit over this, asserting that no one may photograph her property even from public airspace, no matter that this is a vital piece of the effort to preserve California's coast.

Since shortly after our web site "went live", Barbra Streisand has been complaining about a photograph on our web site, 3% of which covers her home. In February 2003, we received a threatening letter from her attorney, John Gatti of Alschuler Grossman Stein & Kahan LLP, demanding that we "immediately cease and desist from photographing and displaying and identifying photographs of Ms. Streisand's home on the website www.californiacoastline.org [...]".

We refuse to be intimidated by these tactics, which would undermine our constitutional protection of free speech and which would compromise the integrity of this historical and scientific database. As a result of which, we received a second threatening letter.

Our goal is to create a complete record of the California coastline. This record has been used by a number of government, university, press, and environmental groups (partial list) free of charge. It is not possible to provide the public with a complete record without the photographs of the coast that happen to include Ms. Streisand's estate. We do not believe in giving special treatment to wealthy coastal land owners.

Anyone with a private plane wanna snap a pic of Streisand's stretch of beach? Thanks to John Parres for providing the image in question Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:24:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Everquest social networks need the Mafia

Wonderful research paper talks about the ways that Mafia-style social groups made up of relatives or meatspace friends can affect the gameplay in MMORPGs, especially Everquest. Pay attention to the wonderfully titled "Friends are the Ultimate Exploit" section of the paper for some geniune mind-blowing. 528k PDF Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:37:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Supernova 2003: DC, July 8-9

I'm moderating a panel at this summer's Supernova conference in DC. Supernova is the brainchild of Kevin Werbach, former FCC wonk turned editor of Esther Dyson's Release 2.0 and convenor of the PC Forum conference. The first Supernova was held last year in the Bay Area, and it was an intense couple of days filled with heated discussion, new technologies, and intense little gatherings at meals and corridors -- an exhilarating 48 hours whose lessons I'm still absorbing today.

The talk I'm moderating is called "New Platforms, New User Experiences:"

(Kevin Lynch, Macromedia; Merrill Brown, RealNetworks; Mena Trott, Six Apart; John Ko, Cincro; RJ Pittman, Groxis)

The environment that drove the Internet -- personal computer and static Web pages -- is ten years old and showing its age. Native Internet content forms such as Weblogs and rich media applications are evolving rapidly. Innovation is shifting from the PC to an array of devices, from mobile phones to home media servers. Adjusting to these changes involves a novel combination of design, technology, and business savv, so as to create experiences that match users' expectations and needs.

Supernova runs in DC on July 8-9 this summer -- hope to see you there! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:11:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to fight the MPAA in TX and win

The Texas version of the Super-DMCA (the law that banned firewalls gave your cable-provider absolutel control over what you plugged into your connection, among other ridiculous provisions) has failed to pass the Texas legislature. The architects of this glorious failure -- which stymied a multi-million-dollar effort backed by the powerful and sophisticated MPAA -- were the volunteers of EFF-Austin, a gang of activists with no significant previous experience in state politics, who bootstrapped themselves into savvy and effective state-capitol machers, stopping this law in its track.

Adina Levin from EFF-Austin has written up a post-mortem of their experiences in state politics. This is a remarkable document, a rare civilian-friendly peek inside the machinations of competing lobbyists and the shortest path to effective action.

The bill was defeated on a point of order -- a technicality -- on Monday night on the House floor. The bill analysis didn't match the content of the bill. Points of order don't happen by accident. Members bring points of order when they oppose the bill, and they're not positive they have enough votes to win. It takes substantial support to sustain a point of order.

The bill was in the queue to return on Tuesday, as an amendment to SB1952, an omnibus government re-org bill where the sponsor was taking any and all amendments (somebody called it "a Christmas tree bill.") But the clock ran out at midnight, after only 100 of the 500 amendments in the queue.

We don't know for sure what would have happened if there was a debate. We do know for sure that there was strong opposition to the bill, from left, right, and center, due to our efforts and the efforts of technology industry allies, to educate and inform members.

In the last few days of the session, a team of eight EFF-Austin/ACLU-Texas volunteers visited all 150 house members' offices, many of whom hadn't heard of the bill before we arrived. Many more volunteers wrote, faxed, and called legislators. Volunteers got the word out to other technology user groups. A number of legislators mentioned they'd been getting constituent calls against the bill.

Link Discuss (Thanks (and congrats!), Adina!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:01:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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