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Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Countdown to NYE Times Square QTVR pano!

Happy New Year, everyone! Jim Galvin of "Virtual Tour of NYC" says:

Hi Xeni, Jook Leung who shot this QTVR of Times Square last year will be in TS again tonight and I anticipate that he will have another stunning QTVR completed and up on the web by 4 or 5 am. I don't have a URL yet but I'm sure that panoramas.dk will have it first.

Update: Leung does it again: a magnificent panorama of NYE*NYC*TS*04, with sound, right here (cropped thumbnail at left).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:41:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Naked Barbie walks free

John Parres points us to an interesting chunk of copyright news:

Court rules on Naked Barbie: We know art when we see it

An artist's use of the iconic Barbie doll in photographs depicting the Mattel toy without clothing and being assaulted by kitchen appliances is protected as "free speech" says a US Circuit Court. Upholding a decision by a lower court, the court of appeals said the works are obvious parodies and do not infringe on the company's copyright and trademark protection. Mattel had claimed people might think they were responsible for the caricatures and that their availability to the public could damage the brand and even hurt sales. At issue was a 78 image series by Utah artist Thomas Forsythe, shot in 1999 and titled "Food Chain Barbie."

Once widely available online, the series has been the subject of intense legal action by Mattel and only a few images remain available for download. In the latest ruling, a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld an August 2001 ruling by US District Judge Ronald Lew. Following that earlier decision, which Mattel appealed, Mr Forsythe's attorney, Simon Frankel, told the press, "The ruling doesn't mean it's open season (to exploit products by) Mattel, it means there is a certain amount of breathing room for artists who want to use a commercial symbol that has tremendous cultural meaning, for purposes of artistic expression."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:09:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photoblogging/phonecamblogging services: watch the terms and conditions...

BoingBoing reader Cassandra Fleetwood asks:

Do you know of a site to post photos where one still retains ownership of their photos? I noticed this is not the case for Textamerica (see excerpt from their Terms and Conditions below).

From Textamerica Terms and Conditions
"12. All images and comments posted on Textamerica.com, regardless of the source or content, immediately shall become the exclusive property of Liberation Management LLC. By posting images and text on Textamerica.com, you are representing that you are the owner of such images/text and thereby assign to Liberation Management LLC any ownership interests you have in the images/text, including your copyrights. By posting images or comments on Textamerica.com, you further agree that Liberation Management LLC shall have the right to use your images/text for any purpose without compensation to you and shall not be responsible to you for unauthorized copying of the images/text."

Link, and thoughts / suggestions from other BoingBoing readers welcome via our submission form.

Update: Textamerica responds by removing the phrase "All images and comments posted on Textamerica.com, regardless of the source or content, immediately shall become the exclusive property of Liberation Management LLC" from the service terms and conditions. The moral of this blog-post? With this or any online service, read the site terms and conditions carefully, and be aware that, as Textamerica's site states, "[They] may change from time to time." .

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:06:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, December 30, 2003

Nihon Break Kogyo

BoingBoing reader Dav says:

JapanToday has an article about an unlikely hit pop song. The song is the official song for a demolition company, composed and performed by one of the workers. After it was picked up and played on a TV show, the company began getting so many calls that they started to sell recordings of it. I usually don't suggest links to my own blog, but in this case I haven't found a better link, since I've collected the english translation of the lyrics and the link to the original Japan Today article together. I've been looking around for an MP3 to no avail. I figure a post about the song on BB might help in that search :)

The sound is, like, really fast drum-n-bass mashed up with a bad TV show theme. Link

update: Oliver Schnarchendorf says, "This site contains a flash animation containing the construction company song."

Jim Spurrier says, "This link contains the mp3 file for the Japanese NBK construction theme song. I don't know how stable the site is, but it oughta hold long enough for you to d/l the thing before the boing-dotting commences."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:22:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hardware Openness Factor

BoingBoing reader Owen Williams points us to:

.... a short article asking reviewers of hardware devices to add a score to their reviews: the openness factor. For instance, when I buy this mp3 player, what will it let me do, and how am I restricted? I've come up with a simple 4-point scale of openness from crippled products that subvert standards to lock you in (remember DivX?), to complete freedom (palmOS or modern hardware).

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:07:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fray: Tell your holiday story!

Derek Powazek says:

Come read Fray's special holiday story by Beth Lisick: Kathy's Annual Ladies Luncheon. It's about her family's annual Christmas gathering, and how it went very, very wrong one year. Have you just had a harrowing holiday? Tell your story!

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:02:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogger Chris Allbritton heads back to Iraq

BoingBoing reader Clive says:

Chris Allbritton was the first truly blog-created journalist -- a former Associated Press guy who raised $13,000 in donations from the audience of his blog Back To Iraq, to pay for a reporting trip to Iraq during the war. With no editors to please, he was able to cover whatever stories he and his audience wanted. Now his readers have asked him to do another trip -- so he's started another fundraising drive. If you want to support truly independent war reporting, drop by his site and throw some change in his Paypal jar.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:01:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bang the Machine - Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts

BoingBoing reader Alex Steffen points us to a new exhibition opening in January at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Jan 17–Apr 4, 2004:

In conjunction with the Stanford Humanities Laboratory and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, the Center presents an exhibition that addresses the pervasive influence of video game culture. The program explores a variety of subject areas, from the evolution of the game and its roots in military training applications to its contemporary features and cross-fertilization with artistic endeavors. Among the anticipated projects included in the exhibition are: an interactive lemon tree-powered hand held games by acclaimed artist and graphic designer, Amy Franceschini; renderings of historic events in the isometric perspective of video games by John Haddock; and a curated show in a virtual Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in The Sims Online created by Katherine Isbister/Rainey Straus. Also on display is an interactive video game created by the youth from YBCA's education program, Young Artists at Work. An exhibition plug-in by KOP, Game Commons, will accompany the exhibition.

Link

Update: BoingBoing reader Seth claims the exhibition's title is a case of unfair name-poaching:

Just a bitchy complaint to say that the title of this art exhibition poaches directly the name of a preexisting documentary film on Street Fighter videogame players (which was at SXSW, Sundance, etc. about 2 years ago). The film's producer (my friend Peter Kang) has been inundated by emails and calls asking whether the film (understandably very popular with gamers at festivals, but not yet in full release due to music licensing issues, and therefore more tantalizingly difficult to see) is playing at this show, to which it has no connection at all.

The Center seems to have poached the name. Even among hardcore players given to obscurantism and inbred slang, this phrase is (or was, pre-documentary) totally obscure. The festival organizers ignored totally repeated attempts by Peter (who ran the fabulously successful boutique design co. Kioken, and is too nice/busy to think about really pushing them, though he is understandably really upset- he's got a very expensive property which they're obfuscating) to at least clarify the situation, before finally responding to say "We came up with it on our own" (???- seems uncontroversially a reference to *something*) and "it refers to pinball". The "pinball" followup at least makes the "we came up with it on our own" sound remotely plausible, though in fact those answers (from the same person) are simply mutually exclusive. Further "pinball" is a pretty implausible inspiration for a naming a show that has no connection whatsoever to pinball. Like most arts center people trying to stay on top of the ever-cresting wave of cool, they probably asked someone whom they adjudged "hip", who coughed up the last sexy-sounding game-related phrase they'd heard. And even if they had somehow come upon this themselves, it doesn't seem really to matter- there's still the copyright stemming from the creation of a known property. I guess being an arts center means you're free to give actual artists the finger?

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

Kirk! Sings! Again!

According to a NY Post article, referenced in this CBC.ca article, William Shatner will soon release a new album -- produced by Ben Folds of Ben Folds Five fame. Guests are said to include country star Brad Paisley and former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins, whose performances have also been described from time to time as examples of "either impassioned intensity or pompous overacting."

The new album isn't the first foray into recording for the Montreal-born actor best known for playing James T. Kirk, the captain of the starship Enterprise on the original Star Trek series. In 1968, Shatner released his first album The Transformed Man, which includes spoken-word cover versions of the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man. Although Shatner intended The Transformed Man to be taken seriously, it's become something of a camp classic. The Hip Surgery Music Guide, an internet guide that celebrates offbeat musical genres, says the songs can be taken as examples of "either impassioned intensity or pompous overacting."

Link (via pho)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:18:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Get your hot live naked anonymous moblog photos right here, folks

Jason Calacanis, founder of Venture Reporter, Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs Inc., etc., blogs thusly:

Phil [Kaplan] (aka PUD) of FuckedCompany.com fame has started an anonymous moblogging project. Basically you send your photo to pics@mobog.com and a minute later they are on his site ready for users to make comments on them.

Jeff Jarvis calls it anonymous instant photophone moblogging, a phrase which is giving me a heavy wallop of jargon vertigo right about now.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:04:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mobile carriers brace for New Year's textstravaganza

Telecom providers in Australia, Japan, and Europe are bracing for a bumper crop of text-messaged new year's greetings:

Mobile phone companies are bolstering networks in anticipation of a record 35 million text messages New Year's Eve revellers will send tonight. The figure would surpass the record estimated 29 million text messages on Christmas Day. With many texters in places where it will be hard to hear a phone ring, never mind hold a phone conversation, some are predicting the volume of text messages could eclipse voice calls for the first time. A Telstra spokesman said that on Christmas Day customers made 15 million voice calls and sent 11.8 million text messages. Virgin, which has the smallest, but youngest and most text-mad customer base, expects to carry about 4 million messages on New Year's Eve - an average of 10 texts per customer.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:38:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Perry Barlow now has a blog

Right here: Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:27:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Art: Eric White

(via Wiley's blog)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:20:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, December 29, 2003

Hoder on Bam earthquake and Iran's goverment

Hossein Derakshan, a native of Tehran who now resides in Canada, posted this today on his English-language blog -- "When people have different needs than the state." Snip:

Nothing could ever show the real sense of diconnectivity and distrust between Iranian people and the Islamic regime, and its deeply dysfunctionality better than a devastating quake. Everywhere you go and every blog you read, there is talk about the political implications of such tragedy going on.

People inside and outside Iran are desperately trying to gather donations, but they don't want to give the money to the government. They'd rather give the aids directly to the International organizations or trusted NGOs and persons in Iran whom they are sure have nothing to do with the regime and its institutions. For instance, Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel laureate has stepped in and announced measures to directly gather people's aids. This amount of distrust and disconnectedness has never been see before.

However, the reason is pretty clear: When a government can run the whole country only by the oil and gas income, it doesn't have to answer its people's needs; it only thinks about its own needs. (In 2004, Iran will have $16 billion revenue from oil export, while it only depends on approximately 18% of citizen's taxes.)

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:26:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FBI warns of terrorists toting copies of Old Farmers' Almanac

My country grows stranger by the day. The elderly Italian lady who lives next door to me annotates her almanac to keep track of which moon phases bode best for planting, thinning, or harvesting fresh back yard arugula. Suspicious ways? She's definitely attempting to maximize the likelihood of operational success through careful planning. If the taste of the fresh, shared greens she drops off on my doorstep in brown paper bags are any proof -- it's working.

The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning.

In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning." It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways. "The practice of researching potential targets is consistent with known methods of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations that seek to maximize the likelihood of operational success through careful planning," the FBI wrote.

Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:06:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Best geek gift yet: decommissioned aircraft carrier

Sorry I missed this when we were assembling lists of hot geek gadget gift ideas last week for NPR. L@@@K! Excellent buyer! A+++++! Would do business again!

Aircraft carrier (deommissioned ) for sale.
Vehicle Description: This maybe the first ever aircraft carrier (decommissioned 2001) available for auction at EBAY ! But the auction was delisted not long ago due to accusation wrongly made by a suspicious customer. We showed evidence that this vessel is DECOMMISSIONED and therefore not Ordanance. We are shipbroker and not arms dealer. We shipbrokers do not have the ownership of the vessels we sell, as none of the shipbrokers does, just as your real estate broker cannot ask you to transfer the title of your house to him before he start selling propery for you.
Current bid: US $6,000,000.00.

Link (via Geeknews)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:40:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BoingBoing exclusive: new cartoon from Graham Roumieu

Click this cropped sneak peek (or here) for full-size image. Here's a fresh piece from Canadian illustrator and cartoonist Graham Roumieu, who is a very sick a very talented man.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:21:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Funding drive for Wikipedia

BoingBoing reader Michael Reeve says:

I'm sure I'm not the only person to recommend this page for inclusion - concerning Wikipedia's appeal for funding. OK, at the time of writing, they've already reached their target, but a little more certainly won't hurt.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:15:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Applying For Prix Ars Electronica's new "Digital Communities" cash prize

So, what exactly does one call a cash prize for weblogs? Bling-blog? Digital arttfest Ars Electronica recently announced that the 2004 competition will include the new category "Digital Communities," awarding cash prizes to projects of great sociopolitical relevance. Howard Rheingold posts more details on his blog, including a snip from instructions on how to apply. Thanks to all who have suggested BoingBoing as an entrant, but since co-editor Cory is a judge this will not be possible.

Prix Ars Electronica, the foremost international prize for computer-based art, offers an open platform for the encounter with leading-edge trends in art, technology, and society. Over the last 17 years, more than 24,800 works from 87 countries have been submitted for Prix Ars Electronica consideration. With a total prize money of 130,000 Euro this year, and no participation fee, it is the highest endowed and most reknown competition in this field worldwide.

The new category "Digital Communities" - to be awarded for the first time in 2004 - encompasses the wide-ranging social consequences of the Internet as well as the latest developments in the domain of mobile communications and wireless networks. "Digital Communities" will spotlight bold and inspired innovations impacting human coexistence, bridging the digital divide regarding gender as well as geography, or creating outstanding social software and enhancing accessibility of technological-social infrastructure.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:12:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney tweaks privacy policy; allows promotions

BoingBoing reader Caines says:

Walt Disney has revised its online privacy policy to allow the sharing of user information to third parties, the company confirmed on Tuesday. New registrants who accept Disney's privacy policy during registration also accept all marketing options by default. They have to manually turn them off later if they want to opt out. A Disney representative said the changes were made to help customer service operate more effectively between its offline and online businesses.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:07:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Does this car make my ass look big?

BoingBoing reader Clive says:

Patent #6,649,848 is for "Vehicle with on-board dieters' weight progress indentifying and control system and method". In plain english, that means it's a car that weighs you when you sit in it -- and yells at you if you're getting fat. There's also a story in the New York Times about it today.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:05:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will the real Antarctic Anti-santa please stand up?

Leave it to me to botch the geographic details of recent posts about Santarchy sightings in Antarctica. Look, I live in LA. Anything south of Wilshire is a remote southern terrain, as far as I'm concerned.

Nevertheless, Oren Leaffer, a member of the National Science Foundation's United Stated Antarctic Program who is evidently stationed near the South Pole, writes:

"I just saw your boingboing posts on the Santas in Mactown, well that's not even part of Antartica (it's on Ross Island). Here at the south pole we had the anti-santa [left], who liked to point out that while Santa brings you coal if you're naughty, here a lump of coal would be a good thing. Happy newyear and whatnot."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:06:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, December 28, 2003

Thoughts on Bam earthquake from Iranian bloggers

The recent earthquake in Bam, Iran may have claimed as many as 40,000 lives by some estimates. Sorting through the Persian blogosphere, you'll find a number of sites where residents and expatriates are posting about this tragedy, and its impact on their country's future.

Hossein Derakshan has yet to sound out on his English-language site, but there's a post on his Farsi blog for those who read Farsi. Among the English-language sites where posts are already out: Persianblogger.com, Pesmanesque, Days of My Life In California, Iranian Truth, Iranfilter, Eyeranian, HumanFirstThenaProudIranian. Many more are listed here, including blogs written in Farsi (there are probably more than 12,000 of them -- here is a good background piece on the Persian blogosphere, from Wired News). And finally, Doug Rushkoff (not Persian) has this to say.

BoingBoing welcomes pointers to other sites sounding out on the Bam earthquake via this form.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:36:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New, sneaky, evil PayPal spoof.

Mike Outmesguine points us to yet another new riff on the classic PayPal scam (click thumbnail for full-size image):

I got this email that looks like it came from PayPal. Of course, I didn't believe it for a second. But I'm sure others would. Digging deeper, the URL redirects people to a site in China that uses the IE URL spoof to seem like it's sitting at paypal.com. Insidious! I reported this to Paypal and they confirmed it's a spoof site. Here's the breakdown:

1. URL included in the original email:
<a href="http://www.paypal.com%01%01%01%01%01%01%
01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%
01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01@pp.youlikeshe.com ">click here</a>
2. jump-off site pp.youlikeshe.com
3. Actual site being loaded (remove spaces to activate): www . Epack . Ch/p/verify.htm
4. Spoofed to appear as www.paypal.com using the IE URL spoof vulnerability shown here:
<script language="JavaScript"> location.href=unescape('http://www.paypal.com%01@www.epack.ch/p/verify.htm '); </script>

Microsoft has not released a patch for this URL vulnerability. Now it seems there is a real-world attack, albeit only to Paypal members so far. Sneaky buggers!

Update/Correction: BoingBoing reader Fraser Cole in Ottowa says, "Hello, just a friendly note regarding the PayPal scam. I'm probably not the first to point out that the final destination site is in the .ch domain, which of course is Switzerland, not China. Maybe since they're in Europe they can be tracked down easier?"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:25:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired: 24-Hour Movie People

Choire "Gawker Guy" Sicha writes:

Recently I was invited to spend the night with two lovely ladies, writer Xeni Jardin and photographer Aliya Naumoff. We didn't sleep for a day and a half! Oh, the hilarity. Anyway, the result: a documentation of the 24-hour digital movie-making contest here in New York. To celebrate, here's a shot of Xeni, who by that point was powered solely by espresso and her iron will, stealth-discoing our non-sleep-deprived editor Rob [Levine] at the Wired offices.

24-Hour Movie People, Wired, January 2004

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:21:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, December 27, 2003

Kevin Kelly: Powering Virtuous Circles

In the latest edition of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools ezine, some thoughts on giving:

There's no shortage of opportunities to support important causes. Lot of charities are local and community based. Some are more internationally- and future-oriented such as Amnesty International, EFF, Long Now Fondation, World Vision, the AFCLU, and Oxfam to name just a few. Everyone can add their favorite. But let's say you were interested in a "tool" to leverage the least amount of money into the largest measurable effect over time. For that I'd like to recommend a type of giving that multiplies itself. Over the years, these are the criteria I've adopted for this challenge:

1) The help is aimed at the lowest, those with the least, where small makes a huge difference.
2) The gift expands itself, gaining amplitude with each cycle.
3) The range is global.

Think of it as enabling philanthropy: take a minimum of money and aim it at the precise point where it can do the maximum good, multiplied by many generations. Maximum good is measured simply: when you enable someone to enable someone else. That is a virtuous circle. I've found the follow three do-good organizations to meet these criteria. They fund the neediest in the world. They are highly-evolved programs that produce amazing results. And one tangential result is that when we give to these three, we feel optimistic.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:05:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Holiday Leftover Zen

holiday medley
nativity
winter scene
dancing santa
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:01:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, December 26, 2003

What to do in LA: see NANO exhibit at LACMA

Recently opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: "nano," a cool art/science exhibit for geeks of all ages:

nano [is] an exhibition that merges the arts and the atom by presenting the world of nanoscience through a participatory aesthetic experience. The exhibition, a collaboration between LACMALab and a UCLA team of nanoscience, media arts, and humanities experts, is free to the public and runs through September 6, 2004 in LACMA's Boone Children's Gallery.

This groundbreaking project provides a greater understanding of how art, science, culture, and technology influence each other. The exhibition addresses sophisticated subject matter that is especially relevant for the next generation. Modular, experiential spaces using embedded computing technologies engage all of the senses to provoke a broader understanding of nanoscience and its cultural ramifications. The various components of nano are designed to immerse the visitor in the radical shifts of scale and sensory modes that characterize nanoscience, which works on the scale of a billionth of a meter. Participants can feel what it is like to manipulate atoms one by one and experience nano-scale structures by engaging in art-making activities.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:33:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Filmica: New collaborative blog about film launches in Spain

Caspa.tv blog founder Antonio Delgado, who gave me a personal guided tour of all things geeky in Barcelona not long ago, sends word of a new addition to Spain's growing blogosphere:

Mainly composed of weblogs, Filmica project was born to become an open platform devoted to the present and future of the film and TV industries, collaborating the dialogue and extracting the knowledge from the information that is flowing on many spaces.

Each weblog is a personal site where authors freely write and comment about topics of their interest. Directors, producers, script-writers, journalists, proffessionals and fans will have their weblog installed and ready for them to write, freely. No computer skills required. At this moment, Filmica.com is at beta stage, finishing some adjustments and designs. The official opening is expected at the begining of 2004. People interested to open a weblog in Filmica should send an e-mail to weblogs@filmica.com, describing who the author is and what the subject of the weblog will be. The proposals will be reviewed.

Links: Spanish, English

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:29:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

On Your Mark, Get Set, Unwire!

On a recent trip to Spain, I caught up with Blast Theory cofounder Matt Adams for a chat about the wireless games his company develops -- high-adrenaline, multiplayer roleplaying experiences like "Can You See Me Now" and "Uncle Roy is All Around You." Here's a snip from Adams' explanation of these games, which take place simultaneously in virtual space and real space:

"It's a chase played simultaneously online (by the public) and in the streets (by assigned participants). You're dropped into a virtual city, you use avatars to navigate, and there's a chat interface so that real-world and online participants can text one another.

"You're chased in the real city and the virtual city, at the same time. Three runners on the street are equipped with PDAs, GPS devices and walkie-talkies. To "get" you, they have to come within five meters of your position. The game is physical and visceral, and we were amazed at just how clearly a sense of presence in time and space was communicated. Players in Seattle, Tokyo and Germany communicating with players on the ground in the U.K. could hear weather conditions, traffic, where the busy roads were -- "Hey, this road's jammed, why don't you zigzag back and forth here?" They learned where hills and valleys were along the game terrain -- "This one's too steep, go there instead."

When virtual players heard a runner say, "OK, she's really close now -- let's run up and get her," they told us the hair stood up on the back of their necks with an adrenaline rush -- "Shit! They're coming for me now" -- it was one of those things we thought would be interesting ahead of time, but had no idea there would be such a strong emotional and physical reaction in an online environment.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:18:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Happy Holidays from Hollywood

Feliz Navidad, y un prospero año nuevo a todos ustedes. Snapshot of the foot of the Xmas tree, here at casa Xeni. Best wishes to all of you out in pixel-land who visit our humble blog. Peace and happiness to you and your families in the new year, and thank you for stopping by.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:31:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy Holidays!

I've had an interesting year. On January 1, 2003, Carla and I decided we would sell our house and move with our two daughters to the South Pacific. We started packing and were surrounded by boxes for weeks and weeks.

Five months later, we were on a plane bound for Rarotonga. It was wonderful (no stress, living in a house next to the ocean and walking barefoot everywhere) and awful (the baby got antibiotic-resistant pneumonia and the hospital sucked, lice, tropical sores, ceaseless weeks of rain).

Four and a half months after that, we were back in Los Angeles. We bought a car (a neat Scion Xb) and a house the first week we got back. We lived at Carla's mother's house for two months.

Now we're in our new house, surrounded by boxes, and I feel like I haven't been anywhere or done anything. Rarotonga, Aitutaki, New Zealand, and Australia seem like a daydream I had while shuffling around these boxes.

Happy holidays to all of you. I appreciate all the great suggestions you've submitted to Boing Boing. And many thanks to David, Xeni, and Cory for all their wonderful entries!

-- Mark

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:55:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Utne chooses Howard Rheingold's 'Smart Mobs' for Award

Roland Piquepaille says: "This is the end of the year and so it is time to give awards for 2003. And Utne Magazine just picked Smart Mobs, the collective blog led by Howard Rheingold for this year's Utne Independent Press Award for best online cultural coverage. This overview tells you why this award is deserved, what are smart mobs, and why you should become a smartmobber in 2004. It also includes a little-known picture of Howard *working* in his *office*. Link

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

R.U. Sirius interviews Richard Metzger

Boing Boing pal R.U. Sirius interviews Boing Boing pal Richard Metzger (Editor of Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult) in the latest issue of R.U.'s online magazine The NeoFiles:

"Most people have this assumption that magick is all about some kind of 'hocus pocus' or 'eye of newt, tongue of toad' thing or the sort of 'incense and affirmations' school of thought that a lot of New Agers and Wiccans are into. I don't see it that way. When I was a teenager, I read in one of the RE/Search books that a modern magician uses the tools of their time. It was Genesis P-Orridge, the rock star, who said that, and it made a major impression on me. He meant that a modern day "sorcerer" would employ video cameras, printing presses, television, electronic instruments, the Internet and so forth to work their magick and since so much of magick is about INTENT, then it stands to reason that something like the Internet can have magical uses. Advertising, too, is a magical act and so is PR, basically. Advertising allows these big corporations to create a desire in the center of your head that you should run out and buy things you don't need! That is magick, right? Right."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:18:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Shirley has a weblog

One of my favorite authors, John Shirley, has a blog. John is the original cyberpunk writer. If William Gibson is Johnny Rotten, John Shirley is Richard Hell. Here's what Gibson says in his forward to Shirley's 1980 novel City Come A-Walkin':

John Shirley was cyberpunk's patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent. A Carrier. City Come A-Walkin' is evidence of that and more. (I was somewhat chagrined, rereading it recently, to see just how much of my own early work takes off from this one novel.)

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

John's new blog is well worth reading! Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:25:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More Santarchy in Antarctica

Somewhere in Antarctica, a woman in a Santa suit is blogging. Alli, aka Sandwichgirl, e-mails BoingBoing with this update on holiday preparations and the spread of Santarchy down south. And by "down south," I mean way, way, way down south. Click thumbnails for larger images.

if there is a god or santa, i must have done something to piss them off in the dish line cause santawich got no love from the health fairy. a week and a half ago, i was told i have a stomach virus. after a very humbling 4 days, a cough that bruised my ribs, a fever of 102, and a vicious lung infection kicked my ass the one week i have been looking forward to since before i came to antarctica.

i have been trapped in my little crap dorm watching no less than 15 movies, wishing, for once, i could be at work. i wanted to be making cookies. i wanted to be slacking off in the name of christmas. i wanted to be taking advantage of all our volunteers. feck. so i stayed in bed the past 4 days. hacking, breathing, sweating, crapping. did i mention the 15 movies i watched? maybe it was more.

today was the first day i emerged since saturday night. i asked medical if icould borrow a wheelchair to make a grand appearance into the galley but they said they needed it for 'real emergencies'. then i asked the firefighters if they could carry me in, but most the firefighters i know were off base on some call. so, i trudged in on my own, clad in santa. it was hilarious, watching santas collect their food from the hot lines, then along table full of santas, eating together in peace and harmony.

after i watched everyone eat (i still have zero appetite), i hung around to watch the community file in and react. it was amusing, but i had to do something less stimulating or perhaps i would die. there were lots of people taking pictures and video. i promise i will report within the next few days. here's a few things. i'm going back to the galley now to see how things are progressing. tonight i want to go out for a little while to get some shots around town. thank you for everything. the galley staff thanks you! -- santawich

(Thanks, David)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:23:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, December 23, 2003

Santarchy in Antarctica

Click thumbnail for full-size image. The RSA's David Calkins shares this snapshot of Santarchy mayhem afoot on the ice continent (left), and says:

"Santacon comes to Antarctica! Yeah! There will be a 36-Santa rampage tomorrow and Thursday. I know... Because me 'n' Rob (who founded Santarchy) bought those 36 suits and shipped 'em to my friend Allie, who works at McMurdo (bigdeadplace.com!)."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:44:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photographer James Nachtwey

War photographer James Nachtwey was injured earlier this month in Iraq.

Image: "Iraqi soldiers search for what they thought was a downed American pilot along the banks of the Tigris River. No pilot was found, and the U.S. denied that any aviator had been lost over Baghdad." This is a link to his work this Spring in Iraq. I understand he will release more work shot in Iraq in the coming months.

This book of his work released a few years ago is fantastic. There's an update about his condition online here. (thanks Invisible Cowgirl)

Update: The Nachtwey documentary was just released on DVD. Link (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:28:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Town of Bourton's miniature model has a miniature model of the model (and so on)

Mark Bourne says: So my wife Elizabeth and I are googling up possibilities for our long trip to England next year. Checking out London sites and so on. An acquaintance suggested staying for a few days in the Cotswolds, a scenic Middle Earthy region west of London. That's how we found a page about the town of Bourton.

You just gotta love this text, which blends Ye Olde Scepter'd Isle with sci-fi gee-wizardry:

You will probably have noticed that when you take a branch from certain trees (some conifers for example), the branch looks like a miniature version of the tree, and when you break a piece off the branch, that looks like a tree too. Mathematicians call this property self-similarity.

Bourton has a wonderful example of self-similarity: it contains a 1/10 scale model of itself. Because the 1/10 scale model is a complete model of the town, it must contain a model of itself, and it does, a 1/100th. scale model of Bourton, and because the 1/100th. scale model is also a complete model of Bourton, it must also contain a 1/1000th. scale model of the scale model of the scale model of Bourton.

And it does. It is only a matter of time before a team of nano-technicians turn up in the town to etch a sub-micron scale model of Bourton on a silicon wafer, complete with mill, waterwheel, and a highly imaginative interpretation of the River Windrush as a stream of electrons.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:07:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sony's QRIO robot

Sony's QRIO robot appears to be an incremental improvement over Honda's ASIMO, but like the ASIMO, it still walks like an old man who needs to go poo (to paraphrase a Boing Boing reader.) Link (thanks, Beej!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:17:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sea Monkey magnate dead at 77

Harold von Braunhut, who ingeniously marketed one of the ugliest and most boring aquatic creatures in existence -- the almost-invisible brine shrimp -- as" Sea Monekys," died last month. "...Mr. von Braunhut's piece de resistance was Sea Monkeys -- which come from dried-up lake bottoms, not the sea, and are not monkeys but brine shrimp. His extravagant claims for the crustaceans -- for example, that they come back from the dead and that they can be trained and hypnotized-- are convincing because they are sort of true. (The shrimp do follow light.)

Billions of shrimp have been sold, not to mention a Sea Monkey aphrodisiac and a wrist watch filled with swimming shrimp. There are Web sites for sea monkey fans; CBS briefly had a Sea Monkeys series on Saturday mornings; 400 million of them went into space with John Glenn in 1998; and, for the lazy, a new Sea Monkey video game allows a player to 'virtually' care for a shrimp colony, lest the animals 'virtually' die." Link (thanks Rael!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:45:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Grand Canyon is only a few thousand years old!

In addition to cutting out scenes of gay events held at National Parks, the US Park service is also selling books that "prove" the Grand Canyon is only a few thousand years old.

This fall, the Park Service also approved a creationist text, 'Grand Canyon: A Different View' for sale in park bookstores and museums. The book by Tom Vail, claims that the Grand Canyon is really only a few thousand years old, developing on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. At the same time, Park Service leadership has blocked publication of guidance for park rangers and other interpretative staff that labeled creationism as lacking any scientific basis."

Here's a quote from the book: "... in the creationist's view, the carving of the Canyon would have taken place when the sedimentary layers were still soft, allowing the catastrophic erosion process to quickly and easily cut through the layers." From Amazon.com: "Author Tom Vail and his wife are the founders of Canyon Ministries, which offers Christ-centered voyages through the canyon." Link (thanks, Nadine!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:27:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fast Company | If He's So Smart...Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation

Fast Company's Heath Row was kind enough to point out this article about Steve Jobs. He says:

The battle over digital music is just another verse in Apple's sad song: This astonishingly imaginative company keeps getting muscled out of markets it creates. So what does Apple have to tell us about innovation?

It's less an anti-apple piece, which is how one reader pegged it, and more an analysis of what innovation really means to an organization. Can you build a company on innovation alone?

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:41:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bollywood gambles on P2P

In the UK Guardian today:

Bollywood movie fans will soon be able to download full-length features with the file-sharing software Kazaa. A deal struck between a partner of Sharman Networks Ltd, the company which owns Kazaa, and IndiaFM.com, a popular entertainment site, will allow Indian film producers to distribute movies, music and other large, rich media files online to an estimated 60 million international Kazaa users. The move follows a pilot scheme in November when Bollywood thriller Supari was offered for sale at US $2.99 and promoted through Kazaa prior to its release in India. The file was designed to self destruct after being watched and could not be copied.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:26:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Textually.org's wireless year in review

BoingBoing pal Emily in Switzerland says, "Here is a round-up in 10 chapters of mobile news for 2003 from the best news sources online and a look at what's ahead in 2004: Textually 2003 - The Year in Review." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:25:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": more gadgets!

On today's edition of the NPR radio program "Day to Day," host Alex Chadwick and I chat about more last-minute gadget ideas for the geek in your life. Wireless fishfinders, bluetooth headsets for your mobile phone, and how to buy a DV cam -- including my current favorite toy, the Panasonic DVX-100 (true 24P for under $3G. Sweeeeeeeet) . Link, audio stream will be available after 12PM Pacific.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:24:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian Liberal party trying to shut down political parody site with crappy Trademark claims

I'm off to catch a plane, but before I go, I had to post this. Bullies from the Canadian Liberal party are strong-arming a parodist who has put up a political site to make fun of the Prime Minister. This (should be) a national embarrassment: Canadian journalists should be covering this story.

I woke up on Wednesday morning to a phone call from a friendly guy named Tim, who informed me that I had one hour to take down the website, PaulMartinTime.ca, or he would set the lawyers loose on our asses (that's not a quote, but it's an accurate summary).

In between his friendly but businesslike remarks, he dropped a few remarks intended to make me nervous. He said, for example, that he "had a little trouble getting through privacy.ca, but they're no longer supporting your cause." If we had in fact been using privacy.ca, that would be pure power-play. It would mean that he had intimidated (legally or otherwise) a company whose function it is to protect the identity of people who use it into breaking its sole mandate. As it turns out, we don't use privacy.ca; the address of Rob Maguire, the person who registered paulmartintime.ca, is publically available, for all with an internet connection to see.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:54:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, December 22, 2003

Howard Dean tattoo

Heavy, man: someone got a fan-tattoo for yet-to-be-nominated-by-the-Democratic-party US presidential candidate Howard Dean. Link (Thanks, boogah!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:13:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jim Griffin on radio show "Politics of culture" Tuesday

Pho list co-founder Jim Griffin moderates a live discussion on copyright, digital entertainment, and the future of online music tomorrow (Tuesday 23 December) at 2.30 p.m. on 89.9 FM Santa Monica, simulcast on KCRW.com.

I'll be moderating, if you can call it that, a panel discussion involving Matt Oppenheim of the RIAA, Sarah Deutsch of Verizon, Ted Cohen of EMI and Fred von Lohmann of the EFF. That's a mouthful of acronyms, to be sure, but one chock full 'o first-hand experience from the front lines of this year's marquee battle over copyright enforcement.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:03:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Some thoughts for 2004, see you then!

I'm going on holidays until after New Years tomorrow, and will be spending a fair bit of time away from the box. I'm going to be simply unavailable, which is kind of unusual for me. I may or may not blog at all (which means that if you're not already using the blog suggestion form that sends your suggestions to the whole team, it's time to start), and I'm going to be ruthlessly pitching out, rejecting, and tersely responding to any requests for my time or attention between now and Jan 3 when I do get online. Downtime is good, and my good-deeds-and-favors-battery is empty and needs recharging.

As a kind of farewell to 2003, I wrote a little squib for Warren Ellis this morning, as part of a series of ruminations on the future that he's putting together on Die Puny Humans. Here's it is:

The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It's about realizing that all the really hard problems -- free expression, copyright, due process, social networking -- may have technical dimensions, but they aren't technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can't solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.

On that note: I have a special request to the toolmakers of 2004: stop making tools that magnify and multilply awkward social situations ("A total stranger asserts that he is your friend: click here to tell a reassuring lie; click here to break his heart!") ("Someone you don't know very well has invited you to a party: click here to advertise whether or not you'll be there!") ("A 'friend' has exposed your location, down to the meter, on a map of people in his social network, using this keen new location-description protocol -- on the same day that you announced that you were leaving town for a week!"). I don't need more "tools" like that, thank you very much.

An important note for 2004: stop trying to build an Internet without malefactors, parasites, freeriders and inefficiency. There is no such thing as a parasite-free complex ecology (thank you Kathryn Myronuk for this formulation). Some organisms lamented the existence of mitochondria. Others adapted to exploit them and integrate them. Some lament the existence of spammers. Spammers will always exist: stamping your foot and demanding their nonexistence won't change that: adapt or die.

I'll see you again in 2004 -- if you've got a response to this piece, post it to your blog or on Tribe or something; I'll see 'em in the referer logs or in Technorati. I won't be responding to any email about it, though. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:20:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online Japorn: plastic poo, bleeding limbs, bad gadgets

A fresh dose of Japorn perversion -- this time, all items are bona fide buyable things. Sexualized plastic turds, severed torso toys, a weird t-shirt, and some mysterious electrical instrument of male torture. I don't know what any of this stuff is, I only know it's giving me nightmares. Links: one, two, three, four. (Um, thanks, Warren. No. Really. Thanks a lot.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:12:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Best of BritBlogs, 2003

In the Guardian UK, this wrap-up of "best blogs," which includes a well-deserved nod to "Belle de Jour," a recent addition to my personal list of frequently-checked urls. Whether or not that online journal is indeed written by a London call girl, as it's said to be -- it's good stuff. Link (Thank you, Bruce Sterling.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:00:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Holiday Zen

christmas price index
wesley willis
happy holidays from lester
christmas choir
record-o-matic
they might be giants
santacon
holiday special
diy cards
create a tree
drunken christmas
santa says
shuffle the penguin

and a zen repeat... chaoskitties in snowsuits

web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:48:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogshares appears to have returned

Back from the dead: Blogshares.com. (thanks, Jean-Luc)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:47:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nerve-y X-mas: human cupcakes and pornstar yule orgies

Two seasonal goodies on Nerve.com for your clicking pleasure. First, a photo gallery with holiday-themed contributions from some of the online zine's regular contributors -- including a terrific X-rated cupcake shot from Siege (cropped thumbnail at left), whose work has been blogged here on BoingBoing before. The gallery is thankfully devoid of naughty Santas because, according to photo editor Whitney, the "treacly tradition... fall[s] into the same category as spiced rum and Kenny G's holiday album." Link (sorry, but paid registration or someone else's password required).

Next up, the latest experiment in Nerve regular Grant Stoddard's "I Did It for Science" series: "To attend a porn star's Christmas party." The party was an orgy in LA (yes, an actual orgy), hosted by a highly Googleable adult entertainment biz couple whose female half is seen as often in pixels as she is on DVD and video. My dear BoingBoing readers, let it be known that I refuse to be outdone in the realm of party invites. I, too, received an Evite to this very same Christmas clusterfuck. I did not attend, but I can tell you (swear on a stack of mid '90s Wired Magazines) that said invitation included a very thorough FAQ with the line, "Q: Can I bang [female co-host's name]? -- A: Sure!" Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:36:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Three men from Yemen sue NASA for trespassing on Mars

File under "News imitates The Onion:"

No one expects to lose much sleep over it but, for the record, NASA has been sued by three men from Yemen for invading Mars. The three say they own the red planet, and claim they have documents to prove it.

"We inherited the planet from our ancestors 3,000 years ago," they told the weekly Arabic-language newspaper Al-Thawri, which published the report Thursday. Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil and Abdullah al-Umari filed the lawsuit in San'a, Yemen, and presented documents to the country's prosecutor general which they say proves their claim. There was no word on whether they had paid the appropriate inheritance taxes.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:41:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xmas music from video-games

Nice CD of Xmas music created by mixiing samples from various 8-bit video games:

This very special holiday release from 8bitpeoples features an allstar cross-platform lineup that is sure to make yours a truly chippy christmas indeed. Brought together from all corners of the globe, these 8 amazing tunes were composed by 8 dedicated chiptune maniacs on 8 different videogame consoles and homecomputers! Featuring the sounds of Yerzmyey on the Spectrum, Nullsleep on the NES, Vim on the VIC20, Paul Slocum on the Atari 2600, Bit Shifter on the GameBoy, Goto80 on the C64, Dma-Sc on the Atari ST, and Hally on the X68000, there is only one way to celebrate the holidays right this year, and this is it.

Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

London Tube Map as flowchart

Nice HOWTO for using graphics in the style of the London tube-map to flowchart complex processes. Includes downloadable PowerPoint templates. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:32:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Terror alerts as breakfast cereal

Talented net.cartoonist Goopymart has shipped this new Terror Alert Chart just in time for the latest installment in the Homeland Security Free Floating Anxiety System. Link (Thanks, Goopymart!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

125-year-old fossil fruitcake coming to Tonight Show

A 125-year-old fruitcake, a family heirloom, will appear on Leno.

The cake rests in a glass bowl, covered by a glass top. A large raisin and what might be a clove are visible among the brown mass - Ford says it's fossilized - that emits a pleasant odor of spices.

Its baker died in Berkey, Ohio, in 1879 and the cake remained untouched for 85 years. Someone clipped Bates' obituary out of The (Toledo) Blade and placed it on top of the cake. Inside the glass cover someone glued newspaper clippings that read "Mother 1878 November 28." Ford guesses that is when the cake was baked.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:39:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Contract-law analysis of Sauron's offer to the Dwarves

A Michigan law student has deconstructed Sauron's offer to the Dwarves in Fellowship of the Ring, with reference to contract law:

But then we get to the last statement. "Refuse, and things will not seem so well." There are (at least) two ways I can think of to view this. One possibility is that Sauron is not actually proposing unilateral contracts at all. After all, a reasonable interpretation of his offers would be that they were unilateral, but we're talking about Dark Lord Sauron who really wants to enslave all the free peoples. He might not contemplate reasonable contracts. In fact, given the ease with which agents of the Dark exact damages from lackeys who fail them, it seems possible that in Morder, where the shadows lie, all contracts are bilateral, no matter how ridiculous it seems to contemplate such a thing. So maybe what he's saying is that if they fail to produce the ring or any information, he'll exact expectation damages.

But this reading doesn't really make sense given the express language of the offer. The Messenger from Mordor isn't claiming that if they fail to deliver the ring they'll suffer expectation damages unto the fourth generation. He's saying "Refuse, and things will not seem so well." The "Refuse" comment modifies the offer. The law doesn't contemplate expectation damages if you don't accept an offer, although Sauron might.

Link (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:21:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WalTunes ToS suck: they 0wn the music they sell you, not you

My co-worker Fred von Lohmann writes: "Wal-Mart launched a music download site today. Notice the rather breathtaking EULA terms (much more onerous than the Apple terms) -- Fair Use, First Sale, all other copyright exceptions are swallowed up by contractual prohibitions. Just as with software, these restrictions will almost certainly be selectively enforced against reverse engineers, would-be competitors, and tinkerers who disrupt the biz model. All backed up by WinMediaPlayer technical restrictions.

"And all completely useless at preventing Internet redistribution, since you can presumably record via analog outputs or burn to CD-R and re-encode to mp3.

"I say again: current DRM has nothing to do with preventing piracy, everything to do with impairing consumer rights, competition and innovation."

You are entitled to download, export, burn or copy Products solely for personal, noncommercial use in accordance with the terms of this Agreement. Any burning or exporting capabilities are solely an accommodation to you and shall not constitute a grant or waiver of any rights of the copyright owners in any Product or in any content, sound recording, underlying musical composition, artwork or other copyrightable matter embodied in any Product. No right, title or interest in any downloaded Products or software is transferred to you as a result of any downloading or copying or otherwise. All rights in the Products are owned by WALMART.COM or its licensors and you have only a limited, nontransferable, nonexclusive, revocable, nonsublicensable right to use the Products for personal use in accordance with the terms of this Agreement.

You may not reproduce (except as noted above), publish, transmit, distribute, display, broadcast, re-broadcast, modify, create derivative works from, sell or participate in any sale of or exploit in any way, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, any of the Products, the Service or any related software. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, modify or disable any copy protection or use limitation systems associated with the Products. You may not play and then re-digitize any Products, or upload those Products to the Internet. You may not use the Products in conjunction with any other third-party content (e.g, to provide sound for a film). You may not sell or offer to sell the Products, including but not limited to, posting any Product for auction, on any Internet auction site. All Products are sublicensed to you and not sold, notwithstanding the use of the terms "sell," "purchase," "order," or "buy" on the Service or in this Agreement.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wrist-mounted walkie-talkies storm Hong Kong

Gizmodo reported that people in Hong Kong are going around with short-range walkie talkies in order to communicate with nearby chums wihtout paying a toll to the telcos; now a Gizmodo reader confirms it:

Your entry on the HK Walkie Talkie phenomenon is 100% accurate. All the electronics markets are filled with FRS radios and the like. I've even seen people using them to meet up on the MTR (Subway).

He also says that walkie-talkies that you wear on your wrist (like the one pictured at right) are most definitely the ones to be seen with.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:12:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Four CDs I'm damned glad I bought this weekend

I took a stack of used CDs to my corner record store this weekend and traded them in for a bunch of new music. Here are the picks of the litter:

• Deep Note: Music of 1970s Adult Cinema: The title says it all, doesn't it? This is a CD that was made for MP3 players. It's amusing to listen to the "tone poems" of ecstatic chanting layered over wah-wah pedals -- once. But the actual funk tracks on this are really nice, the kind of thing you want to put in a high-rotation playlist for urban walking; think of the fat-bass instrumentals from the Fat Albert theme with a George Clinton's slitheriest, perviest licks.
  

• Five Red Caps: 1943-1945. Steve Gibson and the Five Red Caps were a comic, vocal-oriented boogie-woogie act that released a ton of music in the 30s, 40s and 50s, almost none of which is available today. This disc of wartime tracks contains some of my favorite music of all time: Grand Central Station ("Got a yearning to be/down in Tennessee/got a sweetheart that waits for me/got the biggest brown eyes/that can hypnotize/makes you wanna leave New York"), Mama Put Your Britches On ("Put away your fancy hose/and your dainty dese and dose/what you need now is Victory Clothes/so Mama put your britches on"), and Gabriel's Band ("Better be prepared if you want a part in that heavenly show/or on judgement day they'll find a place for you below/make your trumpet call ring out/hallelujah sing and shout/gotta know what rhythm's 'bout, if you wanna play in Gabriel's Band")
  

• The Beau Hunks Play the Original Little Rascals Music. Roy Shield, the composer of the incidental and theme music for the Little Rascals shorts, was a freaking genius, an unsung hero on the order of Raymond Scott and Carl Stalling. His orchestral music -- faithfully recreated by the Beau Hunks here -- manages to evoke the sepia-toned comedy of the Our Gang serials, especially in some of the really short tracks, like the ten seconds of the woodwind-section laughing; close your eyes when it plays and you can see Spanky holding his gut and rocking back and forth.
  

• Doob Doob O' Rama: Filmsongs of Bollywood: One of my plane-trip books for tomorrow is the bound manuscript for Bruce Sterling's new technothriller (Me: "What's a technothriller?" Bruce: "It's like a science fiction novel, only it's got the President in it"), The Zenith Angle, which apparently revolves around Bollywood (I haven't cracked the cover yet, I'm just going off of the stuff he's been blogging). I really enjoyed the Bollywood tracks on the Ghost World soundtrack and the occassional Bollywood licks in Fat Boy Slim and at my local curry hut, but I had no idea of where to begin. This disc turns out to be just the right place for me to have started. I'm enjoying the hell out of it, and I suspect that Asha Bosle has stolen away Tiny Weymouth's place in my heart as my obligatory rock-star crush.
  

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Varley's Red Thunder qualifies for preliminary Nebula ballot

I grew up on John Varley's short fiction (careful readers of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom will note several loving tributes to Varley's work), and still return to collections like The Barbie Murders, Blue Champagne and the magnificent The Persistence of Vision nearly every year, re-reading those stories and marvelling anew at how deft and clever Varley's hand is.

I just noticed that Red Thunder, the second Varley tribute to Heinlein (the first was the Hugo-nominated Steel Beach, a mind-crogglingly wild, funny and clever tribute to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) has qualified for the preliminary Nebula ballot, which is proof that we live in a just universe indeed.

Red Thunder is a tribute to Heinlein's juvie novels, particularily the classic boys-own-adventure tale Rocket Ship Galileo, about three plucky, ethincally diverse, multi-gender adolescent heroes who rescue the US space program.

Varley manages this amazing trick of simultaneously writing a juvie book -- this would be a hell of a book for your favorite precocious thirteen-year-old -- and writing a book about juvie books, a book for those of us who grew up on the juvies of yesteryear. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:58:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Futuro House: better living from the Gernsback Continuum

Amazing gallery of photos and video clips from the Futuro House, a UFO-shaped concept dwelling designed by a Finnish architect in 1968. This is Jetpack Futurism at its finest. 20 of these houses were built! Link (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:40:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Zip-Linq cables: device charging without bricks

It used to be that I shlepped a power-strip (sometimes two!) with me when I went on the road, because they haven't built the hotel-room yet that has enough plugs to charge my entire device array, not least because everything that fits in my pocket comes with a charger whose transformer brick eats two or three outlets.

Then I discovered USB and FireWire charging -- and more specifically, Zip-Linq retractable cables. Instead of plugging everything into the wall, you attach your device to a little bon-bon-sized retractable wire that goes into one of your computer's ports and plug your computer into the wall. This is especially handy if you're travelling overseas, since it's just not practical to buy enough Euro-220 adapters to get your devices to talk to the local alternating current. Your laptop probably has an international power-supply requiring only a plug adapter, and once that's attached to the wall, you've got know-quantity/know-interface power for all your gizmos.

Before I leave on my next trip overseas tomorrow, I will slip into my pocket a Firewire cable (for my little backup harddrive, which I yanked out of an old PowerBook and put into a tiny enclosure, so that I can back up every day on the road), a cellphone charger (one for my US Motorola iDen phone, one for my European Nokia phone -- and cables are available for most manufacturers: Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, Kyocera, Sanyo) and a PDA charger (Palm, iPaq).

Rael crashed on my sofa this weekend and pointed out that Zip-Linq is now shipping a wall-adapter, so that if your laptop is unavailable, you can plug this into the socket and still charge up.

The best part is that at $10-20 these wires are actually cheaper than the manufacturers' chargers for the most part. Link

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

John A MacDonald action figure

Just in time for the holidays, the John A MacDonald action figure: the first Prime Minister of Canada, reborn in PVC with many accessories. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:48:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, December 21, 2003

Rescue your teeth with Mexican dentistry

Amazing first-person story of a guy who couldn't afford the full set of caps his teeth needed and was looking at a lifetime of dentures, who became a medical tourist to Tijuana and got the work done for a fraction of the cost in Mexico.

I mentally multiplied $715 by 28 and groaned. Either my teeth were about to become the most expensive thing I ever owned, or I was going to lose them and likely have to start wearing dentures at the age of 39...

Once again we found tales of $120 caps, and of an entire industry catering to American medical tourists. In several places along the US-Mexico border, clusters of dentists operate within convenient driving distance so that an inexpensive bus tour from Las Vegas or a trolley ride from San Diego could bring you to where this cheap care was available.

Nowhere did we find a horror story -- indeed, everything we read was very enthusiastic. We did research and began to lay plans.

Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:10:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Argosy Magazine reborn

Argosy Magazine got a nice write-up in the Birmingham News. Charlie Stross and I just turned in a novella for the next ish of Argosy, a sequel to Jury Service, called "Appeals Court." Argosy is publishing both stories together in a perfect-bound package, as a fix-up novel called "Rapture of the Nerds."

The original Argosy ran from 1896 to 1943, publishing stories by authors as noted as fantasist Edgar Rice Burroughs, Western author Louis L'Amour and mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. One of the first pulp fiction magazines, Argosy crossed genre boundaries before those boundaries were sharply defined...

The first issue, which came out in November, featured contemporary fantasy by Jeffrey Ford; suspense by Ann Cummins; a science fiction/horror story by Caitlin R. Kiernan; mystery by Barry Baldwin; an interview of groundbreaking science fiction author Samuel R. Delany by author Adam Roberts; a history of Argosy by Rick Klaw; and science fiction by Benjamin Rosenbaum.

Each issue includes a separately bound novella, with both volumes packaged in a single slipcase. The first issue's novella, "The Mystery of the Texas Twister" (an alternate-history Western with "undercurrents of political satire," Anders said), was written by famed fantasy author Michael Moorcock and illustrated by Jon Foster.

LInk

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:17:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, December 20, 2003

Merlin's lists of five

From my pal Merlin Mann, a stunningly funny collection of lists of fives:

Five terrible names for local retail stores

1. Pricey McMarkup's House of Suspicious Deals
2. Hot Fence Electronics Village
3. Kostly Kornerz
4. Chez Ripoffski: A Retailerié
5. Misleadington's Big Box

Link (via EvHead)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:21:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bear: funny comic from Slave Labor Graphics

On a recent trip to London, I picked up a copy of the new(ish) comic "Bear," from Slave Labor Graphics. It's damned funny stuff -- I've asked my corner comix store to put aside new issues for me.

When you're only twelve-inch high teddy bear, you're at a disadvantage, anyway, but Bear has more pressing worries on his mind. His days are spent watching TV on his owner Karl's couch, with short breaks for biscuit-eating or reminiscences on his long, distinguished, and quite frankly, rather unlikely military career.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:52:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Emerging Tech's self-organizing conference-within-a-conference

At this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, there are 27 night sessions reserved from allocation by the organizers, left open to be a "self organizing conference-within-a-conference." The idea is that ETCON attendees propose sessions on the open wiki, and vote on which they'd prefer to attend.

We're not looking for polished presentations. We'd prefer "white board" sessions on your works-in-progess, rough demonstrations with promise, concept and code (with an emphasis on running code, even if it doesn't yet fully represent the concept). You should be prepared to take input, answer questions, engage in discussion, and be open to altering your conceptions and mucking about in your source. Oh, and have a good deal of fun while you're at it.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Doom comic from back in the day

Jesse sez, "This is an old comic based on the video game "Doom". It's actually really funny, because it doesn't attempt to embroider on the game or add anything to the plot, it's just a guy running around shooting demons with successively larger and larger guns, occasionally falling into pits of radioactive waste and making environmentalist speeches. Perfectly captures the essence of Doom in comic book form." Link (Thanks, Jesse!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:25:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amazing week in EFF's history

This was a red-letter week for EFF, with three critical victories coming each on the heels of the last:

* Under pressure from EFF and a broad, bipartisan coalition of organizations we led, the U.S. Forest Service announced that it would drop plans to block messages from web action centers.

* The Dutch Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision protecting peer-to-peer software provider KaZaA from liability under Dutch law for copyright infringement by its users. EFF's Fred von Lohmann will argue a similar appeal in the MGM v. Grokster case in January, and while the European law is different, the decision provides a positive context within which to argue that the higher court should uphold our victory before the lower court last Spring.

* Finally, the DC Circuit ruled Friday to uphold Verizon's right to protect its customers' privacy from subpoenas issued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). EFF helped lead a coalition of 44 privacy and consumer groups, plus a host of ISPs, in an amicus brief in support of Verizon.

A reminder: EFF is a member-supported charity -- and you've got just over a week left to throw some money at a worthy charity before Uncle Sugar will take it away from you. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:28:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A&E gratuitously slams science fiction

A&E has produced a craptacular Flash site to promote Lathe of Heaven, a telepic adapted from an Ursula K Le Guin story. The promo copy contains this grotesquely patronizing bit of gratuitously insulting analysis of science fiction, apparently aimed at ensuring that any science fiction fans who enjoy the work are put firmly in their place and instructed that this is different from that crappy rocket-ship stuff that they're accustomed to. I thought that this kind of thinking was dead and buried, but apparently, it's alive and well at A&E's marketing department. Flash Link, click "Author" (Thanks, Emilyg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:44:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, December 19, 2003

Ooky vintage potato chip cookbook

This scanned-in Good Housekeeping/Smith's Potato Crisps "Cooking With Crisps" cookbook has many revolting comestibles made with potato chips, but perhaps none so grody as these potato-based desserts: a lemon pie and chocolate bananas -- made with crisps. Ew. Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:04:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Get your iPod polychromatically modded

Short review of ColorwarePC's painted-iPod service, wherein your iPod is sent to ColorwarePC, painted, and returned to you. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:55:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ambiguous's ode to eggnog

This elaborate, obsessive rumination of phlegmnog almost makes it sound appetizing:

I love you all, and I am here to help. Here is the recipe by which I was shown the true nature of eggnog:

• Separate the whites & yolks of six eggs.
• Beat whites stiff and add a quarter pound of powdered sugar.
• Beat yolks until thick and add another quarter pound of powdered sugar, 3 drops oil of cinnamon, and 2 drops oil of clove. (Respect these amounts! Do not underestimate the power of these oils!)
• Fold together whites & yolks. This is your batter.
• Right in the mug, combine about 1 part of batter with 2 parts hot milk.
• An appropriate quantity of booze (traditionally 1 part rum to 2 parts brandy) may also be added.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chinese court orders new instances of WMDs for hacked virtual arms dealer

A Chinese court has ordered a online role-playing game host to create new instances of artifacts looted from a player-character's account after it was hacked.

Li Hongchen, 24, had spent two years, and 10,000 yuan ($1,210) on pay-as-you-go cards to play, amassing weapons and victories in the popular online computer game Hongyue, or Red Moon, before his "weapons" were stolen in February, the Xinhua news agency said on Friday...

In the end, Beijing's Chaoyang District People's Court ruled on Thursday that the firm should restore the player's lost items, finding the company liable because of loopholes in the server programs that made it easy for hackers to break in.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:14:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

OSCON call for proposals

O'Reilly has just released the Call for Proposals for the next Open Source conference (to be held in Portland, OR, July 26-30), whose theme is ""Opening the Future: Discover, Develop, Deliver." The keynotes look pretty stunning:

The keynote speakers for the next OSCON exemplify the event's wide-ranging mix: Freeman, George, and Esther Dyson, presenting a joint keynote address; Robert Lefkowitz, who was one of OSCON 2003's most thought-provoking speakers; Milton Ngan of Weta Digital, the company that created the digital effects for "The Lord of the Rings" films; and Tim O'Reilly. Other influential open source leaders will come to OSCON to accept the first Open Source Awards, produced by the Open Source Institute (OSI) and ZDNet (winners will be announced in stages during the winter and spring of 2004).

Link

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

Apple seeking video iPod developer

A job-posting on Apple's site implies that the next generation iPods will do video, too.

Seeking a highly motivated engineer to develop next generation iPod product. Must have experience in overall system design of audio and video products.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:02:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Arthritic cockroaches -- won't someone think of the arthritic cockroaches?

Elderly cockroaches get arthritis and become confused and prone to wandering.

Case Western Reserve University researchers reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology that as the roach's life wanes between 60-65 weeks after the onset of adulthood, and the cockroach slows down, experiences stiff joints and has problems climbing and a decreased spontaneous fleeing response. Death comes shortly after the onset of these movement problems.

Link (via Ambiguous)

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

Homebrew USB menorah

In this project called "Taking Menorah Design into the 59th Century," an amateur hardware hacker uses the $8 commodity USB chipset to brew his own USB-powered menorah, then writes some code to get the shamas to blink arbitrary messages in Morse code. Link (Thanks Buddha!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:04:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Joi Ito kicks Japanese national ID card ass

Joi Ito was hired to audit the security of the Japanese feds' big-brother national ID system as implemented in Nagano . His conclusion? The system sucks -- it places the personally identifying info of Japanese citizens at risk of being stolen, altered, and deleted, and it was implemented incompetently. He wrote a letter to governor to the governor of Nogano (and released it under a Creative Commons license) detailing the problems with the system. Joi is now in big trouble -- and I suspect he likes it that way.

In summary, I believe that the security level of the networks were below average and any average computer network engineer could break into and steal or damage a variety of personal information including Jyukinet information. The people working in the office and in particular, the vendors providing the system security are not sensitive to security and privacy issues. The servers have not been maintained properly and the selection of passwords (many had default passwords or easily guessable passwords) was irresponsible and showed a complete lack of attention to security. I strongly urge that the priority on security for privacy purposes be increased significantly, both in local government offices and vendors providing solutions to these local governments. I believe that the citizens and the people responsible for protecting their information are significantly at risk.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:01:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Open source hackers release open fixes for MSFT vulnerabilityware

MSFT's apparent incapacity for patching MSIE vulnerabilities hasn't deterred open-source hackers, who have released a free software patch for a well-known Explorer vulnerability.

Update: Andrew sez, "...it contains buffer overflow exploits that are wide open for hax0r5 to take advantage of. In addition, it redirects weird URL requests to -it's own website-."

Update: Yoz points out that the patch has been patched. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dear Atari: your DRM screwed me, so now I hate you

Good letter from an Atari fan to Atari, describing the way that their anti-copying technology has screwed the innocent in order to get at the guilty. Link (Thanks, Marie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:48:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Buy an Arizona ALL CAPS ghost-town on eBay

The entire town of Tortilla Flat, Arizona, is up for auction on eBay. The first order of business for the new owner is to fix the town's lone computer's shift-key.

THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO OWN YOUR OWN HISTORIC TOWN. TORTILLA FLAT IS ONE OF THE LAST REMNANTS OF THE OLD WEST. THE SCHOOL, GENERAL STORE, RESTAURANT, OLD TIME ICE CREAM & CANDY STORE AND THE POST OFFICE HAVE BEEN RESTORED OR REBUILT. TORTILLA FLAT IS LOCATED 18 MILES NORTH-EAST OF APACHE JUNCTION, ARIZONA ON HIGHWAY 88 AND IS THE ONLY SETTLEMENT BETWEEN THE "JUNCTION" AND ROOSEVELT DAM, A DISTANCE OF 47 MILES. THE SETTLEMENT IS SITUATED IN THE VALLEY ALONG TORTILLA CREEK SURROUNDED BY THE MYSTERIOUS SUPERSTITION MOUNTAINS, THE LEGENDARY LOCATION OF THE LOST DUTCHMANS MINE. TO DRIVE TO TORTILLA FLAT IS TO PASS THROUGH SOME OF THE MOST SPECTACULAR SCENERY IN THE WORLD. TORTILLA FLAT'S FINE RESTAURANT, THE SUPERSTITION SALOON, IS FAMOUS FOR ITS KILLER CHILI, HUGE HALF-POUND COWBOY BURGERS AND HOME-COOKED MEXICAN FOOD. IT'S KNOWN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AND REGULARLY VISITED NOT ONLY BY LOCAL RANCHERS, COWBOYS AND PROSPECTORS, BUT ALSO BY PEOPLE FROM SURROUNDING TOWNS AND TRAVELERS FROM ALL OVER THE UNITED STATES AS WELL AS THE WORLD. IT IS A DESTINATION PLACE FOR ARIZONA. YOU ARE PURCHASING ALL THE BUILDINGS/LAND IS LEASED FROM THE TONTO NATIONAL FOREST SERVICE CALL 1-888-299-6792 ASK FOR SHERRI PACK EXCULSIVE AGENT TO REQUEST ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.

Link (Thanks, Dan!)

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

Throwaway email addies with RSS-syndicated mailboxes

Dodgeit allows you to create throw-away email addresses (for crappy registration sites), and then delivers the email that comes into the resulting mailbox as an RSS feed that you and everyone else who can guess at your throwaway email addy can read. That's pretty sweet.

Pick a throwaway address, say: deeznuts@dodgeit.com Give that address out whenever you need to. Check deeznuts from homepage of dodgeit.com. Subscribe to RSS feed to keep an eye on the mailbox. Get it?

Link (Thanks, Phil!)

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

Rustic found alphabet

Nick sez, "Dean Allen at Textism created a found alphabet in a rural setting. The alphabet has a pleasant rustic feel, using mostly earth tones." Link (Thanks, Nick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:40:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Small tech in big appliances

My Small Times column this month is online. It's about how microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)--the tiny machines that trigger the airbag in your car and squirt out the ink in your desktop printer--are now being integrated into white goods.

"I'm not talking about an accelerometer-laden Rosie the House-Cleaning Robot, although she may be on deck soon, too. I'm talking about newfangled washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, ovens and even refrigerators that will ease the pain of some household chores while keeping your utility bill in check."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:10:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Red Versus Blue season two to premiere at Lincoln Center

Red Versus Blue is a series of comedy short films made by scripting avatars in the game Half Life Halo and recording screen-movies of the results, then adding voice-over and sound-effects, a process called "machinima." The first two episodes of the next season will be screened at Lincoln Center on January 3. That's pretty cool -- it's almost as if Homestar Runner came to Carnegie Hall.

We are extremely pleased to announce that Red vs Blue Season 2 will debut on January 3, 2004 at the Lincoln Center in New York City. We're extremely honored to be invited back to this prestigious venue and we hope that any Red vs Blue fan in the area will make it to the 9:30 PM show. The plan is to show Season One in its entirety and then show Episodes One and Two of Season Two. Also, the entire cast and crew of Season One will be on hand for the event, which is a milestone in itself -- we have never been in the same place at the same time. So, if you want your RvB DVD signed by the cast, this may be your one and only shot.

Link (via Ambiguous)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:32:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Type in the brain-alphabet

Lucas Gonze has created an app to render out text in the alphabets made from astronomical phenomena and human brain-whorls. Link (Thanks, Lucas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:38:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian Feds adopt RSS

The Canadian government is syndicating its daily news items as RSS feeds. There are a bunch of feeds running, including:

National news
Regional news
Aboriginal peoples
Business
Children
Educators

Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:13:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dead Logo Graveyard

A wistful, meandering walk through the graveyard of dearly departed logotypes. Link (thanks, Jean-Luc)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:03:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online art gallery: Suehiro Maruo

At left, my favorite from this wonderful collection of the works of Suehiro Maruo -- sexy, disturbing, nostalgic, and supercool. Link (thanks Invisible Cowgirl, via Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:56:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More amazing Down and Out news

This week's Entertainment Weekly lists the 10 Best Novels of 2003. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is number five. It's also one of Sunday, December 28th's NYT's "New and Notable" paperbacks. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:52:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nanowire Wrapping a Beam of Light around a Human Hair

BoingBoing pal Roland Piquepaille says:

The nanotechnology research field is pretty fertile these days. Researchers at Harvard recently showed a nanowire which could be the next big diagnostic tool for doctors. Meanwhile, University of Southern California scientists have developed a 'nanosensor' that only works when noise is added. And another Harvard team has developed nanoscale fibers that are thinner than the wavelengths of light they carry which may have applications in ever-shrinking medical products and tiny photonics equipment such as nanoscale laser systems, tools for communications and sensors. This news roundup contains more details and references about these projects. You'll also find a stunning picture of a s ilica nanowire wrapping a beam of light around a strand of human hair.

Link

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

Fold a Yamaha motorcycle

Amazing free downloadable paper-motorcycle kits. Link (Thanks, bakahage!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:56:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Recreating gone Disney rides online

Nice NYT piece about the ongoing efforts to rebuild old Disney rides as CGI, using the Web to coordinate volunteers:

At least two other sites are creating virtual versions of discontinued Disney rides: Adventure Thru Inner Space (www.atommobiles.com/cgi-project.htm), a Disneyland attraction that gave visitors the experience of being smaller than an atom, and If You Had Wings (dizneyworld.net/iyhw.html), a Disney World ride to exotic travel destinations. Although these re-creations have not been authorized by Disney, a spokesman said the company "appreciates their passion."

Why do Disney rides inspire such allegiance? "Disney is one of the few organizations that produce elaborate dark rides, that invest in story line," explained Cory Doctorow, a technology activist and writer whose recent novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," is set in a Disney World of the future.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:20:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smart Radio docket announced at FCC

The FCC has announced a new docket for commentary on "smart radios." It's seeking comment on how to encourage frequency-agile radio technology, including through use of location-snesing technologies to know, a priori, whether the radio is situated out in the bush where it won't interfere with other users if it transmits at higher power. I'm going to be writing some EFF/communtiy wireless comments in this docket -- if you've got a dog in this fight, you should send comments to the Commission, too. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:18:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY medieval tapestry

Vanessa sez, "This is just amazing -- the authors manipulated images from the Bayeux Tapestry and created a Flash-based kit where you can make your own medieval comic strip. Images are scalable, type can be colored. You can send your images as ecards to the medievalists of your acquaintance." I made an Orwellian one that I'm quite proud of, in my own, quiet way. Link (Thanks, Vanessa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:08:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eerily accurate text-sexer

Feed the Gender Genie 500 words of text and it will guess at the sex of the author. It got five in a row right for me. Eerie. Link (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:56:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

Graffiti Archaeology

Eric Rodenbeck and Cassidy Curtis have created a masterful timelapse photographic collage of various San Francisco graffiti sites to show how these urban canvases have changed over the last five years. It's a design tour de force. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:46:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inside Lolita

Great Amazon.com boner with the cover of Lolita! Link (Thanks, Dr. Mazoola and Jeff Zeldman!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:37:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Killer origami

Amazing gallery of spectacular origami. Link (Thanks, Kate!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kids hate CDs for Christmas

Funny site warns parents not to disappoint P2P savvy kids by giving them shiny discs for xmas.

Kids today are so good at downloading music from the internet that most of them already have all the music they like on their computer, or if they don't have it yet they can get it in 10 minutes. And remember: if your family turns off "sharing" downloading songs is 100% safe..

Link (thanks, Marc!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:18:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ode to lutefisk

Tom sez, "Just in time for the Norwegian Christmas rush: Clay Shirky's 1994 epic, 'Ode to Lutefisk'. 'Lutefisk' is an infamous Norwegian dish composed of fish soaked in lye. Clay's take on it: 'You need to drink enough aquavit so you can't tell the difference between caviar on a cracker and ketchup on a Kit-Kat with your eyes open'. My take: I never understood how Jesus fed 5,000 people with just 5 fish, until I had lutefisk." Link (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:39:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stem cells can "humanize" animal organs

"Organ humanizing" is the process of injecting your stem cells into an animal foetus, so that when it is born, its organs' cells will be similar enough to your own that they can be used for spare parts.

The human cells must be injected around halfway through gestation - before the fetus's immune system has learned the difference between its own and foreign cells, so that the animal does not reject them, but after the body plan has formed.

That ensures that the resulting animals look like normal sheep rather than strange hybrids like the "geep", created by fusing the embryos of a sheep and goat.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:31:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Custom bobble-head dolls

Supply this website with a photo, choose a body, pay $39.95, and they will knock out a custom, one-off bobble-head doll of you or a loved-one. Link (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:24:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fart-filtering seat-cushion

The GasBGon is a "flatulence filter" that you put on your chair-seat, so that when you fart, it doesn't smell. Available in many designer patterns.

Q: What is a GasMedic flatulence filter seat cushion?
A: The clinical version of the GasBGon cushion with an impregnated carbon filter based on technology used to develop military chemical defense garments and a specially produced polyurethane foam with improved feel, height and shape retention.

Q: Why use a GasBGon or GasMedic flatulence filter-seat cushion?
A: Today's health conscious population is concerned about eating the right foods and the trend has been towards a high fiber diet. This fact coupled with various illnesses, produce intestinal gas discharges, commonly know as flatulence, crepitating, breaking wind, cutting the cheese, or farting.

Link (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Salem paying flirts to take photos of drivers' licenses

A poster on Farber's IP list sez:

The Salem cigarette brand is marketing itself by paying attractive young men and women to give away its product. To keep these employees from making mass donations to their friends they've been given digital cameras. They're asked to photograph a unique driver license for every 3 packs given away. I witnessed this at my first visit to Dee's Cafe on the south side. It's a favorite hangout of Pittsburgh bike messengers, hep cats, artists, and smokers. About 30 packs were given away in the hour that I was there.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Lisa Rein song online

Lisa Rein has begun to post the recordings from her musical showcase. Her first track, "In the Spirit," is up now. It's her first anti-war song. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:43:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blockbuster prez calls for end to DVD region-coding

The President of Blockbuster has called for an end to region-coding in DVDs:

"I believe, in addition to the elimination of two-tier pricing, the studios should also make another significant strike against piracy with the elimination of regional coding," he said. "The extra time on windows created by regional coding is an opportunity that pirates exploit."

His reasoning is a little mealy-mouthed. This isn't "pirates exploiting opportunities," it's more like "customers routing around market-failures," as when the product they demand isn't offered for sale, or when they discover that they can buy the same product for half the money in a different part of the world. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Everyday Fashion as Pictured in Sears Catalogs

I just happened upon these amazing books edited by JoAnne Olian, the "Everyday Fashion as Pictured in Sears Catalogs" series, covering kids' fashions from 1900-1950, 1909-1920, the forties, the fifties and the sixties.

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

LiveJournal demographics

LiveJournal has posted a bunch of demographic stats about its user-community -- the age distribution skew (shown here) is fascinating. Link (via Smartpatrol)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:18:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Verisign calls for Internet redesign, Minitel-style

When the CEO of Verisign says something as ghastly-stupid as "We have to move the complexity back into the center of the network and remove it from the edge," it's like waving a red flag before David "Stupid Network" Isenberg:

How do you feel about Sclavos' remark?
(a) It is cluelessly megalomaniacal.
(b) It is tragically ignorant.
And I suppose I should add:
(c) It makes me feel warm and fuzzy and safe to think that some day the grown-ups might finally make the Internet a serious communications system instead of the toy that it is today. Mo< Record your vote on a Diebold voting machine and send an image of the paper receipt it produces to isen-at-isen-dot-com.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

They that can give up general purpose computers for the sake of a little eye candy

Today, I wore my new NTK shirt to work and to the Google Xmas Party, and boy, did I ever get a lot of compliments. It reads: "They that can give up general purpose computers for the sake of a little eye candy deserve neither computers nor eye candy," a reference to Franklin's famous "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:01:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

12 Days of Xmas cost index

PNC publishes an annual price index of the good enumerated in the 12 Days of Christmas, discussing the costing trends of celebrating a carol-traditional Yule.

Two exceptions to this trend, however, are the swans and the calling birds, which cost significantly more this year. Unlike 2002, when swans took a significant dive in price, these graceful feathered friends have bounced back to their 2001 level of $500 a piece, up from $300 last year, according to the Philadelphia Zoo. The four calling birds are also flying high at $400, more than a 26 percent increase from last year. "The bird prices tend to be stable, except when supply and demand get out of sync, causing the prices to move dramatically," said Rebekah McCahan, investment strategist who provides the research for the Christmas Price Index. "The low inventory of calling birds and swans this year, combined with a resurgence in demand, has boosted prices -- a sign of consumer confidence returning," she added. All told, the swans, geese, calling birds, French hens, turtle doves, and partridges cost over $4,100, representing about 25 percent of the overall Index.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:51:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-road-piss campaign from Washington State

Washington State highway cops are sick of picking up the bottles of piss and poopie that truckers (and other long-haul drivers) toss out their windows, so they've started a campaign to warn and fine scat-flingers and piss-pitchers. Link (Thanks, Psylux!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:49:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cousin-identification chart for cousin-marriage advocacy

CUDDLE (Cousins United to Defeat Discriminating Laws through Education) is an NGO that advocates for the rights of cousins to marry one-another. Here's a handy chart they've produced to show just how related you are to that cute girl (who looks a little like your mom) in the next pew at the Bar-Mitzvah. Link (via AccordionGuy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:43:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Found alphabet made from human brains

The Brain Alphabet is a set of 26 Roman letters visible in the bumps and valleys of photos of real human brains. Link (Thanks, Armand!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:40:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

You need a license to say "I have a dream"

Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is still in copyright (as is almost everything else familiar in our lives), and Dr King's heirs strictly enforce the copyright. Wendy Seltzer points out what this means for free expression and political commentary.

You can always quote a few lines without asking permission, but that's likely to be the same few lines that have become cliched with repetition. Quote the whole speech to make a more substantial point, and you face thousand-dollar license fee claims from the estate. Quote them to make a point critical of King, and you may be denied a license entirely.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:37:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elf Sex, per Tolkien

Nice scholarly paper on Tolkein's writings describing elf-sex:

There was at least one elvish word related to a sexual act in Quenya or Sindarin: nosta / onna, beget. The source for this is Treebeard's farewell to Galadriel and Celeborn in "Many Partings," ROTK. This farewell includes the Quenya phrase "O vanimar, vanimalion nostari", translated in The End of the Third Age, in the chapter discussing Many Partings, footnote 16, as "fair ones begetters of fair ones." There is a related early Quenya noun, ontâro, meaning begetter/masculine parent. The early Quenya word wegê, meaning manhood or vigor, may be open to a variety of interpretations. There was also a Quenya word meaning virgin, rod, as in Rodwen, "High Virgin Noble (female)." (Maeglin, The War of the Jewels, HME)

Link (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:43:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nagano big-brotherware is insufficiently secured

Nagano's new citizen-tracking system is not only invasive of privacy, it's also incompetently secured and exposes citizen data to potential corruption by malefactors.

Tests by the prefecture to infiltrate the system found that access to private information on residents was accessible with local area network (LAN) connections, both from within and outside local body offices.

"(The network) is in a dangerous situation in which personal information can be stolen," specialists hired by the prefecture wrote in an evaluation of the access tests...

Part of the tests also reportedly showed that it was possible to falsify personal data in the network and send it to servers nationwide.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:39:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virtuoso Super Mario Brothers 3 game

This is a streaming screen-movie of an utterly virtuoso game of Super Mario Brothers 3, played from start to finish in under 11 minutes. Update: various among you point out that the video, while impressive, appears to be faked. Streaming Windows Media Link (Thanks, fRiT0!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:25:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wrist-mounted catapault watch

The Catapault Watch fires BBs and similar projectiles from your wrist. Link (Thanks, Samari Chop!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:19:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nerd porn: "Lord of the G-Strings"

Fleshbot is on a LOTR-themed rampage lately. See a slew of related posts over the last few days. Of particular note, this video:

We'll let the box cover copy speak for itself: "In the mythical realm of Diddle Earth, diminutive yet delectable Throbbit Dildo Saggins is sent by Smirnoff the Wizard to destroy the legendary G-String - most powerful weapon in the land."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:30:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool bodypaint photo gallery

Link (thanks Invisible Cowgirl, via cupofchica)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:18:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Softcore Chinese flower girl photos -- on Xinhua

Bruce Sterling muses aloud, "Holy macaroni. Why is the official news agency of the People's Republic of China posting a whole bunch of nude body-painting? Have they lost all their little gray Mao suits over at Xinhua? What gives? A couple of these pics are Veruschka Lehndorff art-shots from the mid-1980s. Some official Chinese web-guy has been collecting these things. What could this be about?" Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:01:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hungary takes aim at phonecam snapshots

The data protection ombudsman of Hungary ruled last week that phonecam users who transmit pictures of people who are unaware of being photographed may be prosecuted for privacy violation -- as could their mobile service providers.

Ombudsman Attila Peterfalvi said he started an investigation after one of Hungary's three mobile providers ran an advertisement saying: "If you see a good-looking girl or guy on the street, don't hesitate to share the aesthetic experience with your friends via MMS." Mobile phones, kitted out with small cameras used in multimedia messaging (MMS), are selling fast in Hungary, where mobile penetration is a high 75.2 percent.

Link (via diepunyhumans)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:49:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Holiday gift guide zen

design object | print club | acme bags | pixel blocks | hand pressed prints | bleibtreu bags | pimp cups | shag | technokitty bags | catapult watch | tiki art | threadless | jelly bath | zakka | kid robot | happy tree friends | chaoskitty | ultimate wish list

web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:32:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NASA off-world Wi-Fi simulation success

NASA researchers have conducted a successful test of Wi-Fi networking in a remote location to simulate terrain on another planet. BoingBoing pal Mike O points us to part of this article which states "Wi-Fi technology currently rates in the 1-to-3 range on NASA's 10-point technology readiness scale," and asks, "Does anyone know more about this scale? Is it an official thing or just a soundbite for the article?"

During a September field test at Meteor Crater, Ariz., NASA used Wi-Fi cells from Tropos Networks to measure a reliable 1 megabit/sec of solid data throughput at a range of 1.3 miles. A three-node network of Tropos 5110 Wi-Fi cells was set up over a two-square mile hot zone at Meteor Crater. Engineers used a laptop computer inside a moving vehicle, with no external antenna, and successfully transmitted data from a remote location through two nodes back to the base camp computer. Though NASA has no current plans to send Wi-Fi technology into space, researchers are examining Wi-Fi as a possible future communications support to interplanetary expeditions, including flights to Mars.

Link
Update: Joe Crawford points us to background on the NASA scale here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:28:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Evangeline: "Interview with a Child cyber-Prostitute in TSO"

Noted without comment. The anonymity-requesting BoingBoing buddy who forwards this, then ducks and scampers away in a hurry, asks "What subculture is this? Jeez louise!" Snip:

In the following interview, notorious sim Evangeline goes back to her early days in Alphaville, and claims to have worked as a cyber-prostitute and then to have been a madam for various cyber-brothels under the guise of her sims Roxy, Tori, Fanki and then Dorian Merrill, claiming that at times she made the equivalent of $50 US per trick from her customers. She claims to still being a minor and hints that some of her customers have been Maxis employees. She discusses the conflagration with Mia Wallace, and claims to have guessed Mia's password and trashed her property and account. Finally she discusses her current policy of newbie-humiliation on her Free Money for Newbies property, currently number 1 in Alphaville's welcome category. In particular, she discusses her new game of locking newbies "in the freezer" and "caging" dark skinned avatars and calling them "monkeys" and also calling them "ugly" because one can't see their eyes.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:00:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

QTVR: Jehova's witness tub-baptism

QTVR enthusiast and photographer Peter Murphy says: "Sydney is full of thousands of Jehovah Witnesses at the moment, here for a big Convention. My panorama shows their mass baptism ceremony today at the Olympic Stadium here -- Jehovah Witnesses are into full immersion baptism." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:55:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Italian/English poem-collage-photo-blog

Delightful photoblog: snapshots of poems strung together in haphazard kidnapper script; Italian and English. Beautiful visual style; odd, quirky mood. Link (Grazie, Jean-Luc). Update:Gamethyme points out the similarity between this blog and A Softer World, "simultaneously haunting and hilarious."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:47:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dalek Xmas

A little holiday spirit: Daleks eating Christmas dinner. Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSNBC video only for Windows

MSNBC is no longer supporting MacOS or Linux with its free video. They sent Chris an email that said, "MSNBC Video now requires Windows 98SEor higher operating system, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5or higher, Windows Media Player 9 or later, Macromedia Flash Player 7or higher, and Microsoft .NET Passport. The MSNBC Video content is currently unable to support Macintosh or other operating systems." (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:43:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Once More, With Hobbits: Musical Buffy meets LotR

Chris sez, "In honor of Return of the King we've created Once More, With Hobbits. This combines the Buffy: the Vampire Slayer musical episode with Lord of the Rings.

ORC: I've been having a bad bad day
Come on Gimli put that axe away
I'm asking you please no!
You've my sincere apologies
You've got the killing expertise
You'll cut through my collar like cheese
I'm begging let me go!
You have got me on my knees
You could slaughter me with ease
I really hate those fucking trees

GIMLI:
Forty-two, Master Legolas!

Link (Thanks, Chris)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EA's geeky recruiting campaign

Games publisher Electronic Arts Canada is running these amazingly geeky billboards that translate as "Now Hiring." Link (Thanks, Pete!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:36:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UMaine launches free culture/code/knowledge service

The University of Maine has launched "Still Water," a copyright-free zone for posting and sharing images, music, videos, programming code and texts.

"We are training revolutionaries -- not by indoctrinating them with dogma but by exposing them to a process in which sharing culture rather than hoarding it is the norm," said Joline Blais, a professor of new media at the University of Maine and Still Water co-director.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Heil Honey, I'm Home: Britcom about Hitler

In 1990, Britons were delivered a short-lived sitcom called Heil Honey, I'm Home, about Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun's home-life next door to a Jewish couple in the 1930s.

This most infamous of all British sitcoms attracted controversy out of all proportion to the number of people who saw it. Naturally, the hullabaloo was built on the shocking notion that anyone would mount a comedy about Hitler and the Jews - seemingly the definition of poor taste. In reality, the show was no more than a spoof - and not of 1930s Germany but of the kind of 1960s/1970s American sitcoms that would embrace any idea, no matter how stupid. The title, the corny dialogue, the applause when anyone arrived on set, the acting (McCaul's Hitler was more reminiscent of Chaplin's The Great Dictator than your actual Fuhrer) - all were clear signposts of parody. Mel Brooks had already explored the concept of pantomime Nazis in his masterpiece movie (and eventual stage musical) The Producers.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

One of the readers

One of the readers on Farber's Interesting People list traced a spam to a relay on a US Naval vessel, the USS San Antonio or swn-email.lpd17.navy.mil. Link

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

Immersive Quake superimposed over meatspace

Augmented Reality Quake is an Australian academic project to integrate the open-source Quake code with VR goggles and plastic guns. Basically, you put on a headset and the game superimposes enemy characters, geographic elements, and power-ups over your field of vision, so that as you run around the parking lot or football field, you play a Quake that only you can see. Check out the movies from the project. Link (Thanks, Rooter!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:19:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Network effects and the Sampling License

Hot on the heels of Creative Commons' announcement of the Sampling License (which allows you to license your work for reuse, on the condition that only samples, and not the whole work, are used), comes this lucid legal/economic analysis from my co-worker Jason Schultz of what the real benefit of a Sampling License will be: the network effect.

Sampling, by all accounts, should also work on these principles. Yet, under the current sampling system, just because one person clears rights to a song for sampling doesn't mean anyone else can. Each negotiation is generally separate, thereby requiring transaction costs for time and attorneys, etc, each time someone wants to use the track.

Under the CC licensing system, however, the more songs you have in the library, the more valuable the library becomes. This is because you know that you can use all the songs you like in any way you like as often as you like. Eventually, with enough songs, musicians will come to value the CC sampling library more because as a whole it represents more value than any particular individual song might represent under the traditional copyright licensing scheme.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:08:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hong Kong maids are expected to be sysadmins

Maids in Hong Kong can draw a higher salary if they're computer-literate enough to defrag hard-drives, reinstall OSes, and do other sysadminly chores. Well, so much for geeks as the lords of creation. It was nice while it lasted.

The demand for maids who are able to clean up the fridge and the hard drive has been driven by the surge in computer use and the numbers of children now doing their homework on computer...

But some have rebelled against the shift to computer-literate cleaners. "There's too much pressure," said Sally Yip, 47, from the Philippines, who has been in Hong Kong for 15 years and has earned a reputation for her cleaning allied with her computer skills. "I was coming home with a headache and arguing with my husband. I was offered a job with an international law firm but I turned it down. It wasn't about how much they could offer," she said, "I enjoy the babies and doing the ironing."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:04:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free Willy seekritly buried in Norway

Keiko, the killer whale who performed under the screen name "Free Willy," died last week. Free Willy's pals shipped the six-ton whale in seekrit from Oregon to Iceland and then they buried it. They buried a whale. Not at sea. In the ground. A whale. Link (via Ambiguous)

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

Epcot Center ride now comes with puke-bags

Mission: Space, the new thrill ride at Epcot Center, has begun to provide barf-bags to riders.

Several theme park consultants told Local 6 News that it is the first time "motion sickness" bags have been made available on a theme park ride.

Link (Thanks, Caines!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:59:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USB-powered novelties

This Slashdot post has a a nice roundup of novelty USB-powered devices:

• USB electric blanket [mib.co.jp]
• USB coffee heater [dct-net.co.jp]
• USB toothbrush [impress.co.jp]
• USB fan [tt-hardware.com]
• omg wtf is this! [dreamkitty.com]
• USB 'Desktop safety fan' (?) [skysis.com.tw]
• USB light [gamestech.com]
• USB fingerprint reader [eyenetwatch.com]
• USB police strobe [impress.co.jp]
• George Foreman USB iGrill (knock out da USB fat!) [thinkgeek.com]
• USB electric razor [impress.co.jp]
• USB noodle strainer [impress.co.jp]

Link (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:57:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, December 15, 2003

Fuel cell toy

Cool science toy: a DIY fuel cell car.

Pour in the water and watch it separate into hydrogen and oxygen, forming a gas to power your vehicle across the floor. Now that we have your attention, roll up your sleeves and find out more through experiments and demonstrations you can do on your own, in a classroom or with friends.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:50:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sf story about Saddam's Frazetta-dealer

Chris Nakashima-Brown is a hot up-and-coming sf writer whose prose is slick, post-Gibsonian, and funny as hell, like Neal Stephenson meets Hunter S. Thompson. His latest story, about the art dealer who supplied Saddam with his kitschy barbarian-art paintings, is up on Infinite Matrix, called "Script-Doctoring the Apocalypse."

Womack turned to look his guest in the eye. It was only then that Friedman looked closely at the Captain's Hawaiian shirt and realized the pattern was a camouflage design carefully woven from graphic designs of the heads of Seventies action heroes: Mr. T, Bruce Lee, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson.

"Beautiful shirt," said Friedman. "Postmodern Escher-wear."

"Thanks," he answered. "Got it down the street from your gallery. They've got some cool shops up there. You snuck out early that day to party with your boyfriends, so we figured we'd catch up with you this weekend. What we need is for you to help us get some new memes in front of your favorite client."

"Well, you can't just..."

"It's about time," said Womack. "You didn't think you could spend a year working as the Leader's personal shopper without attracting our attention, did you? You're closer to the man than we could ever hope to be."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:19:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flocking CGI orcs are too smart to stand and fight

Computer animators have been using cellular automata in their crowd scenes for ages, granting the dancers in the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Orcs in LotR the liberty to autonomously determine the fine details of their movement, creating realistic mob scenes that appear to contain a cast of thousands. The problem is, as the programming for the automata gets more sophisticated, they start to express non-linear behavior.

In the climax for The Return of the King, the animated forces of evil kept running away from their enemies.

"So each of these computerized soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture - determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence - and there's 200,000 of them doing that..."

"For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle," Taylor said.

"We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."

Link (Thanks, Yoz!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:11:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Golden Age of Silver Age comics

I discovered Jack Kirby around 1972 (with KAMANDI) and quickly devoured his comics from the previous decade, especially Fantastic Four. Here's a nice NYT article about 1960s comic books that sums up why they're so great.

Just as Mr. Infantino's Flash had captured the gung-ho futurism of the late 50's, illustrators like Kirby and Mr. Ditko brought an appropriately darker, grittier and sometimes spaced-out look to Marvel's pages in the mid-60's. The Fantastic Four spent a lot of time on the Lower East Side, where Kirby had grown up. Mr. Ditko's hallucinatory illustrations for the mystic Dr. Strange had a direct impact on the psychedelic art that bloomed a few years later. In "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," Tom Wolfe reported that the LSD guru Ken Kesey spent hours studying Dr. Strange comics with acid-inspired probity. Rock-concert posters also lifted the character's image.

Link (thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:17:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Trademark smackdown: US Olympics Committee v. Robolympics

The United States Olympic Committee says it and it alone can use the word "olympics" to describe an athletic competition, which miffs the organizers of the Robolympics. I filed a story about the copyright conflict between bot-builders and the USOC for Wired News here.

"The last time I checked, the USOC wasn't hosting robot sumo events," said Calkins. "Common sense dictates that no one would confuse a 6-pound hunk of steel and plastic with Picabo Street, nor would this dilute her image or in any way disrespect her accomplishments. "We won't compete against them in the 50-yard dash, so I don't see why they won't help us to create an aptly named forum for competing in robotic line-following or robot firefighting," he said.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:55:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecam snap of LA flyers: Crimes against Elvedom

Phonecam snapshot of freshly plastered flyers along Vermont street in Silverlake, outside the House of Pies where I just ate breakfast. Click thumbnail for larger pic. Who's behind these? I bet it's the Y-Que posse, whose store is like a block away. Everything's always "WANTED" or "FREE SOMEONE" with those people. UPDATE: BoingBoing reader "Crimefighter" says, "Actually the 'Wanted: Santa' poster was related to the Santanarchy/SantaCon in LA. It's a Cacophony Society related event. See this site for more info."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:37:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Region-free-ify your Mac's DVD drive

Here's a firmware update that can region-free-ify and speed up your Mac's Superdrive DVD drive. Warning: may screw up your computer ferociously. Warning: may violate the DMCA. Warning: It's your goddamned computer, why the hell hasn't Apple given you the capability of watching all your DVDs on it, no matter what country you bought them in? Link (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spiderman 2 marketing driven by blogs

Ben sez, "Sony's marketing for Spiderman 2 includes a huge weblogging push, including Blogger and LiveJournal templates, for the downloading." Link (Thanks, Ben!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:39:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SMS keyboard for PCs

If you're frustrated by the ease-of-use represented by a 101-key keyboard, why not buy one of these USB "Texting" keyboards with a 12-button phone-pad, and recreate the fakenet experience of SMS on your PC? Link (via MobileWhack)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

God to smite "Bible pirates"

BBSpot's got the high-larious scoop on God's copyright wroth:

God said that 'spreading the Gospel' was not a valid defense for distributing copyrighted materials. "Rev. Jackson has published at least 35% of My word electronically, where anyone with an internet connection can download it. Thrice did I call on him to repent; thrice did he ignore me or refer me to the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation]."

Link (Thanks, Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virtual hooking, real censorship in The Sims Online

An independent in-game newspaper published in The Sims Online is being censored by Maxis for running ads for underage in-game sex.

So The Alphaville Herald continues to push the edge of the envelope. In this case the envelope has "Underage Child Sexual Solicitation in Virtual Worlds" written all over it. They're running a mind-boggling interview with an avatar who's been turning tricks in TSO since the early days. Since this sexual activity involves real money, an under-age protagonist, and the violation of a serious number of federal and state sexual solicitation statutes, it's your required reading for the day. Call it research.

Oh, did we mention that Maxis, the developers of TSO, have started to delete in-world references to The Alphaville Herald?

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:07:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toshiba's new tiny hard drives

Toshiba's new hard drives are the size of a nickel and can store over a gigabyte of data.

The 0.85 inch diameter disk is believed to be the world's smallest hard disk drive that can store about 2 or 3 gigabytes worth of information, company spokeswoman Midori Suzuki said Monday.

Link (via Werblog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:06:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

JWZ on RFID credit cards

Great commentary by JWZ about the coming RFID wave-to-pay credit-cards:

"I like that it's on your keychain and it's fast to use," said Kristie Beenau, 36, of Peoria, Ariz., who has used ExpressPay for about six months at a CVS Pharmacy and fastfood restaurants. "I charge everything anyways. Now I wave it rather than get my card out. It's more convenient."

I'm going to make a fortune by selling an invention that lets you punch a hole in a credit card so that you can wear it on your keychain. Then later I'll repurpose that invention to let you punch a hole in a $20 bill, so you can wear that on your keychain too!

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hack your Xbox, get illegally converged

Why buy an expensive "media center" PC with lots of DRM that restrict how you can use your own music and movies, when you can hack a cheap Xbox to do the same thing?

"It's a convenience thing," said Phil, whose hacking hobbies discourage him from divulging his full name. "All of my movies are organized into categories, and it's very easy to navigate through the menus to find exactly what I want to watch. I have a PC in the basement of my house which stores all of my music and movies, and the Xbox makes it extremely convenient to use them."

Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:54:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons Flash online

The brilliant new Creative Commons Flash animation (which premiered last night at the one-year anniversary party, which was a blast) is now online! I'm very flattered at being featured in it... 7MB Flash Link New Link, please use (via Lessig) (NB: Two minor corrections: I won a Campbell Award, not a Hugo, and sold out one print run, not two)

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

Sunday, December 14, 2003

Honors for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

My novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has made the Amazon and Chapters/Indigo editors' picks lists for best science fiction novels of 2003. Also, it's only three recommendations short of making the preliminary Nebula ballot (any SFWA members out there who dug the book?). Oh yah, and the Livejournal people are considering adding Whuffie to their system. Killer news, all 'round. (Thanks, Amanda and Bo and Micah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:08:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Left Behind deconstructed

"Left Behind" is an immensely popular science fiction series about the sinners left behind on earth after good Christians are swept up in the rapture. Over at Slacktivist, a blogger has been dissecting the book in two- and three-page chunks, tearing apart the assumptions, fallacies and curiously compelling heresies in the story.

Charlie Stross and I just finished "Appeals Court," the sequel to Jury Service, which Argosy magazine will publish bound together in January, in a fix-up novel called "Rapture of the Nerds." "Appeals Court" is, in part, a response to "Left Behind": a story about a world where the only hominids who haven't ascended to the post-human cloudmind are reactionaries, missionaries, and religious fundamentalists.

Here's a little chunk of "Appeals Court," so you can see what I mean:

The ant-colony has taken the entire Atlantic coast of the US, has marched on Georgia and west to the Mississippi. It is an anarchist colony, whose females lay eggs without regard for any notional Queen, and it has entered its eighth year of life, which is middle-aged for a normal colony, but may be just the beginning for the Hypercolony.

The God-botherers have no treaty with the ants, but have come to view them as another proof of the impending end of the world. Anything that is not contained in chink-free, seamless plastic and rock is riddled in ant-tunnels within hours. They've learned to establish airtight seals around their homes and workplaces, to subject themselves to stinging insecticide showers before clearing a vestibule, to listen for the tupperware burp whenever they seal their children in their space-suits and send them off to Bible classes.

The ants have eaten their way through most of the nematode species beneath the soil, compromised all but the most plasticized root-systems of the sickening flora (the gasoline refining forests are curiously symbiotic with the colony -- anarchist supercolonies like living cheek-by-mouth-part with a lot of hydocarbons). They've eaten the bee-hives and wasp-nests, and they've laid waste to any comestible not tinned and sealed, leaving the limping Americans with naught but a few billion tons of processed food to eat before their supply bottoms out.

The American continent is a fairy tale that the cloudmind tells itself whenever it doubts its collective decision to abandon humanity. The left-behinds there spent their lives waiting for an opportunity to pick up a megaphone and organize crews with long poles to go digging through the ruins of civilization for tinned goods. Presented with their opportunity in the aftermath of the Geek Rapture, they are happy as evangelical pigs in shit -- plenty to rail against, plenty of fossil fuel, plenty of firearms.

What more could they possibly need?

and here's Slacktivist on "Left Behind":

The first words of Left Behind are "Rayford Steele," the protagonist's name.

It sounds like a porn star's name -- and in a sense it is. The Left Behind series is dispensational porno, but it's more than that. One of the most disturbing things about this book is the way LaHaye and Jenkins portray men, women and the relationships between them.

Note that Tim LaHaye's wife is something of a professional misogynist. She runs the 500,000-member "Concerned Women for America" -- jokingly referred to by its critics as "Ladies Against Women." For years, while Beverly LaHaye's husband pastored a church in San Diego, Mrs. L. spent most of her time 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., running a large organization committed to, among other things, telling women they should stay at home and sacrifice their careers for their husbands. She is not an ironic woman and doesn't seem to find any of this inconsistent. (Nor, as I found out firsthand, does she appreciate jokes about the Freudian implications of the view from her L'Enfante Plaza office window. Sometimes the Washington Monument is just a cigar.)

Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:30:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Voting By Design

Voting By Design is a "Knowledge Map" and report on how design affects the voting process. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:19:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help the music industry figure out which way to jump

Aaron Swartz has started a blog to record and discuss "alternative compensation schemes" -- business models for music in the era of P2P nets.

Here's the proposal in a nutshell: Some group of people pay a small fee (like a couple dollars a month). In return, they can download whatever they want, however they want. We track what is downloaded and then distribute the money received, in proportion, to the people responsible for the songs. Everybody wins: users get all the music they want, software developers can continue innovating, and the industry gets paid.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:16:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crippled "disposable" digital camera hacked and improved

The Walgreens-branded PureDigital camera is a "disposable" digital cam, requiring that you bring the device to a Walgreens to have your pix "developed" (printed and/or exported). A hacker has cracked the device, so that you can add Smartmedia memory and export pictures to your PC at home, reusing the camera.

you will see there is a daughter board on there with the nand flash for picture storage .. if you remove that board you can add a smartmedia socket and using smartmedia card you will be able to get the pics with a smartmedia reader standard jpg's but it will not do more that 25 pics still (think its using fat12)..

Slashdotted Link, Mirror Link, Another Mirror (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:10:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wiki inventor goes to MSFT

Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wikis, is taking a job at Microsoft: he's put up a wiki page to solicit advice for surviving there.

You can have a huge impact on Microsoft's culture. Push yourself to the max. Prepare the family -- working at Microsoft is fun and I went overboard. Sometimes the family doesn't understand. Take days to yourself. Try to build friendships and get a mentor or two. That'll help.

Link (via Many2Many)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:05:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Geek tatts

Killer gallery of geeky tattoos. Link (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:02:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Social people don't need social networking

Kevin Werbach points out that social networking sites like LinkedIn and Tribe and so forth have very little to offer highly connected people like Esther Dyson, who would nevertheless be a real asset to the network:

Esther and Pierre don't need LinkedIn to reach pretty much anyone they want to contact. Yet there are a whole lot of folks who want to reach them, and don't have a personal connection to do so. So the service worsens their email overload with little corresponding benefit.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:00:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orange cubic PC

The T-Cube is a new tiny, orange, cubic PC intended for sale in China. It runs some whacky OS called T-Engine. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:58:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virtual casino added to Everquest

Everquest has added a virtual casino to its gamespace:

The casino is a game of chance. To play you will need to buy a token from one of the wait staff in the casino. You can then take this token to one of the dealers and hand it in to him. There are four different dealers, each with prizes suitable for the different class types. When you turn the token in, he will deal you a hand of King's Court. Based on what your hand turned out to be, you will be awarded a prize. The chance to win a Gold Ticket exists on every hand you play. If you win the Gold Ticket you can turn it in to the manager of the casino and he will spin a grand prize wheel. The number the wheel lands on will determine the item you receive. There are many prestigious items that you can obtain from the ticket turn-in. Some of them are the Guise of the Deceiver, Fungus Covered Great Staff, and Holgresh Elder Beads. There are many more, and we also have intentions of adding more prizes in later patches if the games are popular.

Link (via Terra Nova)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:56:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Micronations: folly and grandeur

A conversation this weekend got me to thinking about this old Wired article from March 2000, "It's Good to Be King." The piece is about obsessives who create "countries" by declaring their bedrooms or homes to be sovereign states, and then start issuing passports, attracting adherents, and generally ruling. Just re-read it, and it's as striking as it was when I first found it three years ago:

Some claim physical territory - the family farm, a square foot of Scottish fen, the bottom of the ocean, or, in Talossa's case, the east side of Milwaukee plus a chunk of Antarctica and a small island off the coast of France - but none would actually take power even if it were offered to them. Most feature a founder with the requisite lofty title, and almost all make their home, in one form or another, on the Web...

An entire subcategory of micronations owes its existence to adolescent alienation. These empires of angst betray themselves in one of two ways - either with hackneyed origin myths, usually involving benevolent sultans and distant tropical seas, or with paranoid rants against authority punctuated by proclamations of universal domination and reprinted Rage Against the Machine lyrics. Though almost all teen kingdoms claim legions of subjects, more often than not, populace, ruler, and disaffected youth are one and the same. The Kingdom of Triparia (www.triparia.cx), founded in 1998, is a classic of the genre: 17 citizens, with fancy titles and a penchant for posting overintellectualized bulletin-board messages, united in an act of collective imagination.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:53:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese dollar-store opens doors in North America

Hyaku Yen, a Japanese dollar-store, has begun to open shops in North America.

At its Aberdeen store, at Hazelbridge and Cambie Road, 45,000 items will initially be sold at $2 Cdn each. These are to include cosmetics, gardening tools, household goods, soft drinks, snack food and stationery.

"A public survey in Japan showed Daiso-Sangyo as being the second most recognizable brand-name retailer after Disney World in Tokyo," Fairchild chairman and CEO Thomas Fung said Tuesday. "They ranked ahead of famous brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Sony, Toyota and Starbucks."

Link (Thanks, [sorry, deleted your name]!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:50:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Michael Jackson fan-portaiture

Here's a creepily magnificent gallery of portraits of Michael Jackson, painted by an obsessive fan who sends her work to MJ and sells prints on the Interweb. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

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

Mondo Cane -- the proto-shockumentary

Excellent NYT article about proto-shockumentary Mondo Cane and it spawn by Boing Boing pal Matt Haber.

..."Mondo Cane" presented bizarre, humorous, frightening and downright dubious dispatches from the farthest corners of the world: Italians in the village of Calabria slicing themselves with glass in celebration of Good Friday, the French painter Yves Klein painting with his naked "human paintbrushes," a woman in New Guinea suckling a pig and swanky New Yorkers dining on insects in a restaurant. As seen by Mr. Jacopetti, the world was a truly strange and frightening place.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:19:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, December 13, 2003

Bringing pinball to MAME, one table at a time

MAME is a project to allow for the emulation of every video-game ever minted, but what if you're more the pinball type? No fear: a group of MAME hackers are building virtual pinball machines that lovingly emulate every jot and tittle of every pinball table under the sun. Link (via Smartpatrol)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:54:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Holographic lollies

Screw lollipops screened with detailed edible artwork: these guys are selling giant lollipops with edible holograms embedded in them. Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What Dean needs from the Dems

An interesting view of the Dean campaign: a borging of the Democratic party in order to rescue the brand for an Internet-centric political party:

Other candidates -- Joseph Lieberman , John Kerry, John Edwards -- are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media assets. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants is the Democratic brand name and legacy, its last remaining asset of value, as part of his marketing strategy.

Link (via Many 2 Many)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:43:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Two rants on Geneva's crappy WiFi, one fictional, one non-

Lessig's just got back form the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, where he ran into the Swiss version of WiFi, a craptacular extravaganza of telecom stupidity compounded by the irony of hosting a summit on the "Information Society" where it's easier to get a gift bag of conference schwag than an Internet connection. Lessig's rant on the subject is entertaining, and it put me in mind of a section I wrote for my novel-in-progress, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," which is about community wireless hackers (among other things) and this chunk was inspired by my trip to Geneva a couple months ago to attend the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. I've uploaded the relevant section.

"No problem -- outside every hotel and most of the cafes, I can find a signal for a network called 'SwissCom.' I log on to the network and I fire up a browser and I get a screen asking me for my password. Well, I don't have one, but after poking around, I find out that I can buy a card with a temporary password on it. So I wait until some of the little smoke-shops open and start asking them if they sell SwissCom Internet Cards, in my terrible, miserable French, and after chuckling at my accent, they look at me and say, 'I have no clue what you're talking about,' shrug, and go back to work.

"Then I get the idea to go and ask at the hotels. The first one, the guy tells me that they only sell cards to guests, since they're in short supply. The cards are in short supply! Three hotels later, they allow as how they'll sell me a 30-minute card. Oh, that's fine. 30 whole minutes of connectivity. Whoopee. And how much will that be? Only about a zillion Swiss pesos. Don't they sell cards of larger denominations? Oh sure, two hours, 24 hours, seven days -- and each one costs about double the last, so if you want, you can get a seven day card for about as much as you'd spend on a day's worth of connectivity in 30-minute increments -- about $300 Canadian for a week, just FYI.

"Well, paying 300 bucks for a week's Internet is ghastly, but very Swiss, where they charge you if you have more than two bits of cheese at breakfast, and hell, I could afford it. But Three hundred bucks for a day's worth of 30-minute cards? Fuck that. I was going to have to find a seven-day card or bust. So I ask at a couple more hotels and finally find someone who'll explain to me that SwissCom is the Swiss telco, and that they have a retail storefront a couple blocks away where they'd sell me all the cards I wanted, in whatever denominations I require.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:40:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, December 12, 2003

Eyesore of the Month photos and commentary

Architectural critic James Howard Kunstler has a section on his website called "Eyesore of the Month," which includes a monthly photo of a hideous architectural blunder along with scathing commentary. Like me, he seems to think the 1920s represented a high water mark in esthetics.

Considering I took this shot at lunchtime (12:15) on the first nice spring day. . . and considering that the four towers are full of toiling state workers, the emptiness of the vast plaza is rather remarkable. Conclusion: it totally sucks.

Link (thanks, Steven!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:23:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great science fiction radio plays, open licensed and free for downloading

My pal hugh Spenser is a hell of a science fiction writer, and he's got a passion for the golden age of science fiction radio dramas. He wrote a six-part series of radio plays about the early days of science fiction fandom, which were produced by the wonderful Shoestring Theater and aired last summer on NPR. Hugh and Shoestring have released all six epiisodes as MP3s under a Creative Commons license that allows for the noncommercial redistribution -- give them a listen, they're way boss.

Amazing Struggles Episode 1, 28.8MB MP3 Link
Amazing Struggles Episode 2, 29MB MP3 Link
Amazing Struggles Episode 3, 29.4MB MP3 Link
Astonishing Failures Episode 1, 30.1MB MP3 Link
Astonishing Failures Episode 2, 31.2MB MP3 Link
Astonishing Failures Episode 3, 30MB MP3 Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:20:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Group-blog on security and privacy screwups

Abuseable Tech Awareness Center is a new group blog in which prominent tech researchers will describe their ongoing projects to crack open technology and expose the security and privacy vulnerabilities in the system. The contrib list is amazing:

Steve Bellovin, AT&T Labs-Research
Matt Bishop, UC Davis
Matt Blaze, University of Pennsylvania
Dan Boneh, Stanford University
Simon Byers, AT&T Labs-Research
Bill Cheswick, Lumeta
Lorrie Cranor, AT&T Labs-Research
Ed Felten, Princeton University
Dan Geer, Independent Consultant
Tadayoshi Kohno, UC San Diego
Carl Landwehr, University of Maryland
Patrick McDaniel, AT&T Labs-Research
Gary McGraw, Cigital
Mike Reiter, Carnegie Mellon University
Avi Rubin, Johns Hopkins University
Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security
Richard M. Smith, Internet Consultant
Adam Stubblefield, Johns Hopkins University
Dan Wallach, Rice University

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:20:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": Holiday gizmo-shopping

On today's edition of the NPR radio program "Day to Day," host Alex Chadwick and I talk tips about which of this holiday season's crop of electronic gadgets will make great gifts. This week: Words of advice when shopping for portable DVD players, mobile MP3 players, and universal remotes. In next week's show, more gadget fun. Link, audio stream will be available after 12PM Pacific.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:15:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSFT apparently devising new crapware disc format for Xbox

MSFT has a traditional business-model for the Xbox: sell people devices that are deliberately crippled, then charge them money to temporarily uncripple them. Unfortunately, MSFT's customers keep on treating their bought-and-paid for Xboxes as though they were their property, "hacking" the devices so that any software can be installed and run on them.

To combat this dreadful piracy, MSFT is apparently considering moving from traditional CD-sized silver discs for its Xbox built-in readers to some other, nonstandard format that it will have exclusive control over, via patents or trade secrets or both. This is a wonderfully terrible idea: spending extra engineering dollars to produce a device that does less, costs more, and can't be used to run all the media and code that's available on traditional optical discs. Nice one, MSFT.

According to the ad, Microsoft's Xbox team is seeking an engineer "to manage the design and development of the Xbox Game Disc for the next generation Xbox console", with the job description going on to mention anti-piracy as the first in a list of key factors for the new game disc specification. Although it's possible that the role will simply involve devising a copy protection mechanism for games on existing DVD media, similar to that used by the current generation Xbox and the PlayStation 2, the description of the role hints strongly at the company developing a more proprietary format.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:29:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NPR clip: Paul Boutin on ICANN

Paul Boutin was on NPR the other day discussing the latest on ICANN and the Geneva WSIS summit. "As I say here," says Paul, "When Indymedia and Instapundit agree, how can we be wrong?" Link. Happy birthday, Paul!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:07:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teddy: mind-blowing 3D package

Teddy is a spookily cool 3D modelling package that automatically extrudes your 2D line-drawings into three-dimensional, rotatable objects. It runs in a Java applet and is mindbogglingly easy to use. The forms that it creates have a kind of organic roughness that is utterly unlike the 3D objects I've created with other 3D packages. 32MB AVI Link (via KoKoRo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google tracks packages

Google will now search for UPS, FedEx and other numbers:

UPS tracking numbers example search: "1Z9999W999999999"
FedEx tracking numbers example search: "fedex 999999999999"
Patent numbers example search: "patent 5123123"
FAA airplane registration numbers example search: "n199ua"
FCC equipment IDs example search: "fcc B4Z-34009-PIR"

Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mad Drew: new Toothpaste for Dinner book

Drew, the creator of the Toothpaste for Dinner comics and assorted humoribilia has a new book out, called "Mad Drew: Boyond Coffeedome." It recounts the life of a post-dot-crash temp with a near-autistic inability to understand his surroundings and a deadpan delivery that reminds me of Molesworth, by way of Office Space.

also i remembered how it is sometimes good to work when you can use things like the copy machine and stapler for free! i did not do a lot of copying when i was unemployed but now that i have a job i know that i can write things on a piece of paper and make a hundred copies of them and take them home and put them on telephone poles!! the power is amazing, if i want to tell all the poeple walking down the street to shut up then i can write SHUT UP in large letters on paper. using an office marker for free by the way!!! and then copy it and stable it to telephone poles USING AN OFFICE STAPLER, it is a dream come true!

Link

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

London tube map, remixed

Hilarious remix of the London Tube map. 184K JPEG Link Original source Link (Thanks, rackhelgand!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:40:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stunning snow-sculptures

The winners of the 2003 International Snow Sculpture Championships in Breckenridge, Colorado have been declared -- the photos are stunning. Link (Thanks, Melissa!)

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

Thursday, December 11, 2003

Hyper-trendy prison clothes big in Berlin

Marc sez, "Haeftling sells 'trendy' products manufactured by inmates of a Berlin prison. The marketing and branding is the idea and scheme of a Berlin ad agency. The prison has found itself barely able to keep up with orders." Link (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Selling snowballs in a blizzard

During last week's NYC snowstorm, an entrepreneur set up shop in Times Square, selling snowballs for $1/pop.

The young man was Gilberto Triplitt, a 28-year-old unemployed artist from Queens who attended LaGuardia High School and worked in a furniture store until it closed in the post-Sept. 11 downturn. He went into the snowball business Monday afternoon on Prince St. in SoHo. He reported selling six in 2-1/2 hours.

"It's really easy to sell them," he said, to a reporter's surprise.

Link (via Smart Patrol)

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

Epidemiology meets Six Degrees

Neat-o-keen epidemiological concept: use informal surveys to identify the highly connected individuals who are likely to be super-spreaders of illness, then vaccinate them.

The idea is to randomly choose, say, 20% of the individuals and ask them to name one acquaintance; then vaccinate those acquaintances. Potential super-spreaders have such a large number of acquaintances that they are very likely to be named at least once, the researchers found. On the other hand, the super-spreaders are so few in number that the random 20% of individuals is unlikely to include many of them.

Link (via JWZ)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:14:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Art car near my office

This cool art-car decorated with a diorama of a scene from the mountainous outdoors was parked out front of my office today. Link

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

Toys R Us' sneaky trick loses in court

Eli the Bearded says: "This story of Louisiana winning a court tax battle is interesting to see the types of tax evasion big companies use.

"In this case Toys R Us advertises using a giraffe mascot named Geoffrey. But TRU does not own the rights to that mascot, instead Geoffrey, Inc (a TRU subsidiary) owns them. So the toy store "licenses" the trademark from Geoffrey, Inc, at a hefty rate, then calls that a business expense and deducts from its pre-tax income. Since GI isn't a Louisiana company, TRU argued that it doesn't need to pay LA taxes on it's income. The judge disagreed." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:41:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First-ever public demo of an open-source PC on Monday

The OpenCores movement, which produces open-source-licensed "code" for producing chips using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) has built a complete RISC computer that runs Linux using open source libraries to describe the hardware characteristics. This means that your open source operating system can now run on open source microprocessors. Monday will mark the first-ever public demonstration of the system.

On Monday, December 15, at 7pm, OpenCores developer Damjan Lampret will give the first public demonstration of an all-Open Source System-On-Chip (SoC) at the Freedom Technology Center in Mountain View, California, USA. The new OpenCores System-On-Chip, developed and manufactured by Flextronics Semiconductor, runs Linux, uClinux, or eCos. The SoC is exclusively built with freely licensed OpenCores IP cores. The chip includes the OpenRISC OR1200 32-bit processor, a Memory Controller for SDRAM/FLASH/SRAM, a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet MAC, 32-bit, 33/66MHz PCI support, and a 16550 UART.

Link (Thanks, Seth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:59:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tribute to Sachs: Me

"Me" is a lovely short video from Austrian net.artists Monochrom in tribute to Oliver Sachs's research on neurological defects: a man recounts his unusual defect and his coping mechanism. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

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

Contest to make a tiny chair out of champagne cork wire

Design Within Reach holds a yearly competition to design a chair faishioned out of the wire that secures a champagne cork. Link (thanks, Justin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:33:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Device turns hotdogs into octopuses

Useless but fun gadget converts ordinary hotdogs into "Octodogs." The logo is very cute, that's the main reason I'm blogging this. Link (thanks, Mel!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:00:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Transformation from the Internet as a subset of telecom to telecom as a subset of the Internet

Kevin Werbach comments on Jeff Pulver's worries about the FCC regulating voice-over-Internet technology:

As I said at the FCC VOIP hearing last week, the real issue is the transformation from the Internet as a subset of telecom to telecom as a subset of the Internet. That means treating voice as an application that can run on any platform, not as the platform itself.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:32:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lisa Rein interview on Music for America

Here's a great Music for America interview with activist/musician/geek Lisa Rein, whose open-invitation concert/party is this Saturday in San Francisco.

I believe that music is a good way to approach the emotional side of these controversial political issues. I believe that the cultural aspects of, for instance, copyright -- and the common man's loss of our history and heritage in exchange for big business to make more money on it's intellectual property -- are explained better through song.

I also believe that music is a good way to raise awareness about important issues. If you can write a song that's good in its own right, in that it's a catchy tune and people like it no matter what it's about -- that they might eventually read the lyrics and learn more about the issue you're singing about.

I try to follow John Lennon's model in raising awareness. He was able to eventually stop the vietnam war with this song and the feeling of love and community that he was able to bring to people at large. I hope to do the same thing and encourage others to climb on board.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:43:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More luscious eye candy from Lynnfox: Bjork concert graphics

LynnFox, whose surreal, organic digital creations I swooned over in this previous post, have just published clips of the graphics they created for Bjork's latest concert tour. Beautiful stuff. Four movies they made for her live shows are now online here. (gracias, Jose Luis de Vicente!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:39:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lab Notes from UC Berkeley

In this issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:

* Grabbing waste heat from industry to warm your apartment
* Engineering our water resources against El Nino
* Simulating cyber-attacks on a microscale model of the Net

I hope you enjoy it! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:06:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grassroots WSIS coverage

The Daily Summit is a group blog reporting from the front lines of the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, available in English and Arabic. Check the blogroll for lots more grassroots coverage links.

How do you make your press conference stand out from all the others?

Head of UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Ole-Henrik Magga decided to round his off with a song.

Without any backing, brave Mr Magga from the Sami reindeer hunting tribes of Northern Europe, trilled a song about a young reindeer meeting an early end in life.

Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:25:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steven Levy on Trusted Computing

Steven Levy, author of Hackers and Crypto, has a fantastic piece on Newsweek's site about the potential dangers of Trusted Computing.

How could the freedom genie be shoved back into the bottle? Basically, it's part of a huge effort to transform the Net from an arena where anyone can anonymously participate to a sign-in affair where tamperproof "digital certificates" identify who you are. The advantages of such a system are clear: it would eliminate identity theft and enable small, secure electronic "microtransactions," long a dream of Internet commerce pioneers. (Another bonus: arrivederci, unwelcome spam.) A concurrent step would be the adoption of "trusted computing," a system by which not only people but computer programs would be stamped with identifying marks. Those would link with certificates that determine whether programs are uncorrupted and cleared to run on your computer.

Link (via Smartmobs)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:12:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons party this Sunday

The Creative Commons anniversary party is taking place in San Francisco this Sunday:

Creative Commons is having its anniversary party on Sunday, December 14, from 6-9pm at 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna Street, San Francisco (directions). There will be some cool new CC tunes, and great-news annoucements, and most of Joi’s cool SF friends. Be sure to RSVP.

Link

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

Labels to VCs: invest in P2P at your peril

The IFPI -- the international equivalent of the RIAA -- has begun threatening venture capitalists who are considering investing in P2P applications.

"The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry [IFPI] Taiwan calls for existing investors and potential investors to seriously consider their investments in unauthorized peer-to-peer network operators..>"

"IFPI seriously advises those who collect money on Kuro's behalf to reconsider the legality of their business activities with Kuro," Lee said.

If you've ever thought, "Well, why should I care about P2P? I use my computer in non-infringing ways," this is why: investors who put money into general-purpose technology that is no more immune to infringement that email or web-servers or SIP-phones or what have you are being put on notice by the labels that such investment will be targetted in the courts. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:04:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Urban farmers reclaim Detroit

In Detroit, urban farmers, frustrated with buying their groceries at Party Stores now that the grocery chains have largely pulled out of the city, have begun to reclaim Detroit's vast empty spaces for grow-your-own operations, complete with livestock and tractors.

After decades of blight, large swathes of Detroit are being reclaimed by nature. Roughly a third of this 139-square-mile city consists of weed-choked lots and dilapidated buildings. Satellite images show an urban core giving way to an urban prairie.

Rather than fight this return to nature, Mr. Weertz and other urban farmers have embraced it, gradually converting 15 acres of idle land into more than 40 community gardens and microfarms — some consuming entire blocks.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:54:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thunderbirds trailer is go!

Jonathan "Commander Riker" Frakes is directing a live-action film based on the Thunderbirds. Sweet-looking trailer. 5.8MB Quicktime Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:52:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Turning off your SSID is dumb

Good, short white-paper explains why turning off your WiFi access point's SSID broadcast is not only bad for security, it's also bad for performance.

Contrary to a common belief that the SSID is a WLAN security feature and its exposure a security risk, the SSID is nothing more than a wireless-space group label. It cannot be successfully hidden. Attempts to hide it will not only fail, but will negatively impact WLAN performance, and may result in additional exposure of the SSID to passive scanning. The performance impact of this misguided effort will be felt in multiple WLAN scenarios, including simple operations like joining a WLAN, and in significantly longer roaming times.

129k PDF Link) (via WiFi Net News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:18:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spamware dissected

This is an amazing technical dissection of a piece of spamware that was implanted on a savvy user's webserver, a hunk of code that cleverly turned the machine into a piece of a distributed spamming cluster.

After the identification, the client sends the report command, and sends a list of exactly 1000 items, each item composed by the e-mail identification number (as shown above), and two other arguments, the first one is an error code that determines if the e-mail has been sent (for instance, 6 means 'Timeout connecting to host', 11 that the e-mail has been sent, 9 means 'Timeout reading from socket', ...) and it will be clearly shown in the next paragraphs, and the third one that I haven't identified yet, but it could be a flag to know if the e-mail address has been treated. It seems that it is the report for telling which e-mail address is valid. Just to be sure, I executed the daemon with its configuration file slightly modified, changing the /dev/null to real files to watch its logs. As seen in the daemon's configuration file, there are three different logs: logfile, speedlog and out. The last one (out) is always empty, but the other two contain interesting things: As seen in the daemon's configuration file, there are three different logs: logfile, speedlog and out. The last one (out) is always empty, but the other two contain interesting things; following is the speedlog file:

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:14:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian courts to enforce Shari'a-based arbitration

The Canadian judicial system is admitting a new class of arbitrators who will rule on the basis of Shari'a law. If two parties want to settle a civil dispute according to Muslim law, they can seek out a Shari'a arbitrator, whose judgement will be enforced by the regular Canadian courts. Link (via Smartpatrol)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SCO sends IBM 1,000,000 pieces of paper

As part of a court order to provide IBM with evidence relating to SCO's frivolous anti-Linux lawsuit, SCO sent IBM one million sheets of paper on which were printed the source-code that SCO alleges is being infringed upon. Of course, this is just a tactic to sabotage IBM's defense, since it needs all that code in a machine-readable format.

"Knowing full well that IBM would need its source code in electronic form so that proper analyses--such as those SCO itself claims to have performed--could be conducted, SCO instead produced the source code on one million sheets of paper," IBM said in the motion. "The only reason for SCO's production of code on paper was, we believe, to stall the progress of these proceedings while giving the (false) impression of being forthcoming in its discovery responses."

In response to IBM's complaint, Stowell said, "If a company wants code, it's the other party's decision to provide that any way they feel like providing that."

Link (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Did Blaster cause the August blackout?

Bruce Schneier (author of Beyond Fear) speculates that the great August blackout on the East Coast may have been caused by the Blaster worm.

Although the worm didn't have to perform any malicious actions on the computers it infected, its mere existence drained resources and often caused the host computer to crash. To remove the worm, a system administrator had to run a program that erased the malicious code; then, the administrator had to patch the vulnerability so that the computer would not get reinfected.

The coincidence is too obvious to ignore. At 2:14 p.m. EDT, the MSBlast worm was dropping systems all across North America. The report doesn't explain why so many computers--both primary and backup systems--at FirstEnergy were failing at around the same time. But MSBlast is certainly a reasonable suspect.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mugging caught on audioblog entry

A LiveJournaller was phoning in an audioblog item when she and her friends were beaten and robbed. The thieves didn't think to turn off the phone, and were captured and audblogged to her journal. Link (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Looney Tunes composer profiled in Slate

Nice article about Carl Stalling, composer of Looney Toons scores Link (thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:51:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scary article about the flu

There isn't enough flu vaccine medicine to go around this year, but that might not matter, because the vaccine might not be effective against the "Fujian" flu that's going around.

Bad as they are, the difficulties in coping with this year's influenza epidemic are like the tiny tremors in California that remind you of the looming Big One. In the world of influenza, the Big One is a pandemic—a strain of influenza so different from what has circulated before that people have no immunity. That's what happened in 1918 when the flu killed between 20 million and 40 million people worldwide. Pandemics that killed well over half a million also struck in both 1957 and 1968.

Link(thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:16:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More wonderful Woodring Weirdness

The fun loving freaks at STRANGEco comissioned Jim Woodring to design this lovely seven-inch Dorbel figurine. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:43:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Election Day 2004 newspaper parody

Excellent Fark.com Photoshop contest -- front pages on Election Day 2004. Link (thanks, rb!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:23:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dick Cheney shoots 70 pen-raised birds

Poor Dick Cheney. Those defered-salary payments he receives from Halliburton Oil (which has been importing oil into Iraq -- at taxpayer expense -- at twice the rate other companies have been trucking it in from Kuwait) must not be enough to pay for groceries. He has to go out and shoot his food. Read about his exciting bird hunting trip, where he shot 70 "pen-raised animals that cannot escape." He sure must be hungry. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:16:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jellybath: surely space aliens are responsible

This product looks like it could fit comfortably on that alien porn site below. Fancy getting naked in a tub full of warm, aromatherapeutic slime? Jellybath turns ordinary bath water into a soothing puddle of brightly-colored gel. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it. Site includes a how-to quicktime video. Link (thanks, Quin!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:00:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

String Cheese Incident takes on Ticketbastard

From this month's issue of Mother Jones:

How the String Cheese Incident -- five barefoot, mandolin- plucking improvisers from Boulder -- is taking on the most hated corporation in music (...)What do you call a company that has preserved its near monopoly for more than a decade despite numerous antitrust lawsuits, that charges exorbitant fees to its captive customers, whose CEO is said to revel in the fact that he "crushed" one of America's most beloved rock and roll bands when it dared to take the company on, that (for these reasons and more) is near the top of most Americans' list of companies they love to hate? Well, some people call it Ticketbastard, but Ticketmaster doesn't mind, so long as people keep calling -- and logging on and walking up to its outlets, which they did enough times last year to buy 95 million tickets, worth $4 billion, on behalf of its parent, Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp.

Link. BoingBoing reader Andrew Crocker points us another, earlier story from a local alt weekly in the band's hometown: Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:52:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alien porn, hot space babes.

I don't usually post links to regular old XXX porn sites on BoingBoing, but this one -- well, it's not regular. The kitsch is so thick you'll need a shovel -- cracked me up too hard to pass up. Promises "hot space babes," "celebrity beauties exposed to intergalactic invaders... alien monsters, galactic sex training, and more" -- shot with the lowest production values this side of the twelve colonies. Don't miss the poster for the site's remake of It Came from Outer Space. Warning: gratuitous purple appendages, much spurting of green liquid; probably about the least worksafe thing ever linked to from this blog. Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl, via Indienudes)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:36:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, December 9, 2003

Supersized layoffs at AOL Music?

A BoingBoing pal who prefers anonymity says "AOL @ Music office NUKED today.. ops, QA, eng, PMs all let go." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:14:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Jim Woodring toys: "Imperial Newts"

KidRobot is selling a new series of toy figures designed by cartoonist Jim Woodring. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:49:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Australian magazine editor given terrorist treatment

Kevin Roderick of LA Observed summarizes an Aussie journo's humiliating ordeal at the hands of US immigration officials.

"I've had every part of me groped beyond belief...(I was) shocked more than anything, disbelief, total sense of disbelief, humiliated," she told Australia's Channel Nine. Smethurst was detained under a new reading of the law that lets tourists in on a 90-day waiver of the visa rules, but not working journalists.

Apparently, foreign journalists are percieved to be a threat to U.S. interests. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:22:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Celebs rake in top-drawer swag on charity circuit

Good LA Times article about the lavish perks demanded by stars who attend charity events.

But many celebrities appear at these events not solely out of the goodness of their hearts. They come to line their pockets. "Stars know they can literally steal from charity," said Steven Fox, a Monterey businessman who worked with Tonken on a 1995 fundraiser for the Tommy Lasorda Jr. Memorial Foundation, named after the baseball legend's late son. "Otherwise, they don't perform. They don't appear." Actor David Schwimmer, who has made many millions of dollars starring in NBC's "Friends," received a pair of Rolex watches worth $26,413 in advance of a 1997 charity gala that had among its intended beneficiaries the John Wayne Cancer Institute.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:15:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot pics from "Hallucigenia" event in Japan

BoingBoing reader Dave says:

Check out this page at Gizmodo.com pointing to video clips of the Hallucigenia 01 at FuRo, the Future Robot Technology Research Center of the Chiba Institute of Technology:

"ZDNet Japan has some video clips of the Hallucigenia 01, the futuristic eight-wheeled car/transportation robot with wheels that can rotate independently of the others, and it can move up hills while the body of the car remains level."

Links page is hosted by Cacheop.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:55:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos: amorous trees

BoingBoing reader George Perdicaris points us to the work of photographer Yuri Dojc. His "Amorous Nature" series reveals hidden eroticism in the world of plants. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:52:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

From Lead Blocks to Weblogs

The organizers of Spanish tech conference Artfutura asked me to write a primer on the history of weblogs for a publication distributed at the event. The essay is now online, here's a snip.

When I was a child, my father hauled an abandoned antique printing press into our house one afternoon. He was an artist and writer who had a habit of falling in love with discarded tools, the same way I became routinely obsessed with broken dogs and fallen birds. But this thing weighed over a ton. He'd become enamored with the way words from the press felt in his hands, divided into chunks of lead characters. Sentences formed like spines strung from vertebrae. I remember exactly how the blocks of type felt when he placed them in my small hands -- they were palm-sized then, but cold; sharp enough along the corners to puncture skin. Heavier than the wooden alphabet building-blocks I played with upstairs.

I remember the acrid smell of black ink, and the slapping sounds of my father spreading each blob into a thin film that coated wide plates of assembled text. Gears made metallic groans when he heaved his giant body into the wheel that set the press into motion, a wheel as tall as he was, a wheel that smashed wet steel plates into paper to form printed words.

The press was an elderly oddity: a fat, shut-in houseguest who consumed two rooms, accompanied by floor-to-ceiling cabinets of paper and type trays. Homes didn't have PCs in 1974, but there were many more efficient ways to speak to the world. My father wrote on a typewriter, and words were published in books, newspapers, and magazines. But words that came out of this press had a scent. A personality you could feel with your fingers. Whatever my father's words were, when they were printed this way they had history, as if he had squeezed them through a time machine on their way to the sheets of vellum extra-bright white.

Link to Spanish, Link to English. For more essays from Artfutura contributors including Terence McKenna, Lev Manovich, and others, try this: Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:33:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turning Heads With PowerPoint: David Byrne

In today's edition of Wired News, an interview I conducted with former Talking Heads member David Byrne about his art-explorations into PowerPoint:

From televised presidential aircraft carrier visits to the glut of unreal reality TV shows, "American culture is becoming a culture of pageants," says David Byrne. "We're surrounded by show, just as the Roman Empire turned to bread and circuses to hide other things that were taking place." To examine how the medium shapes the message, the former Talking Head uses Microsoft PowerPoint -- the ubiquitous presentation software -- as a creative tool.

His art presentations make babble of business-speak, and question whether the form of what we communicate can affect its truth: Rebellious flow charts stream backward, screens overflow with clip art gone wild, deliverables and leave-behinds assume surreal new roles, and renegade bullet points assault the viewer in a rapid-fire barrage.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:54:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

B is for Bukkake

Susannah "Invisible Cowgirl" Breslin and illustrator Anthony Ventura are about halfway through a collaborative graphic book called Fetish Alphabet. Check out letter B, now online at ordomag:

It was a matter of mathematics. Outside, 100 men were waiting. She could hear them laughing, and hooting, and pounding on the door. Inside, one of her was waiting. She was down on her knees on the cement floor of a soundstage in Porn Valley. Soon, the men would come in and form an unknown number of concentric circles around her. With her eyes closed, she would count them, as they came forward to her, one-by-one. For the next 120 minutes, she would think about the things in her life that were of value to her. Her boyfriend who was back at home. The sunset where she grew up near the Mojave Desert. The sight of a dozen Maple Glaze Donuts at Krispy Kreme. Eventually, it would all come to an end. The P.A. with one hand would help her to her feet. The men would walk out the back door, where they would be given $50. She would walk out the front door, where she would be given $500.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:45:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Charges of new 'Net censorship in Iran

Persian blogger hoder tells BoingBoing:

Net censorship in Iran has been intensified lately by the government, using expensive filtering software that they've just bought. There are also reports that the TCI (Telecommunication Company of Iran) has blocked Google Cache to stop people accessing the filtered websites. At the same time, Iran has sent a big delegate to the World Summit on information Societies in Geneva.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:37:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Shockwave goodie from Flying Puppet: white vibes

I love what Nicolas Clauss does with Flash Shockwave. Always imaginative, elegant, understated, and in this case, vertigo-inducing.

"interactive sound paintings,a work on pixel as texture, a nods at the cd-rom Alphabet. Four years after dropping the brushes,a virtual come back to painting."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:35:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friendster or Foester? Conspiracy Art of Mark Lombardi

Village Voice piece on the "conspiracy art" of Mark Lombardi -- and what it tells us about real-world and virtual-world social networks:

Much is being made lately of the FBI's phone call to the Whitney Museum in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks requesting access to Mark Lombardi's drawing BCCI, ICIC & FAB (1996-2000). This piece, the last work the artist made before he was found dead in his studio in March 2000, an apparent suicide at age 49, represents the tangled web of power and influence that comprised the largest banking scandal in history—in which an impenetrable network of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, and banks-within-banks laundered billions of dollars while supporting terrorism, arms and drug trafficking, and prostitution. The names of Saddam Hussein and George H.W. Bush, among many other high- and low-profile world figures, are connected by a network of delicate, yet potently insinuating, pencil lines. The FBI agent who called was informed that the work was on view in the museum's galleries, where he was welcome to see it during it during regular museum hours. A visit to the current Mark Lombardi exhibition at the Drawing Center (35 Wooster Street, through December 18) by an affiliate of the Homeland Security Agency has also raised eyebrows in the art world.

In cyberspace, the architectural parallel to Lombardi's work is not to be found in the utilitarian, "drill-down" salt mine of the Defense Department's TIA, but in the burgeoning blackberry-bush tangle of Friendster.com. For the one or two of you who still don't know, Friendster is an online network in which members can connect to friends, as well as to friends' friends, friends' friends' friends, and so on. As a result of having 32 friends in my immediate network, I am automatically linked to a larger network of 441,710 individuals. I can search this database by gender, age, locale, and interest. Unlike some more purposeful sites, such as the business network LinkedIn, or any of the many cruising spots online, Friendster is notably open-ended. In addition to identifying oneself as looking for a "friend," or a "serious relationship," one can also present oneself as "just here to help." It is in part this indirectness that suggests a parallel to Lombardi's indeterminate fields of "influence."

Link (thanks claytonjamescutebutt) Update: this web page has interpretations of some of Lombardi's drawings. Thanks, Jane!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:26:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thai elephants freak out, raid, pillage

Lack of food sparks very bad behavior for elephants in Thailand. Link (thanks siege)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:21:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sri Lankan (et al) journos will netcast footage from WSIS

Jo sez, "Young video journalists from India, Sri Lanka and Uruguay will be covering a variety of topics taking place at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) for OneWorld TV. These diaries will feature video reports from debates, workshops and other events at WSIS, the ICT for Development Platform and other related meetings." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:40:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hippie Hobbit House

The "Mushroom House" is a hippie house in Whistler, BC, built in the style of a Led-Zeppelin- album-cover Hobbit House. Link (Thanks, Glen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:33:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fan-generated Peter Jackson Hobbit trailer

This is a bloody good fan-generated trailer for a notional Peter Jackson film adaptation of The Hobbit, cleverly remixing found footage and footage from the LOTR discs to make a kind of "draft Jackson" piece that shows how good this movie could be. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:26:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Taco joint sign gallery

Tommy and his girlfriend have spent the past two years driving America's highways, taking pictures of signs for taco joints. Here is the gallery of their work. Link (Thanks, Tommy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:23:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stuff breaking in slo-mo

Micah says, "Here are some wonderful high-speed videos of objects changing state, deforming, recoiling and combusting. Glass, tofu, matches and kickballs are all subjected to forces and recorded in fascinating detail." Link (Thanks, Micah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:16:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hacking free WiFi at XML 2003

Ben Hammersley's at the XML 2003 conference, where the WiFi password costs $40. He and Bill Kearney and the other RSS-wonks in the room have interpreted the confernece organizers' charging for basic conference functionality as damage and are routing around it:

In answer to the long held question, can a TiBook with one Wifi card act as a repeater and relay access to everyone else in the room without them having to pay, the answer it turns out is yes. How do we do this? Well, first turn off the built-in Apache installation on the OSX machine that is online. Edit httpd.conf to load mod_proxy (there are about 20 or so lines to uncomment). Turn Apache back on. Go to network prefs, and find out your assigned IP address. Write it on a piece of paper, and pass it around the room, telling them to set it as their web proxy.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:56:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, December 8, 2003

Variety launches porn blog (Peter Bart + AVN + blogs = WTF?)

Variety just launched its very own porn blog. Huh? Anyway: The Porning Report: Coverage of the Porn Industry's Move to Mainstream -- the scribe is Frank Meyer, who's also the Online Associate Editor of AVN. (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:42:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Civil rights hero Rosa Parks sues Outkast

...over their song "Rosa Parks," claiming the band violated her publicity and trademark rights and defamed her. Link (thanks claytonjamescubitt)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:33:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coke's music downloads: the real thing?

Coca-Cola is launching a digital music download service in the UK:

Coca-Cola will become the first high-profile consumer brand to get involved directly in the music business, launching what it claims will be the largest collection of tracks yet available. (...) The site, MyCokeMusic.com, will launch in January next year offering a catalogue of over 250,000 new and recent hits from more than 8,500 artists with all four major record labels represented.

It also promises back catalogue hits from established artists, although some major acts such as The Beatles have yet to allow their songs to be sold digitally. Given the ongoing controversy over the apparent conflict between its claim it would not market its drinks to under-12s and its sponsorship of the chart, Coca-Cola today made it clear only those over 18 would be able to buy music through the site. It plans to back the launch with a year-long campaign to promote legal music downloads, including promotions on its cans and bottles to win free tracks.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:04:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogshares coming back?

Recently-departed website Blogshares may return:

The Bad News: The BlogShares database was corrupted and it's taking a few days to get things back together.

The Good News: A solid agreement has been reached between BlogShares founder Seyed Razavi and technologist Jay Campbell -- the site is coming back! Premium memberships will be extended one month to make up for this downtime. If you had 8 months left, now you have 9. The reconstituted BlogShares team is doing cartwheels over the possibilities that 2004 brings. Check back for more notices, and soon a working site.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:15:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photo of a little fish in the mouth of a big fish

Who says fish can't convey emotions with their faces? See the look of doom in this little guy's eyes?. Link (via Reality Carnival)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:47:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC warblogger, mine blast survivor Stuart Hughes videoblogs in Cambodia

BBC war correspondent Stuart Hughes' courageous, first-person blog testimonial on surviving a land mine accident in Iraq brought home the personal reality of war to readers worldwide. At left, a snapshot of Stuart taken in the hospital, as he recovered from the loss of his leg earlier this year.

Stuart is now traveling to Cambodia and reporting -- through the BBC and through his blog -- on the human impact of mines, during conflicts and long after the conflicts end. He writes to BoingBoing:

"Greetings from London. Me and my artificial leg have just returned from northwestern Cambodia, where I carried out my first experiments in videoblogging. You can view my efforts on my blog here. See what you think!"

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:21:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tart cards: illicit ads from London, chronicled in new book

A fine stocking stuffer idea for literate, wired pervs. On sale for under $20. Warning: do not confuse tart cards with tarot cards. Any attempt to read your future with tart cards may bring about truly hazardous results.

"This amusing, enlightening, and beautifully designed book explains the history and graphic/technical development of tart cards with over 400 examples in color. Tart cards are the means by which providers of sexual services advertise in London, and they have become as ubiquitous a symbol of that city as the red telephone boxes where they are found. The book also contains an eye-opening, comprehensive glossary of the suggestive and coded language they use. 128 pages, trade paperback."

Link (Thanks, Bruce Sterling!). update: Here are more images, not worksafe. Link. And Fleshbot picks up on our hot tartcard-on-tartcard action, and provides more links to images.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:05:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites: back *from* Iraq, here's his latest.

Blogger and MSNBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites posted a final dispatch from Iraq before returning home to the US for a brief break. He returns to Iraq shortly after the holidays.

It is the eve of Eid or the end of the Ramadan and the end of the month long dawn to dusk fasting for many Muslims. It is a time of celebration on par with Christmas for Christians. But the night has begun with a bang. Literally. An IED (improvised explosive device) has exploded just outside the north gate of the 4th Infantry Division's headquarters. I hop in the back of Bressette's Humvee as the patrol heads out to investigate. Bressette gets on his two-way and in the guise of a flight attendant giving the pre-flight briefing, tells the squad the plan. (...)

I videotape Bressette as he walks back to his Humvee with the 1-22's commanding officer Lt. Col. Steve Russell. They at the curb to discuss what's next, when Bressette looks down. He sees something strange; wires sticking out of a concrete block. Suddenly this inert object is filled with potential energy.

"Sir, we better back up," Bressette says, already doing the moonwalk away from the block. "We're standing next to an IED!" The Humvee shoots forward away from the bomb, while the rest of back away. The concrete block has been hollowed out and is packed with enough plastic explosives to kill us. Bressette just shakes his head, still in disbelief that all of us, the Colonel, Bressette and his squad, myself and reporter named Betsy Heil from the Pittsburgh Tribune, were all standing next to a device that could've taken our lives within a fraction of a second.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:51:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More Linux Robot Photo Galleries

BoingBoing buddy Roland Piquepaille says:

Following this LinuxInsider.com story, "Japan's Robot Developers Go Linux," Linux Devices decided to publish its own "Linux-powered Robots Quick Reference Guide." And Paul Baron spent some time shooting pictures during the 2003 International Robot Exposition in Tokyo about two weeks ago. So here is a photo gallery gathered from these two different sources. You'll meet for example TMSUK04 from Meiji University, able to communicate via e-mail, or Isamu, which climbs stairs like Asimo.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:34:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Data Quality Act opens doors to psuedoscience DoS attacks

The Data Quality Act, which sets standards for the quality of data used in US law-making, has turned out to be a great tool for forcing pseudoscience (asbestos isn't that bad for you) into the lawmaking process -- a way to filibuster the scientists by requiring them to disprove whatever woo-woo notions you want to raise.

As the testimony of former Clinton administration Energy official and George Washington University epidemiologist David Michaels shows, the guidelines are very troubling. Michaels' complaint is that under the guise of "peer review," industry sponsored or funded attempts to undermine good science are going to get a big boost. That's for a number of reasons, one of them being the key question of who will be doing the peer reviewing.

The current guidelines say that as far as peer review goes, scientists who have worked for government have a conflict of interest and can't participate, but scientists who have worked for industry have carte blanche. As Michaels puts it, the suggestion "that academic scientists are more beholden to public funding agencies than corporate funders is on face ludicrous." And there's more. The peer review guidelines play into clever industry strategies for using the system of science to advance their economic interests.

Link (Thanks, Henry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:01:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ergonomic shirt folding video

This is an amazing (Japanese? Korean?) Taiwanese video showing an ergonomic method for folding shirts that exploits the unique topology of a hollow fabric vessel to allow for neat-as-a-neurotic folds that look like they came off a Gaparista's folding-board. 6.3MB WMV Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:22:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Man phones in tag renewal, avoids the tow

A man who'd been pulled over for driving with expired tags called a friend while the tow was on the way and had the friend update his registration online. Before the tow arrived, the car had been registered, and the cop let him go with a ticket.

Leach took the renewal form the commission had sent him from his visor, which contained the access code he needed to renew. While Zier issued the summons and ordered the tow, Leach called a friend who took his credit card number and other information and renewed the registration for him, Conry said.

When Zier came back with the ticket, Leach told him the car was now registered. The computer inside Zier's patrol car confirmed it.

Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:13:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SaveDisney: support the dissident Disney board members

SaveDisney.com is a fan-site devoted to promoting the agenda of Roy Disney and the other dissident ex-Disney board members. Link (Thanks, Caines!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New story of mine online

My short story, "Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar)" (which wasn't included in the collection, but is still a personal favorite of mine) was originally published in the print magazine Black Gate last winter. Now, thanks to the good graces of Fortean Bureau, an excellent webzine, the story is online for free in its entirety. This story is my tribute to Wyndham's post-apocalyptic literature. Here's a taste:

We were the Eight-Bar Band: there was me and my bugle; and Timson, whose piano had no top and got rained on from time to time; and Steve, the front-man and singer. And then there was blissed-out, autistic Hambone, our "percussionist" who whacked things together, more-or-less on the beat. Sometimes, it seemed like he was playing another song, but then he'd come back to the rhythm and bam, you'd realise that he'd been subtly keeping time all along, in the mess of clangs and crashes he'd been generating.

I think he may be a genius.

Why the Eight-Bar Band? Thank the military. Against all odds, they managed to build automated bombers that still fly, roaring overhead every minute or so, bomb-bay doors open, dry firing on our little band of survivors. The War had been over for ten years, but still, they flew.

So. The Eight-Bar Band. Everything had a rest every eight bars, punctuated by the white-noise roar of the most expensive rhythm section ever imagined by the military-industrial complex.

We were playing through "Basin Street Blues," arranged for bugle, half-piano, tin cans, vocals, and bombers. Steve, the front-man, was always after me to sing backup on this, crooning a call-and-response. I blew a bugle because I didn't like singing. Bugle's almost like singing, anyway, and I did the backup vocals through it, so when Steve sang, "Come along wi-ith me," I blew, "Wah wah wah wah-wah wah," which sounded dynamite. Steve hated it. Like most front-men, he had an ego that could swallow the battered planet, and didn't want any lip from the troops. That was us. The troops. Wah-wah.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How many years does an Azeri have to work to buy a copy of WinXP?

Over at FirstMonday, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh has published a table showing how many years an average wage-earner in various countries around the world will have to work if they are to buy a copy of Windows.

Country     GDP/cap  PCs ('000s)  Piracy   WinXP Cost [3]
                                        Effective $ GDP months
Albania     1300     24           n.a.     15196    5.17
Algeria     1773     220          n.a.     11140    3.79
Angola      701      17           n.a.     28184    9.59
Argentina   7166     3415         62%      2757     0.94
Armenia     686      24           n.a.     28806    9.80
Australia   19019    10000        27%      1039     0.35
Austria     23186    2727         33%      852      0.29
Azerbaijan  688      n.a.         n.a.     28708    9.77

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:26:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Borribles: fine, dark English kids' trilogy

Michael de Larrabeiti's classic children's trilogy, "The Borribles," is back in print in an omnibus edition incorporating all three volumes of the story. "Borribles" is not only one of the finest children's adventure stories ever penned, it's also an epic love poem to London, in the same way that China Mieville's King Rat is -- dark and glorying in the decadent, intestinal twistings and turnings of London's sooty, crowded, vibrant streets. I've just started re-reading the trilogy, and I'm astonished anew at how good this is. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:27:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, December 7, 2003

Rubber duckie keychain drives

This Japanese company is selling glowing rubber duckie USB keychain drives. Capacity caps out at 16MB -- someone should make a 1GB version of this. That plays MIDI jingles. And has a fingerprint-reader-based encryption scheme. You would be the coolest kid in the Internet cafe when you plugged in your fingerprint-reading lightup singing duckie and used it to transfer your ssh keypair-halves to gain acess to your cage. Seriously. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:11:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Not to be read by Metafilter Matt

Matt Haughey, if you're reading this, stop, right now.















All right. The members of MetaFilter are teaming up to buy Matt an Xmas present -- a trip to Iceland -- to thank him for all his hard work on MeFi. If you've enjoyed the fruits of Matt's labor, go on and chip in. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:34:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LayerOne geek festival call for proposals

Boogah Smalls and his pals are putting on a low-cost geek festival in LA on June 12, called LayerOne -- looks wonderful! They've just put out a call for papers; got something you want to say?

LayerOne is now officially accepting papers and presentations for our first session, tentatively scheduled for June 12th and 13th, 2004. We are looking for people to speak on a broad range of topics, however we encourage all submissions. Since the target audience will consist of mainly technophiles we've gathered a list of some of the topics we'd love to see covered below...

    :: Peer To Peer Networks
          :: Securing
          :: New models
    :: Network Security
          :: Flaws with current protocols
          :: Techniques for hardening
    :: Community based tools 
          :: Social software models
          :: Weblogs
    :: Encryption
          :: Securing your files
          :: Implementation
    :: Telephony 
          :: VoIP
    :: Copyright Issues
          :: Releasing works into the public domain
          :: Creative Commons

Link (Thanks, Boogah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:04:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mental card games without a referee

Is it possible to play card games without a deck of cards and without a referee? The question has profound implications for cryptography, in which the need to nominate and monitor a trusted third party (the referee in a cryptographic transaction) is a major pain in the ass -- this is the basis for the assertion that Trusted Computing systems will enable P2P games and distributed computation projects to proceed without cheating. This paper demonstrates some of the ways that we can dispense with a referee and rely on math to keep everyone honest.

Mental card games are played without a trusted party and without cards. It is well known that the problem of mental card games can be solved in principle. But the schemes known so far are too messy to be used in practice. Only for the mental poker game a suitable solution is known [Cr'ep 87] that achieves security against player coalition and complete confidentiality of a player's strategy. Here, we present a general-purpose scheme that may be used as basic toolbox for straight-forward implementations of card games. We present a data structure for cards and decks that is secure against player coalitions and enables standard operations like picking up a card, opening it, and (re-)mixing stacks. Futhermore, we introduce tools for special operations like inserting a card into the deck, splitting the deck, parting the game. The correctness of all operations is testified by zeroknowledge proofs.

Link (via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:02:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cthuhloid Chick tract

Wonderful mock-Jack-Chick religious tract, suitable for educating your neighbours about Cthulhu. Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:56:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kitschy religious items for Xmas

The 12 Days of Kitschmas is a gallery of twelve utterly tasteless (and apparently sincere and unironic) items of religious paraphenalia. Don't miss the five-inch-nail-Xmas-ornament, a $8.99 remembrance of the crucifiction for your tree. Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:53:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ska-anthem about duct tape

Something to Do, a Ska band based in Waukesha, WI, has won a $2,500 prize for writing "When I'm Stuck I Turn to Duck Tape," a ska-anthem celebrating gaffer tape's many virtues.

I never had much luck with nails
(so, I turn to duck tape)
Staples always seem to fail
(so, I turn to duck tape)
Wood glue can't help but go stale
(so, I turn to duck tape)
(so, I turn to duck tape)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:50:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, December 6, 2003

Sega's Crazy Taxi patent suit against EA is crazy

Avi Bar Zeev, former Imagineer who invented a Crazy Taxi video game while at Disney, weighs in on a patent dispute between Sega (which hired a Disney exec who'd seen Avi's idea and which quickly produced and patented a Crazy Taxi game) and EA (which has its own Crazy Taxi game). Here's a case where none of the litigants in the patent dispute is the inventor of the patented material. Nice work, USPTO. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:33:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First Cut Books: indie online bookstore and publisher

First Cut Books is an online indie publisher and bookstore with a small, hand-picked, entertainingly reviewed selection of books. Link (Thanks, Lucia!)

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

Calling all bluejackers in L.A.

If you are (a) in Los Angeles over the next couple of weeks and (b) you engage in bluejacking, and (c) you're not opposed to the idea of talking about it on broadcast media, and (d) you're not bullshitting about it, please e-mail me at xeni at xeni dot net.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:25:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mago Brooms: if Pixar made housewares

In a housewares shop today, I was struck by these Mago Brooms, which have the feel of something out of a Pixar cartoon, with colors and lines that look explicitly computer-generated but still fanciful. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:13:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Walt Disney's FBI files

Update: I've found a new host for these files, thanks to the generosity of Danny O'Brien and James Cronin

Walt Disney's FBI files are a hoot -- all 450 pages worth. Mostly, they consist of various Feebs (all the way up to Hoover, whom field agents call "The Boss") fretting that Disney's farce comedies like That Darn Cat (which was based on a novel written by a retired Agent who was a constant thorn in the Bureau's side) would cast a disparaging light on the Bureau and speculating about how to convince Walt to change the FBI agents to a different species of Fed cop -- SS, Park Ranger, anything but the G-Men. Also noteworthy: trying to figure out if Walt is a Commie, debating whether they should let Walt film the crime-lab as part of a Mickey Mouse Club "future careers" spot. 2.8MB PDF Link, 3MB PDF Link, 2.7MB PDF Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:13:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Taschen book of Chinese propaganda posters

From artbook publisher extraordinaire Taschen comes this oversized collection of Chinese Propaganda Posters, faithfully reproduced and annotated with scholarly essays. I couldn't put this down in the bookstore -- it was only the fact that I've already got thousands of books in storage and not a lot of room in my suitcase that stopped me from buying it. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:08:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stunning board-game history book

In a shop today, I came across "The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board and Table Games," which is a stunningly illustrated book from an academic press, which collects board and token-art from a museum collection of boardgames. It was one of those books that I wished I had someone on my Xmas list to buy it for. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:04:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ongoing discussion of Eastern Standard Tribe

The early review copies of my next novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, have begun to circulate among critics and bookstore owners. There's a bit of a discussion going on about the book's notions of geography-independent tribes over in Julie Czernada's SFF.net newsgroup.

What struck me, about 2:00 AM this morning, after reading the book last night, is that the tribes exist already. Cory isn't talking about a nebulous future, I am, in effect, part of E.S.T. I certainly haven't adjusted my circadians to E.S.T. (consciously, though for some time I have been rising an hour or two earlier than I used to, and going to bed earlier), yet also, for some time now, a significant percentage of my social interaction has revolved around newsgroups that focus on several E.S.T.authors, some E.S.T.publishers, a WorldCon that took place in E.S.T. Additional time is spent communicating with Robert J. Sawyer's Yahoo Group (E.S.T.) and an R.P.Gaming programmers' group that has its key members in E.S.T. My favourite Canadian book distributor is on E.S.T. and I devote a dis-proportionate share of my work energy into promoting their books.

Link (Thanks, Kent!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:03:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jojo in the Stars: Rankin-Bass meets Delicatessen

Jojo in the Stars is a stop-motion CGI animation movie that was apparently released in November. Looks like Delicatessen meets Rankin-Bass. The Flash-based trailer is beautiful. Link (Thanks, Why!)

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

Tech hits and misses of 2003

Dan Gillmor is soliticing your suggestions for his annual Hits and Misses column:

As in previous years, I'll be doing a year-end round-up of the hits and misses in technology, tech policy and the business world in general. (Here's last year's column.)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:39:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

20 Things auction has begun!

The "20 things. 20 people. 20 days." project collects 20 pieces of art and auctions them on eBay once a year, raising money for charity -- including EFF. The new 20 Things has just kicked off, and is open for business.

Face Jug, by Ben Truesdale, in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This salt fired, cobalt-alkaline glazed stoneware face jug is a small and charming relative of last year's hottest auction item. Measuring 3.25" h X 2" d x 2" w, this quizzical face jug will ponder your activities as you glide thru your day. Fits nicely on computer monitors, desk tops, breakfast tables or dashboards.

Link (Thanks, Ben!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:38:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Marijuana IPO in the offing

An entrepreneur has responded to Canada's impending marijuana legalization by founding a company to package, sell, and pay taxes on medical pot, and now he hopes to take the firm public.

Eugene estimates the grass crop is worth anywhere from CN$4 billion to CN$7 billion and thinks a money-making opportunity exists as governments move to decriminalize the drug. He also said a U.S. Supreme Court decision in October lifting a federal ban on medical marijuana will open the doors to a larger international market.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toronto skyline at high speed

This is a breathtaking 24h time-lapse film of the Toronto skyline. The sunrise, in particular, is spectacular. 5.07MB Quicktime Link (Thanks, homerj!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:24:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, December 5, 2003

Growing a car

Interesting piece in VentureBlog about job loss in the US. Since 1995, two million Americans have lost jobs in the manufacturing industry. Those jobs didn't go overseas, though. China lost 16 million manufacturing jobs in the same period.

Economically, trade is no different than other technologies. Economist David Friedman of Santa Clara University puts it most succinctly: there are two ways to make a car -- you can either make it in Detroit or grow it in Iowa. You already know how to make it in Detroit. You get a bunch of iron ore, smelt it into steel, and have an assembly line of robots and workers shape it into a finished vehicle. To grow it in Iowa, you plant car seeds in the ground (also known as "wheat"), wait until they sprout, and harvest them. Take the harvest and put it into a big boat marked "to Japan" and let it sail off. A few months later a brand new car comes back.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:46:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The mother lode of omnivorous trees

Here's the site of a guy so obsessed with "gluttonous trees" that he has a collection of pictures of them and a book, to boot. Don't you wish someone had trained a time-lapse movie camera at some of these trees? Links

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:51:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Omnivorous Trees: Part 4

Here's another hungry tree. This one has a taste for rusty farm machinery. Link(thanks, Paul!)

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

Bike-eating tree

Number three in a series of object-eating trees: the bike borg. Link (thanks, ernie!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:24:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Updated: eCommerce is 0wned by bogus patents

Want to get a sense of just how screwed up the patent system is? Check out this mockup of a simple e-commerce page, which is annotated with the twenty patents it violates.

* 24-kids-scannan.ie: domain name. National characters in domain names: EP1159820
* [Action] [Kids] [Drama] [Adventure]: (tabbed pallettes) EP689133
* Picture link - pop-up window: EP0537100
* Watch - Displaying video through the web: EP0933892
* Download film - Displaying video through the web (same as above):
EP0933892
* mpeg4-format - Widely used video format for video download: More than 40 patents (herunder DK638218)

Link Updated URL: Link (Thanks, Yoz!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:58:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tree with Attitude

Inspired by yesterday's sign-eating tree, Boing Boing reader "cow" sent in these pictures of a plaque-biting tree. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:02:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mr Potatohead meets Picasso

Mr. Picassohead: a roll-your-own picassoid face app, a la Mr Potatohead. Link (Thanks, Grad!)

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

Jorn Barger is alive and well

Jorn "Robotwisdom" Barger, missing for two months, has been found alive and well in New Mexico.

It turns out Barger had simply relocated to a new home in the small desert town of Socorro, New Mexico, without telling his roommate.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:07:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, December 4, 2003

Lessig tears SCO a new one

Larry Lessig, having heard about Darl "SCO" McBride's latest missive, has dropped everything to write a scathing response.

We should all believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced when "Authors" have the right to do with their property whatever it is they want to do -- consistent with the law, and so long as the property right is properly balanced. And we should all believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced when that right is "vigorously protect[ed]".

But the owners of GPL'd software are doing no more than exercising this right, just as Microsoft would exercise its right. They are profiting from the right to choose the terms under which they release their software, and the terms they have chosen also have a great benefit to other software innovation. They exercise their property right; they and we benefit.

But if we are to protect that property right "vigorously," then we should take steps to protect property owners from baseless lawsuits against their right to use their property as they wish. So when it comes to the matter of sanctions against the lawyers in this case, the judge might well want to consider how important it is that the property right of copyright owners be "vigorously" defended.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:24:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reforming a garbage house

This is an inspiring story about an obsessive "hoarder" whose home had become a garbage house, so full of crap that he was in danger of going to jail for criminal violations of local ordinances. Then the county counsel cut a deal with the president of the local chapter of the National Assn. of Professional Organizers to help the craphound clean up his life -- and he allowed a news-crew to document the process.

Drum, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat tied under his chin, will supervise from a chair near the garage. Breininger is jazzed. Drum has kept his promise not to bring anything back into the two rooms the crew cleared out a week ago.

Drum is nervous. He frets about the broken windows and rotting flooring, things that must be fixed to put him back on the right side of the law. And he wants shelves so he can have his books, now boxed, around him.

"First, we get you organized, then we'll figure out how to take care of the repairs and the beautification," Breininger reminds him.

Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:06:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos from amusement park trade-show

The crew from Intercot have been attending the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions conference in Orlando and posting kick-ass photos as they go. Link (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:06:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homemade astrolabes and such

Nice gallery of a hobbyist's efforts to reproduce ancient scientific instruments. I love the astrolabes. Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:31:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cellphone charger also disinfects

A Korean outfit has announced a cell-phone charger that also disinfects the handset. I need one of these for airport touchscreen check-in kiosks, which always seem to be covered in a thin film of Burger King and mucous.

According to the company, the germ-killing products are equipped with an airtight container and a special lid on top of the normal charger's body to sterilize the digital gadgets during recharging.

Link (via Gizmodo)

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

Infringement isn't terrorism

My colleague Jason Schultz has blogged some pithy remarks about the head of WIPO's comparison of copyright infringement to terrorism. God, how I hate the comparison of all things to terrorism, it's such shoddy rhetoric. Really: if copyright infringement is like terrorism, does that mean that our first line of defense against illicit music downloading shoud be the systematic confiscation of nailfiles and scissors from business travellers?

Mr Idris described how he had heard of children dying after using counterfeit baby shampoo and warned of the potentially disastrous consequences of relying on machines that had been made using an illicitly duplicated model.

Excuse me, but those aren't intellectual property/piracy problems. False advertising is a consumer protection issue and a problem that everyone supports eradicating...

However, there have been several documented instances where WIPO's own high protectionist patent and data registration policies are actively hurting patient access to AIDS-related drugs and other essential medicines in the third world, Africa in particular...

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:26:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New bizmodel: screw customers with phony charges

David Pogue takes up arms against "miscellaneous" charges on phone and banking bills, and against "innocent" mistakes where customers are repeatedly, routinely overcharged.

Phase 1 of this program was the proliferation of miscellaneous fees - for "regulatory assessment," "handling," "restocking," and so on. According to Business Week, newly concocted fees will generate $100 million for hotels this year, $2 billion for banks, $11 billion for credit-card companies - and an average of 20 percent extra on every phone bill.

Link (via Smartpatrol)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:23:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stephen King: forget piracy, boomers are just tired of buying crap

Stephen King's editorial in the new Entertainment Weekly (not online, but the best part is below) opines that the real crisis in the entertainment industry isn't piracy, it's mental fatigue among moneyed baby boomers.

So what happened in the '90s? I think we're seeing an entire generation -- my generation, the baby-boom generation -- turning off the lights upstairs and putting a sign on the door: SORRY, BUT I'M TAKING A NAP. MIND CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Pretty much the same deal is going on with music sales. Piracy and illegal downloads, although covered to a fare-thee-well in the press, account for only a fraction of the drop in $$. I think what's happening is all too clear: We baby boomers are just too pooped to party. Oh, we do buy some records -- you may have heard that we love the Beatles, Rod Stewart, and those funksters the Rolling Stones. Just don't try to get us to listen to anyone who isn't registered with AARP! Bob Seger was probably correct when he told us rock & roll never forgets, but it sure gets tired.

Movie-ticket sales have remained strong, but only because the studios are selling a product aimed almost solely at Gen-X and Gen-Y. Most R-rated movies go in the tank. PG-13 rules. A film like ''The Fast and the Furious'' strikes box office gold, while Clint Eastwood's ''Mystic River'' muddles along at the box office. I'd argue that 20 years ago, ''Mystic River'' would have done ''Chinatown'' box office numbers. Now the baby boomers look at the previews on TV and think, Nah, that looks too serious. Too hard. Guess I'll stay home and watch ''Jeopardy!'' And the ''Jeopardy!'' answer is ''Just about the saddest thing Steve King can think of.'' The question is ''What do you call a whole generation going to sleep?''

(Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:02:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-Terror Line: audblogging The Man

The Anti-Terror Line is the reverse of a Fed snitch line -- it's a number you can call when The Man is giving you a hard time in the name of defending the homeland from terrorists -- your call (and anything you can get your attacker to utter into the handset) is recorded and published on a webserver where you can annotate it. Natalie Jermijenko, the project's originator, has used it to record herself being put off an airline for using the first class toilet. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:55:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Recreating Toad Hall in CGI

The Mr Toad's Wild Ride at Walt Disney World's Fantasyland has been gone for years, shoved aside to make way for the Pooh ride. One Toad truefan is bringing the ride back as a detailed 3D VR experience, a la the virtual Journey Thru Innerspace. Link (Thanks, Caines!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:51:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tapestries for the 21st Century

Wonderful Something Awful photoshopping contest to create medieval tapestries with modern themes. Link (Thanks, Gnat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:46:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Update on Star Wars and Photoshop

At least a hundred (well, OK, 30) of you wrote to say that the MacWorld story about Photoshop's relationship to Star Wars is bogus. Here's a link, decide for yourself. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:41:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Smalley vs. Drexler "Battle of the Nano Scientists" rages on

Nobel Laureate nanotechnologist Richard Smalley and pioneering nano visionary Eric Drexler have taken their firey debate about the scientific probability (and exact definition) of molecular assemblers to the front page of Chemical & Engineering News magazine. Here's the Foresight Institute's summary. Ray Kurzweil has jumped into the fray too. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:53:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

No Parking Tree

Picture of a tree that has assimilated a No Parking sign. Link (thanks, Pete!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:07:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Battlestar Erotica: Alien Sex! Bombs! Robots! Pathos!

I filed this story for Wired News about the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries:

"We realized the only way we could improve on the original is if the Cylons could have sex," quipped co-executive producer David Eick at Tuesday night's Los Angeles premiere. The chrome-domed "walking toasters" from the original TV series are succeeded by -- well, really hot blond chicks, who infiltrate human society to engineer its doom.

One of the newly humanized enemy androids, Number Six, is played by former Victoria's Secret model Tricia Helfer (so that's Victoria's big secret! -- we always knew there was a sinister purpose behind those ubiquitous catalogs). While in the throes of sex, her spine glows a luminescent, otherworldly, X-ray crimson.

Episode No. 1 of the two-part miniseries, which debuts Dec. 8, explodes with a jaw dropper of a scene that blends Cylon eroticism with equal parts pants-wetting apocalyptic terror and blast-tacular deep-space warfare. None of this should work, but under the nuanced direction of Michael Rymer, it does, spectacularly, and the rest of the episode never disappoints.

Link

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

Photoshop was invented for Star Wars

Photoshop was developed as part of the SFX efforts for Star Wars:

Thomas was a programmer, while John was in charge of special effects for the first Star Wars film. Brown confirms: "Photoshop is here today because of that movie." Thomas developed software to add effects and painting tools to images at John's request.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:32:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crank letters to corporate America and its response

Consumer Joe is a collection of crank/prank letters sent by screenwriter Paul Davidson to a variety of giagantic corporations, asking, for example, if he should call poison control after swallowing toothpaste, or if the Barbie hot-tub would be suitable for a garden party. The letters are genuinely funny, and the clueless bureaucratese in the responses is often equally good, but best of all are the responses from corporate letter-answerers who have winkled out his game and are playing along with their own sly humor:

Our research and development department went to work right away in the smoothie lab experimenting with your concoctions.

The Tuna Melt smoothie looks promising. We found the key to be white albacore tuna in oil, lots of mayonnaisse and some powdered cheese. However, the Thanksgiving smoothie (turkey, cranberry, and gravy) is posing some challenges. Your recommendation to heat it up would require us to install microwave ovens at all locations.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:13:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turn NSFW into SFW

BadBlue allows you to interpret your workplace (or school) sysadmin as damage and route around him. The way it works is, you install an app on your home, broadband-connected PC, and then when you get to the office or school, you run a complimentary app on your PC there. The app disguises and forwards all of your Web traffic to your home PC, which fetches and sends back the pages you're looking for, free from automatic monitors, filters, and workplace snoopers.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it's based on the principles underpinning Peek-a-Booty and other "hactivist" apps intended to give Chinese dissidents and other prisoners of censoring proxies free access to the net. Of course, the killer app for this is looking at porn at the office.

OfficeSurfer lets you surf in privacy from your office, bypassing corporate restrictions on specific web sites, defeating monitoring software, and preventing routine logging of your online activities.

Check personal email accounts... visit your favorite web sites... worry-free and hassle-free.

Link (via Infoanarchy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:15:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What happens when you give gamers intellectual property rights?

James Grimmelmann has penned a bloody brilliant essay about the issues raised by allowing (or not allowing) players to hold an intellectual property right to objects they create in games. Inspired by the Second Life announcement at last month's State of Play conference, Grimmelmann presents and synthesizes the positions of a variety of the world's leading thinkers on IP, game economics, and playability, and comes up with more questions than answers. There's fodder for a dozen sf novels here -- and just when I thought that stories about VR worlds where anything can happen (and hence nothing is interesting) were narratively dead in the water...

# Castronova cares about the game society, but not so much about the platform. He's thinking about these in-game values as things that we ought to encourage, perhaps by giving appropriate economic incentives to game owners. It's okay with him if the owners keep their game platforms locked down. As long as some owners give their players a rule-set that preserves in-game freedom, fairness, and community, it's all good.

# Benkler is more or less the opposite. He'd love to see some games ripped open at the level of the platform -- developed by distributed groups and run without a single centralized owner-god-wizard. In his writings on the regulation of communications infrastructure and media concentration, Benkler has consistently emphasized the view that avoiding such concentrations of power at the infrastructure level is the most important act -- from it, everything good flows.

# The agoraXchange people want both the platform and the game world to be open. Now, the question above tugs at apotential tension between these two forms of openness. When push absolutely comes to shove, the agoraXchange team will assert control at the platform layer if their core values are threatened in the game universe; otherwise, they walk the walk and quack the quack of freedom at every level.

# Bartle really doesn't care about either form of freedom. My caricature of him lives in what might be caricatured as the "game designer" paradigm: I want to be free to create whatever strange and twisted world I want. If players like it, they'll join and stay; if they don't like it, they'll go somewhere. Now, Bartle is a great designer, and as with the other great designers, his writings involve an exquisite level of sympathy for (and understanding of) players. But his is basically a "game"-centric view: if you build it, they will play. There aren't political questions here, except potentially if stupid lawyers come barging in and start treating games as something other than games.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:13:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Dude Where's My Blogshares?

Blogshares.com is no more. Founder Seyed Razavi says:

Dear BlogShares players, I am sorry to announce that BlogShares will not be reopening after the current technical difficulties are resolved. Currently, the database server is dead and looks to be for the next few days. The latest system crash has highlighted to me that deliverying a fun, useful service for the BlogShares community requires an active operator and developer. As most of you are no doubt aware I've been neither for the past couple of months. That has led to a decline of quality service, new features and ultimately income for the site and it looked likely that there wouldn't be enough to pay for next month's hosting.

It's been an interesting and very rewarding nine months bringing a bit of entertainment to bloggers (and blog lovers). I'd like to thank especially all those people who donated money or their valuable time, those who became premium subscribers, those who worked on cool toys which made use of the fledgling API and all those who could be found on the forums and IRC channel. You turned a silly fun idea of a mad monkey coder in London into something worthy of the attention by thousands of bloggers and the press. (...) My goal with the project was always to embrace the power law and to provide a new way of highlighting blogs with a little bit of fun. I've been pleasantly surprised of how well it did and stupefied it did it for so long. Now, however, it is time to move on to other things. I'm sure you'll be hearing from me in the not so distant future. You can also find me at my perpetual home: monkeyx.com.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:15:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Zoo Zen

chaoskitties
bunnies
uncommon creatures
no hands kitten
counting sheep
teddy bear
lemur
monkey
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:03:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nokia 6600 review

BoingBoing pal R. Emory Lundberg just reviewed the apparently ubergruven Nokia 6600:

[The] all-in-one organizer, information manager, and mobile communicator that you may have been waiting for. If the Nokia 3650 was too playful for your lifestyle, you should consider this handset as a way to communicate, organize, and lighten the load in your pocket. Generally I prefer separate devices. I really like the Palm Tungsten T3 (review) and find it a very capable tool. But there are times when I just want my schedule and contacts with me, and don't need to work on Office documents on the go, and the Nokia 6600 has quickly become my handset of choice.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:26:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

David Cronenberg talks geek tech philosphy on "Alias" TV show

Via "Amy's Robot" blog:

David Cronenberg was on Alias last night, playing a neuroscientist with an experimental method for recovering lost memories through the use of drugs and lucid dreaming. The episode itself is almost an homage to Cronenberg's ideas and visual style...as Sidney undergoes DC's process, the show turns into one of the more visually and conceptually cinematic bits of TV I've seen in a while, full of Cronenberg's illogical logic, layered realities, and of course the requisite bit of Cronenberg's nonsensical corniness. In any case, before the experiment gets started, DC's character offers a nice little monologue about simulation, postmodernism, lucid dreaming, and fake bacon. Watch:

David Cronenberg on Alias talking about postmodernism and reality [mp3, 2.5 mins, 1.8 mb]

If you missed him this week, he'll be on next week, too.

Link, (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:52:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool aerial snapshots -- from a kite

Sweet snapshots taken from a small camera attached to a flying kite. Link (thanks, Jean-Luc!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:48:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

R.U. Sirius' NeoFiles

Mondo 2000 founding editor R.U. Sirius is conducting interviews with cutting-edge scientists and thinkers (including Boing Boing's own David Pescovitz) for a nutritional supplement company website. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:43:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The CIA Assassination of John Lennon

My friend, cartoonist Mack White, has a new one-page comic called "Dead Silence in the Brain: The CIA Assassination of John Lennon." The page also has a bunch of links relating to government-sponsored assasinations and real-life Manchurian Candidates. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:29:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dell won't help customers remove spyware

Dell has issued a memo to its tech-support staff, telling them not to help Dell customers remove spyware from their systems, because it "may conflict with user license agreements of other applications installed on your system." I.e., Dell has decided that its duty to its users is superceded by its duty to upholding "contracts" that you "sign" when you click on the I Agree button after downloading this app or that, contracts in which you promise to allow spyware to be installed on your machine, and promise not to try to remove it. Nice one, Dell.

This means we do not take callers to download.com or doxdesk.com, nor do we recommend spyware removal programs, nor do we advise callers on the use of spyware removal programs. This includes using phrases "We don't support the removal of spyware, but I use..."

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:09:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Talking Heads box set

There's a new Talking Heads box set out, "Once in a Lifetime," with four CDs (including the rarities released on the Sand in the Vaseline two-disc set a few years back), a DVD containing all the band's videos, and lots of other juicy stuff. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:06:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free software, for the sake of regional identity

Nice Bruce Sterling editorial from this month's Wired on the move in Extremadura, Spain, to develop a local flavor of Linux:

The features may be mundane, but they add up to something quite new: a patriotic regional operating system. The emailer's logo is a stork, Extremadura's most beloved bird. The word processor is named after a famous local poet. The desktop is crammed with hallowed symbols of the homeland. Extremaduran schoolkids could stand up and pledge allegiance to this thing...

This deeply rooted regional approach could prove a more nurturing environment for Tux than either the EU, with its stifling bureaucracy, or the US, where lawyers for SCO are eager to sue the daylights out of anyone who dares to propagate the penguin. Right now, most of the action is in government, where officials are beginning to wake up to the advantages of open standards and malleable code - and not having to pay Americans for any of it. India is releasing Linux variations in local dialects from Assamese to Telugu. China, Japan, and South Korea are collaborating on their own OS. South Africa recently approved an open source strategy, and similar things are going on in Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Peru, and Ukraine.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:04:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Perl Advent Calendar: Xmas spirit with an RSS feed

The Perl Advent Calendar is a clickable tip-a-day site for aspiring perl hackers. Lovely geeky holiday spirit. Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:03:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Soylent Dean poster

Nice work from the Dean campaign: downloadable Soylent Dean posters. These are the next "When you download MP3s, you're downloading communism" posters, or possibly the next "When you download porn, God kills a kitten" posters -- mark my words! 520K PDF Link)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:01:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Typeface brought to life

"Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black" is a long, hilarious video is a spoof of the MTV VH1 "Behind the Music" show, tracing the history of the Cooper Black typeface with font-otaku care and affection. Link (via Electrolite)

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

Tuesday, December 2, 2003

SciFi Channel launch party for Battlestar Galactica miniseries, Hollywood

At the DGA in Hollywood tonight, SciFi Channel premiered the forthcoming "reimagined" miniseries Battlestar Galactica, which debuts Monday night, next week.

Cast and crew were present, along with SciFi Network brass. The event included a screening of episode one in entirety. Forget what you've heard about complaints from fans of the original series -- the new version is nothing short of breathtaking, and lives up to its producers' promise to turn the science fiction TV genre on its head. The two-part miniseries was co-produced by David Eick and Ron Moore (Moore also co-wrote the screenplay), and masterfully, sensitively directed by Michael Rymer -- who is destined to become "untouchable in five minutes," according to a pre-screening quip from Eick. He's right. This stuff is the real thing.

More in Wired News shortly... but for now, here are a few snapshots I took of the cast members who were present this evening. From left to right: Edward James Olmos (Commander Adama), Tricia Helfer (Cylon Number 6), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck), and Grace Park (Boomer).
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:46:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ClickTheVote launches

John Parres writes:

Today marks the official launch of Click The Vote. We are a grassroots non-profit dedicated to educating and organizing new technology users to promote legalized file-sharing, defend open source computing and demand democratic spectrum allocation for emergent technologies like Ultra-Wideband and software radio. We invite everyone to join up because over the coming election year we are going to have fun asking tough questions, flash mobbing candidates, sending targeted CD-Rs, utilizing P2P tools for grassroots efforts and demanding answers to important questions that affect the lives and futures of everyday users of new technology. The USA primaries are only months away and the general election is less than a year off. Time to get busy!

Link to CNET news article, Link to Clickthevote.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:34:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

National Radiotape Network: 1960s audiotape APA

In 1964, a group of Britons began the practice of producing homemade "radio" programming -- light entertainment, music, etc -- and recording them to reel-to-reel tape, and then passing them around to their colleagues via the post. The club grew into something called the National Radiotape Network, and now its archives are online.

In 1972, Transdiffusion merged with Electromusications, another school-based tape recording network, running in the English midlands. Over 20 years, Transdiffusion, with Electromusications, built up a large collection of music, jingles and TV and radio presentation material.

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the fashion for circulating tapes diminished, and the National Radiotape Network closed. Transdiffusion was left with its own archives, together with the archives of its defunct contributing member organisations, and the archives of the Round the Horne Appreciation Society.

Link (Thanks, Alice!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:08:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Naked sushi in Seattle update

Our pornpals at DazeReader say:

Naked sushi in Seattle update. Dan Savage ridiculed both the "clenchbutts" for protesting naked sushi and the local media for giving them attention. His one criticism: "How come no boy plates?" In the interests of equal opportunity objectification, The Stranger sponsored Naked Doughnuts at the same restaurant on a recent Friday night. "Two good-looking guys will be laid out on the bar and covered with Top Pot doughnuts. . . . Ogle the boys, eat the donuts, fuck the clenchbutts." The restaurant owners invited the two men back for sushi night, so now you can eat sushi off naked women and naked men in Seattle. Bonzai gallery.

Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:53:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jorn Barger is missing

Jorn "Robot Wisdom" Barger, who coined the term "weblog," is missing. He hasn't been seen since October.

Jorn Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, is missing. He resides in Socorro, New Mexico, and was last seen there by his housemate in very early October. Most if not all of his possessions, including his ID card, are still at his residence.

Jorn is a prolific Usenet poster, but his last posting took place on September 30. His last posting on Slashdot was also on September 30. He last accessed his website via an FTP connection from Socorro on October 1.

Link (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:03:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": Hollywood Wardrive

On today's edition of the NPR show "Day to Day," I go wardriving with founders of the Southern California Wireless User's Group -- we hunt for wireless LANS that might be vulnerable to security breaches.

"As wireless network technology becomes increasingly popular, users still seem unwilling to outfit their networks with proper security to protect their information from hackers. "

Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show using Real or WinMedia here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:50:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lisa Rein open-invite party/showcase on Dec 13, San Francisco

Lisa Rein -- XML wonk, activist, writer, musician -- is holding a giant, open party on Dec 13 in San Francisco at which she will be performing her music. Admission's free!

This party is basically a chance for me to present my music and catch up with old friends. I've wanted to have a party for some time since I moved back to San Francisco in October 2001, but I kind of know a lot of people, and wanted to invite all of them, and still have enough room for the people I don't know personally yet to come by and say hi and hear my tunes.

6:30-6:55 Lisa and Ron and Friends
7:00-7:30 Alex Walsh
7:30-7:55 Lisa and Ron and Friends
8:00-8:30 Paul de Benedictis
8:45-9:30 Lisa and Ron and Friends

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:22:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

David Byrne loves PowerPoint

This Thursday in LA, Wired Magazine is teaming up with the LA County Museum of Art to produce a performance by David Byrne called "I [Heart] Powerpoint." I'll be there, and if there's Wi-Fi, goshdarnit I'll blog it.

[His] most recent project is Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, a book of artwork [and DVD] done with the ubiquitous presentation software PowerPoint. "I have been working with PowerPoint as an art medium for a number of years. It started off as a joke (this software is a symbol of corporate salesmanship--or lack thereof), but then the work took on a life of its own as I realized I could create pieces that were moving, despite the limitations of the 'medium'."

See excerpted portions of E.E.E.I. in the September 2003 issue of WIRED.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:45:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Updated: Open HDTV PVR coming to market, probably illegal

The inventor of the ReplayTV has created an open high-definition PVR/entertainment hub that is Linux-based and invites itw owners to hack the hell out of it. This is not only a nice piece of technology, it's also probably illegal, given the tamper-resistance requirement in last month's Broadcast Flag order from the FCC. Thanks, Hollywood. You've successfully outlawed the next generation of VCRs. Turns out that this box is a media player, not a PVR, and probably won't be touched by the Broadcast Flag.

High-definition TV content remains scarce, according to Roku, and the HD1000 is intended to help fill that gap, letting HDTV owners actually use their machines rather than just having them hanging there, on the wall, with nothing to do. "The Roku HD1000 gives HDTV owners the ability to create a high-definition showcase for art, music, and photos that is individual and unique," says Woodward.

The Roku HD1000 range of media capabilities comprises digital photos, art, music, and "dynamic media applications." Content is displayed through memory card slots for CompactFlash, MMC, SD, Memory Stick, and SmartMedia. Or, the Roku HD1000 can connect via Ethernet or Wi-Fi to a home network.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:04:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

E-texts used against Bayesian spam-filters

Bayesian anti-spam filters count word-frequency in suspect messages and compare the results to profiles of word-frequency in spam and ham. Defeating this requires that your spam include a lot of natural human prose. So spammers have started to mine the Gutenberg Project and other sources of human-generated ASCII and dumping random hunks of literature into their messages to get around the filters.

Blogger and journalist Clive Thompson found an excerpt from Chapter 20 of The Master Key by Wizard of Oz author L Frank Baum in a message that had as its subject line "the big unit" (no prizes for guessing what the rest of it was hawking).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:00:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CSS hack to replicate OSX toolbar zooming

CSS-Fisheye is a CSS hack that allows you to create lists that zoom on mouseover in a fashion reminiscent of the OSX zooming toolbar. It's super-sweet. Try mousing over the text below to see what I mean:

Tiger, tiger, burning bright,
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
When thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand forged thy dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dared its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile his work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger, on the mat,
You're nothing but a pussy cat,
But damn your eyes and rue the day!
I have to clean your litter tray.

with apologies to William Blake

Link (via Smartpatrol)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:56:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New mobile hacking blog

Rael Dornfest -- inventor of Blosxom, editor of the O'Reilly Hacks series -- has started a new blog called MobileWhack, where he's keeping track of sexy/weird crap you can do with cellphones.

MobileWhack is all about that mobile handset, palmtop, hiptop, ipod, or laptop in your pocket, purse, briefcase, or dangling from your utility belt. It's about squeezing every last ounce of mobility out of your mobile device.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:54:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, December 1, 2003

New regional weblog Blogging.LA launches

Sean Bonner, Jason DeFillippo, Wil Wheaton, Caryn Coleman, Chris Pirillo, and a herd of fine nerds just launched Blogging.LA. Bunch of cool contributors on board. And then, in an unguarded moment, they loosened their standards and let me in. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:45:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RE/Search Pranks Festival in San Francisco on Saturday!

"Fifteen years after it first hit shelves, PRANKS! remains one of the most important and relevant books ever to emerge from RE/Search's outre publishing house. In today's current surreal political landscape, a well-executed prank can do much more than yelling theater in a crowded fire!

In that spirit, RE/Search and The Lab present The Pranks! Festival (Saturday, 12/6). The Pranks! Festival will celebrate ten Bay Area artists who appeared in PRANKS! Through art exhibits, panel discussions, and chaotic socialization, we will fete the fearless Situationist spirit that San Francisco's pranksters embody. This is a rare opportunity to engage with prankster pioneers Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), Monte Cazazza, Bruce Conner, Paul Mavrides, Mark McCloud, Mal Sharpe (yes, of Coyle & Sharpe), Fluxus anti-artist Robert Delford Brown, John Trubee, tattoo guru Don Ed Hardy and Jello Biafra (tent.)."

Update: Milton Rand Kalman, Chief Scientist of the Billboard Liberation Front, tells us that the BLF will also be making an appearance!
Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:27:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fan builds 11,000 sqft Haunted Mansion replica

This former Disney contractor turned his 11,000 sqft house into a replica of the Haunted Mansion, complete with homebrew audio-animatronics. Link (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:44:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Digital sundial: passive timekeeping through new materials

Gosh, this is clever.

...the device is purely passive - it operates without electricity, and has no moving parts. Instead, the sunlight is cast through two cleverly designed masks in the shape of numbers that show the current time of day. The sundial is available in two versions, for use in either hemisphere. Placed on the inside of a south-facing window (north-facing in the southern hemisphere), the sundial can be read through the horizontal mirror. The display updates every 10 minutes, and gives a remarkably accurate record of the time during the daylight hours.

Link (Thanks, manx!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:03:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hayes Micro: the moral is, take the money and run

Amazing profile of the founders of Hayes Microcomputers -- Hayes (who wanted to build empires, went broke and blind instead) and his partner Heatherington (who cashed out early and has a putterer's dream-life now).

"Competition was heating up. Technology was moving faster. I just wanted out of the rat race," Heatherington says. "Apparently Dennis enjoyed the rat race, so he stayed."

Heatherington retired at 36. Hayes was shocked. He knew there was more money to be made in the years ahead...

Neither of Hayes' former wives would be interviewed. But Chan's attorney, Jimmy Deal, said Hayes is months behind on child support payments for the couple's two children.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:52:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Sterling hits his stride on his blog

Bruce Sterling's been running his new Wired blog for a couple months now, and this morning, though, he hit his stride with a classic cyberpunk-dense review-cum-rant of a Brazillian electro-pop CD. This is killer prose.

I am digging this thing. Even a white-guy-samba chestnut like "So Nice (Summer Samba)" springs into a weird post-60s afterlife once it's been globally cyberized with a samplerdelic melange of hisses, whoops, whooshes, bleeps, thuds and twitters. The spacey remixes of "Tanto Tempo" sounds like they're scratching at the edge of the universe with thick rubber spatulas.

I pay attention to electronica for obvious reasons, and I can always get along with easy-going, caiparinha-blurred Brazilian beach music... I mean, who couldn't like such stuff, it's so harmlessly sexual and ingratiating... but techno gives bossa nova some serious nova-osity. The fact that these are actual songs, with verse-verse chorus and that ruthlessly slinky beat, gives all that synth dithering some useful spine. Hey, it's "Brazilectronica!" This stuff could conquer the world!

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:08:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ruggedized bike-powered mesh WiFi demo tomorrow in San Francisco

The Jhai Foundation is demonstrating its ruggedized bicycle-powered WiFi access points in San Francisco tomorrow. These meshing wireless bridges are intended for use in rural Laos, as part of a sustainable economic development project.

When: Tuesday, December 2, at 10 a.m
Where: Jhai Foundation, 921 France Ave., San Francisco, CA 94112

The relay point would therefore have a computer (the "relay PC")serving the access point function for the villages and providing a link (the "backhaul" in the language of telephony) to the phone lines at Phon Hong. This computer would be a remote installation where access is by foot up a trail of moderate difficulty. It would be solar powered and highly resistant to environmental factors.

At Phon Hong the "server PC" would be installed on a water tower having an unblocked view of the mountain ridge. High-gain (24 dbi parabolic) antennas would be installed at the villages and at the server, while lower-gain "patch" antennas would be installed at the relay PC.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:30:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Techie Xmas list

Dan Gillmor's put together a list of geeky Xmas prezzies that I quite like:

Inexpensive:

# Free software. OK, almost nothing is truly free. But free open-source software comes pretty close. I'm running the Mozilla Firebird Web browser on my everyday personal computer, for example. It's fast, capable and reliable. Isn't that enough these days?

On the Web, meanwhile, are vast numbers of excellent utilities such as the Google Toolbar, which works only with Windows and recent versions of Internet Explorer.

# USB plug-ins. Once entrepreneurs glommed onto the fact that USB ports on computers offer elecrical power in addition to data connectivity, they came up with a raft of cool stuff.

I use the Zip-LINQ retractable cables from Keyspan to charge my phone and make connections with several other devices. They cost $15 to $25 or so, but mean fewer power bricks to lug around. A colleague at Hong Kong University, where I'm teaching part time this month, also just brought to work a USB cable that connects to a sleeve you slide around your coffee cup. I haven't been able to discover if anyone in the U.S. is selling NewMotion's $6 "Cup Warmer" (but I'm planning to bring several home).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:42:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Half Life mod based on notorious Aussie detention camp

Escape from Woomera is a first-person video strategy game (based on Half-Life) in which you play a refugee in the notorious Australian detention center. The idea is to call attention to the deplorable state of Woomera and the inherent cruelty of the detention process.

Q: By basing the game on the perpetration of illegal activities such as breaking out of detention aren't you inciting people to break the law?

A: This raises a further question: "By basing the game on the perpetration of illegal activities, such as locking up people without trial, aren't you inciting governments to break the law?" Fortunately for those worried that the game would encourage refugees to break out of detention, or would incite governments around the world to break international law and defy UN conventions, these ideas show a real ignorance about the nature of videogames. Giving a player agency within a fictional game world - allowing them to make decisions and act out roles - is not at all the same as incitement or advocacy. Though there have been many studies done to try to prove a causal link between virtual actions in game and the real-life actions of the game player (for example "do violent videogames make kids violent"), no link whatsoever has ever been found. If we apply Ruddock's logic to the world's top-selling game for over a year (how many gamers do you know that haven't played GTA3?)- Grand Theft Auto III- a game in which the central premise is breaking the law, we'd presumably be seeing a massive increase in car thefts, prostitution and murder, and we'd have to believe that Rockstar games (the developers) condone such activities in real life. And finally, let's stop to consider exactly which law would be broken in an escape from detention. Yes, believe it or not - it's actually legally a crime punishable by imprisonment (oh irony of ironies!) to step outside a detention centre to 'tresspass' on Australian soil.

Link (Thanks, Jean!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:07:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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