On Declan McCullagh's Politech list, attorney Charles Mudd says:

I have updated my RIAA web page that provides general answers to questions that individuals may have regarding the RIAA's initiative. This reflects updates in light of the two opinions of recent note.

Link

Author and blogger Warren Ellis shot this phonecam snap with a Nokia 3650, then opined aloud:

"What I just clicked into is that futurephones are very good for the micro, and that weird impressionistic smudging and the odd focal length creates its own suite of weird effects.

This was made by touching the phone's top down on some gravel on the edge of a puddle in a back alley.

The photo is upside down -- if you look closely at the top half of the picture, you can just make out the stones underwater in the puddle.

I am oddly pleased with this little picture."

Link

Gareth Branwyn says:

"BoingBoing was named Top Blog in the December issue of PC Magazine (Top Ten Blogs)."

Thanks, PC Magazine! Link

0.5-scale Star Wars scoutwalker up for bids on eBay. Link (Thanks, Beau!)

Interesting discussion of the number of bytes necessary to store all the syllables ever uttered by every person who ever lived, and when acquiring that number of bytes will be in the realm of affordability.

First, the proposed configuration would amount to 1.2 petabytes, which is a thousand times smaller than 1.2 exabytes. Second, a 5 exabyte store would roughly be eight thousand times too small to store "all words ever spoken by human beings", at least in audio form. Therefore the 2007 cluster's storage would be too small by a factor of about 32 million rather than a factor of 4. I freely confess that maybe the authors were thinking about text -- but in the first place I'm a phonetician, and in the second place most human languages have not had a written form. So bear with me here for a while.

Link (via Ben Hammersley)

Bruce Sterling's doing a public interview on The WELL -- it's just been running for a day or so, and it's already accumulating some primo SterlingRants:

Spammers are not monsters ten feet tall. Spammers are vermin. If we all looked, acted, thought and behaved as badly as spammers do, our world would be reduced to desperate penury.

Spammers are parasites. They contribute nothing to the general welfare. Spammers couldn't trust each other with five bucks to walk down to the corner grocery and bring back a loaf of bread. They are wicked and malicious and they should be brought to justice.

The day when the delete key still ruled, well, these cool clean technocratic days are over on the Net. Microsoft might patch some security holes here and there, but there are no technical solutions to semantic frauds like phishing. The Internet has become a massive, worldwide medium. It has become a global arena of massive popular struggle, It's Chinese Indian American Brazilian European, the world wide works, and it reflects our own faults and deficits with cruel accuracy. When we look at the Net these days, we are staring straight into the portrait of Dorian Gray.

Link

A fascinating analysis of the contents of a "millions of email addresses" CDROM acquired via a spam-advertisement:

You can find a number of addresses you don't want to send spam to. The spammer didn't even remove the abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses, 175 and 561 respectively. Both of them have doubles themselves. These role accounts include respectable providers that have a widely known anti-spam policy: the abuse desk of XS4ALL appears 5 times, the abuse desk of Planet three times and their postmasters will receive the spam three times each.

Role accounts not only encompass abuse desks or Network Operation Centers, but also operational accounts like 'hostmaster' and 'postmaster', who have to deal with requests from customers and feedback from key institutions like ARIN and RIPE or domain registrars. Spamming those accounts has several drawbacks for a spammer, their spam is most definitely not wanted by the recipient. It isn't too farfetched to state that online businesses (that mostly have to rely on e-mail for direct customer contact) might be facing increasing difficulties coping with the loss incurred by spam, both technically and financially.

Link (via /.)

Monochrom, the Austrian arts collective, has asked 25 people to draw 12 famous logos from memory and published the results online. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

The Brazilian government has retaliated against a US plan to fingerprint Brazilian visitors to the US by fingerprinting US visitors to Brazil. The judge who enacted the regulation has exempted citizens of countries whom the US intends to fingerprint from the Brazilian requirement, and has had a little Godwin's Law moment in his publicity regarding the decision:

"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," said Sebastiao da Silva in the court order released on Tuesday.

Link

Turns out that you can buy a "No Farting On This Ride" Disneyland Paris sign on eBay for about $10. Link (Thanks, Gary!)

Gareth Branwyn points us to this post by Nate on streettech.com:

Crazy little January 1st Easter egg appeared on my UX50 (thanks to a heads-up from mattyy at ClieSource): a little fiddling with the time and a soft-reset caused this man to appear in the Settings screen for a fleeting moment, holding what appears to be a driver's license or some sort of ID. Who is this guy? Street Tech swag to the first person to positively identify this man and post info in this blog item's Comments area.

Link

I keep a spreadsheet where I record our monthly visitor, post, and reload stats, so that we can get an idea of how things are going on Boing Boing from month to month and year to year. 2003 was very good: we more than doubled the pageviews here, and posted over 4,000 entries to the blog. Here's the latest version of the spreadsheet, with the numbers for 2000-2003 48K Excel Link

Luis has made a free Flash game based on the Filipino call-center industry. He sez, "The call-center business is really huge in places like India and the Philippines, and in my country in particular (the latter of the two), working in a call-center has become the default occupation after you graduate. It pays more than your average bottom-of-the-ladder job and let's you exercise a bit of control over your work-hours." Link (Thanks, Luis!)

Check out this crazy legalese on an old Hasbro "Arena Blast" CDROM, which indemnifies Hasbro in the event that a foreign government disbands the Internet. 630K JPEG Link

I took a holiday in Disneyland Paris this Christmas, and was amazed to find the flatulence-humor subtext pervading the safety cards stuck on all the ride-vehicles. JPEG Link