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

Thursday, August 28, 2003

Robert Anton Wilson for Governor

My party, the Guns and Dope Party, invites extremists of both right and left to unite behind our shared goals of:

1. Get those pointy-headed Washington bureaucrats off our backs and off our fronts too!

2. Guns for everybody who wants them; no guns for those who don't want them

3. Drugs for everybody who wants them; no drugs for those who don't want them

4. Freedom of choice, free love,free speech, free Internet and free beer

5. California secession -- Keep the anti-gun and anti-dope fanatics on the Eastern side of the Rockies

6. Lotsa wild parties every night by gun-toting dopers

7. Animal protection -- Support your right to keep and arm bears
More position papers will follow; we know at least 69 good positions.

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:08:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My WorldCon reading, tomorrow at 5PM

Trish gathered her staff in the board room and wrote the following in glowing letters on the wall with her fingertip, leaving the text in her expressive schoolmarm's handwriting rather than converting it to some sterile font: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

Her staff, all five of them, chuckled softly. "Recognize it?" she asked, looking round at them.

"Pee-Wee Herman?" said the grassroots guy, who was so young it ached to look at him, but who could fire a cannonload of email into any congressional office on 12 hours' notice. He never stopped joking.

The lawyer cocked an eyebrow at him and stroked her moustache, a distinctive gesture that you could see in any number of courtv archives of famous civil-rights battles, typically just before she unloaded both barrels at the jury-box and set one or another of her many precedents. "It's Martin Luther King, right?"

"Close," Trish said.

"Geronimo," guessed the paralegal, who probably wasn't going to work out after all, being something of a giant flake who spent more time on the phone to her girlfriend than filing papers and looking up precedents.

"Nope," Trish said, looking at the other two staffers -- the office manager and the media guy -- who shrugged and shook their heads. "It's Gandhi," she said.

They all went, "Ohhhh," except the grassroots guy, who crossed to the wall and used his fingertip to add, "And then they assassinate you."

"I'm too tough to die," the lawyer said. "And you're all too young. So I think we're safe."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:16:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Danny on the Beeb's Creative Archive

The BBC, in theory, shouldn't care how many times you share a copy of, say, Dixon of Dock Green. On the contrary, it should thank you. You're taking the hard work - and cost - out of distributing the works you have already paid for with your licence fee. So not only does the BBC not need to care about Napster and other file-sharing systems - it can actively take advantage of them. Distributing content in this way does not reduce the BBC's income, but it can reduce its costs. Copy protection devices and clampdowns on internet copying just get in the way of the BBC's mission.

Of course, simply allowing anyone to download and copy the BBC's output has its problems. While broadcasts are free, the BBC makes money selling DVDs and tapes of its work, and reselling to other countries. Not a great deal of money - less than 5% of the £3bn it receives in licence fees - but some.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:11:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Fair and Balanced, the play

Fair & Balanced is a scathing satirical attack on Fox News Channel and its claim of ownership to the words "fair and balanced." Playwright Brian Flemming, who co-wrote the Off-Broadway smash hit Bat Boy: The Musical, penned this dark one-act comedy in which "Fair" and "Balanced" are characters—they are prisoners held in an underground dungeon, and every night at 8 p.m. a foul character named "Bill O'Reilly" comes down into the dungeon to torture them.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:52:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

2D animation's last days at Disney

Eisner has expressed interest in reanimating Disney's classic 2-D features in 3-D.

A computerized Pinocchio, anyone? (In fact, much of the 3-D character animation for Walt Disney World's upcoming Mickey's PhilharMagic was so bad—in particular Ariel from The Little Mermaid—it had to be reanimated by 2-D animators, then transferred into the computer.) The tens of millions of dollars lost on Treasure Planet are fresh on Disney's mind—and executives are bracing for the worst with next spring's Home on the Range.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:50:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Franken's Lies book excerpted on Salon

God began our conversation by clearing something up. Some of George W. Bush's friends say that Bush believes God called him to be president during these times of trial. But God told me that He/She/It had actually chosen Al Gore by making sure that Gore won the popular vote and, God thought, the Electoral College. "THAT WORKED FOR EVERYONE ELSE," God said.

"What about Tilden?" I asked, referring to the 1876 debacle.

"QUIET!" God snapped. God was angry.

God said that after 9/11, George W. Bush squandered a unique moment of national unity. That instead of rallying the country around a program of mutual purpose and sacrifice, Bush cynically used the tragedy to solidify his political power and pursue an agenda that panders to his base and serves the interests of his corporate backers.

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

Kinetic human maze

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:33:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Burningman Bingo

Update: Numerous BoingBoing readers have e-mailed to ask why John Perry Barlow's head was selected to represent "A Bad Trip" (shown at left) That is not John Perry Barlow's head. That is Chuck Norris' head.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:24:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Station-wagons from the days when cars were cars and men were men and kids wanted to be cowboys

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:53:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Sequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on Salon

I don't really write sequels. More than half the point of writing sf is thinking up new worlds, and sequels involve revisiting places I've left behind.

But this is different. A couple years ago, right after I sold the novel, I wrote a short-story set in the same world as the book, but a century or more later. It's a parable about Napster, and it's called Truncat, and today, Salon has published it. And you can read it for free.

First, Adrian got on the subway, opting to go deadhead for a faster load-time. He stepped into the sparkling cryochamber at the Downsview Station, conjured a helmet-mounted display (HUD) against his field of vision, and granted permission to be frozen. The next thing he knew, he was thawing out on the Union Station platform, pressed belly-to-butt with a couple thousand other commuters who'd opted for the same treatment. In India, where this kind of convenience-freezing was even more prevalent, Mohan had observed that the reason their generation was small for their age was that they spent so much of it in cold-sleep, conserving space in transit. Adrian might've been 18, but he figured that he'd spent at least one cumulative year frozen.

Adrian shuffled through the crowd and up the stairs to the steady-temp surface, peeling off the routing sticker that the cryo had stuck to his shoulder. His tummy was still rumbling, so he popped the sticker in his mouth and chewed until it had dissolved, savoring the steaky flavor and the burst of calories. The guy who'd figured out edible routing tags had Whuffie to spare: Adrian's mom knew someone who knew someone who knew him, and she said that he had an entire subaquatic palace to rattle around in.

A clamor of swallowing noises filled his ears, as the crowd subvocalized, carrying on conversations with distant friends. Adrian basked in the warm, simulated sunlight emanating from the dome overhead. He was going outside of the dome in a matter of minutes, and he had a sneaking suspicion that he was going to be plenty cold soon enough. He patted his little rucksack and made sure he had his cowl with him.

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

Emerging Tech 3 call for participation

Interfaces and Services: Sherlock, Watson, and Dashboard; micro-content viewers and RSS; laptop, palmtop, hiptop, and cellphone interfaces; web services.

Social Software Software: for describing and exploring social connections, FOAF (friend-of-a-friend networks), Flash Mobs, MeetUp, and related applications.

Untethered: WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular networks; Rendezvous, SMS, and ad hoc networking; Symbian and J2ME mobile development environments.

Location: GPS/GIS technologies and devices, location based services, navigational devices, geospacial annotation tools, and visualization software.

Hardware Hardware: hacks and mobile devices, sensor arrays, RFID tags, TinyOS, and sub-micro computing.

Business Models: Who is putting a stake in the ground and attempting to build the new applications, network, and online culture -- and how are they doing it?

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

Yahoo News is now available via RSS feed

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:58:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos of 737 after assault by hail storm

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:27:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lazyweb: Can someone make Burningman Bingo cards?

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:33:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Who uses Free MIT?

Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City's relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing aside the rolled-up mat he sleeps on with one of his brothers. To the smell of a chicken roasting on a grill in the alley and the clang of the next-door neighbor's metalworking operation, Lam turns on his Pentium 4 PC, and soon the screen displays Lecture 2 of Laboratory in Software Engineering, a course taught each semester on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Here," he says, pointing at the screen. "This is where I got the idea to use decoupling as a way of integrating two programs."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:43:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, August 25, 2003

CAPPSII relaunched -- who needs the Constitution when you're fightin' air terrorism?

CAPPS II testing has been restarted.

The Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration continues in its attempts to set up defacto internal border controls at our nation's airports.

In response to the collaboration of Galileo, a subsidiary of Cendant, Inc. in this test of the CAPPS II system, a disinvestment campaign has been launched.

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

Cheaper By the Dozen appreciated

My memories of "Cheaper by the Dozen" remained happy over the years, but it was with a measure of apprehension that I opened the book recently. The books of one's childhood rarely age well into one's late adulthood, no matter how affectionate (and dim) one's memories may be. Yes, I love C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels as much now as I did when I was a boy, but those are the rare exceptions; mostly the literary pleasures of childhood and adolescence are best left undisturbed in later years.

So it is a joy to report that "Cheaper by the Dozen" still reads remarkably well. It is not a work of literature and no claims will be made for it as such. It is about American family life at a time (the 1910s and 1920s) now so impossibly distant that today's teenage reader may be unable to connect with it. Yet families are families, then as now, and I like to think that young readers would respond to the Gilbreth family's joys and sorrows just as I and millions of other, older readers have.

The prose in "Cheaper by the Dozen" is unadorned and matter of fact, and its organizational structure is a bit difficult to detect, but what matters most is that it is a touching family portrait that also happens to be very, very funny. Paterfamilias Gilbreth is, to paraphrase the Reader's Digest, one of the most unforgettable characters you'll ever meet. His wife was by any standards a remarkable woman, but in the book her role is mainly that of mother and helpmeet. Yes, at a time when a female college graduate was still something of a rarity, she accumulated a bunch of degrees -- when she and Frank married one newspaper wrote, "Although a graduate of the University of California, the bride is nonetheless an extremely attractive young woman" -- but in these pages the limelight only occasionally falls on her.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired News: Burning Man never gets old

"The important thing about Burning Man is that it is the most experiential phenomenon I can think of," says [Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow, who has been making the yearly pilgrimage since 1997]. "It can't be turned into data in any useful way. You can't informatize it by blogging it, filming it or taking pictures of it, because so much of it can't be translated into information."

Burning Man volunteer Jim Graham isn't fazed when he hears the event derided by some as "Girls Gone Wild" with extra helpings of sand and drugs. "Any time someone makes that kind of generalization, I say 'Yeah! It's exactly like that,' and smile. In the beginning, I came for the spectacle. Now, I come back for the opportunity to interact with so many people who possess such mind-boggling creativity."

Sometimes first-time attendees get a little too mind-boggled. "One crew from Israel last year wanted to do a 24-hour falafel camp," Graham recalls. "I said, 'Guys, maybe you should just do it around dinnertime.' They became such a hit, they were all wiped out by the third day. It's still a temporary city of 30,000 in the middle of nowhere, so there are practical considerations. Bikes get stolen, people get in fights over how loud the trance music is, someone still has to coordinate port-a-potties. But it's like nothing else."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:22:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

From RSS to radio with iSpeak It

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

Neal Stephenson in Wired

For the most part, Snow Crash turned out to be a failed prediction. People have shown limited interest in immersive 3-D technology, so I think it worked better as a novel than as a prognostication. But it provided a reasonable, coherent picture of a particular kind of entertainment technology. That sort of vision is valuable to engineers. Because of the way institutions work, an engineer ends up working on one part of a system but doesn't get to stand back and see the big picture. When engineering types speak highly of some science fiction writer, usually it's not because that person predicted the future. Rather, it's because he or she put together disparate ideas into a coherent vision that could be used as a road map by the people who are actually deploying such a technology.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:23:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Save Christiania, August 30th march in Copenhagen

The Danish government, in an uncharacterstic show of extremely poor sense, has decided that it must "normalize" Christiania -- that is, raze it and kill it. Danes are not happy about this. If you're within rail-distance of Copenhagen on August 30th, you can help shame the Danish government into taking its hands off of Christiania at a mass demonstration.

Saturday the 30th of August 2003 special trains are departuring from Aalborg, ?rhus, Vejle, Fredericia and Odense. Moreover there will be special busses leaving from 45 Danish towns. Tickets can be bought at BILLETNET

The popular parade begins at Carl Madsens Plads, Christiania at Noon. The parade meets all the guests arriving by trains and buses at Copenhagen Central Train station at 1.30 p.m., where a short ceremony will take place. At 3 p.m. the parade reaches Christiansborg Castle (Parliament) where we'll give the publicly elected a piece of our mind. The parade ends at Christiania around 5 p.m. where a huge multicultural feast starts with many, many kinds of music and cultural entertainment. All bands, artists, speakers and performers, known and unknown join without any payment. Everything is done as a support to Christiania and what it represents.

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

Citytv invents live television blogging

Bob Hunter is the co-founder of Greenpeace, and he's been a fixture in Canadian political commentary for years now -- indeed, he's the environmental reporter on Citytv's 24-hour news-channel.

On Breakfast Television we get a very different Bob Hunter. What the network does is send a camera crew to Hunter's home every morning at about 7AM, where he is sat at his kitchen table in his bathrobe, with all the day's newspapers spread out before him. Hunter's been up long genough to have gone through the Star, the Goble, the Post -- possibly even the Sun -- and he's marked up the interesting bits wiht a highlighter.

When the news-anchor cuts to the remote feed from Hunter's kitchen, he takes us on a guided tour of the day's news, taking apart and contrasting the reportage from the different news-organs. This is blogging, plain and simple, but it's on live television. And it's interesting as hell.

If you're coming to Toronto for the WorldCon, switch on your hotel-room TV one morning and give it a watch. It's pretty hot stuff. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:13:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, August 24, 2003

How does the Pentagon spend its yearly $400 million?

More than $1.1 trillion of federal government money is missing. Our government leaders say they will not account for it. However finding this money could solve all of our federal, state and local budget crises.

Where is the Money?

[...]

The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General has reported that DOD has not and will not account for $1.1 trillion of "undocumentable adjustments."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:56:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

900 more names in the RIAA subpoena database

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:31:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC to put its entire archive online

"I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion.

"In particular, it will be about how public money can be combined with new digital technologies to transform everyone's lives."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:57:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My Boston Globe op-ed on net-politics

When Trent Lott's revealing faux pas about Strom Thurmond was lightly touched upon by the press, the Internet's howling masses seized on the story, reviving it with a fresh angle -- Lott backhandedly endorses segregation! -- and kept the news cycle going long beyond its expected lifespan, until Lott crashed and burned and lost his post as Senate majority leader. Huzzah. Of course, Lott is still a senator. In fact, every scandal exposed by or through the net -- INS witchhunts, stubbornly illusory WMDs, awarding of war-pork to Halliburton -- has yielded a decidedly hollow victory. Information is power, but it's not enough. Modern emperors have learned the knack of spinning revelations of wrongdoing and bouncing back. Thus far, the Internet has lacked the follow-through necessary to make a lasting difference. That's changing. As the Internet matures as a place for political action, services like the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Action Center (punch in your ZIP and e-mail your lawmaker), MeetUp's coordinated nationwide kaffeeklatsches for every Democratic candidate (but especially Howard Dean) and MoveOn's thronged mailing list millions (who can conjure the budget for a major media-buy on 24 hours' notice) are providing the bodies, budget and means for advancing proposals and seeing them through to their ends

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, August 23, 2003

Kyle "Why I Hate Saturn" Baker's new collection

He's kind of dropped out of the field for a couple years, apparently to work on commercial illustrations for magazines, and I've really missed him. Vertigo has just issued a new collection of Baker material, called "Undercover Genie."

It's...OK. The funny parts are really, really, really funny. The hard-edged, mean parts are really, really really mean. But about two-thirds of this book is filler, page after page of mildly amusic caricatures of political figures, doodles and sketches. I got my copy for free as a reviewer, but I would have certainly have bought it as soon as I spotted it on the shelf at the comics shop. At $15, I think I would have felt a little ripped off by the time I was done. A book for Kyle Baker completists (a fine thing to be!), but not worth the price otherwise. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, August 22, 2003

WiFi Detector that works

There's been a lot of grumbling (here and elsewhere) about how awful Kensington's new WiFi Finder is, and how it doesn't detect closed networks or 802.11g, or distinguish between cordless phones and WiFi. Well, we've been playing with the other WiFi detector out there, the WFS-1 from SmartID, and can attest that it works pretty well, at least for us. Over the past month or so we've used it all over New York and San Francisco, it picked up WiFi everywhere we expected it to, and in plenty of places we didn't (like on the corner of Bowery and Delancey in Manhattan). It even detected the closed 802.11b network at the Starbucks near where we're staying here in central California, and best of all, it can tell the difference between WiFi and a microwave oven (the lights on it go solid instead of flash).

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:05:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Edge.org -- The Moral Sense Test: Blackout

Once power is fully restored, it will take little time to find the culprit: most likely, it will be a malfunctioning switch or fuse, a snapped power line or some other local failure. Somebody will be fired, promotions and raises denied, and lawmakers will draw up legislation guaranteeing that this problem will not occur again.

Something will be inevitably missed, however, during all this finger-pointing: this week's blackout has little to do with faulty equipment, negligence or bad design. President Bush's call to upgrade the power grid will do little to eliminate power failures. The magnitude of the blackout is rooted in an often ignored aspect of our globalized world: vulnerability due to interconnectivity.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:47:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi roaming coming to Canada, via telcos

The 12-million people who own cellphones, personal digital assistants or any wireless device and subscribe to Bell Mobility (with Aliant Mobility), Microcell Solutions (Fido), Rogers AT&T Wireless or Telus Mobility will be able to use all Wi-Fi hot-spots operated by any one of those companies.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:36:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US goverment trying to sink WIPO open content talks

But the astonishing part is the justification for the US opposing the meeting. According to the Post, Lois Boland, director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said "that open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights." As she is quoted as saying, "To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO."

If Lois Boland said this, then she should be asked to resign. The level of ignorance built into that statement is astonishing, and the idea that a government official of her level would be so ignorant is an embarrassment. First, and most obviously, open-source software is based in intellectual-property rights. It can't exist (and free software can't have its effect) without it. Second, the goal of WIPO, and the goal of any government, should be to promote the right balance of intellectual-property rights, not simply to promote intellectual property rights. And finally, if an intellectual property right holder wants to "disclaim" or "waive" her rights, what business is it of WIPOs? Why should WIPO oppose a copyright or patent rights holder's choice to do with his or her rights what he or she wants?

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

Gilberto Gil supports CD-burning automats

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

Thursday, August 21, 2003

Beyond Fear: Required reading for Ashcroft's America

One of the books I'm delighted to have had the chance to read here is Bruce Schneier's latest, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. I reviewed three or four drafts of this while Bruce was working on it, and I am completely delighted with how it turned out.

In Beyond Fear, Schneier has utterly demystified the idea of security with a text aimed squarely at nontechnical individuals. He takes his legendary skill at applying common sense and lucidity to information-security problems and applies it to all the bogeymen of the post-9/11 world, and asks the vital question: What are we getting in exchange for the liberties that the Ashcroftian authorities have taken away from us in the name of security?

This is possibly the most important question of this decade, and that makes Schenier's book one of the most important texts of the decade. This should be required reading for every American, and the world would be a better place if anyone venturing an opinion on electronic voting, airline security, roving wiretaps, or any other modern horror absorbed this book's lessons first. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:56:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hoovering kinky conduit

But when we tried to run the Ethernet cable from the roof to the basement, we discovered that the conduit makes 3 90-degree turns and one 45-degree turn, and it was not at all clear how one pushes a cable through such a maze.

So of course we turned first to the internet. I typed in a totally natural language question into Google (which I find these days is increasingly the best method): something like “how do you thread a cable through a long conduit with 90 degree angles.” The first post that came up was a thread from some list titled Threading fiber through a long conduit. This thread reported no good luck, but it had the kernel of an idea: a vacuum cleaner.

So we took a bit of foam, tied it to the end of a roll of kite string, and connected a small Shop-Vac at the other end of the conduit (which is at least 50 feet long). Bingo. The key, it seems, is to have a big but light obstruction, and google at hand.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:56:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Movable Type meets Mujahedeen

So, anyway. I figure it's about the time this nano-publishing journalism-of-the-future meme started to get off its collective bottom. So I'm off to Afghanistan for your education and pleasure. I fly to Islamabad tomorrow, and from there by train or bus to Peshawar. On Saturday I'll be crossing the Khyber Pass and making my way to Kabul. All being well, technology and men-with-guns willing, I'll be posting from every stop, and weblogging from Afghanistan for ten days or so. Movable Type meets Mujahedeen. It's going to be fun.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:55:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Palahniuk has a new novel!

I just started reading Palahniuk this year, with Survivor, but once I'd read that, I sought out every one of his novels and read them one after another. His got the glibness and popcult sensibility of Douglas Coupland, the drunken-master prose of William S Burroughs, and the ferocity of Charles Bukowski. Can't wait to read Diary, even though Salon panned it -- the reviewer admits up front that she hates all of Palahniuk's books, so it's a little mysterious as to why she'd decide to pick up his latest...

The latest is "Diary," the story of Misty Marie Wilmot, who works as a waitress on a tourist-plagued island off the New England coast. Peter, her building-contractor husband, lies in a coma after a suicide attempt. Early on, it's fairly obvious that Misty's 13-year-old daughter and mother-in-law are colluding with the rest of the island's old-family residents in a homicidal plot to drive the tourists away by forcing Misty to become a painter. Misty, however, remains clueless about this despite everyone's egregiously suspicious, "Rosemary's Baby"-style behavior and despite the fact that shortly before Peter shut himself up in the garage with the car motor running, he went around scrawling graffiti about the plot in the houses of his clients, then walling off the vandalized rooms to make it look as if they'd never existed. (By the way, the car now smells like urine.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:54:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Down and Out and Fair and Balanced

It appears that the brief includes a list of other books that use registered trademarks in their titles, among them my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. OK, that's pretty cool right there. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:54:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese watches from the edge of cool

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:53:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PowerPoint corrupts

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:52:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What community WiFi can learn from hams

The really fascinating thing about this is how well it works politically. Every time there's a disaster, the hams pitch in, and then a Congresscritter gets up on its hind legs and reads a commendation for America's brave and selfless amateur radio operators into the record.

And then, whenever the FCC gets an idea that it could make a couple billion dollars by auctioning off the hams' spectrum to cellular companies, the hams pack the hearings and the comments with commendations from congresscritters from every party and every district. This is powerful mojo.

The most interesting thing about the community WiFi projects like SFLan and Personal Telco is that to the extent that they get adopted by emergency services workers and used in disaster relief (the way that NYC Wireless's WiFi was used by lower Manhattanites after 9-11), WiFi activists can amass an enormous amount of political clout. Open spectrum radios are even better than hams for coordinating disaster relief, I think -- and there's nothing more politically compelling, it seems, than heroism in times of trouble. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:51:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anal Fissures in a nutshell

This has prompted Quinn to assemble some really authoritative, no-nonsense, occasionally screamingly funny pages describing the ins and outs of icky illnesses. Her most recent page is for those of you who may be curious about anal fissures -- something that Quinn got to experience in the aftermath of childbirth.

getting an anal fissure is not a freudian thing, it doesn't mean you rebelled against your parents by practicing anal retention and practice makes perfect. there's a good chance you need more fiber. if you have an anal fissure, the atkins diet may simply not be for you. i suspect i had a proto-fissure brewing for a while, but childbirth traumatized the area and very very hard stools post- childbirth ripped me a new one. many people look back and see their diet wasn't all it could have been. others discover that lactose intolerance or other food intolerances are the hardness culprit. every once in a while you're just kind of built that way, and laxatives may need to be a way of life for you. if your sphincter just likes to spasm and tighten all the time, the only thing that may work for you is surgery to cut the sphincter. both of these are extremes, but they happen, and when they happen, they aren't anyone's fault.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:50:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paramilitary wing of the usability movement

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:49:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saran Wrap can turn your laptop screen 3D

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:49:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Out of Blue Six: a lost gem

One of these wonderful, vanished gems is Out on Blue Six, a 1989 Bantam Spectra paperback that I've read my way through five copies of. Picture a 16-car pileup in Dr Suess country, where the colliding zithermobiles are piloted by Gibson's console cowboys and parodical caricatures out of Mad Magazine, have PK Dick and Orwell do alternating rewrites on the text, and you'll be getting close to the kind of novel that this is.

I've just re-read it. It is a wonder. We often apply the term "wildly inventive" to authors and their product, but it takes a book like Out on Blue Six to demonstrate what "wild" and "imaginative" really mean.

Out on Blue Six is set in the Benevolent Society, where all suffering has been eliminated by the Orwellian Ministry of Pain, which rearranges your genome to fit you into one sub-species or another depending on the activities it calculates you will be most likely to enjoy. All citizens of the Benevolent Society -- a culture shrouded in mysticism and poetry -- wear "famulouses," artificially intelligent consciousnesses and PDAs that advise them on behalf of the Ministry of Pain and rat them out to the PainCops in the event of serious PainCrime.

Courteney Hall is the last incisive satirist in the Benevolent Society, and her recasting of the perennial favorite Wee Wendy Waif strips as vicious swipes at the Benevolent Society sets her on the run from the PainCops and the wrath of the society at large.

Like I say, this book is out of print. Long, long out of print. But thanks to the wonderful Bookfinder service, it's possible to lay hands on 100+ copies of the novel, for prices starting at $0.75 plus shipping. I just got another copy, and I'm savoring every page. Link Update: Looks like Bookfinder won't let you bookmark a search for more than an hour. Bugger. Here're the used copies available through Amazon. (thanks, Dan!) Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:48:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Secure your protocols: SSL instead of IPSEC tunneling

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:47:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Undead Feds -- a fantastical regulatory body

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:46:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

mirror of shut-down xMule site launches

This is a mirror of the original xmule.org site which has been shut down. xMule is p2p software for linux that works on the Edonkey2000 network. The developer has been subpoened by the government for infringing the DMCA. Or something like that. It's not clear. The developer includes more detail in the "Featured Article" on the website and is accepting donations for his defense through Amazon.com.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:49:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Goodbye flashmobs, hello flashmops

Here's the plan. Everybody meet up at the house at 11765 Parker st. N. (98101) on that Sunday morning. Then, at exactly 10:00 AM we'll completely clean the place! Hah hah! Talk about zany and unexpected! We'll go nuts: scrubbing the shower and cleaning the gutters and washing the cars and mowing the lawn and brushing the cats, etc. This is going to totally freak out the house owners (who I will trick into going to get French Slams at the nearby Denny's while this takes place)! And when we're done (making sure we clean behind the fridge, just to be extra-unexpected) we'll suddenly disperse. Poof! Hah hah! This is going to be so wild we'll probably get in the paper and stuff. Just meet at the house on the morning of Sunday, August 17th (don't worry about how we are going to get in -- fortunately I have a key and will leave the door unlocked), bring cleaning supplies, and be sure to pass this message on to all of your friends. It's gonna be, like, so great! Flash mobs! Woo! Spread the word!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:56:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

McSweeney's rips hilarious hole in flash mob trend

Hello! You are invited to take part in a flash mob, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people for ten minutes or less, in the front yard of my ex-girlfriend Deborah's house, tomorrow at 6:13 p.m. Please tell anybody else that you think might be interested in joining us. INSTRUCTIONS:

1) We'll meet outside the Crazy Pizza around the corner from Deborah's place. Be there by 6 p.m. Please be respectful of Crazy Pizza's employees and patrons, and refrain from ordering pizza or Crazy Cinnaballs.

2) At exactly 6:05 p.m. I will pass out slips of paper with general instructions and poster boards. One-third of the poster boards will read "I will never stop lovin' you, Deborah"; one-third will read "Why do you insist on ruining my life?"; and one-third will read "Please don't throw out my comic book collection."

3) Once the instructions and poster boards have been passed out, I will organize the group. All of the guys who are better looking than me will be sent to the back and will be required to wear sad clown masks. If I find that a better-looking-than-me guy in a sad clown mask is still better-looking than me I will ask him to leave. This may seem a little paranoid, but you don't know Deborah like I know Deborah. All of the just as good-looking as me guys will be placed in the middle of the line, and the guys who I think are uglier than me will get to be in the front. Women can choose to be wherever they want.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:49:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Going to Burningman? Doing something cool with technology there? Tell me.

One of the things I'm most interested in exploring out there is how people are using technology to connect with each other -- and the rest of the world -- while they're out on the playa. Some participants are planning unusual uses of social software, others are preparing to blog live from Black Rock City. If you (or a "burner" you know) are planning anything particularly innovative, fun, or flat-out cool along those lines, please e-mail me or post in the discuss link. I'd love to hear about it. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:18:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Derek "Fray" Powazek counts down to Burningman

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:15:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Learning Robot: Adam in Eden

More correctly, this is Adam (ADAptive Mobile robot) in Eden (EDucational ENvironment). Adam is a learning robot developed by Professor Andy Russell at Monash University in Australia. The Melbourne Herald Sun tells us more in "Current research gives Adam a charge." "Adam contains colour, light, collision and sound sensors and a micro-controller system that lets him wander around. The Garden of Eden has three flowers made of aluminium plates and green borders, which he can feed from with his antenna-like nose to acquire the energy he needs." This summary contains more details, including a photo of Adam feeding from a 'flower' in Eden. Andy Russell's homepage contains two videos of Adam learning to avoid colliding into a wall.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:13:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reanimating the Dead

During last Siggraph, researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany showed a software they use to reconstruct human faces over skulls found by the police. New Scientist published "Animation lets murder victims have final say" on this work about two weeks ago with a nice illustration, "How the dead can express themselves." In "Skulls gain virtual faces," Technology Research News gives additional details. So how does this work? "The researchers' software allows users to attach markers, or landmarks, to a three-dimensional skull model generated from a laser scan of a skull. The landmarks are correlated with statistical tissue depth measurements in order to provide reference points for the software to generate muscles and skin for the mo del." This summary contains more details and references, including an illustration of a face reconstruction process.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:05:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Twister Duvet Cover

Link, Discuss Twister Duvet Cover (via Geisha)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:03:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Update: Mark's tropical island skin afflication

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:59:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Island Chronicles: Friends

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:52:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Palestinian P2P network declares war on MPAA, RIAA

Earth Station 5 Declares War Against The Motion Picture Association of America: FREE Music, FREE Movies, FREE Software and Now FREE Sex Being Beamed By Earthstation 5 to the Humans for Free. In response to the email received today from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to Earthstation 5 for copyright violations for streaming FIRST RUN movies over the internet for FREE, this is our official response! Earthstation 5 is at war with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Record Association of America (RIAA), and to make our point very clear that their governing laws and policys have absolutely no meaning to us here in Palestine, we will continue to add even more movies for FREE. ES5 does not require any signups, registration, credit cards and/or any other personal information to watch the first rate streamed movies like TERMINATOR 3, BRUCE ALMIGHTY, MATRIX RELOADED, etc.

Our secure software protect our users who use our P2P application and there is nothing that you can do to stop us, says Ras Kabir, president of Earthstation 5.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:12:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Evan Wiliams has a phonecamblog

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:43:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I have an iPod -- in my MIND

I'm sure you've seen a lot of tech-savvy people smugly showing off that new hunk of entertainment hardware, the iPod personal stereo. Well, I might not have the scratch to get one, but frankly, I don't want the white-corded wonder. I have my very own iPod--in my mind.

I hear those little things carry up to a month's worth of music. Well, so does my mind. I can call up any song I've ever heard, any time I want. And I never have to load software or charge batteries. There are no firewire cords or docks to mess with. I just put my hands behind my head, lean back, and select a tune from the extensive music-library folder inside my brain. Thirty gigabytes? So what? I know 7,500 songs, maybe more. Some songs, I forget I even have until they come around on shuffle. Why, just the other day, my mind started playing David Naughton's "Makin' It," a song I hadn't heard in years. And the sound quality was great!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:00:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

babyhummingbirdcam.com

"A birder friend of mine sent this link to me-- it's a series of photos of hummingbird eggs and hatchlings. The most amazing part is the gauge that they put on the nest, a small toothpick, to give scale to what's in the photos." Thanks, Mom! Note: the site's a little slow right now, I don't think they were prepared for being Boinged. Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:05:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dontbuymusic.com: back from the dead

Hello again, faithful visitors of DontBuyMusic.com! As you probably know, the site was offline for several days at the request of Buy.com's legal team (a law firm operating out of the great mass of humans known as "Los Angeles"). Having carefully analyzed their letter, we're quite sure that our newly designed parody web site does not fall within the bounds of the letter they sent us in any way, and can now be completely, totally, 100% certainly defined as a parody web site, as it contains absolutely none of BuyMusic.com's original graphics or HTML code, and unless Buy.com has trademarked the ugly colors and fonts that they like too, then we are operating what is legally recognized as a form of free speech. Previously, it was a gray area (though we do believe we were in the right), but read their legal notice and judge for yourself.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:47:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese gadget for translating baby cries

"The translator of a baby's cry for first-time mothers has launched. This equipment analyzes and displays the kind of a cry a baby makes, and shows five different feelings, which include a hungry feeling, sleepiness, stress, and inconvenient, and the degree of correctness exceeds 90%"

I'm gonna take "inconvenient" to mean "poopy," but perhaps someone who reads Japanese can clarify that for me. Link to article in Japanese, Auto-translated to English, Discuss, (Via Geisha Asobi blog)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:08:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free Machine art in SF Thursday night: SEEMEN

"I am in a BIG group show this Thursday in the Lovely Tenderloin with a bunch of really cool robot/hacker tech artists at Rx Gallery aka BLASTHAUS, 132 Eddy Street at Mason in the Tenderloin, San Francisco, Ca, at 6:00 PM on Thursday, August 21, 2003. Come operate my new machine, "Monkey on your Back!" see here and here.

Volunteer puts on backpack and gloves... there are flex and EKG sensors in and on the gloves. Moving or just wearing the gloves activates the monkey, and the EKG inside the gloves picks up a signal from your heart and turns on or off the tail and spine. There is a tilt sensor that activates the top arm depending on which direction you lean, and the hands can pick up all sorts of things."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:15:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

cool gadget: Nokia MusicStand review

Joining an increasingly growing array of Nokia mobile phone accessories, the sleek and stylish Nokia Music Stand is a highly uncomplicated gadget, which performs only a few tasks - all revolving around audio. Compatible with recent Nokia mobile phones sporting the manufacturer's proprietary Pop Port expansion solution and featuring audio functionality of some kind, the Music Stand quite simply consists of a pair of speakers and a microphone.

The first and foremost task of the Music Stand is to enable owners of audio capable Nokia mobile phones to connect their handsets via the Pop Port, cradle-style, to enable playback through the Music Stand rather than the internal speaker of a phone. Thus far, only phones with built-in radio capabilities are available in a form factor compatible with the Music Stand, but there is little reason for why the Music Stand should not work with any type of audio.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:06:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yet another Friendster parody: wifester

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:03:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Urban cuisine culturewatch: Strip mall shabby chic in LA

"You move out here, and people are immediately like, have you tried that place in the mall? That little place between the doughnut shop and the 7-11?" said [34-year-old screenwriter Jeffrey] Lieber, whose favorite strip-mall spot is an Italian place in Marina del Rey called Alejo's, which is famous for its shrimp pasta. "You feel like you have a neighborhood secret. Then you give it to the people you like, and keep it from those you don't."

The result of this cult of underground cool is that the dingiest, most unassuming restaurants often have long lines to get in, and the person at the next plastic-topped table is just as likely to be Christina Applegate as a newly arrived immigrant (not to mention a struggling student or actor drawn by the rock-bottom prices). True food fans will seek out those little-known places frequented by locals, whose presence both attests to the authenticity of the cuisine and provides a fashionably anti-hip atmosphere. Such is the scene at Palms Thai in Hollywood, for example, where an Asian Elvis impersonator, with jeweled belts and mutton-chop sideburns, sings karaoke while Thai families shovel down tom kha gai at long banquet tables. The smattering of 20-somethings in fierce footwear are willing to wait an hour for a table so that they can revel in the ironic obscurity of it all.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:00:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dontbuymusic.com shut down by The Man

The website, created by the online community Macteens, spoofed the BuyMusic.com website by using the same format as the original site but rewriting the text and redirecting all clicks to the Apple iTunes website. ITunes and BuyMusic.com are both online paid music services. DontBuyMusic.com last week brought attention to the marked similarities between TV commercials for iTunes and BuyMusic (see the ads here and here).

Macteens server master Clark Mueller said Macteens did not receive any direct communication from BuyMusic's lawyers. Instead, the counsel for Direct Response Network and its affiliated companies, including BuyMusic.com and Buy.com, sent an e-mail that reached DontBuyMusic's host, datahive. Though datahive said it had no intention of removing dontbuymusic.com from its servers, Mueller -- claiming responsibility for most of the changes to the spoof page's code -- elected to take to the site down. "I think that the copyright and trademark acts may not even apply to us," he said. "But I'm not sure -- I'm not a lawyer and I can't afford one."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:50:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

I'm buried under by email virus

"Initial analysis would suggest that Sobig.F is a mass-e-mailing virus that is spreading very vigorously. Sobig.F appears to be polymorphic in nature. The address is also spoofed and may not indicate the true identity of the sender," a MessageLabs statement said. The sender appears to be someone from a recognized domain name, such as ibm.com, zdnet.com or microsoft.com. The subject line typically says "Re: Details," "Resume" or "Thank you."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:57:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Guest Blog: Steve Steinberg aka Frank Drake

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:41:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wi-Fi "un-banned" in the Philippines

In a final draft of a memorandum circular posted on its website, the national regulator set out new rules governing the provision of wireless LAN services and lifted the suspension on the National Capital Region, Region III and Region IV covering Metro Manila, Central Luzon and Southern Luzon. As reported on 11 July by Mobile Data Daily, relations between the NTC and operators had been deteriorating rapidly as PLDT and Globe Telecom continued to roll out wifi hotspots regardless of a law prohibiting the use of 2.4GHz frequencies in certain areas. While the NTC manfully defended the legislation, which dated back to the early 1930s, it conceded that new regulations were required if the country was to keep up with wireless LAN developments elsewhere in the region.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:23:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogstakes -- sweepstakes for blogs -- launches

A friend of a friend was asking me for ways to promote his product that were better than begging top bloggers for links in exchange for samples. I took more than a week to respond since I didn't have any answers. Then I told him he should do a contest and give out prizes to the randomly-chosen winners AND the blogs that sent them. The more I explained about it technically (how it should track 'referer strings' rather than force blogs to sign up for affiliate tracking URLs and how that means everyone can just use the same link to the contest), he explained that it was beyond him to build.

So I built it. It was quietly launched yesterday afternoon and already this morning I've had a bunch of requests from people who want to either interview me about it or have things that they want to give away (or both). Many of them have been people with blog-related software that they want me to promote. I did a lot of testing of the concept and the execution to make sure it conveys the message that I'm just a guy who builds Web sites, not a Raging Cow marketing outsider who is here to rip you off and the feedback was great. People were worried that they were going to refer thousands of people to my site and I was going to steal their email addresses and my sponsors were going to spam them endlessly. They're not, because they never get to see individual data on anyone except the winners. So the privacy policy is really simple and in-your-face. We hate spam too.

Another person was concerned about having to link to contests that they didn't want to win. The easy answer is: link to contests you want to win and don't link to ones you don't want to win. And already some people are adding this to their non-content column -- in fixture positions just like their Blogrolling lists and Blogshares icons. That was without prompting. They just saw that as how these contests will fit into their blogs. That was really cool to see. In many ways it's a social experiment. I've been asked why the contests last 4 weeks and 6 weeks. "Won't they have a ton of interest in the first week and then die off?" Who knows? I'm going to find out.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:01:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Lucky" Chinese phone number has a high price

An eight-digit number containing only the number eight is considered especially auspicious. "Everyone at the company believes the number was worth the price we paid," Xing Bing, a spokesperson for Sichuan Airlines, told the Associated Press news agency. The company is said to be planning to use the number for a 24-hour customer hotline.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:45:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Illustrator Chris Bishop invites you to draw his comic strip

Link to "Her," Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:41:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spray-on Nanocomputers Are Coming

Computing is about to really become ubiquitous if a research project started at Edinburgh University delivers its promises. In "A spray-on computer is way to do IT, the Edinburgh Evening News writes that "spray-on computers the size of a grain of sand are set to transform information technology." The scientists are already working with Edinburgh hospitals to spray nanocomputers on coronary patients to monitor their hearts unobtrusively and wirelessly. The technology should be ready within four years and these spray-on nanocomputers should be at work in hospitals, schools and shops in less than ten years. This summary contains more details about these nanocomputers which will be able to be diffused into our environment.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:30:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Aliens, children, and tinfoil beanie caps

Thoughts screens have successfully stopped four kinds of aliens from abducting humans. (1) The praying mantis-like aliens. (2) Servants of the mantis-like aliens who are popularly referred to as grays. (3) Snake-skinned aliens popularly referred to as reptilians. (4) "Meek-Moks" which refers to the sound these aliens make while speaking.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:24:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Construction web sign museum

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:18:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, August 18, 2003

Worth1000 + US Army = Saddam Photoshop psyops-fest?

"Zsa Zsa Saddam" is one of a series spoof images of the ousted Iraqi dictator that are due to be posted on walls and billboards around his former stronghold of Tikrit by troops of the 4th Infantry Division's 1st Battalion 22nd Armoured Regiment. The idea is both to boost the morale of U.S. soldiers, ridicule the deposed leader and, also, help identify those who are still loyal to Saddam. "The bad guys are going to be upset," Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Russell told Reuters. "Which will just make it easier for us to know who they are." Sergeant David Cade, a psychological operations specialist, added: "It's mostly good for troop morale, but if we can put these posters up in Tikrit and the enemy can't take them down, then at least it shows who owns the streets."

While Russell insists that most local people "will love 'em and be laughing," there are nonetheless concerns that, far from aiding the American cause, the images will only serve to increase anti-American feeling among ordinary Iraqis. The Billy Idol Saddam, for instance, is portrayed with a gold crucifix around his neck, someything that could well cause offense in a Muslim country such as Iraq. Likewise images of scantily clad women. "I think this type of activity by U.S. forces will only further anger the Muslim population of Iraq," Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Great Britain, told CNN. "This clear flaunting of Islamic Law by displaying pictures of scantily clad women will only add fuel to sentiments that the U.S. is trying to undermine Muslim culture in Iraq. It risks alienating the actual population."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:43:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AmiGovernorOrNot.com

www.amigovernorornot.com.

The inclusion of photos featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger in various states of undress makes this anything but worksafe. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:23:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

And now, we pause for a Unicorn Moment

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:57:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Please diagnose my tropical island skin sore

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:09:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecamblog hijinks: Playa-bound robots and art-cars

Link to first phonecam snapshot in series, click "back" arrow to proceed through the series. Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:00:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nanotech and the black-outs

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:07:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stripper Strips Skin

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:57:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Essay on privacy and piracy: My lipstick is not a camera

An open letter to the Hollywood studios: Stop going through my purse. I mean it. I don't like strangers rifling through my belongings without a very good reason. Keeping terrorists off airplanes qualifies. Keeping "Freaky Friday" off the Internet does not. I've been a film critic for only six years, but I remember a time when I could get into a preview screening without going through a security gauntlet. Sure, high-profile stuff like the "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" movies were shrouded in top-secret mystery, but that was just part of the hype. It only happened a couple of times a year, and nobody thought anything of it, except that it was kind of amusing to see how paranoid you were about your franchises. But when uniformed guards showed up at "The In-Laws," it officially wasn't funny anymore.

I know you're just trying to stop the recording of your films, but that's been going on for years now, with people sneaking into theaters with camcorders and taping the movies straight off the screen, then selling copies on street corners or at conventions. Strangely, you didn't seem to notice or care about this phenomenon until high-speed Internet connections became common, and people began downloading films at home. Like the record industry before you, you've suddenly decided to freak out now that those scary computers are involved.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:49:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DNA computer plays Tic-Tac-Toe

"The human player has nine types of DNA strand, each with a sequence specific to a particular square. To make a move, one type of strand is added to all the squares, as all must be aware of the choice. The DNA strands are the on-switch for the "deoxyribozyme" enzymes. The enzymes' output, when activated by the required DNA strand, is to snip apart molecules in the mixture, which produces the green glow."

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

SMS WOM kills Hollywood box office

Fatima Bholat stepped into the summer sunshine, fresh from the darkened theater where she'd just seen "The Hulk." It was opening day, and the 16-year-old high school junior had rushed out with her younger brother to see director Ang Lee's moody take on the big green superhero. Now she wanted to tell her friends all about it. She whipped out her silver-and-blue T-Mobile cell phone, pressed a button and did something that strikes terror into the hearts of studio executives: She tapped out a message telling her friends exactly what she thought of the movie -- and the verdict was brutal.

Fatima's pan was all her friends needed to convince them to stay away. And they told their friends. Soon the chatter would end up in a girls Internet discussion group, where all the world could see what a few teenagers in Manhattan Beach thought about a movie. Word of mouth -- buzz -- has long been an element in a film's success or failure. But rapid advances in technology, in the hands of an "American Idol" culture quick to express its vote-'em-off sentiments, has accelerated the pace of communication so much that Hollywood feels the reverberations at the box office almost immediately.

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " said Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, referring to the millions of dollars studios throw at a movie to ensure a big opening weekend. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience," he said. "Those days are over. Today, there is no fooling the public."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:05:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big Biz pushes porn mainstream

There are limits, though. "The mainstream is not interested in showing porn or glorifying the industry, but it's interested in finding out how far it can go and what it can get away with," says Susannah Breslin, who writes about the sex industry for the Web site Salon.com and runs a popular Web log on the subject. How far the mainstream will go is generally just this side of actual sex. Traditionally, sex in mainstream entertainment, from R-rated movies to "NYPD Blue" to late night on Cinemax, has been called soft-core -- actors pretending to have sex. Hard-core, also called XXX, shows real sex acts. Adult Video News reports that rentals of hard-core videos in the United States soared from 79 million in 1985 to 759 million in 2001, an increase of almost 1,000 percent.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:52:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Panoramic QTVR: the Matterhorn

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:36:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bathroom gadgets: High-tech toilet with remote control

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:30:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired illo: The Treasure Hunter

In 1694, an 80-gun British warship called the HMS Sussex set sail for southern France loaded with as much as 3 million pounds sterling and 6 tons of gold. The bounty was intended for the Duke of Savoy, a bribe to keep him allied with England in its war against Louis XIV. The Duke never did get the money. Severe gales whipped up off the north coast of Africa. The Sussex foundered along with a dozen other ships in the British fleet, taking all its riches (and the lives of 1,200 crew members) to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Ultimately, the Duke threw his support to Louis XIV, and England's battle with France raged for seven more years before ending in a stalemate.

The plight of the Sussex left behind two huge questions, the first for historians: What if the mission had been successful? It's conceivable that England would have beaten back Louis XIV and annexed parts or all of France. If so, the British government might have been less concerned with a group of 13 rebellious colonies across the Atlantic and allowed them to split off to form a commonwealth - like Canada. The other question, for the rest of us: What happened to all that loot?

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

Sprint to customers: you'll have to pay for portability

Here's a piece on how, after fighting tooth and nail to stop number portability, Sprint (along with all the other cell carriers) is tacking on a fee to users bills to cover it's costs for implementing the system. Only catch is, there's no requirement that the fee actually be related to the costs it's supposed to defray. Result? Sprint claims it's spending "hundreds of millions" to get it's system compatible, a figure several times greater than that claimed by it's slightly-less-evil competitors. Sprint stands to make millions...

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:19:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, August 17, 2003

Oryx and Crake Website

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:40:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Fully interactive" porn DVDs become a reality

The actress is shown looking at the camera the whole time and talking directly to the viewer. Her co-star is never fully revealed. Only his hands and other crucial appendages are visible, depending on the sex act that the viewer gets to choose.(...)In "Virtual Sex With Devon," the DVD starts with a brief introduction: "I'm Devon. Are you ready to play with me?" At that point Devon's head bobs robotically back into place and the same greeting is repeated until the viewer chooses from four features offered on the on-screen menu: "Strip," "Stories," "Foreplay" and "Sex."

If the viewer chooses the "Foreplay" or "Sex" option, he can choose one of four sexual positions and even Devon's "demeanor" — like "innocent" or "nasty" (when she "talks dirty and gets dominant"). There are also little icons on screen in the shape of tongues, vibrators and fingers to choose from to further direct the action."You choose the sexual positions!" screams the box text for the "Virtual Sex" series. "You choose the camera angles! You can choose her moods between innocent and nasty! You ask her to strip naked for you! You control this gorgeous sexual animal and enjoy her countless times!"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:51:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, August 16, 2003

Photographs of the blackout, from Manhattan

Link to photos, Discuss, more photoblogs and first-hand weblog accounts from BoingBoing readers here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:57:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Comic-shop shelf-sign maker

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, August 15, 2003

Giant spectrum poster for the masses

On a personal note, I sure wish that every single link on that site wouldn't try to open up in its own window. I'm perfectly capable of holding down the command-key when I want to make a new window; I don't need the site's author deciding for me. Link Discuss (via WiFi Net News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:38:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My WorldCon schedule

Thursday, August 28th: Old New Voices: The John W. Campbell Award Winners, Thirty Years Later (2PM-3PM), Conference center 104CD

Come join our august group of panellists as they discuss the John W. Campbell Award and the impact it made on them and their career. (George R. R. Martin, Cory Doctorow, Gardner Dozois, Alexis Gilliland, Harry Harrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Spider Robinson, Kristine Smith, Amy Thomson, Lisa Tuttle)

Thursday, Aug 28, Electronic Books - What do READERS Need? (6PM-7PM), Conference center 201E

Our own genre extols the virtures of easily accessing electronic information, but the reality falls far short. What's missing? What's needed? What are the roadblocks? (John Bartley, Stephanie Bedwell-Grime, Cory Doctorow, Norma McPhee, Michael Ward)

Friday, August 29, Reading (6PM-6:30PM), Conference center 203A

Saturday, August 30: Awards and Getting Discovered (3PM-4PM), Conference center 205B

(Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Karin Lowachee)

Sunday, August 31: The Economics of Innovation (10AM - 11AM), Conference center 203BD

Sometimes what seems like a brilliant idea really isn't, when the true cost of implementation is considered vs. other options. This panel will try, once and for all, to drive a stake in the heart of the so-called "solar power satellite", but will also discuss what advances or breakthroughs are needed for other ideas to become economically feasible. (Charles Cohen, Cory Doctorow, Tom Doherty, Richard Lynch)

Monday, September 1: The Death of Money (noon-1PM), Conference center 104A

Money is a tool to ration limited wealth. With AI and robotics the potential exists for infinite wealth. How will this affect the existence of money, and what sort of society might emerge as a result? What sort of society do we want to create? How do we create it? (Cory Doctorow, Sean Mead, Charlie Stross, Walter Jon Williams, Eliezer Yudkowsky)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:13:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily Show on "Fair and Balanced"

Best line: "If anyone knows about blurring and tarnishing 'Fair and Balanced,' it's Fox News."

Second best line: "We all know that corporations must be protected from individuals." 6MB Quicktime Link Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:15:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

List of "Fair and Balanced" weblogs is huge

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:06:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool french "mute" artblog

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:30:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HTML and hedonism: Ibiza summer weblog

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:22:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LA event this weekend: Robot mayhem!

If you liked BattleBots or RobotWars on TV, you should see robot combat up close and in person. SteelConflict and the Robot Fighting League come to LA this weekend for 2 days of flame-throwing, parts-flying, metal crunching mayhem. Peterson Automotive Museum on Wilshire. $12 gets you all the destruction you could want.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:15:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Starfucker phonecamblog

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:11:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friendster fakesters

The site has attracted legions of young creative types: DJs, artists, media people, Burning Man freaks, and other hipsters -- particularly in tech-savvy San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Not surprisingly, many of them went to great lengths to make their profiles unusual, or above-it-all and drenched in irony. Some, like Batty, took it a step further by not being themselves at all.

Batty and numerous other Friendsters routinely violate the site's user agreement by creating fictional characters as profiles instead of, or in addition to, their "real" profiles. These "fakesters" portray themselves as everything from inanimate objects like the World Trade Center to celebrities like Paris Hilton to historical forces like War (which lists its profession as "resolving disputes"). Emboldened by their masks and often preferring the weird over the normal, fakesters are turning Friendster on its ear. They link to other users they've never met in real life, flouting the site's original intent of connecting people through verifiable personal relationships. Many compete to link to as many other users as possible, so that their fictional characters function as social hubs in the Friendster network.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:01:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grokster: Record labels are an illegal cartel

"It's clearly a cartel in violation of competition laws. We've tried to negotiate with the record labels. They leave us no choice but to protect consumers and ourselves from these grievous practices," Mr Rosso told trade magazine New Media Age.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

East Coast bloggers' first-hand accounts of blackout

I was standing at the urinal in the Men's restroom here at work when the power shut off. Yeah, yeah, very funny, I thought. Who's fucking with the light switch? I finished up and fumbled outside back to my office and discovered that the whole building was without power.

From my office window, I can see the NYU dorm across the street. I saw a kid at the window, waved to him. He waved back. He pointed at his computer monitor, then drew his hand horizontally across his neck, the international sign for 'kill him', or 'you're dead meat', or something. Anyway, I pointed to my monitor and did the same thing. So I told the people in my office that the dorm didn't have power either.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:33:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi Redwoods

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:20:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Trademark-holders don't have to be bullies

There aren't many areas of business wisdom more fraught with superstition and dread than trademark lore. Trademarks exist, mainly, to prevent consumer confusion, but for many business people, they're important competitive assets. They're the company's good name, upon which it trades, and companies have a duty to their shareholders to defend those good names. And defend it they do, even if the defense is so odious that it makes the company synonymous with litigious bullying.

Ask a lawyer for a 100 percent assurance of trademark protection and he'll give you plain advice: pay me to send a nasty letter to everyone who utters your name without due care and specificity, or I can't guarantee you that your mark won't slip out of your fingers and into the public domain. He won't be lying: 100 percent certainty is the kind of unrealistic objective that requires extraordinary, self-defeating measures to achieve.

Ask a security consultant to eliminate 100 percent of the shoplifting in your store, and he'll tell you to cavity-search all customers on the way out. Sure, it's effective, but if you want to stay in business, you'll need to consider trading off smugly complete certainty for a cheaper and more friendly 95 percent (or even 75 percent!) solution: say, magnetic door-monitors and a couple of plainclothes rent-a-cops in the aisles. Your legal counsel works for you: he's capable of giving you the same kind of 95 percent solution that your security outfit is -- and if he isn't, maybe it's time to seek better counsel.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hassidic soap opera

"The Rebbe's Court" opens to traditional music played to a rock beat. The main plot centers on Hanoch, the son-in-law of community leader Rabbi Azriel Rutenberg. Hanoch, who is married to the beautiful Zippora, is expelled from the community and reluctantly settles in the secular world after being falsely accused of gambling with $250,000 of the community's funds.

Zippora believes in Hanoch's innocence, and resists matchmakers' efforts to find her a new husband. Meanwhile, her younger sister Ruhi is plotting to snare Hanoch for herself -- and that's just in the first of 26 episodes.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, August 14, 2003

Cingularity defined

Cingularity: The point in time when exponentially increasing churn rates among mobile telephony subscribers reaches infinity.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:36:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Troy McClure's Filmography

# [7F13] "Here Comes the Coast Guard"
# [8F01] "Preacher With a Shovel" (with Dolores Montenegro)
# [8F03] "The Revenge of Abe Lincoln"
# [8F03] "The Wackiest Covered Wagon in the West"
# [8F14] "Calling All Quakers" (with Dolores Montenegro)
# [8F14] "Gladys The Groovy Mule"
# [8F14] "Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die" (1)
# [9F07] "Dial M for Murderousness"
# [9F07] "The Erotic Adventures of Hercules"
# [9F20] "'P' is for Psycho"
# [9F20] "The President's Neck is Missing!"

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photographic evidence of cetacean flatulence

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

Insurer adds lie-detector to its claims-line

Telephone lie detectors are used by only one other insurer - Lloyd's of London syndicate Highway Insurance - which has had the technology in place for more than a year.

The system, known as a "voice stress monitor" picks up speech patterns such as long pauses before answering questions.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecamblog the NYC blackout

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:17:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Devo sells out? (Again?)

"Whip It," the 1980 song that was the anthem of the band Devo's rage against a society dehumanized by industry and commercialism, is now the theme of a Procter & Gamble Co. TV campaign for the Swiffer line of home-cleaning products.

In a new version of the tune, Devo lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh substitutes the lyrics "Swiffer's good" for the "Whip it good" of the original...

...Devo agreed to perform the altered version for Swiffer advertisements because, Mr. Mothersbaugh said, "it was so absurd. We like messing with the boundaries between art and commerce."

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:51:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mini-Kiss cover band

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:43:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

P2P network originates in Palestinian refugee camp

"We're in Palestine, in a refugee camp," said Ras Kabir, the service's co-founder. "There aren't too many process servers that are going to be coming into the Jenin refugee camp. We'll welcome them if they do."

On its face, Earthstation 5 appears to be at the leading edge of the movie and music industry's next nightmare -- copyright-flouting networks based in a territory without strong intellectual property laws, with security built in that protects users from scrutiny. Indeed, the company is confident enough in its territorial immunity that it even streams and offers downloads of full albums and first-run movies like "Terminator 3" and "Tomb Raider" directly from its own servers, an activity that has previously resulted in lawsuits and the prompt disappearance of predecessors.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:52:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Multi-city blackouts? Power grid Clusterfuck?

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:30:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

French Hip Hop

"The lyrics to IAM's 'L'Empire du Cote Obscur' -- 'The Empire of the Dark Side' -- are worth checking out, complete with the translation. For example:

'Je balaie les petits Ewoks comme le vent balaie les feuilles mortes...'
(I sweep away the little Ewoks like the wind sweeps away the dead leaves...)

Classique.

Meanwhile, NTM tends to write about life in the projects. You'll hear a lot of shout-outs to the 'Neuf-trois' -- The Nine Three. It's the Compton of Paris."

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:14:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kucinich: Democratic hopeful and suspected terrorist

I have to admit to a feeling of resentment at the extent of the security searches every time I travel by air. The armed guards, the x-ray machines, the metal detectors, the pat downs, the search of luggage and personal effects, the removal of shoes, and for some, I suppose, the explanation of prosthetics, pacemakers, and appurtenances, constitutes a massive invasion of privacy. We have just come to accept this as a natural state of things because, like Gilmore, we're all suspected terrorists. I find myself having to explain to people why I, as a Presidential candidate, am repeatedly shuttled off to that special line of selectees identified by the SSSS stamped on my ticket. The transportation security agents inform me that a computer has made this decision. I want to know who programs the computer. Is it John Ashcroft?

Even though I don't feel as though I'm getting special treatment or that I'm entitled to special treatment, it makes me wonder how much of a threat I must be since I really do intend to replace the entire government. So when people occasionally recognize me getting the magic metal detector wanding and dutifully submitting to searches of my person, extending my arms and my legs spread-eagle, I explain with a smile, "I'm running against George Bush."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:29:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Island Chronicles: First Day of School

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:50:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Public domain needs your copyright horror-stories!

Public Knowledge, Creative Commons, and The Center for the Study of the Public Domain are putting together a public-education campaign to disseminate IP law horror-stories to help people understand what the expansion of copyright and related doctrines has cost us all. They want your stories for the collection.

We'd like to hear stories from artists, authors, musicians, filmmakers, computer programmers, entrepreneurs, librarians - or anyone with a personal story involving intellectual property law. Your stories are important because American copyright, trademark and patent law, grounded in Article I of the Constitution, are designed to promote individual creativity and innovation: we need to make sure they're functioning in this way.

Unfortunately, the recent expansion of intellectual property laws has had the opposite effect. New laws are discouraging creativity and innovation rather than encouraging it, and stifling other important values such as freedom of speech. Longer copyright terms, the end of copyright registration requirements, stronger trademark laws and the expansion of patent eligibility are some of the changes that have spurred this trend.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:26:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wish list: cheap or free laptop for Burningman?

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:05:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Speed up OS X's Mail.app by rebuilding Address Book

1. Open Address Book
2. Create 10 or more entries
3. Delete your new entries
4. Quit Address Book

I've tried it, and it worked beautifully for me. What's more, it seems to have improved the performance of iSync for synching with PalmOS and iPod. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:43:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friendster spider

I wrote a spider (a.k.a. "crawler", "scraper", "robot") to browse the Friendster site, recording the following information for each person: id (e.g. 867412), nickname (e.g. "Ben"), address (they call it "Location"), type (valid or suspended), friends (array of friend IDs). My spider program starts with a given node, and walks outward through the network (breadth-first) for as long as you tell it. It writes its output to an ad-hoc text file. On the day that i first run it, i have around 14 friends and 220,000 people in my "Personal Network". I run the spider until i have around 1000 of the people (friendsters) closest to me. The spider is then tweaked to write output that can be used for graphing the friend network....

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:34:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wi-Fi: WTF? Jargon confusion

The polling group Mori interviewed just under a thousand people for the survey on behalf of the computer seller Packard Bell. They were asked what the term wi-fi hotspot meant and were offered a list of possible answers. The wireless technology jargon baffled most people, who instead opted for some of the more bizarre choices. Five per cent thought that it referred to a night club, while 2% said it was something smelly that had been left in the sun for too long. Among the other explanations picked by people was a posh hot tub, a sunbed and a microwave ready meal. And 1% of married people though that it meant someone was having trouble with the wife.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:49:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sony Ericsson T616 review

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:45:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Textually.org guestblog stint continues...

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:33:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Housekeeping: Fair and Balanced, link-suggestions

1. Don't miss our new tagline, Fair and Balanced, and the discussion thereof
2. Please don't ever, never, ever, never, ever send me blog suggestions by email. Never. Not if you're my best friend. Not if you're a publicist for a billion-dollar media empire. Not if you're a genius whose work must be blogged this instant. Instead, use the suggest a link form, which formats the suggestion for posting, is properly tagged by my mail-filters, and reaches not only me, but my co-editors as well. Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Philip Pullman's brilliant kids' trilogy

The book revolves around the quest of a little girl to uncover the nature of the universes parallel to her own -- beginning in an alternate, steampunky Oxford University and ranging through London, the fens, and Lappland. The fantastic creatures and the magic that fuels them is utterly captivating and brilliantly executed. The book reveals its oddities and back-story in tiny sips, interspersed masterfully through the fast-paced action. I've just contacted my corner bookstore to see if they have volumes two and three in stock: I plan on devouring them.

I'm intrigued to see that there's an audio edition with Pullman reading: sounds wonderful. Link Discuss (Thanks, Cait!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Theme-park mermaids in danger!

For nearly 40 years mermaids have frolicked at 27-acre Weeki Wachee Springs theme park in Florida. But dwindling crowds and a lack of repairs could mean the theme park’s end. NBC’s Kerry Sanders reports on the efforts to stave off the closing.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

They froze Ted Williams's noggin

After Williams died July 5, 2002, his body was taken by private jet to the company in Scottsdale, Ariz. There, Williams' body was separated from his head in a procedure called neuroseparation, according to the magazine.

The operation was completed and Williams' head and body were preserved separately. The head is stored in a steel can filled with liquid nitrogen. It has been shaved, drilled with holes and accidentally cracked 10 times, the magazine said. Williams' body stands upright in a 9-foot tall cylindrical steel tank, also filled with liquid nitrogen.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:29:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free is the right way to do WiFi

Sure, leasing a broadband connection with a Wi-Fi base is cheap. But add a billing system - secure login server, transactional database, credit card processing, tech staff, customer service operators standing by - and the outlay skyrockets to $30, $50, even $70 a day, particularly if there are lots of support calls. (Ironically, most of those calls will be about problems with the billing system itself.)

If you want to see the right way to serve wireless access, find a Schlotzsky's Deli. The Austin, Texas-based sandwich chain figured out the secret of making money from Wi-Fi: Give it away. Schlotzsky's lets anyone sign up and use its network free, even if they don't come in for a sandwich. The chain advises its 600 franchise owners to beam Wi-Fi signals through the walls into nearby hotels, parks, and college dorms. Such complimentary access points are popping up everywhere, from Buck's, a roadside restaurant in Woodside, California, to the Portland Harbor Hotel on the Maine coast. And why not? Giving away wireless broadband saves on billing costs, attracts customers, and creates an instant competitive advantage. Buck's owner Jamis MacNiven, who serves buttermilk pancakes to some of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists, has the perfect rap on the topic: "Charging for online usage would be like charging for salt and pepper."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:10:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NPR Radio: Friendster, Tribe.net, Ryze, and rise of social networking apps

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:39:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hypnosis: playing games with your head

I've used clinical hypnosis since I was 12. Most recently, I saw a hypnotherapist to address a five-year bout of writer's block that ended when I was 26, and then, a month ago, to help me quit smoking. In both instances, I've had unqualified success. I started really selling fiction in earnest in my mid-twenties, and I have gone a month without a cigarette and without any serious cravings (I've been using the patch to cope with the physical component, but I've tried that before, unsuccessfully -- the hypnosis addresses the habit, not the addiction).

Hypnosis is really fascinating to me. It comes down to playing games with your own mind. In the case of smoking, for instance, the point is to come to seeing yourself not as an ex-smoker (someone who resists the urge to smoke every moment of every day), but as a non-smoker -- someone who doesn't have the urge. I'm a non-drinker. I'll have some Irish whisky at Christmas and chamagne at New Year's and a martini at my brother's wedding, but I won't drink a drop otherwise, and I don't miss it. Getting to that place with cigs, and as quickly as I have, after 18 years of pack-a-day smoking, was pretty cool. Made me feel like I'd attained root on my own brain.

(My hypnotherapist isn't taking on new clients, so please don't ask for a referral)

Last year, Stanford University psychiatric researcher David Spiegel used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to watch changes in brain function in volunteers who were highly hypnotizable.

The hypnotized volunteers were told to see colour. Then, regardless of whether or not the researchers showed them colour, the areas of the visual cortex that registers colour would fire. When the researchers told them to see "grey" objects, the volunteers had less activity in the colour zones of the brain.

"When they believed they were looking at colour, the part of their brain that processes colour vision showed increased blood flow," said Spiegel, who is presenting hypnosis research at the Toronto conference today.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wooden mirror

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ultima's economic indicators

Total sales: $113,049 (-11,984 from last week)
Total sales, annualized: $2.9 million
Total volume: 3,147 sales (-341)
Exchange rate: $16.50 (+0.37) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces
Price of an 18x18 house in the new Malas region: $150.80 (-3.66)
My gold holdings: 74.9 million gp ($1,235.85)
My dollar holdings: $214.04
My profits, year to date: $1,088.10

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:58:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, August 11, 2003

Kucinich guestblogging for Lessig

During my academic career, I studied the Failing Newspaper Act, which provided for joint operating agreements (JOA), which presaged the death of afternoon newspapers in America. In my own lifespan, I’ve seen the city of Cleveland go from 3 daily newspapers, the Cleveland News, the Cleveland Press, and the Plain Dealer, to just one. I’ve studied the Federal Communications Act of 1934, which set specific responsibilities for broadcast license holders to serve “in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” H.L. Mencken, the famous critic, once wrote “freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” Indeed, the Constitution is liberally interpreted when it comes to the government having any role in directing what goes into print. And that is as it should be (that is not to abandon questions of horizontal and vertical market concentration). However, holders of broadcast licenses have specific responsibilities to the public. It is the public which owns the airwaves. The public provides a license in exchange for service. At the same time the definition of media has expanded to include interactive services, the requirements of service have been largely abandoned as media monopolies have grown more powerful. Community groups struggle for recognition, social and economic causes which run counter to vested interests are marginalized, and our politics are corrupted by having to raise huge amounts of money from one set of corporate interest to buy airtime from another set of corporate interests.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Missionites: Save Al's Comics!

Al's Comics has been the best comic shop in San Francisco's Mission district for well over a decade. Al has struggled to pay ludicrously escalated rent for his small but meticulously organized space, and the bad bay area economy has hit Al's comics hard. All the ex-dotcom employees who used to love Al's great selection of alternative and independent comics are long gone and not coming back soon...

Please, if you live in San Francisco or know somebody who does, encourage them to at least check the store out. You don't have to drop your current store, just go see what Al has to offer. He doesn't have a flashy hipster joint or a humongous space, but he's got a genuine love for comics and could really use just a little bit of your support.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:11:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Real-life Hipster Bingo at NY's Siren Festival

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:20:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hong Kong Nazi chic?

Swastikas and other Nazi symbols are used as decoration in a Hong Kong clothing store, as seen on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2003. Israeli and German diplomats have lashed out at a Hong Kong fashion company for using swastikas and other Nazi party symbols. The Hong Kong-based firm designed a range of T-shirts and pants with Nazi symbols and launched new decorations this past week in its 14 stores. One branch projected Nazi propaganda films on the shop's wall.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:28:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

0wnz0red made the preliminary Nebula ballot!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:48:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Science fiction prefigured the Creative Commons

Whereas in other literary fields you wouldn't dare take an idea from another writer and use it, because that would be considered plagiarism, science fiction people loved to build on each other's stories. The business of giving away ideas and promoting other people's work was a part of the community at large.

The Futurians did this to an amazing extent. For example, every Futurian had a pen name that included the family name Conway. A good number of the stories that appeared in science fiction magazines at the time were written by someone-or-other Conway.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:45:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I'm guestblogging on mobile media news site textually.org

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:32:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired: Mister Disruption Strikes Again

By offering low-cost SIP phones -- $129.99 per pair, with plans to reduce the price to $40 per phone within a year and $20 within two -- Robertson hopes to tap into SIP's early momentum, just as he did with his Linux and MP3 ventures.

"Wherever there's massive potential disruption, there's massive business opportunity ... that happens wherever you can completely digitize a product -- with music, MP3s; with software, Linux; with voice communication, SIP," says Robertson. "By moving something from the offline world into the digital world, you're placing it back in the consumer's control."

"There's no per-minute cost for the phone company to zap electrons from one set of copper wires to another, so why do we pay per minute?" he says, "If you intersect with the (regular phone) system, you inherit their cost structure. With SIP to SIP, it can all be free."

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

NYT Op-Ed: Spam, I am

I remember the first unsolicited commercial e-mail message (otherwise known as spam) I received. It began with a friendly greeting: "Hello Sparquee." It went on to offer me various drugs like Valium and Viagra, "no prescription needed." The name Sparquee was a total surprise, but it made sense. It combines my name, Sparrow, with that harpooner from "Moby Dick," Queequeg. (...)

I love these names -- temporary, awkward, apt. They seem expressive of my inner selves. Sparky799 is my party personality; Souciep is my suave, artistic persona. Soowee, though mildly insulting (it is a call for pigs), is my abrasive side. Sparlin combines my name with that of my hero, Abraham Lincoln.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:57:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Warren Ellis writing a novel-on-a-blog

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:04:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Print-to-toilet-roll

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:47:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Starbucks-smashers put San Francisco Fourbucks out of business

The culprits went as far as to stick "closed" and "for lease" signs and notices on the stores -- using bogus Starbucks Corp. letterhead -- announcing that "thousands of retail locations worldwide" were closing, and the Seattle- based company was "making room for local coffee bars."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:43:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nature-sounds from British Library as ringtones

Hippos Bellowing
House Martin Song
Lapwing Calls
Lions Roaring
Lions Snarl
Loons Yodelling
Mallard Calls Female
Mallard Calls Male
Manx Shearwater Caterwauling
Marsh Frog

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:39:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Technorati tutorial

1) We spider weblogs, and correlate each weblog's outbound links to any page on your blog/site

2) Technorati works on any URL - not just URLs for weblogs. For example, you can see what people are saying about an interesting article or favorite company, and get an instant read on the conversations going on around that article or site.

3) The simplest way get your weblog included in the Technorati index is to ping us whenever you update your weblog. That puts you in the high-priority queue for indexing. You can save the page as a bookmark, or you can program your weblog software to do it automatically.

4) To calculate the inbound blog list, we use the outbound links from the blog homepage, not from the archives

5) We do process RSS feeds an other metadata, but that doesn't affect your inbound blog stats. As long as you produce HTML, you're OK.

6) Nightly, we go through the database and re-calculate the number of inbound blogs and links to every weblog we track, which helps us double-check our work and also allows us to create the interesting newcomers list, the interesting recent blogs list, etc.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:37:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Covert celeb endorsements sought for cigarettes

Freedom paid covert actresses, called "leaners," to smoke the cigarettes in Manhattan bars and nightclubs for several weeks this spring in a New York effort to promote the fledgling brand, company spokeswoman Nancy Tamosaitis said.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:36:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Call junk-mail porn and it becomes illegal

A little-known Federal law allows individuals to send a Prohibitory Order against companies that are sending unsolicited sexually provocative or erotically arousing mail. The Supreme Court went one step further, allowing individuals to decide what constitutes "erotically arousing" mail. The law makes it illegal for a company to send mail to an individual within thirty days of receiving the Order.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:34:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mash-Up Mixes in Salon

The wacky juxtaposition spawned its own kind of revolution, inspiring legions of the club remixes now called "mash-ups" -- with one classic example being "Smells Like Booty," in which Destiny's Child wails over Nirvana's classic dirge and drone. Also referred to as "bastard pop," mash-ups involves blending samples from two songs -- generally, one song's vocals atop another's instrumental or rhythm track. The sum of the parts often surpasses the originals. The more disparate the genre-blending is, the better; the best mash-ups blend punk with funk or Top 40 with heavy metal, boosting the tension between slick and raw. Part of the fun is identifying the source of two familiar sounds now made strange -- and then giggling over how perfect Whitney sounds singing with Kraftwerk.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:28:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Soda machine costume

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:26:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Detailed spinal model indicates torque-related injuries

But while the principal loading hypothesis can explain gross injuries, such as fractures in vertebrae or slipped discs, it does not explain the vast majority of cases of back pain.

The researchers say the spine should be considered not as a column, but as a dynamic chain of segments that can rotate. When viewed as such, it becomes clear that torque can damage the joints and muscle between and around vertebrae.

The model can reveal, for instance, whether equipment added to a soldier's helmet could result in excessive "torque jolts" - the kind of quick rotational jerks that Beagley and Ivancevic blame for spinal injuries - as the soldier performs manoeuvres.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:24:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New "Spiders" comic episode online

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:21:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Revisionist Shrub action-figure with AWOL-Action Grip

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:21:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ian Clarke is leaving America

Ian is the co-inventor of Freenet, an important piece of software devoted to enabling citizens of oppressive regimes to retreive information from all over the world: this goal is not only lauded by civil liberties cranks like me, but by the State Department and the Voice of America, which is actively funding research into this, as a way of spreading samizdata to every corner of the earth.

America is losing an important thinker and toolsmith in Ian (and no doubt, many other Ians are being scared off without the same fanfare). It's a shame that he violated Godwin's Law when he wrote his goodbye letter, as it gives those who would distract us from the real issue here a handy red herring to toss into the fray, i.e., pointless arguments about the appropriateness of a comparison to Nazi Germany.

As an Irish citizen living in the US - I have decided that it is time to leave this country - it is starting to look, smell, and act as Germany did during the 1930s. I wish you Americans luck in regaining civilized justice in your broken country, if not, I hope that the EU will be accepting of political refugees from this brave but failed experiment.

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

Memory in mice: memory-readers in mice?

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:04:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Printable felony sarcasm

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:00:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, August 9, 2003

Geek-hipster erotica: Dreampod Sessions, Part 2

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:42:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Latest Nikon digicam has Wi-Fi option and built-in FTP

"The new Nikon Digital SLR has an option for Wifi! FUCKING WIFI! Only problem is that it's 4.1 megapixel. I've got a 6.1 and I'll live with the offloading but... FUCKING WIFI! Here's good overview. List price is $3500 which is steep for the resolution but everything else on the camera is STELLAR. 11 area AF sensors. Jesus. And it's got built in FTP. The fucking camera has FTP. Those boys at Nikon rock. If it had a full sized CCD and higher res it would be perfect. Utterly perfect. Oh yeah, and Firewire. USB 2 is lame."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:47:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, August 8, 2003

DoCoMo plans fuel-cell mobile phones

Fuel cells require platinum as a major component to enable them to generate energy. Platinum increases electrical conductivity in PEM (proton exchange membrane) fuel cells. It is critical to fuel cell commercialization and can alone command 10% to 20% of a fuel cell system's cost. Accepting the U.S. Department of Energy's target for platinum use in fuel cell vehicles - 0.2 grams per kilowatt - total platinum use by fuel cell systems could bring an 8% to 12% increase to the world demand for platinum by 2013, according to ABI projections.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:41:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I hate Jason DeFillippo

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:41:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

System for tracking someone's location by mobile phone launches in UK

The mapAmobile service, unveiled last month in Britain, claims accuracy to within 50 yards. It charges an annual fee of £30, or $48, plus 30 pence per request. Even more precise services are likely in the United States within the next year as more phone models come with global positioning system, or GPS, chips already installed.

Carphone Warehouse, which runs the British service, promotes it as offering parents peace of mind or allowing businesses to check on the whereabouts of wayward staff. "We are responding to a real con sumer need by bringing to the market a reliable, affordable and effective way for people to locate each other without disturbing them," said the company’s chief executive, Andrew Harrison. The consent of the cellphone owner is required, Harrison said. Even so, privacy advocates said there was potential for abuse. "Given that we know that schoolboys have hacked into the Pentagon computer, nothing is secure," said Barry Hugill of the rights group Liberty. "Once the technology is there, it is there to be abused and I find it very hard to believe that it would be watertight. Potentially, we could see stalkers moving in on the act."

The service is available from Britain's four main wireless operators: Vodafone Group, Orange, mmO2 and T-Mobile International. The smaller operators Virgin, Fresh and 3 Mobile are expected to join as well.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:15:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New "anti-terrorism" spin for RFID

"The Auto-ID Center, an RFID consortium, presented its technology to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in Washington, D.C., last year. In fact, many Auto-ID Center sponsors consider Ridge's blessing to be key to public acceptance. An internal presentation by Fleishman-Hillard, the powerhouse PR firm that advises the center, lists Ridge as a 'top-tier opinion leader.' And the minutes of another meeting, attended by a representative of the Department of Defense, records a group statement that the technology will catch on 'when the government mandates it for homeland security reasons.'"

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:14:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF Music and Freedom Celebration in SF's GG Park Sat Aug 9th

This Saturday, August 9, The Electronic Frontier Foundation will host Freedom Fest 2003 from Noon until 5:00pm on at the Music Concourse Bandshell in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

I will be your Master of Ceremonies, assisted in this by the winsome yet redoubtable Mountain Girl Garcia as well as KFOG radio personality Peter Finch. Mostly, it will be an opportunity to hang out in the park on what's forecast to be a lovely day and listen to some wonderful music, freely shared with you by up-and-coming Bay Area musicians.

Bands include Box Set (SF Bay Guardian's Best of the Bay "Best Local Rock Band" award winners), Noelle Hampton (Winner of the highly competitive Lilith Fair Talent Search), Austin Willacy (SF Chron describes his music as "an edgy adult contemporary sound that goes down easily and speaks to the heart. Don't miss him live."), Colin McGrath (He originally came to San Francisco to compose music for a comedy group called Killing My Lobster. That could be all one needs to know), Lasana Bandele (Bandele is a rastaman who hails from the Parish of St. James in Jamaica), and many more.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:56:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Photo Zen

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:42:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, August 7, 2003

More wacky candidates in California governor race

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:43:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moblog the vote

The founders of two popular weblogs plan to launch a "smart mob-style site" that promises to redefine news coverage of the presidential campaign. Matt Haughey (Metafilter) and Rusty Foster (Kuro5hin) say the site will post phonecam pics, video clips, audio and transcripts gathered from a host of contributors attending campaign events across the country. The site will also feature an hour-by-hour weblog of campaign events and news stories. The site is a great idea and should become an instant hit.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:38:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Social Fisking: some background.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:35:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How To Walk On Water

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:40:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mass registration in the "Do Not Call Registry"

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:57:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Salam Pax has a photoblog

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:20:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lab Notes research digest from Berkeley Engineering

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:09:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Segway has competition from C5 electric tricycle inventor

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:06:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paging Doctor Robot

This new high-tech robot is currently being tested at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. And so far, it has visited 20 pleased patients. The robot doesn't deliver advises itself. Instead, patients interact with a real physician through a computer screen, a camera and a speaker. "Looking at a computer terminal, the doctor directing the robot sees what the robot sees and hears what the robot hears. At the other end, patients can see and talk to the doctor's face displayed on a flat screen that sits on the robot's 'shoulders.'" Read this overview to see Dr. Robot in action and more details. And don't worry, this new kind of robot is not intended to replace a human physician.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:52:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Global storytelling "Fray Day" coming up in October

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:49:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shirky on nutty pay-as-you-go Wi-Fi economics

More proof, as if any were needed, that the economics of Wifi are interfering with plans to offer metered commercial access. I have a T-Mobile Wifi account, 300 mins for $50, so that when I'm away from free APs, I can at least drop into a Starbucks, order up a doppio, and check my mail.

Today, T-Mobile informed me when I logged in that that deal was over, dead, forget it, they're sorry they ever mentioned it. Instead, they were offering me a "convenient" Day-Pass, for the low, low rate of $10/24 hour period. Meaning, of course, that even if you spend even as much as an hour logged in at a Starbucks, the cost per minute has still almost tripled, to 16 cents a minute from 6. Worse, if you just want to go in, grab a cup of coffee and check your mail under the old "10 minute minimum" regime, that will now cost *a dollar a minute.* I could have elective surgery for a dollar a minute.

This is Iridium or those back-of-the-seat airphones all over again. Any pricing plan that is even moderately convenient shows up on the spreadsheets at HQ as being less than a rocket ride to riches, so they come up with the two-fisted brainstorm of raising the price, then slapping a "Now with new inconvenience!" sticker on it. I smell a business school case study in the making -- don't take products with vanishingly small marginal cost and make them too expensive for your target audience to want to use.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:47:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photoshop artifact in NYTimes news photo

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:43:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mike Hawash plea bargain

Aug 6: Mike pled guilty today to one count of his three-count indictment. He admitted attempting to enter Afghanistan with members of the "Portland 6". We hope that justice has been served, and our focus now shifts to support for Mike's family in this difficult time

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:40:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Social moblog: raped at the pump

I set up this new public moblog called RAPED AT THE PUMP about gas prices sucking ass. Anyway, if you take a pic of gas prices you can upload it by e-mailing it to gasprices.gas@tamw.com Textamerica, the people who host it are excited about it and are going to give $100 bucks to the person who posts the highest and lowest prices each month, so be sure to sign the post somehow so they know who took it.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:34:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Social Fisking: the new new thing

Xeni Jardin wrote an article for Grammy magazine on compulsory licensing. I've fisked it using QuickTopic here. If you want to join in, please do here. [The word "fisking" is] a warblogger term by derivation - it means rebutting an article by interleaving quotation with refutation (or general ridicule). Robert Fisk's reports were prime targets, hence the name.

At first glance, http://xrl.us/ogh appears to be a clone of the graphics and text published at Grammy Magazine. But on closer examination it is obvious you have transformed some of the original works by interlacing QuickTopic links within the original so as to create a distinctively new page that fosters criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, AND research. Indeed, in determining fair use limitations on exclusive copy-rights TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 1 > Sec. 107., USA courts are required to consider many factors including (3) "...the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole..." That's pre-Internet old skool, of course.

Today, you reproduced an entire work in situ, yet it is mechanically transformed with encoded instructions (hyperlinks) at salient points that enable new capabilities for public criticism and comment as encouraged and desired by the fair use exemption set forth by the Courts and Affirmed by Congress. The maximalists will of course disagree. But those of us who cherish the Communions which arise from the sharing of ideas, commentary and debate intuitively know these exchanges inevitably illuminate Knowledge and Wisdom -- which as the art-deco Masons of 30 Rock etched like lightning in stone -- Shall be the Stability of Thy Times.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:51:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, August 6, 2003

Brion Gysin retrospective book

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:46:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Battlestar Galactica, continued: Fans can be so cruel.

* When you were following your dream to become a writer, did you ever think that someday you would be using it to crush the dreams of others?
* Are you lying to us, Mister Moore? NOTHING is going on with your production! Prove to us there is current movement or move on! We need some proof that you really filming & doing this miniseries.
* First of all, you probably think everyone hates you and how you took over the show. That's completely true. So I will ask, how do you think fans will embrace your show and why will they embrace it?
* I bumped into you at Paramount years ago. You've changed. When did you get a fire lit under you to be the next Gene Roddenberry?
* Mr. Moore, why do you lie (LIE) to us in some of your BG posts? You aren't telling the truth and you know it. Tell us.
* What right do you have to destroy something we all love?
* Mr. Ronald D. Moore, recreating the cataclysmic events of human kind's destruction on BG is deplorable considering the tension over 9/11, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, fighting in other countries and warcomingsoon for Iraq, the U.S. And the U.K. Why are you choosing to retell the story of BG instead of continuing it?

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:27:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired: Fans Battle TV Over Galactica

[co-Executive Producer David] Eick said it won't feel like conventional science-fiction television, and cites inspirations as diverse as the film Black Hawk Down and the vintage Atari arcade game Asteroids. "We considered seriously how space travel might happen. In outer space, objects in motion remain in motion. You can't bank against a gravitational pull. There's a sense of organized chaos, you have to turn your craft around and fire jets in the opposite direction to slow down -- just like the old games. When we were developing the show, I ran around telling everyone, 'Remember Asteroids! Remember Asteroids!'"

An introduction by Moore on the new series' website indicates they're shooting to transform more than a miniseries. The statement reads like Dogme 95 for the entire sci-fi television genre.

"Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of the science-fiction television series," Moore's statement reads. "We believe you can explore adult themes with adult characters and still tell a ripping good yarn. We believe that to portray human beings as flawed creations does not weaken them, it strengthens them ... We believe that science fiction provides an opportunity to explore our own society, to provoke debate and to challenge our perceptions of ourselves and our fellow Man. If you agree with us, then this is the show for you. If not, then thanks for coming, but the popcorn is in a different aisle."

Thank you Xeni Jardin for mentioning that filmmakers helped Richard Hatch make the trailer that started the Battlestar revival effort in a major way. I Co-Directed the trailer with Richard Hatch and worked long and hard on it along with many other filmmakers with whom I'd had a long standing relationships with to get it done. Regardless of this, the trailer has too long been written about as being Richard's Fan trailer and it's great to finally have someone give a more balanced view of how it was made. I hope someday the trailer all of us made is available outside of the convention circuit so potential viewers can really see what we all were trying to do with a new Battletar Galactica.

I wish the mini series well and am glad that the revival effort lead to at least one new long-form Battlestar for audiences to watch. Thanks again, Jay Woelfel (Co-Director)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:01:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grammy Magazine: Compulsories a solution for digital music?

Hundreds of millions of dollars in profits are already being earned each year through digital music distribution, so the pro-compulsories argument goes, but not by artists or labels. Instead, digital music fans pay ISPs, blank-disc manufacturers, and PC- or software-makers: each a necessary component in the digital-music food chain. Instead of criminalizing filesharing, advocates argue, why not introduce compulsory-license schemes that would pay creators for their work while taking into account the inherently uncontrollable nature of digital music distribution?

(...) "It's too late to put the genie back in the bottle, because the anarchy already exists," states [Jim Griffin, cofounder of the Pho digital entertainment discussion list and CEO of L.A.-based consulting firm Cherry Lane Digital]. "Monetizing that anarchy is the problem now. A new system might function like insurance systems do. Everyone pays in, and each of us draws out as needed."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:53:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photoblog of extreme medical images

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:34:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AICN's Robotic Women of Film Contest

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:28:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF Freedom Fest in San Francisco this Saturday

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:30:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

See you next week!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Discworld interrelations map

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Penisman: Giger meets The Tick

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anarchist hives: you have nothing to lose but your royal jelly!

Naturally anarchic hives contain a few dozen laying workers, and seem to function well. But by selective breeding, Oldroyd and his colleagues have got the egg-layers up to about 40% of the workforce. In these hives, breeding workers neglect their chores and the hives become decadent to the point of collapse2. "They can barely feed themselves, and they do weird things like trying to raise queens out of male larvae," Oldroyd says.

These selectively bred anarchist hives have some other odd features. Normal workers transplanted into them may start laying, which suggests that the queen's pheromones are weaker than normal. Most strangely, taking the queen out of an anarchic colony - which triggers worker egg-laying in normal hives - causes anarchic workers' eggs to lose their deceptive properties. They are eaten if transplanted into a normal hive, says Oldroyd.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:14:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Criminal Ukraine site-proprietor shot and beaten

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:10:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Going overseas? Buy a phone there

But the drawback of traveling abroad with the same number you use at home is that roaming charges can add up fast, up to several dollars a minute depending on your service plan and where you are.

"Let's say you're tooling around Paris and you get a phone call from your cousin Larry who wants to borrow your lawn mower -- that call cost you $5," Mr. Kerton said. "And if Larry's a real talker and you can't get him off the phone, it could be $10 or $15."

For that reason -- or because they do not have a G.S.M. phone -- some travelers purchase a second phone just for international travel. That was what Julie Pfeffer, an analyst with DuPont Capital Management in Wilmington, Del., decided to do after realizing it was getting too difficult to do business on trips abroad without a phone.

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

Tuesday, August 5, 2003

Open Source and Industry Alliance

"Open source software fosters competition within the software industry, and expands choices for users, which is vitally important to innovation, the economy and consumers.
Open source licenses, which grant to all the right to use, copy, modify and distribute the licensed software, are fully consistent with international norms of copyright and patent law.

Open source licenses ensure the freedom:

* to employ open source software for any purpose
* to study how a program works by accessing the source code so any and all can adapt it to their needs;
* to redistribute open source software without continuing royalty obligations to the original developer;
* to improve the software and to release those improvements to the public.

Business, government and private individuals must be free to choose software and technologies that best suit their needs, independent of the methodologies or licenses used in their development.

The marketplace must be free of prejudice against open source software, whether through law, regulation, defamation or other means. OSAIA will act to achieve this goal. "

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:49:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Make a Creative Commons vid, get a dual-G5

Create, or mash-up, a moving image that explains Creative Commons mission, using your favorite moving image authoring tool, such as Flash, iMovie, or Final Cut Pro. Entries can contain video, animated images, text, and audio. We welcome and encourage the use of other people's work, provided that you have permission or the work is Creative Commons-licensed or public domain. The entry should be 2 minutes or less. All entries must be licensed under a Creative Commons license of your choosing by time of entry.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:48:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hal Robins, notable SubGenius and man-about-town

Robins lives with a roommate in a Victorian apartment in the Mission that looks like a museum storeroom filled with dusty tomes and dinosaur bones. He reads constantly and can produce odd facts on subjects ranging from hallucinogenic toad spittle to the Bible to outer space to transportation. Some call him a "walking encyclopedia." Others find him infuriatingly unable to adjust to the modern world, often to his own detriment. Though his dress for the "Ask Dr. Hal Show" is Victorian, at other times he wears a fedora and resembles Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. He speaks in soft, baroque sentences and is shy and polite. For friends who come to visit, he keeps boxes of cinnamon candy in the refrigerator; he made it himself, from his grandmother's recipe.

Robins has no day job and supports himself by a variety of artistic pursuits. Since Robins was discovered by R. Crumb and published in the comic book series Weirdo in 1981, his dense, dark, detailed cartoons have appeared in collections with some of underground comix's biggest names, Spain Rodriguez (Trashman) and Gilbert Shelton (The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), to name a few.

Others know Robins as Dr. Howland Owll, from the Church of the SubGenius, a dada-esque art project and fake religious sect started in the late 1970s. A cross between a club and a movement, SubGenius pokes fun at organized religion and authority through books, videos, pamphlets, and performances. It has devotees in cities all over the country.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:56:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Evaporating Danube reveals sunken Nazi ships

Europe's worst drought in years has pushed the mighty river Danube to its lowest level in more than a century, revealing German warships sunk to slow advancing Soviet forces in World War II.

As the Danube's depth at this remote spot in eastern Serbia fell to levels not seen since records began in 1888, the wreckage of an old battle ship last week slowly emerged above the surface by the Romanian border.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:21:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Post-cyborg event in Toronto, August 14 and 15

We've all seen smart buildings, smart lightswitches, smart toilets, and intelligent user interfaces, but what happens when you have "smart people"? What happens when you wire up the "intelligence" onto people?

2003 August 14th and 15th we explore what happens when the intelligent building meets intelligent occupants.

The August 14th event will be an intellectual discussion about the relationship between cyborglogs and buildinglogs. Three panelists (Maurice Benayoun, Pierre Levy, Steve Mann), moderated by the Director of the Marshall McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, will enter an immersive multimedia space (a brainwave bath) while discussing the implications of the post-cyborg age.

The August 15th event will be an actual collective (de)consciousness where the occupant-cyborgs interact with the building, to create an audiovisual experience from their brainwaves, as part of a brainwave (de)concert performed by jazz musicians Bryden Baird, James Fung, Dave Gouveia, Sandy Mamane, and Corey Manders.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will Dell fix this guy's machine?

My big question is, if this gets picked up by enough newspapers and blogs, will Dell replace the guy's machine with a current top-of-the-line box with a fresh one-year warranty and the direct number of a tech-support supervisor who can shepherd him through future problems? That's the kind of service recovery you'd expect from a decent company, especially after being publicly outed for egregious customer abuse. Link Discuss

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

WiFi gear nearly free at this point

JustDeals.com is offering the D-Link AirPlus DI-614+ 2.4GHz 802.11b 22Mbps Wireless Cable/DSL Router for $28.95, $6 off their regular price. Use coupon code "DI614" to get the discount. The router has a built-in 4-port switch, advanced firewall features with parental controls, and is compatible with XBoxLive and Playstation 2. It's the best current price we've seen. Coupon expires 8/11/03.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bye-bye, Miss Blogistan Pie

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:51:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, August 4, 2003

Blood-powered "human batteries"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:33:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Leopalooza: It's my birthday, and I'll unplug if I want to

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:03:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hand-cranked Game Boy

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free anonymous WiFi at FCC offices

Last year, Powell directed his staff to take the steps needed to make the FCC one of the first federal agencies to provide public WiFi access. Visitors bringing their own hardware and software can use the service on the Twelfth Street, Courtyard, and Eighth Floor levels of the headquarters located at 445 12th Street, SW in Washington, D.C. The system uses the 802.11a and 802.11b protocols, commonly referred to as WiFi.

The Commission will be unable to provide technical support, and all transactions using this service are the responsibility of the visitor. At present, the FCC will not request personal identifying information prior to allowing access to the wireless network. If requested by outside authorities, however, the FCC will provide data from system audit logs to support external investigations of improper Internet use.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Frottle: collision-mitigation for WiFi

Frottle works by scheduling the traffic of each client, using a master node to co-ordinate actions. This eliminates collisions, and prevents clients with stronger signals from receiving bandwidth bias...

Frottle currently operates as a userspace application, receiveing outbound packets via the iptables QUEUE functionality. Access to the network is controlled by the frottle master, sending each client a control packet (token) which contains information about how much data can be sent at this time...

"I have a poor connection to the access point. I have a low snr (varies from 7 to 11 dB) and rarely achieve better than a 2 Mb/s connection. When we were running without any form of QOS I was often struggling to achieve transfer rates of 3 kB/s. During testing of the current frottle I am able to get my share of bandwidth. My transfer rates now average 80 kB/s download and 35 kB/s upload. Peaks for these are about double this. The end result is a network which is usable and reliable."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Electronic talking glove for the deaf

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:52:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ode to metric paper

You are in a library and want to copy an article out of a journal that has A4 format. In order to save paper, you want copy two journal pages onto each sheet of A4 xerox paper. If you open the journal, the two A4 pages that you will now see together have A3 format. By setting the magnification factor on the copying machine to 71% (that is sqrt(0.5)), or by pressing the A3-->A4 button that is available on most copying machines, both A4 pages of the journal article together will fill exactly the A4 page produced by the copying machine. One reproduced A4 page will now have A5 format. No wasted paper margins appear, no text has been cut off, and no experiments for finding the appropriate magnification factor are necessary. The same principle works for books in B5 or A5 format...

If you prepare a letter, you will have to know the weight of the content in order to determine the postal fee. This can be very conveniently calculated with the ISO A series paper sizes. Usual typewriter and laser printer paper weighs 80 g/m². An A0 page has an area of 1 m², and the next smaller A series page has half of this area. Therefore the A4 format has an area of 1/16 m² and weighs with the common paper quality 5 g per page. If we estimate 20 g for a C4 envelope (including some safety margin), then you will be able to put 16 A4 pages into a letter before you reach the 100 g limit for the next higher postal fee...

Using standard paper sizes saves money and makes life simpler in many applications. For example, if all scientific journals used only ISO formats, then libraries would have to buy only very few different sizes for the binders. Shelves can be designed such that standard formats will fit in exactly without too much wasted shelf volume.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:20:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yawn-contagion correlated with kindness

Those impervious to the infection also struggle to put themselves in other people's shoes, psychological tests showed. For example, they might be less likely to recognize that a social faux pas or insult could cause someone else offence.

Identifying with another's state of mind while they yawn may trigger an unconscious impersonation, the team suggests. The findings might also explain why schizophrenics, who have particular difficulty in doing this, rarely catch yawns.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:40:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hammersley to run six consecutive marathons through the Sahara

If your company would like to support these good causes, have their logo all over my gear and televised in 150 countries plus photographed in hundreds of magazines -- not counting the ones I'll be writing about this in -- and plastered over my blog (yes, indeed, I'll be moblogging the damn thing), and have me run 6 consecutive marathons in the middle of the desert, then now is the chance.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:24:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi and email for impoverished islands

Already, Pfnet, the Solomon Islands People First Network initiative, is a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge 2002, and has been entered into the InfoDev ICT Story Competition of 2002; competitions that recognize the ingenious use of technology for the development of human life.

Pfnet is basically an email system, by which villagers in faraway islands like Ontong Java, in the far north-east of the group, can get in touch instantly with a relative in the capital Honiara, or someone else overseas, simply at the press of a button. And the beauty of the system, and what makes it successful so far is its low cost. Under Pfnet, an email sent from one of its rural centers to anywhere around the globe costs a mere SOL$2, irrespective of the length of the message.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ishotmyself.com: autoerotica

Project_ISM is a public art apparatus. Each day we exhibit a new folio in which the artist presents herself in a bold statement about nudity, fame and the Internet. This is Selfploitation. It can make you look, make you think, make you jelly-kneed, and if you want, it can even make you famous.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:13:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

But nobody knows what time it is

Unbeknown to most people there is not a single accepted way of telling the time, but several different scales running concurrently. The differences are usually small, but the scales can be as much as 30 seconds apart and the gap between them is growing steadily.

Aircraft navigation systems tell a different time from the watches of passengers, pilots and air traffic controllers. Experts are warning that this could spell disaster...

"We should only have one type of timescale throughout the world," says Bill Klepczynski, a time expert who advises the federal aviation administration. "There's a possibility for danger..."

The problem arises because the Earth cannot keep time as accurately as modern atomic clocks, which count the steady shaking of atoms. These atomic clocks replaced the motion of the Earth as the world's official timekeeper in 1967. The pull of the moon is gradually slowing our planet down, so every now and then our clocks are halted for a second to let it catch up.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:09:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, August 3, 2003

Friendster parodies, party umptybillion-deux: STDster

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:33:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First Bollywood sci-fi epic

'KOI MIL GAYA' or 'Found Someone,' set for release next week, features one of India's most popular stars, Hrithik Roshan, who plays the role of an adult whose mental abilities have not grown beyond those of an 11-year-old.

He accidentally establishes contact with aliens while playing around with a computer left behind by his dead father, a scientist obsessed with extraterrestrial life.

'We thought we should try something different and stop making formula films which are very safe,' Rakesh Roshan, Hrithik's father, who has produced and directed 'Koi Mil Gaya,' told a news conference.

The filmmaker, who has several hits to his credit, said he was willing to risk showing his son prancing around as an 11-year-old rather than the cliched muscle-flexing romantic hero that has won Hrithik scores of hysterical female fans.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:37:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gillmor on VoIP

Previously, I had two phone lines into my house, each costing almost $20 a month for the dial tone plus local calls. One of those lines was split to also handle digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband data access. In addition, I paid a long-distance carrier per-minute rates and a monthly connection charge.

Today I have one phone line, split into voice and DSL services. But I also have a new box attached to the network that links my phone to the Internet.

The system converts voice into Internet data packets -- little packages of data that go to and fro on the Net -- and vice versa. For $20 a month, the box gives me unlimited calls inside the United States and Canada. International calls are extra, but at laughably low rates such as 5 cents a minute to Japan and 12 cents a minute to South Africa.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:27:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

San Francisco restaurant hygeine

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:13:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stross on mini-PCs

And the next thing: at a very specific level, mini-ITX motherboards and cases are The Way To Go. Tiny, cheap, fanless PCs with trailing-edge processors -- only 1GHz -- are nevertheless a really amazingly cool idea, especially when you start thinking in terms of turning them into personal video recorders (running things like FreeVo) or in-car GPS navigation systems. Or Beowulf clusters. Marketing hype has obsessed most punters with clock speed, so that the owner of a 2.4GHz processor sneers at their neighbour with the 2.1GHz clock -- but if both machines have the same bus frequency, memory, and disk architecture, all the extra CPU speed means is that the faster machine will spend more time in cache stalls. "Slower" computers (we're still talking faster than a Cray XMP here) that don't sound like an air conditioning system, that can run off a trickle of current and live in a case the size of a paperback book, and that are tailored to a specific task, are really useful.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:06:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dave Nelson(s) versus the TSA

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:51:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gladiator algorithms

In each battle, programs fought to gain control of processing power in a huge parallel computer.

Besides giving computer scientists an excuse to tear themselves away from their terminals the contest also has scientific merit, according to some contestants. "Grid Wars gave me the opportunity to test my algorithm," says Mark Wenig, one of the finalists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It is a perfect environment to test and compare different approaches."

The contest began with 236 different programs, submitted by universities, government research departments and software companies from around the world. The objective of each entrant was to fight for control of 2500 computer processors.

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

Why John Gilmore is a Suspected Terrorist

The button is not a joke. It's a serious statement which one may agree or disagree with. The point that people seem to be missing is that a "suspected terrorist" is not the same as a "terrorist". Yet, that's exactly the conflation that has occurred: treat every citizen like a suspect, and every suspect like a terrorist...

On the BA flight, in my carry-on bag, I had brought the current issue of Reason magazine, which has a cover story with my picture and the label "Suspected Terrorist". (It didn't even occur to me to censor my reading material on the flight; I must need political retraining. I hadn't read most of the issue, including Declan's piece in it, plus I wanted to show it to Europeans I met on my vacation.) During the British Airways incident I never removed the magazine from my bag, but supposing I had done so, and merely sat in my seat and read it, would that have been grounds to remove me from the flight (button or no button)?

I am not a lawyer (lucky me!) but I do follow legal issues. The carriage of passengers by common carriers is governed by their tariffs, filed with the government. Common carriers are NOT permitted to refuse service to anybody for any reason. In return they are not held liable for the acts of their customers (e.g. transporting dangerous substances, purloined intellectual property, etc). BA's "Conditions of Carriage" are part of their tariffs (other parts include their prices, etc). You will note paragraph 7: they can refuse passage... 7) If you have not obeyed the instructions of our ground staff or a member of the crew of the aircraft relating to safety or security. The crew ONLY has the authority to order passengers around when the orders relate to safety or security. An order to cease reading a book would not qualify.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:41:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, August 2, 2003

TSA adds "sarcasm" to list of aviation risks

''[Expletive] you. Stay the [expletive] out of my bag you [expletive] sucker. Have you found a [expletive] bomb yet? No, just clothes. Am I right? Yea, so [expletive] you.''

You know, the more I think about this the worse it gets. The TSA is poormouthing at Congress, saying that it's run out of money and can't adequately defend our skies, and yet it can spare its highly trained crack professionals to go chasing off on ridiculous power-flexing exercises like this?

And before anyone posts the inevitable, "But the kid showed poor judgement in putting that note in his luggage," comment in the Discuss link, let me point out three things:

1. He is a kid; kids are supposed to have poor judgement -- that's why we don't let them vote. If our national security depends on teenagers abstaining from foolishness, we are doomed.
2. The TSA screeners are adults. What's more, they're adults who are supposed to be professional risk-assessors. If the people who found that note couldn't evaluate its risk any better than they did at Logan airport, we are doomed.
3. Look me in the screen and tell me that you haven't had the exact same thought while having some blank-eyed bureaucrat rummaging through your dirty underwear. If that sentiment endangers aircrafts, we are doomed.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:03:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Censorship: How scandals get neutralized

The New Censorship does not work by keeping things secret. Are our leaders liars and criminals? Is the government run by wealthy corporations and political elites? Are we all being slowly poisoned? The answer is yes to all of the above, and there's hardly a soul on these shores who doesn't know it. The reign of George II practically revels in this perverse transparency. Oil policy created in backrooms with lobbyists from Enron and ExxonMobil. Naked pandering to the electricity industry in rolling back clean-air mandates. Accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen buying even "watchdog" liberal senators such as Christopher Dodd. Elections rigged with brother Jeb's connivance in Florida. All of the details are utterly public, reported in newspapers, television newscasts and books, yet it's perfectly safe for this stuff to be known. The genius of the New Censorship is that it works through the obscenity of absolute openness. Iraq-gate wasn't a secret. The real secret is that it wasn't a secret, and certainly wasn't a scandal. It was business as usual. The betrayal of a public trust is a daily story manipulated by the media within the narrative confines of "scandal," when in fact it's all a part of the daily routine and everyone knows it. The media makes pornography out of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our "entertainment" and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a resellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!

All this being the case, what consequences can we expect from the work of Chalmers Johnson or Noam Chomsky? None. Their writings are taken up as a part of the spectrum (a modestly disturbing part of the spectrum to be sure) of info-pornographics. The truth-function of Chomsky's work is neutralized because there are people who will participate in actions leading to death and worse all over the world and then tell you about it. In detail. In great detail. The truth is that everything is known, the revelations grotesquely vivid.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:46:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RAPS: a fantastic way to protect your laptop

Joe Clark described it most lyrically:

In half a second Cory had whipped out a quilted metallic yellow rectangle, flipped it over, and unvelcroed two flaps, which revealed two more Velcro flaps. This was his 22nd-century laptop case...

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

Great snarky photo-caption

Dear Japanese people:

Please stop exploring your sexuality. It really freaks us out.

Love, American People.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, August 1, 2003

Ellis's Switchblade Honey

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:54:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage computer ads: "Digital Data Porn"

Link, Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:26:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecam helps foil alleged child kidnapping attempt

The teen gave the evidence to police, who arrested a suspect the next day. "It's surprising the kid had the presence of mind to use the technology under duress," Det. Capt. Robert Rowan told The Record of Bergen County. A spokeswoman for Sprint, whose phone the boy used, said she had never heard of someone using the new technology to catch a criminal.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:57:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sweet new Minox digital camera

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:41:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friendster parodies, party umptybillion: Introvertster

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:04:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I know who I'm voting for: Larry Flynt for CA Governor

The registered Democrat, civil libertarian and free speech advocate said he'd solve California's budget woes by expanding slot machine gambling. His holdings include several casinos. "California is the most progressive state in the union," said Flynt, 61. "I don't think anyone here will have a problem with a smut peddler as governor." Flynt had not yet paid the $3,500 filing fee by Thursday afternoon, according to the California Secretary of State Web site. More than 250 people statewide have taken the very first step of filing the paperwork with county registrars, according to the site."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:59:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rutan private spacecraft in flight

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:18:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK bans iPod-to-FM-radio gadget

A N Micro, the UK distributor of the iTrip, said use of the device was prohibited under the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949. The act forbids the use of radio equipment without a license or an exemption. The iTrip transmits at very low power on an FM frequency and so in theory could interfere with broadcasts from a radio station.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:42:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: crafts

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

Sen Coleman admits to downloading MP3s, but denies inhaling

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fogscreen: ethereal display

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

RoboGrill to displace McDonald's burger-flippers

Later this year, a Chicago-area McDonald’s restaurant will fry up hamburgers with an automated grill that dispenses patties directly onto the griddle from a separate freezer compartment, reducing labor and promising fresher sandwiches.

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

Kensington keychain WiFinder sucks

I immediately tried it, since I have an open AP at home. At the time, there were no clients on the network, just the AP happily sending out beacon packets. The WiFinder didn't detect anything. I double-checked the settings of the AP and tried it again. Still no signal registering on the WiFinder.

On a hunch, I started up a couple WLAN clients and had them stream some music and d/l some game demos in order to create a good amount of 802.11b traffic. The WiFinder eventually did pick up the activity, but as soon as the traffic stopped (leaving the AP beacon only), the WiFinder couldn't find anything.

I was going to give their support organization some time to answer a few questions I submitted before contacting you and others, but when I was told that it would be 2 days before I would hear something, I had to start spreading the news.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments