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Friday, February 27, 2004

Gingerbread Kama Sutra

These desperate amateur cookies will do anything to stay warm. Site includes recipes. Link (Thanks, Rose).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:32:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orson Scott Card's disgraceful anti-gay-marriage editorial

Orson Scott Card, whose notorious Hypocrites of Homosexuality revealed his revolting anti-gay side, has published a new broadside against gay marriages that dresses up homophobia with more sophistry. How shameful.

The dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.

It's that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual "marriage."

Link (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Matchstick rockets: kitchen-sink rocketry

Matchstick rockets are made by combining a paper match, a straight-pin, a paperclip and a little tinfoil, transforming these ordinary household items into a streaking, flaming jet of hot gases and eye-blinding fun! Link (Thanks, Bas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:17:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Low-cost, DRM-free audiobooks, to make an audio Gutenberg Project

TellTale Weekly is a new audiobook service selling low-cost (<$1) audiobooks as DRM-free MP3s and Oggs -- and building an audiobook version of the Gutenberg Project by releasing all their titles under a Creative Commons license after 5 years or 100,000 paid downloads, whichever comes first. There aren't many tracks up there yet, but as a certified audiobook addict, this is as exciting an idea as I've heard in a long, long time. Link (via Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:09:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

White House To Seek Ban On Gay Sex On The Moon

This is a pretty good extrapolation of the next probable announcement out of the Bush White House:

Worried by flagging poll numbers, a deteriorating situation in Iraq, and a sluggish economy, President Bush called on Congress today to approve a constitutional amendment that would ban gay sex on the Moon. Republican leaders hailed the move as a bold step to unite the country in a bold and forward-looking strategy to spread family values across the solar system, and protect the legacy of the Apollo missions.

Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:00:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

University requires copyright waiver from game-publishers for LAN parties

A university has begin requiring that LAN party organizers secure a written letter of permission from all game publishers whose works will be "performed" at the party.

A college student at Bowling Green University has run into trouble while trying to set up a LAN party, after the university refused to let him schedule the event over fears it may violate copyright laws.

I was casually informed that I had to secure permission from the copyright holders for the games we would be playing. I was quite confused as to why they needed this, and their only answer was that it would be considered a 'public showing of copyrighted work', and therefore I must secure permission. I asked a lawyer about the policy and his best advice was to get a hard copy of their policy and then comply to the bare minimum. The University was unable to provide much hardcopy, but largely referred me to the University rule that all State and Federal laws were in effect.

Link (via Lawgeek)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:59:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, February 26, 2004

EFF on the Grey Album and Information Wants to be $5

Two goodies from EFF this week:

Legal analysis of the Grey Album's copyright status:

Are the Grey Tuesday protesters protected by fair use?

Fair use generally refers to the federal copyright law exception contained in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Because the White Album is not protectible under federal copyright law, fair use is not directly applicable.

A proposal to end the file-sharing wars for a measly $5:

Voluntarily creating collecting societies like ASCAP, BMI and SESAC was how songwriters brought broadcast radio in from the copyright cold in the first half of the twentieth century.

Songwriters originally viewed radio exactly the way the music industry today views KaZaA users -- as pirates. After trying to sue radio out of existence, the songwriters ultimately got together to form ASCAP (and later BMI and SESAC). Radio stations interested in broadcasting music stepped up, paid a fee, and in return got to play whatever music they liked, using whatever equipment worked best. Today, the performing-rights societies ASCAP and BMI collect money and pay out millions annually to their artists. Even though these collecting societies get a fair bit of criticism, there's no question that the system that has evolved for radio is preferable to one based on trying to sue radio out of existence one broadcaster at a time.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:05:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

History of a punk band circa 1980

M.Ace, who runs one of my very favorite weblogs, Irregular Orbit, has posted a wonderful history of the punk band he was in over 20 years ago. I really like the songs, which you can download one at a time, or in a 50 MB chunk.

Once upon a time, back in the old punk era, I was in a band you never heard of called Narthex. We played shows in Philadelphia and vicinity from 1980 to 1983. We've put together a web page recounting our ridiculously obscure story, because we think all of the little stories of all of the little bands are what added up to make a remarkable era. Everyone who participated should be telling their own first-hand stories. So here is ours. Along with visual artifacts, there's also a free web-album of audio, released with a Creative Commons license.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:18:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Absurd news bites from Reason

Good daily report of idiots on parade.

Weather forecasters weren't yet sure whether a snowstorm was coming, but Somerville, Massachusetts, Mayor Joseph A Curtatone wasn't taking any chances. Though not a flake of snow was in sight, he declared a snow emergency. The next day, citizens of the city awoke to find little snow. But some 3,000 of them found $50 tickets on their cars for parking on a snow emergency street. They were the lucky ones. Another 200 had their cars towed. The mayor says he has no plans to forgive the tickets or to cancel the towing charges, which could net the city some $179,000. Neither the state nor any other city in the area declared a snow emergency.

Link

Jesse sez: "Our mayor may have made a bad call to pad the city's coffers, but that doesn't mean he can't backpedal furiously."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:29:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

'Musclebots' Are Coming

Roland sez: According to an article to be published by New Scientist on February 28, First robot moved by muscle power, a microrobot half the width of a human hair has been powered by living rat heart muscle. "It is the first time muscle tissue has been used to propel a micromachine." Carlos Montemagno, from the University of California at Los Angeles, who created the 'musclebot', wants to use the technology to help paralyzed people to breathe without a ventilator. And NASA, who helped funding the research, hopes that battalions of these 'musclebots' could one day help maintain spacecraft by plugging holes made by micrometeorites. The device is an arch of silicon 50 micrometres wide. This overview contains more details and additional pictures.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:04:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tragic, hilarious Marioland 8-bit Flash movies

The tragedy of Marioland: a three-part Flash animation using pixel-cool graphics from 8-bit Mario games as characters in a screamingly funny movie about the tragic invasion of Marioland. The use of Marioland mood music is a masterstroke. Part 1 Link, Part 2 Link, Part 3 (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Electroluminescent purse-liners

Bayer is proposing to use electroluminescent panels to line womens' purses, turning them into radiant, suitcase-of-drugs-from-Pulp-Fiction-esque cavities in which no lipstick or loose change can hide. Link (Thanks, Norm!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:45:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Drinky Crow jack-in-the-box

This April will see the release of a jack-in-the-box featuring Drinky Crow from Tony Millionaire's genius transgressive funnybook series Maakies. Link (Thanks, Goopymart!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:53:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Save money by tearing apart your iPod mini

Joanne sez: "The $249 iPod mini contains a $479.95 Hitachi MicroDrive. So the best deal on buying a MicroDrive is to buy a iPod mini and take it apart. You get the MicroDrive for almost 50% off and you get a free pair of headphones. You can slap an old compact flash card into the mini and keep on rocking." Link

Sean Bonner sez: "This guy took apart the mini iPod and found that it is NOT useable outside of the iPod, so buying one for the drive will prove useless." A firmware issue?

A Boing Boing reader sez: "The iPod/microdrive hack does work. Where the other poster is confused is that you can't format the microdrive in the camera. You need to mount drive on you system with a CF reader. Then format it FAT and it works fine. The drive out of the mini has a partition on it that their camera can't deal with. A full wipe on your machine solves the problem and gets you a cheap mammoth camera card.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:44:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spy shots of Branson's Virgin Global Flyer:

Boing Boing guestblog alumnis Todd Lappin points us out to these pics of the Virgin Global Flyer, a plane designed for a solo pilot to fly around the world on a single tank of gas. (Here's a good PopSci article about it.) Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:11:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Casshern Japanese movie trailer

Scott sez: "Imagine David Fincher & Terry Gilliam having a drunken fistfight in ILM's parking lot, and you've approximated the look."Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:59:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inside the CIA Museum

Bas sez: "One page showing some absolutely fascinating CIA gadgets. The remote-control libella and catfish are awsome. Note that these are not on the CIA Museum's own website." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:49:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

China International Adult Toys & Reproductive Health Exhibition 2004

Mark your calendars for the China International Adult Toys & Reproductive Health Exhibition 2004, Aust 6-8, 2004.

With the economic development today Chinese people begin to pay more attention to the quality of their daily life including sex and reproductive health. A civilized, healthy and happy life has already been the realm of necessity that the Chinese mass cherishes.

The time of being shocked at the mention of sex or regarding sex as an evil has gone by. Now in China, the civilized sexual concept has widely prevailed.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:46:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark's new media blog: Mad Professor

Madprofessor.net is my new media review blog. I'm writing about books, DVDs, software, games, and other media-like things that I like a lot. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:23:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Berocca: stay sharp?

My wife Kelly just returned from London Fashion Week with several packages of Berocca, an effervescent over-the-counter nutritional supplement sold by Roche "for hectic lifestyles." She says it's all the rage there as a vitamin source, energy enhancer, hangover remedy, and all-purpose pick-me-up. (The Berocca slogan is "Stay sharp!") It's mostly B vitamins and doesn't contain any caffeine, sugar, or ephedra. That's probably why it didn't seem to affect me too much. But it does taste great, kinda like Tang. Link

Australian Boing Boing reader Pete tells me that down under--where Berocca's much more fun slogan is "gives you back your b-b-bounce!"--he has a couple of friends "who think it's fun to suck on the tablets rather than dissolving them in water. Apparently having them fizz in your mouth wakes you up just as much as all those vitamins." Meanwhile, Jen points us to a US product similar to Berocca, called Emer'gen-C. "Whenever I'm feeling sick, I down a couple and immediately feel better," she says.

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:19:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yale Photonegatives Collection

Avi sez: "Don't know if you've had this before, but this database is an amazing photographic (and artistic) treasure of America's people and places at the turn of the previous century. Unfortunately, there is no index of the contents so you have to try your luck with keywords, which almost always turn up interesting finds. For example try typing in 'Indian' and see what happens! My favorite entries are 'Garden' and 'Gurdjieff'!" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:24:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mykeru.Com on anti-gay editorial

This is a wonderful evisceration of a hilariously dunderheaded editorial against gay marriage that appeared in The Daily Mountain Eagle Online of Jasper Alabama. The editorial was written by the paper's copy editor, Susan Sanford.

Sanford (quoting from the Bible): "And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works." -- Revelation 20:12

Mykeru: Uh huh. How about this one:

"Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church." -- I Corinthians 14:34-35 (NIV)

How many times do you think Susan Sanford has been disgraceful in church? Do you think she ran this by her hubby?

Link (Thanks, bywayoftheroad!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:02:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory signing/reading at San Francisco's Booksmith tonight

A reminder: tonight I will give my last public reading and signing for Eastern Standard Tribe before leaving San Francisco to emigrate to the UK.

Where: The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, at Clayton, +1.800.793.7323
When: Tonight, Wednesday, February 25, 2004, 7PM

Hope to see you there! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:16:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Universal crackpot spam solution rebuttal

This is a very funny checkbox-based form-letter for responding to crackpot spam solutions proposed in message-board posts:

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Link (Thanks, Jef!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Aryanfest 2004

Fascinating New Times article about Aryanfest 2004, "an 'international' gathering of Nazi skinheads, Ku Klux Klan members and other white supremacists that took place inside McDowell Regional Mountain Park just north of Fountain Hills a couple of weekends ago."

The atmosphere inside Aryanfest was that of a Renaissance Fair gone over to the dark side, with "Heils" in place of "Huzzahs." Costumed attendees wore Iron Cross medallions and black bomber jackets emblazoned with swastika patches instead of studded leather armor and princess dresses. A Nazi memorabilia dealer hawked SS patches and framed photographs of Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolph Hess in the parking lot. Next to the stage was a picnic pagoda, serving as the Aryanfest day-care center, where little white children in skinhead clothes colored in white power coloring books. Directly next door to the pagoda was a tattoo booth, where the incessant high-pitched buzz of a tattoo gun sounded from behind a blue tarp curtain. Beside the Panzerfaust merchandise stand was the Women for Aryan Unity booth, which sold child-rearing guides and White Nationalist Baby magazines, including one containing a simplified biography of Hitler suitable for bedtime stories: "He was a lifelong lover of animals and children . . . He is invincible and victory shall one day be his."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:28:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Slug Food T-Shirt now available

People have emailed me asking for a Slug Food T-shirt. So I'm selling them for $18. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:18:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jimmy Scott biography on PBS tonight

Check your local listings for the airtime of this biography of vocalist Jimmy Scott, If You Only Knew.

"If You Only Knew is a film portrait of the now famous jazz vocalist who was 'rediscovered' decades after he disappeared from the public eye. Born in Cleveland in 1925, Jimmy Scott's early years were filled with devastating hardships. At age 12, he was diagnosed with Kallmann's Syndrome, a rare hormonal condition that kept his body -- and his voice -- from developing beyond boyhood. Seven months after the diagnosis, his beloved mother, the sole guardian of Scott and his nine siblings, was killed in a car accident. Her children were separated and sent to live in foster homes.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:16:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pentagon warns Bush of apocalyptic climate change by 2020

The Pentagon issued a secret report to Bush warning him that catastrophic climate changes in the next 15 years are a bigger threat than terrorism, and will lead to massive riots and nuclear war.

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

Link (Thanks, Tony!)

AndyHat sez: For those who want to make up their own minds about the Guardian story on the "suppressed" Pentagon report, Greenpeace has the full text available. Of course, as it says right at the top: "We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately." I like how The Guardian has changed "plausible" but "not the most likely" to a statement of near certainty.

A Boing Boing Pal sez:The Pentagon climate change paper story is interesting - but not quite accurate. The more interesting story is how the European press distorted what was a very interesting piece on abrupt climate change into a would-be smoking gun for the Bush administration.  

Initial press on the abrupt climate change paper was neutral. It was a scenario exercise written for Andy Marshall in the Pentagon, profiled a month ago in Fortune Magazine.

From that piece, here is the story in a nutshell:
"Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked [Andrew Marshall] to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons.

When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to write a report on the national-security implications of the threat. Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to DreamWorks—he helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report. Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away from—at least in public.

The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that the Pentagon has agreed to share with FORTUNE. It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies."

So a month later, the world press catches wind of the story and sensationalizes the hell out of it. Headlines:

Agence France Presse: Leaked Pentagon report warns climate change may bring famine, war
The Observer: Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us: The US President has denied the existence of global warming. But a secret report predicts a looming catastrophe - a world riven with water wars, famine and anarchy

The story was picked up by Al Jazeera, Hindustan Times, Times of Oman, and more I'm sure.

That's just what landed in my inbox.

At this point the Oakland Tribune has the best coverage of the story - as well as the story behind the story.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:55:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thanks, John Escobedo!

John Escobedo, who animated Boing Boing's Jackhammer Jill, sent me a transparent version of the logo so it looks good on a gray background. Thanks!

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:18:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nelson's Grey Tuesday RSS

Kudos to Nelson Minar for turning his RSS feed grey in honor of Grey Tuesday. (Also, kudos to Nelson for recently switching his RSS to full text instead of the stingy excerpts that some people still publish). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Garry Trudeau puts $10K up for anyone who will confirm Bush's Air Guard claims

Garry B Trudeau, the author of the Doonesbury comic strip, has put up $10,000 of his personal fortune for anyone who will come forward and confirm to having witnessed, first-hand, GW Bush's putiative Air Guard service story, in which the President claims not to have deserted his military post, despite all evidence to the contrary.

For the past several weeks, trolling-for-trash journalists have made repeated forays into the continuing mystery of George W. Bush's Air National Guard service (to catch up on developments, read Salon's "Bad news doesn't get better with age", The Decatur Daily's "Former Dannelly worker: Bush not AWOL", The Nation's "W's AWOL Spin Update!", and -- of particular interest -- The Memphis Flyer's "On Guard -- Or Awol?"). With just eight months left in the presidential campaign, GBT is hoping to speed the disclosure process along by offering a $10,000 reward to coax a witness to step forward and confirm President Bush's story, thereby putting the whole sordid mess behind us.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Education czar calls teachers' union a "terrorist organization"

The US Secretary of Education called the NEA, the national teachers' union, a terrorist organization. Then, he spun a mealymouthed apology that wasn't:

It was an inappropriate choice of words to describe the obstructionist scare tactics the NEA's Washington lobbyists have employed against No Child Left Behind's historic education reforms.

Link (via Making Light)

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

Monday, February 23, 2004

Worst Beatles cover ever

Mrs Miller's Greatest Hits is a novelty vinyl rarity featuring a woman named Mrs Miller doing random covers in a kind of Aunt-Bea-contralto with really inappropriate crisp diction and crazy off-key whackiness (a reminder that the difference between crazy and eccentric is how much money you have). There are a couple of Real streams of her excruciating Beatles and Petula Clark covers linked off of this page.

Mrs. Miller's album is definitely over the top, but I get the very sinister feeling from the liner notes that while Miller herself may have been completely serious about what she was doing, whoever coaxed her to make this album was laughing on the inside, and probably egging her on to be even more extreme. The sarcasm is very subtle, just enough to give the wink to record collectors like us while keeping poor Mrs. Miller in the dark. References to her "impeccible diction" and "scintillating delivery" abound, as well as the accolade "one of the most interesting voices extant... one that brings to mind the tonal qualities of a Florence Foster Jenkins or a Mrs. B. J. Fangman".

Link (Thanks, miles!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:18:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elmore Leonard's 10 rules for writing

Elmore Leonard's ten rule for writers. Brilliant.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

(this is my third link from Teresa Nielsen Hayden in one day, which has to be some kind of record) Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:09:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tokyo Trader Vic's makes a mean goddamned mojito

The mojitos at the Tokyo Trader Vic's come in a ~8" tall block of ice, bored out to make room for the drink, served with a fat-ass novelty straw (that's a dinner-plate, shown for scale). 20,000 Yen! Link (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:48:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boing Boing is grey for Grey Tuesday

Kottke's got the right approach: I can't afford the bandwidth to mirror the Grey Album, but Boing Boing is going grey for 24h to protest EMI/Capitol's heavy-handed response to DJ Danger Mouse's brilliant Grey Album project. Apologies for reduced legibility.

kottke.org is grey today because I believe that musical sampling without prior consent of the copyright holder should be legally allowed because it does our society more good than harm.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:57:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Capitol Records ships threatening Grey Tuesday letter

In honor of tomorrow's Grey Tuesday civil disobedience event (in which sites are encouraged to mirror copies of DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, which mixes together the Beatles' White Album and Jay Z's Black Album, a 3,000-pressing CD that attracted the maximal wroth of Capitol Records's bullying copyright lawyers), Capitol Records has already produced a threatening letter telling you just what you can expect if you take their precious. Good to see copyright protecting creativity here, by stamping it out -- as if the existence of this album will cost either The Beatles or Jay Z a single, solitary sale.

We are aware of the so-called "Grey Tuesday" event, sponsored by http://www.downhillbattle.org and described on the http://www.greytuesday.org website as a "day of coordinated civil disobedience" in which participating sites will make the unlawful Grey Album available for downloading, distribution, and file-sharing in order to force "reforms to copyright law that can make sampling legal." Your site is listed among those that will engage in this openly unlawful conduct. Any unauthorized distribution, reproduction, public performance, and/or other exploitation of The Grey Album will constitute, among other things, common law copyright infringement/misappropriation, unfair competition, and unjust enrichment rendering you and anyone engaged with you in such acts liable for all of the remedies provided by relevant laws. These remedies include but are not limited to preliminary and permanent injunctive relief as well as monetary and punitive damages necessary to remedy your openly willful violation of Capitol's rights.

Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spam filters that are better than people

Interesting Slashdot thread about two spam-filters that score higher accuracy that human beings:

Based on a study by Bill Yerazunis of CRM114, the average human is only 99.84% accurate. Both filters are reporting to have reached accuracy levels between 99.983% and 99.984% (1 misclassification in 6250 messages) using completely different approaches (CRM114 touts Markovan, while DSPAM implements a Dolby-type noise reduction algorithm called Dobly).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TSA mistakenly nabs one of its own

Henry sez: "Another Brazil-style 'Tuttle-Buttle' situation:"

Michael Bills thought he had a pretty good gig with the federal Transportation Security Administration. His job as a screener at Love Field was government work--good bennies, nice retirement package. An ex-Marine and former quality inspector for a company in Garland before he was laid off, Bills says he even turned down other potential employers to stick with the TSA, where he worked for about 12 months.

Then the TSA fired him last October; said he failed to pass his background security check. Even worse, the TSA called him a sex offender--and worse than that, a child molester.

Except he isn't. The TSA--remember, these are the people who are supposed to weed out the terrorists from the regular airline passengers--got the wrong man.

"What hurt me the most is they accused me of being a sex offender," Bills says. "To me, that's the worst thing you can do."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:39:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FBI shuts down entire ISP to investigate one customer

Eli the Bearded sez: "The FBI completely shut down an ISP by confiscating all its servers for about a week. Gotta love that sensitivity to keeping a business viable."

According to the warrant, it appears that the Bureau is investigating whether someone hosted on our network hacked and attacked someone else.

After several hours of attempting to track down, inspect and audit the terabytes of data that we host, the FBI determined that it was more efficient (from their point of view) to remove all of our servers and transport them to the FBI local laboratories for inspection. This was completed at 7:00 pm EST same day.

The FBI has assured us that as soon as the data has been safely copied and inspected, the equipment will be promptly returned. Unfortunately, the FBI has not been able to tell us when they will be completed with their inspection.

Link

Chris Siebenmann sez: " This may not be what it seems. At least some people in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email believe strongly that Foonet/cithosting.com are either spammers or active, knowing supporters of spammers. The FBI raid was reported in NANAE, in a thread starting at message-ID Xns949086FF99721bruns2mbitcom@130.133.1.4, and it has been suggested (strongly) that it may not have anything to do with the reason that cithosting.com is claiming for it.

"Both SPEWS and Spamhaus have listings for some or all of Foonet. The SPEWS listing is http://www.spews.org/html/S2591.html and the Spamhaus listings can be accessed through their SBL-search-by-ISP web page (under 'foonet.net', not 'cithosting.com')."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:41:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stuart Hughes covering Tehran elections

Stuart Hughes, the incredibly brave blogger and BBC reporter whose work I've posted about previously on BoingBoing, writes:

Greetings, Xeni, from Tehran! I managed to get an Iranian visa to come over and cover the elections. This afternoon I've uploaded what could be the very first Iranian videoblog...take a look at www.stuhughes.co.uk.

(and yes, as Cory blogged -- I'm on the road in Central America this week, so blogging will be thin where I'm concerned... please send suggestions via our form, not by email to me personally).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:09:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help take apart a pro-war astroturf letter

If you recently received a letter in support of the Iraq war, urging you to pass it along to your local paper, have a look at Teresa Nielsen Hayden's online, interactive, participatory shredding of it before you do:

Let's look at the "worst" president and mismanagement claims.

FDR led us into World War II. Germany never attacked us: Japan did. From 1941-1945, 450,000 lives were lost, an average of 112,500 per year.

Germany declared war on us shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

As for direct attacks, on 31 October 1941 a German sub attacked and sank the Reuben James in the North Atlantic. You can look it up. There's even a song.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Shirley on The Nader Illusion

John Shirley has some smart things to say about Nader:

The Nader Illusion is that both major parties are alike. He claims the Demos and the GOP are just the same, both beholden to special interests to such a degree that they're essentially paralyzed, no point in choosing one over the other. This is mostly hogwash. Yes they're beholden to special interests, but there are limits on that factor, and in fact there is a very distinct policy difference between the two parties. It *matters* which one you choose. There's not a chance that Gore would have supported --or that Kerry will support --a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. Bush will try to push one through and with a Republican congress he may well succeed. Gore or Kerry--never happen. And this is a watershed issue, like so many that distinguish GOP and Dems. Such an amendment erodes the distinction between church and state, sets a bad precedent, and of course puts a Constitutional imprimatur on discrimination against a class of people, gays.

Bush has been a one-man environmental disaster, weakening the clean air and water acts, allowing mercury and arsenic pollution to go on. Gore would NOT have done this. The air will be dirtier because Bush was elected.

Gore would have encouraged an increase in the minimum wage; Bush is against it. People will be paid less because Bush was elected.

Too many special interests? Yes and that needs to be changed. But it matters which party you choose. Nader's preaching a fantasy.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:26:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vanity Fair article: John Ashcroft is nuts

Mike Harris sez: Vanity Fair article on John Ashcroft from February 2004 issue. Among other things, describes how Ashcroft fears calico cats, how he attended opponent Mel Carnahan's funeral against the family's wishes, how Ashcroft's dad put him at the controls of a plane with no training at age 8, and how parts of Justice Department boilerplate were altered because they conflicted with the Seven Deadly Sins." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:55:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weblog of Fortean phenomena

Undiscovered is a nice looking site that reports on unusual "Fortean" style events, and takea a particular interest in a 19th century priest in France who built a lavish church, Rennes le Chateau, which is full of still-undeciphered symbols. Link

Here are some pics of the Rennes le Chateau.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:43:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory signing/reading at San Francisco's Booksmith this Wednesday

A reminder: I'm doing a signing and a reading for Eastern Standard Tribe at 7PM this Wednesday at San Francisco's Booksmith in the Haight at Clayton. This'll be my last west-coast signing for the foreseeable future -- hope to see you there! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:53:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SXSW set-list available over iTunes on free WiFi networks

Jim sez, "My friend Rich in Austin is running LESS networks, a 'free wifi' startup that actually has a revenue plan. The first real crack of this involves making the SXSW '04 set list available via iTunes at any of their 25 Austin locations." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:35:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Personal Nautilus sub

This guy has built an 18' long personal replica of the Nautilus sub from Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Link (Thanks, Lev!)

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

Phone-support confessions

Salon's continuing its series of workplace horror stories with the inside story of an outsource telephone tech-support outfit where the only thing the staff know how to do is keep call-times down, but are clueless as to how to fix any tech problem you may have.

A punter is someone who gets rid of problems by giving them to someone else. Punters tell customers that their problem is not really with their computer, but with their software, their printer, their phone lines, solar flares, whatever they can make sound believable. Then a punter will look at the piece of paper hanging above their phone and read you those four magic words. We don't support that. If you want your problem fixed, a punter will tell you, you'll have to call someone else...

Ted is someone I don't speak to. Ted is a formatter. Ted, and those like him, have only one solution to their customers' problems. Erase everything on the computer's hard drive and start over from scratch. While this can be effective for solving all sorts of software troubles, it's like amputating someone's leg to fix an ingrown toenail. The solution is usually worse than the problem. Most times Ted doesn't actually follow through with his plan. The entire strategy is just a bluff. Most people will balk at the proposition of losing everything and decide they can live with whatever problem they've called to complain about. At the very least they'll decide to hang up, back up their data, and call back -- at which point they'll become someone else's problem.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tube-map as constellation-strewn sky

An apopheniac's illustrated guide to unintentional animals hidden in the constellations of the London tubemap. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:26:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to get an agent

Teresa Neilsen Hayden's essay about how to get a book agent and how not to get a rotten book agent is fantastic.

Not very helpful agents have some knowledge of and connection with the industry, but what they know isn't current, and the people who were their best connections at various houses no longer hold those positions. They tend to have one or two notable clients plus a bunch of small fry and marginal types. These agents have two virtues: they won't deliberately cheat you, and they can get you past the "agented mss. only" barriers. It's still a bit like marrying someone you don't care for because at least that way you'll get laid: the imagined benefits will rapidly pall, while the underlying discontents will only become more irritating.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:22:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, February 22, 2004

Mediachest has a Boing Boing group

Nick Douglas has started a Boing Boing group on the media sharing network, Mediachest. There are currently only four members but they are sharing 400 items! Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:42:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ZigBee Spins The Carousel of Progress Forward

I wrote an article about a new wireless standard called ZigBee for TheFeature.

ZigBee, which operates at 2.4-GHz, is two-way so it'll be able to log your house's electric, water, gas usage, and send it to your computer for analysis. (That way, you'll have documented evidence next time you yell at your kids for leaving the lights on.) Because ZigBee has a range of only about 30 feet, and sends data in infrequent bursts, batteries could last for a couple of years without having to replace them. Light switch and thermostat manufacturers have joined the ZigBee alliance, along with the usual suspects, such as Philips, Motorola, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard.

A recent analyst report issued by West Technology Research Solutions estimates that by 2008 "annual shipments for ZigBee chipsets into the home automation segment alone will exceed 339 million units," and will show up in "light switches, fire and smoke detectors, thermostats, appliances in the kitchen, video and audio remote controls, landscaping, and security systems."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:20:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Infrequent updates this week

Some people have written in asking about blog updates:

I'm really busy preparing for my move (see the FAQ if you have any questions -- particularily about getting together in Toronto or London) and will likely only be blogging a few announcements as I get ready for my departure over the next week or so. Xeni's trekking in latinamerica, and so she's off the grid. Mark and Pesco are still blogging, but with half the team away this week, it might get a little slow around here.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:03:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, February 20, 2004

Mediachest -- like eBay, except you borrow instead of buy

Michael sez: "Mediachest is a social software site that allows users to inventory their collection of physical media items and search the collections of their friends and friends-of-friends for items such as DVDs or books that they would like to borrow. The site facilitates the borrowing and loaning of these items in a similar way to how Ebay facilitates online auctions -- there are user profiles, feedback pages, and rankings. In addition to searching the collections of friends you are able to see the items of people that are geographically close to you, or that are members of groups that you associate with (such as a student organization, gym, or work place group)." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:38:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Decease: The 'zine people are dying to read!

Last summer, I posted that Boing Boing pal Meri Brin was seeking submissions for her new 'zine Decease, about the "cuture of death." This weekend, the first issue debuts at the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco! APE is *the* gathering/conference/market for independent 'zine, comic, and book publishers. Congrats, Meri! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:18:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, February 19, 2004

Collective buying concern for flowers to queued-up SF gay betrothed couples

Given the high cost of shipping flowers to queued-up gay couples waiting to get married in San Francisco, Darren Barefoot is putting together collective flower-buys to save on shipping costs.

Hence, Flowers for Al and Don. I'm using a PayPal account to collect money, with which I'll buy bouquets in bulk for the couples in line. You can donate as much or little as you please, and I pledge that every cent (minus the PayPal fees) that I receive will go to this project. If make a donation, and want your name and/or Web site to be listed below, let me know when making your payment in PayPal.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:49:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Build handcranked automata from books of die-cut parts

Wacky Neighbor sez: "I just ran into this while googling Die Fledermaus. Little origami robots for the desktop. They call 'em paper automata, and they're trying to sell them as executive toys. Although I think their real market is the geek sector. And given the lascivious movement of the witch, I think with minor redesigns, they could have a future in the risque novelty market. Whether the titular flying pig appears at life's lineups, a la Kids in the Hall, is another matter." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:16:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GOODHAPPYFUN Baby bags

My friend Racelle has made some amazingly useful baby bags. They work well as computer bags, too. Carla and I use them all the time. (And I designed her website, too). Racelle's going to start offering dad-friendly patterns. I'm trying to talk her into making one with J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' smiling mug. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:06:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Send flowers to a random couple at SF City Hall

A Minnesotan got the idea to have congratulatory flowers delivered to a random gay couple on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, and now s/he's trying to start a movement.

He called a florist and they agreed to do it. He told them to deliver to any couple -- it didn't matter who -- standing in line to get married, with his blessing. The card will read simply "With love, from Minneapolis, Minnesota."

Once they understood, they were very touched and thought it was a great idea.

He told another co-worker who did the same thing. And now we want to start a movement. Wouldn't that be cool if people from all over the country, gay, straight and otherwise, started sending flowers to the people waiting in line to get married.

Link (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video: seatbeltless driver falls asleep, crashes

Incredible in-car video of a poor guy who falls asleep while driving, and then gets in an accident. No blood, but he flies all over the car and cracks his head through a window. Link (Thanks, Lorin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:50:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help Derek give San Francisco's married gays prints of their happy moments

Derek sez, "Last weekend I was a City Hall, photographing the happy couples descend the steps after their marriages. Now I'd like to track down as many of the couples as I can to give them prints of their happy moment! If you know one of these people, or know someone who might, please put them in touch with me using one of the many social software tools at our disposal!" Link (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:50:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GreyTuesday: mass mirroring of the Grey Album

GreyTuesday is an effort to protest EMI's crackdown on DJ Danger Mouse's amazing Grey Album.

Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI's attempts to censor this work.

Link (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Curry KitKats

Nestle is rolling out curry-flavored KitKats.

As well as the cumin and masala flavour, Nestle is considering offering lemon cheesecake, liquorice, saffron and passion fruit.

Lemon cheesecake KitKat is already sold in Germany and Japan, and the group confirmed it may be brought to Britain.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:44:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google designer on Yahoo! search

A Google user-interface designer has some pithy thoughts on Yahoo!'s new search product:

Google's search for 'cameras' gives a sponsored link for cameras at Buy.com at the top of the page, and eight AdWords ads down the side. The first four results make perfect sense: DP Review, Short Courses the leading publisher of photography-related eBooks, Conatax/Yashica, and Nikon USA. As you go farther down the list, there's more useful stuff.

Now try Yahoo's version. Right off the bat you have cross-sell links to products, and sponsored results that mimic web results which, along with the standard AdWordsClone ads on the right, push the first actual web search result below the fold, where most users won't even see it.

But say you do scroll down and see 'top 20 web results' (out of 27,700,000). The first one on the list is for Jersey Swimwear, USA with the blurb: "Coming soon -- Jersey swimwear for MILKDUDS.COM!"

Link (via Battelle)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Case against Nader in Flash

Ralph Nader is soliciting comments on whether he should run for the presidency this coming fall. Ralphdontrun is a site put together by "progressive Democrats and independents" urging Nader not to run on the grounds that he could act as a spoiler, handing another four years to Bush. They've put up a powerful and effective Flash movie stating this case, and they're urging the public to contact Nader and politely, forcefully urge him to not run. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired -- Larry Flynt: Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Porn

For today's edition of Wired News, I interview Larry Flynt. As Hustler magazine nears its 30-year anniversary, the adult entertainment magnate reflects on how technology has changed his business, the Justice Department's new "porn czar," the first major federal obscenity prosecution in over a decade, how the Patriot Act relates to porn, and why online anonymity matters. I also asked him about some recent allegations regarding George W. Bush that were attributed to Flynt, and published by New York Daily News. His response: a new book he's releasing on July 4 will document a year-long investigation into those claims. Snip:

Larry Flynt: [Technology has] had a dramatic effect. In the 1980s, publishing was 80 percent of my business. Now it's about 20 percent, and the rest is Internet or video. I don't think many people anticipated how the Internet was going to revolutionize the way we disseminate information. Now everybody does -- but some did in time, and some didn't. That's one of the reasons Penthouse filed for bankruptcy. They were relying totally on publishing. We knew in the early 1990s that we needed to diversify and branched out into a lot of different areas. Technology still has many surprises for us down the road, particularly in the wireless area. It's going to be absolutely phenomenal. In the next two to five years, you'll see the computer and your home television set merging. You'll have one remote control, and they'll effectively be one device.

WN: Do you ever get tired of having to answer for the actions of some of your more extreme colleagues in the industry?

Flynt: No. I let them do their thing and I do mine. I try to set an example for them. But I've been to prison, and I don't think some of them have. Let them try it, maybe it will change their attitude.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:38:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory reading tonight at Borderlands Books

One final reminder: I'm giving a signing and a reading at San Francisco's Borderlands Books (19th and Valencia) tonight at 7PM, in honor of Eastern Standard Tribe. Hope to see you there! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rotate video 90 degrees in OS X?

Does anyone know of a free/cheap tool for OS X that will let me rotate video clips by 90 degrees? I have a little Exilim camera that shoots short video clips, and I'm perennially framing my clips in portrait, forgetting that the camera saves everything as a landscape-ratio AVI. I want to be able to open the clips, rotate them 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clock and save them again as AVIs or MOVs. Mail me if you know the answer, please!

OK, here are a couple of solutions for this:

1. In QuickTime Pro: Movie -> Get Movie Properties -> Video Track/Size -- then use rotate buttons
2. Simple Rotate, an iMovie plugin

(Thanks to Matthias, Marc, Mike, Dieter, and David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:15:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Story of the TiVo remote

The NYTimes covers the birth of the TiVo remote, one of the finest pieces of user-centered design I've ever encountered (if only there were some way to tell, without looking, whether you were holding it upside-down).

The peanut-shaped TiVo remote is at once playful and functional. A smiling TV set with feet and rabbit ears, the company's logo, graces the top. Distinctive buttons like a green thumbs-up and a red thumbs-down button have helped the remote win design awards from the Consumer Electronics Association.

"They did a really good job," said Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, a technology consulting firm in Fremont, Calif. Mr. Nielsen called the oversize yellow pause button in the middle of the remote "the most beautiful pause button I've ever seen."

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:35:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Microcar and Minicar Club annual meet photos

Once a year, members of the National Microcar and Minicar Club meet to show off their fully-restored pint-sized vehicles. Wouldn't the roadways of America be a lot more fun to look at if people drove microcars instead of SUVs? The 2004 meet will be in Huntington Beach in July. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:32:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jim Macdonald explains writing

Jim Macdonald, half of the Doyle-Macdonald writing team, has been presiding over a hundreds-posts-long running tutorial on how to write that is unbelievably good and sensible and right. If you want to write, go read this now.

Well, now, what to put in the opening?

We're going to stick with the chess game metaphor for a while here. In the opening you're trying to put yourself into a strong position for going into the midgame (where the exciting action and the exciting combinations occur), and you do this mostly by getting your pieces off the back rank as quickly as possible. The pieces are your major characters. Get them out there, and get them doing things.

Don't neglect your pawns -- your minor characters. You should cherish your minor characters. They'll save your life. If you have a selection of minor characters you can pull them out to solve problems later in the book.

Now, what to put in that first chapter? (Recall that if your readers don't finish the first chapter they'll never get to chapter two.)

To answer the question of what goes into chapter one, I'm going to grab the first stanzas from a bunch of Anglo-Scots folk ballads. These were the popular songs of earlier times, cooked by the folk process so that only the important and memorable parts remain, they're entertaining, and they tell stories.

Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:20:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Science Fiction Inventions by Publication Date

Very nice:

1980 Food Factory - fast food from outer space (from Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl)
1980 Watercouch (from Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl)
1981 Communications Implant - I think therefore I network (from Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven)
1981 Mole - Underground vehicle (from Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven)
1981 Underground MagLev Train (from Dream Park by Larry Niven (w/S. Barnes))
1981 Arcology - Soleri's dream (from Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle)

Link (via Ben Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:52:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory speaking at Wireless Future conference at SXSW in March

Jonl sez: "Time is running out to register for the Wireless Future conference, which will be held March 12-16 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. Explore the future of licensed and unlicensed wireless technology with such luminaries as Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs), Kevin Werbach (organizer of Supernova and author of New America Foundation's Radio Revolution), Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legendary Dave Hughes, David Weinberger (author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Dewayne Hendricks of Dandin Group, Joichi Ito of Neoteny, Ltd., Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury, John Quarterman and many more! This is a great conference for wireless entrepreneurs, business strategists, developers, inventors, creative thinkers and anyone else interested in the promise of mobile technology. Sponsored by Andrews Kruth, Metrowerks, Motion Computing, RockSteady Networks, The Futures Lab, Polycot Consulting, Austin Wireless Alliance and Ink PR." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:56:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark's "Slug Food Journal" for sale

I'm selling blank notebooks with my cover illustration of a girl feeding some magic pellets to her pet slugs. (click here for a larger image) The notebooks are wire-o bound, measure 5" x 8", and contain 80 sheets of paper. Yours for just $10. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:17:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bnetd brief: a legal doc that *sings*

Most legal briefs are boring and vaccilating, couched in a thousand maybes and coulds and other qualifiers. Thus, it's a pleasure to read a brief in which a lawyer lays down some muscular, no-nonsense prose in defense of a good cause.

My cow-orker Jason Schultz has just filed a brief in the Southern District Court in the BNETD case, in which Blizzard -- a Universal company that makes video games -- is suing some hackers who wrote their own free software version of Blizzard's game-server, called bnetd. The arguments from the other side are the height of bogosity, and Jason makes no bones about it in his brief. The prose here positively sings, and is as good a treatise on fair-use reverse engineering as you could hope to read.

First, as discussed in Defendants' opening brief, the dissimilarity between the "BATTLE.NET" and "bnetd project" marks alone warrants summary judgment for the Defendants on Blizzard's Count III. Also weighing heavily in Defendants' favor is the fact that Blizzard has still failed to come forward with any admissible evidence of actual customer confusion. Blizzard's sole set of "evidence" are two hearsay statements in a declaration from Paul Sams, a Blizzard employee. These vague assertions regarding what other unnamed people have said when contacting Blizzard constitutes inadmissible hearsay, and therefore cannot be considered as evidence of actual confusion. Even if these statements were admissible, misdirected communications such as these have been considered in other cases to be "de minimis and to show inattentiveness on the part of the caller or sender rather than actual confusion."

296K PDF Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:43:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wirelessly Enabling the Disabled

My latest piece for TheFeature is about researchers at Georgia Tech who are hacking mobile devices and off-the-shelf components to help disabled people become more independent. I'm really intrigued by the wearable "audiitory display," a navigation system for the blind that generates spatially-located sounds as trail-markers for the wearer to follow as they walk somewhere. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:30:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free WiFi influences 40% of Schlotskys's customers

Schlotzky's is a deli chain that gives away free WiFi -- they were among the first to do so, in a bold expeeriment at one of their flagship restaurants on the main drag in Austin, TX, after Starbucks set up shop directly across the street (Schlotsky's also took the incredibly canny step of renaming their coffee sizes Tall, Grande, and Venti and putting a starbusian combinatorial explosion of caffeine-delivery systems on the menu). The company has released new market research showing that free connectivity is a selection-factor for 40 percent of its customers.

Glenn writes,

I've met the CEO and the marketing director when I invited the CEO to speak at a panel I moderated at Wi-Fi Planet last year, and the most interesting aspect of the Wi-Fi is that they're not excited about the technology but its uses. There's a financial aspect to this, of course: the average purchase price of a Schlotzsky's customer is about $7.

But the CEO wasn't a geek; he liked seeing entire families or sports teams or groups of parents and kids come in and spent time using the high-speed connection. It's important to recall that a small but significant minority of Internet users have broadband; for the rest, Schlotzsky's offering is a profound (and free) pleasure.

Link (via WiFiNetNews)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory reading tomorrow night at Borderlands Books

I'm giving a signing and a reading at San Francisco's Borderlands Books (19th and Valencia) tomorrow night at 7PM, in honor of Eastern Standard Tribe. Hope to see you there! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mysterious celebrity-themed posters plaster LA streets

Click image for full size. A mysterious epidemic of posters is reported in LA this week. We understand they bear the work of famed street artist Robbie Conal They're Robbie Conal-esque, and we know they're some sort of sneaky underground campaign for some Hot New Thing Which Shall Be Revealed Shortly, and that posters sending up Wynona, Courtney, and Moby are also in the works, but we're told we'll be sent on a one-way ride to Naked Scientology Boot Camp for extensive botox torture if we reveal their true origin and purpose. (Thanks, Susannah!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:57:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FCC Chairman's astounding statement of Internet Rights

FCC Chairman Michael Powell recently gave a talk called "Preserving Internet Freedom: Guiding Principles for the Industry" at the University of Colorado School of Law. Powell sets out some "Internet Freedoms" that he believes Americans are entitled to: these are astonishingly radical ideas to hear coming out of the mouth of the Chairman of the FCC.

1. Freedom to Access Content. First, consumers should have access to their choice of legal content.
2. Freedom to Use Applications. Second, consumers should be able to run applications of their choice.
3. Freedom to Attach Personal Devices. Third, consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes.
4. Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information. Fourth, consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans.

100K PDF Link (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:56:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian file-sharing lawsuit clearing house

Glen sez, "A new Canadian site with resources to fight record company lawsuits re: file sharing. Looks like it was set up mostly by law students. This page on the message forum lists usernames & IP addresses of Kazaa users that CRIA is going after." Link (Thanks, Glen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:51:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Discordians organize MeetUp

evilevilmatt sez, "This site is devoted to getting discordians, worshipers of chaos to organize a 'meetup day.' Oh the irony!" Link (Thanks, evilevilmatt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:42:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turn yourself into a UPC

Feeling overly humanized? Let this Flash-based barcode-generator dehumanize you a little: apparently this UPC decodes to "32-year-old male, 173 lbs, 5'10", living in the US." Link (Thanks, Liz!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wicked-cool home robot videos from Japan

Robotics Society of America President and Robolympics founder David Calkins tells BoingBoing:

"While in Japan, I saw the coolest thing ever! Fighting robots. But not in the traditional Battlebots sense. Imagine rock-em sock-em robots, only fully articulated and computer controlled. It's called Robo-One and it's amazing. 15" tall androids belt each other boxing style until one falls down. These mini androids are as articulate as the Sony Curio, Honda ASIMO, or Fujitsu HOAP - only guys are making them in their apartments for about $3000, rather than 10 Million. I've uploaded a bunch of videos to give you an idea. Robolympics is sponsoring a Robo-One match in San Francisco in March - along with Battlebots, sumo bots, and others. Watch these videos!" Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:36:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mind Wide Open excerpt

Salon is running a long excerpt from Steven Johnson's mindblowing new book, Mind Wide Open, which I read last week and have been returning to in my thoughts several times a day. Johnson takes apart the jargon and theory of various kinds of brain and mind science and exposes us to a bunch of aha! moments about the physiological, evolutionary and non-material bases for our thought processes. Reading this book, you get this curious form of vertigo in which you begin to see your brain as a collection of chemicals and processes and physiological serendipities, and then realize that that very same collection of goo is the thing that is having this realization, and boy, that's a weird goddamned feeling. As for me, after reading this I'm in the market for a cheap travel-sized USB neurofeedback EEG.

Areas that do show noticeable changes appear on the images as a cluster of bright yellow pixels, fading out to orange and red at their peripheries. The images look strikingly like the Doppler radar images you see on the Weather Channel. (If you blur your eyes a little, you might think that yellow patch on the image was a thunderhead, not a brainstorm.) The image is projected over a grid with numbers running along each axis. The numbered grid and the slices create a three-dimensional system of coordinates, the latitude and longitude of neuromapping. The grid is made up of small cubes called "voxels," and each voxel has a specific address.

Joy begins by laying down the twenty-five slices for stage one of our experiment, the dreaded checkerboard. The pattern of activity is immediately visible, even to my untutored eyes, mostly because there's literally nothing going on in 95 percent of my brain. Only a thin band wrapping around the back of my head, roughly at ear level, glows yellow.

"We know that the flashing checkerboard is a very salient stimulus for just the visual processing areas of the brain," she says. "And that's exactly what's happening here."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:14:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woman sued for file-sharing brings RICO countersuit against RIAA

A New Jersey mom who was sued for file-sharing by the RIAA has brought a countersuit for racketeering.

The Rockaway Township woman, who claims she was targeted for her teenager's school research project, is among hundreds of individuals sued by the music industry since last summer. Another 531 computer users were sued yesterday in "John Doe" suits filed in Trenton, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Orlando.

Labels are using "scare tactics (that) amount to extortion" in efforts to extract settlements, Scimeca alleges in legal papers sent to the U.S. District Court in Newark.

"They're banding together to extort money, telling people they're guilty and they will have to pay big bucks to defend their cases if they don't pony up now. It is fundamentally not fair," Scimeca's lawyer, Bart Lombardo, said yesterday. The Cranford attorney said he occasionally downloads songs for personal use and sees nothing wrong with that.

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:47:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

William Gibson interview

Here's a great interview with William Gibson, who is on the road promoting the paperback of his brilliant novel of apophenia run wild, Pattern Recognition (see my review, too).

"When you write a science-fiction novel set in some sort of recognizable future, as soon as you finish it you have the dubious pleasure of watching it acquire a patina of quaint technological obsolescence. For instance, there are no cell phones in Neuromancer. I couldn't have foreseen them. It would have seemed corny, like Dick Tracy wrist radios."

And he never set out to predict how we might be living a few decades hence. "I always assumed that social-science fiction - anything set on Earth in a not-too-distant future - is just a mutant version of the present. But the easiest hook to hang on me was that I was a futurist. I had always maintained that I was squinting at the present in a certain way."

Link (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to get free iTunes from Pepsi with every bottle

If you tilt a sealed, new Pepsi bottle at 25 degrees and squint at the underside of the cap, you can tell whether it's a winning free-iTunes-track bottle or a try-again bottle. Link (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:35:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pagan hierarchy

The Pagan Hierarchy: like the Geek Hierarchy, but for pagans. I don't know why this kind of chart is so inherently funny, but damn, it sure is. Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:12:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Judicial pedantry saves gay marriage in San Fran

The judge who refused to issue an immediate injunction against gay and lesbian weddings in San Francisco did so on the basis of a punctuation nit.

"The way you've written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word 'or'," the judge said. "I don't have the authority to issue it under these circumstances."

Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:56:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Going away party this Sunday

All right, I've promised a party, and I'm delivering. If anyone wants to wish me well and see me off from San Francisco, please come on down to Zeitgeist this Sunday for a late-afternoon send-off.

Where: Zeitgeist Bar and Guest Haus, 199 Valencia St at Duboce, San Francisco, (415)255-7505
When: Sunday, February 22, 2004, 5-9PM
What: Cory's going-away party

Please, no prezzies or keepsakes! I have enough to pack and store! (Oh, and on that note, I've just added a couple clock-radios, a heater and a trackball to the garage-sale blog) Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:15:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

COINTELPRO II: Police tactics since 9-11

Kevin Bankston, EFF's Equal Justice Works/Bruce J. Ennis Fellow, sez, "This is an incredible, two part series in Salon about cops spying on political activists post-9/11. It is an absolute must read."

"What we're seeing is something much larger in scale and danger than anything that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s," he says. "That's because of computers. Now, instead of having these agencies working in semi-isolation or occasional cooperation, there's the equivalent of the great Alaska pipeline running between them, and the information flows in both directions. In addition, in the 1950s or '60s, it took weeks of pavement pounding and doorknobbing for the FBI or police or military to collect personal information about people, the kind of information you need to put them under surveillance. Today that kind of information can be obtained by a few computer keystrokes. The harassment potential is much greater."

Part 1 Link, Part 2 Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:09:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harnessing the Hacker's HeckleBot

Boing Boing pal Justin Hall sez: "Ostensibly a story about the Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego last week, it's secretly a reflection of my own struggle to manage my attention span when I have access to the internet and I'm surrounded by hyperactive geeks and I'm supposed to be listening to straightforward in-person presentations but the twitchy nature of communcations online suits me more readily." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:34:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sponsored Paris

More logomarked futurism: a Flash app (with un-mutable, obnoxious soundtrack) showing various Paris landmarks as they might appear once sponsored by multinational brands. You know, I wrote a story about this (reprinted in this book). Link (Thanks, Chryde!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:32:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

List of programs disapproved for Closed Captioning

Sarah sez, "As a follow-up to the posting on closed-captioning censorship, people may be interested to know that it's not just Bewitched and Scooby-Doo that have been deemed too strong for the sensitive eyes of the hearing impaired. Movies on the IFC, NASCAR, and Law & Order are all disapproved, but we can still read along with "The Fountainhead" and Fox Network News. List courtesy of the National Association for the Deaf." Link (Thanks, Sarah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I'm moving to England and selling off a bunch of stuff

I've got a lot of changes coming up in my life this year. At the end of the month, I'm starting a one-month leave-of-absence from EFF, and I'll be going off to Toronto to finish my next novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town."

Then, starting on April 1, I'll be heading off to London, England, to work for Creative Commons and EFF on a variety of projects:

• Responding to the EUIPR enforcement directive in Brussels
• Participating in the DVB standards-body in Geneva
• Working with large-scale UK open licensing projects
• Representing EFF at WIPO in Geneva

It's really exciting (and I'm really frazzled!), and, in answer to some common questions:

1. No, I'm sorry, I just don't have any time for dinner, drinks, lunch, coffee or meetings before I leave San Francisco. Every moment is spoken for. I'd love to see you at one of my book-signings, and there's a chance that I'll throw a party before I go (watch this space for details).
2. I have a little bit of time in Toronto to hang out, but first priority is going to be finishing my novel (which, have I mentioned, is due at the end of March, eek!), seeing my family, and spending quality time with my closest friends. I'll be working out what days I have free time on after I touch down, and I'll post something here once I've got that sorted out.
3. I would love to talk to you about EFF's plans in Europe, and/or socialize in London. Please drop me an email after April 2, once I'm off my leave-of-absence, and we'll sort something out!

Anyway, the other reason for this post is to let you know that I'm selling off a bunch of stuff that I'm not storing or shipping:

• A deco table lamp
• An iPod
• An iMic
• A bull-skull
• An iBook stand
• A fax machine/scanner/printer
• A Metro shelving unit
• A two-tub washing machine
• A queen-sized bed and frame (comfiest bed I ever slept in)
• A machine-washable rubber keyboard

I've put up a blog where I've listed all this stuff with prices, descriptions and pictures. I'll be adding a few more items tonight if I get the chance:

• A city bicycle
• Two Sony Dream Machine clock-radios
• An oil-filled radiator

It's all as-is/final/pickup in San Francisco (no shipping, sorry!). Check out the blog for more details: Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:20:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eastern Standard Tribe is shipping

Eastern Standard Tribe, my second novel, is starting to appear on store-shelves across America. I spotted copies this weekend at Borderlands in San Francisco, and Amazon has started shipping their orders as well. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:52:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Papers Please: right not to show ID goes to Supreme Court

A Nevada cowboy is fighting for his right not to produce ID on law-enforcement demand, and he's going all the way to the Supreme Court.

Meet Dudley Hiibel. He's a 59 year old cowboy who owns a small ranch outside of Winnemucca, Nevada. He lives a simple life, but he's his own man. You probably never would have heard of Dudley Hiibel if it weren't for his belief in the U.S. Constitution.

One balmy May evening back in 2000, Dudley was standing around minding his own business when all of a sudden, a policeman pulled-up and demanded that Dudley produce his ID. Dudley, having done nothing wrong, declined. He was arrested and charged with "failure to cooperate" for refusing to show ID on demand. And it's all on video.

On the 22nd of March 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether Dudley and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show "the papers" whenever a cop demands them.

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:49:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Verizon sez you can't sell 867-5309, it doesn't belong to you

The guy auctioning off 867-5309 (made famous in the forgettable hit 867-5309/Jenny) is collecting eBay bids despite the fact that Verizon says they won't transfer the number because number portability wasn't supposed to confer ownership (and hence the right to sell) to its customers.

But there's a question of whether the number can even be transferred to the winner once the auction ends Feb. 22. Verizon says there's no question: It can't. Individuals do not have ownership of the numbers given to them, a Verizon spokesman said.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:44:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Product placement future cityscapes

Nice gallery of photoshopped images of a sponsored future in which logomarks are plastered everywhere we look. Erm, kinda like today, but moreso. Nice counterpoint to the idea that in a PVR world, product placement displaces direct ads. Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cingular buys AT+T Wireless

$41 billion. What will the resulting company be, and do? Wow. Dan Gillmor has this to say about why the mega-merger shouldn't worry those concerned about carrier consolidation:

This merger won't necessarily be bad for competition.I've been using AT&T Wireless' GSM service for about a year now. Quality of service is marginal, and the customer service has been a bit lower than marginal. But Cingular, also a GSM carrier, has an even worse reputation. So maybe combining these two networks will create something that offers at least reasonable quality.

Cingular probably overpaid, but it's smart to make this deal in at least one respect. There's only room for a couple of mergers before the market gets too cozy for real competition. While expecting serious antitrust scrutiny from the Bush administration is probably futile, there's probably enough angst in Congress to keep consolidation from being rampant.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:34:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Webmonkey closes down

This may be the year of the monkey, but sadly it is not the year of the Webmonkey. I'm gonna miss it. I learned some of my very first lessons about building websites from that website, and I still have various sections bookmarked for handy reference. BoingBoing reader Philip says:

Webmonkey is closing down! They finally pulled the plug. "Webmonkey, the site that turned humble Web developers into attention-grabbing authors, said last week it is closing down following a round of layoffs in the U.S. division of its parent company, Terra Lycos (also the parent company of Wired News). Judging by blog posts and e-mails, the site's fans aren't surprised. Still, they're sad to see the end of an era."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:28:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

China police arrest online essayist for subversion

Police in China have arrested 40-year-old civil servant Du Daobin with charges of subversion, after he criticized the government by way of a series of 28 online essays.

Du, who has been detained since October, also accepted money from overseas organisations and individuals in return for helping them post articles harmful to state security on domestic Web sites, official news agency Xinhua quoted the spokesman as saying. Du had overstepped his legal right to criticise government work and civil servants with good intent, and viciously incited subversion of state power through fabrication, Xinhua said. (...)Du's case has drawn protests from scores of Chinese academics and reporters who have urged his release. Activists have written to Premier Wen Jiabao saying Du's detention was groundless. Internet surfers have flocked to Du's defence, even posting an online petition at www.mzyzy.com saying he had not called for the overthrow of the Chinese government.

Link to Reuters story, A quick Google of "Du Daobin" reveals dozens of "Free Du" petitions.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:26:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, February 16, 2004

Shows that mention witchcraft no longer eligible for closed-captioning

The five-secret-person Department of Education panel that allocates funding for closed-captioning will no longer provide assitive tracks for the deaf to shows that mention witchcraft, including Scooby Doo, Bewitched, and Justice League.

[T]he result of this mysterious panel's deliberations was that the US Department of Education was to declare over 200 TV programs (almost no cartoons, except for things like Prince of Egypt. No more sports. Precious little drama...) were now inappropriate for closed-caption funding...

28 million Americans are now being protected from Sabrina...

Witches of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your vertical blanking interval! Link (Thanks, Sam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:04:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Honda Hybrid Heist How-dunnit -- can you solve this?

Former guestblogger Todd Lappin says:

Newsweek correspondent Brad Stone has written a "how-dunnit?" piece about the recent theft (and recovery) of his 2003 Honda Civic hybrid [affectionately nicknamed "Honky" --XJ]. In theory, thieves shouldn't have been able to steal the car, because it's equipped with a security transponder that's all but uncrackable. Brad writes, "Were we to believe that a thief stole our car to brag to his friends about getting 40-plus miles to the gallon and preserving city air? Odder still, how could they have bypassed the security chip in the thick black jacket of our car key, designed so that our keys, and only our keys, could send the unique code needed to activate the car's ignition? We still had all our keys in our possession."

The mystery remains unsolved, so Brad is soliciting theories from armchair-detectives who think they can explain this high-tech hybrid heist.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:39:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Guerrilla Gates-assassination mockumentary

Brian Flemming, who is making a guerrilla fake-documentary about the assassination of Bill Gates, sez, "I just posted a QuickTime movie to my blog about the 'reality hack' the cast of Nothing So Strange and I did at the 2000 Democratic National Convention." Link (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:34:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Michigan TV "journalists" confuse Asimov's Science Fiction with pr0n

Brian sez:

The local TV station had been running radio promos for a story about a local school magazine fundraiser that included an "adult" magazine. It's a conservative area, so we figured maybe they accidentally got order forms with Playboy, or maybe the locals were just throwing fits over FHM and Maxxim.

Nope -- the adult magazine in question was Asimov's Science Fiction.

Link (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:18:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orkut OD: TOS hack, and craziest community yet

BoingBoing reader Larry sends an interesting "loophole" for Orkut's much-bemoaned TOS:

I noticed that people have been making a stink about Orkut.com's TOS lately, saying that it reserves the right to do pretty much anything with content posted to Orkut.com. I was actually a little more disturbed by another item from the TOS. Orkut.com forbids "directing any user (for example, by linking) to any Materials of any third party without such third party's prior written consent." That runs counter to the ethics of practically everyone on the Web, right on up to Tim Berners-Lee himself. So I made a PHP hack so Orkut users can strictly comply with the letter of the law in the TOS, but still point to any site they want on the Web without guilt. The URL I give here is just an example of how it works; as you can see, it refers to bOING bOING. There are no specific instructions on my site yet for using my hack, but I may remedy that if needed. In the meantime, anyone on Orkut has my permission to use it. Link

... while Jason Schultz sends us a link to something that wins my vote for zaniest/most paranoid Orkut community ever:

"PONZI: For those who believe orkut is a Ponzi scheme, fans of Ponzi schemes, or those who think Ponzi was on Happy Days. It's all about the Ponzi is all we're sayin." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:13:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jordan wants to impose license fees on 'Net radio broadcasting

Award-winning Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab -- founder of the Arab world's first Internet-based radio station, AmmanNet -- is protesting the Jordanian government's plans to regulate Internet broadcasting. He describes the recently-announced intent to impose a license fee on Internet broadcasting in the mideast nation as "undemocratic," and "against the trends in Jordan and the rest of the world for openness and deregulation."

Hussein Ben Hani, the director of the newly established audio visual department has confirmed to the press that his governmental department has submitted a draft law that regulates internet broadcasting. Jordan will be one of the first countries in the world to impose such a regulation. Jordan's Higher Media Council is said to be opposed including the internet in the new media regulation. In his statement, Kuttab said that any restrictions on internet publishing is illegal according to international law and contradicts the efforts of King Abdullah to open up Jordanian society. "How can the Kingdom succeed in attracting new business and convincing the world that they are scaling back their media laws when such restrictions are being regulated," he asked. Kuttab warned that such regulations are harmful to all forms of free expression. "Once you charge a license fee on audio broadcasting you will next charge a fee on all internet publishing. Imagine government regulators knocking on every Jordanian citizen's home to see if their 12 year old son has created and published a web page for himself."

Link to complete statement, Link to AmmanNet english site; link to recent op-ed by Kuttab, "Bridging the Digital Divide."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:41:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gum Blondes - portraits of blonde women made out of bubble gum

Figures of famously fine flaxen-haired females (Britney, Xtina, Pamela, and others) -- made entirely from chewing gum. The bio page on this Flash-based site states that the artist doesn't actually chew the gum himself to make the art, and that color in the images is all from the gum itself, no extra pigment added. Link (Thanks, Steve; also spotted at Fleshbot)

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

Mathematics of M&M packing

According to a paper in the new issue of Science, researchers were surprised to discover that M&Ms randomly dumped into a bowl pack together much more densely than spheres. Why? Aspherical ellipsoids like M&Ms can touch eleven neighbors when dumped together while spheres only saddle up to six. Understanding how particles pack together can help scientists develop new and denser materials, like ceramics for heat shields. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:58:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dmitry has a book out!

Pablos sez, "Dmitry Sklyarov became the first martyr of the DMCA's Dark Age when he was arrested by federal agents for speaking at a conference about eBook security in 2001. He's a brilliant engineer who has done security analysis of eBook copy protection schemes. Dmitry is also a Russian citizen, and the wrong guy to suffer for backwards attempts at modern copyright by United States corporate lawmakers. Fortunately, the courts did the right thing and the case against Dmitry was dropped. Dmitry has since written 'Hidden Keys to Software Break-ins and Unauthorized Entry' which became available in English on Amazon this week. Even if you aren't into cryptanalysis, DRM, or computer security, buying this book will up your whuffie." Link (Thanks, Pablos!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:18:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO: turn off html in your mailer

Here's a great overview of the reasons to eschew HTML for email, and an amazing, exhaustive primer on turning off html-mail-sending in dozens of mail clients. I keep my screen resolution high enough that most of the html mail I receive shows up at completely unreadable sizes -- plain text mail automativally sizes to my preferred scale, but not so html mail.

Many E-mail and Usenet News reader programs, usually the mail and news reader programs that come with browser packages, allow users to include binary attachments (MIME or other encoding) or HTML (normally found on web pages) within their E-mail messages. This makes URLs into clickable links and it means that graphic images, formatting, and even color coded text can also be included in E-mail messages. While this makes your E-mail interesting and pretty to look at, it can cause problems for other people who receive your E-mail because they may use different E-mail programs, different computer systems, and different application programs whose files are often not fully compatible with each other. Any of these can cause trouble with in-line HTML (or encoded attachments). Most of the time all they see is the actual HTML code behind the message. And if someone replies to the HTML formatted message, the quoting can render the message even more unreadable. In some cases, the message is nothing but strange looking text. For this reason, many mailing lists especially those that provide a digest version, explicitly forbid the use of HTML formatted e-mail. See examples section.

Link (via Dive Into Mark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:06:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Social Software for Children

Fiona Romeo has posted her notes from her excellent ETCON presentation, "Social Software for Children."

My talk focused on the findings of the BBC identity group's qualitative research and usability testing with children and teens. I shared insights into Jessica and Jake's approaches to identity management, friendship and group membership, with the view to inform actual product development work in this area.

While the purpose of my talk was to stimulate interest in the question: How can we ensure children's safety while letting them have expressive identities in social software?, I also gave some of my own opinions about the appropriateness - or not - of existing social software, and speculated about some positive future directions that wikis and weblogs could take (e.g. using RSS syndication to involve parents in the moderation of social spaces for children).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:03:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ann Coulter's lies about Cleland torn to bits

Ann "Nutcase" Coulter wrote a scathing editorial in which she made up a bunch of unforgivable lies about Max Cleland, a US senator who lost three limbs in Vietnam, by way of rebuttal to his criticism of the Bush administration. The Center for American Progress tears apart her editorial, identifying, lie-by-lie, just how full of shit she is.

SAYING CLELAND WAS "LUCKY" TO HAVE LIMBS BLOWN OFF: Coulter said, "Luckily for Cleland…he happened to [lose his limbs] while in Vietnam" and said that had he been injured "at Fort Dix rather than in Vietnam, he would never have been a U.S. Senator." Of course, Cleland probably would not have been dealing with live grenades and enemy fire in the save haven of Ft. Dix. But, then, many top conservatives might not know this because they do not have firsthand knowledge of a combat zone. President Bush did not go to Vietnam because he was in the Texas National Guard. Vice President Dick Cheney did not serve in the military, saying, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." According to the Houston Press in 1999, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) "tried to blame minorities for his lack of military experience" saying, "so many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks" like him. And Rush Limbaugh avoided service by apparently claiming his "anal cysts" prevented him from defending the nation. See more conservatives who attack veterans while avoiding military service themselves.

Link via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:01:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SimCity for Sims, recursion will eat itself

A third-party Sims developer has produced a version of SimCity for use in the Sims, so that your simulated people can simulate being the mayor of a simulated city. No word yet on whether we are all just sims in a great simulation in the sky, executing on a celestial computer the size of the universe, with "God" simply a gamer playing an unimaginably scaled up version of the Sims. But I have my suspicions. Have a melon. Lag. Dude.

"The Sims must routinely refurbish the buildings to keep the citizens happy, or just let them deteriorate and force the citizens to become unhappy and move away," says Alvey. "Happy citizens go to work and pay taxes, which the Sims collect as revenue. The higher the profits, the more attractive the city becomes, so more citizens will move into it."

Link (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Win2K source code comments analyzed

This great K5 article dissects the code and comments from the leaked source-code to Win2K. The conclusion: the code is pretty good, and the comments are an illumnating, NC-17 journey through the frustrations of working on giant code-projects that drag long tails of legacy code behind them.

In some cases, the programmers themselves appear to have been frustrated or surprised.

private\ntos\w32\ntuser\kernel\mnpopup.c:
// Set the GlobalPopupMenu variable so that EndMenu works for popupmenus so
// that WinWart II people can continue to abuse undocumented functions.

private\windows\shell\accesory\hypertrm\emu\minitel.c:
// Guess what? Latent background color is always adopted for mosaics.
// This is a major undocumented find...

private\windows\shell\accesory\hypertrm\emu\minitelf.c:
// Ah, the life of the undocumented. The documentation says
// that this guys does not validate, colors, act as a delimiter
// and fills with spaces. Wrong. It does validate the color.
// As such its a delimiter. If...

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:48:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of visual zen: DARPA Grand Challenge illustration

In this month's Popular Science Magazine, an illustration by Kenn Brown, who says:

"DARPA is putting together a race of autonomous (robotic) vehicles that runs from LA to Las Vegas. Completely remote, no one at the wheel. They are recruiting people (these guys are serious robot geeks who build and tinker with this stuff as a hobby and obsession) to build their own vehicles to participate in the race. The vehicles range from motorcycles to HumVees. The point of this story is to illustrate DARPA's interest in this technology, and that they hope to have autonomous vehicles waging war by 2015. "

Oh, goodie. I can hardly wait. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:16:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Detecting Patterns in Complex Social Networks

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:

So-called social networking is very popular these days, as show the proliferation of services like Friendster, Orkut and dozens of others. But do the companies behind these services have any idea of what is hidden inside their complicated networks? When these networks reach a size of millions of users, it's not an easy task. A researcher at the University of Michigan is trying to help, with a new method for uncovering patterns in complicated networks, from football conferences to food webs. This overview contains more details and references about this non-traditional method. It also includes a spectacular representation of the Internet and another image showing a food web at Little Rock Lake.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:13:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, February 15, 2004

Sophie Crumb profiled in NYT

NYT story about Robert Crumb's daughter Sophie, who has a new comic book out called Belly Button Comix.

Ms. Crumb at work is reminiscent of several scenes in "Crumb," Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary about her father. The resemblance is only heightened by her surroundings, the remnants of the hippie subculture from which Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat and the rest of her father's most famous characters sprang. She's currently living in a communal household — "It's so stuck in the 70's it's really painful," she said — and she and her housemates often raid local dumpsters for food. Her sketchbook, whose pages are imprinted with kitschy cat motifs, was also found in the garbage. "I'm trying to not spend money so I don't have to get a job," she said.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:23:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MeFi, Megnut and Whole Lotta Nothing status

MeFi, Megnut and A Whole Lotta Nothing have been offline for a couple days. Here's why:

People have been asking (not really), so I thought I'd let you know that MetaFilter, Megnut, and A Whole Lotta Nothing are down because of a bad computer fan. No ETA as of yet on when the box will be back up. Matt Haughey was unavailable for comment due to laziness on my part, but if he were available, he'd probably say something like, "you tell those ungrateful bastards that I'll order that new fan when I'm damn good and ready."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:17:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Freud/Jung slash

Short (but high-larious) Sigmund Freud/Carl Jung slash fiction:

'I had a dream last night, Siggy.'

'Ja?'

'It was you and me together skipping in a field. Und then this great serpent appeared and slithered into a cave.'

'Du lieber gott! Do you know what you are saying to me? Do you know what zis serpent means?'

'Ja, it is some manifestation of the World-Spirit.'

NSFW Link (Thanks, Quinn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:23:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Earn $25 for each junk fax you send in.

The Demirali Law Firm says it will pay you $25 for each junk fax you send it (if a collection is made). You need to send in at least ten faxes at a time.Consumer rights advocate Tom Martino is behind this. Link (Thanks, Travis!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:04:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

James Joyce's descendants are copyright jerks

James Joyce's terrible descendants have decided to use the newly extended Euro copyright to bully anyone who publicly reads his work, in Ireland, on Bloomsday, into silence.

Christ, this makes me angry enough to spit. Note to my literary executor: if you ever dream of doing anything like this after I die, I'll come back from the dead and reach out of the toilet and unspool your guts while dragging you down to hell. Sheesh.

...[T]he Joyce estate has informed the Irish government that it intends to sue for copyright infringement if there are any public readings of Joyce's works during the festival commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday this June.

James Joyce died in 1941 and the copyright in his work expired in 1991. Then the EU extended terms to life+70 years, and the work went back into copyright in July 1995. The estate has been very active in enforcing their copyright, suing regularly.

Link (via Lessig)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney takeover photoshopping contest

Nice: a Fark photoshopping contest whose theme is "Would-be takeover attempts of the Walt Disney Company." Link (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:46:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Firsthand account of the gay marriage rush at San Fran city hall

My colleague Seth Schoen took a walk yesterday down to the San Francisco city hall and watched the hundreds of lesbian and gay couple in various states of marriage. His first-person account is touching and sent a shiver up my spine.

We walked around the side of the line and saw hundreds of same-sex couples in all states of dress (punk to tuxedo to family heirloom dress to just-off-the-street-in-work-attire). One couple wore yarmulkes and carried a siddur; another couple looked like ordained ministers, but I didn't know for sure of which Christian denomination. (It must be one willing to ordain gay women.) At the back of City Hall, the line was making its way through the door past a group of about half a dozen well-wishers with big pink signs. They looked like high school students. One of them was carrying an American flag with gay rights symbols in place of the stars. (Oddly enough, San Francisco regular Frank Chu was demonstrating too, with his usual sign that had nothing to do with same-sex marriage -- instead about galaxies, a rocket society, and impeaching former U.S. presidents. I was pretty sure he was just trying to get on TV with his message. You see him frequently in the Financial District.)...

Zack and I applauded for the couples as they were married, and shook hands with them. The couples were as diverse in age as they were in dress: I saw a pair of women get married and was sure they were younger than I am. And I saw and was most touched by several weddings of people who had likely been waiting even longer than 18 years. Two women of my mother's age, or a little older, were married right in front of me, and they started to cry. I almost started to cry, too.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:11:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

IRC log from Trippi's talk at ETCON

Kevin Burton kept a running transcript of Joe Trippi's talk at the ETCON Emergent Democracy event, pasting it into IRC as he went. He's posted the IRC log, which includes Kevin's transcription and the peanut gallery's responses (Burtonator tells us not to mind the typos: "The Internet is not a system for testing spell-checkers")

<burtonator> amazed that the press frankly can't figure out what the dean campaign WAS
<GabeW> WHY DIDN'T YOU LET US HAVE THE CONTACT INFO FOR LOCAL DEAN SUPPORTERS EARLIER?
<burtonator> not it's defining if it's a SUCCESS but still doesn't konw what it was
<Argyle> the sound of typing everywhere....
<burtonator> it's a mistake to buy the spin from broadcast media
<burtonator> broadcast politics has failed us miserably
<burtonator> no debate about the war

Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:09:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, February 14, 2004

"I'm the guy that killed that mad cow ... a good walker."

Website by a man who claims to have slaughtered the mad cow. He says the cow was not a downer as claimed by the USDA.

WE WERE ONLY TESTING DOWNERS FOR BSE. NO MORE DOWNERS MEANS NO MORE BSE TESTING. PERIOD. We tested that big white walker because she was mixed in with the downers. Mad cows are not downers they are up and they are crazy. The USDA started testing downers because they didn't think they would find any BSE cows in that mess. They could then say to the consumer we've been testing and we haven't found anything. EAT YOUR MEAT. BUY BEEF. ITS SAFE

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:11:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy Valentine's Day

Love is all that matters.

(image: a snapshot I took at Burning Man 2003 -- full size here).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:51:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, February 13, 2004

There's a club if you'd like to go

The photo inside The Smiths' The Queen is Dead album depicts the boys in front of the Salford Lads Club in Manchester, England. Ever since the record was released in 1986, the building has become a mecca for Smiths fans--a notoriously, er, dedicated bunch. At first, the Club was less than thrilled at being associated with the kinds of characters who would sing about "stealing lead from a church roof." Now though, the charity is dedicating an entire room to those charming men who made their gateway famous. Link (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:21:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amazon discloses many reviews written by insecure, sniping writers

Amazon accidentally revealed the real names of many anonymous reviewers this week, through a bug in the amazon.ca back-end. It turns out that many of the reviewers are writers saying nice things about their own books or trashing their colleagues.

"That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd," said Mr. Rechy, who, having been caught, freely admitted to praising his new book, "The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens," on Amazon under the signature "a reader from Chicago." "How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them...."

One well-known writer admitted privately -- and gleefully -- to anonymously criticizing a more prominent novelist who he felt had unfairly reaped critical praise for years. She regularly posts responses, or at least he thinks it is her, but the elegant rebuttals of his reviews are also written from behind a pseudonym.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily Show on Bush's Meet the Press

Lisa Rein has posted the Daily Show take on Bush's Meet the Press appearance. AHAHAHAHA. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:37:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wagner on copyright

Mitch Wagner's written a very lucid essay about DRM and file-sharing that strikes me as one of the better formulations of the problem that I've seen to date.

It's rather appropriate that the logo for Disney is a mouse, because The Walt Disney Company this week announced its intention to throw money down a rathole. Disney became the latest company to license Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. DRM doesn't work and consumers don't want it, so of course it's very appealing to big business, who are also in a big rush to sell other, equally practical products, such as anchovy flavored ice cream and bicycles with square wheels.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:36:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nano's Ways and Memes

(This will be my last vanity post for a while, I promise...) My new Small Times column is online today. It's a look at how the nanotechnology meme is spreading through popular culture, specifically video games and cartoons. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:51:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ETCON in five-minute chunks in San Fran and London, Monday

If you missed ETCON, it's not too late -- ConCons are planned for next Monday in San Francisco and London, at which many of the ETCON speakers and attendees will recapitulate their ETCON talks as five minute lightning talks, with beer, in bars.

If you saw some good stuff at etech and want to tell people - or spoke at etech and want to retell your work to a wider audience, sign up below. Then force other people you know to do the same. The more people we have, the less you'll have to do!

The format is a casual, five-minute lightning talk with a friendly audience, with the emphasis less on five minutes and more on questions and answers. We'll just go through names until we run out of time. Then we'll have fun.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:44:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great Star Wars photo remix

I'm greatly amused by this remixed, Star Wars-themed photo of an iced-over freezer. 160k JPEG Link (Thanks, Neils!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:43:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: Cheeseball pop love songs are poetry, too.

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I interview a University of Pennsylvania writing instructor who is teaching her students the common literary elements found in simple pop songs from the '70s and '80s, classic love poems, and sonnets. Her course is called "Hit Me Baby One More Time -- The Erotic Lyric Tradition", and uses two recently-published compilations of uber-schlocky pop song lyrics: I Can't Fight This Feeling (love songs), and You Give Love a Bad Name (breakup songs).

Listen to the archived audio segment after 12PM PT, and hear what may well be the most hilarious 30 seconds in NPR history: award-winning news man Carl Kassel performing a reading of the Pat Benatar classic "Love is a Battlefield." Who loves you, baby? Link to archived audio (Real and WM), available after 12PM PT.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:10:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Love Zen

(1) the things we do for love
(2) we love cards
(3) i love egg
(4) love calculator
(5) candy heart maker

(6) and the classic...
chaoskitty hearts you

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

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:40:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Netwon-based NES

There's a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator for the Netwon, called "Newtendo." Link (Thanks, c1josh!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:09:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

D&D to be reissued by WotC

Wizards of the Coast is releasing a 30th Anniversary D&D set, including a recreation of the an historical Basic D&D booklets D&D set:

Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set: Modeled after a classic boxed set from the game's early history..., the new Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set is the perfect introduction to the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying experience. The set includes streamlined rulebooks, map boards, roleplaying dice, and 16 miniatures from the new Dungeons & Dragons miniatures line. Release date scheduled for September 2004.

Link (via Terra Nova)

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

Phone numbers for sale on eBay

Clive sez: "The advent of number portability has produced an interesting and predictable side effect: People selling off cool phone numbers. Someone on ebay is selling off the number 867-5309, made famous in the Tommy Tutone hit song 'Jenny (867-5309)'. It's in the 212 area code." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:48:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, February 12, 2004

Sims + Sex on CNN and the Daily Show

Two pieces of TV news coverage about the vrtual scandal involving digital sex in the Sims Online -- and related discussions aired The Alphaville Herald that led to the Herald's Peter Ludlow being yanked from the game. Ludlow writes:

CNN has produced a story on the joys of cyberbrothels in alphaville. I have no idea if it has aired on the network. It seems that the reporter (Bruce Burkhardt) got his virtual ashes hauled in the Jiggolo [sic] Escorts cyber brothel, which offers a good hour of cybering for the low low price of 17 K simoleans. I guess my complaint would be that the story makes it sould like all the Romance category houses are sex oriented.

Meanwhile, everyone who is angry at me for the CNN story can look forward to my ritual humiliation by The Daily Show on Comedy Central tonight! My students are especially looking forward to this one, as will all haters of Urizenus -- The producer promised that they would indeed make me look like a total ass. I'm not sure what will make it into the story, but there is a bit where Rob Cordry (sp?) insists that I shoot Polie Bear. There are also some obligatory remarks about fisting parties (how else are they going to stay on basic cable?).

background: NYT article via IHT, no registration required

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:16:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Study: N.Y. Drivers Ignore Cell Phone Ban

On today's edition of the NPR program Morning Edition:

In 2001, New York became the first state to prohibit drivers from using hand-held cell phones. A new study indicates that New York drivers reduced their use of hand-held mobile phones by half a few months after the ban went into effect, but usage has since bounced back. Hear NPR's Bob Edwards and New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, who helped draft the ban.

Link (thanks, Mike!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:58:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What do do in SF on Valentine's Day if you heart robots

Geek heartthrob Kal Spelletich, the dapper mad scientist who performs as SEEMEN with a herd of crazed machines, performs at San Francisco's Odeon Bar this Saturday, February 14, 10pm-2am, for a whopping six bucks.

Well, we are in several shows this month, even one in Switzerland, BUT we have been saving the NEW BIG MACHINES AND ROBOTS for this one! Like the GYROSCOPE, LION LEAP, GROPEY CHAIR, MONKEY ON YER BACK and a slew of other goodies. Jay, GEEKBOY, RANESSA, Kal and some of the gang are gonna DJ, show special rare videos and RUN MACHINES! SEEMEN create situations where audiences are encouraged to Interact and operate their machines and robots. You get to run a machine that can kill you. IT'S FUN!

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:47:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mobile Phones With Manners

I'm humbled and honored that I was asked to join Mark, Doug Rushkoff, Howard Rheingold, Justin Hall, and the rest of the big thinkers contributing to TheFeature. My first article is about MIT researchers who are technologically instilling mobile phones with some manners. I hope you enjoy it! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:44:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jay-Z v. the Beatles -- "Grey Album" food fight

BoingBoing pal (and former guestblogger) Todd Lappin points us to yet another food fight between copyright and Remix Culture.

DJ Danger Mouse remixed Jay-Z's "Black Album" with the Beatles "White Album" to create... The "Grey Album," of course. The New Yorker had a little Talk of the Town piece on this, Apparently, Jay-Z created a vocals-only version of his album *explicitly* so DJs could remix it. And many have. This week, the Beatles issued a cease and desist to stop the Grey Album... which of course makes the Grey Album even more desirable as a collector's item, so now the whole album is available for download. Here's the commentary above the download links:

"Special interests, including the major labels, have turned copyright law into a weapon," said Downhill Battle co-founder Holmes Wilson. "If Danger Mouse had requested permission and offered to pay royalties, EMI still would have said no and the public would never have been able to enjoy this critically acclaimed work. Artists are being forced to break the law to innovate."

So is the Grey Album any good? Hell yes! I've been listening to it for a few days, and it grows on me more and more with each listen.

Link.

UPDATE: Andy from Waxy.org, the fellow behind the download link referenced above, says "Just received a DMCA violation notice from EMI about the copy of the "Grey Album" I have online. I took the MP3s offline." And a sekrit BB reader says, "HERE (MP3 link) is another place to get the grey album. I know waxy can't post it .. but we can! and did. please tell the people."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:21:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

And this little piggie got stuffed

If I had an extra $3800, I would purchase this antique taxidermy mount of an eight-legged hermaphrodite piglet. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:19:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney/Dali Oscar nomination has execs in a tizzy

Sam sez, "Disney/Salvadore Dali film Destino nominated for Oscar. Disney PR isn't happy with the thought of Roy Disney speaking to 200 million viewers."

"This is really a lose/lose situation for the Walt Disney Company," said one studio insider. "If the studio doesn't mount a really aggressive promotional campaign in order to claim a Best Animated Short Oscar for 'Destino,' Roy and Stanley get the right to complain that the Disney Company deliberately torpedoed this film's chance. Out of fear over what Walt's nephew might say once he gets up on stage at the Kodak Theatre."

"On the other hand, if Disney does put together a great Academy Award promotional campaign for 'Destino' and the short does actually win, all the suits still have to sit there and sweat. Wondering if Roy is going to use his opportunity -- standing there in front of over 200 million television viewers worldwide -- to talk about his campaign to remove Eisner."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:11:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CAPPSII report ships, head of program resigns

The General Accounting Office has released a report on the CAPPSII airline-profiling system that is so damning, the head of the program resigned before the report shipped.

The Supreme Court decided in Bowsher v. Synar that the GAO is part of the legislative branch, not the executive,1 and therefore Presidents and their legal advisors consistently maintain that the GAO can have no role in executing the laws. That conclusion follows naturally from the earlier Chadha decision, which held that the only way in which the legislative branch may affect the legal rights duties or responsibilities of persons outside the legislative branch is by legislation—passage in both houses (bicameralism) followed by presentment of the act to the President (presentment) for signature or veto (which can then be overridden).2

In light of these very clear precedents, the White House announced at the time GW Bush signed the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act of 2004 that it would treat the report as advisory only. This is a reasonable legal position, and probably the one a court would adopt, although one could also argue that the favorable report requirement can't be severed from the appropriation and that therefore the unconstitutionality of the one implies the invalidity of the other.

Link (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:36:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My ETCON talk, in the Public Domain

I have just given a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confernece called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, which is something of an anomaly for me in three ways:

1. I wrote out this talk, word for word, in advance of the presentation
2. I am releasing that written text as a free, public domain file, right now, moments before I get off the stage

So here's the text of that talk, dedicated to the Public Domain, for you to do with what you will.

This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.

From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease with which it can reproduced.

(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent* control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:16:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Down and Out relicensed today

Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.

It didn't.

So here we are, just a little over a year later, and I am currently, at this moment, standing on a stage at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, delivering a talk called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, in which I lay out the case for what I've done and explain the myraid ways in which the sky has not fallen on me, and just about now, I'm announcing what' sin this blog post:

That I am re-licensing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, effective today, under the terms of one of the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which explicitly allows anyone in the world to make any non-commercial adaptation of my book s/he can think of: translations, radio plays, movies, sequels, fanfic, slashfic...you get the picture.

I can't wait to see what you-all make of this. Surprise me, please! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:14:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Popping water balloons in zero gravity

I love these quicktime movies of water balloons being popped in space. Link (via Good Morning Silicon Valley)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:08:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Atkins vs. the PCRM

Today, I sent an email to the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the non-profit organization that gave Dr. Atkins' death report to the Wall Street Journal. The PCRM promotes a vegan diet, so they obviously don't like the Atkins' diet, which is almost impossible to follow as a vegan.

A group called the Center for Consumer Freedom, a non-profit supported by restaurants and food companies that sell meat and junk food (and are therefore natural enemies of the PCRM), loves to issue press releases calling the PCRM a "phony" organization. It's doubtful that either group delivers the unvarnished truth, but on Tuesday the CCF issued a press release claiming that:

The late Dr. Robert Atkins is being smeared for his alleged obesity at the time of his death, by a phony doctors organization that has been exposed as a front group for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and has been censured by the American Medical Association (AMA).

The AMA has formally censured PCRM in the past, calling its recommendations "irresponsible" and "potentially dangerous to the health and welfare of Americans." The AMA has also called PCRM a "fringe organization" that uses "unethical tactics" and is "interested in perverting medical science."

Dr. Stuart Trager MD, chairman of the Atkins Physicians Council ... release this morning reads in part: "Due to water retention ... [Atkins] had a weight that varied between 180 and 195. During his coma, as he deteriorated and his major organs failed, fluid retention and bloating dramatically distorted his body and left him at 258 pounds at the time of his death, a documented weight gain of over 60 pounds."

(Don't forget that Dr. Trager, as chairman of the Atkins Physicians Council, isn't exactly a disinterested party in this.) I asked the PCRM to respond to the reports that Dr. Atkins actually weighed 195 pounds at the time of his accident, and that his weight gain to 258 pounds -- while in a coma -- was due to the major organ deterioration and fluid retention he suffered as a result of his accident. I also asked the PCRM if it had challenged or investigated these reports, because I couldn't find anything on the PCRM website about this. Here is the PCRM's reply

Mr. Frauenfelder:

Thank you for contacting the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Jeanne McVey forwarded your note to me for a response.

This is a huge public health issue. The Atkins Nutritional Corporation and Dr. Atkins through his books have been telling millions of people that cholesterol, saturated fat, and total fat don’t matter. We clearly know from the medical and nutritional scientific literature that these nutrients do matter, and consuming them in increasing quantities escalates the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers.

And the Atkins Nutritionals Corporation has evidently put a lot of effort into painting a picture of robust health for the late Dr. Atkins going even so far as to say that he had “an extraordinarily healthy cardiovascular system” right after his cardiac arrest in April 2001 (http://atkins.com/Archive/2002/4/25-466719.html). Now, in her most recent statement Ms. Atkins allows as how, in addition to the cardiomyopathy that he suffered,  “Robert did have some progression of his coronary artery disease in the last three years of his life including some new blockage of a secondary artery that was remedied during this admission.”

We know from the medical examiners report that Dr. Atkins weighed 258 pounds at the time of his death. We know that the examiner listed myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, and hypertension on the report. All of this is simply evidence that he was not in the best of health, and especially not in excellent cardiovascular health when he died.

By the way, 195 pounds at 6 feet tall, still puts Dr. Atkins above a BMI of 25  (26.4) which is technically considered overweight for an adult male.  One might expect a famous diet doctor to boast a weight that actually puts him in a healthy weight range for his height and weight.

Please feel free to contact me if you have further questions.

Best regards,

Amy Joy Lanou, Ph.D.
Nutrition Director
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

I checked out a BMI calculator, and Dr. Lanou is correct. 26.4 is overweight, but not by a lot. And the link to the pictures of Dr. Atkins that Cory posted a couple of months before he died show that he was quite trim. But all in all, I feel this reply is pretty sneaky. The PCRM doesn't mention that Atkins' heart disease may have been from a virus, or that his weight gain while in a coma may have been from the fact that his body had stopped functioning properly. Instead, the PCRM hopes you'll connect the dots between Atkins' weight at death and his heart disease with his diet.

I'm sure there will be more news about Atkins/PCRM/CCF in the coming days.

Stimps sez: "A lot of what you say is true, but if you look at the background of the Center for Consumer Freedom, you see that they are hardly just a group of restaurants and food companies. =). Organic Consumers has a long list of who they [CCF] have fought against, as well as a list of who their backers and officers are... people ranging from Philip Morris people to Coca Cola people, with a look towards protecting FoxNews' advertisers. It's pretty nasty stuff.

Brian sez: "In regards to PCRM vs. CCF. I run an anti-animal rights site at http://www.animalrights.net/ and there is something you might want to add to that post about PCRM vs. CCF.

Yes, CCF takes money from the food and beverage industry, but it is open and up front about that.

On the other hand, PETA and PCRM deceptively use another nonprofit front group, The Foundation to Support Animal Protection, to hide the fact that PCRM is a front group for PETA. Basically PETA transfers large amounts of money to the FSAP which then transfers the money to PCRM -- that way people looking at PCRM's tax returns don't see large donations from PETA and vice versa. That's outrageous behavior regardless of what the ideology or movement is.

That was was originally publicized not by CCF or me but by the animal rights magazine Animal People which has for years provided excellent analyses of the funding of AR groups.

Follow the link I provided for a summary of the PETA-->PCRM connection and quotes from Animal People.

PCRM regularly misinforms the public about the role of animal research in thigns like keeping premature infants alive (http://www.animalrights.net/articles/2001/000125.html), so it's not surprising they're deceiving people about Dr. Atkins weight.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:30:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sneaky game hijacks your buddy list to spam your pals

When players accept the terms of service for an Osama Bin Laden game, a piggyback program sends advertising to everyone on their buddy lists.

On Wednesday, Buddylinks' Web site contained a message denying the program is a virus. The home page also makes no mention that the program would in the future send out additional advertisements using the same method.

"Our games interact with instant messengers by promoting the game among the user's network of buddies,'' it reads. "Please understand, our flash games are in no way a virus. We simply combine peer-to-peer, social networking, and instant messaging into one spectacular technology.''

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:41:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Python runs on Nokia phones

During yesterday's morning keynote at ETCON, the CTO of Nokia confirmed that new Nokia phones could run python scripts. Rael's got the screenshots.

Yesterday's keynote by Nokia CTO Pertti Korhonen at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference confirmed that we would be seeing Python rolling on Series 60 handsets (specifically the 6600 and family) via Forum Nokia.

The proof being in the pudding, here are a few snapshots of the Python interpreter and scripts running on a 6600 to get your programming juices flowing...

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:37:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Emotional Design: The Principles ETCON talk notes

Here're my running notes from Donald A. Norman's Emotional Design: The Principles talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

I no longer tell you why everything is crappy -- now I'm the guy who tells you how nice and pretty things can be.

The orange juicer on the cover of my new book, Emotional Design, evokes strong emotion.

I'm here to talk about consumer products, not computers.

Getting the tech right is only part of the problem: the big part is the hearts and minds, so your customers enjoy it.

There's something about physical design that really turns people on. The tech has to be flaawlessly, but no one cares about it -- it's just infrastructure.

See the Mini Cooper -- the NYT said, "It has many flaws, but boy is it fun."

I used to buy stuff that I knew was b0rked, but I wanted to own them anyway.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:24:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Fictional Google banners

Fark photoshopping contest: Google banners for fictitious holidays. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:57:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CIA creates WMD snitch-form

Tim sez, "CIA is asking for help finding WMD by entering information on a secure form on their website. You can't say the CIA isn't innovative!" Link (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:30:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Slashdot bans ETCON

Slashdot has a script that bans your IP address if you pull their RSS too often. I'm at ETCON, where I'm sharing a public-facing IP with hundreds of Slashdot readers who are all pulling /.'s RSS. So I have been banned, along with all of them, for 72 hours.

Update: Thanks to Jamie McCarthy for fixing this! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:15:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney World parade float kills castmember

A parade-float has killed a castmember backstage near Walt Disney World's Splash Mountain. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:48:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lurid Toy Stories

Deranged X-rated toy fanfic. Wayward Barbies doing bestiality threeways, bookshelf quickies, BDSM, homoerotic roleplaying, and other activities so hot they melt plastic: "silver plastic molded Terminator Arnie and big-armed Last Action Hero Arnie get to know each other. Terminator is just two molded pieces of thin silver plastic, but Last Action Hero is a high quality articulated doll, with holes through his clenched hands which once clearly locked into something; a car, perhaps, or one of his enormous weapons." Link (Thanks, Steffen!)

UPDATE: Owie! This humble Geocities site was BoingBoinged and Fleshbotted in one day, and is now inanimate. BoingBoing reader Pete says of the site's creator, "There's occasionally more toy fun in her weekly comic strip, and her home page is here."

UPDATE #2: Jeremy Dennis writes to let BoingBoing readers know that even though her Geocities "Lurid Toy Stories" site is dead, "You can now find them here!"

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

Atkins was skinny when he died

Business 2.0's blog reports that Atkins was skinny and healthy just before he died, no matter what the scandal-rags (which have been reporting that he was 60lbs overweight with heart disease at the time of his accidental death) say. Link (Thanks, Joshua!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:38:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google is Harder Than it Looks ETCON talk notes

Here're my running notes from Nelson Minar's Google is Harder Than it Looks talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Query comes into custom httpd, Google Web Server ("gwis")

Sent in parallel to several places:

* Index server, "every page with the word 'apple' in it -- a cluster that manages "shards" or "partitions" (everything starting with the letter "a") and then load-balancing replications for each. Have to calculate intersections for multiple-term queries

* Doc server, copies of webpages -- whence page-snippets are served in results. Sharded and replicated for scaleability and redundancy

* Misc servers: QuickLinks, spell-checkers, Ad server (first two are small servers, ad server is humongous)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:30:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Decompression bombs: email attachments expanded and expanded and expanded

Here's an interesting security noodle from Yoz Grahame: some (meaningless) data is highly compressible using standard compression algorithms -- what would it do your computer if the payloads in automatically decompressed messages went from 7kb to 100gb?

Here's an example scenario: A mail arrives at your super-barbed-wire-protected mail gateway. The gzip-compressed attachment - only 7k big - is grabbed by the anti-virus scanner, looking for any suspicious signatures. It starts to decompress it and BANG - the resulting file, over 100 gigabytes, crashes the AV scanner and completely fills the hard drive partition in the process.

Fortunately, a good number of the AV scanners that AERAsec tested aren't too vulnerable, but some require patching. Similarly, sending a gzipped-HTML bomb to a browser will crash a fair few of them. Not so scary, then, but nifty in an admirably-nasty way.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:44:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harlan Ellison's AOL/Time-Warner suit

Jason Schultz, my cow-orker at EFF, has written a lucid legal analysis about the latest turn in Harlan Ellison's ongoing suit against AOL/Time-Warner, in which he asserts that AOL should actively police its newsfeeds and restrict access to feeds that carry infringing materials, and be on the hook if they are insufficently diligent in their restriction of access to information.

The e-mail standard doesn't trouble me as much, but the phone call one certainly does. Just because one person (who isn't even the copyright owner) calls your company on the phone to complain about something on your servers generally shouldn't, in my mind, trigger "knowledge" liabiliity generally. Perhaps the caller specifically mentioned Ellsion, but the opinion isn't clear about that.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:41:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

boyd's social networks talk from ETCON

danah boyd has posted the text of her ETCON talk, Revenge of the User: Lessons from Creator/User Battles.

Asking favors is fundamentally different than offering them. People gain by being bridges. Thus, to be able to tell you about a job gives me whuffie in our relationship. Feeling pressured to connect you to an open job makes me uncomfortable. In all of the networks described above, the bridge got to control the information flow. In Milgram's "Small Worlds," if you didn't know that i knew the target person, you may not have tried to pass it on to me. If you don't know that i am dating someone who has something that you want, you won't try to pressure me into giving you access to it. Thus, i can choose when to reveal my connections in a situation where i can come across as being helpful, rather than being put in a position to feel cornered. Revealing the network shifts the power.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:39:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eastern Standard Tribe for sale today at ETCON

Came down to the ETCON conference space today to discover that even though my signing isn't scheduled until tomorrow, the bookseller has copies of Eastern Standard Tribe on sale today. A bunch of people have told me that they're not going to be able to make it tomorrow -- I'd be delighted to sign a copy anytime! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:36:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Revenge of the User: Lessons from Creator/User Battles ETCON talk notes

Here're my running notes from danah boyd's Revenge of the User: Lessons from Creator/User Battles at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

The response is an attempt to "configure the users" -- constrain behavior to acceptable behavior with messaaging, kicking people off, etc.

This won't work: you can't tell a hacker not to hack. These kids are social hackers. You can stop some bad behavior, but you chase off your best users, too.

Dating doesn't happen because you're in a dating context. Dating arises out of real contexts.

Taking away fakesters didn't make Frienster more real. Friendster is unreal because people never remove their friends, even if they never see them (the exception is when you break up, ironic, because ex-lovers are strong ties!).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:29:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great ETCON pic

I love this pic from ETCON. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:09:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks ETCON talk notes

Here're my running notes from Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

It's the 10-second rule: if you can't file something in 10 seconds, you won't do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the simplest interface we can imagine.

It's also the simplest way to find intercomation. EMACS, Moz and Panther have incremental search: when you type a "t" it goes to the first mention of "t", add "to" and you jump to the first instance of "to", etc.

This is being added to Longhorn (Unix geeks, we've had this since Jan 1 1900, and it will go away in 2038).

Power-users don't trust complicated apps. Every time power-geeks has had a crash, s/he moves away from it. You can't trust software unless you've written it -- and then you're just more forgiiving.

Text files are portable (except for CRLF issues) between mac and win and *nix.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:48:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Put your ETCON notes on the Wiki

Justin Hall is trying to get everyone to add links to their ETCON conference notes to the wiki: Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:26:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Laden vs USA" handheld game

Carlo sez: "Your post yesterday on the Afghani blanket showing the WTC made me think of this handheld video game a friend of mine brought me back from Taiwan about 6 months after 9/11, and I thought you might like to see it... (Sorry for the low-quality images, it's still in its plastic blister pack and I didn't want to take it out.)" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:05:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jim Griffin on un-b0rking copyright

Fantastic interview with Jim Griffin, one of the leading advocates of blanket licenses for online music, in The Register.

Broadcasting started out as a pirate technology. But as rights holders we'd rather not have bar owners and radio stations ringing us up and asking us for permission each time they wanted to play a song, because it would cost us more to answer than phone than it would gain us in revenue. So the US broadcast industry went to rights holders and created this bundled price with bundled choice, a sort of 'theme park admission fee' for content that allowed that cable operator, or satellite operator, or radio station, or bar to use the content without seeking permission.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Human-computer-interface rap

The people behind OK/Cancel, the hilarious comic-strip about human-computer interface, have written the HCI gangsta rap.

So sit down -- and listen to me
No one wants see their product become ancient history
BEFORE you start rushing to build those interfaces
your best bet is make a set :: of simple use cases

They should describe what users actually do
and if that's unknown, run a contextual inquiry too
Because your interface will never be easy to follow
lest you build it to match up with their cognitive models

Link (Thanks, Oliverw!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:53:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video of my UNC talk online

The iBiblio people have posted the video of my talk on copyright and the entertainment industry at the University of North Carolina last week. Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:43:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Comcast makes offer on Disney

Comcast has made a $66 billion offer for Disney.

Comcast also released a letter sent to Eisner indicating that Eisner had personally rejected Roberts' offer to enter into discussions about a merger earlier in the week.

The letter from Roberts called it "unfortunate" that Eisner was not willing to enter into discussions. "Given this, the only way for us to proceed is to make a public proposal directly to you and your board," the letter stated.

Under the merger, Comcast said it would issue 0.78 of a share of its stock for each Disney share, and Disney shareholders would retain 42 percent of the combined company.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:41:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grokster is the new Betamax

My cow-orker Ren Bucholz has done a magnificent and pithy analysis of the parallels between the 1983 Supreme Court arguments in Betamax, in which the studios argued that the VCR should be criminalized, and last week's arguments in the 9th Circuit Appeals Court in Grokster, in which the recording industry argued the same thing about P2P file-sharing networks:

Later in last week's argument, Judge Thomas took Frackman's argument (knowledge - ability = contributory infringement) to its logical conclusion by asking whether he thought Xerox should be held liable when a UCLA student uses a photocopier to make infringing copies. Here's what happened to Kroft in '83:

Justice Stevens: Under your test, supposing somebody tells the Xerox people that there are people making illegal copies with their machine, and they know it. What are they supposed to do? ... Your view of the law is that as long as Xerox knows that there is some illegal copying going on, Xerox is a contributory infringer?

Kroft: To be consistent, your honor, I'd have to say yes.

Justice Stevens: A rather extreme position.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:38:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scans of every Spiderman cover

This "Spiderman completist" has scanned the covers of basically every funnybook on which Spidey appears (over 4,000!) and posted them to the intarweb. Link (via Smartpatrol)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Photos of funky retro erotic museum in Japan

Surreal series of snapshots from what is said to be Japan's "oldest and still open 'house of hidden treasures," or Hihokan -- including some crazy, retro, sex themed circus-midway-style games. And whale vulvas. And walls plastered with scary plastic breasts. And very, very old Japorn movie posters.

At left: what the museum's proprieters promote as "Japan's only live horse sex show," which visitors soon discover is no more than a faux herd of weird livestock mannequins knocking bovine boot in front of some equally weird human mannequins. Photoblogger Juergen says, "This was Japan's first (or second, depends on how you count) Erotic Museum and is pretty much unchanged since 1971."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:15:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Sterling

pwns.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:47:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orkut members launch Orkut Paranoia community about Orkut TOS on Orkut

Geez. My head is spinning. Anyway, BoingBoing reader Adam fields points us to a new "Orkut community" (one of many online affinity groups within the social networking service), called "Orkut Paranoia" (link requires free membership). Adam says, "This formed out of some interesting discussion we've had about what's going on... summarized in this blog post:"

1) Orkut claims irrevocable unlimited license rights to everything you post. Most people don't understand what that means. One example of this is that many of my friends have posted pictures that I've taken. This is probably not a problem, generally, but they've granted Orkut a license to use them without consulting me, and created a legal tangle should I have a problem with that, forcing me to have to perform a legal struggle with Orkut, because of their unwitting actions. I think this is rude behavior on the part of Orkut, but their prerogative to demand.
2) Orkut may share personal information with Google in an unrestricted way. Google is unwilling (so far) to discuss what use they may make of that information.
3) Google's privacy policy possibly has some holes in it with regards to data collected by way of means other than use of the google.com website.

I suspect that Orkut is a way for Google to gather personal information about their clientele for marketing purposes, and to try to form a more solid relationship beyond "I just use Google for search because it's convenient". This is not terribly nefarious, but the kind of data that could be collected to do so has wide potential for abuse, and people should be aware that that's what's going on. Some may not care, but many people I know are signing up without reading or understanding the implications of the above three points.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:36:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Please Don't Squeeze the Sharman

Best. Headline. Ever. Story in today's Wired News on the legal response of Kazaa's makers to last week's court ordered raid of its Australian headquarters.

Sharman Networks threw down the legal challenge Tuesday in Australia's Federal Court in Sydney. Sharman was raided by Music Industry Piracy Investigations, a private investigations unit established by the Australian Recording Industry Association to crack down on copyright infringement, including illegal Internet file sharing. MIPI successfully applied to the federal court for a number of private search warrants, known as Anton Piller orders, which were executed at 12 locations, including Sharman's offices in Sydney. The order allowed MIPI to seize data and documents from all 12 sites, including the private residence of Sharman chief executive Nikki Hemming. The raids are a prelude to a copyright infringement suit, which will argue that Sharman has the ability to block the transfer of copyrighted works through its software but refuses to do so. Sharman vehemently denies the claim.

Link

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

Transcendant Interactions ETCON talk

Here're my running notes from Danny O'Brien's Transcendant Interactions at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Manifesto: Don't build applications. Build contexts for interactions.

The architecture of entertainment has been shaped by the idea of immersion.

We try to design places for people to play, but play is about people, not places.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:55:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flickr for image-sharing launches at ETCON

Ludicorp (disclosure: I'm an advisor to Ludicorp), whose Game Neverending was one of the most interesting social software projects of the last two years, has just launched a new product, called Flickr, live on-stage at ETCON.

Flikr is a social image-sharing application: it's a mechanism for creating ad-hoc chats, using a drag-and-drop GUI interface that lives inside your browser, and share images from peer-to-peer and within conversational groups.

I've beta-tested this at various points and at each time I've been struck by Ludicorp's amazing combination of utilitarian, usable interface aesthetic and genuinely witty whimsy. As Ben Ceivgny, a developer on the project, said:

We collect images with cameraphones and so forth, but we have no good mechanism for advancing them out into the world. Here's a mechanism for batching them into a locked-and-loaded tool for firing them into the world.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:52:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Future of Cyberspace Economies

Here're my running notes from The Future of Cyberspace Economies at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Econ is the study of choice under scarcity. The dismal science says, when essential stuff is scarce, you've got to trade something for something else.

MMORPGs sometimes try letting everyone have everyone for free are ghost towns. MMORPGs create artificial scarcity.

The surprise to econismists is that scarcity is fun -- people hunger for that which is dismal, scarce.

Because wealth accrues due to temporal investment, the rich and powerful in MMORPGs are people who can devote a lot of time to games, which means that they tend to be poor in real life.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:19:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tim O'Reilly's ETCON keynote per Quinn

Quinn's written a damned good summary of Tim O'Reilly's opening keynote from the Emerging Technology Conference.

having seen a few of tim o'reilly's keynotes i get the feeling that he throws conferences to get thousands of people working on the technologies he really wants. if tim really wanted a jet car, he'd throw a conference, invite some jet car enthusiasts and talk about how great it would be to have a jet car and then sit back and wait for someone to build him a jet car. it's like the peter lynch investing philosophy in reverse: instead of investing in the things you use everyday, get other people to invest in the things you wish you had everyday.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:18:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Win a Fluke ukulele

Boing Boing gets only 30,000 visitors a day. My other blog, Ukulelia.com pulls in a whopping 175 visitors a day. If you don't own a uke, you're missing out on a whole mess o' fun. But here's your chance to enter a drawing for a free ukulele. It's a Fluke ukulele, and it's a great instrument. I reviewed the Fluke for Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:40:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GI Joe Meets the Ubergeeks ETCON panel

Here're my running notes from GI Joe Meets the Ubergeeks: Many-to-Many Technologies in the Defense Department at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Military logistics are unstructured. We're trying to build a neural-network like fluid resposne systems that is complex and adaptive to get stuff to the right place.

Everyone under 30 gets this, everyone else is too old.

We are moral, legal and unconstrained.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:19:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Leveraging RSS at Disney ETCON talk

Here're my running notes from Leveraging RSS at Disney: from Collaboration to Massive Content Delivery at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Modern computers can handle large files, video, media, etc.

Want to provide experiences above the effective bitrate of our users, and bits are expensive to ship.

Example: Added a high-quality video clip to the front page of ESPN.com.

Came to think about the enclosure tag in RSS -- the idea of asynchronously d/ling content behind the scenes. You can download the experience prior to hitting the page.

Built a client-side technology -- espn.com, disney.com, etc -- an RSS aggregator that d/ls and pre-caches video on the machine, and communicates with the mothership to tell them who's got what in the cache.

We wanted 500k users in 1 year -- in three weeks we hit a million. Over 2 million now. Sustainign 2GB of bandwidth, TBs/day.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:40:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Which Amazon products are most blogged today?

Dave Sifry has whipped up a Technorati hack that tells you which Amazon products have been blogged most today. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:37:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cartoonist and Animator Gene Deitch at Egyptian Theatre in L.A. tonight!

Gene Deitch, the former art director for UPA (the cartoon studio that made Gerald McBoingBoing) and the illustrator for a 1940s jazz magazine called the Record Changer (see his book, The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove), and the father of underground cartoonist Kim Deitch, is going to be showing a bunch of his great old cartoons at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. See you there! Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:42:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Raymond Scott album: The Unexpected

There's a new Raymond Scott album! If you don't know Scott, here's a quick bio: he was a bandleader in the 40s, well-known for quirky, whimsical songs (many were used in Looney Tunes). In the 1950s he became interested in electronic music, and composed amazing pre-Moog marvels, including two albums designed to soothe babies. The Secret 7 is a group of jazz players headed by Scott and the 1959 album they recorded is called "The Unexpected." You can hear a Real Audio sample on the site. Be sure to look at the rest of Basta Music's offerings. They're a wonderful label out of Holland. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:35:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elizabeth Lawley's Breaking Into the Boys' Club ETCON talk

Here're my running notes from Elizabeth Lawley's Breaking Into the Boys' Club: How Diversifying Your Team Can Expand Your Market at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

RIT is struggling with enrolment, but the enrolment is overwhelmingly male. Why not bring in more women? It's an untapped field and it makes men happier.

People say that women don't want want to be there, why are your forcing them to go? But this is what people said about math 30 years ago.

Today there's gender parity in math classes, but subtle pressures steered them away.

We design products for men -- women get killed by airbags. If you include women in the devleopment of product, you diversify the view. Women aren't the only viewpoint you need to include, but it's half the potential market.

Anil Dash: It's no coincidence that the two popular blogging packages (Blogger and MT) were co-developmed by women (Meg Hourihan and Mena Trott).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:35:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Afghan rugs depict twin towers

Get your hand-made rugs depicting the Twin Towers being hit by planes here. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

Kerim sez: I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but I feel your comment on the Afghan War rug to be dangerously misleading. Please see my comments here.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:16:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eric Bonabeau's Evolving the Bad Guy ETCON talk

Here're my running notes from Eric Bonabeau's Evolving the Bad Guy at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Bad guys co-evolve with your defenses -- tax code, software and NBA rules all need to constantly evolve, as does Google

Evolutionary computation: represent individuals as genetic strings, i.e. 110100101

Test individuals for fitness -- how good they are at finding and exploiting loopholes

Mutate and crossover to get individuals who are better and better at solving your problem -- at finding loopholes.

In 2002, Sussex researchers tried to design an osscilator using evolutionary computation, but found it ended up weird because of unintentional RFI emission from a nearby PC

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:54:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Detroit's SuperBowl bid faked the skyline

The Detroit Free Press has broken a story about how Detroit's SuperBowl 2006 bid used a doctored photo to sex-up Detroit's snaggle-tooth skyline, lighting up abandoned buildings with Photoshop. Don't miss the killer infographic.

In real life, though, at least 10 of the photo's buildings are abandoned hulks. Some are burned-out, roofless and scarred with soot.

Artists touched up the photo by splashing light onto darkened windows and streets and adding roofs where there were none.

The final product made Detroit's lonely blocks look as Super Bowl-worthy as busy Houston.

"We want to do the same thing, put our best foot forward and turn on all the lights we can," said Michelle Fusco, a spokeswoman for the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau, which helped staff the Detroit booth.

Link (Thanks, tracymilburn!)

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

Tim O'Reilly's Emerging Technology keynote

Here're my running notes from Tim O'Reilly's opening keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

What's on the radar now?

* Amazon Hacks, Google Hacks, eBay Hacks, Spidering Hacks, etc

* You might think you're not a Linux user, but if you use Google, you use Linux. What you use isn't (just) what's on your desk

* The Internet is the platform

* Killer apps are built on OSS, but aren't themselves OSS -- like Google and Amazon

* User contributions are critical to market dominance: Listmania in AMZN search-results (BN.com doesn't have this -- and it shows, and they have 1/10 the market of AMZN)

* MSN maps are really cool and useful, but there's no collab element, just blinking banners that appear to be saying "Go away user, go away"

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Battlestar Galactica becomes a regular series on SciFi Channel

SciFi Channel has greenlit an ongoing BSG series, after a successful pilot (blogged previously on BoingBoing):

SCI FI Channel has greenlit production on the Battlestar Galactica franchise as a new original weekly series. Based on the top-rated December miniseries event of the same name, the one-hour drama is slated to begin production on 13 episodes in Vancouver next month. All principal cast from the mini will reprise their roles for the series, including Edward James Olmos (Commander Adama), Mary McDonnell (President Laura Roslin), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck), and Tricia Helfer (Number Six), among others. Ronald D. Moore (Carnivale, Mission Impossible 2) returns as executive producer as well as writer. The project will be produced exclusively forSCI FI, in association with Sky One. The series will be distributed by USACE, where David Eick, an executive producer of the miniseries, serves as Executive Vice President.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:18:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scanned instructions for every Transformer ever made

Here are scanned instructions for every Transformer ever made. Link (Thanks, Josh!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New mobile short stories for your WAP -- Warren Ellis Portable -- phone.

"Warren Ellis Portable" -- Thirteen ultrashort stories in permanent installation, from author/blogger/geek-mentor Warren Ellis, "For those long train/bus trips, extended visits to the toilet, whatever."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:44:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Piratical outhouse tchotchkes

Not one but two online stores specializing in pirate-themed bathroom accoutrements. Link One, Link Two (via Making Light)

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

Folk street-art in discarded urban space

BoingBoing reader Heidi says,

"Rob Walker writes about the North Claiborne area of New Orleans, where a community still uses an area as public space -- even though it's now under a freeway. Some of the highway support columns are painted with murals, but the most interesting column is plastered with newspaper obituaries of neighborhood residents. Photos are included in the essay."

Link

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

Rotary Engine Fishtanks

BoingBoing pal Mike Outmesguine says, "Australian Paul Cochrane mods expired Mazda rotary engines into Fish Tanks for less than US$200." Link (by way of Car and Driver)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:05:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Everything I Need To Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz

My former Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine colleague Brian Alvey documents the fundamental rules of good web design by way of a cable TV parable:

Running on HBO from the summer of 1997 through early 2003, Oz is everyone’s favorite don't-drop-the-soap opera. Reflecting on the same years in my web design career, I see considerable parallels. Many of the lessons I learned watching Oz and designing websites are too similar to be coincidental.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:01:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, February 9, 2004

Disabled blogger Mark Siegel: The Invisible Man

Mark Siegel of the blog 19th Floor, who has spinal muscular atrophy, is the subject of a feature article in Law & Politics, a legal magazine out of Minnesota. Some images from the article are here; the full text of the article is here, and includes excerpts from his blog. (Thanks, Susannah!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:57:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Insanity Chic in Hollywood

Mark Ebner -- investigative journalist and contributor to the jaded, snarky, underground Hollywood rag LA Innuendo -- has a new book out on February 24. "Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon -- The Case Against Celebrity," co-written with Andrew Breitbart (Matt Drudge's right-hand guy). Basically 416 pages of celebrities behaving badly. Read how Mike Ovitz's then six-year-old son once peed on a tree in the front yard, yelling "My mom said I could, and mom is in charge of you, I could have you fired!" to his nanny when she scolded him. There's supposed to be another section in here that chronicles some Powerful Hollywood People engaging in cybersexual harassment with a young AOL customer support agent. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:32:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos from SF Chinese New Year Parade

Derek "Fray" Powazek just posted some lovely snaps from Saturday's Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:17:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Columbia's online social search study released

BoingBoing reader Eli the Bearded says:

In this era of renewed interest in social networks, finally comes the results of perhaps the biggest social network connection study. Snip: "We report on a global social-search experiment in which more than 60,000 e-mail users attempted to reach one of 18 target persons in 13 countries by forwarding messages to acquaintances. We find that successful social search is conducted primarily through intermediate to weak strength ties, does not require highly connected 'hubs' to succeed, and, in contrast to unsuccessful social search, disproportionately relies on professional relationships."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:06:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hobbit Love

LOTR stars photographed when asked to sign a decidedly homoerotic bit of slash art. Fake? Link (Thanks again, Dr. Maz!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:26:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ultimate Soccer Souvenir

Football (soccer) Hall of Famer George Best's diseased liver is allegedly up for auction on ebay. Link (Thanks, Vann!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:20:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogging eTech

In addition to the slew of live blog and wiki coverage already taking place at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego (Cory's a featured speaker, and I'm popping in to schmooze for a few hours later today!), Jason Calacanis just launched www.bloggingetech.com. Update: Textamerica's doing a live phonecam blog.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:52:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney bans Segways in the parks

Disabled Segway users are outraged at Disney's decision to ban Segways from the theme parks.

Disney World doesn't allow visitors, even those with disabilities like Exum, to use the self-balancing transportation machines in the parks. The policy angered some Segway owners with disabilities and surprised others since the Disney parks have a reputation for accommodating the disabled.

They said even some Disney employees use Segways, which are becoming increasingly popular with people who otherwise would have to use wheelchairs.

"I'm not prepared to let a corporate attorney dictate to me how I should be mobile," said Exum, who is technically quadriplegic from an injury as a teenager but functions as a paraplegic.

Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:08:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Technorati adds text search

Dave Sifry has added keyword search to Technorati: now you can run structured queries agains tthe full text of over a million blogs that ping blo.gs, Technorati or weblogs.com, and get up-to-the-minute accurate results. Link (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Marvin the Martian secretly etched on Mars Lander chips

Trademark-infringing images of Marvin the Martian were secretly etched into the Mars rovers' image-sensor chips.

We managed to capture a photograph of what are now perhaps the tiniest Martians on Mars. Appearing as an opposed duet of helmeted gladiators, these angry silicon soldiers were discovered on the surface of an image sensor used by the Spirit and Opportunity rovers sent to probe the Red planet. Maybe these are the ONLY Martians on Mars? Probably not. In any event, the chip was loaned to us by designer Mark Wadsworth who is a fan of the Silicon Zoo. Mark informs us that he decided to try his hand at silicon artwork after visiting the Zoo on several occasions. The title of his artwork is the "Dueling Marvin the Martians". Mark designed the image sensor for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory along with Tom Elliot, who actually did the testing of the flight candidate imagers to select the 20 or so that actually made it on the two missions. Tom and Mark tended to butt heads quite a bit, which was the inspiration for the doodle.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pecksniff: The word of the day

From this Electrolite post, my vocabulary word for the day: Pecksniff. Damned if I know what it means (no, don't tell me, I prefer to guess), but I sure like the sound of it.

Denied a visa to attend the Grammy Awards, in which he's a nominee: Buena Vista Social Club musician Ibrahim Ferrer. And five colleagues...

Tell me again how John Kerry, with all his drawbacks, would be "barely any improvement" on this crowd of censorious, vengeful, authoritarian pecksniffs.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:09:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Random advice for composition

Here's a procedure that I almost always find useful for improving almost any kind of written composition -- a speech, an essay, an op-ed or a story. As a first pass, try cutting the first 10 percent (the "throat clearing") then moving the last 30 percent (the payoff) to the beginning of the talk (don't bury your lede!). About 90 percent of the time when someone gives me a paper for review, I find that it can be improved through this algorithm.

Weirdly, I almost always need someone else to point this out to me. I circulated a draft paper for comment this week, and it took Grad to remind me that I'd buried my lede and spent too much time throat-clearing. It turned out that he was completely right, but I didn't see it until it was pointed out to me.

Just a bit of random foo for the day.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, February 8, 2004

New anti-download campaign debuts during Grammys

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), the organization behind the Grammys, debuted a TV and radio PSA campaign against digital filesharing during tonight's awards show. One TV ad premiered during the awards show observes a young woman downloading a 3MB file called "music" to her PC, while a club full of hipsters dances to the music somewhere else. When her download completes, lights and music in that somewhere else shut off.

The spot urges viewers to visit the dorkily-domained whatsthedownload.com, where they'll find statements from pop stars about the dire consequences of downloading (causes regional blackouts?), and pleas to purchase tunes from a list of approved online services. I understand there's already a deadpool going for how long until haxxors shut off the lights. The site also includes a message board. Will be interesting to see how that portion of the site fleshes out.

One thing that visitors won't find, unless they're looking really really hard, is the fact that The Recording Academy is behind the site. Regardless of whether you're for or against filesharing, lack of transparency makes people suspicious -- particularly the web-savvy, younger crowd they're probably hoping this site will reach. At least one flamewar about that issue is already under way in this area of the site's message board. Link to press release about whatsthedownload.com launch.

And in other news, what the hell was up with that Outkast finale number? I mean, what was that? The Lucky Charms leprechaun meets every horrible Native American stereotype ever plastered on a football helmet meets a set of macrame curtains? Where are the Fab 5 when you need 'em?

Update: For those of you without MTV or someone under 25 in your life, "whatsthedownload" is a bad pun sortasoundalike for "what's the downlow." Which translates to "wassup." "Que hubo." "What's shakin'." BoingBoing reader Bruce says, "On a hunch, I tried www.whatsthedownlow.com, and I'm happy to report that NARAS didn't secure that domain as well. Heh!"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:26:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Register: is Orkut TOS a deja vu of controversial, discarded Microsoft TOS?

In the Register, an interesting piece on Orkut's terms of service, which danah previously criticized, and Cory described here as "craptacular":

Orkut's terms of service harbor a nasty payload -- "By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials." -- It's startlingly similar to the Microsoft Passport Terms which caused a storm of outrage two years ago, a reader points out. (...) Microsoft was forced to amend [its] terms five days after our first story, amidst threats of defections.

I don't imagine that the folks behind Orkut are evil people, and I wonder what their response is to the Reg article -- and to concerns voiced by present and former Orkut members. In a similar flap, users publicly lambasted phonecam-blog service Textamerica last December over a draconian TOS; to their credit, Textamerica modified it promptly.

Link (via The Unofficial Google Weblog, and thanks, Cole!)

BoingBoing reader Michael J. Madison, a professor at Pitt, says "take a look at this post on my blog about RSS v. Atom as XML standards for feeds. I haven't seen anyone else in the techlaw/policy blogosphere pick up on this, but the possible Google/MS parallel is interesting. "

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:50:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LaundryView helps students schedule clothes washing

Roland sez: "It's Sunday and you realize that all your clothes are dirty. If you're a student, it's time to go to your campus laundry room. But wait, you might be lucky enough to plan your laundry in advance. In this article, the Boston Globe reports that it's now possible in some colleges and universities in the U.S. "to go online to check all laundry rooms on campus and see which washers and dryers are open, occupied, or broken; how long until a machine completes a cycle; and how many others are waiting." Users of the LaundryView system "can arrange for an e-mail to alert them when it's time to put clothes into the dryer or rescue their wardrobe and fold it." This overview contains more details on this 'Web service' and includes a screenshot of what students can see if the LaundryView system has been installed on their campus."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:50:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Carbohydrate-Free Lunch

The Los Angeles CBS affiliate has just released a damning report on low-carb foodstuffs, in which its lab determines that many low-carb foodstuffs have far more carbohydrate content than claimed by the manufacturers ("Low-Carb Emporium claims 15 grams of carbs per bagel. Our lab found... 55").

At Subway we tested the Turkey Bacon Melt Wrap. Subway claims that it has 22 grams of carbs, while our lab results showed it at 28 grams...

At Carl's Jr., we tested the low-carb Six Dollar Burger, which the company claims has six grams of carbohydrates. Our lab results: 9 grams...

We tested TGIF's Sizzling New York Strip with Blue Cheese. TGIF claims 6 net carbs and 11 total carbs. Our lab found 20 total carbs...

Low-Carb Emporium claims 15 grams of carbs per bagel. Our lab found triple the carbs -- 55. Low-carb Emporium says they just re-did the formulas and will be getting lab reports on new formulas soon.

Link (Thanks, saiyuk!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:46:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Florida's officials threaten journalists who ask for documents

Nearly half of Florida county officials tested disgraced themselves last week, when journalists posing as average Americans attempted to retrieve government documents under Florida's open access laws. 43 percent of the county bureacrats stonewalled, threatened, cajoled and gave the run around to the journalists who participated.

Roger Desjarlais, the Broward County administrator, threatened a volunteer by saying, "I can make your life very difficult."

After insisting that the volunteer give his name, Desjarlais used the Internet to identify the volunteer, find his cell phone number and call him after work hours...

They cited a number of arbitrary reasons for their suspicions, including the volunteers' hair length, casual dress and, in one case, "the look in his eyes."

Link (Thanks, Justin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:32:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, February 7, 2004

Open WiFi ethics

The NYTimes's Ethicist tackles the question of using open WiFi nodes you discover. I like his conclusion (it's pretty much OK), but disagree with some of his implicit assumptions -- that all ISPs ban running open WiFi (they don't), and that most people don't know they're sharing (lots do).

The person who opened up access to you is unlikely even to know, let alone mind, that you've used it. If he does object, there's easy recourse: nearly all wireless setups offer password protection. And while the failure to lock a door may indicate carelessness, not consent, in this case it does suggest indifference. Godwin does warn of the tragedy of the commons, however, which here means you have an obligation not to use too much bandwidth -- by downloading massive music files, for example, which would inconvenience other users.

Link (via WiFiNetNews)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:23:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virus writers profiled

Clive Thompson's written a lyrical and evocative article profiling several (mostly European) virus-writers, coders who write and post proof-of-concept malware to demonstrate security flaws in Microsoft products.

Benny, clean-cut and wide-eyed, has been writing viruses for five years, making him a veteran in the field at age 21. ''The main thing that I'm most proud of, and that no one else can say, is that I always come up with a new idea,'' he said, ushering me into a bedroom so neat that it looked as if he'd stacked his magazines using a ruler and level. ''Each worm shows something different, something new that hadn't been done before by anyone.''

Benny -- that's his handle, not his real name -- is most famous for having written a virus that infected Windows 2000 two weeks before Windows 2000 was released. He'd met a Microsoft employee months earlier who boasted that the new operating system would be ''more secure than ever''; Benny wrote (but says he didn't release) the virus specifically to humiliate the company. ''Microsoft,'' he said with a laugh, ''wasn't enthusiastic.'' He also wrote Leviathan, the first virus to use ''multithreading,'' a technique that makes the computer execute several commands at once, like a juggler handling multiple balls. It greatly speeds up the pace at which viruses can spread. Benny published that invention in his group's zine, and now many of the most virulent bugs have adopted the technique, including last summer's infamous Sobig.F.

Clive touches on, and dismisses the free-speech arguments for publishing malware code (interestingly, he does so without any quotes from legal scholars and impact litigators who work on First Amendment issues, and so ends up eliding the nuance in the argument and presenting a somewhat blunted picture of the issue) and only lightly touches on the far more important notion of legitimate security research.

If, as Schneier says, "Any person can create a security system so clever s/he can't think of a way to defeat it," then the only experimental methodology for evaluating the relative security of a system is publishing its details and inviting proof of its flaws -- proof readily embodied in malware.

Codebreakers and worm-writers are the only mechanism we know about for reliably strengthening systems, and the idea that they should refrain from publishing their research in order to keep us safe is fundamentally flawed, since it depends on the idea that malicious people will never be clever enough to independently reproduce their techniques, and that the public is better served by remaining ignorant of the potential risks in the systems they've bought than by being exposed to the evidence of the rampant flaws in those systems.

This notion falls flat when considered in light of the real world. If a developer was building condos whose doors could all be unlocked with an unbent paper-clip, this line of reasoning demands that the person(s) who discover this should keep mum about it, in the hopes that no bad guy ever catches on. In the real world, the best answer is usually to scream about this to high heaven, so that the bad developer can't silence you and cover his ass, and so that his customers can get their locks fixed. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:52:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Geek love poem

Here's a lovely, pithy geek poem written by KillerHamster, a Slashdot poster. Select from here --> roses are red, violets are blue, all my base are belong to you <-- to here for a white-on-white translation.

Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
chown -R you ~/base

Link (Thanks, Mozai!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snitchpix as photojournalism

These pictures of moron vandals trashing cars on the Northeastern University campus after the SuperBowl have been posted by the campus cops in order to garner snitch-tips that will help them bust these guys; but the pictures themselves are actually pretty compelling when considered as pieces of photojournalism. Link (Thanks, Vandal!)

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

New twist in Bikram Yoga copyright feuds

Bikram Choudhury, the eccentric Beverly Hills yoga master who once said in a Business 2.0 interview, "I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me," has been suing practitioners he accuses of illicitly teaching his particular style of yoga (26 postures, done twice each in a >105-degree-hot room). Now, one group of yoga enthusiasts is suing back.

Choudhury, America's best known and most controversial yogi, opened one of his first yoga schools in San Francisco in 1973 and now boasts 900 studios worldwide. He copyrighted, trademarked and franchised his poses, breathing techniques and dialogue, creating the first chain of its kind. He also hired lawyers who set loose a flurry of cease-and-desist letters warning yoga teachers in the Bay Area and beyond not to teach his yoga or anything "derivative" if they haven't graduated from his $5,000-per-person training program and are not paying a studio franchise fee. His letters threaten a penalty of $150,000 per infringement.

Now, a San Francisco nonprofit organization of yoga enthusiasts from San Rafael to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., is countering with a federal lawsuit attacking the guru's claim that yoga is proprietary. They say that yoga is a 5,000-year- old tradition that cannot be owned. The suit is asking the judge to determine whether Choudhury is entitled to copyright and trademark his material under federal copyright laws. A trial date has been set for next February.

Link to SF Chron story, Link to Reuters story, Link to a spookily similar Onion story (thanks, Siege!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:12:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Piracy for pornos

Jonno on Fleshbot says:

Interesting New York Times article on the adult industry's take on file sharing and digital piracy, with responses ranging from legal threats (Titan Media) to a regulated "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach (Playboy.com). (For the record: we here at Fleshbot believe that porn wants to be free, but also think that people deserve to be credited and/or compensated for their creative efforts. How's that for a diplomatic response?)

Link to "The Pornography Industry vs. Digital Pirates" (NY Times; registration required)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:31:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New AIM supports video IM, crossplatforms with iChat AV 2.1

BoingBoing pal Mike Outmesguine says:

The new version of AIM (5.5, released Thursday, 2/5/04) now supports video instant messaging. That's kind of cool in and of itself. But check this: AOL Video IM crosses platforms and works with Apple's iChat AV 2.1 "public beta".

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:38:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool Tokyo-retro shopping arcade

BoingBoing reader Rob Satterwhite says,

"This week Tokyo Q magazine is running a special feature on the Nakano Broadway complex in Tokyo. It's a very old shopping arcade that's now filled with tiny shops catering to all sorts of "otaku" collectors - shops selling comic books, collectible toys, cels from anime films, old movie posters, "costume play" shops selling full-size outfits for comic-book dress-up parties, etc. "One of my favorite shops is Rough Toys, which specializes in "urban vinyl" - limited-edition artistic hiphop action figures from Hong Kong (Link). Another nice shop is Robot Robot (Link), where you can find Ren and Stimpy dolls and thousands of other cartoon-related toys. This article covers the entire complex, with links at the bottom to seven more short articles about some of the most interesting individual shops. "

Sweet! I'm dying for one of the Robot Robot shop logo t-shirts -- a stick-figure 'bot sketch captioned, "childhood obsession with robots drove us insanity." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:16:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Physics of Haute Couture

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:

In this article, Nature tells us that mathematicians have set up "equations that predict how fabric will fold." This theory of drapery could help fashion designers build clothes that hang straight. It also will allow computer animators to "model more realistically how clothes hang and move." "Mahadevan's equations could also allow clothing companies to give online shoppers a personalized, virtual view of how a garment will look on them -- something they are keen to do as web-based retailing gathers pace. This overview contains more details and references on wrinkles and crumples because one of the leading researchers studied them extensively. It also includes pictures of how a crumpled sheet exhibits deformations that are strongly localized around peaks and ridges and of "crow's feet" wrinkles that appear around people's eyes as they age.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:13:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Garbage house via eBay

A SomethingAwful user has posted dozens of photos of the house he shares with his mother, who has some compulsion to order tchotchkes from eBay well beyond her ability to display or use them, so that the house is full of hundreds of unopened boxes of glass paperweights and god-knows-what. It's like a garbage house, but with bubblewrap and Mailboxes, Etc boxes instead of kittylitter (though she does have a lot of parakeets). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How fanfic makes kids into better writers (and copyright victims)

Here's an amazing Technology Review piece about how kids are writing Harry Potter fanfic and editing one-another's stories in order to become great and prolific writers. The author, Henry Jenkins, characterizes this as an "unconventional" way of teaching creative writing, but I think that fanfic is more conventional than he credits (the first story I wrote was set in the Star Wars universe; I was six -- and the first long-form work I wrote was a Conan pastiche, at 12). The biggest difference between the kids' fanfic of yore and that of today is that back in the old days, kids had no way to readily collaborate with one another on their creations -- nor to expose themselves to copyright infringement liability from overzealous rightsholders who indiscriminately shut down kids' sites with threatening letters.

FictionAlley, the largest Harry Potter archive, hosts more than 30,000 stories and book chapters, including hundreds of completed or partially completed novels. Its (unpaid) staff of more than 200 people includes 40 mentors who welcome each new participant individually. At the Sugar Quill, another popular site, every posted story undergoes a peer-review process it calls "beta-reading." New writers often go through multiple drafts before their stories are ready for posting. "The beta-reader service has really helped me to get the adverbs out of my writing and get my prepositions in the right place and improve my sentence structure and refine the overall quality of my writing," explains the girl who writes under the pen name Sweeney Agonistes?a college freshman with years of publishing behind her.

Like many of the other young writers, Agonistes says that Rowling's books provide her with a helpful creative scaffolding: "It's easier to develop a good sense of plot and characterization and other literary techniques if your reader already knows something of the world where the story takes place," she says. By poaching off Rowling, the writers are able to start with a well-established world and a set of familiar characters and thus are able to focus on other aspects of their craft. Often, unresolved issues in the books stimulate them to think through their own plots or to develop new insights into the characters.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:13:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, February 6, 2004

iTunes blocks you from sharing music with YOURSELF, on your own computer

Rael has discovered another "feature" of iTunes: if you leave a copy of it running in one of my user accounts and switch to another, I'm blocked from launching it. That's right, iTunes is set up to keep you from sharing music with yourself.

It's silly enough that I can share my tunes across my home network yet I can't share them with someone on the same machine. Despite keeping all my music in /Macintosh HD/Users/Shared/Music, I still have to wander from account to account adding each new CD or iTunes Music Store purchase to each user's library just so that we can share _our_ (defined in the strictest sense) music. Surely your iTunes library on the local machine should show up in my iTunes window just like any other network-shared iTunes library?

You cannot open the application "iTunes" because another user has it open.
Ask the other user to quit the application, then try again.
[OK]

No, not OK.

Should I mistakenly leave "my copy" of iTunes open and wander off for a bit, there's no music for anyone until my return. No music for you! Nobody but an administrator capable of killing off other logins and processes has the ability to rectify this situation. Should every user really need to be an administrator to truly share this multi-user environment?

Link

Here's how to hack iTunes to play in multiple accounts

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:26:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Win a leather-bound "insanely detailed" Necronomicon

The HP Lovecraft society is holding a contest to write the best "spell, drawing, chapter, or passage of mad Mythos rambling." The grand prize is a "handmade, leather-bound, super authentic copy of the finished work, done up in full 17th-century style at the insane level of detail the HPLHS is known for!" Link (Thanks, Alan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:13:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

American dispatches from London

Yankee Fog is a weekly blog account of life in London written by a former Dennis-Miller-comedy-writer, living as an American in the UK. The weekly essays are engaging and funny and evocative. Link (Thanks, Jacob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:47:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mean Valentine's Day cards

Love this gallery of print-and-assemble Valentine's Day cards that are full of bitterness, exquisitely expressed. Link (Thanks, Eyes Spies and Lies!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:41:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Age-maps: cool photoshoppery to span the years

Less sez, "Two photographs of the same person, from different periods of time (child and adult) are spliced together. In this fusion a jump-of-time is established at the tear." Link (Thanks, Lee!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:38:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dumbass "Copyright Registration" "service"

GoDaddy has created an idiotic "Copyright Registration" service that provides "expert assistance" in registering your copyright -- something that you have virtually no good earthly reason to do, and something you absolutely don't need any pricey "expert assistance" with. They offer a goony little badge you can put on your work to show that it's really, really, s00per-copyrighted, too ("Display this on your site and show thieves and others that you have federally assured rights to damages and attorneys' fees"). This is about half a step above the Green Card lotto scam and pay-for-book-doctoring "services" that prey on would-be artists' anxieties. Link (Thanks, Devon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:31:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My New Fighting Technique: a tale of xerography on the high seas

David Rees, author of the Get Your War On strips and the book My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable describes how MNFTIU became a book -- a tale involving countless under-the-table deals with people who have access to high-speed photocopiers. This kind of story illustrates the power of xerography and the importance of having a job wiht access to a high-speed photocopies.

So the book was being distributed via fax without my permission. This is called "file sharing." I asked the guy if he thought his photocopy friend would make me some copies of the book at a reduced rate ? seeing as how he was already engaged in unauthorized fax piracy on the high seas of clip-art comics. He thought this was reasonable. I called the guy at the photocopy shop and we worked out an arrangement whereby I would stop by the shop on Friday afternoons with a 12-pack of beer. I would leave the beer on top of the counter and he would kick a box of books under the counter. I would lug the books (actually, collated pages) home on the subway and staple them in my living room. That is how I learned the ancient art of bookbinding.

Link (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:26:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USB-powered vacuum

This USB-powered, keyboard-sized vacuum cleaner looks geniunely useful. 192K PDF Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:49:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Two "official" blank CDRs when you buy the new Eisbrecher CD

Eisbrecher, a band, is bundling two blank CDRs, silkscreened to match the official CD, with sales of its new disc:

We are of the opinion that the music buyers are criminalized enough and have been made responsible for the wretched state in the music industry. We are giving them the chance to make 2 legal copies for private use with 'official blanks'. It can't always be that the end users have to take the blame for something that international corporations have arranged with their artist-burning methods.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:46:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wolfram's giant book free online

Stephen Wolfram has made the complete text of his New Kind of Science (a 1000+-page treatise on the way that virtually everything in the universe can be explained with cellular automata), which he self-published a couple years back with some of the squillions of dollars he's earned on his seminal Mathematica software program, available for free on the Internet. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:44:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Playboy syndicates Suicide Girl nudie pics

Not one of the links in this post is worksafe, but you knew that. So: Playboy online just launched a new feature, "Suicide Girl of the week." I heard about plans for the syndication launch last week from SG founder Sean in LA, and I understand this is the first time Playboy has ever syndicated another site's content nudes directly on playboy.com (thanks, Michael). An interesting development, given SG's humble, indie dot-com beginnings. BoingBoing reader matt rhodes says, "You can see the thread on the SG board here and the Playboy boards are here. From what I gather, there is some degree of bitching on the Playboy boards. They don't seem to want their nudes with tattoos and piercings." The Suicide Girls may be a first for Playboy, but Playboy certainly isn't the first to syndicate Suicide Girls: Fleshbot has been featuring a SGOTW since launch.

In other news... SG is launching a bunch of new website content in a beta section called SG Newswire (think hybrid collaborative blog/news format, on music, politics, technology, etc.), plus an RSS feed for SG Newswire, and they've also got another big announcement in the works about a new offline project. If I tell you what it is, hordes of hot chicks clad solely in SG-logo underoos will swarm my office and spank me. And that would be, you know, a bad thing.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:26:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

William Gibson's U.S. book tour

Author William Gibson is on a book tour this month, promoting Pattern Recognition. 02.03.04 to 02.21.04. Check out dates and venues here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:19:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amazing Iraq photo website from Stephanie Sinclair

A weblog and an incredible collection of images from Iraq (also Cuba), shot and written by photographer Stephanie Sinclair. Click thumbnail for full-size image.

link

(note: Her blog and photo gallery launch by way of a nasty javascript pop-up window, but the UI is well worth enduring for the truly stunning images inside)

(Thanks, Sean)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:12:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dell's Linux Blog

Genuine, honest-to-blog corporate weblogging from a Fortune 500? Dell Linux engineers speak freely in this collaborative online journal, which consists mostly of software update news, patch pointers, and other deeply geeky stuff: Link. Also available in tasty, low-carb RSS.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:20:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Qwesting in NYC

Earlier this week, I participated in an internal symposium in NYC for telecom company Qwest, along with Doug Rushkoff (far left in snapshot here), Sueann Ambron, Omar Wasow, Clay Shirky, Janet Abrams, Justin Hall, Dennis Crowley, and Jane Buckingham. Justin blogs and shares snapshots from the event at links.net. Snip from Justin:

"We wrapped up the extended session by listing all of our telecommunications loyalties - astonishingly long lists (...) That jumble of communications begs simplification. What one company might offer me all those services? A frighteningly large company, I suspect. Or maybe a nimble one. We left them with a number of bold propositions and excited suggestions; I will be interested to see how the company develops itself over the coming years. Between wireless, landlines and high speed internet, with a firm local footing in the middle-West United States, I think Qwest has potential to create new forms of community using telecommunications."

Link

UPDATE: Numerous BoingBoing readers who are current or former Qwest customers wrote in to express, shall we say, less-than-warm-and-fuzzy feelings about past service experiences with this provider. Qwest is currently undergoing aggressive restructuring under a new CEO, after a disastrous recent past. Among the more polite comments received, Robert Rose writes "People here HATE Qwest in Oregon (...) [They need] to get the few services they offer currently right before they start looking at others." To their credit, the handful of Qwest executives I met in NYC this week seemed to be an intelligent and forward-minded lot who are well aware of this fact, and of the inherent challenges involved in planning for the future while contending with the company's past.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:18:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kazaa, Sharman offices raided in Australia

Australian recording industry investigators raided the Sydney offices of Kazaa, of owner Sharman Networks, and homes of two company execs today -- seeking evidence to support copyright infringement allegations.

The raid was conducted under a rarely used law, known as Anton Pillar, which allows litigants in civil copyright cases to gather evidence. The Federal Court gave major Australian record labels permission to raid 12 premises in three states to collect evidence against Kazaa, said Michael Speck, general manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations. The group is owned by Universal, Festival Mushroom Records, EMI Music, Sony Music, Warner Music Australia and BMG Australia. (...) Speck said the recording industry would launch a civil action against Kazaa in the Federal Court on Tuesday.

Link to SF Chronicle article. Link to statement from Sharman Networks about the raid. (via pho)

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

eBay as distribution channel for haute couture

NYT article on a new eBay hack of sorts -- up-and-coming fashion designers are using the online auction site as a means of reaching would-be customers who don't live in spitting distance of Park Avenue or Rodeo Drive.

The 10-day auction, planned for Feb. 26 to March 7, will not be the first on eBay by a fashion designer. Narciso Rodriquez crossed that threshold last September. But in that case only two items, a nude-tone sequin dress and a similar colored suit, were direct from the runway.

The coming Proenza Schouler auction, by contrast, will be "virtually an online trunk show - the first of its kind,'' said Constance White, the style director at eBay. The Web site is intent on expanding its clothing offerings and special promotions. "The potential is vast," Ms. White said.

Link (Thanks, Susannah!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:49:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Comic Zen

(1) her! (2) the boy fitz hammond (3) a softer world (4) death to the extremist (5) my fighting technique. Link to web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

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

Gallery of fabulous 3D-like sidewalk chalk paintings

BoingBoing reader satirista says,

"A half-dozen photos of simply the finest trompe l'oeil works I've ever seen--and they're done on sidewalks with pastels! The pix at Snopes are better than the gallery photos at Kurt Wenner's own site (in my opinion), but here's a link to Wenner's Q&A with the Artist page, which answers questions like 'what happens when it rains on your pictures?'"

Link to gallery at Snopes.com

UPDATE: Will the real Kurt Wenner please stand up? BoingBoing reader Walt writes: "Unfortunately I think people are failing to recognize that the work cited from the original blog, and now on Snopes, is not the artwork of LA based Kurt Wenner but ANOTHER sidewalk artist, most likely based in Britan. You can see by comparing the pictures of the two, it is not the same guy. I have yet to determine the name of the artist originally sited in the blog. I have also contacted Snopes to try and set them straight."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:29:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

So.... ahem... there was life on Mars?

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:

Two researchers from the University of Queensland (UQ) have confirmed that life existed on Mars. They first looked at magnetic crystals found in mud samples from a water trap of an Australian golf course. UQ News Online reports that they found their proof by comparing these crystals with those contained in a meteorite discovered in Antartica in 1984 and named ALH84001. "Our research shows that the structures found in the NASA meteorite were more than likely made by bacteria present on Mars four billion years ago, before life even started on Earth," said Dr Taylor, one of the two scientists. You'll find more details and references in this overview, both on the research work and the meteorite.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:24:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sexually explicit snowpersons

Snapshots of pornographic snow figure tableaus. Link (Thanks, Siege)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:22:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steve Jobs for Disney CEO?

One of the purged Disney board members working to secure theouster of Michael Eisner thinks that Steve Jobs should run their show.

Gold, who left Disney in December, told The New York Post: "There are five or six guys I believe can run this company. Steve Jobs would absolutely be one of them."

Gold confirmed that he hasn't approached Jobs, nor has Jobs asked him for the job.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:23:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, February 5, 2004

iTunes/Pepsi ad parody

This is a great parody (cum attack on the recording industry) of the iTunes/Pepsi ad that ran during the Superbowl. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:01:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Worst ToS on the entire Internet

The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum has 21,000 words of legalese on its homepage, a disclaimer and terms-of-service document that is likely the very worst of its kind on the entire Internet. James Grimmelman shreds this thing, picking out the dumbest moments in a 21 kiloword extravanganza of dumbness:

[It] gives every sign of having been professionally drafted by a competent lawyer with severe OCD. It's not quite that any individual term is clearly insane as that the redundancy makes the whole much less than the sum of its parts. We've been cracking each other up by reading selections aloud. Some highlights inside:

"All other access, use, disclosure, reproduction, delayed use, reduction to human-perceivable form, printing, copying or saving of digital image files or other content, reformatting, file sharing, downloading, uploading, storing, posting, mirroring, archiving, recording, distributing, redistribution, repurposing, modification, rewriting, manipulation, creation of derivative works, translations, or products, licensing, sale, transfer, display, public performance, publicity, broadcast, televising, reporting, publication (in whole or part) or transmission whether by http, ftp, electronic mail or any other file transfer protocol, and whether by electronic means or otherwise, or use by other than individual scholars, or commercial use requires prior written permission of the rights owner(s) and payment of a fee, and severe penalties apply for theft and unauthorized publication, which is also a crime."

Link (Thanks, James!)

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

RIP Disney World's designer, John Hench

John Hench, the Disney artist designated as "Mickey Mouse's offical portrait artist" and the designer behind the look and feel of the parks, is dead at 95.

When Walt Disney started planning for Disneyland, one of the first artists he enlisted was Hench, who designed such attractions as Disneyland's Space Mountain.

After Walt Disney's death in 1966, Hench oversaw the creation of Walt Disney World in Florida in 1971 and the addition of Epcot in 1982. He also helped supervise the design of Disney's first overseas park, Tokyo Disneyland, which opened in 1983 in Japan, among other projects.

His color sense was legendary.

Against Hench's arguments, the head of a corporation once insisted on white for the walls of an Epcot attraction. A frustrated Hench finally replied, "Well, I have 34 shades of white. Which one do you want?"

Link (Thanks, Caines!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:05:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wild Eastern Standard Tribe remixes

Trevor Smith has whipped up two amazing remixes of Eastern Standard Tribe, my new novel. The first is a "speed-reader," based on the research of Xerox PARC researcher Rich Gold, which flashes the book, one word at a time, up on the screen, at a high rate of speed. It is astonishingly readable, and makes you feel like you've found a back-door to your brain's comprehension nodes. The second is a "PurpleSlurped" version of the book, in which every paragraph is given its own link, so that one can easily refer to a specific passage of the text. Link (Thanks, Trevor!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ed Broadbent's campaign blog

Ed Broadbent, the former head of Canada's progressive New Democratic Party, has started a blog. It's a running personal account of electoral stumping, and witty as hell.

Let me begin by saying that I know nothing about trucks. Except that driving around this old beat up borrowed one-ton helped me get in touch with the big butch of a man?s man that lives somewhere under my yuppie Glebe demeanor.

Something about that big roaring engine that lurches into gear like a rodeo bull, and the satisfaction of being able to throw anything in the back and haul ?er away.

Except when it doesn?t start. That?s when the big butch of a man?s man shrinks back into the yuppie Glebe shell.

Link (Thanks, Jordan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:56:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

META: Boingboing readers, please use our handy site suggestion form

A friendly reminder to BoingBoing readers who'd like to submit item suggestions to me, or any of the blog's co-editors: we love you, we love your ideas -- you are what makes this blog fun to produce and fun to read. But please, please, please, please, please, please use our handy online submission form instead of sharing ideas by email. Or (gag) IM.

Really. Even if you're a personal pal. Each of the site's four editors -- myself included -- have spam and virii-challenged in-boxes, and we find ourselves traveling/being crushed by other deadlines/having to take blog-breaks at various times for various reasons. So, submitting your suggestions by online form instead of personal email is really really really the best way to (a) ensure that your suggestion receives timely consideration, and (b) help us avoid nervous breakdowns. Thanks! Here's that link again!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:19:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

2004 DIY Convention, this week in LA

In LA this week? Check out this year's edition of the DIY Convention, a how-to event about creating, promoting, protecting and distributing independent film, music and books. The three-day gathering helps artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians lean how to "make a living, not a killing," -- in other words, do it for themselves. $85 gets you into all three days of events, including the big opening night bash (tonight).

The fourth annual DIY Convention: Do It Yourself in Film, Music & Books will be held Feb. 5-7 in Hollywood. The grand finale of the DIY Music and DIY Film Festivals will be augmented by a full day of panels, workshops and speeches by some of the cutting-edge leaders of independent film, music and books.

Happens in Hollywood today through Saturday. Panelists, schedule, and more details here: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:13:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-YASNS is the new black

More ramblings throughout the blogosphere on Orkut and all of the other online schmooze enablers we all love to say we hate, but secretly participate in anyway. Link to an amusing musing from Michael O'Connor Clarke, who crafts the genius image at left. Me? I'm wearing an "I'd rather be filtering out networking invitations from my in-box" T-shirt right now. Yeah... uh-huh... it's the same one I'm wearing in my Friendster headshot. (via Paul)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:06:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Kevin Sites Iraq dispatch: Portrait of the Dictator as an Old Man

A new photo and essay dispatch from Kevin Sites (blogger and NBC News correspondent currently stationed in northern Iraq) about an artist named Wisam Rady -- former propagandist for the Ministry of Information under Saddam Hussein. Excerpt:

Wisam is 36 years old, but still lives at home with his parents in Ath Thawra or Sader City. Partly he says it's because his family is so close. His mother still waits outside the gate for him to come home at night. But it also has to do with prison. His time at Abu Graib deeply wounded him, he says; his loss of time and place, which perhaps only home, only the familiar, can heal. It seems strange that healing can be done here, a city so strewn with garbage that goats feast along the median strip, among the passing traffic. It is also, the inspiration for the rats on Saddam's shoulders.

"There were no rats in Ath Thawra," Wisam says, "And then one morning we awoke and the city was infested with them. "It was a scheme by Saddam to make the people sick." Or so the people of the city believe. Wisam says he first did the Saddam paintings for his own catharsis. He shot a digital picture of the television video and turned reality into artistic realism. When he added the rats, the work somehow transcended the painterly necessities of so many Iraqi artists who knock out quick commissions on popular contemporary motifs. Now the work was more than just a colored mirror of a current event. Now the work found an audience. Local newspapers began doing stories on Wisam. American Army officers and western journalist began buying the paintings at $100 a pop. A steal, by Soho standards, but a good price in post-war Iraq.

Link, discussion forum

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:15:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Car-mod: Cuban '51 Chevy transformed into tailfinned escape boat

Former BB guestblogger Todd Lappin says:

"The Cuban guy who tried to flee to Florida in a 1951 Chevy he turned into a boat has now tried again... in a tailfinned 1959 Buick. Nice paint job!"

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:29:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sweatshop conditions alleged in computer parts factories

The overseas development agency of the Catholic Church in England has released a report called "Clean Up Your Computer" alleging dire working conditions in computer production facilities throughout the developing world.

CAFOD has proof that electronic workers in Mexico, Thailand and China suffer harassment, discrimination and intolerable working conditions. The workers produce parts that end up in the computers of companies such as Hewlett Packard, Dell and IBM.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:27:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Art.blogging.la launches

A new blog about art in Los Angeles just launched: art.blogging.la. Upcoming profile in the LA Weekly, and check #5 on Modern Art Notes' "five to see" list (right hand column).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:13:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PETA Goes Porno

Fleshbot says:

"Is that a sausage in your pocket, or are you just happy to eat zucchini? Whether or not you believe that eating meat causes impotence (we've never had a problem), this 70s porno-themed ad for PETA makes vegetarianism look mighty sexy."

Link to "The Super Bowl Ad They Won't Show", link to other meat-themed items on Fleshbot, aka "Atkins Porn." Don't ask.

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

Hackers improve cablemodem firmware

Hackers have reverse-engineered a popular cablemodem design and released a homebrew firmware version that...

....lets you log in to an interactive VxWorks shell, or issue commands from a Web browser through an http interface. You load it by tapping an undocumented console serial port on the circuit board

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:09:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple selling DRM'ed silence at $0.99 a pop

As the Apple Turns has compiled a playlist of silent tracks available as DRM-restricted files from the iTunes Music Store.

Yesterday we mentioned in passing that faithful viewer djsteve had purchased a track that cost him the "best 99 cents [he'd] ever spent." The joke, of course, was that it was the second track from The Whitey Album by Ciccone Youth, which consists of a minute and three seconds' worth of silence. To tell you the truth, while we're amused by the fact that Apple is charging 99 cents for a song full o' nothing, we're even more amused by the fact that said track contains the usual digital rights management code to prevent you from playing it on any unauthorized systems. And the most amusing thing of all, of course, is that the song has a thirty-second preview.

Well, as it turns out, the Ciccone Youth track is by no means the only all-silent untune for sale at the iTMS; faithful viewers ben, Scott Levin, and Michael Wyszomierski contributed their own suggestions, too. And you know how Apple recently added a bunch of "iTunes Essentials" playlists to the store, such as "Cover Songs" and "'70s AM Radio Classics"? Well, we've compiled all the silent tracks we managed to scrape together into the first AtAT Essentials playlist, "To Be Played At Maximum Volume."

Link (Thanks, noel!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bay Guardian articles on iPods and digital music

The San Francisco Bay Guardian ran a series of articles about digital music, iPods and the RIAA this week. Unfortunately, the Guardian's profoundly awful archiving policy means that this URL will go stale in a week (Cheez!), so enjoy this stuff while you can. They've fixed their permalinks, hurrah! Here's a bit from Annalee Newitz's piece:

And that's where the high-tech industry comes into the picture. Software companies, eager to lap up profits any way they can, realized there would be a huge market for programs that could be wrapped around digital media or put into players to prevent piracy. Microsoft, Apple, and RealNetworks are at the forefront of this burgeoning market with their DRM schemes for music. Apple packages iTunes songs in its Fairplay software, while RealNetworks (maker of the popular RealPlayer) has just opened a music store full of DRM-shackled songs to compete with iTunes. Microsoft markets the Media Rights Management software package and is planning to include a controversial and elaborate DRM scheme called the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (formerly known as Palladium) in the next version of Windows.

Link (Thanks, Annalee!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:22:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Court to entertainment lawyer: Calling it "theft" doesn't solve it. And curtail the use of abusive language

Judge Noonan, one of the Ninth Circuit judges who listened to the Morpheus case in which the legality of building a tool without the entertainment industry's permission -- and hence the future of the Internet -- is being decided directed this blast at Ramos, the attorney arguing the music publishers' side:

"Let me say what I think your problem is. You can use these harsh terms ["piracy," "theft"], but you are dealing with something new, and the question is, does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that something new. And that's a very debatable question. You don't solve it by calling it 'theft.' You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That's your problem. Address that if you would. And curtail the use of abusive language."

EFF is now hosting the entire argument in the case as an MP3, which is in the public domain. My cow-orker Donna Wentworth sums up some other good linkage in her blog post: Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:03:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jimmy Carter -- was president, is blogger.

Former US President Jimmy Carter has a blog:

"Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, are traveling in West Africa Feb. 2-7, 2004, on behalf of The Carter Center. The purpose of their trip is two-fold: to call international attention to the need to eliminate the last 1 percent of Guinea worm disease remaining in the world and to launch the Development and Cooperation Initiative, a multiyear effort to help reduce poverty in Mali. Members of the general public can accompany President Carter virtually as President Carter blogs, or publishes regular journal entries from the field. Reports will be posted as they are received from President Carter, who will share his thoughts and feelings during his journey in West Africa."

Link
(Thanks, Jean-Luc)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:20:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, February 4, 2004

Web Zen: Animation Zen

(1) muffin films
(2) robot love
(3) door steps
(4) weapon of stick figure
(5) catfish hotel
(6) acme catalog
(7) ray patin studios
(8) animwatch
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:43:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New paper on data privacy and Social Networking Services

Roger Clarke says:

I expressed concerns a couple of days ago about Plaxo. I've now flung together a draft privacy analysis of address-book and social networking services (SNS) generally, with particular reference to Plaxo. As always, I'd appreciate constructively negative criticism, particularly if I'm being unfair to anyone.

Abstract:
Technology and human ingenuity continue to pose new privacy challenges. During 2003, a new dot.com fashion arose from an odd amalgam of Rolodex address-books, e-communities and dating. Users of these services store personal data on a central server, which can be accessed by other people, and, potentially at least, exploited by the service-operator. There are privacy concerns, of a kind that has been analysed many times before. The new dimension that these services bring is that they entice users to disclose personal data about their friends, business contacts or acquaintances. That is a disturbing feature, and it requires careful analysis.

Link to Very Black Little Black Books (via politech) --

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:40:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Should Robots Have Human Faces?

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:

A robotics designer named David Hanson, who lives in Dallas, Texas, says yes, according to this story from the Associated Press. But can you imagine that this guy gave his latest robot, designed to resemble his girlfriend, a name like Hertz? Does he think his girlfriend is for rent? Quite amazing! Besides choosing such a name, why is this such a controversial idea to make robots looking very much like human beings? Because the theory goes like this: "humans have a positive psychological reaction to robots that look somewhat like humans. But if a robot is made to look very realistic but somehow isn't quite right (it has an odd smile, or it doesn't blink, for example) it seems grotesque instead of comforting." You'll find more details and an astonishing picture in this overview.

Link

UPDATE: Popular Science magazine ran an extensive profile of David Hansen and his robot/girlfriend project last September, which includes some cool photos. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:38:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Is photoblogging good for photography?

BoingBoing reader mat says, " This essay from Emese Gaal asks the question, 'While [photo]blogging helps build traffic and creates a sense of a welcoming and creative community, does blogging actually make you a better a photographer?' Well written and interesting article on the relative merits of the rise in photoblogging, from the point of view of a professional photographer. A selection of excellent comments really makes this worth a read." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:37:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crazy art from guys in Finland: Mieskuoro Huutaja

BoingBoing buddy Gareth says:

Take a group of men from the northern Finnish town of Oulu... dress them in dark suits with black ties made from the inner tubes of car tyres. Next, send them out on to the ice floes of the frozen Baltic and get them to shout - in choral unison - at a stranded 10,000-ton ice breaking vessel, and you have got something called Mieskuoro Huutaja (Men's Choir Shouters)... a new art form, and it is taking parts of the world by arctic storm.

Link to BBC news story, Link to truly bizarre audio and video clips of these Finnish guys, well, flowing with the ice floes.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:33:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Andy Warhol and the Commodore Amiga 1000

Artnode.org has uncovered and posted a fascinating mid-'80s interview from Amigaworld magazine in which Andy Warhol discusses his relationship with his Commodore Amiga 1000, his experiments using it in portrait pieces of Debbie Harry and Dolly Parton, and his predictions about the future of computer art.

BoingBoing reader Jose Luis of Barcelona-based blog elastico.net, says "It's always fun finding this sort of stuff from the past, and wondering what would have happened if he hadn't died a year later."

Link to elastico.net post, Link to 2 MB PDF of the original magazine article.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:30:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell's Message Board

BoingBoing reader Avi Solomon says:

Edgar Mitchell,former Apollo 14 Astronaut maintains a message board where he answers questions put to him by the public. He is one of the few Apollo astronauts who is in public contact and the message board is a rare chance to put your own question to a man who walked on the moon. The thread I link to is one in which Dr. Mitchell discusses the impact of seeing earth from space. Many other threads on the message board relate to interesting details of the Apollo missions.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:24:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Holy crap: South Park's "Casa Bonita" is for reals

Intrepid fact-checker and friend of BoingBoing Mara Schwartz says,

"I was doing some research on Comedy Central programming for work, and found this. There was a recent South Park episode where the kids go for Kyle's birthday to a huge, amped-up Mexican restaurant in Denver called Casa Bonita, that features cliff divers, caves, waterfalls, etc. Turns out it's a real restaurant. Here's a link to their site."

UPDATE: Holy crap, indeed! Many BoingBoing readers wrote in to share experiences of the real-life Casa Bonita, and of other similiarly over-the-top Mexican/Central American/Pseudo-Mayan theme restaurant/amusement park combos located in the American midwest. Who knew? Reader Emily Smith says, "I've eaten [at Casa Bonita]. I don't recommend it for the food (sub-standard Mexican with a high chance that you'll be puking in the fountain outside later) and the food tastes a bit funny with the amount of chlorine from the diving pool floating around in the air. But, if you get the chance, do go sometime. The wait to get in is 1 hour at least and the wait to get out can be half an hour, but the chance to go through their haunted cave and get lost on the way to the bathroom is priceless."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:17:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pepsi and Guinness Can Stove

Via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools e-zine:

This little stove is amazing; it's made from pepsi and guinness cans, using things that can be found around most households. It takes about an afternoon to make (plus some time waiting for the epoxy to set), weighs only a few grams, and is sufficient for most backpacking trips. I made my first one a few years ago, and I've been handing them out as gifts ever since. The stove is powerful enough to boil a quart of water in a reasonable amount of time, it's MUCH quieter than other camping stoves, if you lose it you're not out $80.00, and you can get the fuel for it (denatured alcohol) at most hardware or paint stores. Mine fits nicely inside of the mug I use for cooking and eating, with room to spare. I usually stuff a spare pair of socks in with it to keep it from rattling around. The site provides detailed instructions and photographs, as well as a message board with feedback and suggestions from other stove builders.

Link to Scott Henderson's Pepsi-G Stove

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:15:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, February 3, 2004

Eastern Standard Tribe has launched!

My second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe starts shipping today -- it should be showing up in bookstores any day now.

As with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my first novel, I've made the whole text of the novel available as a free download in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license -- and I've written a short essay explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.

I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Because you -- the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers -- hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody's got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You've got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

I'm unashamedly exploiting your imagination. Imagine me a new practice of book, readers. Take this novel and pass it from inbox to inbox, through your IM clients, over P2P networks. Put it on webservers. Convert it to weird, obscure ebook formats. Show me -- and my colleagues, and my publisher -- what the future of book looks like.

I'll keep on writing them if you keep on reading them. But as cool and wonderful as writing is, it's not half so cool as inventing the future. Thanks for helping me do it.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:01:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google tutorial

GoogleGuide is a pretty good tutorial on building good Google queries, covered by a Creative Commons license. Link (Thanks, Robert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Number "6" makes your foot change direction

Teresa Nielsen Hayden brings us this interesting mind-hack:

While sitting in your chair, lift your right foot slightly off the ground and move it in clockwise circles. Now draw the numeral "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will involuntarily reverse direction.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:36:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Political book network maps reveal deep divide

Fascinating map of political book clusters. The researcher used Amazon's "Customers who bought this book also bought these books" service to draw links between books that were purchased together.

So, if you are working a 2004 political campaign what do you do with this information? Obviously you will not be successful in removing a reader from deep in one cluster and transplanting them into the other cluster. All you can do is focus on the edge nodes and the bridges. See someone reading Sleeping with the Devil? That is someone you can talk to about your candidate. If they are reading Bushwacked or Dereliction of Duty -- the most central books in each cluster -- then either give them a high-five or a sneer, you won't change their views.

Link(Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:34:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Low-tech multidimensional maps

The Dynamap is a low-tech way of superimposing differnt logical and geographical networks over one another. As Gizmodo puts it:

...using interlaced images, manages to put three different maps of Manhattan -- a street map, a subway map, and one showing landmarks and neighborhoods -- all onto the same surface. Tilt it to one side and you see the street map, tilt it another way and you see the subway map, etc.

Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:15:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Freaky ceramic figurines from the '60s

Wotta treaure trove -- extra creepy ceramic dust collectors for sale. Link (via sensibleerection)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:18:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Words-per-query on the rise

The number of words in the average search-query is increasing. No theories proffered for this, but I'd assume ti's because Internet users are, on the whole, getting more sophisticated in the way that they think about information storage, labelling and retrieval.

1. 2 word phrases 32.58%
2. 3 word phrase 25.61%
3. 1 word phrases 19.02%
4. 4 word phrases 12.83%
5. 5 word phrases 5.64%
6. 6 word phrases 2.32%
7. 7 word phrases 0.98%

Link (via Battelle)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:03:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Things you can't talk about on standardized tests

Harper's publishes a leaked memo from the Princeton Review advising of subjects that should be avoided when preparing practice-versions of standardized tests. The list is an astonishing testament to squeamishness, and what's most remarkable about it is that it excludes virtually every subject of moment, depth or verve that I can think of, guaranteeing that the examples in these tests will be utterly devoid of any interest-grabbing content, and will consequently lack the vividness that examples can bring to a good examination.

Individuals who may be associated with drug use or with advertising of substances such as cigarettes or alcohol

Name brands, trademarked names

Junk food

Fad diets

Abuse, poverty, running away

Divorce

Socioeconomic advantages (e.g., video games, swimming pools, computers in the home, expensive vacations)

Link (via Dive Into Mark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:38:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSFT's "Practice Safe Hex" classroom posters

MSFT is offering teachers free posters for their classrooms advising their students of the risks of opening dodgy attachments. Link (Thanks, Higgins!)

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

Dave Pell's Electablog

Dave Pell has started a new blog about the upcoming presidential election, and as you would expect, it's very funny and insightful. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:49:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why checking IDs doesn't make you secure

Bruce Schneier explains why verifying that someone has a photo ID is a completely useless security measure:

Our goal is to somehow identify the few bad guys scattered in the sea of good guys. In an ideal world, what we would want is some kind of ID that denotes intention. We'd want all terrorists to carry a card that says "evildoer" and everyone else to carry a card that said "honest person who won't try to hijack or blow up anything." Then, security would be easy. We would just look at people's IDs and, if they were evildoers, we wouldn't let them on the airplane or into the building.

This is, of course, ridiculous, so we rely on identity as a substitute. In theory, if we know who you are, and if we have enough information about you, we can somehow predict whether you're likely to be an evildoer. This is the basis behind CAPPS-2, the government's new airline passenger profiling system. People are divided into two categories based on various criteria: the traveler's address, credit history and police and tax records; flight origin and destination; whether the ticket was purchased by cash, check or credit card; whether the ticket is one way or round trip; whether the traveler is alone or with a larger party; how frequently the traveler flies; and how long before departure the ticket was purchased.

Link (Thanks, Bruce!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:07:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What do the states' shapes mean?

Funny commentaries on the hidden messages in the shapes of the states and Canadian provinces, such as, "what makes Oklahoma so desperate to touch New Mexico?" Link (via Kottke))

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Giving a talk on Thursday in Chapel Hill, NC

I'm going to be at the UNC in Chapel Hill, North Carolina this week for some iBiblio events, one of which is a public talk on copyright and the EFF at 3:30 on February 5. If you're in the area, it'd be great to see ya!

What: A Public Talk on the Electronic Frountier Foundation and Copyright
When: Thursday February 5 at 3:30
Where: Wilson Library's Pleasants Family Room, UNC-CH

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:43:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, February 2, 2004

Homemade M&M dispenser

Erincraft features homemade one-of-a-kind ceramics, including this ingenious M&M dispenser. Link (via Smartpatrol)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:12:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unix as she is spoke

Glossary of how to speak your Unix vocabulary.

<> ANGLE BRACKETS, angles, funnels, brokets, pointy brackets, widgets

< LESS THAN, less, read from*, from*, in*, comesfrom*, crunch, sucks, left chevron#, open pointy (brack[et]), bra#, upstairs&, west, (left|open) widget

> GREATER THAN, more, write to*, into/toward*, out*, gazinta*, zap, blows, right chevron#, closing pointy (brack[et]), ket#, downstairs&, east, (right|close) widget

Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:09:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Explore your privacy with Swipe

Chris sez, "Swipe focuses on automated collection of personal information. You can read the barcode on your driver's license, request your personal information and opt-out from commercial databases, and with the 'data calculator,' determine how much your personal information is worth to direct marketers. It's neato torpedo." Link (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:45:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Wiley Wiggins movie available on DVD

Wiley Wiggins sez, "My last movie, Frontier - A surreal quasi-comedy performed entirely in a heretofore unknown eastern european language with English (and Esparanto) subtitles, is now available on DVD from Film Threat. Watch grown men beat each other with whole raw chickens. Watch me copulate with a hole in the ground and lick inhabited spiderwebs. Fun for the whole family. Frontier was directed by David Zellner and is based on the classic Bulbovian drama fragment 'Froktog'." Link (Thanks, Wiley!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:28:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Course in googling comes to UW Seattle LIS department

The UW Seattle Library and Information Science program is offering a course in Google -- in Microsoft's back-yard, no less, and just a few days since Bill Gates said that MSFT was going to un-break its search offerings:

'Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignore the other stuff,' he said. But 'it's the remaining 20 percent that counts,' he added, 'because that's where the quality perception is.'

This was by far the most interesting thing I've read about Google in 2004: the value proposition is in the 20 percent that represents the least-frequent queries in the service. It's the same reason that PirateNapster, with millions of songs (most of which you didn't care about) was a million times better than LegitNapster, with a few hundred thousand songs, most of which you can hear by turning on the radio. It's the difference between an ASCII ebook that you can print of turn into a PDF or run through text-to-speech or any of a million tasks that most of us don't care about and a frozen ebook in a DRM format that you can only use in the ways that the publisher's research has indicated are most popular. Link (via Battelle)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:53:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Extremophile mining for bio-ideas

Bio-miners are looking closely at extremophiles, organisms that thrive in adverse environments, for exploitable bio-ideas. The gold rush mentality is endangering the extremophile habitats, though, and may cost humanity the lessons they have to offer us.

Extremophiles comprise principally bacteria, which have the remarkable ability to thrive in conditions that would be hazardous to other lifeforms - extremes of temperature, radiation, salinity, and metal toxicity...

One promising discovery is a glycoprotein which prevents Antarctic fish from freezing... Other Antarctic discoveries include an extract from green algae for use in cosmetic skin treatment, and anti-tumour properties in a strain of yeast.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:24:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

State Department bans Courier 12

The US State Department has banned Courier 12 in favor of Times New Roman 14. Hammersley points out that the logical next step is "intelligence reports in Comic Sans, obviously."

"In response to many requests and with a view to making our written work easier to read, we are moving to a new standard font: 'Times New Roman 14'," said the memorandum.

The new font "takes up almost exactly the same area on the page as Courier New 12, while offering a crisper, cleaner, more modern look," it said, adding that after February 1 "only Times New Roman 14 will be accepted."

Link (via Ben Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mingering Mike run to ground

Mingering Mike is the unknown folk-artist responsible for the astonishing hand-painted record albums Xeni wrote about here last month. Today, the NYT features a report from a journalist who tracked him down and got his amazing story.

He said he would spend as long as a week making his album jackets. He originally put the cardboard records inside because the covers were too flimsy otherwise. And then he began adding fake promotional stickers, seven-inch singles to accompany the records, lyric sheets, gatefold sleeves, fan club information and nearly every other detail imaginable. "I wanted everything to be my own stuff and my own ideas," he said, "and not copy from anybody else."

Mingering Mike's dream, he said, was to be known for his music, and for his songs to inspire people. Thus, he tackled subjects like the growing drug problem in the United States on the cover of "The Drug War" and compulsory military service in his apocryphal reissue of an apocryphal soundtrack to the apocryphal film "You Only Know What They Tell You."

Link (Thanks, Star!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:20:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tomorrow, the future of the Internet gets set in court

A bunch of my EFF co-workers are in Hollywood tomorrow, fighting for your rights and mine. Today is the day that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals hears the Morpheus appeal, fighting the studios who say that the toolmakers who build P2P networks should be on the hook for what their users do with those networks (like saying that Bank of America should be able to sue Ford if they get stuck up by someone driving a Mustang getaway car).

Good luck to them. We've won this fight in the lower court, and we'd all better hope we win it again on appeal, too: otherwise, you can kiss the idea of general-purpose networks goodbye: network operators will have to build their systems to police their users' activities, using fallible human judgement or even more fallible algorithms to grant or forbid access to the network depending on the file you're trying to share.

"This is not just a case about peer-to-peer," countered Fred von Lohmann, who represents Streamcast and is senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It is a case that will determine whether technology companies are allowed to innovate or whether they have to ask permission from copyright owners before they build new products."

The legal doctrine tested in this case is the same one that protects companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft from being held liable when someone uses HP CD burners or Internet Explorer to commit copyright infringement, von Lohmann said.

"It's important to protect the Betamax doctrine, so the price of innovation doesn't become a huge lawsuit from the entertainment industry," he said.

In the landmark Sony Betamax case in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that Sony was not liable for contributory copyright infringement for selling VCRs that allowed consumers to tape content from their televisions.

This will be an important day in the history of the future. Hold your breath and hope. And give to EFF -- someone's got to fight this fight. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tablature for Super Mario Brothers

I've seen walkthroughs and screenmovies of video-games that explain or show how to win and find all the Easter Eggs, but this takes the cake.

It's a how-to-win guide for Super Mario Brothers, and the authors have invented an ingenious, ASCII-based tablature for noting the proper keypresses at each moment in the game for a perfect win.

It's hard to say what's more impressive here: the obsessive documenting of the winning strategy or the marvellous creativity in the invention of the tablature itself. Link (Thanks, stx!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:55:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

William Carlos Williams's "This is Just to Say"

I followed a link to William Carlos Williams's poem "This is Just to Say" this morning, and it froze me in my tracks. So much in just 12 lines. I want a plum.

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:49:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The SuperBowl ad you didn't get to see

MoveOn.org organized the BushIn30Seconds campaign to raise the money to air a 30-second spot during the SuperBowl detailing the problems with the Bush administration. The spots were produced by MoveOn fans, released under a Creative Commons license, and juried by a distinguished panel.

Only one snag: CBS wouldn't run the winning ad. They claimed that it would be too topical for them (though an ad equating drugs with terrorism and a Janet Jackson's nipple were both peachy keen). So much for open political discourse in America.

Here's the SuperBowl ad you didn't see. It's licensed under a Creative Commons license, so you can make copies, you can share it with your friends, you can put it on your hard-drive and show it to your kids when they ask you what happened to America. Link (via Vertical Hold)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:47:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSFT ships a metadata stripper for Office

It appears that the MPAA writes memoes to the FCC on behalf of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee chairman Fritz Hollings.

How do I know this? Because last year, Hollings sent a letter to Chairman Powell urging him to open proceedings into the apocalyptically stupid Broadcast Flag, and the memo was released as a Word file.

Word files contain tons of metadata about their creation and revision, including things like the name of the person to whom the version of Word used to create the document was registered, which is how we busted Hollings. NTK sometimes pulls apart the Word-based press-releases coming out of the UK government and shows how the New Labor taskmasters are rewriting (and upbraiding) the Old Labour bureaucrats who produce the initial drafts.

After years and years of this sort of humiliation, MSFT has finally gotten wise and shipped the "Remove Hidden Data" add-in for Office XP/2003, which "you can use to remove personal or hidden data that might not be immediately apparent when you view the document in your Microsoft Office application."

Of course, the "add-in" only cover a couple recent flavors of Office and doesn't work on the Mac, so for the rest of us, there's still a pretty good reason not to use Word for any sensitive electronic document dissemenation.

And, of course, it remains to be seen whether the "Remove Hidden-Data" function actually removes all the hidden data -- MSFT has devoted so much engineering to obfuscating its file format to lock out competitors from shipping a compatible word-processor, there's really no good way to evaluate this claim. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Emer3g1ng L0ft, an ETCON crashspace in the tradition of Emerging Man

At last year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, Danny O'Brien, Quinn Norton and Jon Gilbert invited ten people to come pitch tents in their nearby backyard, where there was WiFi, water, and electricity. They called it Emerging Man, a cross between Emerging Tech and Burning Man. They even had a geodesic dome.

This year, ETCON is being held in San Diego and the kids don't have a backyard to throw open to the public, so I suggested that they get in touch with the DachB0den crew, the hacker group who run the wonderful ToorCon, an astounding tech-security conference at which I spoke last year.

One thing led to another, and DachB0den has opened up its wicked hacker loft (here are my pictures of the space from the ToorCon afterparty in September) in downtown San Diego as a communal crashspace for some of this year's ETCON attendees.

The roster filled up fast, but as with the Emerging Man space, there's every reason to believe that the Dachb0den loft will become a social nexus for this year's ETCON, and there's also every reason to believe that there will be some dropping out and shifting around, so don't give up hope if you're looking for an ETCON crashpad.

There is, of course, a Wiki wherein the whole affair is being planned. I love watching this stuff come together. Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hers-n-his duvet cover

It seems to me that this his-n-hers duvet cover would be a great way to finally settle any lingering arguments over who gets which side (and would make life easier if you were, you know, "getting to know someone"), but at $276, it might be cheaper to go for a session or two of counselling. Link (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:24:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Understanding slush, a primer on rejection

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor who's been in publishing for enough time to have developed some very advanced theories on the inner workings of the industry, has published a detailed account of the action on RejectionCollection.com, a site where writers post and complain about the rejection slips they've garnered from publishers.

Teresa invites us into the world of the "slushreader" -- the editor who goes through the unsolicited manuscripts, deciding which will to have a chance at publication and which will go back to their creators, and then analyses the mental model of this process implicit in the RejectionCollection.com commentary. The disconnect is profound and highly thought-provoking. At the very least, this should be required reading for anyone who aspires to a career in the arts (where the stiff competition from your fellow would-bes gives decision-makers the ultimate buyer's market).

But even if you don't want to write or paint or sing for a living, this is important stuff, illustrating the core principles of life in a world where we strive to get busy people to recognize the merit of our contributions.

Herewith, the rough breakdown of manuscript characteristics, from most to least obvious rejections:

1. Author is functionally illiterate.

2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don't publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.

3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.

4. Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, incentiary, reeking havoc, nearly penultimate, dire straights, viscous/vicious.

5. Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.

6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can't tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.

7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.

(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:53:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, February 1, 2004

Pierced fish

Interview with a piercer who has come up with a successful method for piercing pet fish.

BME: If someone brought their fish to you for a piercing, would you do it and what would you charge?

WILLIAM: Yes, as long as it was a fish of substantial size. People have asked me to pierce Betas and there's no way I would. I don't think I could charge for the service, just the jewelry.

BME: What's morally worse, piercing a human baby's ears, or piercing a fish's "labret"?

WILLIAM: Well, I pierced a baby's lobes once and I'll never do it again! I'll pierce fish again though.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sock-puppets in oil

Wonderful gallery of oil-paintings of sock-puppets. Link (Thanks, Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:10:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Engineer calls his namesake son "2.0" instead of "Jr."

An engineer from Michigan named Jon Blake Cusack has named his son, also called Jon, "Jon Blake Cusack 2.0." Link (Thanks, edmz)

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

MSFT outfits Chinese MiniTrue's Room 101

Amnesty International has fingered MSFT for violating the UN's Human Rights code in supplying the Chinese government with the network tools necessary to entrap and bust political dissidents.

Amnesty believes Microsoft is in violation of a new United Nations Human Rights code for multinationals which says businesses should 'seek to ensure that the goods and services they provide will not be used to abuse human rights'...

Microsoft told The Observer: 'We are focused on delivering the best technology to people throughout the world. However, how that technology is used is with the individual and ultimately not in the company's control.'

This is a curious rationale from a company that is shoving DRM down its customers' throats, effectively telling the entertainment industry that it believes that it can and should control how its users use its products. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Satan as file-sharer

Satan, in Paradise Lost, on "Apple Sharing"

'O fruit divine, Sweet of thyself, but much more sweet thus cropt,
Forbidd'n here, it seems, as onely fit
For Gods, yet able to make Gods of Men:
And why not Gods of Men, since good, the more
Communicated, more abundant growes,
The author not impair'd, but honourd more?

Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:28:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to get spyware-free RealPlayer through the BBC

An anonymous reader sez, "The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It's because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it." Link (Thanks, Anonymous Reader!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:33:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Marvel and DC claim they own "superhero"

Zed sez, "It seems Marvel and DC co-own a trademark on the word 'superhero.'"

GeekPunk is announcing that their flagship comic book title featuring superheroes patronizing their favorite bar & grill during their off-hours will now be entitled Hero Happy Hour beginning with the fifth issue of the ongoing series.

According to creator Dan Taylor, "The decision to change the title was brought upon by the fact that we received a letter from the trademark counsel to 'the two big comic book companies' claiming that they are the joint owners of the trademark 'SUPER HEROES' and variations thereof."

Link (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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