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

Mark Allen is selling "dangerously strong" magnets for $5 a throw:

These are neodymium rare earth magnets with a magnetic field strength in the 45MGOe range. 45MGOe! I'm not kidding around here! Should two become co-joined by mishap, they are very very difficult to pull asunder. These magnets will fly eagerly through the air to reach each other, possibly crushing your fingers in the process. Let us be honest with each other- I'm simply not responsible enough to have these around.

Link (via Torrez)

MIT researchers have gained insight into why sever calorie-restriction in a wide variety of organisms leads to life-extension.

"These findings provide a simple model for activation of Sir2 and extension of life span by calorie restriction," the authors write. "Our findings suggest that the NAD/NADH ratio can serve a critical regulatory function, determining the life span of yeast mother cells. A reduction in this nucleotide activates Sir2 to extend the life span in calorie restriction."

In previous research, Guarente found that rather than a slower metabolism leading to a slower rate of respiration, it turns out that respiration in yeast cells under calorie restriction goes up, not down. "A high respiration rate is intimately connected with calorie restriction in yeast," he said. "A high respiration rate activates SIR2. When respiration goes up, NADH goes down and SIR2 goes up. When SIR2 goes up, longevity happens."

Link

The NYT has published its list of most-forwarded stories from 2003.

MARCH 15 (No. 75) The tale of a carp that shouted in Hebrew, shattering the calm of a New York fish market and creating what many called a miracle.

Link

Caterina Fake is sewing a dress entirely out of labels from other clothes, and she's soliciting raw materials for the project.

If you have any clothing you are throwing out or giving away (or even if you're not) would you do me a favor and cut the labels out of them and send them to me? I am trying to make a dress that is contructed entirely of labels for a show at the Helen Pitt this coming spring. I've cut all the labels out of my own clothes, and they aren't nearly enough. I can only make a little doll-sized dress.

Link

Yesterday marked the turning of the year, and as a consequence, millions of works entered the public domain in Canada and other countries with copyright terms more limited than those in the US.

Today, January 1, 2004, every unpublished document whose author had died on or before December 31, 1948, has passed from copyright into the public domain in Canada...

Also today, the published works of people who had the good sense to die in 1953 have become public domain in Canada and any other country which retains the life+50 rule for copyright term. These people include Polish poet Julian Tuwim, British mathematician Alan Turing, Dutch children's author Hugo Pilon, Russian author and Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, metaphyisical author Baird Spalding, Norwegian novelist and Nobel laureat Knut Hamsun, playwright and Nobel laureate Eugene O'Neill (1953 was a bad year for Nobel laureates!), Irish poet and Yeats' one-time lover Maud Gonne, Welsh poet and playwright Dylan Thomas (bad year for poets!), country music singer-songwriter Hank Williams, French author Hilaire Belloc, American historian J.G. Randall, Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (bad year for Russians!), founder of Saudi Arabia Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, Maria Montessori of school fame, and many more.

Link

The Miss Digital World pageant is a beauty contest for digitally-rendered women such as Lara Croft and Ananova. Link

The Plus Deck: a cassette deck for your PC. This would be pretty cool if it could be used to auto-rip tapes to MP3, but alas, it goes the other way around -- i.e., it's a (slightly) more convenient way to record MP3s to audio cassette. Apparently, this can be used to rip tapes to MP3 as well as recoding MP3s and other computer-derived audio to cassette.

- Records all kinds of sound sources on Cassette Tape.
- Records sounds from Internet contents - Web learning, Internet Radio, Flash movie, etc onto Tape.
- Records CD sound onto Cassette Tape.
- Dub voice with mic on Tape.

Link

A Duke University study has concluded that back pain costs the US economy $90 billion a year.

"To put these expenses in perspective, the total $90 billion spent in 1998 represented 1 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the $26 billion in direct back pain costs accounted for 2.5 percent of all health care expenditures for that year," said lead researcher Xuemei Luo, Ph.D., who published the results of the Duke study today (Jan. 1, 2004) in the journal Spine.

OK, here's a thing: from the age of 17, right up until September 2002, I suffered from really bad back pain. I would spend a couple days a month laid up on the sofa, unable to move, and I'd go through a couple bottles of over-the-counter pain meds a month. I developed chemical burns on my back from overuse of "deep heat" patches and Tiger Balm. I saw a doctor who told me that I would likely need to have my spine fused.

Then I read this really weird, hippy-trippy book by Richard John Sarno, a guy who appears to be to back pain what Atkins was to dieting a couple years back, a fringe researcher with no independent verification of his results and a slightly suspect, "They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them all" affect that makes it hard to take his stuff seriously.

Sarno advocates a kind of self-hypnosis or self-interrogation to relieve the mental causes of back pain, and states that it works even if you don't believe in it. Well, I tried it. 24h later, I began the single longest period of pain-free living in my adult life. I haven't been laid up in over a year now, and I take painkillers for headaches, not back-aches.

Your mileage may vary, but after more than a year of this, I'm ready to start talking about it. Like Atkins for weight loss and hypnosis for smoking cessation, Sarnoid back-therapy feels something like getting root on my body, like being able to move into user-controlled space stuff that the OS was badly mismanaging in the background. Link

A Korean company has shipped a USB-based HDTV decoder -- that is, a box you plug into your PC's USB port and use to receive high-defintion TV signals. I wonder how "open" this device is -- under the proposed Broadcast Flag rules, if open-source drivers can be written for it, it might be illegal. Link

Google has published its "Zeitgeist" for 2003 -- some interesting aggregated stats about what people searched for and how and when they searched for it through the year (there's a lame Yahoo version, too -- do people really still search there?). As Jason pointed out, it's amazing to think what Google could charge for access to this kind of info-porn. Link (Thanks, Jason!)

Fiona Romeo writes about a BBC program about children and collecting, and the way that the commercialization of collectibles has changed the experience of collecting for kids.

Finkel argued that the commercialisation of collecting, through products like Pokémon cards, has devalued the experience: "What's really exciting about collecting is looking for things that you can't find when you want them. All you need to find [mass market collectibles] is the money. The real thrill is lost."

And, that these products might be branded as 'limited edition' or 'rare' but this is manipulated rather than spontaneous. I noticed this recently in Forbidden Planet, which has lucky-dip style vending machines for pocket-money priced toys, and trading cards on the counter. Reading both the pitches and disclaimers reminded me more of gambling than collecting.

Link

Danah Boyd has posted an interesting rumination on the "Kuleshov Effect," wherein a still image is freighted with opposite emotions by adding different soundtracks to it. The most interesting question this raises for me is: how can we expect "accurate" tagging of the subjective content of an artistic work ("Happy boy," "Pretty dog") when there are such fundamental conditionals dependent on context?

Lev Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker. Because of the political climate of Russia, he was left without access to actual film. Instead, he constructed films by splicing film and telling his story in a collage-esque manner. In addition to his style of film, he's known for something called the Kuleshov Experiment. In this experiment, an image of a man's face is shown juxtapositioned with various other images immediately following. Viewers thought that the man's emotion changed even though it is exactly the same shot.

Link

Nice review of Disney's anti-VD movie, produced for the US military during WWII.

The next scene is of an animated germ wearing a spiked Kaiser helmet, the Sergeant (played by Keenan Wynn -- perhaps best known for his role as Colonel 'Bat' Guano in Dr. Strangelove) briefing his troops of the Contagion Corps. The troops are syphilis and gonorrhea germs that wear berets with their initials on them ('S' and 'G').

Link (via Smartpatrol)

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has been knighted by the Queen of England.

The rank of Knight Commander is the second most senior rank of the Order of the British Empire, one of the Orders of Chivalry awarded. Berners-Lee, 48, a British citizen who lives in the United States, is being knighted in recognition of his "services to the global development of the Internet" through the invention of the World Wide Web.

Link

Crooks are sending email to naive office-workers, warning that their computers have been 0wned and demanding small sums of money in exchange for not getting them fired by filling their machines with child-porn.

What caught my eye about this is that it preys on the fact that most office-workers are required to sign documents saying that they understand that all of their Internetn use can be monitored, and that being caught with porn on your PC is a no-questions-asked firing offense.

These two measures, meant to enhance "security" by intimidating end-users into believing that they are universally surveilled and readily fired, has instead had the consequence of turning them into patsies for con-artists who exploit their fear to blackmail them.

In the annals of cybercrime, investigators acknowledge the racket is one of the most difficult to crack. Because the ransom is small, people tend to pay up and keep quiet...

The e-mail said several security vulnerabilities had been detected on the university's network and that unless the e-mail recipient transferred 20 euros ($25) to the author's online bank account, he would release a series of viruses capable of deleting a host of computer files.

Link

Paul Boutin has created a list of 101 Ways to Save the Internet for Wired magazine. Some I disagree with violently ("Declare spammers are terrorists" Oh really? Does that mean that we can solve spam by taking away business-travellers' nail-scissors?), some I laughed aloud at ("Take over the MPAA, Keanu") and some I cheered for:

3 Quit already, Jack Valenti

4 Appoint Larry Lessig to the Supreme Court Is he a Democrat or a Republican? Who cares! Laws governing information flow are the new affirmative action, abortion, and gun control rolled into one.

5 Create the all-in-one inbox Email, phone calls, instant messages - they should all go into a single app.

6 Triple our cable modem speed First step: Just turn off the Golf Channel and UPN.

7 Demand truth in advertising for software updates C'mon, AOL 9.0 is really AOL 8.0 with the version number increased 1.0.

Link

This is an amazing video-clip of "Daniel," a hyperactive contestant on The Price is Right. Daniel wins very big, all the while doing a kind of flippy-floppy hope-and-victory dance that looks like a Saturday Night Live schtick and has Bob Barker in disoriented stitches. 3.4 MB RealVideo Link

This LiveJournal post explaining how to apologize is a fine read, and particularily nice to start the year with. I did my share of apology-worth things in 2003, and I expect there will be any number deeds in 2004: if I can hew to these guidelines when saying sorry, I'll be a better person for it.

Be Specific and Don't Exaggerate: Avoid hyperbole, exaggeration, self-pity, and vagueness. Instead, try to focus on a realistic and specific approximation of what you actually did wrong. Exaggerations and vague generalizations put the other person in the position of defending you instead of accepting an apology, which isn't fair to them. It's a way of (consciously or unconsciously) weaseling out of actually taking responsibility for your actions. For example:

* I'm sorry I was such a pain in the ass. (self-pitying exaggeration)
* I'm sorry I yelled at you. (better)

* I'm sorry I ruined our whole day. (vague exaggeration)
* I'm sorry I lost my temper in front of your friends. (better)

* I'm sorry. I just suck at this stuff. (vague self-pity)
* I'm sorry I wasn't communicating with you very well about how I was feeling. (better)

* I'm sorry I can't do anything right. (self-pitying, vague exaggeration)
* I'm sorry I ruined your shirt by drying it on "Hot". (better)

These kinds of pseudo-apologies often work to inspire in a caring person the desire to comfort you, to say that it's really not all that bad, etc. Miraculously, you are relieved from actually have to talk about what you did do, because you've redirected the conversation toward things you didn't do. Sneaky. Manipulative.

Link (via Electrolite)